It was, however, admiration for his gifts as a writer rather than for his skill as an advocate which he principally desired. And it was in the Academy of Arras, to which he was elected in 1783, that he sought to shine even more than in the courts of law. This Academy, like similar establishments in other provincial cities, was a kind of literary and scientific club whose members read papers to each other, debated the important questions of the day, and held intellectual competitions for the winners of which occasional prizes were awarded. Derobespierre soon made himself a leading member, and within three years of his election he was appointed its director with the responsibility of presiding over meetings and making official speeches on its behalf.
By this time he had seen his work in print once more. The Academy of Metz had offered prizes for the best essays submitted on the theme of whether or not a criminal’s family should share his shame. Derobespierre had immediately put his eager mind to work, and had submitted an entry which had been awarded the second prize. He had spent the money he won in having an extended version of his essay printed and distributed in a booklet of sixty pages. He had also submitted an entry for a competition later set by the Academy of Amiens. This did not win a prize, but its author had had it printed and circulated all the same.
During his time as director of the Academy of Arras, when he was one of the three judges appointed to consider the entries, no prizes were awarded to any of the essays submitted in its competitions. They were, indeed, more likely to be rejected with some severe strictures upon their merits by the Academy director who, jealous as always of those whom he considered his rivals, pronounced upon one essay that it was as ill-organized as it was undeveloped; that it put forward nothing either new or useful; that it was ‘badly written and badly presented’; that its only merit was that it was short.
Derobespierre’s sister, Charlotte, described her brother’s daily life and habits at this time in a light which softens the rather harsh and disagreeable portrait others have drawn of the dapper, little, ambitious, pushing lawyer, marching so quickly and so purposefully through the cobbled streets of Arras. According to Charlotte, he woke up early and was out of bed by seven o’clock, sometimes by six. He worked for an hour or two before getting dressed, an operation which was performed with the utmost care and attention. Before putting on his coat his hair was brushed, dressed and powdered by the barber who now came to the house every morning for this purpose. After a meagre breakfast of bread and milk, he set off for the law courts, returning in time for an almost equally meagre evening meal with which he drank a little wine, and that much watered. He seems to have been almost completely uninterested in food, living mainly on bread, fruit and coffee. He had a passion for pastry, but as this gave him indigestion he could not indulge himself, and he never appeared to enjoy anything else. A fellow-guest at a dinner party said that when eating he looked like a cat lapping vinegar. Whenever Charlotte asked him what he would like for a meal he replied that he did not care.
Still, she did not find him either difficult or morose. Admittedly he was usually reserved and quiet, withdrawing to an armchair in a corner whenever other people in the room began to gossip about their neighbours or produced a pack of cards. Charlotte remembered one evening when she and her brother had been out visiting friends. On the way home he started walking at an even faster pace than usual, leaving her trailing far behind him. By the time he arrived home he had forgotten that she had been with him. He let himself into the house and settled down to work in his study. ‘I went into his study,’ Charlotte said, ‘and found him already in his dressing-gown, working very hard. He asked me with a look of some surprise where I had been to arrive back so late.’
In 1789 Robespierre, as he was beginning to call himself, was elected to the Estates General as one of the deputies for Artois. Although he was eventually to speak more than five hundred times during the life of the National Assembly and to gain wide respect as one of the shrewdest and most incorruptible men of the Left, he found it difficult at first to obtain a hearing. His voice was weak; his views unacceptable to most of his fellow-deputies; his rather self-righteous manner irritating; his habit of blinking his eyes and never looking directly at those to whom he spoke, disconcerting; his self-confidence not proof against the rowdy interruptions and catcalls with which speakers in those early days of the Assembly had to contend. ‘Monsieur de Robespierre took the floor,’ runs an account in the Courrier of one of his failures, ‘but the Assembly having shown its impatience, the honourable member withdrew with tears in his eyes.’ ‘He was interrupted again,’ according to another account describing a different occasion, ‘and, at last…he left the rostrum. The President remonstrated with the Assembly that this conduct was not fair. Monsieur de Robespierre was invited to take the rostrum once more. He did so. But whatever excellent things he might have had to say, the rude opposition he had experienced had put him off his stroke.’
When the Assembly moved to Paris, however, Robespierre’s voice was heard with greater respect and his sincerity unquestioningly admitted. ‘That man will go far,’ Mirabeau said of him. ‘He believes what he says.’ The public, too, admired him and listened to him attentively, and it was to them that his speeches were principally addressed. ‘I was always looking beyond the narrow confines of the house of legislation,’ he confessed. ‘When I spoke to the body of representatives, my aim was above all to be heard by the nation and by humanity. I wanted to arouse, and to arouse for ever in the hearts of citizens the feeling of the dignity of man.’ His only regret was that the Manège was not bigger; he would have preferred a debating chamber ‘open to twelve thousand spectators’. For, ‘under the eyes of so many witnesses neither corruption, intrigue nor perfidy would dare show themselves. Only the general will would be consulted. The voice of the nation alone would be heard’.
Robespierre’s new fame and influence in the Assembly and at the Jacobin Club made no alteration in the extreme – it seemed to some ostentatious – simplicity of his life. He still dressed with excessive neatness and was often to be seen in a smart green striped nankeen coat, a blue striped waistcoat and a crisp cravat of red and white stripes. His hair seemed more neatly brushed and carefully powdered than ever. But once his appearance had been attended to, he seemed to have little use for the generous allowance of eighteen livres a day which the deputies had voted for themselves. He shared a small third-floor apartment in the Rue Saintonge with another bachelor, and appeared to take no respite from his work except for an occasional walk in the gardens of the Tuileries, where he fed the sparrows, or a visit to the theatre where – fortunately for him since there were so many of them – he ‘liked declamatory tragedies’.
After the day of the Champ de Mars, when warrants had been issued for the arrest of several left-wing leaders, and various members of the Jacobin Club had gone into hiding, a master joiner, Maurice Duplay, who belonged to the Club, suggested that Robespierre would be safer with him than living so far away in the Rue Saintonge. So, after trying life with the Duplays for a few weeks, he moved his belongings and his beloved dog, Brount, from his apartment and settled in at 398 Rue Saint-Honoré with the Duplays who treated him as an honoured guest. Both the father and mother, as well as the three daughters who lived at home with them, tried ‘to detect in Robespierre’s eyes all his wishes,’ so one visitor thought, ‘in order to anticipate them immediately’. According to his sister, Robespierre was ‘extremely sensitive to all this kind of thing’; and it was certainly obvious to everyone who came to the house and found the Duplays’ distinguished guest sitting at the dining-table at which it was his practice always to say grace, that he greatly enjoyed the fussy attentions which were paid to him and that he was not in the least averse to having pictures of himself displayed in every room. One of the girls, Eleonore, a fat, plain girl of twenty-four, was particularly attentive. It was rumoured that they were engaged to be married, but his sister doubted this: ‘Overwhelmed with business and work as my brother was, and entirely taken up with his career,’ she asked, ‘how could he think of love or marriage?’ Indeed, Robespierre seemed to have as little interest in women as in food: some said he hated women.