With its material mind, Jacobinism does not perceive that the Terror failed from not being capable of fulfilling the conditions of its continuance. It was unable to achieve its aim, because it was unable to cut off enough heads: it would have needed four or five hundred thousand more; now time was wanting for those long massacres; nothing remains but unfinished crimes whose fruit cannot be gathered, because the last sun of the storm did not ripen it sufficiently. [Sidenote: The French revolutionaries.] The secret of the inconsistencies of the men of the day lies in the privation of moral sense, the absence of any fixed principle and the worship of force: whoever goes to the wall is guilty and without merit, at least without that merit which assimilates with events. Behind the liberal phrases of the devotees of the Terror, you must see only what lies hidden there: the deification of success. Do not adore the Convention except in the manner in which one adores a tyrant. When the Convention is upset, go over with your baggage of liberties to the Directory, then to Bonaparte, and that without having a suspicion of your metamorphosis, without thinking that you have changed. Sworn dramatist that you are, while looking upon the Girondins as poor wretches because they have been "beaten," nevertheless draw a fantastic picture of their death: they are beautiful young men marching, crowned with flowers, to the sacrifice. The Girondins, a cowardly faction, who spoke in favour of Louis XVI. and voted for his execution, did wonderfully, it is true, on the scaffold; but who did not, in those days, run full butt at death? The women were distinguished for their heroism: the young girls of Verdun climbed the steps of the altar like Iphigenia; the artisans, about whom we are prudently silent, those plebeians of whom the Convention reaped so large a crop, braved the steel of the executioner as resolutely as our grenadiers braved the steel of the enemy. For one priest and one noble, the Convention offered up thousands of workmen taken from the lowest classes of the population[287]: this is what we always refuse to remember. Does M. Thiers set store by his principles? Not in the least: he has cried up massacre and he would preach humanity in quite as edifying a manner; he gave himself out as a bigot for liberty, and he has oppressed Lyons, shot people down in the Rue Transnonain, and upheld the September Laws against all men: if he ever reads this, he will take it for a panegyric. Since he became President of the Council and Minister for Foreign Affairs[288], M. Thiers is enraptured with the diplomatic intrigues of the Talleyrand School; he runs the risk of being taken for a buffoon-in-waiting, for lack of equilibrium, gravity and silence. One can turn up one's nose at earnestness and greatness of soul: but it does not do to say so, before one has brought the subjugated world to take its seat at the orgies of Grand-Vaux[289].