"Do you want me to be guillotined? It is not in my power to save those people."[3295] And another time: "I have my orders; I must observe them; I do not want to have my head cut off!" Under penalty of death, the representative on mission is a Terrorist, like his colleagues in the Convention and on the Committee of Public Safety, but with a much more serious disturbance of his nervous and his moral system; for he does not operate like them on paper, at a distance, against categories of abstract, anonymous and vague beings; his work is not merely an effort of the intellect, but also of the senses and the imagination. If he belongs to the region, like Lecarpentier, Barras, Lebon, Javogue, Couthon, André Dumont and many others, he is well acquainted with the families he proscribes; names to him are not merely so many letters strung together, but they recall personal souvenirs and evoke living forms. At all events, he is the spectator, artisan and beneficiary of his own dictatorship; the silver-plate and money he confiscates passes under his eye, through his hands; he sees the "suspects" he incarcerates march before him; he is in the court-room on the rendering of the sentence of death; frequently, the guillotine he has supplied with heads works under his windows; he sleeps in the mansion of an emigré he makes requisitions for the furniture, linen and wine belonging to the decapitated and the imprisoned,[3296] lies in their beds, drinks their wine and revels with plenty of company at their expense, and in their place. In the same way as a bandit chief who neither kills nor robs with his own hands, but has murder and robbery committed in his presence, by which he substantially profits, not by proxy, but personally, through the well-directed blows ordered by him.--To this degree, and in such proximity to physical action, omnipotence is a noxious atmosphere which no state of health can resist. Restored to the conditions which poisoned man in barbarous times or countries, he is again attacked by moral maladies from which he was thenceforth believed to be exempt; he retrogrades even to the strange corruptions of the Orient and the Middle Ages; forgotten leprosies, apparently extinct, with exotic pestilences to which civilized lands seemed closed, reappear in his soul with their issues and tumors. VII. Brutal Instincts. Eruption of brutal instincts.--Duquesnoy at Metz.--Dumont at Amiens.--Drunkards.--Cusset, Bourbotte, Moustier, Bourdon de l'Oise, Dartigoyte. "It seems," says a witness who was long acquainted with Maignet, "that all he did for these five or six years was simply the delirious phase of an illness, after which he recovered, and lived on as if nothing had happened."[3297] And Maignet himself writes "I was not made for these tempests." That goes for everyone but especially for the coarser natures; subordination would have restrained them while dictatorial power make the instincts of the brute and the mob appear.