AFTER so long a suspension of our corres­pondence, after a silence like that of death, and a separation which for some time past seemed as final as if we had been divided by the limits of ‘that country from whose bourn no traveller returns,’ with what grateful pleasure did I recognize your hand-writing, with what eagerness did I break the seal of your welcome letter, and with what soothing emotions receive the tidings of your welfare, and the assurance of your affection! Your letter was a talisman that served to conjure up a thousand ima­ges of sorrows and of joys that are past, and which were obliterated by the turbulent sensations of dis­may and horror.

Perhaps it will not be uninteresting to you to re­ceive from me a sketch of the scenes which have passed in Paris since the second of June, an epocha to be for ever deplored by the friends of liberty, which seated a vulgar and sanguinary despot on the ruins of a throne, till the memorable 28th of July 1794, when Liberty, bleeding with a thousand wounds, revived once more. If the picture I send you of those extraordinary events be not well drawn, it is at least marked with the characters of truth, since I have been the witness of the scenes I de­scribe, [Page 4] and have known personally all the principal actors. Those scenes, connected in my mind with all the detail of domestic sorrow, with the feelings of private sympathy, with the tears of mourning friendship, are impressed upon my memory in cha­racters that are indelible. They rise in sad succes­sion like the shades of Banquo's line, and pass along my shuddering recollection.

After having so long suffered without daring to utter a complaint, it will relieve my oppressed spi­rits, to give you an account of our late situation; and, in so doing, I shall feel the same sort of me­lancholy pleasure as the mariner who paints the horrors of the tempest when he has reached the harbour, and sheds a tender tear over his lost com­panions who have perished in the wreck—Ah! my dear friend, that overwhelming recollection fills my heart with anguish which only they who have suffered can conceive. Those persons in whose society I most delighted, in whose cultivated minds and enlightened conversation I found the sole com­pensation for what I had lost in leaving my country and my friends—to see them torn from me for ever, to know the precise moment in which they were dragged to execution, to feel—but let me turn a while from images of horror which I have consider­ed but too deeply, and which have cast a sadness over my mind that can never, never be dispelled. Whenever they recur, a funereal veil seems to me to be spread over nature; and neither the consci­ousness of present, nor the assurance of future safety, neither the charms of society, nor all the graces, nor all the wonder of the scenes I am now con­templating, can dissipate the gloom.

Not long after the reign of Robespierre began, all passports to leave the country were refused, and the arrestation of the English residing in France was [Page 5] decreed by the national convention; but the very next day the decree was repealed on the representa­tions of some French merchants, who shewed its impolicy. We therefore concluded that we had no such measures to fear in future; and we heard from what we believed to be good anthority, that if any decree passed with respect to the English, it would be that of their being ordered to leave the republic. The political clouds in the mean time gathered thick round the hemisphere: we heard rumours of severity and terror, which seemed like those hollow noises that roll in the dark gulph of the vulcano, and portend its dangerous eruptions: but no one could calculate how far the threatened mischief would extend, and how wide a waste of ruin would desolate the land. Already considerable numbers were imprisoned as suspected—suspected! that in­definite word, which was tortured into every mean­ing of injustice and oppression, and became what the French call the mot de ralliement, the initiative term of captivity and death.

One evening when Bernardin St. Pierre, the author of the charming little novel of Paul and Vir­ginia, was drinking tea with me, and while I was listening to a description he gave me of a small house which he had lately built in the centre of a beautiful island of the river that flows by Essonne, which he was employed in decorating, and where he meant to realise some of the lovely scenes which his fine imagination has pictured in the Mauritius, I was suddenly called away from this fairy land by the appearance of a friend, who rushed into the room, and with great agitation told us, that a de­cree had just passed in the national convention, or­dering all the English in France to be put into ar­restation in the space of four-and-twenty hours, and their property to be confiscated. We passed [Page 6] the night without sleep, and the following day in anxiety and perturbation not to be described, ex­pecting every moment the commissaries of the re­volutionary committee and their guards, to put in force the mandates of the convention. As the day advanced, our terror increased: in the evening we received information that most of our English ac­quaintances were conducted to prison. At length night came; and no commissaries appearing, we began to flatter ourselves that, being a family of women, it was intended that we should be spared; for the time was only now arrived when neither sex nor age gave any claim to compassion. Over­come with fatigue and emotion, we went to bed with some faint hopes of exemption from the gene­ral calamity of our countrymen. These hopes were however but of short duration. At two in the morning we were awakened by a loud knocking at the gate of the hotel, which we well knew to be the fatal signal of our approaching captivity; and a few minutes after the bell of our apartments was rung with violence. My sister and myself hurried on our clothes and went with trembling steps to the anti-chamber, when we found two commissaries of the revolutionary committee of our section, accom­panied by a guard, two of whom were placed at the outer door with their swords drawn, while the rest entered the room. One of these constituted autho­rities held a paper in his hand, which was a copy of the decree of the convention, and which he offered to read to us; but we declined hearing it, and told him we were ready to obey the law. Seeing us pale and trembling, he and his colleague endeavour­ed to comfort us; they begged us to compose our­selves; they repeated that our arrestation was only part of a general political measure, and that inno­cence had nothing to fear.—Alas! innocence was [Page 7] no longer any plea for safety. They took a procès-verbal of our names, ages, the country where we were born, the length of time we had lived in France; and when this register was finished, we were told that we must prepare to depart. We were each of us allowed to take as much clean linen as we could tie up in a handkerchief, and which was all the property which we could now call our own; the rest, in consequence of the decree, being seized by the nation. Sometimes, under the pres­sure of a great calamity, the most acute sensations are excited by little circumstances which form a part of the whole, and serve in the retrospect of memory, like certain points in a landscape, to call up the surrounding scenery: such is the feeling with which I recall the moments when, having got out of our appartments, we stood upon the stair­case surrounded with guards, while the commissa­ries placed the seals on our doors. The contrast between the prison where we were going to be led, and that home which was now closed against us, perhaps for years, filled my heart with a pang for which language has no utterance. Some of the guards were disposed to treat us with rudeness; which the commissaries sternly repressed, and or­dering them to keep at some distance, made us lean on their arms, for they saw we stood in need of sup­port, in our way to the committee-room. We found this place crowded with commissaries and soldiers, some sleeping, some writing, and others amusing themselves with pleasantries of a revolutionary na­ture, to which we listened trembling. Every half-hour a guard entered, conducting English prisoners, among whom were no women but ourselves. Here we passed the long night; and at eight in the morning our countrymen were taken to the prison of the Madelonettes, while we were still detained [Page 8] at the committee. We discovered afterwards that this was owing to the humanity of the commis­saries who arrested us, and who sent to the municipality to know if we might not be taken to the Luxembourg, where we should find good accommodations, while at the Madelonettes' scarce­ly a bed could be procured. All that compas­sion could dictate, all the lenity which it was in the power of these commissaries to display with­out incurring ten years imprisonment, the penal­ty annexed to leaving us at liberty, we experi­enced. Humanity from members of a revolutionary committee! You will perhaps exclaim in the lan­guage of the Jews, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ It is certain, however, strange as it may seem, that our two commissaries behaved towards us as if they remembered that we were defenceless women in a land of strangers; that we were accused of no crime except that of be­ing born on the soil of England; and that, if we were punished, we had only deserved it by trusting with too easy a belief in that national faith which was now violated. By the way, when I tell you that we experienced compassion from revolutionary committees, you will not suppose I mean to assert that compassionate men formed the majority of their committees. The greater part of mankind in all ages, even when accustomed to the most elevated rank, have abused power: how then could it be hoped that unlimited power would not be abused, which was confided to men who were for the most part ignorant and unenlightened; men who, till that period, confined to their shops and their manu­al occupations, were suddenly transported into splen­did hotels, with authority to unlock cabinets blaz­ing with jewels, to seize upon heaps of uncounted gold, and with a stroke of their pens to disperse as [Page 9] many warrants for imprisonment, as caprice, envy, or mistaken zeal might prompt; who were made arbiters of the liberty, property, and even lives of their fellow-citizens: and who were incited, nay even compelled, to acts of violence under the penalty of being branded with the guilt of modera [...]tism? When such was the new-established system, when it required the most daring courage to be humane, and when to be cruel was to be safe, can you won­der, that among the revolutionary committees in general there was not ‘as much pity to be found as would fill the eye of a wren?’ After passing the whole day as we had done the night, in the committee-room, orders arrived from the munici­pality to send us to the former palace, now the pri­son of the Luxembourg, where we were attended by two guards within each coach, while two walked on each side. What strange sensations I felt as I passed through the streets of Paris, and ascended the steps of the Luxembourg, a sad spectacle to the crowd! We were conducted to the range of apart­ments above the former rooms of state, where we were received with the utmost civility by the keeper of the prison, Benoit, a name which many a wretch has blessed, for many a sorrow his compassion and gentleness have softened. His heart was indeed but ill suited to his office; and often he incurred the displeasure of those savages by whom he was employed, and who wished their victims to feel the full extent of their calamity, unmitigated by any detail of kindness, any attention to those little wants which this benevolent person was anxious to remove, or those few comforts which he had the power to bestow. The barbarians thought it not enough to load their victims with iron, unless "it entered into their souls." But Benoit was not to be intimidated into cruelty. Without deviating [Page 10] from his duty, he pursued his steady course of hu­manity; and may the grateful benedictions of the unhappy have ascended for him to heaven!

We had a good apartment allotted us, which a few weeks before had been inhabited by Valaze, one of the deputies of the convention, who was now transferred to the prison of the Conciergerie. Our apartment, with several adjoining, had soon after the event of the 31st of May been prepared for the imprisonment of the deputies of the coté droit; and for that purpose the windows which command­ed a fine view of the Luxembourg-gardens had been blocked up to the upper panes, which were barred with iron. Mattrasses were provided for us in this gloomy chamber, the door of which was locked by one of our jailors; and we had suffered too much fatigue of body, as well as disturbance of mind, not to find a refuge from sorrow in some hours of pro­found sleep.

THE next morning the sun arose with unusual brightness; and with the aid of a table on which I mounted, I saw through our grated windows the beautiful gardens of the Luxembourg. Its tall ma­jestic trees had not yet lost their foliage; and though they were fallen, like our fortunes, ‘into the sear, the yellow leaf,’ they still presented those rich gra­dations of colouring which belong to autumn. The sun gilded the Gothic spires of the surrounding con­vents, which lifted up their tall points above the venerable groves; while on the back-ground of the [Page 11] scenery arose the hills of Meudon. It seemed to me as if the declining season had shed its last inte­resting graces over the landscape to sooth my af­flicted spirit; and such was the effect it produced. It is scarcely possible to contemplate the beauties of nature without that enthusiastic pleasure which swells into devotion; and when such dispositions are excited in the mind, resignation to sufferings, which in the sacred words of scripture ‘are but for a moment,’ becomes a less difficult duty.

The Luxembourg had lately been fitted up to receive the crowd of new inhabitants, with which it was going to be peopled, and every apartment obtained a particular appellation, which was in­scribed on the outside of the door. We were lodged in the chamber of Cincinnatus: Brutus, I think, was our next-door neighbour; and Socrates had pitched his tent at the distance of a few paces. The chamber of Indivisibility was allotted to some persons accused of federalism, and Liberty was writ­ten in broad characters over the door of a prisoner who was au secret ^*. With respect to great names, it has been observed in Paris that almost all the illustrious characters of Greece and Rome have been led to the Guillotine—for instance, Brutus, who often, while we were in prison, came from the mu­nicipality with orders from Anaxagoras, was soon after doomed to an equal fate,

together with Anacharsis, Agricola, Aristides, Pho­cion, Sempronius Gracchus, Epaminondas, Cato the elder and the younger, and many other no less [Page 12] celebrated worthies, who fell in sad succession under the sword of Maximilian^*.

Our prison was filled with a multitude of persons of different conditions, characters, opinions and countries, and seemed an epitome of the whole world. The mornings were devoted to business, and passed in little occupations, of which the pri­soners sometimes complained, but for which per­haps they had rea [...]on to be thankful, since less lei­sure was left them to brood over their misfortunes. Every one had an appointed task; in each chamber the prisoners, by turns, lighted the fires, swept the rooms, arranged the beds; and those who could not afford to have dinner from a tavern, or, as the rich were yet permitted, from their own houses, prepared themselves their meals. Every chamber formed a society subject to certain regulations: a new president was chosen every day, or every week, who enforced its laws and maintained good order. In some chambers no person was allowed to sing after ten, in others, after eleven at night. This restriction would, perhaps, have been super­fluous in England in a similar situation; but it was highly necessary here, since it prevented such of the prisoners as were more light-hearted than the rest from singing all night long, to the annoyance of others of their neighbours, who might think the music which resounded through the prison during the day fully sufficient. The system of equality, whatever opposition it met with in the world, was in its full extent practised in the prison. United by the strong tie of common calamity, the prisoners considered themselves as bound to soften the gene­ral evil by mutual kind offices; [...]and strangers meeting in such circumstances soon became friends. [Page 13] The poor lived not upon the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table, but shared the comforts of the repast; and here was found a community of the small stock of goods, which belonged to the whole without the necessity of a requisition. One broom, which was the property of a countess, was used by twenty delicate hands to sweep the respec­tive apartments; and a tea-kettle with which a friend furnished my mother was literally, as Dr. Johnson observed of his own, "never allowed time to cool," but was employed from morning till night in furnishing the English with tea.

In the afternoon, the prisoners met in an anti-chamber, which commanded a view of the gardens. Here they formed themselves into groups: some conversed, others walked up and down the room; others gazed from the windows on the walks below, where, perhaps, they recognised a relation or a friend, who being denied the privilege of visiting the prison, had come to sooth them by a look or tear of sympathy. During the first days of our confinement, the prisoners were permitted to see their friends; and many a striking contrast of gai­ety and sorrow did the anti-chamber then exhibit. In one part of the room, lively young people were amusing their visitors by a thousand little pleasan­tries on their own situation; in another, a husband who was a prisoner was taking leave of his wife who had come to see him, and shedding tears over his child who was clinging to his knees, or had thrown its arms around his neck and refused to be torn from its father. As the number of prisoners increased, which they did so rapidly, that in less than a week they were augmented from an hundred to a thousand, the rules of the prison became more severe, and the administrators of the police gave strict orders, that no person whatever should be [Page 14] admitted. After this period the wives of some of the prisoners came regularly every day, bringing their children with them to the terrace of the gar­dens. You often saw the mother weeping, and the children stretching out their little hands and point­ing to their fathers, who stood with their eyes fixed on the objects of their affection: but sometimes a surly sentinel repressed these melancholy effusions of tenderness, by calling to the persons in the walk to keep off, and make no signs to the prisoners.—In the mean time, among the crowd that filled the public room were fine gentlemen and fine ladies, who had held the highest rank at court, some flirt­ing together, others making appointments for card parties or music in their own apartments in the evening, and others relating to us in pathetic lan­guage all they had suffered and all they had lost by the revolution. It was impossible not to sympathize in the distresses of some, or avoid wondering at the folly of others, in whom the strong sense of danger could not overcome the feelings of vanity; and who, although the tremendous decree had just gone forth, making "terror the order of the day," and knowing that the fatal pre-eminence of rank was the surest passport to the guillotine, could not resist using the proscribed nomenclature of "Madame la duchesse," "Monsieur le comte," &c. which seemed to issue from their lips like natural melodies to which the ear has long been accustomed, and which the voice involuntarily repeats. There were, however, among the captive nobility many persons who had too much good sense not to observe a dif­ferent conduct, who had proved themselves real friends to liberty, had made important sacrifices in its cause, and who had been led to prison by revolu­tionary committees on pretences the most trivial, and sometimes from mistakes the most ludicrous. [Page 15] Such was the fate of the former count and countess of—, who had distinguished themselves from the beginning of the revolution by the ardour of their patriotism and the largeness of their civic donations. They had hitherto lived undisturbed in their splendid hotel, and there they might probably have continued to live a little longer had not the Countess, in an evil hour, sent down to her chateau a fine marble hearth, which by some accident was broken in the way. The steward sent a letter, in which, among other things, he mentioned that the "foyer^* must be repaired at Paris." This letter was intercepted and read by the revolutionary com­mittee. They swore, they raged at the dark de­signs of aristocracy. "Here," said they, "is a daring plot indeed! a foyer of counter-revolution, and to be repaired at Paris! We must instantly seize the authors and the accomplices." In vain the Countess related the story of the hearth, and asserted that no conspiracy lurked beneath the mar­bles: both herself and her husband were conducted to the maison d'arrêt of their section, from which we saw them arrive at the Luxembourg with about sixty other persons at the hour of midnight, after having been led through the streets in procession by the light of an immense number of flambeaux, and guarded by a whole battalion. These prisoners had at least the consolation of finding themselves in the society of many of their friends and acquaint­ances, for all the polite part of the fauxbourg St. Germain might be said to be assembled at the Lux­embourg in mass. Imprisonment here was, how­ever, no longer the exclusive distinction of former nobility, but was extended to great numbers of the [Page 16] former third estate. We had priests, physicians, merchants, shop-keeper, actors and actresses, French valets and English waiting-women, all as­sembled together in the public room; but in the private apartments Benoit's benevolent heart taught him the most delicate species of politeness, by plac­ing those persons together who were most likely to find satisfaction in each other's society.

Amidst many an eloquent tale of chateaux level­led with the ground, and palaces where, to borrow an image of desolation from Ossian, "the fox might be seen looking out at the window," we sometimes heard the complaints of simple sorrow unallied to greatness; but, like the notes of the starling, "so true in time to nature were they chanted," that they seized irresistibly on the heart. Of this kind was a scene which passed sometimes between a poor English woman and her dog, which she had brought to keep her company in her captivity. She had been house-keeper in a French family, and, some months before she was imprisoned, had sent her daughter, who was her only child, to her friends in England. The poor woman often exclaimed, while her face was bathed in tears, "Oh, Charlotte, Charlotte, I shall never see you again!" Whene­ver the dog heard the name of Charlotte, he began to howl in so melancholy a note that it was impossi­ble not to sympathise in his lamention.

The most frightful circumstance which attended our arrestation were the visits of Henriot, the com­mandant of the military force of Paris. This wretch had been one of the executioners on the se­cond of September, and was appointed by the com­mune of Paris on the 31st of May to take the command of the National Guard, to point the can­non against the convention, to violate the repre­sentation of the people, and to act the prelude of [Page 17] that dark drama of which France has been the de­solated scene, and Europe the affrighted spectator. Henriot performed his part so much to the satisfac­tion of his employers, that he was continued in his command; and it was a part of his office to visit the prisons, and take care that they were properly guarded. The first time I saw him was the day after our confinement. He entered on a sudden our apartment, brandishing his sword, and accom­panied by twelve of his officers. There was some­thing in his look which did not give you simply the idea of the ferocity which is sometimes to be found among civilized Europeans: his fierceness seemed to be of that kind which belongs to a cannibal of New Zealand; and he looked not merely as if he longed to plunge his sabre in our bosoms, but to drink a libation of our blood. He poured forth a volley of oaths and imprecations, called out to know how many guillotines must be erected for the English, and did not leave our chamber till one per­son who was present had fainted with terror. In this manner he visited every apartment, spreading consternation and dismay; and these visits were re­peated three or four times in a week. Whenever the trampling of his horse's feet was heard in the court-yard, the first prisoner who distinguished the well-known sound gave the alarm, and in one mo­ment the public room was cleared; every person flying with the precipitation of fear to his own apartment. Every noise was instantly hushed; a stillness like that of death prevaded the whole dwel­ling; and we remained crouching in our cells, like the Greeks in the cave of Polyphemus, till the monster disappeared. The visits of the administra­tors of police, though not so terrific as those of Henriot, were nothing less than soothing. Bruta­lity, as well as terror, was the order of day; [Page 18] and those public functionaries, whose business it was not only to see that the police of the prison was well regulated, but also to hear if the prisoners had any subject of complaint, used to make the enquiry in a tone of such ferocity, that, whatever oppressions might hang on the heart, the lips lost the power of giving them utterance. The visits of the police generally produced some additional rigour to our confinement; and in a short time all access to us whatever was forbidden ex [...]pt by letters, which were sent open, and delivered to us after being ex­amined by the sentinels. There was sometimes room for deep meditation on the strange caprice and vicissitudes of fortune. We found the ex-minister Amelot a prisoner in the Luxembourg; he, who during his administration had distributed letters de cachet with so much liberality. Tyranny had now changed its instruments, and he was become him­self the victim of despotism with new insignia; the blue ribband had given place to the red cap, and "de par le roi" was transformed into "par mesure de sureté generale." By his order La Tude, whose history is so well known, had been confined thirty years in the Bastille. He was now enjoying the sweets of liberty; and, before the prison-doors were shut against strangers, came frequently to visit some of his friends in the very room where the mi­nister was imprisoned.

Amelot, in a comfortable apartment and sur­rounded by society, did not bear his confinement with the same firmness as La Tude had borne the solitude of his dungeon, cheered only by the plain­tive sounds of his flute of reeds. He was in a short time bereft of his reason; and, among the wanderings of his imagination, used to address let­ters to all the kings of Europe and all the emigrant princes, inviting them to sumptuous repasts, to [Page 19] which he sometimes proposed admitting the na­tional convention, to shew that he was above bear­ing malice.

Whenever any new prisoners arrived, the rest crowded around them, and hastened to calm their minds by the most soothing expressions of sympa­thy. Not such were the emotions excited by the appearance of Maillard, who was one of the mur­derers on the second of September, and who had lately been appointed to a command in the revolu­tionary army; from which, for some malversations, he was now dismissed, sent to prison, and ordered into close confinement. He had taken a very ac­tive part in the late transactions, and had a few days before his own arrest, conducted to prison two fine boys, who were the sons of the ex-mi­nister La Tour du Pin, together with their gover­nor, who was a priest. They were stepping into a carriage, which was to convey them to school, when they were seized upon by Maillard, who tak­ing the youngest, a child of eleven years of age, by the shoulder, said to him in a stern accent, "Il faut dire la verité, toute la verité, et rien que la verité^*." No sooner was Maillard brought into the anti-chamber, while his room was preparing, than the little boy recognized his acquaintance, and running up to him cried, "Bon jour, citoyen Maillard—il faut dire la verité, toute la verité, et rien que la verité."

Nothing could be more painful than the sensa­tions excited by reading the evening papers, which the prisoners were at this time permitted to receive, and which were expected with that trembling anxi­ety with which, under present evils, we long to [Page 20] look into the promises of futurity. The evening paper seemed to us the book of our destiny; but there we could trace no soothing characters of hope, or mercy. Every line was stamped with conspiracy, vengeance, desolation, and death; and the reading the events of the day left impressions on our minds which often deprived us of sleep. We sometimes quitted the crowd in the public room, and, shutting ourselves up in our own a­partment, endeavoured, amidst the evils of this world, like Sterne's monk, to look beyond it. If such meditation was calculated to wipe away our tears, it sometimes made them flow—"Let the sighing of the prisoner come before Thee: accord­ing to the greatness of Thy power, preserve Thou those that are appointed to die."

THE days of my captivity are often brought back to my remembrance, by circumstances which seem sufficiently remote from sorrows; by that con­nexion of the past with the present, which Aken­side describes so beautifully^*: and you will perhaps think that my imagination is somewhat disordered, when I tell you that the lake, from the luxuriant banks of which I send you this letter, recalls to my mind our apartment in the prison. The walls of that apartment were hung with tapestry which de­scribed a landscape of romantic beauty. On that [Page 21] landscape I often gazed till I almost persuaded my­self that the scenery was alive around me, so much did I delight in the pleasing illusion. How often, while my eyes were fixed on that canvas which led my wounded spirit from the cruelty of man to the benignity of God—how often did I wish "for the wings of a dove, that I might flee away and be at rest!" To be seated at the foot of those shel­tering hills which embosomed some mimic habita­tions, or beneath a mighty elm which rose majes­tically in the fore-ground of the piece, and spread its thick foliage over a green slope, appeared to me the summit of earthly felicity. Those hills, the torrent-stream which rolled down their steep sides, the shady elm, and all the objects on the tapestry, are indelibly impressed on my memory; and often when I am wandering through the charming scenes of Switzerland, a country which nature seems to have created more for ornament than use, where she has spread over every landscape those lavish graces which in other regions belong only to a few favoured spots, I have felt my eyes bathed in tears, while, amidst views of overwhelming great­ness, some minute object unobserved by others has led my imagination to the tapestry and the prison. A few days since I passed along the falls of the Tessino, rolling through narrow clif [...]s under rocks of the most terrific form, in a succession of tor­rents, sweeping after each other down the abrupt descent, and broken in their course by enormous fragments torn from the cliffs; sometimes raising their scattered surges into thin air, and sometimes displaying the prismatic colours on the foam. While I was standing on one of those daring bridges that are thrown across the gulph, and that tradition calls the work of supernatural agency, after the first transport of admiration, in which [Page 22] the mind loses all traces of the past, or thought of the future, had subsided, the torrent-rill which rushed down the Luxembourg tapestry presented itself to my memory, while amidst the pendent groves of pine and fir, bending along the cliffs, and above the sweeping birch which dipped its drooping branches in the surf, I discovered a tow­ering elm, the form of which resembled the friend of my captivity—But how far have I escaped from my prison!—You will forgive this digression: my mind is full of those scenes of beauty and gran­deur which have calmed my troubled spirit, and in which I have found a renovation of existence.

I have yet only given you a general outline of our prison; but there was one scene of calamity which myself and my family were alone doomed to witness, and of which our fellow captives had no share. Our apartment, with two others adjoin­ing, was separated from the public room by a little passage, and a door which the huissiers carefully locked at night. It happened that these apartments were then occupied by two persons in whose socie­ty we had passed some of the most agreeable hours of our residence in France. These persons were Sillery and La Source, two of the members of the convention, who had been long in close confine­ment, and who were now on the point of appear­ing before that sanguinary tribunal whence, after the most shocking mockery of justice, they were inhumanly dragged to the scaffold. Sillery on ac­count of his infirmities, had with much difficulty obtained permission from the police for his servant to be admitted into the prison during the day, to­gether with an old female friend, who, on the plea of his illness, had implored leave to attend him as his nurse, with that eloquence which be­longs to affliction, and which sometimes even the [Page 23] most hardened hearts are unable to resist. While men assume over our sex so many claims of supe­riority, let them at least bestow on us the palm of constancy, and allow that in the fidelity of our attachments we have the right of pre-eminence. Those prisons from which men shrunk back with terror, and where they often left their friends abandoned lest they should be involved in their fate—women, in whom the force of sensibility over­came the fears of female weakness, demanded and sometimes obtained permission to visit, in defiance of all the dangers that surrounded their gloomy walls. Sillery's friend and his servant being al­lowed to go in and out of his apartment, the door was not kept constantly locked, although he and La Source were closely confined, and not permit­ted to have any communication with the other prisoners. The second night of our abode in the Luxembourg, when the prisoners had retired to their respective chambers, and the keeper had lock­ed the outer door which enclosed our three apart­ments, La Source entered our room. Oh! how different was this interview from those meetings of social enjoyment that were embellished by [...]e charms of his conversation, always distinguished by a flow of eloquence, and animated by that enthusiastic fervour which peculiarly belonged to his character! La Source was a native of Langue­doc, und united with very superior talents, that vi­vid warmth of imagination for which the southern provinces of France have been renowned since the period when, awakened by the genial influence of those luxuriant regions, the song of the Trouba­dours burst from the gloom of Gothic barbarism. Liberty in the soul of La Source was less a prin­ciple than a passion for his bosom beat high with philanthropy; and in his former situation as a pro­testant [Page 24] minister he had felt in a peculiar manner the oppression of the ancient system. His sensibi­lity was acute, and his detestation of the crimes by which the revolution had been sullied, was in pro­portion to his devoted attachment to its cause. La Source was polite and amiable in his manners: he had a taste for music, and a powerful voice; and sung, as he conversed, with all the energy of feel­ing. After the day had passed in the fatigue of public debates, he was glad to lay aside the tumult of politics in the evening, for the conversation of some literary men whom he met occasionally at our tea-table. Ah! how little did we then foresee the horrors of that period when we should meet him in the gloom of a prison, a proscribed victim, with whom this melancholy interview was beset with danger!

We were obliged to converse in whispers, while we kept watch successively at the outer door, that if any step approached he might instantly fly to his chamber. He had much to ask, having been three months a close prisoner, and knowing little of what was passing in the world; and though he seemed to forget all the horrors of his situation in the consolation [...] derived from these moments of confidential conversation, yet he frequently lament­ed, that this last gleam of pleasure which was shed over his existence was purchased at the price of our captivity. In the solitude of his prison, no voice of friendship, no accents of pity had reached his ear; and after our arrival, he used through the lonely day to count the hours till the prison-gates were closed, till all was still within its walls, and no sound was heard without, except at intervals the hoarse cry of the sentinels, when he hastened to our apartment. The discovery of these visits would indeed have exposed us to the most fatal consequences; but our sympathy prevailed over [Page 25] our fears; nor could we, whatever might be the event, refuse our devoted friend this last melancho­ly satisfaction. La Source at his second visit was accompanied by Sillery, the husband of Madame de Sillery, whose writings are so well known in England. Sillery was about sixty years of age; had lived freely, like most men of his former rank in France; and from this dissipated life had more the appearance of age than belonged to his years. His manners retained the elegance, by which that class was distinguished which Mr. Burke has de­nominated "the Corinthian capital of polished so­ciety." Sillery had a fine taste for drawing, and during his confinement displayed the powers of his pencil by tracing beautiful landscapes. He also amused himself by reading history; and, possessing considerable talents for literature, had recorded with a rich warmth of colouring the events of the revolution, in which he had been a distinguished actor, and of which he had treasured up details precious for history. With keen regret he told me that he had committed several volumes of ma­nuscript to the flames, a sad sacrifice to the Omars of the day.

The mind of Sillery was somewhat less fortified against his approaching fate than that of La Source. The old man often turned back on the past and wept, and sometimes enquired with an anxious look, if we believed there was any chance of his deliverance. Alas! I have no words to paint the sensations of those moments!—To know that the days of our fellow-captives were numbered—that they were doomed to perish—that the bloody tri­bunal before which they were going to appear, was but the path-way to the scaffold—to have the pain­ful task of stifling our feelings, while we endea­voured to sooth the weakness of humanity by [Page 26] hopes which we knew were fallacious, was a spe­cies of misery almost insupportable. There were moments indeed, when the task became too pain­ful to be endured. There are moments when, shocked by some new incident of terror, this cruel restraint gave way to uncontrolable emotion; when the tears, the sobbings of convulsive anguish would no longer be suppressed, and our unfortu­nate friends were obliged to give instead of re­ceiving consolation.

They had in their calamity that support which is of all others the most effectual under misfortune. Religion was in La Source a habit of the mind. Impressed with the most sublime ideas of the Su­preme Being, although the ways of heaven never appeared more dark and intricate than in this tri­umph of guilt over innocence, he reposed with un­bounded confidence in that Providence in whose hand are the issues of life and death. Sillery, who had a feeling heart, found devotion the most sooth­ing refuge of affliction. He and La Source com­posed together a little hymn adapted to a sweet so­lemn air, which they called their evening service. Every night before we parted they sung this sim­ple dirge in a low tone to prevent their being heard in the other apartments, which made it seem more plaintive. Those mournful sounds, the knell of my departing friends, yet thrill upon my heart!

La Source often spoke of his wife with tender regret. He had been married only a week, when he was chosen a member of the legislative assem­bly, and was obliged to hasten to Paris, while his wife remained in Languedoc to take care of an aged mother. When the legislative assembly was dissolved, La Source was immediately elected a member of the national convention, and could find no interval in which to visit his native spot, or his wife, whom he saw no more. In his meditations on the chain of political events, he mentioned one little incident which seemed to hang on his mind with a sort of superstitious feeling. A few days after the tenth of August he dined in the fauxbourg of St. Antoine with several members of the legis­lative assembly, who were the most distinguished for their talents and patriotism. They were ex­ulting [Page 29] in the birth of the new republic, and the glorious part they were to act as its founders, when a citizen of the fauxbourg, who had been in­vited to partake of the repast, observed, that he feared a different destiny awaited them. "As you have been the founders of the republic," said he, "you will also be its victims. In a short time you will be obliged to impose restraints and duties on the people, to whom your enemies and theirs will represent you as having overthrown regal power only to establish your own. You will be ac­cused of aristrocacy; and I foresee," he added with much perturbation, "that you will all perish on the scaffold." The company smiled at his singular pre­diction: but during the ensuing winter, when the storm was gathering over the political horizon, La Source recalled the prophecy, and sometimes re­minded Vergniaud of the man of the fauxbourg St. Antoine. Vergniaud had little heeded the au­gur; but a few days previous to the 31st of May, when the convention was for the first time besieg­ed, La Source said again to Vergniaud, "Well, what think you of the prophet of the fauxbourg?" "The prophet of the fauxbourg," answered Verg­niaud, "was in the right."

The morning now arrived when La Source and Sillery, together with nineteen other members of the convention, were led before the revolutionary tribunal. When the guards who were to conduct them arrived, the other prisoners crowded to the public room to see them pass, and we shut our­selves up in our own apartment. They returned about five in the evening; soon after which their counsel arrived, and we had no opportunity of seeing them till midnight, when they related to us what had passed. The conduct of the judges and [Page 30] the aspect of the jury were calculated to banish every gleam of hope from the bosoms of the pri­soners; the former permitted with reluctance any thing to be urged in their defence, and the latter listened with impatience, casting upon their victims looks of atrocity in which they might easily read their fate: yet in spite of these unhappy omens our friends returned from the tribunal with their minds much elevated. La Source described in his eloquent language the noble enthusiasm of liberty, the ardent love of their country, the heroical con­tempt of death which animated his colleagues, whom he had not seen for some time, since they had been transferred to the Conciergerie, while himself and Sillery had obtained permission to re­main at the Luxembourg upon the certificates of their physicians, that they were too ill to be re­moved without danger. La Source declared that ancient history offered no model of public virtue beyond that which was exhibited by his friends at the tribunal, and who in their prison, blending with the fortitude of Romans the gaiety of French­men, and being confined in one apartment, passed the short interval of life which was left in con­versation, and cheerful repasts which were usu­ally concluded with patriotic songs. "You," said Vergniaud to La Source when they met at the tribunal, "you perhaps will find something to regret in the loss of life. You have a glimpse of the gardens of the Luxembourg, which may remind you that there is something beautiful in nature: but we who live in human shambles, who every day see fresh victims dragged to execution, we are become so familiarized with death, that we look on it with unconcern.

A few days before this sanguinary trial ended, the administration of the police sent orders that [Page 31] the English-women confined in the Luxembourg should be removed the next day to a convent in the fauxbourg St. Antoine. With what keen regret La Source and Sillery received this intelligence! A thousand and a thousand times they thanked us for the dangers we had risqued in receiving them, and for the sympathy which had soothed the last hours of their existence—a thousand times they declared, that if it were possible their lives might be preserved, they should consider themselves for ever bound to us by the most sacred ties of gra­titude and friendship: but they felt, alas! how small was the chance that we should meet again in this world. Sillery cut off a lock of his white hairs, which he begged I would preserve for his sake, and La Source gave me the same relic. They embraced us with much emotion. They prayed that the blessing of God might be upon us: we mingled our tears together, and parted to meet no more!—

Let me, before I conduct you to our new pri­son, give you a short account of the political events and their causes, which, after bringing those mem­bers of the convention to the scaffold who were most fitted by their talents to defend liberty, and by their moral qualities to make it beloved, ended in such a system of cruelty and crimes, that it can be only by a long perseverance in public virtue that France can make reparation to humanity, or retrieve her character among the nations.

THE republican party of the legislative assem­bly had, it is well known, very early projected many alterations in the new constitution. They had observed with great inquietude the changes which had taken place at the close of the first na­tional assembly, when its labours underwent a re­vision previously to the acceptance of the constitu­tion by the executive power, and when they found that those who had hitherto been the most strenu­ous opponents of the court suddenly became its most zealous advocates and friends.

Though this party formed the minority of the legislative assembly, its influence by means of the popular societies was very extensive. But when the struggle took place between the court and the republican party, both of which were at length agreed in the overthrow of the new constitution, with which each was for different reasons equal­ly dissatisfied, the party was joined by many who in this destruction of the regal authority had no other end in view than the establishment of their own.

The society of the Jacobins, which had been for a long time the rival and at length the conqueror of the throne, was deserted immediately after the victory by almost all those who had contributed to gain it. They imagined that every domestic ene­my was annihilated when the first decree of the convention changed the monarchy into a republic; and though symptoms of discontent discovered themselves among some who thought that the change had been too hastily decided on, and symp­toms [Page 33] of a more dangerous and fatal tendency to the welfare of the government had already appear­ed among others, yet those to whom the people had given their confidence were not sufficiently aware of the instability of popular favour, and the precarious tenure by which they held it. The commune of Paris claimed an equal right to share with the Jacobins the honours of the triumph over royalty; but dissatisfied with the little credit given to the services it had rendered during the struggle, it took advantage of the imbecility of the legisla­tive assembly then expiring, and had already erect­ed itself into a rival power before the convention had opened its first debates. The pretence of making extraordinary exertions to oppose the march of the enemy towards Paris had led the commune, amidst a multiplicity of other acts of rebellion, to arrogate the functions of the representatives of the people; and having at the fatal period of the mas­sacre of September humbled the legislative assem­bly to the dust, they thought that the same daring conduct would give them the same superiority over the national convention. But in this calculation they were deceived. Robespierre and his adhe­rents, who had hitherto directed their counsels, now aspired to higher destinies; and, though soli­citous to make the commune an auxiliary in their designs, were unwilling that it should become their rival. In the new election of representatives, all those were excluded who had been influenced by the court, or who had opposed from purer motives the republican party. Although this party gained a considerable reinforcement by the new election, yet the dread of returning royalty, with all the se­verity of the old system, had operated so power­fully on the minds of the people of the depart­ments, that many deputies were chosen whose pre­tensions [Page 34] to this trust arose more from the strength of their lungs than of their talents, and whose ha­rangues made up in noise what they wanted in ar­gument; while the still greater dread of the return of those horrors which the commune had just been exercising had so intimidated the citizens of Paris, that a part of their deputation to the convention, at the head of which was Robespierre, triumphing over the fears they had excited, took their feats rather as the conquerors than the representatives of the people. The conduct of the officers of the municipality, however, called aloud for punishment. It was impossible for the convention to suffer the crimes they had committed, and the still greater atrocities which they had meditated, to pass unno­ticed. The council-general of the commune were called to the bar, but escaped justice by dissembled professions of repentence, and the promise of deli­vering up those who had led them to the commis­sion of such enormities. Had the convention, while its rival was thus subdued, proceeded to dis­tinguish between those who had been the chiefs of the conspiracy and those who had been the dupes of their imposture, they would have done a great act of national justice, and would have crushed any far­ther attempts against the national honour. But as this humiliation of the commune was a contrivance to escape examination, of which the conspirators who directed its operations, and who had been chosen since to the convention, were afraid; the assembly, deceived by this artifice, had no sooner granted the pardon they implored, than the faction, emboldened by impunity, perceived that with au­dacity and preseverance they might yet attain the end to which they aspired. While Robespierre sat in the commune, his object was probably to [Page 35] frame a government of municipalities, of which Paris was to be the chief, and himself the dictator: but his enterprise being encompassed with difficulty, since the people had determined to have a national convention, he afterwards changed his measures, and began to meditate a plan of making the con­vention itself, of which he was now a member, serve as the instrument of his usurpation.

With this view, he and his disorganizing faction in the convention assumed the direction of the mu­nicipality; and as the society of the Jacobins was deserted by the republicans, who thought its ser­vices no longer necessary, the name and the place were seized on by the conspirators, and filled with intriguing and ambitious men, whose hopes of shar­ing in the plunder or the power induced them to become accomplices in the guilt.

While the municipality laboured to win over the sections of Paris, the Jacobins made proselytes to their system of anarchy by their affiliations and correspondence in the departments; and before the existing government was fully aware of the extent of the conspiracy, or could collect sufficient ener­gy to counteract it, the faction had gained a most alarming ascendency; and although they formed a very small minority in the convention, their influ­ence both in the executive part of the government and amongst the constituted authorities was suffici­ent to outweigh that of the representation itself. Every concession made to the conspirators served only to increase the insolence of their demands; and although the most eloquent members of the convention, Guadet, Vergniaud, Pethion, Louvet, Brissot and La Source gave incessant warnings of the progress of the anarchists towards the dissolu­tion of all order in the state, yet like Cassandra [Page 36] they were believed only when the prophecies were fulfilled^*.

However criminal this band of conspirators, who have exercised a despotism more hideous than histo­ry has ever presented, may appear, or whatever be the regrets we feel for those virtuous friends of li­berty who fell the victims of their rage, the historian, more impartial than the friend, will not fail to ani­madvert on the negligence of which in some instanc­es they were guilty, and above all in carelessly throwing aside, by the desertion of the Jacobin so­ciety, the means which they had obtained of inform­ing the public mind and directing its will.

But before we carry our censures too far, we must recollect that they had to contend against men hardened in crimes and inaccessible to shame, who found refuge from the detection of their guilt in the protection of their party, and who returned the thun­der of the patriots in the convention by their noisy vociferations at the Jacobins and the commune.

[Page 37] The first attempt made on the national represen­tation by the commune of Paris and the Jacobins, ought to have been punished as an act of rebellion against the sovereignty of the people. But an ill-judged application of the principles of individual li­berty, a too delicate regard for the rights of persons, led on the majority of the convention to the permis­sion of offences, of which they took no measures to stop the progress, till the conspiracy had acquired such strength as made every exertion against it in­effectual.

The treason of Dumourier had furnished the fac­tion with new resources for calumny against the re­publican party, with some of whom he had former­ly been connected: for, as the faction was in the constant habit of denouncing indiscriminately every agent of the republic, the completion of one pro­phecy gave an air of credit to the rest^*. Although the conspirators had acquired considerable influence from the assistance given them by the commune and the Jacobins, they perceived that the object which they had in view, would never fully be attained till they had gained so absolute a controul over the con­vention, as to make it, like the ancient parliaments, the registers of their imperial edicts. To this end all their efforts were directed: but while those men still sat within its walls whose virtue and eloquence had hitherto warded off the blow which menaced [Page 38] their country, there was little hope of success. The prize set before these traitors was too great to suf­fer them to hesitate about the means of seizing it; and having thrown aside all regard to the laws, all respect for individual or political liberty, they con­ceived the project of violating the national repre­sentation itself, and tearing from it the most elo­quent and intrepid defenders of its rights. To car­ry their plot into execution, it was necessary to co­ver it with the veil of the wish of the people, of whom a few hired desperadoes and other ignorant and seduced persons became the representatives, bearing petitions written by the conspirators themselves, praying the convention to drive from their seats a certain number whom they marked as unworthy of their confidence or that of the nation. The indig­nation of the convention being roused at these at­tempts, they instituted a commission of enquiry to search into the causes of this conspiracy. This commission, in pursuance of the powers it had re­ceived, after mature examination, arrested Hebert, one of the municipal chiefs, and gave notice to the convention that they were prepared to make their report. The conspirators seeing that their crimes were on the point of being brought to light, the discovery of which would annihilate their project, threw off the mask, and brought forward the com­mune of Paris to demand not only the dismission of the commission which the convention had created, but the arrestation of the members who composed it, together with the twenty-two deputies of the convention the most eminent for their virtue and ta­lents. The convention for several days withstood every effort that was made to shake its firmness. The president Isnard, with all the warmth of ho­nest indignation, threatened in the name of the re­public the liberticide factioners of the commune, [Page 39] that if they dared to proceed to the execution of those designs which their present measures indicated, if the national representation should be violated by any of those conspiracies of which they had been the accomplices, that Paris should be blotted out from the rest of its cities, and that the traveller should wander on the banks of the Seine enquiring where it once stood.

The chiefs of the conspiracy had proceeded too far to be stopped in their career by such considera­tions as these; but they found more intrepidity and firmness in the convention than they expected, and therefore determined to employ their last expedient. The ringing of the tocsin and the firing of alarm guns had excited the attention of the citizens of Pa­ris for two days, when on the third the beating to arms informed them that they were going to be put into insurrection. The national guard being thus put into insurrection, the cause of which was un­known, the whole body were conducted to the hall of the convention, where Henriot the commander of the military force, who had been created by the conspirators for that purpose, had ordered them to assemble. The convention was surrounded till nearly midnight by the military force, nor was any member permitted to leave the hall; but although besieged, the assembly was not yet conquered. The day passed in the most frightful tumult, and Rabaut de St. Etienne in vain stood at the tribune, holding in his hand the report of the commission of twelve upon the conspiracy of the commune, together with the proofs of its authenticity. His voice was lost in the horrible vociferations of the tribunes, and the murmurs of the faction within the hall. At length finding all his efforts ineffectual, he left the assem­bly in despair.

[Page 40] The assault of the convention on the 31st of May, though it had produced the most horrible disorder, had not forced from the assembly the decree of arres­tation. But Robespierre with his commune, his Jacobins, and his body guard of revolutionary wo­men, who were in the van of the attack, and stood in the passages of the convention armed with poni­ards, which they pointed at the bosoms of such of the deputies as attempted to leave the hall, had gone too far to recede. The first of June they employ­ed in preparations for a fresh attack; and on the se­cond again the tocsin rung, again the whole city was under arms, and the convention was again in­vested by sixty thousand men.

It does not appear that all the adherents of the conspirators, or rather the different factions in league with them, were acquainted with all the means which Robespierre, Marat, and the munici­pality, the original authors of the plot, meant to employ. La Croix, a member of the mountain, who had been repulsed in endeavouring to go out of the hall, protested with vehemence against this vio­lation of their liberties; and when Henriot, in re­ceiving orders from the president to draw off his troops, replied, that as soon as he had executed the orders of the people he would obey those of the con­vention, and threatened that if they refused to deli­ver up to justice the twenty-two deputies whom he called traitors, he would order the cannon to be sired on the hall; Danton with great indignation imprecated vengeance on the head of the ruffian, which some months after, at the period of his own fall, was in the act of accusation alleged against him as a crime. In vain did the convention, partaking Danton's indignation, hope to obtain their li­berty by decreeing that the officers of the post next the entrance of the hall should be called to the bar. [Page 41] Two of them had received no orders, and a third informed them that he was himself consigned by a few strangers who did not appear to him acquainted even with military forms. These strangers were ordered to the bar; but they refused to attend: and thus this assembly, which talked of nothing less than bringing princes and kings in chains to their feet, were made prisoners in their very sanctuary by a few hirelings, of whom no other description was given than that they were strangers and wore mustaches. This was an indignity not to be borne. The pre­sident, therefore, proposed that the assembly in a body should go out of the hall: this was decreed, and the sentinels seeing themselves likely to be over­powered gave way. The deputies paraded in the garden, expecting every moment to be massacred; but the conspirators who directed their motions led them back again to the hall, observing that the con­vention, after so striking a proof, could have no doubt of their being at liberty.

Previously to this mock parade, Barrere, who had been weighing the probabilities of success on either side, and examining which party would have the ascendency, at length invited the proscribed de­puties, for the sake of peace and for the good of the state, to submit, and devote themselves to their country. To this admonition three of them ac­ceded; but Barbaroux asserted, that he had no right to give in his dismission, nor could he obey any other mandate than that of the people, who having in­vested him with the power had alone the right to take it from him. With more vehemence Lanjui­nais exclaimed, that he would remain at his post to his latest breath, or till he was torn from it by force. His intrepidity provoked the conspirators to rage and tumult. "Citizens," said he, "we have beheld in barbarous countries the people leading hu­man [Page 42] victims to the altar, after crowning them with flowers; but we never heard, that the priests who were about to sacrifice them treated them with in­sult. I repeat, that I have no right to lay aside the august character with which the people have honour­ed me; therefore, expect from me neither self-dis­mission, nor voluntary suspension for a moment." This courageous reply to their fury appalled the ty­rants; and had Vergniaud, Rabaut, Brissot, and others whose names were in the conspirators' list, been then at their post, had they seconded their pro­scribed colleagues at this critical moment with the thunder of their eloquence, the project of the con­spirators might easily have been defeated, and they might have saved both themselves and the republic. While the conspirators were perpetrating this abo­minable deed, they were deliberating in the house of Gaudet about the means that should be taken to avoid it, and deceived by a report which a friend unhappily ill-informed conveyed to them, that the blood of their colleagues was flowing; and believ­ing it to be too late to make any further struggle, they suffered the decree of arrestation to be carried without opposition^*.

[Page 43] Had the convention, when Henriot sent them his mandate, ordered him to be instantly put to death, their orders, if they could have been promulgated out of the precincts of the hall, would undoubtedly have been obeyed; but the conspirators had taken measures to prevent any such transmission, by con­signing every officer to his post, by filling up every avenue with their agents, who had received orders to suffer no communication between the hall and the court or garden, and also by closing the gates of the latter, so that the people in general knew no­thing of what was passing.

With many others I saw parts of the execution of this conspiracy. I saw the armed force surround­ing the hall, but was ignorant, like the rest, of what was passing within. I beheld from a window that overlooked the Tuilleries the convention in full procession; but I could not account for this singular parade, nor was it till midnight that I learned the history of the day, which some of the deputies related to us; among whom was Barrere, who with eyes full of tears lamented to us the fate of his friends, and the total ruin of the republic—that [Page 44] Barrere who a few months after provoked and glo­ried in their murder!

Liberty, however, did not see her principles and rights abandoned with impunity, but has been ter­ribly avenged. From that fatal decree may be dated all the horrors which have cast their sanguinary cloud over the glories of the revolution, which have given strength to despots and arguments to slaves. The national convention has beheld its members dragged in successive multitudes to the scaffold. The Parisian guard, who submitted to become the passive instruments of this atrocious faction; the citizens of Paris, who bent their necks tamely to the yoke; the departments, who, when they afterwards accepted the constitution, had the baseness to make no conditions for their imprisoned representatives: have seen their fellow-citizens, their friends, their relations, led to death, their property violated, all social ties shaken, virtue every where depressed, vice every where trium­phant, and their country one wide scene of cala­mity, of which the long page of history presents no similar picture, even in the proscriptions of Sylla or the caprices of Caligula^*.

[Page 45] Immediately after the insurrection of the 2d of June, an insidious address was published by the committee of public safety to calm the minds, and in their language to enlighten the understanding, of the people. This address was heard with great indig [...]ation by the majority of the convention, some of whom protested with vehemence against the state of humiliation to which they were re­duced; while others, to give their dissent a more solemn form, assembled and signed individually a protest, in which they detailed the events of the 2d of June, representing in strong colours the despot­ism which had been exercised, the consequences to which it would lead, and their resolution to take no part in the deliberations of an assembly whose rights had been so shamefully violated^*. This protest was signed by seventy-three deputies a few days after the arrest of their colleagues; but it was not then published, since the report promised by the committee of public safety on those who were ar­rested had not yet been presented; and as this report never appeared, several members of the committee being in the number of the conspirators, the pro­test was found among the papers of D [...]perre [...], and caused the imprisonment of all those who had sign­ed it.

The tidings of the insurrection in Paris occa­sioned much fermentation in the departments, who were expected to have demanded of the Parisians, in a manner more serious than by address or re­monstrance, why the representatives whom they [Page 46] had committed to their respect and protection were retained as prisoners and regarded as traitors. The Parisians, who had been altogether passive during this struggle, were not much moved by these me­naces. They had beheld with indifference the pro­gress of the contest. Finding themselves delivered from the oppression of the former government; concluding that no tyrant existed except such as [...]ore the name of king; and persuaded that that system could never return, they were careless whe­ther the plain or the mountain, the côté droit or côté gauche held the reins of government. This fatal error has been the source of almost all the evils that have desolated the republic; for had the Pari­sians attended to the political duties that were re­quired of them in exchange for their enjoyment of political rights, they would never have seen their fellow-citizens dragged daily through their streets to the scaffold, at the nod of tyrants whom they ought early to have crushed.

During the progress of this conspiracy, the as­semblies of the sections where the citizens met to deliberate on public affairs, were either filled by the agents of the conspirators, or governed by the conspirators themselves; and where neither of them had weight sufficient to mislead the citizens, they took advantage of their departure to propose and carry resolutions among themselves, which they proclaimed as the voice of the section. Though these practices were denounced in the convention, and though sometimes the section of to-day came to disclaim what the same section of yesterday had said, yet the discovery of the fraud had no tendency to awaken the citizens to greater vigilance. Had they known to what end all the artifices of the con­spirators tended, they would undoubtedly have been on their guard; but as they were made to serve the [Page 47] views of the traitors in demanding the expulsion of their representatives, without believing that they had committed any crime; so they were also made the instruments of consummating the treason by assisting in the violation of the representation itself in the arbitrary arrest of the deputies, without knowing for what reason they were armed and as­sembled. A long and mournful experience has at length shewn them, that it is not sufficient to feel the love of liberty without making continual ef­forts to preserve it; that so many and various are the enemies which it has to combat before its reign can be permanently established, that as much vigi­lance is required to guard it from the inroads of the aspiring demagogue, as courage to shake off the yoke of despotism; and that when the sacred code of freedom is violated in one point it leads to the destruction of the whole. When the nobles whom the law had confounded in the class of citizens were persecuted as a cast, when men of superior abilities became proscribed for "aristocracy of talents," those who were distinguished for neither deceived themselves in believing they were safe.

Although the citizens remained unmoved at these violations, a considerable number of the depart­ments felt the indignity, and prepared to avenge the national honour. Some made eloquent remon­strances at the bar of the convention; some deli­berated on the convocation of the primary assem­blies; some proposed sending no farther contribu­tions to Paris, while others took arms to suppress the rebellion of the commune against the republic. For some time the arrival of the departmental force was expected; but the conspirators, who foresaw this formidable opposition to the accomplishment of their designs, had the prudence to provide against it by sending previously into the departments as [Page 48] many of their emissaries as they could spare with­out weakening their force at home, taken partly from among their accomplices in the convention, who carried with them the importance of represen­tatives of the people.

The conspirators had also the advantage of being invested with the authority of government, as they had seized on the machine. They had possession of the convention, who were compelled to follow the impulse already given them; they were propri­etors of the national wealth, and had the armies at their command. The departments, on the con­trary, had no central point of union except the common indignation which the conduct of the conspirators had excited. They had no treasure at their disposal but what arose from voluntary contri­butions; and while they were deliberating what steps they should pursue, the conspirators, clothed with the national power which they had usurped, reduced the departments to the same state of sub­jection as they had the convention and Paris. In the western departments, where some of the depu­ties who were accused had fled, and around whom the people had crowded partaking their indignation, the armies that had hastily assembled as suddenly disappeared; and the whole of the republic except the city of Lyons submitted to the yoke. The causes of this defection, which have hitherto been involved in obscurity, it being the interest of the conspirators to keep them concealed from the world, have lately been developed by one of the principal actors in those memorable scenes, Louvet, deputy of the department of the Loiret, who distinguished himself early in the convention by his accusation of Robespierre, who unmasked the conspiracy of the 10th of March, and who o [...] the 31st of May was honourably proscribed, but is now restored to his [Page 49] friends and his country. I shall transcribe his own words:

"Gaudet and myself reached Caen on the 26th of June. On the fifth of the same month eight departments, namely, five of the former provinces of Brittany and three of Normandy, had entered into a common league. They had just sent their commissaries to Caen, and their troops were at the point of arriving. Wimpfen the general of the whole force, had hitherto confined all his exploits to travelling about and talking, and under the most frivolous pretences delayed every kind of organisa­tion. As soon as I saw him I was convinced that he was a determined royalist, for he took no pains to conceal it. I asked Barbaroux and Buzot what they could expect from such a man, for the support of our cause. One of them answered me, that Wimpfen was a man of honour, and incapable of breaking his engagements, and the other was al­together captivated by his agreeable manners. Gaudet and Pethion, who had just arrived, did not feel my apprehensions. They were astonished at my readiness in suspecting every one that was not as much a republican as myself. From that time I saw that every thing was going the same way at Caen as it had done at Paris. Wimpfen was be­loved by the Normans; he had a considerable party among the administrators of Calvados, and had gained the confidence of the Bretons. In order to take the command from him, it was necessary to unite and make use of all our exertions; but I found myself altogether unsupported. Every thing therefore was likely to fail on the side of the repub­lic. Besides, many Normans, who shewed the most favourable dispositions towards us, because in the credit of the news-papers they believed us to be royalists, changed their conduct in the most [Page 50] pointed manner when by our conversation, and particularly by our actions, they came to know us better. My first hopes were directed therefore to­wards the south. If my wife had been at Caen, we should have gone aboard some vessel at Hon-fleur bound to Bourdeaux; and as it would have been very easy for us to have seen whether things went no better there than elsewhere, we should have taken our passage aboard the first American vessel, and have been at this time safe in Philadel­phia.

"Three weeks elapsed, while Wimpfen did no­thing but lead to Evreux the two thousand men who had come up from the different departments. In the mean time report had so swelled this little troop, that it was said at Paris to be thirty thousand strong. At this period, the patriots there had re­covered from their fears, spoke their opinions pub­licly, and were preparing to overthrow the terri­ble municipality. Many sections had already sent their commissaries to Evreux, who had carried back to Paris different publications explanatory of our true sentiments, and particularly a piece which they called, but I know not for what reason, Wimp­fen's Manifesto, and which was a declaration of the commissaries of the united departments; a de­claration which I had composed with great labour, which breathed only peace, fraternity and assistance to the Parisians, but open war and exemplary pu­nishment to some of the mountain, to the munici­pality and the cordeliers; and this just distinction had produced the best possible effect in Paris. The commissaries besides had seen and borne their testi­monies against the base calumnies which had been uttered against this departmental army, when it was accused of having worn the white cockade, and expressed its wish for royalty. Every thing in [Page 51] short was so disposed, that if, at this moment, our arms had met but with the slightest success, the revolution would have been effected in Paris, with­out the interposition of the departmental army; but it was not in this kind of success that Wimpfen was interested.

"The mountain under great apprehensions had at length raised in Paris 1800 foot soldiers, the bet­ter half of which were praying for our success, and also seven or eight hundred ruffians as cowardly as they were thievish: this collection had just entered Vernon. Then it was that Wimpfen talked of attacking this town; and here suddenly a Mr. Puy­say, of whom we had never heard, was introduced to us by the general, as an officer full of republi­canism and knowledge. He it was whom Wimp­fen ordered to attack Vernon, and certainly he very well obeyed his secret instructions.

"In order to surprise the enemy, he went out in open day with drums beating. He marched dur­ing the extreme heat, and then made his soldiers, who had no tents, and who for the greater part had never been in a camp, pass the night in the open air. He lost the whole of the following day in at­tacking a small castle, which he had the honour of taking. The enemy having by this time been well and duly informed of all his manoeuvres, he, in order to give them still greater advantage, made his troops halt at the entrance of a wood a league distant from Vernon; placed his cannon one piece behind the other along a wall; left all his little army in the greatest disorder; did not even place sentinels; and went to sleep at a cottage at half a league from the place. An hour after, a few hun­dred men suddenly made their appearance, who sur­prised our men and fired three rounds of grape shot; but the guns in all probability were charged only [Page 52] with powder, for there is no doubt that it was but a farce well arranged. However that may be, a [...]ont took place immediately among the soldiers, who did not know with what numbers they had to engage, who could scarcely find their arms, and who were looking about in vain for their com­mander. This was so expeditious a retreat, that, had it not been for the brave soldiers of the de­partment of the Isle and Vilain [...], who stood their ground for some little time, not a single field- [...] would have been saved. In short, not a man re­ceived the slightest wound: the enemy did not ad­vance thirty steps to follow up their easy victory. This adventure did not hinder Mr. Puysay, whom the administration of the department of the Eure entreated not to abandon them, from declaring that Evreux was not tenable; and in reality the next day he withdrew himself sixteen leagues, without striking a blow, and abandoned a whole depart­ment to the enemy.

"On the arrival of the courier who brought us these sad tidings, Wimpfen did not appear at all disconcerted. He moreover assured us that there was nothing unfortunate in this event: he talked of fortifying Caen, of declaring the city in a state of defence, of organizing an army somewhat stronger, and of making paper-money which should be current throughout the seven united depart­ments.

"These observations afforded room for deep re­flection. Salles and myself, after having a long time conversed on the subject, were convinced that the general, so far from wishing to march to Paris, intended to keep us shut up with him in the city, where his party was prevalent, to establish a com­munication with England, and to commit us with that power if it were possible; in fine, to make use [Page 53] of us according to circumstances, either to make his peace with the mountain if the coalition of the southern departments should be dissolved, or make his peace with the republicans if they should over­throw the mountain. Our colleagues, to whom we communicated our suspicions, thought us visi­onaries, and nothing less was necessary to convince them than what happened soon after.

"The general requested to have a conference with all of [...] were deputies, on an affair of the greatest consequence. He began by describing to us our situations as very critical, unless we took some vigorous resolution. He was going to Li­sieux to organise his army, and to form his camp in such a manner as to make at least for some time a proper defence. The future, however, required something more permanent. He returned back to his projects respecting Caen, to his proposals about the creation of paper-money, &c. &c. &c. and as he judged it necessary to support his reasoning by terror, though he ought to have known that such a mode of proceeding would have little influence on men accustomed to brave daily the fury and the murders of the mountain, an officer, who un­doubtedly had been instructed, suddenly entered, and with a frightened look informed the general that there was a riot; that the people had arrested the convoys going to the army; and that they were making violent motions against the deputies. Wimp­fen affected to be angry at the precipitation with which he told him this alarming news. It is no­thing, said he to the officer; go and talk calmly to the people, make them easy; give them a little money, if it be necessary. When this man left us, the general thought he might venture to make the great proposition. Reflect maturely on all that I have said, resumed he: in order to execute great [Page 54] projects we must employ great means. But stay, I am going to speak plainly: I see only one possible mode of providing ourselves with men, arms, am­munition, money, and help of every kind; that is, to negociate with England; and I myself have the means provided, but I must have your authority, your en­gagement.

"The reader may be assured that I have a per­fect recollection of the lines I have written in Ita­li [...]s, and I can also assure him that I have stated truly the scene of the preceding passage. It is dif­ficult to paint the effect which these words produ­ced on my too confiding friends. All of them at the same moment, struck with indignation, with­out any previous consultation rose up. The con­ference was instantly interrupted, though the gene­ral tried every means of renewing it.

"Wimpfen, somewhat disconcerted, left us without seeming to feel any resentment. He only repeated to us that he was going to Lisieux, and insinuated, that in order to restrain some malevo­lent people who were endeavouring in Caen to ren­der us unpopular, we should all do better to remain in that place. I think that every person must per­ceive the infamous snare into which this worthy al­ly of the mountain wished to draw us. Had fear or the desire of vengeance prompted us to accede to this proposition, the republic would have been lost as well as our honour. The mountain would have had victorious proofs against us. It would have been they who were republicans, we that were royalists; and all the republicans persecuted for be­ing royalists, would have been arrested, impri­soned and guillotined. Our conspiracy, they would have said, extended to the south. It would have been we, and not themselves, who delivered Tou­lon to the English. I know, indeed, that after [Page 55] their terrible triumphs they did not fail to make such assertions; but they found no honest or enlightened man who gave them credit. They were, therefore, driven to their accusation of fe­deralism; an accusation not less absurd and calum­nio [...].

"The next day Barbaroux and myself went to Lisieux. The general was somewhat surprised to see us, but he did not receive us with less courte­sy. We learned, what he himself took care not to inform us, that he had just had a secret conference with one of the agents of the chiefs of the moun­tain, who for three weeks past were throwing away handfuls of assignats at Evreux, and every where on their passage; and who, soon after, probably sure of powerful support, came with the intention of continuing the same plan of corruption at Caen, even under our eyes. We found at Lisieux many people in arms, but no soldiers, no organization, no discipline, and the rage of making motions. A secret hand in a single day disorganized even the Breton battalions which had hitherto been firmly united. The general was at pains to make us ob­serve this disorder, and to lead us to conclude from thence that he could not maintain his position there, but that he must march back with all his troops to Caen, and make this city the central point of resistance, &c. He nevertheless avoided repeating to us his English prepositions. Accord­ingly the retreat took place the following day: all my friends then acknowledged that our affairs were ruined in the western departments. In vain did the general, after having gone back to Caen, where he was always desirous of establishing himself, shew dispositions for a serious defence. In vain did he create staff officers, arrange his troops, em­ploy himself in searching for a convenient situation [Page 56] for encampment, establish batteries of eighteen-pounders; all this parade no longer imposed on our colleagues.

"It appears clear, that Wimpfen, the evening before, had given notice by one of the couriers of the committee of public safety, to the mountain; and I hope that I am understood, when I say the mountain, that is not of the whole body, nor even all its leaders, that I speak, but the princi­pal cordelier of the mountain, such as La Croix, Fabre d'Eglantine, and, who were equally de­ceiving and shifting between the republicans, Pe­thion, Guadet, &c. and the dictator Robespierre—that Wimpfen had given information of the bad success of his English overtures, and that it was useless to renew the proposition. It also appears that the mountain then determined to disperse our little band, but without neglecting to throw on our party that colouring of royalism which was so ne­cessary to effect our ruin; and it was without doubt at this period only that they determined to deliver, at least to all appearance, Toulon to the English. What I am now saying will possibly astonish every one who is not well informed as to this business; but when the proper time shall come, I will explain myself fully with respect to this terrible farce of Toulon.

"It is thought that Wimpfen had a safe-con­duct from the mountain, and a ready opportunity of going into England; but I know not what be­came of Mr. Puysay, who suffered himself to be so complaisantly beaten at Vernon. The administra­tors of Calvados had given notice to the admini­stration of their shameful defection. They had secretly made their peace with the mountain, with­out giving us any information. The third day on­ly they made it known to us; and the method [Page 57] they took was to send and post up at the gate of the intendance, where we lodged, the mountain pla­card, in which was the decree of our being out of the law."

The counterpart of the scene acted at Paris, be­tween the conspirators and the convention, was attempted at Lyons, and the same day was appoint­ed in both cities for the accomplishment of their purpose. At the head of this provincial conspiracy was a man named Chalier, a Piedmontese by birth (for most of the agents of the conspirators were foreigners) and a sharper by profession, having fled his own country on account of having committed fraudulent bankruptcies. He was sent to Lyons by the commune of Paris, after the massacre of September, and opened his mission by the murder of nine persons who had been committed to prison by the municipality of Lyons for slight offences. Agreeably to the instructions he had received, and in conformity to the general plan which the com­mune of Paris and the conspirators had formed, their apostle laboured incessantly to propagate the doctrines of robbery, rebellion and murder. See­ing that these exhortations had been attended with their due effects in Paris, "the needy villain's ge­neral home," where the promise of riches without labour had allured all the idle and profligate to the standard of the conspirators, he was disappointed that more proselytes to this seducing system had not honoured his embassy at Lyons, where society was less disunited, and where industry had established a superstitious regard to property, altogether in­compatible with Chalier's system of reform. A few, however, he found who listened to his pro­jects, and to those he communicated his plan of re­generation, which consisted in placing a guillotine the following day on one of the bridges, where all [Page 58] the capital merchants, who were necessarily aristo­crats, were to be executed, and their bodies thrown into the Rhone. Though this secret was imparted under the solemnity of an oath, yet there were some who touched with remorse gave private notice of it to the citizens, who took measures to prevent its execution.

Chalier, who ought instantly to have been put to death by the just indignation of the people, was suffered to continue his revolutionary projects, to the great annoyance of the wealthy citizens, against whom his attacks were continually directed. By perseverance he had at length formed a set out of the profligate which are to be found in all large communities, and with their aid he was encourag­ed to attempt once more the accomplishment of his designs.

He had been appointed procurer of the com­mune; and as the municipality were composed of Jacobins, and of others as weak as those were wicked, Chalier, supported by the faction of Paris, became its principal director. Knowing the pro­gress of the conspiracy in that city, he prepared his friends for the same events at Lyons, by declaring openly in the popular society on the 27th of May, that the presidents and secretaries of the sections, together with the rich egotists, should be beheaded on the following day. The municipality on the 26th, influenced by Chalier, had levied a revolu­tionary tax of six millions of livres on the rich, to be paid in twenty-four hours. This municipal le­vy excited murmurs as was expected, and gave the anarchists pretences for raising tumults. The rich were destined to be the victims, and Chalier's band prepared themselves to be the executioners. But the Lyonnais might have crushed this insurrection in its birth, had not the narrow spirit of traffic, [Page 59] which sees nothing beneficial in society except the accumulation of wealth, made them feel that their country was but a secondary object, and fitted on­ly to employ the attention of those whose time was of less mercantile profit than their own.

Apprised of the intentions of the conspirators, who had made out the list of the proscriptions, and arranged the plan of the massacre, the citizens flew to arms, and seized on the arsenal. The conspira­tors kept possession of the town-hall, and both par­ties prepared for action; for Lyons now consisted only of those who intended to murder, and those who did not like to be murdered. The combat was vigorously supported on both sides; for the conspirators were aided by a party of military whom they had previously engaged in their interests. Vic­tory remained doubtful for a long time, as the bat­tle was fought in the streets of the city, one quarter being in the possession of the conspirators, while the republicans were masters of the other. It was not till midnight that the citizens took the town-hall, which was the head quarters of Chalier's party. This event decided the contest, which had been severe and bloody. The conspirators were im­prisoned, and their chief, after a long and formal trial, was condemned by the tribunal to death. Had the same resistance been made to oppression in other communes, that of Paris would have been compel­led to submit to the general will; but as the depart­ments had declined the contest, Lyons was left to withstand alone all the resentment of the conspira­tors, and was besieged a few weeks after this period.

THE chief point of accusation against the depu­ties who were arrested on the second of June, was the continual opposition which they were accused of having made to the formation of a republican con­stitution. This calumny was contradicted by the fact; the proscribed deputies having, after the la­bour of some months, presented a plan of constitu­tion to the convention, which had been published by its order; but of which it was a part of the conspirators' plan to interrupt and prevent the dis­cussion.

As many believed that a constitution was the re­medy for every evil, moral and political, and even physical, that afflicted the state; and that, when once prepared and administered, all its maladies would be cured; some of the departments were ap­peased by the assurance that their present rulers would give them in a fortnight what they were made to believe their predecessors had so long with­held.

The appearance of this constitution within the appointed time tended greatly to allay the discon­tents, and gave an air of popularity to the proceed­ings of the conspirators; for, as long as the people obtained the blessing, they were indifferent from what hand they received it. They were little aware of the purposes of their tyrants, who only giving them one short glimpse of this wished-for constitu­tion, and having obtained their sanction of it, threw it aside, locked up this hallowed book of the law, shrowded with a dark veil the tables of the rights of man, and boldly proclaimed a new-invented species [Page 61] of tyranny, under the denomination of revolutionary government. That epithet has since justified every enormity, warranted the violation of every princi­ple: and theft and pillagè, noyades and fusilades have all received the common appellation of revolu­tionary measures.

What contributed also to dissipate the storm that was going to be poured on Paris, was the dread which the departments themselves had of extending the civil war, which then raged in the country south of the Loire, when there was a possibility of at­taining by milder means the objects they had in view, the re-establishment of their representatives, and confining the extravagant power of the com­mune of Paris within its just bounds. What also misled them was, the subjection to which Paris itself was reduced, and which, deceived by addres­ses from the convention and the commune, they mistook for the enjoyment of tranquillity; and what finished the contest was the thunder of the conspira­tors hurled against the departments which had shewn most zeal in favour of the imprisoned deputies, the constituted powers of which were dissolved by the convention, and its members declared guilty of acts of rebellion. It was fortunate for the usurpers, that this almost general and speedy acquiescence took place; as, independently of the coalesced pow­ers, they had a most formidable enemy to contend with in the royalists of the Vendée, who, while these struggles for power convulsed Paris, were or­ganizing a force that, but for the invincible spirit of liberty that inspired the immense majority of the re­public, was calculated to overwhelm every contend­ing party, and bring back the ancient despotism with all the avenging terrors of sacerdotal and aristocra­tical rage.

[Page 62] The country which was the scene of this insurrec­tion in favour of priesthood and royalty, is situated between the Loire and the Charente, stretching along the coasts between the two rivers, and making part of the territory which was called, under the ancient government, the Province of Poi [...]o [...]. It is a country fertile both in corn and pasture; and from its rich abundance distributed plenty to most of the neighbouring departments, and furnished even to the centre of France a considerable part of its sup­plies. Where nature had done so much to make this region the seat of plenty, the inhabitant was not solicitous to increase his riches by foreign traffic; so that commerce contributed but little to his opu­lence, and manufacturers were almost unknown. However innocent and pastoral the life of a shep­herd and the husbandman has been represented, and however productive of those vices that corrupt and enervate mankind the commercial intercourse be­tween nations may have been found; this commu­nication brings with it an interchange of knowledge and manners which improves and embellishes soci­ety, while the permanent habitudes of the former serve to retain him in a state which adds nothing to the common stock of knowledge, and contributes nothing to the progressive improvement of the world. The negative merit of exemption from vices to which we have never been tempted, may be grant­ed to this intellectual darkness, where it is placed beyond the reach of endangering more enlightened society; but when ignorance becomes the sport of fanaticism, and ambitious men make it the instru­ment of their guilty designs, it becomes a calamity the most terrible in the list of human evils.

The department of the Vendée, from its local situation, had little other intercourse with the rest of the republic than what arose from the export of the [Page 63] superfluity of its produce; and while the great and immortal principles which directed the revolution awakened in the bosom of every mechanic and pea­sant throughout France the noble sentiment that no man was superior to him in his rights, the Vendéan, who had only heard of these things through the organ of the noble and the priest, remained the implicit believer and obedient vassal, while his fellow-citi­zens were rejoicing in their emancipation.

In this insulated department the feodal system had been maintained in all its rigour. The provin­cial laws of Brittany, which, from the minuteness and singularity of their oppression, would be rather subjects of ridicule than abhorrence, had they not contributed so much to the degradation of the human character in the tyrant who inflicted and the slave who suffered them, were incorporated with other laws equally barbarous, and peculiar to the country.

As this part of the republic, from its geogra­phical and moral situation, had received but a few faint rays of the light of that liberty which had burst forth in France; and as already the seeds of discord had been plentifully scattered among the inhabitants by the fanatical clergy, it was fitted to become the retreat of all who were averse to the new order of public affairs. Accordingly the nobles and the priests, who, in the first meetings of the constitu­ent assembly, discovered, that by the removal of those factious barriers by which they had hitherto been separated from the other classes of the people, they were now to mingle in the common mass, found refuge in these departments, where they trust­ed that those distinctions might still be respected which had elsewhere sunk into contempt. Their influence was extensive; and as their zeal was quickened by implacable resentment, those laws of which they could not hinder the promulgation, and [Page 64] particularly those which respected their own orders, were but imperfectly executed, or apparently obey­ed. Having found that that enthusiasim which led the constituent assembly to overthrow these gigantic pri­vileges, had considerably evaporated towards its close; and seeing also that the court, in struggling to regain its lost power, sought their alliance; they grew bolder in their pretensions, and became more active in their hatred towards the establishment of the new government. At first an air of general discontent overspread this part of the country—par­tial fermentations next succeeded, and the spirit of insurrection at length became so general, that the constituent assembly was compelled to take measures to stop its alarming progress.

The means employed by the legislature were cal­culated rather to increase than prevent the evil; for, instead of sending commissaries from their own bo­dy to examine into its causes; instead of enlighten­ing the people, and unmasking and punishing those who had prompted them to rebellion; they entrust­ed the court with the execution of their decrees, and, as it might have been expected, the insurrection obtained additional force, and even a sort of royal sanction.

The authority of the next assembly was insuffici­ent to repress so alarming an evil. Too much di­vided by the spirit of party, and too much occupied in struggles against the court, the legislative assem­bly for a long time applied only palliatives to the disease; nor, till it wore an aspect dangerous to the existence of the revolution, was the assembly roused to the application of any effective remedy. The measure they first proposed was the banishment of the priests who had refused adherence to the new constitution; but this measure appeared so alarming to the court, and so destructive of the system it had [Page 65] adopted to regain its lost influence, that the king was advised to make use of the repressive power which the constitution gave him, and to refuse his royal sanction. Though this refusal hastened the destruction of the court, already tottering, it gave new courage to the discontended, who, finding themselves so zealously supported, burst into open resistance in the Vendée and the neighbouring de­partments, which it required all the exertion of the departmental force to suppress.

The fall of the court suspended for a time the pro­gress of this insurrection; but the unhappy au­spices under which the convention met, inspired fresh ardour, and led the insurgents to new exertions. In hopes of restoring the monarchy, a vast plan of insurrection was formed, which not only compre­hended the Vendée and the adjoining departments, but extended itself through a great part of Brittany. The convention was too much occupied in resisting the conspirators at Paris to attend to the progress of the royalists, who were suffered to take uninterrupt­ed possession of the Vendée and the neighbouring departments. Before the end of March they had organized an army of 40,000 men, consisting chief­ly of peasants, servants of the former nobility, smug­glers, poachers and game-keepers, men well ac­customed to the use of arms, and had began their march towards Paris before the convention were formally advised that any insurrection had taken place. Their army was commanded by experien­ced chiefs who had served under the ancient govern­ment: but what gave the rebellion its fiercest rage was the fanaticism which the priest inspired, who marching at the head of their columns, bearing the crucifix in his hand, pointed out to his followers the road to victory or heaven. The progress which the royalists had made before any force was opposed to [Page 66] them was so alarming, that at the period when the Jacobins had seized upon the government at Paris, the portion of the country which the Vendéens had subdued was so extensive, that it seemed doubtful of which party France was destined to be the prey. The royalists had entire possession of the Loire al­most as far as Paris, and menaced Rochelle on the one side while they besieged Nantes on the other, and opened a passage into the departments which made part of the former province of Brittany.

The faction at Paris did not fail to improve the events of the Vendée to their own advantage. Pe­thion, Buzot, Rabaut St. Etienne, Isnard, Lanjui­nais, Barbaroux, Gaudet, Louvet and others of the proscribed deputies having made their escape, the conspirators declared, in an address to the depart­ments, that the project of the deputies who were still in arrestation was evidently the same as that of their colleagues, who were gone to facilitate the march of the rebels, and aid them in the establish­ment of the royal power. This calumny, which was refuted by every address received from the de­partments^*, formed the basis of the accusation which was framed against the Giroude; and the founders and most strenuous supporters of the re­public were soon after dragged to the scaffold as the advocates and protectors of royalty.

In proportion as the departments relaxed in their energy, the ferocity of the conspirators increased. An event also happened at this period, which, from the calumnies to which it gave rise, and the conse­quences it produced, proved fatal to the arrested de­puties. This was the assassination of Marat. In the first dawn of the conspiracy Marat became a principal instrument in the hands of the traitors, [Page 67] who found him well fitted for their purposes; and being saved from the punishment which usually fol­lows personal insult by the contempt which the de­formity and diminutiveness of his person excited, he became the habitual retailer of all the falsehoods and calumnies which were invented by his party against every man of influence or reputation. He was the Thersites of the convention, whom no one would deign to chastise; for his extravagance made his employers often disclaim him as a fool, while the general sentiment he excited was the sort of an­tipathy we feel for a loathsome reptile. His politi­cal sentiments often varied; for he sometimes ex­horted the choice of a chief, and sometimes made declamations in favour of a limited monarchy; but what rendered him useful to the conspirators was his readiness to publish every slander which they fram­ed, and to exhort to every horror which they me­ditated.—His rage for denunciation was so great that he became the dupe of the idle; and his daily paper contains the names of great criminals who existed only in the imagination of those who impos­ed on his credulous malignity.

After this first preacher of blood had performed the part allotted to him in the plan of evil, he was confined to his chamber by a lingering disease to which he was subject, and of which he would pro­bably soon have died. But he was assassinated in his bath by a young woman who had travelled with this intention from Caen in Normandy. Charlotte Anne Marie Corday was a native of St. Saturnin in the department of the Orne. She appears to have lived in a state of literary retirement with her father, and by the study of ancient and modern his­torians to have imbibed a strong attachment to li­berty. She had been accustomed to assimilate cer­tain periods of ancient history with the events that [Page 68] were passing before her, and was probably excited by the examples of antiquity to the commission of a deed, which she believed with fond enthusiasm would deliver and save her country.

Being at Caen when the citizens of the depart­ment were enrolling themselves to march to the relief of the convention, the animation with which she saw them devoting their lives to their country, led her to execute, without delay, the project she had formed^*. Under pretence of going home, she came to Paris, and the third day after her arrival obtained admission to Marat. She had invented a story to deceive him; and when he promised her that all the promoters of the insurrection in the de­partments should be sent to the guillotine, she drew out a knife which she had purchased for the occa­sion, and plunged it into his breast.

She was immediately apprehended, and conduct­ed to the Abbaye prison, from which she was trans­ferred [Page 69] to the Conciergerie, and brought before the revolutionary tribunal.

She acknowledged the deed, and justified it by asserting that it was a duty she owed her country and mankind to rid the world of a monster, whose sanguinary doctrines were framed to involve the country in anarchy and civil war, and asserted her right to put Marat to death as a convict already condemned by the public opinion. She trusted that her example would inspire the people with that energy which had been at all times the distinguish­ed characteristic of republicans; and which she defined to be that devotedness to our country which renders life of little comparative estimation.

Her deportment during the trial was modest and dignified. There was so engaging a softness in her countenance, that it was difficult to conceive how she could have armed herself with sufficient intre­pidity to execute the deed. Her answers to the in­terrogatories of the court were full of point and energy. She sometimes surprised the audience by her wit, and excited their admiration by her elo­quence. Her face sometimes beamed with subli­mity, and was sometimes covered with smiles. At the close of her trial she took three letters from her bosom, and presented them to the judges, and requested they might be forwarded to the persons to whom they were addressed. Two were written to Barbaroux, in which with great ease and spirit she relates her adventures from her leaving Caen to the morning of her trial. The other was an af­fectionate and solemn adieu to her father. She retired while the jury deliberated on their verdict; and when she again entered the tribunal there was a majestic solemnity in her demeanour which per­fectly became her situation. She heard her sen­tence with attention and composure; and after con­versing [Page 70] for a few minutes with her counsel and a friend of mine who had sat near her during the trial, and whom she requested to discharge some trifling debts she had incurred in the prison, she left the court with the same serenity, and prepared herself for the last scene.

She had concluded her letter to her father with this verse of Corneille,

and it is difficult to conceive the kind of heroism which she displayed in the way to execution. The women who were called furies of the guillotine, and who had assembled to insult her on leaving the prison, were awed into silence by her demeanour, while some of the spectators uncovered their heads before her, and others gave loud tokens of applause. There was such an air of chastened exultation thrown over her countenence, that she inspired sentiments of love rather than sensations of pity^*. She ascended the scaffold with undaunted firmness, and, knowing that she had only to die, was resolved [Page 71] to die with dignity. She had learned from her jailor the mode of punishment, but was not in­structed in the detail; and when the executioner attempted to tie her feet to the plank, she resisted, from an apprehension that he had been ordered to insult her; but on his explaining himself she sub­mitted with a smile. When he took off her handker­chief, the moment before she bent under the fatal stroke, she blushed deeply; and her head, which was held up to the multitude the moment after, ex­hibited this last impression of offended modesty.

The leaders of the faction, who thought every measure good that could be made subservient to their purpose, found this event too replete with favourable circumstances to be neglected. Marat, whom they had thrown aside to die at leisure, un­less perchance he should have lived to share the fate to which they afterwards condemned their other agents, was now restored to more than his antient honours, was proclaimed a martyr, and his death ordered to be lamented as an irreparable loss to the republic. The conspirators declared that no far­ther doubt of the federalism of the departments remained. The death of Marat was the point of conviction. Every member of the mountain was to be assassinated in his turn, and the traitors of the departments had their accomplices in Paris who had whetted their poniards to involve the city in destruction. Though the Parisians were not suf­ficiently credulous to believe these calumnies, the faction made them the pretence to proceed to the farther commission of crimes; and while they en­deavoured to amuse the people with what they called the inauguration of Marat and of Chalier, they were meditating the murder of the deputies whom they had driven from the legislature.

[Page 72] It was impossible to contemplate without indig­nation and despair that glorious revolution, which had opened to mankind the brightest prospects of happiness, and which had promised the most bene­ficial effects to the world, become the sport of the cruel, and the prey of the rapacious; to see a peo­ple who were called to liberty, bending their necks, like the votaries of the storied assassin of the moun­tain, at the nod of their tyrant; to see a nation which had possessed Rousseau, Mably and Voltaire, prostrate in frantic enthusiasm before the shrine of Marat, like the idolaters of Montapa [...]a, whose devotion rose in proportion to the hideousness of their gods.

Every day some pretended plot was discovered, some dark conspiracy, attributed successively to nobles, priests, bankers and foreigners, was drag­ged to light; but the specimens produced of these counter-revolutionary projects were often such as did little honour to the invention of those by whom they were exhibited. Sometimes letters were found from agents of the coalesced powers; but they were generally so ill fabricated that they only deceived those who could not read them.

The departments having submitted to the usurp­ers, they now began their measures of severity against those who had resisted their authority. The general denomination for disaffection to their prin­ciples was that of being suspected; and accord­ingly a decree was issued to arrest all those who came under this title. The revolutionary tribunal not having all the energy necessary to carry into execution the plans that were meditating, was de­nounced for its moderantism, and the members of which it was composed, renewed.

[Page 73] A certain class of the women of Paris, who gave themselves the title of revolutionary women, had been serviceable auxiliaries to the conspirators, and had taken place of the poissards, who not hav­ing all the energy which the present exigencies re­quired, had yielded the palm to their revolutionary successors. These female politicians held delibe­rative assemblies, and afterwards presented their views to the convention, while they influenced its debates by their vociferations in the tribunes, which they now exclusively occupied. On the days of tumult which preceded the 31st of May they had mounted guard in person at the convention, and prevented the execution of certain orders which they disliked. They now presented themselves at the bar of the assembly, and demanded the exclu­sion of the former nobles from every function civil or military, the renewal of all the administrations throughout the republic, the examination of the conduct of the ministers, the arrest of every sus­pected person, the raising of the whole nation in a mass, and obliging the women to wear red caps. The convention having shewn some disinclination to comply with these modest requisitions, these fe­male politicians insulted some of the members, and the society was dissolved by a decree.

In the mean time the royalists had proceeded almost as far as Tours on their way to Paris. Lyons was in a state of formidable resistance. The Marseillois were at Avignon. Mentz sur­rendered to the Prussians. The province of Al­sace was over-run by the Austrians. Valencienn [...]s was taken after a formidable siege, and Cambray was summoned to surrender. The Piedmontese had invaded the department of Montblanc, for­merly Savoy, the Spaniards had invested Perpig­nan, and the English were masters of Toulon.

[Page 74] More efficient measures became necessary than had hitherto been employed, and that which was now adopted was putting into requisition every individual that could be made useful to his country in any situation in which his services were claimed. That part of the community which was destined to the most active service were the young men from 18 to 25 years of age, who under the name of the first requisitions were immediately invested with the title of the defenders of their country, and, as soon as arms were procured, sent to the frontiers.

Whatever may be the difference of political opi­nion respecting the events of the French revolu­tion, there can be no dissenting voice against the tribute of honour and applause which belongs to the armies of the republic. Amidst all the inter­nal commotions of contending chiefs, regardless of plain or mountain, of côté droit or côté gauche, they saw their country invaded, and bravely re­pulsed the attack, leaving the arrangement of the internal concerns of the state to the individuals who were left behind. They were not of that class which composes the usual mass of armies, the idle and the profligate, who seek a refuge from industry or want in the vocation of a soldier; and they were of that age when the love of military glory and the passion for liberty are felt with the greatest ardour. This passion was nourished by the consciousness that their sections, their com­munes, the convention, and their country were looking on them with fond and anxious expecta­tion, and the decrees which declared that they de­served well of the republic animated them with a more ardent desire to merit the eulogium.

One of the great springs which mechanically inspired courage and resolution, was the patriotic [Page 75] songs and hymns which were continually resound­ing through their camps. But the great moral motive that urged them to valorous deeds, was that contempt of death which men in all ages, who combat for liberty and their country, have felt, and this was a motive which their antagonists could not feel. The soldier was conscious that, if he survived, he should partake of the honour he had laboured to acquire; and if he died, that his coun­try would enroll his name among those of its de­liverers, and that his fate would inspire that senti­ment which our animated poet has so beautifully described in his ode on the glorious dead.

"But the life of a modern soldier," Dr. John­son has observed, "is ill represented by heroic fic­tion. War has means of destruction more formi­dable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thou­sands and ten thousands that perished in our late contest with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy. The rest lan­guished in tents and ships, amidst damps and pu­trefaction, pale, torpid, spiritless and helpless, gasp­ing and groaning, unpitied among men made obdu­rate [Page 76] by long continuance of helpless misery, and were at last whelmed in pits or heaved into the ocean without notice and without remembrance. By in­commodious encampments and unwholesome stati­ons, where courage is useless and enterprise impracti­cable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies slug­gishly melted away."

From this devastation of disease the French have been exempted; for the evils which Dr. Johnson enumerates most commonly proceed from the ab­sence of those conveniencies which money can pro­cure. But a great part of the first requisition, which was taken from the class of the rich as well as of the poor, were enabled, by the attention of their friends, and the expenditure of their own in­come, to procure not only the means of plenty to themselves, but to contribute to the accommodation of their less wealthy companions.

THE usurpers saw that those young citizens who had obeyed with alacrity the call of the convention against the common enemy were not fitted to be the instruments of these revolutionary projects. Revo­lutionary committees had been established in every commune of the departments, and in every section of Paris; but though the last were in general compos­ed of the creatures of the faction, they were not so secure of what they called the energy of the commit­tees in the country. For this reason, a certain number of what was termed the most sansculotti [...]e [Page 77] and revolutionary citizens of each section of Paris who chosen by their respective committees to com­pose a body of six thousand men, which was called the revolutionary army, and which, accompanied by a^* guillotine ambulante, was to issue forth from Paris into the departments, to invite the people to raise themselves to the height of the revolution.

In the mean while, the usurpers framed an act of accusation against the deputies whom they had dri­ven from the convention on the 31st of May, and arrested the seventy-three members who had protest­ed against that measure. At this period also the vague report of a spy, that Beauvais a deputy of the convention had been put to death by the English at Toulon, served as a pretext to the usurpers for in­flicting twenty years imprisonment on whoever should introduce English merchandize into the re­public, and for throwing into prison and confiscat­ing the property of all those who had been born in the British dominions, except such as were employ­ed in manufactures. This impolitic and savage de­cree, in open violation of the rights of nations, and breach of that hospitality under the protection of which but a few months before they had invited the English then in France to remain among them, was put into execution; and though it met with universal reprobation, yet as terror was the order of the day, no one felt himself sufficiently bold to demand its repeal; and as business of more import­ance lay before the conspirators than the considera­tion of the cases of individuals, those who had the credulity to trust to their protection were left to ru­minate on their injustice.

The next step taken by the conspirators was that of throwing aside the incumbrance of the constitu­tion. [Page 78] A report was accordingly prepared, shewing the impossibility of conducting the machine of the revolution without the use of extraordinary mea­sures, and the convention voted without discussion, that the constitution should be set aside, and that the government should become revolutionary. The superiority of a monarchical over a republican go­vernment has been said to consist in the unity of its action, particularly in cases of danger. The Ro­mans in time of great public calamity were accus­tomed to throw a veil over the tables of the laws, and place in the hands of one of their fellow-citi­zens, whom they called a Dictator, the whole ener­gy of the government, as long as the danger which threatened the state should exist. Rousseau admires this policy, and recommends it in similar cases to all free governments. Of whatever advantage the temporary absence of liberty might have been, had the people of France, like the Romans, chosen those to rule the storm who had the greatest skill or the most acknowledged virtue; those sanguinary and ferocious characters who now seized on the power, instead of making this temporary despotism a means of saving the country, like the malevolent genii who preside over evil, filled it with horror, desolation, and death.

To reconcile the nation to the assumption of their new power, the conspirators thought it necessary to shew their distinguishing attachment to what they called the people by the exercise of every kind of persecution against what they called aristocracy, an appellation by no means confined to the adherents of the former court or the nobility. To the "aris­tocracy of talents" succeeded the "aristocracy of commerce," which signified that he who enriched himself while he enriched his country by the supply of its wants, was an object of suspicion, or a coun­ter-revolutionist. [Page 79] They therefore conceived the pro­ject of reducing every article of merchandize and subsistence to what they called the maximum, and obliged every merchant and shop-keeper to sell his goods to the public at the prescribed rate, whatever might have been the first cost. Though it was evi­dent to the most superficial observer, that such a measure must be eventually destructive of commerce, and productive of the evil it was intended to prevent; yet, as it was an evil that but remotely affected the consumer, it was calculated to please the lower class of people.

The faction, armed with the absolute power they had usurped, fancied they could control all possible circumstances; and though they could not but per­ceive that the manufacturer must necessarily cease his labour when the new materials exceeded the stat­ed price of the goods he exposed to sale, and that the merchant could no longer go on with his com­merce, when the cargo which he had purchased abroad was struck with the revolutionary maximum on its entrance into port; though they could not but see that it was a law fraught with every evil, yet as it was a blow at the aristocracy of commerce, and a revolutionary measure, it was proposed and adopted.

While they were thus persuading the people what interest they took in their welfare by the introduc­tion of plenty, in the extinction of monopolies, and the reduction of the price of merchandize, they were equally solicitous to show their regard for the public safety by the punishment of traitors and con­spirators. For a long time the Jacobins had de­manded the trial of Maria Antoinette, whose ex­istence they declared endangered that of the repub­lic. She was accordingly arraigned for having [Page 80] committed a series of crimes, which in the language of the indictment comprehended not merely counter-revolutionary projects, but all the enormities of the Messalinas, Brunehauts, Fredegondes, and Medi­cis. A curious account of the evidence in support of these charges, and the effect which her behavi­our produced upon Robespierre, is given by Vilate, a young man of the revolutionary tribunal. The scene passed during the trial, at a tavern near the Tuilleries, where he was invited to dine with Ro­bespierre, Barrere, and St. Just. "Seated around the table," he says, "in a close and retired room, they asked me to give them some leading features of the evidence on the trial of the Austrian. I did not forget that expostulation of insulted nature when, Hebert accusing Antoinette of having committed the most shocking crime, she turned with dignity towards the audience, and said, "I appeal to the conscience and feelings of every mother present, to declare if there be one amongst them who does not shudder at the idea of such horrors." Robespierre struck with this answer as by an electrical stroke, broke his plate with his fork. "That blockhead Hebert!" cried he, "as if it were not enough that she was really a Messalina, he must make her an Agrippina also, and furnish her with the triumph of exciting the sympathy of the public in her last mo­ments."

Marie Antoinette made no defence, and called no witnesses, alleging that no positive fact had been produced against her. She had preserved an uni­form behaviour during the whole of her trial, ex­cept when a starting tear accompanied her answer to Hebert. She was condemned about four in the morning, and heard her sentence with composure. But her firmness forsook her in the way from the [Page 81] court to her dungeon—she burst into tears; when, as if ashamed of this weakness, she observed to her guards, that though she wept at that moment, they should see her go to the scaffold without shedding a tear.

In her way to execution, where she was taken af­ter the accustomed manner in a cart, with her hands tied behind her, she paid little attention to the priest who attended her, and still less to the sur­rounding multitude. Her eyes, though bent on vacancy, did not conceal the emotion that was la­bouring at her heart—her cheeks were sometimes in a singular manner streaked with red, and sometimes overspread with deadly paleness; but her general look was that of indignant sorrow. She reached the place of execution about noon; and when she turned her eyes towards the gardens and the palace, she became visibly agitated. She ascended the scaf­fold with precipitation, and her head was in a mo­ment held up to the people by the executioner.

The trial of Marie Antoinette was followed by that of the accused deputies. Although those guar­dians of the public weal, the Jacobins, had repeat­edly urged the convention to bring forward their trial, it had been long delayed from the difficulty of finding any proofs that wore the appearance of pro­bability; and it remained long undecided what should be the charges, and who should be the vic­tims. The substance of the accusation was at length founded on a sort of sportive party romance written by Camille Desmoulins on Brissot and the Brisso­tins; and what was meant by the author merely to excite a laugh, was distorted to serve this hor­rible purpose. Camille, it is said, remonstrated loudly on this perversion of his intentions, and dis­claimed any participation in the guilt. He declar­ed that the charges were only extravagancies of his [Page 82] own imagination, and that he could not support any of them by evidence. This remonstrance was inef­fectual, and the romance formed part of the indict­ment, which was filled up with charges of royalism and federalism; which being presented to the assem­bly for their sanction, the decree of accusation passed without a discussion.

The witnesses in support of the charges consisted principally of the chiefs of the municipality of Paris, who were the original accusers. But the defence which the prisoners made was so entirely destruc­tive of the accusation, that though the judges and the jury had bound up their nature to this execrable deed; though the audience, like the tribunes of the Jacobins and the convention, were hired to ap­plaud this crime, the eloquence of the accused drew iron tears down their cheeks, and convinced the whole tribunal of the infamy and falsehood of the charges. Imagine the remorse with which the minds of the jury must have been wrung when their employment compelled them to dress out matter for condemnation from the absurd and lying fables of the conspirators, who were called as witnesses to the indictment; while, to the demonstration even of the most perverse and ignorant, the prisoners refut­ed every charge with triumph on their accusers; and if any suspicion had existed with respect to their patriotism or love of the republic, the prosecution would have served to dispel it.

The judges, as well as the jury, although deter­mined to execute their atrocious commission, saw that the defence of the prisoners would carry con­viction to the minds of the audience, who, notwith­standing their being hired by the accusers, began to shew signs of compassion. The court, there­fore, wrote to the convention to inform them, that if the trials were permitted to proceed, the forma­lities [Page 83] of the law would reduce them to extreme dif­ficulties; and observed, that in a revolutionary pro­cess it was not necessary to be incumbered with troublesome witnesses, or a long defence. This humane epistle was supported by a deputation of the Jacobins, who spoke a still plainer language, by demanding a decree, that the accused should be condemned whenever the jury should feel themselves "sufficiently instructed," without attending to the whole of the charge, or hearing what the prisoners might have to allege in their defence. To this measure the society was urged by the municipal witnesses, who were stung with shame at seeing their perjuries unveiled.

The decree, empowering the jury to stop the prosecution at whatever period they thought proper, was virtually pronouncing the sentence of death: and the tribunal, releasing themselves from the tor­ture they were compelled to suffer, while their con­sciences were every hour more and more loaded with the conviction of the innocence of the victims whose judicial murder they were bound to perpe­trate, lost no time in declaring that they were suffi­ciently instructed.

Alas! in what were "they sufficiently instruct­ed?" That the men they were going to condemn, were those who were the most distinguished for ta­lents, and most devoted to the establishment of the republic, of which they were the founders. Were not this sanguinary jury sufficiently instructed, that it was for their virtues, and not their crimes, that these victims had been dragged before them? and yet, with all this conviction on their minds, they coolly commanded the murder.

This atrocious condemnation was remonstrated against by the prisoners in vain. In vain they al­leged, that against some of them no evidence what­ever [Page 84] had been heard; that their names had scarcely been mentioned at the tribunal; and that, what­ever pretence the jury might have for calling them­selves sufficiently instructed respecting the rest, they could not be informed of the crimes of those against whom no witnesses had appeared. The court, sheltering themselves under the sanction of a decree, were little inclined to give the reasons of their conviction; and therefore replied to the arguments of the prisoners, by ordering the mili­tary force to take them from the tribunal. Va­lazé, in a transport of indignation, stabbed him­self before the court. Brissot, Vergniaud, Gen­sonné, La Source, Fonfrede, Sillery, Ducos, Carra, Duperret, Gardien, Duprat, Fauchet, Beauvais, Duchastel, Mainvielle, La Caze, Le Hardy, Boi­leau, Anteboul, and Vigée, were led to execution on the following day. Vergniaud, having a pre­sage of his impending fate, had early provided himself with poison; but finding that his young friends Fonfrede and Ducos, who he had some hopes would be spared, were companions of his misfor­tune, he gave the phial to the officer of the guard, resolving to wait the appointed moment, and to pe­rish with them.

They met their fate with all the calm of inno­cence, and breathed their last vows for the safety and liberty of the republic. Those who were the melancholy witnesses of their last hours in prison, love to relate how they spoke, and felt, and acted. I have been told by one who was their fellow pri­soner and friend, that their minds were in such a state of elevation, that no one could approach them with the common-place and ordinary topics of con­solation. Brissot was serious and thoughtful, and at times an air of discontent clouded his brow; but it was evident that he mourned over the fate of [Page 85] his country and not his own. Gensonné, firm and self-collected, seemed fearful of sullying his lips by mentioning the names of his murderers. He did not utter a word respecting his own situation, but made many observations on the state of the re­public, and expressed his ardent wishes for its hap­piness. Vergniaud was sometimes serious, and sometimes gay. He amused his fellow-prisoners at times with the recital of poetry which he re­tained in his memory, and sometimes indulged them with the last touches of that sublime elo­quence which was now for ever lost to the world. Fonfrede and Ducos relieved the sombre of the piece by the habitual liveliness of their characters, although each lamented the fate of his brother to their respective friends, and sometimes shed tears over the distress and ruin of their wives and chil­dren; for both had young families and immense fortunes. Their courage was the more exemplary, as their fate was altogether unexpected.

Previously to the imprisonment of the deputies, while they were yet under arrest in their own houses, I frequently visited those who were in the number of our friends. Vergniaud had long told me that he saw no just foundation for hope, and that he would rather die, than live a witness of his country's shame. Fonfrede and Ducos had the full enjoyment of their liberty till the act of accu­sation appeared, in which they had not the least suspicion that they should be included. The day previous to the reading of this murderous proscrip­tion in the convention, Fonfrede had accompa­nied us to Montmorenci, about four leagues from Paris, where we had wandered till evening, amidst that enchanting scenery which Rousseau once in­habited, and which he had so luxuriantly described. [Page 86] Alas! while the charms of nature had soothed our imaginations, and made us forget a while the scenes of moral deformity exhibited in the polluted city we had left; while every thing around us breathed delight, and the landscape was a hymn to the Al­mighty; the assassins were at their bloody work, and plotting the murder of our friends. The next day Fonfrede was sent to the Conciergerie, and we saw him no more. A week after we were our­selves arrested. He conveyed to us, from his dun­geon, his sympathy in our misfortunes, and, after his condemnation, wrote to bid us a last farewell; but the letter was carried to the committee of gene­ral safety, and never reached us.

They were condemned at midnight. When they returned to their prison, they gave the ap­pointed signal of their fate to their fellow-prisoners, whose seclusion afforded them no other means of knowing it, by singing a parody of the chorus of the Marsellois hymn—

After spending the few hours of life that re­mained, in conversation, now and then enlivened by the sallies of the young and gay amongst them, they bade adieu to their fellow-prisoners, whose minds were so raised by the heroism which these patriots displayed, that it was some time before they became sensible of their loss.

The dungeon which they inhabited was shewn with profound veneration to every prisoner who afterwards arrived at this preparatory scene of mur­der. A superstitious respect was paid to the mi­serable matrass of Vergniaud; and those who felt neither the force of their patriotism, nor shared in [Page 87] their love for their country, were taught to pro­nounce with religious awe the names of these mar­tyrs of liberty.

Had these lamented patriots known all the foul­ness of the crimes which the conspirators were me­ditating against them, it would have been easy to have withdrawn themselves from their vengeance, as many of their proscribed colleagues did. Some, indeed, fell under the murderer's hands, but some have happily escaped—Lanjuinais, Isnard, Louvet, and some others, appear again on the scene. Bar­baroux and Buzot, I am told, are alive; and Pe­thion, who but a few months before was hailed as the support of his country, may again deserve the appellation—but the rest are gone for ever; and there is no one who has any taste for literature, or feeling for liberty, but will sigh at the remembrance of Rabaut, Guadet, and Condorcet.

SINCE my last letter was written, I have left Switzerland, and returned to Paris, and have had the unspeakable joy of embracing my family again. I have not yet mentioned to you (for till the Jacobins were destroyed it was too soon to relate) that I forsook home to return no more while Robespierre existed; and Robespierre was then in possession of such established dominion, the spirit of liberty had [Page 88] so bowed itself beneath the axe of the guillotine, from the pastoral hills of Normandy to the orange-groves of Nice, from the ensanguined banks of the Loire to the mourning waters of Vaucluse, that when my mother, while she gave me her last em­brace at parting, told me she should see me no more, my desponding heart assented to the sad pre­diction. Upon the fall of the deputies who were proscribed the 31st of May, and who were well known to have honoured us with their friendship, we became a subject of discussion at the committee of public safety, and a mandat d'arrêt would cer­tainly have been issued against us if we had not already been imprisoned in consequence of the law against the English. By sharing the general mis­fortune of our countrymen in France, we were sheltered from any particular mark of vengeance. We afterwards obtained our liberty by means of the municipality, to whom we were unknown; and when the murderers had satiated their vengeance in the blood of our friends, my family had no longer any peculiar danger to fear. But my situ­ation was far different. During the spring pre­ceding the fatal 31st of May, when the deputies of the Gironde, and Barrere, passed most of their evenings at our house, I had not concealed that I was employed in writing some letters which have since been published in England, in which I had drawn the portrait of the tyrant in those dark shades of colouring that belonged to his hideous nature; and Barrere, in whose power my life was placed, was now the lacquey of Robespierre, and the great inquisitor of the English at Paris. He had now seared his conscience with crimes, and bathed his hands in the blood of the innocent. What still increased my danger was, that Barrere could not but recollect, with the consciousness of [Page 89] his present vileness in our eyes, the political sen­timents which he had expressed in those hours of social confidence, when had he been told that he should become the accomplice of unrecorded hor­rors, he would have answered with the feelings of Hazael, "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?" He could not but recollect that on the third of June, the day after the insurrection, he came to our house with looks disordered and haggard, with eyes filled with tears, and a mind that seemed bursting with indignant sorrow; repeatedly declaring that, since the national representation was violated, liberty was lost; deploring the fate of the Gironde, above all of Vergniaud, and execrating the Jacobins, and the commune of Paris. A thousand times he wished that he could transport himself to the foot of his native mountains, the Pyrenées, bid adieu for ever to the polluted city of Paris, and wander for the rest of his life amidst that sublime scenery which he described with melancholy enthusiasm.

It was not a little dangerous to have heard such sentiments from the lips of one who afterwards said boastingly in the convention, "Il n'y a que les morts qui ne reviennent pas;"—of one who became the leader of assassinations; and who, mounting the tribune with the light step of gaiety, dressed up with point and epigram those atrocious edicts of the committee to which his bleeding coun­try answered with her groans. Barrere also knew that there was no danger of my declaring these things at the revolutionary tribunal, since those who were tried were not permitted to speak: and he had no longer any ties of acquaintance with us which might have restrained him from such con­duct; since very soon after the 31st of May, upon our refusing to receive some deputies of the moun­tain [Page 90] whom he asked leave to introduce to us, he abandoned us altogether.

In the mean time the English newspapers came regularly to the committee of public safety, in which passages from my letters were frequently transcribed, and the work mentioned as mine; and those papers were constantly translated into French for the members of the committee. Two copies of the work had also reached Paris; and although one was at my request destroyed, the other might, by means of those domiciliary visits which were so often repeated, have been thrown into the hands of revolutionary commissaries.

Thus I passed the winter at Paris, with the knife of the guillotine suspended over me by a frail thread, when a singular opportunity of escape presented it­self, and I fled to Switzerland, with a heart almost broken by the crimes I had witnessed, and the cala­mities I had shared. I forsook those who were most dear to me on earth, with no other consolation than that I left them exposed only to the common danger of every individual in the country, and re­lieved from the cruel apprehensions they had felt on my account.

I proceeded on my journey haunted by the images of gens d'armes, who I fancied were pursuing me, and with a sort of superstitious persuasion that it was impossible I should escape. I felt as if some magical spell would chain my feet at the frontier of France, which seemed to me a boundary that was impassable. As I approached the frontier the agi­tation of my spirits increased, and when I reached Bourg-Libre, the last French post where commis­saries were appointed to examine the passports and those who presented them, my heart sunk within me, and I tried to resign myself to a fate which [Page 91] seemed to my disordered mind inevitable. But I found that I had disquieted myself in vain: revolu­tionary government had relaxed its iron nerve at this distance from the seat of tyranny; and the commissaries on the frontiers, after having per­formed their office with the mildest urbanity, suf­fered us to proceed to Basil, which is only half a league further.

Some tall stakes driven into the earth at certain distances mark the limits of France and Switzer­land. We drove rapidly past them, and were then beyond the reach of revolutionary government, and the axe of the guillotine.

At Basil, now almost the only social speck on Europe's wide surface, where men meet for any other purposes than those of mutual destruction, I was in safety: but I was an exile from my fa­mily—from the only friends I had left—my friends in England, to whom I had written immediately on my arrival, in the fulness of my heart, and with the fond persuasion that they had trembled for my safety and would rejoice in my deliverance, having (with few exceptions indeed!) returned no an­swers to my letters. With what overwhelming sensations did I receive the tidings of the fall of Robespierre, which was to change the colour of my life, and give peace and consolation to so many millions of my fellow-creatures! After waiting till the struggle maintained by the Jacobins against the national representation had happily ended, I returned to Paris. On entering again that polluted city, a thousand fatal recollections rushed upon my mind, a thousand local sensations overwhelmed my spirit. In driving along the Rue Honoré, the ap­palling procession of the guillotine arose before my troubled imagination—I saw in the vehicles of death the spectres of my murdered friends. The [Page 92] magnificent square of the revolution, with all its gay buildings, appeared to me clotted with blood, and incumbered with the dead. Along the silent and deserted streets of the fauxbourg Germain, I saw inscribed in broad letters upon the gate of eve­ry hotel, "propriéte nationale," while the orphans whose fathers and mothers have perished on the scaf­fold, and who lived upon the alms of charity, pass in silence by the dwellings which are their rightful inheritance.—The red flag waving above the por­tals of their forfeited mansions, reminded me of an image of horror in De Foe's history of the plague at London, where, he says, every house that was infected was marked with a bloody sign of the cross.

Yet at least we are no longer condemned to des­pair of finding justice on earth. Every day is sig­nalized by such acts of retribution, that it seems as if heaven visibly descended to punish the guilty, while at the same time mercy and humanity are binding up the wounds of the afflicted, and set­ting the captive free. We seem to live in regions of romance. Louvet, Isnard, and others of our proscribed friends so long entombed in subterrane­ous dungeons, wandering over desert mountains, or concealed in the gloom of caverns unvisited by day, now restored to society and to their country, recount to us the secrets of their prison-house, their "hair-breadth 'scapes" to which we listen with eager anxiety, and tremble at their past dangers.—But I must not thus anticipate. Let me lead you to the convent in the fauxbourg St. Antoine, to which we were transferred in order to make room at the Luxembourg for prisoners whom it was thought expedient to guard more strictly. We were taught by the administrators of the police to consider our removal as a mark of particular indul­gence towards us, since we should have the privi­lege [Page 93] of seeing our friends through the grate, and of walking occasionally in the garden of the convent. Our countrymen were condemned to remain in the Luxembourg, at which they repined and remon­strated in vain. Wives were separated from their husbands, daughters from their fathers; and as far the greater part of the English were in confined circumstances, and lived by their respective occu­pations, their resources being stopped by their im­prisonment, the little store of assignats which they had saved from sequestration they were now forced to divide, and, instead of sharing their frugal meal together, their expences were doubled. Many were reduced to the most cruel difficulties, who had been accustomed to maintain their families respectably by their industry, and felt that the hu­miliation of receiving alms was no slight aggrava­tion of the miseries of captivity^*. That part of the convent which the municipality had allotted for our prison consisting only of bare walls, we were each of us permitted to return to our respective houses, in order to provide ourselves with beds, and what furniture and clothes we thought proper. We were attended thither by an inspector of the police and guards, together with one of the com­missaries of our own section, who had put the seals on our apartments, and who on removing them [Page 94] examined our papers, consisting now only of a few poetical scraps which had escaped the flames. Odes, elegies, and sonnets were instantly bundled up and sent to the municipality, notwithstanding my assurances that the muses to whom they were addressed, far from being accomplices in any con­spiracy against liberty, had in all ages been its warmest auxiliaries. With what melancholy sen­sations did we re-visit that home from which we were again to be torn in a few hours! How often did my eyes wander over every object in our apart­ment! The chairs and tables, which we found in the same position as we had left them on our first imprisonment, seemed like mute friends whom it was anguish to leave, and whose well-known atti­tudes recalled the comforts of the past. With aching hearts we were once more led through the streets of Paris to our new prison. This convent, called Les Anglaises, was still inhabited by twenty-three English nuns, and, as it was their own pro­perty, had not shared the general fate of the mo­nastic edifices. While the French monks and nuns had for more than a year before this period been driven from their retreats, the religious houses both of men and women, which belonged to the Eng­lish, had been respected, and their inhabitants left undisturbed. The English or rather Irish monks had, however, long since thrown off their habits, and conformed as well as they were able to the new system of opinions. But this was not the case with those religious sisters, whose enthusiastic attachment to the external signs of their profession was greater, and their worldly wisdom less. The inhabitants of the fauxbourg St. Antoine, where they resided, ac­customed from infancy to revere them, to have the wants of the poor supplied at the gate of the con­vent, and, while under the former government they [Page 95] were treated with neglect or disdain by others, to be there received with evangelical humility, felt that their esteem and veneration for the nuns had survived their own superstitious belief. The con­querors of the Bastile, the terror of aristocracy, and the vanguard of revolutions, laying aside their bloody pikes and bayonets, humbled themselves be­fore these holy sisters, whom a sort of visible sanctity seemed to encompass, and whom they suffered, not­withstanding the general regulation, to wear the cherished symbols of their order, the veil and the cross, and seven times a day to ring the bell for prayers. When we had passed the sentinels who guarded the convent, the gate was unlocked for our admission by a nun in her habit. She embra­ced us with affectionate warmth, and, addressing us in English, begged we would be comforted, since she and the other nuns who were to have the charge of us were our countrywomen and our sisters. This soothing sympathy, expressed in our native language, formed such a contrast to the rude ac­cents of inspectors of police, that it seemed as if some pitying angel had leaned from heaven to com­fort us. The kindness with which we were re­ceived by our amiable country-women, contri­buted to reconcile us to our chamber, which might more properly be called a passage to other rooms, where the glowing tapestry of the Luxembourg was exchanged for plaistered walls, and where we had to suffer physical as well as moral evils, the weather being intensely cold, and our wretched gallery having neither stove nor chimney. One circumstance tended to make our situation tolerable, which was that true spirit of fraternity that pre­vailed in our community, consisting of about forty female prisoners besides the nuns. Into how happy a region would the world be transformed, if that [Page 96] mutual forbearance and amity were to be found in it which had power to cheer even the gloom of a prison!

In addition to the tie of common calamity was the tie of a common country; and in our present situation this bond of union appeared so strong, that it seemed, as Dr. Johnson said of family relations, that we were born each others friends. It was the general study of the whole community to prevent each others wishes. There were no rich amongst us. The rich had made themselves wings, and vanished away before the promulgation of the law against the English; but those who had still any resources left, shared all their little luxuries and indulgencies with those that had none. The young succoured the old, the active served the infirm, and the gay cheered the dejected. There were indeed among us a few persons, who born of French parents, having passed their whole lives in France, and not speaking one word of our native language, seemed astonished to find by their imprisonment that they were English women. They had no trace or re­collection of that country which in evil hour chanc­ed to give them birth, and did not easily reconcile themselves to the grated convent, while their French sisters were enjoying perfect liberty.

When such of the former nobility who were our fellow-prisoners at the Luxembourg heard that we were going to be transferred to the fauxbourg St. Antoine, they gathered round us to express their fears for our safety in that frightful quarter of the city. I was persuaded, on the contrary, that we had much more to fear while shut up in this state prison with themselves, than in the fauxbourg St. Antoine, the inhabitants of which were chiefly com­posed of workmen and mechanics, who in the course of the revolution had acted too much in [Page 97] union to be led to perpetrate any partial mischief; since those immense numbers which had power to overthrow government could not be bribed to com­mit massacres.

The administrators of the police, when they or­dered preparations to be made for our reception, announced us to the section as being all the wives and daughters of milords anglois. This was no auspicious introduction: accordingly our first care was to lay aside the honours and dignities conferred upon us by the officers of the police, and which certainly would not have been confirmed by the he­rald's office. The only distinction we now envied was that of belonging to the privileged class who gained their bread by the labour of their hands, and who alone were exempted from the penalties of the law. We would thankfully have consented to purchase at the price of toil the sweets of liber­ty, when bereaved of which the sickening soul grows weary of existence. In vain we tried to twine the flowers of social pleasure around the bars of our prison; in vain we "took the viol and the harp, or endeavoured to rejoice at the sound of the organ." That good which alone gives value to every other, was wanting; and music was discor­dant, and conversation joyless.

Having repelled the calumnious report of our no­bility, the revolutionary committee of our section, un­der whose inspection we were placed, and who visited us in succession every day, began to look upon us with a more propitious eye; and lest our health should be impaired by confinement, they unlocked the garden gate, of the key of which since our arrival they had taken possession, to prevent any attempts to scale the walls, and permitted us to walk two hours every day accompanied by themselves. During these walks we found means to convince them that we had been [Page 98] guilty of no other offence against the state, than that of being born in England; and the common principles of justice taught these unlettered patriots to lament the severity of our fate, which they en­deavoured to soften by every mark of honest kind­ness.

The visits of the administration of police were far less agreeable than those of our good commissa­ries. The first time they came, Brutus, one of their secretaries, fired with uncontrolable rage at the sight of the nun who unlocked the gate for his admission, rudely seized her veil, which he was with difficulty prevented from tearing off her face. This ferocious pagan threw down the cross which was erected in the garden, and trampled it under foot; and having poured forth a volley of impreca­tions against the great bell, which still hung at the steeple instead of being transformed into a cannon, he left the dismayed nuns trembling with horror, and hastened to denounce the veils, the crosses, and the great bell at the municipality. The next morn­ing Pache, the mayor of Paris, sent orders for the bell to be taken down, the crosses to be removed, and the nuns to throw off their habits immediately. Nothing could exceed their despair upon receiving this municipal mandate. The convent resounded with lamentations, and the veils which were now to be cast off were bathed with tears.

There was, however, little time to be allowed to the indulgence of unavailing sorrow. Brutus might return, and it was necessary to proceed to action. Accordingly, a council of caps was called in the room of the superior; and after a delibera­tion, sometimes interrupted by sighs and sometimes by pleasantry, we all went to work, and in a few hours sweeping trains were converted into gowns, and flowing veils into bonnets. One charming [Page 99] young nun, who was a pensive enthusiast, begged that, if it were possible, her bonnet might shroud her face altogether; while another, whose regards were not entirely turned away from this world, hinted that she should have no objection to the decoration of a bow.

My chief consolation during my confinement arose from the society of sister Theresa, that amia­ble nun who so much wished to hide a face which nature had formed to excite love and admiration. It was impossible to converse with her without feeling that the revolution was a blessing, if it was only for having prohibited vows which robbed soci­ety of those who were formed to be its delight and ornament. I never met with a human creature who seemed to approach nearer to the ideas we form of angelic purity, who possessed a more cor­rected spirit, or a more tender heart. Devotion was her first delight, her unfailing source of hap­piness; and sometimes, instead of regretting her fate, I [...] her feelings, and was tempted to ex­claim with Pope,

We were allowed the melancholy indulgence of seeing our friends through an iron grate; and there were still among the French some persons whose courageous friendship, undismayed by all the frowns of power, and the increasing terrors of revolutionary measures, did not abandon us in our prison. The [Page 100] greater part of the English who were yet in France, having been established in that country for years, had acquired some friends who lamented their mis­fortunes, and who risqued their own personal safety by making unwearied efforts for their deliverance. The dress of our visitors was indeed not a little gro­tesque, the period being now arrived when the visi­ble signs of patriotism were dirty linen, pantaloons, uncombed hair, red caps, or black wigs, and all, as [...]salind says, "denoting a careless disorder." The obsolete term of muscadin, which means a scent­ed fop, was revived; and every man who had the boldness to appear in a clean shirt was branded with that appellation, and every woman who wore a hat was a muscadine; for the period was still remember­ed when a round cap was the badge of roture, nor were the aristocratical pretensions of the hat yet bu­ried in oblivion. It is remarkable enough, that at this period Robespierre always appeared not only dressed with neatness, but with some degree of ele­gance, and, while he called himself the leader of the sans-culottes, never adopted the costume of his band. His hideous countenance, far from being involved in a black wig, was decorated with hair carefully arranged, and nicely powdered; while he endeavoured to hide those emotions of his inhuman soul which his eyes might sometimes have betrayed, beneath a large pair of green spectacles, though he had no defect in his sight.

At this period one of the most accomplished wo­men that France has produced perished on the scaf­fold. This lady was Madame Roland, the wife of the late minister. On the 31st of May he had fled from his prosecutors, and his wife who remained was carried to prison. The wits observed on this occasion, that the body of Roland was missing, but that he had left his soul behind. Madame Roland [Page 101] was indeed possessed of the most distinguished ta­lents, and a mind highly cultivated by the study of literature. I have been acquainted with her since I first came to France, and had always observed in her conversation the most ardent attachment to li­berty, and the most enlarged sentiments of philan­thropy; sentiments which she developed with an eloquence peculiar to herself, with a flow and pow­er of expression which gave new graces and new energy to the French language. With these ex­traordinary endowments of mind she united all the warmth of a feeling heart, and all the charms of the most elegant manners. She was tall and well shap­ed, her air was dignified, and although more than thirty-five years of age she was still handsome. Her countenance had an expression of uncommon sweet­ness, and her full dark eyes beamed with the bright­est rays of intelligence. I visited her in the prison of St. Pelagie, where her soul, superior to circum­stances, retained its accustomed serenity, and she conversed with the same animated cheerfulness in her little cell as she used to do in the hotel of the mi­nister. She had provided herself with a few books, and I found her reading Plutarch. She told me she expected to die; and the look of placid resignation with which she spoke of it, convinced me that she was prepared to meet death with a firmness wor­thy of her exalted character. When I enquired after her daughter, an only child of thirteen years of age, she burst into tears; and at the overwhelm­ing recollection of her husband and her child, the courage of the victim of liberty was lost in the feel­ings of the wife and the mother.

Immediately after the murder of the Gironde she was sent to the Conciergerie, like them to undergo the mockery of a trial, and like them to perish. [Page 102] When brought before the revolutionary tribunal she preserved the most heroical firmness, though she was treated with such barbarity, and insulted by questions so injurious to her honour, that sometimes the tears of indignation started from her eyes. This celebrated woman, who at the bar of the national convention had by the commanding graces of her eloquence forced even from her enemies the tribute of applause and admiration, was now in the hands of vulgar wretches, by whom her fine talents, far from being appreciated, were not even understood. I shall transcribe a copy of her defence taken from her own manuscript^*. With keen regret I must add, that some papers in her justification, which she sent me from her prison, perhaps with a view that at some happier period, when the voice of innocence might be heard, I should make them public, I was compelled to destroy, the night on which I was my­self arrested; since, had they been found in my pos­session, they would inevitably have involved me in her fate. Before I took this resolution, which cost me a cruel effort, I employed every means in my power to preserve those precious memorials, in vain; for I could find no person who would venture to keep them amidst the terrors of domiciliary visits, and the certainty, if they were found, of being put to death as an accomplice of the writer. But her fair fame stands in no need of such testimonials: her memory is embalmed in the minds of the wise and good, as one of those glorious martyrs who have sealed with their blood the liberties of their country. After hearing her sentence, she said, "Vous me jugez digne de partager le sort des grands hommes que vous avez assassinés. Je tâ­cherai [Page 103] de porter à l'échafaud le courage qu'ils y ont montré^*."

On the day of her trial she dressed herself in white: her long dark hair flowed loosely to her waist, and her figure would have softened any hearts less fero­cious than those of her judges. On her way to the scaffold she was not only composed, but sometimes assumed an air of gaiety, in order to encourage a person who was condemned to die at the same time, but who was not armed with the same for­titude.

When more than one person is led at the same time to execution, since they can suffer only in suc­cession, those who are reserved to the last are con­demned to feel multiplied deaths at the sound of the falling instrument, and the sight of the bloody scaf­fold. To be the first victim was therefore consider­ed as a privilege, and had been allowed to Madame Roland as a woman. But when she observed the dismay of her companion, she said to him, "Allez le premier: que je vous epargne au moins la dou­leur de voir couler mon sang^†." She then turned to the executioner, and begged that this sad indul­gence might be granted to her fellow-sufferer. The executioner told her that he had received orders that she should perish first. "But you cannot, I am sure," said she with a smile, "refuse the last request of a lady." The executioner complied with her demand. When she mounted the scaffold, and was tied to the fatal plank, she lifted up her eyes to the statue of Liberty, near which the guillotine was [Page 104] placed, and exclaimed, "Ah Liberté, comme on t'a Jouée^*!" The next moment she perished. But her name will be recorded in the annals of his­tory, as one of those illustrious women whose supe­rior attainments seem fitted to exalt her sex in the scale of being.

She had predicted that her husband would not sur­vive her loss, and her prediction was fulfilled. Ro­land, who had concealed himself till this period, no sooner heard the fate of his wife, whose influence over his mind had often been a subject of reproach amongst his enemies, than, feeling that life was no longer worth possessing, he put an end to his exis­tence. His body was found in a wood near the high-road between Paris and Rouen: the papers which were in his pocket-book were sent to the committee of general safety, and have never seen the light. His unhappy daughter found an asylum with an old friend of her proscribed parents, who had the courage to receive her at a period when it was imminently dangerous to afford her protection. But the time probably now draws near when this child will be adopted by her country, and an ho­nourable provision will be made for her, as a tes­timony of national gratitude towards those who gave her birth.

Amidst the extraordinary changes which were passing in France, the convention now changed time itself, and decreed the new calendar. A re­port was made on it, so philosophical and so pleasing to the imagination, that, amidst the sanguinary measures of those days, it seemed to the oppressed heart what a solitary spot of fresh verdure appears to the eye amidst the cragginess of louring rocks, or the gloom of savage deserts. Love of change is na­tural [Page 105] to sorrow; and for my own part I felt myself so little obliged to the months of my former acquain­tance, which as they passed over my head had gene­rally brought successive evils in their train, or serv­ed as the anniversaries of some melancholy epocha, that I was not much displeased to part with them for months with appellations that bring to the mind images of nature, which in every aspect has some power of giving pleasure, from Nivo [...]e the month of snows, to Floreal the month of flowers. I there­fore soon learnt to count the days of my captivity by the new calendar, which was highly necessary, since, if a reclamation for liberty had been dated on Monday instead of Primidi, or on Tuesday to the neglect of Duodi, the police would not only have passed to the order of the day, but declared the wri­ter suspect. After two months imprisonment we obtained our liberty, in consequence of the unwea­ried efforts which were made for that purpose by a young Frenchman whom my sister has since mar­ried. He was at Rouen in Normandy when the decree against the English arrived, and a few hours after saw a long procession of coaches pass through the streets filled with English prisoners, who, just torn from their families and their homes, were weeping bitterly. Deeply affected by his specta­cle, he flew to Paris with the resolution of obtain­ing our liberty, or of sharing our prison. He haunt­ed the municipality every night, attended the le­vées of [...] administrators of police every morning, risqued his own personal safety a thousand times, and at length, like a true knight, vanquished all obstacles, and snatched his mistress from captivity. I could not help lamenting, that he was compelled to make application for our release to Chaumette, the procureur of the commune, who had been the [Page 106] principal evidence against the deputies of the Gi­ronde. Nothing could be more cruel than this kind of humiliation—

With what delicious emotions did we return to our own habitation! After passing two months in prison at such a period, we felt the blessedness of home in its full extent. To range through our own apartments without being pursued by guards or jailors, to return to domestic comforts and domestic peace, excited sensations the most delightful. So­ciety had indeed vanished, and home was but a mil­der prison, where we lived in voluntary seclusion, trembling at every knock at the gate, lest it should bring the mandate of a new arrestation; and afraid to venture out, lest we should be found guilty of an English physiognomy, by some of the numerous spies of the police, who were continually prowling through the streets of Paris. These indeed were the only persons we had to fear; for even at the very moment when the permanent order of the day at the Jacobins was the crimes of the English, far from receiving the smallest insult from the people of Paris, they displayed the utmost sympathy for our situation, and our release from prison seemed to diffuse general satisfaction through our whole neigh­bourhood.

The prisons became more and more crowded, and increasing numbers were every day dragged to the scaffold, Suspect was the warrant of imprison­ment, and conspiracy was the watch-word of mur­der. One person was sent to prison, because aris­tocracy was written in his countenance; another, because it was said to be hidden at his heart; many [Page 107] were deprived of liberty, because they were rich; others, because they were learned; and most who were arrested enquired the reason in vain.

A FEW weeks after our release from prison, Rabaut de St. Etienne was put to death. He was one of the most enlightened and virtuous men whom the revolution had called forth, and had ac­quired general esteem by his conduct as a legisla­tor, and considerable reputation by his talents as a writer. He was the president of the famous com­mittee of twelve, which was appointed by the con­vention, previously to the 31st of May, to exa­mine into the conspiracies which threatened its ex­istence, and which, as I have already related, has­tened its partial dissolution. Rabaut, as often as he presented himself to make the report, was compel­led by the interruptions of the conspirators and their agents to retire from the tribune, until that moment arrived, when he, together with the members of the commission, and the deputies of the Gironde, were expelled, or torn from the convention! I saw him on this memorable day (for he took shelter for a few hours at our house) filled with despair, not so much for the loss of his own life, which he then considered as inevitable, as for that of the li­berty of his country, now falling under the vilest [Page 108] despotism. He escaped arrest on the 2d of June, from not having been present at the convention when the conspirators consummated their crime by means of the military force of Paris, and con­cealed himself in the house of a friend, with his brother, one of the seventy-three deputies who had signed the protest.

They enclosed part of a room for their place of shelter, and built up the wall with their own hands, placing a book-case before the entrance, so that there was not the least appearance of conceal­ment. They employed a carpenter, in whom they had great confidence, to make the door, and the wretch betrayed them. Rabaut de St. Etienne was immediately brought before the revolutionary tribunal to have his person identified, for he was now outlawed, which in France is the sentence of death. He was led to execution; and his wife, a most amiable women, unable to support the loss of a husband whom she tenderly loved, put an end to her existence. His brother was taken to the Con­ciergerie, where he languished with three other victims, for many months in a subterraneous dun­geon; and there being only one bed allotted for four persons, he lay upon the damp floor, and con­tracted such violent disorders, that his life was long despaired of. He has now taken his seat in the convention. The generous friend and his wife, who had given the brothers an asylum, were also dragged to prison; and some time after were con­demned, for this noble act of friendship, to perish on the scaffold.

If France, during the unrelenting tyranny of Robespierre, exhibited unexampled crimes, it was also the scene of extraordinary virtue; of the most affecting instances of magnanimity and kindness. Of this nature was the conduct of a young man, [Page 109] who being a prisoner with his brother, happened to be present when the names of the victims were called over, who were summoned to appear the next day before the sanguinary tribunal. The young man found the name of his brother, who at that moment was absent, upon the fatal list. He paused only an instant to reflect, that the life of the father of a large family was of more value than his own; he answered the call, surrendered himself to the officer, and was executed in his brother's stead. A father made the same sacrifice for his son; for the tribunal was so negligent of forms, that it was not difficult to deceive its vigilance.

The increasing horrors which every day pro­duced, had at length the effect of extinguishing in every heart the love of life, that sentiment which clings so fast to our nature. To die, and to get beyond the reach of oppression, appeared a privi­lege; and perhaps nothing appalled the souls of the tyrants so much as that serenity with which their victims went to execution. The page of history has held up to the admiration of succeeding ages, those philosophers who have met death with forti­tude. But had they been led among the victims of Robespierre to execution, they would have found themselves, in this respect, undistinguished from the crowd. They would have seen persons of each sex, of all ages, and all conditions, looking upon death with a contempt equal to their own. So­crates expiring surrounded by his friends, or Se­neca and Lucan sinking gently into death, have perhaps less claim to admiration than those bloom­ing beauties, who in all the first freshness of youth, in the very spring of life, submitted to the stroke of the executioner with placid smiles on their coun­tenances, and looked like angels in their flight to heaven.

[Page 110] Among the victims of the tyrants, the women have been peculiarly distinguished for their admi­rable firmness in death. Perhaps this arose from the superior sensibility which belongs to the female mind, and which made it feel that it was less terri­ble to die, than to survive the objects of its tender­ness. When the general who commanded at Long­wy on its surrender to the Prussians was condemned to die, his wife, a beautiful young woman of four-and-twenty years of age, who heard the sentence pronounced, cried out in a tone of despair, "Vive le roi!" The inhumane tribunal, instead of attri­buting her conduct to distraction, condemned her to die. Her husband, when he was placed in the cart, was filled with astonishment and anguish when he saw his beloved wife led towards it. The people, shocked at the spectacle, followed her to the scaf­fold, crying, "Elle n'a pas mérité la mort." "Mes amis," said she, "c'est ma faute; j'ai vo [...]lu périr avec mon mari^*."

The fury of these implacable monsters seemed directed with peculiar virulence against that sex, whose weakness man was destined by nature to support. The scaffold was every day bathed with the blood of women. Some who had been con­demned to die, but had been respited on account of their pregnancy, were dragged to death immediately after their delivery, in that state of weakness which savages would have respected. One unfortunate woman, the wife of a peasant, had been brought to Paris, with nineteen other women of the same class, and condemned to die with her companions. She heard her sentence without emotion; but when they came to carry her to execution, and take [Page 111] away the infant who was hanging at her breast, and receiving that nourishment of which death was so soon to dry up the source, she rent the air with her cries, with the strong shriek of instinctive af­fection, the piercing throes of maternal tenderness—But in vain! the infant was torn from the bosom that cherished it, and the agonies of the unfortu­nate mother found respite in death.

Fourteen young girls of Verdun, who had danc­ed at a ball given by the Prussians, were led to the scaffold together, and looked like nymphs adorned for a festival. Sometimes whole generations were swept away at one moment; and the tribunal ex­hibited many a family-piece, which has almost bro­ken the heart of humanity. Malesherbes, the coun­sel of Louis XVI. was condemned to die, at eighty years of age, with his daughter, and son-in-law, his grand-daughter and grand-son.

His daughter seemed to have lost sight of every earthly object but her venerable parent: she em­braced him a thousand times on the way to execu­tion; bathed his face with her tears; and when the minister of death dragged her from him, forgetting that the next moment put an end to her own, she exclaimed, "Wretch, are you going to murder my father?"

These proscribed families seemed to find the sweetest source of consolation in dying together, and to consider the momentary passage which they were going to make, as so much the less painful, since they should undergo no separation, but enter at the same instant into another state of existence. A young lady, the former marchioness of Bois-Berenger, was imprisoned in the Luxembourg with her whole family. When her father, mother, and younger sister received their act of accusation, and she found herself alone exempted, she shed a flood [Page 112] of tears, her heart was overwhelmed with anguish. "You will die without me," she cried; "I am condemned to survive you; we shall not perish to­gether!" While she abandoned herself to despair, her act of accusation arrived: a ray of transport was instantly diffused over her countenance, she flew into the arms of her parents, and embraced them. "My dear mother," she exclaimed, "we shall die together!" When the family was trans­ferred to the Conciergerie, she never left her mo­ther a moment, but watched over her with unwea­ried tenderness; and while she tried to sooth her sufferings by her filial endearments, she endea­voured to inspire her with courage by the example of her own heroic fortitude. It was the picture of a sort of Roman charity. The unfortunate mo­ther was mute, and her whole soul seemed petri­fied with horror. She seemed another Niobe. Her admirable daughter died with the most noble reso­lution.

Mademoiselle Malesi, her younger sister, when condemned to die, said to her father with naïveté, "Je me serrerai tant contre vous, mon bon pere, vous qui êtes si honnête homme, que Dieu me laissera passer malgré mes pêchés^*."

In the prison of the Force, the men were allowed to breathe the air in a court-yard separated by a wall from the habitation of the women. A com­mon-sewer was the only means of communication. At that spot, an unhappy son presented himself every morning and every night, to enquire after his mother, who was condemned to die, but reprieved because she was pregnant, and after her dilivery executed. That pious child, in his early age al­ready [Page 113] the victim of misfortune, knelt down before the infectious sewer, and, with his mouth placed upon the hole, poured forth the feelings of his filial tenderness. His younger brother, a lovely child of three years of age, and who was suffered to re­main with his mother till the last moments, was often placed at the opposite end of the fewer, and answered for his mother when she was too ill to undertake that task herself. A person of my ac­quaintance heard him say, "Mama a moins pleure cette nuit—un peu reposee, et te fouhaite le bon jour; c'est Lolo, qui t'aime bien, qui te dit cela^*." At length this unfortunate mother, when going to execution, transmitted to her son, by the sewer, her long and graceful tresses, as the only inheri­tance she had to give. She then bade her infant a last farewell, and was led to the scaffold, where her husband had perished some months before.

One of the persons most distinguished by their noble contempt of death was Girey Dupré, with whom I was well acquainted. He was the writer of a paper called the Patriote François, in con­junction with Brissot: he had acquired a high de­gree of literary reputation, and maintained his mo­ther, a widow, by the labours of his pen. He was twenty-four years of age, and his countenance was one of the most agreeable I ever saw. To these personal advantages he united the most frank and pleasing manners, and distinguished powers of conversation. He had defended the deputies of the Gironde with too much energy not to be in­volved in their fate, and he was also connected by the ties of friendship with Brissot. Dupré was forced to fly from his persecutors, and seek refuge [Page 114] at Bordeaux, where he was seized and brought back in irons to Paris. Far from being depressed by his approaching fate, the natural gaiety of his disposition never forsook him a single moment. When interrogated at the tribunal with respect to his connection with Brissot, he answered only in these words^*, "J'ai connu Brissot; j'atteste qu'il a vécu comme Aristide, et qu'il est mort comme Sydney martyr de la liberté." He presented him­self at the tribunal with his hair cut off, the collar of his shirt thrown open, and already prepared for the stroke of the executioner. On his way to the scaffold he saw Robespierre's mistress at the window of his lodging, with her sister, and some of their ferocious accomplices. "A bas les tyrans et les dictateurs^†!" cried Dupré, repeating this prophe­tic exclamation till he lost sight of the house. While going to execution, he [...]ung in a triumphant tone a very popular patriotic song which he had himself composed, and of which the chorus was "Plutôt la mort que l'esclavage^‡." That che­rished sentiment he fondly repeated even to his last moment, and death left the half-finished sentence [...] his lips:

Claviere, who had been contemporary minister with Roland, and who was imprisoned in the Con­ciergerie, upon receiving his act of accusation, saw that the list of witnesses against him was composed of his most implacable enemies. "These are assas­sins," said he to a fellow-prisoner; "I will snatch myself from their rage." He then repeated these lines of Voltaire,

[Page 115] and after deliberating with his companion upon the most effectual manner of striking himself so that the dagger might reach his heart, he retired to his cell, where he was found a few minutes after breathing his last sigh. Madam Claviere, upon receiving the tidings of his death, swallowed poi­son, after having embraced her children, and regu­lated her affairs. Notwithstanding his suicide, the property of Clavierre was confiscated, as if he had been regularly condemned. A law had lately been passed to construe an act of suicide into a counter-revolutionary project, when the father of a family who knew that his life was devoted, had volunta­rily put an end to his existence in the hope of pre­serving his children from want. Robespierre and his financial agents found nothing more pressing than to baffle those conspiracies against the revenues of their government; for confiscation was so evi­dently the leading motive for the great mass of their judicial assassinations, that the guillotine, amongst other numerous titles, was most generally called the "minister of finance." The tribunal now began to use the language of the orator^*, "to look into their cash account for delinquency, and found the offenders guilty of so many hundred thou­sand pounds worth of treason. They now accused by the multiplication table, tried by the rule of three, and condemned, not by the sublime institutes of Justinian, but by the unerring rules of Cocker's arithmetic."

On some occasions the genuine feelings of nature burst forth amidst the stupefied terror that had fro­zen every heart. A law had lately passed, oblig­ing every merchant to inscribe on his door the stock of merchandize in his warehouse, under the penal­ty [Page 116] of death. A wine-merchant, whose affairs had called him hastily into the country, entrusted the business of the inscription to his son, who from ig­norance or negligence, for it was clearly proved that there existed no intention of fraud, had omit­ted to affix the declaration in the precise words of the law. The conscientious jury of the revolution­ary tribunal condemned him to death, presuming on the counter-revolutionary intention in this case from the act, though they were in general accus­tomed, for want of other evidence, to find the act by guessing at the intention. The innocent prison­er had prepared himself for death, when the mini­ster of justice, informed of the case, wrote to the convention, demanding a respite. His letter had not been half read before the hall resounded with the cry of "reprieve, reprieve!" and fearing that the act of parliament would arrive too late, the con­vention, dispensing with the usual formalities, not only sent its officers and part of the military force, but great numbers of the deputies rushed out to stop the execution. The officer who received the order first, with which he flew towards the place of the revolution, told me that on his coming out of the convention he saw the scaffold reared and the crowd assembled. He had scarcely reached the first tree of the vista when he saw the fatal knife de­scend; he redoubled his speed, but before he got to the end of the walk another head had fallen: a third person had mounted the scaffold, but the voice of the messenger was too weak, from the efforts he had made to reach the spot, to be noticed by the multitude. The fourth had ascended when he gained the place, rushed through the crowd, called to the executioner, and leaped on the scaffold. The prisoner had been stripped, his shoulders were bare, and he was already tied to the plank; when the [Page 117] cry of "reprieve" burst forth. The officer en­quired his name, which the young man told him. "Alas! you are not the person," he replied. The prisoner submitted calmly to his fate.

The bearer of the reprieve, who is a person of a very benevolent disposition, declared that he ne­ver felt so acute a pang as when he was compell­ed to turn away from this unfortunate victim. He hastened, however, to the prison, where he found the person who was reprieved awaiting the return of the cart and the executioner, his hair cut and his hands tied, to be led to death at another part of the city where his house stood. A wife and nine children were deploring the miserable loss of a husband and a father, when the officer who had brought the tidings of life to the prisoner, went at his request to carry them to his distracted fa­mily. I need not describe what he related to me of the scene—your heart will readily fill up the picture.

That class of men who were peculiarly the ob­ject of the tyrant's rage-were men of letters, with respect to whom the jealousy of the rival mingled with the fury of the oppressor, and against whom his hatred was less implacable for having oppos­ed his tyranny, than for having eclipsed his elo­quence. It is a curious consideration, that the unexampled crimes of this sanguinary usurper, and the consequent miseries which have desolated the finest country of Europe, may perhaps, if traced to their source, be found to arise from the resent­ment of a disappointed wit. Robespierre, for the misfortune of humanity, was persecuted by the most restless desire of distinguishing himself as an ora­tor, and nature had denied him the power. He and his brother were born at Arras, and left orphans at an early age. The bishop of Arras had bestowed on them the advantages of a liberal education. Ro­bespierre [Page 118] distinguished himself by his application to his first studies, and obtained many literary prizes. At the age of sixteen, elated by the applause he had received, he fancied himself endowed with such rare power of genius as would enable him to act a splendid part on the theatre of the world, and his friends indulged the same fond expectation. He applied to the study of the law, and already in ima­gination contemplated himself disputing with the first orators of the age the palm of eloquence. Ex­perience, however, convinced his friends, and at length himself, that they had indulged a vain illu­sion. He discovered no taste or aptitude for the profession for which he was designed, became wea­ry of study, was checked by the slightest difficul­ties; and being found destitute of those talents which were necessary to his success as a public speaker, his benefactor, after a trial of sufficient length, re­fused to support him any longer at a considerable and fruitless expence at Paris, but ordered him to return to Arras, where in an humble sphere, bet­ter suited to the mediocrity of his abilities, he might pursue his profession as a lawyer. Robespierre was compelled to return to Arras; which, after the splen­did dreams he had indulged of fame and honours in the capital, was an humiliation he felt keenly, but which he brooded over in silence: for he never on any occasion displayed his sensibility to mortifica­tions, which was in proportion to his excessive va­nity, but concentered within his vindictive soul his disgrace, his resentment, and his projects of venge­ance. From the period of his return to Arras may be dated his abhorrence of men of talents. From that moment, instead of admiring genius, he re­pined at its existence. The same feelings clung to his base and envious spirit when he had usurped his dictatorial power. He made it pain of death to be [Page 119] the author of what he called seditious publications, by which means it was easy for him to involve men of letters in a general proscription. He suppressed every dramatic piece in which there were any allu­sions he disliked, or wherein the picture or history held up to view any feature of his own character. And it was his plan to abolish theatrical entertain­ments altogether; for he considered the applause bestowed on fine poetry as something of which his harangues were defrauded. He held up men of let­ters to the people as persons hostile to the cause of liberty, and incapable of raising themselves to the height of the revolution; and to make them still greater objects of mistrust and suspicion, he had long instructed his agents to declaim unceasingly against them as statesmen; the meaning of which word, in the dictionary of these conspirators, was counter-revolutionist. Their system had even ar­rived at some maturity, when Brissot, in his speech for an appeal to the people on the trial of the late king, thus pourtrays them:

"Il semble à entendre ces hommes qu'on ne pu­isse être à la hauteur de la révolution, qu'en mon­tant sur des piles de cadavres. Il semble que le se­cret de l'homme d'etat soit maintenant le secret des bourreaux. Veut-on faire entendre le langage de la saine politique? on est soudoyé par des puissances [...]trangeres. Veut on parler celui de la raison? c'est de la philosophie toute-pure, s'écrie-t-on; et on accoutume la multitude à mépriser sa bienfai­trice, à diviniser l'ignorance^*."

[Page 120] "L'ignorance de la multitude est le secret du pouvoir des agitate [...]urs comme des despotes; c'est là le secret de la durée de l'art de calomnie [...]. Voilà pourquoi ils s'elevent contre la philosophie, qui veut affermir la liberté sur la raison universelle. Voilà pourquoi ils plaisantent sur le systême d' [...]ducation, sur l'utilité des écoles primaires. Il s'agit bien de tout cela, c'est de massacres qu'il faut entretenir le peuple. Voilà pourquoi ils supposent, ils accusent sans cesse l'aristocratie du talent. Ah pourquoi le talent? n'est-il qu'un être metaphysique? Avec quel doux plaisir ces Vandales le nivelleroient, si leur faux pourroient l'attaindre^*!"

One of the objects of Robespierre's resentment was M. Bitauby, a Prussian, well known in the li­terary world by his elegant translation of Homer into French. He was a member of the academy at Berlin, from which the king of Prussia ordered his name to be struck out, and the pension with which the great Frederic had rewarded his merit to be discontinued, on account of his avowed attachment to the principles of the revolution. M. Bitauby had fixed his residence at Paris several years previ­ous to that event. I have been acquainted with him and his lady since my first arrival in France, and have never met with persons who blended with the [Page 121] wisdom and seriousness of age, so much of all that is amiable in youth. M. Bitauby, in the first days of the revolution, had been personally acquainted with Robespierre, who frequently dined at his house; but he was not long in discovering the san­guinary and fanatical ideas of liberty which filled the soul of the tyrant, and which so much disgusted him that he gave up his acquaintance.

Robespierre did not forget the affront, which he had now the power to avenge. M. Bitauby and his wife were dragged to prison in the beginning of the winter, where they languished ten months; and deprived of those cares which their age and their infirmities required, they had almost sunk beneath their weight. Madame Bitauby's indispositions re­quired medical assistance; but so many formalities were necessary before a physician could be admitted into the prison, that, if the disorder was not of a lingering nature, the patient expired while the po­lice were arranging the ceremonials previous to his relief. During the last months of Robespierre's usurpation, the prisoners were refused the consola­tion of being attended by their own physicians. Professional men were appointed by the police; and as selections were made among those who were able to give clearer proofs of their Jacobin principles than of their medical skill, these revolutionary doc­tors sometimes robbed the revolutionary jury of their prey. A few however of these "officers of health" possessed the negative merit which Dr. Franklin ascribed to old and experienced physicians, "they let their patients die," for the remedies they administered were of too harmless a nature to be capable of doing mischief. The physician of the Conciergerie had as strong a predilection for tisanne as Dr. Sangrado for hot water. Tisanne was the vivifying draught which was destined to sooth all [Page 122] pains, and heal all maladies. One day the doctor, after having felt a patient's pulse, said to the jailor, "He is better this morning." "Yes," answered the jailor, "he is better, but the person who lay in this bed yesterday is dead." "Eh bien," resumed the doctor coolly, "qu'on donne toujours la tisanne."

M. and Madame Bitauby had an advocate in their distress whom it was difficult indeed to resist. This was an old servant of eighty years of age. His fi­gure was so interesting that Sterne's pencil only could sketch in well; and had Sterne seen him, he would not have failed to draw his portrait. He pleaded me cause of his master with such pathetic eloquence, that at the revolutionary committee he sometimes "drew iron tears from Pluto's cheek." But the old man was eloquent in vain, and was sinking with despair into the grave when the revo­lution of the 9th of Thermidor restored his master and mistress of liberty.

The fate of Bo [...]cheu, author of a poem called "The Months," excited particular sympathy. He passed his time in prison, in educating one of his chil­dren, and this employment seemed to charm away his cares. The day she received his act of accusa­tion, knowing well the fate that awaited him, he sent his son home; giving him his portrait, which a painter who was his fellow-prisoner had drawn, and which he ordered child to give his mother. Below the picture he had written the following lines:

Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist, was put to death with the other farmers general. He request­ed a fortnight's respite to enable him to complete a philosophical experiment. The Vandals had no time to pause in their career of blood for the pur­suits of philosophy, and sent him away, observing that the republic had no longer any need of che­mists. Chamfort, a member of the French acade­my, and an enthusiastic advocate for the revolution, with feelings too keen to bear the horrors by which so noble a cause had been stained, hid them from his sight by a voluntary death. La Harpe was thrown into prison, and was destined to perish on the scaffold. The author of the Travels of the younger Anacharsis, notwithstanding his advanced age, was the object of continual persecution. Flo­rian, who was himself imprisoned, and condemned to see his dearest friends perish, had not sufficient fortitude to sustain such trials. His charming pen had displayed the most soothing images of happi­ness and virtue; and when he beheld around him only misery and crimes, his disordered imagination hastened his death. Vicq d'Azyr died of a bro­ken heart. Bailly, the first mayor of Paris, whose astronomical researches have placed him in the highest rank of science, was murdered with cir­cumstances of particular aggravation. He was to have been executed in the Champ de Mars; but from the caprice of the sanguinary mob, he was compelled to wait two or three hours at the place of execution, while the scaffold was removed to a field adjoining, where he stood drenched in rain, in the midst of winter, and, which was more difficult to [Page 124] bear than the "pelting of the pitiless storm," ex­posed to the insults and injuries of an execrable set of wretches who usually attended these horrid spec­tacles. The red fl [...]g was burned before his eyes, and he was compelled to set fire to the pile that consumed it, while the ruffians plunged his head into the smoke for their farther amusement. He submitted to all that was inflicted on him with the serenity of a philosopher, and only re­quested with mildness, that his sufferings might be terminated. One of the barbarians by whom he was tormented, said to him in a tone of savage mockery, "Tu trembles, Bailly." "Mon ami, c'est de froid^*," replied the sage. At length, after having made him drink the cup of bitterness to the very dregs, they permitted him to die.

ONE of the particular objects of Robespierre's rage was general Miranda, a native of Peru, well known in Europe by that philanthropic spirit of ad­venture which led him to pass many years in tra­velling through various parts of the globe, with the view of being useful to his own country; which, since the period of the sanguinary Spanish con­quests, has groaned beneath the yoke of the most abject slavery. If this philosophical enthusiast should not accomplish the purpose for which he un­dertook his crusade of patriotism, it has at least en­abled [Page 125] him to furnish his mind with such acquisitions of knowledge, such stores of observation, and such a distinguished taste for the fine arts, as render his society in the highest degree instructive and delight­ful; while with an understanding of the first order he unites that perfect simplicity of manners which usually belongs to great minds^*.

When the Prussians were on their march to­wards Paris, Miranda accepted a command in the army of Dumourier, who was then retreating be­fore them. After the defeat of the Prussians, and on the entrance of the republican army into the Low Countries, Miranda added to the high repu­tation he had already acquired through Europe, by the gallant manner in which he executed that part of the conquest of those countries which was allotted him. When Dumourier came to Paris, the com­mand of the whole army devolved on Miranda; and when the campaign began, and Dumourier was in­vading Holland, the attack of Maestricht, and the army on the Meuse, were committed to his care. The successful march of the Austrians on Aix-la-Chapelle obliged him to raise the siege; and he was joined soon after by Dumourier, who had left his conquest in Holland to repair the misfortunes of the army commanded by Valence. The ill hu­mour which Dumourier had brought with him from Paris, where the Jacobins had already begun their system of misrule and anarchy, was not les­sened [Page 126] by ill success; and goaded by the pang of in­dignation and of disappointed ambition, he formed the criminal design of betraying the republic. This spirit of rebellion found the most inflexible opposi­tion from Miranda, whose personal friendship for Dumourier did not lead him to forget that his first duty was towards that country which had entrusted him with its defence. The event of the battle of Nerwinden, fought against the repeated advice of Miranda, and in which this general lost a consider­able part of the troops he commanded, having been forced to sustain the whole shock of the enemy, af­forded Dumourier the means of getting rid of an opponent so hostile to his designs; and Miranda was sent by the commissaries La Croix and Dan­ton, without being previously heard by them, to give an account of his conduct at the bar of the convention. He underwent the most strict exami­nation before the committees of war and general safety, who declared, that not the slightest doubt remained of his military conduct, or his fidelity to the republic. But this report was stifled by the intrigues of La Croix, Danton, and others of their party; and he was sent, in defiance of all decency, to the revolutionary tribunal.

His trial took place in the beginning of May, before justice had for ever fled from that sangui­nary court. The hour of carnage was not yet arrived: the tribunal, though from its institution terrible, and cruel in its forms, which placed the life of the accused upon a casting voice, had not yet become a shrine consecrated to infernal deities, and reeking with the daily sacrifice of human vic­tims. The voice of innocence was not yet stifled by the savage vociferations of monsters thirsting for its blood; and Miranda pleaded his cause with such sublime energy, as proved that his powers as [Page 127] an orator were not inferior to his talents as a gene­ral. He covered himself with glory, and his ene­mies with confusion; and overstepping the usual forms, the jury made their verdict the vehicle of eulogium upon his conduct.

After his trial he retired to a small distance from Paris, where he lived in literary leisure, amidst his books and paintings, and where I visited him frequently. His repose was however of short du­ration. He was too distinguished a character to escape the tyranny which the conspiracy of the 31st of May had established; and after having been per­secuted by domiciliary visits on various pretences, he was again thrown into prison, charged with being the chief defender and abettor of the Gi­ronde and Girondism. The real cause of Robes­pierre's animosity towards him is not well known, but may be resolved into that general hatred which he bore towards all men of talents; and as he knew that the eminent abilities of Miranda were improved by advantages which had fallen to the lot of few, he might naturally think that the existence of such a man was dangerous to his own.

Twice, in the zenith of his tyranny, he accused Miranda to his subjects the Jacobins; and when we heard that the name of Miranda had issued from those pestilential lips, we considered his murder as inevitable. One obstacle was found sufficient to shield him from the tyrant's vengeance; and this was a feeling of shame which lurked in the mind of the public accuser, who, covered as he was with blood, did not dare to meet the look of Mi­randa, and bring forward a second accusation, after having once joined the general voice of applause upon his acquittal. This sentiment led Fouquier Tainville to put off the second trial required by Robespierre, till the tyrant would hear of delay [Page 128] and excuses no more; and himself inscribed Mi­randa's name on the fatal list for the twelfth of Thermidor. The revolution of the tenth restored him to liberty.

Miranda submitted to an imprisonment of eigh­teen months, under the continual expectation of death, with that philosophical strength of mind which he possesses in a most emiment degree. He had indeed determined not to be dragged to the guillotine, and had therefore provided himself with poison. Thus armed, he sent for a considerable number of books from his library, and placed them in his little chamber, of which he found means to keep the sole possession. Here he told me, that he endeavoured to forget his present situation in the study of history and science. He tried to con­sider himself as a passenger on a long voyage, who had to fill up the vacuity of time with the re­searches of knowledge, and was alike prepared to perish or to reach the shore. During his long confinement, the only person with whom he asso­ciated was the former marquis Achille Du Cha­telet, who possessed all the accomplishments of literature, and whom the tyrants had dragged to prison while the wounds were yet unhealed which he had received in defending his country. He and Miranda used to meet every evening, take their tea together, and talk over the books they had read during the day, avoiding as much as possible the subject of politics, which affected them too deeply, nor could Du Chatalet bear to pronounce the names of the decemvirs. Tidings, however, of the horrible scenes which were pas­sing in Paris reached him in the gloom of his prison; and the emotions of his mind, together with the irritation of his wound, produced a fe­ver. Miranda attended him day and night alter­nately [Page 129] with another prisoner; and he was reco­vering from this disorder, when he heard that some of his dearest friends had perished on the scaffold. The next morning, when Miranda went to his room to relieve a fellow-prisoner who had watched him during the night, he observed that his whole face was violently inflamed. He en­quired eagerly what was the matter. Du Cha­telet pressed his hand, and bade him farewell. This unfortunate young man, unable to support the shock occasioned by the murder of his friends, and grown weary of existence, resolved not to wait till the assassins called him to the scaffold, but had recourse to poison, with which he had pro­vided himself. A physician had furnished Verg­niaud, Du Chatelet, and several other martyrs to their country, with this lethean remedy, which they called^* la pillule de la liberté. A note was found in Du Chatelet's chamber, in which he declared that he had sold his books and all that belonged to him in the prison, to Miranda. This was the only mode in which he could leave his ef­fects to his friend, or prevent their being seized by the nation.

Miranda found a memorial among his papers, which he has put into my hands, where he traces the history of his political life. It contains an ho­nourable list of the sacrifices he had made, the la­bours he had atchieved, and the perils he had en­countered in the public cause, from the period when in 1789 he contributed in the baillage of Per­ronne to the union of the nobles with the third estate, till the middle of the year 1793; when, although his wounds were not closed, he desired leave to re­turn to the army, and obtained the command of [Page 130] the district of Aire. But he soon found that his infirmities did not permit him to fulfil the duties of his station:—he was obliged to return; and though his fortune was now lost, he refused to accept his pay as a general officer, since he was no longer able to serve his country. At the very moment when he was preparing to return home, he was arrested by the revolutionary committee at Aire, as a mea­sure of "general safety," and conducted with guards to the committee of general safety of the conven­tion, who, with the same tender regard for public se­curity, instead of declaring that this gallant young officer had merited well of his country, sent him to the prison of the Force, and refused to let his servant enter for a few minutes in the day to dress his wound. His prison six months after became his grave, and he was placed beyond the reach of ty­ranny. Miranda was then left to absolute solitude; but he had still the courage to live, and at length the hour of deliverance arrived.

You will perhaps think, dear sir, that the sketch which I have given you of public and private ca­lamity is sufficiently gloomy. But, alas! the scene blackens as we advance, and wears a deeper horror. We have now arrived at that period when the ty­rant, grown bolder by success, intoxicated with power, and throwing aside all regard even to forms, reaching the climax of his crimes, and accelerated the moment of his fall. You will view him and the agents of his iniquity no longer satisfied with victims in detail: they now murder in mass, and, in the words of Racine,

I shall in the course of a fortnight send you a his­tory of the ast scenes of this foul tragedy, and give [Page 131] you such a detail; as can only be learnt on the spot, of the events which produced the revolution of the 9th of Thermidor, and of the incidents which on that memorable night determined the fate of the French republic.

In the mean time, you will not exclaim as the Roman poet did with respect to religion, "Of so many evils could Liberty have been the cause!" It is, alas! the condition of our uninstructed nature, that nations like individuals should acquire wisdom only in the school of experience; and though the page of history, which according to Lord Boling-broke is "philosophy teaching by example," be open before us, we are too presumptuous, or too careless, to heed or apply the lesson. I need not make use of any reasoning to convince you that Li­berty is innocent of the outrages committed under its borrowed sanction; for though we might from some momentary impulse blaspheme its name, as Lucretius did that of religion, we must be persuad­ed that neither religion nor liberty is chargeable with the crimes committed by tyranny or supersti­tion. As no weeds are more pernicious than those which arise in that soil from which good fruit alone should have sprung, so no crimes have exceeded those which the tyrant and the fanatic have com­mitted in the name of Freedom, the guardian angel of the happiness of mankind, and in that of the Be­ing "whose tender mercies are over all his works."

I must not conclude without informing you, that the dark picture which you have been contemplating is relieved by a bright and soothing perspective. The past seems like one of those frightful dreams which presents to the disturbed spirit phantoms of undescribable horror, and "deeds without a name;" awakened from which, we hail with rapture the cheering beams of the morning, and anticipate the [Page 132] meridian lustre of the day. The 9th of Th [...]midor has established the republic; and nothing now re­mains but to arrange its for [...]s. Its internal situa­tion will no more offer a hideous contrast to its ex­ternal victories. The guilty commune of Paris exists no longer; the den of the Jacobins is closed; and the whole nation, roused into a sense of its dan­ger by the terrible lesson it has been taught, can be oppressed no more. There scarcely exists a family or an individual in France, that has not been be­reaved by tyranny of some dear relation, some cho­sen friend, who seems from the grave to call upon them with a warning voice to watch over the liber­ties of their country. The love of public virtue in the people of France is now blended with all the sympathies and affections of their natures: it is heard in the sighs of general mourning; it speaks in the tears of the widow and the orphan; and is not only imprinted by every argument that can render it sacred and durable on the understanding, but clings to every feeling of the heart.

WHILE far along the moral horizon of France the tempest became every hour more black and tur­bulent, the spring, earlier and more profuse of graces than in the climate of England, arose in its un­sullied freshness, and formed a contrast at which hu­manity sickened. The lovely environs of Paris are [Page 133] not, like those of London, so encumbered with houses and buildings that you must travel ten or twelve miles from town to find the country, but, the moment you have passed the barriers of the city, present you with all the charming variety of vine-clad hills, and fields, and woods, and lawns. Im­mediately after our release from prison we quitted our apartments in the centre of the town, and tried to shelter ourselves from observation in an habitation situated in the most remote part of the fauxbourg Germain. From thence a few minutes walk led us to the country. But we no longer dared, as we had done the preceeding year, to forget awhile the horrors of our situation by wandering occasionally amidst the noble parks of St. Cloud, the wild woods of Meudon, or the elegant gardens of Bellevue, all within an hour's ride of Paris. Those seats, once the residence of fallen royalty, were now haunted by vulgar despots, by revolutionary commissaries, by spies of the police, and sometimes by the sanguinary decemvirs themselves. Often they held their fes­tive orgies in those scenes of beauty, where they dared to cast their polluting glance on nature, and tread with profane steps her hallowed recesses. Even the revolutionary jury used sometimes on a decadi, the only day of suspension from their work of death, to go to Marly or Versailles; and, steep­ed as they were to the very lips in blood, without being haunted by the mangled spectres of those whom they had murdered the preceding day, they saw nature in her most benign aspect, pleading the cause of humanity and mercy, and returned to feast upon the groans of those whom they were to mur­der on the morrow.

Those regions of decorated beauty being now forbidden ground, we confined our walks to some pasturage lands near the town, which were inter­spersed [Page 134] with a few scattered hamlets, and skirted by hills, and were so unfrequented, that we heard no sounds except the sheep-bell, and the nightingales, and saw no human figure but an old peasant with a white beard, who together with a large black dog took care of the flock. It was in these walks that the soul, which the scenes of Paris petrified with terror, melted at the view of the soothing land­scape, and that the eye was lifted up to heaven with tears of resignation mingled with hope. I have no words to paint the strong feeling of reluctance with which I always returned from our walks to Paris, that den of carnage, that slaughter-house of man. How I envied the peasant his lonely hut! for I had now almost lost the idea of social happiness. My disturbed imagination divided the communities of men but into two classes, the oppressor and the op­pressed; and peace seemed only to exist with soli­tude.

On the 15th of Germinal (the beginning of April,) the committee of public safety, or rather of public extermination, caused a law to be passed, or­dering all the former nobility and strangers to leave Paris within ten days, under the penalty of being put out of the law; which meant, that if found in Paris after that period, they were to be led to the scaffold without a trial, as soon as their persons were identified. This law, to which my family and my­self were subject, was a part of the plan of general proscription that Robespierre had formed against no­bles and foreigners; and which he was now impa­tient to put in force. We were ordered by the de­cree, after choosing the place of our retreat, to pre­sent ourselves at the revolutionary committee of our respective sections, who delivered to each of us not a passport, but what was called a pass, on which was written a declaration that we left Paris [Page 135] in conformity to the law of the 26th of Germinal. Thus we were condemned to wander into the coun­try with this pass, which was the mark of Cain up­on our foreheads, and which under pain of impri­sonment we were to deposit at the municipality where we bent our course; and we were also con­demned to present ourselves every twenty-four hours before the municipality, and inscribe our names on a list, which was to be dispatched every decade to the committee of public safety. And lest the country municipalities should mistake the intentions of the committee, and treat particular individuals with le­nity upon their producing testimonies of their at­tachment to the cause of the revolution, these de­voted victims were ordered by a decree to burn every certificate of civism of which they might happen to be in possession. We chose for the place of our re­treat a little village half a mile distant from Marly, and with hearts overwhelmed with anguish bade adieu to my sister, who, being married to a French­man, was exempted from the law; and we were once more driven from our home, not to return un­der the penalty of death. Our neighbours came weeping to our gate to take leave of us; and the poor, who were the only class which now dared to utter a complaint, murmured loudly at the injustice of the decree. We were obliged to pass the square of the revolution, where we saw the guillotine erect­ed, the crowd assembled for the bloody tragedy, and the gens d'armes on horseback, followed by vic­tims who were to be sacrificed, entering the square. Such was the daily spectacle which had succeeded the painted shows, the itinerant theatres, the moun­tebank, the dance, the song, the shifting scenes of harmless gaiety, which used to attract the cheerful crowd as they passed from the Thuilleries to the Champs Elisées.

[Page 136] When we reached the barrier we were stopped by a concourse of carriages filled with former no­bles, and were obliged to wait till our passes were examined in our turn. The procession at the gate was singular and affecting. Most of the fugitives having, like ourselves, deferred their departure till the last day, and it being the forfeiture of our heads to be found in Paris the day following, the demand for carriages was so great, and the price exacted by those who let them out, and who knew the urgency of the case, so exorbitant, that a coach or chariot was a luxury which fell only to the lot of a favour­ed few. The greater number were furnished with cabriolets, which seemed from their tottering con­dition somewhat emblematical of decayed nobility; and many who found even these crazy vehicles too costly, journeyed in the carts which transported their furniture, seated upon the chairs they were convey­ing to their new abodes.

We reached our little dwelling at the hour of sun-set. The hills were fringed with clouds, which still reflected the fading colours of the day; the woods were in deep shadow; a soft veil was thrown over nature, and objects indistinctly seen, were de­corated by imagination with those graces which were most congenial to the feelings of the moment. The air was full of delicious fragrance, and the stillness of the scene was only disturbed by sounds the most soothing in nature, the soft rustling of the leaves, or the plaintive notes of the wood-pigeon. The tears which the spectacle of the guillotine had petrified with horror, now flowed again with melan­choly luxury. Our habitation was situated within a few paces of the noble park of Marly; and the de­serted alleys overgrown with long grass—the en­cumbering fragments of rock, over which once fell the mimic cascades, whose streams no longer mur­mur— [Page 137] the piles of marble which once formed the bed of crystal basons—the scattered machinery of the jets d'eaux, whose sources are dried—the fallen statues—the defaced symbols of feudality—the weeds springing between the stone steps of the as­cent to the deserted palace—the cobwebbed win­dows of the gay pavillions, were all in union with that pensiveness of mind which our present circum­stances naturally excited. And here, where we could see nothing of Paris but the distant dome of the Pantheon, we should have been less unhappy, if we had not too well known that the committee of public safety had not sent nobles and foreigners into the country to enjoy the freshness of rural gales, or the beauty of the opening spring, but as the first step towards a general proscription; and as we pass­ed every evening through the park of Marly, in order to appear before the municipality, that appal­ling idea "breathed a browner horror over the woods." We were again rescued from the gene­ral danger by the two benevolent commissaries of the revolutionary committee of our section, who when they came to conduct us to prison had treated us with so much gentleness, who had afterwards re­claimed us of the administration of police, and who now, unsolicited and even unasked, went to the committee of public safety, declared they would answer for us with their lives, and caused us to be put into requisition; a form which enabled us to re­turn to Paris, and thus snatched us from the class of the suspected and the proscribed. To their huma­nity we probably owe our existence; and I shall ever recollect with gratitude that noble courage which led them amidst the cruel impulse of revolu­tionary government, the movement of which was accelerated as it went on, to pause and succour the unfortunate. I have the satisfaction of adding, that [Page 138] those commissaries are now at liberty on account of their general good conduct, while scarcely any other members of revolutionary committees have escaped imprisonment. Our benefactors have indeed a right to this honourable exception; who, although appointed the immediate agents of terror, the order of the day, regulated their actions by the eternal code of humanity.

A short time before our departure from Paris, the guillotine, upon which so many innocent vic­tims had been sacrificed, for once streamed with the blood of the guilty:

One of the secrets of Robespierre's government was to employ as the step-ladders of his ambition men whose characters were marked with opprobri­um, or stained with crimes. Such men were best suited to his purpose; since they were not likely to pause in the execution of his orders, depending upon his favour, perhaps, for shelter from legal punish­ment; and when they had fulfilled the part he al­lotted them, and he no longer stood in need of their agency, he had sufficient address to lead them to make some extravagant proposition, which he de­nominated ultra-revolutionary, and for which he sent them to the scaffold, even with the approbation of the public. Such was the sentiment excited by the execution of Hebert, one of the chiefs of the municipality of Paris, whose arrest by the commis­sion of twelve, previously to the thirty-first of May, had served the conspirators as the signal for ringing that fatal tocsin which was the knell of liberty. Hebert was the man who upon the trial of Marie [Page 139] Antoinette outraged all the feelings of nature, by an accusation which wrung from her bursting heart that affecting appeal to every mother who was pre­sent. It was he who loaded her with the indignity of gross abuse, and poured the bitterness of insult into the cup of death. He soon after acted again at the revolutionary tribunal the part of evidence against the twenty-one; those virtuous patriots, the Sidneys and the Russels of their country, whose martyrdom has been avenged, not as they wished, but as they predicted, by scenes of universal desola­tion and despair.

Hebert was commonly called Pere du Chesne, on account of a daily paper he published, bearing that title. In this paper he professed to tread in the steps of Marat, and indeed he proved himself worthy to be his lineal successor. He had the same insatiable thirst of blood; he demanded with the same vehe­mence the heads of all conspirators, nobles, bank­ers, writers and merchants, the faction of federa­lists, and the faction of Pitt and Cobourg. Those mild demands were breathed in the language of the lowest vulgar: every line was enforced by an oath, and every period rounded by an imprecation. Ca­mille Desmoulins, after drawing the character of this journal, concluded by saying that it was writ­ten "pour faire les délices de Coblentz, et le seul espoir de Pitt^*." Such was Hebert! who having succeeded with his colleagues of the municipality in accomplishing what they called the revolution of the 31st of May, felt with indignation that his re­volutionary genius was forced to bend before the genius of Robespierre, and determined to immor­talize the month of Ventose by a new revolution.

They had hitherto met with such splendid success [Page 140] in insurrection, that they began to think it was no very difficult enterprise, now that the routine was known. It was but to ring the tocsin, beat the ge­nerale, put the city under arms, take the direction of the military force, overthrow the committee of public safety, and seize the reins of government. The ideas of March, however, proved as fatal to the dominion of the red cap, as they had hereto­fore done to that of the purple robe. In vain He­bert mounted the tribune at the Cordeliers, asserted that tyranny existed, and caused a black veil to be thrown over the table of the rights of man—in vain the section of Marat declared itself in insurrec­tion: the other sections of Paris were of opinion, that to go from the committee of public safety to the municipality was flying from Scylla to Charyb­dis; and though all France groaned under the ty­ranny of the committee, there was little hope that the wounds of the bleeding country would be healed by men who were the leaders of massacre, and the preachers of the agrarian law. The Pari­sians therefore applauded the decree which sent Hebert and twenty of his co-adjutors in revolution­ary crimes to that sanguinary tribunal, which, af­ter a mockery of trial, ordered them to execution, "and bade the cruel feel the pains they gave." There appeared so much of retribution in the cir­cumstances that attended the death of Hebert and his colleagues, that it seemed as if Heaven were visibly stretching forth its arm to punish the guilty. For it is remarkable enough, that they were not tried for any of the multiplied crimes they had com­mitted, but for having asserted that tyranny exist­ed: a sacred truth which every heart swelled to acknowledge, though no lips but theirs had dared to give it utterance.—The behaviour of Hebert and his associates upon the approach of death was [Page 141] far different from that of the innocent sufferers who had consciences void of reproach. Along those subterraneous galleries where all the light which entered was "darkness visible," terrific phantoms covered with blood seemed to pursue their steps, and with menacing looks prepare to drag them to abysses of deeper horror: they fancied they saw the headless trunks of murdered victims encumbering the ground; they heard human groans and shrieks founding hollow through the vaulted passages; while the knife of the guillotine, like Macbeth's aërial dagger, hung suspended before their affrighted ima­gination. Anacharsis Clootz, a Prussian baron and a member of the national convention, known by the title which he conferred upon himself, of ora­tor of the human race, suffered death with this band of ruffians. He was also a preacher of blood; but, cruelty being the order of the day, what most distinguished him from others was not the ferocity of his principles, but the chimeras of his imagination. His publications which were numerous, were always dated "Paris, chef lieu du globe ^*;" and he seriously proposed, that as soon as all the potentates of the earth were overthrown, an event of which he had a bird's eye view from the beginning of the French revolution, the people of every nation should send their representatives to Paris, who should be honoured with seats in the na­tional assembly of France, and there form an uni­versal republic, of which France should be the cen­tre, and the other kingdoms of the world the de­partments. He proposed for instance, that as soon as the deputies of the English nation arrived, Eng­land should take the name of le departement de la Tamise^†.

[Page 142] Soon after the memorable 10th of August, Ana­charsis marched to the bar of the legislative assem­bly at the head of a number of men he had hired to represent the natives of every quarter of the globe; and who were clad in the respective dresses of the people they personated. This embassy of the hu­man race declared, by the organ of their common orator Anacharsis, their admiration of the French republic, and their attachment to its cause. The conclusion of this drama however was less splen­did than the opening scene at the bar of the con­vention; for the next morning the door of Ana­charsis was beset with Italians, Germans, Swedes, Poles, Jews, Turks and Russians, clamorously de­manding to be paid: but none were more noisy in their vociferations than a Calmuck Tartar, and an Indian of the banks of the Ohio, who menaced their orator with the vengeance of the whole faux­bourg of St. Antoine, if he refused to pay them for the loss of their day's labour, and the hire of their dresses. Anacharsis, after much altercation, came to a compromise with the deputation of the human race, who departed not very well satisfied with their Champion.—Clootz met death with more firmness than might have been expected from his general character, and his atheistical principles. Hebert and his colleagues passed their time, when together, like the fallen spirits in Milton, in mu­tual accusation, till Clootz with a loud voice recited to them those well known lines:

This citation had the effect he wished: they be­came reconciled to each other; and Clootz, whose [Page 143] only apprehension was lest any of them should die in religious belief, preached atheism to them till their last sigh.

The death of Hebert was the signal for throw­ing off the hideous masquerade of sansculottism, in which all the world had been arrayed during the winter, in submissive deference to his interpreta­tion of equality. Immediately after his execution, the scene suddenly changed: black wigs, red caps, sailor's jackets, and pantaloons were cast aside; and the eye was refreshed with the sight of combed locks, clean linen, and decent apparel;—while the women, who for some months had reluctantly bound up their hair beneath the round cap of the peasant, now unfolded their tresses, perfumed and powdered, to the vernal gales, and decorated in whatever man­ner they thought proper, provided the national cockade formed one of their ornaments.

THE execution of Hebert and his colleagues was soon followed by that of a considerable num­ber of the mountain deputies, among whom were Danton and Camille Desmoulins, names not un­known to fame in the annals of the revolution. Danton had acted a distinguished part on the po­litical theatre, before Robespierre had been heard of; and Camille Desmoulins, on the day preceding the taking of the Bastille, had the glory of being the first man in France who placed the national cockade in his hat, and called upon his fellow-citi­zens [Page 144] to shake off the fetters of despotism. And surely it was glorious to be a leader of the revolu­tion; for, although the sun of liberty, like the orb of day when seen through opposing mists, has been turned into blood, its dawning beams were radiant, and it will again shake off the foul vapours that have hung around it, and spread that insul [...]ied light which exhilarates all nature.

Robespierre was not deterred from marking Dan­ton and Camille Desmoulins as his victims, by the consideration that Danton had saved him at the mo­ment when Louvet's representation of his crimes on the 2d of September had so strongly excited the indignation of the convention, that a decree of ac­cusation was on the point of being hurled against him; and that Camille Desmoulins had been his school-fellow and his friend. But the tyrant felt that Danton was too "near the throne;" and Ca­mille Desmoulins had awakened all his fury by an appeal which he made to the people, in a paper called the "Old Cordelier," and which found an echo in every heart. The excessive severity of the revolutionary law against the suspected had excited Desmoulin's indignation; and in a happy parallel between the capricious tyrannies of the Roman em­perors and those of the committees of government^*, he expanded the glowing precision of Tacitus into charges so extremely ludicrous, that they honoured lord Shaftesbury's axiom, that ridicule is the test of truth. This publication made some atonement to humanity for the mischiefs which his former writ­ing, had produced; above all, that cruel pleasantry upon the party of the Gironde, on which their act of accusation was founded. The atonement came too late; tyranny was established; and Camille [Page 145] Desmoulins perished, to use his own words, "for having shed one tear over the unhappy."

Several other deputies suffered at the same time; and Camille Desmoulins observed when he was go­ing to the scaffold, "Robespierre fait des coups percés de la convention," alluding to the mode of cutting down the forests in France by portions, which are marked to be hewn at certain periods. The person most regretted among the deputies who now perished was Philipeaux, who having been sent on a mission to the Vendée, made known at his re­turn the horrors of which he had been a witness, and was dragged to the scaffold for having dared to lift up the veil which the conspirators had thrown over their crimes. Fabre d'Eglantine, who had been one of the founders of the revolutionary government and auxiliary of Robespierre, perished unlament­ed. He possessed fine talents for literature, and had written a celebrated comedy, entitled Philinthe. It was observed, that he had carried the spirit of in­trigue which prevailed in his comedy into the part he had acted as legislator. The love of fame, the prevailing passion of authors, he felt strong in death; and all his thoughts seemed fixed upon a comedy of five acts, which he had deposited at the committee of public safety, and of which he was afraid Bil­laud Varennes would take the credit. Fabre d'Eg­lantine was also the author of the new French ca­lendar. Danton, while at the Conciergerie, often conversed with the prisoners across the bars of his dungeon. He seemed ashamed of having been duped by Robespierre, with whom, by means of a com­mon friend, he had an interview a few days before he was arrested, in order that they might come to an explanation. Danton, after a long conversation, finding that he was unable to move the implacable Robespierre, who listened to him with a look of [Page 146] insulting malignity, shed some tears, and left the room, saying, "Je vois que mon sort est décidé, mais ma mort sera votre ruine^*." This prediction was fulfilled; for no sooner had Robespierre rid him­self of all his rivals than he pressed forward with a more rapid course towards his own destruction. Dan­ton in his dungeon expatiated continually on the charms of nature, on the beauties of rural scenery, and the peace of rural shades. "In revolutions," cried he, "the power always remains in the hands of vil­lains. It is better to be a poor fisherman than to go­vern men. Those fools! they will cry 'Long live the republic!' on seeing me pass to the scaffold.—This day last year I caused the revolutionary tribunal to be instituted. I ask pardon of God and of men; it was not that it should become the scourge of humanity; it was to prevent the renewal of the massacres of Sep­tember." Camille Desmoulins and Danton, who had both possessed considerable powers of eloquence, defended themselves at the tribunal with so lofty a spirit, and treated their judges with so much dis­dain, that at length irritated by their contempt and the sallies of their wit, and impatient at their per­severance in vindicating themselves when it was determined they should die, the public accuser sent a letter to the convention, informing them that the prisoners were in a state of revolt against the tribu­nal. The committee of public safety caused a de­cree to be passed which put them out of the law, and sent instantly to execution all such of the accused as dared to insult their judges. In vain Danton called upon Barrere, upon Billaud Varennes, and upon other members of the committee of public safety to appear in evidence. Danton was left to [Page 147] his fate, and sent with his colleagues to execution. At the gate of the Conciergerie, while the execu­tioner was placing the condemned deputies in the carts, Danton amused the crowd who were looking on by many sportive observations. He said to Fa­bre d'Eglantine, who was a poet, "Eh bien, nous deviendrons tous poetes, nous allons tous faire des vers^*." On his way to the scaffold his head was bare, and many persons were struck with its resem­blance to the medals of Socrates. He behaved with remarkable firmness, conversing with those who were placed in the same cast, and sometimes answering the cries of the populace by looks of strong indignation. When he was tied to the plank he cast his eyes upwards to the fatal knife, and his countenance and figure assumed an expression of magnanimity with which the spectators were deeply penetrated.

A proof of the horrible oppression under which we groaned, was, that we lamented the fate of Danton—of Danton, the minister of justice on the 2d of September, and one of the murderers of liberty on the 31st of May! Yet with all these crimes upon his head, Danton still possessed some human affections: his mind was still awake to some of the sensibilities of our nature; his temper was frank and social, and humanity in despair leant up­on him as a sort of refuge from its worst oppressor [Page 148] A week after the death of Camille Desmoulins, his wife, a charming woman of twenty-three years of age, was led to the scaffold. For her fate no eye except those of her barbarous judges refused a tear. Her execution forms an epocha in the annals of the revolutionary government; since on that occasion, for the first time, a conspiracy supposed in a prison became the pretext for murder, and multitudes af­terwards perished the victims of that fatal inven­tion. Camille Desmoulins was in habits of friend­ship with Arthur Dillon, an Irish general, who had bravely defended the pass in the forest of Argonne against the Prussian army, and who held the highest rank in the service of the republic. Soon after the the 31st of May, he was arrested with multitudes soupçonnés d'être suspects ^*, and was confined in the prison of the Luxembourg. His hopes of regain­ing his liberty rested upon the influence of his friend Camille Desmoulins, and he was deeply affected by the intelligence of his being sent to the revolutionary tribunal. In his affliction he made use of some imprudent expressions to a fellow prisoner, and seemed to flatter himself with the hope that the people would not suffer such a patriot as Desmoulins to perish. The wretch to whom Dil­lon confided these sentiments had the atrocity to write a denunciation against him to the committee of general safety, with the view of purchasing his own freedom by the life of his unfortunate compa­nion. Dillon had also, a few days before Des­moulins perished, written a letter to his wife, ex­pressing his sympathy in her misfortunes, and his hope that the innocence of her husband would yet triumph. In this letter Dillon enclosed three thou­sand livres. All these circumstances were made known to the committee; and a few days after the [Page 149] execution of Desmoulins, Dillon, the turnkey to whom he had offered the letter, and Madame Des­moulins in the first transports of grief upon the loss of a husband whom she tenderly loved, were sent by an order of the committee to the Concier­gerie to take their trial at the revolutionary tribu­nal. It appeared upon the trial that the turnkey had refused to take the letter; upon which Dillon had slipt it into his pocket; which the turnkey perceiving, returned it to him immediately, and Dillon tore it in pieces. Madame Desmoulins, it was therefore clear, had never received the letter or the three thousand livres enclosed. She an­swered the interrogatories of her judges with the candour of innocence, and the sweet complacency of her manner sensibly affected the spectators. Those assassins in the robes of justice condemned Dillon to die as the author of a conspiracy in the prisons against the security of the French people; the turnkey was sent to death for having had suffi­cient humanity not to make a declaration to the police of Dillon's proposition respecting the letter; and the unfortunate Madame Desmoulins was dragged to the scaffold because a letter was written to her which it was clearly proved had never been sent. In the first anguish of separation from the object of our affections, death ceases to be an evil; and Madame Desmoulins deplored her husband too tenderly to regret that they were going to be re­united in a happier state of existence. She dressed herself in white, and with some care; and went with a placid smile upon her countenance to exe­tion, conversing with her companions in the cart, particularly with the wife of Hebert, who was put to death at the same time, and met her fate with equal firmness. It was one of the singular chances of these revolutionary moments, that Camille Des­moulins [Page 150] who with the pointed shafts of his wit had overthrown the idol of the populace Hebert, perished himself but a fortnight later; and that his own wife and the wife of Hebert, seated on the same stone in the Conciergere, deplored their mu­tual loss, and were led together to the scaffold. The people, as Madame Desmoulins passed along the streets to execution, could not resist uttering exclamations of pity and admiration. "Comme elle est belle! elle a l'air si doux! quel dommage qu'elle va périr^*!" At the foot of the scaffold she embraced the wife of Hebert, bade her compa­nions in the cart farewell, and resigned herself to the executioner with the serenity of an angel. Dillon went to death with great composure, and, as he passed to execution, bowed to a friend of his and mine whom he saw in the street. Far differ­ent from the meek and placid resignation with which Madame Desmoulins made the sacrifice of life in all its bloom and freshness, was the behaviour of Chaumette procureur of the commune, and Go­bet the archbishop of Paris, who perished at the same time. Their aspect testified that death ap­peared to their perturbed spirits, not in the form he wears to suffering innocence, to whom he comes the messenger of peace, but armed with all his stings, and clad in all his terrors.

Chaumette, one of the leaders of the conspiracy of the 31st of May, saw himself dragged to the scaffold by the man whom he had powerfully con­tributed to raise to supreme eminence, and for a measure by which he expected to confirm his own popularity, which was overthrowing the altars of the catholic church. And Gobet, the archbishop [Page 151] of Paris, a weak old man, whom Chaumette and Anacharsis Clootz had persuaded to go with the municipality to the bar of the convention, and at sixty-seven years of age declare that the profession of his life had been imposture, that he renounced the christian faith and his ecclesiastical dignity, and demanded that the churches consecrated to re­ligious worship should henceforth become the tem­ples of Reason, was punished for his apostacy with death. Robespierre embraced the new doc­trine till the church was despoiled of all the trea­sures with which superstition had enriched it, and soon after abolished the decadary feasts of the god­dess Reason, and sent her high priests Gobet and Chaumette to the guillotine. One of the few in­stances of fortitude in death exemplified by persons who had neither the consciousness of innocence nor the sentiment of sympathy to sooth their minds in so severe a trial, was that of the former duke of Orleans, in whose life nothing was worthy of ap­plause except his manner of leaving it. The re­membrance of the vote he had given against his unfortunate relation Lewis XVI. from motives of personal vengeance and ambition, could not but gnaw upon his heart, and depress his spirit, and must have been mingled not only with a feeling of indignation against the wretches who made him suffer upon false pretences, but with all the anguish of remorse for having joined their party; by which act of debasement he had incurred not only guilt, but its speedy punishment. Yet notwithstanding such reflections could not fail to embitter his last moments, he went to execution with a calm dig­nity worthy of a better mind. Nor did he gratify the populace by betraying any emotion when the cart in which he was placed stopped for ten mi­nutes before the gate of the Palais-Royal, the scene [Page 152] of a life of luxurious pleasures. He looked at the building with apparent unconcern; and whatever pangs of recollection might struggle at his heart, his behaviour expressed no sentiment but that of mag­nanimity till he expired.

The resignation and courage with which the victims of this cruel tyranny in general resigned life were truly admirable. Many young persons, after receiving their act of accusation, composed verses written with a pencil at the table where they partook their last repast with their fellow-pri­soners. The following, written by a young man of twenty-four years of age, to his mistress, the night before his execution, are simple and affecting:

Among the crowds who were led to the guillo­tine, two persons only displayed strong marks of dismay and terror. One of these persons was Ma­dame du Barry, the mistress of Lewis XV. She had been induced to leave England, where she passed some time after the revolution, and return to France, in order to secure her property; and soon after the 31 of May was led from her beau­tiful pavillion at Lucienne, to a prison in Paris, by one of the agents of terrorism, who, I am sorry to add, was an Englishman. The prisons, to use a French mode of expression, in a short time became the anti-chambers of the scaffold; and Madame du Barry's mind was impressed strongly with a presage of her fate. Whenever the door of her chamber [Page 154] in the prison opened, she was seized with violent trembling, and sometimes with fainting fits. At length the fatal summons to the revolutionary tri­bunal arrived. The chief evidence against her was a negro slave, whom she had reared from an infant, and to whom she was so much attached, that he was generally to be found in her apart­ments; and one day Lewis XV. sportively cre­ated him governor of Lucienne, with a pension of six hundred livers a year, which this viper, who stung the bosom that cherished him, still en­joys.

One of the most flagrant testimonies which were produced of Madame du Barry's counter-revolutionary principles was Mr. Pitt's picture, which she said had been given to her the night before her departure from London by Lord Thur­low. This unfortunate woman was condemned to die; and a person of my acquaintance who was at that time a prisoner in the Conciergerie told me, that she was deluded with the promise of pardon provided she would discover the spot where she ac­knowledged that some treasures were concealed; but no sooner were they found, than she was or­dered to execution. During her passage thither she appeared almost dead, and leaned her head upon the shoulder of the executioner. But when she reached the square of the revolution, the sight of the instrument of death rallied her sinking spirits, and called forth the most cruel agonies of reluc­tant nature. She rent the air with her shrieks, and was deaf to the expostulations of Noil, a de­puty of the Gironde who perished at the same time, and who encouraged her to resign herself to a fate which was inevitable. Her convulsed frame ac­quired extraordinary strength: she struggled with her executioners, and, after a conflict at which [Page 155] humanity shudders, was forced to undergo the fatal stroke, and released from frantic desperation.

With Madame du Barry perished the banker Vanderuyver, and his two sons, accused of being her accomplices in sending money into England, and also of having aided the knights of the poniard, as they were called, in the chateau of the Thuil­leries on the memorable 10th of August, although twenty-five witnesses attended to prove that Van­deruyver had not quitted his house during the whole of that day. But those who first appeared in his favour being arrested as they went out of court, the others made their escape, and left this unhappy fa­mily to their fate.

Their real crime was their great wealth, which it was thought expedient to seize, On this account bankers were the objects of particular proscription: for although the great revolutionary financier Cam­bon had one day called them all together, and fa­voured them with an harangue of considerable length upon the value of paper money, and the worthlessness of gold, which he asserted every real lover of his country ought to despise as dross, and of which he exhorted them to rid themselves as fast as possible; it was feared that in spite of this pre­cious morsel of eloquence, an obstinate attachment to metallic coin still lurked in the hearts of the bankers, who were for the most part punished for this groveling predilection with death. Of this number was Laborde, once the banker of the court, and now guilty of a revenue of two millions of livres. This respectable old man was dragged to the scaffold at seventy-six years of age, although since the first epocha of the revolution he had given un­questionable proofs of his attachment to its cause, and the magnificence of his donations were more than proportionate to his wealth. His first patrio­tic [Page 156] gift was twenty thousand louis; he had sent all the fine horses with which his stables were filled to the municipality; he had lodged troops of na­tional guards at his house; and above all, he had been the father of the country where his fine seat of Meriville was placed. The year before his death I had passed some very agreeable days at that noble mansion, where strangers properly recommended were received and entertained with the most splen­did hospitality. The pleasure-grounds had been formed in a flat situation unfavourable to beauty. With immense labour and expence pastoral hills arose, and jutting rocks hung over crystal waters, or were worn into fragments by the fall of lavish cascades. A beautiful Grecian temple reared its Corinthian pillars upon a broad green ascent, and amidst the deep recesses of spreading oaks a monu­ment was erected to Captain Cook. Perhaps the decorated scenes of Meriville are somewhat too richly hung with ornaments, but in creating this blooming Eden, which was the work of years, Mons. Laborde had given employment to the whole country. For a great extent of space round his dwelling no wants were felt which his munificence was not eager to re [...]eve; and when the eye saw him, it blessed him. Nor was the good he con­ferred confined to the precincts of his own posses­sions. The Paris markets were often supplied with such articles of living as were most wanted, at the very time when its owner was languishing in prison. With tears and lamentations his tenants heard of his confinement. Whole villages and mu­nicipalities crowded to the bar of the convention, and claimed the enlargment of their common be­nefactor, but in vain. The rich spoils of his cha­teau were too tempting to be resisted, the seizure of his immense property was an expedient of fi­nance, [Page 157] and as a preliminary step to its confiscation he was put to death.

I have mentioned among the multitudes who perished, that Madame du Barry and one other person only were remarked for having betrayed symptoms of weakness and terror in their last mo­ments. You will be surprised to hear that this person was general Custine.

This unfortunate general, although accustomed to look upon death with intrepidity in the ranks of battle, shrunk from it in a form of horror for which he was unprepared. His son, an amiable and accomplished young man, who suffered a few months after as the accomplice of his father, be­cause he had given proofs of filial affection, be­haved with admirable courage. I shall transcribe a letter which he sent to his wife on the day of his execution^*.

This interesting young woman had the courage, during the trial of her father-in-law the general, to sit at his feet at the tribunal, to wipe the damps from his brow, to animate his failing spirits, and calm the agitation of his mind by her soothing at­tentions. After seeing her husband dragged to the scaffold, she was thrown into prison, from which she was one of the last persons released.

Early in the spring Madame Elizabeth was brought before the revolutionary tribunal. The only crime that could be imputed to her was that she was the sister of a king, and had shewn that stedfast fidelity to her brother, which in generous [Page 158] minds, whatever might be their political opinions, would have excited sentiments of esteem and admi­ration. She had taken no part in those fatal schemes of crooked policy, which, by seeking to seize once more that despotic power which the will of a migh­ty nation had torn from its grasp, lost that limited empire, and that circumscribed dominion of which it might still have held possession. But whatever were the errors of Louis XVI. or the vices of Marie Antoinette, no blame was by any party im­puted to the princess Elizabeth. She had neither shared in the intrigues or the licentiousness of the court. All that was known of her in prosperity was her virtuous manners, and her charitable dis­position; and in adversity, her unshaken friendship for her brother, and her piety and resignation to God. She had suffered not only the most severe extremes of calamity, but all those indignities, wants, and hardships, which could give misfortune a keener edge; for, during the tyranny of Robe­spierre, the forms of decency which had till then been observed were altogether disregarded. She, who had been used to the long train of attendants of the most splendid court of Europe, was com­pelled to perform the most menial offices herself; to dress her scanty meal, and to sweep the floor of her prison. In such circumstances, with no ray of hope to cheer the gloomy towers where she was immured, except that hope which was fixed on a better state of existence—she probably looked upon death as her most soothing refuge, and therefore met it with tranquillity and firmness. I shall transcribe her examination at the revolutionary tri­bunal, not only as a proof of the calmness and dig­nity with which she answered the interrogatories of her barbarous judges, but also as a specimen of the manner in which the trials at this sanguinary court [Page 159] were conducted even before the period arrived when all enquiry, all form was laid aside.

IT would require the pencil of a master to trace in all its dark colouring that picture of calamity and horror which Paris presented at this period. A deep and silent gloom pervaded that city, where heretofore every heart bounded with gaiety, and eve­ry [Page 165] eye sparkled with delight. The citizens in ge­neral saw with stupefied terror those processions of death which daily encumbered the streets, and the feelings of sympathy and indignation were repelled by the sense of that personal danger from which no individual was secure. Even in his own habitation, and in the bosom of his family, no man dared to utter a complaint but in anxious whispers, lest a servant should over-hear the forbidden expostula­tions of humanity, and denounce him as a counter-revolutionist. Many persons wearied of spectacles of horror put an end to their existence; and some who desired to die, but shrunk from giving them­selves the stroke of death, took measures to be sent before the revolutionary tribunal, where they knew assassins were ever ready. The usual means em­ployed for this purpose was the cry of "Vive le [...]oi!" words which many young women who had lost their parents or their lovers on the scaffold re­peated in the phrensy of despair, and found them, as they wished, a passport to the tomb. Well might the people of France have exclaimed in the words of our divine poet,

"Alas poor country, almost afraid to know it­self! It cannot be called our mother, but our grave, where nothing, but who knows nothing, is once seen to smile; where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air are made, not marked where vio­lent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy: the dead man's knell is there scarce asked for whom; and good men's lives expire before the flowers in their caps, dying or ere they sicken."—MACBETH.

The beginning of the month of Prairial, a man of the name of Admiral formed the design of assas­sinating Robespierre and Collot d'Herbois: he fail­ed in the attempt, was seized, and sent to the Con­ciergerie. A few days after Amée Cecile Renaud, [Page 166] a girl of nineteen years of age, whose sensibility it appears was singularly affected by the scenes which were passing before her, and whose imagina­tion perhaps was somewhat disordered by those ter­rible impressions, had the courage, while an armed nation bowed before its assassins, to enter alone and unarmed the monster's den, and, as it would seem, with the intention, at the expence of life, to point out to her countrymen the tyrant under whom they groaned. Cecile Renaud went one morning to Robespierre's house, and enquired if he was at home. She was answered in the negative; and being asked what she wanted, replied that she came to see what sort of thing was a tyrant. Upon this declaration she was instantly led to the committee of general safety, and went through a long examination. She again declared with the same simplicity, that she had only gone because she wanted to see a tyrant; and upon being searched, no offensive weapon was found upon her, and all that was contained in a little bundle which she held under her arm was a change of linen, with which she said she had provided herself, knowing she should want it in prison. The conduct of this heroic young woman furnished the tyrants with an oppor­tunity of murder too favourable to be neglected. They instantly proclaimed that a vast plan of con­spiracy against the lives of those renowned patriots Collot d'Herbois and Robespierre had been formed by traitors within the prisons, and traitors without.

The father, mother and aunt of Cecile Renaud were led with herself to the Conciergerie, where she was again interrogated, and threatened that her whole family should perish with her, if she did not confess her intention of assassinating Robespierre. She repeated what she had said at the committee; and added, that they might put her to death if they [Page 167] thought proper, but, if she deserved to die, it was not for any intention to assassinate, but for her anti-republican sentiments. Cecile Renaud, who was very young and handsome, was dressed with some care, and perhaps coquetry. Her appearance led her savage judges to invent a new species of ques­tion in order to bring her to confession. By their directions she was stripped of her own clothes, and covered with squalid and disgusting rags, in which condition she was made to appear in the council-chamber and undergo a new interrogatory, where the same menaces were repeated, and where she answered as she had done before; and with great spirit rallied her judges upon the absurdity of trying to shake her purpose by a mode of punishment so contemptible. Notwithstanding no proof of any in­tention to assassinate Robespierre could be brought against her, she together with her whole family was put to death. Her two brothers, who were fight­ing the battles of the republic on the frontiers, were ordered to be conducted to Paris, that they might share her fate; but the tyrants were too im­patient for blood to wait their arrival, and owing to this circumstance they escaped.

With Cecile Renaud perished not only her own family, but sixty-nine persons were brought from different parts and different prisons of Paris, who had never seen or heard of each other till they met at the Conciergerie, and were together dragged be­fore the tribunal, and declared guilty of one com­mon conspiracy. Their trial only lasted a suffici­ent length of time to call over their names; none of them were permitted to make any defence; the jury declared themselves satisfied in their souls and consciences; and the devoted victims, covered with the red cloaks worn by assassins on their way to ex­ecution were led to death. Among those who pe­rished [Page 168] on this occasion were madame Sainte Ama­ranthe, her daughter, who had married Monsieur Sartine the son of the ex-minister, and who was now only in her nineteenth year, and one of the most beautiful women in France, and her brother, who was but seventeen years of age. A friend of mine was confined in the same prison with this family. A servant from the outside of the walls had made madame Sainte Amaranthe understand by signs that her son-in-law, who had been confined in another prison, had perished, and that she herself was in danger. She went immediately to her daughter, and said to her, "Your husband is no more, and it is very probable that we shall follow him to-morrow to the scaffold—No tears—this is no time for soft­ness—we must prepare to meet with courage a fate that is inevitable." The next day passed, and no summons to the Conciergerie arrived; but on the night following at eleven o'clock a huissier entered madame Sainte Amaranthe's chamber, and told her she was wanted below. The call was well under­stood. "And are not we too wanted?" cried her son and daughter. "Certainly," answered the huissier. They both flew to their mother, threw their arms round her neck, and exclaimed, "We shall die together!" The next day they perished. Fouquier Tainville, the public accuser, that mon­ster, "horribly trick'd with blood of fathers, mo­thers, daughters, sons, bak'd and impasted with the parching streets," placed himself at a window of the Conciergerie close to the gate through which the prisoners passed, in order to ascend the carts which were to carry them to execution. There he feast­ed his atrocious soul with the sight of sixty-nine victims, covered with assassin's cloaks; and observ­ing among them some young women, particularly the lovely madame Sartine, walking towards the [Page 169] vehicles of death with that firmness which belongs to innocence; "How bold those women look!" cried Fouquier, enraged at their calmness; I must go and see if they shew the same effrontery on the scaffold, even if I should lose my dinner!"

Robespierre had now attained nearly the summit of his hopes; and his ignorance being equal to his vanity, he did not perceive that the few steps he had to climb before he could grasp at absolute domi­nion, must be trodden with cautious prudence; since he had advanced so far, that, if he was now compelled to descend, it could only be by a descent which would lead to death. He had destroyed his most powerful rival Danton; but his spies and emissaries, and above all his guilty conscience, told him that more of his colleagues must fall to give him perfect safety. He read in the countenances of the deputies, in the silent gloom with which his edicts were sanctioned, that new storms gathered over his head; and he prepared in conjunction with Couthon, the means of putting the lives of all those who opposed him more absolutely in his power. In the mean time he thought fit to amuse the people by a festival in honour of the Supreme Being, whose existence he had lately proclaimed, and whose name he had dared to utter with his unhallowed lips. The plan of the festival was arranged by the celebrated painter David; he, whose mind the cul­tivation of the finer arts has had no power to sof­ten; who, not satisfied with displaying on canvass those scenes of sanguinary guilt which from the hor­rors they excite furnish fit subjects for the pencil, has contributed to give them in his bleeding coun­try "a local habitation and a name;" who, instead of cherishing that sacred flame of enlightened liberty which is connected with the sublimer powers of the imagination, was the lacquey of the tyrant [Page 170] Robespierre, and the friend of the man of blood, Ma­rat; who, ambitious of recorded disgrace, of immor­tal ignominy, debased the noblest gift of heaven, ge­nius, and employed his degraded pencil in tracing the hideous features of the monster Marat, while a groaning people were compelled to bow the knee be­fore the image he had set up; and who, at the tri­bune of the national convention, insulted all common sense and decency by a comparison which, from its audacious absurdity, excites as much ridicule as in­dignation. "Cato, Aristides, Socrates, Timoleon, Fabricius, and Phocion," exclaims the panegyrist David, "ye whose venerable lives I admire, I have not lived with you—but I have known Marat!" (blessed compensation!) "I have admired him like you, and posterity will do him justice!" Yes, David, repose with your idol upon the civic crowns, the palms and laurels won by revolutionary measures, and doubt not that posterity will do am­ple justice both to you and Marat. Posterity will in­deed be spared the task of overthrowing his altars, since they are already in the dust; and while the offences of many of our vulgar tyrants will be for­gotten with their ignoble names, David's shame will be as durable as his celebrity.

While I am upon the subject of Marat and his friend, I cannot help observing that nothing appears more strange to us in this country than the opini­ons which are formed in England of the public characters of France, not by the enemies but by the friends of the French revolution. That Bris­sot, Gaudet, Vergniaud should receive no incense of applause from those who perhaps lament that the king's castle of the bastile was overthrown, is na­tural; but when we hear Mr. Sheridan speak in the house of commons of the faction of the Gironde, and when we read in Mr. Gilbert Wakefield's an­swer [Page 171] to Mr. Paine's pamphlet his remark upon the Brissotine faction, we are filled with astonishment. They might with as much propriety talk of the faction of Sidney, of Russel, and of Hampden. Such observations are blasphemies indeed from the lovers of liberty; they who ought to pronounce with veneration the names of those illustrious mar­tyrs, who, after the most honourable struggles for their country, shed their blood upon the scaffold in its cause, with heroism worthy of the proudest days of Greece or Rome. But though the iron sceptre of revolutionary government has restrained the groans, the lamentations, of a mourning nation for the fall of its best defenders; and though the slavish pen of the Moniteur, from which Europe received French intelligence, applauded the assassins of liber­ty; though Brissot, it was asserted, had filled his coffers with English gold, while his widow was languishing with an infant at her breast, with no other nourishment than bread and water, in one of the dungeons of Robespierre, and at this moment exists with three children "steeped in poverty to the very lips;" yet with becoming pride disdaining to solicit support, till the memory of her husband has received, as it shortly will do, some mark of public atonement and public honour; history will do justice to his character—history will judge be­tween Brissot and Robespierre, between the Gi­ronde and the Mountain. History will not con­found those sanguinary and ambitious men who passed along the revolutionary horizon like baneful meteors, spreading destruction in their course, with those whose talents formed a radiant constellation in the zone of freedom, and diffused benignant beams over the hemisphere till extinguished by storms and darkness.

[Page 172] Perhaps it will not be displeasing to you to read the following sketch of Brissot, traced by Madame Roland, who was intimately acquainted with him, and who was so admirable a judge of character.

"Brissot came to visit us: I know nothing more pleasant than the first interview of those who, though connected by correspondence, have never seen each other. We look with earnestness to see if the features of the face bear any resemblance to the physiognomy of the soul, and if the figure of the person confirms the opinion which we have formed of the mind.

"The simplicity of Brissot's manners, his frank­ness, his natural negligence, seemed to me in per­fect harmony with the austerity of his principles: but I found in him a sort of lightness of mind and character which was not very consistent with the seriousness of a philosopher. This disposition always gave me uneasiness, and his enemies always took advantage of it. The more I became ac­quainted with him, the greater was my esteem. It is impossible for any one to unite a more perfect disinterestedness to a more ardent zeal for the pub­lic service, or feel with so perfect a forgetfulness of his own interest a greater desire of doing good. But his writings are more fitted than his person to effect it, because they have all the authority which reason, justice and knowledge give to literary works, while his figure, from its want of dignity, inspires no respect. He is the best of human be­ings; a good husband, a tender father, a faithful friend, a virtuous citizen. His conversation is as mild as his character is easy. Confident even to imprudence, gay and sprightly as a youth of fifteen, he was formed to live with the wise, and to be the dupe of the wicked. As a well-informed politi­cian, and studying during his whole life the differ­ent [Page 173] relations of society, and the means of procur­ing the greatest quantity of happiness for the human race, he was well acquainted with the nature of man, and altogether ignorant of the characters of men. He knew that vice existed, but he never could believe him to be a vicious man who spoke to him with an open countenance; and when he discovered such persons he treated them as fools whom he ought to pity, without taking any precau­tions against them. He could not hate: his mind, though very susceptible, had not solidity enough for so vigorous a sentiment. His knowledge was so extensive, that all literary labour was to him ex­tremely easy: and he composed a treatise with the same facility as another would copy a song: an ex­perienced eye will therefore discern in his works, together with an excellent fund of information, the hasty touches of a rapid and sometimes a slight mind. His activity, his good humour, never refusing to join in any thing which he thought useful, have given him the air of meddling in every thing; and have subjected him to animadversions as an intriguer by those who were eager to find fault. A curi­ous kind of intriguer indeed! a man who never thought of himself, or even the interest of his friends; who is as incapable as he is averse to look after his own concerns; who is no more ashamed of poverty than he is afraid of death, considering both as the usual reward of public virtues.

"I have seen him consecrating the whole of his time to the revolution, without any other motives than wishing to see the triumph of truth, and con­curring in the establishment of the public good; working diligently at his journal, which he might easily have made a good object of speculation, but contenting himself with the moderate share allowed him by his partner. His wife as modest as himself, [Page 174] with much prudence and great strength of mind, formed a more severe judgment of things. She had, since their marriage, continually turned her eyes to­wards the United States of America, as the place most suited to their taste, and their manners, and where it was easy to live with a very small income.

"Brissot had made a voyage thither, and they were on the point of their departure when the re­volution fixed him in France. As he was born at Chartres, and was the school-fellow of Pethion, who is a native of the same city, Brissot formed a still stronger attachment to him in the constituent assembly, where his knowledge and his labour were of essential service to his friend. He brought us ac­quainted with him, as well as with many other de­puties whom former acquaintance or conformity of opinion and zeal for the public good frequently call­ed together to converse on the subject. It was even agreed that they should assemble four hours a week in the evening at my house, because I was always at home, had good apartments, and was so conve­niently situated that it was not far from any of those who composed our little circle."

I cannot resist adding to this sketch the copy of a letter addressed by Brissot to Barrere, the day after the latter, from the tribune of the convention, had promised to satiate the people with Brissot's blood.

But let us leave the martyrs of liberty, and return to the polluted festival instituted by a tyrant. Da­vid, ever ready to fulfil the mandates of his master Robespierre, steps forth, marshals the procession, and, like the herald in Othello, "orders every man to put himself into triumph."

[Page 176] At this spot by David's command, the mothers are to embrace their daughters—at that, the fathers are to clasp their sons—here, the old are to bless the young, and there, the young are to kneel to the old—upon this boulevard the people are to sing—upon that, they must dance—at noon they must lis­ten in silence, and at sun-set they must rend the air with acclamations.

Ah, what was then became of those civic festi­vals which hailed the first glories of the revolution! What was become of that sublime federation of an assembled nation which had nobly shaken off its ig­nominious fetters, and exulted in its new-born freedom! What was become of those moments when no emotions were pre-ordained, no feelings measured out, no acclamations decreed; but when every bosom beat high with admiration, when every heart throbbed with enthusiastic transport, when every eye melted into tears, and the vault of heaven resounded the bursts of unpremeditated applause!

But let us not even now despair of the cause of liberty. Let us not abandon a fair and noble regi­on filled with objects which excite the thrill of ten­derness or the glow of admiration, because along the path which France has chosen serpents have lurked beneath the buds of roses, and beasts of prey have issued from the lofty woods: let us discover, if we can, a less tremendous road, but let us not renounce the land of promise.

The citizens of Paris had been invited, and the invitation amounted to a command, to decorate their houses in honour of the festival. Accordingly Paris on that morning, lighted up by brilliant sun-shine, presented the most gay and charming specta­cle imaginable. Woods had been robbed of their shade, and gardens to the extent of some leagues rifled of their sweets, in order to adorn the city. [Page 177] The walls of every house were covered with luxu­riant wreaths of oak and laurel, blended with flow­ers; civic crowns were interwoven with national ribbands; three-coloured flags waved over every portal; and the whole was arranged with that light and airy grace which belongs to Parisian fancy. The women wore garlands of fresh-blown roses in their hair, and held branches of palm or laurel in their hands: the men placed oaken boughs in their hats, and children strewed the way with violets and myrtle. The representatives of the people had large three-coloured plumes in their hats, national scarfs thrown across their shoulders, and nosegays of blended wheat-ears, fruits, and flowers in their hands, as symbols of their mission.

From this profusion of gay objects, which in happier moments would have excited delightful sen­sations, the drooping soul now turned distasteful. The scent of carnage seemed mingled with these lavish sweets; the glowing festoons appeared ting­ed with blood; and in the back ground of this fes­tive scenery the guillotine arose before the disturbed imagination. I thought of that passage in Mr. Burke's book, "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista I see the gallows!" Ah Liberty! best friend of mankind, why have san­guinary monsters profaned thy name, and fulfilled this gloomy prediction!—

A great amphitheatre was raised in the garden of the Thuilleries immediately before the palace, now the seat of the convention. Upon a tribune in the centre of the theatre, Robespierre as president of the convention appeared; and having for a few hours disencumbered the square of the revolution of the guillotine this high-priest of Moloch, within view of that very spot where his daily sacrifice of [Page 178] human victims was offered up, covered with their blood, invoked the Parent of universal nature, talk­ed of the charms of virtue, and breathed the hope of immortality. When the foul fiend had finished this impious mockery, he descended from the tri­bune, and walked with great solemnity towards a grotesque kind of monument that was raised upon the bason in the front of the palace, which had been covered over for that purpose. On this monument was placed a mishapen and hideous figure, with ass's ears, which for some hours served as an enigma to the gazing crowd, who knew not how to account for this singular appearance; till Robespierre having set fire to this image of deformity, which was de­clared to be the symbol of atheism, its cumbrous drapery suddenly vanished, and a fair and majestic form was discovered, emblematical of wisdom and philosophy.

Atheism being thus happily destroyed, the con­vention, attended by a numerous procession of peo­ple, and preceded by triumphal cars and banners, marched to the Champ de Mars, where with much toil and cost a rocky mountain had been reared, up­on whose lofty summit the tyrant and his attendants climbed, and from whence he once more harangued the people; and the festival closed with hymns and choral songs in honour of the Supreme Being.

Robespierre on this day, intoxicated with his power, lost sight of his usual prudence, and display­ed all the littleness of his vanity. He caused a line of separation to be made between himself and the other deputies of the convention, and marched at some distance before them, like a captain at the head of his band. He had the folly to display his importance by keeping the convention and the as­sembled multitude waiting, and the ceremony sus­pended [Page 179] for two hours, while he was sought for in vain. During the procession his creatures attempt­ed to raise the cry of "Vive Robespierre!" but it was faintly re-echoed by the spectators, many of whom followed him with "curses, not loud but deep, which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not."

Two days after this festival in honour of the Su­preme being, Robespierre, the scourge of his crea­tures, compelled the enslaved convention to pass a law, which permitted the revolutionary jury to condemn those who were brought before them, from their own internal conviction, without any proof whatever, or hearing any witnesses; and which also suppressed the superfluous office of offi­cial defender, or counsel; a privilege that Cou­thon, who made the report in the name of the com­mittee of public safety, asserted conspirators by no means deserved^*. In other words, the jury were now authorised to pass sentence without even the forms of a trial. From this period, till the fall of Robespierre, all the judicial solemnities of the revo­lutionary tribunal consisted in reading over the names of the accused, who were immediately after declared by the jury to be guilty of a conspiracy against the safety of the French people, and the in­divisibility of the French republic.

If any of the unhappy persons thus proscribed at­tempted to speak in their defence, they were thus silenced by the president: "Tu n'a pas la parole^†" and if they persisted in declaring their innocence, [Page 180] they were put what was called "hors de debats;" that is, ordered immediately out of the court, con­demned in their absence, and sent to execution. "I was not in prison when this conspiracy took place," cried the viscountess de Noailles, madame de la Fayette's sister. "But you would have been in the conspiracy if you had been there," answered the president; and this unfortunate lady, the mo­ther of three children, perished with her own mo­ther and grandmother. Madame de la Fayette be­ing in another prison was, in the hurry of forming the lists of death, forgotten when her family suffer­ed—and still lives. From this period the prisons▪ became the scenes of unexampled horror and de­spair. Till now, the crowds by which they were inhabited had submitted to their fate with that cheer­ful resignation, and often with that careless gaiety which is buoyant at a Frenchman's heart in circum­stances that would altogether overwhelm the sink­ing spirits of the people of other countries. The houses allotted for the prisons of the suspected per­sons were for the most part hotels of emigrants, which were placed in the most agreeable situations of Paris, with extensive gardens, and commanding beautiful views of the country. Such habitations had nothing of that gloom and darkness which we usually associate with the idea of a prison, and they were peopled with the best society of Paris.

The ladies were attentive to the duties of the toilette, the gentlemen were polite and assiduous, and the court-yard of the Luxembourg, the con­vent of St. Lazare, and some other prisons, exhi­bited of an evening almost as much brilliancy and gaiety as the Thuilleries or the Champs Elisées. Music and literature had their amateurs. At the Luxembourg, select circles were formed to hear lectures from men of letters, sometimes on chemis­try, [Page 181] sometimes on astronomy. At St. Lazare, la­dies sent invitations to dinner from the corridor of Frimaire to the corridor of Floreal, with the fame formalities as formerly from their respective ho­tels. Sometimes cards, sometimes bout-rimés, charades, and epigrams beguiled the evening of its length, and thus the days of captivity rolled on^*. They were indeed embittered by one hour of mournful melancholy, and one of trembling terror: the first when the evening paper arrived, and the list of the victims of the revolutionary tribunal was read over, among whom the prisoners seldom failed to find some friend or acquaintance to lament. But this was a sensation of gentle sadness, com­pared to that turbulent dismay excited by the hoarse voice of the turnkey sounding at midnight through the long galleries the knell of some devoted vic­tim, who was called upon to rise, in order to be led to the Conciergerie by gendarmes sent for that purpose from the revolutionary tribunal. Still, however, amidst the tears which the prisoners shed over their lost companions, many of them cherish­ed the fond hope that they themselves should escape. But the law of the 22d of Prairial tore away every illusion of the imagination or the heart, and dis­played the general proscription of the prisoners in all its extent of horror. It was no longer a solitary individual who was called to death; multitudes were summoned at once. Every returning night, long covered carts drawn by four horses entered successively the court yards of the different prisons. [Page 182] Whenever the trampling of the horses' feet was heard, the prisoners prepared themselves for their doom. The names of the victims marked for ex­ecution the following day were called over, and they were instantly hurried into these gloomy hearses. The husband was scarcely allowed time to bid his wife a last farewell, or the mother to recommend her orphan children to the compassion of such of the prisoners as might survive the general calamity. At the prison of the Luxembourg, an hundred and sixty-nine victims were in one night torn from their beds, and led to the grated dungeons of the Conciergerie, that prison over the gates of which might with equal propriety have been written, the same as over that of the infernal region of Dante,"^* Lasciate speranza voi ch'entrate;" for here it might literally be said, "hope never came, that comes to all." I have seen the Conciergerie, that abode of horror, that anti-chamber of the tomb. I have seen those infectious cells, where the pri­soners breathed contagion, where the walls are in some places stained with the blood of the massacres of September, and where a part of the spacious court-yard, round which the grated dungeons are built, remains unpaved since that period, when the stones were taken up for the purpose of burying the dead. I have seen the chamber, where the persons condemned by the revolutionary tribunal submitted to the preparatory offices of the executioner; where his scissars cut off the lavish tresses of the youthful beauty, and where he tied her tender hands behind her waist with cords. Merciful Heaven! and among those who have thus suffered were persons to whom my heart was bound by the ties of friendship and affection.—But though I have survived such scenes, [Page 183] they have left upon my heart that settled melancholy which never can be dissipated—For me, the world has lost its illusive colouring; its fairy spells, its light enchantments have vanished; and death, the idea most familiar to my imagination, appears to my wearied spirit the only point of rest.

The usual pretext for those murders in mass, which were practised at this period, was that of a conspiracy in the prisons; a vague and wide term which the tyrants might interpret at their pleasure, and which gave them the power of including what­ever persons and whatever numbers they thought proper. Spies were placed in every prison, who, after making out their lists of proscription as they were directed by the tyrants, declared that a con­spiracy existed, of which those marked on the lists were the authors, or accomplices. Persons who had never seen or heard of each other till that mo­ment, were often brought together from different prisons to take their trial for the same conspiracy: and when the decemvirs wished to get rid of any particular individual, he was without any hesitation added to what was called the fournée, the batch; for such was the appellation given to the crowds dragged together to the guillotine, and with such terms of jocular familiarity was mourning humanity insulted. Sometimes the persons accused only re­ceived their act of accusation as they were led up to the tribunal. Sometimes in the hurry, confusion, and carelessness with which these indictments were made out, one person was mistaken for another. The duchess of Biron among other instances, went to the tribunal with an act of accusation which was destined for her steward. The indifference of the tribunal with respect to such errors, enabled mons. Loiserolles, at sixty years of age, to deceive his barbarous judges, by dying for his son, a youth in [Page 184] his twenty-first year. It was observed, that this generous parent, who thus a second time gave life to his child, answered with uncommon alacrity when his name was called upon, and went with a look of exultation to the scaffold. Perhaps history does not offer a more affecting instance of parental tenderness, making the voluntary sacrifice of life to save the object of its affection. But this extraor­dinary epocha called forth the lights and shades of the human character in all their strongest colouring. The last excesses of ferocious crimes were con­trasted by the sublime enthusiasm of the virtuous affections, shedding their sweetness like solitary flowers over the wilderness where serpents hiss, and beasts of the forest howl; and by the noblest efforts of heroical philanthropy bidding us cease to despair of humanity, and converting the throb of indignant horror into the glow of sympathetic ad­miration;—bidding us turn from the tribunal of blood, from Robespierre and his jury of assassins, to Loiserolles dying for his child; to Madame Be­renger, led in the bloom of life to execution with her parents, and, altogether forgetful of herself, seeking only to support the sinking spirits of her mother;—to madame Bousquet, the sister-in-law of Gaudet, scorning the impious laws which punished humanity with death, affording shelter to her pro­scribed friends, and dying with them on the scaf­fold for having done so.

Among the multitudes who perished at this pe­riod, all were not armed with the same fortitude; and sometimes even when tyranny spared the life of its victim, its cruel persecutions bereaved the suf­ferer of reason. Of this mademoiselle—was a melancholy instance. This unfortunate young lady saw her father, her mother, and several of her relations dragged to the scaffold: she alone [Page 185] was spared, and remained a prisoner at the Con­ciergerie. Along the gloomy vaults of that terri­fic prison, by the dim light of sickly lamps, she fancied she saw the mangled spectres of her murder­ed parents, and in a short time became entirely be­reft of reason. She obstinately refused all suste­nance, and remained motionless as a statue, hold­ing to her bosom her parrot, whom she had insisted on bringing with her to her dungeon. When con­jured by the other prisoners to take some nourish­ment, she only answered, "^* Je n'ai besoin de rien." "But your parrot," said they, "your poor parrot is hungry." "Non," she constantly repli­ed, "non, il n'a besoin de rien—Mon paroquet est comme moi—il n'a besoin de rien." The tyrant has fallen, and the dungeon of this unfortunate young lady is thrown open—but alas! for her, re­dress and freedom have come too late—her reason is gone for ever!

The Polish princess Lubomirska united with su­perior talents all the charms of early youth and distinguished beauty. She had been travelling through different countries of Europe, and two years since was compelled to leave Berne in Swit­zerland, on account of the attachment she had avowed to the cause of the French revolution. She came with her husband to Paris, and cultivated the society and friendship of Vergniaud and of other deputies of the convention, who were the most eminent for their talents and their zeal for liberty. This democratic princess, to whom a true repub­lican would have offered a civic crown, became an object of resentment to the vindictive Robespierre, on account of her friendship for some members of [Page 186] the Gironde: she was thrown into prison, from thence sent to the revolutionary tribunal, and con­demned by the jury of assassins to die. Being in a state of pregnancy, her execution was deferred. In the mean time her friends gave information of her danger to Kosciusko, the Polish general, and desired his interposition in her behalf. Kosciusko instantly dispatched a letter to Robespierre, declar­ing that the princess Lubomirska had ever shewn the most devoted attachment to the principles of liberty, and conjuring Robespierre to spare the life of a zealous friend to the common cause in which France and Poland were engaged. Robespierre, after reading the letter, exclaimed, "^* Quoi! grace pour une princesse!—Ah, Kosciusko!—qu'on la guillotine." The unhappy princess, having mis­carried, was immediately sent to execution.—Two days before the fall of Robespierre, eight women who had been respited having declared themselves pregnant, were dragged to the scaffold. Among this number was the princess of Monaco. As she passed along the court of the prison, she said to the prison­ers who were assembled to see the sad procession, and bid a last farewell to the companions of their mis­fortunes, "I go to death with the calmness which innocence inspires, and wish you from my soul a better fate." Then addressing herself to one of the turnkeys who was leading her towards the chamber where the executioner waited to bind the victims, "I have one favour to ask you," said she, taking a pacquet from her bosom, "will you promise to grant it? This pacquet contains my hair: I implore your compassion, I conjure you in my own name, in the name of all who hear me, send it to my son, to [Page 187] whom it is directed; swear to me in the presence of those virtuous persons, whom the same destiny as mine awaits, that you will render me this last ser­vice which I require of humanity." The dismay and terror of one of her women who was involved in the proscription, formed a striking contrast to the firmness she herself displayed. "Take courage, my dear friend," cried the princess, "take courage, it is the guilty only who ought to fear."—The pri­son of Port Libre offered an affecting spectacle of filial piety. Madame Lachabeaussiere, in conse­quence of a malignant denunciation made against her by her son-in-law, was not only dragged to prison, but placed in a dungeon in close confine­ment till the moment arrived when she was to ap­pear before the tribunal. Her daughter, madame Malessi, who was already confined in another pri­son, procured leave to be transferred to that where her mother was immured, whom by tears and sup­plications she obtained permission to see. Madame Lachabeaussiere was taken out of her dungeon, and led to her daughter, who flew towards her, and, throwing her arms round her neck, remained a long time pressing her mother to her bosom, and with­out power to articulate a word. After this melan­choly interview, madame Lachabeaussiere was led back to her dungeon. Her situation affected her daughter so deeply, that she became bereft of her reason. Sometimes she took up her needle-work for a few moments; then throwing it aside, rose with precipitation, and flew along the galleries of the prison, till she reached her mother's cell. She usually seated herself at the door, and listened at­tentively: when she could hear nothing, she used to weep bitterly, and repeat again and again in a tone of despair, "Oh my mother! Oh, my ten­der, my unfortunate mother!" She often remained [Page 188] many hours together, seated upon the stone-floor, and she was in a state of pregnancy. Her hair hung dishevelled over her shoulders, her eye seem­ed bent on vacancy, her cheeks were sometimes flushed with deep red, and sometimes of a deadly paleness, and she was often seized with convulsive faintings. Every day she carried the greatest por­tion of her food to her mother, who without this succour would have often wanted sufficient nourish­ment for her support. It is soothing to add, that ma­dame Lachabeaussier was snatched from death by the fall of the tyrant, and that her tender and vir­tuous daughter is restored to reason.

While the tyrants, far from finding any satiety of blood in their daily murders, were erecting new ranges of seats in the hall of the revolutionary tri­bunal, sufficient to contain an hundred instead of fifty accused persons, death now hovered in a new form over the prisons. The administrators of the police went to each prison attended by a strong guard, and ordered the prisoners to be shut up in their respective chambers, and not suffered to have any communication till the purpose of the visit was effected. They then went successively to every apartment, and demanded of the prisoners their knives, scissars, razors, buckles, watches, and all the money they had in their possession. These un­happy persons, being altogether ignorant of the ob­ject of the visit, had no time to conceal any thing, and were stripped of all they had except fifty livres in paper, which each prisoner was suffered to re­tain in order to pay for his subsistence. But from this day famine scowled along these gloomy man­sions, adding to the pangs of mental sufferings those of debility and disease. The prisoners were no longer permitted to receive their daily meals from their own houses, or from a tavern; but were [Page 189] ordered from henceforth, in conformity to the laws of equality, to eat à la gamelle^*. Their food was provided for them at the rate of fifty sous a day, by a cook placed in the prison. Their nourishment consisted of one meal in twenty-four hours, often too scanty to satisfy the calls of hunger, and some­times composed of such nauseous diet as the greater part of the prisoners were unable to eat.

Age and infirmity were denied every indulgence necessary to support the disordered frame, or raise the sinking spirits. A little bread saved from this wretched meal, and water, was all that could be obtained during the rest of the day^†. To this meal the prisoners at the Luxembourg, where nine hun­dred persons were confined, were summoned in a succession of three hundred at a time, by a great bell, which called them to a hall, at the door of which stood the jailor, who had been an execution­er under Collot d'Herbois at Lyons^‡. This man was remarkably tall, big, and muscular; his arms were bare to the elbow; he wore a fierce red cap, which had now become the symbol of blood, and looked as if he were prepared for a massacre. He only suffered twenty persons at a time to enter the hall, and then flinging the door in the faces of the others, obliged them to remain in the passages till [Page 190] those within were seated at the table. The hour of dinner passed like the other hours of the day, in gloomy and unbroken silence; for even the sooth­ing intercourse of conversation was now forbidden, under the penalty of being dragged immediately be­fore the tribunal, since the spies placed in the pri­sons, whenever they observed two or three persons talking together, inquired sternly if they were form­ing a conspiracy. What most occupied the minds of the prisoners at this period was contriving the means of escaping from their tyrants by a voluntary death, which was now become difficult, since they had been stripped of every instrument which could have served that purpose. Such was the situation of these unhappy victims of tyranny, when on the night of the 9th of Thermidor the tocsin sounded, and the city was called to arms. Many circum­stances which I shall afterwards relate, led the pri­soners to believe that these sounds were the signal of a general massacre. But the tocsin now rung the joyful, the triumphant peal of liberty. Before I give you a detail of the scenes which passed on the 9th of Thermidor, I must trace the political events which led to that memorable epocha, and rescued France from a state which was the astonishment and shame of human nature; from a state more terri­ble than all which the most cunning tyrant could have inflicted upon slaves whom he had previously disarmed. And all this was suffered by a nation which called itself free, which had taken up arms to assert its freedom, and gained the most glorious vic­tories in its defence. France, covered with all the laurels of heroic valour, and the terror of combined Europe, held out her neck to vulgar assassins and executioners, instead of crumbling them into dust.—Such are the strange contradictions of human na­ture! [Page 191] The effects resulting from the terrible im­pulse of revolutionary government upon the moral world, may perhaps be compared to those produced upon the natural scene by the tremendous tempests which sometimes sweep along the western islands; when the mingled elements rush forth in irresistible fury, when the deluging waters bear away vegeta­tion, trees, and rocks, and the shrieking whirlwinds shake the dwellings of man to their foundations.—The storm is past—the enormous vapours have rolled away—a soft light hovers on the horizon, and we are now left at leisure to sigh over the ruins that surround us, and lament the victims laid pros­trate by the blast. But let us hope that this stormy revolution will at least produce some portion of fe­licity to succeeding generations, who have not, like us, felt the tumultuous horrors of this convulsion of the passions, who will owe their happiness to the struggles of a race that is passed away, and whom they have never known; while we, who have been spectators of the cruel conflict—we, who have lost the friends we loved and honoured, are often unable, amidst the tears we shed over their tombs, to consi­der, "all partial evil as universal good."

THE surrender of Lyons, which took place some-days previous to the murder of the deputies of the Gironde, contributed to hasten the execution of that atrocious deed. The Lyonnais had long struggled against the commissaries of the mountain faction, who, under the pretence of an ardent zeal for liber­ty, were diligent in seeking opportunities for riot and plunder; and however strongly this detachment of conspirators were supported by those who direct­ed their motions from Paris, they could not with­stand the indignation and vengeance of the citizens of Lyons, who, roused by the dangers with which [Page 209] they were threatened, crushed their oppressers, the chief of whom, Chalier, they sent to the scaffold. The Lyonnais had proceeded too far to hope for any mercy from the faction, who had now accomplish­ed their treason at Paris: and seeing the cause of li­berty abandoned by the departments, who had made their peace with the traitors, they were driven ei­ther to suffer patiently the weight of their wrath, or prepare to oppose it. Of this dreadful alterna­tive they chose the latter; but finding themselves unsupported in the project they had at first formed of marching to Paris, they determined to defend their own city. In the mean time they employed the most honourable means to explain to the conven­tion, that their resistance arose neither from disaf­fection to the republic, nor from any wish to form a federal government, of which they had been ac­cused; that they had sworn fidelity to the republi­can constitution, and had issued orders to assemble the primary assemblies for its acceptance. But re­sistance for any cause was now a crime, and this concession of the Lyonnais only served to increase the insolence of their oppressors, who decreed that the city was in a state of rebellion, and that all who had resorted thither from the neighbouring depart­ments should be treated as emigrants: for the con­spirators easily perceived that this city might form a central point of opposition, by collecting together all those persons in the southern provinces who were averse to the revolutionary order of things. An army was immediately levied, and ordered to march against Lyons; and it was believed that when the Lyonnais were informed that the affair was about to became so serious, they would make no farther opposition.

The general who commanded the conventional army, endeavoured by proclamations to conciliate [Page 210] the parties, but in vain. His proposals of pardon were rejected by those who thought themselves in­jured, and who know by fatal experience what de­gree of confidence was to be placed in the offer of tender mercies from the cruel. The Lyonnais were allowed three hours to deliberate on the gracious propositions of the general, but a discharge of can­non returned their answer before the first had ex­pired; and though new proclamations were issued, and on the anniversary of the 10th of August both parties sent deputations to celebrate that event to­gether, the Lyonnais continued their warlike oppo­sition, and prepared to make an obstinate resistance.

In the mean time the department of Mont-Blanc, formerly Savoy, was recovered by the Piedmontese, who took advantage of the absence of the army which had been called off for the purpose of reducing Lyons; and the representatives who conducted the operations of the siege wrote to the convention to repeal the decree which the conspirators in their wrath had poured out against that city. The Ly­onnais were as deaf to these concessions as they had been to the proclamations of the generals, who now proceeded to extremities, and began the bombard­ment of the city, which was set on fire in several places, and a great number of the inhabitants pe­rished. Other proclamations followed this act of hostility, which met with the same reception. The black flag continued floating on the towers, indi­cating resistance till death; and though the city, being unfortified, had nothing to defend it but the bravery of its inhabitants, no impression could be made except by bombardment. The conspirators therefore sent their emissaries into the adjoining de­partments to raise the people in mass; and, if any credit is to be given to the reports of those who were employed, the besieging army was reinforced [Page 211] by other armies amounting to fifty thousand men With this reinforcement the attack began afresh the city was surrounded, all communication cut off, and the convention was informed that famine would soon effect what the obstinacy of the Lyonnais had hitherto prevented. During three months these brave republicans contended against the numerous armies that the conspirators had assembled; and had not their ardor been checked by their commanders, they would all have witnessed against the cowardice and baseness of their countrymen, by whom they were left unsupported, with the last drop of their blood. After having performed prodigies of valour, till they were overpowered by numbers, and resist­ance became no longer possible, they endeavoured to effect their retreat, by forcing their way through the besiegers; for according to the dispatches sent to the convention they were entirely surrounded. In this retreat some succeeded; but a great part were cut to pieces, and the conventional army entered the city in triumph.

With the savage joy of the famished cannibal, when he seizes on some ship-wrecked wretch whom the waves have unkindly spared from the fate of his companions, the mountain conspirators heard of the reduction of Lyons. The committee of public safety, through the organ of Barrere, in congratu­lating the convention on the news, informed them that measures were taken to exterminate every fugi­tive; that no weakness, no mercy should be shewn; and that this den of conspirators must make ample reparation, and that this reparation must consist in burying this rebel city under its own ruins. And lest this moment of wrath should be transient, lest the indignation which had filled their capacious souls should evaporate, these guardians of the pub­lic weal methodized their vengeance by a decree, [Page 212] which the convention sanctioned, that Lyons shou [...]d be razed on the ground, and struck out of the cities of the republic. This "great and vigorous mea­sure, the total destruction of the city, was the only one that had escaped us," the deputies in mission at this devoted place echo to their colleagues of the committee. They had already created military tri­bunals to judge the inhabitants; but complete ex­termination had not been within the reach of their comprehension: and left this example of vengeance should be lost to the world by some misplaced hesita­tion, by some sentiment of weak humanity, the committee dispatched one of its own members to direct and superintend the execution.

What had hitherto passed was scarcely the begin­ning of horrors. Collot d'Herbois, a comedian, who had been driven from the stage for his profes­sional incapacity, but who had acted a considerable part in the conspiracy, was gone thither to give tragedy some original strokes. "Alas," says the eloquent reporter on the correspondence of Robes­pierre and the extent of his enormities, [...] the terri­ble instrument of death, erected only for the punish­ment of crimes, springs up like poisonous plants over every part of the republic. It becomes natu­ralised under the opposite skies of the north and the south: the frozen bear and the devouring dog star alike mourn over its fatal successes.

"O! come; let us penetrate together, my fel­low-citizens, across those fiery torrents, under those ruined walls which seem crumbling down to threa­ten us with ruin; let us pass into those cities here­tofore filled with people, now widowed of their in­habitants; into those new des [...]rts more frightful than those of Paran or Horeb. See them, like the hyena growling fiercely over its prey!—Do you not perceive them like destroying demons rushing [Page 213] with their devouring torches over every monument of genius or of art? These new Gengis, who have conquered neither Persia, nor Egypt, nor Lybia, are anxious to make Frenchmen of the 18th century a race of barbarians, reduced not to the practice, but to the simple reading of the rights of man, as the Saracens were heretofore instructed in the knowledge of the Koran.

"Look for a moment with us, on these vile di­lapidations of the treasures of Ptolemy Philadel­p [...]s; observe those evil principles, those Arimanes, who have been disputing with each other for twelve months past the palpitating limbs of our dismember­ed country! What were they, and what are they now, those founders of committees of demolition, those creators of ruins?—Vile slaves, trembling in the presence of the mighty.

"It is the conspiracy of folly and of crimes unit­ed against genius and virtue. It is the insurrec­tion of robbery against the precept of mine and thine. It is the reign of private vengeance and the most abject passions.

"O Lyons! city celebrated for thy commerce, who is this new Gengis^*, who, with the axe and the thunder in his hand, pours down on thy walls, and rushes on to avenge the injuries of Themugin? It is finished, and thy ruin is sworn!"

It is unnecessary to ask of the unfortunate inha­bitants, as I have sometimes done, the history of their woes—their tyrants blazon themselves their crimes to the open day, and invite you to read the black catalogue of their enormities. "In destroy­ing [Page 214] a rebel city," says Collot, "we shall consoli­date the rest. We must leave nothing but ashes. We demolish with cannon balls, and with explo­sions like those of mines." When such were his principles, his projects, and his exploits, it would be trifling to stop to talk of individual distresses—to relate how he ordered three ladies, who had thrown themselves at his feet to implore his mercy, to be tied for six hours to the scaffold where their husbands were to be executed; or to speak of the execution of a young heroine, who had shewn pro­digies of valour during the siege. These were on­ly interludes in this great tragedy, one of whose languishing actors, in his existing correspondence writes, that since the guillotine has been at work, his health has been established; that every thing goes well, and is expected to go better; "since it is found," continues he, that the guillotine is not sufficiently expeditious, and in a few days three or four hundred will be dispatched at a time; and the houses are fast demolishing."

This was no empty menace—the tragedian exe­cuted what this savage had promised.—"The guil­lotine and fusillade do not go amiss," says he; "sixty, eighty, two hundred at once are shot, and every day care is taken to arrest a sufficient num­ber, so as not to leave the prisons empty." But still these were ordinary means. This new Sal­moneus was not contented with the insignia of the god, he panted to imitate his destroying power; and accordingly some of the miserable inhabitants were placed before batteries of cannon; and while they were shattered and torn in pieces by the artillery, though the greater part were left to be dispatched the following day by the spades of those who came to bury them, Collot amused himself in beholding the operation.

[Page 215] During this waste of life, that of the property of the unfortunate victims was not more respected. "It costs four hundred thousand livres each decade for demolitions," writes one of these demons, who talks of re-colonizing the country. "More heads every day, more heads are falling. What ecsta­cies thou wouldst have felt," adds the monster to his correspondent, "if thou hadst seen this national justice executed on two hundred and nine rascals! What cement for the republic! We have knocked off five hundred; and when we have dispatched twice as many, which we shall do, things will go forward."

Where then, it might be asked, was the conven­tion, while these horrors were executing? Where? Alas! this convention, sent by a free people to con­solidate their liberty, was in chains. Had it been less enslaved, the decree, that Lyons should no longer exist, would have justified the executioners.—Collot was not willing that this decree of devas­tation should remain a figure of rhetoric—he says so: "The revolutionary army arrives the day after to-morrow, and then," continues he, "I shall be able to perform great things. These conspirators must soon be dispatched—Lyons must exist no longer—and the inscription thou hast proposed," for this letter is addressed to Robespierre, "contains a great truth, for hitherto the decree has been but an hy­pothesis. It will be your business to make it what it ought to be, and we will prepare the amendments before hand."

This was the private correspondence of the mon­ster with Robespierre. But let us not conceal his language to the convention itself. "We are har­dened," says he, "against the tears of repentance—Indulgence is a dangerous weakness—The de­molitions are too slow—We must employ means [Page 216] more adapted to republican impatience. The ex­plosion of the mine, the devouring activity of the flame alone can express the omnipotence of the people: its will cannot be impeded like that of ty­rants; it ought to have the effect of thunder." And what answer does the convention return to its colleague?—The wretch for a whole year after re­tained a [...]ea [...] in the assembly.—It was the plan of Collot to banish those whom he did not destroy; for he found it difficult to carry his purpose into full execution; and after having murdered a part, and exiled the rest, he discovered that he had ful­filled his commission, and should be able on his re­turn to say with truth, that Lyons existed no longer.

"What ideas! what fury!" exclaims the re­porter: "it seems as if the moral world was fallen back into chaos. And these are legislators! Alas! if the Erebus of the ancients had had its legislation also, it would undoubtedly have been more consist­ent and more humane."

We are at first tempted to believe, in passing in review these ferocious characters, that all the mon­sters of the desert had quitted their dens to rush in on our cities; or rather, to adopt more natural ideas, we cannot help discovering the end of these horrible levellers, which was the destruction of commerce, and the establishment not of an equa­lity of happiness, but of an equality of misery, throughout the republic.

It will scarcely be thought possible, yet it is very generally believed, that Collot was led to this ven­geance on the people of Lyons for having hissed him when he acted on their stage. Thousands of victims have atoned for the insult offered to a wretched comedian; and this great city, which from the time of Augustus had been the centre of the commerce of Gaul, where he lavished his favours, [Page 217] and for three ages received the tribute of gratitude in the honours that were rendered him, had now fallen under the stroke of the most vulgar of ty­rants. Had these monsters looked for precedents for their cruelties, they might have found them in their prototype Caligula, for in this very city that tyrant once resided: and the resemblance of Cali­gula and Collot is so far striking, that they both exercised their despotism over the same class of ci­tizens; though the motives of Caligula appear to have been more natural than those of Collot, and his cruelty more discriminate.

While this tragic ruffian was acting his part at Lyons, others with principles as atrocious, though they were less steeped in blood, were carrying de­solation into other parts of France. Bourdeaux, which had been raising itself to the height of the revolution, was now a prey to the caprice of a young monster who had not yet counted twenty years, and who was the valet of Robespierre in the commission of crimes. The republican patriots having long since fallen under the proscription, Ju­lien's instructions and plan seem to have been the establishment of sancul [...]ttism over the aristocracies of commerce, or muscadinism, and of wealth. His correspondence is as silly as it is atrocious, and of its atrocity we may judge when he condemns the measures of blood already taken as being moderate and almost counter-revolutionary. It appears that he was one of the first who had denounced the enormities of Carrier; but ages of punishment or repentance will not atone for the murder of Salles and Gaudet, who were executed at Bourdeaux dur­ing Julien's administration, together with Gaudet's father, mother, sister and her husband, the hus­band's brother, and one of his aunts; in short, the whole family, excepting Gaudet's wife, whose [Page 218] murder was delayed till she recovered from a se­vere indisposition, which happily lasted till the ty­rants fell.

NO class of men were more interested in the preservation of the abuses of the ancient govern­ment than the priests. When the constituent as­sembly lessened the influence of the higher clergy, by stripping the church of its domains, and making the salaries of its ministers more equal, the na­tional wealth was not only increased, but the great mass of the priesthood were satisfied with the distribution. The majority of those who had hi­therto directed the machine of the revolution were fully persuaded that the priesthood shared but little in its spirit; and, knowing that whatever does not keep pace with his career, retards its progress, had sought at different times to dissolve the alliance of the church and state altogether. They felt indeed that the article in the declaration of rights, which says, "that no one shall be disturbed in his religious opinions," must be eventually subversive of the established religion; since whoever believed it to be not only unnecessary and expensive, but hostile to the great principles of liberty, would murmur at contributing to its support.

A considerable part of the clergy refused to ac­cede to the civil constitution which the constitu­ent assembly had formed, alleging that in matters of religion, or in the regulations of the church, no one ought to guide their faith, or receive their obe­dience, but the personage who, in constant succes­sion [Page 219] from the great author of christianity, had held the delegated power. This class had by their non­conformity lost their employment, but they were not the less cherished on that account by those who thought with themselves, that man was made for the sabbath, and not the sabbath for man. The zeal of these non-jurors for the faith which they contended was once delivered to the saints, was too ardent to suffer this humiliation of the church in silence; nor was the vigilance of the friends of the revolution less awake to counteract their ef­forts. The majesty of the church, of which they believed themselves to be the only true supporters, would not permit them to bow before the majesty of the people; and when the legislative assembly undertook to be the interpreters of the law, and enacted decrees for the banishment of the uncon­stitutional clergy, they sought refuge in the majesty of the throne, the cherished ally hitherto of the church, whose power was at this time scarcely more confirmed than its own.

The protection given by the court to the non­juring clergy hastened the ruin of both^*. The king refused at first to sanction the decree of the legislative assembly, who however at length prevail­ed: and when the royal power was annihilated, which happened not long after, the priests were compelled to seek asylums of charity in foreign countries, of those whose ancestors had fled from the bloody persecutions of their order, but whose injuries the sons had forgotten; or if still remem­bered, [Page 220] they perhaps answered as Guise did to Pol­trot, "If your religion enjoins you to murder, ours compels us to forgive."

The disposition of the national convention was still more unfavourable than that of the legislative assembly to the civil establishment of the clergy. The truth is, that the enlightened part of the coun­try had considered religion as a personal thing. Those who believed, of which the number was not very great, thought the protection of the state no addition to its dignity; and those who disbelieved, or, which was the same, confounded the doctrines of christianity and the established church, thought that its alliance was not only burdensome, but per­nicious. The great divisions of the contending parties for the government gave the priesthood res­pite. But no sooner was this question decided, and the reign of Robespierre established, than the men of reason, as they called themselves, renewed the attack against the men of the church, who were unable to make any farther resistance.

The constitutional clergy had no protection but that which was given them by the constitution now proscribed, and had inspired no interest in the de­votees, who considered them rather as apostates from religion, than defenders of the faith; and treacherous guides in the road of salvation, on ac­count of their compliance with the law.

A strict adherence to the ceremonies and doc­trines of the Romish church was not the only su­perstition that darkened France. There was ano­ther of a more terrible nature and more destructive of social order, which was atheism. Voltaire has observed, that a reasoning atheist is a greater scourge to mankind, than the most sanguinary fanatic. The commune of Paris had assumed this character; and, having twice contributed to overturn the civil go­vernment [Page 221] of the country in the space of a few months, imagined that the kingdom of the next world was to be taken by force as well as the king­dom of the present. This formidable project was conceived, and brought to maturity in modest si­lence. The good people of Paris, who had trou­bled themselves but little about religion, but who imagined that there might be something good in it, as there is in the worst of vocations, were extreme­ly surprised to see the archbishop of Paris, with his clergy, present themselves at the bar of the con­vention, attended by the constituted powers of the department and the municipality, "to be regene­rated;" that is, to abjure their former belief, and make their new confession of faith, in which they declared that there was no other duty than liberty, no other gospel than the republican constitution, and no other worship than equality. This illumi­nation was not the result of the deep studies either of the archbishop or his vicars. The secret was imparted to him by Chamette, the procurer of the commune, to whom it was discovered by one Clootz commonly called Anacharsis, a Prussian by birth, and an atheist by profession, whose history I have already related. Clootz had written a book, which he told the convention on presenting it was the fruit of fifteen hours labour every day during the course of four years. He also instructed them, that this work, singular in its method and curious in its de­tail, overturned at one stroke all sects, antient or modern, of natural or revealed religion.—Of this work, which "proved the nothingness of all reli­gion," the convention decreed the acceptance, and honourable mention; and, thus armed, Anacharsis set out on his travels to convert the world to athe­ism. There was something masterly in his first [Page 222] attempt; and had he been satisfied with the con­version of the archbishop and the commune, whom he brought to the bar of the convention, he might have enjoyed his triumph in security; but when he attempted to proselyte the convention itself, Robe­spierre opposed the invader with his doctrine of the Supreme Being, and Anacharsis was sent to the prison of the Luxembourg. There a friend of mine found him in daily controversy with Thomas Paine, who had just written "The Age of Rea­son," for his credulity in still indulging so many religious and political prejudices. Soon after, this vain enthusiast was sent by his polemic antagonist Robespierre to the guillotine, where many of his converts in succession followed him, and among his pupils was the archbishop.

Many of the bishops and priests who were de­puties in the assembly, and some of the ministers of the protestant faith, animated by the example of the archbishop, made their public recantation. Of this last sect one observed that, though his sys­tem of faith inculcated, more than any other, mo­ral obligations, yet, as the great day of judgment was arrived, the reign of reason, the triumph of philosophy, he must divest himself of his sacerdotal character, and become regenerated also, since, as he confessed, "tous les pr [...]tres dans tous les cultes ont toujours un peu de charlatanisme^*."

The ingenuousness in the members of one pro­fession provoked the same candour in those of ano­ther. The priests having confessed that there was a little quakery in their administration of the next world, the physicians crowded to the bar of the commune, to acknowledge that they had been "un [Page 223] peu prêtres" also, and that a little spice of moun­tebank dealing entered into their administration of this. Admitting that nature and reason were the best remedies, they made offerings of their diplo­mas by which they had been authorised to cure se­cundum artem, in direct contradiction to both; and this virtuous dereliction of their former practice was rewarded with applauses and civic insertion.

Reformation, as well as terror, was the order of the day: the searching eye of the commune left nothing unexplored. To the epuration of the priests and physicians, succeeeded that of the co­medians, who had no professional sins to confess, since they had acted their parts on the stage of the world without any disguise. However, the com­mune thought that those who had been in the ha­bitude of personating princes, and nobles, and queens, and countesses, could little relish habits of equality, and therefore sent to prison both actors and actresses as suspected.

The spirit of reform did not stop at the conse­cration of the spoils of the church to the services of the state. It seized on those privileges which in all countries, and under every establishment of religion, have been accorded with the common consent of mankind, and on the exercise of which much of the order and happiness of the world has been thought to depend. On our entrance into the world it is the priest who confers on us our moral existence; in riper days it is he who hallows our affections; and without his dismission we have been taught to think that our road to heaven was not altogether secure. Of the two first of these func­tions, the legislative assembly had taken possession—the fathers brought their children to be regenerated at the municipal font, and the lover led his blushing mistress before the altar of Hymen, and received [Page 224] her from the hand of the civil officer, who pro­nounced their union "in the name of the law." The care of disposing of the citizens at death yet remained to the church, and the funerals continued to darken the way in long processions, till the com­mune seized on this last prerogative of the clergy, and decreed, that gay revolutionary colours of the nation should take place of the funeral pall—the priests should be changed into municipal officers, and the cemetery should be called the place of re­pose, where, instead of the hope of being troubled with a resurrection, the citizens should have the privilege of sleeping for ever.

The church of Notre Dame was changed into the temple of Reason; and the commune, with the divinity herself, attended by a splended train, came to request the convention to sanctify with their presence the consecration. The Goddess of Rea­son was a fine blooming damsel of the opera-house, and acted her part in this comedy also to the entire satisfaction of her new votaries. From her impe­rial throne, in which she was borne by four por­ters, she descended to the right hand of the presi­dent of the convention, and by a decree received the fraternal kiss, as soon as the procureur of the commune, who attended as high priest, or master of the ceremonies, had announced her negative and positive character; "first, that she was not, like the objects of the ancient worship, a cold and ina­nimate image; and next, that she was a master­piece of nature; and that her sacred form had so enflamed every heart, that only one universal cry was heard, "No more priests, and no other gods!"

When the deputies arrived at the temple, the Goddess of Reason introduced them to the God­dess of Liberty, who came out of the house of Philosophy, to receive their homage, and bestow [Page 225] her benediction. The enemies of the revolution encouraged these follies, which the patriot disa­vowed and lamented: and the philosopher would only have smiled at these transient puerilities, had they not been mixed with atrocity and crimes. Alas! the respect for Reason was as fleeting as the respect for other strange gods; for her altars were soon deserted, and her high priests, and the divinity herself, were soon after conducted amidst the ap­plauses of the people to the guillotine. Immedi­ately after the regeneration of the metropolitan, those who felt the same conviction of its necessity made confession of their sins, and applied for the conventional blessing. This conviction neverthe­less was far from being general in either profession; for though the constitutional clergy were attached to the cause of liberty, and rejoiced in the regene­ration of their country, they did not imagine that the belief of reward in a future state would make a less virtuous citizen of the present. This coun­ter-revolutionary obstinacy was held in great in­dignation. Though the commune had called on Reason, like the priests of Baal, "from morning until noon," the votaries at her shrine were few and solitary, and it became necessary for the honour of the goddess, that more revolutionary measures should be pursued. Accordingly, attended by the committees of the sections, and the popular socie­ties of Paris, the municipality appeared a second time at the bar of the convention, where, after a philippic against the unrecanting clergy, they de­manded the suppression of their salaries, and that those who believed in "the tales of augurs should pay them." The convention, who probably had as little faith in augurs as the commune, had how­ever more charity, and deferred the sentence of fa­mine, which the municipality had decreed. The [Page 226] commune, though it did not succeed in the attack on the priesthood, was more successful in its at­tacks on the church. The word of order was is­sued, and the streets of Paris were filled with mock religious processions. The most ludicrous mas­querades presented themselves in every quarter; pioneers and artillery-men led the march, clothed in the surplices of the inferior clergy; the national guard were arrayed in the habits of the priests; the revolutionary citizens of the section were vested in garments still more costly; the revolutionary la­dies and the priestesses of Reason had sanctified themselves with the dresses belonging to the Vir­gin, and St. Frances and St. Bridget; and the re­volutionary committee had reserved for their own decoration, with great prudence, all the garments of fine gold, embroidery and jewels, while the caps of the priests and the mitres were placed on the heads of the horses employed in dragging these weighty spoils, which were to be presented to the convention. These offerings consisted of crosses, suns, vases, chandeliers, and chases, apostles and saints in gold and silver, St. Anthony and his pig, St. Roche and his dog, and all the other saints re­gistered in the calendar who were found to be of the same metallic worth. From the convention, after undergoing the sentence of condemnation for aristocratical and counter-revolutionary principles, they were sent to be regenerated at the mint, and make expiation for the long series of impositions they had been practising on the world, by becom­ing under a new form, the protectors of liberty and the republic.

The wooden saints, who in moral and religious estimation were equal, and oftentimes superior, in pa­radisaical rank to their brethren, though their con­sideration in these moments of irreligious phrensy [Page 227] was infinitely less, were committed, without re­morse, to the flames at the place of execution. And into the same unhallowed fire were thrown those inestimable treasures which had been for ages the consolation of the suffering believer, and the refuge of the faithful and pious. Amid the sacri­legious pile lay three eyes of the evangelists; a blue jacket, bedaubed with paint, taken from the wardrobe of St. Luke; a piece of ragged tent cloth, that had been purchased from the warehouse of St. Paul, and his cloak, which had been left with Carpus; a few of the coats and garments of St. Dorcas, which the weeping widows had shewn to St. Peter; all which, with other relics still more precious, such as some of the moveables belonging to the holy Virgin, with parts of her apparel; the spoon and pap-dish of the holy child; the head of some renowned saint of St. Genevieve's acquaint­ance; the bones of the patroness of Paris herself, with her linen, and other property found in her chapel^*, of which age had obliterated the know­ledge, with arms, legs, toes, and little fingers of illustrious martyrs, became the prey of revolution­ary flames, kindled with bundles of the real wood of the cross.

But these civic sacrifices were not confined to the worshippers of the established system; the sec­taries [Page 228] also burnt with the same patriotic zeal; the followers of Moses and of Calvin applauded these votive offerings of their catholic brethren. They beheld with secret satisfaction the downfall of a power, of which they had been for ages the vic­tims, while they deposited the precious ornaments and utensils of their own worship, but without complimenting the state with the abjuration of their religious belief. In this madness against su­perstition some method was observed. Almost every monument that bore the mark of genius, every relic that could contribute to the progress of the arts, was preserved with care, and deposited in places of safety. Many a saint owes his rescue from destruction to the chisel of the sculptor or the painter's skill; and except in a few of the depart­ments, nothing was destroyed that was worth pre­serving.

The great depository at St. Denis nevertheless suffered from this reforming rage. The crowns of Dagobert and Clovis; the sceptres of Philip the beautiful, and Henry the fowler; the silver helmet and golden spurs of Charlemagne; and the rich variety of treasure arising from the munificence of sovereigns to the tutelary saint of France, were mingled together in the crucible of the mint. The bodies of these monarchs and heroes were not treat­ed with equal respect; for, as the edict had gone forth against every vestige of royalty, and every mark or remnant of aristocracy, the tombs in which they had been for ages quietly inurned were forced to open their ponderous jaws; and those fu­rious Jacobins, worse than "the hellish rout that tore the Thracian bard in Rhodope," had the sa­tisfaction to see the bones and ashes of the long line of their Charles's Henries, and Louis; of their Condés, Montmorencies, and Turennes, be­fore [Page 229] whose lowest valets they would have trembled in submissive silence, become the prey of famished dogs, and the sport of the winds.

One of the pretences for this violation of the dead, which was general around Paris, and in some of the neighbouring departments, was the want of the coffins that enclosed them to make bullets for the use of the army. The cemeteries were there­fore called the revolutionary lead-mines. If the ramblings of imagination might be indulged amidst the horror which this sort of plunder inspired, we might pursue these revolutionary instruments of death to their destination, and see many an emigrant laid prostrate with the former covering of his pa­rents' dust. On many a countenance doomed to long night, the sun once again shone, and many met its beams, whose features preserved all their original force and character. Among others, ma­dame Sevigné was found entire, with the unfading bloom of healthy and virtuous old age: but as the edict against aristocracy and privileges comprehend­ed talents as well as birth, the wise as well as the mighty suffered in the general proscription against lead coffins; except Descartes, whose bones were put into a basket, and carried to the Pantheon, where he is fated to repose with the "immortal and divine Marat."

WHILE Paris was delivered up to the most execrable factions, of which I shall hereafter give you a detail, the western departments became the [Page 230] theatre of calamities infinitely more tremendous. The struggles which took place previously to the 31st of May between the republicans and the con­spirators, together with the defeat of the northern armies, and the defection of Dumourier, had di­verted the attention of government from the dan­gers by which they were menaced in the Vendée. Of this war we yet know but little, and what we do know is only the history written by the party which persecuted.

Of all the evils which infest mankind, those oc­casioned by war are the most destructive. The hurricane, the earthquake, and the volcano, those convulsions in nature which shake the earth to its basis, and seem to threaten it with annihilation, are not to be compared with the scourges of war. We read of cities besieged and taken by storm, without sympathizing very deeply in the history. We see neither the insidious mine which shatters a thousand limbs at one blow, nor hear the cannon and the bomb, which perform the work of destruction more openly. The soldier climbing precipices, or scaling walls, to fall with indiscriminate rage on the old, the infant, and the defenceless, and to con­vert flourishing cities into one vast cemetery, is only a being of romance to those who have lived at a distance from such scenes, and the terror of whose days has glided away in tranquillity. When the laws of war according to the regulations of ci­vilized society are observed, the miseries are still tremendous: the laws of nature are perverted; it is the young, not the old, that descend first to the tomb, and all the dear and tender relations of life are broken—the father laments his son—the wife the husband torn from them to serve the purposes of ambition or cruelty—whole countries are depopu­lated, [Page 231] fields lie uncultivated, and famine produces despair.

If such are the evils attendant on war when men murder each other without provocation and without resentment; when they scarcely know either the cause of the dispute which brought them into the field, or for whom they are going to shed their blood; what must be the horror of that conflict where every regulation of humanity is considered as conspiracy and treason, where every action be­comes laudable in proportion as it becomes fero­cious, where murder is the only mark of bravery, and where extermination alone is conquest!

The progress of the royalists after the events of the 10th of August to the epocha of Dumourier's defection, had remained unnoticed; nor was it till they had raised a most formidable camp and menaced Nantes, Angers, and other cities, and issued their formal manifestoes demanding the re-establishment of the priesthood, nobility, and royalty, that any effective measures were taken to repress them. The first generals that were sent against them, who were Berruyer, Marie, and Ligonier, acted, it is said, as if they were their allies, rather than their enemies; and Quetinau, who succeeded them, is accused of having surrendered Touars, with the magazines which it contained, and an army of four thousand men.

These defections on the one side, and the vic­tories of the royalists on the other, at length roused the convention, who decreed that an army of three hundred thousand men should be raised to succour what they called the patriots in the Vendée, who were opposed by the robbers. As this seemed to be an extra-service, great rewards were given to those who would enlist to go and assist "their bre­thren;" but most of these heroes, who were paid [Page 232] enormous sums to perform this act of charity, went and increased the armies of the malcontents, in­stead of fighting against them. A short time after the 31st of May, Saumur was taken by the royal­ists, and a number of other important places, Ve­h [...]irs, Partenay, Bressuire, and Fontenay the capi­tal of the department, fell into their power. The armies of the convention fled continually before numbers greatly inferior, and abandoned their ma­gazines, baggage, and cannon; so that the Ven­déan troops were furnished completely with stores, of every kind from the cowardice of the conven­tional forces, or the treachery of their command­ers. While these disgraces befel the armies on the western side, Nantes, which was besieged by an army of forty thousand men, was defended with five thousand, by Canclaux, who by the prudence and vigour of his operations saved the province of Brittany, and gained several important victories. Other generals who appeared to have the means as well as the intention of finishing the war expedi­tiously, among whom was the former due de Biron^*, [Page 233] were suspended, as well as Canclaux, while Ron­sin and Rossignol, two [...] generals, were loaded with eulogiums by the conspirators of Paris, in proportion as they were defeated by the royal­ists.

The royalists, encouraged by their successes, and finding themselves so well seconded by these gene­rals, marched on the 27th of July towards Angers, and to a bridge which was an important pass, called the bridge of Cé. Orders were given to evacuate this post, as had been done in preceding instances. But contrary measures being taken by a deputy in mission, and other dispositions being made by gene­ral Tune, both places were saved, and for the first time a victory was obtained. This general gained a still greater advantage, and a fortnight after he was broke.

The evacuation of Cholet by the royalists would have been the consequence of their defeat; but when general Rey was proposing to take advantage of his victory, an imperial edict of the same sans­culotte general forced him to a retreat. As a re­ward for successes which Rey afterwards gained, he also was broke; and his adjutant, who came to Pa­ris to plead for him, was thrown into the dungeon of the Conciergerie.

These plans of military operations were not likely to be attended with much success, and have appeared at all times mysterious. Phillipeaux, in his strictures on this war, calls it a strange pheno­menon for history, that the government should have looked calmly on, whilst those who gained victo­ries were disgraced, and those whose only prowess had consisted in converting whole armies composed of some of the bravest and best disciplined troops in the republic, into heaps of carcases, were ca­ressed and continued in command. Phillippeaux, [Page 234] in his letter to the committee of public safety, as­sures them that the two generals Ronsin and Ros­signol had butchered from forty to fifty thousand patriots.

But time reveals most mysteries. At this pe­riod the conspirators in Paris were more in dread of the resentment of the departments than they were of the army of the royalists. Of the various calumnies which they invented against the deputies who had fled from Paris, that of joining the royal­ists was the most industriously propagated; and while the proscribed deputies were held up to the public as the supporters and actors in a cause which all parties agreed to call rebellion, the conspirators found themselves justified in taking the measures best fitted to exterminate the only rivals they had to dread. Had the royalists been defeated, and the rebellion crushed, the calumny would have been discovered, and all pretence for punishment taken away. It was the interest therefore of the usurpers to menace the people with the vengeance of royalism and federalism united; and none were better calcu­lated to fulfil their intentions, than those inexperi­enced and profligate men, who had the most re­markable talents for procuring the defeat of the armies they commanded.

Whether or no this be the real explanation of that which has been deemed so mysterious, must be left to the consideration of those who wish to penetrate into this labyrinth. When we see the history of the war of the Vendée written by the royalists themselves, it is probable that they will say, that their own valour, and the goodness of the cause in which they were engaged, gave them these victories. In yielding its full force to this expla­nation, and supposing that the conventional armies were defeated by braver troops, it will yet remain [Page 235] unexplained, why, of two classes of conventional generals, those who beat and those who were beat­en, the former should have found either imprison­ment, or the scaffold, and the others prodigality of favours.

The usurpers having succeeded in their criminal designs against the republican party, now found it necessary to rid themselves of the royalists, whom they had hitherto made useful to their designs. The latter end of August they formed a different plan for the remainder of the campaign, which consisted in attacking at once the royalists from every point, and finishing the contest as it were at a single blow. The army on the northern side was committed to Rossignol and Ronsin, and the revolutionary le­gions and the army on the western coast were en­trusted to Lechelle. However well this plan might have been combined, the first specimen those who were to execute it gave of obedience to their in­structions was to suffer the insurgents to take pos­session of the island of Noirmoutier, Machecoul, and other places, and evacuate Montaigu, where they abandoned immense magazines of every sort, and the army was reduced to sleep in the open air; while their ignorant or treacherous leaders kept at a convenient distance, surrounded by actresses, courtesans, and all the licentiousness of an eastern camp, with all the vulgarity of the lowest profli­gacy.

This defeat was followed by many others, and by the capture also of several towns. The expe­dition which Lechelle made was so contrived, that his troops had not the means of effecting a retreat. The protection of the city of Nantes was entrusted to him, and he suffered a body of some hundred royalists to cut off its provisions for several days in the face of his whole army; and when the represen­tatives [Page 236] of the people requested him to send a de­tachment to rescue a convoy of flour which had fallen into the enemy's hands, he treated the appli­cation with contempt.

While this general was disposing of the conven­tional armies on the western side, his colleagues Rossignol and Ronsin, the latter of whom having seen some service took the title of minister-general, were preparing to execute the plan of the campaign on the other side. Instead of [...] to attack the enemy, they halted for some time at Saumur and Tours, so as to let the royalist army acquire its proper consistency. To surround the enemy was the great object; and orders were sent to the commanders of the southern armies at Niort, Lu­çon, and Partenay, to co-operate. The event of this arrangement was, conformably to the ordinary system, the total defeat of these divisions; and on the 18th of September so admirably were the in­structions obeyed, that fifty thousand men at Coran and near the passage of the Loire at Cé, command­ed by Ronsin and Rossignol, were attacked by an army consisting of three thousand royalists only; and what could appear scarcely credible, the sanscu­lotte generals had so ingeniously arranged their troops, that they were not only defeated by this inconsiderable detachment, but the slaughter was immense.

This extraordinary defeat will not, I am told, surprise any military man, when he hears that the conventional army was arranged for battle in a single column, in the defiles of Coran, with eight men in front, and presenting a flank to the enemy, who had possession of the heights, of nearly twelve miles in extent. The artillery, instead of being placed on those heights, under the protection of a strong detachment, as was proposed by the guides, [Page 237] and those who knew the country, was placed at the head of this long column, and of course fell into the hands of the royalists, who turned it against the conventional troops, and made great carnage. In the mean time, detachments of the enemy gained possession of the heights without difficulty and without resistance, massacred the troops below, taking them in flank, and made them, from the confusion into which they were thrown, the exter­minators of each other.

The generals who commanded this expedition were, in the mean time, regaling themselves at a distance, with their mistresses, some of whom were afterwards goddesses of reason; but they had the prudence to destroy their magazines, instead of leaving them as usual at the disposition of the ene­my. The harvest of that part of the country was just then gathered in, and would have sufficed them for a whole year, had they secured it agreeably to the orders of the convention.

This new plan of a campaign was not attended with more happy success than the former, and the mystery which embarrassed Phillippeaux became still more inexplicable. It would be difficult in­deed to define what could be the motive which led the government to look with so much complacency on this continued system of defeat and carnage, did we not see what combinations of crooked policy were put into execution to secure the purposes of ferocious ambition. The party of the Gironde, being completely crushed, gave them no longer any inquietude, and it became now the interest of the usurpers to bring the war to a speedy issue. The two former plans not having succeeded, the committee of public safety published another. These conspirators had seen how efficacious their decrees had been in several instances, and therefore [Page 238] imagined a mode of putting an end to this destruc­tive contest by decreeing that it should finish on the 20th of October, and that the generals should re­ceive the triumphal crown on the first of Novem­ber following. We should be inclined to smile at this excess of folly, if that disposition were not sup­pressed by indignation and horror at the atrocious orders which were given for this purpose to their armies, "that desolation and indiscriminate destruc­tion must now become the order of the day."

The decree having stated in express terms, "that all the retreats, mills, and ovens of the robbers should be destroyed and burnt, and that the minis­ter of war should be ordered to send combustible matter for that purpose;" and the proclamation of the convention having invited the soldiers of liberty to exterminate all these robbers, before the end of October; "the soldiers of liberty," and all those who were invited to the accomplishment of this new plan of the campaign, prepared to put it into execution. Neither the committee of usurpation, nor the convention had been nice in the definition of their terms, and therefore the soldiers of liberty undertook to construe them at their pleasure. Ac­cordingly, every house of the peaceful inhabitant came within the definition of the retreat of a robber, since every inhabitant of the Vendée was consider­ed as a robber, and consequently his dwelling must be a retreat.

Whether or no the instruments of this barbarous and execrable policy reasoned after this manner, they certainly became practical logicians; and the army, in addition to their hundred thousand bayo­nets, were armed with a hundred thousand torches; and having been pronounced by the usurpers the executors of their just vengeance, the property of the armed royalist and the peaceable republican be­came [Page 239] alike objects of their rapacity and fury; and indiscriminate massacre and plunder were literally the order of the day.

In the first days of the revolution, when liberty and philosophy went hand in hand together, what a moral revolution was instantly effected throughout Europe, by the sublime and immortal principles which this great change seemed about to introduce into government! But what eternal regrets must the lovers of liberty feel, that her cause should have fallen into the hands of monsters ignorant of her charms, by whom she has been transformed into a Fury, who, brandishing her snaky whips and torches, has enlarged the limits of wickedness, and driven us back into regions of guilt hitherto unknown!

So unexampled are the crimes which have been committed, that it will require stronger evidence than the historian is commonly bound to produce, to persuade future generations of their reality. Alas! but a faint outline has been drawn of this terrifying picture, over which the friend of liberty would, if it were possible, like the recording angel, drop a tear, that might blot it out for ever.—"If some sweet oblivious antidote" could drive from my brain the remembrance of these things, and from my heart the feelings that oppress it, as well as from the knowledge of the world, I should be tempted to snatch from the enemies of Liberty the triumph they assume from this mournful history. But these horrors must stain the page of the revo­lution for ever. The bloody characters must re­main indelible on the wall, a dreadful, but instruc­tive lesson to future ages, and to those countries, which are destined to labour through revolutions, and who will learn, while they contemplate this [Page 240] terrific chart, how to avoid the rocks on which Li­berty has been nearly wrecked.

Dreadful indeed has been the crisis we have pas­sed! yet it is some consolation, amidst this mighty mass of evil, that France is at length beginning to learn wisdom from the things she has suffered. France no longer looks around to find apologies for the crimes that have been committed: she herself holds up the criminals to the world. She boasts not of her victories over Europe armed against her rights; but she triumphs in the conquests she has made over herself. It is some relief, while I am struggling through the gloomy history of these horrors, that I see again the dawn of that glorious light which will chase them away. The last stroke has been given to that vile and degrading system, which ignoble usurpers had framed: we may now approach the altar of Liberty with confidence and hope; the hideous spectres that haunted it have fled for ever; and its incense in future will rise grate­ful to heaven, and spread fragrance over a regene­rated land.