[671] Pierre Michel Hennin (1728-1807) was Secretary of Embassy in Poland in 1759, Resident at Warsaw in 1763, Resident at Geneva in 1765, and in 1779 became First Clerk at the Foreign Office, a post in which he did eminent service until 1792, when he was dismissed by General Dumouriez. He was obliged to sell his collections, and took to "scribbling fat novels" for a livelihood, working at learning languages and at his writing until his death, on the 5th of July 1807, at the age of nearly eighty.—B.
[672] Claude Antoine de Bésiade, Duc d'Avaray (1740-1829), brother to the Comte d'Avaray, Louis XVIII.'s companion in exile and chief agent. D'Avaray was imprisoned during the Terror, recovered his liberty on the 9 Thermidor, and emigrated, returning to France in 1814. Louis XVIII. raised him to the peerage in 1815, created him a duke in 1817, and made him his First Chamberlain in 1820.—B.
[673] Cinq jours à Clermont (Auvergne) 2, 3, 4, 5 et 6 août 1805 and Le Mont-Blanc, paysages de montagnes, fin d'août 1805. They appear in Vol. VI. of the complete works.—B.
[674] Honoré d'Urfé (1567-1625), after a life spent in war and diplomacy, wrote the famous pastoral romance of the Astrée, in which he depicted the happiness of the shepherds of the Lignon. The singular book was received with the greatest favour, and gave rise to a whole school of bucolic novelists. D'Urfé died before completing his work, and his secretary, Baro, finished it from the author's manuscripts or his own imagination.—T.
[675] Claude Ignace Brugière de Barante (1745-1814). Napoleon dismissed him because of the indulgence shown by him to Madame de Staël, and he died at the moment when the return of the Bourbons appeared to promise him a just reparation.—B.
[676] Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste Comte de Forbin (1779-1841), a successful writer and painter, and a member of the Academy of Fine Arts. Under the Restoration he became Director of the Museums.—T.
[677] Mathurin Régnier (1573-1613), the first of the French satiric poets. He received the tonsure at the age of thirteen, obtained a rich canonry before he was thirty, and died at forty of his pleasures and excesses.—T.
[678] Oppian, Cynegetica, II. 348.—B.
[679] Jeanne Françoise Thévenin (1763-1841), known as Sophie Devienne, acted at the Comédie Française from 1785 to 1813, and was one of the best "waiting-maids" at that classic theatre.—B.
[680] St. Pothin (87-177), one of the first apostles to the Gauls, became Bishop of Lyons, where he suffered martyrdom at the age of nearly ninety years. He is honoured on the 2nd of June.—T.