In reality Fortune never favoured him more than when she removed him from the coteries of intriguing Corsicans on the coast of Provence and brought him to the centre of all influence.  An able schemer at Paris could decide the fate of parties and governments.  At the frontiers men could only accept the decrees of the omnipotent capital.  Moreover, the Revolution, after passing through the molten stage, was now beginning to solidify, an important opportunity for the political craftsman.  The spring of the year 1795 witnessed a strange blending of the new fanaticism with the old customs.  Society, dammed up for a time by the Spartan rigour of Robespierre, was now flowing back into its wonted channels.  Gay equipages were seen in the streets; theatres, prosperous even during the Terror, were now filled to overflowing; gambling, whether in money or in stocks and assignats, was now permeating all grades of society; and men who had grown rich by amassing the confiscated State lands now vied with bankers, stock-jobbers, and forestallers of grain in vulgar ostentation.  As for the poor, they were meeting their match in the gilded youth of Paris, who with clubbed sticks asserted the right of the rich to be merry.  If the sansculottes attempted to restore the days of the Terror, the National Guards of Paris were ready to sweep them back into the slums.  Such was their fate on May 20th, shortly after Buonaparte’s arrival at Paris.  Any dreams which he may have harboured of restoring the Jacobins to power were dissipated, for Paris now plunged into the gaieties of the ancien regime.  The Terror was remembered only as a horrible nightmare, which served to add zest to the pleasures of the present.  In some circles no one was received who had not lost a relative by the guillotine.  With a ghastly merriment characteristic of the time, “victim balls” were given, to which those alone were admitted who could produce the death warrant of some family connection:  these secured the pleasure of dancing in costumes which recalled those of the scaffold, and of beckoning ever and anon to their partners with nods that simulated the fall of the severed head.  It was for this, then, that the amiable Louis, the majestic Marie Antoinette, the Minerva-like Madame Roland, the Girondins vowed to the utter quest of liberty, the tyrant-quelling Danton, the incorruptible Robespierre himself, had felt the fatal axe; in order that the mimicry of their death agonies might tickle jaded appetites, and help to weave anew the old Circean spells.  So it seemed to the few who cared to think of the frightful sacrifices of the past, and to measure them against the seemingly hopeless degradation of the present.