Memoirs of Barras, Member of the Directorate

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE I.?The Man The first volume of the Memoirs comprises the period of the life of Barras prior to the Revolution (Chapters I. to VII.) and the Revolution itself, from 1789 to the Constitution of the Year III. (1795)?i.e., to the Directorial Government (Chapters VII. to XXII.). From the very first...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE I.?The Man The first volume of the Memoirs comprises the period of the life of Barras prior to the Revolution (Chapters I. to VII.) and the Revolution itself, from 1789 to the Constitution of the Year III. (1795)?i.e., to the Directorial Government (Chapters VII. to XXII.). From the very first pages, the self-complacency and the vanity which constituted one of the dominant traits of the character of Barras are given full play in the Memoirs with a comic and delightful naivcte. If, on the other hand, he is good enough to confess to us his tastes for pleasures which have oftentimes diverted me from my duties, he eagerly redeems this avowal by revealing that he is proud, brave, and his first impulses were ever generous. Any other man might perhaps feel embarrassed about telling us of his pedigree. Bear in mind that he was truly of noble descent, and that his pedigree is a genuine one.1 But this very nobleman, who treasured among his papers a genealogical tree bearing the proud device Vivat Bar- rassia proles, antiquitate nobilis, virtute nobilior? took an active part in the decapitation of his king, and even, in the ardor of his Jacobinical zeal, asked that a fete shouldcelebrate the anniversary of the liberating day on which the head of Capet had fallen on the scaffold. How then reconcile his pride in his noble origin with these deeds which the most rabid sans-culotte would not have disowned, this studied attitude of an impenitent Revolutionary which he assumed and studiously retained to the very last day of his life, even after his equivocal intercourse with the brother of the man whose death he had voted ? Barras gets over the difficulty in truly admirable fashion. A nobleman and proud of his parchments, he is careful to inform us that the Blacas, the Ponteve...