ay, 1795).

In reality Fortune never favoured him more than when she removed him
from the coteries of intriguing Corsicans on the coast of Provence and
brought him to the centre of all influence. An able schemer at Paris
could decide the fate of parties and governments. At the frontiers men
could only accept the decrees of the omnipotent capital. Moreover, the
Revolution, after passing through the molten stage, was now beginning
to solidify, an important opportunity for the political craftsman. The
spring of the year 1795 witnessed a strange blending of the new
fanaticism with the old customs. Society, dammed up for a time by the
Spartan rigour of Robespierre, was now flowing back into its wonted
channels. Gay equipages were seen in the streets; theatres, prosperous
even during the Terror, were now filled to overflowing; gambling,
whether in money or in stocks and _assignats_, was now permeating all
grades of society; and men who had grown rich by amassing the
confiscated State lands now vied with bankers, stock-jobbers, and
forestallers of grain in vulgar ostentation. As for the poor, they
were meeting their match in the gilded youth of Paris, who with
clubbed sticks asserted the right of the rich to be merry. If the
_sansculottes_ attempted to restore the days of the Terror, the
National Guards of Paris were ready to sweep them back into the slums.
Such was their fate on May 20th, shortly after Buonaparte's arrival at
Paris. Any dreams which he may have harboured of restoring the
Jacobins to power were dissipated, for Paris now plunged into the
gaieties of the _ancien regime_. The Terror was remembered only as a
horrible nightmare, which served to add zest to the pleasures of the
present. In some circles no one was received who had not lost a
relative by the guillotine. With a ghastly merriment characteristic of
the time, "victim balls" were given, to which those alone were
admitted who could produce the death warrant of some family
connection: these secured the pleasure of dancing in costumes which
recalled those of the scaffold, and of beckoning ever and anon to
their partners with nods that simulated the fall of the severed head.
It was for this, then, that the amiable Louis, the majestic Marie
Antoinette, the Minerva-like Madame Roland, the Girondins vowed to the
utter quest of liberty, the tyrant-quelling Danton, the incorruptible
Robespierre himself, had felt the fatal axe; in order that the mimicry
of their de