terly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe,
that made this general so famous. The surprising successes of Bonaparte
in Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and,
according to Berthier's assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief,
during the first four months, to change five times his plans of
proceedings and undertakings.
During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made
a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to
live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of
the name of Aublin, as his mistresses. He was the friend of the father
of these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in
1793, to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both
before either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796,
reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to
a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant. He
has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well
aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the
Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would,
with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as
he did for that of Louis XVI. He has waded too far in blood and crime to
retrograde.
To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
legislator. Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of
Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National
Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a
faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre. After the evacuation of
Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the
Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were
arrested and executed. Among these were twenty-two young girls, under
twenty years of age, whose crime was the having presented nosegays to the
late King of Prussia on his entry after the surrender of Verdun. He was
afterwards a national commissary with the armies on the coast near Brest,
on the Rhine, and in Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized
himself by unheard of ferocities and sanguinary deeds. The following
anecdote, printed and published by
|