The representatives, to procure his successor, are obliged to descend down to a depot captain, Carlin, bold enough or stupid enough to allow himself to take a commission under their lead, which was a commission for the guillotine .-- If such is their presumption in military matters, what must it be in civil affairs! On this side there is no external check, no Spanish or German army capable of at once taking them in flagrante delicto, and of profiting by their ambitious incapacity and mischievous interference.

Whatever the social instrumentality may be--judiciary, administration, credit, commerce, manufactures, agriculture--they can dislocate and destroy it with impunity .-- They never fail to do this, and, moreover, in their dispatches, they take credit to themselves for the ruin they cause.

That, indeed, is their mission; otherwise, they would be regarded as bad Jacobins; they would soon become "suspects;" they rule only on condition of being infatuated and destructive; the overthrow of common-sense is with them an act of State grace, a necessity of the office, and, on this common ground of compulsory unreason, every species of physical delirium may be set established.
With those that we can follow closely, not only is their judgment perverted, but the entire nervous apparatus is affected; a permanent over-excitement and a morbid restlessness has begun .-- Consider Joseph Lebon, son of a sergeant-at-arms, subsequently, a teacher with the Oratoriens of Beaune, next, cure of Neuville-Vitasse, repudiated as an interloper by the elite of his parishioners, not respected, without house or furniture, and almost without a flock.[32116] Two years after this, finding himself sovereign of his province, his head is spinning.

Lesser events would have made it turn; his is only a twenty-eight-year-old head, not very solid, without any inside ballast,[32117] already disturbed by vanity, ambition, rancor, and apostasy, by the sudden and complete volteface which puts him in conflict with his past educational habits and most cherished affections: it breaks down under the vastness and novelty of this greatness .-- In the costume of a representative, a Henry IV hat, tri-color plume, waving scarf, and saber dragging the ground, Lebon orders the bell to be rung and summons the villagers into the church, where, aloft in the pulpit in which he had formerly preached in a threadbare cassock, he displays his metamorphosis.
"Who would believe that I should have returned here with unlimited powers!"[32118] And that, before his counterfeit majesty, each person would be humble, bowed down and silent! To a member of the municipality of Cambray who, questioned by him, looked straight at him and answered curtly, and who, to a query twice repeated in the same terms, dared to answer twice in the same terms, he says: "Shut up! You disrespect me, you do not behave properly to the national representative." He immediately commits him to prison.[32119]--One evening, at the theater, he enters a box in which the ladies, seated in front, keep their places.

In a rage, he goes out, rushes on the stage and, brandishing his great saber, shouts and threatens the audience, taking immense strides across the boards and acting and looking so much like a wild beast that several of the ladies faint away: "Look there!" he shouts, at those muscadines who do not condescend to move for a representative of twenty-five millions of men! Everybody used to make way for a prince--they will not budge for me, a representative, who am more than a king!"[32120] The word is spoken.