“Very well, let us go to breakfast then, but keep quiet, I beseech you. Not that way,” as his companion turned towards the Luxembourg.
“Yes, yes! I know the way to the restaurant!” and as he dragged him along in an iron grasp some guards, who had discovered the escape of the prisoner, recognised and seized him.
The Chevalier was taken back to his cell, and, knowing that he had now only a few hours to live, he made his will and wrote the history of this terrible adventure, saying that he could not but forgive the Marquis as he was mad. These papers he confided to a fellow prisoner, and a few hours later was summoned to execution with a number of others.
As the fatal car passed through the streets, for the third time his relentless enemy stood before him, and as a slight delay stopped the car close to him, he called out—
“Ah! Chevalier de ——, where are you going in that carriage? Perhaps to see your mistress, the Marquise de ——?” and the look of triumph and hatred revealed the truth to the victim of his vengeance.
It was dearly bought, however. For some time, for prudence sake, the Marquis kept up his pretence of madness, but after the fall of Robespierre and the Terror he resumed the apparent use of his reason. But the next heir had taken possession of the estates of the family in consequence of the declared madness of its head. The Marquis appealed to the law, but his own notoriety and the last will and letter of the Chevalier —— decided the case against him. He was shut up in the asylum of Charenton, where he lived for many years, resigning himself after a time to his fate, and dying in extreme old age.
Not many days after the Convention had applauded with enthusiasm an extravagant speech about charity, full of absurdities and bombastic sentimentalities, made by Térèzia, Robespierre demanded her arrest of the Comité de salut public.
It has been said that the arrest was made at the end of a fête she had been giving at which Robespierre himself was present, and which he had only just left, with professions of the sincerest friendship.
The incident accords so well with the habitual treachery of Robespierre, that if not true it may be called ben trovato; but in fact it is not really certain that it took place.
But it is confidently affirmed that Robespierre pursued Térèzia, with even more than his usual vindictiveness. He begged the Marquis de la Valette, a ci-devant noble and yet a friend of his, to prevent the escape of this young woman whom they both knew, “for the safety of the Republic.” But M. de la Valette, although he was not ashamed so far to degrade himself as to be the friend of Robespierre, shrank from being the instrument of this infamy; and not only warned Térèzia but offered her the shelter of his roof, which, for some reason or other, she declined. She was arrested and sent to La Force, one of the worst prisons of the Revolution, with the additional horror of being au secret. She had too many and too powerful friends to be sacrificed without difficulty and risk, and it was, in fact, his attack upon her that gave the finishing blow to the tottering tyranny of Robespierre.