A month later, remember, I led the attack on the Paris food merchants. I'm proud of that attack, those in power condemned me for it so I know it must have been right. We ask only for food, a home, a little ease, no more crying in the streets, "Bread, bread for God's sake". We were at war and so we accepted such hardships if they were equally shared, but they weren't. We were dying because of filthy bourgeois graft and greed. The slimy rapacious money-mad exploiters were hoarding food to raise the price on the open market. Our legislators wrung their hands, threatened with a whisper, and did nothing. So we flat-bellies marched, smashed stalls, broke open shops and warehouses, and found the bread and meat and and other foodstuffs they'd hidden in abundance. They asked us why we did it. We told them because we needed it. Citizen Marat said we should kill every merchant in sight. We made do with a few score strung up in front of their own shops to encourage the others. And it did. The next morning, the food markets were filled again, with fruit and vegetables, bread and meat. Like Jesus, we had performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes. We must appropriate the land and money from the rich who have it in excess and give it to those who need it and live in want. The only way to defend and save the Revolution is by pushing it as far as it'll go and then further, and that's never far enough for me. Then Citizen Marat died, steel through the heart, painless, when he had such a painful life. I miss him. No one left to trust. That's why I agreed to become editor of his paper when his staffed asked me "to keep the bright flame burning". So when those impotent excremental conformists Robespierre and the Jacobin gang banned women from political power, we took up the cause. They wanted liberty for themselves alone. I wrote that those refugees from the leper house of reaction should be belled and booted headfirst to the nearest sewer. In return, they persuaded Marat's widow Catherine to denounce me to the revolutionary tribunal for besmirching her husband's memory. Poor sweet Catherine, grief takes many forms. She wanted to protect her husband's fame, she thought I was trying to take it from him in some way. I shun fame! It always costs to much!Late last night, I went walking through the streets of Paris with Georges. Just the two of us, Georges padding beside me sniffing every post and doorway, and me smoking my pipe. There's nothing better. Making love, perhaps, or making a revolution, but with a revolution, you have to be right. It was a clear night, and empty streets, and as we passed St. Nicholas' Church, something strange happened. I was walking, but suddenly I couldn't hear my own footsteps, not one, silence. I was a dead man walking. No more of that. Tomorrow before the tribunal of mumblers I shall make no attempt to defend myself. That doesn't mean to say I'll stay silent--never that. I'll do what I was born to do, attack. If the verdict of that bunch of rotting fish-heads goes against me, I die like friend Marat, through struck down by a better hand, my own! It's been a rich confession after all friends, deserving of some penance--at least five Hail Mary's and twenty-six Amens. After all, I've preached revolution and sedition, slaughtered a King and others, lived in sin, and will probably end even deeper in it by killing myself. In the eyes of the Church it is a hundred percent record of failure. But on Judgment Day, I expect to stand before my God justified. I do not condemn myself and shall not be condemned. And so Amen. If it's to be the last Amen, I go gladly. My wife and son will weep, I know. Georges here will howl a little, won't you boy? My friends will pause, shake their heads, and move on. For they have the difficult part. Living well is so much harder than dying well. I have tried, to help create a people who are skeptical, rational, critical, not easily fooled or impressed, in a word, a free people, ungovernable. It's a dream, of course, but I've been lucky to have lived through times that made the dream seem possible, and just for a moment, we stopped being me and mine, you and yours, us and them, and saw ourselves instead as equals in our common humanity. We are of that generation that so transformed the world that future days and nights can never be the same. We poor clumsy men and women turned the world upside down, inside out, round and about. One last word from my last sermon. The Revolution isn't complete, hardly begun. Defend it. Don't sit back, act! Without action, no life. Without live, no perfection. Without perfection, no eternal peace and freedom. For God is an active power and we do His work in fighting the great battles: light against darkness, love against selfishness, revolution against reaction, life against death. C'mon Georges, it's time for our walk. http://www.britbitsandclips.com/The%20Preacher.htm
2007年08月31日 10点08分
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