At first the notorious Abbé Sieyès had been chosen a member of the executive. He was both deep and dark, like Bonaparte, to whom he later rendered valuable services. His ever famous pamphlet, which in 1789 triumphantly proved that the Third Estate was neither more nor less than the French nation, had made many think him a radical. As years passed on he became the oracle of his time, and as such acquired an enormous influence even in the days of the Terror, which he was helpless to avert, and which he viewed with horror and disgust. Whatever may have been his original ideas, he appears to have been for some time after the thirteenth of Vendémiaire an Orleanist, the head of a party which desired no longer a strict hereditary and absolute monarchy, but thought that in the son of Philippe Égalité they had a useful prince to preside over a constitutional kingdom. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps for the one he gave, which was that the new constitution was not yet the right one, he flatly refused the place in the Directory which was offered to him. It was as a substitute for this dangerous visionary that Carnot was made a director. He was now in his forty-third year, and at the height of his powers. In him was embodied all that was moderate and sound, consequently all that was enduring, in the French Revolution; he was a thorough scholar, and his treatise on the metaphysics of the calculus forms an important chapter in the history of mathematical physics. As an officer in the engineers he had attained the highest distinction, while as minister of war he had shown himself an organizer and strategist of the first order. But his highest aim was to be a model French citizen. In his family relations as son, husband, and father, he was held by his neighbors to be a pattern; in his public life he strove with equal sincerity of purpose to illustrate the highest ideals of the eighteenth century. Such was the ardor of his republicanism that no man nor party in France was so repugnant but that he would use either one or both, if necessary, for his country's welfare, although he was like Chatham in his lofty scorn for parties. To him as a patriot, therefore, France, as against the outer world, was first, no matter what her government might be; but the France he yearned for was a land regenerated by the gospel of humanity, awakened to the highest activity by the equality of all before the law, refined by that self-abnegation of every man which makes all men brothers, and destroys the menace of the law.