the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of his
sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the president,
Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies,

"The Republic has no need of savants."[41157]

And it has no need of poets. The first poet of the epoch, Andre
Chenier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources
of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we possess
the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a veritable
master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full copy
is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and
orthography."[41158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man
of genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who
listen to nothing, who comprehend nothing, who do not even understand
terms in common use, who stumble through their queries, and who, to ape
intelligence, draggle their pens along in supreme stupidity.

The overthrow is complete. France, subject to the Revolutionary
Government, resembles a human being forced to walk with his head down
and to think with his feet.

*****

[Footnote 4101: Cf. "The Revolution," book I., ch. 3, and book III.,
chs. 9 and 10.]

[Footnote 4102: Gregoire, "Memoires," II., 172. "About eighteen thousand
ecclesiastics are enumerated among the emigres of the first epoch. About
eighteen thousand more took themselves off, or were sent off, after the
2nd of September."]

[Footnote 4103: Ibid., 26. "The chief of the emigre bureau in the police
department (May 9, 1805) enumerates about two hundred thousand
persons reached, or affected, by the laws concerning
emigration."--Lally-Tolendal, "Defense des Emigres," (2nd part, p. 62
and passim). Several thousand persons inscribed as emigres did not
leave France. The local administration recorded them on its lists either
because they lived in another department, and could not obtain the
numerous certificates exacted by the law in proof of residence, or
because those who made up the lists treated these certificates with
contempt. It was found convenient to manufacture an emigre in order to
confiscate his possessions legally, and even to guillotine him, not less
legally, as a returned emigre.--Message of the Directory to the "Five
Hundred," Ventose 3, year V.: "According to a rough estimate, obtained
at the Ministry of Finances, the number enrolled on the general list of
emigres amounts to over