and noble men and women form a herd
which must be conveniently stalled, so as to be the more easily milked.
Consequently, toward the end of March, 1794, the Committee, to increase
its business and fill up the pen, hires a large house on the corner of
the boulevard possessing a court and a garden, where the high society of
the quarter is assigned lodgings of two rooms each, at twelve francs a
day, which gives one hundred and fifty thousand livres per annum,
and, as the rent is twenty-four hundred francs, the Committee gain one
hundred and forty-seven thousand six hundred livres by the operation;
we must add to this twenty sorts of profit in money and other
matters--taxes on the articles consumed and on supplies of every
description, charges on the dispatch and receipt of correspondence and
other gratuities, such as ransoms and fees. A penned-up herd refuses
nothing to its keepers,[3353] and this one less than any other; for
if this herd is plundered it is preserved, its keepers finding it too
lucrative to send it to the slaughter-house. During the last six months
of Terror, but two out of the one hundred and sixty boarders of the
"Bonnet Rouge" Committee are withdrawn from the establishment and handed
over to the guillotine. It is only on the 7th and 8th of Thermidor that
the Committee of Public Safety, having undertaken to empty the prisons,
breaks in upon the precious herd and disturbs the well-laid scheme,
so admirably managed.--It was only too well managed, for it excited
jealousy; three months after Thermidor, the "Bonnet Rouge" committee
is denounced and condemned; ten are sentenced to twenty years in
irons, with the pillory in addition, and, among others, the clever
notary,[3354] amidst the jeering and insults of the crowd.--And yet
these are not the worst; their cupidity had mollified their ferocity.
Others, less adroit in robbing, show greater cruelty in murdering. In
any event, in the provinces as well as in Paris, in the revolutionary
committees paid three francs a day for each member, the quality of
one or the other of the officials is about the same. According to the
pay-lists which Barere keeps, there are twenty-one thousand five hundred
of these committees in France.[3355]

IV. Provincial Administration.

The administrative staff in the provinces.--Jacobinism less
in the departmental towns than in Paris.--Less in the
country than in the towns.--The Revolutionary Committees in
th