CHAPTER X
The French Revolution was no longer guided by the men of ideals. With the downfall of Robespierre had come the triumph of those who bothered themselves with no dreams of social regeneration, but whose energies were directed with an eye single to their own advantage. Here and there was left a relic of the better type of revolutionist, “a rose of the garden left on its stalk to show where the garden had been”; but to one Carnot there were dozens of the brood of Barras.
The stern, single-minded, terribly resolute men of the Great Committee, who had worked fourteen hours a day in a plainly furnished room of the Tuileries, taking their lunch like common clerks as they stood about the table at which they wrote,—smiling perhaps, as they ate, at some jest of Barère,—with no thought of enriching themselves, intent only upon working out the problems of the Revolution in order that France might find her way to a future of glory and happiness—these men were gone, to come no more. Fiercely attached to variant creeds, they had warred among themselves, destroying each other, wearying the world with violence, and giving the scoundrels the opportunity to cry “Peace!” and to seize control. True, the work of the Revolution had been done too well to be wholly undone. Feudalism had been torn up root and branch; it could never be so flourishing again. Absolutism, royal and papal infallibility, had been trodden into the mire where they belonged; they might be set in place again, but they would never more look quite so dazzling, nor be worshipped with quite such blindness of devotion. Great principles of civil and religious liberty had been planted; they could never be wholly plucked out. The human race had for once seen a great people fill its lungs and its brain with the air and the inspiration of absolute freedom from priest, king, aristocrat, precedent, conventionality, and caste-made law; the spectacle would never be forgotten, nor the example cease to blaze as a beacon, lighting the feet and kindling the hopes of the world.
But, for the time, the triumph of the venal brought with it shame and disaster to the entire body politic. The public service corrupt, the moral tone of society sank. Ideals came into contempt, idealists into ridicule. The “man of the world,” calling himself practical, and priding himself on his ability to play to the baser passions of humanity, laughed revolutionary dogmas aside, put revolutionary simplicity and honesty out of fashion, made a jest of duty and patriotism, and prostituted public office into a private opportunity.
Hordes of adventurers, male and female, stormed the administration, took it, and looted it. The professional money-getter controlled the Directory: the contractor, stock-jobber, fund-holder, peculator, and speculator. In all matters pertaining to finance, the Bourse was the government. The nobility of the Old Order had monopolized the State’s favors under the kings; the rich men of the middle class, the Bourgeoisie, did so now. The giver and the taker of bribes met and smiled upon each other; the lobbyist hunted his prey and found it. Once again the woman, beautiful, shrewd, and unchaste, became greater than the libertine official who had surrendered to her charms; and she awarded fat contracts, trafficked in pardons and appointments, and influenced the choice of army chiefs.
The government no longer concerned itself with chimeras, dreams of better men and methods, visions of beneficent laws dealing impartially with an improving mass of citizenship. Just as the Grand Monarch’s court had revelled in the fairyland of joy and light and plenty at Versailles while peasants in the provinces fed on grass and roots, dying like flies in noisome huts and garrets; just as the Pompadour of Louis the XV. had squandered national treasures upon diamonds, palaces, endless festivities, while the soldiers of France starved and shivered in Canada, losing an empire for want of ammunition to hold it! so, under the Directory, Barras held court in splendor, while workmen died of want in the garrets of Paris; and he feasted with his Madame Tallien or his Josephine Beauharnais, while the soldiers on the Rhine or on the Alps faced the winter in rags, and were forced to rob to keep from starvation.
This wretched state of things had not reached its climax at the period I am treating, but the beginnings had been made, the germs were all present and active.
In this revival of mock royalty, Barras outshone his peers. He was of most noble descent, his family “as old as the rocks of Provence”; his manners redolent of the Old Régime, and much more so his morals. His honesty, like his patriotism, delighted in large bribes; and he never by any chance told the truth if a lie would do as well. His person was tall and commanding; his voice, in a crisis, had sometimes rung out like a trumpet and rallied the wavering, for the man was brave and capable of energetic action. But he was a sensualist, base to the core, vulgar in mind and heart, true to no creed, and capable of no high, noble, strenuous rôle. Rotten himself, he believed that other men were as degraded. As to women, they never stirred a thought in him which would not, if worded in the ears of a true woman, have mantled her cheek with shame.
This was the man to whom Napoleon had attached himself; this was the man in whose house Josephine was living when Napoleon met her. Barras was the strong man of the hour; Barras had places to give and favors to divide; Barras was the candle around which fluttered moths large and small; and to this light had come the adventurer from Corsica, and the adventuress from Martinique. Usually it is the candle which singes the moth; in this case it was the moths which put out the candle.