The Jacobins, therefore, in view of so dangerous a situation, and not without some reason, had determined that they themselves should administer the new constitution. They were in the most desperate straits because the Paris populace now held them directly responsible for the existing scarcity of food, a scarcity amounting to famine. From time to time for months the mob invaded the hall of the Convention, craving bread with angry, hungry clamor. The members mingled with the disorderly throng on the floor and temporarily soothed them by empty promises. But each inroad of disorder was worse than the preceding until the Mountain was not only without support from the rabble, but an object of loathing and contempt to them and their half-starved leaders. Hence their only chance for power was in some new rearrangement under which they would not be so prominent in affairs. The royalists at the same time saw in the provisions of the new charter a means to accomplish their own ends; and relying upon the attitude of the capital, in which mob and burghers alike were angry, determined simultaneously to strike a blow for mastery, and to supplant the Jacobins. Evidence of their activity appeared both in military and political circles. Throughout the summer of 1795 there was an unaccountable languor in the army. It was believed that Pichegru had purposely palsied his own and Jourdan's abilities, and the needless armistice he made with Austria went far to confirm the idea. It was afterward proved that several members of the Convention had been in communication with royalists. Among their agents was a personage of some importance—a certain Aubry—who, having returned after the events of Thermidor, never disavowed his real sentiments as a royalist; and being later made chairman of the army committee, was in that position when Buonaparte's career was temporarily checked by degradation from the artillery to the infantry. For this absurd reason he was long but unjustly thought also to have caused the original transfer to the west.
The Convention was aware of all that was taking place, but was also helpless to correct the trouble. Having abolished the powerful and terrible Committee of Safety, which had conducted its operations with such success as attends remorseless vigor, it was found necessary on August ninth to reconstruct something similar to meet the new crisis. At the same time the spirit of the hour was propitiated by forming sixteen other committees to control the action of the central one. Such a dispersion of executive power was a virtual paralysis of action, but it was to be only temporary, they would soon centralize their strength in an efficient way. The constitution was adopted only a fortnight later, on August twenty-second. Immediately the sections of Paris began to display irritation at the limitations set to their choice of new representatives. They had many sympathizers in the provinces, and the extreme reactionaries from the Revolution were jubilant. Fortunately for France, Carnot was temporarily retained to control the department of war. He was not removed until the following March.
When General Buonaparte reached Paris, and went to dwell in the mean and shabby lodgings which his lean purse compelled him to choose, he found the city strangely metamorphosed. Animated by a settled purpose not to accept the position assigned to him in the Army of the West, and, if necessary, to defy his military superiors, his humor put him out of all sympathy with the prevalent gaiety. Bitter experience had taught him that in civil war the consequences of victory and defeat are alike inglorious. In the fickleness of public opinion the avenging hero of to-day may easily become the reprobated outcast of to-morrow. What reputation he had gained at Toulon was already dissipated in part; the rest might easily be squandered entirely in Vendée. He felt and said that he could wait. But how about his daily bread?
The drawing-rooms of Paris had opened like magic before the "sesame" of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory. There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and intrigue; walking, driving, and riding—all the avocations of a people soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native passion for pleasure and refinement. All classes indulged in the wildest speculation, securities public and corporate were the sport of the exchange, the gambling spirit absorbed the energies of both sexes in desperate games of skill and chance. The theaters, which had never closed their doors even during the worst periods of terror, were thronged from pit to gallery by a populace that reveled in excitement. The morality of the hour was no better than the old; for there was a strange mixture of elements in this new society. The men in power were of every class—a few of the old aristocracy, many of the wealthy burghers, a certain proportion of the colonial nabobs from the West Indies and elsewhere, adventurers of every stripe, a few even of the city populace, and some country common folk. The purchase and sale of the confiscated lands, the national domain which furnished a slender security for the national debt and depreciated bonds, had enriched thousands of the vulgar sort. The newly rich lost their balance and their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the worst. The ingredients of this queer hodgepodge had yet to learn one another's language and nature; the niceties of speech, gesture, and mien which once had a well-understood significance in the higher circles of government and society were all to be readjusted in accordance with the ideas of the motley crowd and given new conventional currency. In such a disorderly transition vice does not require the mask of hypocrisy, virtue is helpless because unorganized, and something like riot characterizes conduct. The sound and rugged goodness of many newcomers, the habitual respectability of the veterans, were for the moment alike inactive because not yet kneaded into the lump they had to leaven.
There was, nevertheless, a marvelous exhibition of social power in this heterogeneous mass; nothing of course proportionate in extent to what had been brought forth for national defense, but still, of almost if not entirely equal significance. Throughout the revolutionary epoch there had been much discussion concerning reforms in education. It was in 1794 that Monge finally succeeded in founding the great Polytechnic School, an institution which clearly corresponded to a national characteristic, since from that day it has strengthened the natural bias of the French toward applied science, and tempted them to the undue and unfortunate neglect of many important humanizing disciplines. The Conservatory of Music and the Institute were permanently reorganized soon after. The great collections of the Museum of Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers) were begun, and permanent lecture courses were founded in connection with the National Library, the Botanical Garden, the Medical School, and other learned institutions. Almost immediately a philosophical literature began to appear; pictures were painted, and the theaters reopened with new and tolerable pieces written for the day and place. In the very midst of war, moreover, an attempt was made to emancipate the press. The effort was ill advised, and the results were so deplorable for the conduct of affairs that the newspapers were in the event more firmly muzzled than ever.
When Buonaparte had made his living arrangements, and began to look about, he must have been stupefied by the hatred for the Convention so generally and openly manifested on every side. The provinces had looked upon the Revolution as accomplished. Paris was evidently in such ill humor with the body which represented it that the republic was to all appearance virtually undone. "Reëlect two thirds of the Convention members to the new legislature!" said the angry demagogues of the Paris sections. "Never! Those men who, by their own confession, have for three years in all these horrors been the cowardly tools of a sentiment they could not restrain, but are now self-styled and reformed moderates! Impossible!" Whether bribed by foreign gold, and working under the influence of royalists, or by reason of the famine, or through the determination of the well-to-do to have a radical change, or from all these influences combined, the sections were gradually organizing for resistance, and it was soon clear that the National Guard was in sympathy with them. The Convention was equally alert, and began to arm for the conflict. They already had several hundred artillerymen and five thousand regulars who were imbued with the national rather that the local spirit; they now began to enlist a special guard of fifteen hundred from the desperate men who had been the trusty followers of Hébert and Robespierre. The fighting spirit of the Convention was unquenchable. Having lodged the "two thirds" in the coming government, they virtually declared war on all enemies internal and external. By their decree of October twenty-fourth, 1792, they had announced that the natural limits of France were their goal. Having virtually obtained them, they were now determined to defend them. This was the legacy of the Convention to the Directory, a legacy which indefinitely prolonged the Revolution and nullified the new polity from the outset.
For a month or more Buonaparte was a mere onlooker, or at most an interested examiner of events, weighing and speculating in obscurity much as he had done three years before. The war department listened to and granted his earnest request that he might remain in Paris until there should be completed a general reassignment of officers, which had been determined upon, and, as his good fortune would have it, was already in progress. As the first weeks passed, news arrived from the south of a reaction in favor of the Jacobins. It became clearer every day that the Convention had moral support beyond the ramparts of Paris, and within the city it was possible to maintain something in the nature of a Jacobin salon. Many of that faith who were disaffected with the new conditions in Paris—the Corsicans in particular—were welcomed at the home of Mme. Permon by herself and her beautiful daughter, afterward Mme. Junot and Duchess of Abrantès. Salicetti had chosen the other child, a son now grown, as his private secretary, and was of course a special favorite in the house. The first manifestation of reviving Jacobin confidence was shown in the attack made on May twentieth upon the Convention by hungry rioters who shouted for the constitution of 1793. The result was disastrous to the radicals because the tumult was quelled by the courage and presence of mind shown by Boissy d'Anglas, a calm and determined moderate. Commissioned to act alone in provisioning Paris, he bravely accepted his responsibility and mounted the president's chair in the midst of the tumult to defend himself. The mob brandished in his face the bloody head of Féraud, a fellow-member of his whom they had just murdered. The speaker uncovered his head in respect, and his undaunted mien cowed the leaders, who slunk away, followed by the rabble. The consequence was a total annihilation of the Mountain on May twenty-second. The Convention committees were disbanded, their artillerymen were temporarily dismissed, and the constitution of 1793 was abolished.
The friendly home of Mme. Permon was almost the only resort of Buonaparte, who, though disillusioned, was still a Jacobin. Something like desperation appeared in his manner; the lack of proper food emaciated his frame, while uncertainty as to the future left its mark on his wan face and in his restless eyes. It was not astonishing, for his personal and family affairs were apparently hopeless. His brothers, like himself, had now been deprived of profitable employment; they, with him, might possibly and even probably soon be numbered among the suspects; destitute of a powerful patron, and with his family once more in actual want, Napoleon was scarcely fit in either garb or humor for the society even of his friends. His hostess described him as having "sharp, angular features; small hands, long and thin; his hair long and disheveled; without gloves; wearing badly made, badly polished shoes; having always a sickly appearance, which was the result of his lean and yellow complexion, brightened only by two eyes glistening with shrewdness and firmness." Bourrienne, who had now returned from diplomatic service, was not edified by the appearance or temper of his acquaintance, who, he says, "was ill clad and slovenly, his character cold, often inscrutable. His smile was hollow and often out of place. He had moments of fierce gaiety which made you uneasy, and indisposed to love him."
No wonder the man was ill at ease. His worst fears were realized when the influence of the Mountain was wiped out,—Carnot, the organizer of victory, as he had been styled, being the only one of all the old leaders to escape. Salicetti was too prominent a partizan to be overlooked by the angry burghers. For a time he was concealed by Mme. Permon in her Paris home. He escaped the vengeance of his enemies in the disguise of her lackey, flying with her when she left for the south to seek refuge for herself and children. Even the rank and file among the members of the Mountain either fled or were arrested. That Buonaparte was unmolested appears to prove how cleverly he had concealed his connection with them. The story that in these days he proposed for the hand of Mme. Permon, though without any corroborative evidence, has an air of probability, partly in the consideration of a despair which might lead him to seek any support, even that of a wife as old as his mother, partly from the existence of a letter to the lady which, though enigmatical, displays an interesting mixture of wounded pride and real or pretended jealousy. The epistle is dated June eighteenth, 1795. He felt that she would think him duped, he explains, if he did not inform her that although she had not seen fit to give her confidence to him, he had all along known that she had Salicetti in hiding. Then follows an address to that countryman, evidently intended to clear the writer from all taint of Jacobinism, and couched in these terms: "I could have denounced thee, but did not, although it would have been but a just revenge so to do. Which has chosen the truer part? Go, seek in peace an asylum where thou canst return to better thoughts of thy country. My lips shall never utter thy name. Repent, and above all, appreciate my motives. This I deserve, for they are noble and generous." In these words to the political refugee he employs the familiar republican "thou"; in the peroration, addressed, like the introduction, to the lady herself, he recurs to the polite and distant "you." "Mme. Permon, my good wishes go with you as with your child. You are two feeble creatures with no defense. May Providence and the prayers of a friend be with you. Above all, be prudent and never remain in the large cities. Adieu. Accept my friendly greetings."[49]
The meaning of this missive is recondite; perhaps it is this: Mme. Permon, I loved you, and could have ruined the rival who is your protégé with a clear conscience, for he once did me foul wrong, as he will acknowledge. But farewell. I bear you no grudge. Or else it may announce another change in the political weather by the veering of the cock. As a good citizen, despising the horrors of the past, I could have denounced you, Salicetti. I did not, for I recalled old times and your helplessness, and wished to heap coals of fire on your head, that you might see the error of your way. The latter interpretation finds support in the complete renunciation of Jacobinism which the writer made soon afterward, and in his subsequent labored explanation that in the "Supper of Beaucaire" he had not identified himself with the Jacobin soldier (so far an exact statement of fact), but had wished only by a dispassionate presentation of facts to show the hopeless case of Marseilles, and to prevent useless bloodshed.[Back to Contents]