rere had no
scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a thousand francs a
year from the privy purse of the sovereign whom he hated and reviled.
This pension, together with some small sums occasionally doled out
to him by the department of the Interior, on the ground that he was
a distressed man of letters, and by the department of Justice, on the
ground that he had formerly held a high judicial office, saved him from
the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues
of the renowned Committee of Public Safety, and almost all his
colleagues of the Convention, he died in January 1841. He had attained
his eighty-sixth year.

We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account
of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add anything for the
purpose of assisting their judgment of his character? If we were writing
about any of his colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety, about
Carnot, about Robespierre, or Saint Just, nay, even about Couthon,
Collot, or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a full
examination of the arguments which have been employed to vindicate or
to excuse the system of Terror. We could, we think, show that France
was saved from her foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, but in
spite of it; and that the perils which were made the plea of the violent
policy of the Mountain were to a great extent created by that very
policy. We could, we think, also show that the evils produced by
the Jacobin administration did not terminate when it fell; that it
bequeathed a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that
public opinion, which had during two generations been constantly
becoming more and more favourable to civil and religious freedom,
underwent, during the days of Terror, a change of which the traces are
still to be distinctly perceived. It was natural that there should
be such a change, when men saw that those who called themselves the
champions of popular rights had compressed into the space of twelve
months more crimes than the Kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian,
and Capetian, had perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded
as a great delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of
hereditary princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to
any government but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the
imperial despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune,
its dunge