ltern Jacobins, the roots
of independence, humanity, and loyalty, hard to extirpate even in an
ignoble and cruel nature, are eradicated even to the last fiber,
the revolutionary staff, already so debased, becoming more and
more degraded, until it is worthy of the office assigned to it. The
confidants of Hebert, those who listen to Chaumette, the comrades of
Westermann, the officers of Ronsin, the faithful readers of Camille,
the admirers and devotees of Danton, all are bound to publicly repudiate
their incarcerated friend or leader and approve of the decree which
sends him to the scaffold, to applaud his calumniators, to overwhelm
him on trial: this or that judge or juryman, who is one of Danton's
partisans, is obliged to stifle a defense of him, and, knowing him to be
innocent, pronounce him guilty; one who had often dined with Desmoulins
is not only to guillotine him, but, in addition to this, to guillotine
his young widow. Moreover, in the revolutionary committees, at the
Commune, in the offices of the Committee of General Safety, in the
bureau of the Central Police, at the headquarters of the armed force, at
the revolutionary Tribunal, the service to which they are compelled to
do becomes daily more onerous and more repulsive. To denounce neighbors,
to arrest colleagues, to go and seize innocent persons, known to be
such, in their beds, to select in the prisons the thirty or forty
unfortunates who form the daily food of the guillotine, to "amalgamate"
them haphazard, to try them and condemn them in a lot, to escort
octogenarian women and girls of sixteen to the scaffold, even under
the knife-blade, to see heads dropping and bodies swinging, to contrive
means for getting rid of a multitude of corpses, and for removing the
too-visible stains of blood. Of what species do the beings consist, who
can accept such a task, and perform it day after day, with the prospect
of doing it indefinitely? Fouquier-Tinville himself succumbs. One
evening, on his way to the Committee of Public Safety, "he feels unwell"
on the Pont-Neuf and exclaims: "I think I see the ghosts of the
dead following us, especially those of the patriots I have had
guillotined!"[3317] And at another time: "I would rather plow the ground
than be public prosecutor. If I could, I would resign."--The government,
as the system becomes aggravated, is forced to descend lower still that
it may find suitable instruments; it finds them now only in the lowest
depths: in