e inhabitants, he inflicted new ones.
When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he
pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in
his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take
it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First! He pronounced
the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat. "The soul,"
said he, "was moved and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the
Supreme Being with philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;" and he
signed the removal of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to
humanity! In September, 1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to
transportation by the Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made
him first a tribune and afterwards a Senator.

Boissy d' Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself,
he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and
friends.

Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the
same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a
motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France. He
seconded another motion of Bonaparte's prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a
corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
Princes. At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on
having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and
boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary
justice, those who had escaped the laws. After meeting with well-merited
contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a
handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of
Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of
his Senate. Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense
when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
him by Nature. Without education, as well as without parts, he for a
long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent. His ideas of liberty
are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
arrest agains