In the same way as a bandit chief who neither kills nor robs with his own hands, but has murder and robbery committed in his presence, by which he substantially profits, not by proxy, but personally, through the well-directed blows ordered by him .-- To this degree, and in such proximity to physical action, omnipotence is a noxious atmosphere which no state of health can resist.
Restored to the conditions which poisoned man in barbarous times or countries, he is again attacked by moral maladies from which he was thenceforth believed to be exempt; he retrogrades even to the strange corruptions of the Orient and the Middle Ages; forgotten leprosies, apparently extinct, with exotic pestilences to which civilized lands seemed closed, reappear in his soul with their issues and tumors.
VII.

Brutal Instincts.
Eruption of brutal instincts .-- Duquesnoy at Metz .-- Dumont at Amiens .-- Drunkards .-- Cusset, Bourbotte, Moustier, Bourdon de l'Oise, Dartigoyte.
"It seems," says a witness who was long acquainted with Maignet, "that all he did for these five or six years was simply the delirious phase of an illness, after which he recovered, and lived on as if nothing had happened."[3297] And Maignet himself writes "I was not made for these tempests." That goes for everyone but especially for the coarser natures; subordination would have restrained them while dictatorial power make the instincts of the brute and the mob appear.
Contemplate Duquesnoy, a sort of mastiff, always barking and biting, when gorged he is even more furious.

Delegate to the army of the Moselle, and passing by Metz[3298] he summoned before him Altmayer, the public prosecutor, although he had sat down to dinner.

The latter waits three hours and a half in the ante-chamber, is not admitted, returns, and, at length received, is greeted with a thundering exclamation: "Who are you ?" "The public prosecutor," he replies.
"You look like a bishop--you were once a cure or monk--you can't be a revolutionary....

I have come to Metz with unlimited powers.