December 18th.
I met with an emigrant this day at the Palais Royal who was acquainted with my family in London. It was the Vicomte de B*****ye.[58] He had resided some time in England and also in Switzerland. He is an amiable man, but a most incorrigible Ultra. He displayed at once the ideas that prevail among the Ultras, which must render them eternally at variance with the mass of the French nation. In speaking of the state of France, he said: "Je n'ai jamais cessé et jamais je ne cesserai de regarder comme voleurs tous les acquéreurs des biens des émigrés. Il faudroit, pour le bonheur de la France, qu'elle fût placés dans le même état ou elle était avant la Révolution." He would not listen to my reasons against the possibility of effecting such a plan, even were the plan just and reasonable in itself. I told him that for the emigrants to expect to get back their property was just as absurd as for the descendants of those Saxon families in England, whose ancestors were dispossessed of their estates by William the Conqueror, to think of regaining them, and to call upon the Duke of Northumberland, for instance, as a descendant of a Norman invader, to give up his property as unjustly acquired by his progenitors. We did not hold long converse after this; his ideas and mine diverged too much from each other.
The English are very much out of favour with the emigrants, as well on account of the stripping of the Louvre as on account of not having shot all the libéraux. They had the folly to believe that the Allied troops would merely make war for the emigrants' interests, and after having put to death a considerable quantity of those who should be designated as rebels and Jacobins by them (the emigrants), would replace France in the exact position she was in 1789, and then depart.
Poor Marshall Ney's fate is decided. He was sentenced to death, and the sentence was carried into execution not on the Place de Grenelle as was given out, but in the gardens of Luxemburgh at a very early hour. He met his fate with great firmness and composure. I leave Paris to-morrow for London.
[47] Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, VI, 20, 7.
[48] Virgil, Aen., VI, 620 (temnere divos).—ED.
[49] Louis Wirion (1764-1810), an officer of gendarmerie, commander-general of the place de Verdun since 1804, was accused in 1808 of having extorted money from certain English prisoners quartered in Verdun (Estwick, Morshead, Garland, etc.). Wirion shot himself before the end of the long proceedings, which do not seem to have established his guilt, but had reduced him to misery and despair.—ED.
[50] Richard Brinsley Sheridan's (1751-1816) Pizarro, produced at Drury
Lane in 1799.—ED.
[51] Three brothers Zadera, all born in Warsaw, served in the Imperial
army.—ED.
[52] Ariosto, Orlando Furioso III, 2, i.—ED.