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None of the works devoted to Marc-Antoine Jullien has shed light on the shadowy figure of his brother, Saint-Cyr Nugues. To examine their parallel trajectories from the Paris of the pre-revolution to the Italy of the Sister Republics is to measure the effects of the 9th Thermidor on the shattered lives of these schoolboys who entered the service of the “Great Committee”. The family correspondence and the personal diary of Nugues do not reveal so much the way in which he lived through the Year II as the way in which he sought through a writing on the self, a mode of expression permeated by Rousseauist reverie, to relive the experience as a means of better surviving a triple death - political, moral and professional. The habit of keeping a diary of his dreams and memories allowed him separate himself from a time when it was acceptable to live without personal dependence. Thus the confrontation of these two categories of writing facilitates an understanding of the act of writing (administrative no less than intimate), which deal with the public as well as the private status of secretaries, and with that, comprehend the decline in social status brought about by the Thermidorian rupture.