ncement--

"The Citizen Representative Carrier."

The great man came in, stepping quickly. Of middle height, very frail
and delicate, his clay-colored face was long and thin, with arched
eyebrows, a high nose, and a loose, coarse mouth. His deeply sunken dark
eyes glared fiercely, and wisps of dead-black hair, which had escaped
the confining ribbon of his queue, hung about his livid brow. He was
wrapped in a riding-coat of bottle-green, heavily lined with fur, the
skirts reaching down to the tops of his Hessian boots, and the enormous
turned-up collar almost touching the brim of his round hat. Under the
coat his waist was girt with the tricolour of office, and there were
gold rings in his ears.

Such at the age of five-and-thirty was Jean Baptiste Carrier,
Representative of the Convention with the Army of the West, the attorney
who once had been intended by devout parents for the priesthood. He had
been a month in Nantes, sent thither to purge the body politic.

He reached a chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a
semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back,
he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so
terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one
of those stout fellows quailed now before him.

Suddenly he broke into torrential speech, his voice shrill and harsh:

"I do not know by what fatality it happens, but happen it does, that
during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to
give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here
that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!" And
he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him.
"Let me hear from you!" he snapped.

Minee, the unfrocked bishop, preserving still a certain episcopal
portliness of figure, a certain episcopal oiliness of speech,
respectfully implored the representative to be more precise.

The invitation flung him into a passion. His irascibility, indeed,
deserved to become a byword.

"Name of a name!" he shrilled, his sunken eyes ablaze, his face
convulsed. "Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours
that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to
provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now
the brigands are threatening Nantes itself. There is abject want in the
city, disease is rampant; people are dying of h