and his artillerymen pleaded for
mercy, but in vain.

Running like a thread through all these events was a little
counterplot. The Corsicans at Toulon were persons of importance, and
had shown their mettle. Salicetti, Buonaparte, Arena, and Cervoni were
now men of mark; the two latter had, like Buonaparte, been promoted,
though to much lower rank. As Salicetti declared in a letter written
on December twenty-eighth, they were scheming to secure vessels and
arm them for an expedition to Corsica. But for the time their efforts
came to naught; and thenceforward Salicetti seemed to lose all
interest in Corsican affairs, becoming more and more involved in the
ever madder rush of events in France.

This was not strange, for even a common politician could not remain
insensible to the course or the consequences of the malignant anarchy
now raging throughout France. The massacres at Lyons, Marseilles, and
Toulon were the reply to the horrors of like or worse nature
perpetrated in Vendee by the royalists. Danton having used the Paris
sections to overawe the Girondist majority of the Convention, Marat
gathered his riotous band of sansculottes, and hounded the discredited
remnant of the party to death, flight, or arrest. His bloody career
was ended only by Charlotte Corday's dagger. Passions were thus
inflamed until even Danton's conduct appeared calm, moderate, and
inefficient when compared with the reckless bloodthirstiness of
Hebert, now leader of the Exageres. The latter prevailed, the Vendeans
were defeated, and Citizen Carrier of Nantes in three months took
fifteen thousand human lives by his fiendishly ingenious systems of
drowning and shooting. In short, France was chaos, and the Salicettis
of the time might hope for anything, or fear everything, in the throes
of her disorder. Not so a man like Buonaparte. His instinct led him to
stand in readiness at the parting of the ways. Others might choose and
press forward; he gave no sign of being moved by current events, but
stood with his eye still fixed, though now in a backward gaze, on
Corsica, ready, if interest or self-preservation required it, for
another effort to seize and hold it as his own. It was self-esteem,
not Corsican patriotism, his French interest perhaps, which now
prompted him. Determined and revengeful, he was again, through the
confusion of affairs at Paris, to secure means for his enterprise, and
this time on a scale proportionate to the difficulty. The inf