e
discipline of the established Regime. Cambaceres, who had succeeded to
his father as counselor at the bar of Montpellier, would have become
president (of the tribunal) in his turn; meanwhile, he would have
composed able jurisprudential treatises and invented some new pate de
becfigues; Lebrun, former collaborator with Maupeou, might have become
counselor in the court of excise at Paris, or chief-clerk in the
Treasury department; he would have kept up a philosophical salon, with
fashionable ladies and polished men of letters to praise his elegant
and faulty translations. Amongst the future marshals, some of them,
pure plebeians, Massena, Augereau, Lannes, Ney, Lefebvre, might have
succeeded through brilliant actions and have become "officers of
fortune," while others, taking in hand specially difficult services,
like commandant Fischer who undertook the destruction of Mandrin's band,
and again, like the hero Chevert, and the veteran Lueckner, might have
become lieutenant-generals. Rough as these men were, they would have
found, even in the lower ranks, if not full employment for their
superior faculties, at least sufficient food for their strong and coarse
appetites; they would have uttered just the same oaths, at just as
extravagant suppers, with mistresses of just the same caliber.[3316]
Had their temperament, character and genius been indomitable, had they
reared and pranced to escape bridle and harness and been driven like
ordinary men, they need not have broken out of the traces for all that;
there were plenty of openings and issues for them on either side of
the highway on which others were trotting along. Many families often
contained, among numerous children, some hot-headed, imaginative youth,
some independent nature rebellious in advance, in short, a refractory
spirit, unwilling or incapable of being disciplined; a regular life,
mediocrity, even the certainty of getting ahead, were distasteful to
him; he would abandon the hereditary homestead or purchased office to
the docile elder brother, son-in-law or nephew, by which the domain or
the post remained in the family; as for himself, tempted by illimitable
prospects, he would leave France and go abroad; Voltaire says[3317] that
"Frenchmen were found everywhere," in Canada, in Louisiana, as surgeons,
fencing-masters, riding-masters, officers, engineers, adventurers
especially, and even filibusters, trappers and backwoodsmen, the
supplest, most sympathetic and bo