e
who have served, and are to serve, the diverse factions, the diverse
conspiracies.... It may be necessary, perhaps, to purge the prisons
at once and free the soil of liberty of their filth, the refuse of
humanity." The Committee of Public Safety consequently "charges the
commission to ascertain in the prisons of Paris... who have been more
specially concerned in the diverse factions and conspiracies that the
National convention has destroyed." The word "approved" appears at the
foot of the resolution in Robespierre's handwriting, then the signature
of Robespierre, and lower down, those of Billaud and Barere. A similar
resolution providing for the 7th of Messidor, signed by the same parties
and five others, is dispatched the same day. (M. de Martel came across
and made use of this conclusive document before I did, most of it being
quoted in "Les Types Revolutionnaires.")]

[Footnote 31172: Buchez et Roux, XXXIII., 434.]

CHAPTER II. THE RULERS OF THE COUNTRY.

Let us follow the operations of the new government from top to bottom,
from those of its ruling bodies and leaders, to its assemblies,
committees, delegates, administrators and underlings of every kind
and degree. Like living flesh stamped with a red-hot iron, so will the
situation put one their brows the two marks, each with its own different
depth and discoloration. In vain do they, too, strive to conceal their
scars: we detect under the crowns and titles they assume the brand of
the slave or the mark of the tyrant.

I. The Convention.

The Convention.--The "Plain."--The "Mountain."--Degradation
of Souls.--Parades which the Convention is obligated to
make.

At the Tuileries, the omnipotent Convention sits enthroned in
the theater, converted into an Assembly room. It carries on its
deliberations daily, in grand style. Its decrees, received with blind
obedience, startle France and upset all Europe. At a distance, its
majesty is imposing, more august than that of the Republican senate
in Rome. Near by, the effect is quite otherwise; these undisputed
sovereigns are serfs who live in trances, and justly so, for, nowhere,
even in prison, is there more constraint and less security than on their
benches. After the 2nd of June, 1793, their inviolable precincts, the
grand official reservoir from which legal authority flows, becomes a
sort of tank, into which the revolutionary net plunges and successfully
brings out its choicest fish, si