was appointed deputy to the National Assembly. When we again met at the Convention, we, at first, saw each other frequently; but the difference of our opinions, and perhaps the still greater dissimilarity of our dispositions, soon caused a separation.

One day, at the conclusion of a dinner given at my house, Robespierre began to declaim with much violence against the Girondins, particularly abusing Vergniaud, who was present. I was much attached to Vergniaud, who was a great orator, and a man of unaffected manners. I went round to him, and advancing towards Robespierre, said to him, "Such violence may assuredly enlist the passions on your side, but will never obtain for you esteem and confidence." Robespierre, offended, left the room; and it will shortly be seen how far this malignant man carried his animosity against me.

I had, however, no share in the political system of the Gironde party, of which Vergniaud was the reputed leader. I thought that the effect of this system would be to disunite France, by stirring up the greater portion of the people of the provinces against Paris. In this I foresaw great danger, being convinced that there was no safety for the state but in the unity and indivisibility of the body politic. This was what induced me to enter a faction whose excesses I inwardly detested, and whose violences marked the progress of the revolution. What horrors were committed in the names of Morality and Justice! But, it must be admitted, we were not sailing in peaceful seas.

The revolution was at its height. We were without rudder, without government, ruled by only one assembly, a species of monstrous dictatorship, the offspring of confusion, and which alternately presented a counterpart of the anarchy of Athens and the despotism of the Ottoman.

It is here, then, that the revolution and the counter-revolution are politically at issue. Is the question to be decided by the laws which regulate the decisions of criminal tribunals? The convention, notwithstanding its internal divisions and its furious decrees, or, perhaps, by those very decrees, saved the country beyond its integral limits. This is an incontestable fact, and, in this respect, I do not deny my par

ticipation in its labors. Each of its members, when accused before the tribunal of history, may confine himself to the limits of Scipio's defense, and say with that great man, "I have saved the republic-let us ascend to the capitol to thank the gods!"

There was, however, one vote which remains unjustifiable; I will even avow, without shame or without weakness, that it has caused me to know remorse. But I call the God of Truth to witness, that it was far less against the monarch that I aimed the blow (for he was good and just) than against the crown, at that time incompatible with the new order of things. I will also add, for direct avowals must now supersede the shadows of disclosure, that it then appeared to me, as to so many others, that we could not inspire the representatives, and the mass of the people, with an energy sufficient to surmount the difficulties of the crisis, but by abandoning everything like moderation, breaking through all restraint, and involving all the leading men of the revolution in its progress. Such was the reason of state which appeared to us to require this frightful sacrifice. In politics, even atrocity itself may sometimes produce a salutary effect.

The world would not now call us to account if the tree of liberty, having taken strong and firm root, had resisted the ax wielded even by those who had planted it with their own hands. That Brutus was more fortunate in erecting the noble edifice which he besprinkled with his children's blood, I can, as a thinking man, conceive; it was far more easy for him to have placed the fasces of the monarchy in the hands of the aristocracy already organized. The representatives of 1793, by sacrificing the representative of royalty, the father of the monarchy, for the purpose of founding a republic, had no choice as to the means of reconstruction. The level of equality was already so violently established in the nation, that the authority was necessarily intrusted to a floating democracy: it could only work upon a moving sand. After having condemned myself as judge and accused, let me, at least, be allowed to avail myself, in the exercise of my conventional duties, of some extenuating circumstances. Being dispatched upon a mission into the departments, forced to employ the language of the times and to yield to the fatality

of circumstances, I found myself compelled to put in execution the law against suspected persons. This law ordered the imprisonment, en masse, of priests and nobles. The following is what I wrote, the following is what I dared to publish, in a proclamation issued on the 25th of August, 1793:"The law wills that suspected persons should be removed from social intercourse; this law is commanded by the interests of the state: but, to take for the basis of your opinions vague accusations, proceeding from the vilest passions, would be to favor a tyranny as repugnant to my own heart as it is to natural equity. The sword must not be wielded at random. The law decrees severe punishments, and not proscriptions, as immoral as they are barbarous."

It required at that time some courage to mitigate as much as was in one's power the rigor of the conventional decrees. I was not so fortunate in those missions in which I was only one member of a collective authority, because the power of decision was not intrusted to myself alone. Throughout my missions, the actions which may be considered as deserving of censure will be found far less than the every-day phrases, expressed in the language of the times, and which in a period of greater tranquillity still inspire a kind of dread; besides, this language was, so to speak, official and established. Let not also my situation at this period be mistaken. I was the delegate of a violent assembly, and I have already proved that I eluded or softened down several of its severe measures. In other respects, these pretended pro-consulates reduced the missionary deputy to be nothing more than a man-machine, the itinerant commissary of the committees of public safety and general security. I was never a member of these government committees; therefore I never held, during the reign of terror, the helm of power; on the contrary, as will shortly be seen, I was myself a sufferer by it. This will prove how much my responsibility was confined.

But let us unwind the thread of these events. Like that of Ariadne, it will conduct us out of the labyrinth; and we can then attain the object of these memoirs, the sphere of which will increase in importance.

The paroxysm of revolution and of terror was at hand. The guillotine was the only instrument of government. Sus

picion and mistrust preyed upon every heart; fear cowered over all. Even those who held in their hands the instrument of terror, were at times menaced with it. One man alone in the convention appeared to enjoy an inexpugnable popularity: this was Robespierre, a man full of pride and cunning; an envious, malignant, and vindictive being, who was never satiated with the blood of his colleagues; and who, by his capacity, steadiness, the clearness of his head, and the obstinacy of his character, surmounted circumstances the most appalling. Availing himself of his preponderance in the committee of public safety, he openly aspired, not only to the tyranny of the decemviri, but to the despotism of the dictatorship of Marius and Sylla. One step more would have given him the masterdom of the revolution, which it was his audacious ambition to govern at his will; but thirty victims more were to be sacrificed, and he had marked them out in the convention. He well knew that I understood him; and I, therefore, was honored by being inscribed upon his tablets at the head of those doomed to destruction.

I was still on a mission when he accused me of oppressing the patriots and tampering with the aristocracy. Being recalled to Paris, I dared to call upon him from the tribune, to make good his accusation. He caused me to be expelled from the Jacobins, of whom he was the high-priest; this was for me equivalent to a degree of proscription. I did not trifle in contending for my head, nor in long and secret deliberations with such of my colleagues as were threatened with my own fate. I merely said to them, among others to Legendre, Tallien, Dubois de Crancé, Daunou, and Chénier: "You are on the list, you are on the list as well as myself; I am certain of it!" Tallien, Barras, Bourdon de l'Oise, and Dubois de Crancé evinced some energy. Tallien contended for two lives, of which one was then dearer to him than his own: he therefore resolved upon assassinating the future dictator, even in the convention itself. But what a hazardous chance was this! Robespierre's popularity would have survived him, and we should have been immolated to his manes. I therefore dissuaded Tallien from an isolated enterprise, which would have destroyed the man, but preserved his system.

Convinced that other means must be resorted to, I went straight to those who shared with Robespierre the government of terror, and whom I knew to be envious or fearful of his immense popularity. I revealed to Collot d'Herbois, to Carnot, to Billaud de Varennes, the designs of the modern Appius, and I presented to each of them separately, so lively and so true a picture of the danger of their situation, I urged them with so much address and good fortune, that I insinuated into their breasts more than mistrust-the courage of henceforth opposing the Tyrant in any further decimating of the convention. "Count the votes," said I to them, "in your committee, and you will see, that when you are determined, he will be reduced to the powerless minority of a Couthon and a St. Just. Refuse him your votes, and compel him to stand alone by your vis inertiæ.'

But what contrivances, what expedients were necessary to avoid exasperating the Jacobin club, the Seides,1 and the partisans of Robespierre! Sure of having sown the seed, I had the courage to defy him, on the 20th Prairial (June 8, 1794), a day on which, actuated with the ridiculous idea of solemnly acknowledging the existence of the Supreme Being, he dared to proclaim himself both his will and agent, in presence of all the people assembled at the Tuileries. As he was ascending the steps of his lofty tribune, whence he was to proclaim his manifesto in favor of God, I predicted to him aloud (twenty of my colleagues heard it), that his fall was near. Five days after, in full committee, he demanded my head and that of eight of my friends, reserving to himself the destruction of twenty more at a later period. How great was his astonishment, and what was his rage, upon finding amongst the members of the committee an invincible opposition to his sanguinary designs against the national representation! It has already been too much mutilated, said they to him, and it is high time to put a stop to a deliberate and progressive cutting-down, which at last will include ourselves.

Finding himself in a minority, he withdrew, choked with

This is an allusion to a character in Voltaire's Fanatisme, whose name, Seide, has become synonymous with the satellite of a tyrant, or the devotee of an impostor.-English Editor.