An honest monk.
It was this hunted and plundered monk, engaged in conscientiously counting up the relics of his cloister for his proscribes, who restored to me the fifteen hundred francs with which I was about to make my way to exile. Failing this small sum, I should not have emigrated: what should I have become? My whole life would have changed. I will be hanged if I would to-day move a step to recover a million.
This happened on the 16th of June 1792. Obeying the promptings of my instinct, I had returned from America to offer my sword to Louis XVI., not to associate myself with party intrigues. The disbanding of the King's new guard, of which Murat[57] was a member; the successive ministries of Roland[58], Dumouriez, Duport du Tertre[59]; the little conspiracies of the Court and the great popular risings filled me only with weariness and contempt. I heard much talk of Madame Roland, whom I never saw: her Memoirs show that she possessed an extraordinary strength of mind. She was said to be very agreeable: it remains to be known whether she was sufficiently so to make at all tolerable the cynicism of her unnatural virtues. Certainly the woman who, at the foot of the guillotine, asked for pen and ink to describe the last moments of her journey, to write down the discoveries she had made in the course of her progress from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution, that woman displayed an absorption in futurity, a contempt for life, of which there are few examples. Madame Roland possessed character rather than genius: the first can give the second, the second cannot give the first.
On the 19th of June, I went to the Vale of Montmorency to visit the Hermitage of J. J. Rousseau: not that I delighted in the memories of Madame d'Épinay[60] and of that depraved and artificial society; but I wished to take leave of the solitude of a man whose morals were antipathetic to mine, although he himself was endowed with a talent whose accents stirred my youth. On the next day, the 20th of June, I was still at the Hermitage, and there met two men walking, like myself, in that deserted spot during the fatal day of the monarchy, indifferent as they were or might be, thought I, to the affairs of this world: one was M. Maret[61], of the Empire, the other M. Barère[62], of the Republic. The amiable Barère had come, far from the uproar, in his sentimental, philosophical way, to whisper soft revolutionary nothings to the shade of Julie. The troubadour of the guillotine, on whose report the Convention decreed that the Terror was the order of the day, escaped the same Terror by hiding in the head-basket; from the bottom of the bloody trough, beneath the scaffold, he was heard only to croak the word, "Death!" Barère belonged to the species of tigers which Oppian represents as born of the wind's light breath: velocis Zephyri proles.
Ginguené, Chamfort, my old friends among the men of letters, were delighted with the 20th of June. La Harpe, continuing his lectures at the Lycée, shouted in a stentorian voice:
"Fools! To all the representations of the people you answered, 'Bayonets! Bayonets!' Well, you have them now, your bayonets!"
Although my travels in America had made a less insignificant personage of me, I was unable to rise to so great a height of principle and eloquence. Fontanes was in danger through his former connection with the Société Monarchique. My brother was a member of a club of enragés. The Prussians were marching by virtue of a convention between the Cabinets of Vienna and Berlin; a rather fierce engagement had already taken place between the French and Austrians near Mons. It was more than time for me to take a decision.
My brother and I emigrate.
My brother and I procured false passports for Lille: we were two wine-merchants and national guards of Paris, wearing the uniform and proposing to tender for the army supplies. My brother's valet, Louis Poullain, known as Saint-Louis, travelled under his own name; he came from Lamballe, in Lower Brittany, but was going to see his family in Flanders. The day of our emigration was settled for the 15th of July, the day after the second Federation. We spent the 14th in the Tivoli garden, with the Rosanbo family, my sisters and my wife. Tivoli belonged to M. Boutin[63], whose daughter had married M. de Malesherbes[64]. Towards the end of the day we saw a good many federates wandering about after disbanding; on their hats was written in chalk, "Pétion or death!" Tivoli, the starting-point of my exile, was to become a centre of amusements and fêtes. Our relations took leave of us without sadness; they were persuaded that we were going on a pleasure-trip. My recovered fifteen hundred francs seemed a treasure sufficient to bring me back in triumph to Paris.