Jean Bon, always visiting the coasts, goes on board a vessel of the fleet leaving Brest to save the great American convoy; Carnot, at Watignies, orders Jourdan to make a decisive move, and, shouldering his musket, marches along with the attacking column.[3236] Naturally, they have no leisure for speechmaking in the Jacobin club, or for intrigues in the Convention: Carnot lives in his own office and in the committee-room; he does not allow himself time enough to eat with his wife, dines on a crust of bread and a glass of lemonade, and works sixteen and eighteen hours a day;[3237] Lindet, more overtasked than any body else, because hunger will not wait, reads every report himself, and passes days and nights at it;"[3238] Jean Bon, in wooden shoes and woolen vest, with a bit of coarse bread and a glass of bad beer,[3239] writes and dictates until his strength fails him, and he has to lie down and sleep on a mattress on the floor .-- Naturally, again, when interfered with, and the tools in their hands are broken, they are dissatisfied; they know well the worth of a good instrument, and for the service, as they comprehend it, good tools are essential, competent, faithful employees, regular in attendance at their offices, and not at the club.

When they have a subordinate of this kind they defend him, often at the risk of their lives, even to incurring the enmity of Robespierre.

Cambon,[3240] who, on his financial committee, is also a sort of sovereign, retains at the Treasury five or six hundred employees unable to procure their certificate of civism, and whom the Jacobins incessantly denounce so as to get their places.

Carnot saves and employs eminent engineers, D'Arcon, de Montalembert, d'Obenheim, all of them nobles, and one of them an anti-Jacobin, without counting a number of accused officers whom he justifies, replaces, or maintains.[3241]--Through these courageous and humane acts, they solace themselves for their scruples, at least partially and for the time being; moreover, they are statesmen only because the occasion and superior force makes it imperative, more led by others than leading, terrorists through accident and necessity, rather than through system and instinct.

If, in concert with ten others, Prieur and Carnot order wholesale robbery and murder, if they sign orders by twenties and hundreds, amounting to assassinations, it is owing to their forming part of a body.