Brissot de Warville was another of these popular candidates for the representation. As this individual was the root of the Girondist party, the first apostle and first martyr of the republic, we ought to know him. Brissot was the son of a pastrycook at Chartres, and had received his education in that city with Pétion, his fellow countryman. An adventurer in literature, he had begun by assuming the name of _Warville_, which concealed his own. It is a plebeian nobility not to blush at one's father's name. Brissot had not done so. He began by furtively appropriating one of the titles of that aristocracy of races against which he was about to raise equality. Like Rousseau in every thing but his genius, he sought his fortune hither and thither, and descended even lower than he into misery and intrigue, before he acquired celebrity. Dispositions become weakened and stained by such a struggle with the difficulties of life in the dregs of great corrupted cities. Rousseau had paraded his indigence and his reveries in the bosom of nature; and as its consideration calms and purifies everything he quitted it a philosopher. Brissot had dragged his misery and vanity into the heart of Paris and of London, and into those haunts of infamy in which adventurers and pamphleteers drag on a filthy existence: he left them an intriguer. Yet in the very midst of these vices which had rendered his honesty dubious, and name bespotted, he nurtured in the depths of his soul three virtues capable of again elevating him--an unshaken love for a young girl, whom he married in spite of his family, a love of occupation, and a courage against the difficulties of life, which he had afterwards to display in the face of death. His philosophy was identical with Rousseau's. He believed in God. He had faith in liberty, truth, and virtue. He had in his soul that unqualified devotion towards the human species which is the charity of philosophers. He detested society, for in it there was no place awarded to him; but what he hated with unmitigated hate was the state of society; its prejudices--its falsehoods. He would have recast it, less for himself than for the benefit of mankind. He would have consented to be crushed beneath its ruins, provided those ruins were to give place to his ideal plan of the government of reason. Brissot was one of those mercenary scribes who write for those who pay best. He had written on all subjects, for every minister; especially Turgot. Criminal laws, political economy, diplomacy, literature, philosophy, even libels,--his pen was at the hire of the first comer. Seeking the support of celebrated and influential men, he had adulated all from Voltaire and Franklin down to Marat. Known to Madame de Genlis, he had, through her, some acquaintance with the Duc d'Orleans. Sent to London by the minister on one of those missions which are nameless, he there became connected with the editor of the _Courrier de l'Europe_, a French journal, printed in London, and the boldness of whose style was offensive at the court of the Tuileries. He engaged himself to Swinton, the proprietor of this newspaper, and edited it in a manner favorable to the views of Vergennes. He knew at Swinton's several writers, amongst others one Morande. These libellers, outcasts of society, frequently then become the refuse of the pen, and live at the same time on the disgraces of vice and in the pay of spies. Their collision infected Brissot. He was or appeared to be sometimes their accomplice. Hideous blotches thus stain his life, and were cruelly revived by his enemies, when the time came in which he was compelled to appeal to public esteem.