“ Possessing strongly optimist views, a mild and irresolute character, and indefinite and changeable convictions, he played a somewhat undignified part in the great political events of the time, and became a pliant tool in carrying out the designs of others. ”

“ On the 2nd of October he was arrested for Girondist sympathies but soon released, and he escaped further molestation owing to the friendship of Barras and, more especially, of Robespierre, whose literary amour-propre he had been careful to flatter. On the 9th Thermidor, however, he took sides against Robespierre, and on the 12th of September 1794 he was named by the Convention as a member of the executive committee of public instruction. In 1798 he was appointed ambassador to Naples, and in the following year he became member, then president, of the Council of the Ancients. ”