It
accompanies them through the most irritating vicissitudes, and enables
them to deceive, even without deceit: for though this suavity is
habitual, of course frequently undesigning, the stranger is nevertheless
thrown off his guard by it, and tempted to place confidence, or expect
services, which a less conciliating deportment would not have been
suggested. A Frenchman may be an unkind husband, a severe parent, or an
arrogant master, yet never contract his features, or asperate his voice,
and for this reason is, in the national sense, "un homme bien doux." His
heart may become corrupt, his principles immoral, and his disposition
ferocious--yet he shall still retain his equability of tone and
complacent phraseology, and be "un homme bien aimable."
The revolution has tended much to develope this peculiarity of the French
character, and has, by various examples in public life, confirmed the
opinions I had formed from previous observation. Fouquier Tinville, as I
have already noticed, was a man of gentle exterior.--Couthon, the
execrable associate of Robespierre, was mildness itself--Robespierre's
harangues are in a style of distinguished sensibility--and even Carrier,
the destroyer of thirty thousand Nantais, is attested by his
fellow-students to have been of an amiable disposition. I know a man of
most insinuating address, who has been the means of conducting his own
brother to the Guillotine; and another nearly as prepossessing, who,
without losing his courteous demeanor, was, during the late
revolutionary excesses, the intimate of an executioner.
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