"Our labor furnishes us the means to supply our modest wants; we desire nothing more. Our life is rolling on peacefully at Vannes, that old town of Armorica, the cradle of our family."
"I know how greatly the country should please you."
"And nevertheless, we must soon leave our nest, for it is impossible there to give my son a suitable education. In a year or two, or perhaps even sooner, we shall return to Paris, where we shall continue our Breton cloth commerce. Such, at least, is my intention and that of my dear wife and her mother."
"Hurrah! May your plan be realized, the sooner the better, my dear friend. Then we shall no longer be reduced to a correspondence for consolation."
"Your last letters," replied John, "decided me to come to Paris, seeing the Republic was in danger of perishing. I think I could be useful to you in such a case, and also perhaps to the Republic, by still pulling a trigger against her enemies."
"The political situation is indeed grave. Nevertheless, there is no ground for fearing a catastrophe very soon. In the Council of Five Hundred there is an imposing republican majority; we are decided to preserve liberty, and to fight the clericals, Jesuits and monarchists to the finish."
"I doubt not your energy nor that of your friends; but the Republic has now been for some time deprived of the popular element, its life, its spirit, its strength."
"True; since Thermidor a great gap has been made in the republican ranks. You may be sure that General Bonaparte, for all his military renown, would never have dared affront Vergniaud, Danton, or Robespierre, had they been in the Council of Five Hundred. At their voice the people would rise in arms, and the ambitious dictator would be sent before the revolutionary tribunal."
"Belated regrets, my friend. But explain to me how it is that the Directorate, knowing full well the intrigues organized in Napoleon's favor by his brothers, by Fouché, and by that former Bishop Talleyrand, than whom no meaner rascal ever lived—how the Directorate was so weak as not to send this General Bonaparte before a court-martial, guilty as he was of deserting the army in Egypt, more than six hundred leagues from France? In the height of the Convention such an act would not have passed unpunished."
"For this weakness of the Directorate, and our own indecision in the Council of Five Hundred, there are many causes. Sieyès is the soul of the conspiracy against the Constitution of the year III, which he himself framed, while we republicans rather defend that Constitution, defective as it is, in order not to throw the Republic open to new dangers. Sieyès, a member of the Directorate, and Roger Ducos, his colleague and accomplice, are at the head of the sworn enemies of the present Constitution. Among these oppositionists are the majority of the Council of Ancients and some members of the Council of Five Hundred; then come a crowd of intriguers of all sorts, stock brokers, men with frayed reputations, get-rich-quick contractors, bourgeois weather-vanes, corruptionists, harpies, repentant Terrorists, like Fouché and your brother-in-law Desmarais, who is now a member of the Council of Ancients. Sieyès's object is to overthrow the Constitution of the year III by a coup d'etat and replace it by a bourgeois oligarchy; on top of which would come a constitutional monarchy similar to that of '92, and then it would be done for the Republic. That is the plan of the opposition. Now here is the situation of us republicans, who constitute the majority of the Council of Five Hundred. We count on the support of two members of the Directorate, Moulins and Gohier, devoted to the Republic. Then in case of a conflict, we have cause to hope that General Bernadotte, whose influence may serve to blanket Bonaparte's, will march on our side. The Council of Five Hundred has, moreover, for braces, the remains of the several republican parties—Girondins, Mountainists, Jacobins, Terrorists—as well as a large number of former members of the Commune who escaped the scaffold after Thermidor, and belong to the bourgeoisie—men of progress and free thought."