"In February 1790, caught up in an obscure argument over a legal issue that had resulted in an accusation of bad faith, he produced a pamphlet lambasting the 'friends of despotism and aristocracy' who 'apply themselves with indefatigable confidence to renewing their fatal plots,' and connecting his own actions to a context in which 'at the heart of this capital the horrible secret of the most cowardly and the most extravagant conspiracy that venality and tyranny has ever woven against the patrie and liberty begins to emerge.' At the end of that year he responded to praise from the patriots of Avignon, in the context of their violent struggle for integration into the patrie, by calling their language 'the most flattering prize of my attachment to their cause and that of humanity.' In defending them, 'it is justice, it is liberty, it is my patrie, it is myself that I have defended.' After a further page of such effusion, he concluded that 'the happiness of the people of Avignon would be proportional to their magnanimity, if my power equaled my zeal for their interests, and the tender veneration that I have pledged to them.' Whatever else Robespierre may be said to be doing in such passages, he is certainly fashioning a self in which this particularly melodramatic form of sentimental identification is to the fore." David Andress