Such at the age of five-and-thirty was Jean Baptiste Carrier, Representative of the Convention with the Army of the West, the attorney who once had been intended by devout parents for the priesthood. He had been a month in Nantes, sent thither to purge the body politic.
He reached a chair placed in the focus of the gathering, which sat in a semicircle. Standing by it, one of his lean hands resting upon the back, he surveyed them, disgust in his glance, a sneer curling his lip, so terrible and brutal of aspect despite his frailness that more than one of those stout fellows quailed now before him.
Suddenly he broke into torrential speech, his voice shrill and harsh:
“I do not know by what fatality it happens, but happen it does, that during the month that I have been in Nantes you have never ceased to give me reason to complain of you. I have summoned you to meet me here that you may justify yourselves, if you can, for your ineptitude!” And he flung himself into the chair, drawing his fur-lined coat about him. “Let me hear from you!” he snapped.
Minee, the unfrocked bishop, preserving still a certain episcopal portliness of figure, a certain episcopal oiliness of speech, respectfully implored the representative to be more precise.
The invitation flung him into a passion. His irascibility, indeed, deserved to become a byword.
“Name of a name!” he shrilled, his sunken eyes ablaze, his face convulsed. “Is there a thing I can mention in this filthy city of yours that is not wrong? Everything is wrong! You have failed in your duty to provide adequately for the army of Vendee. Angers has fallen, and now the brigands are threatening Nantes itself. There is abject want in the city, disease is rampant; people are dying of hunger in the streets and of typhus in the prisons. And sacre nom!—you ask me to be precise! I'll be precise in telling you where lies the fault. It lies in your lousy administration. Do you call yourselves administrators? You—” He became unprintable. “I have come here to shake you out of your torpor, and by—I'll shake you out of it or I'll have the blasted heads off the lot of you.”
They shivered with chill fear under the wild glare of his sunken eyes.
“Well?” he barked after a long pause. “Are you all dumb as well as idiots?”
It was the ruffian Forget who had the courage to answer him: