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The old conventionnel Fouche, Senator of the Empire, traitor to every man, to every principle and motive of human conduct. Duke of Otranto, and the wily artizan of the second Restoration, was trying the fit of a court suit in which his young and accomplished fiancee had declared her intention to have his portrait painted on porcelain.
Whilst Barroux, the elder of the pair by ten years, blanched and solemn, with a handsome face, snowy whiskers, clean-shaven chin and upper-lip, retained all the dignity of power, the bearing of a Conventionnel of romantic views, who sought to magnify the simple loyalty of a rather foolish but good-hearted bourgeois nature into something great; the other, beneath his heavy common countenance and feigned frankness and simplicity, concealed unknown depths, the unfathomable soul of a shrewd enjoyer and despot who was alike pitiless and unscrupulous in attaining his ends.
A force de logique on tend a remplacer le gouvernement pondere de l'Angleterre par ce que nous appelons le gouvernement conventionnel, c'est a dire le despotisme d'une Assemblee unique appuyee sur la brutale loi du nombre. Que Dieu vous garde d'un tel avenir. C'est le voeu d'un ami sincere de vos institutions.
The conventionnel Carrier organized a Revolutionary Tribunal at Nantes, and committed worse horrors than Fouché had at Lyons. Finding a rate of 200 executions a day insufficient he invented the noyade. River barges were taken, their bottoms were hinged so as to open conveniently, and prisoners, tied in pairs, naked and regardless of sex, were taken out in them, and released into the water.
At the extreme end of the town, close to the ancestral home of the Dantons, stands the straggling old-fashioned Hotel de la Poste, a hostelry, I should suppose, not in the least changed since the days of the great conventionnel. All here was bustle and excitement.
Whilst Barroux, the elder of the pair by ten years, blanched and solemn, with a handsome face, snowy whiskers, clean-shaven chin and upper-lip, retained all the dignity of power, the bearing of a Conventionnel of romantic views, who sought to magnify the simple loyalty of a rather foolish but good-hearted /bourgeois/ nature into something great; the other, beneath his heavy common countenance and feigned frankness and simplicity, concealed unknown depths, the unfathomable soul of a shrewd enjoyer and despot who was alike pitiless and unscrupulous in attaining his ends.
They would have forbidden to Charles X. the memory of Louis XVI. Yet a king could hardly be asked to have the sentiments of a conventionnel, of a regicide. In their systematic and bitter opposition, the adversaries of the Restoration imputed to the royal family as a crime its very virtues and its piety. Charles X. was not unaware of this half-expressed hostility.
The first object looked for will be Robespierre's birthplace, an eminently respectable middle-class abode, now occupied by a personage almost as generally distasteful as that of the Conventionnel himself, namely, a process-server or bailiff.
At the risk of appearing slightly egotistical, I will here describe an incident which has other than personal interest. My visit to Damon's country, the particulars of which were given in a former chapter, had an especial object, viz., the setting of a novel of my own having the great conventionnel for its hero.
Whilst Barroux, the elder of the pair by ten years, blanched and solemn, with a handsome face, snowy whiskers, clean-shaven chin and upper-lip, retained all the dignity of power, the bearing of a Conventionnel of romantic views, who sought to magnify the simple loyalty of a rather foolish but good-hearted bourgeois nature into something great; the other, beneath his heavy common countenance and feigned frankness and simplicity, concealed unknown depths, the unfathomable soul of a shrewd enjoyer and despot who was alike pitiless and unscrupulous in attaining his ends.
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