" -- "What guarantee do you then require?" -- "Only one.
After that, we'll do all you want - we'll let you relax the springs -
give us this guarantee and we'll follow you blindly! -- "Well, what do
you mean by that?" -
"Enter the tribune and declare that if you had been a member of the
Convention, you would have voted the death of Louis XVI. as we did!"
-
"You demand an impossibility. You would not do this in our place.
You sacrifice France to vain terrors." -
"No, the risk is not equal; our heads are at stake!"
Their heads, perhaps, - but certainly their power, places, fortunes,
comforts and pleasures, all that in their eyes makes it worth while to
live. - Every morning, seventy Paris newspapers and as many local
gazettes in the large towns of the provinces expose, with supporting
documents, details and figures, not merely their former crimes, but,
again, their actual corruption, their sudden opulence founded on
prevarication and rapine, their bribes and peculations -
* one, rewarded with a sumptuously furnished mansion by a company of
grateful contractors;
* another, son of a bailiwick attorney and a would-be Carthusian, now
possessor of ecclesiastical property, restored by him at a great
outlay for hunting-grounds; another also monopolizes the finest land
in Seine-et-Oise;
* another, the improvised owner of four chateaux;
* another, who has feathered his nest with fifteen or eighteen
millions,[62]
With their loose or arbitrary ways of doing things, their habits as
hoarders or spendthrifts, their display and effrontery, their
dissipations, their courtiers and their prostitutes.
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