tion of Mayor Fleuriot-Lescot and Payen, the national
agent, bring to the general council no administrative ability, but the
faculty for verbal argumentation, along with the requisite amount of
talk and scribbling indispensable to a deliberative assembly. And it is
curious to see them in session. Toward the end of September, 1793,[3348]
one of the veterans of liberal philosophy and political economy,
belonging to the French Academy and ruined by the Revolution, the old
Abbe Morellet, needs a certificate of civism, to enable him to
obtain payment of the small pension of one thousand francs, which the
Constituent Assembly had voted him in recompense for his writings; the
Commune, desiring information about this, selects three of its body
to inquire into it. Morellet naturally takes the preliminary steps. He
first writes "a very humble, very civic note," to the president of the
General Council, Lubin Jr., formerly an art-apprentice who had abandoned
art for politics, and is now living with his father a butcher, in the
rue St. Honore; he calls on this authority, and passes through the
stall, picking his way amongst the slaughterhouse offal; admitted after
some delay, he finds his judge in bed, before whom he pleads his cause.
He then calls upon Bernard, an ex-priest, "built like an incendiary
and ill-looking," and respectfully bows to the lady of the house,
"a tolerably young woman, but very ugly and very dirty." Finally, he
carries his ten or a dozen volumes to the most important of the three
examiners, Vialard, "ex-ladies' hair-dresser;" the latter is almost
a colleague, "for," says he, "I have always liked technicians, having
presented to the Academy of Sciences a top which I invented myself."
Nobody, however, had seen the petitioner in the streets on the 10th of
August, nor on the 2nd of September, nor on the 31st of May; how can a
certificate of civism be granted after such evidences of lukewarmness?
Morellet, not disheartened, awaits the all-powerful hair-dresser at the
Hotel-de-Ville, and accosts him frequently as he passes along. He,
"with greater haughtiness and distraction than the most unapproachable
Minister of War would show to an infantry lieutenant," scarcely listens
to him and walks on; he goes in and takes his seat, and Morellet, much
against his will, has to be present at ten or twelve of these meetings.
What strange meetings, to which patriotic deputations, volunteers and
amateurs come in turn to declaim an