"And the Duc de Damas said to him, 'Monseigneur, you have made a mess on the floor; I am much distressed about it, but you must wipe it up.' 'What! I must wipe it up!' the young prince exclaimed. 'Why are there no servants here?' 'There are, but, as the mess was made this time by your Highness, your Highness must wipe it up.... Go and fetch a mop!' said the duke to a footman; and, when the man hesitated, he added, 'Do as I command you!' The lackey arrived with a mop five minutes later, and His Highness shed many tears; but M. de Damas was firm and Monseigneur was himself obliged to mop up the mess he had made! What do you say to that, citizen-general?"
"I should say," Barras replied, in the sarcastic tones that were habitual to him, "that the tutor of the Duc de Bordeaux did quite right to teach his pupil a trade; so that when his noble parents depart he will have something in his hands to take to."
Another time—again it happened at table—a famous general, who was an eminent soldier and a man of striking abilities, then ambassador at Constantinople, related, with bitter feeling, a scene that took place during the Revolution.
By chance, Courtand, Barras's valet and steward and a free-spoken friend, stood behind the general's chair. He touched the general on the shoulder in the very middle of his story.
"General," he said, "I must stop you—it did not happen at all as you are telling it: you are slandering the Revolution!"
The general turned indignantly to Barras to call his attention to this familiarity on the part of his lackey. But Barras broke out—
"Messieurs, Courtand is right! Tell the episode as it happened, Courtand; re-establish the facts and give a lesson in history to Monsieur the ambassador."
And Courtand related the facts as they had occurred, to the great satisfaction of Barras and the amazed astonishment of the company.
When Walter Scott came to Paris to hunt up documents connected with the reign of Napoleon, whose life he was proposing to write, Barras, who had some precious papers to show him, desired to see him and begged Cabarrus—who knew the history of the Revolution as intimately as did Courtand, but could tell it better than he (we mean no offence to the memory of Citizen-general Barras)—to invite the celebrated romance-writer to come and dine with him. Cabarrus began by having a long conversation with Walter Scott, who, knowing that he was in the society of the son of Madame Tallien, talked much of all the events in which Cabarrus's mother had played a part: finally, the messenger approached the real object of his visit and transmitted Barras's invitation to the Scottish poet. But Walter Scott shook his head.
"I cannot dine with that man," he replied. "I shall write against him, and it would be said, as we say in Scotland, 'that I have flung his own dinner-plates at his head!'"