The Whites and The Blues

While Sothin, the minister of police, was drawing up his placards, and proposing to have Carnot and forty-two deputies shot while the directors were annulling the appointment of Barthélemy, the fifth director, and promising his place to Augereau if they had reason to be satisfied with him when the evening of the next day arrived two men were quietly playing backgammon in a corner of the Luxembourg.

One of these two men, the younger by two years only, had begun as an officer of engineers, and had published mathematical essays which had won him admittance into several societies of learning. He had also composed a eulogy on Vauban which had been crowned by the Academy of Dijon.