" were the reporters,
the voters, the claqueurs, and the agents of the worst decrees against
religion, property and persons. The foundations of Terror were all laid
by the seventy-three in confinement before they were imprisoned, and by
the sixteen who were proscribed before their proscription. Excepting
ten or a dozen who stayed away, the Convention, in a mass, pronounced
judgment against the King and declared him guilty; more than one-half of
the Convention, the Girondists at the head of them, voted his death.
The hall does not contain fifty honorable men in whom character sustains
conscience, and who had a right to carry their heads erect.[5108] In no
law they passed, good or bad, did the other seven hundred have in view
the interests of their constituents. In all their laws, good or bad,
they solely regarded their own interests. So long as the attacks of the
"Mountain" and of the rabble affected the public only, they lauded them,
decreed them and had them executed. If they finally rebelled against
the "Mountain," and against the rabble, it was at the last moment,
and solely to save their lives. Before, as after the 9th of Thermidor,
before, as after the 1st of Prairial, the incentives of the conduct of
these pusillanimous oppressors or involuntary liberators were baseness
and egoism. Hence, "the contempt and horror universally poured out
against them; only Jacobins could be still more odious!"[5109] If
further support is given to these faithless mandatories, it is because
they are soon to be put out. On the premature report that the
Convention is going to break up, people accost each other in the street,
exclaiming, "We are rid of these brigands, they are going at last...
People caper and dance about as if they could not repress their joy;
they talk of nothing but the boy, (Louis XVIII. confined in the Temple),
and the new elections. Everybody agrees on excluding the present
deputies.... There is less discussion on the crimes which each has
committed than on the insignificance of the entire assemblage, while the
epithets of vicious, used up and corrupt have almost wholly given way to
thieves and scoundrels."[5110] Even in Paris, during the closing months
of their rule, they hardly dare appear in public: "in the dirtiest and
most careless costume which the tricolor scarf and gold fringe makes
more apparent, they try to escape notice in the crowd[5111] and, in
spite of their modesty, do not always avoid insult and still