More troubling to Robespierre were the undesirable elements of the Mountain, those who gave their party a rather disreputable edge: Jean-Paul Marat, a druid strikingly disfigured by a curse that had gone awry, whose aggressive rhetoric chilled the blood of the most hardened Republicans; and Jacques Hébert, a fire-mage whose pamphlets were written in the language of the street and called for violence in the filthiest terms.
