ms
enthusiastic, as at Rochefort and Grenoble, they report that it is
"artificial heat."[3380] At Rochefort, zeal is maintained only "by the
presence of five or six Parisian Jacobins." At Grenoble, Chepy, the
political agent and president of the club, writes that "he is knocked
up, worn out, and exhausted, in trying to keep up public spirit and
maintain it on a level with events," but he is "conscious that, if he
should leave, all would crumble."--There are none other than Moderates
at Brest, at Lille, at Dunkirk; if this or that department, the Nord,
for instance, hastened to accept the "Montagnard" constitution, it is
only a pretense: "an infinitely small portion of the population answered
for the rest."[3381]--At Belfort, where "from one thousand to twelve
hundred fathers of families alone are counted," writes the agent,[3382]
"one popular club of thirty or forty members, at the most, maintains and
enforces the love of liberty."--In Arras, "out of three or four hundred
members composing the popular club" the weeding-out of 1793 has spared
but "sixty-three, one tenth of whom are absent."[3383] At Toulouse, "out
of about fourteen hundred members" who form the club, only three or four
hundred remain after the weeding-out of 1793,[3384] "mere machines,
for the most part," and "whom ten or a dozen intriguers lead as they
please."--The same state of things exists elsewhere, a dozen or two
determined Jacobins-twenty-two at Troyes, twenty-one at Grenoble, ten
at Bordeaux, seven at Poitiers, as many at Dijon-constitute the active
staff of a large town:[3385] the whole number might sit around one
table.--The Jacobins, straining as they do to swell their numbers, only
scatter their band; careful as they are in making their selections, they
only limit their number. They remain what they always have been, a
small feudality of brigands superposed on conquered France.[3386] If
the terror they spread around multiplies their serfs, the horror they
inspire diminishes their proselytes, while their minority remains
insignificant because, for their collaborators, they can have only those
just like themselves.

VI. Quality of staff thus formed.

Quality of staff thus formed.--Social state of the agents.
--Their unfitness and bad conduct.--The administrators in
Seine-et-Marne.--Drunkenness and feasting.--Committees and
Municipalities in the Cote-d'Or.--Waste and extortions.
--Traffickers in favors at Bordea