Meets her fond husband with averted eye.
Four beardless youths the obdurate beauty move
With soft attentions of Platonic love.”—Ed.]
[235]. [Brissot was one of the first movers in the outbreak of the French Revolution, and with twenty other Girondists suffered death under the guillotine, October 30, 1793. He was one of the most virtuous as well as most accomplished littérateurs of the time.—Ed.]
[236]. Such was the end of these worthies. They were found starved to death in a cave in Languedoc. Vide Barrère’s Rep.
[Charles Barbaroux was one of the most distinguished and energetic of the Girondists. As he opposed the party of Marat and Robespierre, he was, in 1793, proscribed as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic. He wandered about the country, hiding himself as he best could for thirteen months, when he was taken, and perished by the guillotine, June 25, 1794.—Ed.]
[Jérome Pétion de Villeneuve was a prominent member of the Jacobin Club, and a great ally of Robespierre. Being elected Maire de Paris in Bailly’s stead, he encouraged the demonstrations of the lowest classes, and the arming of the populace. He then joined the Girondists. On their defeat by the army of the Convention, he fled in July, 1793, into Bretagne. A short time after the corpses of himself and Buzot were found in a corn-field near St. Emilion, partly devoured by wolves. They were supposed to have died by their own hands. He was extremely virtuous in all his domestic relations; but his public career shows him to have been weak, shallow, ostentatious, and vain.—Ed.]
[237]. See Louvet’s Récit de mes Périls.
[238]. This philosophic coxcomb is the idol of those who admire the French Revolution up to a certain point.
[239]. This little anecdote is not generally known.—It is strikingly pathetic.—Garat has recorded this circumstance in a very eloquent sentence—“O toi, qui arrêtas la main avec laquelle tu traçais le progrès de l’esprit humain, pour porter sur tes lèvres le breuvage mortel, d’autres pensées et d’autres sentimens out incliné ta volonté vers le tombeau, dans ta dernière délibération.—(Garat, it seems, did not choose to poison himself.)—Tu as rendu à la liberté éternelle ton âme Républicaine par ce poison qui avait été partagé entre nous comme le pain entre des frères.”