[Sidenote: JOSEPH LA VALLÉE] In April 1792, he arrived in England, in the suite of the French Embassy. After the memorable 10th of August in the same year, he having returned to France, was made by the Convention _Editeur de la Gazette Nationale_. Less than two months later, on October 9, he was appointed Minister of Justice. Here was a leap! During his short ministry, he truckled to every faction, and courted the goodwill of every demagogue. He was nevertheless pronounced an imbecile, deposed, arrested for a day, and released. He next composed a book, in which he compared himself to Sully, Turgot, and our Lord Jesus Christ. He was appointed Commissary of Public Instruction, but shortly afterwards cashiered. Then sent as French Ambassador to the Court of Naples, in order to pave the way for the irruption of a Republican army. Recalled and nominated a member of the Council of the Ancients, dismissed by Bonaparte--he retired into a corner, and quitted his obscurity for a seat among the Mutes. He then became the apologist of Bonaparte, as he had before been of Robespierre and Danton--gets a pension of £3000 sterling per annum of the public spoils, and finally becomes a member of the National Institute. He, now, in a work of his lately published, calls Robespierre _un monstre, un fou, scélérat, étranger à une bonne logique, having a soul filled with suspicion, terror, vanity and vengeance_. His elocution, he pronounces to have been _senseless babbling, eternal and tiresome repetition of the same sentiments for the rights of man, the sovereignty of the people on principles of which he incessantly harangued without ever propounding a new or correct idea_. The following epistle was found among the papers of Robespierre after his execution; it was a letter, written by this very Garot to the man whom he afterwards described as given above. _October 30, 1793._ “I have read your report on foreign powers, and the extracts of your last speech, delivered to the Jacobins: as I have not at this time an opportunity of making my sentiments known to the public, I hasten to acquaint you yourself with the impressions they have made on me. “The report is a _magnificent_ piece of policy, Republican morality, style and eloquence. It is with such _profound_ and exalted sentiments of virtue, and I will add with such _language_, that the nation one represents is honoured in the eyes of all mankind. The style of the report on foreign Powers is throughout dignified, pointed and elegant, and rises to the tone of the highest order of eloquence by the grandeur of its sentiments and its ideas.