power. Military operations having been suspended to
await the result of diplomacy, his instructions from Ricord were drawn
so as to be loose and merely formal. On July eleventh he started from
Nice, reaching his destination three days later. During the week of
his stay--for he left again on the twenty-first--the envoy made his
representations, and laid down his ultimatum that the republic of
Genoa should preserve absolute neutrality, neither permitting troops
to pass over its territories, nor lending aid in the construction of
military roads, as she was charged with doing secretly. His success in
overawing the oligarchy was complete, and a written promise of
compliance to these demands was made by the Doge. Buonaparte arrived
again in Nice on the twenty-eighth. We may imagine that as he traveled
the romantic road between the mountains and the sea, the rising
general and diplomat indulged in many rosy dreams, probably feeling
already on his shoulders the insignia of a commander-in-chief. But he
was returning to disgrace, if not to destruction. A week after his
arrival came the stupefying news that the hour-glass had once again
been reversed, that on the very day of his own exultant return to
Nice, Robespierre's head had fallen, that the Mountain was shattered,
and that the land was again staggering to gain its balance after
another political earthquake.

The shock had been awful, but it was directly traceable to the
accumulated disorders of Jacobin rule. A rude and vigorous but eerie
order of things had been inaugurated on November twenty-fourth, 1793,
by the so-called republic. There was first the new calendar, in which
the year I began on September twenty-second, 1792, the day on which
the republic had been proclaimed. In it were the twelve thirty-day
months, with their names of vintage, fog, and frost; of snow, rain,
and wind; of bud, flower, and meadow; of seed, heat, and harvest: the
whole terminated most unpoetically by the five or six supplementary
days named sansculot-tides,--sansculottes meaning without
knee-breeches, a garment confined to the upper classes; that is, with
long trousers like the common people,--and these days were so named
because they were to be a holiday for the long-trousered populace
which was to use the new reckoning. There was next the new, strange,
and unhallowed spectacle, seen in history for the first time, the
realization of a nightmare--a whole people finally turned into an
army, and