The government no longer concerned itself with chimeras, dreams of better men and methods, visions of beneficent laws dealing impartially with an improving mass of citizenship. Just as the Grand Monarch’s court had revelled in the fairyland of joy and light and plenty at Versailles while peasants in the provinces fed on grass and roots, dying like flies in noisome huts and garrets; just as the Pompadour of Louis the XV. had squandered national treasures upon diamonds, palaces, endless festivities, while the soldiers of France starved and shivered in Canada, losing an empire for want of ammunition to hold it! so, under the Directory, Barras held court in splendor, while workmen died of want in the garrets of Paris; and he feasted with his Madame Tallien or his Josephine Beauharnais, while the soldiers on the Rhine or on the Alps faced the winter in rags, and were forced to rob to keep from starvation. This wretched state of things had not reached its climax at the period I am treating, but the beginnings had been made, the germs were all present and active. In this revival of mock royalty, Barras outshone his peers. He was of most noble descent, his family “as old as the rocks of Provence”; his manners redolent of the Old Régime, and much more so his morals. His honesty, like his patriotism, delighted in large bribes; and he never by any chance told the truth if a lie would do as well. His person was tall and commanding; his voice, in a crisis, had sometimes rung out like a trumpet and rallied the wavering, for the man was brave and capable of energetic action. But he was a sensualist, base to the core, vulgar in mind and heart, true to no creed, and capable of no high, noble, strenuous rôle. Rotten himself, he believed that other men were as degraded. As to women, they never stirred a thought in him which would not, if worded in the ears of a true woman, have mantled her cheek with shame. This was the man to whom Napoleon had attached himself; this was the man in whose house Josephine was living when Napoleon met her. Barras was the strong man of the hour; Barras had places to give and favors to divide; Barras was the candle around which fluttered moths large and small; and to this light had come the adventurer from Corsica, and the adventuress from Martinique. Usually it is the candle which singes the moth; in this case it was the moths which put out the candle.