He watches them, and, pretending to retreat, affects a renunciation, crouched in his corner,[31169] waiting until they discredit themselves, so as to spring upon them a second time.

He has not to wait long, for the exterminating machine he set up on the 22nd of Prairial, is in their hands, and it has to work as he planned it, namely, by making rapid turns and almost haphazard: the odium of a blind sweeping massacre rests with them; he not only makes no opposition to this, but, while pretending to abstain from it, he urges it on.

Secluded in the private office of his secret police, he orders arrests;[31170] 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."[31171]--"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."[31172] 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.
Such is the scenic exterior of the Revolution, a specious mask with a hideous visage beneath it, under the reign of a nominal humanitarian theory, covering over the effective dictatorship of evil and low passions.

In its true representative, as in itself, we see ferocity issuing from philanthropy, and, from the pedant (cuistre), the executioner.
***** [Footnote 3101: Harmand (de la Meuse): "Anecdotes relatives a la Revolution." "He was dressed like a tough cab-driver.