when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
him by Nature. Without education, as well as without parts, he for a
long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent. His ideas of liberty
are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.

Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
four are slaves.

Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal. The former
is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist. A
mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
caused to be massacred or guillotined. When, as a Minister of Justice,
he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices,
whose nature had not much of tenderness. As a member of the first
assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the
Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press. "The
laws, you say" (exclaimed he, in the Council), "punish libellers; so they
do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors
unbolted? Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a
citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press,
you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think.
The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain. Were you,