Of what species do the beings consist, who can accept such a task, and perform it day after day, with the prospect of doing it indefinitely?
Fouquier-Tinville himself succumbs.

One evening, on his way to the Committee of Public Safety, "he feels unwell" on the Pont-Neuf and exclaims: "I think I see the ghosts of the dead following us, especially those of the patriots I have had guillotined!"[3317] And at another time: "I would rather plow the ground than be public prosecutor.

If I could, I would resign."-- The government, as the system becomes aggravated, is forced to descend lower still that it may find suitable instruments; it finds them now only in the lowest depths: in Germinal, to renew the Commune, in Floreal, to renew the ministries, in Prairial, to re-compose the revolutionary Tribunal, month after month, purging and re-constituting the committees of each quarter[3318] of the city.

In vain does Robespierre, writing and re-writing his secret lists, try to find men able to maintain the system; he always falls back on the same names, those of unknown persons, illiterate, about a hundred knaves or fools with four or five second-class despots or fanatics among them, as malevolent and as narrow as himself .-- The purifying crucible has been used too often and for too long a time; it has overheated; what was sound, or nearly so, in the elements of the primitive fluid has been forcibly evaporated; the rest has fermented and become acid; nothing remains in the bottom of the vessel but the lees of stupidity and wickedness, their concentrated and corrosive dregs.
II.

Subaltern Jacobins.
Quality of subaltern leaders .-- How they rule in the section assemblies .-- How they seize and hold office.
Such are the subordinate sovereigns[3319] who in Paris, during 14 months dispose as they please, of fortunes, liberties and lives .-- And first, in the section assemblies, which still maintain a semblance of popular sovereignty, they rule despotically and uncontested .-- "A dozen or fifteen men wearing a red cap,[3320] well-informed or not, claim the exclusive right of speaking and acting, and if any other citizen with honest motives happens to propose measures which he thinks proper, and which really are so, no attention is paid to these measures, or, if it is, it is only to show the members composing the assemblage of how little account they are.