ndemiaire, year III.,[33134]
there is found "in his apartments" a superb and complete assortment of
ecclesiastical objects, "forty-nine copes and chasubles, silk or satin,
covered with gold or silver; fifty-four palles of the same description;"
a quantity of "reliquaries, vases and spoons, censers, laces, silver and
gold fringe, thirty-two pieces of silk," etc. None of these fine things
belong to him; they are the property of citizen Mouet, his father. This
prudent parent, taking his word for it, "deposited them for safe keeping
in his son's house during the month of June, 1792 (old style);"--could a
good son refuse his father such a slight favor? It is very certain that,
in '93 and '94, during the young man's municipal dictatorship, the
elder did not pay the Strasbourg Jew brokers too much, and that they did
business in an off-hand way. By what right could a son and magistrate
prevent his father, a free individual, from looking after "his own
affairs" and buying according to trade principles, as cheap as he could?

If such are the profits on the sale of personal property, what must they
be on the sale of real estate?--It is on this traffic that the fortunes
of the clever terrorists are founded. It accounts for the "colossal
wealth peaceably enjoyed," after Thermidor, of the well-known "thieves"
who, before Thermidor, were so many "little Robespierres," each in his
own canton, "the patriots" who, around Orleans, "built palaces," who,
"exclusives" at Valenciennes, "having wasted both public and private
funds, possess the houses and property of emigrants, knocked down to
them at a hundred times less than their value."[33135] On this side,
their outstretched fingers shamelessly clutch all they can get hold of;
for the obligation of each arrested party to declare his name, quality
and fortune, as it now is and was before the Revolution, gives local
cupidity a known, sure, direct and palpable object.--At Toulouse, says a
prisoner,[33136] "the details and value of an object were taken down as
if for a succession," while the commissioners who drew up the statement,
"our assassins, proceeded, beforehand and almost under our eyes, to take
their share, disputing with each other on the choice and suitableness
of each object, comparing the cost of adjudication with the means of
lessening it, discussing the certain profits of selling again and of the
transfer, and consuming in advance the pickings arising from sales and
leases."--In