Truth.—Truth comes home to the mind so naturally, that when we learn it for the first time it seems as though we did no more than recall it to our memory.—Fontenelle.
An Infirm Tribunal.[2]
The fact has been mentioned above of Camille Desmoulins’ stutter, which indomitable perseverance and enthusiasm in his chosen cause so far threw into the shade as that it proved no drawback to his attainment of a pre-eminent position in those troublous times.
It must be acknowledged as a somewhat singular circumstance that another of the revolutionary chiefs suffered from an affliction that would appear a still more certain impediment to success in public life. Couthon, while yet an obscure provincial advocate in Auvergne, was stricken with paralysis, which deprived him of the use of his limbs. Yet Couthon, thus laid past, as it might seem, once and for all, on life’s most obscure and dismal shelf—Couthon was no longer in Auvergne, but in Paris, in the forefront of the fiercest turmoil! Couthon, the paralytic, formed the third of the famous Triumvirate which exercised for above a year—an age in revolutionary times—the Dictatorship of France.
It is another rather curious fact about this man that, in spite of his grievous infirmity, he is represented as a person of engaging aspect and noble presence. When any measures of peculiar severity were to be proposed, he was always chosen by the committee to bring them forward, and he was remarkable for uttering the most atrocious and pitiless sentiments in a tone and with a manner the most affectionate and tender. The details of those wholesale murders, the Fournées, or Batches, as they were grimly termed, which marked the last and most sanguinary month of the Reign of Terror, were left to the unflinching hands of this pitiless, soft-seeming Couthon, and the suspicious, ferocious St. Just.
Proud and Ungrateful.—Never was any person remarkably ungrateful who was not also insufferably proud, nor anyone proud who was not equally ungrateful.
The Way of the World.—When two people disagree, each person tells her own story as much to the disadvantage of the other as she possibly can. The rule of the world on these occasions is to believe much of the evil which each says of the other, and very little of the good which each says of herself. Both, therefore, suffer.
Mothers-in-Law.—“Yes,” said a mother-in-law, “you can deceive your guileless little wife, young man, but her father’s wife—never!”
The Obedient Husband.
A clergyman, travelling through the village of Kettle, in Fifeshire, was called into an inn to officiate at a marriage, instead of the parish minister, who, from some accident, was unable to attend, and had caused the company to wait for a considerable time.