d the officious broker
and fail to pay up at once! Brichard, the notary, having refused or
tendered too late, the hundred thousand crowns demanded of him, is to
put his head "at the red window."--And I omit ordinary rapine, the vast
field open to extortion through innumerable inventories, sequestrations
and adjudications, through the enormities of contractors, through
hastily executed purchases and deliveries, through the waste of two
or three millions given weekly by the government to the Commune for
supplies for the capital, through the requisitions of grain which give
fifteen hundred men of the revolutionary army an opportunity to clean
out all the neighboring farms, as far as Corbeil and Meaux, and benefit
by this after the fashion of the chauffeurs.[3340]--With such a staff,
these anonymous thefts cannot surprise us. Babeuf, the falsifier of
public contracts, is secretary for provisions to the Commune; Maillard,
the Abbaye Septembriseur, receives eight thousand francs for his
direction, in the forty-eight sections, of the ninety-six observers and
leaders of public opinion; Chretien, whose smoking-shop serves as the
rendezvous of rowdies, becomes a juryman at eighteen francs a day in the
revolutionary Tribunal, and leads his section with uplifted saber;[3341]
De Sade, professor of crimes, is now the oracle of his quarter, and, in
the name of the Piques Section, he reads addresses to the Convention.

III. A Revolutionary Committee.

A Minister of Foreign Affairs.--A General in command.--The
Paris Commune.--A Revolutionary Committee.

Let us examine some of these figures closely: the nearer they are to the
eye and foremost in position, the more the importance of the duty brings
into light the unworthiness of the potentate.--There is already one of
them, whom we have seen in passing, Buchot, twice noticed by Robespierre
under his own hand as "a man of probity, energetic and capable of
fulfilling the most important functions,"[3342] appointed by the
Committee of Public Safety "Commissioner on External Relations," that is
to say, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and kept in this important position
for nearly six months. He is a school-master from the Jura,[3343]
recently disembarked from his small town and whose "ignorance, low
habits and stupidity surpass anything that can be imagined... The chief
clerks have nothing to do with him; he neither sees nor asks for them.
He is never found in his office, and wh