"Well, and what then? A little gold made you a betrayer of the trust your country had reposed in you; for the sake of a little gold you were soon seen with the parricidal sword in your hand lacerating its bosom. Ah! Monsieur, I am far from wishing you any harm; but tremble ... there are pangs of conscience that avenge. Your fellow-citizens, who abhor you, will enlighten France as to your true character. The estates and the pensions, the fruit of your treasons, will be taken from you. Bowed down by age and misery, in the horrible solitude of crime, you will live long enough to be tormented by your conscience. The father will point you out to his son, the teacher to his scholar, and say: "Children, learn to honour your country, virtue, fidelity, and humanity.'
"And she, whose youth, beauty, and innocence they prostitute—her pure and chaste heart trembles under the touch of a polluted hand? Estimable and unhappy woman!...
"Soon the cordons of honour and the pomp of wealth will vanish, and the contempt of mankind will be heaped on you. Will you seek, on the breast of him who is the author of that report, a consolation with which your gentle and loving soul cannot dispense? Will you seek in his eyes tears to mingle with your own? Will your trembling hand, laid upon his heart, try to tell him the emotion of yours? Ah! if you find tears with him, they will be tears of remorse. If his heart beats, it will be in the convulsions of the wretch who dies cursing nature, himself, and the hand that leads him.
"O Lameth! O Robespierre! O Petion! O Volney! O Mirabeau! O Barnave! O Bailley! O Lafayette! see, this is the man that dares to sit by your side! Quite drenched in the blood of his brothers, polluted with crimes of every kind, he presents himself shamelessly in his General's uniform, the unrighteous hire of his villanies! He dares to call himself a representative of the nation, he—who has sold it, and you suffer it! He dares to raise his eyes to listen to your discourses, and you suffer it! This the voice of the people!—he had but the votes of twelve aristocrats! This the voice of the people!—and Ajaccio, Bastia, and most of the cantons wreaked that upon his effigy which they would willingly have done upon his person.
"But you, whom the mistake of the moment misleads, whose belief is for the present abused to make you oppose the projected alterations, will you endure the traitor? him who, under the cold exterior of a sensible man, conceals the greed of a lackey? I cannot believe it. You will be the first to drive him forth in shame and disgrace, as soon as you have been made to comprehend that web of knaveries of which he has been the artist.
"I have the honour, Monsieur, to be your very humble, and very obedient servant,
Bonaparte."
"From my Cabinet of Milelli,
"Jan. 23, in the second year."
"From my Cabinet of Milelli"—it sounds quite imperially. The reader will probably find that this bold, unsparing, powerful letter of the youth of twenty-one, half-Robespierre, half-Murat, is in no respect inferior to the best specimens of revolutionary eloquence furnished by the pamphlets of the period.
I may observe here, that of the six Corsican deputies to the Convention, three voted for the perpetual confinement of Louis Capet, two for his confinement till peace was established and his banishment thereafter, Cristoforo Saliceti alone for his death.