Buchot regards such delicacy as strange, and, seeing M.Miot's embarrassment, he ends by saying: "If you don't find me fit for a clerk, I shall be content with the place of a servant." This estimate of himself shows his proper value.
The other, whom we have also met before, and who is already known by his acts,[3344] general in Paris of the entire armed force, commander-in-chief of one hundred and ten thousand men, is that former servant or under-clerk of the procureur Formey, who, dismissed by his employer for robbery, shut up in Bicetre, by turns a runner and announcer for a traveling show, barrier-clerk and September assassin, has purged the Convention on the 2nd of June--in short, the famous Henriot, and now simply a brute and a sot.

In this latter capacity, spared on the trial of the Hebertists, he is kept as a tool, for the reason, doubtless, that he is narrow, coarse and manageable, more compromised than anybody else, good for any job, without the slightest chance of becoming independent, unemployed in the army,[3345] having no prestige with true soldiers, a general for street parade and an interloper and lower than the lowest of the mob; his mansion, his box at the Opera-Comique, his horses, his importance at festivals and reviews, and, above all, his orgies make him perfectly content .-- Every evening, in full uniform, escorted by his aides-de-camp, he gallops to Choisy-sur-Seine, where, in the domicile of a flatterer named Fauvel, along with some of Robespierre's confederates or the local demagogues, he revels.

They toss off the wines of the Duc de Coigny, smash the glasses, plates and bottles, betake themselves to neighboring dance-rooms and kick up a row, bursting in doors, and breaking benches and chairs to pieces--in short, they have a good time .-- The next morning, having slept himself sober, he dictates his orders for the day, veritable masterpieces in which the silliness, imbecility and credulity of a numskull, the sentimentality of the drunkard, the clap-trap of a mountebank and the tirades of a cheap philosopher form an unique compound, at once sickening and irritating, like the fiery, pungent mixtures of cheap bars, which suit his audience better because they contain the biting, mawkish ingredients that compose the adulterated brandy of the Revolution .-- He is posted on foreign maneuvers, and enlarges upon the true reasons for the famine: "A lot of bread has been lately found in the privies: the Pitts and Cobourgs and other rascals who want to enslave justice and reason, and assassinate philosophy, must be called to account for this.

Headquarters, etc."[3346] He has theories on religions and preaches civic modesty to all dissenters: "The ministers and sectaries of every form of worship are requested not to practice any further religious ceremonies outside their temples.

Every good sectarian will see the propriety of observing this order.