of the Paris sections. "Never! Those men who, by their own confession,
have for three years in all these horrors been the cowardly tools of a
sentiment they could not restrain, but are now self-styled and
reformed moderates! Impossible!" Whether bribed by foreign gold, and
working under the influence of royalists, or by reason of the famine,
or through the determination of the well-to-do to have a radical
change, or from all these influences combined, the sections were
gradually organizing for resistance, and it was soon clear that the
National Guard was in sympathy with them. The Convention was equally
alert, and began to arm for the conflict. They already had several
hundred artillerymen and five thousand regulars who were imbued with
the national rather that the local spirit; they now began to enlist a
special guard of fifteen hundred from the desperate men who had been
the trusty followers of Hebert and Robespierre. The fighting spirit of
the Convention was unquenchable. Having lodged the "two thirds" in the
coming government, they virtually declared war on all enemies internal
and external. By their decree of October twenty-fourth, 1792, they had
announced that the natural limits of France were their goal. Having
virtually obtained them, they were now determined to defend them. This
was the legacy of the Convention to the Directory, a legacy which
indefinitely prolonged the Revolution and nullified the new polity
from the outset.

For a month or more Buonaparte was a mere onlooker, or at most an
interested examiner of events, weighing and speculating in obscurity
much as he had done three years before. The war department listened to
and granted his earnest request that he might remain in Paris until
there should be completed a general reassignment of officers, which
had been determined upon, and, as his good fortune would have it, was
already in progress. As the first weeks passed, news arrived from the
south of a reaction in favor of the Jacobins. It became clearer every
day that the Convention had moral support beyond the ramparts of
Paris, and within the city it was possible to maintain something in
the nature of a Jacobin salon. Many of that faith who were disaffected
with the new conditions in Paris--the Corsicans in particular--were
welcomed at the home of Mme. Permon by herself and her beautiful
daughter, afterward Mme. Junot and Duchess of Abrantes. Salicetti had
chosen the other child, a son now grown, a