110 . CARNOT. 
not even express regret at losing his advantageous posi- 
tion through the breaking out of the Revolution; but when 
the enemy menaced our frontiers, it was to the frontiers 
that he was seen to march. Modesty made him decline 
all promotion ; the old captain obstinately remains a cap- 
tain. In order not to deprive the country of the eminent 
services that Monsieur Latour d’Auvergne could render 
it, Carnot authorizes the representatives of the people to 
group together all the companies of Grenadiers of the 
army of the Western Pyrenees, and form a separate 
corps of them ; never to place a senior officer over them, 
and to remove with equal care all the captains that were 
senior to Latour d'Auvergne ; by this arrangement the 
diffident officer finds himself daily in charge of an impor- 
tant command. The name of infernal column given by 
the Spaniards to this body of troops soon sanctions in 
splendid way all that there was of anomalous, of unusual, 
and strange in the contrivance suggested by Carnot, and 
carried into effect by the representatives. 
Latour d’ Auvergne, whom you now know, Gentlemen, 
as a military man, for the third time quitted his retreat 
and his beloved learned studies, and asked to serve under 
Moreau, when Carnot became Minister of War after the 
18th Brumaire. Already at that epoch the First Consul 
would not certainly have approved an arrangement simi- 
lar to the one that the Conventional representatives 
adopted in the Pyrenees. Carnot, however, suffered in 
seeing that the chief of the ifernal column, he who 
counted so many dashing services, that the estimable 
author of the Gauwlish Origins—must we add, that a 
correspondent of the Institute, should arrive on the banks 
of the Rhine as an obscure officer. The title of [First 
Grenadier of France strikes his imagination ; Latour 
