With a ghastly merriment characteristic of the time, "victim balls" were given, to which those alone were admitted who could produce the death warrant of some family connection: these secured the pleasure of dancing in costumes which recalled those of the scaffold, and of beckoning ever and anon to their partners with nods that simulated the fall of the severed head.
It was for this, then, that the amiable Louis, the majestic Marie Antoinette, the Minerva-like Madame Roland, the Girondins vowed to the utter quest of liberty, the tyrant-quelling Danton, the incorruptible Robespierre himself, had felt the fatal axe; in order that the mimicry of their death agonies might tickle jaded appetites, and help to weave anew the old Circean spells.

So it seemed to the few who cared to think of the frightful sacrifices of the past, and to measure them against the seemingly hopeless degradation of the present.
Some such thoughts seem to have flitted across the mind of Buonaparte in those months of forced inactivity.

It was a time of disillusionment.
Rarely do we find thenceforth in his correspondence any gleams of faith respecting the higher possibilities of the human race.

The golden visions of youth now vanish along with the _bonnet rouge_ and the jargon of the Terror.

His bent had ever been for the material and practical: and now that faith in the Jacobinical creed was vanishing, it was more than ever desirable to grapple that errant balloon to substantial facts.