France in Eighteen Hundred and Two

Appendix

Adams, John.

The sailor who led the mutiny on the Bounty against Lieutenant Bligh in 1789. Fearing the eventual reprisals of the British Government, he persuaded a number of his companions to leave Otaheite and seek fortune among the then unknown islands of the Southern Sea. They eventually settled at Pitcairn Island, and founded a colony.

John Adams was born in 1754 and died at Pitcairn Island, May 5, 1829, having fully earned the title by which he was known—“The Patriarch of Pitcairn.”

ANDRON.

A Greek sculptor, believed to have lived some time in the second century A.D.

BARNAVE, Antony Peter Joseph Marie.

Born at Grenoble, October 22, 1761; executed in Paris, November 30, 1793. One of the great promoters of that Revolution of which he eventually became a victim.

His father was a Procurator of Parliament and his mother the daughter of a military officer. In those days professions were hereditary, and young Barnave was therefore destined for the Bar. In early life he showed signs of talent and an impetuous disposition; he was sixteen when he fought his first duel, and he published a remarkable book at the age of twenty.

In 1783 he was chosen by the lawyers of the Grenoble Bar to pronounce the speech before the vacation at the local Parliament. He chose for his subject “The Divisions of Political Power in a State.” This discourse excited much interest, not only in Dauphiny, but all over France; the speaker was then twenty-two years of age.

His political career did not commence until he was twenty-eight, when, having been elected Deputy to the States-General, he proceeded to Versailles.

Barnave was, a few days after the opening of that Assembly, named a Commissioner by the “Tiers Etat,” and he composed the first petition, or address, that body presented to the King. During the session of the Assembly he became more and more prominent; he was still a believer in the monarchical system, and—under a constitutional form of government—a strong supporter of the throne.

On October 25, 1790, Barnave was elected President of the Assembly.

A few weeks after the death of Mirabeau, April 2, 1791, the Royal Family fled from Paris and were arrested at Varennes: Barnave was commissioned with Pêthion to bring them back to Paris. The many hours he thus spent in their company greatly influenced him in their favour, and the Queen’s charm exercised an influence over him which dominated the remainder of his short life. The question of the inviolability of Royalty arose immediately after the King’s return, and Barnave made a moving and eloquent speech on this subject. The discussion of the new Constitution commenced on August 8, 1791. On the 14th the King took the oath, and on the 30th the Assembly was dissolved.

The public career of Barnave then terminated, and his final speech was made before a different tribunal. He returned to Grenoble in January 1792, and there wrote “The Introduction to the French Revolution.” On August 15 of the same year the Deputy La Rivière denounced the author of this book from the Tribune; on the 29th of the same month Barnave was arrested. After ten months’ imprisonment at Grenoble he was removed to Paris on November 3, 1793. He appeared on December 28 before the Revolutionary Tribunal; two days later he perished.

Barnave addressed the crowd from the scaffold, his last words being, as he pointed to the fatal knife, “This is the reward for all I have done for France and for Liberty.”

BARBŒUF (surnamed “Caius Gracchus”), François Noel.

Born at St. Quintin in 1764; died May 25, 1797.

In early life he was apprenticed to an architect, and when quite a young man he wrote articles for newspapers at Amiens. He hailed with joy the principles of the Revolution.

He was tried in 1790, in Paris, owing to the violence of his writings; although acquitted, he had to undergo another trial in 1792, under an accusation of embezzlement, when he was a second time acquitted and soon after appointed administrator of a Department; he did not return to Paris until Thermidor 1794.

He created the journal Le Tribun du Peuple, and developed in its pages, under the synonym “Caius Gracchus,” the doctrine of the absolute equality of mankind. Two years later Babœuf and his followers, now a numerous body, constituted themselves into a secret society, with the object of re-establishing the régime of 1793.

This society spread its emissaries over France, and early in 1796 was prepared for a rising. With the aid of 16,000 men, soldiers belonging to the garrison of Paris, and of artillery posted at Vincennes and at the Invalides, and of certain disaffected members of Grenadiers and police, together with a large number of the labouring classes—these conspirators planned to seize the Directorate, the Legislative Assembly, and the Military Staff of the Etat Major. Their arrangements were apparently perfect, but, as is usual in such cases, traitors among the plotters revealed the whole scheme to the Directorate. The heads of this conjuration, to the number of sixty-five, were arrested, and Babœuf himself was seized just as he was dictating the manifesto which was to be issued after the rising had taken place.

The trial of the conspirators lasted three months and was held at Vendôme. After the sentence of death was pronounced, Babœuf and his friend Dârtre stabbed themselves, but were nevertheless, like Robespierre and his friends, carried in an expiring condition to the scaffold and beheaded.

Babœuf’s principles were those of the most advanced Socialism, one of his precepts for the government of the Utopia of his dreams being, “Whoever pronounces the word ‘property’ shall be imprisoned as a dangerous madman.”

BARBAROUX, Charles Jean Marie.

Born in Marseilles, 1767; guillotined at Bordeaux, June 23, 1794.

As a very young man he showed scientific aptitude, and when quite a boy was in correspondence with Franklin. He became an advocate at the Bar of Marseilles, and had already obtained much success as a pleader when the Revolution broke out.

He was made secretary to the new Commune of Marseilles, and after quelling a Royalist insurrection at Arles, was despatched to Paris as Deputy for Marseilles. He became a member of the “Jacobin Club,” and an intimate friend and ally of Roland and his wife. He took an active part in the events of August 10, 1792, and was soon after named President of the “Elective Assembly,” and, later, a member of the Convention. From the outset of his legislative career he was an opponent of the Extreme Left; he denounced Robespierre and Marat, insisting upon the punishment of the authors of the bloody massacres of September. An excellent economist, Barbaroux treated in a masterly manner the question of commercial administration.

At the trial of Louis XVI. he voted against the execution of the monarch. A movement was set on foot to drive Barbaroux from the Convention, and on May 31 he was forced to fly from Paris. He was declared a traitor to his country. At Caen he had an interview with Charlotte Corday, and it is he who is supposed to have inspired this young girl with the idea of killing Marat.

He was a man of remarkable personal beauty, and unjustly accused of having carried on a guilty intrigue with Mme. Roland. He took refuge at Bordeaux, but was discovered and arrested. Although he shot himself twice, he retained sufficient appearance of life to enable the possibility of his public execution.

BARRAS, Jean Paul François, Comte de.

Born in 1755 at Lohenpoux, Provence; died at Chaillot, near Paris, 1829.

He entered the army at the age of eighteen, went with his regiment to the Ile de France in 1775, and eventually joined the French Indian Army at Pondicherry. After the capture of that town he took service under Suffren, and spent some time at the Cape of Good Hope, returning to France with the rank of captain.

He then proceeded to lead a life of debauchery and extravagance. Many ruined rakes perceived in the Revolution a chance, as they thought, of retrieving their fallen fortunes; among such was Barras. He was present at the attack on the Bastille in 1789, and at the sack of the Tuileries three years later. He was a member of the Convention, and voted for the instant execution of Louis XVI. without appeal.

As a delegate to the South of France he assisted in those sanguinary repressions of the revolt against the Republic in Provence. At Nice he arrested Brunet and Trogoff, whom he accused of ceding Toulon to the English. He was present at the siege and capture of that town, and helped to carry out horrible massacres of supposed traitors. Nevertheless, he was an object of distrust to Robespierre, who disliked the intense immorality of his private life, and doubted the sincerity of his Republicanism. Barras therefore directed his efforts towards the overthrow of the Montagne, and was the principal instigator of the events of Thermidor, which led to the fall of Robespierre.

Later he obtained control of the home military force—and the Presidency of the Convention. He declared Paris in a state of siege, and when the mob surrounded the Assembly, shouting for bread and the Constitution of 1793, he directed the armed force which dispersed the people.

To him Bonaparte owed the command, by which the latter, in the name of Barras, suppressed the attempted Royalist revolution.

During the Directorate, Barras reigned practically alone until the advent of Sièyes. He amassed a vast fortune, although during his official reign he squandered money lavishly upon his pleasures and lived in great state.

The Revolution of the 18th Brumaire annulled his political power, and he sought and obtained permission to leave Paris.

During the rest of his life he ceased to be a man of any public importance; he was frequently exiled, and perpetually intriguing with the Bourbons. After the second Restoration he returned to Paris, and settled at Chaillot, where he died at the age of seventy-four.

BARRÈRE DE VIEUZAC, Bertrand.

Born at Tarbes, September 10, 1755; died January 15, 1841.

He studied law and was advocate to the Parliament of Toulouse. Later he returned to Tarbes, from whence he eventually went as Deputy to the States-General. Here he soon took a prominent place, defending the liberty of the press; and brought forward successfully numerous motions as to the confiscation of Crown lands and the declarations of the rights of citizens.

The National Assembly being dissolved, Barrère became a member of the Tribunal of Cassation, and in 1792 Deputy for the Department of the Upper Pyrenees. He publicly defended the September massacres on the ground of their being a necessity to save the State. He was elected President of the Convention of December 1792, his first act being to press for the immediate judgment of “Louis the Traitor,” as he termed the King, saying that “the tree of Liberty would never flourish until it had been watered by the blood of kings.” He voted the death of Louis XVI. without respite, and later in the year brought forward a project of ostracism against the Duke of Orleans and the Ministers Roland and Pache.

The triumph of the Montagne over the Girondins caused Barrère to join forces with the former. Terror for his own life made him ruthless in the destruction of the lives of others.

He became in July 1793 a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and, soon after, chief of that body, and its principal acts were carried out by his order and at his instigation. By his command the royal tombs at St. Denis were destroyed, Paoli declared a traitor, the expulsion of those English who arrived in France after July 14, 1789, decreed, as well as instant confiscation of all property belonging to the émigrés. He caused the Château de Caen to be razed to the ground, sent troops to punish Lyons, created a revolutionary army, and promulgated the decree, “Terror is the order of the day.” He also planned the speedy execution of the Queen, and proposed that every Frenchman who had not already made his declaration of adhesion to the Republic should be transported, and all persons accused of spreading false news brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He implored the Assembly to treat with the utmost severity all enemies of the nation, saying: “Have pity on them to-day and they will massacre you to-morrow. It is only the dead who cannot return.”

Until the fall of Robespierre, Barrère was his lieutenant and obedient servant; but after the coup d’état against Robespierre, Barrère was violent and condemnatory against the “conspirator whose projects had up to then been veiled in mystery.” Nevertheless, Barrère did not succeed in escaping; he was arrested, with Callot, D’Herbois and Billaud, on March 2, 1795. He and they were condemned to transportation, but later on Barrère obtained a re-trial of his case, and was removed to another prison, from which he succeeded in making his escape. He evaded re-arrest until the law of amnesty for political prisoners was passed. He remained in obscurity till 1815, when, during “the hundred days,” he was elected a Deputy.

After the second Restoration he was banished as a regicide, and retired to Brussels, where he resided until 1830, when he returned to France and there remained until his death, at the age of eighty-six years, in 1841.

BLANCHARD DE DA MUSSE, François Gabriel Ursin.

Born at Nantes, 1752; died at Rennes in 1836.

A pupil and friend of Delisle de Salés. He was called to the Bar at Rennes, capital of Brittany, and became Councillor of the Parliament of that town. He was one of those arrested suspects saved by the Revolution of Thermidor, 1794.

After the 18th Brumaire his well-known honesty and amiability of character caused his nomination as a judge of the High Court at Trèves and later Nantes. In 1815 he was, as a Liberal, deprived of his functions, but reinstated the following year.

He wrote much poetry and several philosophical treatises.

BRISSOT DE WARVILLE, Jean Pierre.

Born at Chartres, January 1754; executed in Paris, October 1793.

The thirteenth child of a wealthy innkeeper, Brissot early showed signs of talent, and his first book, Théories des Lois criminelles, evoked a complimentary letter from the aged Voltaire, to whom the work was dedicated.

In Paris, Brissot entered a lawyer’s office, where Robespierre was his fellow clerk. But he soon abandoned law for journalism, and became a well-known pamphleteer. He visited England, and his book upon English literature was at one time considered a classic.

On his return from England he was falsely accused of being the author of a lampoon upon the Queen of France, and imprisoned in the Bastille. Here he remained four months, but was released by the influence of Mdme. de Genlis and the Duke of Orleans. He was advised to take refuge in London. He joined the Abolition of Slavery League, and resolved to establish a similar League in France under the title of Les Amis des Noirs. He went to America to study the question of slavery.

On his return from America he devoted all his talents and his efforts to add to the impetus of the French Revolution.

Brissot was elected one of the members for Paris in the National Assembly. An honest man and a true patriot, he fought against anarchy. He was an opponent of the massacres of September, and of the King’s trial.

Constantly attacked by the Robespierre faction, he was arrested at Moulins; incarcerated in the Abbaye at Paris; condemned to death with twenty-one of his friends on October 12, 1793, and executed on the following day.

Brissot was one of the writers who exercised great influence in those various publications which aided the advance of the French Revolution, and accelerated that movement. His books on law and legislature, his innumerable pamphlets, his speeches at the Assembly and Convention, attest his earnest devotion to the Revolutionary cause in its infancy.

BOURDON DE L’OISE, François Louis.

Born at Rémy, near Campièges; died in 1797 at Simamari in Guiana.

He commenced his career as a lawyer, became Procureur of the Parliament of Paris, and eventually embraced the Revolutionary cause in 1789, taking part in the attack on the Tuileries, August 10, 1792.

He became a member of the Convention by a trick. Another François Louis Bourdon, to whom he was in no way related, was elected both by the Department of l’Oise and also that of the Loiret as a Member of the Convention. This Bourdon chose to represent the Loiret; and his namesake, whom the electors had never seen, profiting by the similarity of names, presented himself to the Convention, took his seat without any difficulty, and held it without question.

He first distinguished himself by the ferocity of his utterances. He voted for the death of Louis XVI. without an appeal to the people, and denounced all the more moderate Deputies, such as Brissot, as being Royalists at heart. He defended the Reign of Terror, violently attacking the Abbé Grégoire for his desire to Christianise the Revolution.

As he later showed signs of pity towards the Royal insurgents in La Vendée, Robespierre and Hébert accused him of moderation, and caused him to be excluded from the Jacobin Club. Bourdon, alarmed, threw his influence in the scale against Robespierre in the Thermidor contra-Revolution, and went so far as to suggest that every Deputy who resisted the decree for Robespierre’s arrest should be shot upon the spot. He was one of the escort that accompanied Robespierre and his partisans to the scaffold.

From this time Bourdon declared himself the enemy of the Revolutionary system, and the protector of priests and nobles. Nevertheless, when sent to Chârtres to discover traces of those who were supposed to have plotted against the Convention, Bourdon showed excessive and merciless cruelty. He eventually became a Member of the Council of the Five Hundred, and realised a large fortune by dealing in assignats and in the national property.

The Directorate contained many of his mortal enemies, who inscribed his name upon the list of those to be transported to Cayenne, and he was arrested and deported; shortly after his arrival at Simamari Bourdon expired, broken down by impotent rage, remorse and despair.

BITANBÉ, Paul Jeremie.

Born at Kœnigsburg in Prussia, 1732; died in Paris, 1808.

Descended from a Huguenot family, banished from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a learned student, and a voluminous writer.

His translation of the Iliad, published in Berlin in 1762, brought him the patronage of Frederick the Great, who allowed him to settle in France, in order that he might perfect his knowledge of the French language. He published various translations from the Greek in Paris, and was naturalised as a French citizen.

He was arrested during the Terror, and, together with his wife, suffered a lengthy imprisonment; the 9th Thermidor brought his release.

He was one of the principal members of the new Institut, and there represented literature and the fine arts. His writings are somewhat marred by the fact that they were composed by a man who had not thoroughly grasped the intricacies of the French language.

LE BON, Josephe.

Born at Arras, September 25, 1765; executed at Amiens, 1795.

He made his first studies at an Oratorian College, and eventually became a member of that congregation. At the age of eighteen, he was already a teacher of rhetoric in the College of Béaune in Burgundy, and enjoyed a great reputation for piety and learning. His sympathy with the Revolution caused him to become a “Constitutional” parish priest at Vernois, and a year later he was appointed to a cure of souls near Arras.

Robespierre, St. Just, and Le Bas were his intimate friends: at their persuasion he abandoned Christianity, married, and adopted a political career. He was appointed Mayor of Arras and Syndic for the whole Department of Pas de Calais, and, at first, showed much judgment and great moderation.

In 1793 he was despatched on a mission to the Pas du Calais, and was at first so indulgent, that Suffray, his neighbour and enemy, denounced him to the Committee of Public Safety as a protector of the aristocrats and a persecutor of patriots. He was recalled to Paris, but under Robespierre’s guarantee and his own promise to redeem the past, was sent back to the Pas de Calais with unlimited powers, and the order to crush the anti-revolutionary movement in the towns of this Department. He carried out these orders without mercy. Terrified by these responsibilities and by the fact that the Austrian army occupied the neighbouring frontier, he imagined enemies of the Republic on every side, and wherever he went blood flowed freely. So great, however, were his cruelties that he was again accused. But Barrère declared that Le Bon had saved Cambrai by his energy, and for a time the accusation lapsed; his severities, however, made his enemies thirst for revenge. In May 1795, a committee was appointed to inquire into his conduct, and the report they returned was:

1. That he had been guilty of public assassination.

2. Of oppressing citizens.

3. Exercising personal vengeance in his summary executions of accused persons.

He was then tried and found guilty of an “unlimited abuse of the guillotine.”

Le Bon exclaimed, as they dressed him in the red garment reserved for murderers upon their road to the scaffold; “It is not I who should wear this garment, but those whose orders I obeyed.” He showed pitiable cowardice at his execution, and his cries and groans rent the air.

Lamartine says of Le Bon:

He decimated the Departments of Le Nord and Pas du Calais. This man is a striking example of the kind of vertigo by which men of weak mind are affected in great political crises. Certain periods of history excite criminality. Blood is in the air. Revolutionary fever has its delirium. Le Bon during his short life of thirty years experienced all the phases of this mental disease. In ordinary times he would have left behind him the reputation of a worthy, respectable, and religious man. In those sinister days he became a pitiless proscriptor.

BEAUHARNAIS, Eugène, Duke de Leuchtenberg, Prince of Eichstadt, Viceroy of Italy.

Born in Paris, 1781, died February 22, 1824.

His father was executed by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1794, and his mother would have shared the same fate but for the fall of Robespierre. At the age of fourteen he was taken by General Hoche, who had been his father’s friend, to join the army in Brittany. His mother’s marriage to Napoleon in 1796 changed the course of his existence. In 1797 he was created sub-lieutenant, and from that time was the constant companion of his stepfather; and for the future that stepfather’s fortunes were his own.

He was only twenty-four when he became ruler of Italy, and showed extraordinary intelligence and moderation during his Vice-Royalty. After the signature of the Treaty of Pressburg, he married in 1806 Princess Louisa of Bavaria, and Napoleon bestowed upon him the titles of “Prince of the Empire, adopted son and heir-presumptive to the crown of Italy.”

After the fall of Napoleon, Prince Eugène retired with his wife and family to Bavaria, and was created Duke de Leuchtenberg by the King, his father-in-law. He spent a few years in seclusion, devoting himself to the education of his children. He died suddenly from an accident when only forty-three years of age.

His sons and daughters made brilliant alliances, his eldest son marrying Donna Maria della Gloria, Queen Regnant of Portugal; his younger son, Olga, daughter of the Emperor Nicholas. Of his daughters, the eldest became Queen of Sweden, the second Princess Hohenzollern, and the third Empress of Brazil.

The present Russian semi-Imperial family of Leuchtenberg is descended from Prince Eugène.

BARLOW, Joel.

Born at Reading in Connecticut, 1755; died in December 1812, in Russian Poland.

He served as chaplain to a regiment during the American War of Independence, and attained some celebrity by the patriotic songs he composed.

In 1788 he abandoned the clerical profession and sailed for Europe as agent of the Ohio Company. He settled in Paris, where he identified himself with the Revolutionary party, and was intimate with the leaders of the Girondins.

In 1791 he published several pamphlets and poems in favour of the Revolution, and in 1792 he addressed “A letter to the National Convention” begging them to abolish royalty, and presented in person an address to that Assembly from English Republicans. When the Abbé Gregoire went to Savoy on a special mission from the Convention, Barlow accompanied him and made many speeches at Chambéry against the King of Savoy.

On his return to Paris he was appointed American Consul at Tripoli; in 1805, after another long stay in Paris, he returned to America; in 1811 he was sent as American Minister to Paris. The following year he started to join the Duke de Bassano in Russia, which the French had just invaded, but falling ill on his way to Wilna he expired in a miserable village near Cracow.

CAMBACÈRES and Prince of Parma, Jean Jaques Régis, Duc de.

Born at Montpellier, 1753; died at Paris, 1824.

He belonged to an ancient family of the Long Robe, and many of his ancestors and family connections had been distinguished lawyers and churchmen. He was intended for the magistrature, and made law his chief study. In 1789 he proceeded to Paris and became a popular leader during the first years of the Revolution. He was elected a member of the Convention in 1792. Through the next two stormy years Cambacères, by the exercise of extreme prudence, kept himself free from suspicion, although he was never identified with the extreme party, and opposed the execution of Louis XVI. He was President of the Assembly in 1794, and a member of the Committee of Public Safety. He was Minister of Justice during the Directory, and when Napoleon Bonaparte assumed the head of affairs after the eighteenth Brumaire he appointed Cambacères as Second Consul, with power to act for the First Consul during the latter’s absence.

When Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor Cambacères was created Arch-Chancellor, with perpetual Presidency of the Senate. He held this position during the whole of the reign of Napoleon I. None of his councillors were esteemed more highly by the Emperor than Cambacères; his advice was usually moderate and sensible. He opposed the Austrian marriage and the Russian campaign. It was he who in 1814 conducted Marie Louise and her child to Blois and delivered them over to the Austrian commissioners. Her flight from Paris was contrary to his advice.

During “the hundred days” he resumed his position as Chancellor. The Second Restoration banished him from France as a regicide. In 1818 the decree of his banishment was reversed, and he returned to Paris, where he died six years later at the age of seventy-one.

CARNOT, Lazare Nicholas Marguerite.

Born at Noisy, Burgundy, 1753; died at Magdeburg, in Prussia, 1827.

Educated in Paris at a military school he joined the army with the grade of lieutenant in 1773. He was soon distinguished by his scientific attainments as well as his literary talents.

When the Revolution broke out Carnot addressed many memorials to the Assembly on the subject of financial reform. Had his proposals been then carried out national bankruptcy might have been prevented.

He became a Deputy in 1791, and after the events of August 10, 1792, Carnot was despatched to the Republican army of the Rhine. During the next two years he commanded armies on the frontier, and gained many brilliant victories. He took no part in the atrocities of the Terror, but has been unjustly accused both by his contemporaries and by posterity of having approved the massacres at Avignon and the executions at Lyons. As a member of the Committee of Public Safety his name is attached to the decrees ordering these cruel punishments, but he was at this time fighting on the banks of the Rhine. He hated Robespierre and Robespierre detested him, often saying, “We need Carnot now for the war, but as soon as the war is over his head shall fall.”

Carnot became one of the five Directors, and in that capacity gave Napoleon Bonaparte command of the army of Italy. During that campaign the other four Directors opposed Carnot; he was stripped of his office and even of his seat in the Institut, a body he had virtually founded, was impeached and forced to fly for his life to Switzerland. He remained in exile until the events of the 18th Brumaire, when he was recalled and appointed Minister of War and Tribune. He was opposed to the creation of a life consulate, and later on to that of an Empire.

From 1807 to 1813 he retired into private life, employing his leisure in scientific studies and the education of his children. The disasters of 1813 brought him out of his retreat, and he again offered his services to the Emperor.

Napoleon appointed him Governor of Antwerp on January 24, 1814, which place he defended with so much ability that it was still in the possession of the French at the conclusion of the war. He again retired into private life, but when Napoleon returned from Elba he made Carnot Minister of the Interior. He held his appointment for less than three months, but during that short period brought about many educational reforms which are still in use.

After Waterloo, Carnot was a member of the Provisional Government, but as soon as the Bourbons returned he was banished and outlawed. The Emperor Alexander gave him a passport to Poland. He eventually fixed his residence with his family at Magdeburg in Prussia, where he died at the age of seventy.

CHAPTAL, Comte de Chanteloup, Jean Antoine.

Born June 4, 1756; died 1832.

A celebrated chemist. His uncle, a rich physician at Montpellier, gave him his first education. He studied chemistry at the University of Montpellier, received the title of Doctor in 1777, and went to Paris. In 1781 he returned to his native town a celebrated man.

The State of Languedoc founded in his honour a Professorship of Chemistry at the School of Medicine. Chaptal had adopted the theories of Lavoisier. The young professor considered chemistry, then in its infancy, likely to become the most useful and practical of sciences. By his uncle’s death he inherited a large fortune, and he devoted the whole of it to constructing various laboratories, where experiments could be carried out, and large establishments in which scientific productions might be manufactured.

By his inventive studies, and assisted by his large fortune, manufactories of alum, soda, and saltpetre were successfully established, and the Government recompensed this work by giving him a patent of nobility and the Grand Cordon of the Order of St. Michael.

Chaptal adopted all the ideas of the Revolution, although he disapproved its excesses. He was in consequence arrested; but his scientific knowledge was too important to the Government, and he was liberated and appointed Director of the Saltpetre Manufactory at Grenoble. After this he directed also the re-organisation of the School of Medicine. During the Consulate, Chaptal succeeded Lucien Bonaparte as Minister of the Interior, and in that capacity rendered great service to the State; he was appointed Treasurer of the Senat, under the title of Count Chanteloup. When Napoleon returned from Elba, Chaptal accepted the portfolio of Minister of Commerce. After the Restoration, Louis XVIII. erased his name from the list of Peers of France, but a few years later his peerage was restored. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences, and wrote several important scientific works in his old age.

Before his death, at the age of seventy-five, he had many pecuniary misfortunes, and died in comparative poverty.

CIMAROSA, Domenico.

Born 1749 at Aversa, in the Kingdom of Naples; died in Venice, 1801.

The son of a poor mason, he was but seven years of age when his father was killed by a fall from a scaffold. In her distress the boy’s mother applied to a charitable monk for help. This good man gave Cimarosa a few Latin lessons, and was so struck by the child’s intelligence that he decided to adopt him. This monk was organist of the convent, and taught his pupil music. Discovering the boy’s extraordinary aptitude for musical composition, he obtained his admission into the Conservatory at Santa Maria di Loretto.

At the age of twenty-four Cimarosa produced his first opera at Naples. His next ten years were a succession of triumphs, and he produced innumerable operas and other musical compositions. In 1787 the Empress Catherine offered him the title of Imperial Composer, with a high salary. He journeyed to Russia, was treated with great distinction, and many operas written by him in Russia were performed during his five years’ stay in that country. He returned to Naples in 1793.

In 1799 he joined the Revolutionary party in Italy, was thrown into prison, and but for the intercession of the Russian Ambassador would have been executed. Upon his release he took refuge at Venice, where he died.

He composed over a hundred operas, many of which still hold the stage.

CLOOTZ (surnamed ANACHARSIS), Jean Baptiste, Baron de.

Born in Cleves in Germany, 1755; guillotined in Paris, 1794.

He was educated in Paris, possessed considerable natural intelligence, but was led astray by the violent excitability of his nature. He had confused dreams of social regeneration, and declared that his life was to be devoted to the reformation of the world.

He inherited a vast fortune, renounced his title of baron, taking the romantic name of Anacharsis, travelled over Germany, Italy and England, preaching his extraordinary doctrines, and spending money with unbridled extravagance.

The French Revolution filled him with delirious joy; it appeared to realise all his mad projects. On June 19, 1790, he presented himself at the bar of the Assembly to read an address in which he requested that all strangers residing in Paris might be admitted to the Grand Federation which was to take place on July 14 of the same year. He called himself “the Ambassador of Humanity” to France, and gave large sums to the “nation” for the fitting out of a regiment “to fight in the holy war against tyranny.”

The events of August 10 seem to have shaken Clootz’s reason. Not content with attacking all the kings and princes of the earth, he delivered a violent tirade against the Almighty, declaring himself the personal enemy of God. He publicly abjured all religion. He complimented the Convention upon their victories near the Rhine, and requested the members to put prices upon the heads of the Duke of Brunswick and the King of Prussia. A decree of August 20, 1792, having granted him the title of citizen, he repaired to the Bar of the Assembly and delivered a long speech of thanks, and in the praise of regicide. After he became a member of the Convention he wearied his co-Deputies by long rambling speeches. He voted for the death of the King “in the name of the whole generation of mankind,” adding, “he personally condemned Frederick William of Prussia to death.”

Robespierre was his secret enemy, and by his (Robespierre’s) influence Clootz was excluded from the club of the Jacobins and arrested, the only accusation against him being that he was rich and of noble birth. Clootz was condemned to death with his supposed accomplices. He received his sentence with calmness, and passed his remaining hours preaching materialism to his fellow victims. At the scaffold he requested permission to suffer last, as he wished to make some observations while watching the heads of his companions fall.

He wrote several books, as strange in their contents as was his own character.

CONDORCET, Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carinton, Marquis de.

Born at Ribemont, in Picardy, 1743.

A member of a very ancient and noble family: being her only surviving son, his mother devoted him to the Virgin, making him wear girl’s clothes until the age of eleven.

He became one of the most illustrious mathematicians and philosophers of France. He was not quite twenty-two when he presented his celebrated essay, “Sur le calcul intégral” before the Academy. He was elected member of the Academy of Science after composing an eulogy on the death of La Fontaine in 1771.

During the next fifteen years he published many books of historical and philosophical interest.

Turgot inspired Condorcet with a taste for political economy.

In 1789, notwithstanding his great position in the world of literature and politics, Condorcet was not elected a member of the States-General. But in 1791 he was a Deputy for Paris in the second Assembly. He voted against the execution of Louis XVI.

Condorcet was shortly after denounced as an Academician, a conspirator, and an enemy of the people. He was also accused of having attacked the “sublime efforts of the Committee of Public Safety,” and on October 3 the Convention ordered his arrest. For a time various friends concealed the illustrious refugee in their houses, but he was obliged to fly on April 6, 1794, from his last hiding-place. Hunger drove him into a baker’s shop to buy bread, where the whiteness of his hands, the fineness of his linen, and the fact that he was carrying a volume of Horace excited suspicion, and he was arrested. He committed suicide the same night in prison, swallowing poison contained in a ring. He was fifty years of age.

Condorcet was one of the most illustrious of Frenchmen, a true friend of liberty, a gentleman, an honest man, an elegant speaker, a brilliant writer, and a distinguished geometrician; he fell a victim, with many others almost equally distinguished, to the fury of those revolutionary demagogues who deprived France of most of the benefits she might have received from the Revolution of 1789.

CONDÉ, Prince Louis Joseph de Bourbon.

Born at Chantilly, 1736; died in Paris, 1818.

The son of that Duke de Bourbon (afterwards Prince de Condé) who succeeded the Regent Duke of Orleans as Prime Minister to Louis XV. This Prince died in 1739, when his only son was three years of age.

From his earliest childhood the young Prince de Condé was devoted to military studies. His guardian, the Count de Charolais, gave him an excellent general education. The Prince made a good classical scholar, and through life was fond of making quotations of Greek and Latin authors. He wrote an admirable history of the life of his ancestor, the great Condé.

During the Seven Years War he showed military genius and personal courage, and the victory of Johannesburg was principally due to his efforts (1762). He married at the age of seventeen Mlle. de Soubise, by whom he had a son and a daughter. She died when her husband was twenty-seven and she but twenty-five years old.

His disposition was noble and generous, and his political views distinctly liberal. He violently opposed the suggestions of Count St. Germain (the War Minister) that Russian discipline, including the caning of soldiers, should be introduced into the French army. Deserving officers, not of noble birth, found in him a friend and protector, as he used his influence to assist their promotion.

The Prince de Condé spent twenty years of his life in embellishing and improving his magnificent residence at Chantilly and the surrounding domain. Here he entertained the German Emperor, Joseph II., the Emperor Paul, when Grand Duke Cesarovitch, Gustavus, King of Sweden, the Duke of Brunswick, and many other potentates. He was a generous landlord and a public benefactor during the famine (1775); he bought up, at any and every price, all the grain he could possibly obtain, this corn being re-sold to the people at the usual price given in prosperous years for wheat.

Governor of Burgundy, that province owed to his efforts new roads and bridges, the encouragement of local art, and the foundation of useful and literary institutions. In 1787, as President of the Assembly of Notables, his discourses were in favour of order, economy and reform. Nevertheless, he was one of the first objects of attack by the Revolutionary party, and menaced on every side. Very shortly after the destruction of the Bastille he departed with his family from France. He went first to Austrian Flanders, and later to Turin, where he helped to combine the movement which brought about the counter revolution in Lyons and Southern France. He was chosen to command the body of French noblemen and gentlemen known as L’armée du Rhin or Des Emigrés.

A decree of the Assembly, 1791, deprived him of an annuity of £24,000 a year (granted by the State to the House of Condé in exchange for the territory of Clemontain). His property at Chantilly was confiscated, and, as he was without resources, he sold all his plate, diamonds and jewels.

When the civil war began he commanded a body of five thousand men. At the close of the first campaign he possessed no funds beyond a sum of money the Empress Catherine sent him as a present. Shortly after this he entered regularly into the service of the Emperor of Austria and received the pay of an ordinary general.

In the campaign of 1793 the Prince de Condé performed many brilliant feats of strategy, entering Alsace and occupying Berstein; the enemy drove his troops to Hagenau, and he marched on foot at the head of his regiment and retook Berstein by a bayonet charge. During the two following campaigns, Condé’s army was occupied only in guarding the Rhine. He suffered from the jealousy and malevolence of the Austrian commanders, and was supplied with bad provisions and spoilt flour; but the Prince ordered his table to be served with similar bread to that of the soldiers.

During the whole of this time (in 1795) Condé was negotiating with Pichegru, who commanded the Republican army on the opposite bank of the Rhine. They agreed that Condé should pass over the Rhine with his army and join Pichegru; they were to march jointly on Paris and restore the monarchy. The Prince, being subordinate to the Austrian Commander-in-Chief, Werhmer, considered it a point of honour to communicate this scheme to his superior officer. The Cabinet of Vienna refused to assent to Condé’s arrangement with the Republican general, unless Strasburg and the other Alsatian fortresses were occupied by the Imperial troops. The Prince refused his consent, and Pichegru, whose first condition had been “no Austrian soldier shall set his foot on French soil,” naturally refused to entertain the proposal for an instant. The project was, therefore, abandoned.

The forces of Condé, consisting of 10,000 men, were now an integral part of the regular Austrian army. The passage of Moreau over the Rhine caused the retreat of the Austrians, and although Condé and his troops invariably distinguished themselves, and at the battle of Biberach saved the Austrian army from a crushing defeat, the advance of Moreau was never seriously checked.

After the peace of Campo-Formio in the following year, Condé and his remaining followers took service under Paul I. of Russia. In 1799 Paul abandoned the Austrian alliance, and made peace with France; the army of the Emigrés then passed over to the English. Condé fought in Bavaria and defended the passage of the Inn. But after the battle of Hohenlinden the whole of his remaining forces were disbanded. In 1801 the Prince joined his son, the Duke de Bourbon, in England, the British Government providing them with a small allowance.

Condé settled in the ancient abbey of Malmesbury, where he found a devoted companion in his second wife, the Dowager Princess of Monaco. In 1804 the news reached him of the assassination of his grandson, the Duke d’Enghien, the last male heir of his race. In 1813 he lost his wife, at the very moment when his long and cruel exile was about to terminate.

He landed at Calais with Louis XVIII. in May 1814. Notwithstanding his great age (he was nearly eighty) he was the only member of the royal family who did not instantly attempt flight from Paris on the return of Napoleon from Elba.

“We should fight,” he cried, as the carriage in which he had been forcibly seated was bearing him away towards the frontier.

On his return after Waterloo he spent the remaining five years of his life at the Palais Bourbon (now the Chamber of the French Legislature) and at a small château at Chantilly, the last relic of its ancient splendour.

He died in Paris, aged eighty two, and was, by order of Louis XVIII., buried at St. Denis, in the vault of the Kings of France.

DANTON, George Jacques.

Born October 28, 1759; executed April 6, 1794.

At the time of the outbreak of the Revolution he was a needy lawyer. The immorality of his private life caused him to be greatly discredited by members of his profession, and he seldom obtained employment. He therefore hailed with joy the social changes, and threw himself with all the energy of his temperament into the Revolutionary movement. He made the acquaintance of Mirabeau, who found him a man whose actions and unscrupulousness were likely to be of great use to his political plans. Mignet, in his “History of the Revolution,” says:

Danton was a revolutionary giant. He saw nothing condemnable in any action which could serve his purpose. His theory was that with audacity one could achieve anything and everything.

Danton, who had been surnamed “the Mirabeau of the populace,” possessed the following characteristics in common with the great Tribune. Strongly marked features, a loud voice, an imperious mien, a bold eloquence, and a dominating presence. Their vices were similar, with this difference, that in all his debaucheries Mirabeau remained a patrician, and Danton never ceased to be a democrat.

President of the Cordeliers, Danton took for his satellites Marât and Camille Desmoulins. Danton became the orator of the people, and was ready to speak anywhere and everywhere either in a public hall or in the street, from an open window or in the Tribune of the Assembly.

The political rôle and public life of Danton did not attain real importance until the return of the Royal Family from Varennes. For a time he sold himself to the Court party, and as he was under an order of arrest for debts he gladly accepted the terms offered him by the anti-revolutionists. He received altogether £12,000 sterling, but as soon as supplies ceased he rejoined his former friends and was a more implacable revolutionist than before. When the “Federals” arrived from Marseilles, Pétion, the Mayor of Paris, placed them under Danton’s orders. He plied them with wine and led them himself, with that personal courage which never deserted him, to the attack on the Tuileries on August 10. During the whole of that eventful day Marât and Robespierre were hiding in a cellar.

After August 10, Danton was appointed, as a reward for his services, Minister of Justice. He began his ministry by ordering domiciliary visits in every part of Paris, by arresting the clergy and all suspected Royalists. He then assembled the General Committee of National Defence, and in a speech to that body on September 1, 1792, said: “My advice is that it is necessary to terrify all Royalists.”

The following day he appeared in the Legislative Assembly at the head of the authorities, and in a voice of thunder shouted to the trembling Deputies:

It is at this moment, gentlemen, you can decree that Paris is worthy of France. The cannon you are about to hear sound, is not the cannon of alarm, it is the first step taken to destroy our enemies. What is required to vanquish them? Audacity! still more audacity!! and ever increasing audacity!!!

A few hours afterwards the massacres of September commenced. They lasted four days, and to the assassinations of defenceless prisoners in Paris succeeded those of the equally defenceless prisoners at Orleans on the ninth of the same month; a day or two later, a similar scene of slaughter occurred at Versailles.

Elected one of the Paris Deputies to the Convention, Danton resigned his Ministerial post. He was a violent promoter of the trial of Louis XVI., and to a friend who suggested the Convention was not by right of law a court of justice, he replied: “You are right; and we will not judge him, we shall kill him.”

Bertrand de Molleville, ex-Minister of Marine, who had taken refuge in London, informed Danton he possessed a letter written by him (Danton) at the time he was in the pay of the Royalists. This he threatened to publish if Danton used his influence to condemn Louis XVI. Danton left Paris in consequence and did not return until the last day of the King’s trial. Immediately after the King’s execution, Danton and Lacroix repaired to Belgium, which Dumouriez had just invaded. They received 4,000,000 of francs (£600,000) to be used in promoting a Revolution in Flanders and the Netherlands.

They were accused of having appropriated the greater part of this enormous sum, and there is every reason to believe this accusation was a just one. In order to avert suspicion, Danton replaced himself at the head of the most extreme revolutionists. He proposed and carried a motion for the levying of an army of 300,000 men, and also suggested the devastation of France in case of invasion. On March 10 he decreed the establishment of the famous Revolutionary Tribunal, which a year later sent him to the scaffold.

The Committee of Public Safety was formed and became the real governing power of France. Danton was its foremost member, and now reached the apogee of his career. But he was menaced on two sides; by the party of the Girondins, who clamoured for the punishment of those who had by murder soiled the cause of Liberty, and by the “Purists” of the Montagne, who accused him of the embezzlement of funds in Belgium. As, according to his own cynical remark, “authority in a Revolution should always belong to rogues,” he joined Robespierre and Pache and brought about the trial and execution of the Girondins. Soon afterwards the influence of Danton began to wane, he was now reproached with too much moderation, and of being desirous to coerce the actions of the Revolutionary Tribunal. He had denounced the Saturnalia of the Feast of Reason.

Robespierre decided Danton should fall, and many of his (Danton’s) friends advised him to fly while there was yet time. He replied: “They would not dare!” and remained, lulled by this false security, until he was arrested in his own house on the night of March 30, 1794. Many members of the Convention tried to save him, and an effort was made to give him an opportunity of appearing before the Assembly and publicly attesting his patriotism; but this was vetoed by Robespierre, who with feigned indignation said: “We shall see whether the Convention will be able to break a rotten idol, or will allow that idol to destroy in its fall not only the Convention but the people of France.”

St. Just ascended the Tribune, and poured forth a violent impeachment of his former ally, whom he accused of every possible form of treachery to the Republic. “Terror was voted as the order of the day,” and Danton’s fate was sealed.

After he and his companions had undergone a mock trial, devoid of every semblance of justice, they were sentenced to death. Danton’s answer to the sentence was: “We are being immolated by a few cowardly brigands; but they will not long enjoy the fruits of their victory. Robespierre, that infamous coward, will soon follow me.”

Danton was executed on April 5 with Camille Desmoulins, Lacroix, Fabre d’Eglantine, Hermit, Le Sechelle, Philippeaux, Declannoy de Angers, Chalet and Bazire (all of these men were Deputies of the Convention) the famous Abbé d’Espagne, General Westerman, a Spaniard, a Dane, and two Austrians. His last words were: Montrez ma tête au Peuple, elle en vaut la peine.

He was thirty-five years of age when he perished. Robespierre enjoyed the sight of the execution of his rival from a neighbouring window, and after the fall of the knife retired into the Tuileries gardens to take his daily walk, rubbing his hands with satisfaction.

DAVID, Jacques Louis.

Born in Paris, 1748; died in Brussels, 1824.

Left an orphan at an early age, his grandfather, an architect, adopted him. When a boy at school he met with an accident which deformed his face for life. A stone struck him in the mouth, broke several teeth, and a growth eventually formed upon his upper lip which gave him a savage and ferocious expression. In early childhood he showed promise of artistic talent. His uncle intended the boy to follow his profession of an architect, but when the youth begged to be allowed to study painting he yielded to his entreaties.

The famous painter, Boucher, then a very old man, saw some sketches made by young David, and offered to take him into his studio as a pupil. After Boucher, the painter Vien became David’s master, and the student competed for the “Grand Prix de Rome”; he was unsuccessful four times, but finally carrying off the prize started for Italy in 1776. He devoted himself to the study of the antique, and adopted that severe classical style by which his work is distinguished. While at Rome he painted “The Pests of Saint Roch” for the Lazaretto at Marseilles. In 1780 he returned to Paris and produced “Belisarius” and “The Death of Hector,” after which he was elected to the Academy, given an appointment in the Louvre, and opened a school for young painters.

He married Mademoiselle Pecconi, a beautiful Italian girl, on the occasion of his second visit to Rome in 1784. He exhibited the “Horaces” in Paris, and was proclaimed “The Regenerator of Art.” Louis XVI. patronised the painter, and commissioned him to paint “Brutus,” which picture was finished early in 1789.

The Revolution changed David’s life and ideas; in 1790 the National Assembly commissioned him to paint “The Oath in the Tennis Court.” In 1792 the artist was elected Deputy for Paris in the Convention. This position seemed to affect his intellect and excite his brain.

The painter of “Brutus” considered himself another Brutus, and imagined Louis XVI. deserved death because, being a king he must necessarily be a tyrant.

During the early months of the Republic David organised those fêtes which were intended to imitate the ancient popular feasts of Greece and Rome.

He painted, amongst other numerous pictures, “The Assassination of Michel le Pelletier” and that of “Marat by Charlotte Corday.” These pictures were exhibited to the public in the courtyard of the Louvre.

He became the most violent among the violent Terrorists. His speeches in the Convention invariably contained cries for more bloodshed. He was the intimate friend and ally of Robespierre. After the fall of the latter, David was twice arrested, and remained first four, and then three, months in prison.

Bonaparte, after his first campaign in Italy, and when the peace of Campo-Formio was concluded, sent for the painter, with whom he had an interview. The General desiring he should paint his portrait David said, “I will paint you sword in hand in the midst of a battle.” Bonaparte replied, “Battles are not now gained with swords. Paint me seated on a fiery charger.” This idea was realised in that well-known picture, “The Return from Marengo.” Napoleon, after assuming the imperial title, appointed David his painter-in-ordinary, and commissioned him to paint four immense pictures to cover the walls of the throne room in the Tuileries. “The Coronation” and “The Distribution of Eagles in the Champ de Maers” were the only two executed. “The Coronation” occupied the artist during three years of incessant work. Until 1814 David remained in Paris, an imperial favourite and a fashionable portrait-painter, enjoying the reputation of being the greatest artist of his day. On the return of the Bourbons, of whom he had been in a certain sense a personal enemy, he was not allowed to exhibit his great picture, “The Thermophyles,” in public.

After the Second Restoration he was banished from France, to which country he never returned. Before his departure he cut his two great works, “The Coronation” and “The Distribution of the Eagles,” to pieces with his own hands. By the order of Louis XVIII. the fragments were re-united, and the pictures may now be seen in the museum at Versailles.

During his twenty years exile David continued to paint with industry and vigour, dying at Brussels in 1824.

D’ESTAING, General.

The General mentioned by Yorke was a member of a very ancient family, whose archives date back to the tenth century. A Count D’Estaing saved the life of Philippe Augustus in battle. As a reward the D’Estaing family were granted the privilege by that King of quartering the Royal arms of France upon their escutcheon. An Admiral D’Estaing, uncle of General D’Estaing, was one of the most distinguished French naval officers of the eighteenth century; his opinions were liberal, and he at first favoured the Revolutionary changes. He was, nevertheless, a devoted friend of Marie Antoinette, and when she was tried in October 1793, made an effort to assist in her defence. He fell in consequence under the suspicion of the Committee of Public Safety, and was condemned and executed. When sentence of death was pronounced upon him, he exclaimed: “You had better send my head to the English; they will pay you highly for it.”

FITZ JAMES, Edouard, Duke De.

Born at Versailles, 1776; died in Paris, 1838.

His family emigrated in the early days of the Revolution, and settled in Italy.

After the formation of Condé’s army, young Fitz James joined its ranks, became aide-de-camp to Marshal Castries, showing on many occasions great personal bravery. After the forcible dispersion of the French Emigré Regiment, Fitz James visited England and Scotland, and married in London a Mdlle. Latouche.

During the Consulate he applied for, and received, permission to reside in France.

He refused to accept any place or dignity at the hands of Napoleon, and took no part in public affairs until December 1813 (when the fall of the Empire appeared imminent). He then entered the National Guard as a non-commissioned officer, with the object of obtaining a secret influence over the men. In this he was successful, for his arguments and actions practically caused the refusal on the part of the National Guard to attack the Allied Army then marching upon Paris.

After the capitulation of that city, Fitz James organised and headed a vast demonstration in favour of the restoration of the Bourbons. Thousands of young men rushed through the streets of Paris, waving white flags and shouting Vive le Roi! This popular manifestation greatly affected the Emperor Alexander, and caused his final decision in favour of the Restoration of the ancient monarchy.

When Louis XVIII. assumed the sovereignty of France, Fitz James was created a Peer, Colonel of the National Cavalry, and Chamberlain to Count d’Artois. During the second Restoration Fitz James was one of the principal instigators of the severe reprisals on the Royalist side, known as the “White Terror.” Marshal Ney’s execution was caused by the efforts of Fitz James.

He unsuccessfully endeavoured to bring about the condemnation to death of General Bertrand, although the latter was his own brother-in-law.

A wild fanaticism seemed at this period to have affected his mind. He opposed every constitutional concession on the part of the Government, and showed himself so hostile to Ministerial and even Royalist projects, that he was finally forbidden to appear at Court.

After the Revolution of 1830, Fitz James, as a Peer of France, took the oath of allegiance to Louis Philippe. But in secret he was still loyal to the exiled King.

At the time of the rising in La Vendée excited by the Duchess de Berry, Fitz James was arrested, but released owing to lack of evidence against him.

He became Deputy for Toulouse in 1834, and until his death four years later was a prominent member of the Right in the French Parliament, and took a considerable part in the debates.

FOUCHÉ, Duke of Otranto, Joseph.

Born at Nantes, 1763; died at Trieste, 1820.

He was intended by his father, a sea captain, for the merchant service, but owing to his delicate health this project was abandoned. He was sent to the Oratorian College in Nantes, and later to an establishment of the same Order in Paris. He received the tonsure and became an abbé; at the time of the Revolution he was a professor in the Nantes University. He quitted the cassock, married, and proceeded to Paris.

In 1792 he was elected member of the Convention, and became intimate with Robespierre. The King’s trial gave him his first opportunity of publicly expressing his extreme views. He said in a speech from the Tribune: “I demand the execution of the tyrant, for it would almost appear as if we regretted our courage in abolishing Royalty, were we to tremble before its wretched shadow.”

In March 1793, Fouché was despatched to his native town (Nantes), armed with full powers to crush a rebellion against the Republic in the West of France. He opened the campaign by a violent attack on every form of Christianity, confiscated all ecclesiastical buildings, arrested and imprisoned the priests, commanded the destruction of all religious emblems, and ordered this inscription to be placed on the gates of the cemeteries: “Death is an Eternal Sleep.”

He affected a disdain for wealth, writing to the Assembly, “Let us abolish gold and silver and fling away all such idols of Monarchy!”

These deeds and sentiments caused his rapid promotion, and he was sent to Lyons in company with Herbois, with orders to chastise with fire and sword that recalcitrant city. The two commissioners inaugurated their mission by celebrating a “Feast of Reason,” which, like that of Paris, was a licentious and impious orgie. One of its principal features was a procession headed by an ass, upon whose head was fixed a mitre, while to his tail were fastened the Books of the Old and New Testaments. An altar was erected, at which a mock Mass was celebrated, and the ass given food and drink from consecrated vessels. A bonfire fed with religious emblems and sacred books was extinguished by a violent storm of rain and wind, which finally broke up the “Feast.” Upon the next day the massacres of Lyons began. The tribunal decided that the guillotine was too slow a form of execution. They therefore decreed the condemned should be mowed down in batches by cannon shot. As many as fifty-nine persons were on one occasion blown to pieces at the same instant. During their four months’ reign in Lyons, over 1700 persons are known to have been destroyed by order of the commissioners.

On the retaking of Toulouse by the Republican forces Fouché wrote to Callot, who was charged with the administration of “justice” to the rebels: “Annihilate all traitors. Take Nature’s example, strike and scorch as one does with lightning and thunderbolts, so that the very ashes of the enemies of the Republic may disappear from the soil of Liberty. Tears of joy flow from my eyes and inundate my soul. We celebrate your victory to-day by sending 213 rebels to be destroyed by the thunder of our guns!”

During his residence at Lyons, Fouché was denounced by Hébert at the Jacobin Club; it was with satisfaction, therefore, that he saw the former fall with Danton. When, in April 1794, Fouché returned to Paris, after an absence of eight months, he found Robespierre at the zenith of his power. When rendering an account of his services, Fouché ended his speech with these words: “Criminal blood fertilises the soil of Liberty and establishes justice upon secure and immovable foundations.” He was almost immediately afterwards selected as President by the Jacobin Club.

On the occasion of the celebrated Fête de l’Etre Suprême, Fouché had the imprudence publicly to mock Robespierre’s devotion to the new Deity, saying Tu nous embêtes avec ton être suprême. Robespierre impeached him before the Jacobin Society, and caused Fouché’s expulsion from the Club of which he was President, but the 10th Thermidor was not far off; and the execution of Robespierre saved the life of Fouché.

For a time the latter retired into private life. Two years later he ostensibly joined the party of Baboeuf, the Socialist, but when he had thoroughly mastered the details of Baboeuf’s plot he revealed the whole of the affair to the Directorate.

After the execution of Baboeuf, Fouché obtained, as the price of his services, an army contractorship, and later was created ambassador to the Cisalpine Republic. After remaining some time in this capacity at Milan he returned to Paris in January 1799. In July of the same year he was nominated Minister of Police. Notwithstanding the opposition of Siezès, Fouché retained this appointment until the establishment of the Consular Government. Napoleon, who thoroughly appreciated the abilities and understood the astuteness of Fouché’s character, made use of him as his most confidential Minister until 1810.

The remarkable system of secret police which distinguished the Consular and Imperial Governments was originated and carried out by Fouché. It was he who discovered the plot of Georges; who prevented the assassination of the First Consul by an infernal machine in 1810; and upon his head, more than upon his master’s, that the guilt of the murderous execution of the Duke d’Enghien rests.

Fouché was too wise and far-seeing to approve of the divorce and re-marriage of Napoleon, and he particularly opposed the Austrian Alliance; for this the Emperor never forgave him, and when he discovered that his union with Marie Louise did not induce the British Government to recognise his sovereignty, he dismissed Fouché, and in 1810 gave the portfolio of Police to Savary. Fouché was not, at first, openly disgraced, but appointed Governor of Rome. Before his intended departure, however, Napoleon ordered him to give up all political documents in his possession. Fouché sent some insignificant papers, declaring he had destroyed the remainder. Napoleon was furious, and the ex-Minister was obliged to fly from France.

A compromise was arranged, and two years later Fouché returned. In 1813 he was appointed Governor of Illyria. In the following April, after the first abdication of the Emperor, he returned to Paris, headed the deputation which received the Comte d’Artois, and shortly afterwards Louis XVIII. took him into his confidence and consulted him on many points. He did not, as he desired, become Police Minister.

Upon the return of Napoleon and the flight of the Royal Family, Fouché accepted his old post, but during the whole of the hundred days he secretly intrigued with the exiled Princes.

After the Second Restoration, he was immediately summoned to the Tuileries and re-appointed Police Minister, but he only retained office three months; he had too many enemies in the Royal entourage, and found foes among Liberals and reactionaries alike. He was made Ambassador to the Court of Saxony, but the law of 1815—which banished all regicides—deprived him of this position and drove him again into exile. He became a naturalised Austrian, and died four years later at Trieste, on Christmas Day, 1820. He was but fifty-seven years old, but a life of excitement and mental overwork had given him the appearance of extreme old age. He left a fortune of £560,000, amassed, it is supposed, by subtle and dishonest means during his occupation of the Ministry of Police.

FOUQUIER-TINVILLE, Quentin Antoine.

Born at Hérouet in 1747; guillotined in Paris May 8, 1795.

He was a son of a wealthy farmer, and after studying law in Paris bought a charge of procureur at the Châtelet. Although active and intelligent, his well-known immorality prevented his achieving success in his profession, and he was forced to sell his charge to avoid bankruptcy.

Reduced to any and every expedient to earn a livelihood, he addressed some flattering verses to Louis XVI., which, by the efforts of the Abbé Delille, obtained for their author an appointment in the bureau of police.

On the outbreak of the Revolution, Fouquier-Tinville, became an extremist, and was made commissionary over the district in Paris where he resided.

He passed the evening of August 9 in the Commune, pronouncing the most sanguinary discourses, and took a prominent part in the attack upon the Tuileries the following day.

Robespierre and Danton appointed him a member of the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

His legal knowledge, his calm determined manner, and his gift of eloquence led very shortly afterwards to his nomination to the post of “Public Accuser.” From this moment he considered that he was “Minister of Political Justice,” the Committee of Public Safety being his sovereign, and the jury and executioners his servants. He interrogated the accused as a judicial formality, but he made no inquiry as to the innocence or guilt of the prisoner. Every evening at ten o’clock he repaired to the Committee of Public Safety, to give an account of his doings during the day. His lodgings were in the Palace of Justice, and he never left them, except to go in the daytime to the Tribunal, and in the evening to the Committee.

It was before him that Marat appeared on April 24, 1793, accused by the National Assembly. Fouquier facilitated his acquittal; this was the only instance in which he ever showed mercy. Before him passed in vast procession during the next fifteen months the victims of the Revolution.

He accused and delivered to death Danton, Hébert and the whole Commune of Paris, as mercilessly as he prosecuted the last Queen of France. When Robespierre and his companions were dragged before the Tribunal, Fouquier said to the jury, who were in doubt as to the course they should pursue: “We are dispensers of justice, and justice must be executed upon all who come before us.”

After the 12th Thermidor, Barrère was desirous of retaining Fouquier-Tinville in his sanguinary functions. But a universal outcry prevented this. Fréron, who had himself an odious reputation for cruelty, denounced Fouquier, saying: “It is time Fouquier-Tinville were sent to hell to expiate his bloody deeds.”

The Assembly decreed his trial, and five days later he appeared at the bar of the Convention. He attempted to throw all the blame for his acts upon Robespierre, but he was arrested and imprisoned. His trial lasted forty-one days, over two hundred witnesses, who gave lengthy evidence, being interrogated

He was found guilty of

having caused the death of innumerable innocent persons of both sexes under pretence of being conspirators; of having on one occasion sent during the space of three hours eighty persons to the scaffold without respecting legal formalities; of having crowded upon carts (prepared in readiness before their trial), victims who had not had any semblance of justice and whose condemnations were never signed; of having ordered the execution of a number of pregnant women.

Fouquier’s defence was as follows:

The Convention having declared Terror to be the Order of the day, in the same breath ordered the extermination of all rebels. The prisoners were merely sent before me in order that I might carry out certain legal formalities. It was therefore your orders, citizen representatives, that I obeyed. Which of you ever gave me a word of blame? Blood was the perpetual cry upon the lips of your orators. If I am guilty, then you are all guilty. I was but the weapon of the Convention; do you punish the executioner’s axe?

He was condemned to death with fifteen other persons, and conducted the following day to the scaffold. The populace followed the cart which bore him to punishment with yells of execration and insult. He spoke to them cynically, and to a man who cried out, Tu n’as plus la parole aujourd’hui—the taunt he used to those of his victims who wished to defend themselves before the Tribunal—Fouquier said:

“And thou, wretched creature, go and claim thy three ounces of bread at the Section; I at least die with a full stomach and have never known want.”

GANGENELLI, POPE CLEMENT XIV., Jean Vincent Antoine.

Born, October 1705; died, September 22, 1774.

He was the son of a doctor, and became a Franciscan monk at the age of nineteen. An ardent student of philosophy and theology, he was sent to the College of St. Bonaventura at Rome to teach theology, and made a doctor of divinity. Later he became Professor of Philosophy at Ascoli. He was also a noted orator, and his reputation as a preacher was high at Bologna, Milan, Ferrara, Venice, and Florence.

In 1741 he was recalled to Rome.

He led as retired a life as practicable in Rome, though he was fond of exercise and riding on horseback. He declared it to be his most earnest wish to return to the monastery of S. Francis at Assisi, and twice refused to accept the position of General of his Order. Nevertheless his great reputation as a theologian caused his elevation to the Cardinalate in 1759 and ten years later to the Papacy. His election surprised every one, himself most of all, for Cardinal Ganganelli was not even a Bishop when nominated to the headship of the Church.

His five years’ reign was one of the most important during the history of the Papacy. At that time the Order of Jesus was assailed on all sides, and every reigning Prince of Europe desired its dissolution. Still the Society was so powerful, so numerous, and had been so staunch a supporter of the Holy See that its position was considered impregnable. Clement XIV., after due consideration and much diplomatic action, decreed in 1773 the suppression of the congregation founded by S. Ignatius Loyola.

He died the following year, and the Jesuits have frequently been accused of having poisoned him. Historical researches have proved the injustice of this statement. He was in his seventieth year, and completely worn out by mental anxiety and overwork.

He was one of the very ablest as well as one of the worthiest successors of St. Peter.

GIRARDON, François.

François Girardon, a celebrated French sculptor, born in 1628, died in 1715 (the same year as his patron and employer, Louis XIV.).

From 1652 until his retirement in extreme old age he was employed, first in conjunction with Le Brun, and afterwards singly in directing the art work undertaken in Paris and at Versailles by Louis XIV.

His greatest achievements were considered to be the Bain d’Apollon, the “Rape of Proserpine” at Versailles and the equestrian statue of Louis XIV., which, before its destruction during the Revolution, occupied the centre of the Place Vendôme.

GRÉGOIRE, Henri.

Henri Grégoire, born near Lunéville, 1750, died in Paris, 1831, was Curé of Embermesnil. Elected to the States-General as representative of the clergy of Lorraine he proceeded to Versailles, 1789.

His liberal opinions were already well known by a book he had published, entitled “Regeneration of the Jews.” This book was in 1788 crowned by the Academy of Metz.

At Versailles the Abbé Grégoire soon became intimate with the leading members of the Tiers État. He exercised an ever-increasing influence over those among the clerical members of the Assembly who, like himself, were drawn from the ranks of the people.

At the very moment when the attack upon the Bastille was proceeding, and when a large proportion of the Deputies expressed apprehension, fear and alarm, Grégoire delivered a vehement oration in the Assembly in favour of the Revolution.

His influence in the Constitutional Assembly was invariably directed towards the advancement of those reforms by which he hoped the enfranchisement of the people might be accelerated. He took an active part in the abolition of the privileges possessed by the nobility and clergy, voted against the law of primogeniture, and demanded that Jews and negroes should have equal civil rights with Christians and white men.

When the Clerical Constitution was promulgated, Grégoire was the first priest who took the oath; and he accepted the Bishopric of Blois under the new régime. He represented the Department Loir et Cher (in which his episcopal see is situated) in the Convention, and on September 22 brought forward a motion in favour of the total abolition of Royalty and the proclamation of a Republic; his favourite axiom being, “The history of kings is the martyrology of the people.”

He was not present at the trial of Louis XVI., but wrote from Chambery to the Convention, declaring his opposition to a death sentence upon the King.

Grégoire became a prominent member of the Committee of Public Instruction, and by his efforts the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers was established.

He persuaded the Assembly to vote for the political and civil emancipation of the Hebrew race in France, and to pass a law abolishing negro slavery in the French colonies.

Grégoire continued to be an earnest and ardent Christian throughout the bitter religious persecutions of “the Terror,” and constantly proclaimed the sincerity of his religious beliefs. He had, indeed, been first attracted towards the Revolution because he imagined it would bring the adoption of Gospel principles into ordinary life. Bourdon de l’Oise accused him in the Jacobin Club of a design to Christianise the Revolution. Grégoire, in reply, declared this his earnest desire.

After the closing of the Convention, Grégoire joined the Council of the five hundred; in 1798 he became a Member of the Corps Législatif to the Presidency, of which he was soon after elected. He did not hold this post many weeks. His intense Republicanism was distasteful to the new Government, while his faith in Christianity aroused against him the animosity of the Radical party.

Grégoire became a senator in 1801, and retained his senatorship during Napoleon’s reign. He was opposed to the Imperial policy, protesting against the occupation of the Papal States and the divorce and re-marriage of Napoleon. After the Restoration Grégoire suffered considerable persecution. The Government deprived him of his pension as a Senator and of his membership in the Academy and Institute. He was reduced to such a depth of poverty as to be compelled to sell his library in order to support existence.

The next fifteen years of his life were spent in complete retirement; he carried out during this period a vast amount of literary work, and kept up a very extensive correspondence with eminent and learned men belonging to various European countries.

His situation was not improved by the Revolution of 1830. Louis Philippe obliged him to resign his commandership of the Legion of Honour, and when, a few months later, he was upon his death bed, the last sacraments were refused him, by the express order of the Archbishop of Paris. A courageous priest, the Abbé Gallon, did, however, administer the viaticum to the dying ex-bishop.

HAMILTON, William Richard.

William Richard Hamilton was born in London in 1777. In 1799 he accompanied Lord Elgin to Constantinople as private secretary, and was employed by that nobleman (British Ambassador to the Porte) to bring from Rome those artists who assisted him in his selection of certain statues and friezes, known as the Elgin Marbles, which are now in the British Museum. These marbles were placed on the Mentor, this ship being wrecked in September 1803, near the Island of Cos. Hamilton, who was on board, saved most of these priceless relics of antiquity by his presence of mind and intelligence.

He travelled shortly afterwards in Egypt, and published in 1809 a book, “Egyptian Monuments,” which was the first work of any importance on that subject since the days of Herodotus.

Mr. Hamilton was permanent Under Secretary at the English Foreign Office from 1809 to 1822; British Minister to the Court of Naples from 1822 to 1829, and President of the Geographical Society in London from 1837 to 1841.

HAUTERIVE, Count Blanc de Lanautte (Alexandre Maurice).

Born in 1754 at Aspres, in Dauphiné; died in Paris, 1830.

He was the thirteenth child of noble born but poor parents.

One of his uncles, a priest, adopted him, and he was intended for the Church, and educated at an Oratorian College. He refused to take orders, and became a lay professor in the University of Tours.

When the Duke de Choiseul visited this College, young Hauterive composed and delivered the discourse of welcome. The great nobleman was so well satisfied that he invited the youthful professor to Chanteloup. Here he found the Count de Choiseul de Gauffier, who was about to depart as Ambassador to Constantinople. Hauterive was offered and accepted the post of private secretary to this Minister, whom he accompanied to the Levant in 1784.

When he reached Constantinople he was appointed French secretary to the Hospodar of Moldavia, an important and highly paid situation.

Four years later he returned to Paris and married a rich and handsome widow. When the Revolution broke out he refused to emigrate, and remained in France a faithful servant to the house of Choiseul. He was in consequence totally ruined.

In 1792 he was given the French Consulship at New York, but he soon lost this appointment on account of his anti-Republican views. He was at last reduced to great poverty, and worked for a time as a day labourer. While in America he was joined by Talleyrand, who, however, soon returned to France. In 1798 Hauterive ventured back to Paris, and obtained a clerkship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After the Revolution of the 18th Brumaire (November 1799) Bonaparte, who required an intelligent individual capable of composing a general manifesto to the nations of Europe, was recommended by Talleyrand to employ Hauterive.

In six weeks the work appeared under the title of “The Condition of France at the End of the Year VIII.” Napoleon was greatly pleased, and Hauterive became one of his most trusted councillors. He was the principal factor in the diplomatic work of France during the Consulate. The most important of his achievements was the Concordat. His ancient theological studies among the Oratorians fitted him well for his task, and, as he had never taken holy orders, he was not, like Talleyrand, under the stigma of being a renegade priest. All through the Empire Hauterive continued to act as diplomatic adviser and agent for Napoleon all over Europe; he was also the guardian of the archives of France. In 1809 he received the title of Count of the Empire.

In 1814 he retired into private life. During “the Hundred Days” he refused to join the Ministry, and only solicited the restitution of his position as “Director and Guardian of the Archives of France.”

When the Bourbons returned, Hauterive was restored in this position by the Duke of Richelieu, the Prime Minister.

Hauterive exercised great influence during the reign of Louis XVIII., who had an immense respect for him. His literary work during the fifteen years of the Restoration was colossal. He died in 1830, aged seventy-six.

HOUDON, Jean Antoine.

Born at Versailles, 1740; died, July 16, 1828.

He gained at the age of nineteen the “Grand Prix” of Sculpture, and immediately departed for Rome. He was in Italy when Herculaneum and Pompeii were discovered. He remained for ten years in the Italian Peninsula, and executed the colossal statue of St. Bruno, founder of the Cistercian order, which still stands in the Portico of Santa Maria dei Angeli in Rome.

After his return to France he attained great celebrity, and “L’Ecorché,” the well-known study of a man’s body after the skin has been removed, showing all the sinews and muscles, was his work. This model is still used in all Art Academies.

The United States having decreed that a statue of Washington should be erected, Houdon was invited to America that he might undertake the commission. He accompanied Franklin to Philadelphia on the return of the latter from his embassy in France. Washington gave him many sittings, and the statue in question is now in the City Hall of Richmond, Virginia.

Many of his later works are well known, particularly the seated figure of Voltaire in the foyer of the Théâtre Français.

KOSCIUZKO (Thaddeus of Warsaw).

Born in Poland, February 12, 1746; died in Switzerland, in 1817.

A member of an ancient and noble family belonging to Lithuanian Poland. Being disappointed in love, he left his native country in 1775, for America, offering his services to Washington as a volunteer. During the War of Independence he became the intimate friend of Lafayette. He served with great distinction throughout the long campaign, and, on the conclusion of peace in 1783, was awarded a considerable share in those pecuniary gifts decreed by Congress for those who aided the cause of Freedom; he received the rank of Brigadier-General, and the order of Cincinnatus. He returned to Poland, and proceeded to take a considerable and active part in the politics of his native country.

When, after the first treaty of partition, the Russians occupied Poland under various pretexts, Kosciuzko acted successfully as General-in-Chief of the Polish Army and repulsed the enemy; but the pusillanimous King Stanislaus commanded his troops to lay down their arms. The Russians entered Warsaw in 1792, and from that moment the independence of Poland virtually terminated.

Kosciuzko headed an insurrection against the Russians in 1794, and after many successes was defeated, seriously wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of Maciejovice, while Warsaw and Praga were brutally sacked by Suwaroff. The patriot Pole was thrown into a dungeon, where he remained until the death of Catherine II. in 1796.

Paul I. reversed his mother’s policy and released Kosciuzko, who proceeded first to France and then to England. In both countries he was received with the greatest honour and respect; the former granted him the title of Citoyen Français. Napoleon, as First Consul, favoured the Polish general, and employed him in hopes of obtaining redress for his country’s wrong; the latter was ready to serve and did serve either Napoleon or Alexander I., but his hopes were always frustrated, and after the peace of 1815, when the Duchy of Warsaw was finally united to the Russian Empire, he retired into voluntary exile and died at Solenme in Switzerland in 1817. His body was eventually removed to Cracow in Austrian Poland, and his coffin placed in the cathedral of that city between those of John Sobieski and Joseph Poniotowski.

LAFAYETTE, Marie Paul Motier, Marquis de.

Born, 1757; died, May 19, 1834.

Lafayette’s father fell at Minden a few months before his son’s birth, his mother died when he was an infant. Lafayette inherited a large fortune, and at the age of seventeen married an heiress, Mdlle. de Novilles.

Refusing brilliant offers to Court appointments, and regardless of the entreaties of his young wife and other relatives, he insisted, when but twenty years of age, in fitting out a ship at his own expense and offered his sword to Washington in aid of American independence. He fought for two years in the War of Secession, was wounded at the battle of Brandy-Wine, and assisted in the retreat of Barren Hill, where he showed much courage and tactical skill.

On hearing there was a likelihood of war breaking out between England and France, he returned to Europe. He succeeded in persuading Louis XVI. to send out 4000 troops under the joint command of Count Rochambeau and himself to assist Washington, and this reinforcement was mainly instrumental in obtaining the American final successes.

Lafayette defended Virginia against Lord Cornwallis, and it was he who was the principal means of causing that commander to capitulate at York Town.

Lafayette returned to France in 1785 with a glorious reputation.

When the States-General assembled, Lafayette was member for Auvergne. He was elected Vice-President of the Assembly; was in Paris during the taking of the Bastille, and used every effort in his power to produce moderation in the Revolutionary party, of which he was a member. When the mob attacked Versailles his presence of mind and influence over the crowd were the means of saving the lives of the Queen and the whole Royal Family. During their terrible drive to Paris, Lafayette rode the whole way by the side of their carriage, and saved them from as much outrage as possible.

His popularity declined after the flight to Varennes, which he was suspected to have assisted. He was given the command of the army on the frontier, and succeeded in putting these irregular troops into some kind of order and discipline. He fell into disgrace and was deprived of his command, owing to the fact that he dared to report unfavourably of the Jacobin Club; forced to fly from France, arrested in Austria, and imprisoned for five years at Olmutz.

His wife and daughters having escaped after fifteen months’ captivity in the dungeons of Robespierre, joined him in his exile.

When at last released the Directorate forbade his return to France, which he did not re-enter until after the events of 18 Brumaire. Napoleon received him with favour, made him a Counsellor, and offered him a Senatorship. He voted against the Life Consulate and the Empire, and retired from public life until the end of the Napoleonic régime.

After Waterloo he took part in the Provisionary Government which held the reins of power until the Allies re-entered Paris. He met with little favour from the Government of the Restoration, his opinions were too liberal, and he was suspected of Republicanism.

In 1824 he returned to the United States, where he was received with unbounded enthusiasm. In recognition of his services that Government voted him in land and money a sum equivalent to £30,000.

He took a leading part in the Revolution of 1830, and greatly assisted Louis Philippe in obtaining the sovereignty of France; for in his opinion a constitutional monarchy was the best of republics.

He died in 1834 at the age of seventy-seven.

LARCHER, Pierre Henri.

Born, 1726; died, 1812.

One of the greatest Greek scholars of modern times. He translated Herodotus and innumerable Greek plays and poems. His writings are very numerous.

During the Revolution, although his religious convictions were well known, he escaped persecution and was allotted a pension of 3000 francs a year by the Directory. He was one of the founders of the Institut, and was nominated Professor of Greek when aged eighty-four. Notwithstanding his great age he carried out his duties in this capacity satisfactorily until his death three years later.

L’ASNE, Michel.

Born in Paris, 1594; died, 1667.

He was a celebrated draughtsman and engraver. His engravings after Rubens and Paul Veronese are now of great value. He also drew and engraved the portraits of great and distinguished men.

LAVOISIER, Antoine Laurent.

Born in Paris, 1743; guillotined, May 8, 1794.

The founder of modern chemistry. His father, a wealthy merchant, gave him an excellent education, but from his early youth he showed a precocious taste for science, and when only twenty-one he received the prize that the Academy of Science had offered “for discovering the best manner of lighting the streets of great towns.” In 1768 he was elected Academician. Turgot, in 1776, gave to this great chemist the direction of the manufacture of gunpowder and saltpetre. In the course of the next ten years Lavoisier made innumerable useful scientific discoveries.

Elected Deputy to the National Assembly in 1789; in 1791 he was named Commissionary of the Treasury, and propounded a scheme which, had it been carried out, would have been of immense economical service to France. He took an active part in the construction of the new system of weights and measures, and constructed in the gardens of the arsenal apparatus for experiments to aid this purpose.

In 1793 he measured the base of the new meridian; as Treasurer of the Academy he put in order the whole of the accounts of that body; and was able to discover funds which no one was aware the Academy possessed. In 1769 he had received a post as Fermier-Général from the Crown; and although such offices had long ceased to exist Robespierre caused his arrest in 1794, and, on the sole plea that it was the will of the people that no Fermier-Général’s life should be spared, the head of this great citizen fell upon the scaffold: four other former Fermier-Généraux, including his father-in-law, M. Poulze, perished the same day.

LE BRUN, Duc de Plaisance, Charles François.

Born, March 19, 1739; died, June 16, 1824.

In early life he showed an extraordinary disposition for learning languages, and he resolved to perfect this talent by travelling in foreign countries. He went to England, where he spent some time. He was delighted with the country, its inhabitants and its liberty, notwithstanding its aristocracy and monarchy.

After his return to France he became a lawyer. In 1768 he was appointed Inspector-General of the Crown Lands. He was Chief Secretary to Maupeau, the Chancellor, whose speeches he composed. In 1774, after the accession to the throne of Louis XVI., when Maupeau shared the fate of all the favourites of Louis XV., and had to deliver up his seals of office, le Brun lost his place too; he continued to practise his profession till the outbreak of the Revolution; he was Deputy to the States-General, and spoke in that assembly in favour of the reform of all abuses. In the Constitutional Assembly he opposed the issue of paper money and the creation of public lotteries.

He was the editor and reporter of the new financial laws. Le Brun was named President of the Directorate of Seine and Oise. In 1792, riots having occurred in his Department, he put them down by energetic measures.

After August 10 he threw up all his employments and retired into private life; he was shortly afterwards arrested and imprisoned at Versailles, but, under the surveillance of a gaoler, he was allowed to visit his friends and relatives. When Robespierre attained supreme power, le Brun’s captivity became severe; but for the events of the 9th Thermidor he would certainly have perished upon the scaffold.

Le Brun re-entered public life in 1795. In December 1799, Bonaparte appointed him Third Consul, with control of the Finance Department, and, after the establishment of the Empire, Arch-Treasurer of France.

Notwithstanding le Brun’s objection to hereditary titles, the Emperor insisted on creating him Duc de Plaisance.

To le Brun France owes the establishment of the Cour des Comptes.

In 1805 the Republic of Genoa was annexed to France. Napoleon despatched le Brun as Governor-General. He remained a year in Genoa, and showed both ability and moderation there. On his return to Paris he had the courage to remonstrate with the Emperor upon the proposed abolition of the “Tribunal,” and resigning his Arch-Treasurership, retired into private life.

In 1810 Napoleon, who respected his honesty and valued his intellectual powers, commanded le Brun to undertake the Governorship of Holland, the throne of that country being vacant owing to the abdication of Louis Bonaparte. Le Brun was now seventy-one years of age, yet he undertook this arduous task with the vigour of a young man, and in fifteen months completely reorganised the little kingdom. He was called “the good Stadtholder” by the Dutch.

In the disastrous Russian retreat the second son of le Brun perished, and after the battle of Leipzig the Cossacks invaded Holland. The Dutch, anxious to regain their independence, rose against the French. Their respect for the Viceroy was, however, so great that they conducted him to the frontier with an honourable escort and every possible courtesy.

During the events of the first two months of 1814, le Brun assisted the Imperial Government to the best of his power, and vigorously opposed the departure from Paris of the Empress Marie Louise.

He accepted, in the “Hundred Days,” the Grand Mastership of the University of Paris. After the Second Restoration his name was erased from the list of peers of France. It was restored in 1819, after which date, though eighty years of age, he made many important speeches in the House of Peers, and occupied himself with literary as well as political work until his death in 1824, aged eighty-five.

He was not only a great statesman, but a distinguished author, and besides writing many important works, translated Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.

LE CLERC, Jean Baptiste.

Born, 1756; died, 1826.

A philosopher of the school of Jean Jacques Rousseau, he led until the outbreak of the Revolution, a secluded and studious life, devoted to literature, music and philosophy, in his native town of Angers.

Elected to the States-General as a representative of Anjou he embraced extreme revolutionary views, and, becoming later a member of the Assembly, invariably voted with the majority: as a member of the Convention he voted for the immediate death of the King. He was suspected of favouring the principles of the Girondins, and arrested and imprisoned, but released after the fall of Robespierre.

When on the Council of the Five Hundred he created the French Conservatoire of Music.

In 1801 Le Clerc was elected President of the Corps Législatif, but only retained this office for a year. He then retired to Chalonnes, refusing all honours from Napoleon.

The act of 1816 banished Le Clerc as a regicide.

Some years before his death he was permitted to return to France.

He wrote books upon history, philosophy and music, besides much poetry and many moral tales.

LEGENDRE, Jean Sebastian.

Born, 1755; died, 1794. Until 1789 he was a butcher in Paris.

He headed that procession which on July 13, 1789, carried round Paris busts of the Duke of Orleans and Necker. On the following day he conducted the mob to the Invalides, where they plundered the armoury, previous to attacking the Bastille. He soon became one of the principal revolutionary leaders, and was instrumental in forming the Club des Cordeliers. He it was who, when the crowd invaded the Tuileries upon June 20, 1792, forced the red cap upon Louis XVI. On August 10 he took a prominent part in the attack upon the Palace.

Member for Paris in the Convention, he pressed incessantly for the speedy trial and execution of the King. During that trial he was constantly appearing at the Convention and in the Jacobin Club, where mounting the tribune he demanded with violence that the body of Louis after his execution should be divided into eighty-four pieces, so that a portion of the tyrant’s remains might be despatched to every Department in the Republic. Legendre as Member of the Committee of Public Safety was, like Marat, one of the principal instigators of the proscription and execution of the Girondins. When Lanjuna made an attempt to speak in their defence, the ex-butcher threatened to hurl the orator from the tribune, unless he was instantly silent. In January 1794, Legendre was accused of Hébertisme, and threatened with expulsion from the Jacobin Club, but he escaped by proving his intimate friendship with Marat. Danton had been his friend and ally, and when the former was arrested Legendre at first spoke in his favour; finding that the Convention were against such a proceeding, he immediately declared that he answered for no one’s patriotism, and would never again defend an accused person. Legendre became the ally of Tallien and Fréron, and played an important part in the revolution of 9th Thermidor. As soon as the decree of arrest against Robespierre had been carried, Legendre sprang into the tribune and harangued with great heat and much vigour against the accused, after which he rushed to the Jacobin Club, forced every member to quit the building, locked the doors and brought the keys to the Convention. From that day Legendre never ceased clamouring for the immediate condemnation of the members of the very party of which he had so long been a leader, calling them “blood drinkers” and “terrorists.”

He was elected President of the Convention, and in that capacity marched at the head of the troops who dispersed and shot down the surging mobs who surrounded the walls of the Convention demanding bread.

This was his last exploit. His excesses and the violence of his temperament had undermined his constitution, and as Member of the Council of Ancients, he took little part in debate. A few weeks before his death he made a speech indicting the Government for their leniency towards the emigrés. He bequeathed his body to the School of Medicine, “so that even after his death he might still serve mankind.”

LIVINGSTONE, Robert.

Born, 1746; died, 1813. He was descended from an ancient Dutch family that settled on the banks of the Hudson, in the seventeenth century.

A lawyer, one of the committee of five who drew up the Act of Independence, in 1780 he became Foreign Secretary, and distinguished himself during the whole of the American War by his zeal and intelligence. On the conclusion of peace he was named Chancellor for the State of New York.

In 1801 President Jefferson despatched him to Paris as American Minister, when he, conjointly with Monroe, carried out successfully the negotiations for the cession of Louisiana to the United States.

Upon his return to his native country in 1805 he founded the New York Academy of Art, of which he was first President.

MARAT, Jean Paul.

Born at Boudry, 1744; assassinated in Paris, July, 3, 1793.

In early life he was a medical student, and the author of various treatises on physical science, and of a pamphlet in favour of the abolition of capital punishment.

He settled in Paris, and after attempting unsuccessfully many careers, such as savant, romantic writer and philosopher, was finally glad, after many efforts, to obtain the position of doctor to the body guard of the Comte D’Artois. He had lost this situation some time before the Revolution.

When that took place, Marat adopted the surname of “Friend of the People”: editing and publishing under that title a weekly newspaper.

Towards the close of 1789, in one of his articles he proposed the erection of 800 gibbets within the Tuileries Gardens, upon each of which was to be hanged one of those whom he called “traitors to the community”; of these the first was to be Mirabeau. In consequence of this audacious proposal the Constitutional Assembly ordered the arrest of the author, who took refuge first in the house of an actress at the Théâtre Français, and later in the presbytery of the curé of St. Louis at Versailles.

Marat was one of those seven members of the Commune who signed the order for the September massacres in the prisons of Paris.

At the King’s trial his (Marat’s) vote was couched in these terms: “No appeal to the people, only an accomplice of the tyrant would demand this.”

After the execution of Louis XVI. Marat was seized with a frenzied thirst for blood and massacre, “Let us slay,” he wrote in his journal, “270,000 partisans of the ancien régime, and reduce by executions the number of the Convention by a quarter.” He constantly complained that too few persons were executed, adding, “Only the dead do not return.”

The Girondins succeeded in bringing him before the Revolutionary Tribune, but by the efforts of Fouquier-Tinville he was triumphantly acquitted. He soon revenged himself upon them, for all the Girondin party were ordered into arrest upon the 2nd of June following.

A few escaped from Paris, amongst these was the young gallant and handsome Barbaroux, who took temporary refuge at Caen in Normandy, where he met a female descendant of the great Corneille, Charlotte Corday. Barbaroux’s recitals of the cruelties being exercised in Paris moved her profoundly; and when a few days later the news of his execution at Bordeaux reached Caen, she determined ta proceed to Paris and kill Danton or Marat. The sequel of her journey is too well known to need repetition here.

After the death of Marat his body lay in state; he was accorded a magnificent funeral; his bust placed in all French municipalities, and the honours of the Panthéon decreed to him.

When the reaction came his bust and statue were destroyed, his remains disinterred and burnt, and their ashes flung into the main sewer of the Rue Montmârtre.

MIRECOURT, Théroigne de.

Born at Mirecourt, Flanders, 1752; died in Paris, 1817.

The true name of this heroine of the French Revolution was Anne Josephe Terwagne of Marcourt, a small town in Luxemburg. The daughter of a rich farmer, Pierre Théroigne or Terwagne, by the kindness of a distant cousin, who was the Abbess, she was, although not of noble birth, educated in the Convent of Robermont. At the age of seventeen she left her home and followed her lover, a young nobleman, to Paris.

Here we find her settled, apparently independently, in 1789. A contemporary describes her as having “a waist you could span with two hands and the face of the Venus of Praxiteles.” She adopted violent revolutionary principles, and never missed attending a meeting of the Assembly.

She held a kind of salon in her apartment, where she received the Abbé Siezès and his brother Roussin, Camille Desmoulins, Péthion and other well-known revolutionists; adopted an extraordinary semi-masculine military costume, never appearing in public without a couple of pistols in her girdle, and a sword by her side. She attended all the principal revolutionary meetings, making violent and incendiary harangues on every possible occasion; was present at the taking of the Bastille, and rode in front of the mob which marched on Versailles. After the arrival of the Royal family in Paris her speeches in Flemish to the soldiers of the “Regiment de Flandre” assisted greatly in shaking their loyalty to the King.

In 1790 she returned to her native country, and remained some time at Liège. She was arrested there by the Austrians and carried off to the fortress of Kuffstein in the Tyrol, being accused of plotting against Marie Antoinette.

The Emperor Leopold II. had an interview with Théroigne at Vienna, and was so much smitten by her charms as not only to order her release, but to pay the expenses of her journey back to France. When she reached Paris she found herself the heroine of the hour. Soon after her return she commanded the 3rd Army Corps in the Faubourg on the occasion of the riots of June 20, 1792, and when the fight was over, the Federals, as a compliment to her bravery, decreed her a civic crown.

Suleon, the editor of a newspaper, having insulted Théroigne in a leading article, she, in company with a band of devoted adherents, laid in wait for him; and although he was at the time actually one of a patrol of the National Guard going their rounds, seized him by the coat collar and dragged him into the middle of the street, where she and her companions despatched him with their sabres.

She professed opinions similar to those of the Girondins, and when the fall of this party was imminent, declaimed loudly in their favour in public places. On one occasion when making a speech in the gardens of the Tuileries a number of women belonging to the so-called Société Fraternelle, stripped her naked and flogged her on the spot. This terrible punishment drove her mad, and she never recovered her reason. She died at the age of fifty-four in the public madhouse of La Salpêtrière, where, with one or two brief intervals, she had been confined for over twenty-four years.

METHERIE, Jean Claud de la.

Born near Macon, 1743; died in Paris, 1817.

A medical doctor and a great celebrity in his day as a chemist. He made many remarkable discoveries, particularly on the subject of oxygen and other gases. During the last thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the study of mineralogy and geology. He was appointed in 1812 Professor of Natural Science to the Collège de France, which post he retained until his death.

MERLIN, Antoine Christopher.

Born, 1762; died, 1833.

The eldest of four remarkable brothers, who all took a prominent part in the days of the Revolution and the Empire. Intended for the Church, he resolutely refused to take holy orders, and leaving his home in Lorraine at the age of twenty-one, arrived in Paris with only twenty-five louis in his pocket. He obtained a place as usher in a military school. The following year he was reconciled to his family, and his father being President and Procureur of Thionville, he agreed to act as his head clerk, intending eventually to succeed to his parent’s appointments.

When the Revolution commenced, Merlin joined the Jacobin party, returned to Paris, and in 1791 represented Moselle in the Legislative Assembly. According to his views, Royalty, clergy, and nobility were alike to be annihilated without delay. Living as he had done upon the road to Coblentz, he had been able to watch emigration upon the spot. He wearied the Assembly by his rages and recriminations, accumulating, as he said, proof upon proof of treason. His violent speeches, his fierce activity, and his wild passion made him a leader in the Jacobin Club. He demanded the deportation to the American penal colonies of all priests who refused the oath, the confiscation of the property of every émigré, and the establishment of a Committee of Public Safety.

After the abolition of the Monarchy these proposals were all adopted, and he made an audacious appeal to insurrection. “It is not with speeches,” he said, “but with cannon we should attack kings in their palaces, if we wish to ensure the liberty of the people.”

When the Tuileries was invaded upon June 20, the spectacle of the Royal family, abandoned by their friends and covered with insult and opprobrium, affected him to tears. “You weep,” said the Queen, “at the sight of a great King brought so low.” “Madame,” he answered, “my tears are not for a King but for a good father of a family and his estimable wife, who are suffering misfortune.”

He took an active part in the events of August 10. He persuaded the King and his family to leave the Château of the Tuileries, protecting them on their way to the Assembly. At the peril of his own life he saved later in the day those of the Duc de Choiseul and a number of the officers of the Swiss Guard.

After these events his conduct in the Legislature was more violent than before. His cry was: “War upon Kings, and peace for Nations.” At the moment of the invasion he encouraged the people to meet the enemy at the frontier. Commissioner of the Assembly, he rode over the five Departments surrounding Paris, obtaining money, horses and provisions everywhere he went; through his eloquence volunteers flocked to the Republican flag. He used his influence to prevent massacres of prisoners and suspected persons.

His joy at the proclamation of the Republic was intense. He took his seat in the Convention on the benches of the Montagne, and soon became as ferocious as the most ferocious of his companions. He declared it would be an honour to stab, with his own hand, any person who aspired to become a tyrant. He pressed forward the trials of the “infamous Louis” and the “infamous Antoinette.” He defended Robespierre against Louvet, and was a mortal enemy to Roland.

At the time of the trial of Louis XVI. Merlin was with the army at Mayence, he therefore did not vote for the King’s death; but he wrote to Paris on January 8, 1793: “We are surrounded by the dead and dying. In the name of Louis Capet our brothers are slain, and yet Louis Capet still lives!” Merlin, who was in supreme command, showed great ability and prodigies of courage during the siege of Mayence, which lasted from March to July of the same year, but famine and the superior number of the enemy prevailed, and the town capitulated on July 24, 1793.

On his return to Paris he was arrested as a traitor, and accused of selling Mayence to the enemy; but was triumphantly acquitted, a victim being found to assuage the vanity of the Republic in the person of General Alexandre de Beauharnais, the first husband of the Empress Josephine, who, being a noble, was a more agreeable offering to the guillotine than Merlin.

Merlin for a short time commanded part of the Republican army in La Vendée, but was recalled and returned to the Convention after an absence of nearly a year. During this time the political condition of France had undergone a complete change.

Merlin, who had now become more a soldier than a politician, joined no party, until a few days before the fall of Robespierre.

He made a speech in favour of Danton, and also brought forward a motion (which was carried) that all the riches and art treasures of conquered nations should be brought to Paris. It was upon this very motion Bonaparte acted when he first began to plunder the art collections of Italy. Merlin terminated his speech in these words: “People of foreign nations may complain; the remedy is, however, in their own hands,—let them destroy their monarchs.”

When the 9th Thermidor arrived, Merlin at once entered into direct antagonism with Robespierre, and as head of the Committee of War despatched various brigades of the Parisian Gendarmerie in detachments to various positions in the city. He descended into the street, haranguing the people, whom he called upon to rise in defence of the Convention. Henriot was arrested by Merlin’s soldiers, and the same men made the celebrated seizure at the Hôtel de Ville of Robespierre and the proscribed representatives. The real success of the 9th Thermidor rising is entirely due to Merlin. On August 17 he was elected President of the Convention, and he prosecuted the Jacobins without mercy, insisting upon the dissolution of that club (of which he had once been a leading member), “Let us close,” said he, “this cavern of brigands and murderers.” It was mainly through his influence that this society was dissolved.

In October 1794 he was again despatched to the army of the Rhine, and gave further proof of excellent generalship and military ability. The taking of Mannheim, the occupation of Luxemburg and another siege of Mayence marked this campaign.

After his return to Paris he assisted in quelling the insurrection of April 1, 1795, in the Faubourgs of Paris. He was even then only thirty years of age; and strange to say (although he was still a member of the Five Hundred), his political and military career may be then said to have closed. He saw with disgust the Republic alienating itself from the people and entirely depending upon the army. His dreams of universal freedom were over, and he did not seek re-election in 1798. He retired to Commençaux near Chauny, and devoted himself to the cultivation and improvement of an estate he had purchased during the Ventes des Biens Nationaux, and the only public function he exercised was the modest one of juge de paix.

As he was absent from Paris during the trial of Louis XVI. the law against regicides did not affect him. He was threatened with banishment on account of the message he sent the Convention on January 8, 1793, but he addressed a letter to the Ministers of Louis XVIII. which gained his pardon; it terminated in these words; “Messeigneurs, I was twenty-seven when I wrote from Mayence; I am now fifty, and my opinions have changed. I rely upon the clemency and justice of his Majesty Louis XVIII.”

MIRABEAU, Honoré Gabriel Richietti, Comte de.

Born, March 9, 1749; died, April 2, 1791.

At the age of three he suffered from the smallpox, which disfigured him for life and completely transformed his features. His father was a bigoted Jansenist, despotic, harsh, and cruel to his son, whose ardent nature and genius he did not in the least understand. He compelled Honoré, at the age of fifteen, to enter the army. After five years with his regiment, the young man had shown such aptitude for military study that he was about to receive promotion, when his father discovered that he had lost forty louis at play; was in debt, and engaged in an amorous intrigue with a young woman of the people. The old marquis, therefore, obtained a lettre de cachet, by which his son was imprisoned in the fort of the Ile de Rê. Here Mirabeau wrote his famous “Essay upon Despotism.” After his release he went with his regiment to Corsica, where he conducted himself with so much distinction as to be recommended for a captaincy of dragoons. But his arbitrary old father would not consent to this, as he now wished his son to leave the army and to embrace a rural life.

The result was a breach between father and son, though a reconciliation was effected a few months later. The maternal grandmother of young Mirabeau died in 1770, and left a vast fortune, which her daughter attempted to secure entirely for herself by obtaining a separation from her tyrannical husband. The result was a lawsuit lasting fifteen years, during the whole of which time Mirabeau was in the painful position of a son between two parents who furiously hated one another. In 1772 Mirabeau married, under pressure from his father, the only daughter of the Marquis de Mariguana, a plain girl of eighteen, reputed to be a great heiress. He never received any fortune with her, beyond an annuity of 3000 francs, for her father survived his son-in-law twelve years, dying in 1803.

The young couple lived for some time quietly together in the Château of Mirabeau, but Mirabeau’s fortune was not in any way equal to his rank, and he soon contracted heavy debts; this again excited his father’s anger, and he caused him to be arrested in 1774. Mirabeau was therefore reimprisoned, this time in the Château d’If, in the Gulf of Marseilles. From the Château d’If he was transported to Fort de Jaux in the Jura. The governor, who sympathised with him, accorded him semi-liberty, and he was able to make acquaintances in the town of Portarlier, where he was hospitably received by the leading families. One of these was that of the Marquis de Monnier, an old man of seventy, with a young, beautiful and intelligent wife. Mirabeau became her lover, and he and she eloped, first to Switzerland, and then to Holland, where they took up their abode in Amsterdam. The two fugitives were arrested, and Mirabeau was imprisoned in the Castle of Vincennes, where he remained for four years, his lengthy incarceration being the result of the efforts of his implacable father.

He wrote in prison his Lettres à Sophie, and executed much literary work. After personally conducting two law cases, one to cause the revocation of the act against him as ravisher of Mdme. Monnier, and the other to re-establish his conjugal rights over Mdme. Mirabeau—both of which he won, after showing prodigious eloquence, though he had never before spoken in public—he proceeded to London, where he printed “Considerations upon the Order of Cincinnatus.”

When the States-General assembled, Mirabeau endeavoured to obtain a membership; but his own order, the nobility, refused to accept him as a candidate. He therefore hired a shop in the town of Aix in Provence, and wrote over the door “Mirabeau, Cloth Merchant.” He was elected by the Tiers État Deputy for Aix.

After the opening of the States-General, Mirabeau soon became the most noted orator in the Assembly, and although on the side of liberty and freedom he showed much moderation and common sense. It is probable that had he lived France might have enjoyed the benefits of a constitutional monarchy, and all the horrors of the Revolution been averted; but his irregular life had destroyed even his robust constitution, and he expired on April 2, 1791, aged forty-two.

MOUGE, Comte de Peluse, Gaspard.

Born at Béaune in Burgundy, 1746; died in Paris, 1818.

Early in life he attained extraordinary knowledge in mathematics, chemistry and geometry. At the age of sixteen he made a plan of his native town with only the aid of geometrical instruments he had manufactured himself. This plan was exhibited in the Hôtel de Ville of Béaune, and was there seen by a distinguished engineering officer, who invited its creator to enter the famous College of Mézières. This offer was accepted; Mouge became Professor of Mathematics in this College, and was admitted to the Academy of Sciences in 1780. He retained this post until the Revolution closed both College and Academy.

In 1792 Mouge was appointed Minister of Marine; he held this position for a year—from August 11, 1792, to August 12, 1793.

At this moment the indignation of Europe against France had reached its height; the whole continent was prepared to attack her. The French Government, without money and without credit, required fourteen armies—and they obtained them. A million men were at their disposal, but these men were unarmed. Until this period all war material, iron, bronze, steel, even gunpowder had been supplied from abroad; but importation had now ceased. Mouge now showed the resources of his genius; he wrote, “All we require to aid the triumphs of our soldiers, all we formerly asked for from the stranger is concealed in our soil—it remains only for us to pluck it out.”

He placed himself at the head of a body of metallurgists, mechanics and chemists, and directed night and day the manufacture of arms and explosives. Bells were turned into cannon, old iron hardened into steel, and saltpetre extracted from the simplest materials. An immense quantity of powder filled the magazines, and cannons and other weapons were cast or forged in enormous quantities.

These great efforts ended, Mouge determined to open, at his own expense, a house where he might entertain and instruct a number of young men destined for the artillery of engineers. This establishment was the nucleus from which the École Polytechnique sprang.

In 1792, when Mouge was Minister of Marine, he received with kindness a young artillery officer who was out of employment. This same artillery officer, four years later, became the conqueror of Italy.

Mouge received an order to proceed to Italy to value, collect, and attempt to preserve, those works of Italian art it was proposed to remove to France. He received the warmest greeting from Bonaparte, who gave him every token of friendship.

Mouge was despatched by Bonaparte in 1797 to Rome—when the Pope was forced to fly and the Roman Republic established—with the order to bring statues and pictures from the Vatican to Paris.

He accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, together with many other men of science, to bring back the spoils of that country, in the same way they had removed those of ancient Rome. While the French occupation of Egypt continued, Mouge made many discoveries there, and explored the Temples of the Nile, travelling as far as the Second Cataract. He followed Bonaparte to Syria, and was his constant companion during that disastrous expedition. When Napoleon quitted Egypt surreptitiously for France, August 22, 1799, Mouge was one of the passengers on board the small frigate which carried General Bonaparte and his destiny.

On his return to France, Mouge continued his scientific work. After the establishment of the Empire, he was appointed Governor and Director of the École Polytechnique, Senator, and given the title of Comte de Peluse. He retained these honours until the second Restoration, when Louis XVIII. erased his name from the list of the Institute, besides depriving him of the Directorship of the Polytechnique, which he (Mouge) had founded.

Mouge felt this deprivation deeply, and the last three years of his life were passed in melancholy depression and regret. He died in 1818, at the age of seventy-two.

MOITTE, Pierre-Etienne.

Born, 1722; died, 1780.

A celebrated French engraver. His works are now of high commercial value.

NECKER, Suzanne Curchod.

Born at Crassier in the Canton of Vaud, 1739; died at Lauzanne, 1794.

Her father was a Protestant pastor, who educated her. At the age of twenty she had a perfect and intimate knowledge of modern and classical literature. She was tall and handsome, her manners amiable and dignified. Her parents were poor; she was therefore obliged to give private lessons in families. Gibbon, the historian, knew and admired, and even desired to marry her. His father, however, absolutely refused his consent on account of Mdlle. Curchod’s want of means.

Having lost both her parents she went to Paris as the companion of a Mdme. de Verenenon, a rich widow. Mdme. Verenenon possessed a suitor, one Monsieur Necker, a wealthy banker of about thirty-two years of age.

When M. Necker met the young companion he transferred his affections to her, and they were married in 1764. Their union was a very happy one.

Mdme. Necker’s salon was one of the most agreeable and cultured in Paris, her habitués being Buffon, Thomas, St. Lambert, Suard, Marmontel, Saurin, Duclosé, Diderot, D’Alembert, De la Harpe, Guibert, Abbé Delille, Abbé Arnaud, Abbé Morellet, Comte de Creutz, Duc d’Azeu, Marquis de Caraccioli. Her greatest friends were Buffon and Thomas.

During her husband’s first Ministry, Mdme. Necker occupied herself particularly with the Paris Hospitals, then in a deplorable condition, and at the moment when the Revolution drove her from France, she was busy arranging a model hospital she had founded at her own expense.

She died, aged fifty-four, at Lausanne.

She had an only daughter, the celebrated Madame de Staël, born in 1766. The relations of mother and child were, unfortunately, never happy, as the amiable, pious, but rigid Calvinist mother could in no way understand the character or disposition of her brilliant daughter. M. Necker, on the contrary, made his child his friend and companion from her early girlhood, and in consequence a violent jealousy existed between the mother and daughter, which as years went on embittered both their lives, and continued until Mdme. Necker’s death. M. Necker died ten years later, in 1804.

NEUFCHÂTEAU, Nicholas François, Comte de.

Born, 1750; died, 1828.

Son of a schoolmaster in Lorraine, Nicholas François was educated at a Jesuit College, where he was known as “the Infant Prodigy.” At the age of fourteen he published a volume of poems and fables, imitations of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil; and was crowned by the Academy of Dijon. Voltaire, then seventy-two years of age, invited the youthful genius to Ferney, and wished to make him his private secretary (1767), but the Comte de Henin, who was the patron of François, insisted upon his protégé leaving Ferney and accepting a post in the magistracy. The town of Neufchâteau solemnly adopted their illustrious young citizen, who from thenceforward added the name of Neufchâteau to that of François.

He was brought under the notice of Maréchal de Costires, then Minister of Marine, who appointed François Procurator to the General Council in the Colony of St. Domingo, now the Island of Hayti.

After spending five years in the West Indies, the young magistrate obtained leave of absence, and started for France, bringing with him the literary work of five years, including a complete translation of the works of Ariosto. His ship was wrecked, and he was cast on a desert island; all his manuscripts going down with the ill-fated vessel. François Neufchâteau considered this loss to be the great catastrophe of his life. He was finally rescued, reaching France in safety, and receiving a pension of 3000 livres (£120), proposed to devote his life to literature and poetry.

The events of 1789 altered the current of his existence. He was elected a member of the Assembly, and the following year sent as Commissionary to the Vosges for the organisation of that new Department.

He was eventually appointed President of the first Legislative Assembly.

He refused the Ministry of Justice, choosing instead the humbler but safer position of juge de paix in the Department of Vosges.

His friends persuaded him to return to Paris to superintend the rehearsal of his play “Pamela” (translated from one of Goldoni’s comedies) at the Théâtre Français. Produced on August 1, 1793, this innocent and simple drama achieved an immense success, and was played for eight consecutive nights. The curtain was just about to rise upon the ninth performance, when a message from the Committee of Public Safety arrived to stop the play, the author was summoned before the Committee the same evening, and ordered to bring with him the manuscript of the piece. Neufchâteau submitted humbly to all demands as to corrections and excisions, altered, as desired, the fourth and fifth acts of the play, and even gave it a different ending. Robespierre and his Council permitted the performance of the revised play. It was reproduced September 1, and again ran for eight nights; upon the ninth evening this verse was applauded:—

Ah! les persécuteurs sont les seuls condamnable,
Et les plus tolérants sont les plus raisonnable.

Before the play was finished, the Committee of Public Safety served the following order at the Théâtre Français:

“The Théâtre Français is to be immediately closed, the actors, actresses, and employées arrested, together with the author of ‘Pamela,’ and conveyed to the Prison of La Force.”

In this prison Neufchâteau remained eleven months, until August 4, 1794, when he was released, and shortly afterwards appointed Judge of the High Court during the Directorate, after being Governmental Commissionary for some time in the district of the Vosges. He became Minister of the Interior in 1797. In all these appointments he gave many proofs of capacity, judgment, moderation, and kindliness of heart.

When the Consulate was established he was not only made a Senator, but occupied the Presidential Chair of the Senate until 1808, when he abandoned politics for scientific and literary pursuits. He was deprived of his peerage (Napoleon had made him a Count of the Empire) at the Restoration, but allowed to retain his membership of the Academy.

Although married four times, he left only one surviving son. A painful malady rendered Neufchâteau a helpless invalid for the last ten years of his life, but he retained his lively philosophic character to the last, and was constantly surrounded by friends and admirers, who enjoyed his witty as well as learned conversation. He continued his literary work until his death.

His moral tales, poems, and philosophical and historical treatises are now forgotten; but his writings upon scientific agriculture are still consulted by experts in that science.

LE NÔTRE, André.

A celebrated designer of gardens. Born, 1613; died, 1700.

Louis XIV. commissioned him to lay out the park and gardens of Versailles, and gave him entire control over the royal gardens of France. The geographical situation of Versailles made any arrangements for gardens, fountains, and terraces extremely difficult, but Le Nôtre overcame all difficulties, and fed the fountains by constructing a canal to carry off the waters of a neighbouring marsh, which was thus rendered a fertile and cultivated spot.

Le Nôtre created the gardens of Marly, and also constructed the splendid terrace at St. Germain. He laid out the gardens of Chantilly for the Prince de Condé of the day. Those at Fontainebleau and St. Cloud were also designed by him. Proceeding to England in the reign of Charles II., he laid out and arranged the present Parks of Greenwich and St. James. The lake in the latter was constructed by Le Nôtre.

Le Nôtre was a man of the most simple and natural nature, and for that very reason was probably one of the greatest favourites, among his servants, of Louis XIV. This anecdote, which is historically true, describes the character of the man: In 1678 he made a visit to Italy to study the beautiful gardens which surround the great villas of that country. He was received in audience by Pope Innocent XI., who treated him with much distinction, and Le Nôtre, as he was taking leave, remarked: “I have now nothing more to desire; I have seen the two greatest men in the world—your Holiness and the King of France.” “There is a great difference between us,” replied the Pope; “the King of France is a great and victorious Prince, I am but a poor priest, the servant of the servants of God.” Le Nôtre, delighted with this reply, slapped the Pope familiarly on the back, saying, “Holy Father, do not be despondent; you look in perfect health, and may live to bury every present member of your sacred College.” Innocent XI. burst into a fit of laughter, and Le Nôtre threw himself on the Pope’s neck, kissing him affectionately. Le Nôtre retired, delighted with his interview, and proceeded to write full details of it to Bontemps, the confidential valet of Louis XIV.; this letter was read aloud at the Petit Levée of the King. Several courtiers doubted the truth of its contents, but the King said, “Why not? Whenever I return from a campaign and give Le Nôtre an audience he always embraces me, so he most likely embraces the Pope also.”

At the age of eighty, when he wished to retire, Le Nôtre only obtained permission to do so on the condition he would pay a weekly visit to the King. He died at eighty-seven, and was buried in the church of St. Roch in Paris, in a chapel he had founded.

He refused armorial bearings when offered a patent of nobility, declaring his only crest was a spade.

D’ORLÉANS, Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc (Philippe Egalité).

Born at St. Cloud, April 13, 1747. Guillotined in Paris, November 6, 1793.

His tutor was the Comte St. Meurice, and great pains were taken with his education.

He appears to have inherited the character and disposition of his great grandfather, the Regent, without the firmness of disposition and great natural intelligence and perspicuity possessed by that Prince.

In 1769 he married Louise de Bourbon, only daughter of the Duke de Penthièvre. At the wedding he greatly scandalised the Court by his behaviour, although his offence was only that natural to a lively young man. Being accidentally placed on the left, instead of the right, of the bride, he took a running leap and jumped over her train to reach the other side.

Soon after his marriage, he entered on a life of wild dissipation, became a Freemason, declared his admiration for everything English, and imported horses and jockeys from the other side of the Channel. He also made every effort to gain popularity with the people. In 1771 he opposed the decree by which, in the last years of the reign of Louis XV., the Chancellor Maupeon had suppressed the provincial Parliaments of France, and was in consequence exiled to his country seat during the remainder of that King’s reign. Immediately on his accession, Louis XVI. re-established these Parliaments, and the Duc de Chartres (as he then was) returned to Court.

When the war broke out between France and England, the young Duke petitioned that he might act for his father-in-law, the Duke de Penthièvre, who was Grand Admiral of France. This was refused; he was, however, given a nominal command in the fleet of Admiral d’Orvilliers. He was present at the battle of Onessant, where he commanded the squadron of the blue, under the surveillance of Admiral Lamotte Picquet, who was really in charge of this portion of the fleet. The admiral gave an excellent account of the courage and coolness shown by the Prince when under fire.

The French were victorious, but, owing to the incompetency of d’Orvilliers, gained no real advantage from the combat.

The fleet returned to Brest, August 2, 1778, and when the Duc de Chartres reached Paris he was received with so much enthusiasm by the populace as to excite the apprehension of the Court party and to evoke an indignant hostility from the Queen.

Shortly afterwards the Duke returned to his duties on the fleet, and his enemies at Court took the opportunity of his absence to spread against him the most scandalous libels—amongst others that the Duke de Penthièvre was persuaded that his son-in-law desired to supplant him in the post of Grand Admiral, whereas he only desired to act as his deputy. So well did his enemies work, that when Chartres returned after a few months’ absence, he was as coldly received by the populace as by the courtiers. More than this, when he wished to return to the fleet, his command was taken from him and he was compelled to leave the Navy. This treatment was rendered the more bitter, as the first intimation he received of it was in a letter from his avowed enemy the Queen.

From this moment the Duke avoided the Court, although he retained a friendship for the Comte d’Artois, and the two young Princes were companions in pleasure. The Queen, who was greatly attached to her young brother-in-law, used all her influence to draw him away from the “contagion” of Orleans. She persuaded the King to buy the Château de S. Cloud from the Duke (it was the favourite residence of the latter), and although d’Orléans was both furious and chagrined at being compelled to part with his château, he had no alternative but to obey the order of his sovereign. The huge sum raised to buy this palace was a serious drain on the exhausted Treasury, and the Queen lived to bitterly regret her imprudent action. A libel was freely circulated and believed all over France, on the occasion of the death of the Prince de Lamballe, only son of the Duke de Penthièvre. It was said that d’Orleans had poisoned his brother-in-law, in order that his wife might be sole heiress to the vast fortune of her father. The Queen went so far as to say publicly she feared a similar fate would soon befall the Comte d’Artois. Driven from the Court by these outrages, the Duke d’Orleans’ amiable and débonnaire nature became utterly soured. In the first Assembly of Notables he became one of the leaders of the Opposition. On November 19, 1787, when the King proposed to this Assembly two edicts—one for the creation of a stamp duty, the other for a graduated loan of 440,000,000 francs—the Duke d’Orleans rose and boldly questioned the monarch, asking him whether this sitting was “a bed of justice” or “an open debate.” “It is a royal sitting,” the King replied. “If that is the case,” answered the Duke, “I protest against this measure; for I declare that the right of voting taxes only belongs to the States-General.” Only two other Councillors agreed with the Duke, and the edicts were immediately carried. Fréteau and Sabatier, the Councillors in question, were immediately exiled to Iles d’Hyères, the Duke of Orleans to Villers. This disgrace immensely increased the Duke’s popularity. He did not return to Paris for a year, and when the States-General was assembled he was elected deputy for Crespy. During the solemn procession at Versailles (May 4, 1789), before the opening of this Assembly, it was noticed with what affectation the Duke sought to mingle with the ranks of the Deputies of the Tiers État.

In the first sittings of the States-General, the Duke pronounced energetically in favour of the reunion of all the orders. On June 25 he, together with forty-six other noblemen, joined the Tiers État, now the National Assembly; on July 3 he was elected President, but refused the honour. On the 12th the people, exasperated by the fall of Necker, carried the busts of Necker and the Duke about Paris under the leadership of Legendre. It was from the gardens of the Duke’s house (the Palais Royal) that, two days later, the organised mob departed to take the Bastille.

Had d’Orléans possessed at this moment sufficient determination and intellectual force, he might easily have become Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, with Necker for his Prime Minister. But he had not enough courage, nor, possibly, enough ambition to carry out any definite project; and he drove his partisans, among whom was Mirabeau, to despair by his hesitating and undecided conduct. He remained a member of the Extreme Left of the Assembly, but scarcely ever made a public speech. In October of the same year, the Court party, and also the bourgeois, were so exasperated against the Duke of Orleans, that Lafayette himself was persuaded to order the Duke out of France. He was sent to London on an imaginary mission: returned the following summer, was acclaimed by the Assembly, and renewed his alliance with Mirabeau.

After the flight of Louis XVI., in June 1791, the throne was temporarily vacant; and again, had the Duke chosen to come forward, his advances would have been well received by the nation and the Assembly. He did not dare to do so, and so lost his last opportunity.

The next month the new Constitution ordained that French Princes could not be elected to any functions by the votes of the people; Orléans, therefore, publicly renounced all prerogatives or privileges accorded to Royalty, and declared himself a simple citizen.

At that time there was an attempted reconciliation between the King and the Duke, which was doubtless sincere on both sides. The new Minister of Marine, Bertrand de Motteville, arranged that the Duke of Orleans should be one of the Vice-Admirals in the reorganised fleet. The project was communicated to Louis XVI., who expressed himself satisfied, and the Duke was grateful. The King and he, by the medium of de Motteville, had a private interview, and parted on friendly terms. The following Sunday (January 1792) the new Admiral came to the Tuileries to pay homage to the King. It was the dinner-hour, the table for the King and Queen was already laid, and the room was full of courtiers. As soon as the Duke appeared, he became the object for the most opprobrious insults. “Take care of the dishes!” was shouted on all sides—the insinuation being he was about to put poison in them. He was pushed about, his feet were purposely trodden on, and as he descended the stairs several persons spat on his head and clothes. He left in a state of indescribable rage, believing that the King had enticed him to the Palace in order to insult him; the King was really innocent of the whole matter, but sent no message of apology or regret.

From that day Orléans threw himself with energy into the extreme revolutionary party, and by becoming Danton’s banker drew him away from the Court party, in whose pay that corrupt politician had for some time been.

Orléans became Deputy for Paris in the Convention, accepting the name of Philippe Égalité, which title was bestowed upon him on September 15, 1792. When the King’s trial took place, “Egalité” said Robespierre, “is the only member who has a right to refuse to vote.” But Orléans thought he would save his own head and his credit with the Jacobins by condemning his relative. When his name was called, he said: “Entirely preoccupied by a sense of duty, and convinced that all those who attempted to reign or have reigned as sovereigns over the people merit death—I vote for death.” This speech did not have the expected effect, those who were not indignant being disgusted at it.

On April 6 of the same year the Convention ordered that “all members of the Bourbon family be detained as hostages”; on the 7th, Orléans was arrested and conducted to Marseilles. He addressed petition after petition to the Convention without effect, and was removed to Paris and imprisoned at the Conciergerie on October 3. Both Queen Marie Antoinette and d’Orleans simultaneously occupied cells in this prison for a space of a few days. Two or three weeks after her execution the Duke was put upon his trial; he defended himself with courage and coolness, but his fate was sealed in advance. After condemnation he asked to be executed without delay; and on the same afternoon, four hours after the trial, he was conducted to the scaffold with five Deputies, condemned, like himself, as Girondists. He passed by his former palace on the way to execution, and, pointing to it, exclaimed, with a gesture of contempt, “How they applauded me once!” When he had left the cart and mounted the plank of the guillotine he said to the executioner, “Do not let your fellows pull off my boots until I am dead, they will come off easier then; make haste! make haste!” These were his last words.

PAINE, Thomas.

Born at Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737; died at New York, 1809.

Paine was the son of a Quaker staymaker. He learnt to read, write, and cypher at a free school, and at the age of sixteen worked at his father’s trade. He twice ran away from home to go to sea; but married in 1759 and settled in Sandwich, still working as a staymaker. His wife dying two years later, he went to London, and obtained a situation as schoolmaster in an elementary school, and toiled hard for two years at his own self-education.

In 1771 he married the daughter of a tobacconist, and joined his father-in-law in trade. His affairs did not prosper, and three years later he became bankrupt. He decided to emigrate to America; having made the acquaintance of Franklin (at that time in London), the latter, as a fellow Quaker, gave him letters of recommendation. Paine was thirty-seven when he embarked for America; on his arrival in Philadelphia he was engaged as editor for a periodical called the Philadelphian Magazine. His articles began to excite attention, particularly several against slavery.

He took the most ardent interest in the struggle between England and America. After the battle of Bunker Hill it was still undecided whether the colonists would demand complete independence and separation, or be satisfied with certain concessions on the part of the mother country. It was then Paine published his famous pamphlet “Common Sense,” which produced a tremendous impression, more than 100,000 copies being sold. From an obscure individual he became a celebrity. During the remainder of his life Paine invariably signed himself “Common Sense,” and was convinced that had he not written the work in question the United States, as a nation, would never have come into existence.

The following autumn he joined the American army as aide-de-camp to General Green, and in 1777 he was appointed by Congress Secretary to the Committee of Foreign Affairs; after two years he was dismissed, under the accusation of indiscretion as to diplomatic secrets. In 1781 he accompanied Colonel Laurence, whom Congress had commissioned to try and raise a loan, to France. This mission was a complete success. Louis XVI. lent six millions of francs, and guaranteed another ten millions promised by Holland.

Peace having been declared, Paine returned to America. As a return for his services, Congress voted him 5500 dollars in two separate sums, and gave him a grant of 300 acres of land and a house.

Paine proceeded to work out various scientific and mechanical problems, by which he hoped to realise a large fortune, his favourite dream being to throw an iron bridge over the Schuykill. Want of capital, and the impossibility of getting iron properly wrought or cast in America, caused his return to Europe. He proposed to present the model of his bridge to the French Academy of Science, Franklin giving him letters of introduction: the Academy received him well, and their committee made a favourable report. But politics, and not science, were in the air, and no one could be persuaded to put money into the venture. Paine then went to London in hopes of better luck; a Yorkshire ironmaster took up the invention, and an American merchant advanced the money; but the expenses proved far heavier than had been anticipated, the ironmaster went bankrupt, and his creditors arrested Paine, who only obtained his liberty at the sacrifice of most of his little fortune.

The Revolution had now broken out in France, and the English Whig party, which had at first shown much sympathy with the movement, became alarmed and shocked at the excesses and disorders it entailed. In 1790 Burke published his celebrated treatise, “Thoughts on the French Revolution,” which Paine answered by his equally well-known work, “The Rights of Man.” This book excited immense indignation in England among the general public, and its author was burnt in effigy in the streets. The second part of the “Rights of Man,” which was published in February 1792, was still more violent, containing direct personal attacks upon George III. These books delighted the extremists, and were immediately translated into French. The British Ministry issued a royal proclamation forbidding seditious writings, and summoned Paine before the Court of King’s Bench.

At the same time a deputation of electors arrived from France to inform Paine that he had been elected a Member of the Convention; flattered by this distinction, he started at once for France, and an hour after he had sailed the order for his arrest arrived. He was tried by default, and his sentence was banishment for life from Great Britain and Ireland. As he could not speak French, he was unable to take part in the debates of the Convention; but when the King’s trial took place he fought courageously against the death sentence, and caused the following expression of his opinions to be read aloud by one of his fellow members:

To kill Louis would not only be a gross act of inhumanity, but also of insane folly. His death would augment the number of your enemies. If I could speak French I would now descend and appear as a humble suppliant before your bar, imploring you in the name of my generous American brethren not to send Louis to execution.

This generous action on the part of Paine completely destroyed his credit with the Jacobins, and also in a great measure his general popularity in France. The governing party were from that time his open enemies; Robespierre erased his name from the list of members of the Convention, as “a foreigner who was an enemy to Liberty and Equality.” He was arrested and imprisoned in the Luxemburg.

Thomas Paine remained for more than a year in prison in daily expectation of death. It was only by a mistake on the part of his gaoler in reading out the names of the condemned that he escaped execution. Even the fall of Robespierre did not give him freedom; and he was at length liberated in November 1794, by the influence of Monroe, the American Minister, who claimed him as a citizen of the United States.

He attempted to obtain a seat in the Assembly, but was not elected. The long imprisonment had not only affected his health but also his intelligence. He published a work entitled the “Age of Reason”—a violent attack upon Christianity, which aroused a sensation in England, and evoked much energetic refutation of its teaching. It made Paine a vast number of enemies in the United States, and he rendered the situation still more impossible by publishing in 1797 a letter, full of bitterness and ill-nature, criticising the character and administration of Washington.

He did not leave France until the autumn of 1802, when he returned to America, where he found he had lost the consideration and respect which he formerly enjoyed in the United States.

His last years were spent in loneliness and neglect. He was thought by his enemies to be avaricious, dirty and careless of his appearance, and to indulge in intemperate habits. He died, almost forgotten, in New York in 1809, aged seventy-one, and was buried upon his farm at New Rochelle. In 1837 Cobbett transported the remains to England, where they were reverently received by the Radicals and Chartists of the day.

PIUS VI., Giovanni Angelo, Count de Braschi.

Born, December 27, 1717; died at Valence, August 29, 1799.

He was the only child of Count More Aurelius Braschi, the head of one of the oldest families in the Romagna. To his parents’ grief he insisted upon taking holy orders, and was appointed secretary to his maternal uncle, Cardinal Ruffio, Legate at Ferrara. Later Braschi became auditor to the Bishoprics of Ostia and Velletri; while in the latter city, in 1744, when there was an encounter between the Austrians and Neapolitans (the latter commanded by King Charles III. of Spain, then King of Naples), Braschi was able by his presence of mind to save the Neapolitan archives. This circumstance brought him to the notice of the King of Naples, who promised him his protection: shortly afterwards he successfully conducted a mission from the Pope to the King of Naples, and was appointed Camariere Segreto and Canon of St. Peter’s. In 1758 he became a Prelate, and Treasurer-General of the Apostolic Chamber. Clement XIV. created him a Cardinal in 1773, and in 1775 he was elected Pope, under the title of Pius VI.

His reign inaugurated an era of reform; he issued many rules and regulations as to the dress and general conduct of the clergy, which at the time, owing to the indifference and weakness of his immediate predecessor’s administration, left much to be desired.

His position as treasurer had given him an insight into the abuses prevailing in the financial department of the Papal Government, and a reduction or suppression of a number of dishonestly obtained pensions took place. He published various laws for the protection of farmers and corn-dealers, and offered substantial pecuniary rewards to industrious and intelligent peasant farmers. A Congregation of Cardinals was called together to pass regulations to put a stop to the grave disorders occasioned by idleness, mendicity, and too low wages; the system of weights and measures was thoroughly investigated, and one contractor in particular, who had received 900,000 crowns from the Apostolic See during the famine of 1771–72 to buy grain for the assistance of ruined farmers, was forced to restore 280,000 crowns of this money to the Treasury. Pius VI. ordered the drainage of the Pontine Marshes, and employed for this purpose the celebrated engineer, Louis Benck; and although the work was not finished, owing to the Revolution, 12,000 acres were reclaimed. He also cleared the Appian Way, then impassable owing to the vast multitude of stone heaps from ruined buildings by which it was encumbered. Pius VI. embellished, completed, arranged, and classified the “Museo Clementino.” Combined with these reforms he gave great attention to charitable institutions, initiated those schools of the Christian Brothers which are now spread all over the world, and erected many orphanages and refuges for poor children of both sexes.

Pius’s serious troubles began with the accession of that misguided but well-meaning monarch, Joseph II. of Austria. This Emperor’s intentions were excellent, nor was he impious or irreligious, yet by his exorbitant pretensions to sovereignty in every department of the State, and his avowed intention to re-organise on his own responsibility the spiritual affairs of his Empire, he was a powerful agent to the enemies of Christianity. After having continued for some time a correspondence with the Emperor which led to no satisfactory understanding on either side, Pius VI. determined to seek a personal interview with him. Leaving on February 27, 1782, he arrived on March 22 at Vienna. The Emperor received the Pope with the utmost courtesy, but remained inflexible, and Pius VI. soon perceived that his long journey had been in vain. However, Joseph II. treated the Pope with the greatest outward magnificence, and endeavoured to appease him by offering the brevet of a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire to Count Louis Braschi, the Pontiff’s nephew and heir. This the Pope refused, saying: “We are not occupied with the advancement or grandeur of our family, our interests are concentrated on those of the Church.” The following year Joseph II. returned the Pope’s visit, but on his way to Rome he appointed a new Archbishop of Milan without consulting the Holy See; but gave way, however, on this point later, and the result of the visit was the signature of a Concordat between the Pope and Austria, which put an end to the principal misunderstandings, although, until his death, Joseph never ceased to be a source of anxiety and annoyance to his Holiness.

The French Revolution brought more trouble to Pius VI. After the measures taken against the clergy, attacks began to be levelled at the Roman Curia. The Assembly introduced the “Constitution Civile du Clergé,” which, by abolishing the various hierarchical degrees, destroyed the ancient Gallican Church; and Avignon, a part of the Papal States since mediæval times, was formally united to France. The Pope was powerless, and the storm of war began to descend on Italy: Savoy and Nice were invaded, the clergy compelled to fly before the persecutions of the Republic, and the States of the Church were crowded by destitute ecclesiastics of every condition, who were hospitably entertained by the Pope, whose own turn of misfortune was at hand; the French Government accused him of being “an enemy of the changes in the French Government”; they invaded the Pontifical territory, and Pius signed in 1797 the treaty of Tolentio, by which he gave up Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna, and renounced all claims to the sovereignty over Avignon.

Throughout these reverses Pius VI. showed courage, self-control and prudence. The Directorate were determined to drive him from Rome; they therefore excited a riot in the city, and under pretence of quelling it, despatched an army, commanded by General Berthier, which camped under the walls of Rome, January 29, 1798. (As Bonaparte was at that time in Egypt, and did not return until after the death of the Pope, he took no part in the events which followed.)

On February 15, the French general threw off the mask, entered Rome, and the robbery and sacrilege commenced. Five days later the Swiss Haller, the corrupt treasurer of the French army, seized the person of the Pontiff, flung him by force into a post-chaise, and, without attendants, luggage or any conveniences for a winter’s journey, carried this infirm old man of eighty into exile. He was first taken to Siena, then to the Benedictine mountain fortress of San Cassiano, to Florence, to Parma, to Piacenza, to Turin; at length, worn out and half paralysed, he arrived at Valence on July 14, after enduring five months’ imprisonment, privation and misery, during which time no pity had been shown him, although his physical condition was most pitiful, for he had suffered a paralytic stroke, and from sheer weakness his body had become covered with ulcers. He was incarcerated in the ordinary prison of the citadel at Valence and kept in solitary confinement; but by this time he was indifferent to earthly affairs, and his time spent entirely in prayer. He retained his faculties to the last, and, as a special favour, permitted to receive the last Sacraments at the hands of a fellow prisoner, Mgr. Spina, Archbishop of Corinth.

Pius VI. died on August 26, 1799, at one o’clock in the morning, aged eighty-one years and eight months. His body was buried without any ceremony in the desecrated chapel of the citadel; but after the establishment of the Concordat it was, by the orders of the First Consul, removed to Rome, and now lies there in the Church of St. Peter. He was Pope for more than twenty-four years.

PELLETIER, Jacques.

Born, 1760; died, 1839.

A rich landed proprietor who adopted revolutionary principles, represented the Department of Cher in the Convention, and voted for Louis XVI.’s death, subject to an appeal to the people. After the 9th Thermidor, he was sent to administer Languedoc, showed firmness, justice and moderation, and in 1795 was one of the Commissioners for the Directorate.

Banished as a regicide in 1816, he was allowed to return to France in 1819, and the last twenty years of his life were uneventful.

PRIEUR, Claude Antoine Duvernois.

Born, 1763; died, 1832.

The son of a receiver of taxes at Auxonne, Prieur was an officer in the Engineers at the time of the Revolution, which he joined from its outset. Elected by the Côte d’Or to the Assembly, the Convention, and finally to the Council of the Five Hundred, he sat in all these Assemblies from 1791 to 1793, and distinguished himself by his genuine Republicanism, was for a short time President of the Convention, but after August 10 joined the Army of the Rhine.

At the King’s trial he voted for the immediate execution of the accused. Three months later the Convention sent him to Normandy to put down the counter revolutionary projects of the Girondins, who succeeded in arresting Prieur and his brother commissionary, and they remained fifty-one days in the prisons of Caen. On his return to Paris, Prieur became a member of the Committee of Public Safety (August 1793). At the time of the Revolution of 18th Brumaire, Prieur was once more with the army, acting as a colonel in the Engineers, but being too republican to serve the First Consul, he in 1800 retired from military service.

He was one of those few among the revolutionists who was an admirable organiser and a practical man. He worked heart and soul for the re-establishment of Public Instruction, and together with Mouge helped to found the École Polytechnique. Prieur was the author of the great reform in the metric system.

PRONY, Gaspard Clair Français Marie Riche de.

Born, 1755; died, 1839.

One of the greatest engineers of France. In 1787 he commenced the bridge, first called Pont Louis XVI., and now Pont de la Concorde, which was completed in 1791, when Prony was appointed chief engineer of France. The same year he undertook the composition of new tables of trigonometry adapted to the decimal division of the circle. Prony completed his work in three years, and in 1798 became the Director of the École des Ponts et des Chaussées and professor of mechanics and mathematics at the École Polytechnique. Bonaparte made every effort to induce Prony to abandon this appointment and accompany him to Egypt, but was unsuccessful. During the Consulate and Empire, Prony’s word was considered law in all that concerned civil engineering in France, and after the restoration he retained his post at the École Polytechnique. In 1818 he was sent to Italy to carry out improvements in the Ports of Genoa, Pola, and Ancona, and to give an opinion upon the possible regularisation of the course of the Po, and in 1827 he carried out works which successfully stopped the annual floods in the Rhone valley, for which service Charles X. created him a Baron.

He died at the age of eighty-four.

LA REVEILLIÈRE, Louis Marie.

Born, 1753; died, 1824.

One of the five Directors, and at the time of the dissolution of the Directorate their President. Unlike Barras and his co-directors, la Reveillière was an honest man and a sincere Republican. He refused to take the oath of allegiance to Napoleon as First Consul or Emperor, and retired into private life after the events of the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 1799).

REGNIER, Duc de Massa, Claude Ambroise.

Born, 1736; died, June 24, 1814.

He was at the time of the Revolution one of the most distinguished lawyers in Nancy. He pronounced violently in favour of the new doctrines, and was elected by the Tiers État of his native town as their representative at the States-General. He took a considerable part in the debates of the Assembly, and defended Nancy against the attacks of the Jacobins. When the Convention took extreme measures, Regnier disappeared from Paris until the events of the 9th Thermidor were concluded. In 1795 he joined the Council of the Ancients, and became first Secretary to and then President of the Council. He opposed the return of the exiled émigrés and caused the transportation of many priests (February 1796). He was re-elected in 1799, but as he was persuaded, by this time, that the Directorate could neither serve the peace nor the aggrandisement of France, he took an active part in arranging the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire (Nov. 1799). It was in his house that the conspirators met the day before this event took place. When he was appointed a member of the Conseil d’État, he catalogued and investigated all details with regard to the National Domains. He was the principal author of that code of laws known as the Code Napoleon, still the law of France. In 1802 he became Minister of Justice and also Chief Judge of France; he held these offices until 1813. He was created Duc de Massa by the Emperor in 1805. In 1813, after resigning the portfolio of Minister of Justice, Regnier became President of the Corps Législatif. After the first abdication of Napoleon Regnier hoped to retain his position, but he was doomed to be disappointed, a misfortune which, together with the fall of the Emperor, to whom he was personally attached, probably hastened his death, which occurred two months later, at the age of seventy-eight.

ROBESPIERRE, Maximilien Marie Isidore de.

Born at Arras, May 6, 1756; died in Paris, July 1794.

The public history of Robespierre is so well known that it is unnecessary to give it here. A short description of his early life, previous to becoming a Deputy to the States-General in 1789, may, however, be of interest, as but little is known.

Robespierre’s father, a lawyer, was a man of eccentric habits and peculiar disposition, who after the death of his wife left his native town, and, it is believed, went to England and America. Nothing was again seen of him in France, nor did he ever communicate with his family. He left behind him three young children, Augustus, Maximilien, and a daughter Margaret. Of these Maximilien was adopted by two maiden aunts, who sent him to the College at Arras, and defrayed the expenses of his education. The religious circle in which his aunts lived brought the boy in contact with the wealthy and influential clergy of the town; a canon of the Cathedral of Arras took him under his immediate protection, and obtained for him, when twelve years of age, a bourse or scholarship at the College of Louis le Grand, Paris. Robespierre, during his six years’ stay at this College, was studious, obedient, and intelligent, and took a first prize in the class of rhetoric. Among his schoolfellows were Camille, Desmoulins, and Fréron. On leaving college, Robespierre, who was very poor, studied law. A letter addressed by him to the Abbé Proyart, is still extant, in which he begs for a little help towards purchasing a decent suit of clothes in which to present himself before the Bishop of Arras, one of his protectors then in Paris. At this time (1778) Robespierre was twenty years of age. After completing his legal studies, he returned to his native town and exercised his profession as lawyer. His reputation had preceded him, and he soon obtained many clients, unfortunately for him most of them poorer than himself. Many reports of his pleadings remain—they are (most of them) mere declamations or speeches upon political and social questions; full of tirades against the “ignorance, prejudice, and those passions which form a redoubtable league against all men of genius—in order to punish these men for the services they render to humanity.” These speeches produced a great sensation. Robespierre invariably interlarded his discourses with the most fulsome eulogies of the King. In one speech he speaks of “that beloved and sacred head, the head of the Prince who is the delight and glory of France.” He occupied his spare time in literary pursuits, and wrote a great deal of indifferent poetry. He was in 1783 elected member of the Academy of Arras. His reputation for eloquence and intellect was now such that when the States-General assembled he was immediately chosen one of the sixteen representatives for the province of Artois. He was then so poor that he was obliged to borrow ten louis and a travelling trunk in order to be able to proceed to Paris. The inventory of the contents of his trunk is preserved, viz.: “six shirts, six neckcloths, and six pocket handkerchiefs, of which the greater portion are in good order.”

ROCHEFOUCAULT, François Alexandre Frederic, Duke de la (Liancourt.) Born, 1737; died, 1827, aged eighty.

This distinguished nobleman was the son of the Duke d’Estissac and of Marie, daughter and heiress of the Duke Alexandre de la Rochefoucault, from whom he inherited his title. He joined the regiment of Carabineers when a mere lad, and married at the age of seventeen. His father was Grand Master of the King’s Garderobe, this appointment being hereditary in the family. The young Duke of Liancourt, as he was then called, did not find favour with Madame du Barry. He left Court in 1769, and paid a long visit to England. On his return he put into practice, upon his estate at Liancourt, the industrial and agricultural improvements he had observed upon his journey; amongst other undertakings he started a model farm, and brought cattle from Switzerland and Germany, to improve the breed of cows. He founded an industrial school at Liancourt for the education and instruction of the children of poor soldiers. In 1786 de la Rochefoucault accompanied Louis XVI. on a progress through Normandy, and showed the King the various industrial and agricultural establishments of that province, then in a very prosperous condition. When the States-General assembled, the Duke de Liancourt was elected Deputy by the nobility of Clermont. His position in the Assembly was that of a defender of Royalty, and also of public liberty. On July 12, 1789, the Duke de Liancourt, who, though no courtier, was one of the few sincere friends of Louis XVI., for whom he had a personal regard, appeared at Versailles and gave a true and succinct account of the agitation which was pervading the capital. “It is a revolt,” said the astonished monarch. “Sire,” replied the Duke, “it is a Revolution.” The Bastille fell two days later. On July 18 the Duke was invested with the Presidency of the Assembly. After the session of the Assembly had concluded, he returned to Liancourt, where he continued his industrial experiments, and founded in 1790 work-rooms for spinning and weaving cotton and wool under a new process. As a lieutenant-general, his rank in the army, he commanded a military division in Normandy, and, when the first excesses of the Revolution began, implored the King and Royal Family to take refuge at Rouen. Had this proposal been accepted much trouble might have been averted. Upon the King’s refusal of his offer the Duke generously put at his disposal the sum of 150,000 livres (£6000). The horrors of August 10 decided the Duke to fly from France, and pass into England. In exile he was almost without resources. An old maiden lady, in whom—although she had never seen him—he inspired a romantic interest, left him her whole fortune, some £50,000. He refused to accept any part of the legacy, and handed the money to her legal heirs. The death of Louis XVI. induced the Duke de la Rochefoucault (since the massacre of his cousin in 1793, he had assumed this title) to leave Europe and spend several years in America, devoting his time to scientific studies, and observations of the Government and character of the people of the United States, and even of the Indians in Canada. Louis XVIII. sent him in 1798 an imperious message, commanding him to join him and take up his duties as Grand Master of the royal household, an order which the Duke respectfully declined; Louis XVIII. never forgave him, and there is little doubt the neglect and quasi-disgrace with which la Rochefoucault was treated after the Restoration arose mainly from this unforgotten incident.

In 1799 Rochefoucault returned to France, and dwelt for some time ignored in Paris; he was still, however, conferring benefits upon humanity. As soon as his name was erased from the list of émigrés he started a committee for vaccination in Paris, and opened a dispensary for the purpose of making this remedy known among the people. When he was allowed to return to Liancourt, he found to his delight that notwithstanding the storms of the Revolution, every succeeding Government since his departure had respected the institutions he had created. The Emperor Napoleon bestowed upon him the legion of honour, but affected to treat him as a manufacturer, and did not offer him a peerage. The Duke lived entirely at Liancourt. In 1809 when Napoleon restored his title, and gave him the right of grand entry to the Imperial Court, la Rochefoucault did not take advantage of this favour, and remained in retirement until the Restoration. Louis XVIII. treated him with marked coldness and disfavour, and did not appoint him to any office at Court. Rochefoucault, nevertheless, was a member of the House of Peers as a Duke of France. In 1816 he was elected member of the general council of the hospitals of Paris. The Duke de la Rochefoucault inaugurated the “Society of Christian Morals” in 1821, and soon afterwards became President of the school of Arts et Métiers, founded by him at Liancourt, now transferred to Châlons, and member of the Councils of Agriculture, Hospitals and Prisons. In 1823 the reactionist Ministry, who disapproved of his political views, relieved him of all his public but strictly honourable functions, on the ground of his age (76). Not daring to deprive him of his Presidency of the Committee on vaccination, they suppressed this Committee altogether. On March 21, 1827, whilst the Duke was speaking in the Chamber of Peers, he was suddenly seized with a fit, and expired four days later.

On the day of his funeral, a number of old students of his school of Arts et Métiers came to the church, with the intention of carrying his coffin; when they attempted to do so, they were suddenly charged by a troop of mounted gens d’armes in the Rue St. Honoré, and the Duke’s coffin fell in the mud, his coronet and other symbols of the peerage being trampled under foot.

ROEDERER, Pierre Louis, Comte de.

Born 1654 at Metz; died in 1735.

His father, a lawyer at Strasbourg, compelled his son, who was an ardent disciple of Jean Jacques Rousseau, to follow the parental profession, much against his will.

Roederer began his political life in 1788, by publishing a pamphlet on the “Deputation to the States-General,” when he also became a journalist. Sent by the electors of Metz to the States-General, as a representative of the Tiers État, he took an important part in the debates, proposing the new law reforms, the institution of trial by jury, the abolition of religious orders and of titles of nobility, and demanding also liberty for the press and equality in political rights for every citizen. He showed great financial ability, compiled the new stamp and patent laws, inventing a new system of taxation. He was a member of the Jacobin Society until June 20, 1792, after which date (the day of the first invasion of the Tuileries) he seceded from the club, and from that period the extreme party were his mortal enemies. On August 10 he, together with Merlin, conducted the Royal Family to the Assembly, and protected, helped, and comforted them to the best of his power.

The following day he was denounced by the Jacobins, but not arrested, and he prudently disappeared from the Assembly, and devoted himself entirely to the sub-editorship of the Journal de Paris. An article in this paper, dated January 6, 1793, in which Roederer denied the right of the Convention to try the King, brought him into immediate danger; however, he fled from Paris, and did not reappear there until after the 9th Thermidor (July 28, 1794).

In 1795 he became editor of the Journal de Paris. He was threatened with transportation to Guienne during the Directorate, and only saved by the direct intervention of Talleyrand. He was now satisfied that a firm and stable government was the sole means of the regenerating of France, and was therefore an active agent for what he termed the “generous and patriotic conspiracy” of the 18th Brumaire. He wrote the “Address to the Parisians,” which was placarded upon the walls of Paris on that eventful morning.

Bonaparte made him Councillor of State on 25th December, 1799, and in 1802 he was named Director of L’Esprit Public, a position which gave him control of all the theatres and of public instruction. In 1806 he was sent to Naples, of which Joseph Bonaparte had just been created King, and by Napoleon’s orders undertook the duty of Neapolitan Finance Minister, which post he continued to hold under Murat. In 1810 he was appointed administrator to the Grand Duchy of Berg. When the Bourbons returned, he quitted political life and retired to his country seat, the Château of Bois Roussel, devoting himself until 1830 to literary pursuits.

After the accession of Louis Philippe he was again summoned to the Chamber of Peers, and, notwithstanding his advanced age, took a considerable part in debate, publishing a pamphlet, Lettre aux Constitutionnels, which caused a violent excitement all over Paris. In it he attacked the doctrine that “The King reigns, but does not govern.”

Roederer died from an accident at the age of eighty-one, when still in the enjoyment of good health and spirits.

DE SADE, Marquis Alphonse François.

Born in Paris 1740; died in the madhouse at Charenton, 1814.

De Sade, a man of noble family and high position, being Lieutenant-General of Bresse and Valroney, appears at the age of twenty-six to have been seized with a form of insanity which only showed itself in the use of obscene language, writings, and deeds.

He was arrested at Marseilles in 1772 for a terrible offence against public morality, and from that time, under a lettre de cachet, was imprisoned in various fortresses, amongst others Vincennes and the Bastille. During this imprisonment he wrote those notoriously obscene books which have rendered his name infamously famous. He was liberated in 1790 by the decree which released all prisoners imprisoned under lettres de cachet.

His wife obtained a separation from him, and for the next ten years he continued to publish books and plays of the most appalling immorality. When Bonaparte returned from Egypt, De Sade sent him copies of his two novels, “Juliette” and “Justine,” illustrated by himself, and with a dedication to the First Consul. Napoleon, filled with disgust, had the books burned, and De Sade arrested as a dangerous lunatic, and incarcerated in the madhouse at Charenton, where he died fourteen years later.

Those who visited him there describe him as a venerable looking old man, with beautiful features and abundant snow-white hair, exquisite manners and an amiable expression; but as soon as he opened his mouth, every word he spoke was either indecent or profane.

SANTERRE, Antoine Joseph, General.

Born, 1752, in Paris; died in 1809.

Son of a Flemish brewer who had established himself in the Faubourg St. Antoine, he continued to follow his father’s trade. He was rich, and had an excellent reputation among the working classes for the generosity and kindness he showed his employées. Santerre was one of those electors of Paris who met on July 14, 1789, at the Hôtel de Ville; he commanded the National Guard of his district, and for the next three years the brewery and beerhouse of Santerre were a rendezvous for all the agitators of the Faubourg, indeed it was here that the attack upon the Tuileries of June 20, 1792, was agreed upon.

Upon that day Santerre marched at the head of the crowd which invaded the National Assembly, and standing at the foot of the tribune he directed the march of the people through the Chamber. After thanking the Deputies for the marks of friendship they had shown to the inhabitants of the Faubourg St. Antoine, he presented them with a flag, and then went out to join his men upon the Place Carousel, from whence he led them to the Tuileries. He also took a prominent part in the second attack upon August 10, and the Commune afterwards created him commander-in-chief of the National Guard of Paris, a command originally held by the Marquis of Lafayette (!) in which capacity he conducted Louis XVI. and his family to the Temple. On January 21, 1793, he was in command of the troops who surrounded the scaffold, and it was at his signal that the drums were beaten to drown the dying speech of King Louis.

In April of the same year, Santerre obtained a release from the debt of 40,500 francs which he owed to the State for taxes he should have paid upon malt and beer, the reason for the remission of this debt being “that the beer in question had all been consumed by patriots.”

Santerre, who was raised to the rank of a general of division, in July 1793, expressed a desire to show his prowess in the field, and asking for employment in the army, was sent to fight the Royalists in La Vendée. He met with nothing but disaster, owing to his complete ignorance of military tactics, and after being defeated at Corow on September 3, was recalled to Paris. Shortly afterwards he was arrested, and remained in prison until the death of Robespierre.

In July 1794, he was deprived of his rank as general and returned to private life; but his business had perished, and he was entirely ruined. He addressed petitions to various authorities, and finally, in January 1800, appealed to the First Consul for employment in the army or “any post by which I can live.”

Bonaparte did not employ him, but he placed his name on the list of retired generals, by which means Santerre enjoyed a pension for the rest of his life. Santerre has been quoted as a monster of ferocity, no doubt owing to the part he played on January 21, 1793: but he was in reality neither brutal nor cruel, and constantly sought to calm the ardour of his partisans, and saved the lives of persons whose opinions were opposed to his own. He was, however, a man without either capacity or originality, whom the irony of fate placed for a short time in a prominent and powerful situation.

SIEYÈS, Emmanuel Joseph, Comte de.

Born, 1748 at Fréjus; died in Paris, 1836.

Being the youngest of seven children his father insisted upon his embarking in an ecclesiastical career. Sieyès remained for ten years at the seminary of Saint Sulpice in Paris, until he had, at the age of twenty-four, received priest’s orders. While at college he devoted himself to the study of metaphysics, Locke being his favourite author.

He was made Canon of Trégnier in Brittany in 1775, and in 1780 transferred to a Canonry at Chârtres, united to the posts of Vicar-General and Chancellor.

The revolutionary period approached, and Provincial Assemblies were called together, Sieyès being a member of the Assembly at Orleans in 1787. He published a succession of pamphlets in the course of the next two years, which added greatly to his literary and political reputation.

The electors of Paris sent him as the twentieth member for their town to the States-General, where he represented the Tiers d’État and not the clergy. He took a prominent part as soon as he entered this assembly; it was he who promoted the meeting of the Orders, framed the oath administered in the Tennis Court; and the division of France into Departments was entirely his work. His influence in the Assembly was so great that Mirabeau gave him the nickname of “Mahomet.” In February 1791 he was offered the Constitutional Bishopric of Paris, which he refused. He was elected member of the Convention in 1792, and appointed to the leadership of the Committee D’Instruction Publique. Sieyès was too prudent and, possibly, too humane to take any prominent part in that noisy and ill-regulated assembly; but at the trial of Louis XVI. he voted for death, without adding a single word beyond recording his vote; indeed, with the exception of the occasion when he publicly abjured his religious faith and declared he had ceased to be a priest, Sieyès never made a speech in the Convention, though he recorded his vote in favour of every revolutionary measure.

He was asked, in later life, what he had done during the Terror. He replied significantly, “I lived.”

In 1795 he went to Holland, and while in that country was offered a place in the Directorate, which he refused, but the coup d’état of Vendemaire brought him out of his retreat, and he was named President of the Five Hundred (November 25, 1797).

The following year he went as Ambassador to Berlin, and on May 16, 1799, he returned to Paris and replaced Rewbell in the Directorate. On June 19 he undertook the Presidency of the disorganised Government, his object being to make an end of Republicanism, and he joined forces with Bonaparte.

During the Revolution of 18th Brumaire, Sieyès showed great ability and coolness, and Napoleon appointed him one of the three provisionary Consuls. He was soon succeeded by le Brun, after which his active political life may be said to have concluded, for Bonaparte, supported by the army, easily effaced his rival. The constitution planned by Sieyès was not even discussed, and Napoleon entirely destroyed his public influence by creating him a Senator, and bestowing upon him as a national gift the fine estate and château of Crosne.

In later years Sieyès was given the Presidency of the Senate, the grand cross of the legion of honour, and created a Count. After the second restoration the law of 1816 exiled him as a regicide, and he retired to Brussels until 1830, dying at Paris six years later, aged eighty-eight.

SICARD, Roch Ambroise, Abbé.

Born, 1742; died, 1822. Ordained priest at Toulouse and joined the Congregation de la Doctrine Chrétienne.

In 1784, the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who intended to open an asylum and school for the deaf and dumb in his cathedral town, sent the Abbé Sicard to Paris, that he might study the method of instructing deaf mutes invented by the Abbé l’Epée. He returned to Bordeaux two years later, and the school was immediately opened, the Abbé Sicard proving extraordinarily successful, many of his pupils making rapid and even astonishing progress. The Abbé l’Epée died in 1789, and Sicard was appointed to succeed him in Paris.

Sicard adopted the principles of the Revolution, and although he did not take the civil or constitutional clerical oath, he took that of fidelity to liberty, equality and fraternity. On August 26, 1792, he was arrested as a suspect; his pupils addressed a touching petition to the Assembly in favour of their master, but it was disregarded, and on September 2 he was conveyed with other priests to the Abbaye. Nearly all of his companions were slaughtered as soon as they reached the prison, but Sicard’s life was saved by a watchmaker, Mounet. Sicard remained for some time in prison expecting immediate death, but was eventually liberated and returned to his Institution.

When the “Institute” was created in 1795, he was one of its first members, but writing some offensive articles in a publication entitled Les Annales Réligieuses, he was arrested and condemned to transportation; he escaped this fate, but was not replaced in his functions at the deaf and dumb asylum until after the 18th Brumaire, 1799. He found an ardent protector in Choptal, the Minister of the Interior, who caused a printing press to be erected, at the Abbé’s request, at the Institution.

For some unknown reason Napoleon always detested the Abbé Sicard, and refused to ratify his appointment as Canon at Nôtre Dame; nor would he give him the legion of honour; but he was more fortunate under the Restoration, when he received the coveted decoration, a canonry, and other honourable and well-paid appointments.

Abbé Sicard wrote a number of books on the deaf and dumb, and even some for their use.

SAINT FARGEON, Louis Michel le Pelletier, De.

Born, 1760; assassinated, 1793.

He was the great grandson of the celebrated Comte de Saint Fargeon, Minister of Finance from 1726 to 1730; at the outbreak of the Revolution he possessed an annual income of 600,000 francs (£24,000). He was chosen as one of the ten Deputies to represent the nobility of Paris in the States-General; of these only two, the Count de Mirepoix and himself, joined the Tiers État, and from that time they became the most democratic among the Deputies. Saint Fargeon said, “If one has 600,000 francs a year one must either be at Coblentz or join the Jacobins.”

In January 1790, as Member for Criminal Jurisprudence, he first proposed the abolition of the death penalty, the galleys, and branding or flogging, and in June the same year he succeeded in passing a decree replacing hanging by decapitation. In the same month he proposed a motion, which was adopted, abolishing all titles, and took the name of le Pelletier instead of Fargeon.

At the trial of Louis XVI. he declared his intention of voting against the death penalty; but when the time came he pronounced in favour of immediate execution, saying:

If we decide the fate of Louis Capet in a way which is contrary to the conscience and intimate feelings of the French people, would it be against the prisoner in the Temple that the people would have a right to execute their vengeance? No, for in his case treason is unarmed and vanquished. It would be against her unfaithful representatives that the nation would have a right to rise, because in such a case they would find treason and power united.

This speech persuaded a number of Deputies who were wavering to vote for the death penalty, and thus decided a majority in its favour.

A former soldier of the King’s body guard swore to revenge the death of Louis XVI. upon one of his judges. Le Pelletier, de Saint Fargeon, like the Duke of Orleans and many other persons of high rank, voted the death penalty in order to save his own life and fortune, and for this very reason he excited the bitterest hatred among the Royalists. On the evening of the King’s trial he went to dine at Feorier’s, the restaurant in the Palais Royale, and was pointed out to the soldier in question as he was sitting at table. The young man, wrapped in a cloak under which he concealed a sword, came forward and said; “Is it thou, infamous le Pelletier, who has just voted for the death of thy King?” Le Pelletier answered: “Yes, but I am not infamous, I voted according ‘to my conscience.’” The soldier, whose name was Paris, replied: “Here is thy recompense,” and drawing the sword, thrust Saint Fargeon through the body; he fell mortally wounded and was carried to his hôtel, where he expired. The Convention buried him in the Pantheon, and his daughter, aged eight, was formally adopted by the Republic.

The soldier Paris escaped at the time, but when about to be arrested a few days later, he blew out his brains.

SHEARES, John.

Born, 1766; executed, 1798.

This young Irish patriot, who is described by Yorke as having been the fervent admirer of and even suitor for the hand of Théroigne de Mirecourt, was the fourth son of Henry Sheares, of Whiterock (who was a connection of the then Earl of Shannon). This gentleman was a member of the Irish Parliament from 1761 to 1767, and was eventually appointed to a well-paid Governmental sinecure office. When his father died, John Sheares, a student in Trinity College, Dublin, inherited £3000. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1790.

In 1792 he and his brother Henry visited France and he became a convert to the views of the most revolutionary party in that country. He was a member of the Convention, voted for the death of Louis XVI., and was present at his execution. He was obliged to fly from France, as his views were considered too moderate by the leaders of the Jacobin Club. He returned to Dublin and there led a retired and literary life, following at the same time his profession as a barrister, when unfortunately for himself he began to take a leading part in Irish politics.

When the “Press,” an anti-Governmental organ, was started by Arthur O’Connor in 1797, Sheares wrote several leading articles for it; and one of these, a violent attack upon Lord Clare, caused the total suppression of that newspaper in March 1798.

The hostility of Lord Clare having stopped him in the practice of his profession, Sheares and his brother Henry decided to emigrate to America. But they not only did not do so but joined in a plot to disaffect the militia in King’s County against the Government. A certain Captain Armstrong of that regiment made their acquaintance, and after having gained their confidence, informed against them, and they were both arrested May 21, 1798, and confined in Kilmainham Gaol. They were tried for high treason six weeks later. John Sheares, knowing that his own fate was sealed, only desired and hoped to save his brother Henry, his senior by thirteen years, a married man with six children, and whom he declared had acted entirely under his (John Sheares’) guidance.

The only witness against the brothers was Armstrong. The trial lasted for sixteen consecutive hours—an adjournment was moved for by the prisoner’s counsel, as every one connected with the affair was sinking from exhaustion, but the motion was opposed by the Attorney-General—and at eight o’clock in the morning, after a summing up lasting only a few minutes, a hurried verdict of guilty against the prisoners was returned by the wearied and worn out jury. Henry Sheares fainted in court upon hearing the sentence of death pronounced. After their condemnation no friends or relatives were allowed an interview with the brothers, who were hanged the following morning before the prison gates. After remaining for some time on the gallows their heads were struck off; but their bodies were not quartered (July 14, 1798).

ST. JUST, Louis Antoine de Saint Just.

Born August 25, 1767; guillotined, July 28 (10th Thermidor), 1794, in Paris.

His father, a retired army captain, died in 1777, and St. Just was placed in the Oratorian school of Soissons, where he remained for seven years. On leaving school he studied law for a short time at Rheims, but finally decided to embrace a literary career. Having written a volume of poems, he proceeded to Paris, to arrange about their publication, towards the close of the year 1789, and he there became an enthusiastic revolutionary, giving up literature for politics. His youthful ardour and natural eloquence were assisted by an extraordinary beauty of form and feature, grave and serious manners, and a haughty and resolute demeanour. His private life was that of an ascetic until the termination of his short but chequered career.

The inhabitants of his native town, Decize (Minervais) elected him lieutenant-colonel of their newly formed National Guard, and he conducted a detachment of that regiment to Paris in 1790 to join in the Feast of Federation. His youth prevented his election to the Legislative Assembly until September 1792, when he attained the age of twenty-five.

From that time he took a most active part in the Government, and became the intimate (perhaps the only intimate) friend of Robespierre.

On November 12, when the question of the King’s trial came before the Convention, St. Just’s diatribe was by far the most violent of the many violent and fanatical speeches made on that occasion. On December 16 he proposed the exile of all the Bourbons. At the trial of Louis XVI. he voted for the immediate execution of the King.

In the meantime the Republic was attacked on all sides, from both without and within, for, of the eighty-four Departments, sixty-five were known to be secretly hostile to the Revolution, and to desire the restoration of the ancien régime. On April 24, 1793, St. Just presented to the Convention the following scheme:

The Republic, one and indivisible, was to be represented by a Legislative Assembly, elected every two years by universal suffrage and by a Council elected every three years by the electors of the second degree. This Council, composed of a member for each Department, could only act by the authority of the Assembly, and the Ministers whom it was to appoint were to have no personal or individual power. Any conflict between the Council and the Assembly should be settled by an appeal to the people.

This impossible and impracticable project gives an excellent example of the exaggerated humanitarianism which at that time pervaded the opinions of the young legislator. The Girondins were, in the opinion of St. Just, a danger to the Republic. Their dreams of a federation by which France would be governed in the same way as the United States, and Paris cease to be the head and centre of government, filled him with apprehension. When the Girondins fell St. Just took an important part in their impeachment; his report on the matter was received with applause, and in July he became one of the leading members of the Committee of Public Safety.

From this moment a coalition was formed between Robespierre, Couthon, Le Bas, and St. Just, which continued until they all perished twelve months later. They banded themselves together with a settled purpose, and pitilessly destroyed any and every individual who opposed their views. St. Just was the principal instrument of Robespierre; he read, on October 10, the report upon the organisation of a revolutionary government until a general peace should be declared. “In the present circumstances,” he said, “no Constitution can be established; for it would be an attack upon liberty; with a Constitution the Government could not use sufficient violence against the enemies of the Republic.” He then proposed a decree, which was unanimously adopted by which the Ministers, the Generals, the Admirals, the Executive Council, and all constitutional bodies were to be placed under the immediate supervision of the Committee of Public Safety.

On October 16, the very day of the execution of the Queen, St. Just presented a report by which all foreigners residing in Paris, and particularly the English, were to be arrested. He referred to the death of Marie Antoinette in these words: “Your Committee has punished Austria by bringing a scaffold and the infamy of a public execution into the reigning family of that country.”

A few days later St. Just was despatched to Alsace as a superintendent of military operations; le Bas accompanied him. Arrived at Strasburg, they immediately established a commission to punish summarily “crimes, disorders, and abuses.” No legal forms were observed: a colonel accused of having spoken against the Republic was shot upon the spot; an officer accused of striking one of his men was degraded to the ranks; General Eisenberg, who had been defeated by the Austrians, was executed without a trial. The soldiers were in want of boots. St. Just wrote to the Strasburg municipality: “Ten thousand men in the army are bare-footed; strip the boots and shoes from the feet of the aristocrats of Strasburg. To-morrow, before 10 o’clock, 10,000 pairs of boots must be on their way to the military headquarters.” An immense number of persons were arrested and imprisoned, and innumerable executions took place. The commissioners left Strasburg and joined the army beyond the Rhine, where the generals were treated in the same high-handed manner. On the 12th Frimaire (November 9) St. Just wrote to General Hoche: “Thou hast taken at Kaiserslautern (where he had won a great battle) a further engagement; for instead of one victory, we require TWO.”

After remaining two months with the army St. Just returned to Paris in January 1794. He only remained a couple of weeks in the metropolis, departing for Flanders to supervise the conduct of those military chiefs who commanded in the north. In a few days he had inspected the various posts on the frontier, and, after carrying out his usual policy, he gave the supreme command to Pichegru, and returned to Paris. On February 19 St. Just was elected President of the Convention.

In March the fall of Hébert was followed by that of Danton. The impeachment of the latter was carried out by St. Just, his speech being composed from notes made by Robespierre. He accused Danton of having served the “Tyrant,” of being the protégé of Mirabeau, the friend of Lameth, the accomplice of Dumouriez, and of having defended the Girondins.

Danton’s execution, and those of his immediate allies, delivered Robespierre and St. Just from the enemies they feared, and they flattered themselves they could now carry out their plans without interruption.

On April 29 St. Just returned to the army, Robespierre remaining the head and centre of all government in Paris. This was the most sanguinary period of the Terror.

St. Just remained with the army in Flanders until June 27, when, Charleroi having fallen and the army of the Republic being everywhere victorious in Belgium, he returned in triumph to Paris. The conspiracy which was to break out on July 27 (9th Thermidor) was already in process of formation, but St. Just suspected nothing, and continued to attend the meetings of the Committee of Public Safety and to make many violent speeches. He attacked Fouché, Tallien, and other members without mercy, and on the very morning of 9th Thermidor was speaking in the Tribune, when he was interrupted by Tallien, and the well-known violent scenes which resulted in the arrest of Robespierre and his immediate friends took place.

St. Just, unlike Couthon, le Bas, and Robespierre, did not attempt suicide; he followed the mutilated bodies of his friends on foot, with his hands bound behind him, from the Hôtel de Ville to the Conciergerie. The next day he mounted the scaffold and died silently and courageously. He was not quite twenty-seven years of age.

TALLEYRAND, Perigard, Prince de Benevento, Charles Maurice de.

Born, 1754; died, 1838.

To give a description of the life and work of this statesman would far exceed the limits of this biographical supplement; but the following few facts may interest the reader.

The eldest son of the Comte de Talleyrand, as he was lame and slightly deformed he could not enter the army, he was therefore compelled by his parents to take holy orders; he had no vocation whatever for the priesthood. He received valuable ecclesiastical preferment, and in 1778 was ordained Bishop of Autun. He joined the revolutionary party, and was a member of the National Assembly.

On July 14, 1790, it was he who celebrated the Mass of the Federation in the Champs de Mars, and in December of the same year he took the constitutional oath. He ordained several of the constitutional bishops, and was in consequence excommunicated by the Holy See, who declared all constitutional priests and bishops schismatics.

He was sent to England in February 1792 as an envoy by the French Government, with the idea of reconciling the British Sovereign and his Ministers to the revolutionary changes being then carried out in France. He did not, however, inspire any confidence in either George III. or Pitt, with whom he had several interviews. He returned privately to London in December 1792, and three months later was accused of conspiring against the Republic. He continued to remain in England until the death of Louis XVI., when, finding his position intolerable, owing to the indignation the death of the King excited against all supposed revolutionaries, he departed to America, where he remained until his sentence of banishment from France was revoked in 1795. He did not arrive in France till the following year; he was accompanied by the then notorious Mdme. Grand, with whom he cohabited for a considerable time before he married her. She was the divorced wife of a merchant at Calcutta, and had created a considerable scandal in India owing to her intrigue with Sir Philip Francis, the enemy of Warren Hastings, and reputed author of the Junius Letters. Talleyrand reached Paris, March 1796.

In 1797, by the influence of Barras, and notwithstanding the opposition of Carnot (who was probably the only sincere and disinterested member of the Directorate), Talleyrand was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. He took a considerable part in the coup d’état of 18th Fructidor (September 4, 1797), by which the Directorate re-established, in the name of liberty, most of the tyrannical excesses of the Convention. He had already discovered the extraordinary genius of Bonaparte, and from that time until the fall of the Empire was more or less attached to the fortunes of the then youthful hero.

It was Talleyrand who drew up the treaty of Campo-Formio (October 17, 1794), which Talleyrand and Bonaparte concluded in direct opposition to the desires of the Directorate. Talleyrand first suggested to Bonaparte the idea of an expedition to Egypt, in lieu of that invasion of England which was then the favourite scheme of the French Government.

Bonaparte endeavoured to persuade Talleyrand to accompany him to Egypt; but this he refused, and remained in Paris during the Egyptian and Syrian campaigns, carrying out unchecked his ingenious and tortuous foreign policy. He it was who brought about the occupation of the Papal States by the French, and the imprisonment and capture of the Pope (see Pius VI.), and he also caused the destruction of the Swiss Republic, on the ground that its government was not sufficiently democratic. By diplomatic ruses and threatened violence he extorted an act of abdication from Charles Emmanuel, King of Sardinia, December 9, 1798.

During this time Talleyrand was obtaining in various ways large sums of money for his own private use, more particularly from the Kings of Spain and Portugal, who by lavish bribes to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs hoped to prevent the invasion of their kingdoms.

These circumstances, coupled with the fact that the French army met with defeat after defeat, and, since the departure of Bonaparte, lost all hold over Northern Italy, brought about a violent movement against Talleyrand, who resigned his office as Minister of Foreign Affairs in July 1799.

The return of Napoleon changed the situation, and on November 22 Talleyrand once more occupied his old post, which he held until 1807, when, a month after the treaty of Tilsit, he gave up the seals of this office to Champagny, Duke de Cadore. He was promoted to the dignity of a Prince Electeur of the Empire; he had been created Prince of Benevento, with a fief granted from the Papal States in the previous year.

He continued to hold the key of office as Lord High Chamberlain until 1809, but his intimate relations with the Emperor ceased from the time he abandoned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His astute nature had already foreseen the inevitable fall of the Empire, and he secretly used every effort to hasten this catastrophe. He continued to act, nevertheless, as Napoleon’s emissary with foreign Powers; gave up his château at Valençay as a State prison for the Spanish Princes; was present at the interview between Napoleon and Alexander at Erfurt, and in an audience with the Russian Emperor, explained to that sovereign Napoleon’s project for a divorce, and asked him, in his master’s name, for the hand of the Grand Duchess Catherine Paulovna, sister to the Czar.

In 1813, when the troubles of the Empire had reached their zenith, Talleyrand was summoned to St. Cloud, and offered the portfolio of Foreign Affairs. He consented to take it on condition peace should immediately be concluded. His advice was not accepted.

During the winter of 1814 he was in secret communication with the Bourbons; had much to do with the conclusion of peace in the April of that year, and entered as Foreign Minister into the first Cabinet of Louis XVIII. May 12, 1814, he represented France at the Council of Vienna.

On the return of Napoleon, Talleyrand during “the Hundred Days” absolutely refused to listen to any offer from the Emperor. After the Second Restoration he took up his old office in the Cabinet, but his opposition to the return of the artistic treasures with which the Republic and the Empire had enriched the Museums of Paris, and his efforts to prevent any cession of French territory, diminished his credit with the Czar and the English commander-in-chief, who were at that time the rulers of France. By their influence he was compelled to leave the Cabinet, Louis XVIII. creating him the same day Lord Chamberlain with a salary of 100,000 francs (£4000).

During the whole of the Restoration, Talleyrand was excluded from taking any leading part in public affairs.

After the Revolution of 1830, to which he had contributed not a little, Talleyrand, who had had for a considerable period a private understanding with Louis Philippe, became his principal political auxiliary.

In September 1830, Prince Talleyrand was sent as Ambassador from the King of the French to the Court of St. James’. He remained in London in that capacity for four years, and notwithstanding his great age showed himself an astute and admirable diplomatist. He received a warm welcome in all the higher circles of English society.

In November 1834 he retired from political life; but his mind was still fresh and vigorous, and his life during the next four years was occupied by social amenities and intellectual pursuits. On March 3, 1838, having entered his eighty-fifth year, he gave an address to the Academy of Science upon the death of the Comte Reinhard, a celebrated diplomatist.

A few weeks later he was suddenly attacked by a painful internal malady, and died on May 17, aged eighty-four years and three months. Before his death he received the Sacraments, signing a letter in which he regretted his abjurations and sins against religion; this letter was despatched to Pope Gregory XVI.

TALLIEN, Jean Lambart.

Born in 1769; died in 1820.

The son of the house steward of the Marquis de Bercy. He received, through the kindness of this nobleman, a good education, and became a notary’s clerk.

At the outbreak of the Revolution he gave up this employment for journalism, publishing for five months under the title of L’Ami des Citoyens, a newspaper which was a worthy companion to the Ami du Peuple of Marat. His newspaper was financed by the Jacobin Club.

He took a prominent part in the events of August 10, and in the massacres in the prisons on September 2. Elected member of the Convention, he defended Marat and denounced General Montesquieu and Roland (then Minister). His speeches against Louis XVI. and the Royal family were so violent and so frequent as actually to evoke a vote of censure from the Convention. At the King’s trial he voted, “For instant death in the interests of humanity.”

It was upon his proposal five months later that the Girondins were put hors de la loi; and in September 1793, Tallien departed with Ysabeau for Bordeaux, “to utterly extirpate any remains of that hydra Girondism.”

Here he instituted a reign of terror. He added tortures to executions, and, under the name of “requisitions,” made, as he said, war upon the commercial aristocracy, by plundering all the wealthy merchants of the town. To the mean cruelties of the worst form of Roman pro-consul he added in his private life the luxury and pomp of a Persian satrap.

He met Mdme. Fontenay and fell desperately in love with her. He saved her from prison and brought her back with him to Paris. He was in consequence ill received by the Committee of Public Safety, who immediately imprisoned the woman he loved, on the accusation of being an aristocrat.

To avert suspicion, Tallien affected an even more vehement and sanguinary patriotism than he had previously shown, and on March 22, 1794, was elected President of the Convention. Robespierre denounced him to the Convention on June 12. He also erased the name of Tallien from the Jacobin Society; this was tantamount to a sentence of death.

Tallien determined to strike first, and to save not only his own life, but that of his mistress; he therefore joined those who feared and hated the triumvirate of Robespierre, St. Just, and le Bas, and who wished to avenge Danton and save their own lives. Tallien became the leader of the party who six weeks later overthrew Robespierre.

After this he occupied for a short time the place that the death of Maximilien Robespierre had left unoccupied. He married the woman he loved, closed the Club of the Jacobins, and put upon their trial le Bon, Fouquier-Tinville and other agents of terrorism. He retained predominant power in the State until July 1795, when he visited the army on the western frontier on a mission to General Hoche. Here he was once more guilty of summary executions and caused much unnecessary bloodshed.

The advent of the Directorate in October of the same year practically finished his active political career. He was accused of venality and treason, and though he became a member of the Five Hundred, his speeches were received with indifference or insult.

In May 1798 he left that assembly, and here his public life may be said to have terminated.

He accompanied the expedition of Bonaparte to Egypt in the capacity of a savant! Bonaparte and he were friends at the time owing to the intimacy of their wives, and he had acted as witness when the general married Madame Beauharnais.

In Egypt Tallien was appointed Administrator of the Interior, and he wrote a work called “Décade Egyptienne.” On his return to Europe a year after the departure of Napoleon, the ship upon which he sailed was taken by an English cruiser and he was carried to London. Here he was enthusiastically received by the Radical party.

After the peace of Amiens he returned to France, but did not find a warm welcome. His wife had been notoriously unfaithful to him during his absence; he divorced her immediately.

After vainly petitioning the First Consul for an appointment he received, by the influence of Talleyrand and Fouché, the unenviable situation of Consul in the unhealthy Spanish seaport of Alicante several months later. Here he remained for some years, nearly dying on one occasion of yellow fever, by which he lost the sight of an eye.

He returned to France, and ended his days living in obscurity on a small pension, and dying in 1820, at the age of fifty-one.

TALLIEN, Comtesse of Caramon, Princesse de Chimay, Theresa Cabarrus.

Born at Saragossa, in Spain, 1773; died at Chimay, in Belgium, 1835.

This beautiful woman was the daughter of the Count of Cabarrus, Spanish Minister of Finance. At the age of sixteen she married M. Devin de Fontenoy, Counsellor to the Parliament of Bordeaux. Her married life was unhappy; and when the Republic instituted divorce, she obtained one from her husband. After this she led a life of absolute freedom, joined the revolutionary party, and became a conspicuous feature in their meetings at Bordeaux. For some reason, now unknown, she was imprisoned. Tallien, on his mission to Bordeaux as Commissionary of the Republic, heard her beauty praised, visited her in her cell, fell madly in love with her, and carried her back with him to Paris; there she was arrested and again imprisoned. After her release and marriage to Tallien, she became one of the most brilliant leaders of the corrupt and immoral society of the Directorate. Her conduct, during the absence of her husband in Egypt, passed all bounds of decency, and she gave birth to two children, whom Tallien refused to acknowledge. He divorced her in 1802.

In 1805 she married M. de Caramon, who became Prince de Chimay, by whom she had a family of two sons and two daughters.

Although she had been the companion in prison of Josephine Beauharnais, and both Tallien and herself intimate friends of the Bonapartes in the early days of their married life, Napoleon would never allow his wife to receive her publicly at the Tuileries, either as Mdme. Tallien or the Princess de Chimay.

TREILHARD, Jean Baptiste, Comte de.

Born at Brives, January 3, 1742; died in Paris, 1810.

He began life as a lawyer, being a prominent notary at Limoges. The whole aristocracy and higher clergy in the town put their business affairs into his hands. In 1789 he was sent to Paris as a member of the Tiers État. His opinions were moderate at first, but soon became intensely democratic. It was he who undertook the business of reporting on Church property, and he presided over the Ecclesiastical Committee in the Assembly. He proposed and passed a decree which suppressed all religious orders, and made the property of the Church national. In 1791 he proposed that Voltaire should receive the honours of the Panthéon, adding “that Voltaire was perhaps the man amongst the dead who most deserved the honours accorded to great patriots.” During the session of 1792, Treilhard presided over the criminal tribune of the departments of Paris. He decreed that Louis XVI. was guilty of conspiracy against public liberty, and against the security of the State. At the King’s trial he voted for his death, but with a respite and appeal to the people. He was sent to Bordeaux to suppress the rising of the Girondins, but recalled under the accusation of showing too much moderation, and was replaced by Tallien.

He was Minister of Justice under the Directorate. Later he underwent much persecution, owing to the intrigues of Sieyès, who was his enemy. Napoleon appointed him President (or Judge) of the High Court of Appeal, and he held this appointment till 1808, when he became President of the Council of State until his death, two years later, at the age of sixty-eight.

TURENNE, Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de.

Born at Sedan, September 11, 1611; killed at Salzbach, July 27, 1675.

The second son of Henri, Duc de Bouillon, and Elizabeth, daughter of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, and granddaughter of Admiral Coligny. He was educated in his mother’s religion, Calvinism. At the age of fifteen (1626), he went to study military science and the art of war under his uncles, the Princes Maurice and Henry of Nassau. In 1630 he arrived in France, and Richelieu gave him the colonelcy of a regiment. For the next eight years he was incessantly engaged in active service, and distinguished himself as a commander, both on the Rhine and in Flanders. Richelieu, who had the highest opinion of his military capacity, wished to attach him to his interests, and offered him the hand of one of his nieces who had a large dowry. Turenne took advantage of the difference of religion as a pretext for refusing this alliance.

In 1639 Turenne served in Italy, and saved the army of the Prince de Carignan by the celebrated battle of the “Route de Quiers.” His courage and tenacity of purpose brought about the capture of Turin. The Duke de Bouillon, his elder brother, was implicated in the plot of Cinq Mars and arrested. Turenne used his influence over the Cardinal to obtain his brother’s release. The Duke left France, abjured Calvinism, and became commander-in-chief of the Papal army. At the commencement of the Regency of Anne of Austria, Turenne was commanding the French army in Italy; but Richelieu, fearing that he and his elder brother might become allies against him, despatched Turenne to Germany, with orders to collect and reform the dispersed and broken mercenary Westphalian troops, then in the pay of France. In this he was successful. From 1644 to 1648 he continued the German campaign, until the conclusion of the Treaty of Westphalia (October 24, 1648), which terminated the Thirty Years War. At this time the troubles of the Fronde, which had been long simmering, blazed out. The Duke de Bouillon, Turenne’s brother, was one of the principal leaders of the movement. The Queen, Condé, and the Cardinal used every effort to prevent Turenne following his brother’s example. Mazarin offered him one of his nieces in marriage and the Governorship of Alsace. Turenne brought his troops back to France, and then attempted to lead them against the Minister; but the men, having been bribed by Cardinal Mazarin, refused to obey their general, who was compelled to take refuge in Holland. A month later he returned to Paris. When the Princes were arrested (January 18, 1650), Mazarin again offered him his protection, and the command of the army in Flanders. By this time the seductive graces of the Duchess de Longueville had completely captivated Turenne, and he left Paris for Stenay, a fortified town near Sedan, in the principality of the Duke de Bouillon. Here he was joined by the Duchess. Under her influence he signed a treaty with the Spaniards, by which he agreed to fight with them against France until the imprisoned Princes should be released. He joined the Archduke Leopold, marched through Picardy, took several towns, and pushed on until he and his army were within a few hours of Vincennes, where the Princes had been confined; but hearing they had been transferred to the Castle of Marcoussis, near Rambouillet, he recrossed the River Aisne and directed his march in that direction; he encountered the whole Royal army, 19,000 strong, and though enormously outnumbered, was forced to fight in a valley near Sompuis. He was totally defeated. He then retired from the civil war, and returned to the Archduke the 100,000 crowns which the latter had given him to continue the campaign. The Princes were shortly afterwards released, Mazarin exiled, and the Duc de Bouillon’s just claims, which he had been making unavailingly for eight years, fully satisfied. Turenne then returned to France, and married, in 1651, Charlotte de Caumont, daughter of the Maréchal Armand de la Force. The bridegroom was forty and the bride thirty, but their attachment had lasted many years, and it was for her sake Turenne had already refused many brilliant alliances.

Turenne was greatly opposed to the second rebellion of Condé, who up to that time had been his intimate friend. He conducted the campaign against the army of the Fronde during the critical year of 1652, defeated the rebellious Princes, and was able to bring back the King to Paris on October 21. Condé and his allies, the Spaniards, were eventually absolutely vanquished and driven from France, but the war lasted for nearly seven years, and it was not until November 1659, that a peace, glorious for France, was concluded by the Treaty of the Pyrenees.

From this time forth Turenne was one of those few men in whom Louis XIV. had absolute confidence, and he consulted him on all matters of foreign policy. Turenne took a very considerable part in the restoration of Charles II. In 1667 a fresh war with Spain was imminent, the King of France informed Turenne that it was his intention to march at the head of the army, and learn from his commander-in-chief the art of war.

At this time Turenne abjured Calvinism and joined the Catholic Church. There is every reason to believe his change of religion was sincere and not dictated by political motives. He had for two years been anxious to become a Catholic, and made a serious study of religious questions under the guidance of Bossuet; and in 1668 he was privately re-baptised by the Archbishop of Paris.

Turenne in 1672 took supreme command on the occasion of the war with Holland; the King acting as a figure-head. The campaign was long, arduous and only partially successful.

The year 1674 was the apogee of the military career of Turenne. At a moment when several armies were gathered together ready to invade France, he determined, notwithstanding the inferiority of his forces, to divide his enemies and attack them separately. He marched down the left bank of the Rhine, and, meeting the Imperialists, defeated them at Sinzheim upon June 16. He then passed the river, and defeated another body of the enemy’s troops at Ladenburg. The allies, having reorganised their army, invaded Alsace and established there their winter quarters. Turenne brought his troops by the Vosges mountains, entered Alsace, and attacking the Imperialists (who were taken entirely by surprise, not expecting an army would venture to move in the winter), defeated them first at Mulhouse (December 29) and at Turckheim on January 5. Alsace was thus entirely reconquered. Turenne made a triumphant return to Versailles, where Louis XIV. publicly embraced him.

In the following year, 1675, Turenne found himself the adversary of Montecuccoli, the greatest living tactician in Europe. For six weeks the two generals manœuvred and out-manœuvred each other in their respective efforts to cross the Rhine. At length Turenne found a favourable opportunity. The two armies were face to face near the village of Salzbach (July 27), and Turenne was riding round the advance posts, when his lieutenant-general, St. Hilaric, rode up to inform him a column of the enemy was approaching. At this moment a shell struck the party, St. Hilaric lost his left arm, and Turenne was wounded in the side. The marshal never spoke again, but fell dead from his horse.

His death caused universal mourning all over France. General Montecuccoli, on hearing of the death of his rival, said: “A man has died to-day who was an honour to humanity.” Turenne is buried under the same dome as Napoleon—at the Invalides.

VAUBAN, Sebastian le Prestre, Seigneur de.

Military engineer and Marshal of France. Born, May 1, 1633; died, March 30, 1707. His father, the cadet of an ancient family, was styled by himself “the poorest gentleman in France.”

Young Vauban, left a penniless orphan at the age of ten, was adopted and educated by the village priest. At seventeen he enlisted in Condé’s rebel army, being taken prisoner a year later, and brought before Mazarin, who, discovering his natural genius, gave him a commission of lieutenant and put him under the orders of the Chevalier de Clermont, the greatest military engineer of the day.

In 1655 Vauban obtained the brevet of engineer. His reputation grew rapidly. Acting under the orders of Turenne he was of the greatest service at the sieges of Stenay, Clermont, Landrecies, Condé, Valenciennes, and Montmedz, and this notwithstanding the fact that he was several times severely wounded.

In 1658 he directed on his own responsibility the sieges and attacks upon Mardyk, Gravelines, Oudenarde and Ypres. After the Peace of the Pyrenees he employed the succeeding next years of profound peace in constructing new fortresses and modernising old ones. When, in 1667, war broke out again he at once reassumed his old post. In the presence of Louis XIV. he conducted the sieges of Tournai and Douai, and took Lille after only eighteen days’ investiture.

The following year he captured Dôle, and was then desired by Loubois, who was his principal protector, to construct new fortifications at all the recently conquered Flemish towns. He carried out these orders so completely that when the Dutch war occurred five years later the northern frontier of France was defended by a chain of almost impregnable forts. The siege of Maestricht, which fell after an attack lasting only thirteen days, raised his credit to an enormous height.

In 1674 he was created Brigadier of the Royal army, and in 1675 Maréchal de camp. Two years later he succeeded the Chevalier M. Clermont as Commissary-General of the fortifications of France. During the next ten years he surrounded France from north to south with admirably planned and almost impregnable fortresses. He also constructed the aqueduct of Maintenon and the canal of Riquet. Another war taking place in 1688, Vauban conducted the sieges of Phillipsburg, and, after saving Dunkirk and other French towns from the enemy, conquered Mons and Namur in the King’s presence. In 1697 the Peace of Ryswick put an end to his military career, during which he had built or repaired 333 fortresses, conducted 53 sieges, and been present at 140 battles and skirmishes.

After the Peace of Ryswick, Vauban devoted the remaining ten years of his life to the study of political economy; and the result of his labours was the composition of a book, famous in its day and still remembered by economists, called Dîme Royale. This book described the system of political economy Vauban wished to introduce, which was to substitute for all taxes and levies of money from the people a contribution of the tenth part (or less) of the annual value of all lands and money in the hands of private individuals; in fact, a graduated income tax.

He wished to abolish all taxes and Governmental duties on articles of food and upon salt; but he desired to retain duties upon articles of luxury and certain merchandise, such as spirits, tea, coffee and tobacco. This book, which also included a graphic description of the misery and want which the lower classes in France were suffering at the time, appeared in 1707.

St. Simon gives a vivid description of the King’s fury, when he received a copy from Maréchal Vauban. His Majesty had already obtained a pretty good idea of the scope and matter it contained.

A few weeks later the book was seized and confiscated by an Act of Parliament, and its publication stopped. Vauban did not long survive the blow; he died in Paris three weeks after this decree was promulgated. To quote St. Simon:

The King looked now upon Marshal Vauban as a fanatical defender of the people, and a criminal who was attempting an attack upon the authority of the Ministers, and, through them, upon the Crown. The unfortunate Marshal could not survive the loss of the favour of a master to whom he was deeply attached and whom he had served so faithfully; he died soon after, seeing no one and consumed with grief. The King received the news of his death with indifference, and did not even recognise that he had lost one of his most illustrious servants.

The writings of Vauban upon fortifications and military matters are well-known to all experts, and are still the best works that have been written on these subjects.

VISCONTI, Ennio Quirino.

Born in Rome, 1751; died in Paris, 1818.

He was an extraordinarily precocious child, and at the age of thirteen had translated “Hecuba” of Euripides and the “Olympics” of Pindar. He obtained the degree of doctor of law and literature in 1771 (aged twenty), and was then appointed camararis to the Pope and sub-librarian to the Vatican. He steadily refused to take holy orders, notwithstanding personal pressure from the Pope. When he married in 1785, he was dismissed from the Vatican, although he had compiled the whole of the catalogues of the Museo Clementius. Prince Chigi then took him into his service as librarian. During the next ten years he arranged and classified the collections the two Englishmen, Jenkins and Wortley, had made from excavations at Athens and other parts of Greece. He also organised the Borghese Museum.

When the French entered Rome in January 1798, Visconti was appointed by General Berthier Minister of the Interior, and, later, one of the five Consuls who were to govern the Roman Republic; he had only occupied this post seven months, when the intrigues of his enemies compelled his flight to Perugia, his honesty and moderation having excited the hatred of his four fellow Consuls.

The Neapolitans retook Rome in 1799, and Visconti, separated from his wife and family, was exiled, and departed for France. Here he was immediately employed in organising and arranging the Museum of the Louvre, then just founded. He was appointed Professor of Archæology and Member of the Institute. In 1801 appeared his celebrated Livret du Musée. He also made a complete catalogue containing elaborate descriptions of the works of art in the Louvre. By Napoleon’s orders he commenced the des dessins antiques, which was to contain illustrations drawn and engraved by him, comprising portraits of all the illustrious heroes of antiquity. The Academies of Europe vied with one another in asking his advice and judgment upon matters of art. In 1814 he was summoned to London to give his opinion upon the merits or possible demerits of the Elgin marbles, the English Government not being willing to give Lord Elgin the price demanded. Visconti valued them at 800,000 francs (£32,000) and decided that they were all the work of Phidias and his pupils. This sum was paid.

Soon after his return to Paris he was attacked by a painful internal malady, and died, aged sixty-six.

LA VALLÉE, Marquis Joseph de Bois, Robert de.

Born in 1747; died in 1816.

He was captain in a regiment of Champagne before the Revolution. He became an enthusiastic democrat; later, a devoted adherent of Napoleon. During the Empire he was head of the Chancellerie of the Legion of Honour. He lost this appointment, however, under the Restoration, and retired to London, where he died. La Vallée was a voluminous writer, a great linguist, and had a knowledge of ancient art and literature.

VOLTAIRE, François Marie, de.

Born, 1694, at Sceaux; died in Paris, 1778.

He was the son of Maître François Arouet, a lawyer who held a position in the Cour des Comptes in Paris. The birth of Voltaire took place under peculiar circumstances. His mother, who was not immediately expecting her confinement, joined a party one afternoon for a long walk in the environs of Paris. Before she could get home, she was taken suddenly in labour, and her child was prematurely born in a stranger’s house. The infant was so weak, small, and feeble that it could not be taken to church for baptism until nine months after its birth. Young Arouet lost his mother a few years later. His relations with his father were not happy, and his only brother, ten years his senior, was a bigoted Jansenist.

When only ten years of age, François Arouet was placed at the College of Louis le Grand, directed by the Jesuit Fathers. Here he remained for seven years, the favourite of his teachers, who considered him their most brilliant scholar, his amusing sallies and lively wit gained him popularity with his fellow students. At college, Voltaire (who through life assiduously cultivated intimacy with exalted personages) contracted friendships with the sons of noblemen, ministers and magistrates. When he was eleven years of age his godfather, the Abbé Châteauneuf, presented him to Ninon de l’Enclos, then nearly ninety years old, but still mentally and physically attractive. The clever and witty child delighted the aged courtesan, who in her will left him 2000 francs (£80) to buy books. He also met Jean Jacques Rousseau a few years later: the latter embraced him, and predicted a glorious future for the youthful genius.

After he left college, Arouet soon profited by the friendships he had made among his superiors in rank and position, and succeeded in obtaining a footing which he maintained till 1726 in the most exclusive and fashionable society in Paris. He had many adventures, notably a romantic affair when attached to the Legation in Holland. Accused of writing a series of satirical poems against the Government of the Regency, he was sent to the Bastille; but this only increased his fame and added to his notoriety. Released a year later, the Regent granted him a private and friendly interview, settling upon him a pension of 1000 livres (£120) a year. Ever afterwards he wrote in most eulogistic terms of the Regent, and dedicated his Tragedy of Œdipus to the Duchess of Orleans. He continued to write successful plays and to publish books of poetry and prose as well as to move in the highest society until 1726, when a catastrophe occurred which changed the bent of his whole life.

Arouet, who had now assumed the name and style of de Voltaire, was on December 10 of this year dining with one of his chief patrons, the Duke de Sully. Among the guests was a dissolute middle aged man, the Chevalier de Rohan (younger son of the Duke de Rohan). The Chevalier inquired in a loud voice—“Who was the young man who talked so much and gave his unasked-for opinion so freely?” Voltaire answered, “He is a man who cannot boast of an exalted name, but who understands how to keep up the honour of the humble name he does bear.” This sally almost convulsed de Rohan with fury, being a direct allusion to his notoriously evil reputation. Three days later Voltaire was seized on the very steps of the Hôtel du Sully and soundly flogged there and then in the open street by three of the chevalier’s lackeys, De Rohan enjoying the spectacle seated in a coach drawn up hard by. The chevalier’s victim could obtain no redress, his adversary refused to fight him, and when Arouet made further efforts to obtain satisfaction, he was again confined in the Bastille. Upon his release he immediately started for England, his pride forbade his reappearance among his old companions. His host in London was Bolingbroke, who had only just returned to Great Britain after a long exile. Arouet remained three years in England, making an earnest and thorough study of English literature, and becoming intimate with Pope, Addison, and Swift.

In 1729 he went back to Paris and recommenced his literary career. The bold unconventionality of his writings and the freedom of his opinions in religion and politics made the author an object of suspicion to the French Government. His “Letters from England” were suppressed, his Lettres Philosophiques publicly burnt by the common hangman, and their publisher incarcerated in the Bastille; to avoid sharing his fate, Voltaire again fled from France.

His liaison with the beautiful and cultivated Madame du Châtelet commenced about this time. She was about twenty-eight years of age. The Marquis and Marchioness du Châtelet inhabited a château in Lorraine, and there Voltaire principally lived until the death of the Marquis in 1749. He was occasionally absent for considerable periods—at Brussels in 1739, in Paris, 1740.

He had several interviews with Frederick the Great when the latter was Prince of Prussia.

After the Battle of Fontenoy in 1744, an ode he composed upon that victory brought him once more into favour at Versailles, and for two years he enjoyed the immediate patronage of Madame de Pompadour. He could not, however, control his powers of satire, and in 1746 fell into disgrace at Court, from which he never successfully emerged. He then, in company with Madame du Châtelet, joined the literary coterie of the Duchess de Maine at Sçeaux, and afterwards, still accompanied by his fair friend, paid a visit to the Court of the ex-King Stanislaus, father of the Queen of France, at Luneville. Here Madame du Châtelet fell desperately in love with a handsome young officer, thirteen years her junior, the Marquis de St. Lombert. Voltaire accepted the situation with philosophic calm, saying he wished to change his position as lover for that of a sincere and devoted friend. A year later the Marquise died in child-bed, and a grotesque as well as melancholy scene took place; the three men, her husband, the Marquis du Châtelet, Voltaire, and St. Lombert, all weeping in each other’s arms over her body!

Voltaire established himself in Paris: a widowed niece, Mdme. Denis, whom he adopted as his daughter, kept house for him, and remained his companion for the rest of his life. In 1750 Frederick the Great invited the distinguished author to settle at Potsdam as his permanent guest. Voltaire accepted the offer, reaching Berlin in July of the same year. He was received with almost regal honours: a pension of 20,000 livres, the golden key of Great Chamberlain, and the Cross of the Order of Prussia bestowed upon him. All his plays were performed in succession at the theatre of Potsdam. At the King’s private suppers the French poet was privileged to make any remarks he pleased, and not bound to observe any form of Court etiquette. This (to Voltaire) ideal existence lasted two years and six months, during which time he wrote and published at Berlin the Siècle de Louis XIV. Voltaire began to take too great an advantage of the licence accorded to him by the Prussian monarch; he presumed to correct Frederick’s French prose, and to make light of his verses. He quarrelled with the Court banker, Hirsch (the direct ancestor of the late great financier Baron Hirsch), about a doubtful monetary speculation, and a lawsuit took place between them. It seems probable that this affair, which has never been satisfactorily cleared up, contributed far more than a literary dispute to the final rupture between King Frederick and his pet philosopher. Voltaire had always shown great financial ability, and had amassed a large fortune, which he continued to increase during the remainder of his career.

In the early spring of 1753, Voltaire and Frederick parted never to meet again, mutually disgusted with one another. The poet departed with his niece to Weime, on a visit to the Grand Duke and Duchess. Frederick, discovering soon after that Voltaire had taken with him a volume of very obscene, scurrilous, and questionable verse, which the King had had printed for private circulation only, a commission, led by a stupid and hotheaded officer named Freytag, was despatched in pursuit, with orders to take it by force if necessary from the former favourite, together with his golden key, and the Cross of Prussia. Voltaire and Mdme. Denis were accordingly arrested at Frankfort and kept in durance for thirty-six days, during which time they were subjected to every possible form of arrogant insult.

Although Voltaire desired to conciliate the religious party in France, even going so far as to confess and communicate at Easter in Lyons, he could not persuade them to overlook his anti-Christian publications. The appearance in print of the Siècle de Louis XIV., and an abominable skit upon Joan of Arc, called La Pucelle, destroyed the last chance of his ever again being received at Court. He therefore purchased an estate in Switzerland, where he built a charming villa called Les Délices; in 1760 he bought the estate of Ferney, near the Swiss and French frontier, but in French territory. For the next eighteen years he resided there in great state, and was visited by innumerable famous and distinguished personages, from kings and princes to authors and actors. One of his visitors has thus described life at Ferney:

Voltaire is very rich; he is as proud of his wealth as of his literary reputation. He loves to act the part of Seigneur du Village, and to show his guests his houses, gardens, fields, woods, horses (of which he has twelve in his private stable), and his cattle. He dresses with elegance and care; on feast days his attire is splendid. He has built a church for the villagers, and attends Mass in state on Sundays, with an escort of two game-keepers carrying loaded muskets. He exacts all feudal rights and privileges as a landlord. He is always ill, or ailing, and yet an indefatigable worker, with an activity and liveliness of mind and intellect of a young man. His temper is variable. He is by turns capricious, obstinate, irascible, passionate, and revengeful. His reputation for avarice is undeserved, but, on the other hand, he is often very liberal and generous; though, being a man of great business capacity, he administers his affairs with practical common sense, and will not allow himself to be cheated of a farthing.

His writings continued to make more and more stir in the world of letters, and he was to a great extent the arbiter of intellectual thought all over Europe during the last twenty years of his life. He hailed the advent of Louis XVI. to the throne of France with joy, believing a new and enlightened régime was about to begin.

Pressure was put upon him on all sides to return to Paris, Queen Marie Antoinette herself interceded with the King to give the required permission for the exile’s reception at Court, and in February 1778, Voltaire quitted Ferney and arrived in Paris on the evening of the 10th of that month. He had been an exile for twenty-nine years. From this time until his death his existence was one perpetual ovation. The excitement of this round of entertainments and receptions—which culminated, when after a performance of his new tragedy Irene, his bust was crowned upon the stage of the Théâtre Français—was too much for his aged feeble frame to support, and taken suddenly ill he expired on May 30, 1778, aged eighty-four and three months. He desired to receive the last Sacraments, but when the priest arrived the patient was already unconscious. He had, however, confessed himself to the Abbé Gauthier, an ex-Jesuit, and received the Communion on the previous March 2, when he signed a retractation of his deistic and infidel opinions. He added—“I shall die adoring God, loving my friends, and detesting superstition of every kind.”

Voltaire was buried in the Abbey of Scellières, where his body lay until it was removed to the Panthéon by the order of the Convention.

Footnotes

1 See Appendix.

2 These articles have since 1802 increased a hundredfold in value.—[Ed.]

3 This bird is undoubtedly a Penguin.

4 Probably an albatross.

5 Italian or rather Corsican pronunciation.

6 This statue is the celebrated dying Gladiator immortalised by Byron.

7 Chauvilet.

8 I must here relate two very extraordinary circumstances respecting the younger Sheares, whom I described in Letter XII. as a charming young man and the admirer of Mlle. Théronne (Théroigne). During the King’s trial he sat near me, and was so extremely affected he shed tears, observing at the same time that the French would dishonour their name and the cause of freedom by this proceeding.
Some days later we visited Versailles together, and as we were contemplating the scenery of the beautiful garden at Petit Trianon, laid out by the Queen, he went to the top of the look-out, fell upon one knee, and exclaimed, drawing a dirk: “By heaven! I’ll thrust this dirk into the heart of the man who shall dare to propose the least injury to Marie Antoinette.” His brother, who was of a more cool and less enthusiastic temperament, immediately observed, “You had better set off post to Paris and take her out of the Temple.” It may appear incredible to those who have been unconnected with any of the agents of those convulsions which have disturbed the world for the last twelve years, that men previously distinguished for the sensibility of their natures and for their humanity, have proved, when immersed in the Revolution whirlpool, the most cruel and inexorable of incarnate devils. Carrier, Robespierre, Foquet-Tinville, and most of those exterminating furies who thinned the best part of the population of France, are instances in point.

9 A peculiar motive, which I shall not here explain, obliges me to omit the insertion of the case alluded to, but I have given the beginning, which contains an account of Mr. Paine’s mode of life before he was sent to prison, and the conclusion.

10 This passage and the following, which I have marked in italics, deserves the solemn reflection of every one who formerly entertained a favourable prepossession in behalf of the French Revolution.

11 At this period the French talked of the “Rights of Man,” of the Republic one and indivisible, democratic and imperishable; and branded English people with the epithets of English slaves, serfs of George, &c. &c.

12 Of the Committee of Public Safety, at that time the executive power of France in every sense of the word. For the benefit of the Great Nation they pocketed £400 for signing these very passports, permitting two of the “serfs of George and agents of Pitt” to escape from France.

13 So that the £400 these Public Safety scoundrels had touched would have caused their murder had they delayed their departure for a few hours, as Barrère wisely observed, “dead men tell no tales”—it would have been vain to plead the bribe; this plea itself would have been such an outrage to the Majesty of the Republic that it alone would have satisfied the consciences of the jury of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

14 The use of packs of cards with figures of royal personages, i.e., the kings and queens of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, were forbidden by the revolutionary authorities as being emblems of royalty, and those who used them were condemned as Royalists.