rope,
and takes a historical position. If it cares for its own honor it will
select reporters of bills that are not unworthy, and instruct them
to support these with available arguments, as closely reasoned out as
possible; the bill, discussed and adopted in full council, will show
the measure of its capacity, the information it possesses and its
common-sense.

To estimate all this, read the bills put forth in the name of the
Committee; weigh the preambles, remark the tone, listen to the
two reporters usually chosen, Saint-Just, who draws up the acts of
proscription, special or general, and Barere, who draws up all acts
indifferently, but particularly military announcements and decrees
against the foreigner; never did public personages, addressing France
and posterity, use such irrational arguments and state falsehoods with
greater impudence.[3265]

The former, stiff in his starched cravat, posing "like the Holy Ghost,"
more didactic and more absolute than Robespierre himself, comes and
proclaims to Frenchmen from the tribune, equality, probity, frugality,
Spartan habits, and a rural cot with all the voluptuousness of
virtue;[3266] this suits admirably the chevalier Saint-Just, a former
applicant for a place in the Count d'Artois' body-guard, a domestic
thief, a purloiner of silver plate which he takes to Paris, sells and
spends on prostitutes, imprisoned for six months on complaint of his own
mother,[3267] and author of a lewd poem which he succeeds in rendering
filthy by trying to render it fanciful.--Now, indeed, he is grave; he no
longer leers; he kills--but with what arguments, and what a style![3268]
The young Laubardemont as well as the paid informers and prosecutors
of imperial Rome, have less disgraced the human intellect, for these
creatures of a Tiberius or a Richelieu still used plausible arguments
in their reasoning, and with more or less adroitness. With Saint-Just,
there is no connection of ideas; there is no sequence or march in his
rhapsody; like an instrument strained to the utmost, his mind plays only
false notes in violent fits and starts; logical continuity, the art then
so common of regularly developing a theme, has disappeared; he stumbles
over the ground, piling up telling aphorisms and dogmatic axioms. In
dealing with facts there is nothing in his speech but a perversion
of the truth; impostures abound in it of pure invention, palpable, as
brazen as those of a charlatan in his booth;[3269] he