Thus the question whether he had then thrown himself into the Court party remains to be solved. It would not perhaps be difficult to ascertain the fact, for it is well known that Fox, driven from office, became more popular than ever. It is also known that he drew the Prince of Wales into the Opposition.
‘3. As to this I will repeat what I have said above. It is for the Government to order its agents to watch him. As for me I promise to neglect nothing in Paris, and if any positive facts reach me I will transmit them to the Directory. Only yesterday I ascertained where he lives and the places which he frequents.
‘4. It is quite certain that Poter has made purchases besides his Chantilly factory. To ascertain this it will merely be necessary to apply to the Senlis district. I remember having stated in my report of the 16th (sic) that Poter eighteen months ago was in everybody’s debt, and that now he had settled with everybody. This is perhaps what has given rise to the belief that he might have dealings with Pitt in France, for in fact his fortune at this moment is marvellous; but it may be the result of great speculations or of stock-jobbing, which in the last twenty months has made the fortune of so many.
‘I think I have dwelt enough on this subject. I repeat that my sole object has been to do my duty as surveillant. I will add this. Formerly entrusted with powers by the General Security Committee in the department of the Oise, I ascertained that Poter did much good at Chantilly, that he professed republican principles, and that I had even occasion to render him justice before the committee against the persecution which for eleven months he had been undergoing from the Chantilly revolutionary committee.’
These reports seem to have induced Barras to make Potter’s acquaintance and to send him first to Malmesbury[133] in Paris in 1796, and next to London in 1797, with an offer to conclude peace for a handsome bribe. On his return he warned the Directory that one of its members regularly communicated its deliberations to England. These relations with Barras probably protected him from further molestation during the Directory, but on the 13th December 1800 a police bulletin again denounced him as an English emissary sent to ruin French pottery and hat-making.[134] In 1800 he was a first-class medallist at the Paris Industrial Exhibition, and in 1802 he was one of the gold medallists to whom Napoleon gave a dinner. His Montereau factory, an old monastery where he employed a hundred men, was burnt down in 1802. He probably remained in France till 1814; he died in England three years later.
Among the silver medallists in 1802 was White, a mechanical inventor, probably the uncle or grandfather of Dupont White, sub-Minister of Justice in 1848, President Carnot’s father-in-law. The exhibits also included a filter by Smith, an Englishman, perhaps the James Smith who in 1813 succeeded to Stone’s printing business.
There were of course teachers of English. They included Robert, of whom Napoleon might have learned the language at the Paris military school, a lost opportunity which he regretted; Mrs. Galignani, née Parsons, who had married an Italian ex-priest, ultimately the founder of the newspaper bearing his name; and Samuel Baldwin, employed before the Revolution in the French Foreign Office, who was arrested as a spy in the Terror, and having been inscribed on a long list of prisoners for trial would, but for Robespierre’s fall, have been guillotined. He had taught English to the Royal Family before 1789, and he was accused of associating with priests and receiving frequent letters from Calais. He latterly published English and Spanish lesson books, and died in 1804, aged seventy-nine. There were also Cresswell, Davies, Fox, Hickie, Boswell, Macdermott, who kept a school, Stubbs, who had a reading-room with such English newspapers as were allowed to enter France, and Roche, probably Hamilton Roche, teacher at the military school, whose son Eugenius became a journalist in London. There were also two maiden ladies named Haines, ultimately joined by a Mrs. Poppleton, who carried on a school. She was probably the wife or widow of George Poppleton, who had taught English. There was likewise the daughter of a Scotsman named James Mather Flint, the widow of the clever but unprincipled anti-revolutionary pamphleteer Rivarol. Flint and his wife settled about 1734 in France, where their daughter Louisa in 1768 translated into French one of Shakespeare’s plays with Dr. Johnson’s notes,[135] and Johnson wrote to her in French a letter of thanks, in which he humorously rallied her on detaining in Paris the sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Fanny Reynolds had apparently gone to lodge with the Flints, for Northcote is incorrect in stating that Louisa accompanied her to France. Reynolds himself in the following year, when visiting Paris, called on the Flints. On the death of his wife, Flint, who had embraced Catholicism, entered the priesthood and received a small benefice which was supplemented by a pension of 200 francs from the General Assembly of the Clergy. This pension he enjoyed till the Revolution, and he must have died before 1793, for his daughter alone was then arrested as an Englishwoman. She had, it is true, in 1780 married Rivarol and had given birth to a son, but Rivarol had long deserted her, leaving her and her infant in such distress that the Montyon prize, much to his mortification, was awarded in 1788 to a Frenchwoman who had kindly succoured them. Madame Rivarol afterwards tried to maintain herself by translations from the English. Her faithless husband died in Germany as an émigré in 1810, and her son Daniel was now serving till his death in 1810 in the Danish or Russian army. She herself survived till 1821. She is not likely to have been hunted up by any of her fellow-Britons in 1802 or 1814.
Nor were political refugees likely to be sought by them, otherwise they might have made numerous acquaintances. Most of them were Irish, but King mentions two Englishmen, Ashley, an ex-member of the London Corresponding Society, who had a flourishing business in Paris, and ‘Hodgson,’ a hatter, either Richard Hodson, one of the Reformers prosecuted in 1794, or William Hodson, who in December 1793 incurred twelve months’ imprisonment and a fine of £200 for saying that the world would not be happy till there were no more kings. There was also one Scot, Robert Watson, who had crossed the Channel in 1798, secretary and biographer of Lord George Gordon, alleged teacher of English (but more probably ‘skimmer’ of English newspapers) to Napoleon, rescuer from rain and rats of the Stuart papers at Rome; his career was full of romance, and it ended in the tragedy of suicide at a London inn at the age of eighty-eight. As for the Irish, some had been long domiciled in France, while others had just been liberated under a secret article, or at least a secret understanding, of the Treaty of Amiens. They would, according to French documents, have been executed in Ireland but for the threat of reprisals against General Sir George Don, who, as will be explained hereafter, had been arrested in France.[136] These ex-prisoners included James Napper Tandy, given up by Hamburg, along with James Blackwell, Hervey Montmorency Morris, and Wm. Corbett, to Sir James Craufurd, but all claimed by Napoleon as French officers.[137] Tandy landed at Bordeaux in March 1802, and died there in the following year, not having been allowed to go to Paris. In December 1802, describing himself as a French general, he sent a challenge to Elliott, an English M.P., who had spoken of him as an ‘arch traitor,’ and on Elliott taking no notice of his letter he denounced him as a coward.[138] Morris, who had fought for Austria against the Turks before fighting for the French Revolution, after a visit to Paris returned to Ireland, but in 1811 rejoined the French army. Corbett had escaped from Kilmainham prison, an episode utilised by Miss Edgeworth in one of her stories. He, too, joined the French army, became a general, and later on helped to liberate Greece. Blackwell, who, a student in the Irish College, had joined in the attack on the Bastille, was penniless on now landing in France, and Napoleon first gave him 6000 francs and then a pension of 3000 francs ‘for his services to liberty,’ Napoleon not having yet ceased to talk of liberty. In 1803 Blackwell commanded Napoleon’s Irish legion, Corbett serving under him, as also John Devereux,[139] who, though a conspirator of 1798, waited on Lord Whitworth with a letter of introduction from Lord Moira. He was permitted in 1819 to enlist recruits for Bolivar at Dublin, the British authorities being doubtless glad thus to get rid of restless spirits. He became a general in the service of Colombia, and in 1825 revisited Paris, where, as a ‘most active and dangerous man,’ his movements were suspiciously watched by detectives.[140] Arthur O’Connor, nephew of Lord Longueville and ex-M.P. for Cork, has been already mentioned. He married Condorcet’s daughter, and latterly devoted himself to agriculture and to his village mayoralty. He just lived to see the French empire restored. Robert Emmet returned to Dublin in October 1802, and was executed for a fresh conspiracy. So also was Thomas Russell, who while a soldier in Ireland became acquainted with Tone and was won over to his views. Thomas Addis Emmet, Robert’s brother, went in 1804 to New York, where he became a barrister. William James Macnevin likewise crossed the Atlantic.
Other Irishmen had been or were now employed in the French civil service. Aherne, an ex-priest, had served under Delacroix or Carnot. Nicholas Madgett was in the Foreign Office under the Directory, as also a nephew, Sullivan, who had been a professor of mathematics at La Flèche and had gone with Hoche’s expedition to Ireland.[141] Edward Joseph Lewins, who had dubbed himself first Luines and then de Luynes, as though related to the French duke of that name, had been educated at the Irish College, Paris. Sent by the United Irishmen to France, he was employed by the Directory in missions and reports, and on the abandonment of French expeditions to Ireland he joined the Duc de Larochefoucault-Liancourt in industrial enterprises, to carry on which he applied for the reimbursement of his secret service expenses. Talleyrand endorsed this application.[142] He was afterwards the soi-disant Thompson who, according to Goldsmith, was employed in opening English letters at the post-office, for he had been originally in the Irish post-office. He subsequently had appointments in the Foreign and Education Offices. He was still living in Paris in 1824, but his son refused, doubtless for cogent reasons, to give any information on him to Madden for his history of the United Irishmen. William Duckett, one of the instigators of the mutiny of the Nore, had been employed by the diplomatic committee of the Convention, but eventually turned pedagogue. Patrick Lattin, so brilliant in conversation, according to Lady Morgan, as to reduce Curran and Sheil to silence, had served in the Franco-Irish brigade till 1791, and was in the carriage when Theobald Dillon was murdered by his troops at Lille in 1792. He had settled near Lyons, but occasionally visited Paris, where he died about 1849. But it is not always easy to distinguish him from another Lattin. John Fitzgerald, also a Franco-Irish officer, had emigrated at the Revolution but returned in 1802, and his dinners from 1823 to 1836 drew the best British and French company.[143] William Putnam M’Cabe, one of Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s bodyguard in 1798, was now starting a cotton mill near Rouen, but sold it in 1806 to Waddington. He had hairbreadth escapes from arrest on repeated visits to England and Ireland, and died in Paris in 1821. He had been intimate with Tone,[144] the funeral of whose daughter Mira in March 1803 drew together all the Irish refugees. Tone’s son had entered the French army, but after Waterloo went to America with his mother, who then married an old Scottish friend, Hugh Wilson of Bordeaux. In 1803 she took out a patent for clarifying liquids. Wilson, after a roaming life, ended his days at Santa Cruz in 1829.
The English, of course, found many foreigners in Paris, though except in the aggregate in much smaller numbers than themselves. The Russians were already noted for their prodigality. Swedes were tolerably numerous. The Germans were mostly economical. Among Americans were Rufus King, Livingston, Jay, the Ambassador at London, and the future president, Monroe. There was also Colonel James Swan, a native of Dunfermline, but one of the ‘Boston tea-party,’ whose contracts with the French Government had involved him in litigation with his partner Schweizer, and who, rather than meet what he considered an unjust claim, was to undergo twenty-two years’ imprisonment in a Paris debtors’ prison.[145] Count Rumford, the inventor, now likewise settled in Paris.[146] The visitor of highest rank was the Prince of Orange, afterwards suitor to our Princess Charlotte and ultimately King of Holland. His father had sent him from London to claim an indemnity for the loss of the statthalterate, and he appears to have succeeded in his mission. Charlotte’s eventually successful suitor, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, also visited Paris, but not till 1810, when he offered, it is said, to be aide-de-camp to Napoleon. Higher destinies awaited him. The Russians and Poles included Count Zamoiski, Count Potocki, Prince Troubetski, Prince Galitzin, and Princess Demidoff, an accomplished dancer. Nor should we forget Kosciusko, who had failed to liberate Poland. Shepherd found him in a cottage near the barriers, with a small garden which he cultivated himself. He must have been able to relate Polish imitations of the French Revolution—a massacre of prisoners, a revolutionary tribunal, pillages, and confiscations; but he could claim credit for Stanislas having been honourably treated as a captive, in lieu of having been executed like Louis XVI. Possibly a South American youth, Bolivar, the future Liberator, made his acquaintance. There was also Madame de Krudener, the Delphine of Madame de Staël’s story, now famous for her beauty and her gallantries, not yet for the mysticism which was to captivate the Tsar Alexander and the Queen of Prussia. She was at this time enamoured of the singer Garat, but was shortly to accompany her sick husband who, before reaching Aix, his destination, died of apoplexy. Madame de Staël herself, described in a police note as known for her love of intrigue, was not yet banished from the capital outside which she was miserable, and there was her satellite, Benjamin Constant, not yet much known, though he had been arrested in 1796 for declaring that France needed a king. A fellow Swiss visitor was Pestalozzi, the educationist, noted by the police as having an English pension. Another educationist was the German Campe, who in 1792, along with Cloots, Paine, Priestley, and others, had received French citizenship. He was surprised to find the Parisians taciturn and apathetic, instead of being lively, talkative, and enthusiastic as in 1792. Science was represented by Oersted, who, however, was as yet merely a youth who had gained a travelling scholarship.