from all who were weary of the Convention and all its works.  “Down with the two-thirds!” was the cry that resounded through the streets of Paris.  The movement was not so much definitely royalist as vaguely malcontent.  The many were enraged by the existing dearth and by the failure of the Revolution to secure even cheap bread.  Doubtless the royalists strove to drive on the discontent to the desired goal, and in many parts they tinged the movement with an unmistakably Bourbon tint.  But it is fairly certain that in Paris they could not alone have fomented a discontent so general as that of Vendemiaire.  That they would have profited by the defeat of the Convention is, however, equally certain.  The history of the Revolution proves that those who at first merely opposed the excesses of the Jacobins gradually drifted over to the royalists.  The Convention now found itself attacked in the very city which had been the chosen abode of Liberty and Equality.  Some thirty thousand of the Parisian National Guards were determined to give short shrift to this Assembly that clung so indecently to life; and as the armies were far away, the Parisian malcontents seemed masters of the situation.  Without doubt they would have been but for their own precipitation and the energy of Buonaparte.

But how came he to receive the military authority which was so potently to influence the course of events?  We left him in Fructidor disgraced:  we find him in the middle of Vendemiaire leading part of the forces of the Convention.  This bewildering change was due to the pressing needs of the Republic, to his own signal abilities, and to the discerning eye of Barras, whose career claims a brief notice.

Paul Barras came of a Provencal family, and had an adventurous life both on land and in maritime expeditions.  Gifted with a robust frame, consummate self-assurance, and a ready tongue, he was well equipped for intrigues, both amorous and political, when the outbreak of the Revolution gave his thoughts a more serious turn.  Espousing the ultra-democratic side, he yet contrived to emerge unscathed from the schisms which were fatal to less dextrous trimmers.  He was present at the siege of Toulon, and has striven in his “Memoires” to disparage Buonaparte’s services and exalt his own.  At the crisis of Thermidor the Convention intrusted him with the command of the “army of the interior,” and the energy which he then displayed gained for him the same position in the equally critical days of Vendemiaire.  Though he subsequently carped at the conduct of Buonaparte, his action proved his complete confidence in that young officer’s capacity:  he at once sent for him, and intrusted him with most important duties.  Herein lies the chief chance of immortality for the name of Barras; not that, as a terrorist, he slaughtered royalists at Toulon; not that he was the military chief of the Thermidorians, who, from fear of their own necks, ended the supremacy of Robespierre; not even that he degraded the new regime by a cynical display of all the worst vices of the old; but rather because he was now privileged to hold the stirrup for the great captain who vaulted lightly into the saddle.