110 CARNOT, 



not even express regret at losing bis advantageous posi- 

 tion througli 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 Pj'renees, and form a separate 

 corps of them ; never to place a senior oflRcer over them, 

 and to remove witli 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 a 

 splendid way all that there was of anomalous, of unusual, 

 and strange in the contrivance suggested by Carnot, and 

 carried into effisct 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, sulFered in 

 seeing that the chief of the infernal column, he who 

 counted so many dashing services, that the estimable 

 author of the Gaulish Origins — must w^e 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 



