and independence in the manner of examining them, as the
government is in such causes almost always a party interested.

We have since seen what are the military commissions to try crimes
of state; and the death of the Duke d'Eughien marks to all the
horror which that hypocritical power ought to inspire, which covers
murder with the mantle of the law.

The resistance of the tribunate, feeble as it was, displeased the
first consul; not that it was any obstacle to his designs, but it
kept up the habit of thinking in the nation, which he wished to
stifle entirely. He put into the journals among other things, an
absurd argument against the opposition. Nothing is so simple or so
proper, was it there said, as an opposition in England, because the
king is the enemy of the people; but in a country, where the
executive government is itself named by the people, it is opposing
the nation to oppose its representative. What a number of phrases of
this kind have the scribes of Napoleon deluged the public with for
ten years! In England or America the meanest peasant would laugh in
your face at a sophism of this nature; in France, all that is
desired, is to have a phrase ready, with which to give to one's
interest the appearance of conviction.

Very few persons showed themselves strangers to the desire of having
places; a great number were ruined, and the interest of their wives
and children, or of their nephews and nieces, if they had no
children, or of their cousins, if they had no nephews, obliged
them, they said, to seek employment from the government. The
great strength of the heads of the state in France, is the
prodigious taste that the people have for places; vanity even makes
them more sought for, than the emolument attached to them. Bonaparte
received thousands of petitions for every office, from the highest
to the lowest. If he had not had naturally a profound contempt for
the human race, he would have conceived it in running over
petitions, signed by names illustrious from their ancestry, or
celebrated by revolutionary actions in complete opposition to the
new functions they were ambitious of fulfilling.

The winter of 1801 at Paris was made extremely agreeable to me, by
the readiness with which Fouche granted the applications I made to
him for the return of different emigrants: in this way he left me,
in the midst of my disgrace, the pleasure of being useful, and I
retain a most grateful recollection to him for it. I