"No, the risk is not equal; our heads are at stake!"
Their heads, perhaps,—but certainly their power, places, fortunes, comforts and pleasures, all that in their eyes makes it worth while to live.—Every morning, seventy Paris newspapers and as many local gazettes in the large towns of the provinces expose, with supporting documents, details and figures, not merely their former crimes, but, again, their actual corruption, their sudden opulence founded on prevarication and rapine, their bribes and peculations—
* one, rewarded with a sumptuously furnished mansion by a company of grateful contractors;
* another, son of a bailiwick attorney and a would-be Carthusian, now possessor of ecclesiastical property, restored by him at a great outlay for hunting-grounds; another also monopolizes the finest land in Seine-et-Oise;
* another, the improvised owner of four chateaux;
* another, who has feathered his nest with fifteen or eighteen millions,[5162]
With their loose or arbitrary ways of doing things, their habits as hoarders or spendthrifts, their display and effrontery, their dissipations, their courtiers and their prostitutes. How can they renounce all this?—And all the more because this is all they have. These jaded consciences are wholly indifferent to abstract principles, to popular sovereignty, to the common weal, to public security; the thin and brittle coating of sonorous phrases under which they formerly tried to hide the selfishness and perversity of their lusts, scales off and falls to the ground. They themselves confess that it is not the Republic for which they are concerned, but for themselves above everything else, and for themselves alone. So much the worse for the Republic if its interest is opposed to their interest; as Siéyès will soon express it, the object is not to save the Revolution but the revolutionaries.—Thus disabused, unscrupulous, knowing that they are staking their all, and resolute, like their colleagues of August 10, September 2 and May31 and like the Committee of Public Safety, they are determined to win, no matter at what cost or by what means.
For this time again, the Moderates do not want to comprehend that the war has been declared, and that it is war to the knife. They do not agree amongst themselves; they want to gain time, they hesitate and take refuge in constitutional forms—they do not act. The strong measures which the eighty decided and clear-sighted deputies propose, are weakened or suspended by the precautions of the three hundred others, short-sighted, unreliable or timid.[5163] They dare not even avail themselves of their legal arms:
* annul the military division of the interior,
* suppress Augereau's commission,