ing
Monestier says to the president of the court: "Well, we gave poor
Lasalle a famous fright last night, didn't we?" "How a famous fright? He
is executed!" Monestier is astonished--he did not remember having issued
the order.[32110]--With others, wine, besides sanguinary instincts,
brings out the foulest instincts. At Nimes; Borie, in the uniform of a
representative, along with Courbis, the mayor, Geret, the justice and
a number of prostitutes, dance the farandole around the guillotine. At
Auch, one of the worst tyrants in the South, Dartigoyte, always heated
with liquor "vomited every species of obscenity" in the faces of women
that came to demand justice; "he compels, under penalty of imprisonment,
mothers to take their daughters to the popular club," to listen to his
filthy preaching; one evening, at the theatre, probably after an orgy,
he shouts at all the women between the acts, lets loose upon them his
smutty vocabulary, and, by way of demonstration, or as a practical
conclusion, ends by stripping himself naked.[32111]--This time, the
genuine brute appears. All the clothing woven during the past centuries
and with which civilization had dressed him, the last drapery of
humanity, falls to the ground. Nothing remains but the primitive animal,
the ferocious, lewd gorilla supposed to be tamed, but which still
subsists indefinitely and which a dictatorship, joined to drunkenness,
revives in an uglier guise than in remotest times.

VIII. Delirium.

Approach of madness.--Loss of common-sense.--Fabre, Gaston,
Guiter, in the army of the Eastern Pyrenees.--Baudot, Lebas,
Saint-Just, and the predecessors and successors in the army
of the Rhine.--Furious excitement.--Lebon at Arras, and
Carrier at Nantes.

If intoxication is needed to awaken the brute, a dictatorship suffices
to arouse the madman. The mental equilibrium of most of these new
sovereigns is disturbed; the distance between what the man once was and
what he now is, is too great. Formerly he was a petty lawyer, village
doctor, or schoolmaster, an unknown mover of a resolution in a local
club, and only yesterday he was one voter in the Convention out of
seven hundred and fifty. Look at him now, the arbiter, in one of the
departments, of all fortunes and liberties, and master of five thousand
lives. Like a pair of scales into which a disproportionate weight has
been thrown, his reason totters on the side of pride. Some of them
regard