en urged to spare the rebels who surrendered of their own
accord:

"Do you want me to be guillotined? It is not in my power to save those
people."[3295]

And another time:

"I have my orders; I must observe them; I do not want to have my head
cut off!"

Under penalty of death, the representative on mission is a Terrorist,
like his colleagues in the Convention and on the Committee of Public
Safety, but with a much more serious disturbance of his nervous and his
moral system; for he does not operate like them on paper, at a distance,
against categories of abstract, anonymous and vague beings; his work is
not merely an effort of the intellect, but also of the senses and the
imagination. If he belongs to the region, like Lecarpentier, Barras,
Lebon, Javogue, Couthon, Andre Dumont and many others, he is well
acquainted with the families he proscribes; names to him are not merely
so many letters strung together, but they recall personal souvenirs
and evoke living forms. At all events, he is the spectator, artisan
and beneficiary of his own dictatorship; the silver-plate and money
he confiscates passes under his eye, through his hands; he sees the
"suspects" he incarcerates march before him; he is in the court-room on
the rendering of the sentence of death; frequently, the guillotine
he has supplied with heads works under his windows; he sleeps in the
mansion of an emigre he makes requisitions for the furniture, linen
and wine belonging to the decapitated and the imprisoned,[3296] lies in
their beds, drinks their wine and revels with plenty of company at
their expense, and in their place. In the same way as a bandit chief who
neither kills nor robs with his own hands, but has murder and robbery
committed in his presence, by which he substantially profits, not
by proxy, but personally, through the well-directed blows ordered
by him.--To this degree, and in such proximity to physical action,
omnipotence is a noxious atmosphere which no state of health can resist.
Restored to the conditions which poisoned man in barbarous times or
countries, he is again attacked by moral maladies from which he was
thenceforth believed to be exempt; he retrogrades even to the strange
corruptions of the Orient and the Middle Ages; forgotten leprosies,
apparently extinct, with exotic pestilences to which civilized lands
seemed closed, reappear in his soul with their issues and tumors.

VII. Brutal Instincts.

Eruption of brutal in