l surgeon, therefore, must mark the places for the stitches, not
force the junctures, but anticipate and prepare for the final healing
process, and await the gradual and slow results of vital effort and
spontaneous renewal. Above all he must not alarm the patient. The First
Consul is far from doing this; on the contrary his expressions are all
encouraging. Let the patient keep quiet, there shall be no re-stitching,
the wound shall not be touched. The constitution solemnly declares that
the French people shall never allow the return of the emigres,[3117]
and, on this point, the hands of future legislators are already tied
fast; it prohibits any exception being added to the old ones.--But,
first, by virtue of the same constitution, every Frenchman not an emigre
or banished has the right to vote, to be elected, to exercise every
species of public function; consequently, twelve days later,[3118] a
mere order of the Council of State restores civil and political rights
to former nobles and the ennobled, to the kinsmen and relations of
emigres, to all who have been dubbed emigres of the interior and whom
Jacobin intolerance had excluded, if not from the territory, at least
from the civic body: here are 200,000 or 300,000 Frenchmen already
brought back into political communion if not to the soil.--They had
succumbed to the coup-d'etat of Fructidor; naturally, the leading
fugitives or those transported, suffering under the same coup-d'etat,
were restored to political rights along with them and thus to the
territory--Carnot, Barthelemy, Lafont-Ladebat, Simeon, Poissy d'Anglas,
Mathieu Dumas, in all thirty-nine, designated by name;[3119] very soon
after. Through a simple extension of the same resolution, others of the
Fructidor victims, a crowd of priests huddled together and pining
away on the Ile-de-Re, the most unfortunate and most inoffensive of
all.[3120]--Two months later, a law declares that the list of emigres
is definitely closed;[3121] a resolution orders immediate investigation
into the claims of those who are to be struck off the list; a second
resolution strikes off the first founders of the new order of things,
the members of the National Assembly "who voted for the establishment
of equality and the abolition of nobility;" and, day after day, new
erasures succeed each other, all specific and by name, under cover of
toleration, pardon, and exception:[3122] on the 19th of October 1800,
there are already 1200 of them. Bon