[283] This book was written in Paris, in 1837 and 1838, and revised in June 1847—T.
[284] Ferdinand Philippe Louis Charles Henri Duc d'Orléans (1810-1842) married, on the 30th of May 1837, the Princess Helen of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was killed, on the 13th of July, at Neuilly, by leaping from his carriage, of which the horses had run away. His widow, who was and remained a Lutheran, died in 1858.—T.
[285] Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux (1767-1794), a noted Girondin orator and politician, belonged, like most of the participants in the Revolution of 1789, to the middle-classes, and was a lawyer by profession. He led the Marseillaise section in the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August 1792. He was sent, as a Girondin deputy, to the Convention, where he appears to have been noted for the beauty of his person no less than for his eloquence, and soon went to loggerheads with Marat and Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI., he voted for the appeal to the nation. He was proscribed, on the 31st of May 1793, as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic: he sought shelter in Calvados and took ship at Quimper for Bordeaux. Hardly had he arrived there when he was arrested and well and duly guillotined, on the 25th of July 1794 and in the twenty-eighth year of his age. Carlyle says, wrongly, I believe, that he shot himself to escape arrest.—T.
[286] Antoine Saint-Just (1767-1794) has been only once mentioned in the Memoirs (Cf. Vol. III., p. 196). He was born a few months after Barbaroux, and died three days later. This "black-haired, mild-toned youth," to quote Carlyle, was one of the most violent organizers of the Terror. He became President of the Convention in February 1794 and took charge of the reports against his colleagues Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others, who were promptly sent to the scaffold. Almost alone he defended Robespierre, was eventually involved in the same condemnation, and was guillotined with him on the 28th of July. Saint-Just cultivated the Muse: at the early age of twenty, he published Organt, a licentious poem in twenty cantos (1789). He also left the Esprit de la Révolution (1791) and a number of Reports and Opinions delivered in the Convention.—T.
[287] Cf., in Chateaubriand's preface to his Études historiques, the table of the victims of the Terror, taken from the six volumes of Prudhomme, the Republican. There were 18,923 men not of noble birth, of different conditions; 2,231 wives of labourers or artisans; and 2,000 children guillotined, drowned and shot. In the Vendée, 15,000 women were killed, and almost all of these were peasant-women. Terrible as they are, these figures are very far below the reality.—B.
[288] Thiers was Premier and Foreign Minister from the 22nd of February to the 25th of August 1836 and, for the second time, from the 1st of March to the 28th of October 1840.—T.
[289] This is in allusion to an episode which occurred in 1834, of which the country-house of a ministerial deputy was the scene and M. Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, the hero. Dr. Bonnet de Malherbe, in his Notes inédites sur M. Thiers (1888, p. 73) refers to it in the following words:
"One episode especially, the feast of Grand-Vaux, at the château of the Comte Vigier, which the newspapers called the 'Orgy of Grand-Vaux,' made a great stir at the time. M. Thiers, if the chroniclers of the time are to be credited, played a part in it which went far beyond the 'pranks' of the Marseilles school-boy, and 'showed himself' in a 'posture' which was not exactly that of which another minister spoke, with some emphasis, half a century later. The Quotidienne published a very spicy article in this connection, nor was the Charivari sparing in caricatures."—B.
[290] Tiberius Claudius Atticus Herodes (circa 104—circa 180), a Greek rhetorician celebrated for his munificence. He erected many public works at his own expense and restored several decayed towns in various parts of Greece.—T.