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We are far from regarding even the best of the Girondists with unmixed admiration; but history owes to them this honorable testimony, that, being free to choose whether they would be oppressors or victims, they deliberately and firmly resolved rather to suffer injustice than to inflict it. And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed.
Cloud some score or so of the dispersed deputies known to be favourable to his brother, declaimed against the Jacobins, whose spectral plot had proved so useful to the real plotters, and proposed to this "Rump" of the Council the formation of a commission who should report on measures that were deemed necessary for the public safety.
In this implacable spirit Carrier was acting at Nantes. But I care not to tell the vengeance of the victorious republicans upon the brave men who had made them tremble. The same atrocities were being committed in the south. Lyons had overthrown the Jacobins, had put the worst of them to death, and had stood a siege under the republican flag.
"Toujours seul, monsieur," he said, with an ugly grin. "What does that mean, Terrapin?" said Ralph. "He says that you always come home alone." "How else should I come?" said Ralph, dubiously. "How, indeed?" answered Terrapin. It was without doubt a dim old pile the Hôtel du Hibou. What murderers, and thieves, and Jacobins might not have ascended the tiles of the grand stairway?
But they had obtained a recruit of a very different class, a younger son of the Duke of Leinster, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a man of very slender capacity, who, at his first entrance into Parliament, when scarcely more than of age, had made himself remarkable by a furious denunciation of Pitt's Irish propositions; had married a natural daughter of the Duke of Orleans, a prince, in spite of his royal birth, one of the most profligate and ferocious of the French Jacobins; and had caught the revolutionary mania to such a degree that he abjured his nobility, and substituted for the appellation which marked his rank the title of "Citizen Fitzgerald."
When Bonaparte intended to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not infallible or their government the best of all possible governments.
Doctor Gozzi was in the habit of giving us the sacrament in his own church, but he always sent us for our confession to the church of Saint-Augustin, in which the Jacobins of Padua officiated.
On the day on which the fallen Queen was dragged, already more than half dead, to her doom Barère regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins at a tavern. Robespierre's acceptance of the invitation caused some surprise to those who knew how long and how bitterly it was his nature to hate. "Robespierre of the party!" muttered St. Just. "Barère is the only man whom Robespierre has forgiven."
Savary declined to be burdened with the Police, and Napoleon did not press him: for that clever intriguer, Fouché, was pointed out as the only man who could rally the Jacobins around the imperial throne: to him, then, Napoleon assigned this important post, though fully aware that in his hands it was a two-edged tool. Carnot was finally persuaded to become Minister for Home Affairs.
Barnave said that all who were set down in it passed for decided Jacobins, but were not so in fact; that they, as well as himself, were in despair at seeing the monarchical government attacked; that they had learnt to dissemble their sentiments, and that it would be at least a fortnight before the Assembly could know them well, and certainly before it could succeed in making them unpopular; that it would be necessary to take advantage of that short space of time to get away from Paris, immediately after their nomination.
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