deaux, where he remained in concealment during some years.
There seems to have been a kind of understanding between him and the
government, that, as long as he hid himself, he should not be found,
but that, if he obtruded himself on the public eye, he must take the
consequences of his rashness.

While the constitution of 1795, with its Executive Directory, its
Council of Elders, and its Council of Five Hundred, was in operation,
he continued to live under the ban of the law. It was in vain that he
solicited, even at moments when the politics of the Mountain seemed to
be again in the ascendant, a remission of the sentence pronounced by the
Convention. Even his fellow-regicides, even the authors of the slaughter
of Vendemiaire and of the arrests of Fructidor, were ashamed of him.

About eighteen months after his escape from prison, his name was again
brought before the world. In his own province he still retained some of
his early popularity. He had, indeed, never been in that province since
the downfall of the monarchy. The mountaineers of Gascony were far
removed from the seat of government, and were but imperfectly informed
of what passed there. They knew that their countryman had played an
important part, and that he had on some occasions promoted their local
interests; and they stood by him in his adversity and in his disgrace
with a constancy which presents a singular contrast to his own abject
fickleness. All France was amazed to learn that the department of the
Upper Pyrenees had chosen the proscribed tyrant a member of the Council
of Five Hundred. The council which, like our House of Commons, was the
judge of the election of its own members, refused to admit him. When his
name was read from the roll, a cry of indignation rose from the benches.
"Which of you," exclaimed one of the members, "would sit by the side of
such a monster?" "Not I, not I!" answered a crowd of voices. One deputy
declared that he would vacate his seat if the hall were polluted by the
presence of such a wretch. The election was declared null on the ground
that the person elected was a criminal skulking from justice; and many
severe reflections were thrown on the lenity which suffered him to be
still at large.

He tried to make his peace with the Directory, by writing a bulky
libel on England, entitled, the Liberty of the Seas. He seems to have
confidently expected that this work would produce a great effect. He
printed three thousand copies