In men spoiled by long right of Insurrection, what confused ferments will rise, tongues once begun wagging!  Journalists declaim, your Lacretelles, Laharpes; Orators spout.  There is Royalism traceable in it, and Jacobinism.  On the West Frontier, in deep secrecy, Pichegru, durst he trust his Army, is treating with Conde:  in these Sections, there spout wolves in sheep’s clothing, masked Emigrants and Royalists!  (Napoleon, Las Cases, Choix des Rapports, xvii. 398-411.) All men, as we say, had hoped, each that the Election would do something for his own side:  and now there is no Election, or only the third of one.  Black is united with white against this clause of the Two-thirds; all the Unruly of France, who see their trade thereby near ending.

Section Lepelletier, after Addresses enough, finds that such clause is a manifest infraction; that it, Lepelletier, for one, will simply not conform thereto; and invites all other free Sections to join it, ’in central Committee,’ in resistance to oppression. (Deux Amis, xiii. 375-406.) The Sections join it, nearly all; strong with their Forty Thousand fighting men.  The Convention therefore may look to itself!  Lepelletier, on this 12th day of Vendemiaire, 4th of October 1795, is sitting in open contravention, in its Convent of Filles Saint-Thomas, Rue Vivienne, with guns primed.  The Convention has some Five Thousand regular troops at hand; Generals in abundance; and a Fifteen Hundred of miscellaneous persecuted Ultra-Jacobins, whom in this crisis it has hastily got together and armed, under the title Patriots of Eighty-nine.  Strong in Law, it sends its General Menou to disarm Lepelletier.

General Menou marches accordingly, with due summons and demonstration; with no result.  General Menou, about eight in the evening, finds that he is standing ranked in the Rue Vivienne, emitting vain summonses; with primed guns pointed out of every window at him; and that he cannot disarm Lepelletier.  He has to return, with whole skin, but without success; and be thrown into arrest as ‘a traitor.’  Whereupon the whole Forty Thousand join this Lepelletier which cannot be vanquished:  to what hand shall a quaking Convention now turn?  Our poor Convention, after such voyaging, just entering harbour, so to speak, has struck on the bar;—­and labours there frightfully, with breakers roaring round it, Forty thousand of them, like to wash it, and its Sieyes Cargo and the whole future of France, into the deep!  Yet one last time, it struggles, ready to perish.

Some call for Barras to be made Commandant; he conquered in Thermidor.  Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen Buonaparte, unemployed Artillery Officer, who took Toulon.  A man of head, a man of action:  Barras is named Commandant’s-Cloak; this young Artillery Officer is named Commandant.  He was in the Gallery at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew, some half hour, to consider with himself:  after a half hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers Yea.