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_— 7 . : 
COUNCIL OF THE FIVE-HUNDRED. 69 
out exciting contradiction, that he was always sold, and 
always for sale—would have offered himself to me as 
the friend, as the ally, or at least as the intimate confi- 
dant, of the austere, the honest La Révelliere ; I should 
have seen that same Barras, who already, perhaps, at 
that epoch, corresponded directly with the Count de 
Provence, surrounded by a crowd of myrmidons, of 
whom none, be it said in passing, afterwards refused the 
imperial livery,—upset, by incessant accusations of roy- 
alty, the only man of our assemblies who, always constant 
in his convictions, battled foot by foot against the insati- 
able ambition of Bonaparte. 
Seeking in the sequel by facts, and only by facts, 
whether the majority of the counsellors was really 
factious; whether the counter-revolution could not be 
avoided but by a coup-d état; in a word, whether the 
18th of Fructidor was inevitable, I should have found, 
and this notwithstanding the mutual concessions which 
the authors of the proscription no doubt made, as in the 
time of Octavius, of Lepidus, of Anthony,—I should 
have found an elimination, or, if you will, a filtering of 
forty-one members only, in the Council of the Five-Hun- 
~ dred, and of eleven in the Council of the Elders. 
The thread that could safely guide the historian in 
this labyrinth of contradictory facts, I repeat it, I have 
not found. The memoirs snatched from the family of 
Barras by order of Louis XVIII.; the memoirs that 
were left by La Révelliére, and of which it is so desir- 
able that the public should be no longer deprived; the 
confessions which on the other hand, we have a right to 
expect on the part of some of the victims of the Direc- 
torial coup-d état, may, perhaps, dissipate all the clouds. 
Would to God, for the honour of the country, that in the 
