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"If you were really going on a matter of business, it would be different, but to ride to Versailles merely to see the place would be regarded as ample proof that you were an aristocrat; and no one would regard your papers as anything but a proof that these had been obtained by fraud, and that you were either an aristocrat, or a spy of Pitt's, or a Girondist, and certainly an enemy of the Convention.
For, among the eight thousand commissioners, some, appointed by refractory assemblies, bring a refusal instead of an adhesion; others, more numerous, are instructed to present objections and point out omissions: it is very certain that the envoys of the Girondist departments will insist on the release or return of their excluded representatives.
Then, when they saw a young and handsome man emerge from the shop, his jacket thrown open, his neckerchief flying loose over a muscular chest, and carrying over his shoulder a basket of cherries and his coat at the end of a stick, taking him for the proscribed girondist, a posse of sansculottes laid violent hands on him.
But when the Girondist avocat called him a Capuchin, he turned scarlet with anger and declared that a man incapable of distinguishing a Barnabite from a Franciscan was too blind to see a fly in milk. The Revolutionary Tribunal was always draining the prisons, which the Committees were as unceasingly replenishing; in three months the chamber of the eighteen was half full of new faces.
Without delay or hesitation, Hood, the English admiral, grasped the easy prize, and before long war-ships of the Spaniards, Neapolitans, and Sardinians were gathered to share in the defense of the town against the Convention forces. Soon the Girondist fugitives from Marseilles arrived, and were received with kindness.
This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always a Trissotin. As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barère gradually estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to the republicans.
Two persons whose talents were not brilliant, but who enjoyed a high reputation for probity and public spirit, Pétion and Roland, lent the whole weight of their names to the Girondist connection. The wife of Roland brought to the deliberations of her husband's friends masculine courage and force of thought, tempered by womanly grace and vivacity.
After having taken Valenciennes and Conde, blockaded Maubeuge and Le Quesnoy, the enemy advanced on Cassel, Hondschoote, and Furnes, under the command of the duke of York. The committee of public safety, dissatisfied with Custine, who was further regarded with suspicion as a Girondist, superseded him by general Houchard.
Men and women of the Girondist party came to tell her of the hideous deeds that were perpetrated there. All these horrors gradually wove themselves in the young girl's imagination around the sinister and repulsive figure of Jean Paul Marat. She knew nothing of his associates, Danton and Robespierre.
Frightened by the experience of Lyons, Bordeaux and Marseilles decided that resistance was futile and admitted the troops of the Convention. Some of the Girondist deputies had escaped from Paris and attempted to gather an army in Normandy; but they failed, too.
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