all Emperors, Kings, and Princes.  At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary justice, those who had escaped the laws.  After meeting with well-merited contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of his Senate.  Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted him by Nature.  Without education, as well as without parts, he for a long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent.  His ideas of liberty are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball, because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.

Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all four are slaves.

Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal.  The former is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the sentence of his good King’s death, while declaring himself a royalist.  A mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots caused to be massacred or guillotined.  When, as a Minister of Justice, he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices, whose nature had not much of tenderness.  As a member of the first assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press.  “The laws, you say” (exclaimed he, in the Council), “punish libellers; so they do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors unbolted?  Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press, you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think.  The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain.  Were you, therefore, determined to decree the motion for this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that conviction of having written a libel carries with it capital punishment, and that a label be fastened on the breast of the libeller, when carried to execution, with this inscription:  ‘A social murderer,’ or ‘A murderer of characters!’”