l burdens; they had
acquired land; they had profited from free transit. Anxious to retain
what they had won, they elected men of {240} moderate views rather than
reactionaries. The voice of these new members could not, however,
influence the choice of the Directors, who were all taken from the
ex-conventionnels. They were Barras, Rewbell, Carnot, Larevelliere and
Letourneur. Of these Letourneur and Carnot were ready to listen to the
wishes of the electorate, and to join hands with the new party of
moderates in a constructive policy. The other three however took their
stand firmly on the maintenance of the settlement effected by the
Convention, and on deriving all the personal advantage they could from
power. Rewbell began to accumulate a vast fortune, and Barras to
squander and luxuriate.

The officials appointed by the Directors were as needy and rapacious as
their chiefs. Everything could be had for money. England and the
United States were offered treaties on the basis of first purchasing
the good will of ministers for Foreign Affairs or Directors. In the
gilded halls of the Luxembourg, Barras, surrounded by a raffish court,
dispensed the honours and the spoils of the new regime. Women in
astounding and wilfully indecent dresses gravitated about him and his
entourage, women representing all the strata heaved upwards by the
Revolution, with here {241} and there a surviving aristocrat, like the
widow of Beauharnais, needy, and turning to the new sun to relieve her
distress. Among them morality was at the lowest ebb. For the old
sacrament of marriage had been virtually demolished by law; civil
marriage and divorce had been introduced, and in the governing classes,
so much affected in family life and fortune by the reign of terror, the
step between civil marriage and what was no marriage at all soon
appeared a distinction without much difference. There seemed only one
practical rule for life, to find the means of subsistence, and to have
as good a time as possible.

The external situation which the new Government had to face required
energetic measures. There had been great hopes after the victories of
1794, that the year 1795 would see the French armies pressing into the
valley of the Danube and bringing the Austrian monarchy to terms. But
the campaign of 1795 went to pieces. The generals were nearly as venal
as the politicians, and Pichegru was successfully tampered with. He
failed to support Jourd