On a man becoming a slave, said old Homer, the Gods take away the half of his soul; the same is true of a man who becomes a tyrant.—In the Pavilion de Flore, alongside of and above the enslaved Convention, sit the twelve kings it has enthroned, twice a day,3233 ruling over it as well as over France.3234 Of course, some guarantee is required from those who fill this place; there is not one of them who is not a revolutionary of long standing, an impenitent regicide, a fanatic in essence and a despot through principle; but the fumes of omnipotence have not intoxicated them all to the same degree.—Three or four of them, Robert Lindet, Jean Bon St. AndrÉ, Prieur de la CÔte-d'Or and Carnot, confine themselves to useful and secondary duties; this suffices to keep them partially safe. As specialists, charged with an important service, their first object is to do this well, and hence they subordinate the rest to this, even theoretical exigencies and the outcries of the clubs.

Lindet's prime object is to feed the departments that are without wheat, and the towns that are soon to be short of bread.

Prieur's business is to see that biscuits, brandy, clothes, shoes, gunpowder and arms are manufactured.3235

Jean Bon, that vessels are equipped and crews drilled.

Carnot, to draw up campaign plans and direct the march of armies: the dispatch of so many bags of grain during the coming fortnight to this or that town, or warehouse in this or that district; the making up of so many weekly rations, to be deported during the month to certain places on the frontier; the transformation of so many fishermen into artillerymen or marines, and to set afloat so many vessels in three months; to expedite certain Corps of Cavalry, infantry and artillery, so as to arrive by such and such roads at this or that pass—

These are precise combinations which purge the brain of dogmatic phrases, which force revolutionary jargon into the background and keep a man sensible and practical; and all the more because three of them, Jean Bon, former captain of a merchantman, Prieur and Carnot, engineering officers, are professional men and go to the front to put their shoulders to the wheel on the spot. Jean Bon, always visiting the coasts, goes on board a vessel of the fleet leaving Brest to save the great American convoy; Carnot, at Watignies, orders Jourdan to make a decisive move, and, shouldering his musket, marches along with the attacking column.3236 Naturally, they have no leisure for speechmaking in the Jacobin club, or for intrigues in the Convention: Carnot lives in his own office and in the committee-room; he does not allow himself time enough to eat with his wife, dines on a crust of bread and a glass of lemonade, and works sixteen and eighteen hours a day;3237 Lindet, more overtasked than any body else, because hunger will not wait, reads every report himself, and passes days and nights at it;"3238 Jean Bon, in wooden shoes and woolen vest, with a bit of coarse bread and a glass of bad beer,3239 writes and dictates until his strength fails him, and he has to lie down and sleep on a mattress on the floor.—Naturally, again, when interfered with, and the tools in their hands are broken, they are dissatisfied; they know well the worth of a good instrument, and for the service, as they comprehend it, good tools are essential, competent, faithful employees, regular in attendance at their offices, and not at the club. When they have a subordinate of this kind they defend him, often at the risk of their lives, even to incurring the enmity of Robespierre. Cambon,3240 who, on his financial committee, is also a sort of sovereign, retains at the Treasury five or six hundred employees unable to procure their certificate of civism, and whom the Jacobins incessantly denounce so as to get their places. Carnot saves and employs eminent engineers, D'Arcon, de Montalembert, d'Obenheim, all of them nobles, and one of them an anti-Jacobin, without counting a number of accused officers whom he justifies, replaces, or maintains.3241—Through these courageous and humane acts, they solace themselves for their scruples, at least partially and for the time being; moreover, they are statesmen only because the occasion and superior force makes it imperative, more led by others than leading, terrorists through accident and necessity, rather than through system and instinct. If, in concert with ten others, Prieur and Carnot order wholesale robbery and murder, if they sign orders by twenties and hundreds, amounting to assassinations, it is owing to their forming part of a body. When the whole committee deliberates, they are bound, in important decrees, to submit to the preponderating opinion of the majority, after voting in the negative. In relation to secondary decrees, in which there has been no preliminary discussion in common, the only responsible member is the one whose signature stands first; the following signatures affixed, without reading the document, are simply a "formality which the law requires," merely a visa, necessarily mechanical; with "four or five hundred business matters to attend to daily," it is impossible to do otherwise. To read all and vote in every case, would be "a physical impossibility."3242—Finally, as things are, "is not the general will, at least the apparent general will, that alone on which the government can decide, itself ultra-revolutionary?"3243 In other words, should not the five or six rascals in a State who vociferate, be listened to, rather than a hundred honest folks who keep their mouths shut? With this sophism, gross as it is, but of pure Jacobin manufacture, Carnot ends by hoodwinking his honor and his conscience; otherwise intact, and far more so than his colleagues, he likewise undergoes moral and mental mutilation; constrained by the duties of his post and the illusions of his creed, he succeeded in an inward decapitation of the two noblest of human faculties, common-sense, the most useful, and the moral sense, the most exalted of all.