daggers opened with a spring and shot | tainly a premature report) of the "odious forth a two-edged blade ending en langue test." And, with only a jarring note where de vipère. Concerning the famous "O the key of religious bitterness is struck by Richard, O mon roi!" banquet, where denouncing some sham miracle, said to be Marie-Antoinette appeared among the offi- wrought by or for prêtres réfractoires, the cers, and drew forth demonstrations of volume closes with a beautiful vision of loyalty, he uses the stock newspaper all Europe, led by France, disbanding its phrases of "an indecent orgie," "a delib- armies, and sitting every man under his erate insult to the majesty of the nation," own vine or by his own tobacco-plant, to and the equally stock assertions that the read the Declaration of Rights and the next day's insurrection was really a very Scriptures. mild affair, and that the cry, "We bring To this same period belongs a correthe baker, baker's wife, and little baker's spondence with the English Unitarian boy," which the populace shouted in the minister, Dr. Price, advocating an internaears of king, queen, and dauphin, was tional union, political and religious, and meant in all loyalty. He had himself two printed "Adresses aux Anglais " on known a respectable family which was the same subject, which were duly sent surnamed Boulanger because it gave much over, and read and admired by Rabaut's bread to the people. "It is their way of English Dissenting friends, but their inpraising." Still, at the present day, we fluence probably went no further. More may note that Rabaut sums up his plan of practically important was the publication a constitution in three words, “Liberté, of the "Précis de la Révolution," Egalité, Propriété," which shows that he little duodecimo with a frontispiece where was no socialist; and that, though he had Peace and Plenty trample on the emblems been too ready to excuse the attacks on of superstition in the foreground, while a châteaux as "part of the universal move-winged and torch-bearing Liberty hovers ment against tyranny," he distinctly condemns the "furious populace," who murdered Foulon, and the "savage who tears out the heart of M. Berthier."

On the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Rabaut settled down with his wife in the Rue de l'Echelle Saint Honoré,* to report for the Moniteur the debates of the new Legislative Assembly, and to edit the Feuille Villageoise in conjunction with the ex-Abbé Cerutti. This journal merits attention as the prototype of all "Cheap Repositories "and" Useful Knowledge Series." It begins by inviting the curé to read it aloud in church every Sunday, and in simple language it explains the nature of assignats, the function of a juge de paix, and the right way of grow ing tobacco. An imaginary M. Etienne Bonnetête is introduced to put forth correct views on taxation; an anxious peasant is assured that he will not be eternally lost for having replaced his SS. Peter and Paul by pictures of Voltaire and Rousseau; and equal joy is displayed at the marriage of nuns or at their good works in the hospitals. Favorable comments, too, are made on some rather doubtful pieces of news from England. the hanging of a London carter for tearing out a horse's tongue,† and the abolition (cer

Sir R. Musgrave (Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland, vol. I., p. 129) asserts that during this interval Rabaut was sent over to Dublin, with offers of help to the United Irishmen; but Madden contests this. (United Irishmen, vol. II., ch. iv., p. 43.)

Unluckily, English books tell us that this man went

a fat

in mid-air above. But as the year went on, Rabaut found that in real life Peace and Plenty were retreating further and further, and that the Liberty who presided over the scene was not the genuine article. A new set of revolutionists had sprung up, with whom he had nothing in common. They know not true liberty,' he said; "we have more to dread from them than from the emigrants." The Revolution was outstripping him, and yet he must follow it. A Protestant could not draw back. Counter-revolution meant the restoration of a Church smarting under recent injuries. Royalists and clericals would be sure to point out how ill the Protestants had requited the old régime for its concessions to them, and how little claim they had for a continuance even of toleration. Barnave, the suppressor of the monastic orders, was a Protestant; Marat, indeed, was one by birth; and in the main, Protestants had sided with the Revolution, and the Revolution with them. Rabaut could not think his work had been all in vain when he saw the municipality of Paris solemnly assisting at the Protestant service of thanksgiving for the Constitution, or when he pictured his Nîmes congregation, now installed in a ci-divant Church of the Dominicans. His father,

free, because there was no law under which he could be punished.

See Mrs. Barbauld's letter, July 13, 1791, in Clayden's Early Life of Samuel Rogers (1887), ch. xii., p. 204.

he

ine all children aged ten and fifteen, the juniors in the Declaration of Rights and the hymnes civils, the seniors in the catechisms of the Constitution and of the rights of nations, to be hereafter drawn up by the Corps Législatif. In this same National Temple, or in the churches while this was building, the municipal officers were to read to the citizens every Sunday the Declaration of Rights and a moral lesson out of books approved by the Corps Législatif, and the citizens were to sing hymns to the Patrie, to fraternity, and to all the civil virtues, these hymns being first approved by the Corps Législatif. Here we have Church and State, and no doubt about it.

though infirm, and pensioned off, had taken his part in the dedication. "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," he read, after giving the blessing, "for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.' When the elections for the Convention began, Rabaut (on his reputation alone, so says Boissy d'Anglas, but Camille Desmoulins insinuates that there was some jobbery on the part of Roland) found himself invited to sit for a department, the Aube, where he knew nobody, and where there was not a single Protestant. Immediately he wrote to the Assembly that he always had hated and would hate monarchy, and then took his seat, this time avowedly as "ministre évangélique" had been "homme de lettres " in the first But all lesser matters were swallowed Assembly. There were, in all, seven min-up in the great question whether the king istres in the Convention, ranging from should or should not be brought to trial Lasource, who sang hymns with his fellow- before the Convention, and against this captive before execution, down to Jullien, Rabaut set himself far too strongly for who abjured Christianity on the altar of prudence. His most celebrated speech Reason. Another "displayed such calm and that which ruined him was made and such courage in the great naval battle in vain endeavor to avert the trial, or at against Lord Howe!" This is the French least to have it conducted with legal forms, account; we English know him as "Poor by a regularly appointed tribunal. John," who "fled full soon on the first of June." Finally, there was Rabaut's brother, Jacques-Antoine, called Pommier, unwisely quitting his church and hospital at Montpellier, and his experiments on la picote (local name for sheep, goat, and cow pox).*

As an

In the new Convention Rabaut, now attached to the Girondin or Moderate party, took as his line the maintenance of the Assembly's rights, in opposition to the growing power of the commune. interlude, he proposed a scheme of national education Cretan," he called it, having some misty idea that it resembled the laws of Minos. In every canton a Senate of men and women past sixty was to be empowered to censure all children guilty of cowardice, cruelty, or disobedience, all parents over-indulgent or neg lectful of their children; and to give public éloges to the contrary virtues. The children's dress from birth to adolescence was to be designed by the Corps Législatif. On appointed Sundays there should be held in the National Temple the Fête des Enfans and the Fête des Adolescens, when the municipal officers were to exam

In 1812 James Ireland (misnamed Sir Henry Ireland in the Biographie universelle), a Bristol merchant, and a great light of Methodism, certified that as early as 1784 M. Rabaut-Pommier had informed Dr. Pugh, friend of Jenner, of a possible substitute for inocula tion. By that time, however, Jenner had perfected the invention, and Rabaut-Pommier put in his claim too

late.

*

You say that it is no new thing for you to pronounce judgments; I reply that is just what I complain of. I, for one, am sick of my share of despotism, I am fatigued, harassed, tormented by the tyranny in which I take part, and I sigh for the moment when a national tribunal shall relieve me of the form and countenance of a tyrant. [Murmurs.] History blames the English, not that they judged their King, but that the Commons, [Redoubled secretly pushed by Cromwell, murmurs] had usurped the right of judging, that they set at nought_the_legal forms, that they declared themselves exponents of the will of a people whom they had never consulted. And this very peoplethis people of London, which was said to have so pressed for the death of the King-was the first to curse his judges and to bow before The city of London feasted his successor. the restored Charles II., the people displayed riotous joy, and crowded round the scaffolds of those very judges, sacrificed by Charles to the shade of his father. People of Paris, Parliament of France, have you understood me?

"Louis dead will be more dangerous than Louis living," he urged for the last time, after giving his vote for the mild sentence of "Detention during the war and banishment afterwards." "I would fain see my countrymen not savage tigers, but disdainful lions." He had tried to enlist his friends on the side of mercy, but

Every one knew that the Cromwell pointed at was Robespierre.

999

with small success, it would appear, since | prepared with great skill a certain varhe could not persuade his own brother to nish of moderation with which to overlay anything more decided than "Death, with his verdigris. With three mouths, the respite -a miserable subterfuge. Out Moniteur, Mercure, and Chronique, this of seven pastors four were regicides, and Brissotin Cerberus barked daily at the but one voted with Rabaut; this, we record Mountain. Sick of his share of Royal it to his honor, was Bernard Saint-Afrique, ty,' misquotes Camille, like all false of whom history tells little more than that witnesses," he would gladly have resigned he lived to be the father-in-law of one peer his quota to Capet.' But the crowning of France, and the stepfather of another. sin which is charged upon poor Rabaut is Rabaut was elected president of the making grimaces with set purpose to put Convention for the week following the Robespierre out of countenance during king's execution, and he did his best to one of his best speeches. "This one trait disprove the charge already brought lays bare the soul of this Rabaut - this against him of royalism. "Brave enemy priest, this reptile, this slave, this traitor, of kings," he said to the Dutchman who this tartuffe this Brissotin, in short; came to thank France for declaring war and I move that he shall not be guillotined, on his country, "gladly will we shed our but that when the good time comes that blood with yours for the cause of Liberty men shall ask what was a Brissotin, he and Equality." He duly embraced and shall be stuffed, and preserved as a perfect adopted in the name of the nation the specimen in the Cabinet of Natural Hischild of Lepelletier, the murdered regi- tory." cide, and he addressed to her a pretty Rabaut's fall dates actually from May speech about "the immortal name of her 18, 1793, the day that the Girondin Guadet father, the martyr of Liberty." But his uttered his conviction that the commune fortunes were now past redeeming. His of Paris was plotting to enact something efforts to save the king had cost him his of the nature of "Pride's Purge" on the place on the Moniteur. A notice, three Convention, and the Convention thereupon times repeated (Moniteur of March 10-12, elected a "Council of Twelve " to keep a 1793), informed the world that for nearly watch on the commune, and report on four months "(ie., since the time of the suspicious proceedings. The ablest men king's trial), the citizen Rabaut has ceased of the Gironde were chosen, among them to be on our staff;" and it is significant Rabaut Saint-Etienne; and the Council that from that same time the Moniteur thus formed sat day and night in the king's began to abridge or omit the Girondins' kitchen, examining witnesses, turning over speeches. The "Tragedy of the Giron- the municipal registers, inviting every dins " was now beginning, and Rabaut good citizen to reveal what he might know had to play his part as one of the fated of treason, and issuing mandates of arrest. victims. It was remembered that he had How it tried conclusions with Hébert, been the protégé of Lafayette Lafayette substitute of the procureur of the comwas now outlawed and a fugitive that mune and editor of the notorious journal he was friendly with the equally heretical Père Duchesne, how it got the worst of it, Bailly, and (even this is gravely noted and how the "sections" of Paris rose up down in Robespierre's papers) that in old against the Girondins, may be read in the days at Nîmes he had got up a subscrip- Moniteur, or, more briefly and more vivtion for a book by one Ronsin, who had idly, in Carlyle. After that stormy Sunlately come out with a drama of Fayettist day (May 26) when section after section tendencies. Jacobin orators, once so of Paris came shrieking for Hébert and ready to play off Protestant against Cath- against the "Duodecemvirs," Rabaut, sitolic now contemptuously hinted that one ting late into the small hours with Garat kind of priest was as bad as another. (minister of the interior), told him that And the alarms of Rabaut and all his he himself had done all he could to disparty were justified by the appearance suade the Council from arresting Hébert, of a pamphlet by Camille Desmoulins a step for which he knew that their "Hommes d'Etat demasqués -attack-strength was insufficient. ing the Girondins by name, and "the We quote Rabaut's own description of priest Rabaut in particular as a mere the ensuing week of chaos: "Represencreature of Roland's ; "Roland distributed deputies' medals as the kings did cardinals' hats." "And Rabaut was worth his price," adds the venomous pamphleteer. Charged to poison public opinion, he

66

A name invented by Marat for the Girondins. Brissot, "who lived like Aristides and died like Algernon Sidney," was one of the leaders of the Girondin party in the Convention, and the editor of their principal journals.

that we must set it down as one of Lamartine's little embellishments. The testimony of Louvet, an eye-witness, points rather the other way, for he avers that when the little band of Girondins, on their way to the Convention, found an unpleasant looking crowd gathering about them, Rabaut plainly showed his uneasiness. More than once, as they walked along, he repeated "Illa suprema dies!"*

tatives of the people have not blushed to | drown with their voices the voice of our reporters, packed galleries have hooted them down, and twice has this struggle of triumphant vice with persecuted virtue lasted six whole hours, a spectacle unparalleled by any civilized nation." On the evening of Monday the 27th, after the first attempt to read the report of the twelve had been howled down, we have a glimpse of Rabaut in the committee-room, looking tired to death, supping broth," and pursued even there by the mayor of of three hours, he strove to make his Paris and two or three Montagnards, all blaming him for the disturbances. Danton and Marat were foremost in raging against the hapless Twelve. Robespierre took no part, being ill. He had the knack, invaluable to politicians, of falling ill at critical moments.

66

The next day, Rabaut was put on to make a second attempt to read the obnoxious report, in which the commune's plots were unveiled, and which the commune and its allies, the Montagnards, were determined should not be read. Rabaut, with a great bundle of papers, was at it for full two hours, but all the words he is recorded to have got out are: "The Council cannot... Will you, or will you not, have the Report? In the name of the public safety!. Hear the Report!" and finally, in despair, "I give in my resignation from the Council!" But the concession came too late to save him. Hébert, who had been "provisionally released," was at that moment receiving the embraces and the oak-garlands of his colleagues, and petitions were drawing up for the arrest of all the Twelve, and especially of the "priest Rabaut, the editor of four poisonous journals, the legislator four times subsidized, the defender of the traitor Lafayette."

Friday, May 31, dawned, the day on which everybody understood the purgation pridienne (Pride's Purge) of the Convention was to be effected. Rabaut, with five of his colleagues, had spent the night, two in a bed, in a room in an obscure faubourg with doors barred and pistols and swords in readiness. At 3 A.M. they were roused by the tocsin from Notre-Dame and from Saint-Eustache calling all Paris to the attack. We should like to believe the story that Rabaut, once more acting in his old capacity as pastor, knelt and prayed alond for France and for the party of law and order, and by his Christian confidence kept up the hearts of his more sceptical companions; but for want of contemporary evidence, we fear

It was Rabaut's last appearance in the Convention. Once again, for the space

voice heard against a storm of howls and yells; he was interrupted at every word, he was given the lie direct, he was shrieked at as "Priest!" "Constitutionalist!" and other names which are best not repeated; he was literally spat upon. "The Council demands to justify itself," he gasped forth, audibly enough for the words to be reported, "and you refuse to hear it!... You accuse it because you know that it could accuse you! Then, in the midst of "indescribable tumult," a kindly door-keeper helped him to slip out; and the rest of the Girondins seem to have followed his example.

Next day, Saturday, we find Rabaut and some twenty colleagues dining with the deputy Meillan, who gave them all the chairs in his house to sleep upon, and on the morrow, June 2- the fatal Sundaywent to and fro, keeping them informed how matters were going in the Convention. They were debating whether again to try their luck there, when in rushed Rabaut's brother, Pommier, as if beside himself. "There is no more Convention!" he cried. They are breaking into the hall! they are laying hands on the deputies! Sauve qui peut! Sauve qui peut!" The Girondins embraced each other, and did as he advised.

Rabaut Saint-Etienne's first thought was for their papers, and he and Bergoing burried at once to the latter's lodgings, in the Rue J. J. Rousseau, where each took a copy of that unlucky report. Bergoing escaped with his copy to Caen, and there got it printed. As for Rabaut, he took shelter first at the house of the English Protestant, Helen Maria Williams, and there gave himself up to despair, less for the almost certain loss of his own life than for that of his country's liberty. His

of June 2, which was more truly the suprema dies, but Carlyle transfers this exclamation to the morning there can be no doubt that the right date is May 31. (Louvet, Mémoires, p. 89, the passage which Carlyle himself cites). It is one of the few occasions that Louvet gives a precise date, and he adds, moreover, that it was the last time he saw Rabaut Saint-Etienne.

name appeared in the "List of Deputies | made his way back to Paris, there to find who could not be placed under arrest, not himself in worse plight than ever-outbeing in their domicile; "* and an address lawed, declared a traitor to his country, from his own constituents of Arcis-sur- and with Albitte and Saint-Just demandAube (or from those who professed to ing vengeance on him as an "incendiary speak for them) demanded vengeance on writer." Robespierre laid it down, with the fugitives, and "above all, on our own special application to Rabaut, that "the deputy, the tartuffe Rabaut." But of the liberty of the press must not be allowed tartuffe himself all trace was lost, till, in to jeopard public liberty;" and Garat, a week or two, there appeared at Nîmes a who owed to Rabaut his place in the min"Précis hastily traced by the citizen istry, and says in his memoirs, "We were Rabaut Saint-Étienne, at the moment very intimate, I liked him personally, and when a decree wrested from the Conven- I knew that he loved truth," now, as editor tion drove him to seek shelter from the of the Moniteur, wrote his well-known bloody and liberticidal plots of which he letter to Robespierre:* "I am hard at had acquired only too good certitude." In work to correct the effect of a few debates this, to the wrath of the Mountain, all the touched up by Rabaut Saint-Etienne. This provinces could read what Paris was for- Rabaut had been on our staff only three bidden to hear. "Men say the Council weeks [three years would have been nearer had exceeded its powers." Rabaut con- the truth]. We have got rid of him." cluded, "Would to God it had, for in that One friend alone, a Catholic from Nîmes, case it would have saved the republic, Etienne Peyssac, or De Peyssac, clerk in and the National Convention would not the Bureau des Subsistances, remember. be enslaved to the commune of Paris." ing old obligations to Rabaut père, received the persecuted man and his brother Pommier into his house in the Faubourg Poissonnière (now Arrondissement de l'Opéra). Here the brothers, with their own hands, walled off the end of their host's bedroom for a secret chamber, employing a skilled carpenter to make the door, which was concealed by a bookcase placed against it, and here they lay hidden for over four months, letting their beards grow, and employing themselves in writing historical letters in continuation of the Précis de la Révolution."

Rabaut had found a refuge in the house of a Nîmes Protestant in the suburbs of Versailles, and, probably by the instrumentality of his brother, he got his manuscript conveyed to the press. A few days later he himself, and probably his wife with him, arrived at Nîmes. There he hoped to find shelter and support, for, on the first news of the insurrection of June 2, Nîmes had broken off all connection with the capital, had closed its branch Jacobin club, and had joined the southern federation of "Seventy-three respectable" cities" against Paris. There was assem- Meanwhile, the trial of the Girondins bling of sections, there were oaths of proceeded, absent and present being inunion " soon to be cemented on the banks dicted together, on charges of raising the of the Seine;" Rabaut Saint-Etienne was standard of revolt at Nîmes and elsegiven an enthusiastic reception in the new where, of Orleanism, royalism-in evitheatre, and twelve hundred men were dence of which was cited Rabaut's speech despatched to join the confederate forces against bringing Louis XVI. to trial. which were to march upon Paris. But Rabaut was more particularly accused Albitte, agent of the Convention, sent four of having what would now be called thousand men to intercept them at Pont "cooked" the Moniteur, misrepresenting Saint-Esprit, and the Nîmois retreated and disfiguring the speeches of the "pawithout firing a shot. Next day the Sec-triots." The accused were of course all tional Assembly of Nîmes retracted all its measures, and declared itself no longer "in a state of resistance to oppression." Rabaut's supporters fled to Switzerland; Rabaut himself,

pursue,

found guilty, and the twenty-one who were actually in the hands of the Revolutionary Tribunal were duly sent to the guillotine.

All through November, while the guillotine was hard at work, shearing off Philippe Egalité's and Madame Roland's

As a hare, whom hounds and horns Pants to the place from whence at first he flew, It is to be hoped that this point will be reconsidered in the revisedFrance protestante," now appearing.

"Placed under arrest, he eluded the vigilance of his guard." (Haag, La France protestante, article Rabaut.) This can hardly be correct; we have not only this list in the Moniteur, and H. M. Williams's statement, but also Rabaut's own testimony in his letter to Nîmes: "I have not obeyed the decree of arrest."

Papiers trouvés chez Robespierre, II. 129. The letter is signed only G****, and headed "Rédacteur de l'article Convention Nationale' du Moniteur," but there can be no doubt as to the author. The description fits Garat, and, moreover, the baseness and servility are quite in accordance with his character.