He went out without giving time for any one to answer him. Cambacérès, moderate and prudent, equally clever in giving counsel and at yielding when counsels were useless, deemed the anger of the First Consul too passionate to admit of contradiction. The Council of State, several times consulted, was brought over with repugnance to the idea of an extraordinary measure. The First Consul wished a law; it was decided to involve the great bodies of the State in the arbitrary act which he was about to commit. "The consuls do not know what may happen," said he. "So long as I am alive I am not afraid of any one daring to ask me an account of my actions; but I may be killed, and then I cannot answer for my two colleagues. You are not very firmly placed in your stirrups," he added, turning to Cambacérès, with a smile. "Better to have a law now as well as for the future." The Council of State hesitated from a repugnance to form a proscription list, assuring him that it would be rejected by the Tribunate and the Legislative Body. "You are always afraid of the Tribunate," said Bonaparte, "because it rejected one or two of your laws; but there are only a few Jacobins in the Legislative Body, ten or twelve at most. The others know well that but for me they would all have been massacred. The law will be passed." At last, Talleyrand, who had previously remained silent, said that since there was a Senate, some use should be made of it. The proscription list was sent to the Senate. It had been written by Fouché, who knew the real criminals; and the statement of reasons were drawn up by the two sections of the Council of State who were at first unanimously opposed to the measure: the Senate voted, the First Consul having signed the act. "All these men have not taken the dagger in their hands," said the preamble, "but they are all universally known to be capable of sharpening it and taking it." Two days afterwards 133 Jacobins sailed from Nantes for Guiana--formerly members of the Convention and the Commune, proved or supposed to have had a part in the massacres of September, all certainly loaded with crime, and worthy of the punishment which they underwent, strangers to the attempt to assassinate the First Consul, and condemned without regard to moral or legal justice. At the same time, and as if to clear off all old accounts with the conspirators, the four men accused in October, Aréna, formerly a representative, and recently employed by the Committee of Public Safety, and the artists Ceracchi and Topino-Lebrun, were at last tried, and condemned to perish on the scaffold. Chauveau- Lagarde defended them, as he had formerly defended Charlotte Corday and the men of Nantes denounced by Carrier. His efforts were not crowned with success; whether acknowledged or only suspected, the Jacobin conspiracy was everywhere repressed with the same rigor.