because they have deserved well of their country.  Let all suspected traitors expire by the sword or by fire; continue to march upon that revolutionary line so well delineated by you.  The committee applauds all your undertakings, all your measures of vigour; they are not only all permitted, but commanded by your mission.”  Most of the decrees concerning the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, and particularly that for the organization of the atrocious military commission at Orange, were signed by him.

Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without talents; but his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of those plans of campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and 1796, were so triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and Bonaparte, is impertinent, as well as unfounded.  At the risk of his own life, Pichegru entirely altered the plan sent him by the Committee of Public Safety; and it was Moreau’s masterly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe, that made this general so famous.  The surprising successes of Bonaparte in Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and, according to Berthier’s assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief, during the first four months, to change five times his plans of proceedings and undertakings.

During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of the name of Aublin, as his mistresses.  He was the friend of the father of these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in 1793, to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both before either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796, reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant.  He has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.

Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would, with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as he did for that of Louis XVI.  He has waded too far in blood and crime to retrograde.

To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern legislator.  Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre.  After the evacuation of Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were arrested