ret reports, filled with the talk of
coffee-houses, were carried by him every week to the Tuileries. His
friends assure us that he took especial pains to do all the harm in his
power to the returned emigrants. It was not his fault if Napoleon was
not apprised of every murmur and every sarcasm which old marquises who
had lost their estates, and old clergymen who had lost their benefices,
uttered against the Imperial system. M. Hippolyte Carnot, we grieve to
say, is so much blinded by party spirit that he seems to reckon this
dirty wickedness among his hero's titles to public esteem.

Barere was, at the same time, an indefatigable journalist and
pamphleteer. He set up a paper directed against England, and called the
Memorial Antibritannique. He planned a work, entitled France made Great
and Illustrious by Napoleon. When the Imperial government was
established the old regicide made himself conspicuous even among the
crowd of flatterers by the peculiar fulsomeness of his adulation. He
translated into French a contemptible volume of Italian verses, entitled
The Poetic Crown, composed on the Glorious Accession of Napoleon the
First, by the Shepherds of Arcadia. He commenced a new series of
Carmagnoles very different from those which had charmed the Mountain.
The title of Emperor of the French, he said, was mean; Napoleon ought to
be Emperor of Europe. King of Italy was too humble an appellation;
Napoleon's style ought to be King of Kings.

But Barere labored to small purpose in both his vocations. Neither as a
writer nor as a spy was he of much use. He complains bitterly that his
paper did not sell. While the Journal des Debats, then flourishing under
the able management of Geoffroy, had a circulation of at least twenty
thousand copies, the Memorial Antibritannique never, in its most
prosperous times, had more than fifteen hundred subscribers; and these
subscribers were, with scarcely an exception, persons residing far from
Paris, probably Gascons, among whom the name of Barere had not yet lost
its influence.

A writer who cannot find readers generally attributes the public neglect
to any cause rather than to the true one; and Barere was no exception to
the general rule. His old hatred to Paris revived in all its fury. That
city, he says, has no sympathy with France. No Parisian cares to
subscribe to a journal which dwells on the real wants and interests of
the country. To a Parisian nothing is so ridiculous as patriotism.