kept it up. For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled
art--from the periwig- maker
to the play-actor--who like them had seen the frivolity, the baseness,
the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered, whom they
despised while they adored!
Figaro himself
may have looked up to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long
as the law enabled the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de
cachet; yet Figaro may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when
lettres de cachet were abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a
Comite de Salut
Public. Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed
poets, like Fabre
d'Olivet, were,
they say, especially ferocious. Why not? Ingenious, sensitive spirits,
used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men and women whom
they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it may be, a juster
appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than had our own Pitt
and Burke. They had played the valet: and no man was a hero to t