Of all these men, Gohier struck me as the most remarkable. Contrary to the laws of perspective, there are certain persons of ordinary calibre, who having, through stress of eventful circumstance, occupied high positions, loom larger in one's view the further away they recede. Now I could not help but look upon the man who had presided over Barras, Roger-Ducos, Moulin and Sièyes as worth notice; for, for the time being, he had been first of the five kings who had governed France. But I was deceived in my estimate of his greatness: M. Gohier was a solid, worthy man who knew just so much of history as one cannot help learning, who knew nothing of politics and who possessed no depth of judgment. I cannot do better than compare him with our Boulay (de la Meurthe), whom history will enroll as having been three years Vice-President of the Republic, although he may pretend to have no idea of such a thing, even on 2 December! Gohier cordially detested Bonaparte; but his hatred was neither philosophical nor political, but wholly a personal matter. He could never forgive the future First Consul for the ridiculous part he had made him play on 18 Brumaire, by inviting him to lunch with Joséphine, and in inviting himself to dine at his house, whilst he was changing the whole Government. I need not draw the portrait of Andrieux: everybody knows that petty, old, shrivelled man, with his petty voice and his petty eyes, the author of petty fables and petty comedies and petty stories, who died at the age of eighty, leaving behind him a petty reputation after having raised petty hopes. Renaud was an old artist who had once painted a picture that was thought well of, the _Jeunesse d'Achille._ He had grown old in painting the nude. And in his old age he painted nothing but the Graces, naiads and nymphs, turning to the public their ... blue and rosy backs. Desgenettes was an old libertine of an extremely quick-witted and very cynical turn of mind, half soldier, half doctor, very fond of the real flesh-and-blood goddesses that old Renaud was so fond of copying; he would relate in season and out" the broadest and most immodest of stories, with great glee. There was much of the eighteenth century about him.