from one end of the Assembly of the Convention to the other, and
the Assembly itself became as one vast den of wild beasts wherein
wolves and hyenas devoured one another and, still unsatiated,
licked their streaming jaws hungering for more prey.

Those same enthusiastic historians, who have a firm belief in the
so-called "Foreign Conspiracy," ascribe every important event of
the Great Revolution--be that event the downfall of the Girondins,
the escape of the Dauphin from the Temple, or the death of
Robespierre--to the intrigues of Baron de Batz. He it was, so
they say, who egged the Jacobins on against the Mountain,
Robespierre against Danton, Hebert against Robespierre. He it was
who instigated the massacres of September, the atrocities of
Nantes, the horrors of Thermidor, the sacrileges, the noyades:
all with the view of causing every section of the National
Assembly to vie with the other in excesses and in cruelty, until
the makers of the Revolution, satiated with their own lust, turned
on one another, and Sardanapalus-like buried themselves and their
orgies in the vast hecatomb of a self-consumed anarchy.

Whether the power thus ascribed to Baron de Batz by his historians
is real or imaginary it is not the purpose of this preface to
investigate. Its sole object is to point out the difference
between the career of this plotter and that of the Scarlet
Pimpernel.

The Baron de Batz himself was an adventurer without substance,
save that which he derived from abroad. He was one of those men
who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by throwing
themselves headlong in the seething cauldron of internal politics.