crat, enthusiastic for the Revolution and its
extension. He was no Frenchman himself, but a German at heart, and
thought that the German lands--Holland, Switzerland, Germany
itself--should be brought into the great movement. Like Barras, who
needed disorder for his Orleanist schemes and for the supply of his
lavish purse, Rewbell despised the new constitution; but for a
different reason. To him it appeared a flimsy, theoretical document,
so subdividing the exercise of power as to destroy it altogether. His
role was in the world of finance, and he was always suspected, though
unjustly, of unholy alliances with army contractors and stock
manipulators. Larevelliere was another doctrinaire, but, in comparison
with Rewbell, a bigot. He had been a Girondist, a good citizen, and
active in the formation of the new constitution; but he lacked
practical common sense, and hated the Church with as much narrow
bitterness as the most rancorous modern agnostic,--seeking, however,
not merely its destruction, but, like Robespierre, to substitute for
it a cult of reason and humanity. The fourth member of the Directory,
Letourneur, was a plain soldier, an officer in the engineers. With
abundant common sense and a hard head, he, too, was a sincere
republican; but he was a tolerant one, a moderate, kindly man like his
friend Carnot, with whom, as time passed by and there was gradually
developed an irreconcilable split in the Directory, he always voted in
a minority of two against the other three.

At first the notorious Abbe Sieyes had been chosen a member of the
executive. He was both deep and dark, like Bonaparte, to whom he later
rendered valuable services. His ever famous pamphlet, which in 1789
triumphantly proved that the Third Estate was neither more nor less
than the French nation, had made many think him a radical. As years
passed on he became the oracle of his time, and as such acquired an
enormous influence even in the days of the Terror, which he was
helpless to avert, and which he viewed with horror and disgust.
Whatever may have been his original ideas, he appears to have been for
some time after the thirteenth of Vendemiaire an Orleanist, the head
of a party which desired no longer a strict hereditary and absolute
monarchy, but thought that in the son of Philippe Egalite they had a
useful prince to preside over a constitutional kingdom. Perhaps for
this reason, perhaps for the one he gave, which was that the new
constitution