intriguers of all parties overthrowing each other only to get offices;

* the intoxicated soldier boasting of the services he has rendered
and is to render, and abandoning himself shamelessly to every sort of
debauchery;

* commercial houses transformed into dens of thieves;

* rascals become traders and traders become rascals; the most sordid
cupidity and a mortal egoism--such is the picture presented by
Paris."[42150]

One group is wanting in this picture, that of the governors who preside
over this wretchedness, which group remains in the background; one might
say that it was so designed and composed by some great artist, a lover
of contrasts, an inexorable logician, whose invisible hand traces human
character unvaryingly, and whose mournful irony unfailingly depicts
side by side, in strong relief, the grotesqueness of folly and the
seriousness of death. How many perished on account of this misery?
Probably more than a million persons.[42151]--

Try to take in at a glance the extraordinary spectacle presented on
twenty-six thousand square leagues of territory:

* The immense multitude of the starving in town and country,

* the long lines of women for three years waiting for bread in all the
cities,

* this or that town of twenty-three thousand souls in which one-third of
the population dies in the hospitals in three months,

* the crowds of paupers at the poor-houses,

* the file of poor wretches entering and the file of coffins going out,

* the asylums deprived of their property, overcrowded with the sick,
unable to feed the multitude of foundlings pining away in their cradles
the very first week, their little faces in wrinkles like those of old
men,

* the malady of want aggravating all other maladies, the long suffering
of a persistent vitality amidst pain and which refuses to succumb, the
final death-rattle in a garret or in a ditch.

Contrast this with this the small, powerful, triumphant group of
Jacobins which, having understood how to place themselves in the good
places, is determined to stay there at any cost.--About ten o'clock in
the morning,[42152] Cambaceres, president of the Committee of Public
Safety, is seen entering its hall in the Pavillon de l'Egalite. He is
a large, cautious and shrewd personage who will, later on, become
arch-chancellor of the Empire and famous for his epicurean inventions
and other peculiar tastes revived from antiquity. Scarcely seated, he
orders an ample pat