Durler rose to the rank of general before his death. He naturally regarded this piece of historic writing as among the most precious of his possessions, and left it to his family, who were resident in Lucerne. Chateaubriand, visiting Lucerne on the 15th of May 1832, saw it in that town. From General Durler’s daughter and heiress it descended to his grandchildren, Schimacher by name, and was in the early eighties the property of M. Felix Schimacher of Lucerne, whose agent in Paris was a banker, Mr. de Trooz.
M. Cousin, the curator of the Municipal Museum of Paris (the Carnavalet), hearing of it, approached Mr. de Trooz, and offered a large sum on behalf of the city. The offer was accepted. The pedigree of the document was drawn up by M. Dagobert Schimacher, lawyer in Lucerne, and the whole despatched to Paris, where the purchase was completed on the 27th July 1886, and the document deposited in the Museum, where it now lies.
APPENDIX D
ON THE LOGE OF THE “LOGOTACHYGRAPHE”
THE Manège was pulled down after the consular decree of year XI., which originated the Rue de Rivoli; the historical reconstruction of its arrangements on the 10th of August 1792 is the more difficult from the fact that the only accurate plan of it which has come down to us[[56]] dates from a period earlier than December 1791, in which month (on the 27th) the order was given to change nearly the whole of its dispositions. The box of the Logographe can be fixed in this plan (though not in the new place it occupied after the 5th of January 1792),[[57]] but not that of the Logotachygraphe.
[56]. In the Histoire des Edifices, &c., by Paris.
[57]. The work was finished by the 26th of January 1792.
We know[[58]] that the first was near the President’s Chair, and this was on the south side of the Manège, in the middle. It was in this box that the Queen had appeared when her husband had accepted the Constitution on the return from Varennes; and it was in this box that the Royal Family were supposed, until lately, to have stayed in the three days after the fall of the palace.
[58]. By the 7th clause of the order cited.
There were many such grated boxes for reporters up and down the Hall: the proximity of the Logographe’s to the Chair being due to the desire for accurate verbatim reports to be recorded from the best acoustic position of the Hall.