The rest, collected from amongst the mass of unknown demagogues, are six art-apprentices or bad painters, six business-agents or ex-lawyers, seven second or third-rate merchants, one teacher, one surgeon, one unfrocked married priest, all of whom, under the political direction of Mayor Fleuriot-Lescot and Payen, the national agent, bring to the general council no administrative ability, but the faculty for verbal argumentation, along with the requisite amount of talk and scribbling indispensable to a deliberative assembly.

And it is curious to see them in session.

Toward the end of September, 1793,[3348] one of the veterans of liberal philosophy and political economy, belonging to the French Academy and ruined by the Revolution, the old Abbe Morellet, needs a certificate of civism, to enable him to obtain payment of the small pension of one thousand francs, which the Constituent Assembly had voted him in recompense for his writings; the Commune, desiring information about this, selects three of its body to inquire into it.

Morellet naturally takes the preliminary steps.

He first writes "a very humble, very civic note," to the president of the General Council, Lubin Jr., formerly an art-apprentice who had abandoned art for politics, and is now living with his father a butcher, in the rue St.Honore; he calls on this authority, and passes through the stall, picking his way amongst the slaughterhouse offal; admitted after some delay, he finds his judge in bed, before whom he pleads his cause.
He then calls upon Bernard, an ex-priest, "built like an incendiary and ill-looking," and respectfully bows to the lady of the house, "a tolerably young woman, but very ugly and very dirty." Finally, he carries his ten or a dozen volumes to the most important of the three examiners, Vialard, "ex-ladies' hair-dresser;" the latter is almost a colleague, "for," says he, "I have always liked technicians, having presented to the Academy of Sciences a top which I invented myself." Nobody, however, had seen the petitioner in the streets on the 10th of August, nor on the 2nd of September, nor on the 31st of May; how can a certificate of civism be granted after such evidences of lukewarmness?
Morellet, not disheartened, awaits the all-powerful hair-dresser at the Hotel-de-Ville, and accosts him frequently as he passes along.