example, and Saint Just, were substituted for more moderate
politicians; but Barere was suffered to retain his seat at the Board.

The indulgence with which he was treated excited the murmurs of some
stern and ardent zealots. Marat, in the very last words that he wrote,
words not published till the dagger of Charlotte Corday had avenged
France and mankind, complained that a man who had no principles, who was
always on the side of the strongest, who had been a royalist, and who
was ready, in case of a turn of fortune, to be a royalist again, should
be entrusted with an important share in the administration. (See the
"Publiciste" of the 14th July, 1793. Marat was stabbed on the evening
of the 13th.) But the chiefs of the Mountain judged more correctly. They
knew, indeed, as well as Marat, that Barere was a man utterly without
faith or steadiness; that, if he could be said to have any political
leaning, his leaning was not towards them; that he felt for the
Girondist party that faint and wavering sort of preference of which
alone his nature was susceptible; and that, if he had been at liberty
to make his choice, he would rather have murdered Robespierre and Danton
than Vergniaud and Gensonne. But they justly appreciated that levity
which made him incapable alike of earnest love and of earnest hatred,
and that meanness which made it necessary to him to have a master. In
truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of black men with
flat noses and woolly hair was strictly true of Barere. The curse of
Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an instinct in
him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity to a party in
prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the cuckoo and the
swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are approaching.
The law which doomed him to be the humble attendant of stronger spirits
resembled the law which binds the pilot fish to the shark. "Ken ye,"
said a shrewd Scotch lord, who was asked his opinion of James the
First--"Ken ye a John Ape? If I have Jacko by the collar, I can make him
bite you; but, if you have Jacko, you can make him bite me." Just such
a creature was Barere. In the hands of the Girondists he would have been
eager to proscribe the Jacobins; he was just as ready, in the gripe of
the Jacobins, to proscribe the Girondists. On the fidelity of such a man
the heads of the Mountain could not, of course, reckon; but they
valued their co