APPENDIX G
THE cautious student will attach considerable importance to the account given by Dumas, and to the account given by the Abbé Gabriel, especially to the former, in his La Route de Varennes. Dumas was a novelist. His contribution to history will therefore seem suspect, but it must be remembered that he had the whole story from Choiseul himself. The motives to which he ascribes Choiseul’s departure are substantially those given in the text; but he particularly adds that the number of peasants crowding round the Hussars greatly outnumbered those soldiers; that the local villages were rising, and that a special reason for their anxiety was discoverable in the fact that the recently emancipated copyholders of a local noblewoman were on that particular day in dread of distraint upon their goods at the hands of a military force.