My mother never believed that it was the correct one.
Although she had an instinctive feeling of respect for System, she
always said to me: "I am sure that he was one of the Terrorists. I
sometimes fancy that I remember seeing him in 1793. Besides, he has
all the ways and ideas of M----, who terrorised Lannion and kept the
guillotine in constant play there during the time that Robespierre
had the upper hand." Fifteen or twenty years ago, I read the following
paragraph in a newspaper:
"There died yesterday, almost suddenly, in an unfrequented street
of the Faubourg St. Jacques, an old man whose way of living was a
constant source of gossip in the neighbourhood. He was respected in
the parish as a model of charity and kindness, but he was careful
to avoid any allusion to his past. A few works, such as Volney's
_Catechism_, and odd volumes of Rousseau, were scattered about the
table. All his property consisted of a trunk, which, when opened by
the Commissary of Police, was found to contain only a few clothes and
a faded bouquet carefully wrapped up in a piece of paper on which was
written: 'Bouquet which I wore at the festival of the Supreme Being,
20 Prairial, year II.'"
This explained the whole thing to me. I remembered how the few
disciples of the Jacobite School whom I had known were ardently
attached to the recollections of 1793-94 and incapable of dwelling
upon anything else. The twelvemonths' dream was so vivid that those
who had experienced it could not come back to real life.
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