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!’”

Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them, or betrayed them.  Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court.  Immoral and unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only equalled by his perversity and cruelty.  It was he who, on the 10th of August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act.  After he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and afterwards as a Senator.  His own and only daughter died in a miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his father’s baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to marry.