Secluded in the private office of his secret police, he orders
arrests;[170] he sends out his principal bloodhound, Herman; he first
signs and then dispatches the resolution by which it is supposed that
there are conspirators among those in confinement and which,
authorizing spies or paid informers, is to provide the guillotine with
those vast batches which purge and clean prisons out in a trice."[171]
- "I am not responsible," he states later on . . . ." My lack of
power to do any good, to arrest the evil, forced me for more than six
weeks to abandon my post on the Committee of Public Safety."[172] To
ruin his adversaries by murders committed by him, by those which he
makes them commit and which he imputes to them, to whitewash himself
and blacken them with the same stroke of the brush, what intense
delight! If the natural conscience murmurs in whispers at moments, the
acquired superposed conscience immediately imposes silence, concealing
personal hatreds under public pretexts: the guillotined, after all,
were aristocrats, and whoever comes under the guillotine is immoral.
Thus, the means are good and the end better; in employing the means,
as well as in pursuing the end, the function is sacerdotal.
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