This was the great crisis of his life.Hitherto he had done nothing inexpiable, nothing which marked him out as a much worse man than most of his colleagues in the Conven

dignation. Bordeaux declared that it would stand by its representatives, and would, if necessary, defend them by the sword against the tyranny of Paris. Lyons and Marseilles were animated by a similar spirit. These tion. His voice had generally been on the manifestations of public opinion gave courage side of moderate measures. Had he bravely to the majority of the Convention. Thanks cast in his lot with the Girondists, and sufwere voted to the people of Bordeaux for their fered with them, he would like them have patriotic declaration, and a commission con- had a not dishonorable place in history. Had sisting of twelve members was appointed for he, like the great body of deputies who meant the purpose of investigating the conduct of well, but who had not the courage to expose the municipal authorities of Paris; and was themselves to martyrdom, crouched quietly empowered to place under arrest such per- under the dominion of the triumphant minorsons as should appear to have been concerned ity, and suffered every motion of Robespierre in any plot against the authority of the Con- and Billaud to pass unopposed, he would have vention. This measure was adopted on the incurred no peculiar ignominy. But it is motion of Barère. probable that this course was not open to A few days of stormy excitement and pro- him. He had been too prominent among the found anxiety followed; and then came the adversaries of the Mountain, to be admitted crash. On the thirty-first of May the mob to quarter without making some atonement. of Paris rose; the palace of the Tuileries It was necessary that, if he hoped to find parwas besieged by a vast array of pikes; the don from his new lords, he should not be majority of the deputies, after vain struggles merely a silent and passive slave. What passand remonstrances, yielded to violence, and ed in private between him and them cannot suffered the Mountain to carry a decree for be accurately related; but the result was soon the suspension and arrest of the deputies apparent. The Committee of Public Safety whom the wards of the capital had accused. was renewed. Several of the fiercest of the During this contest, Barère had been toss-dominant faction, Couthon for example, and ed backwards and forwards between the two St. Just, were substituted for more moderate raging factions. His feelings, languid and politicians; but Barère was suffered to retain unsteady as they always were, drew him to his seat at the Board. the Girondists; but he was awed by the The indulgence with which he was treated vigor and determination of the Mountain. excited the murmurs of some stern and arAt one moment he held high and firm lan-dent zealots. Marat, in the very last words guage, complained that the Convention was that he wrote, words not published till the not free, and protested against the validity of dagger of Charlotte Corday had avenged any vote passed under coercion. At another France and mankind, complained that a man moment he proposed to conciliate the Pa- who had no principles, who was always on risians by abolishing that commission of the side of the strongest, who had been a roytwelve which he had himself proposed only a alist, and who was ready, in case of a turn of few days before; and himself drew up a pa- fortune, to be a royalist again, should be enper condemning the very measures which trusted with an important share in the adminhad been adopted at his own instance, and istration.* But the chiefs of the Mountain eulogizing the public spirit of the insurgents. judged more correctly. They knew indeed, To do him justice, it was not without some as well as Marat, that Barère was a man utsymptoms of shame that he read this docu-terly without faith or steadiness; that if he ment from the tribune, where he had so often could be said to have any political leaning, expressed very different sentiments. It is his leaning was not towards them; that he said that, at some passages, he was even seen felt for the Girondist party that faint and to blush. It may have been so; he was still in his novitiate of infamy.

Some days later he proposed that hostages for the personal safety of the accused deputies should be sent to the departments, and offered to be himself one of those hostages. Nor do we in the least doubt that the offer was sincere. He would, we firmly believe, have thought himself far safer at Bordeaux or Marseilles than at Paris. His proposition, however, was not carried into effect; and he remained in the power of the victorious Mountain.

wavering sort of preference of which alone his nature was susceptible; and that, if he had been at liberty to make his choice, he would rather have murdered Robespierre and Danton than Vergniaud and Gensonné.— But they justly appreciated that levity which made him incapable alike of earnest love and of earnest hatred, and that meanness which made it necessary to him to have a master.

See the Publiciste of the 14th of July 1793. Marat was stabbed on the evening of the 13th.

In truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of black men with flat noses and woolly hair, was strictly true of Barère. The curse of Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an instinct in him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity to a party in prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the cuckoo and the swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are approaching. The law which doomed him to be the humble attendant of stronger spirits, resembled the law which binds the pilot-fish to the shark. Ken ye,' said a shrewd Scotch lord, who was asked his opinion of James the First; 'Ken ye a John Ape? If I have Jacko by the collar, I can make him bite you; but if you have Jacko, you can make him bite me.' Just such a creature was Barère. In the hands of the Girondists he would have been eager to proscribe the Jacobins; he was just as ready, in the gripe of the Jacobins, to proscribe the Girondists. On the fidelity of such a man the heads of the Mountain could not, of course, reckon; but they valued their conquest as the very easy and not very delicate lover in Congreve's lively song valued the conquest of a prostitute of a different kind. Barère was, like Chloe, false and common; but he was, like Chloe, constant while possessed; and they asked no more. They needed a service which he was very competent to perform. Destitute as he was of all the talents both of an active and of a speculative statesman, he could with great facility draw up a report, or make a speech on any subject and on any side. If other people would furnish facts and thoughts, he could always furnish phrases; and this talent was absolutely at the command of his owners for the time being. Nor had he excited any angry passion among those to whom he had hitherto been opposed. They felt no more hatred to him than they felt to the horses which dragged the cannon of the Duke of Brunswick and of the Prince of Saxe-Coburg. The horses had only done according to their kind, and would, if they fell into the hands of the French, drag with equal vigor and equal docility the guns of the republic, and therefore ought not merely to be spared, but to be well fed and curried. So was it with Barère. He was of a nature so low, that it might be doubted whether he could properly be an object of the hostility of reasonable beings. He had not been an enemy; he was not now a friend. But he had been an annoyance; and he would now be a help.

acting pledges such as made it impossible for him, false and fickle as he was, ever again to find admission into the ranks which he had deserted. That was truly a terrible sacrament by which they admitted the apostate into their communion. They demanded of him that he should himself take the most prominent part in murdering his old friends. To refuse was as much as his life was worth. But what is life worth when it is only one long agony of remorse and shame? These, however, are feelings of which it is idle to talk, when we are considering the conduct of such a man as Barère. He undertook the task, mounted the tribune, and told the Convention that the time was come for taking the stern attitude of justice, and for striking at all conspirators without distinction. He then moved that Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and thirteen other deputies, should be placed out of the pale of the law, or, in other words, beheaded without a trial; and that Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonné, and six others, should be impeached. The motion was carried without debate.

We have already seen with what effrontery Barère has denied, in these Memoirs, that he took any part against the Girondists. This denial, we think, was the only thing wanting to make his infamy complete. The most impudent of all lies was a fit companion for the foulest of all murders.

Barère, however, had not as yet earned his pardon. The Jacobin party contained one gang which, even in that party, was pre-eminent in every mean and every savage vice, a gang so low-minded and so inhuman, that, compared with them, Robespierre might be called magnanimous and merciful. Of these wretches Hébert was perhaps the best representative. His favorite amusement was to torment and insult the miserable remains of that great family which, having ruled France during eight hundred years, had now become an object of pity to the humblest artisan or peasant. The influence of this man, and of men like him, induced the Committee of Public Safety to determine that Marie Antoinette should be sent to the scaffold. Barère was again summoned to his duty. Only four days after he had proposed the decrees against the Girondist deputies he again mounted the tribune, in order to move that the Queen should be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was improving fast in the society of his new allies. When he asked for the heads of Vergniaud and Pétion, he had spoken like a man who had some slight sense of his own guilt and degradation; he had But though the heads of the Mountain par- said little, and that little had not been violent. doned this man, and admitted him into partner- The office of expatiating on the guilt of his ship with themselves, it was not without ex-old friends he had left to St. Just. Very

different was Barère's second appearance | monarchy; just as a swarm of new superstiin the character of an accuser. He now tions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, cried out for blood in the eager tones of true and burning thirst, and raved against the Austrian woman with the virulence natural to a coward who finds himself at liberty to outrage that which he has feared and envied. We have already exposed the shameless mendacity with which, in these Memoirs, he attempts to throw the blame of his own guilt on the guiltless.

and the fooleries of the Theophilanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient Church; even so, out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence, sprang new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars and dictionaries were necessary.The same innovating spirit which altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns and Peters into Scævolas On the day on which the fallen Queen was and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sundragged, already more than half dead, to her day and Monday, January and February, doom, Barère regaled Robespierre and some Lady-day and Christmas from the calendar, other Jacobins at a tavern. Robespierre's in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, acceptance of the invitation caused some sur- Nivose and Pluviose, Feasts of Opinion and prise to those who knew how long and how Feasts of the Supreme Being, changed all the bitterly it was his nature to hate. Robe- forms of official correspondence. For the spierre of the party!' muttered St. Just. Ba- calm, guarded, and sternly courteous language rère is the only man whom Robespierre has which governments had long been accustomed forgiven.' We have an account of this singu- to employ, were substituted puns, interjeclar repast from one of the guests. Robe- tions, Ossianic rants, rhetoric worthy only of spierre condemned the senseless brutality a schoolboy, scurrility worthy only of a fishwith which Hébert had conducted the pro- wife. Of the phraseology which was now ceedings against the Austrian woman, and, in thought to be peculiarly well suited to a Retalking on that subject, became so much ex-port or a Manifesto, Barère had a greater cited that he broke his plate in the violence command than any man of his time; and, of his gesticulation. Barère exclaimed that the guillotine had cut a diplomatic knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals between the Beaune and the Champagne, between the ragout of thrushes and the partridge with truffles, he fervently preached his new political creed. The vessel of the revolution,' he said, can float into port only on waves of blood. We must begin with the members of the National Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rubbish must be swept away.'

6

during the short and sharp paroxysm of the revolutionary delirium, passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was considered as what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent elocution, with no originality, with little information, and with a taste as bad as his heart. His Reports were popularly called Carmagnoles. A few months ago we should have had some difficulty in conveying to an English reader an exact notion of the state papers to which this appellation was given. Fortunately a noble and distinguished person, whom her Majesty's Ministers have thought qualified to fill the most important post in the empire, has made our task easy. Whoever has read Lord Ellenborough's proclamations is able to form a complete idea of a Carmagnole.

As he talked at table he talked in the Convention. His peculiar style of oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and liveliness. But, in any other age or country, it would have been thought unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still more unfit for state papers. It The effect which Barère's discourses at one might, perhaps, succeed at a meeting of a time produced is not to be wholly attributed Protestant Association in Exeter Hall, at a to the perversion of the national taste. The Repeal dinner in Ireland, after men had well occasions on which he rose were frequently drunk, or in an American oration on the such as would have secured to the worst Fourth of July No legislative body would speaker a favorable hearing. When any mil now endure it. But in France, during the itary advantage had been gained, he was reign of the Convention, the old laws of com- generally deputed by the Committee of Pub position were held in as much contempt as lic Safety to announce the good news. the old government or the old creed. Cor- hall resounded with applause as he mounted rect and noble diction belonged, like the eti- the tribune, holding the despatches in his quette of Versailles and the solemnities of hand. Deputies and strangers listened with Notre Dame, to an age which had passed delight while he told them that victory was away. Just as a swarm of ephemeral con- the order of the day; that the guineas of Pitt stitutions, democratic, directorial, and consu- had been vainly lavished to hire machines six lar, sprang from the decay of the ancient feet high, carrying guns; that the flight

The

of

the English leopard deserved to be celebrated | were graceful and handsome youths of six or by Tyrtæus; and that the saltpetre dug out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which would crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis.

fanaticism which had emancipated them from [ting a capital crime; when spies lurked in the restraints of justice and compassion, had every corner; when the guillotine was long emancipated them also from the dominion of and hard at work every morning; when the vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, jails were filled as close as the hold of a slavewhile hardly knowing where to find an assig-ship; when the gutters ran foaming with nat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they blood into the Seine; when it was death to expended with strict integrity the immense be great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, revenue which they collected by every art of or half-brother of a doctor of the Sorbonne, rapine; and that they were ready, in support to express a doubt whether assignats would of their cause, to mount the scaffold with as not fall, to hint that the English have been much indifference as they showed when they victorious in the action of the First of June, signed the death-warrants of aristocrats and to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets priests. But no great party can be composed locked up in a desk, to laugh at a Jacobin of such materials as these. It is the inevita- for taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon, ble law, that such zealots as we have describ- or to call the Fifth Sans-culottide by its old ed shall collect around them a multitude of superstitious name of St. Matthew's Day. slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose While the daily wagon-loads of victims were savage tempers and licentious appetites, with- carried to their doom through the streets of held only by the dread of law and magistracy Paris, the Proconsuls whom the sovereign from the worst excesses, are called into full Committee had sent forth to the departments, activity by the hope of impunity. A faction revealed an extravagance of cruelty unknown which, from whatever motive, relaxes the even in the capital. The knife of the deadgreat laws of morality, is certain to be joined ly machine rose and fell too slow for their by the most immoral part of the community. work of slaughter. Long rows of captives This has been repeatedly proved in religious were mowed down with grape-shot. Holes wars. The war of the Holy Sepulchre, the were made in the bottom of crowded barges Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras Thirty Years' war, all originated in pious even the cruel mercy of a speedy death was zeal. That zeal inflamed the champions of denied to the prisoners. All down the Loire, the church to such a point, that they regard- from Saumer to the sea, great flocks of crows ed all generosity to the vanquished as a sin- and kites feasted on naked corpses, twined ful weakness. The infidel, the heretic, was together in hideous embraces. No mercy was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage shown to sex or age. The number of young committed by the Catholic warrior on the lads and of girls of seventeen who were murdermiscreant enemy could deserve punishment. ed by that execrable government, is to be As soon as it was known that boundless license reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the was thus given to barbarity and dissoluteness, breast were tossed from pike to pike along the thousands of wretches who cared nothing for Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had the sacred cause, but who were eager to be his pockets well stuffed with ears. Another exempted from the police of peaceful cities, swaggered about with the finger of a little and the discipline of well-governed camps, child in his hat. A few months had sufficed flocked to the standard of the faith. The to degrade France below the level of New men who had set up that standard were sin-Zealand.

cere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, It is absurd to say that any amount of pubwhere only themselves were concerned, not lic danger can justify a system like this, we unforgiving; but round that standard were do not say on Christian principles, we do not assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, say on the principles of a high morality, but plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as were even on principles of Machiavelian policy. It scarcely ever found under the flag of any state is true that great emergencies call for activiengaged in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very ty and vigilance; it is true that they justify similar way was the Jacobin party composed. severity which, in ordinary times, would deThere was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; serve the name of cruelty. But indiscrimi round that nucleus was gathered a vast mass nate severity can never, under any circumof ignoble depravity; and in all that mass, stances, be useful. It is plain that the whole there was nothing so depraved and so ignoble efficacy of punishment depends on the care as Barère. with which the guilty are distinguished. PunThen came those days, when the most bar-ishment which strikes the guilty and the inbarous of all codes was administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could greet his neighbors, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without danger of commit

nocent promiscuously operates merely like a pestilence or a great convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences, than the cholera, or an earthquake like that