Let the patient keep quiet, there shall be no re-stitching, the wound shall not be touched.

The constitution solemnly declares that the French people shall never allow the return of the emigres,[3117] and, on this point, the hands of future legislators are already tied fast; it prohibits any exception being added to the old ones .-- But, first, by virtue of the same constitution, every Frenchman not an emigre or banished has the right to vote, to be elected, to exercise every species of public function; consequently, twelve days later,[3118] a mere order of the Council of State restores civil and political rights to former nobles and the ennobled, to the kinsmen and relations of emigres, to all who have been dubbed emigres of the interior and whom Jacobin intolerance had excluded, if not from the territory, at least from the civic body: here are 200,000 or 300,000 Frenchmen already brought back into political communion if not to the soil .-- They had succumbed to the coup-d'etat of Fructidor; naturally, the leading fugitives or those transported, suffering under the same coup-d'etat, were restored to political rights along with them and thus to the territory--Carnot, Barthelemy, Lafont-Ladebat, Simeon, Poissy d'Anglas, Mathieu Dumas, in all thirty-nine, designated by name;[3119] very soon after.

Through a simple extension of the same resolution, others of the Fructidor victims, a crowd of priests huddled together and pining away on the Ile-de-Re, the most unfortunate and most inoffensive of all.[3120]--Two months later, a law declares that the list of emigres is definitely closed;[3121] a resolution orders immediate investigation into the claims of those who are to be struck off the list; a second resolution strikes off the first founders of the new order of things, the members of the National Assembly "who voted for the establishment of equality and the abolition of nobility;" and, day after day, new erasures succeed each other, all specific and by name, under cover of toleration, pardon, and exception:[3122] on the 19th of October 1800, there are already 1200 of them.

Bonaparte, at this date, had gained the battle of Marengo; the surgical restorer feels that his hands are more free; he can operate on a larger scale and take in whole bodies collectively.

On the 20th of October 1800, a resolution strikes off entire categories from the list, all whose condemnation is too grossly unjust or malicious,[3123] at first, minors under sixteen and the wives of emigres; next, farmers, artisans, workmen, journeymen and servants with their wives and children and at last 18,000 ecclesiastics who, banished by law, left the country only in obedience to the law.