He was known as a Robespierre man, and to a very great extent he was. He had been put under heavy obligations by the younger brother whom he liked, and he did not believe that the elder was at heart a bad man. He had seen private letters which the elder brother had written to the younger, in which letters the crimes of the more rabid and corrupt revolutionists were deplored, and the necessity for moderation and purity expressed. Among those who befouled the names of the Robespierres, either then or afterward, Napoleon is not to be found. He understood well enough that the convulsion of July 27, 1794 (Thermidor), was the work of a gang of scoundrels (Barras, Fouché, Carrier, Tallien, Billaud, Collot), who took advantage of circumstances to pull down a man who had threatened to punish them for their crimes. Napoleon believed then and afterward that Robespierre had been a scapegoat, and that he had not been responsible for the awful days of the Terror in June and July 1794. The manly constancy with which he always clung to his own estimates of men and events is shown by the way in which he spoke well of the Robespierre brothers when all others damned them, and by his granting Charlotte Robespierre a pension at a time when the act could not have been one of policy. Marvellous was the complexity of Napoleon’s character; but like a thread of gold runs through all the tangled warp and woof of his life the splendid loyalty with which he remembered those who had ever been kind to him. Not once did he ever pursue a foe and take revenge so far as I can discover; not once did he ever fail to reward a friend, so far as the record is known. Napoleon’s arrest created such indignation among the young officers of the army of Italy that a scheme for his forcible release was broached. Junot, Marmont, and other ardent friends were to take him out of prison and flee with him into Genoese territory. Napoleon would not hear of it. “Do nothing,” he wrote Junot. “You would only compromise me.” Junot the hot-headed, Junot the tender-hearted, was beside himself with grief; and he wept like a child as he told the bad news to Madame Letitia. But Napoleon himself was not idle. He knew that to be sent to Paris for trial at that time was almost like going to the scaffold, and he made his appeal directly to the Commissioners. By name he addressed Salicetti and Albitte, in words manly, bold, and passionate, protesting against the wrong done him, demanding that they investigate the case, and appealing to his past record and services for proofs of his republican loyalty. This protest had its effect. Salicetti himself examined Napoleon’s papers, and found nothing against him. The suspicious trip to Genoa was no longer suspicious, for his official instructions for that trip were found.