of discontent, burnt the tree of liberty, and even the
representative, Dumont, has been menaced; but these are only the blows of
a coward who is alarmed at his own temerity, and dreads the chastisement
of it.*

* The whole town of Bedouin, in the south of France, was burnt
pursuant to a decree of the convention, to expiate the imprudence of
some of its inhabitants in having cut down a dead tree of liberty.
Above sixty people were guillotined as accomplices, and their bodies
thrown into pits, dug by order of the representative, Magnet, (then
on mission,) before their death. These executions were succeeded by
a conflagration of all the houses, and the imprisonment or
dispersion of their possessors. It is likewise worthy of remark,
that many of these last were obliged, by express order of Maignet,
to be spectators of the murder of their friends and relations.

This crime in the revolutionary code is of a very serious nature; and
however trifling it may appear to you, it depends only on the will of
Dumont to sacrifice many lives on the occasion. But Dumont, though
erected by circumstances into a tyrant, is not sanguinary--he is by
nature and education passionate and gross, and in other times might only
have been a good natured Polisson. Hitherto he has contented himself
with alarming, and making people tired of their lives, but I do not
believe he has been the direct or intentional cause of anyone's death.
He has so often been the hero of my adventures, that I mention him
familiarly to you, without reflecting, that though the delegate of more
than monarchical power here, he is too insignificant of himself to be
known in England. But the history of Dumont is that of two-thirds of the
Convention. He was originally clerk to an attorney at Abbeville, and
afterwards set up for himself in a neighbouring village. His youth
having been marked by some digressions from the "'haviour of reputation,"
his profession was far from affording him a subsistence; and the
revolution, which seems to have called forth all that was turbulent,
unprincipled, or necessitous in the country, naturally found a partizan
in an attorney without practice.--At the election of 1792, when the
King's fall and the domination of the Jacobins had spread so general a
terror that no man of character could be prevailed upon to be a candidate
for a public situation, Dumont availed himself of this timidity and
s