undered; 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 against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.

Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
four are slaves.

Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal. The former
is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist. A
mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
caused to be massacred or guillotined. When, as a Minister of Justice,
he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
affected and atrocious indifference that he even s