If it cares for its own honor it will select reporters of bills that are not unworthy, and instruct them to support these with available arguments, as closely reasoned out as possible; the bill, discussed and adopted in full council, will show the measure of its capacity, the information it possesses and its common-sense.
To estimate all this, read the bills put forth in the name of the Committee; weigh the preambles, remark the tone, listen to the two reporters usually chosen, Saint-Just, who draws up the acts of proscription, special or general, and Barere, who draws up all acts indifferently, but particularly military announcements and decrees against the foreigner; never did public personages, addressing France and posterity, use such irrational arguments and state falsehoods with greater impudence.[3265] The former, stiff in his starched cravat, posing "like the Holy Ghost," more didactic and more absolute than Robespierre himself, comes and proclaims to Frenchmen from the tribune, equality, probity, frugality, Spartan habits, and a rural cot with all the voluptuousness of virtue;[3266] this suits admirably the chevalier Saint-Just, a former applicant for a place in the Count d'Artois' body-guard, a domestic thief, a purloiner of silver plate which he takes to Paris, sells and spends on prostitutes, imprisoned for six months on complaint of his own mother,[3267] and author of a lewd poem which he succeeds in rendering filthy by trying to render it fanciful .-- Now, indeed, he is grave; he no longer leers; he kills--but with what arguments, and what a style![3268] The young Laubardemont as well as the paid informers and prosecutors of imperial Rome, have less disgraced the human intellect, for these creatures of a Tiberius or a Richelieu still used plausible arguments in their reasoning, and with more or less adroitness.

With Saint-Just, there is no connection of ideas; there is no sequence or march in his rhapsody; like an instrument strained to the utmost, his mind plays only false notes in violent fits and starts; logical continuity, the art then so common of regularly developing a theme, has disappeared; he stumbles over the ground, piling up telling aphorisms and dogmatic axioms.

In dealing with facts there is nothing in his speech but a perversion of the truth; impostures abound in it of pure invention, palpable, as brazen as those of a charlatan in his booth;[3269] he does not even deign to disguise them with a shadow of probability; as to the Girondists, and as to Danton, Fabre d'Eglantine and his other adversaries, whoever they may be, old or new, any rope to hang them with suffices for him; any rough, knotted, badly-twisted cord he can lay his hands on, no matter what, provided it strangles, is good enough; there is no need of a finer one for confirmed conspirators; with the gossip of the club and an Inquisition catechism, he can frame his bill of indictment .-- Accordingly, his intellect grasps nothing and yields him nothing; he is a sententious and overexcited declaimer, an artificial spirit always on the stretch, full of affectations,[3270] his talent reducing itself down to the rare flashes of a somber imagination, a pupil of Robespierre, as Robespierre himself is a pupil of Rousseau, the exaggerated scholar of a plodding scholar, always rabidly ultra, furious through calculation, deliberately violating both language and ideas,[3271] confining himself to theatrical and funereal paradoxes, a sort of "grand vizier"[3272] with the airs of an exalted moralist and the bearing of the sentimental shepherd.[3273] Were one of a mocking humor one might shrug one's shoulders; but, in the present state of the Convention, there is no room for anything but fear.

Launched in imperious tones, his phrases fall upon their ears in monotonous strokes, on bowed heads, and, after five or six blows from this leaden hammer, the stoutest are stretched out stupefied on the ground; discussion is out of the question; when Saint-Just, in the name of the Convention, affirms anything, it must be believed; his dissertation is a peremptory injunction and not an effort of reason; it commands obedience; it is not open to examination; it is not a report which he draws from his coat pocket, but a bludgeon.
The other reporter, Barere, is of quite another stamp, a "patent-right" haranguer, an amusing Gascon, alert, "free and easy," fond of a joke, even on the Committee of Public Safety,[3274] unconcerned in the midst of assassinations, and, to the very last, speaking of the reign of Terror as "the simplest and most innocent thing in the world."[3275] No man was ever less trammeled by a conscience; in truth, he has several, that of two days ago, that of the previous day, that of the present day, that of the morrow, of the following day, and still others, as many as you like, all equally pliant and supple, at the service of the strongest against the weakest, ready to swing round at once on the wind changing, but all joined together and working to one common end through physical instinct, the only one that lasts in the immoral, adroit and volatile being who circulates nimbly about, with no other aim than self-preservation, and to amuse himself.[3276]--In his dressing-gown, early in the morning, he receives a crowd of solicitors, and, with the ways of a "dandified minister," graciously accepts the petitions handed to him; first, those of ladies, "distributing gallantries among the prettiest;" he makes promises, and smiles, and then, returning to his cabinet, throws the papers in the fire: "There," he says, my correspondence is done."-- He sups twice every decade in his fine house at Clichy, along with three more than accommodating pretty women; he is gay, awarding flatteries and attentions quite becoming to an amiable protector: he enters into their professional rivalries, their spites against the reigning beauty, their jealousy of another who wears a blonde wig and pretends "to set the fashion." He sends immediately for the National Agent and gravely informs him that this head-dress, borrowed from the guillotined, is a rallying point for anti-revolutionaries, whereupon, the next day, wigs are denounced at the Commune-council, and suppressed; "Barere roared with laughter on alluding to this piece of fun." The humor of an undertaker and the dexterity of a commercial drummer: he plays with Terror .-- In like manner he plays with his reports, and at this latter exercise, he improvises; he is never embarrassed; it is simply necessary to turn the faucet and the water runs.

"Had he any subject to treat, he would fasten himself on Robespierre, Herault, Saint-Just, or somebody else, and draw them out; he would then rush off to the tribune and spin out their ideas; "they were all astonished at hearing their thoughts expressed as fully as if reflected in a mirror." No individual on the Committee, or in the Convention, equaled him in promptness and fluency, for the reason that he was not obliged to think before he spoke: with him, the faculty of speaking, like an independent organ, acted by itself, the empty brain or indifferent heart contributing nothing to his loquacity.