human and picturesque in his strange, terrible, and contradictory nature—with love and laughter on the one side, and a struggle on the edge of the precipice and at the foot of the guillotine on the other—with the beautiful Madame Tallien and Josephine Beauharnais on his arm, and on the other hand, the tiger-eyes of Robespierre to face and to subdue?
II.
BARRAS AND ROBESPIERRE—A CONTRAST.
What merit these Memoirs have is not in the least due to grace of style. Barras was not a very articulate man. He was, above all things, a man of action. In the tribune he was rarely effective; his pen is clumsy, cold, uninspired. But to a certain extent that is one of the charms of these Memoirs. I find it thrilling and convincing to read an account such as he gives—dry, unpretentious, matter-of-fact—of some of the wildest and most terrible scenes of the Revolution—notably of that day of days when he and Robespierre were in the death-grip. And indeed, I find something else in the absence of all grace from these accounts. Napoleon used to say that he was always on his guard against generals who made pictures to their imaginations. He wanted the man who saw what was right in front of him without haze or illusion, or thoughts coloured by wishes. Barras made no pictures to his imagina-
