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PARTISAN REVIEW
be lived and not merely believed, which wants to convince only in
order to convert. On a pedestal of definitions he erects the indefin–
able. Already, at the trial of the King, he had forced sensitive souls
and reasonable minds to see looming behind the stage-sets of the
period, which he removed one by one, the deep night of the Revolu–
tion; and the orator who followed him seemed ridiculous in returning
to questions of legality. Like the prophets, he endowed the mystery
with the self-evidence of truth. For most of his audience as for him,
the Republic was not merely a system of government, but above all
an Apocalypse, and the hope of an unknown world. He passionately
upheld the revolutionary dream in convincing the Convention that
its mission was to accomplish exemplary acts--or to die. He forced
the men who wanted to talk like the great Romans to live like them;
and so he dominated them, up until the day when, the enemy de–
feated, his death could only be brought about by the guillotine: it
was thanks to the victory at Fleurus that they could condemn him.
Most of them wanted nothing more than to re-establish the
state, to have power in it; the Directory proved this to the hilt. Still,
victory was necessary for this. But what did Saint-Just want? He
seems to have aimed at exemplary acts for their own sake; more
exactly, in order to testify to the truth which possessed him. Often
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in this book, as we follow him from page to page, he seems to call
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upon death as the impending and necessary end to his life. Does he
condemn all the more ruthlessly, all the more impersonally too, be–
cause he wants to be condemned himself? Against this backdrop of
victories (from his arrival at the Convention until the ninth of Ther–
midor, he was not once defeated) one sees the little black shadow
of Lenin dancing in the snow of the Kremlin, and saying to the
amazement of the people's commissars: "We have held out one day
longer than the Paris Commune!"
The Goddess of Reason seemed ridiculous to Saint-Just. He be–
lieved vaguely in the Supreme Being, strongly in the immortality of
the soul. Perhaps his last word was in "that independent life which
I have won for myself in the centuries to come and in the empyrean."
It was guaranteed less by posterity than by a heroic absolute. To
explain Saint-Just, the nineteenth century tried to mix rationalism
with individualism, but nineteenth-century individualism, as we see
it in Napoleon and in the heroeS of Balzac, is acquisitive; it is the
