a — " p = 
HIS STRICT HONESTY. 107 
show, that Carnot even unintentionally does not reach, if 
not riches, at least the easy circumstances of those men 
who, like him, have long held brilliant employments ? 
Some facts will serve as answers. 
After the 18th Brumaire, at the moment when Carnot 
became Minister of War, the pay of the troops, and, what 
must occasion still more surprise, the pay of the clerks, 
was fifteen months in arrear. A few weeks elapsed and 
all was paid up; all, except the salary of the Minister 
himself ! 
Pins, was the name given to a sort of gratuity destined 
in appearance for the wife of any one with whom a farmer, 
a merchant, or a commissary had concluded a contract, 
whether public or private. Although pins did not appear 
in the written conditions, the contracting parties did not 
therefore regard them as less obligatory ; habit, that see- 
ond nature, had at last come to acknowledge them as 
legal ; the most sensitive consciences satisfied themselves 
‘by not fixing their amount. 
A horse-dealer, whose offer Carnot had approved, was 
going, according to custom, to bring him a considerable 
sum, under the name of pins; it was, I believe, 50,000 
franes. The Minister, at first, does not understand. At 
the Committee of Public Safety, where he had served his 
apprenticeship, the purveyors took good care not to speak 
of pins. All is explained at last, and Carnot, far from 
being angry, receives with a laugh the notes that are pre- 
sented to him; he receives them witli one hand, and gives 
them back with the other, as a first instalment of the 
price of the horses that the dealer had agreed to furnish 
for our cavalry, and demands an immediate receipt. 
In the most violent paroxysms of their fury, the fac- 
tions had the prudence not to attack Carnot as a private 
