had been the joyous instruments of Robespierre's tyranny.
"When Robespierre, together with Couthon and Saint-Just, were arraigned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, merely for the purpose of having their identity established, since they were outlawed and nothing remained but to-hand them over to the executioner, Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor (performing the duties of the officer of the law nowadays called procureur-général), was in a state of agitation hardly to be imagined—he who up to that very moment had gone every day, even but yesterday, to take the orders of Robespierre and Saint-Just in regard to all the unfortunate people whom it pleased them to send to the scaffold, to see himself directly, and by a superior and inevitable will, entrusted with the duty of bringing to the same scaffold the men who had been first chosen, so to speak, as organisers of slaughter, and, to say the very least, actual dictators! Fouquier's embarrassment in so critical a conjunction may be conceived; he doubtless could say to himself with some show of reason and presentiment: 'Mutato nomine de te . . .' I could not blame him for the sort of embarrassment I noticed in his whole person at the moment of fulfilling a like duty. Fouquier-Tinville had already made an attempt to apologise for his behaviour with regard to the condemned men themselves. 'I am well aware that it is not
