While the Dictator thus commented on his favourite author, whom in his orations he laboured hard to imitate, the second visitor was wheeled into the room in a chair.  This man was also in what, to most, is the prime of life,—­namely, about thirty-eight; but he was literally dead in the lower limbs:  crippled, paralytic, distorted, he was yet, as the time soon came to tell him,—­a Hercules in Crime!  But the sweetest of human smiles dwelt upon his lips; a beauty almost angelic characterised his features ("Figure d’ange,” says one of his contemporaries, in describing Couthon.  The address, drawn up most probably by Payan (Thermidor 9), after the arrest of Robespierre, thus mentions his crippled colleague:  “Couthon, ce citoyen vertueux, qui n’a que le coeur et la tete de VIVANS, mais qui les a brulants de patriotisme” (Couthon, that virtuous citizen, who has but the head and the heart of the living, yet possesses these all on flame with patriotism.)); an inexpressible aspect of kindness, and the resignation of suffering but cheerful benignity, stole into the hearts of those who for the first time beheld him.  With the most caressing, silver, flute-like voice, Citizen Couthon saluted the admirer of Jean Jacques.

“Nay,—­do not say that it is not the love that attracts thee; it is the love! but not the gross, sensual attachment of man for woman.  No! the sublime affection for the whole human race, and indeed, for all that lives!”

And Citizen Couthon, bending down, fondled the little spaniel that he invariably carried in his bosom, even to the Convention, as a vent for the exuberant sensibilities which overflowed his affectionate heart.  (This tenderness for some pet animal was by no means peculiar to Couthon; it seems rather a common fashion with the gentle butchers of the Revolution.  M. George Duval informs us ("Souvenirs de la Terreur,” volume iii page 183) that Chaumette had an aviary, to which he devoted his harmless leisure; the murderous Fournier carried on his shoulders a pretty little squirrel, attached by a silver chain; Panis bestowed the superfluity of his affections upon two gold pheasants; and Marat, who would not abate one of the three hundred thousand heads he demanded, reared doves!  Apropos of the spaniel of Couthon, Duval gives us an amusing anecdote of Sergent, not one of the least relentless agents of the massacre of September.  A lady came to implore his protection for one of her relations confined in the Abbaye.  He scarcely deigned to speak to her.  As she retired in despair, she trod by accident on the paw of his favourite spaniel.  Sergent, turning round, enraged and furious, exclaimed, “Madam, have you no humanity?”)