Note 169 — Chapter XXIII

I should say "resuscitated," if it were not doing these eunuchs too much honour to compare them to Robespierre, who by their side appears a hero. But how prevent one's thoughts from wandering to the pontiff declaring inopportune the Republican outburst of June-July 1791; inopportune the cries of Paris famished by engrossers; inopportune the people asking for a single article in their favour in the Constitution of 1798; inopportune the commissaries, without whom France would have been dismembered; inopportune the great movement against the Church; inopportune the Socialists and Jacques Roux, whom he did to death; inopportune the popular societies closed by him, and after the disappearance of which Paris expired; inopportune Clootz, yearning to rally round France all the revolutionary forces of the world; inopportune Hébert, who, nevertheless, had helped him to stifle the Socialists; inopportune, in fine, all that was not cut out after his own amiable pattern up to the day when he was himself declared inopportune by the great bourgeoisie, who found it as easy as opportune to swallow him at a mouthful as soon as he had purged, bled, muzzled for them the revolutionary lion.