The Revolutionary Committees, without Suspects to prey upon, perish fast; as it were of famine.  In Paris the whole Forty-eight of them are reduced to Twelve, their Forty sous are abolished:  yet a little while, and Revolutionary Committees are no more.  Maximum will be abolished; let Sansculottism find food where it can. (24th December 1794, Moniteur, No. 97.) Neither is there now any Municipality; any centre at the Townhall.  Mayor Fleuriot and Company perished; whom we shall not be in haste to replace.  The Townhall remains in a broken submissive state; knows not well what it is growing to; knows only that it is grown weak, and must obey.  What if we should split Paris into, say, a Dozen separate Municipalities; incapable of concert!  The Sections were thus rendered safe to act with:—­or indeed might not the Sections themselves be abolished?  You had then merely your Twelve manageable pacific Townships, without centre or subdivision; (October 1795, Dulaure, viii. 454-6.) and sacred right of Insurrection fell into abeyance!

So much is getting abolished; fleeting swiftly into the Inane.  For the Press speaks, and the human tongue; Journals, heavy and light, in Philippic and Burlesque:  a renegade Freron, a renegade Prudhomme, loud they as ever, only the contrary way.  And Ci-devants shew themselves, almost parade themselves; resuscitated as from death-sleep; publish what death-pains they have had.  The very Frogs of the Marsh croak with emphasis.  Your protesting Seventy-three shall, with a struggle, be emitted out of Prison, back to their seats; your Louvets, Isnards, Lanjuinais, and wrecks of Girondism, recalled from their haylofts, and caves in Switzerland, will resume their place in the Convention:  (Deux Amis, xiii. 3-39.) natural foes of Terror!

Thermidorian Talliens, and mere foes of Terror, rule in this Convention, and out of it.  The compressed Mountain shrinks silent more and more.  Moderatism rises louder and louder:  not as a tempest, with threatenings; say rather, as the rushing of a mighty organ-blast, and melodious deafening Force of Public Opinion, from the Twenty-five million windpipes of a Nation all in Committee of Mercy:  which how shall any detached body of individuals withstand?

Chapter 3.7.II.

La Cabarus.

How, above all, shall a poor National Convention, withstand it?  In this poor National Convention, broken, bewildered by long terror, perturbations, and guillotinement, there is no Pilot, there is not now even a Danton, who could undertake to steer you anywhither, in such press of weather.  The utmost a bewildered Convention can do, is to veer, and trim, and try to keep itself steady:  and rush, undrowned, before the wind.  Needless to struggle; to fling helm a-lee, and make ’bout ship!  A bewildered Convention sails not in the teeth of the wind; but is rapidly blown round again.  So strong is the wind, we say; and so changed; blowing fresher and fresher, as from the sweet South-West; your devastating North-Easters, and wild tornado-gusts of Terror, blown utterly out!  All Sansculottic things are passing away; all things are becoming Culottic.