m suffices to put any intelligent individual into the path of
justice and truth. Whenever innocence can be sacrificed with impunity,
crime is not sure of succeeding. There is so great a difference between
the death of a good man and that of a wicked man, that the multitude is
incapable of estimating it."

Cannibals devouring their vanquished enemies seem to me less hideous,
less contrary to nature, than those wretches, the refuse of the
population of large towns, who, too often alas! have carried their
ferocity so far, as to disturb by their clamorous and infamous raillery
the last moments of the unhappy victims about to be struck by the sword
of the law. The more humiliating this picture of the degradation of the
human species may be, the more we should beware of overcharging the
colouring. With few exceptions, the historians of Bailly's last agony
appear to me to have forgotten this duty. Was the truth, the strict
truth, not sufficiently distressing? Was it requisite, without any sort
of proof, to impute to the mass of the people the infernal cynicism of
cannibals? Should they lightly make just sentiments of disgust and
indignation rest upon an immense class of citizens? I think not,
Gentlemen, and I will therefore avoid the cruelty and poignancy of
chaining the thoughts for a long time on such scenes; I will prove that
by rendering the drama a little less atrocious, I have only sacrificed
imaginary details, which are the envenomed fruits of the spirit of the
party.

I will not shut my ears to the questions that already hum around me.
People will say to me, What are your claims for daring to modify a page
of our revolutionary history, on which every one seemed agreed? What
right have you to weaken contemporary testimonies, you, who at the time
of Bailly's death, were scarcely born; you, who lived in an obscure
valley of the Pyrenees, two hundred and twenty leagues from the capital?

These questions do not embarrass me at all. In short, I do not ask that
the relation of what seems to me to be the expression of the truth,
should be adopted upon my word. I enumerate my proofs, I express my
doubts. Within these limits there is no one but has claims to bring
forward; the discussion is open to all the world, the public will
pronounce its definitive judgment.

As a general thesis, I will add that by concentrating our researches on
one circumscribed and special object, we have a better chance of seeing
it correctly and kn