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A certain Andre Dumont, an old village attorney, now king of Picardie, or sultan, as occasion offers, "figures as a white Negro," sometimes jovial, but generally as a rude hardened cynic, treating female prisoners and petitioners as in a kermesse. One morning a lady enters his ante-room, and waits amidst about twenty sans-culottes, to solicit the release of her husband.
Some of our Senators have been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks, physicians, barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers, mountebanks, Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors, counsellors, or presidents of Parliament, admirals, barristers, Bishops, sailors, attorneys, authors, Barons, spies, painters, professors, Ministers, sans-culottes, atheists, stonemasons, robbers, mathematicians, philosophers, regicides, and a long et cetera.
The Mountain, on the contrary, disposed of all the effective force of the capital, of the public mind by the Jacobins, of the sections and faubourgs by the sans-culottes, of the insurrectionists by the municipality. The first measure of parties after having decreed the republic, was to contend with each other.
Honore, select sans-culottes who, authorized or delegated by the Committee of Public Safety, proceed to Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Tonnerre, Rochefort and elsewhere, to act as missionaries among the too inert population, or form the committees of action and the tribunals of extermination that are recruited with difficulty on the spot.
First, as is indicated by their name, they all must be, and nearly all are, sans-culottes, that is to say, men who live from day to day on their daily earnings, possessing no income from capital, confined to subordinate places, to petty trading, to manual services, lodged or encamped on the lowest steps of the social ladder, and therefore requiring pay to enable them to attend to public business; it is on this account that decrees and orders allow them wages of three, five, six, ten, and even eighteen francs a day.
Had he been left to his own devices he would have been like the doomed king who refused to believe that his people were hungry until thirty thousand starving sans-culottes were thundering at his palace gates. It soon became generally known throughout the country that strained relations existed between Judge Willis and the whole race of officialdom at the capital.
He has furnished disciples to all factions, and to all sects, assassins to the revolutionary tribunals, as well as victims for the revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to Robespierre, Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies to Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc d' Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly condemned and privately executed in France.
Through the dense ranks of the National Guard, which to-day was composed of mere sans-culottes, the raging, bloodthirsty men of the suburbs drove the carriage in which was the king, followed and escorted by National Guardsmen on horseback.
Thus our regicide, Cambaceres, owes his princely title to the shallow intrigues of the agents of legitimate Sovereigns. Their nicety in talking of innovations with regard to him, after they had without difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an Emperor, and other sans-culottes Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd as improper.
The hall was filled with sans-culottes and tricoteuses who came every day to feast their eyes upon the agony of the prisoners, and to accompany them to the guillotine. Never was there such an intense and long-continued thirst for blood as prevailed in those horrible days.
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