No More Learning

The stately bridge was occupied by a throng of people, who swore that
the men under whose rule the Loire had been choked with corpses should
have full personal experience of the nature of a noyade. In consequence
of this news, the officers who had charge of the criminals made such
arrangements that the carriages reached Tours at two in the morning, and
drove straight to the post-house. Fresh horses were instantly ordered;
and the travellers started again at full gallop. They had, in truth,
not a moment to lose; for the alarm had been given; lights were seen in
motion; and the yells of a great multitude, disappointed of its revenge,
mingled with the sound of the departing wheels.

At Poitiers there was another narrow escape. As the prisoners quitted
the post-house, they saw the whole population pouring in fury down the
steep declivity on which the city is built. They passed near Niort,
but could not venture to enter it. The inhabitants came forth with
threatening aspect, and vehemently cried to the postillions to stop; but
the postillions urged the horses to full speed, and soon left the town
behind. Through such dangers the men of blood were brought in safety to
Rochelle.

Oleron was the place of their destination, a dreary island beaten by the
raging waves of the Bay of Biscay. The prisoners were confined in the
castle; each had a single chamber, at the door of which a guard was
placed; and each was allowed the ration of a single soldier. They
were not allowed to communicate either with the garrison or with the
population of the island; and soon after their arrival they were denied
the indulgence of walking on the ramparts. The only place where they
were suffered to take exercise was the esplanade where the troops were
drilled.

They had not been long in this situation when news came that the
Jacobins of Paris had made a last attempt to regain ascendency in the
state, that the hall of the Convention had been forced by a furious
crowd, that one of the deputies had been murdered and his head fixed on
a pike, that the life of the President had been for a time in imminent
danger, and that some members of the legislature had not been ashamed to
join the rioters. But troops had arrived in time to prevent a
massacre. The insurgents had been put to flight; the inhabitants of
the disaffected quarters of the capital had been disarmed; the guilty
deputies had suffered the just punishment of their treason; and the
power of the Mountain was broken for ever. These events strengthened the
aversion with which the system of terror and the authors of that system
were regarded. One member of the Convention had moved that the three
prisoners of Oleron should be put to death; another, that they should be
brought back to Paris, and tried by a council of war. These propositions
were rejected. But something was conceded to the party which called for
severity. A vessel which had been fitted out with great expedition at
Rochefort touched at Oleron; and it was announced to Collot and Billaud
that they must instantly go on board. They were forthwith conveyed to
Guiana, where Collot soon drank himself to death with brandy. Billaud
lived many years, shunning his fellow-creatures and shunned by them; and
diverted his lonely hours by teaching parrots to talk. Why a distinction
was made between Barere and his companions in guilt, neither he nor any
other writer, as far as we know, has explained. It does not appear that
the distinction was meant to be at all in his favour; for orders soon
arrived from Paris, that he should be brought to trial for his crimes
before the criminal court of the department of the Upper Charente. He
was accordingly brought back to the continent, and confined during some
months at Saintes, in an old convent which had lately been turned into a
jail.

While he lingered here, the reaction which had followed the great crisis
of Thermidor met with a temporary check. The friends of the House of
Bourbon, presuming on the indulgence with which they had been treated
after the fall of Robespierre, not only ventured to avow their opinions
with little disguise, but at length took arms against the Convention,
and were not put down till much blood had been shed in the streets
of Paris. The vigilance of the public authorities was therefore now
directed chiefly against the Royalists; and the rigour with which the
Jacobins had lately been treated was somewhat relaxed. The Convention,
indeed, again resolved that Barere should be sent to Guiana. But this
decree was not carried into effect. The prisoner, probably with the
connivance of some powerful persons, made his escape from Saintes and
fled to Bordeaux, where he remained in concealment during some years.
There seems to have been a kind of understanding between him and the
government, that, as long as he hid himself, he should not be found,
but that, if he obtruded himself on the public eye, he must take the
consequences of his rashness.

While the constitution of 1795, with its Executive Directory, its
Council of Elders, and its Council of Five Hundred, was in operation,
he continued to live under the ban of the law. It was in vain that he
solicited, even at moments when the politics of the Mountain seemed to
be again in the ascendant, a remission of the sentence pronounced by the
Convention. Even his fellow-regicides, even the authors of the slaughter
of Vendemiaire and of the arrests of Fructidor, were ashamed of him.

About eighteen months after his escape from prison, his name was again
brought before the world. In his own province he still retained some of
his early popularity. He had, indeed, never been in that province since
the downfall of the monarchy. The mountaineers of Gascony were far
removed from the seat of government, and were but imperfectly informed
of what passed there. They knew that their countryman had played an
important part, and that he had on some occasions promoted their local
interests; and they stood by him in his adversity and in his disgrace
with a constancy which presents a singular contrast to his own abject
fickleness. All France was amazed to learn that the department of the
Upper Pyrenees had chosen the proscribed tyrant a member of the Council
of Five Hundred. The council which, like our House of Commons, was the
judge of the election of its own members, refused to admit him. When his
name was read from the roll, a cry of indignation rose from the benches.
"Which of you," exclaimed one of the members, "would sit by the side of
such a monster? " "Not I, not I! " answered a crowd of voices. One deputy
declared that he would vacate his seat if the hall were polluted by the
presence of such a wretch. The election was declared null on the ground
that the person elected was a criminal skulking from justice; and many
severe reflections were thrown on the lenity which suffered him to be
still at large.

He tried to make his peace with the Directory, by writing a bulky
libel on England, entitled, the Liberty of the Seas. He seems to have
confidently expected that this work would produce a great effect. He
printed three thousand copies, and in order to defray the expense of
publication, sold one of his farms for the sum of ten thousand francs.
The book came out; but nobody bought it, in consequence, if Barere is
to be believed, of the villainy of Mr Pitt, who bribed the Directory
to order the Reviewers not to notice so formidable an attack on the
maritime greatness of perfidious Albion.

Barere had been about three years at Bordeaux when he received
intelligence that the mob of the town designed him the honour of a visit
on the ninth of Thermidor, and would probably administer to him what
he had, in his defence of his friend Lebon, described as substantial
justice under forms a little harsh. It was necessary for him to disguise
himself in clothes such as were worn by the carpenters of the dock. In
this garb, with a bundle of wood shavings under his arm, he made his
escape into the vineyards which surrounded the city, lurked during some
days in a peasant's hut, and, when the dreaded anniversary was over,
stole back into the city. A few months later he was again in danger. He
now thought that he should be nowhere so safe as in the neighbourhood
of Paris. He quitted Bordeaux, hastened undetected through those towns
where four years before his life had been in extreme danger, passed
through the capital in the morning twilight, when none were in the
streets except shop-boys taking down the shutters, and arrived safe
at the pleasant village of St Ouen on the Seine. Here he remained in
seclusion during some months. In the meantime Bonaparte returned from
Egypt, placed himself at the head of a coalition of discontented parties,
covered his designs with the authority of the Elders, drove the Five
Hundred out of their hall at the point of the bayonet, and became
absolute monarch of France under the name of First Consul.

Barere assures us that these events almost broke his heart; that he
could not bear to see France again subject to a master; and that if the
representatives had been worthy of that honourable name, they would
have arrested the ambitious general who insulted them. These feelings,
however, did not prevent him from soliciting the protection of the new
government, and from sending to the First Consul a handsome copy of the
essay on the Liberty of the Seas.

The policy of Bonaparte was to cover all the past with a general
oblivion. He belonged half to the Revolution and half to the reaction.
He was an upstart and a sovereign; and had therefore something in
common with the Jacobin, and something in common with the Royalist.
All, whether Jacobins or Royalists, who were disposed to support his
government, were readily received--all, whether Jacobins or Royalists,
who showed hostility to his government, were put down and punished. Men
who had borne a part in the worst crimes of the Reign of Terror, and men
who had fought in the army of Conde, were to be found close together,
both in his antechambers and in his dungeons. He decorated Fouche and
Maury with the same cross. He sent Arena and Georges Cadoudal to the
same scaffold. From a government acting on such principles Barere easily
obtained the indulgence which the Directory had constantly refused to
grant. The sentence passed by the Convention was remitted; and he was
allowed to reside at Paris. His pardon, it is true, was not granted in
the most honourable form; and he remained, during some time, under the
special supervision of the police. He hastened, however, to pay his
court at the Luxembourg palace, where Bonaparte then resided, and was
honoured with a few dry and careless words by the master of France.

Here begins a new chapter of Barere's history. What passed between him
and the Consular government cannot, of course, be so accurately known to
us as the speeches and reports which he made in the Convention. It is,
however, not difficult, from notorious facts, and from the admissions
scattered over these lying Memoirs, to form a tolerably accurate notion
of what took place. Bonaparte wanted to buy Barere: Barere wanted to
sell himself to Bonaparte. The only question was one of price; and there
was an immense interval between what was offered and what was demanded.

Bonaparte, whose vehemence of will, fixedness of purpose, and reliance
on his own genius were not only great but extravagant, looked with
scorn on the most effeminate and dependent of human minds. He was quite
capable of perpetrating crimes under the influence either of ambition or
of revenge: but he had no touch of that accursed monomania, that craving
for blood and tears, which raged in some of the Jacobin chiefs. To
proscribe the Terrorists would have been wholly inconsistent with his
policy; but, of all the classes of men whom his comprehensive system
included, he liked them the least; and Barere was the worst of them.
This wretch had been branded with infamy, first by the Convention, and
then by the Council of Five Hundred. The inhabitants of four or five
great cities had attempted to tear him limb from limb. Nor were his
vices redeemed by eminent talents for administration or legislation. It
would be unwise to place in any honourable or important post a man so
wicked, so odious, and so little qualified to discharge high political
duties. At the same time there was a way in which it seemed likely that
he might be of use to the government. The First Consul, as he afterwards
acknowledged, greatly overrated Barere's powers as a writer. The effect
which the Reports of the Committee of Public Safety had produced by the
camp fires of the Republican armies had been great. Napoleon himself,
when a young soldier, had been delighted by those compositions,
which had much in common with the rhapsodies of his favourite poet,
Macpherson. The taste, indeed, of the great warrior and statesman
was never very pure. His bulletins, his general orders, and his
proclamations, are sometimes, it is true, masterpieces in their kind;
but we too often detect, even in his best writing, traces of Fingal, and
of the Carmagnoles. It is not strange, therefore, that he should have
been desirous to secure the aid of Barere's pen. Nor was this the only
kind of assistance which the old member of the Committee of Public
Safety might render to the Consular government. He was likely to find
admission into the gloomy dens in which those Jacobins whose constancy
was to be overcome by no reverse, or whose crimes admitted of no
expiation, hid themselves from the curses of mankind. No enterprise was
too bold or too atrocious for minds crazed by fanatacism, and familiar
with misery and death. The government was anxious to have information of
what passed in their secret councils; and no man was better qualified to
furnish such information than Barere.

For these reasons the First Consul was disposed to employ Barere as a
writer and as a spy. But Barere--was it possible that he would submit
to such a degradation? Bad as he was, he had played a great part. He had
belonged to that class of criminals who filled the world with the renown
of their crimes; he had been one of a cabinet which had ruled France
with absolute power, and made war on all Europe with signal success.
Nay, he had been, though not the most powerful, yet, with the single
exception of Robespierre, the most conspicuous member of that cabinet.
His name had been a household word at Moscow and at Philadelphia, at
Edinburgh and at Cadiz. The blood of the Queen of France, the blood of
the greatest orators and philosophers of France, was on his hands. He
had spoken; and it had been decreed that the plough should pass over the
great city of Lyons. He had spoken again; and it had been decreed that
the streets of Toulon should be razed to the ground. When depravity is
placed so high as his, the hatred which it inspires is mingled with awe.
His place was with great tyrants, with Critias and Sylla, with Eccelino
and Borgia; not with hireling scribblers and police runners.

"Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast;
But shall the dignity of vice be lost? "

So sang Pope; and so felt Barere. When it was proposed to him to publish
a journal in defence of the Consular government, rage and shame inspired
him for the first and last time with something like courage. He had
filled as large a space in the eyes of mankind as Mr Pitt or General
Washington; and he was coolly invited to descend at once to the level
of Mr Lewis Goldsmith. He saw, too, with agonies of envy, that a wide
distinction was made between himself and the other statesmen of the
Revolution who were summoned to the aid of the government. Those
statesmen were required, indeed, to make large sacrifices of principle;
but they were not called on to sacrifice what, in the opinion of the
vulgar, constitutes personal dignity. They were made tribunes and
legislators, ambassadors and counsellors of state, ministers, senators,
and consuls. They might reasonably expect to rise with the rising
fortunes of their master; and, in truth, many of them were destined
to wear the badge of his Legion of Honour and of his order of the Iron
Crown; to be arch-chancellors and arch-treasurers, counts, dukes, and
princes. Barere, only six years before, had been far more powerful, far
more widely renowned, than any of them; and now, while they were thought
worthy to represent the majesty of France at foreign courts, while they
received crowds of suitors in gilded antechambers, he was to pass his
life in measuring paragraphs, and scolding correctors of the press. It
was too much. Those lips which had never before been able to fashion
themselves to a No, now murmured expostulation and refusal. "I could
not"--these are his own words--"abase myself to such a point as to serve
the First Consul merely in the capacity of a journalist, while so many
insignificant, low, and servile people, such as the Treilhards, the
Roederers, the Lebruns, the Marets, and others whom it is superfluous to
name, held the first place in this government of upstarts. "

This outbreak of spirit was of short duration. Napoleon was inexorable.
It is said indeed that he was, for a moment, half inclined to admit
Barere into the Council of State; but the members of that body
remonstrated in the strongest terms, and declared that such a nomination
would be a disgrace to them all. This plan was therefore relinquished.
Thenceforth Barere's only chance of obtaining the patronage of the
government was to subdue his pride, to forget that there had been a
time when, with three words, he might have had the heads of the three
consuls, and to betake himself, humbly and industriously, to the task of
composing lampoons on England and panegyrics on Bonaparte.

It has been often asserted, we know not on what grounds, that Barere was
employed by the government not only as a writer, but as a censor of
the writings of other men. This imputation he vehemently denies in his
Memoirs; but our readers will probably agree with us in thinking that
his denial leaves the question exactly where it was.

Thus much is certain, that he was not restrained from exercising the
office of censor by any scruple of conscience or honour; for he did
accept an office, compared with which that of censor, odious as it is,
may be called an august and beneficent magistracy. He began to have what
are delicately called relations with the police. We are not sure that
we have formed, or that we can convey, an exact notion of the nature
of Barere's new calling. It is a calling unknown in our country. It has
indeed often happened in England that a plot has been revealed to the
government by one of the conspirators. The informer has sometimes been
directed to carry it fair towards his accomplices, and to let the
evil design come to full maturity. As soon as his work is done, he
is generally snatched from the public gaze, and sent to some obscure
village or to some remote colony. The use of spies, even to this extent,
is in the highest degree unpopular in England; but a political spy by
profession is a creature from which our island is as free as it is from
wolves. In France the race is well-known, and was never more numerous,
more greedy, more cunning, or more savage, than under the government of
Bonaparte.

Our idea of a gentleman in relations with the Consular and Imperial
police may perhaps be incorrect. Such as it is, we will try to convey it
to our readers. We image to ourselves a well-dressed person, with a
soft voice and affable manners. His opinions are those of the society
in which he finds himself, but a little stronger. He often complains,
in the language of honest indignation, that what passes in private
conversation finds its way strangely to the government, and cautions his
associates to take care what they say when they are not sure of their
company. As for himself, he owns that he is indiscreet. He can never
refrain from speaking his mind; and that is the reason that he is not
prefect of a department.

In a gallery of the Palais Royal he overhears two friends talking
earnestly about the King and the Count of Artois. He follows them into
a coffee-house, sits at the table next to them, calls for his half-dish
and his small glass of cognac, takes up a journal, and seems occupied
with the news. His neighbours go on talking without restraint, and in
the style of persons warmly attached to the exiled family. They depart;
and he follows them half round the boulevards till he fairly tracks them
to their apartments, and learns their names from the porters. From
that day every letter addressed to either of them is sent from the
post-office to the police, and opened. Their correspondents become
known to the government, and are carefully watched. Six or eight honest
families, in different parts of France, find themselves at once under
the frown of power without being able to guess what offence they have
given. One person is dismissed from a public office; another learns with
dismay that his promising son has been turned out of the Polytechnic
school.

Next, the indefatigable servant of the state falls in with an old
republican, who has not changed with the times, who regrets the red cap
and the tree of liberty, who has not unlearned the Thee and Thou, and
who still subscribes his letters with "Health and Fraternity. " Into the
ears of this sturdy politician our friend pours forth a long series
of complaints. What evil times! What a change since the days when the
Mountain governed France! What is the First Consul but a king under a
new name? What is this Legion of Honour but a new aristocracy? The old
superstition is reviving with the old tyranny. There is a treaty with
the Pope, and a provision for the clergy. Emigrant nobles are returning
in crowds, and are better received at the Tuileries than the men of the
10th of August. This cannot last. What is life without liberty? What
terrors has death to the true patriot? The old Jacobin catches fire,
bestows and receives the fraternal hug, and hints that there will soon
be great news, and that the breed of Harmodius and Brutus is not quite
extinct. The next day he is close prisoner, and all his papers are in
the hands of the government.

To this vocation, a vocation compared with which the life of a beggar,
of a pickpocket, of a pimp, is honourable, did Barere now descend. It
was his constant practice, as often as he enrolled himself in a new
party, to pay his footing with the heads of old friends. He was at first
a Royalist; and he made atonement by watering the tree of liberty with
the blood of Louis. He was then a Girondist; and he made atonement by
murdering Vergniaud and Gensonne. He fawned on Robespierre up to the
eighth of Thermidor; and he made atonement by moving, on the ninth, that
Robespierre should be beheaded without a trial. He was now enlisted
in the service of the new monarchy; and he proceeded to atone for his
republican heresies by sending republican throats to the guillotine.

Among his most intimate associates was a Gascon named Demerville, who
had been employed in an office of high trust under the Committee of
Public Safety. This man was fanatically attached to the Jacobin system
of politics, and, in conjunction with other enthusiasts of the same
class, formed a design against the First Consul. A hint of this design
escaped him in conversation with Barere. Barere carried the intelligence
to Lannes, who commanded the Consular Guards. Demerville was arrested,
tried, and beheaded; and among the witnesses who appeared against him
was his friend Barere.

The account which Barere has given of these transactions is studiously
confused and grossly dishonest. We think, however, that we can discern,
through much falsehood and much artful obscurity, some truths which he
labours to conceal. It is clear to us that the government suspected him
of what the Italians call a double treason. It was natural that such
a suspicion should attach to him. He had, in times not very remote,
zealously preached the Jacobin doctrine, that he who smites a tyrant
deserves higher praise than he who saves a citizen. Was it possible
that the member of the Committee of Public Safety, the king-killer, the
queen-killer, could in earnest mean to deliver his old confederates, his
bosom friends, to the executioner, solely because they had planned an
act which, if there were any truth in his own Carmagnoles, was in the
highest degree virtuous and glorious? Was it not more probable that he
was really concerned in the plot, and that the information which he gave
was merely intended to lull or to mislead the police? Accordingly,
spies were set on the spy. He was ordered to quit Paris, and not to come
within twenty leagues till he received further orders. Nay, he ran no
small risk of being sent, with some of his old friends, to Madagascar.

He made his peace, however, with the government so far, that he was not
only permitted, during some years, to live unmolested, but was employed
in the lowest sort of political drudgery. In the summer of 1803, while
he was preparing to visit the south of France, he received a letter
which deserves to be inserted. It was from Duroc, who is well known to
have enjoyed a large share of Napoleon's confidence and favour.

"The First Consul, having been informed that Citizen Barere is about to
set out for the country, desires that he will stay at Paris.

"Citizen Barere will every week draw up a report on the state of
public opinion on the proceedings of the government, and generally on
everything which, in his judgment, it will be interesting to the First
Consul to learn.

"He may write with perfect freedom.

"He will deliver his reports under seal into General Duroc's own hand,
and General Duroc will deliver them to the First Consul. But it is
absolutely necessary that nobody should suspect that this species of
communication takes place; and, should any such suspicion get abroad,
the First Consul will cease to receive the reports of Citizen Barere.

"It will also be proper that Citizen Barere should frequently insert in
the journals articles tending to animate the public mind, particularly
against the English. "

During some years Barere continued to discharge the functions
assigned to him by his master. Secret reports, filled with the talk
of coffee-houses, were carried by him every week to the Tuileries. His
friends assure us that he took especial pains to do all the harm in his
power to the returned emigrants. It was not his fault if Napoleon was
not apprised of every murmur and every sarcasm which old marquesses who
had lost their estates, and old clergymen who had lost their benefices,
uttered against the imperial system. M.
Hippolyte Carnot, we grieve to
say, is so much blinded by party spirit that he seems to reckon this
dirty wickedness among his hero's titles to public esteem.

Barere was, at the same time, an indefatigable journalist and
pamphleteer. He set up a paper directed against England, and called the
"Memorial Antibritannique". He planned a work entitled, "France made
great and illustrious by Napoleon. " When the Imperial government was
established, the old regicide made himself conspicuous even among the
crowd of flatterers by the peculiar fulsomeness of his adulation.
He translated into French a contemptible volume of Italian verses,
entitled, "The Poetic Crown, composed on the glorious accession of
Napoleon the First, by the Shepherds of Arcadia. " He commenced a new
series of Carmagnoles very different from those which had charmed
the Mountain. The title of Emperor of the French, he said, was mean;
Napoleon ought to be Emperor of Europe. King of Italy was too humble an
appellation; Napoleon's style ought to be King of Kings.

But Barere laboured to small purpose in both his vocations. Neither as
a writer nor as a spy was he of much use. He complains bitterly that
his paper did not sell. While the "Journal des Debats", then flourishing
under the able management of Geoffroy, had a circulation of at least
twenty thousand copies, the "Memorial Antibritannique" never, in its
most prosperous times, had more than fifteen hundred subscribers; and
these subscribers were, with scarcely an exception, persons residing far
from Paris, probably Gascons, among whom the name of Barere had not yet
lost its influence.

A writer who cannot find readers generally attributes the public neglect
to any cause rather than to the true one; and Barere was no exception to
the general rule. His old hatred to Paris revived in all its fury.
That city, he says, has no sympathy with France. No Parisian cares to
subscribe to a journal which dwells on the real wants and interests of
the country. To a Parisian nothing is so ridiculous as patriotism. The
higher classes of the capital have always been devoted to England.
A corporal from London is better received among them than a French
general. A journal, therefore, which attacks England has no chance of
their support.

A much better explanation of the failure of the "Memorial" was given
by Bonaparte at St Helena. "Barere," said he to Barry O'Meara, "had
the reputation of being a man of talent: but I did not find him so.
I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many
flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie
wrapped up in high-sounding language. "

The truth is that, though Barere was a man of quick parts, and could do
with ease what he could do at all, he had never been a good writer. In
the day of his power he had been in the habit of haranguing an excitable
audience on exciting topics. The faults of his style passed uncensured;
for it was a time of literary as well as of civil lawlessness, and a
patriot was licensed to violate the ordinary rules of composition as
well as the ordinary rules of jurisprudence and of social morality. But
there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was
again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy,
so was there a revival of classical taste. Honour was again paid to
the prose of Pascal and Massillon, and to the verse of Racine and
La Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the
Convention was not only as much out of date as the language of
Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind
with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the
guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his
conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had
become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the
Restoration.

Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of the Reign of Terror, had now
ceased to fear them. He was all-powerful and at the height of glory;
they were weak and universally abhorred. He was a sovereign; and it
is probable that he already meditated a matrimonial alliance with
sovereigns. He was naturally unwilling, in his new position, to hold
any intercourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had Barere's literary
assistance been important to the government, personal aversion might
have yielded to considerations of policy; but there was no motive for
keeping terms with a worthless man who had also proved a worthless
writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to his feelings. Barere was not
gently dropped, not sent into an honourable retirement, but spurned
and scourged away like a troublesome dog. He had been in the habit of
sending six copies of his journal on fine paper daily to the Tuileries.
Instead of receiving the thanks and praises which he expected, he was
drily told that the great man had ordered five copies to be sent back.
Still he toiled on; still he cherished a hope that at last Napoleon
would relent, and that at last some share in the honours of the state
would reward so much assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He was
bitterly undeceived. Under the Imperial constitution the electoral
colleges of the departments did not possess the right of choosing
senators or deputies, but merely that of presenting candidates. From
among these candidates the emperor named members of the senate, and the
senate named members of the legislative body. The inhabitants of the
Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to Barere. In the year 1805,
they were disposed to present him as a candidate for the senate. On this
Napoleon expressed the highest displeasure; and the president of the
electoral college was directed to tell the voters, in plain terms, that
such a choice would be disgraceful to the department. All thought of
naming Barere a candidate for the senate was consequently dropped.
But the people of Argeles ventured to name him a candidate for the
legislative body. That body was altogether destitute of weight and
dignity; it was not permitted to debate; its only function was to vote
in silence for whatever the government proposed. It is not easy to
understand how any man who had sat in free and powerful deliberative
assemblies could condescend to bear a part in such a mummery. Barere,
however, was desirous of a place even in this mock legislature; and a
place even in this mock legislature was refused to him. In the whole
senate he had not a single vote.

Such treatment was sufficient, it might have been thought, to move the
most abject of mankind to resentment. Still, however, Barere cringed and
fawned on. His letters came weekly to the Tuileries till the year
1807. At length, while he was actually writing the two hundred and
twenty-third of the series, a note was put into his hands. It was from
Duroc, and was much more perspicuous than polite. Barere was requested
to send no more of his Reports to the palace, as the Emperor was too
busy to read them.

Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces even the shell of the
tortoise; and the contempt of the Court was felt to the quick even by
the callous heart of Barere. He had humbled himself to the dust; and he
had humbled himself in vain. Having been eminent among the rulers of
a great and victorious state, he had stooped to serve a master in the
vilest capacities; and he had been told that, even in those capacities,
he was not worthy of the pittance which had been disdainfully flung to
him. He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the
government employed in the most infamous offices. He stood idle in
the market-place, not because he thought any office too infamous, but
because none would hire him.

Yet he had reason to think himself fortunate; for, had all that
is avowed in these Memoirs been known, he would have received very
different tokens of the Imperial displeasure. We learn from himself
that, while publishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, and while
carrying weekly budgets of calumny to the Tuileries, he was in close
connection with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, then by no means
favourably disposed towards France, employed to watch all that passed at
Paris; was permitted to read their secret despatches; was consulted by
them as to the temper of the public mind and the character of Napoleon;
and did his best to persuade them that the government was in a tottering
condition, and that the new sovereign was not, as the world supposed,
a great statesman and soldier. Next, Barere, still the flatterer and
talebearer of the Imperial Court, connected himself in the same manner
with the Spanish envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations
which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government;
that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned
on the vices of Napoleon; on his designs against Spain, and on the best
mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness
was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps.
It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among
sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant
is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; and the vilest
spy is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native
land.

From 1807 to 1814 Barere lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his
craven cowardice would permit against the Imperial administration,
and coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons
returned, he, as might have been expected, became a royalist, and
wrote a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the
Restoration had delivered France, and magnifying the wisdom and goodness
which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis,
he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose
hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of
ancient monarchs, assures us, with great complacency, that "in this work
monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly
expressed. " By this apostasy he got nothing, not even any additional
infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened.

During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into
public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the
Chamber of Representatives. But, though that assembly was composed in
a great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with
indulgence, he found himself an object of general aversion. When the
President first informed the Chamber that M. Barere requested a hearing,
a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of
Waterloo, Barere proposed that the Chamber should save France from the
victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of
Thermopylae and the Lacedaemonian custom of wearing flowers in times of
extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would
have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting
which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last
of the Carmagnoles.

The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of
Representatives, after burlesquing during a few weeks the proceedings
of the National Convention, retired with the well-earned character of
having been the silliest political assembly that had met in France.
Those dreaming pedants and praters never for a moment comprehended
their position. They could never understand that Europe must be either
conciliated or vanquished; that Europe could be conciliated only by
the restoration of Louis, and vanquished only by means of a dictatorial
power entrusted to Napoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet they
would not hear of the only measures which could keep him out. They
incurred the enmity of all foreign powers by putting Napoleon at their
head; yet they shackled him, thwarted him, quarrelled with him about
every trifle, abandoned him on the first reverse. They then opposed
declamations and disquisitions to eight hundred thousand bayonets;
played at making a constitution for their country, when it depended on
the indulgence of the victor whether they should have a country; and
were at last interrupted, in the midst of their babble about the rights
of man and the sovereignty of the people, by the soldiers of Wellington
and Blucher.

A new Chamber of Deputies was elected, so bitterly hostile to the
Revolution that there was no small risk of a new Reign of Terror. It
is just, however, to say that the king, his ministers, and his allies
exerted themselves to restrain the violence of the fanatical royalists,
and that the punishments inflicted, though in our opinion unjustifiable,
were few and lenient when compared with those which were demanded by M.
de Labourdonnaye and M. Hyde de Neuville. We have always heard, and are
inclined to believe, that the government was not disposed to treat
even the regicides with severity. But on this point the feeling of the
Chamber of Deputies was so strong that it was thought necessary to make
some concession. It was enacted, therefore, that whoever, having voted
in January 1793 for the death of Louis the Sixteenth, had in any manner
given in an adhesion to the government of Bonaparte during the hundred
days should be banished for life from France. Barere fell within this
description. He had voted for the death of Louis; and he had sat in the
Chamber of Representatives during the hundred days.

He accordingly retired to Belgium, and resided there, forgotten by all
mankind, till the year 1830. After the revolution of July he was at
liberty to return to France; and he fixed his residence in his native
province. But he was soon involved in a succession of lawsuits with his
nearest relations--"three fatal sisters and an ungrateful brother," to
use his own words. Who was in the right is a question about which we
have no means of judging, and certainly shall not take Barere's word.
The Courts appear to have decided some points in his favour and some
against him. The natural inference is, that there were faults on all
sides. The result of this litigation was that the old man was reduced to
extreme poverty, and was forced to sell his paternal house.

As far as we can judge from the few facts which remain to be mentioned,
Barere continued Barere to the last. After his exile he turned Jacobin
again, and, when he came back to France, joined the party of the
extreme left in railing at Louis Philippe, and at all Louis Philippe's
ministers. M. Casimir Perier, M. De Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers,
in particular, are honoured with his abuse; and the King himself is held
up to execration as a hypocritical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barere had no
scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a thousand francs a
year from the privy purse of the sovereign whom he hated and reviled.
This pension, together with some small sums occasionally doled out
to him by the department of the Interior, on the ground that he was
a distressed man of letters, and by the department of Justice, on the
ground that he had formerly held a high judicial office, saved him from
the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues
of the renowned Committee of Public Safety, and almost all his
colleagues of the Convention, he died in January 1841. He had attained
his eighty-sixth year.

We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account
of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add anything for the
purpose of assisting their judgment of his character? If we were writing
about any of his colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety, about
Carnot, about Robespierre, or Saint Just, nay, even about Couthon,
Collot, or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a full
examination of the arguments which have been employed to vindicate or
to excuse the system of Terror. We could, we think, show that France
was saved from her foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, but in
spite of it; and that the perils which were made the plea of the violent
policy of the Mountain were to a great extent created by that very
policy. We could, we think, also show that the evils produced by
the Jacobin administration did not terminate when it fell; that it
bequeathed a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that
public opinion, which had during two generations been constantly
becoming more and more favourable to civil and religious freedom,
underwent, during the days of Terror, a change of which the traces are
still to be distinctly perceived. It was natural that there should
be such a change, when men saw that those who called themselves the
champions of popular rights had compressed into the space of twelve
months more crimes than the Kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian,
and Capetian, had perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded
as a great delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of
hereditary princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to
any government but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the
imperial despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune,
its dungeons stronger than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more
obsequious than the old parliaments. Hence the restoration of the
Bourbons and of the Jesuits, the Chamber of 1815 with its categories of
proscription, the revival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of
the clergy, the persecution of the Protestants, the appearance of a new
breed of De Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth
century. Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the
war waged by the old soldiers of the tricolor against the liberties of
Spain. Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present
day, the most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of
the French representation are regarded by those who are especially
interested in the security of property and maintenance of order. Half
a century has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of
depravity and madness has left on the noblest of causes.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M.
Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while
they declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has
produced and is still producing much evil, is perfectly true. But what
produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to
that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn
far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of
intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the
morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall
generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesman
who strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the
rebound. But such calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the
authors of the Reign of Terror. Violence, and more violence, blood,
and more blood, made up their whole policy. In a few months these poor
creatures succeeded in bringing about a reaction, of which none of them
saw, and of which none of us may see the close; and, having brought it
about, they marvelled at it; they bewailed it; they execrated it; they
ascribed it to everything but the real cause--their own immortality and
their own profound incapacity for the conduct of great affairs.

These, however, are considerations to which, on the present occasion, it
is hardly necessary for us to advert; for, be the defence which has been
set up for the Jacobin policy good or bad, it is a defence which cannot
avail Barere. From his own life, from his own pen, from his own mouth,
we can prove that the part which he took in the work of blood is to be
attributed, not even to sincere fanaticism, not even to misdirected
and ill-regulated patriotism, but either to cowardice, or to delight in
human misery. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that
he murdered the Girondists? In these very Memoirs he tells us that he
always regarded their death as the greatest calamity that could befall
France. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he
raved for the head of the Austrian woman? In these very Memoirs he tells
us that the time spent in attacking her was ill spent, and ought to have
been employed in concerting measures of national defence. Will it be
pretended that he was induced by sincere and earnest abhorrence of
kingly government to butcher the living and to outrage the dead; he who
invited Napoleon to take the title of King of Kings, he who assures us
that after the Restoration he expressed in noble language his attachment
to monarchy, and to the house of Bourbon? Had he been less mean,
something might have been said in extenuation of his cruelty. Had he
been less cruel, something might have been said in extenuation of his
meanness. But for him, regicide and court-spy, for him who patronised
Lebon and betrayed Demerville, for him who wantoned alternately in
gasconades of Jacobinism and gasconades of servility, what excuse has
the largest charity to offer?

We cannot conclude without saying something about two parts of his
character, which his biographer appears to consider as deserving of
high admiration. Barere, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle; but in two
things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity, and in his hatred
to England. If this were so, we must say that England is much more
beholden to him than Christianity.

It is possible that our inclinations may bias our judgment; but we think
that we do not flatter ourselves when we say that Barere's aversion to
our country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his mind was
capable of entertaining. The value of this compliment is indeed somewhat
diminished by the circumstance that he knew very little about us.
His ignorance of our institutions, manners, and history is the less
excusable, because, according to his own account, he consorted much,
during the peace of Amiens, with Englishmen of note, such as that
eminent nobleman Lord Greaten, and that not less eminent philosopher
Mr Mackensie Coefhis. In spite, however, of his connection with these
well-known ornaments of our country, he was so ill-informed about us as
to fancy that our government was always laying plans to torment him.
If he was hooted at Saintes, probably by people whose relations he had
murdered, it was because the cabinet of St James's had hired the mob. If
nobody would read his bad books it was because the cabinet of St James's
had secured the Reviewers. His accounts of Mr Fox, of Mr Pitt, of the
Duke of Wellington, of Mr Canning, swarm with blunders surpassing even
the ordinary blunders committed by Frenchmen who write about England. Mr
Fox and Mr Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two different reigns.
Mr Pitt's sinking fund was instituted in order to enable England to pay
subsidies to the powers allied against the French republic. The Duke
of Wellington's house in Hyde Park was built by the nation, which twice
voted the sum of 200,000 pounds for the purpose. This, however, is
exclusive of the cost of the frescoes, which were also paid for out of
the public purse. Mr Canning was the first Englishman whose death
Europe had reason to lament; for the death of Lord Ward, a relation, we
presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr Coefhis, had been an immense benefit to
mankind.

Ignorant, however, as Barere was, he knew enough of us to hate us; and
we persuade ourselves that, had he known us better, he would have hated
us more. The nation which has combined, beyond all example and all hope,
the blessings of liberty with those of order, might well be an object
of aversion to one who had been false alike to the cause of order and
to the cause of liberty. We have had amongst us intemperate zeal for
popular rights; we have had amongst us also the intemperance of loyalty.
But we have never been shocked by such a spectacle as the Barere
of 1794, or as the Barere of 1804. Compared with him, our fiercest
demagogues have been gentle; compared with him, our meanest courtiers
have been manly. Mix together Thistlewood and Bubb Doddington; and you
are still far from having Barere. The antipathy between him and us is
such, that neither for the crimes of his earlier nor for those of his
later life does our language, rich as it is, furnish us with adequate
names. We have found it difficult to relate his history without having
perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary of horror, and to the French
vocabulary of baseness. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct
in the Convention, without using those emphatic terms, guillotinade,
noyade, fusillade, mitraillade. It is not easy to give a notion of his
conduct under the Consulate and the Empire without borrowing such words
as mouchard and mouton.

We therefore like his invectives against us much better than
anything else that he has written; and dwell on them, not merely with
complacency, but with a feeling akin to gratitude. It was but little
that he could do to promote the honour of our country; but that little
he did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, traitor, slave, coward,
liar, slanderer, murderer, hack writer, police-spy--the one small
service which he could render to England was to hate her: and such as he
was may all who hate her be!

We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent
and constant zeal for religion which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot,
distinguished Barere; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonour on
religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barere
was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a
sceptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and
that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is
a pious treatise, entitled "Of Christianity, and of its Influence. "
Another consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doubtless
greatly console and edify the Church.

This makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false,
whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust,
whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever
things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any
infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended in Barere. But one thing
was still wanting; and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supplied. When to
such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added,
the effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such
exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how
presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this
beatified athlete of the faith, St Bertrand of the Carmagnoles.

Something more we had to say about him. But let him go. We did not seek
him out, and will not keep him longer. If those who call themselves his
friends had not forced him on our notice we should never have vouchsafed
to him more than a passing word of scorn and abhorrence, such as we
might fling at his brethren, Hebert and Fouquier Tinville, and Carrier
and Lebon. We have no pleasure in seeing human nature thus degraded. We
turn with disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos of the fiction;
and the filthiest and most spiteful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble
creature when compared with the Barere of history. But what is no
pleasure M.