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Fouquier Tinville, with sixteen revolutionary Judges and Jurymen, have been tried and executed, at the moment when the instigators of their crimes, Billaud-Varennes, Collot, &c. were sentenced by the Convention to a banishment, which is probably the object of their wishes.
It is 157 miles to Boulogne by road, and Collot, burning with ambition to be in at the death, rides or drives as no messenger of good tidings has ever ridden or driven before. He does not stop to eat, but munches chunks of bread and cheese in the recess of the lumbering chaise or waggon that bears him along whenever his limbs refuse him service and he cannot mount a horse.
The press was seething with recovered freedom, and the horrors of Carrier gave the journalists a tremendous text. A long struggle was waged over him. In the Convention, Billaud and Collot, feeling that the attack on Carrier was in reality an attack against them and every other terrorist, tried hard to save him.
He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers, quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion.
In the reports made by Collot we find a list of bottles of brandy at four francs each, along with partridges, capons, turkeys, chickens, pike, and crawfish, note also the white bread, the other kind, called "equality bread," assigned to simple mortals, offends this august palate.
On Joseph's arrival at Paris, Collot sent him the State bonds for the sum ordered, together with a very polite letter; but though he waited on the grand pacificator several times afterwards, all admittance was refused, until a douceur of one million of livres nearly L 42,000 of Collot's private profit opened the door.
* The Jacobins were at this time headed by Billaud Varenne, Collot, Thuriot, &c. veterans, who were not likely to be deceived by temporizing. Supported by all the force of government, and intrinsically formidable by their union, the Clubs had long existed in defiance of public reprobation, and for some time they had braved not only the people, but the government itself.
Collot d'Herbois incredulous, half-contemptuous, did not altogether approve of these schemes which seemed to him wild and uncanny: he like the direct simplicity of a summary trial, of the guillotine, or of his own well stage-managed "Noyades."
Unanimously and amid cries of admiration and enthusiasm, amid demonstrations of passionate sympathy for Collot d'Herbois, Couthon, and Robespierre, the Convention by spontaneous and repeated re-elections keeps in office the homicidal government which the Plain detests because it is homicidal, and the Mountain detests because it is decimated by it.
A man would have had quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, as at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.
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