As the troops are so are their leaders. Bulls must have drovers to
conduct them, one degree superior to the brute but only one degree,
dressed, talking and acting in accordance with his occupation, without
dislikes or scruples, naturally or willfully hardened, fertile in
jockeying and in the expedients of the slaughterhouse, themselves
belonging to the people or pretending to belong to them. Santerre is
a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, commander of the battalion of"
Enfants Trouvés," tall, stout and ostentatious, with stentorian lungs,
shaking the hand of everybody he meets in the street, and when at home
treating everybody to a drink paid for by the Duke of Orleans. Legendre
is a choleric butcher, who even in the Convention maintains his
butchering traits. There are three or four foreign adventurers,
experienced in all kinds of deadly operations, using the saber or the
bayonet without warning people to get out of the way. Rotonde, the first
one, is an Italian, a teacher of English and professional rioter, who,
convicted of murder and robbery, is to end his days in Piedmont on the
gallows. The second, Lazowski, is a Pole, a former dandy, a
conceited fop, who, with Slave facility, becomes the barest of naked
sans-culottes; former enjoying a sinecure, then suddenly turned out in
the street, and shouting in the clubs against his protectors who he
sees put down; he is elected captain of the gunners of the battalion St.
Marcel, and is to be one of the September slaughterers. His drawing-room
temperament, however, is not rigorous enough for the part he plays in
the streets, and at the end of a year he is to die, consumed by a fever
and by brandy. The third is another chief slaughterer at the September
massacres. Fournier, known as the American, a former planter, who has
brought with him from St. Domingo a contempt for human life; "with
his livid and sinister countenance, his mustache, his triple belt of
pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate."
By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named
Cuirette-Verrières, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October,
1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for
Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish
him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold
nocturnal meetings at Santerre's needed a writer and he probably met
their requirements.--This secret society can count on other faithfuls.
"Brière, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the 'Enfants Trouvés'
battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the
Bastille,"[2527] Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a
journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La
Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity,
debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendée. "There are yet more of
them," Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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