ll
the agents" sent into the departments and abroad; they refer to it
every minute detail; they are its scribes, merely its puppets,
so insignificant that they finally lose their title, and for the
"Commission on External Relations" a former school-master is taken, an
inept clubbist, bar-fly and the pillar of the billiard-room, scarcely
able to read the documents brought to him to sign in the cafe where he
passes his days.[11121]--Thus is the second power in the State converted
by the Committee into a squad of domestics, while the foremost one is
converted into an audience of claqueurs.

To make them do their duty, it has two hands.--One, the right, which
seizes people unawares by the collar, is the Committee of General
Security, composed of twelve extreme Montagnards, such as Panis, Vadier,
Le Bas, Geoffroy, David, Amar, La Vicomterie, Lebon and Ruhl, all
nominated, that is to say, appointed by it, being its confederates and
subalterns. They are its lieutenants of police, and once a week they
come and take part in its labors, as formerly the Sartines, and
the Lenoirs assisted the Comptroller-general. A man who this secret
committee deems a "suspect," is suddenly seized, no matter who, whether
representative, minister, or general, and finds himself the next morning
behind the bars in one of the ten new Bastilles.--There, the other
hand seizes him by the throat; this is the revolutionary tribunal, an
exceptional court like the extraordinary commissions of the ancient
regime, only far more terrible. Aided by its police gang, the
Committee of Public Safety itself selects the sixteen judges and sixty
jurymen[11122] from among the most servile, the most furious, or the
most brutal of the fanatics:[11123] Fouquier-Tinville, Hermann, Dumas,
Payan, Coffinhal, Fleuriot-Lescot, and, lower down on the scale,
apostate priests, renegade nobles, disappointed artists, infatuated
studio-apprentices, journeymen scarcely able to write their names,
shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, tailors, barbers, former lackeys,
an idiot like Ganney, a deaf man like Leroy-Dix-Aout; their names and
professions indicate all that is necessary to be told: these men are
licensed and paid murderers. The Jurymen themselves are allowed eighteen
francs a day, so that they may attend to their business more leisurely.
This business consists in condemning without proof, without any
pleadings, and scarcely any examination, in a hurry, in batches,
whoever the Commit