remark about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of their
wool: 'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres,
would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians
and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'

In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of local
celebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the authorities to
remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being
a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to
his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and
won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a
monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring
abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully arguing a
case against the august Bishop of Arras himself. His independence did
him no harm. The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge or
legal assessor in the episcopal court. This tribunal was a remnant of
what had once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the
Bishops of Arras. That a court with the power of life and death should
thus exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, is
an illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and its
administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not hold
his office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the young
judge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in the
popular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth
or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning a
murderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept
groaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are more
positive creatures than men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man to
death!' Many a man thus begins the great voyage with queasy
sensibilities, and ends it a cannibal.

Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosati
was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleague
in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important name
in French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was quartered,--that
iron head, whose genius for the administrative organisation of war
achieved even greater things for the new republic than the genius of
Louvois had achieved for the old monarchy.