is pernicious design was the influence of Paris. To
strengthen the influence of Paris ought therefore to be the chief object
of every patriot.

The accusation brought against the leaders of the Girondist party was a
mere calumny. They were undoubtedly desirous to prevent the capital from
domineering over the republic, and would gladly have seen the Convention
removed for a time to some provincial town, or placed under the
protection of a trusty guard, which might have overawed the Parisian
mob; but there is not the slightest reason to suspect them of any
design against the unity of the state. Barere, however, really was a
federalist, and, we are inclined to believe, the only federalist in the
Convention. As far as a man so unstable and servile can be said to have
felt any preference for any form of government, he felt a preference for
federal government. He was born under the Pyrenees; he was a Gascon of
the Gascons, one of a people strongly distinguished by intellectual and
moral character, by manners, by modes of speech, by accent, and by
physiognomy from the French of the Seine and of the Loire; and he had
many of the peculiarities of the race to which he belonged. When he
first left his own province he had attained his thirty-fourth year, and
had acquired a high local reputation for eloquence and literature. He
had then visited Paris for the first time. He had found himself in a new
world. His feelings were those of a banished man. It is clear also that
he had been by no means without his share of the small disappointments
and humiliations so often experienced by men of letters who, elated by
provincial applause, venture to display their powers before the
fastidious critics of a capital. On the other hand, whenever he
revisited the mountains among which he had been born, he found himself
an object of general admiration. His dislike of Paris and his partiality
to his native district were therefore as strong and durable as any
sentiments of a mind like his could be. He long continued to maintain
that the ascendency of one great city was the bane of France; that the
superiority of taste and intelligence which it was the fashion to
ascribe to the inhabitants of that city were wholly imaginary; and that
the nation would never enjoy a really good government till the Alsatian
people, the Breton people, the people of Bearn, the people of Provence,
should have each an independent existence, and laws suited to its own
tastes