the palace, as the Emperor was too
busy to read them.

Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces even the shell of the
tortoise; and the contempt of the Court was felt to the quick even by
the callous heart of Barere. He had humbled himself to the dust; and he
had humbled himself in vain. Having been eminent among the rulers of a
great and victorious state, he had stooped to serve a master in the
vilest capacities; and he had been told that, even in those capacities,
he was not worthy of the pittance which had been disdainfully flung to
him. He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the
government employed in the most infamous offices. He stood idle in the
market-place, not because he thought any office too infamous, but
because none would hire him.

Yet he had reason to think himself fortunate; for, had all that is
avowed in these Memoirs been known, he would have received very
different tokens of the Imperial displeasure. We learn from himself
that, while publishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, and while
carrying weekly budgets of calumny to the Tuileries, he was in close
connection with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, then by no means
favorably disposed towards France, employed to watch all that passed at
Paris; was permitted to read their secret dispatches; was consulted by
them as to the temper of the public mind and the character of Napoleon;
and did his best to persuade them that the government was in a tottering
condition, and that the new sovereign was not, as the world supposed, a
great statesman and soldier. Next, Barere, still the flatterer and
talebearer of the Imperial Court, connected himself in the same manner
with the Spanish envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations
which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government;
that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned on
the vices of Napoleon, on his designs against Spain, and on the best
mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness
was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps.
It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among
sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant
is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; the vilest spy
is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native land.

From 1807 to 1814 Barere lived in obscurity, railing as bitt