ON SAINT-JUST
475
French Republic receives nothing from its enemies and sends them
nothing but lead." After the relief of Landau, when Jourdan sur–
rounded Charleroix, Saint-Just did not open the letter sent him by
the besieged governor: "It is not paper I want from you but the
fortress." "But if the garrison surrenders unconditionally, it is dis–
honored." "We cannot honor you or dishonor you here, just as we
cannot honor or dishonor the French nation. We have nothing in
common with you."
Some have found
in
these replies the eloquence of
tragedy~
the
influence of Mirabeau. No doubt Saint-Just expressed the conviction
that he was at Landau by the will of the people. But at the same
time he makes
it
clear that he could not be dislodged by the power
of bayonets: "Landau or death." He does not devise "noble replies,"
he expresses an epic absolute. "You don't make revolutions by halves,"
is akin to the inscription at Thermopylae ("Passer-by, go tell Lace–
daemonia-those who died here fell in accordance with its laws"),
and belongs to the same world as the gesture of Mucius Scoevola, as
the return of Regulus to Carthage, and Alexander's setting fire to
his fleet. For, "One cannot rule innocently." A great man
is
vulner–
able by virtue of the multiple aspects of his character, even though
sometimes
it
is this very multiplicity which makes him great; Saint–
Just admits multiplicity only through his choice of means. His invul–
nerability recalls-strangely enough- that of Joan of Arc at Rouen,
because their replies were on a higher plane than the questions that
were put to them. "Was Saint Michael naked?" "Do you think God
too poor to dress his angels? ..."
If
Saint-Just was a terrible accuser, it is because he was the
most profound conscience of the Revolution, and this not because he
was austere (though he was that), but because he was monolithic–
seemingly in an intellectual sense, but actually
in
an ethical and al–
most religious sense (Mohammed, after all, was also a legislator).
We know the obsessive "We must" of his notes. In the Committee of
Public Safety, with the army of Sambre-et-Meuse, at the Police De–
partment, to think, for
him,
meant to define a duty. Like certain
characters of Claudel, like so many characters of Dostoevsky, whose
simple and implacable logic, sometimes verging on insanity, he shares
(for the Republic to survive it was necessary for all those who could
stand
in
its way to die), he lives within a truth which demands to
