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tyranny were to be clothed at the expense of the republic; and the sans-culottes were to have their houses commodiously furnished (avec aisunce) with goods taken from the rich. Lists were made out of the patriots fit to be employed in the insurrection, and the characters of some of these patriots, as described in the dramatis personæ, shew them to have been most fit personages to figure on such a stage. Manque fils, portier des écuries Egalité. Agé de 18 ans; sans talens, mais vigoureux, determiné, et bon pour exterminer les scélérats. Chatain, sellier en face des Bains Chinois, No.7: capable de commander une compagnie; c'est un brave-d'un beau fisique. La Vicomterie, rue de l'Echelle, coin de celle Honoré, un peu poltron, mais vertueux et capable de prendre de grands mesures pour amener à la pure démocratie, quoiqu'il ne soit pas pour le bonheur commun, parce qu'il le regarde comme impossible.

The message which the Directory sent to the two councils concerning this conspiracy, asserted, that it was the intention of the conspirators to massacre the two councils, the Directory, the staff of the army of the interior, the constituted authorities and all their agents, and the strangers of every nation. The whole of the papers found upon the conspirators were published; but there is not a trace of any such intended massacre; there was no list of proscriptions made out; and one of the principal persons engaged in the conspiracy was a foreigner himself, Buonarotti, a Florentine, and a descendant of Michel Angelo. What is more remarkable is, that the Directory in their account of the conspiracy never hinted at its object, as if they were afraid of bringing the levelling principles into discussion even under such a form,-a striking indication of the state of popular feeling at that time.

On the same day that the directors laid their report before the councils, Babœuf addressed a letter to them in a style not less extraordinary than the other part of his conduct; in which he endeavoured to persuade them that their true interest was to give a more popular character to the measures of their government, and strengthening themselves by the assistance of him and his party, instead of favouring the royalists. They took his advice in part, but it did not avail for the purpose for which it was designed, that of saving himself. They hushed up the conspiracy as far as possible, and suffered many months to elapse before they brought a few of the chief agents to trial. Phillips's Anecdotes' say, that the candid and equitable, proceedings of the court on this occasion, exhibited to the world a prepossessing representation of the security afforded by the new, constitution to the life of a French citizen.' The new Biogra phy gives a different account. After very long debates, it says, though the jury declared that no conspiracy had existed, Baboeuf was condemned to death on an incidental question; M. Real,

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counsel for the accused, pleaded with great force against the application of the law, but in vain; he then approached the two prisoners, Babœuf and Darthe, and informed them of their fate: they both stabbed themselves at the same instant with daggers which they had concealed in their clothes; their bodies were dragged to the scaffold and beheaded. Phillips says they were executed. If we recollect rightly, this was the case, and another of the conspirators, Charles Germain, suffered with them. Buonarotti was sentenced to be transported to Cayenne; during his trial the Tuscan envoy hinted to him that he would only be banished, if he would promise to return to Florence; but he replied that he would stay in France to enjoy the last rays of sinking liberty! The sentence was not carried into execution; he was sent under guard to a town on the Alps, and there he remained in 1806. This lenity assuredly would not have been shewn had there been any such massacre designed as the Directory affirmed, nor would so few of the conspirators have suffered: they were evidently considered as madmen or desperate enthusiasts, of whom it was necessary to sacrifice only a few as examples.

The first political jail delivery as it may be called, after the mur der of the Brissotines, cleared France of the Hebertists, the most loathsome of all the wretches who disgraced it. Hebert was the man, who with equal ferocity had called for the deaths of M. Roland and the queen; and he it was who devised that accursed accusation against the queen, which perhaps of all the crimes of the revolution, excites the greatest horror and indignation at the villain who could be guilty of it. When he was on the way to the scaffold, he was assailed on all sides with phrases from his own execrable journal, with which he had made the people as it were drunk with blood. That poor madman Clootz, who had declared that his heart was French and his soul sans-culottes, perished with him, after having past the night before the execution, in preaching atheism to his fellow sufferers.--The crimes of the Hebertists had been so enormous, that it might almost be said, no other creed could have afforded them consolation! Clootz was the martyr of atheism, and submitted to his fate with perfect philosophy; he requested the executioner to let him suffer the last of the party, because he wished to deliver a short exhortation to each of his companions, and moreover was desirous of making a few observations upon materialism as their heads fell. Sampson, to whom it was a matter of perfect indifference with whom he began or ended, indulged him in his request; and Anacharsis Clootz had the satisfaction of encouraging his comrades with the prospect of annihilation one by one, and drawing new arguments from an experimental course of decapitation in aid of his favorite theory, till his own turn came.

Gobet,

Gobet, the constitutional archbishop of Paris, who at the age of seventy, professed atheism at the bar of the Convention, and declared that for sixty years of his life he had been a hypocrite, and that the religion which he had professed from his youth was founded in falsehood, had recourse in his sufferings to the faith which he had renounced. He resumed his former religious exercises in prison, performing them, perhaps for the first time, with earnest sincerity, and rapidly repeated the prayers of the dying as he went to execution. Chaumette suffered with him: this was the wretch who prepared the charges and regulated the evidence of the queen, a crime which hastened his own fate; for the accusation which he brought so shocked the whole auditory, that Robespierre in one of his strong expressions, devoted him to the death which he had so well deserved. When he was committed to prison, he found a number of persons whom he himself had sent there, and who assailed him with such stinging reproaches as this visible retribution provoked. One of them greeted him by repeating the present tense of a verb, at that time in fatal use ;-I am suspected, thou art suspected, he is suspected; we are suspected, ye are suspected, they are suspected.-Chabot died in company with Danton and Camille Desmoulins, who were ashamed of him :-the revolution made this Capuchin a rogue; when that event broke out, those who knew him knew nothing worse of him than that he was tired of his frock, and glad to seize the first opportunity of returning to a secular life, but he was believed to be a man of generous feelings and good intentions. He was far gone in the frenzy of the times, but has been made more notorious by a few lucky epigrams against him, than by any acts of individual wickedness. It is said that he saved the life of the Abbé Sicard during the massacres, and that when he was imprisoned he appeared to feel far more for his friend Bazire, than for himself. He poisoned himself clumsily with corrosive sublimate; in the agony which this caused, his groans were heard; he was conveyed to the Infirmary, and such measures were taken that his life was prolonged till he could be conveyed to the scaffold.

Danton was included in the same bill of indictment with Chabot and Bazire, whom he despised, with Lacroix and Fabre d'Eglantine, both of whom were accused and as it appears unjustly, of peculation, with his friend Camille Desmoulins, Herault de Sechelles, and Phelippeaux, all men who had acted conspicuous parts in the revolution. Danton went to the scaffold with the blood, of the September victims and of the Brissotines upon his soul, and yet when he fell, Danton was commiserated and regretted even by the friends of Brissot; so much more detestable were the persons by whom he was destroyed. He died, like his own victims, innocent

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of the charge for which he was condemned, and his former guilt was thus in some degree forgotten, because of the iniquity of his sentence, and the deeper guilt of his successful rivals. In wholesale state crimes, this man was as remorseless as Sylla or Buonaparte, but he would fain have prevented that system of murder, which the ruffians of the revolution, under pretence of revolu tionary zeal, were carrying on from motives of private wickedness. Let us leave something to be done by the guillotine of public opinion, said he in the hall of the jacobins. To this course he would fain have persuaded Robespierre, telling him it was just to restrain the royalists, but that they ought not to confound the innocent with the guilty, and their power ought to extend no farther than to strike for the good of the republic. But that demagogue would bear no rival in popularity; envy had as large a portion of his heart as ambition, and he succeeded in destroying Danton, because Danton relied with a fatal confidence upon his services to the republic and his natural superiority, and gave way to an indolence and self-indulgence, from which even the desperate game wherein he was engaged, did not sufficiently rouse him. No man had done so much good and so much evil to the republic. He alone it was who, when the approach of the Prussians spread consternation through the metropolis, and dismayed all the other ministers, took upon himself the immediate direction of public affairs, and prevented the Legislative Assembly from leaving Paris, which if they had done, the king would probably have regained his throne:-the revolutionary army, and the revolutionary tribunal were suggested by him. France has reason to curse one, and all Europe the other. He obtained a decree for the establishment of national schools, where all children who were in need, should be brought up and educated at the national expense:-a measure, which if it had been carried into effect, might almost have atoned for his offences. He also stood forward against the atheistical faction in defence of public worship, and called upon the Convention to declare that they wished not to destroy any thing, but to perfect every thing. We did not,' said he,' strive to annihilate superstition for the sake of establishing atheism.' Yet the theism of Danton was virtually as little worth, as the more impudent system against which he contended. When he was asked his name at the bar, he replied, I am Danton, well known in the revolution; my home will shortly be annihilation, but my name will live in the pantheon of history. Like every other victim of that accursed tribunal which he had instituted, he was treated with equal insolence and injustice; but his trial was shortened by a manœuvre, and he was executed the same day, before measures could be taken by his friends for raising an insurrection in his behalf. Legen

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dre was at that time wholly employed by fear for himself, otherwise, had he exerted the same spirit as on the day of Robespierre's overthrow, the tyrant might then have perished instead of Danton. When he was taken back to the Conciergerie he exclaimed, It is the anniversary of the day on which I caused the institution of the revolutionary tribunal, for which I implore pardon of God and man! I leave every thing in dreadful confusion;-there is not one among them who understands any thing of government. After all, they are such brethren as Cain: Brissot would have had me guillotined, even as Robespierre has me guillotined.'-It was true that Brissot would have condemned him, but not as Robespierre did; he would have condemned him not as an Orleanist,-not as a royalist,-not for a mock conspiracy,-but for his share in those massacres, of which it appears almost certain, that he was the prime mover. In the cart and on the scaffold, Danton was, perhaps, the only man who seemed to awe the rascally rabble that attended these bloody spectacles: the pride and dignity of his manner commanded respect even there, and dupes and ruffians as they were, they probably felt some degree of doubt as well as of wonder, in beholding the man in that situation, who, not many days before, had been their favourite. Once he uttered his wife's name in a passionate exclamation of grief, but instantly he subdued himself, saying, Danton, no weakness,-and immediately ascended the scaffold.

This execution was what the Robespierrians called the second weeding of the republican garden. Herault de Sechelles might have escaped from it; he was offered a retreat in Switzerland, and a passport in a fictitious name from the agent of Basle, then residing at Paris, but his answer was, 'I would gladly accept of the offer, if I could carry my native country with me.' There was no wisdom in this; to remain and struggle with his enemies would, to be sure, have been a more manful part than to fly from them, but he made no effort either to relieve his country or himself. Herault was a man of family and fortune, of a fine person, literary talents, high Parisian manners, and Parisian morals;-better calculated to figure in a court than a revolution;-he had attracted the notice and obtained the patronage of the queen, and will be remembered as an author, by the account which he has left of Buffon, and by the constitution of 1793, which he and St. Just composed.

Fabre d'Eglantine also, was an author of considerable talent and celebrity; the latter part of his name indeed was assumed, because when a youth he had won the prize of the Eglantine in Provence. The biographers have forgotten a curious instance of the ruling passion which he displayed in prison. One of the things which seemed most to trouble him was, that he had left an unpublished comedy

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