XVI. as we did!"-
"You demand an impossibility. You would not do this in our place. You
sacrifice France to vain terrors."--

"No, the risk is not equal; our heads are at stake!"

Their heads, perhaps,--but certainly their power, places, fortunes,
comforts and pleasures, all that in their eyes makes it worth while
to live.--Every morning, seventy Paris newspapers and as many local
gazettes in the large towns of the provinces expose, with supporting
documents, details and figures, not merely their former crimes, but,
again, their actual corruption, their sudden opulence founded on
prevarication and rapine, their bribes and peculations--

* one, rewarded with a sumptuously furnished mansion by a company of
grateful contractors;

* another, son of a bailiwick attorney and a would-be Carthusian, now
possessor of ecclesiastical property, restored by him at a great
outlay for hunting-grounds; another also monopolizes the finest land in
Seine-et-Oise;

* another, the improvised owner of four chateaux;

* another, who has feathered his nest with fifteen or eighteen
millions,[5162]

With their loose or arbitrary ways of doing things, their habits
as hoarders or spendthrifts, their display and effrontery, their
dissipations, their courtiers and their prostitutes. How can they
renounce all this?--And all the more because this is all they have.
These jaded consciences are wholly indifferent to abstract principles,
to popular sovereignty, to the common weal, to public security; the thin
and brittle coating of sonorous phrases under which they formerly tried
to hide the selfishness and perversity of their lusts, scales off and
falls to the ground. They themselves confess that it is not the Republic
for which they are concerned, but for themselves above everything else,
and for themselves alone. So much the worse for the Republic if its
interest is opposed to their interest; as Sieyes will soon express it,
the object is not to save the Revolution but the revolutionaries.--Thus
disabused, unscrupulous, knowing that they are staking their all, and
resolute, like their colleagues of August 10, September 2 and May31
and like the Committee of Public Safety, they are determined to win, no
matter at what cost or by what means.

For this time again, the Moderates do not want to comprehend that the
war has been declared, and that it is war to the knife. They do not
agree amongst themselves; they want to gain time, they hesitate and t