THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Ex Libris [ C. K. OGDEN c. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. NASSAU W. SENIOR LONDON: LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, ROBERTS, & GREEN. 1863. The right of translation is reserved. CTVOt. PREFACE. volume contains the biographical papers -*- which I have published during a period of more than twenty years. I have arranged them, not ac- cording to their dates, but to their subjects. The first part, containing the lives of M. Berryer the elder, and M. Tronson du Coudray, relates to the history of France from the end of the reign of Louis XV. to the beginning of that of Louis Philippe. The second part, taken from Lord Campbell's Chief Justices and from German authorities, consists of sketches of remarkable judges and of remarkable criminals. The third part contains miscellaneous sketches. I have entitled the work Biographical Sketches be- cause that title designates its contents. They are not portraits. They do not attempt to give complete, or even detailed delineations of the persons who are viii PREFACE. their subjects. All that I proposed to myself in writing them was to describe some of the most striking features of some remarkable men and of some remarkable states of society. With few ex- ceptions, my subjects have been either lawyers or persons with whom lawyers have had to deal. I believe that nothing throws so much light on the state of society at any given time as what was then passing in its courts of law. With the exception of M. de Tocqueville's immortal book, I know of no writings which describe the state of France before and during the Revolution more vividly than the anecdotes told by Berry er and Tronson du Coudray. CONTENTS, PAGE BEKKYER . . . ^ . 1 Remarks on Autobiographies . . . . .1 Changes in Prance during Berryer's Life . . .5 Story of M. duB 6 Story of Mad. du Pestre de Seneffe . . . .12 Evening after the Taking of the Bastile . . .17 Coffinhal 19 Reign of Terror . . . . . . 20 Loi des Suspects . . . . .21 Revolutionary Tribunal . . . . . .21 Madlle. du Faudoas . . . . . .25 The Messieurs Magon . . . . . .28 Fate of the Municipality of Sedan . . . .32 Thibaudeau's Picture of the Convention . . .34 Visit from Bourdon de I'Oifie . . . . .35 Character of Robespierre . . . . .37 Eighth Thennidor . . . . . * 40 Ninth Thermidor . . . . .41 Constitution of 1795 (An. III.) . . . . .49 Eighteenth Fructidor . . . . . .51 Trial of Chauffeurs . . . . . .53 French Maritime Law under the Directory . . .56 Consulate . 58 X CONTENTS. BERRYER continued. PAGE French Maritime Law under the Consulate . . .61 Prosecution of the Mayor of Antwerp . . . .65 Marshal Key's Treason . ... , . .69 His Trial ..76 Lord Holland's Letter . . . . . .78 Kemarks on Key's Execution . . . . .85 Berryer's Political Philosophy . . . . . 90 TRONSON DU COUDRAY 94 His Early History . . . . .94 Difference between Criminal Procedure by Enquiry and by Accusation . . . . . . .95 Cazeaux and the false Count Solar : . . .97 M. and Mad. de Soyecourt '; . . ' . . 108 The Sieur Thibault and M. Froudiere . . . .110 The Sieur Reveillon . . - . . . .121 Constitution of 1795 (An. III.) compared to that of 1848 . 127 State of Parties in 1796 . . . . .129 Tronson du Coudray's Speeches against the Revolutionary Laws of the 9th Floreal and the 3rd Brumaire . . .134 Partial Renewal of the Assembly . . . .137 Partial Renewal of the Directory . . . .137 Contest between the Assembly and the Directory . .138 Preparations by the Directory for a coup d'etat . .141 Preparations by the Assembly for resistance . . .144 Tronson du Coudray's Report of the 3rd Fructidor . . 144 Coup d'etat of the 18th Fructidor . . . .149 Transportation of Tronson du Coudray to Cayenne . . 149 His Death ....... 152 Comparison of the coup d'etat of the 18th Fructidor to that of the 2nd December, 1851 . . . . .153 Story of a Young Author transported to Cayenne in 1851 . 155 Atrocities which followed the 2nd December . . .157 Character of the Parisian Mob 158 CONTENTS. XI LORD CAMPBELL'S CHIEF JUSTICES PAGE Lord Campbell's posthumous Fame will depend on his Bio- graphies . . . .... . 162 Lord Coke . . . . ' . " . . 163 Compared to Bacon . . . . . 165 His Merits as a Politician ..... 168 His Defeats as a Lawyer ..... 173 Sir Randolph Crewe . . . . .180 Chief Justice Heath . . . . . .186 Trial of Love . . . . . .189 Sir Matthew Hale . . . . .' .192 Chief Justice Scroggs . . . . .195 Chief Justice Pemberton . . . .196 Chief Justice Holt . . . . . .201 English and Foreign Modes of selecting Judges . . 202 Holt's Examination of Prisoners . . . . 207 Defence of it . . . . . .209 Lord Mansfield . . . . . . . . 213 His Services to Commercial Law . . . .217 The Rule in Shelley's Case, and Pen-in and Blake . .218 Rex v. Woodfall and the Independence of Juries . . 223 FEUERBACH ' . . ' r . . . .228 English Criminal Procedure . . . ; .231 Trial of Lord Cardigan . '. . . . .234 Its Absurdity accounted for ' .. . . . . 234 Penal Code of Bavaria '' . . . . . . 235 Enforcement of Confession ' . . ... . 238 Examination of Prisoner ..... 241 Classification of Witnesses ..... 244 Value of Circumstantial Evidence ' . . " . . 246 Value of Confession ' . . . ' . . . 247 Defence . . . . . . ' . . 249 Early History of Riembauer ..... 251 Depositions against him ..... 256 Xii CONTENTS. FEUERBACH continued. PAGE Discovery of the Body of Anna Eiehstaedter . . . 259 His Defence . . . . . . .260 Further Evidence . . . . . .262 Attempts to extort a Confession from him . . . 266 His Confession . . . . ... 270 Remarks on his Sentence ..... 274 Fichtel Gebirge . . . . . .282 Kleinschrot Family . . . . . .286 Disappearance of Kleinschrot ..... 289 Discovery of his Body ...... 292 Story of the Murder . . . . . .298 Convictions and Sentences ..... 304 Comparison with English Procedure .... 307 Criticisms on Feuerbach as a Writer , 310 JOCHIM HINRICH RAMCKE 313 State of his Family . . . . f . 314 Holstein farm-houses . . . . . .314 Appearance of the Widow and the Murdered Child on June 14, 1837 315 Confession of H. Ludiges . . . , .318 Confession of Anna Ludiges . . > . 320 Confession of Ramcke . . . . . ,, * , ^ 323 Defences . . . . . , . . 326 Sentences . . . .,-- . . 328 Publication of Sentences ..... 328 Report by Dr. Jessen on the Sanity of Ramcke . . 330 Preparations for his Execution ..... 331 Respite ........ 332 Enquiry as to state of Ramcke's mind .... 335 Final Sentence . . , . . . . 340 Graba's visit to him . . . . . .341 Comparison of Ramcke's Trial with the English Procedure . 345 CONTENTS. Xlll PAGE CHAELES V. . ., . \ ... 348 Influence of Luther and of Charles V. on the Destinies of the World . .. ,i* Y , ,; , ;: . 349 Materials for the Biography of Charles V. . e . .. , 356 M. Mignet's Character of Charles V. , . .,, . 362 Mr. Stirling's Character of Charles V. . -..;;*;' . 367 Question when his Fanaticism began . ,4.... 4 , . 375 His Eemorse for not having burnt Luther .-,' . , . 379 His refusal to examine into the Doctrines of the Kefonners . 379 What kind of religious error is sinful, or leads to sinfulness . 380 Difference between the Transubstantiation of Charles and the Consubstantiation of Luther . . + * . . 382 Mischievousness of the Conduct of Charles *.:. . . 383 BACON . . . * .384 Character of Archbishop Whately's Works . . . 385 Character of Bacon's Essays ..... 387 Essay on Unity of Keligion ..... 388 Attempt to explain the Existence of Heresies . . 391 Essay on Envy . . ' , ' . .''.' . 393 TheEvilEye . ' .' V ' ;! ;: . ' . '" 393 Essay on Goodness '. " .- . '. . . 397 Archbishop Whately on the Evils of Misdirected Benevolence . 399 Bacon on Youth and Old Age . " , ' . ! . . 402 Aristotle on Youth and Old Age .... 404 Archbishop Whately's Comment ... 406 Improvement in Bacon as he grew older . . . 407 Explained by the Essay on Adversity . ' . . . 410 Bacon fitter for Theoretic than for Active Life . . .411 Our Gain and Loss if he had confined himself to Theoretic Life. 413 LOED KING 415 Ingratitude of Mankind to their Benefactors . . .416 Progress of Eefonn . . . . . .416 XIV CONTENTS. LORD KING continued. PAGE Lord King's Parliamentary Conduct .... 418 Character of the Ministries which he opposed . . . 420 Nature of private Paper Money ..... 423 Conduct of the Bank during the Kestriction of Cash Payments . 425 Opinions on it of the Public ..... 427 Lord King's ' Thoughts on the Effect of the Bank Kestriction' . 429 The Effects of the Introductions of Paper Money . .431 Lord King's Opinions as to the Demand for Currency . . 438 Erroneous Inferences drawn by him from the Price of Bullion . 439 His Eeasons for thinking that in 1803 our Currency was depre- ciated ....... 441 Peculiarities of Bullion ...... 445 Causes which delayed Depreciation . . . .451 Amount of Depreciation in 1811 ..... 454 Mode by which Lord King tested it .... 455 Lord Stanhope's Bill ...... 458 Lord King's Speech on it . . . . . . 458 His Place in Political Science . . 462 COLONEL KING 453 Difficulty of establishing Subordination .... 464 Its Conditions . ' . . . . . . 455 Difference between English and Spanish Colonies after Inde- pendence ....... 466 How to be accounted for ..... 467 Colonel King's entrance into South American Life . . 472 Artigas . . . . 473 The Carreras ..... 473 Defeat of Ramirez by Carrera and Echagua . .481 Colonel King imprisoned in St. Juan . . 435 Description of Peru .... 488 Attack on Tucuman from Salta ... . 491 Campaign in Peru .... 493 Colonel King at Cordova .... 493 Early History of Rosas ... .499 CONTENTS. XV COLONEL KING continued. PAOK Attack on Cordova by Quiroga, an Officer of Eosas . . 503 Quiroga defeated by Paz ..... 503 Paz captured and his Troops defeated by Quiroga . . 508 Colonel King's Marriage ...... 509 His Keturn to the United States . , 510 ANECDOTES OF MONKEYS 511 Sailor Monkeys . . . . . . .511 Stratagem of a Terrier . . . . . .516 BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCHES. BEEKYEE.* [EDINBUEGH EEVTEW, October 1842.] A UTOBIOGrEAPHIES may be divided into two classes : -C* those which interest principally as a history of the mind of the writer, and those which derive their chief value from the events which they relate, or from the persons whom they describe. The first class require the union of several rare conditions. Few men know their own history. Few men know the fluctuating nature of their own character ; how much it has varied from ten years to ten years, or even from year to year ; or what qualities it would exhibit in untried circumstances, or even on the recurrence of similar events. Few men attempt to distinguish between the original predisposi- tions and the accidental influences which, sometimes con- trolling and sometimes aggravating one another, together formed at any particular epoch their character for the time being. Still fewer attempt to estimate the relative * ' Souvenirs de M. Berryer.' 2 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1839. B 2 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. force of each ; and fewer still would succeed in such an attempt. The conversations, the books, the examples, the pains and the pleasures which constitute our educa- tion, exert an influence quite disproportioned to their apparent importance at the time when they occurred. Such influences operate long after their causes have been forgotten. The effects of early education are confounded with natural predisposition, and tendencies implanted by nature are attributed to events which were merely the occasions on which they burst forth. The bulk of men think of their minds as they think of their bodies : they enjoy their strength and regret their weakness; they dwell with pleasure on the points in which they are superior to others, and with pain on those in which they are inferior ; but they cannot account for the one or for the other. They know no more of the causes of their talents or of their morals, than they do of those of their beauty or of their vigour. Again: among the few who have the power to relate their mental history, few indeed have the wish. Most men dread the imputation of egotism or vanity. Most men, too, are aware that a full narrative of their feelings, wishes, and habits, must frequently excite the disappro- bation of a reader. 'Each mind,' says Foster, 'has an interior apartment of its own, into which none but itself and the Divinity can enter. In this retired place the passions mingle and fluctuate in unknown agitations. There, all the fantastic and all the tragic shapes of imagination have a haunt where they can neither be BEERYER. 3 invaded nor descried. There, the surrounding human beings, while quite unconscious of it, are made the subjects of deliberate thought, and many of the designs respecting them revolved in silence. There, projects, convictions, vows, are confusedly scattered, and the records of past life are laid. There, in solitary state, sits conscience, surrounded by her own thunders, which some- times sleep, and sometimes roar, while the world does not know.' * Men are unwilling to reveal, even posthumously, the secret which a whole life has been employed in conceal- ing. Even those who could bear to excite disapprobation are afraid of ridicule, and perfect frankness is certain to be absurd. We do not believe that a really unreserved autobiography has ever been written. Eousseau's appears to approach most nearly to one. Almost every chapter tends to make the writer hateful, contemptible, or ridicu- lous. And yet we now know that even the ' Confessions ' are not to be depended upon. We now know that much has been concealed, and that much has been positively invented. Under these circumstances, autobiographies of the first class are almost as rare as epic poems ; but those of the second class those which amuse or instruct as pictures of the events and of the people among whom the writer lived are among the most abundant products of modern literature. It is remarkable, however, that while soldiers, statesmen, * Foster's ' Essays,' p. 41. B 2 4 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. diplomatists, men of letters, actors, artists, courtiers in short, almost all classes who have something to tell, and who have been accustomed to notoriety have been anxious to relate their own story to the public, one body of active men, though ready enough to talk of others, have been almost uniformly silent as to themselves. With the exception of the beautiful fragments by Sir Samuel Eomilly and they belong rather to the former class of autobiographies, and of the work the title of which we have prefixed to this article we scarcely recollect an instance in which a Lawyer, either British or foreign, has thought fit to be his own biographer.* And yet there are scarcely any persons the result of whose experience would be more instructive ; since there are none who obtain so close or so undisturbed a view of human nature. In courts, in public assemblies, in busi- ness, in society, men are masked, and they generally believe that their success depends on their disguise. But few men think that anything is to be gained by deceiving their lawyer. He is not their rival, but their instrument. His skill is to extricate them from difficulties where they know neither the amount of the danger nor the means of escape. He is to be the tool of their avarice or of their revenge. They generally know that, in order to enable him to execute their purposes, they must sta,nd naked before him ; and even when they are absurd enough to * Since these pages were first printed Sir George Stephen has published, in his 'Adventures of an Attorney in search of Practice,' a most curious and instructive legal autobiography. BERRYER. 5 attempt concealment, his experience almost uniformly detects it. These remarks, however, do not apply to the bar of England or of Scotland. The professional rule which excludes counsel from the real client, except in the pre- sence of the client's solicitor, deprives our barristers of almost all these peculiar opportunities of observation. But on the Continent, not only does no such rule exist, but the counsel appear to perform almost all the duties which with us are confined to the solicitors. We shall find M. Berryer receiving his clients, calling on them, travel- ling with them, obtaining evidence in short, acting almost always in the double capacity of counsel and attorney. This circumstance adds greatly to the interest of his memoirs, and appears also to have added greatly to the interest of his professional life. His clients, instead of being mere names to be forgotten as soon as the suit should terminate, became his friends and associates. Unhappily, indeed, the miserable period through which he lived made such intimacies often a source of pain. They naturally included the men most eminent in commerce, manufactures, and banking ; and those were precisely the persons whom the anarchists thought fit to suspect at a time when suspicion was death. M. Berryer's memoirs belong to the second class of autobiographies those in which the attention is fixed, not on the author, but on the objects which surround him. M. Berryer's professional life endured sixty-four years, from 1774 to 1838 the most remarkable period in the 6 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. history of France, perhaps in the history of the world. It extended through the delusive calm of the unreformed royalty, the brief attempt at constitutional monarchy under the Constituent Assembly, the anarchy under the Legislative Assembly and the Convention, the base tyranny of the Directory, the restorative interval of the Consulate, the glories and despotism of the Empire, the impotent reaction of the Eestoration, and the in- trigues and corruption of the kingdom of the French. The other institutions of the country were still more unstable than its government. M. Berryer found the Eoman Catholic religion established with vast wealth and exclusive domination. It is now one among several sects acknowledged and salaried by the State. During the in- terval its priests have been despoiled, transported, and massacred ; every form of worship has been abolished ; and it depended on one man whether France should be Protestant or Catholic. All the laws regulating the nature, the enjoyment, the exchange, and the devolution of real and personal property the laws of marriage, of divorce, of legitimacy, of adoption, and of inheritance the franchises and privileges of individuals, and of bodies politic in short, all the rights of persons and of things, while M. Berryer was engaged in enforcing them, were altered, abolished, restored, and amended, by a legislation so transitory as really to deserve to be called, as he has called it, ephemeral. The criminal law was equally fluctuating. New crimes, new modes of trial, new rules of evidence, new tribunals, BERRFER. 7 and new punishments, were invented, repealed, renewed, and modified, as it suited the convenience of a party, a faction, or an individual. A similar fate befell the law of procedure. Within two years from the meeting of the first National Assembly, not a court in which M. Berryer had practised during the first fifteen years of his pro- fessional life was in existence. Soon afterwards, the order of which he was a member was abolished, and the law ceased to be a profession. For some years, again, there was no standard of value. To use, or even to possess, metallic money, was a capital crime, and the only legal tender, the assignat, sank to about one four-hundredth part of its nominal value. The seller of a commodity was no longer allowed to fix its price : the price was to be determined by a committee, with reference solely to the ability of purchasers, whether the dealer could afford to sell at that price or not. To discontinue, or even to diminish, any accustomed trade, was to incur the crime of being ' suspected ; ' and to be suspected was to be imprisoned; to be imprisoned was at one period to be massacred, and at another to be guillotined. The picture of a society subjected to such influences is most valuable, and no one had a better opportunity of drawing it than M. Berryer. He had for materials not only his own experience, but that of his clients, and of clients taken from every class of society. His recollections, as might be expected from a writer of his advanced age, seem to be more vivid as they recede 8 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. towards the past. His first consultation in the dressing- room of the Duchess of Mazarin, where the aristocratic beauty, surrounded by her maids, and going through the details of her complicated toilette, listened to the con- ference between the timid junior and Grerbier, the leader of the bar ; his first pleading in the Grand Chamber of the Parliament of Paris, its vaulted roof dimly illumi- nated at a seven o'clock sitting on a winter's morning, and the profound silence of the court, which awed him until he fainted; his first negotiation in the moated chateau of a feudal magistrate, while his client was con- cealed in the avenue ; all these scenes are dwelt upon with a minuteness of detail and brilliancy of colouring which gradually disappear as he approaches the modern part of his narrative. Of this, however, we do not com- plain. Equality is not picturesque : a society in which it prevails may sometimes be good to live in, but can seldom be good to describe ; and we shall imitate our author in drawing our materials rather from the eighteenth century than from the nineteenth. M. Berryer was born in the year 1757 at St. Menehould in Champagne, a small town of 3,000 inhabitants, which seems to have been a nest of lawyers, since it contained nine different courts, and all the accessories of avocats, notaires, procureurs, and greffiers* In September 1774 he commenced his legal studies in the office of a solicitor to the Parlement de Paris, which then extended its * VoL i. p. 41. M. Berryer expresses a naive regret that all the work is now done by a single tribunal. BERRYER. 9 jurisdiction over the greater part of France. The state of the law was such as might have been expected in a system created, not by statesmen, but by lawyers. ' The forms of procedure,' says M. Berryer, ' were operose and intricate, and to prolong and complicate their entangle- ment was the business and the pride of the practitioner. Many suits were eternal ; they descended from the solicitor who commenced them to his successors, or rather to gene- rations of successors, as the property the patrimony of the office.'* The number of persons supported by this legal property was enormous. The Grand Chatelet, an inferior court having jurisdiction only over a part of Paris, gave occupation to nearly 300 attorneys, f M. Berryer was admitted to the bar in 1778. One of the first transactions in which he was engaged is so striking an instance of the pride and the despotism of the aristo- cracy of France, as it then was, that we shall relate it at some length. M. du B , a man of considerable fortune, was a member of the provincial parliament of Normandy. In 1771, when the parliaments were exiled by Louis XV., he retired to Holland, leaving his affairs under the manage- ment of his wife, who, together with his son, a young man of twenty-two, resided in one of the country mansions of the family, a few leagues from Rouen. In that reign, and in that country, to be out of favour with the government was almost an exclusion from society. Neither neighbours, friends, nor even relations, visited the chateau, and the * Vol. i. p. 24. t Ibid. p. 29. 10 . BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. young man, solitary and unemployed, fell in love with his mother's maid. The mother's consent was obtained ; her general powers of acting for her husband were supposed to enable her to give the father's assent, and the marriage took place in the chapel of the chateau. Two children were born, when, in 1774, the parliaments were recalled, and M. du B returned. His daughter-in-law and her children fled before him and took refuge in England. The son, now in his twenty-sixth year, remained. M. du B required him to take proceedings to annul the marriage ; and on his refusal obtained a lettre de cachet, under which he was confined in the prison of St. Yon. The father visited him in his cell on the second floor of one of the towers. "What passed between them is not known; but the result of the interview was, that as the father was descending the staircase, the son threw himself from the window, and was found by the father on the pavement of the court, with a fractured limb and a concussion of the brain. It does not appear that the father was softened, but the government was induced, by the horror of the catastrophe which its interference had occasioned, to revoke the lettre de cachet. The son, at liberty, but a cripple for life, fled to join his wife and children in England. In London, however, they must all have starved, or have had recourse to parish relief, unless a M. Tubeuf, a French jeweller, established in England, had supported them. M. Tubeuf 's advances for this purpose amounted during four years to about 1,200. They were made at the request of BEBRYEE. 11 the mother, and with the knowledge of the father, but without his express authority. M. Tubeuf returned to France, demanded repayment from the father, was refused, commenced a suit against him in the Parliament of Paris, and engaged M. Berryer as his counsel. The first step was to obtain an order for the examination of JVL du B on interrogatories an order which was made, as of course, without notice to the party to be examined. Armed with this order, M. Berryer and M. Tubeuf travelled to the chateau of the magistrate. When they entered its long avenue, the carriage with M. Tubeuf was left concealed by the trees, and M. Berryer proceeded on foot. The first person whom he saw was Madame du B . But such was the awe inspired by the domestic despot, that she would not venture even to hint to her husband the object of M. Berryer's mission. He was forced, therefore, to explain it himself, and to communicate to M. du B the astonishing fact that MM. de Paris, his brethren, had subjected him to a public examination. The result, however, was, that the fear of an open discussion prevailed, where justice, compassion, and natural affection had all been powerless. M. Tubeuf was sent for, and before they re-crossed the drawbridge all had been arranged. Sixty years afterwards M. Berryer again visited Eouen as an advocate, and the matter was again a family contest originating in aristocratic pride. The chateau and family of B had long disappeared. M. Berryer interested his audience by a narrative of which he was probably the only depository ; and urged them to 12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. crown his second appearance in their country with equal success. As a further illustration of the morals of the old regime, we shall introduce in this place the notice of a more im- portant cause of M. Berryer's, though it terminated at a later period of his career that of Madame de Pestre de Seneffe. When the events which we have to relate com- menced, she was between fifty and sixty years old, and resided at Brussels, a widow with seven children, and a still more numerous progeny of grandchildren ; enjoying a high reputation, and a large jointure derived from property in Belgium and in France. At a supper in the palace of the Prince de Soubise, a set of Parisian fashionables resolved that one of them should proceed to Brussels and marry the opulent widow. The necessary funds were supplied by a contribution, and the choice of the emissary was left to chance. The lot fell upon the Comte de Wargemont, a man of high family, and of considerable property, heavily encumbered. On his arrival at Brussels he introduced himself to Madame de Pestre, and secured the services of her maid and of her confessor. The maid concealed him one evening in her mistress's bedroom. In the middle of the night he showed himself. Ma,dame de Pestre called for assistance. This was the signal for the appearance of the maid, who urged on her mistress the danger to her repu- tation of an eclat, and proposed that the advice of the confessor should be taken. The Count protested that his indiscretion had been forced on him by the violence of BERRYER. 13 his passion ; and the confessor recommended that all scandal should be avoided by an immediate marriage. Madame de Pestre was weak enough to consent ; but as she yielded, not to love, but to fear, she insisted that the marriage should take place in Brussels, that she and all her estates should continue subject to the laws of Flanders, that her husband should have no power to require her to enter France, that she should continue absolute mistress of her property, and that the only benefit derived by the Count should be a life income of 20,000 francs, and 100,000 francs as capital. The marriage on these terms took place in February 1776. The husband almost immediately quitted his wife, and in June wrote to ask her whether she could suppose that he had any motive for marrying an old woman except the full command of her fortune. A few days afterwards he informed her that he intended to seize all her property in France, and to force her to join him there. His attempts to execute these threats produced a compromise, in pursuance of which a divorce a mensa et thoro, in a suit instituted by the husband, was pronounced by the ecclesiastical tribunal of Mechlin; and the Count, in exchange for all his claims under the marriage or the settlement, received 350,000 francs and an annuity of 10,000 more. The 350,000 francs, however, were soon spent, and the Count renewed his legal warfare. He attempted to set aside the divorce, succeeded in getting possession of the U BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. French estates, and kept up a never-ending litigation respecting those in Belgium. Madame de Pestre died, worn out with care and vexation. The annexation of Belgium rendered the whole property of her children subject to the jurisdiction of the French laws, and the Count spent the remainder of his life in prosecuting them from tribunal to tribunal. M. Berryer was counsel for Madame de Pestre and for her descendants ; and he dwells upon his exertions in their cause as one of the most ardu- ous and one of the most brilliant parts of his professional career. They procured him on one occasion a curious testimony of admiration. M. de Wargemont was dead, and his sister, Madame de Querrieux, had succeeded to some of his claims, and apparently to some of his liti- giousness. As her brother's representative, she prosecuted an appeal against the Pestre family. An elderly lady sat behind M. Berryer while he conducted the defence. She was observed to listen with great emotion, and as soon as he sat down, pressed him to accept, as a mark of her admiration, a ring made of the hair of her youth. The episode of Madame de Pestre has led us to antici- pate a portion of M. Berryer's history. Nature had given him the bodily qualifications most useful to an advocate a fine voice, and health independent of exercise. In the strict discipline of a procureur's office, where the hours of business, with a few minutes' interval for breakfast and an hour for dinner, lasted from between six and seven in the morning till nine at night, he acquired intrepid diligence and the love of a sedentary life. He was stimulated, too, BERRTEK. 15 he tells us,* by the splendid pecuniary rewards of the profession. He saw Grerbier receiving 300,000 francs for a single cause, and Duvaudier's exertions in securing a jointure, paid by an equipage and an annuity of 4,000 francs for its support. He began early to emancipate himself from the procureur by obtaining a set of clients of his own. He succeeded first in becoming counsel to the eminent merchants constituting the India Company, in a cause which lasted many years ; then in getting the con- duct of a claim depending on an ancient pedigree, which ' appears to have remained undisposed of for more than twenty years; and lastly, in obtaining as his clients the two great ecclesiastical chapters of Brioude and Bourges. His marriage in January 1789 with Mademoiselle Grorneau, whose father, as Procureur aux Conseils, had for his clients the chief bankers and merchants of Paris, placed him at once in possession of the first mercantile practice. The heads of the great houses became his clients and his friends; and we may judge of the extent of litigation in which they were engaged, when we are told that one of them, M. Magon de la Balue, paid him a daily visit.f It does not appear that, when he married, he was aware that a time was approaching when the bravest man might wish to have no safety to provide for but his own. He had, indeed, been somewhat surprised, but not dis- quieted, by the anti-monarchical spirit of the press, and had felt some alarm at the opposition of the parliaments * Vol. i. p. 87. t Vol. ii. p. 325. 16 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. to the court ; but his fears did not exceed a vague uneasiness. The extent of his political sagacity may be estimated by the three causes, to which even now, after fifty years' experience, he assigns the Eevolution; namely, financial difficulties, which he thinks might have been got out of by economy; the contest between the parliaments and the crown ; and the reduction of a portion of the house- hold troops. His fears, however, were soon to be awakened. On the evening of Sunday, July 12, he was returning with his young wife from a country holiday that day was, in fact, the last but one of the monarchy but so little were they aware of the real nature of the events which had disturbed the previous weeks, that they felt, as he tells us, perfect security. But at the Barriere du Trone, they heard of the sanguinary conflict between the Eoyal Allemand and the procession carrying the busts of Orleans and Necker ; and as they passed the paper manufactory of Reveillon they saw the gates guarded by soldiery, and were told that behind them lay the bodies of those who had perished in the attack on the building. Two mornings after,* M. Berryer was roused from his bed by the tocsin ; he was summoned, by what authority he does not know, to a meeting of the inhabitants of his parish, in the church of * M. Berryer's recollection has misled him as to these dates. He supposes the storming of the Bastile to have taken place on the Monday, and therefore that Sunday was the 13th. But in fact Sunday was the 12th, and a day intervened between the riot of that day and the insurrection of the 14th. BEERYER. ] 7 St. Mery. He found there crowds as ignorant of the cause of their assembling as himself. For hours they wandered, without an object, up and down the aisles of the church. At length some persons talked of organising the parish as a municipal body. M. Berryer suggested the means to those about him they carried him to the pulpit, and thence he proposed his plan, which was to divide the parish into quarters, or, as we should call them, wards ; the inhabitants of each ward grouping themselves round a particular pillar ; and then, that each ward should present a list of six persons, to constitute the bureau or common council of the parish one being the president and another the secretary. His plan was adopted by accla- mation ; he refused the office of president, but accepted that of secretary. The bureau, was elected, and directed to provide for the civil and military organisation of the parish. In the evening the bureau assembled ; M. Berryer was quietly engaged in his duties as secretary ; it was hot, and the windows were open, when some pikes bearing bloody heads were thrust in, and they were told that one was that of Launay, and that the others were those of the Swiss massacred within the Bastile. This horrible incident influenced permanently the fortunes of M. Berryer. With his talents and his advantages, it was obvious that the highest professional honours were within his grasp. His advance had been checked by no difficulties, and, till then, seemed to be attended by no dangers. But the fourteenth of July dispelled his dream of safety. He saw the time c 18 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. coming when the servants of the public might have to choose between death and crime. He doubted how he might stand the trial, and he felt certain that no reward was worth the risk. He resolved therefore, and he kept his resolution, to remain for life in a private station. His companions at the bar acted differently. Some perished for their virtues, some for their crimes, and some obtained and kept the most elevated civil dignities. But it was in vain that they pressed him to accompany them in their rise. He preserved his conscience, and perhaps his life, by the sacrifice of his ambition. He soon found, however, that the humbler path of an advocate had its difficulties and its dangers. The order to which he belonged was abolished ; in its room were substi- tuted defenseurs officieux a function which everyone, whatever were his previous employments or his previous ignorance, was allowed to exercise. The great objects of his veneration, the Parliaments, which, with a strange mis- conception of history, he describes as the supporters of pure monarchy, shared the fate of the bar. New tribunals were erected in their room, with inferior powers and a more limited jurisdiction. The greater part of the old bar refused to plead before them : and the character of the new judges, generally selected from among fierce political par- tizans, accounts for their refusal. As an illustration of their judicial conduct, M. Berryer relates the history of a cause tried before the Tribunal des Minimes, one of the new metropolitan courts, over which M. Le Eoy Sermaise, a violent democrat, presided. The parties were two vil- BERRYER. 19 lagers from Montreuil, the matter in dispute a small estate. The plaintiff rested his claim on a deed of conveyance, which appeared on inspection to have nothing to do with the property ; the defendant's case depended on uninter- rupted possession. ' How long,' said M. Le Eoy Sermaise, ' has this possession lasted ? ' * Why, citizen president,' replied the peasant, ' it must be at least eighty or ninety years, taking in my great-grandfather, my grandfather, my father, and myself.' ' Then,' replied the judge, ' you ought to be satisfied ; everyone in his turn yours has lasted long enough in all conscience now let your poor neighbour have his.' * It must be added that the new defenseurs officieux, un- trained in the conventional hostility of the bar, sometimes resented opposition as a personal injury ; and no one could tell, in such times, what might be the consequence of making an enemy of the most insignificant or of the most worthless individual. On one occasion, M. Berryer had the misfor- tune of being opposed to Coffinhal, afterwards the sanguinary vice-president of the revolutionary tribunal. M. Berryer's clients were M. and Mde. Deville, rich and defenceless, for he had been a fermier-general and she a foundling. M, and Mde. de Challut, persons of large property and childless, had taken her while an infant from the foundling hospital, educated her, married her to M. Deville, and left to her the whole of their joint fortune. A distant relation employed Coffinhal to attack the will, as obtained by undue * Vol. i. p. 133. . C 2 20 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. influence. Berryer proved that Mde. Deville had always supplied the place of a daughter to her benefactors. Coffinhal's only answer was to declaim against fermiers- generaux as vampires gorged with riches extorted by fraud and violence. The tribunal maintained the will, and Coffinhal left the court pouring out imprecations and threats of vengeance against Deville and all his colleagues. * As for the counsel,' he added, ' who has dared to plead in such a cause, je le tortillerai.' Berryer tells us that he shud- dered whenever the threat returned to his memory and with great reason, for Comnhal might have said with Caesar, that it was much less trouble to him to destroy than to menace. But these were preludes. Monarchical government was destroyed by the insurrection of August the 10th, 1792, re- publican government by that of June the 2nd, 1793. The strange sort of rule arose, which, for want of a more definite word, has been called the i Reign of Terror' a mixture of anarchy and despotism, of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, which combined all the worst faults of all the worst institutions. Two powers strove for mastery in this chaos, the Convention, and the Commune or Municipal Council of Paris, and each of these was subdivided into hostile factions. In all of them the objects of the leaders were power and safety ; and in all of them the object of the subordinate members was safety. All joined in the en- deavour to effect their purposes by the means resorted to in what has been called the state of nature ; by the destruc- tion or intimidation of those whose power or whose safety they BERRYER. 21 thought inconsistent with their own. The ordinary instru- ments employed by each party were the loi des suspects, the revolutionary committees, and the revolutionary tribunal. The extraordinary instrument was the armed population of Paris, consisting of the National Guards, furnished by the forty-eight sections into which Paris was divided a force generally called in the histories of the times by the somewhat puzzling name of ' the Sections.' The whole body, if it could have been collected, amounted to above 80,000 men, some provided with guns, but many more with only pikes ; their principal arms consisted of some pieces of artillery attached to each section. The forty-eight revolutionary committees of Paris were appointed by the inhabitants of the forty-eight sections, voting by universal suffrage. Their duty, for which they received a regular pay, was to enquire into all conduct which might affect the public safety, to give certificates of civisme that is to say, of attachment to the revolution and to order the arrest of all suspected persons. The loi des suspects declared guilty of being suspected, and therefore subject to arrest, four principal classes : 1. All those who by their connections, their conversation, their writings, or their conduct, appeared to be opposed to liberty. 2. All those who could not prove their means of living, and of performing their civil duties. 3. All those who had been refused certificates of civisme. 4. All persons of noble birth, and all relations of emigrants, unless they could prove their ardent devotion to the Eevolution. The revolutionary tribunal was a criminal court of 22 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. equity; a court for the punishment of those who were unpunishable by law. It is a strong proof of the little progress which France has made towards real liberty, that M. Berryer approves of the principle of such an institution, and recommends its adoption as a restraint on the press.* It consisted of a public accuser, judges and jurymen, all nominated by the Convention, restrained by no form of procedure or rules of evidence, and authorised on an application from the Convention, or from one of its two committees of surete generate and salut public, to judge all conspirators and opposers of the Kevolution; and all those whose conduct or whose expression of opinion had a tendency to mislead the people. At first evidence was required, and the accused were allowed defenders ; but as the trials increased in number, these forms were found inconvenient ; and, after all, they were mere forms, for the business of the tribunal was not to try, but to condemn. They were therefore abolished, and the tribunal was required to decide without hearing any witnesses, if there were grounds, material or moral (such were the words of the decree), for believing the accused to be an enemy to the people. Lists were kept ready of persons accused, others of persons condemned, with the names left in blank. Every evening the list of the accused was prepared by Fouquier- Tinville, the public accuser, settled by the comite de salut public of the Convention, and sent round to the prisons ; those named in it were taken to the Conciergerie ; the * Vol. ii. p. 419. BERRTEE. 23 next morning they were before their judges, and before the evening they had suffered. That there were grounds, material or moral, for conviction, was always assumed; no witnesses were examined ; and the trial, if it could be called one, was generally merely the identifying the pri- soner with one of the names on the list of persons accused. Even this might be dispensed with. When, as it some- times happened, prisoners were brought to the bar whose names, in the hurry of business, had been left out of the list, the only result was that the public accuser immedi- ately supplied the omission ; and thus, in three minutes, a man might be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced, and an hour after executed. As the Convention possessed the power of appointing and removing the members of the revolutionary tribunal, and of selecting its victims, it was, while its orders were obeyed, despotic in Paris ; and when two committees of the Convention, that of salut public and surete generale, could send before the tribunal that is to say, could send to death any members of the Convention, the two committees became despotic in the Convention. The inflicting death seems, like many other acts which are at first painful, to become a passion. No other expla- nation can be given of the condemnation by the revolu- tionary tribunal of many of the humblest and obscurest persons among the petty shopkeepers, and even workmen, of Paris. No other explanation can be given of some of the capricious murders related by M. Berryer. We give one or two examples: In 1787, money had been 24 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. borrowed in Paris on printed debentures for IOQL each, signed by the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, and the Duke of Clarence. They went by the name of actions du Prince de Galles. The transaction was an unfortu- nate one ; the debentures were refused payment, lost their value, and disappeared. Six years afterwards, all persons concerned in their introduction into the Parisian market, or in their circulation, were accused as contre-revolution- naires, and enemies of the people. The Due de St. Aignan, a former client of M. Berryer, on whom a money-lender had forced some of these debentures, and who had obliged him by law to take them back, was among the accused. So was his duchess, a young woman of fashion, whom no one could suppose to have been acquainted with her husband's transactions. So were even the notaries in whose hands they were deposited, and their clerks ; and even M. Chaudot, who had merely given a notarial attes- tation which he could not legally refuse. All were con- demned, and all were executed. Another notary, M. Martin a friend, like M. Chaudot, of M. Berryer met at his door, on his return from a morning's walk, a gendarme, who required his immediate attendance before the revolutionary tribunal. He found there three persons accused of having signed a pedigree certificate, which had been deposited in his office. There was nothing objectionable in the certificate, but it was said that some ill use might be made of it. The public accuser simply asked him if the paper had been placed with him ; and on his admitting it, required the tribunal to convict and sentence him to death, together with those BERRYEE. 25 previously accused. The tribunal instantly complied ; the four prisoners were removed from the bar ; room was found for them in the carriages which were setting off for the guillotine ; and within three hours M. Martin was an unaccused man, and an executed criminal. In the grand old castle of Canisy, near St. Lo in Nor- mandy, is the portrait of a Madlle. de Faudoas, the daughter of a M. de Faudoas,who in 1793 was the proprietor of the castle and of the large estate dependent on it. It is that of a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a bright gay expression. The Faudoas were popular in their neigh- bourhood, and took no part in politics. In a letter to a young friend, Madlle. de Faudoas said ' Ma chienne vient de mettre au monde quatre petits citoyens.' The letter was opened at the Paris post-office. She and her father were accused of being suspected of incivicism, arrested in their castle, carried to Paris, and guillotined. 'My great grandmother, my grandmother, and my great aunt,' said a lady whom we met at a neighbouring chateau, * were guillotined on the same day. My great grandmother was ninety years old. When interrogated, she begged them to speak louder, as she was deaf. * Ecri- vez,' said P'ouquier-Tinville,* ' que la citoyenne Noailles a conspire sourdement contre la Eepublique.' They were drawn to the Place de la Republique in the same tombereau, and sat, waiting their turn, on the same bench. My great aunt was young and beautiful. The executioner, while fastening her to the plank, had a rose in his mouth. * This speech has been given to Coffinhal, but it was really uttered, and on this occasion, by Fouquier-Tinville. 26 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. The Abbe de Noailles, who was below the scaffold disguised, to give them, at the risk of his life, a sign of benediction, was asked how they looked. " Comme si," he said, " elles allaient a la messe." ' During the * Reign of Terror ' M. Berryer gave up the public exercise of his profession. No one could act as defenseur officieux without a certificate of civisme from the revolutionary committee of his section. But he could not rely upon obtaining one from the uneducated and violent persons a brothel-keeper, a knife-grinder, a porter, and a shoe-cleaner who were paid forty sous a day to administer the affairs of the section. A person to whom such a certificate had been refused, became, as we have seen, by express enactment suspected, and certain, from the notoriety of the fact, to be arrested the next day ; and equally certain to be executed, as soon as the malice of an enemy, or the caprice of the public accuser, should call him forth. He at first proposed to shut himself up in his study, and to act solely as a chamber-counsel ; but he was soon told that seclusion would inevitably ^attract suspicion, and that he must find some mode of life which would not bear the interpretation of fear. Fortunately he had been counsel, in happier times, for the National Treasury, and M. Turpin, the agent (a functionary corre- sponding, we believe, to our secretary), was his intimate friend. M. Turpin, indeed, was not safe; for, though intrusted with matters of the utmost confidence, and daily transacting business with the heads of the depart- ment, he was the object of such jealousy, that a gendarme BEERTEE. 27 watched all his proceedings, and, in fact, never quitted him by day or night. Notwithstanding the want of a certificate of civisme, the previous services and the reputa- tion of M. Berryer, and the friendship of M. Turpin, effected his admission into the offices of the Treasury as sub-agent a favour great, not only from its importance to the person admitted, but from the danger to which it exposed those who admitted him. In this new post, his days were passed in the office, and his evenings in transacting the legal business of his former clients ; and again he fancied himself safe. Some vexations, indeed, he was exposed to, but they were almost ludicrous annoyances. He and his wife were forced to bring their table into the street, and to consume, in the presence of the passers-by, ' le diner patriotique.' His wife was some- times forced to attend at the baker's to inspect the sale of bread, to see that no one was served before his turn, and that no one was allowed to purchase beyond his strict wants. At other times she had to head a deputation from the women of the section to the Convention, deliver a patriotic speech, and receive the fraternal embrace of the president. Suddenly, however, he was roused to a sense of imminent danger by an accidental visit to the Treasury offices of a M. L , one of his former brethren of the bar, now be- come a member of the Convention. The visitor loudly expressed his astonishment that an aristocrat, and a coun- ter-revolutionist, in whose house conspirators met every evening, should fill a government employment. Such 28 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. remarks were deadly. They were sure to be whispered about, and to be acted upon by same wretch anxious to pay court to the deputy. It was probable that, in twenty- four hours, M. Berryer would be in one of the dungeons of the Abbaye, and in a week afterwards in the Place de la Eevolution ; and there was no knowing how many of those who had favoured his employment might ac- company him. Fortunately he had two friends in the Convention, Charles Lacroix and Bourdon de 1'Oise, both stanch members of the Montague. He ran to the cham- ber, and found Bourdon de 1'Oise entering it, clattering, as he went, the huge sabre which he had carried in the storm of the Bastile. What were the persuasions applied by his two friends to their colleague, M. Berryer does not tell us, but they were sufficient. M. L - returned to the Treasury, praised loudly the patriotism of M. Berryer, informed the hearers that the nightly visitors were inof- fensive clients, and ended by stating that his remarks had been quite misunderstood, and in fact were meant for a different person. But the danger had been averted, only to reappear in a form less direct, but more painful. Among M. Berryer's most honoured clients were the great bankers of the Place Vendorne, MM. Magon de la Balue and Magon de la Blinais, MM. Laurent Le Couteulx and Le Couteulx Cautelen, and M. Pourrat. One Heron, a merchant of Marseilles, had become bankrupt, had fled to South America, and returned in the beginning of the Revolution with some bills of the Spanish government of considerable nominal BERRYER. 29 value. He offered them to the principal banking-houses, but could not get them discounted. This rankled in his mind, and as soon as the loi des suspects gave arms to malignity, he denounced all those who had refused him. MM. Laurent Le Couteulx and Le Couteulx Cautelen were detained for eleven months in the Conciergerie ; saw it weekly emptied and weekly filled, but escaped at an enormous expense, by bribing the clerks to place the papers relating to them always at the bottom of the bundles of accusations. M. Pourrat fell early a victim to his own precautions. He became a member of the Jacobin club. The singularity of a banker in such a society attracted at- tention, and he was arrested on the benches of the club. MM. Magon de la Balue and Magon de la Blinais, both venerable men between eighty and ninety, were confined in the Mai-son de saute de, BeUwmme ; a place celebrated for having exhibited the last traces of the ancient aristocratic habits. There those who could afford the expense of such a prison spent the last weeks of their lives among the en- joyments and the forms to which they had been accus- tomed. The roturiers and the nobles, and among the nobles, those of the sword and those of the robe, kept their distinct circles. There were ceremonious visits, and full-dress evening parties, where the younger portion of this short-lived society amused themselves by rehearsing the trial and the execution. Herault de Sechelles was then the President of the Convention. He was a man of birth and education, 30 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. nephew of the Marechal de Contades, and of his sister, Madame Magon de la Balue. To him, in this extremity, M. Berryer had recourse. A word from him would have saved the prisoners. But in revolutionary times there is little sympathy, and still less courage. Herault de Sechelles was cold and embarrassed dwelt on the deli- cacy of his own position and all that could be got from him were a few lines introducing Berryer to Dubarran, a member of the committee of surete generate. He had to wait long in Dubarran's ante-chamber, among sup- pliants who, like himself, looked forward with dread to their audience. When he announced himself as M. Magon de la Balue's counsel, Dubarran exclaimed, with a mixture of fierceness and contempt, ' So you are one of those who defend the enemies of the Republic, the aristocrats, and the conspirators ! You had better leave them and us alone.' Early the next morning, a gentlemanlike man called on Berryer. 4 You,' he said, ' are counsel for the Magons. It is in your power to take them from their prison, and send them in safety across the frontier. Magon de la Balue has, sewed into his dressing gown, assignats worth 1,500,000 francs. I ask for only 300,000 out of them. In return he shall have these passports ; ' and he showed three blank passports, signed by Eobespierre, Couthon, Carnot, and Barrere. ' I show them to you,' he added, ' that you may report to the Magons that I have them. As respects all other persons, BERRYER. 31 forget them, as you value your life. On mentioning your name, you will have free access to the Magons. I shall be here, at this time to-morrow, to hear the result.' The emissary's promise was performed. The doors of M. Magon's prison opened at Berryer's name. He found Magon de la Balue wrapped in his dressing gown. He started when he was told that its linings contained 150 assignats of 10,000 francs each. * Who would have thought,' he exclaimed, 'that the person in whom I most confide would have betrayed me ! ' But he believed the offer of the passports to be sincere, and sent for his brother, to consult as to its acceptance. The only answer of M. de la Blinais was, that he and his brother were perfectly innocent, that to fly from their trial would be an admission of guilt, and that, in fact, their conviction was impossible. In spite of Berryer's arguments, M. de la Balue agreed with his brother. The next day the emissary returned. * My clients,' said Berryer, * feel that they are irreproachable, and can have nothing to fear from justice.' * That means,' he answered, * that they refuse my offer. They will soon reap the consequences of their folly. As for yourself, be silent. If you ever allude to the possibi- lity of passports from the committee of salut public being obtainable, you will follow your foolish clients.' A week after, M. Berryer read in the papers the conviction of the conspirators, Magon de la Blinais, Magon de la Balue, the woman St. Perne, daughter, the woman Cornulier, grand-daughter of the latter, and the 32 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. man Cornulier, his son-in-law, and the man Coureur, his secretary. Mixed with his regrets were his fears. He was known to have been their counsel. The fierce Dubarran had already threatened him with the consequences of defending aristocrats and conspirators, and he knew that among their papers must be found whole bundles of his letters. He does not appear to be even now able to ex- plain his escape, unless by imputing it to gratitude in Fouquier-Tinville for an early service; a solution, perhaps, as improbable as the imputation of any monstrous wicked- ness to a man of ordinary virtue. As confiscation was the necessary consequence of con- demnation, indeed one of its principal motives, the three infant children of Cornulier were thrust into the street, and kept alive only, through the fidelity of their nurse, by the sale of her little property and by her daily labour. M. Berryer soon suffered a still severer loss. In 1792, his uncle, M. Varroquier, one of the most respected inhabitants of Sedan, was a member of its municipality. His colleagues were twenty-three men of large fortune, the great manufacturers of the town. Its fine cloths had then, as indeed they have now, an European reputation. The in- surrection of August the 10th, 1792, had dethroned the king, and rendered the mob the temporary rulers of Paris. The legislative assembly had summoned the Convention, but in the interval before that body had met the assembly repre- sented the government. The two armies commanded by La Fayette and Luckner were supposed to remain faithful to the old constitution, and the assembly sent commissioners taken BERRYER. 33 from its own body to supersede them. La Fayette's head-quarters were at Sedan. He refused obedience to the commissioners, and, with the acquiescence of the municipality, sent them to the citadel of Sedan. The next day (according to Berryer the 15th of August, but as we believe the 19th) La Fayette, finding that he could not rely on his troops, fled from Sedan, in the hope of finding a refuge in America. The municipality of Sedan instantly released the commissioners and acknowledged their author- ity. * Our first business,' said the commissioners in their report to the assembly, * was to set at ease those who had concurred in our arrest. It was a fault, but one which we have forgotten, and which we trust that you will forget.' And apparently it was forgotten. All the autumn of 1792, all the year 1793, and the first four months of 1794, passed without the incident being even alluded to. But on the 13th Floreal, An 2 (May 2, 1794), Berryer received a letter from his uncle to say that he and his twenty-three col- leagues in the municipality had been arrested by order of the committee of salut public, and were on their way to Paris to be tried by the revolutionary tribunal. The only pretext could be their acquiescence, a year and a half before, in the arrest of the commissioners of the legislative * O assembly. The want of a certificate of civicism rendered him unable to defend them in person ; but he engaged for them Fleuret, the most eminent of the advocates who ventured to plead before that terrible tribunal, and he persuaded La Croix, a member of the Montagne,to intercede with the two committees. The real crime of the prisoners D 34 BIOOKAPHICAL SKETCHES. was their wealth. It must have amounted to many millions of francs a larger booty than had been obtained by any single confiscation. La Croix was, therefore, told that the course of justice could not be interrupted; that if the accused were innocent, they had nothing to fear from an equitable and merciful tribunal. As a matter of course, they were all convicted of incivicism and executed. These horrors, however, were at length to terminate. The party of which Robespierre and his immediate friends formed the nucleus, had risen to power by a process of constant contraction. Originally, it comprised nearly the whole of the deputies of the Tiers Etat, for who was there that refused the oath of the Tennis Court? First it threw off and destroyed the aristocratic Royalists, then the Girondins, then the Hebertists, and at last even the Dantonists. At every change, while it destroyed a rival, it deprived itself of a supporter. At first it spoke the voice of a nation, afterwards that of an assembly ; then that of a party, and at length that of a committee. But the committees of salut public and surete generate were omnipotent. Fielding has remarked, that a man with a pistol may hold at bay a multitude; for though he can shoot but one man, everyone feels that the first who attacks him will be that one. Nothing in the history of the Revolution is more striking than Thibaudeau's picture of the submission of the fierce and violent Convention before the governing Committee of Public Safety : ' The object of every member, from the instant that he entered the house, was to prevent his BERRYER. 35 behaviour there from being a crime. Every movement, every look, every murmur, every smile, was calculated. Those who ventured to have a place crowded to the Montague (the high benches of the left), as the re- publican seats, or took refuge in the centre (answering to our benches below the gangway), as the seats which manifested no party feeling. Others wandered from bench to bench, in the hope that they might be supposed to be opposed to no party, and to no opinion ; but the more prudent never ventured to sit. They stood in groups at the bar, and slunk away whenever a vote was probable. The sittings, once so long and so violent, were cold and short. Trifling details were discussed until the Committee of Public Safety appeared. The Committee, headed by their rapporteur (the member charged to announce their decisions), entered with the air of masters. In their progress to the tribune they were preceded and followed by those who were striving to propitiate them by apparent devotion. There was deep silence until the rapporteur spoke : everyone sought to read in his countenance whether he was to announce a victory or a proscription. His proposals, whatever they were, were servilely adopted, generally in silence ; but if a word were spoken, it was merely an echo.' * Such was the state of things when, on the 24th Prairial An 2 (June 12, 1794), Bourdon de 1'Oise requested a visit from M. Berryer. He went, little expecting the frightful * Memoires sur la Convention et le Directoire. Paris, 1827. Vol. i. p. 47. D 2 36 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. confidence that was to be reposed in him. e Robespierre,' said Bourdon, 'has become my enemy. He intends to murder me by the guillotine. I have resolved to be beforehand, and to destroy him with my own hand.' As proofs of his courage and resolution, he displayed the dress which he had worn at the storm of the Bastille, still covered with the blood of its defenders ; the plumes which had ornamented his cap in the Vendean war, torn by balls in every feather; and the huge sword with which he had pierced many an enemy, and which was now to be plunged into the heart of Robespierre. Berryer lis- tened in terror ; but still more dangerous matter was to come. Bourdon added, that he had selected him as depositary, not only of his secrets, but of his last wishes and of his fortune, and placed in his hands a parcel containing his will, his title-deeds, and instructions to be followed in the very probable event of Bourdon's fall before he had an opportunity to execute his attempt, or in consequence of the attempt. For forty-five* anxious days, and almost sleepless nights, M. Berryer retained this terrible deposit. He was now for the first time an actual conspirator. His connection with the chief conspirator was notorious. His safety seemed to depend on Bourdon's immediate success in destroying, by his own hand, both Robespierre and the * M. Berryer says sixteen days ; but the time between the 24th Prairial and the 9th Themnidor, that is, from the 12th of June to the 27th of July, was forty-five days. Perhaps the error may lie in the date of the conver- sation. BERRYER. 37 oligarchy of which he was the president. Assassination is a desperate resource. The attempt itself rarely succeeds, and where it does succeed rarely produces the intended result. Happily for M. Berryer, events took a different turn. We have said that the committees were omnipotent ; but their power depended, more obviously and immediately than that of governments in general, on opinion. They had not, like the tyrannies that succeeded them, an armed force trained to unreflecting obedience. While the Con- vention bent before them, they seemed to be irresistible ; but the Convention was obedient, not from affection or confidence for the committees were objects of distrust and hatred but because they were supposed to have the support of the National Guards. How far that supposition was true, was a doubt not to be solved without extreme peril ; for the fact could be ascertained only by resistance, and if they really had that support, those who resisted must perish. Dissensions among themselves forced the decision of this tremendous question. Eobespierre threw all his colleagues in the committees into shade. He formed, with his devoted adherents St. Just and Couthon, what began to be called the triumvirate a sort of committee of the committees, which controlled all their operations. It was rather, however, a dictatorship than a triumvirate; for St. Just from fanaticism, and Couthon from servility, were mere instruments. Robespierre did not owe his predominance to his talents ; 38 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. for his talents, though it is absurd to deny him great talents both as a writer and as a speaker, were inferior to those of several of his rivals, and even of his dependents ; nor to his courage, for there he was positively deficient. But he had insatiable ambition, and insatiable vanity, and no passion that interfered with them. He had no love of money, of ostentation, of pleasure, or of ease. He had no friendship, no pity, no truth, no shame, no remorse: he appeared, therefore, to have an inflexible will. The weakest part of his character was the combination of ambition with vanity; but during the earlier part of his career these passions acted well together. His desire of immediate applause led him to flatter the self-love of the Parisian mob, by an adulation of which no man with self- respect could have been guilty; to encourage all their most mischievous prejudices, and to stimulate all their worst passions. In any ordinary state of society such conduct would have been fatal to his prospects as a statesman ; but in a revolution, it gave him unbounded popularity, and popularity was power. On the other hand, his love of power impelled him to destroy those whose influence interfered with his own, and thus pleased at the same time his vanity by leaving him the only prominent figure. But the time was come when the gratification of both these passions at once became impossible. He might, perhaps, have retained predominant power if he had been satisfied with the reality, and allowed his colleagues to appear to the world as his equals; but this was repugnant to his BERRYER. 39 vanity. He might have remained the general object of admiration if he had allowed them to be really his associates in power ; but this interfered with his ambition. He wished to absorb all power and all reputation ; to be the dictator of a republic to which his will was to be the law ; and to be the high priest of a religion which his recognition had established. To do this it was necessary to destroy his present associates ; and, as their removal would have revived the more moderate revolutionary party, of which Danton had been the head, it was also necessary to destroy the remnant of the Dantonists. These objects could be effected, how- ever, only by the aid either of the Convention, or of the Commune of Paris and the National Guards. If he could obtain from the Convention a decree for the arrest and accusation of the other members of the two committees, he would have succeeded : the remainder of the Convention, deprived of all its influential members, would have been at his feet. The Commune was already devoted to him, so was Henriot, the commander of the National Guards ; and he relied on the obedience of these citizen troops to orders in which all the authorities should concur. But if the Convention took part with the committees, he still hoped, with the aid of the Commune and of Henriot, to dispose of the National Guards, and to put an end, by terror or by force, to all resistance. It may appear that it would have been simpler to begin by force ; but, in the first place, he expected submission from the Convention ; and, in the second place, until the Convention had refused his 40 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. demands, there was no pretext for rising against it, and some pretext was required even in those times, and even for an insurrection. At the meeting of the Convention on the 8th Thermidor, An 2 (July the 26th, 1794), Eobespierre commenced his attack. After a long description of the general mal -administration of the country, he inferred * that there was a conspiracy to destroy the republic and the patriots; that members of the two committees were among the conspirators ; and that it had become necessary to punish the traitors, to crush all factions under the weight of the national authority, and to raise from the ruins the supremacy of justice and freedom.' This speech was received, as no speech of Robespierre's had ever before been received in that assembly, with dead silence. The usual motion, however, for its being printed and distributed was made and carried, and the Convention seemed to remain in obedience. But the extremity of the peril now gave courage to the members of the two committees. Those who spoke first ventured only to defend themselves ; those who followed dared to recrimi- nate. Robespierre, unaccustomed to opposition, began to explain and retract : the Dantonists joined his opponents, and the sitting terminated by rescinding the resolution for printing his speech. The first attack, therefore, had been repulsed. The evening and the night were spent by each party in prepa- ration. It was resolved on the part of Robespierre that the Convention should meet the next morning; that BERRYER. 41 in the Convention a definite motion, denouncing the crimes and requiring the arrest of those whom it was intended to sacrifice, should be made by St. Just, and enforced by Eobespierre ; and that if the Convention refused, the Commune should declare that the people had resumed the direct exercise of its sovereignty, should assemble the National Guards, and march to deliver the Convention from the criminals who were misleading it. In the meantime the members of the committees and the Dantonists, united into one party by their common danger, were employed in endeavouring to obtain the co- operation of the other parties in the Convention. Such was the detestation which they themselves had inspired, and such the fear of Eobespierre, that it was only after many repulses that they began to make any progress. Succeed, however, they did, and the next day, the cele- brated 9th Thermidor, when Eobespierre entered the assembly, he probably had not ten adherents left in a body of which (two days before) he had been the dictator. We need not do more than refer to the scene of the 9th Thermidor a scene probably unequalled in any deliberative assembly : when St. Just was interrupted after his first sentence, and Eobespierre had to listen hour after hour to the long- compressed hatred of his revolted subjects his cries and screams for the right of reply drowned by the imprecations of his accusers and the bell of the president ; until at length, as he lay on the bench gasping with fatigue, rage, and terror, he was ordered into arrest, together with his adherents, St. Just, Couthon, 42 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Le Bas, and Robespierre the younger, and seized by the attendants of the house. It was now five o'clock, and the house adjourned to seven, exhausted by the struggle, and scarcely venturing to believe the result. The Commune in the meantime had assembled, but had not acted. It had adjourned before the arrest of Eobespierre was known. Indeed, considering the strangeness and the magnitude of that event, the news appears to have circulated very slowly. Thibaudeau tells us that, when the Convention met in the evening, the greater part of the members heard for the first time the events of the morning. It is probable that the morning attendance had been comparatively thin, and consisted chiefly of those who the night before had con- certed their proceedings. The Commune had adjourned only till six. When they reassembled, and heard of the arrest of Robespierre and of his companions, they declared that the people, and the Commune, as the organ of the people, had resumed its sovereignty ; ordered the tocsin to ring in every section ; despatched messengers on all sides to call out the National Guards; and, in short, set in motion the insurrectional machinery which had never failed during the previous course of the Revolution. They soon collected a force sufficient to rescue the prisoners from their confinement in one of the committee rooms, and to carry them in triumph to the head-quarters of the Commune, the Hotel de Ville. By this time it was nearly eight. The Convention re- BERRYER. 43 assembled, but it was only to communicate their alarms. ' A few,' says Thibaudeau, ' had gained courage by their success in the morning ; others awaited the result in silence ; the greater -part were unable to comprehend what was going on. As it became dark the horror of our situation increased. We heard the noise of the drums and of the tocsin. A few members formed themselves into a committee to consider the course to be adopted, the others listened in the utmost anxiety to the reports brought back by those who had ventured to ascertain the state of things without. At length, about midnight, the crisis appeared to approach. Collot d'Herbois, the President, said in his sepulchral voice, " Representatives, the time is come for us to die at our posts ; I am informed that Henriot's forces surround us." Instantly all the spectators fled from the galleries, the members who had been standing together in groups took their usual seats, and prepared to die with decency. As for myself, I had not the slightest doubt that our last moment was come.' * It was true that Henriot had led his men to the attack. His cannon even were pointed at their doors. But when he gave the word to fire, his artillerymen hesitated, and at last refused. Henriot, finding that his troops could not be depended on, thought it prudent to march them back to the Hotel de Ville. It was thus that, on the caprice or the irresolution of half a dozen men, the fate of the Convention, and perhaps * Memoires, vol. i. p. 83. 44 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. the future history of France, and even of Europe, depended. For if the cannon had fired, and Henriot's forces, many of them the same men who three years before had stormed the Tuileries and destroyed the defenders, had rushed into the hall where the members were sitting, merely awaiting their fate without any plan of resistance, it seems probable that the greater part of the assembly would have been massacred on their seats; and certain that all who escaped would have been treated as they themselves treated their adversaries a few hours afterwards would have been condemned and executed without trial. Ko- bespierre would have been absolute master of Paris. Whether he would or would not have been able to summon another representative assembly, or, without one, to retain the provinces and the armies in subjection to Paris, is more questionable. But, on any supposition, the whole subse- quent course of events would have been different: there would have been different scenes and different actors. Pichegru might have imitated Monk, and royalty have been restored by a native army in 1794, instead of by a foreign one in 1814 ; or Nantes, and Lyons, and Bordeaux, and Toulon, and La Vendee, might have successfully risen against Paris, and France have split into hostile com- munities. Keform would have been delayed in Germany, and accelerated in Great Britain and Ireland. The half- minute during which it was undecided whether the artillery would fire or not, is the most important half- minute in history. The retreat of Henriot seems to have given to the BERRYER. 45 Convention the courage necessary to active resistance. They declared Henriot, Kobespierre, and his associates, and the whole Commune of Paris, hors de la loi ; invested Barras with the command of the National Ghiards, and appointed members to act under him ; despatched others to the head-quarters of the different sections, to announce these decrees, and summon the National Guards, and resolved as soon as a sufficient body could be collected to march and attack the Commune at the Hotel de Ville. The events of this night have been told in so many different ways, that some future Strauss may treat the whole as a legend. The following is M. Berryer's narrative : * The corps de garde of my section, La Beimion, was at the Hotel d'Asnieres, and I determined not to return home during the night. There was great indecision among us until the exhortations of the messengers from the Conven- tion, marked by their dress, and raised, from their being on horseback, above the audience, decided the wavering to side with the Convention. We resolved to march immediately to the defence of the Assembly. I was armed as usual with my pike, which was the common weapon ; a very few had muskets. When we reached the Place of the Carrousel, which at that time joined the Tuileries, receiving no orders, we sat down on the pavement. Between midnight and one in the morning we were ordered to form column and march on the Hotel de Ville, then occupied by Eobespierre and his associates. On our left was the section Marat, consisting, like ourselves, of 46 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. about 200 men, about as well armed as we were. Three guns with lighted matches preceded us. By the time we had reached the Oratoire in the Kue St. Honore, our artillery, very ill commanded, was in the centre of the column. I now discovered by the cries of Bourdon de FOise, as he was rectifying this blunder, that we were under his command. When we reached the open space before the Hotel de Ville, we found there many pieces of cannon, and the troops of several other sections, apparently directed like ourselves against the Commune.* Our officers had ranged us in front of the Hotel de Ville, with our cannon behind, so that we should have been the first objects of a discharge. While Bourdon de 1'Oise was setting this right, he noticed me, and congratulated me on my courage. ' Suddenly a sort of commotion was heard in the great hall of the Hotel de Ville ; and immediately afterwards I saw Bourdon de 1'Oise, with some determined followers, rush up the large open staircase. He held a pistol in each hand, a drawn sabre between his teeth, and with his fiery eyes and burning cheeks, looked more like a fury than a human being. In a minute or two we heard shots in the interior. Kobespierre the younger jumped out of one window, Henriot was thrown out of another, Kobespierre * On comparing M. Berryer's statements with those of other witnesses, we are inclined to believe that the greater part of these troops consisted of the National Guards, who had originally obeyed the summons of the Commune ; and whom the retreat of Henriot, the decree which outlawed the Commune, and the arguments of the members who had been sent out, had subsequently induced to support the Convention. BERRYER. 47 was wounded, and Le Bas killed in the struggle. Couthon, pretending to be dead, was laid at full length on the coping of the Quai Pelletier, until a prick from a bayonet made him wince, and he was removed in custody ; Eobe- spierre was carried by me on a litter, to endure the utmost bitterness of death. ' The next morning I found it so difficult to believe my recollections of the night, that, notwithstanding my horror of executions, I went to the Terrace of the Tuileries, which overlooks the Place de la Eevolution, to watch the carts filled with the conquered party enter the enclosure of the guillotine. The long-continued shouts and applause which soon followed left me no* doubt that the head of Kobespierre had really fallen. ' The next day, however, perished some whom I could not but pity. These were the seventy-two members of the Commune of Paris, who had been all seized in their hall of assembly, kept in custody for thirty-six hours, and then, without any trial beyond a mere identification, thrown into seven or eight carts, carried to the Place de la Eevolution, and executed. The greater part of them had committed no error except that of taking office in such times as these. The punishment en masse of a whole body, though it may comprehend a minority who have protested against the acts of the majority, is the ne plus ultra of political iniquity. As I saw them pass by to their dreadful fate, I congratulated myself again and again on my resolution to refuse public employment. 4 Heron, the murderer of the Magons, was arrested 48 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. under a resolution of the Convention, and immediately executed. My formidable enemy Coffinhal, who had contrived to add to the ferocity even of judgements such as his, by the jests with which he embittered them, was destroyed by the ingratitude of a wretch like himself. He had escaped from the Hotel de Ville in the confusion of the night of the 9th Thermidor, fled to the river side, and lay hid for two days at the bottom of a barge. At length he was forced by hunger from his retreat, and reached the house of a petty shopkeeper, who owed to him his marriage and his establishment in business. It was late, and he found the husband and wife in the back room. While the wife was providing him with food, the husband went forward under the pretence of closing his shop, but in fact to denounce his benefactor and call in the police. Coffinhal resisted, was tied and thrown into a cart, and carried to instant execution, shouting and screaming in impotent rage.'* Experience had proved the mischiefs and the dangers, both to rulers and to subjects, of what has been called revolutionary government ; that is to say, government by a single assembly representing the omnipotence of the people, and exercising or delegating to its own instruments all legislative and executive powers. The surviving leaders, therefore, in the Convention, a small minority of the remarkable men whom it once contained, employed themselves in preparing, for the third time, a constitution. * Vol. i. pp. 231, 237. BERRYER. 49 The constitution of 1791 had failed, partly from its intrinsic defects, partly from the disinclination of the separate authorities to acknowledge the rights which the constitution gave to others, or the restraints which it imposed on themselves, and partly from the violent and unjust aggressions of foreign powers. That of 1793 had been prepared in a week, accepted by the people in three days, and immediately suspended. It scarcely differed, in fact, from the then existing revolutionary government, except by subjecting to annual re-election the single assembly which was to govern as a sort of committee of the nation. The wisdom of the constitution of 1795 has been highly praised. We have been told that it would have endured, and endured beneficially, if any government not monar- chical could have supported itself in France. It was prepared at leisure, and by men of talents, knowledge, and integrity; and as it was the result of six years' experience in revolution, it provided against the most obvious of the disorders under which the previous govern- ments had fallen. It provided against the dangers of universal suffrage by establishing indirect election, and by requiring from the first body of electors, the members of what were called the primary assemblies, a qualification depending on taxation ; and from the second body, the members of the electoral assemblies, a qualification depending on property. It guarded against rash legisla- tion, by dividing the legislative body into two chambers ; one intrusted with the preparation of laws, the other with E 50 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. their acceptance or rejection. It created a separate executive, consisting of a Directory of five persons, appointed by the Chambers, and endeavoured to prevent the union of legislative and executive powers, by prohibit- ing any member of either chamber from filling any other office whatever. It guarded against permanence in office, by enacting that no one should be an elector of the higher order, that is to say, a member of an electoral assembly, for two successive years, or a member of the legislative body for more than six successive years, or a director for more than five years. One director and a third of the legislature were to retire annually, the former by lot, the latter according to seniority of election. It is impossible to believe that under any circumstances such a constitution could have been permanent. Its fundamental principles were change and collision. Neither the electoral, the. legislative, nor the executive body were to remain unaltered for more than one year. It made experience in public affairs a positive disqualification. A member of the legislature was not re-eligible till after two years' interval, nor a member of the Directory till after five. The members of the legislature, incapable of any other functions, were necessarily in opposition to the Directory. The five directors, with no head, and no common interest, whom accident had made colleagues, and accident was to separate, necessarily split into factions. All the principles of good government were sacrificed to republican jealousy of those to whom power was to be intrusted. BERRYER. 51 The fitness of this new government to withstand assaults from without cannot be said to have been tried. Before it had lasted two years it was destroyed from within ; and with it was destroyed, for many years, all hope of con- stitutional, or even legal, government in France. From the unhappy morning of the 18th Fruct-idor, An. 5 (Sept. 4, 1797), when a portion of the Directory used a military force to overpower their colleagues and the two represen- tative bodies of France, the army had become the masters of the state. Such a precedent once set was not to be recalled. For many subsequent years the drum was substituted for the tocsin, the voice of the general for that of the demagogue, and a military commission for a revolu- tionary tribunal. From that time the history of France loses its interest. From the history of a nation it becomes the history of an army ; and soon afterwards the biography of the individual whose genius enabled him to seize that coarse but irresistible instrument. The picturesque and exciting acts of the vast drama were ended ; the great actors, whose audacity of thought, language, and conduct had crowded into six years changes that seemed to require centuries, had perished, were exiled, or were silenced. The work of destruction ended with the Convention : that of reconstruction began with the Consulate. The Directory was an interval of fraud and force applied to personal purposes combining the insecurity of a revolution with- out its enthusiasm, and the oppression of a tyranny with- out its vigour. The establishment, however, of something resembling E 2 52 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. regular government, restored M. Berryer to the public exercise of his profession. One of his first appearances was in defence of a member of the revolutionary com- mittee who had been the petty despots of his section. Their acts of oppression were passed over as incidental to their office, but it was thought safe to attack their" miserable peculations. Among these was the robbery of a chapel : the knife-grinder had appropriated the cloth, the president had turned the velvet of the high altar into a pair of breeches, the shoe-cleaner had taken the silk, the porter the silver fringes, and the fifth member the linen. The shoe-cleaner had bean M. Berryer's patron, had obtained a passport for him at a critical time, and had given coun- tenance and protection to some others of the inhabitants of the section, who had the merit of being the customers of his stall. These services were urged by M. Berryer, and accepted by the judges as an excuse for the sacrilege. More serious questions soon arose. In a country in which the law had been powerless for nearly two years in which property had been a ground for proscription, and every stratagem had been used to conceal it in which the legal currency had been in a course of daily deprecia- tion, while death was the punishment of those who ventured to refuse it, or even to take it at less than its nominal value where even the connection and mutual rights of husband and wife, and parent and child, had been fluctuating the relations of individuals towards one another, and towards the property which had escaped confiscation, required to be ascertained. BERRYER. 53 M. Berryer's narratives of his contests on questions depending on marriage, divorce, and legitimacy, are in- teresting. They describe a community unsupported by religion, delicacy, or morality in which virtues had so often been declared to be criminal, and crimes to be virtuous, that public opinion had been destroyed, and with it the conscience and even the self-respect of individuals. Brothers and sisters bred up together attack one another's legitimacy, women set aside their own marriages, husbands disavow their wives, and parents their children ; in short, all the misery is exhibited of a society in which mere law is the only restraint. But M. Berryer's stories of this kind are too concise, and too much alike in their features, to be interesting in such an abridgement as we could give of them. We shall select, therefore, some other incidents from his parti-coloured narrative. One of the most remarkable, and one of those which throw most light upon the internal state of France, during the interval between the Reign of Terror and the Con- sulate, is a trial before the tribunal of Chartres, in which M. Berryer was only a spectator. For some years previous to the trial, which appears to have taken place in the year 1795, a large tract of country, of which the forest of Orgeres, extending to within thirty miles of Chartres, is the centre, had been infested by bands of ruffians, who, from their use of fire as an instrument of torture, acquired the name of Chauffeurs. They were accustomed to surround lonely farm-houses in numbers too large for resistance, bind the males, and force the females, by fire applied to 54 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. the feet, to discover the property of the family. From the number of their outrages, the uniformity of their pro- ceedings, and the skill with which they were conducted, it was inferred that they formed a large confederacy, acting on system, and obeying some central authority. But this was mere suspicion : common as the crime was, not one of the criminals was identified. One day, however, two gendarmes, as they crossed a portion of the forest, found a child about ten years old, the singularity of whose dress excited their curiosity. He asked for food, and was persuaded to accompany them to a neighbouring town. A good breakfast and a glass of wine obtained his confidence. He told them that he lived with his father and mother, and many other families, in a vast cavern in the forest. That a great many men came there from time to time, bringing with them sometimes plate and other valuables, which were afterwards taken away, and sometimes provisions and clothes for the inhabitants. It seemed probable that the head-quarter of the Chauffeurs was now detected ; but, instead of attacking the cavern, the result of which would have been only the seizure of those who might be in it at the time, and the alarm and escape of the other members of the confederacy, it was resolved to use the child as a means of arresting the out- door brigands, one by one, and to reserve the cavern for the last. For this purpose, the child, to whom we will give, by anticipation, the name of Finfin, which he afterwards ac- quired by the dexterity with which he played his part, BERRYER. 55 was disguised by good clothes, and placed, under the care of a woman who acted as his nurse, at the corners of the markets of the towns to which it was supposed that the brigands would resort to sell the plundered property. Whenever he saw a face with which he had become familiar in the cavern, he gave a sign, and the person indicated was arrested. At length the number exceeded a hundred; descriptions of the prisoners, and of the property found on them, were published; and evidence poured in from all sides. The trial lasted several days. Every morning the accused, about 1 1 2 in number, were marched in a long column, guarded by a numerous escort, through the streets of Chartres, to a church in the centre of the town, which had been fitted up on this occasion as a court, and was large enough to exhibit them all to the witnesses and the jury. M. Berryer dwells on the horrors of the evidence, particularly on that of the daughters of an opulent proprietor, three sisters, whose feet had been de- stroyed by fire, so that they were forced to come on crutches into the court. It appeared that the cavern, or rather the collection of caverns, from whence Finfin had wandered, was situated in the least accessible portion of the forest, and formed out of the quarries which had furnished the stone for the magnificent cathedral of Chartres. Here a colony of malefactors, male and female, had been founded, which re- cruited itself, partly by immigration and partly by natural increase. Like the Indian associations of Thugs, it had a government, laws, and police, adapted to the frightful 56 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. profession of its members. It had corresponding members, who indicated the dwellings most fit for attack, and an executive, which planned expeditions, and appointed the persons who were to effect them. The whole 112 were convicted. At a subsequent period, it would have been difficult to dispose of a body of criminals for whom death was the only appropriate sentence, and who would have been thought too numerous for such a punishment ; but in 1795, and in France, men were accustomed to such scenes, and M. Berryer passes over their execution without remark. During the six years which elapsed between M. Berryer's return to his profession and the peace of Amiens, his prin- cipal employment, as honourable as it was ineffectual, was the defence of neutral owners against French privateers. At the breaking out of the war in 1793, a decree of the Convention had given jurisdiction in all cases of capture to the local tribunals of France, and even to the French consuls in foreign parts. 4 It became,' says M. Berryer, * a presumption of law in those local prize courts, that not a vessel that traversed the ocean was really neutral; that every cargo was in fact English property ; and that all the exteriors of neu- trality were frauds to be exposed or eluded. The most fri- volous objections were raised to the different papers by which the nationality of the ship, or the ownership of the cargo, was proved, and always with success. Every syllable in every passport was challenged, and every change that, during a long voyage, had taken place in the crew. But when the law of 1798 had declared good prize BERRYER. 57 every vessel containing goods (marchandises) the produce of England, or of any English dependency, the robberies of the privateers were unrestrained. They seized, abso- lutely, without exception, every vessel which they met with at sea, whatever the flag, for they were sure to find on board some English goods. It might have been supposed that the word goods (marcJiandises') meant something in- tended for sale, or at least something for which freight was to be paid. It was held to comprehend the mere furniture of a cabin, a bed, a chair, or a carpet, or even a knife or a razor used by the captain. The presence of any such article drew after it the confiscation of ship and cargo, valued perhaps at millions. 4 Hundreds of appeals were put into my hands, not from the hope of redress, but because the policies which insured against capture required that every means to ward off con- demnation should have been exhausted. The neutral captains and supercargoes crowded to my office men who had been intrusted with millions ; and now, deprived of their own little funds, and even of their baggage, had to depend on the consuls of their countries for the means of existence during the suit. * In one matter, I so far shook the Court of Appeal as to delay its judgment for one day. It was the case of the Federalist, a ship belonging to citizens of the United States of America, with whom we were in strict alliance. The ground of confiscation was a strip of carpet by the captain's bedside. It was discovered, or pretended to be discovered, that this bit of carpeting was of English 58 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. manufacture. On this pretence the ship and her whole cargo, worth a million and a half of francs, had been con- demned. At the conclusion of my address, the Court was proceeding to reverse the condemnation. One judge only suggested a doubt. The decision was adjourned to the next day, and was then given in favour of the captors. * The ultimate results were, that not a vessel ventured to approach a French port ; that we were cut off from the supply of indispensable commodities ; that our privateers, acting without concert and without prudence, fell into the power of the English cruisers ; that our maritime population was crowded into the English prisons; that our colonies were lost for want of sailors to form a military marine ; and, ultimately, when the day of re- tribution arrived, the state had to pay for the plunder which had been profitable only to a few individuals.' * The revolution which placed Bonaparte on the consular throne was unquestionably beneficial. The despotism which seems to be the inevitable result of military rule, was more tolerable than that of the factions which owed to treason their rise and their fall. Even the tyranny of the empire was as great an improvement on the intrigues and violence of the Directory, as the Directory was on the anarchy of the Convention. We are inclined, indeed, to consider the eighteen months of the Peace of Amiens as the most brilliant * This narrative is extracted, with some changes of arrangement, from the second volume, cap. iii. 1, 2. BERRYER. 59 portion of the history of France since the death of Charlemagne. England was supposed to be incapable of any but maritime war, and had accepted an insecure and dishonourable peace. The force of Eussia was unknown, and neither Austria nor Prussia had yet adopted the systems which, at the expense of all the other objects of government, now give them powers offensive and defensive which their happier ancestors never contemplated. The military supremacy of France seemed established ; and it was supported by a territory as extensive as can be usefully united in one empire. She had incorporated Savoy, Piedmont, the Milanese, a considerable part of Switzerland, and all the great and rich countries that lie between her present frontier and the Khine. The por- tions of Holland, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, which she had not made French, were her dependencies. It is true that under the empire she acquired a still more extended territory, and a still larger body of subordinate allies ; but her subsequent acquisitions were not ratified by England. They were mere incidents in a fearful game, liable to be torn away, and in fact actually torn away, as soon as her fatal system of playing double or quits should produce its usual result. At the Peace of Amiens her gains were realised. Had she remained contented with them, she would probably now form the most powerful empire that the world has seen. She would possess fifty millions of rich, warlike, and highly civilised inhabitants, with the best soil, the best climate, the best frontier, and the best position, on the continent. 60 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. The same remark may be extended to the extraordinary man who had seized the command of her destinies. He then enjoyed more real power, more real popularity, and more real glory, than at any subsequent period of his career. As a soldier, he never repeated the miracles of his Italian victories. In his subsequent campaigns he obtained vast and decisive advantages when he had a superior force; suffered vast and decisive defeats when his force was inferior ; and when the force on each side was nearly balanced, as at Eylau, Aspern, Borodino, and Ligny, so was the success. As a politician, he was known only as a pacificator ; he had had nothing to do with the origin of the three great wars in which he had been an actor ; and he had concluded each of them by a glorious peace. He owed, it is true, his power to usurpation, but it was the most pardonable usurpation that history records. Those whom he deposed were themselves usurpers, and for hundreds that regretted the change, there were millions that hailed it with delight. Never was there an easier or a more popular revolution ; and, up to the time of which we are speaking, the millions appeared to be right. He had given to France internal as well as external peace. He had restored the rule of law, and made it omnipotent against all except himself. He had laid the foundation of a code which, with all its defects, is superior to that of any other continental nation. He had restored religion, not indeed in its purest form, but in the form most attractive to a people among whom imagination and pas- sion predominate over reason, and who yield more readily BERRYER. 61 to feeling, to authority, and to example, than to conviction. With religion he had restored decency of manners, and, in a considerable degree, decency of morals. He had effected all this under the forms of a constitution, which, depending not on the balanced rights and privileges of classes, but on the simple basis of centralised power, gave to the body of the people the equality which they seem to prefer to real liberty and to real security. One of the first acts of the Consulate was to withdraw matters of prize from the ordinary tribunals, and place them in the hands of a department of the government, denominated the Conseil des Prises. The unfitness of the petty local courts had been shown ; but the referring questions of pure law to an administrative instead of a legal body, was a strange anomaly. And when we add that the persons appointed to decide between French captors and neutral owners were mere officers of the executive, removable at pleasure, the anomaly became an oppression. It is strange that M. Berryer, himself a lawyer, approves of this institution : he had soon a re- markable opportunity of ascertaining its impartiality and its integrity. ' Holland,' says M. Berryer, * at that time forming the Batavian Eepublic, was in the year 1797 the unhappy ally of the Eepublic of France. The price of the alliance had been the loss of all her colonies, and of all maritime com- merce iinder her own flag : for all Indian commodities, and particularly for tea, in Holland a necessary of life, she depended on that of Denmark, the only flag respected by England on the southern ocean. 62 BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCHES. ' In the autumn of 1797 the Batavian Eepublic wished to . import a year's supply of green tea. The attempt to send from Amsterdam to Canton ten millions of francs of Dutch property, and to bring it back in so peculiar a form, was difficult and perilous ; on the one hand the seas of Africa and Asia were swarming with English cruisers, which respected no flag but the Danish, and on the other hand the seas of Europe were filled with the privateers of the dear ally of Holland, which respected no flag whatever. * To delude the English cruisers, a ship which had be- longed to the English East India Company was purchased and sent to Copenhagen. There she was named the Caninholm ; her captain was naturalised as a Dane ; she had a whole set of Danish papers, and cleared for Tranquebar, a Danish settlement ; taking in at Portsmouth her outward cargo in dollars. These precautions were sup- posed, and indeed proved, sufficient as regarded the cruisers of the enemy, England ; the real danger was from those of the ally, France. To ward off this the Batavian government took into their confidence the French govern- ment, then consisting of the Directory, and obtained their sanction to the expedition, and a license or protection against all interference by French vessels. As a further precaution, a Dutch supercargo was taken in at Tran- quebar, and the Caninholm, on her return voyage, cleared out at Canton for the Texel. 'The expedition lasted more than eighteen months. The Caninholm left Copenhagen in November 1797, and it was in June 1799 that she was captured as she entered BERRYER. 63 the European seas by a French privateer, and carried into Bordeaux. The captain instantly went on shore to show his license to the Bordeaux authorities ; but no justice was to be expected in a privateering town, when a prize of ten millions of francs was in dispute. The ship was of course condemned. The owners appealed, but, before they could be heard, the revolution of 1799 had overthrown the Directory. The consular government refused to recognise the contracts of its predecessors or the rights of its ally, and the Caninholm was definitely condemned as English property. I ascertained afterwards that Bonnet and Co., the owners of the privateer, had been obliged to scatter some of their prey to keep the remainder. Bills accepted by them suddenly appeared in the Paris market; I myself had to advise proceedings on more than half a million's worth of them.' * Some branches of the legal profession may flourish under a despot; attorneys and chamber counsel do not excite his jealousy; and judges are the best instruments of his power. They enable him to express his will in the form of general principles, and thus to regulate the actions of millions, of whose individual existence he is not even aware. They convert resistance to his power into a breach of law, and punish it without his apparent interference. An army or a mob may give power to its chief; but that power cannot be safe until it is supported by legal forms, enforced by legal authorities. But no arbitrary ruler looks favourably on advocates. * Vol. ii. 3. 64 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. The bar is essentially an aristocracy in the noblest sense of that term ; the relative position of its members depends on their merit ; the smiles of the crown cannot give repu- tation to mediocrity, its frowns cannot depress diligence and talent. The functions of the bar are still more offen- sive than its independence ; its business is to discuss, and an absolute government hates discussion : its business is to enforce the observance of general rules and adherents to precedents : such a government, though it requires obedience to them from others, refuses itself to be bound by either. * Every day,' said Bonaparte, and he was then only Consul, * one must break through positive laws ; there is no other mode of proceeding.- The action of the govern- ment must never be impeded there must be no oppo- sition.' * Again, a bar, though it offers its services indifferently to the government and to its subjects, is really useful only to the latter. Such a government does not require the aid of an advocate to persuade judges to be subservient to a power which appoints, promotes, and removes them ; but to those whom the government is attacking, his assist- ance is inestimable. He may sometimes be able to pro- tect their lives or their fortunes, and he can almost always protect their reputation. All other appeals to public opinion may be tolerated up to a certain point, and silently prevented from passing the prescribed limit. A censorship may effectually chain the press without attracting attention .to any given case of interference ; but if an advocate has * Thibaudeau, Memoires sur le Consulat, pp. 229, 231. BERRYER. 65 been once allowed to speak, he cannot be stopped without an apparent denial of justice. Bonaparte, who had all the jealousies and the instincts of ambition in their utmost intensity, must, under any circumstances, have hated the French bar ; but he had also a personal quarrel with its members : out of more than two hundred advocates, only three voted in favour of the empire, and this was a subject on which he never for- gave opposition. He restored indeed the order, but he deprived it of self-government, and laid it at the feet of the imperial authorities. The express permission of the chief judge was made necessary before an advocate could plead in any court but his own ; the attorney-general selected the members of the Conseils de discipline, which regulated the internal affairs of the order ; and he also selected from them the bdtonnier, or president of the bar ; and, finally, the chief judge had an arbitrary power of sus- pension, and even of expulsion. M. Berryer himself incurred Bonaparte's especial dis- pleasure. He had been counsel against Bourrienne before Bourrienne had lost his master's favour ; he had defended Moreau and Dupont, and the family of Monnett the un- fortunate defender of Flushing. For these offences he was excluded from the Tribunate, and from the honours of the bar ; but the contest which he appears to think the most dangerous was his defence of M. the Mayor of Antwerp, in 1812 and 1813. The mayor, an old man of high character and great wealth, and once in high favour with Bonaparte, married 66 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. a young wife, who quarrelled with the wife of the com- missioner of police about a box in the theatre. The com- missioner revenged himself by accusing the mayor, and three other municipal officers, of embezzling the proceeds of the Octroi of Antwerp ; and, having Bonaparte's con- fidence, contrived to render him the determined enemy of the accused. The indictment was an enormous instrument : the attorney-general of the imperial court of Brussels, which then included Antwerp in its jurisdiction, was said to have been killed by the labour of preparing it. The trial took place at Brussels, before a jury consisting of the principal persons of the country. After it had gone on for some days, it became clear that it must terminate by an acquittal. The law officers who conducted the prosecution, therefore, interrupted its progress, by indicting for perjury two of the mayor's witnesses. As, according to French law, this matter was to be disposed of before the mayor's trial could be concluded, the latter was thrown over to a subsequent session and a new jury. The indictment against the witnesses utterly failed, and the mayor's trial was resumed. A new jury was selected solely from Frenchmen, most of them public functionaries, and all devoted to the emperor, whose determination to destroy the mayor was now notorious. We will pursue the narrative in M. Berryer's words : ' On my second arrival at Brussels, I had to unveil before the jury the complicated iniquity of the prosecution. I referred to the oppressive indictment of the witnesses for the defence, and showed it to have been a trick to get rid BERRYER. 67 of the first jury. I dwelt on the absence of any docu- mentary evidence against my clients, and refuted all the verbal testimony which had been procured. The trial, after several days of hearing, ended by a general acquittal. The whole population of Brussels surrounded the mayor, and drew his carriage in triumph to his hotel. Even when I left the town late in the evening, on my return to Paris, the streets were still resounding with music and acclama- tions. The news reached Bonaparte at Dresden, and put him into a state of fury. He instantly sent a violent despatch to Paris, ordering the mayor and his co-defendants to be re-tried, and even the jury to be tried for having acquitted them. The minister of justice transmitted the order to M. Argenson,the prefect of Antwerp. M. Argenson replied that it was impossible to try men again on charges from which a jury had acquitted them. The Council of State was assembled, and decided that the imperial com- mand must be obeyed. This decision was notified to M. Argenson. He merely repeated his refusal. Application was now made by the minister of justice to the Senate, as the highest body in the state. The Senate referred the matter to a committee. I flew to the Luxembourg, and obtained an interview with a member of the com- mittee. He heard all I had to say, agreed with me that such a profanation of the forms and of the substance of law would be disastrous, but ended by saying, " After all, what would you have us do ? do you not perceive that we should upset ourselves ? " * The committee accordingly reported as the Council of * 2 63 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. State had done before ; and by virtue of a decree of the Senate, the mayor and his supposed accomplices were directed to be tried before the Court of Assizes of Douai. I heard of the ' decree before it was published, and had time to advise two of those who had been acquitted with the mayor, and some of the members of the jury who had fled to me in Paris for my aid in the extreme danger in which they were placed, to avoid the storm by concealing them- selves. M. Argenson not only persisted in his refusal, but resigned. Other persons, however, less scrupulous were found, and the mayor was arrested and conveyed to the prison of Douai. Worn out, however, by oppression and anxiety, he died there, before the period of trial. Indeed, before that trial could have been terminated, the man who had been mad enough to order it had ceased to reign.' * Though a stanch royalist, M. Berryer does not appear to have been one of the enthusiastic welcomers of the Kesto- ration. It was connected, indeed, with the loss of his fortune, the honourable accumulation of thirty-four years of labour. A manufacturer who had been the victim of the fraud and ingratitude of his partners, became his client. He obtained for him damages sufficient to form the nucleus of a capital, and, by becoming, his guarantee to a banking company, enabled him to establish himself as a cotton- spinner at Eouen. M. Berryer's security for the sums advanced on his guarantee, was the deposit of twist of double the value. At the time of the Eestoration, the amount for which M. Berryer was liable exceeded 25,0001., * Vol. i. pp. 350-354. BERRYER. 69 for which he held twist valued at 50,000. The relaxation of prohibitory duties in the first effervescence of the Ke- storation, instantly reduced the value of the twist to 8,000. The bankers required a further security. M. Berryer was forced to mortgage, and ultimately to sell, all his own estates, and also all those of his wife, for she generously consented to surrender them. Soon afterwards came the most important of M. Berryer's causes a cause in which his exertions, though unproduc- tive to his client, and injurious to his own interests, were honourable to his talents and to his courage. This was the trial of Marshal Ney. The many years which have elapsed since that striking event, may have effaced its details from the memories of many of our readers. t We will shortly recapitulate them : In the beginning of 1815, Marshal Ney was governor of Besancon, but residing on his estate near Chateaudun, a town between Chartres and Orleans, about eighty miles from Paris. On the 6th of March he received an order from Soult, then minister of war, to proceed to Besancon. News travels slowly in France : though Bonaparte had been five days in Provence, the fact was unknown at Chateauduu, and Ney, curious as to the motive of the order, took Paris in his road. He arrived on the 7th, and found M. Batardy, his attorney, at his house waiting for him.* They arranged some private business, and Batardy, surprised at Ney's making no allusion to what occupied every mind in Paris, * See M. Batardy's deposition. ' Proce-s du Marechal Ney,' Michaud. No. i. p. 51. . . 70 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. ventured to remark, * This is a strange event.' ' What event ? ' answered Ney. ' Don't you know,' replied Batardy, ' that Bonaparte has landed at Cannes that Monsieur proceeded this morning- to Lyons, and that you are ordered to your government ? ' At first Ney treated the news as incredible ; but when he was told that it was officially stated in the f Moniteur,' he leant his head upon the mantelpiece and exclaimed, ' What a calamity ! what a horrible event ! What can be done ? what is there to oppose such a man as that ? Would he have ventured to return unless he had relied on finding here enemies to the government ? ' Ney went immediately to the minister, and was told that he would find his instructions at Besancon. He then saw the King, made his memorable promise to bring back Bonaparte in a cage, left Paris for Besancon, and appears to have arrived there during the night between the 9th and 10th. The 10th he employed in directing the forces under his control to meet at Lons le Saulnier, a small town to the south of Besanpon, and to the east of the high road from Lyons to Paris. On the llth he set out himself for Lons le Saulnier. In the meantime, Grenoble had opened its gates to Bonaparte; he had rushed forward to Lyons, the second city in France, occupied by a considerable force under Monsieur and Marshal Macdonald. The city and the garrison had received him with enthusiam ; Monsieur and Macdonald had been forced to fly ; the trifling band with which he had landed had been swelled by the garrisons of BERRYER. 71 Grenoble and Lyons to more than 10,000 men, and was augmenting every day by the desertion from the royal forces of individuals, companies, and even regiments. On his road, Ney met M. de St. Amour and M. de Soran returning from Lyons, who described to him the revolu- tionary madness which they had witnessed in the people, and the cries of Vive VEmpereur which they had heard from the troops whom they had met on their march. In the morning of the 12th, Ney reached Lons le Saulnier. During the whole of that day, and until the night of the 13th, he appears to have been making active preparations to attack Bonaparte, or at least to resist him. The troops nominally under his order did not amount to 5,000 men; they were deficient in ammunition, and scarcely provided with artillery the artillery horses having been hired by the farmers, and not to be found when unexpectedly wanted. Bonaparte's proclamations were scattered round, and seemed everywhere to produce their intended effects. In the evening of the 13th, Ney's spies informed him that Bonaparte, preceding his own forces with an escort of only forty men, had entered Macon in triumph ; that from Macon to Bourg (which is only seven posts from Lons le Saulnier) the whole country was in what the French call exaltation that even the villagers, and the people in the fields, were crying Vive UEmpereur. Ney's last acts on the 13th were to make arrangements the prudence and details of which raised the admiration of the peers at his trial,* to write to * See Proces, No. iv. p. 14. 72 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Marshals Suchet and Oudinot, who were cooperating with him in support of the royal cause ; and to require all the regimental and non-commissioned officers of his small force, separately, to swear before him to be faithful to the Bourbons. It is to be observed that on this very day, at a council held in the Tuileries, it was admitted that resist- ance was hopeless that not a soldier would fire on his former Emperor and that the only debatable question was, in what direction the King should fly.* Late in the night between the 13th and 14th, Ney was guilty of his first breach of duty. He admitted messengers from Bonaparte : they brought him a letter from Bertrand, assuring him that Louis had been betrayed by his ministers; that troops devoted to Bonaparte had been posted along the road to Paris, so as to insure his advance without opposition; and that the whole enterprise had been concerted with England and Austria. The folly of the last statements ought not to revolt us, when we re- member that the successor to Napoleon was the grandson of Francis ; and that M. Berryer, who has passed his life in estimating evidence, even now believes that we effected Bonaparte's escape. Absurd as they really were, they did not appear so to Ney. With Bertrand's letter came a pro- clamation ready prepared in the name of Ney, in which he was made to declare that the cause of the Bourbons was lost for ever, and that liberty and Napoleon were tri- umphant. And there came also orders from Bonaparte, expressed as if the old relations between himself and Ney * See the details in Bourrienne, rol. x. cap. 16. Bourrienne was present. BERRYER. 73 had remained uninterrupted, and giving him instructions in the style which he had long been accustomed to obey. Between three and four in the morning of the 14th, he was roused from his sleep by M. de Capelle, the prefect of Bourg, who came to tell him that one of his regiments, the 76th, stationed at Bourg, had proclaimed Bonaparte ; that even the regiment at St. Amour, which formed the advanced guard of the small force at Lons le Saulnier, was preparing to go over ; and that throughout the country the higher classes were stupefied, and the lower mad with revolutionary excitement. This information appears to have convinced him of the impossibility of further opposi- tion. ' Can I stop,' he said to M. de Capelle, ' with my hand the rising of the tide ? ' A few hours afterwards he ordered his troops to be called together; but before he took a decisive step, summoned the two generals next him in command, Bourmont and Lecourbe, both of them supposed to be devoted to the King, showed them the proclamation, repeated the contents of Bertrand's letter, and asked their advice. No fourth person was present. Bourmont and Lecourbe state that they urged him to remain faithful to the King; Ney maintains that they approved of his joining Bonaparte. It is in favour of Ney's statement, that they both accompanied him to the parade where the troops were formed in square, stood on each side of him while he read the proclamation, heard it without any expression of dissent, and dined with him the same evening. The dinner was silent and melancholy. "We fully believe Ney's account of the effect produced on his own 74 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. mind by the irrevocable step which he had taken. ' From the time of that unhappy proclamation life was a burden to me ; I wished for nothing but death, and did all I could to find it at Waterloo. A hundred times I was on the point of blowing out my brains; all that restrained me was my wish to defend my character, I knew that all honourable men must blame me I blamed myself. I did wrong, I admit it, but I was not a traitor ; I was partly deceived, and partly carried away.'* Ney proceeded to meet Bonaparte at Dijon, and a few days afterwards was ordered to visit the northern and eastern frontier, from Lille to Landau, to ascertain the state of the fortresses and hospitals; and to publish everywhere that Bonaparte had returned under a treaty between himself, England, and Austria stipulating that he was never to carry on war beyond the frontier of France ; that he was to give France a liberal constitution ; and that his wife and child were to remain as hostages in Vienna until he had performed all the positive parts of his engagement.! Having executed his mission, he retired into the country, and took so little part in the trans- actions of April and May, that when, on the 1st of June, he appeared at the ceremony of the acceptance of the new constitution, Bonaparte told him that he thought he had emigrated. ' I ought to have done so long ago,' answered Ney ; ' now it is too late.' J He returned after the battle of Waterloo to Paris ; and by his bold exposition in the Chamber of Peers, on the * Proces, No. i. p. 12. f Ibid. p. 27. } Ibid. p. 12. BERRYER. 7/5 22nd of June, of the real facts and consequences of the battle, materially assisted in driving Bonaparte from power. In that speech, Ney maintained that the allies would be before Paris in a week. His prediction was accomplished ; and on the morning of the 3rd of July it seemed probable that, before the evening, a battle would have been fought, more disastrous to France, and par- ticularly to Paris, than any event in the history of the French nation. Davoust, who commanded the army defending the town, had a large body of infantry (80,000 men, according to M. Berryer*), 25,000 cavalry, and between four and five hundred pieces of field artilleryf a force insufficient for victory, but sufficient to maintain a contest destructive of the city in which it was to take place. Already the firing had begun, when the provisional government and Davoust sent to propose a negotiation ; of which the bases were to be, the entry of the allied forces on the one hand, and the preservation of Paris and the security of all who inhabited it on the other. On these terms, the convention of the 3rd of July, 1815, was framed; and ratified by the Duke of Wellington and Blucher on the part of the allies, and by Davoust on the part of the provisional government. The twelfth article provided that all the inhabitants, and generally all persons found in Paris, should continue to enjoy all their rights and liberty, and should not be liable to any molestation or enquiry whatsoever, with relation to their functions, * Vol. i. p. 374. f See the evidence, Proces, No. iv. p. 19. 76 to their conduct, or to their political opinons. It appears from the evidence of General G-uilleminot, one of the negotiators of the convention, that this was the clause to which the defenders of Paris attached the most im- portance. Had it been refused, he was to break off the discussion, and the battle would have commenced.* Belying on the protection given to him by the convention, Ney remained in Paris till the 6th of July, and continued in France until the 3rd of August ; when he was arrested on a charge of treason, and ordered to be tried by a court-martial, comprising among its members four of the marshals of France. Ney protested against the jurisdiction of such a tribunal, and the court, un- fortunately, as M. Berryer thinks, for the prisoner, de- clared itself incompetent. The cause, therefore, was transferred to the House of Peers ; the court appointed by the Charter for the trial of treason. The object of Ney's counsel was to gain time. They knew, from the experience of thirty-five years of revolution, that political resentment is a passion as fleeting as it is fierce, and that, if a delay of a few months could be obtained, the government would no longer have the courage to execute him, nor indeed the wish. For this purpose they endeavoured to show that, although the Charter rendered treason cognisable by the House of Peers, yet it laid down no rules by which the House was to be governed when sitting as a court of criminal justice; and they required that the trial should be suspended until a * Proems, No. iv. p. 20. BERRYER. 77 law regulating the procedure of the House should have been passed. M. Berryer's speech* is an admirable specimen of legal and constitutional reasoning; and in- dicates, with great sagacity, the errors into which such a tribunal, unless supported and directed by strict regula- tions, would be likely to fall. The House, however, after a secret deliberation of an hour and a half, decided that the trial should go on. Objections were then raised to the indictment, and, though they were overruled, so much time was gained, that the House, which had met for the trial on the 1 1th of November, did not really begin it till the 4th of December. In the meantime, Ney had applied to the ministers of the allied powers, and required them to interfere, and to prevent the convention of the 3rd of July from being violated in his person. Their answer, drawn up by the Duke of Wellington, and adopted by the ministers of Austria and Prussia, stated, that * the object of the 12th article was to prevent the adoption of any measure of severity, under the military authority of those who made it, towards any persons in Paris, on account of the offices which they had filled, or their conduct, or their political opinions ; but it was not intended, and could not be intended, to prevent either the existing French government, or any French government which should succeed to it, from acting in this respect as it might deem fit.' f * Proces, No. ii. p. 32. f British and Foregn State Papers, 1815, 1816, printed by the Foreign Office, p. 262. 78 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. In this extremity Madame Ney sought the aid of Lord Holland, a name illustrious throughout Europe as the friend of the oppressed. She requested him to lay Ney's memorial before the Prince Eegent. It was done ; but the only effect was a letter from Lord Liverpool, referring her to the communication already made to her husband by the Duke of Wellington.* Lord Holland, however, did not yet despair. He still thought that the Duke of Wellington's interference might be obtained, and must be decisive ; and in that hope he addressed to their common friend, Lord Kinnaird, then at Paris, a letter which was to be shown to the Duke. What effect it might have had cannot be told. It arrived the day after the sentence had been executed. As this admirable letter has never been published, we cannot resist the temptation of extracting, from the original, preserved in the archives of Holland House, some of its most material passages. 'Middleton: Dec. 5, 1816. * Dear Kinnaird, ' What is passin at Paris annoys me more than I can describe. For La Valette, on the score of private ac- quaintance, though slight, I am much concerned ; but from regard to the character of our country, and to that of the Duke of Wellington (in whom, after the great things he has done, even as decided an opponent of the war as myself must feel a national interest), I have conceived more horror at the trials and executions going on in the * British and Foreign State Papers, 1816, 1816, printed by the Foreign Office, p. 272. BERRYER. 79 teeth of our capitulation than mere humanity could create. ' How can such a man as Wellington assert that the im- punity for political conduct extends only to impunity from the allies for offences committed against them? When ships, when garrisons surrender, do the captains or com- manders stipulate that the foreign conqueror shall not molest them for their political exertions ? With or without such stipulations, what shadow of right has a foreign enemy to punish individuals for opinions held, or conduct pursued, in their own country? It is clear that the impunity promised was impunity for crimes, real or sup- posed, against a French government. If the French govern- ment was a party to that promise, by that promise it must abide. If not, the other allies are bound in honour not to deliver over a town taken in virtue of it, without exacting the same terms from those to whom they deliver it. 'Such, perhaps, is the formal technical way of putting the argument. Practically and substantially the case, if not more striking, is yet more conclusive to men of justice and honour. The allies have virtually, I might say formally too, been masters of Paris, while the persons who delivered it to them on the faith of impunity for political offences, have for political offences been imprisoned, tried, condemned, and executed ! Wellington has himself precluded all doubt on the question. He maintains, in his letter to Lord Castle- reagh, that there is no article in the capitulation securing to the town of Paris the pictures and statues; and therefore he argues, and he acts on his argument, that the 80 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. allies may seize the pictures, &c., and seize them without any fresh or formal cession from Louis XVIII. Up to that time, then, the allies, according to him, were in military possession of Paris, and up to that time, therefore, even upon his own view of the subject, the inhabitants were entitled to claim impunity for all political opinions and conduct. Those who had the right and the power of taking forcibly from Paris, property not specified or disposed of in the capitulation, notwithstanding the nominal government of Louis XVIII., must surely have a right to enforce on any such nominal and dependent government the observance of promises, on the faith of which the inhabitants had surrendered the town. * Technical arguments may possibly be urged on both sides ; and, though they appear to me all in favour of Ney's claim, it is not on them that I lay stress, but on the obvious and practical aspect of the transaction as it must strike impartial men and posterity. The plain relation of the events in history will be this. A promise of security was held out to the inhabitants of Paris they surrendered the town, and while Wellington and the allies were still really in possession of it, Labedoyere was executed, and Ney was tried for political opinions and conduct. Even of subsequent executions, and I fear there will be many, it will be said The allies delivered over their authority, in Paris, to a French government, without exacting an ob- servance of the stipulations on which they had originally acquired it. 'Had we taken Martinique in 1794, on a promise of not BERKYEK. 81 molesting individuals for political opinions or conduct, should we have been at liberty to cede it, had Louis XVIII. been then restored, without insisting on the impunity of all political offenders ; or, at the very least, on the right of leaving the country for all such as might have so offended ? In Egypt the French stipulated that no natives should be molested for their conduct or opinions during the war. We took military possession of the country on these terms, and then delivered it over to the political authority of the Ottoman Porte. When, however, the Capitan Pasha, acting under that authority, began murdering the Beys, and proceeding against the adherents of the French, we not only remonstrated and threatened, but actually protected the persecuted men within our own lines. Yet, by reference to the history of those times, we find that many blamed Lord Hutchinson for not having had recourse to yet more violent methods, to enforce on the legitimate political authority the observ- ance of engagements entered into by our military power on taking military possession of the country. 'What would Wellington himself have said, if the British troops had surrendered any town in Spain to the French with a similar stipulation, and if, on the flimsy and hypocritical subterfuge of a distinction between Joseph's government and the French military authorities, all the Spaniards who had assisted us during the siege had been prosecuted for treason against Joseph ? Yet where is the distinction ? * The want of principle and consistency, and the disgust- G 82 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. ing changes of the marshals, have, I know, steeled men's minds to their sufferings. This is natural enough. But when the violence of the times is gone by, and, above all, when the tomb has closed on their offences, the transaction will be judged with reference to the nature of the promise, not to the conduct or misconduct of the sufferers. Si ego digna in quam faceres, tu tainen indignus qui feceris, Pamphile. ' Nor is this all. If we judge by former instances, even the crime itself will be regarded with more indulgence by posterity than any irregular mode of punishing it. Allow- ance for individuals is made in all great changes. It is difficult in sudden emergencies and great convulsions of state, especially for professional men whose lives have been passed in camps, to weigh maturely all the considerations by which their conduct should, in the strict line of duty, be regulated. Unforeseen cases occur, and men of good principles and understanding are hurried into acts of in- consistency and political immorality. ' In this latter view of the subject, I know that I am somewhat singular. Few at present make such allowances for the political tergiversations of the marshals; and many, more indulgent than I am in their judgement of political apostasy in England, are quite outrageous with Frenchmen for not acting with inflexible principle in the most trying and difficult circumstances. Some, however, among the most indignant at their crimes, yet doubt the justice, policy, and safety of punishing them ; and more, especially among the moderate of all parties, think the EEIIHYEII. 83 claim of the capitulation conclusive ; or, if not quite so, of a nature questionable enough to induce Wellington, for the preservation of his own and the national character, to give it the construction most favourable to the weaker party. * My opinion is of no importance ; but it is so strong that I could not resist expressing it to you, who have access to those whose character is most interested in forming a sound one on this important subject. I have not spoken of La Valette. All my arguments apply in his favour as strongly as in Ney's ; and surely he is not, as others may be, any object of a bystander's indignation. He seems an honourable man throughout. Yours ever truly, 'VASSALL HOLLAND.' The progress of the trial had been comparatively rapid. In two sittings, on the 5th and 6th of December, each party proved satisfactorily their principal points ; the accusers, that the treason was legally completed the defenders, that the crime had been unpremeditated. But when M. Berryer opened the real defence, the convention of the 3rd of July, he was interrupted by the counsel for the Crown. M. Bellart, their leader, protested against any allusions to a convention, the conditions of which had been demanded by rebels, and had never been accepted by the King ; and he presented to the House a requisition, by which he formally opposed the reading of the convention, and any allusion to it, and required the House, by the Chancellor, its president, to order Marshal Ney and his G 2 84 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. defenders to confine their defence to the mere facts of the indictment. The Chancellor, speaking in the name of the House, answered that, foreseeing the line of defence that would be adopted, he had already taken the opinion of the House ; and that the peers had decided, by a large majority, that it would be highly improper to rely in that House on a convention to which the King was no party, and by which it was obvious, from the mere fact of Ney's prosecution, that His Majesty did not consider himself bound. He therefore forbade the defenders to make any use of the convention. Ney's counsel replied, that they bowed to the will of the King, and to the decision which the court, without hearing them, had thought fit to adopt ; but that they felt bound to offer a plea to the jurisdiction of the court namely, that Sarre Louis, the birthplace of their client, having been ceded to Prussia, he was no longer a subject of France. Here, however, the counsel were interrupted by N-ey. ' " No ! " he exclaimed ; " I was born a Frenchman I will die a Frenchman. Up to this time my defence has been free, but I now see that it is to be fettered. I thank my generous defenders for the exertions which they have made, and which they are ready to make ; but I had rather have no defence than the mere shadow of one. If, when I am accused in the teeth of a solemn treaty, I am not allowed to appeal to it, I must appeal to Europe and to posterity." ' " Gentlemen, counsel for the prisoner," said the BERRYER. 8$ Chancellor, " continue your defence within the limits which I have prescribed." '"My lord," said Ney, "I forbid my counsel to say another word. Your excellency may give to the House what orders you think fit ; but, as to my counsel, they may go on if they are free, but if they are to be restrained by your limits, I forbid them to speak. You see," he said, turning to M. Berryer, who was anxious to continue, " that it is a decided thing. I had rather have no defence than one chalked out by my accusers." 4 " Then," said M. Bellart, " we waive our right of reply ; if the defence is at an end so is the accusation. We have only to demand the judgement of the Court." f " Have you anything to add ? " said the Chancellor, turning to the prisoner and his counsel. *" Nothing whatever," replied Ney, in rather an* im- patient tone.' * The Chamber was then cleared, and the peers alone remained in deliberation ; the result of their deliberation, and of the attempts afterwards made to obtain a pardon, are too notorious to require repetition. The execution of Ney was one of the grossest faults of the Restoration : his crime was great he himself appears to have admitted that it was so; but, as we have seen, it was not premeditated ; only a few hours elapsed between his active fidelity and his treason ; it was the effect of the pressure of circumstances of extraordinary difficulty and perplexity on a mind unaccustomed to balance conflicting * Proces, No. iv. pp. 37, 38, 39. Berryer, vol. i. p. 376. 86 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. motives. If Ney had been a man of higher education, he would have felt that no motive justifies a failure in honour. But he had been trained in revolutionary camps; the only fidelity to which he had been accustomed was fidelity to France, and fidelity to the Emperor. He was now required to become an emigrant from the one and an opponent to the other ; he was required to do this, though he believed the cause of the Bourbons to be irretrievably lost, and the reign of Bonaparte an inevitable calamity. No one can doubt what his conduct ought to have been ; but no one can wonder at what it actually was. It must be added, that his treason was really harmless; no opposition on his part could have retarded, by a single hour, the entry of Bonaparte into Paris. If he had followed the example of Macdonald, he must have shared his fate have seen his troops join the usurper, and then have fled across the frontier ; the only consequence would have been, that Bonaparte would have had one brave man less at Quatre-Bras and Waterloo. Under such circum- stances, his execution, even if it had been legal, would have been impolitic. Public opinion would have sanctioned his banishment, but not his death. But the judgement under which he suffered was manifestly illegal. Royalist as he is, M. Berryer is so convinced of this, that he accounts for it by the irrational supposition that it was extorted from the King by the allied powers for the mere purpose of degrading the French army. Ney was included in the words and in the spirit of the convention. To deny validity to the convention BERRYEK. 87 because it was entered into with rebels, was to affirm the execrable doctrine, that faith is not to be kept in civil war. To deny its validity because it was not formally accepted by the King, was to add fraud to oppression ; for what can be a baser fraud than to accept the benefits of an agree- ment and to refuse its obligations ? There was not a human being to whom that convention was so beneficial as Louis. If it had not been effected if, after the slaugh- ter of 25,000 of its defenders, Paris had had to endure the horrors of a town taken by assault, could Louis have retained a crown so recovered for a longer period than while English and Austrian troops occupied his capital and his country ? Louis owed to that convention his throne as an independent monarch. When we recollect this, it is unnecessary to refer to the well-known fact alluded to by M. Berry er, that Louis did expressly recognise the convention, by appealing to it in order to prevent Blucher from destroying the Pont de Jena. As is usually the case with political crimes, it received its retribution. The recollection of Ney's death was one of the principal causes of the unpopularity with the army which haunted the elder Bourbons; and fifteen years afterwards, when, in their utmost need, they had to rely on the army for support, that recollection precipitated their fall. We have said that the trial of Ney exercised an un- favourable influence on the subsequent fortunes of M. Berryer. He had obtained from the King the fullest permission to act for the prisoner a permission which 88 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. might have been supposed to be unnecessary to an advocate filling no office under the crown ; but, though the permission was granted, the act was registered as an offence. It was thought, too, that he had too much iden- tified himself with his client. In his honest indignation against the restriction imposed on the defence, he had ventured to call it a denial of justice; and, what was worse, in consequence of the recollections which the term excited a revolutionary proceeding : this seems never to have been forgiven. The result was, that he was excluded under the Kestoration, as he had been under the empire, from the Conseil de Discipline and the dignity of Bdton- nier, an exclusion to which he attaches what seems to us an undue importance. The subsequent life of M. Berryer contains no facts sufficiently interesting to lead us to dwell on them. In 1825 he visited London, on business connected with the administration of the estate of a French subject who died in England. He was charmed, as might have been expected, with his reception by 'Sir Coppley (aujourd? hui Lord Linthurst), Atthorney-General' (we copy literatim) ; gratified by the respect paid to him when he appeared in court; and amused by finding there people 'en perruque a la Louis XIV.' He ascertained, he says, that his reception was meant as a return for that with which Lord Erskine had been honoured, at a sitting of the GOUT cPAppel of Paris. This, however, we can assure him is a mistake. It was scarcely possible that any one of those who rose in "Westminster Hall to welcome a distinguished BERRYER. 89 stranger, could have heard how Lord Erskine had been treated twenty years before in Paris; and it must be added, that the mere announcement of M. Berryer's name was a sufficient passport to the attention of a British bar. Soon after his return from London M. Berryer ceased to appear regularly in court ; he was entering his sixty- ninth year, and began to feel daily contests oppressive. He found, too, his eldest son, by this time a distinguished advocate, often opposed to him ; he thinks that this was done by the suitors intentionally, which is not very probable, since it diminished the efficiency of the son as much as that of the father. The result has been, that for some years he has nearly confined himself to chamber business and arbitrations. He continued, indeed, up to the time of the publication of his memoirs, to plead at the bar in causes in which he possessed peculiar infor- mation. The last circumstance of this kind which he mentions took place at Eouen in the end of the year 1837 ; and he relates with pleasure his reappearance, after an interval of sixty years, on the scene of one of his earliest triumphs. M. Berryer dwells with just pride on the extent and long continuance of his labours. When we consider that his practice embraced every branch of jurisprudence, ecclesiastical, international, civil, and criminal ; that he performed the duties of a solicitor as well as those of a barrister ; and that he has been engaged in these duties, with scarcely any interruption, for more than sixty years ; his readiness to undergo toil, and his power of enduring 90 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. it, are perhaps unparalleled. He attributes his success to his domestic happiness, and to a natural gaiety of dispo- sition, fostered by the amenity, and, to use his own expression, the joyousness, of the manners and habits which for the first thirty-four years of his life adorned his country. But now, he says, no one smiles in France; he finds himself, between eighty and ninety, too young for his associates, and is forced to repress a thousand sallies which the gravity of the times would not tolerate. He tells us, that for the same reason he has suppressed the most amusing parts of his ' Kecollections ;' and defers his full revelations until a period when the public may be better prepared for them. He has appended to the narrative portion of his work some propositions on Political Economy and Legislation, the results of his long experience and meditation. We cannot venture to call the attention of our readers to them on any other ground than as specimens of the degree of knowledge on these subjects which has been acquired by a French lawyer, far superior in intelligence to the bulk of his brethren. He conceives it to be the duty of the government to regulate production, and promote an equivalent consump- tion. For the first purpose, he thinks that the minister of commerce ought to direct, by a perpetual course of regulations founded on accurate statistical facts, all the proceedings of agriculture and manufactures. For the second purpose, he proposes to check the tendency to systematic economy, which he thinks the great enemy of BEERYER. 91 consumption, by a tax on accumulated capital; the amount to be ascertained by requiring from every capitalist a declaration of his fortune, any concealment to be punished by confiscation. Such a tax he thinks would prevent the parsimony which dries up the channels of circulation. He further proposes to establish in every department a bank, to be managed by landholders, of which the capital should consist of land, and which should issue notes to a corresponding amount ; and also insurance companies, to secure the punctual payment of rents, and relieve land- holders from the temptation to provide, by annual savings, against irregularity of income such savings being, in M. Berryer's opinion, unfavourable to circulation. He thinks that eighty-three new peers ought to be created, one for each department ; that their dignity should be hereditary, and that its transmission to an unfit person should be prevented by an examination, from time to time, into the moral and intellectual qualities of each successor. He thinks that the tendency in man to better his condition and to change his residence should be repressed. He proposes that no one should be allowed to exempt himself from military service (the great oppression of France) by finding a substitute, unless he can prove that he has always resided under his father's roof, and that it is probable that he will continue to do so ; and that no one shall be allowed to serve as a substitute, unless he can show that he has always resided in the parish where he 92 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. was born. Further, that those who have changed their residences shall be subjected to increased taxation, and that no one shall be eligible to any local office if he have quitted his birthplace. He ventures to insinuate a regret at the complete abo- lition of lettres de cachet, and, as a substitute, proposes to give parents and guardians power over children and wards until the age of twenty-five. He proposes to create courts of equity, with criminal and civil jurisdiction, for the purpose of punishing offences not cognisable by the existing law, and forcing people to be liberal and grateful. 'Since religion and morality,' says he, ' have lost their power, they must be supplied by legal coercion.' Such views, in so eminent a member of the French bar, explain Bonaparte's contempt of advocates. The work is written in an easy, but rather careless style ; and to the inconvenience of a foreign reader, is full of un- explained technical terms. The great fault of the short narratives of which it is mainly composed, is a perplexed arrangement of facts. To make our extracts intelligible, we have often been forced to transpose them. 93 TRONSON DU COUDRAY.* [EDINBUEGH KEVIEW, April 1852.] work, of which we have prefixed the title to this J- article, is one of an intended series which was in- terrupted by the revolution of 1848. We have not been able to find more of it than these two volumes ; and we believe that no more has been published. They form, however, a complete work, containing the life and remains of a man who was one of the most distinguished members of the French bar during one of its most brilliant periods, and one of the most able and intrepid of the statesmen who, after the bar was silenced, sacrificed their lives in the attempt to erect a stable government out of the ruins left by the Convention. We believe that a short notice of it may be interesting, both as illustrating the remarkable social state which preceded, and in fact brought on, the great French Revolution, and also as throwing light on the military revolution of the 18th Fructidor, which, next to that of 1789, has been the event which has most affected the fortunes of France and of Europe a revolu- tion which deprived France of the glorious peace which * Nouvelles Causes Celebres. Kecueillis et mis en ordre par M. le Comte de Marcourt. Paris: 1846. 94 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Pitt was eagerly offering to her, which led her to play double or quits with fortune, until the unlucky throw, sure to come at last, stripped her of the winnings of twenty years of successful war, and which, during the fifty-six following years, has always placed her sceptre in the hands which know best how to use the sword. Tronson du Coudray was born at Kheims, on the 18th of November, 1750. His family belonged to the noblesse of the town ; a class which the facilities of locomotion, the preponderance of Paris, and a growing contempt for pro- vincial illustration, and indeed for provincial life, have now nearly extinguished in France, as they have in Eng- land ; but which, a century ago, constituted in every city a respected aristocracy, with a public spirit and a public opinion of its own. He was one of ten children, and the means of his family would not have enabled him to receive more than a very narrow education ; but the talents which he displayed as a boy attracted general notice, and the city of Rheims supplied the funds necessary to carry him through the University. His favourite study was the law, then a necessary part of a liberal education ; not, indeed, the municipal law of France (for among the heterogeneous ill-assimilated provinces into which France was then divided, there was no general law of France, any more than in England there is a general law of copyholds), but the great magazine of jurisprudential experience, skill, and philosophy the Roman Civil Law. His exertions injured his health, and he was advised to try a total change of scenes and pursuits. He connected himself with a TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 95 commercial firm in Rheims, and travelled on the business of the House through Germany, Poland, and Russia. His health was restored, but on his return he found himself engaged in a lawsuit with his partners. This decided the course of his future life. He pleaded his own cause, and his success made him resolve to make the law his profes- sion. At the age of twenty-eight, in 1778, four years after the accession of Louis XVI., in the same year with M. Berryer, he was received as avocat in Paris, and began his short but illustrious career. The system of criminal procedure which then prevailed in France, as it still does in the greater part of Europe, is one which in England is adopted merely as preparatory to trial. It is called, by foreign jurists, the process by enquiry, to distinguish it from that which we adopt, which they call the process by accusation. Under the latter system the sovereign, on the complaint of an individual, brings forward and supports a specific accusation, against which the accused defends himself: a time is appointed for the decision, at which all the evidence on each side must be ready. If at the trial any link is wanting in the prosecutor's chain of evidence, so much .the worse for justice ; if one is wanted on the part of the prisoner, so much the worse for innocence. When once the curtain has been raised the play must be played out. The witnesses are bound to remain in attendance, the jury are kept from their homes, the court sits on from hour to hour, or, if necessary, from day to day, until the verdict has been pro- nounced. But the process by enquiry, as is the case with 96 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. us with respect to the preliminary proceedings before the committing magistrate, is not confined within any fixed period. The question which the court has to decide is not whether a prosecutor has proved that a specified person has committed a specified offence, but whether any and what offence has been committed, and who has com- mitted it. The enquiry, therefore, is at first ex parte. If a plausible case is made out against an individual he is arrested, imprisoned, and examined ; his own examinations being expected to afford or to indicate the best evidence against him. When all the criminatory proof has been collected, it is communicated to the prisoner, who now, perhaps for the first time, knows the nature of the charge, and for the first time has legal assistance. As justice has not hurried herself in collecting the evidence against him, she does not hurry him in preparing his defence. No time is fixed for the termination of the proceedings. They are to end as soon as the court is convinced of his innocence or of his guilt. Further proofs on either side may be adduced at what appeared to be the last moment. An accusation is a drama, in which all the unities, action, time, and place, are preserved. An enquiry resembles a novel, in which event succeeds event, and the story wanders on from year to year.* The first important cause in which Tronson du Coudray was engaged was a remarkable one. * I have described the Process by Enquiry at more length in the paper on Feuerbach. TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 97 On the 1st of August, 1773, a horseman, who was ap- proaching Peronne, found on the high road a boy, about eleven years old, covered only by half-consumed rags, attenuated by want and fatigue, and uttering inarticulate cries. The traveller took his new acquaintance with him to Peronnej set before him food, which he devoured with a voracity which showed that he had long endured hunger, and endeavoured to learn his history. This, however, he found impossible, for the boy was deaf and dumb. A charitable woman took charge of him for some weeks, at the end of which, through the intervention of M. de Sartine, the well-known minister of Police, he was placed on the 2nd of September in the Bicetre, then used as an asylum for foundlings. Food and rest restored his bodily health, but he shrank from the contact of the boys among whom he was thrown. They belonged most of them by birth, all of them by education to the lower orders. His appearance, and, as far as his infirmities permitted it, his manners, were aristocratic. He had the quick intelligent look which often animates the countenances of those who derive knowledge only through their eyes, and the docility and refinement which are the results of early cultivation. He was of course oppressed and persecuted by his vulgar companions ; his spirits, and at last his health, failed ; and after remaining twenty- two months in the Bicetre, he was removed to the Hotel Dieu of Paris. The Abbe de 1'Epee, always in search of objects whom, by means of the wonderful system of signs of which he was the inventor, he could enable to communicate with their H 98 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. fellow-creatures, found the deaf and dumb boy at the Hotel Dieu, removed him to his own house, and in a few months rendered him capable of telling something about himself. The story, which Joseph (that was the name given to him by the Abbe) related, was, that he remembered having lived with his father and mother and sister in a fine house with a large garden, and that he used to ride in a carriage and on horseback ; that his father was tall, his face marked by wounds received in battle; that he died, and that his mother and sister, as well as himself, wore mourning ; that he was taken from home by a man on horseback, that his clothes were changed for rags, and that he was turned loose in a wood, wandered for some days until he reached the high road, and then passed through the ad- ventures which we have related. Joseph's story, which bears a wonderful similarity to that related by Caspar Hauser, sixty years afterwards, excited deep interest. It was frequently told by the Abbe in the sort of lectures which he gave to those who visited his establishment; and both the speaker and the audience indulged in conjectures as to what the great family might be of which Joseph was probably the representative. A lady who was present on one of these occasions, apparently in the beginning of the year 1777, mentioned that in the autumn of 1773, a deaf and dumb boy, the only son of Count Solar, the head of the ancient house of Solar, which has produced several knights celebrated in the history of the Order of Malta, had left Toulouse, where his father and mother then resided, and had never returned. He was said TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 99 to have died soon after. It was suggested that this was Joseph. Enquiries were made at Toulouse, and the sug- gestion became plausible. The family of the Count had consisted of two children, a boy and a girl, the boy born in the year 1761, and deaf and dumb. The father had died in the beginning of 1773, and the mother had sent her son from Toulouse to Bagneres de Bigorre, under the care of a young lawyer named Cazeaux. In the beginning of the next year Cazeaux had returned, but not the boy ; he was said to have died in January, 1774, of small pox. The mother died in 1775. The Abbe de 1'Epee took up the cause of his pupil with the enthusiasm which belonged to his character. He believed that in what had passed he could trace the hand of Providence. Young Solar's mother, he maintained, either to escape from the burden of an imperfect child, or to secure for herself or for her daughter his inheritance, had given him to Cazeaux to be exposed. To conceal the crime he had been taken 600 miles off, to Peronne, and abandoned to what appeared certain destruction in a wood. But the eye of Grod was watching. A traveller was sent to rescue him, a woman to receive him, the Abbe himself to instruct him ; and now able for the first time to tell his story, he asked for restoration to the honours of his house, and for the punishment of Cazeaux, the only surviving actor in the crime. The Due de Penthievre, a prince of the blood, was among those whom the Abbe interested for his protege, [e provided munificently for Joseph's support, and sup- 100 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. plied funds for the expensive legal proceedings necessary to establish him as Count Solar. The boy was taken to Clermont, the birthplace of the Countess Solar, where she and her son had lived during the first four years of his life. It was not to be expected that those who had known him only when four years old would recognise him at seventeen. Some recognition, however, there was: Madame de Solar's father was still living; he fancied that Joseph resembled his grandson, and, what he thought more important, he felt for him an affection which must be instinctive. The Countess's brother believed Joseph to be his nephew, because he had the round shoulders and large knees of the Count. The woman who kept the school at Clermont, at which the young Count had been placed, her daughter, and two servants, also perceived a resemblance. It was recollected, too, that the young Count had on his back a mole in the shape of a lentil ; a similar mole was found, or thought to be found, on the back of Joseph. It appears that Joseph possessed considerable natural talents, and that his deafness was not complete. He soon ascertained the nature of the claim which was made on his behalf, and endeavoured to promote it. He had sufficient self-command to feign perfect insensibility to sound, and sufficient acuteness to make out something of the conversations which passed before him. He learned some facts connected with the Solar family, and repro- duced them ; and thus a considerable body of evidence of his identity was collected. The evidence, however, on the TRONSON DU COUDKAY. 101 other side was strong. Many persons belonging to Tou- louse, who had been intimate with the young Count, denied even his resemblance to Joseph ; and, what seemed to be almost decisive, the young Countess Solar did not recognise Joseph as her brother, nor did he know her to be his sister. Each treated the other as a stranger. The identity, therefore, of Joseph and the young Count sank from a probability to a possibility a possibility which must vanish altogether, if the death of the latter could be established. The Abbe de PEpee, however, and the public, had taken up Joseph's cause with the inconsiderate vehemence to which the French are subject. He claimed, before the Cour du Chatelet, in Paris, the name and honours of Count Solar ; and the first step taken by the court was to order the arrest of Cazeaux, and his prosecution as the abductor and exposer of Joseph. Cazeaux was defended by Tronson du Coudray. As a specimen of Tronson du Coudray's powers, we extract his statement of the mode in which the arrest was made. It must be recollected that he was then a young advocate making his first important speech. 'At mid-day the officers of justice, accompanied by a furious mob, seized M. Cazeaux, dragged him through the streets of Toulouse to the Hotel de Ville, where they threw him into a horrible dungeon, called La Misericorde, to wait among condemned felons for the departure of the cart which was to carry him to Paris. The next day, and again at noon, both hands and feet in irons, he was thrown 102 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. into it, and thus set out on a journey of five hundred miles. While they were in motion he was chained to the cart ; when they halted he was chained to the inn table ; at night he was chained to his bed. "At every village," he has often said to me in our consultations, " the inha- bitants crowded round the carriage, and speculated on my crimes." " He is a highwayman, said some." " He is a murderer," said others. " He is to be broken on the wheel." " No, he is to be burned, look at his chains." And I could not close my ears or hide my face." Painful as this picture is, I must dwell on it for an instant. For seventeen days this innocent man (for innocent he is I shall prove it even to demonstration) was exposed to fresh witnesses of his dishonour. For seventeen days he read in hundreds of eyes the horror and the disgust which his presence in- spired. For seventeen days he heard repeated at every stage prophecies of his infamous execution. Though his conscience told him that he was innocent, a hundred voices proclaimed his guilt. "I am innocent," he repeated. "Xonsense," they replied, "look at your chains." And he could not close his ears or hide his face. Ah, Messieurs, s if I could allow myself to admit the supposition that he is guilty, his guilt has been atoned for. The sufferings of seventeen days such as those avenge society. 'Let-another scene of this tragedy pass before us. The ignominious journey at length came to an end. M. Cazeaux reached Paris ; he was taken from his cart and thrown into one of the vaults of the Grand Chatelet. Thence he was transferred to a still lower dungeon, without light or TRONSOX DU COUDRAY. 103 air, and kept for six days without examination. For six days and the law says that every prisoner shall be examined within twenty-four hours for six days my unhappy client was left in darkness and in solitude to brood over the cruelties which he had suffered, and to imagine those which he had to undergo. If the past indi- cates the future, what is the amount of the oppression that is reserved for him ? ' * Tronson du Coudray then proceeded to prove, by the depositions of a host of witnesses, that the day on which the young Count left Toulouse, under the care of Cazeaux, was the 4th of September, 1773. It was on the 1st of August, in the same year, that Joseph was found in the wood near Peronne. From these respective dates he traced the contemporary history of the two youths: showed that in November 1773 Count Solar was at Bag- neres, and Joseph at the Bicetre ; and, finally, that on the 28th of January, 1774, Count Solar died at Charlas, near Bagneres, of small pox, having survived his father about a year. Cazeaux was of course acquitted; but the veil was never removed from the early history of Joseph. That he was the son of a man of fortune and rank, that during his father's life he was treated with kindness, and that when his father died his mother sacrificed him to family pride or cupidity, are facts which there seems no reason to doubt. It is scarcely possible that he could have invented them. And the circumstance that such a * Vol. i. pp. 40, 41, 42. 104 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. sacrifice could be made without detection throws some light on the state of French society before the Bevolution. A frightful mystery must have been confided for many years to many persons ; persons not selected as peculiarly fit to be its depositaries, but the ordinary domestics of a great family. Yet so strong was the feudal principle of loyalty by which they were bound to keep the secrets of the house in which they served, that not a whisper ever revealed the domestic tragedy in which many must have been actors and many more spectators. If such events were to take place now in France, if the deaf and dumb child of opulent parents were exposed by his family, and were rescued by accident, and public curiosity were seeking out his relations, not a month would pass before some accomplice or some confidant would supply a clue by which they would be ascertained. The strong domestic discipline of the eighteenth century suppressed all indi- cation. Another set of events, distinguishing those times from ours, is the treatment of Cazeaux. We have extracted Tronson du Coudray's description of his violent arrest, and of his ignominious transportation to Paris. The sub- sequent proceedings in the enquiry were of a piece with its atrocious beginning. For twenty-two days he was left in a dungeon, unlighted and unventilated, with no in- tercourse with mankind, except six examinations, each of which such was then the pace at which justice advanced in France lasted eight hours. The intercession of the Archbishop of Toulouse procured for him a more tolerable TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 105 prison, and legal assistance. He asked to be admitted to bail. It was refused. He demanded that Joseph should be taken to Toulouse, to Bagneres de Bigorre, and to Charlas, the last places in which Count Solar had been known, and staked his life on the result. If Joseph was there recognised as the Count he would make no further defence. It is obvious to us, and must have been obvious to the judges of Cazeaux, that this experiment would have been decisive. If Joseph was the Count Solar, a thousand witnesses were there to proclaim it ; if he was not, there were there a thousand witnesses to deny it. This again was refused. * On what grounds ? ' asked Tronson du Coudray. ' A reason has been given, but one which this court would not have conjectured one which it can scarcely believe but I must report it as I received it. The ground is, that the expense would be too great. This is the answer to the cries of an innocent man in his despair. This is the sort of excuse which keeps our prisons full. The expense ! when the questions at issue are the rank and fortune of one citizen and the honour and life of another. The expense ! when an impostor is to be exposed or a murderer to be punished. The expense ! as if the most sacred debt owed by the Crown were not the protection of its subjects.' * For eleven months Cazeaux was detained in the prisons of the Chatelet of Paris, uncondemned, unacquitted. All * Vol. i. p. 84. 106 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. his little fortune was wasted, his practice destroyed, and his health ruined. And if he had not appealed to the Parle- ment of Rouen, there seems no reason for fixing any term at which the enquiry would have terminated. How are this cruel rigour and indifference to be accounted for ? It does not appear that the judges of the Chatelet had any personal quarrel with M. Cazeaux. It does not appear that until they ordered his arrest they had ever heard of him. He was an obscure provincial lawyer, whose name had never reached the capital. We believe that it was to this very obscurity that he owed his sufferings. He was a roturier, and he was ac- cused of having injured a noble. The Court cared no more about his feelings, or his sufferings, or his ruin, than a Bramin cares about the fortunes of a Pariah, or a Boer about those of a Hottentot. He belonged to a caste for whom those who then governed France had no fellow- feeling. One cannot wonder that when the millions of whom that caste was composed suddenly passed from ab- ject weakness and contempt to absolute power, they felt no sympathy for those from whom they had received none, and looked with indifference, or in many instances with pleasure, on the exile, the ruin, and even the judicial murder of those who were known to them only as insolent superiors. Our readers may perhaps be interested by the actors in this remarkable drama sufficiently to wish to know their subsequent history. Joseph, admitted to be probably an injured gentleman, though certainly not Count Solar, en- TEONSON DU COUDEAY. 107 tered the army and was killed early in the revolutionary war. A M. Avril, a rich old bachelor, a judge in the Chatelet, who had taken an active part in the proceedings against Cazeaux, sought his acquaintance after his ac- quittal, and made him a splendid amends by bequeathing to him a considerable fortune. The Eevolution came, and for a time diminished the prejudices of caste. The Countess Solar was poor. Cazeaux had become rich. They married, fixed themselves at Mandres, near Brunoy, a few leagues from Paris, on a part of the property inherited from Avril, and lived there through the Revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration. M. Cazeaux died in 1831 ; his wife in 1835. It is a proof of the degree in which manners have degenerated in France, that M. Cazeaux, a provincial and a roturier, was considered in his old age a model of elegance. The only drawback on the tranquil happiness of his later life was that more than once a dramatic or a melo-dramatic writer took Joseph, or the Abbe de 1'Epee, for his hero, and turned Cazeaux into a hired assassin. Cazeaux had to write and to explain ; and there is always some degradation in having to confess that one has been treated as a malefactor, and in having to prove that the treatment was not deserved. We proceed to a trial of a very different kind to a comedy rather than a tragedy. At the time of which we are writing, one of the prin- cipal employments of the Courts was to decide on demands made by wives for a formal separation from their husbands. Such a separation was decreed, on proof that the hus- 108 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. band had either treated his wife with cruelty or had defamed her character. On both these grounds the Marchioness Soyecourt demanded a separation from her husband, the Marquis. We shall not dwell on the evi- dence by which she supported these charges, or on the arguments by which Tronson du Coudray refuted them. The interest of the cause lies in the relative situation of the parties, and in the insight which their ante-nuptial arrangements, and their post-nuptial conduct, give us into the habits and feelings of the aristocracy of the ancien regime. The Marquis de Soyecourt had lost two wives, when he proposed to marry the Princess Nassau-Saarbruck. She had little fortune, and was no longer young; but her rank was high, and this seems to have attracted the Marquis. He was also a man of high birth, though not equal to hers, and he had a large fortune. By the marriage settlement the Marquis engaged to allow his wife 400L a year pin-money ; to keep for her exclusive use a coach and six, three footmen, two ladies-maids, and a postillion, all to be selected by herself ; and, if she re- quired it, to give her a dame d'honneur. On these terms the marriage took place in July 1 783, and they immediately took possession of the Marquis's country house Tilloloy, in Picardy. A large party had been assembled in the house by the Marquis eight days before the marriage, and remained there till the family moved to Paris in December. Open house was kept for the neighbours, so that Tilloloy, for five months, was a TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 109 scene of constant fete. The same sort of life was con- tinued at Paris, and if gaiety and dissipation were the Marchioness's objects she enjoyed them in perfection. It is characteristic of the manners of the times that Du Coudray, among his praises of the Marquis's marital conduct, dwells on his having every morning paid his wife a visit in her apartment to enquire after her health. We have mentioned the clause in the settlement which gave the lady a household of her own. Her servants abused their independence with the insolence of unedu- cated persons. They neglected the orders of the Marquis, they refused to perform for him any services, to announce, for instance, his visitors, or to serve him at table, and they were supported by their mistress. He defended him- self by dismissing two women who were the most offen- sive. The Marchioness instantly quitted his house and made a legal demand for separation, and for alimonj'-, which she fixed at 4,000. a year, being about half of his whole income. Her grounds of complaint were, that he had dismissed her servants, which she termed cruelty, and that he had declared that her child was not his, which, with more reason, she called defamation. Immediately afterwards the Marquis was committed to the Bastile on a lettre de cachet. This was in 1786. A lettre de cachet was not then a thing to be freely discussed. The Marquis was not informed on what grounds, or on whose solicita- tion, this was issued: he was told, however, that if he would arrange matters with his wife it would be recalled. 110 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. He refused to submit, and after some months' imprison^ ment was released, but exiled to Tilloloy. Tronson.du Coudray complains bitterly that this exile prevented his calling personally on his judges, and informing them of the merits of his cause. For, according to a practice which then prevailed over nearly the whole of the con- tinent, and now exists in many parts of it, particularly in Italy, the parties in a cause visited separately their judges, and each told his own story in private. What was the ultimate result of the Marchioness's complaint does not appear. We have only Tronson du Coudray's pleading. Though delivered scarcely more than sixty years ago, it implies a state of habits and feelings which seem to be separated by centuries from those of modern France. The longest and perhaps the most important argument in this collection is that which Tronson du Coudray delivered in the end of 1788, before the Parliament of Rouen, on behalf of the Sieur Thibault against M. Froudiere. Two brothers named Thibault, rich old bachelors, lived together at Paris in 1786, with a small household, in which O y ' one Marie Clereaux was a housemaid. They suspected her honesty, examined her trunks, found there some handker- chiefs belonging to one of the brothers, and five hundred francs, the possession of which she could not account for, and which they therefore assumed to be the produce of former thefts. They immediately dismissed her, retaining the five hundred francs, but took no further proceedings. A few days after she came to them, accompanied by a TRONSON DU COUDRAY. Ill commissaire de police, and demanded from them the money, and a certificate of good conduct. They refused both, assigning as the grounds of their refusal the facts which we have related. She admitted that the handker- chiefs had been found in her box, but maintained that they had been placed there by the Thibaults, and required them either to give up to her the money or to indict her for theft. They were of course forced to accept the challenge, and prosecuted her before the Court of the Bailliage. She was condemned, and appealed to the Parlement of Eouen. In this appeal her counsel was M. Froudiere. The French press was then subject to a censorship, from which legal papers, signed by advocates, were alone exempted. The inhabitants of a great capital delight in gossip and scandal, which were abundantly supplied by the proceedings of the courts of law. They formed the favourite literature of the time. Our readers must re- collect the pleadings of Beaumarchais, and the avidity with which all Paris devoured his requetes and his repliqucs in matters which might have been supposed to possess no public interest. M. Froudiere signed, printed, and dis- tributed on the behalf of Marie Clereaux, a requete, in which her former defence, that the handkerchiefs had been placed by the Thibaults in her box, was repeated. It seems now, however, to have occurred to her, or to her counsel, that it was necessary to assign a motive for such conduct, and to show what could have induced two men of fortune and station to conspire for the purpose of imputing 112 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. to their own servant a capital crime. The motive assigned in the requete was that Marie Clereaux had become the involuntary depositary of a frightful secret. * A few nights,' she said, ' before the day on which my boxes were searched, and the handkerchiefs were found in them, I was awakened by the cries of a woman. I thought that I recognised the voice of my fellow-servant, Marie- Anne Delaunay. They continued for some time. I became too uneasy to stay in bed, got up, and groped my way in the dark towards the room from which they seemed to issue. It was that of the younger M. Thibault, which stands at the end of a passage, detached from the rest of the house. As I reached the passage the cries of the woman were mingled with those of a child. I was alarmed, and went back ; they became more violent, and I went again towards the room ; there was a strong light, like that of a large fire, under the door. I knocked, and called, but the door was kept shut, and Thibault cried from within that nothing was the matter, and desired me to go back to my room. I stayed some time before the door, during which I heard nothing but the suppressed sobs of the woman, and from time to time the low wailing of the child. I knocked again, and was fiercely and peremptorily ordered away, if I valued my life. I did not venture to remain at the door, but lingered at the end of the passage. Suddenly I heard a frightful shriek, succeeded by perfect silence. I ran back to my bed, and passed the rest of the night thinking over the horrors that I had heard. The next day, and, indeed, until I was turned away, M. Tbi- TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 113 bault's room was kept locked. Neither he nor Marie- Anne Delaunay would give me any explanation. They merely answered my enquiries by saying that nothing had happened, and that it would be better for me if I minded my own affairs. I never again heard the voice of the child. What became of it is known only to the Thibaults and Marie-Anne Delaunay. I was not wise enough to follow their advice ; from time to time I al- luded to what had passed. I was caught once trying to enter M. Thibault's room. The next day, on return- ing from a message on which I had been sent, I found my boxes broken open. I was told that property of my masters had been found in them. I was discharged without a character, was robbed of the little money that I had saved, and when I asked for reparation I was prose- cuted for theft.' The libel ran like wildfire through the excitable popula- tion of Paris. It was just on the eve of the Revolution. The press took up the cause of poverty against aristocratic fraud and cruelty. Nothing was too monstrous to be believed when two rich men were accused by a servant girl. The skill with which the dreadful story was rather hinted at than told, the veil thrown over its catastrophe, yet raised enough to show what it must have been, the cre- dibility given to the whole by the official signature of the advocate, seem to have blinded everyone to its original improbability and to its defective proof. A furious mob at- tacked the house of the Thibaults, and were not driven away by the troops . till they had broken through its doors and i 114 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. thrown torches into the sitting-rooms. The two brothers fled from house to house, pursued everywhere by impreca- tions as the burners of the child. The elder Thibault, a man of seventy, ventured to walk in the Cour Dauphin. A crowd soon collected ; he hurried back, slipped, and fell ; they rushed on him., and trampled him under foot ; and though he was saved by the police from being torn to pieces on the spot, he died in three days of the injuries which he then received. A furious mob interrupted his funeral, threw the coffin on the ground, and endeavoured to exclude it from the church. A sister died broken- hearted a few days afterwards. The surviving brother, after one or two narrow escapes from the mob, protected himself by concealment. The proceedings of the court before which Marie Clereaux's appeal was tried, were dis- turbed by the vociferations of the spectators, and more than once suspended. And we cannot avoid suspecting that it was under this pressure from without that the judges gave their decision, if decision it can be called. They ordered her release, without either acquitting her or finding her guilty. M. Thibault proceeded against Froudiere before the Parlement de Eouen, as responsible for the libel. Tronson du Coudray's argument for the plaintiff consists of six distinct speeches ; the first five containing the attack, the sixth the reply. They are now published from a copy corrected by the author. The first tells in detail the story of which we have given the outline. In the second and third, Du Coudray meets TRONSON DU COUDRAT. 115 Froudiere's excuse, that the requete was a necessary part of Marie Clereaux's defence. The statements contained in the requete were a part of the defence only so far as they were true, and Froudiere, a practised advocate, accustomed all his life to sift evidence, must have seen at once that they were false. They rested on the bare assertion of Marie Clereaux, not merely unsupported by any other tes- timony, but opposed by a vast body of negative evidence. No one had ever heard of the existence of the child whose murder was the foundation of her story. No one had ever suspected any female in the house of pregnancy. The two Thibaults, whom she accused of this combination of frightful crimes, had each passed a long life with unim- peached reputation. On her first trial she had merely affirmed that the handkerchiefs had been placed by the Thibaults in her box, but had not suggested any motive for such wickedness. It was only on the appeal, after Froudiere became her counsel, and not early even in that proceeding, that the murder of the child was brought forward. It was the duty of Froudiere at once to tell his client that he would not be a party to the propagation of such a calumny, instead of becoming her active accomplice. ( Your guilt,' said Tronson du Coudray, addressing his adversary, * is a hundred times deeper than that of your client. The calumnies of Marie Clereaux were buried among the manuscripts of the pleadings ; yours were scat- tered by the press over all Paris. Marie Clereaux was a poor wretch, without morals or shame, whose testimony carried no weight ; you are an advocate, a man of talent and I 2 116 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. knowledge ; all that you authenticate is believed. When Marie Clereaux was interrogated she betrayed herself by the extravagance of her answers ; you covered her absur- dities with the skill of an experienced pleader. Marie Clereaux had mere audacity ; you employed eloquence, imagination, sarcasm, and philosophy. Marie Clereaux, with all her evil intentions, addressing only her judges, was impotent; you, appealing to the public, have destroyed the lives of some of your victims and the happiness of all. 'You ask what interest you had in attacking M. Thibault? This was your interest. You wished for cele- brity, you wished to create an effect, you wished to be talked of. An honourable advocate may have these weaknesses, but his self-love is tempered by his feeling of propriety. He refuses to obtain notoriety by calumny ; he repels the suggestions of vanity ; he is ashamed of having allowed them even to soil his mind. An unscrupulous man delights to show his powers of sarcasm and invective. He delights in being feared as well as praised, in inspiring at the same instant terror and admiration. Habitual in- dulgence in these passions produces the hateful state of mind to which we give the name of 'malignity ; a state of mind in which, if the first object is to do good to oneself, the second is to do harm to others. ' You say that you did not hate M. Thibault. Certainly you did not, for, I believe, that until you were Marie Clereaux's counsel you had never heard his name. But your mind was filled with a much worse passion than THOMSON DU COUDKAT. 117 hatred of an individual. You had no special wish to injure M. Thibault, but you had a general determination to injure everyone who stood in your path everyone by injuring whom you could advance yourself. This is the circumstance which interests the public in this cause. This is the circumstance which makes your example dangerous. ' You do not hate M. Thibault ; it would be a hundred times better if you did. It would be a single fact, disgrace- ful, criminal, but not alarming. The only inference would be, that it is dangerous to incur your enmity. But that without any feeling of hatred, of resentment, or even of jealousy, merely because it happened to suit you so to do, you covered an innocent stranger with opprobrium ; this is enough to spread terror all around you. It is possible to avoid incurring your hatred. There is no mode of protecting oneself from your malignity.' * 'And here,' said Du Coudray, at the end of the third speech, ' I might sit down. I have proved, by the clearest evidence, that you have aided in disseminating atrocious calumnies. But you answer, " The evidence is not to be trusted ; at least, the inference of my opponent is not to be drawn from it. It is impossible that a man of my station and character could knowingly have been an accomplice in a calumny. I believed Marie Clereaux's statements to be true. I now believe them to be true. If they are false, it is my error, not my fault." To this answer of yours I have a reply which my compassion for you scarcely allows me to utter. Ten times during the pleadings I have thought * Vol. i. pp. 329, 403. 118 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. of suppressing it, but you have made it necessary to my cause, and it must come out. * This is a dreadful moment for you, M. Froudiere, pro- bably the most terrible that you will ever undergo. You are in the presence of the judges to whom you owe an account of your whole conduct, and never more so than now. You are in the presence of the whole order to which you belong; you have summoned it to hear your justifica- tion. You are in the presence of an audience as large as this vast hall can contain, belonging to every class of society, but all uniting in their hatred of falsehood and treachery. Here is no room for subterfuge, for equivocation, for sophistry, or even for palliation. You will have to give me a clear, a precise, and a convincing answer, or to surrender for ever all claim to public esteem. As for myself, I think no more of the interests of my client, I rely no longer on the privileges of my profession ; I shall speak with the moderation, with the impartiality, and, I trust, with the candour of a bystander or a witness. You shall not reproach me with exaggerating a word or a look. ' These, then, M. Froudiere, are the facts which have been your secret terror during the whole of this long enquiry ; the facts which you have endeavoured to conceal by chicanery, by intimidation, and by corruption facts whose overwhelming weight is increased by their certainty, by their being proved, not by testimony or by inference, but by record. ' Up to the present time I have argued on the supposition that Marie Clereaux had no accomplice in her calumnies, TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 119 that your crime was that of an instrument. I thought it right to demonstrate, that even on that supposition you are inexcusable. I now change the line of my argument. I now maintain and the frightful story which I have to relate will prove that I am right I now maintain that, whether the inventor or not of the calumny (I leave this in doubt, because it is not demonstrably in proof), you were at the very least an active assistant in its production ; that you developed and fashioned her falsehoods, even if you did not originally suggest them. ' You have pleaded in the name of Marie Clereaux, that M. Thibault was the father of a child by Marie-Anne Delaunay, and destroyed that child. You have pleaded in the name of Marie Clereaux that M. Thibault conspired her death, in order to get rid of a witness of his crimes. You have boasted that your pleadings in Marie Clereaux's case were intended, not so much for the judges as for the public. ' Well, I affirm and the records of a court of justice will prove it to be true that you, M. Froudiere, have already been convicted of having, in an action in which a priest, your clergyman and benefactor, was concerned, introduced falsely into the pleadings precisely the same calumnies and nearly in the same words. 'I affirm that you were convicted of having falsely asserted that this priest had had a child by his servant, and had destroyed it. 4 1 affirm that you were convicted of having falsely asserted that this priest had endeavoured to poison one of his parishioners. 120 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. ' I affirm that you were convicted of having falsely asserted that his object was to get rid of a witness of his crimes. 'And I affirm that you boasted that your pleadings should be read by all the shepherds of the country.' * The effect of this denunciation was, of course, terrible. After a short pause the Advocate- General rose, and addressing the court, said, ' We are filled with horror ! M. Tronson du Coudray's story is frightful. I tremble like everyone else. A great criminal is before us. If M. Thibault has instructed his counsel to state facts that cannot be proved, his whole fortune will not pay the damages to which M. Froudiere will be entitled. If these facts can be proved, M. Froudiere is a monster, from whom society ought to be delivered.' f The records of the trial to which Du Coudray referred, were in the Provincial Court of Bernay. The Parlement ordered their production. They fully supported Du Coudray's opening. It appeared that, twelve years before, in 1776, M. Froudiere, having quarrelled with 1'Abbe de Boisgruel, the cure of his parish, had accused him of precisely the same crimes as those which the requite of Marie Clereaux imputed to M. Thibault, had been prosecuted by him for scandal, and had been forced to pay a large sum as damages, and to retract the charge in the face of the congregation. The principal trial was never terminated : the Revolu- tion swept away the plaintiff, the defendant, and the court. * Vol. i. p. 374. t Vol. i. p. 371. TRONSON DU COUDKAY. 121 All that remains of it are six speeches, which are among the most remarkable specimens of the eloquence of the illustrious bar of France. The last of Tronson du Coudray's legal pleadings to which we shall call the reader's attention, carries us still farther on to the Revolution. It is the memoire for the Sieur Reveillon. Reveillon was the son of humble parents : while a child he was apprenticed to a paper maker, and in 1743, when he was fifteen, the failure of his master threw him on the world. He had no money, and for some days could procure no employment, and he was dying, as, in a country without poor laws, a man may die, of cold and hunger, when a lad of his own age and condition saved him by pledging his tools, and raising a sum sufficient to support him till he found work in his trade. His progress was slow. In 1752, after nine years' service as journey- man, he had saved only eighteen francs. With this capital he began the trade of a paper merchant, and in ten years so far increased it as to be able to become a paper maker. Xow, however, his difficulties began. He was an in- ventor; he deviated from the narrow line and routine processes of his trade. He became, of course, an object of jealousy both to the paper makers, whose productions he surpassed, and to other classes of tradesmen, for whose commodities his inventions might become substitutes. In France every manufacture was then a corporation, with its own privileges, its own bye-laws, and its own monopolies. Some corporation claimed the exclusive right to every new 122 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. tool which he employed. Every new process which he used, every new article which he offered for sale, was the property of the engravers, or the tapestry weavers, or the printers, or the embroiderers. Actions were commenced against him which would have ruined him by their costs, even if he had succeeded in defeating every one of them. The remedy to which he had recourse is characteristic of the times: he obtained permission to entitle his establishment ( Manufacture Royale.' Immediately all legal persecution was at an end. An establishment sup- posed to be conducted by the King might of course employ what tools and processes, and make and sell what wares the royal manufacturer thought fit. Under the protection of this title, Reveillon became one of the great manufac- turers of France. His plant and workshops covered five acres in the Faubourg St. Antoine. He paid more than 200,000 livres a year in wages, which, considering the value of money at that time in Paris, was equal to 20,000. a year in London now. A painter of eminence, who received 10,000 livres a year, superintended the designs of the painted papers : under him were four artists, all of considerable merit. The whole number of persons whose support, directly or indirectly, depended on Eevei lion's manufactory, must have amounted to thousands. During the memorable winter of 1788, the severity of the frost for some weeks stopped the works ; he continued to pay the same wages as before. The jealousy, however, of his rivals was not extinct. They whispered about in the Faubourg St. Antoine, that TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 123 Eeveillon was the friend of the noblesse; that he was looking out for the cordon of St. Michael ; and, at last, that he had said, that fifteen sous a day were wages enough for a workman. Such was then the state of mind in the Faubourg St. Antoine, that on the 12th of June, 1789, without warning, without explanation, a ferocious mob marched on Keveillon's premises, with a declared intention of burning them down and murdering the proprietor. Happily for him he was then at the arch- bishop's, exercising his privilege of voting. A body of national guards were drawn up in the first court yard : the rioters after some parley retired, announcing their intention to return the next day, but in arms. At noon, the next day, they kept their engagement ; a strong body of soldiers was present, but remained inactive. The mob broke through the gates, and lighted three great fires in the yards. Into these they threw everything that was consumable furniture, pictures, books, including all those belonging to the trade, hangings, linen, and clothes. When all that would burn had been burnt, they broke to pieces the chandeliers and glasses, tore down the wain- scoting and chimney-pieces, and stole all the money and plate. Having thus amused themselves for two hours, they at last thought fit to fire on the troops. And then, at last, the troops fired in return, and the mob, having i leisurely and effectually done its work, retired. We have refrained from extracting any of Tronson du Coudray's comments on this outrage, because he does not appear to have perceived its importance. All that he 124 BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCHES. dwells on, all that appears to have struck him, is the malignity of the authors of the imputation. The really for- midable symptom was the effect of that imputation. The object which Colbert and his successors had been pursuing for a century, the object to which they had sacrificed the agriculture and commerce of France, was beginning to be attained. France was becoming a manufacturing nation. Paris was not then, what unhappily it is now, a great manufacturing town, but it had a large manufacturing population. This is the population, the offspring of the French prohibitory commercial, or rather anti-commercial, system, which for sixty years has rendered unstable every form of French government, imperial, regal, oligarchical, and democratic, and at length has enabled an usurper to destroy liberty, on the pretence that it leads to anarchy. The facility with which the population of the Faubourg St. Antoine believed the absurd calumnies which Marie Clereaux cast on the Thibaults, and which his manufac- turing rivals directed against Reveillon; the ferocity to which in both cases that belief impelled them the subservience in the former case of a court of justice to the folly and violence of the mob ; and the inactivity in the second case of the public force were symptoms of the state of mind both in the people and in its rulers, which six weeks after showed themselves in the unpunished murder of the garrison of the Bastille, and three years afterwards in the paid massacres of September. With the memoir for the Sieur Eeveillon, the collection TROXSON DU COUDKAY. 125 of Tronson du Coudray's civil pleadings ends. This is much to be regretted, as we know that the period between the plunder of Eeveil Ion's establishment in 1 789, and Du Coudray's entrance into the legislative body in 1795, was the most brilliant portion of his forensic life. He was one of the few advocates whom the Reign of Terror did not silence ; who ventured to defend those who were sent to undergo what was meant to be a mere form of trial before the ferocious judges and the sanguinary jury of the revolu- tionary tribunal. He dared to snatch victims from Dumas, Coffinhal, and Fouquier Tinville. He wrote to the Con- vention to offer himself as the defender of Louis XVI. The Convention not only refused the request, but excluded all mention of it from their journals. Du Coudray pub- lished his offer in every newspaper that dared to print it. * If Louis,' he said, in his letter to the newspapers, ' had enjoyed a free choice of his counsel, I should not have ventured to propose myself. But when it became certain that Target had refused, and probable that Tronchet would do so too, it seemed to me frightful that such a prisoner should be deserted by all those whose profession it is to defend the unfortunate. I know my insufficiency ; but as one of the oldest members of the bar, I feel it to be my duty, if there be any risk, to be among the first to encounter it.' His services, however, were accepted by Marie An- toinette, a still more dangerous client ; for Louis was only despised, and was put to death principally as a defiance of Prussia and Austria, and to gratify the national vanity by 126 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. showing that the democrats of France were as decided and as unprejudiced as those of England had been 150 years before. Marie Antoinette was hated and feared. Nothing can exceed the vigour and the boldness of his defence; and it was the more heroic, as he must have known its utter fruitlessness. Its only effect was to involve him in her danger. He was denounced, imprisoned, and in a few hours would have been on a charette on his way to the guillotine. He was saved, as no one else was saved, by a decree of the Convention ordering his release. At length the Convention approached the end of its memorable reign. For three years it had exercised absolute power, legislative and executive : it had beaten down an almost general insurrection ; it had waged success- fully an almost general war ; it had been more terrible to its subjects, to its enemies, and to its friends, than any government which modern Europe had then seen; and, while terrifying and crushing all around it, it had been more enslaved, more trampled on, frightened into more abject submission by its committees, than even was the case with the victims of its own oppression. Those among its members who had survived the per- secutions which had successively driven Into exile, or to the scaffold, the Girondins, the Dantonists, the Hebertists, and the Terrorists, resolved to leave behind them a constitution which should render impossible the tyranny of either an individual or an assembly. For this purpose they enacted the constitution of 1795, or, as it was called in the jargon of that period, de 1'An III. This constitution attempted TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 127 to realise the favourite theory of continental philosophers, the total separation of the legislative and executive powers. The members of the legislative body were incapable of any other functions. They were not to be ministers, they were not to be generals in short, they were not to do anything but legislate. The Directory was to be a collective king, acting by its ministers. It made war, and peace, and treaties it nominated to every office that was not elective it did everything except make laws. As respects administration it was omnipotent ; as respects legislation it was impotent. It had not even a suspensive veto. It could not dissolve, it could not even prorogue, the legislative body. Above both powers was the Consti- tution, to be altered only by a new constituent assembly summoned for that express purpose. It is interesting to study the working of the constitution of 1795, for it corresponds in many important particulars with that of 1848. Each was the work of an assembly which itself had reigned despotically. Each was based on an incompatibility of executive and legislative functions. .Each vested these powers in two distinct authorities, to neither of which it gave any means of controlling, or indeed of influencing, the other ; and neither constitution supplied any machinery by which a difference of opinion between these two great authorities could be settled. Each constitution seemed to assume that its directory and its legislature, or its president and its assembly, would act together in perfect harmony, for neither appointed an umpire to decide their disputes. 128 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. In England the power of the Crown to dissolve Parliament supplies such an umpire. In case of a difference of opinion among the three branches of the legislature, or between any two and the third, Parliament is dissolved, and the great umpire the people is consulted. When that experiment was tried in 1784, a House of Commons was returned which differed from the opinions of its predecessor and agreed with those of the King and of the House of Lords. In 1831 the new House agreed with the views of the King, but differed both from those of its predecessor and from those of the House of Lords : the House of Lords therefore submitted. In 1835 the new House agreed in opinion with its predecessor, and differed from both the King and the House of Lords : the King and the House of Lords therefore yielded. The presence of this safety-valve enables the balanced constitution of England to work. Its absence destroyed the French constitutions of 1795 and 1848. No legislative body elected by the people, and believing itself, therefore, to be the impersonation of the national will, is satisfied with the mere business of making laws. It soon perceives that the manner in which the laws are interpreted and carried into execution is quite as impor- tant as their enactment, and it cannot bear to see its intentions eluded and frustrated, or even imperfectly performed, by what it considers its subordinate- the executive. It sees that the spirit of a government depends on the spirit of its ministers, and that the same law may be a blessing in the hands of one administrator, TEONSON DTJ COUDKAY. 129 a curse in the hands of another, and nugatory in those of a third. It begins by requiring that those in whom it has not confidence shall be dismissed, and it soon requires that those in whom it has confidence shall be appointed. An executive, however, to which the constitution has expressly given the power of appointing and removing its ministers, does not easily acquiesce in these pretensions. Its favourites are seldom those of the Legislature ; those of the Legislature are often its enemies. It offends the popular body, both by its appointments and by its dis- missals, and a quarrel begins, which, in the absence of a mediator, is decided by violence. Under the constitution of 1795, Tronson du Coudray was elected a member of the Conseil des Anciens, one of the two houses into which the Legislature was divided. Its duties were to adopt or reject, without amendment, the laws passed by the other House, the Conseil des Cinq Cents. It has always been the misfortune of those who have had to rule France under republican institutions, that they have had to administer a form of government unpopular with the bulk of the nation. Such a state of things is dangerous even to a monarchy or to an aristocracy. Experience, however, shows that either of those forms may subsist for centuries supported only by a minority, and even by a small minority. An unpopular democracy sounds like a contradiction in terms, and must become a contradiction in fact. As soon as the people has found K 130 BIOGKAPHICAL SKETCHES. the means of ascertaining and expressing its will, it will select or accept, or submit to the master whom it prefers to self-government. The French people during the last seventy years, that is to say, ever since they have been able to manifest their wishes, have been far more influenced by hate than by love : they have been far more acute in discovering the faults than the merits of their institutions., far readier to pull down than to repair, far more destructive than conserva- tive. The oppressions and abuses which had accumulated under Louis XIV., and his immediate successors, rendered the bulk of the nation furiously anti-monarchical. The Reign of Terror rendered it furiously anti-democratic. On the 5th of October, 1795 (13th Vendemaire An IV.), the Convention had to fight a royalist insurrection, on nearly the same ground on which, three years before, the mon- archy had been destroyed by a republican mob. There were three places, however, in which democracy was not extinguished. It still prevailed in the Conven- tion, in the low populace of Paris, and in the army. The Convention had been elected just after the 10th of August, when the republican fever was at its height. A majority of its members, by voting for the death of the King, had given up all hopes of favour, perhaps of safety, under a restoration, and nearly all enjoyed influence, patronage, and consideration, which must vanish as soon as, from sovereigns, they became not merely subjects, but the subjects of a hostile faction, as violent, and perhaps as unscrupulous, as they had been themselves. TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 131 The Parisian populace had the love of tumult and the hatred of authority which belongs to the lowest classes in all great capitals, and the indifference to human life, the readiness to take it and to risk it, which is peculiar to the mob of Paris. But it was dispirited, by its recent defeats ; its leaders had perished, it had been disarmed, it had been excluded from the National Guard, and was at this instant merely a shadow of the tremendous insurrectionary power which, three years before, and thirty-five years afterwards, could sport with the institutions of France. The army was almost the only great body that had gained by the Eevolution. The bar had been silenced ; the clergy had been murdered or exiled ; the landed proprietors had fled, abandoning their estates to the holders of assignats ; the merchants, bankers, and rentiers had been beggared ; but the army stood erect in the general ruin. The camp and the garrison had afforded an asylum, which the denunciator and the public prosecutor did not venture to violate. In the three years of the Eepublic it had obtained successes which eclipsed all the glories of all the reign of Louis XIV. Its rewards had been as splendid as its victories. Men who four years before were following the plough who under the ancien regime would have hoped for nothing higher than to be Serjeants or under- lieutenants found themselves generals and proconsuls, the arbiters between sovereigns and their subjects, and in- fluencing the destinies of Europe. We may conceive the contempt or hatred with which Hoche, or Bernadotte, or Moreau looked on the counter-revolutionists, whose object K 2 132 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. was to restore the reign of favour, privilege, and caste, under which no one could hold a commission until his nobility had been certified by the court genealogist. Supported by the army, and wielding all legislative and all executive power, the Convention had been irresistible. But it feared, with great reason, that the legislative body which was to succeed it elected, though indirectly, by universal suffrage, and representing the monarchical feeling of France would abolish republican institutions. It took two different means to prevent this. One was the old ex- pedient, constantly failing and constantly reproduced, of trying to fetter the supreme power by forbidding it to alter the Constitution, except at a remote period, and on condi- tions scarcely capable of performance. No change was to be made until it was demanded by three successive legisla- tures, and after three intervals of three years each. The other was effectual but transitory. The Convention decreed that two-thirds of the first legislative body should be taken from among its own members. As the members of the Directory were to be chosen by the Legislature, this secured to the new government a democratic executive, as well as a democratic legislative. For the first year the pressure from without kept the Legislature and the Directory in tolerable union. The anti-republican minority, at the head of which were Barbe-Marbois, Portalis, Simeon, Tronson du Coudray, and Dupont de Nemours, knew well that as soon as the legislative body was changed by one-third, in May 1797, from a weak minority they would form part of a large TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 133 majority a majority which, appointing the Directory, and through them the ministers, the judges, and the countless officials of France, and wielding the whole patronage of the army, would be far more powerful and far less responsible than any constitutional monarch, or indeed any despot can be. They waited, therefore, patiently for what appeared their inevitable triumph, and, without carrying on a systematic opposition, contented themselves with endeavouring to repeal, or to modify, the worst legislative atrocities of the Convention. Some of Tronson du Coudray's best speeches belong to this period of tranquillity the last that he was ever to enjoy. One of these was made on the 6 Pluviose An IV. (27th January, 1796), against the law of the 9 Floreal An III. (28th April, 1795). By that law the properties, or rather the expectancies, of all emigrants were confiscated by an- ticipation. So that if a son emigrated, the State became instantly entitled in possession to all the emigrant's pre- sumptive share in his father's estate. When we recollect that by the law of the 3 Brumaire An IV. (24th October, 1794), all who in any meetings had proposed or concurred in any liberticidal proceedings (that is to say, who had opposed on any occasion the democratic faction), and all those who by blood, or even by mere affinity, were con- nected with emigrants, were incapable of public service, it is obvious that the ruling faction in the Convention had resolved to deprive of the means of subsistence all the adherents of monarchy or aristocracy who had 134 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. escaped the executioner to starve all whom it could not murder. * You deprive a man,' said Tronson de Coudray, ' of half his fortune, and your excuse is that his grandson has emigrated. You cannot call this a punishment, unless to have been the grandfather of an emigrant is a crime. But if it be not a punishment it is a robbery, and a robbery more mischievous and more hateful than any that is expiated on the scaffold. We can bar our doors against thieves, we can appeal against the partiality or the cor- ruption even of a magistrate, but against the injustice of a law there is no defence and no remedy. An individual commits his crimes one by one, the law can rob at once thousands or millions. Not only all sense of security, but all morality, is destroyed when the example of wrong is set by the guardian of right, when the power which we have to dread is that which was created for our protec- tion. Of all means of government the weakest, the most absurd, is injustice. Its insolence irritates, its oppres- sion rouses hatred, its falsehood spreads distrust ; and when once a government, and above all a popular govern- ment, has lost the public confidence, it is on the eve of destruction. It falls before the first assailant, however weak or however contemptible, because its own friends are still weaker, and still more worthless.'* A few months afterwards, on the 3 Frimaire An V. (23rd November, 1796), an attempt was made to modify the law of the 3 Brumaire An IV. That law had been an act * Vol. ii. pp. 35, 41. TKONSON LU COUDRAY. 135 of violence perpetrated by the Convention in its dying struggles. It was proposed, and passed after a single reading, on the day before that memorable assembly re- luctantly surrendered its powers. Tronson du Coudray resisted the partial repeal, and consequently the partial retention, of a law of which every portion was atrocious. ( You know/ he said, ' that that law was extorted by a dominant faction. It was the price even at that time perhaps an extravagant price at which the anti-revolu- tionary minority purchased the Constitution. Those who paid that price were perhaps excusable. They yielded to necessity. But what excuse is there for us, who have the power in our own hands, if we retain any fragments of a law which introduces into a constitutional government the worst deformities of the revolutionary period a law which recreates "suspects"* by hundreds of classes a law which as soon as a citizen's name has been inserted on the list of emigrants an insertion perhaps founded on mistake or on malice deprives of their rights and of their employ- ments perhaps twenty of his relations and connections a law which expels from France, or buries in her prisons, all the most respected and the most respectable members of her clergy a law which drives into perpetual exile every public servant, whom it has incapacitated, if within twenty-four hours after he is supposed to have been aware of his incapacity, he has not resigned his office a law * There is no English equivalent for a ' suspect.' It is a technical revolutionary term, indicating a person presumed to be a traitor, though not actually convicted of treason. 136 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. which creates privileged classes, as it has created " sus- pects," and allows the vilest Royalist or Anarchist, if he have sat in one of the three revolutionary assemblies, to sit on the bench, or even in the Legislature a law which affects to allow those who disapprove of republican insti- tutions to quit France, but to quit France as beggars; which professes, indeed, to permit them to carry with them their fortunes, but neither in the form of money nor of merchandise, and sells this favour at a price which leaves them nothing to take away a law which breathes in every sentence the insolence of those who demanded, and the cowardice of those who conceded, it which has not a clause which is not intended to serve some sordid interest or some base malignity.' * The ultra-democratic faction, however, was too strong, and these laws continued, except during an interval of a few months, to disgrace the French statute-book, until they and the party which they were intended to maintain were swept away by Bonaparte. We have already remarked on the resemblance of the Constitution of 1795 to that of 1848. They each, with an imprudence which posterity will scarcely believe, provided that the change both of the legislative and of the executive powers should take place at the same period. Under the Constitution of 1795, the 1 Praireal An V. (20th May, 1797) was the period fixed for the substitution of a new for one of the existing directors, and of 250 new members * Vol. ii. p. 91. TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 137 of the Legislature, to be elected by the people, for 250 who sat there as ex-conventionalists. The political character of the 250 new members showed what was the prevailing feeling in France. They were all, we believe without exception, anti-republicans. The Royalist, or rather, perhaps, the anti-democratic, party had therefore a majority of two to one. The Constitution, with a folly which again is almost inconceivable, had left to chance the selection of the retiring director. On this chance the destinies of France turned. Barras, La Reviellere-Lepeaux, and Rewbell were the three democratic directors. The two others, Carnot and Letourneur, though not Eoyalists in opinion, favoured in fact the tactics of the Eoyalist party. They treated the Revolution as ended, maintained the supremacy of the Constitution and of the law, and opposed all the violent expedients by which the democratic majority, both in the Directory and in the Le- gislature, endeavoured to control public opinion, and to force the French people to retain institutions which it abhorred. If the lot had fallen on La Reviellere, or on Barras, or on Rewbell, the majority in the Directory would have been turned against the democratic faction ; for it is obvious that the Royalist majority in the Legislature would elect a Royalist director. It fell on Letourneur. The new director therefore, Barthelemy, was, with Carnot, still in a minority. If the Royalist majority in the Legislature had been only tolerably prudent, they would have waited until the lot of retirement was drawn by one of the republican 138 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. directors an event which could not be delayed for more than two years, and was probable, in the proportion of three to one, the very next year. The executive, the legislative, and the electoral bodies, being then all unanimous, might probably have effected a legal restoration of the monarchy. We say probably , not certainly, for the army was, as we have seen, still anti-monarchical. The army, however, had not then taken an active part in politics, and it is not likely that it would have ventured to oppose the rest of the nation. But the Eoyalists acted with the usual impatience of a French majority. They declared instant war against the Directory, or rather against the republican majority of the Directory ; apparently without having seriously considered what were their means for carrying it on. Executive power the legislative body had none, except the police of the building in which they sat. Their members were excluded from all other public functions ; and their powers of legislation were fettered by the Consti- tution. It prohibited them, for instance, from allowing the emigrants to return, or to enjoy the revenues of their properties: it prohibited their making any provision for the exercise of any religion. When they had repealed the law of the 3rd Brumaire, they had exhausted their powers of legitimate anti-revolutionary legislation. They were forced, therefore, to have recourse to factious opposition a conduct almost always adopted by a legislative body which has quarrelled with the executive, but almost always unsuccessful. The country at whose expense such a battle must be fought is not reconciled to the inconveni- TRONSON DU COTJDRAY. 139 ence by being told that such are the rules of the game. When it sees bad measures proposed and good measures rejected, it does not accept the apology, that such are the means by which a bad government is to be frightened out or starved out. It does not choose to be misgoverned in order to prevent misgovernment. Such, however, was the course adopted by the legislative body. The Conseil des Anciens, indeed, to which Tronson du Coudray belonged, acted with some prudence. It re- jected some of the absurd or ill-timed decrees of the Cinq Cents, and it was saved, by having no initiative, from pro- posing any itself. The Cinq Cents began by attacking the government in its most vulnerable point its finance. The state of the revenue, after five years of civil and external war, and eight of revolutions, was of course deplorable. The fear of a counter-revolution had stopped the sale of the confiscated property ; general distress rendered the taxes, direct and indirect, unproductive ; public credit was gone, except that which was to be obtained by making purchases and contracts on credit at extravagant prices ; the armies were ill-fed, ill-clothed, and unpaid, except so far as they supported themselves by exactions or by rapine. Under such circumstances the Cinq Cents refused to sanction any further taxes, and required the produce of those which existed to be paid into the hands of commis- sioners appointed by itself, and to be applied in payment, not of the most urgent demands, but of those entitled to legal priority. It forbade the notes issued by the Treasury to be accepted in payment for the national property. It 140 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. would not allow the growing produce of the taxes to be discounted ; it would not allow the ordinary revenue to be applied to extraordinary expenses, or the extraordinary revenue to ordinary ones ; it intercepted a sum of money which Bonaparte had sent direct to Toulon from the funds of the army of Italy in the hope of expediting some necessary supplies. In quiet times such interference would have been merely vexatious and inconvenient. At a period of distress and struggle it was ruinous. Some of these propositions were rejected by the Conseil des Anciens, chiefly through the influence of Tronson du Coudray, but what passed was enough seriously to aggravate the existing pecuniary difficulties. From the purse the Opposition proceeded to the sword. They proposed to give to military men dismissed or degraded an appeal to the Legislature from the Executive ; they proposed that the National Guard, instead of compre- hending, according to the republican theory, all capable of military service, should be an elected and comparatively small body, drawn almost exclusively from the middle and higher classes, in which anti-revolutionary opinions pre- dominated. They proposed a law nominally to define the responsibility of the executive power and of its ministers, but really to increase the punishment of any illegal act, and to facilitate its proof; and to complete the parallel between their conduct and that of the leaders of the Legis- lative Assembly of 1851, they proposed that the guard of the Legislature should be increased by the addition of TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 141 cavalry and artillery, and put under the direct command of the Inspecteurs de la Salle du Corps Legislatif, whose functions were nearly the same as those of the modern Questors. As the Constitution forbade the presence of any regular troops within twenty-five miles of Paris, ex- cept on the express requisition of the Legislature, this measure, and the proposed reconstruction of the National Guard, would have given to the anti-revolutionary party the military command of Paris. Animated by the contest, they ventured on still more dangerous ground : they proposed to take into consideration the events in Grenoa and in Venice, and to enquire under what circumstances and by whose authority, a French army had overturned the two most ancient and most glorious governments of Italy. The Directory had recourse to the expedient which naturally suggests itself to a continental government when attacked by a parliamentary majority. They resolved to crush their opponents by force. It was obvious, indeed, that such conduct involved the destruction of republican institutions ; for the only force which they could call on was the army, and when once the army had been called in when once a military body had subdued the represen- tatives of the people nothing would remain but to submit, sooner or later, to the dictatorship of the chief whom the army should think fit to adopt. But they could obtain an immediate triumph : they could obtain a few months, perhaps a few years, of supreme unresisted power ; and when at last they should have to surrender, they might justly hope to be better treated by an usurping 142 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. soldier than by a restored monarch. They turned, there- fore, towards the armies. It was easy to persuade the soldiers, for in fact it was true, that the financial measures of the Legislature had contributed to the penury under which they were suffering. It was equally easy to persuade them, for it was also true, that a portion of the Legislature were striving to restore the monarchy. As for the Generals, Hoche, who com- manded the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, had been insulted, in the Cinq Cents, by a wanton imputation of embezzlement ; Moreau, who commanded the army of the Rhine, had been kept inactive by the want of supplies ; Bonaparte had been threatened with impeachment for his treatment of Genoa and Venice ; and all were furious at the prospect of a restoration, which would degrade them from what were then the highest positions in France almost in Europe to be the subjects of a court, to have to solicit its favours, and, indeed, to implore its pardon. Nothing was easier than to apply a torch to such mate- rials. On the first signal of the government, addresses from the armies to the Directory, and from one army to another, poured in. The violence, we may say the ferocity, of these military state papers is an amusing contrast to the measured language of civil diplomacy. We extract as a sample a portion of the address which was forwarded from Augereau's division, then forming a part of the army of Italy :- * Conspirators ! you wish, then, for war. You shall have it ; you rascals, you shall have it. But do you doubt the TKONSON DU COUDKAY. 143 result ? What have you to hope in such a contest ? You have, it is true, on your side numbers, cunning, and treachery. But you are cowards, and you are defenceless. We have arms, and virtue, and courage; the recollections of victory, and the enthusiasm of liberty. And you, the wretched instruments of the crimes of your masters you, who hate us for having protected your properties and your frontiers ; you, who have rewarded us with contempt and penury, tremble ! From the Adige or the Rhine to the Seine is but a step ; tremble! Your iniquities are recorded, and their punishment is on the points of our bayonets.' 4 Citizen-Directors,' said Baraguy d'Hillier's division, * We swear before you eternal hatred against the factious, and eternal war against the Royalists. Rely on our fidelity and our zeal. Our bayonets will always defend you from all enemies without or within.' Encouraged by these addresses, the Directory ventured on a decisive move. They ordered a body of 27,000 men, a part of the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, to march on Paris. On the 26 Messidor (14th July, 1797), the first column reached La Ferte Alais, about twenty-five miles from Paris, and therefore within the circle from which the Constitution excluded all regular troops, except when expressly demanded by the Legislature. The Legislature, of course, asked the Directory for an explanation or an excuse, and on the 22 Thermidor (9th of August) the Directory made their answer. The presence of the troops within the forbidden circle was attributed to the ignorance of the officer in command. 144 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. His orders were to march from the Rhine to Brest: this was the shortest road, and he was not aware of the constitutional prohibition. As to the addresses from the army, the Directory deplored them, but deplored still more their causes. These, they said, were the want of supplies, the arrears of pay, the insolence of the returned emigrants, the priests and the journalists, and the contempt shown towards the armies and towards republican institutions. ' We trust,' they continued, * that we shall save France from the ruin with which she is threatened, and extinguish the torches of civil war, though they are lighted by those who are supposed to be the guardians of peace. But while we are resolved to face the danger, we will not conceal it. We will tear the veil from the conspirators who are determined, by fraud or by force, to overthrow the republican Constitution, and to plunge France into the horrors of a fresh revolution.' This was a declaration of war. The Anciens threw on Tronson du Coudray the task of drawing up the counter- declaration, and on the 20th of August, 1797 (3 Fructidor) he presented his memorable report, the last independent state paper which was to appear in France for nearly seventeen years. 'We have been fighting,' it began, 'for liberty during eight years, and we now seem to be almost in the arms of despotism. Not the despotism of the throne, which we overthrew on the 14th of July, not the despotism of the scaffold which disappeared on the 9 Thermidor, but the more formidable, because the more permanent, despotism TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 145 of the sword. A political party has called for the assist- ance of the army. Are they so blind as to think that freedom can survive a military interference ? Most truly has the Constitution said, "the duty of the army is to obey it cannot deliberate." Every military quality, in fact, is incompatible with deliberation, and even with dis- cussion. His ardour, his enthusiasm, the habit of obeying the orders and following the example of his leaders, the recklessness of the camp, and the intoxication of success all unite to render the soldier impetuous and unreflect- ing. He is violent while he debates, and headstrong as soon as he has decided. A few sentences from the chief whom he has been accustomed to adore convert him into a blind but furious instrument. ' It is thus that republics perish it is thus that he who was only a general in the camp became an emperor in the forum. It is thus that emperor after emperor fell, and that the destinies of the civilised world came to depend on the result of a mutiny among the praetorian cohorts. Directors, have you ever thought on the fate of those who have had recourse to such assistance? Have you ever measured the interval between their triumph and their ruin ? We know that you would not wish to survive the liberty of France we know that you will perish in its defence, as we shall have perished before you. But how different will be our dying moments. We shall die for a cause which we have embraced, well knowing its danger, d looking on that danger with calmness. We shall quit life with indifference, because we value it only at what it 146 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. is worth, and because we know that our names will be honoured by a grateful posterity. You will feel that the blood of your fellow-countrymen has flowed as well as your own; that your own hand has lighted the conflagration which has destroyed you ; that your names, republicans as you call yourselves, will always be associated with the birth of despotism.'* The denunciations of Tronson du Coudray had the usual fate of political prophecies. The Directors cared far more for an immediate triumph than for a danger which they probably thought remote. They put the garrison of Paris, amounting to about 10,000 men, under the command of Augereau, the general whose division had joined in the most violent addresses against the Legislature ; they placed as a reserve a large portion of the army commanded by Hoche on the edge of the constitutional circle of twenty- five miles, and they borrowed from Hoche himself 50,000 francs, his wife's fortune, to be employed in corrupting the 1,200 men who formed the ordinary guard of the Legislature. Of these preparations the first two were of course notorious. It was obvious that the Directory intended to employ force. A speech of Talleyrand's was quoted. With his usual perspicacity and his usual indifference he said, ' The 'plan of attack is laid, and must succeed. The councils have only one course to take to surrender at discretion.' The Legislature seem now, for the first time, to have considered what were their means of resistance. Thibau- .x * Vol ii pp. 112, 134. TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 147 deau has described two of the meetings at which the heads of the opposition held councils of war. They were convoked at Tronson du Coudray's. Among those present were Simeon, the president of the Cinq Cents, and Lafond Ladebat, president of the Anciens, Portalis, and Pichegra. The imminence of the danger was admitted. It was certain that La Eeviellere had declared that the sword was now the only arbiter; it was probable that the day on which the leading members of the Opposition were to be arrested was fixed. Portalis and Du Coudray proposed to accuse the three conspiring directors of high treason, to sus- pend them from their functions, direct them to be arrested, and, if they resisted, declare them hors la loi. Thibaudeau asked what was their physical force to execute such purposes. * The guard of the Legislature, a portion of the llth regiment, and the National Guard, when organ- ised,' was the answer. But even the law under which the National Guard was to be called out had not passed. In the meantime it was proposed to send out into each of the twelve arrondissements of Paris twenty-five men from the guard of the Legislature, to form little military centres, round which the anti-republican bourgeoisie might rally. Pichegru, the soldier of the party, showed the weakness of such resources, and at the second meeting it was decided that they had no present means of em- ploying force, and must therefore wait until they were provided with their National Guard. ' We parted,' says Thibaudeau, ' as men who were not to meet again. " I could not sleep, and amused myself by L 2 148 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. drawing a picture of our situation." " Our struggles," it records, "are as fruitless as those of a sick man on his bed. Ruin has surrounded us, and is pressing us more and more closely every day. We speak boldly from the Tribune, but all our courage is assumed. The Directory treats us with the contempt which is due to weakness ; it knows that immediate despotism is within its grasp, and it cares not what may follow. The legislative body will not attack, it will not resist, it will lie down to be trampled on. What do I advise ? Nothing. The triumph of crime is at hand. Republicans have only to draw round them their cloaks and fall decorously." ' Schiller compares the state of Brussels, during the anxious interval between the entry of Alva and the beginning of his persecution, to that of a man who has just emptied a cup of poison, and is waiting for the first symptoms of its working. Such, too, was the state of Du Coudray and of his friends. An enemy, whom they could neither escape nor resist, was watching for the most con- venient opportunity to spring on them. Barras, to whom La Reviellere and Rewbell had in- trusted the enterprise, at first proposed to act on the 16th Fructidor ; but this was the 2nd of September, a date associated with too much horror to be selected for another insurrection. On the morning of the 1 7th the Directors met as usual. At four, when they rose, Barras took La Reviellere and Rewbell aside, and told them that the time was come, and that Augereau had his orders. The ministers were now TRONSON DTJ COUDRAY. 149 ^ summoned to Bewbell's apartment ; the three directors joined them there ; sentinels were placed at the doors and windows to prevent egress or communication; and they waited the result. At midnight Augereau surrounded the Tuileries with his troops. The guard, partly bribed, and partly intimi- dated, gave up their posts without resistance. A detach- ment was sent to seize the two opposing directors ; Bar- thelemy was taken in bed, Carnot escaped through the garden of the Luxembourg. So silently had all been done, that on the morning of the 18th Fructidor (4th of Sept. 1797), many of the obnoxious members went as usual to their respective halls in the Tuileries, and were arrested as they entered the building; others, among whom was Tronson du Coudray, after having been driven from the Tuileries, were seized in a house in which they had met to deliberate and protest: all were sent to the Temple. The remnant of the two legislative bodies, deprived of all those to whom they owed their vigour, or courage, or in- telligence, met to ratify the violence of the night and of the morning, to re-enact with aggravations the laws of the 3rd Brumaire, to extinguish the liberty of the press, and to sentence to transportation for life the two directors, Carnot and Barthelemy, all the proprietors, publishers, and editors of forty-two newspapers, and more than fifty of the most eminent members of the Legislature, among whom was of course Tronson du Coudray. Barthelemy, Tronson du Coudray, Pichegru, and thir- teen others, as the most important victims, were sent off 150 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. the very same evening towards Eochefort, on their road to the tropical marshes of G-uiana. They were carried in what were called, and indeed really were, cages de fer ; that is to say, carts surmounted by an iron grating instead of a tilt, with one small iron door closed by a padlock. The journey lasted thirteen days. The prisoners passed the nights in the frightful dungeons which disgrace the provinces of France. They passed the days exposed to the brutalities of their escort and of the low revolutionary populace of the towns, to whose outrages they were pointed out as royalists and traitors. Once Du Coudray's patience seems to have been worn out. It was as they were passing through Etampes, one of the principal towns of a depart- ment in which, not two years before, he had been returned by a triumphal majority. * Yes,' he cried to the crowd that was insulting him, ' it is I, it is your representative, whom you see in this iron cage ; it is I, whom you sent to defend your rights, and it is in my person that they are violated. They are dragging me to the place of punishment, untried, unaccused. My crime is, that I have protected liberty and property ; that I have striven to restore peace to the country and the soldier to his family ; that I have kept my oath to the Constitution. These are the crimes for which you league with the Government to torture me.' The voyage lasted seven weeks, and appears to have resembled the celebrated middle passage of the slave trade, except that the sufferings of the negroes were the result merely of the indifference of the slave-traders to the TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 151 misery of their cargo, those of the deportes were inten- tionally inflicted. To want of space and want of air was added want of food. By the eighth day only three out of the sixteen were able to stand, and it is difficult, when we read the journal of Kamel, to understand how any of them reached Cayenne alive. The coast of French Gruiana is among the most un- healthy portions of the globe. It is alluvial, intersected by almost a network of sluggish rivers, covered with rank vegetation, infested even beyond the average of that coast by the flying and creeping and crawling pests of tropical jungles, streams, and marshes, and enjoys no variation of season, except that the heat is accompanied by constant drought for one half of the year, and by constant rain for the other half. The prison selected for the exiles was the fort of Sinna- mary, situated on the river of that name, about seventy miles from the town of Cayenne. It is a solitary square wooden building, about 140 yards each way, surrounded by a deep and wide ditch. Before it runs the river ; immediately behind and on each side is an impenetrable forest. In the court-yard were eight huts, built to serve as prisons for negroes. One of them was occupied by the Terrorist Billaud-Varennes, who had been transported some months before. The new comers were distributed in the seven that remained. Tronson du Coudray had for his companions, Lafond, the ex-president of the Conseil des Anciens, and Barthelemy, the ex-director. The first who sank under the climate was General de 152 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Murinais. His health, indeed, had been destroyed by the hardships of the voyage. He was a man of high character and family, whose crime was that he belonged to the majority of the Conseil des Anciens, and was one of its inspectors. Tronson du Coudray pronounced his funeral eulogium : Eamel tells us that it drew tears from the garrison and the negroes. A strong testimony to its eloquence was an order from Jeannot, the governor, a nephew of Danton's, that whoever in future tried to excite compassion for the deportes should be instantly shot. The next victim was Bourdon de 1'Oise, the hero of the 9th Thermidor, to whose courage and decision it was owing that the directors themselves were not bound to the plank of the guillotine. A few days after, the fever of the country seized Tronson du Coudray. He appears to have borne his imprisonment more impatiently than his companions. He did not, says Ramel, complain of his physical sufferings, but of the manner in which they had been inflicted. The illegality and violence of the coup d'etat affected him more than its cruelty. He was always crying out for a trial and a judge ; and, even in his last illness, was as much irritated by the injustice of his treatment as he had been on the first night that he spent in the Temple. His friends, however, persuaded him to apply to be removed to the hospital of Cayenne. The governor's answer is so characteristic of the feelings and language of the revolu- tionary proconsuls that we insert it verbatim : * Je ne sais pourquoi ces messieurs ne cessent de m'im- TEONSON DU COUDRAT. 153 portuner. Us doivent savoir qu'ils n'ont pas ete envoyes a Sinnamary pour vivre.' He died on the 27th of May, 1798, six months after his arrival at Sinnamary, about seventeen months before the base despotism of the Directory made way for the glorious despotism of the Consulate. When that event recalled the exiles from Sinnamary, only two were found there ; Barbe-Marbois and Lafond-Ladebat. Eight had escaped almost miraculously in an open boat ; the rest had died. More than half a century has passed since this tragedy was enacted on the shores of French Gruiana. It is now to be repeated on a much grander scale.* Among the defects of character in the present ruler of France, one of the most fatal is the want of originality. He is essentially a copyist. His opinions, his theories, his maxims, even his plots, all are borrowed, either from the Convention or from the Directory, or from a still more dangerous model from a man who, though he possessed genius and industry, such as are not seen coupled, or indeed single, once in a thousand years, yet ruined himself by the extravagance of his attempts. It would be well for Louis Napoleon if he could utterly forget the whole history of the Kevolution. He might then trust to his own sense, or to that of his advisers. Either would probably lead him into fewer dangers than a blind imitation of what was done fifty or sixty years ago, by men very unlike him, and in a state of * This was written in the beginning of 1852. 154 BIOGBAPHICAL SKETCHES. society, both in France and in Europe, very unlike anything which now exists. In the meantime, like all imitators, he exaggerates all that is monstrous in his monstrous originals. The 2nd of December was a parody of the 18th Fructidor, only in larger proportions. Instead of 10,000 troops, which was the whole force of Augereau, Louis Napoleon occupied Paris with about 60,000. The Directory, on that night, arrested sixteen of their opponents ; Louis Napoleon, seventy-eight. The whole number of persons whom the Directory sent to Guiana was 335. Those whom Louis Napoleon has seized, and has either already sent away or detains in the frightful prisons of Eochefort and Brest, and the other ports on the Atlantic, are already counted by thousands : the lowest esti- mate that we have heard is 8,000, the highest 12,000 ; and we believe the latter to be nearer to the truth. A single de- partment, the Nievre, has furnished more than a thousand. A traveller through the middle of France, in the latter part of February 1852, found the roads swarming with prisoners on their way to the coast. Some in long strings on foot, others piled together in diligences, in caleches, and in carts. The Directory published the names of their victims ; those of Louis Napoleon are known only to himself or to his agents; among them may be many of the persons supposed to have perished in the massacre of the 5th of December. All that is known is, that about 3,200 have since disappeared from Paris : they may have been killed on the Boulevards, and thrown into the large pits in which those who fell on that day were promiscuously TRONSON DU COUDRAY. 155 interred ; they may have been among the hundreds who were put to death in the court-yards of the barracks or in the garden of the Luxembourg ; they may be in the casemates of Fort Bicetre or in the bagnes of Kochefort, or they may be at sea on their way to Cayenne. The story of one we will relate. It is that of a young author whose name, as he may still be living, we suppress. He was arrested on the 2nd of December, but his friends were told not to make themselves uneasy ; that his liberal opinions were known, and that he was imprisoned merely to prevent his compromising himself. Week, however, after week went on, during which his place of confine- ment, the casemates of Fort Bicetre, was gradually filled with 3,000 prisoners. His friends were thinking with anxiety of the influence which the cold of a Parisian winter, endured in damp dark vaults, and the pestilential air produced by the crowds which had been thrust into them, might produce on a constitution unaccustomed to hardship. At length they found that he had quitted Fort Bicetre, but that he had quitted it on his road to Cayenne, untried, indeed unaccused ; but sentenced to a death in comparison of which the Noyades were merciful. Those who are shocked only by the arbitrary violence of the deportations who see in them only the exile of 10,000 persons, without public, or, as far as we know, without even private enquiry, on the evidence of secret informers, probably the private enemies, or the debtors, or perhaps the heirs of those whom they denounce those who see only this, horrible as it is, see only a portion of the 156 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. horrors that are going on. They see their injustice and their oppression, but only a part of their cruelty. Even if Cayenne were prepared for the reception of the deportes if there were barracks or even prisons to lodge them, wholesome food to support them, and the other pro- visions made for them which are necessary to the exist- ence of an European under the tropics the climate alone would destroy them. The whole number of those who were transported to Cayenne in 1797 and 1798 was, as we have already said, only 335. So small a number was easily provided for. Yet of those 335 there were living in 1800 only 115, including 23 who had escaped soon after their arrival. Of the 312 who remained in the colony, 210 died in two years. What will be the result when thousands are thrown at once into a country of which the old inhabitants will be scarcely more numerous than the strangers ? The deportes are sent, not to exile, but to death. * Us n'ont pas ete envoyes a Cayenne pour vivre.' The grief with which England contemplates the cala- mities of France is mixed with surprise. It is difficult to understand how a nation so jealous of authority, so impatient of control, and so careless of life, submits to an oppression of which there is no other example on this side of the Alps. We believe that the explanation is to be found in the terror inspired by deportation. Men who would affront the guillotine or the musket-ball, shrink from the slow torture of the crowded convict ship and the pestilential prison. We have already stated that the number of persons undergoing, or sentenced to these TKONSON DU COUDRAT. 157 cruelties, is believed to exceed 10,000. Many -thousands more are supposed to be in the vaults and casemates which the French dignify with the name of prisons. Over every one of these prisoners deportation is suspended. It is suspended, indeed, over the head of every Frenchman. We have before us a few of the proclamations of the prefects and generals, each of whom seems, like a Turkish pasha, to have within his district supreme legislative and executive power. Thus, the prefet of the Haute Garonne declares that every person present at any meeting not authorised by himself, shall be held to be a member of a secret society, and punishable as such. That everyone who, in a commune in which he is not resident, disseminates any political opinions [se livre a une propagande quelconque], shall be held a promoter of civil war. The prefet of Valenciennes declares enemies of the country all who suggest doubts as to the sincerity [loyaute] of the government, or of any of its acts. The prefet of the Bas Ehin orders the arrest of all who distribute negative voting papers. The commander-in-chief in the department of the Cher subjects to military execution Every person interfering in an election in a commune in which he does not reside. Also every person spreading rumours or suggesting doubts tending to unsettle people's minds [inquieter les esprits]. 158 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. The prefet of Bordeaux subjects to the same punish- ment all persons carrying weapons, unless specially authorised. Also all persons distributing [col-portant] printed or written papers. Also all persons who assist, or receive, or even supply with food, any persons pursued by the authorities. For this last crime we see, in a Lyons paper of the 30th of December, 1851, that one Brun was sentenced to ten years', and one Astier to twenty years', imprisonment in irons. The natural result of such a tyranny is either a sudden and universal insurrection, or silent abject submission. There can be no middle course. The French have preferred the latter. They are bold, but not resolute. They are violent and impetuous, but not enthusiastic. The audacity with which the mob has from time to time risen against the garrison of Paris, murdered its outposts, stormed its barracks, and repulsed its assaults, is the fruit not so much of love of freedom, or hatred of despotism, as of indifference to what they were hazarding. A life alternating between toil, vice, and debauchery, endeared by few social sympathies, ennobled by no ulterior objects, a mere struggle for existence and amusement, is readily risked, because it is scarcely worth preserving. The tmeutier gambles with it, as he is ready to gamble with anything else that he possesses ; if he wins, he has a week or two of triumph and boasting and im- TKONSON DU COUDRAY. 159 portance ; if he falls, his troubles are over, and he quits a world in which he had to suffer far more than to enjoy. Such insurgents may sweep away by a sudden assault an unprepared or inadequate regular force. For one day, for two days, and it may be for three, they can repel from their barricades even a considerable army, but they are unfit for prolonged civil war. They want skill, they want combination, and, above all, they want pertinacity. As long as the army remains Napoleonist, we hope nothing from the people. 160 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. LOKD CAMPBELL'S CHIEF JUSTICES.* [EDINBURGH EEVIEW, January 1851.] AMONG- the felicities of Lord Campbell's long and prosperous career, the comparative leisure which he enjoyed from 1841 to 1850 was, perhaps, one of the greatest. It is to that interval of leisure that he probably will owe his widest and his most permanent fame. Had he retained the Irish seals, or exchanged them for the high office which he now holds, he would have been remembered as a successful advocate, a useful legislator, and a distin- guished judge. His decisions would have been quoted by lawyers, and historians must have noticed him as a debater ; but his literary reputation would have depended on his speeches. Now speeches, however admirable, are seldom popular. Of the hundreds, probably the thousands, of orators, who, from the times of Ulysses down to those of Guizot, have ruled or charmed their hearers, there are really only two the great Greek and the great Eoman whose speeches are * The Lives of the Chief Justices of England, from the Norman Conquest to the Death of Lord Mansfield. By John Lord Campbell, LL.P. F.RS.E. 2 volumes. London: 1849. LORD COKE. 161 familiarly read. During centuries the greatest masters of thought and of language that ever spoke or wrote threw into public speaking the whole force of their brilliant talents and unwearied diligence. Many of their orations are preserved, but they are used only as materials of history or as commentaries on Demosthenes; and would be probably as much studied, or nearly so, if they had none of the high qualities to which their authors devoted the labour of years. Some outlines, indeed, of Pericles are well known, because they have been worked into the enduring fabric of Thucydides, but they are not speeches but essays: wonderful examples of acute observation and elaborate reasoning, but too compressed and perhaps too refined to be followed by even an Athenian audience. All Eoman oratory, except that of Cicero, has perished; it did not retain sufficient interest to repay transcription. Modern eloquence has been embalmed by the printing press; but it is preserved like a mummy. It does not perish, but it is not looked at. Who now reads the vast body of eloquence which rendered the bar of France illustrious ? How few consult, as collections of works of rhetorical art, the records of her deliberative assemblies ? Mirabeau is known in consequence of the interest ex- cited by his strange social, and by his brilliant historical, life ; but of the speeches which influenced the destinies of Europe little is now read except some dazzling sentences. The world had almost forgotten that Kobespierre was a great orator, when Lamartine disinterred a few specimens M 162 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. of the cold argumentative enthusiasm which made him master of the Jacobins and of the Convention. There are few English libraries that do not contain whole lines of volumes of Pitt, Fox, Burke, Windham, Erskine, and Sheridan ; but which of them, except those of Burke, are ever taken from the shelf ? and Burke's speeches are read principally in consequence of the very qualities which interfered with their efficiency when delivered their penetrating philosophy and widely-drawn and varied illus- trations. We do not believe that Lord Campbell will be an exception to the general law which confines the orator to evanescent celebrity: which puts him on the same footing with the other artists whose business it is to produce immediate and powerful but transient effects : to excite and animate and delight those who see and hear them, but to leave behind them a reputation depending, like the peculiarities of the Church of Eome, not on Scripture, but on tradition. From this fate the Lives of the Chancellors and the Lives of the Chief Justices will preserve him. He has enriched the literature of England with contributions which will probably never die, because they will always amuse, and it is the power of amusing that confers literary immortality. The writer who has merely conveyed instruc- tion may leave a permanent name, but it soon outlives the popularity of his works. They are among the quarries from which his successors dig materials to be employed in constructing more spacious edifices, which, in their turn, serve merely as materials to another generation of philo- LORD COKE. 163 sophers. Few, even among scholars, know much of Plato : every schoolboy is familiar with Plutarch. The ' Eambler ' and the ( Idler' have become mere names/ It is in the * Lives of the Poets,' in the 'Journey to the Hebrides,' and, far more than those, in the gossip of Boswell, that Dr. Johnson really lives. There is, indeed, in Lord Campbell's works much instruction. His subjects have been so happily selected, that it was scarcely possible that there should not be. An eminent lawyer and statesman could not write the lives of great statesmen and lawyers without interweaving curious information, and suggesting valuable principles of judge- ment and useful practical maxims : but it is not for these that his works will be read. Their principal merit is their easy animated flow of interesting narrative. No one possesses better than Lord Campbell the art of telling a story : of passing over what is commonplace ; of merely suggesting what may be inferred ; of explaining what is obscure ; and of placing in a strong light the details of what is interesting from its strangeness or from its importance. Of course it is impossible to notice all, or even the majority, of so numerous a list of biographies. We shall select a few names, which, either from their intrinsic in- terest or from the manner in which they have been treated by Lord Campbell, appear to us to deserve especial con- sideration. We shall begin by Sir Edward Coke. He is obviously a favourite with his biographer; and M 2 164 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Lord Campbell, being a judicious patron, has heightened the flavour of his praise by a judicious mixture of blame. Still we cannot but think that he puts his hero too high : - ' Most men,' he says, ' I am afraid, would rather have been Bacon than Coke. The superior rank of the office of Chancellor, and the titles of Baron and Viscount, would now go for little in the comparison ; but the intellectual and the noble-minded must be in danger of being cap- tivated too much by Bacon's stupendous genius and his brilliant European reputation, while his amiable qualities win their way to the heart. Coke, on the contrary, appears as a deep but narrow-minded lawyer, knowing hardly anything beyond the wearisome and crabbed learning of his own craft, famous only in his own country, and repelling all friendship or attachment by his harsh manners. Yet when we come to apply the test of moral worth and upright conduct, Coke ought, beyond all question, to be preferred. He never betrayed a friend, or truckled to an enemy. He never tampered with the integrity of judges, or himself took a bribe. When he had risen to influence, he exerted it strenuously in support of the laws and liberties of his country, instead of being the advocate of every abuse, and the abettor of despotic sway. When he lost his high office he did not retire from public life " with wasted spirits and an oppressed mind," overwhelmed by the consciousness of guilt, but bold, energetic, and uncompromising, from the lofty feeling of integrity, he placed himself at the head of that band of LORD COKE. 165 patriots to whom we are mainly indebted for the free institutions which we now enjoy.' * To most of the readers of the histories of those times the names of Bacon and Coke appear to be contrasts. Yet there were many points, and those very important ones, in which their characters agreed. Both were the slaves of ambition and of avarice. Ambition drove Bacon to trample on Essex, and Coke to trample on Kaleigh. Coke's integrity did not show itself until he was on the Bench. Lord Campbell admits that while Attorney- General he unscrupulously stretched the prerogatives of the Crown, was utterly regardless of public liberty, and perverted the criminal law by much individual oppres- sion, f So much for his public morality. In private life we find him deliberately sacrificing the whole happiness and, as it turned out, the honour and the virtue of his young daughter, to the hopes of reconciling himself to the Favourite and to the King. This is perhaps less despicable than the corruption of Bacon, but more odious. Both Bacon and Coke were eager to acquire money ; but the covetousness of Bacon was stimulated by the desire of magnificent expenditure; that of Coke by the desire of vast accumulation. And as the wish to accumulate is less urgent than the wish to spend, Coke kept his passion under better control than his great rival. Avarice seduced Bacon into dishonour Coke only into meanness. Both Bacon and Coke are entitled to a high rank among the benefactors of mankind; and many of our readers * Vol. i. p. 345. t Vol. i. p. 268. 166 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. may be surprised at our discussing as a question their comparative preeminence. The services rendered by Bacon are acknowledged by the whole civilised world. Every head bows at the name of the reformer of philo- sophical inquiry. The merits of Coke are known only to lawyers and historians; and even historians have in general passed slightly over his parliamentary career, and have treated his judicial independence merely as honour- able to him, without attaching to it great public im- portance. Yet we are inclined to place Coke, as an object of the gratitude of posterity, not merely on a level with Lord Bacon, but perhaps even above him. Bacon's services in pointing out the true road to scientific dis- covery were unquestionably very great. To him we owe mainly the rapid progress of physical science. But it must be recollected, in the first place, that he did com- paratively little to advance mental science. After three and twenty centuries, we find rhetoric, criticism, and logic nearly as they were left by Aristotle. If our knowledge of politics exceeds his, we owe it principally to our enlarged experience. If our morality is purer, it is owing alto- gether to Kevelation. The Nicomachaean ethics pushed the science of mental pathology and the art of morality as far as unassisted reason could carry them. In the mental sciences and arts, as far as we can infer from the results which they obtained, the methods employed by the Greeks did not require correction from Bacon. Hume's expectation of the ( like reformation in all moral LORD COKE. 167 disquisitions' from the experimental method, has not yet been realised. In the second place, there seems no reason to believe that, if Bacon had never existed, the advance even of physical science would have been materially retarded. The real emancipator of the human mind was Luther. After principles of belief so ancient and so firmly estab- lished as those which he attacked had been uprooted, it was impossible that the baseless assumptions of onto- logists and cosmogonists could remain unchallenged. It was impossible that Philosophy could long be permitted wantonly to assume her premises, after Faith had been forced to submit hers to the test of enquiry. Sooner or later the bubbles of the schools would have been punc- tured by common sense, and they would have collapsed as completely as they did under the hands of Bacon. And lastly, the knowledge to which he led the way, important and even glorious as it is, is not the knowledge on which human happiness principally depends. Abstract and physical science have been cultivated with most suc- cess in France moral and political science in England ; and how different has been the degree of happiness en- joyed by the respective countries. Even in the arts to which physical science is subservient, we excel those who furnished the principles of which we make use. We are better navigators and better manufacturers than those on whose discoveries we found our processes. If a people enjoy the institutions which are favourable to security of property and to freedom of action and thought, 168 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. it will obtain moral and political knowledge ; and it is on that knowledge, and on the habits of acting and feeling which that knowledge produces, that its happiness principally depends. Now it is the glory of Coke, that he was one of the illustrious men to whom we owe the parliamentary inde- pendence on which our free institutions are based, and the judicial independence by which they are preserved. The most celebrated part of his history is, perhaps, his mag- nanimous firmness as a Judge. For in that struggle he o oo was alone. A judge, a removable officer of the Crown, appointed and dismissed according to the caprice of the monarch, was as much a servant as any page in the royal household. When Coke, to the question whether he would stay proceedings in obedience to a royal order, answered that * When the case happened he would do that which it should be fit for a Judge to do,' he took a position from which all his colleagues fled, and which none of his immediate predecessors had ever assumed, or pro- bably had ever thought of assuming. And he not merely risked influence and station, he knowingly abandoned them. Surrounded by such rivals and enemies, without supporters or even friends, old and unpopular, he could not hope to beard so despotic a monarch as James and to retain his office ; he could not rely on even his personal safety. That he preserved his fortune and his liberty was more than he had a right to expect. But wealth and freedom, to a man deprived of power and exiled from court, were not then what they are to us, or what they LOED COKE. 169 were even fifty years afterwards. The sovereign was then really the fountain of honour, and those on whom he looked coldly were frowned on by the world. We admire a man who sacrifices power to principle, though he is rewarded by immediate popularity. Coke made the sacri- fice, but had to wait many years for the reward. The splendour of Coke's conduct as a magistrate has somewhat obscured his reputation as a statesman. Yet the part which he took in securing to us internal freedom of trade, by abolishing monopolies, and to obtain for us extended free trade, by opposing the restrictive system which was then beginning to infuse its poison into our commercial code, would have given immortality to any man who had not other and stronger claims to it. It was fortunate for his fame as a political economist that Eng- land was still an exporter of agricultural produce, so that the immediate and obvious interests of the governing classes were promoted by free trade ; this enabled him to say, * I never yet heard that a bill was ever before pre- ferred in Parliament against the importation of corn, and I love to follow ancient precedents.' We doubt whether, if he had lived in 1846, he would have ventured to undo the legislation of 150 years. His defence of usury laws, on the ground that God forbade usury to his own people, and because usury is contrary to the law of nature, is not promising. Still more meritorious was the Protestation of 1621, in which, replying to the King's command to the House of Commons 'that none therein should presume henceforth 170 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. to meddle with anything concerning our government or deep matters of State,' he declared, * that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King and State, and the making and maintenance of laws, and the redress of grievances, are proper subjects and matter of counsel and debate in Parliament, and that the Commons in Parlia- ment have and ought to have liberty and freedom to treat of such matters ia such order as in their judgement shall seem fittest.' More important still were the resolutions of 1628, which affirmed, ' that no freeman ought to be detained in prison unless some cause of the detainer be expressed for which by law he ought to be detained, and that the writ of habeas corpus cannot be denied to any man that is detained in prison or otherwise restrained by command of the King, the Privy Council, or any other : ' resolutions on which is founded a degree of personal liberty which no other portion of Europe, not even France after seventy years of revolution, has yet acquired. But his greatest claim to our gratitude is as the framer of the Petition of Eight, which laid so firmly the basis of parliamentary, as opposed to monarchical, government, that it was only by civil war that Charles could hope to shake it. His speech, in moving the rejection of the Lords' amendment 'that nothing contained in the bill should be construed to entrench on the sovereign power of the Crown,' has a simplicity and brevity which amount to eloquence. * This is a petition of right, grounded on Acts of Parliament and on the laws which we were born to LORD COKE. 171 enjoy. Our ancestors could never endure a "salvo jure suo " from kings no more than our kings of old could endure from Churchmen " salvo houore Dei et Ecclesiae." We must not admit it, and to qualify it is impossible. Let us hold our privileges according to law. That power which is above the law is not fit for the king to ask or the people to yield. Sooner would I have the prerogative abused, and myself to lie under it : for, though I should suffer, a time would come for the deliverance of the country.' We are inclined to think that Coke's political services are somewhat undervalued even in England. He certainly has not received from foreign nations the gratitude to which he is entitled. The reigns of the Stuarts form the turning point in the history not only of England but of Europe. With the single exception of Holland, the current was everywhere running steadily towards absolute monarchy. Nation after nation had been forced to sur- render liberties as ample as those which, at the accession of James L, we could legally claim. England was the only remaining stronghold of the constitutional monarchy which our German ancestors spread over the whole of Europe. Losd Campbell thinks that, even if Charles had succeeded, yet * in the course of time the violence of popular discon- tent, and the weakness of a despotic government, would at last have brought about a sudden and dreadful convulsion such as those which we now see raging on the continental States.'* This we are inclined to doubt. We do not * VoL i. p. 387. 172 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. think that it can be affirmed with confidence, that in the seventeenth century a permanent despotism was impossible in England. Without doubt such a form of government cannot coexist with a parliament. The despotism of France melted away before the Etats Greneraux. But parliaments might have been disused or even abolished. Lord Campbell has shown that the law, as laid down by Chief Baron Fleming in ' The great Case of Impositions,' would have enabled the Crown to enjoy a sufficient re venue without any parliamentary tax. According to that case, which for years was accepted as law, ' It being for the benefit of every subject that the king's treasure should be increased, all commerce and dealings with foreigners, like war and peace, are determined and regulated by the absolute power of the king. No importation or exporta- tion can be but at the king's ports. They are his gates, which he may open or close when and on what conditions he pleases. The wisdom of the king must not be disputed, for, by intendment, it cannot be separated from his person. If it be objected that no reason is assigned, I answer, it is not reasonable that the king should express the cause and consideration of his actions. They are arcana regis? * Armed with such doctrines, and supported by an un- limited power of imposing duties on all imports and on all exports, the king of England, like his brothers on the Continent, might have gradually assumed every power that he wanted, until the liberties of England, without any posi- tive revolution, had become as obsolete as those of Bohemia * VoL i. p. 234. LOUD COKE. 173 have become. Our American colonies would have withered under the absolute viceroys of an absolute king. Holland, unprotected by the sympathy and the force of England, would have become a part of France. France herself would have had no example of freedom to induce her to break the gilded chains which she appeared to wear as ornaments. And while France and England remained despotic, there would have been little chance of the estab- lishment of constitutional government anywhere else. We have left to the last the portion of Coke's achieve- ments on which his reputation has chiefly rested his legal writings. In his Keports and his Institutes he left a memorial, now crumbling into dust, of his unwearied diligence, his exact memory, and his wonderful power of analogical reasoning. And he left in them also a memorial of his utter unfit- ness to discover, or even to understand, the real purposes for which laws ought to be made. One of the most im- portant of these purposes is to lay down the rules accord- ing to which landed property is to be enjoyed, transmitted, and transferred. The different problems into which this great question may be subdivided are not all resolvable in the same way in every state of society. There are some political institutions to which permanent entails are suitable, others in which a less durable power of entail is advisable ; and there may be some in which none ought to be per- mitted. Some great nations such as France repudiate, except in a very slight degree, testamentary power ; others such as England insist on its existing absolutely 174 BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCHES. uncontrolled. But there are two rules which appear to be universally expedient to be equally applicable in a new and in an old community, in a monarchy, in an aristocracy, and in a democracy. They are, first, that where a man has the power, and has clearly manifested the will, to give property, or a partial interest in property, to another, the conveyance should be effectual ; and, secondly, that the law should oppose, or at least should not facilitate, the acquisition of property by wrongful acts. Now the law of England, as expounded in the courts of common law, not only has neglected, but has syste- matically and intentionally violated both these rules. It has surrounded the transfer of property with a network of quicksands and reefs, through which a narrow channel winds, dangerous to even the most cautious and the most experienced pilot. Even now, after the track has been buoyed by the decisions of centuries; after act of par- liament on act of parliament has endeavoured to widen and improve it ; and after the courts of equity with a courage and a good sense which are above all praise have applied their powerful machinery to float us over its dangers and obstructions even now the English system of conveyancing is a disgrace to a civilised nation. The law of real property, as created and administered by the common law judges, instead of being a collection of rules founded on convenience, is an arbitrary science, like heraldry, or astrology, or freemasonry, based on definitions and similes, and sacrificing without scruple LORD COKE. 175 both justice and reason, to keep its metaphors un- broken. Thus one sort of uncertain future interest, called a contingent remainder, was said to be supported by a previous interest, which the courts thought fit to say must be an interest for life. If this interest was absent or destroyed, the support failed. Therefore, in pursuance of the metaphor, the remainder failed too. A science resting on verbal subtleties might have been expected to possess at least an accurate terminology. So far, however, is this from being the case, that the words ' right,' ' possibility,' ' estate,' ' contingent,' * executory,' * limitation,' ' purchase,' ( power,' and, in fact, most of the important technical terms in conveyancing, are promiscuously used in half a dozen different senses ; and grave decisions have been grounded, and even rules of law established, on syllogisms, in which the middle term was used in one sense in the major, and in another in the minor. But while the law dug these pitfalls around the honest purchaser, devisee, or inheritor, it devised a whole science, called the learning of deforcement, for the benefit of the fraudulent or violent intruder. It divided wrongful possessors into classes, such as abaters, disseisors, de- forciants, and intruders, and allotted to them their several modes of defeating the claim of the lawful owner. We will illustrate its proceedings by a case within our own experience. A man without near relations devised his property to a friend who was not his heir. The 176 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. devisee died a few days before the testator. The devisee's son thought it hard that such an accident should deprive him of an estate. Provisionally, therefore, he took possession, and consulted his lawyer as to the means of retaining it. The answer was, that he was an abator, and that the means given to him by the law for the purpose of defeating the lawful heir were, a feofment and a fine. Both these proceedings were adopted. But on taking further advice, he was told that he had not used them in their proper order. He had, it seems, levied the fine before he made the feofment, and the charm, therefore, would not work. So he reversed the process, first made the feofment, and then levied the fine. Again, however, it was found that he had done wrong. Both the feofment and the fine having been perfected during a vacation, the fine had reference to the pre- ceding term, and overreached the feofment. So he began again, and made a feofment in one term, and levied a fine n the next. At last the professors of the dark art declared that the legal magic had been properly employed, and he is now the undisputed, indeed the indisputable owner. A recent act of parliament has destroyed this science by abolishing tortious conveyances ; but until a few years ago they were in constant use. They were used by persons having terms of years, who wished to rob the reversioner of his fee simple; by persons in possession, who wished to despoil contingent remaindermen; and, as in the case we have mentioned, by mere intruders, who LORD COKE. 177 wished to seize on property to which they had not the shadow of a claim. It is to this system, and to the expense and insecurity which it seems to have been intended to create, that we mainly owe one of our greatest political inconveniences and dangers the separation of the great mass of our population from the ownership of land. In the larger portion of Europe almost everywhere, indeed, except in Spain, in parts of Italy, and in the British Islands the greater part of the soil belongs to small proprietors. They are less skillful than our farmers, but they are more diligent, more economical, and more provident. They marry late, and consequently have small families : in France the average number of children to a marriage is only three. They defend the rights of property, because they possess them ; dependence on public relief or on private charity, instead of being, as before the Poor Law Amend- ment Act it was with us, the rule, is the rare exception. From this fertile source of happiness and moral improvement our peasantry, indeed our middle classes, are cut off by our system of conveyancing. The French peasant, as soon as he has agreed with his neighbour for the purchase of half an acre, goes with him to the notaire, and has it transferred into his name ; and if he wishes to sell, can part with it as easily as he obtained it. A small purchaser with us has to ask for the abstract of the title, to send it to his lawyer, to pay for its being examined, to pay for further enquiries being made, to pay for the con- sideration of the answers to those enquiries, and, perhaps, N 178 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. after half a year's delay, finds that he has purchased a chancery suit. As the amount of these expenses in no respect depends on the value of the property for the title to an acre may be as intricate as that to a whole manor they operate as an almost prohibitory tax on small purchases. We once bought a small freehold as a qualification ; the price was 401. the expenses were 301. To this cause, also, is to be attributed the comparatively low value of land in England. France is a poorer country than England, landed property there is a less advantageous investment : it is subject to enormous direct taxation, and does not give the social preeminence which attends it in England. But it sells for one-third more. Forty- five years' purchase is as common in France as thirty years' purchase is with us. If, instead of clamouring for protec- tion from foreigners, the landed interest had asked for protection from lawyers if they had required from the legislature, of which they are the most powerful portion, a rational system of conveyancing, they would have done what they have failed to do they would have really raised the value of land. Now this monstrous system was Sir Edward Coke's idol. It was this silly, but yet mischievous rubbish, which he thought the perfection of reason. He resisted its correc- tion by the courts of equity and by the clearness with which he expounded its principles, and the sagacity with which he endeavoured to reconcile its discrepancies, he contributed more than any other writer to its permanence. No man knows its faults better than Lord Campbell ; no MONTAGUE. 179 man has laboured more zealously or more ably in the arduous work of correcting them. We rather wonder, therefore, at his rating so highly as he appears to do the services of Coke as its expounder, and, to a considerable degree, its creator. We confess that the utter ignorance of the real objects of legislation which is betrayed by Coke's writings almost leads us to modify our praise of his parliamentary conduct. We cannot but suspect that the measures which he carried, great and well directed as they were, were almost as much the fruit of his quarrel with the Government as of his wish to promote the welfare of the people. With our imperfect nature, when benefits have been conferred, we ought not, perhaps, to scan nicely the motives by which our bene- factors may be supposed to have been influenced. Great services ought to be repaid by great gratitude. Still it must be admitted that Coke's opposition to monopolies, to arbitrary imprisonment, and to arbitrary taxation, would have conferred on him a still higher reputation if we had been sure that it had been prompted by an enlightened desire of the public good, unassisted by blind resistance to change, or by well-founded resentment against the Crown. Coke's successor, Montague, need not detain us long. The only remarkable event of his Chief-Justiceship was his having to pronounce sentence on Sir Walter Ealeigh. The concluding passage of his address to the prisoner is very striking : ' I know you have been valiant and wise, and I doubt N 2 180 BIOGKAJHICAL SKETCHES. not but you retain both these virtues, which now you shall have occasion to use. Your faith has heretofore been questioned ; but I am satisfied that you are a good Chris- tian, for your book, which is an admirable work, doth testify as much. I would give you counsel, but I know you can apply unto yourself far better counsel than I am able to give you. Yet, with the good Samaritan in the gospel, who, finding one in the way wounded and distressed, poured oil into his wounds and refreshed him, so will I now give unto you the oil of comfort ; though (in respect that I am a minister of the law) mixed with vinegar. Fear not death too much nor too little not too much, lest you fail in your hopes nor too little, lest you die presumptuously. The judgement of the court is, that execution be granted; and may God have mercy on your soul!'* Passing over his undistinguished successor, Ley, we proceed to Chief Justice Crewe, whom Lord Campbell properly designates as ' a perfectly competent and tho- roughly honest Chief Justice.' He seems to have been an admirable specimen of an accomplished civilian of the 17th century. Mild, but yet resolute, fond of heraldry and genealogy, and, as may be inferred from the magni- ficent mansion which he erected at Crewe, of architecture ; deeply imbued with the feelings and associations, perhaps we might call them the prejudices, which often accompany ancient descent, and devoting the whole force of a power- ful intellect and of unwearied perseverance to one great * Vol. i. p. 357. CREWE. 181 object, the restoration of the splendours of the family of Crewe. His opinion on the Oxford Peerage Case, in which he preferred a remote male heir to a nearer female, illustrates well both the man and the times. It might figure in the * Eomance of the Peerage.' * This great and weighty cause, incomparable to any other of the sort that hath happened at any time, requires much deliberation and solid and mature judgement to determine it. Here is represented to your lordships certa- men honoris, of illustrious honour. I heard a great peer of this realm and a learned man say, when he lived, there is no king in Christendom hath such a subject as Oxford. And well might this be said, for De Vere came in with the Conqueror, being then Earl of Guynes ; shortly after the Conquest he was made Great Chamberlain by Henry I., the Conqueror's son, above 500 years ago. By Maud, the Empress, he was created Earl of Oxford, the grant being Alberico Comiti, so that he was clearly an Earl before. He was confirmed and approved by Henry Fitz-Empress, Henry the Second. This great honour, this high and noble dignity, hath continued ever since in the remarkable surname of De Vere, by so many ages, descents and generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a peer in one and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this time but two attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy times, when the government was unsettled, and the kingdom in competition. * I have laboured to make a covenant with myself, that affection may not press upon judgement; for I suppose 182 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of a house so illustrious, and would take hold of a twig or twine thread to uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions ; there must be a period and an end to all temporal things finis rerum an end of names and dignities, and whatsoever is terrene; and why not of De Vere ? for where is BOHUN ? Where is MOWBRAY? Where is MORTIMER ? Nay, which is more, and most of all, where is PLANTAGENET ? They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality! Yet let the name of De Vere stand so long as it pleaseth God.'* Could such a speech be made now ? We think not. The enthusiasm of the Chief Justice was kindled, as might perhaps have been expected from his heraldic and genea- logical pursuits, not by the great deeds of the De Veres, but by the antiquity of their descent. He venerated them as we venerate an ancient oak which has seen the rise and fall of thirty generations of short-lived men. Now mere antiquity of birth, that is to say, descent from a family which has possessed great wealth during many centuries, has ceased to be reverenced. We admire it, as we admire every thing which we very seldom meet with, but by itself it excites no stronger feeling. If indeed it be added to great personal distinction, the union of the two is imposing. When we see the House of Lords led, as it scarcely ever was led before, by one whose nobility is as old as that of the De Veres, we are struck by the combination of two VoL i. p. 373. CREWE. 183 sources of illustration, each of which, even alone, is very rare. But an ancient name, unsupported by personal merits, is now almost valueless. Sir Eandolph Crewe followed Coke's glorious example in declaring the unlawfulness of arbitrary taxation and imprisonment. Like Coke, he was dismissed ; like him, he felt deeply, more deeply than it is easy for us to conceive, the loss of his office; and, like him, he made a strong effort to recover it. But it was the effort of a much loftier virtue and of a much less vigorous will. Coke strove to influence Buckingham, first by his hopes and afterwards by his fears : first by surrendering his daughter and her vast expectations to Sir John Villiers ; and afterwards, when that had failed, by leading the first regular parliamentary opposition of which an English House of Commons was the scene. Crewe tried to propitiate the favourite merely by respectful argument and entreaty. Lord Campbell thinks his letter to Buckingham most creditable. It appears to us pitched in too low a key. As a specimen of the humility, we had almost said the servility, with which a great man then addressed a still greater man, we extract a portion of it, with its many strange grammatical errors : 4 My duty most humbly done to your grace, to read the misfortune of a poor man herein, and take them into your noble thoughts, whose case is considerable. I have lived almost two years under the burden of His Majesty's heavy displeasure, deprived of the place I held, and laid aside as a person not thought of, and unserviceable, whereof I have been soe sensible, that ever since living at my house att 184 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. Westminster, I have not sett my foot into any other house there or at London (saving the house of God), but have lived private and retired as it best became me. * I did decline to be of this late Parliament, distrusting I might have been called upon to have discovered, in the public, the passages concerning my removal from my place, which I was willing should be lapped up in my own busome. * I likewise took special care, if my name were touchit upon in the Comons house, that some of my friends there should doe their best to divert any further speech of me, for I alwaies resolved wholly to relie upon the King's good- ness, who I did not doubt would take me into his princely thoughts, if your grace vouchsafed to intercede for me. ' I am now in the seventieth year of my age ; it is the general period of man's life, and my glass runs on apace. Well was it with me when I was King's serjeant, I found profitt by it ; I have lost the title and place of Chiefe Justice. I am now neither the one or other; the latter makes me uncapable of the former, and since I left the Chiefe's place, my losse has been little less than 30001. already. * I was by your favour in the way to have raised and renewed in some measure my poore name and familey, which I will be bold to say hath heretofore been in the best ranke of the famileys of my country, till by a general heir the patrimony was carried from the male line into another sirname, and since which time it hath been in a weak condition. Your grace may be the means to repair the CEEWE. 185 breach made in my poore fortune, if God soe please to move you, and you will lose no honour by it. Howsoever, I have made my suit to your noblenesse, and your conscience, for I appeal to both ; and whatsoever my success be, I shall still appear to be a silent and patient man, and humbly submit myself to the will of God and the King. God be with your grace ; He guide and direct you ; and to His holy protection I commit you, resting ever ' A most humble servant to your grace, (Signed) 'EANDULPH CREWE. 'Westminster, 28th Junii, 1628.' When it is recollected that a short time afterwards Sir Randolph was able to purchase the great Crewe estates, and to build a magnificent palace which still, without addition or alteration, is one of the ornaments of England, it is not easy to sympathise with his lamentations over his ' poore name and familey,' and ' poore fortune.' Crewe's successors during the stormy interval between his removal and the Commonwealth need not detain us. The only remarkable act of Hyde is his answer, when Charles asked whether, by assenting to the Petition of Eight, he would lose the power, which that petition formally denied to him, of committing or restraining a subject without showing cause ? ' Every law,' said Hyde, * after it is made, hath its exposition, which it is left to the Courts of Justice to determine ; and although the petition be granted, there is no fear of conclusion, as is intimated in 186 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. the question.'* These few words comprehend the whole theory of legal interpretation an art which has never flourished so vigorously as in England. In some countries a law, of which the courts disapprove, is still executed until public opinion demands its repeal ; in others advan- tage is taken of an interval in which it has not been called into force, and it is considered to have ceased by desuetude. Our judges acknowledge its validity, but blandly evade it by an interpretation. Peter, Jack, and Martin, sitting in conclave to expound their father's will, were timidly scrupulous when compared to an English Bench. Heath, the last of Charles's Chief Justices, was one of the most respectable, for he was a conscientious ultra- royalist. e He read law and history,' says Lord Campbell, e with the preconceived conviction that the king of England was an absolute sovereign, and converted all he met with into arguments to support his theory. One convenient doctrine solved many difficulties; he maintained that Parliament had no power to curtail the essential pre- rogatives of the crown, and that all acts of parliament for such a purpose were ultra vires, and void. There is no absurdity in this doctrine, for a legislative assembly may have only a limited power, like the Congress of the United States ; and it was by no means so startling then as now, when the omnipotence of Parliament has passed into a maxim.' f * VoL i p. 384. t VoL i. p. 409. HEATH. 187 We are inclined to differ from Lord Campbell, and to believe that Heath's doctrine was as absurd as it was mischievous. It is true that a legislative body may have only a limited mission. The Poor Law Commissioners, in respect of their power to issue general rules, and the Equity Judges, in respect of their power to make orders in Chancery, are legislative bodies, with narrowly re- stricted powers. The Assemblies in our colonies have a much wider field, but still there are bounds to it. All these, however, are subordinate bodies. So is the Congress of the United States: it is appointed for certain special purposes, and when it has attempted to go further the judges have declared its acts unconstitutional and void. But a legislative body which has no superior, which re- presents the will of the nation, like the Convention of the United States or the British Parliament, must be omnipotent. Every independent nation has a right to make its own laws every successive generation of such a nation has a right to alter those laws. To deny this is to maintain that those who inhabit a given territory in one century have a right to prescribe rules to those who are to inhabit it in all future centuries. It is to say that the legislation of barbarians is to govern their civilised descendants, that that of the ignorant is to govern the instructed, that that of the dead is to govern the living. The only plausible theory in favour of an un- alterable monarchy is divine right. All human rights are necessarily transitory. 18$ BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. As far as the appointment of judges is concerned, the Commonwealth was a sunny interval between storms. Cromwell was just and conscientious. He hated advocates indeed, as the founder of a revolutionary government necessarily must do ; he despised their scruples, and saw through the absurdity of many of the forms which they worshipped ; he even expressed rather indecorously his want of reverence for Magna Charta but he felt the necessity of having the bench well filled, and showed his usual sagacity in the choice of judges. Eolle, however, the most eminent of the judges of this period, was not made by him, but by the Long Parliament. Lord Campbell has inserted his judgement in the case of Don Pantaleon Sa, who, though secretary to the Portuguese ambassador, was executed for avenging a supposed insult by assassination. It is an admirable piece of legal reasoning, and has established both the law which it lays down, that the attendants of an ambassador are privileged only in civil cases, and also the law which it suggests, that the foreign minister himself is exempt from the jurisdiction of the criminal courts of the country to which he is accredited. Lord Campbell remarks, that the administration of criminal justice during the Commonwealth was purer and fairer than it had been for a long period before, or than it became under the Restoration. During the Common wealth the prevailing motive was religion ; and religion, though in ill-regulated minds it may produce cruelty towards those of different opinions, seldom tempts to fraud or chicanery ; while, on subjects unconnected with faith, it TRIAL OF THE EEV. CHRISTOPHER LOVE. 189 prompts to justice and fair dealing. Still, however, many of the old oppressions remained : prisoners were denied the assistance of counsel, even as to legal questions arising on the evidence, unless the Court, in its discretion, thought fit (which it seldom did) to grant it. The witnesses in their favour were not allowed to be sworn, and they had no means of compelling their attendance. Improper evidence was admitted, though not so freely as before; juries were packed ; and for the trial of those with whom juries could not be trusted, a High Court of Justice was created, consisting of about 150 persons, any seventeen or more of whom were a quorum, not subject to challenge, deciding by a bare majority, and combining the functions of judge and jury. At the same time it is observable that this tribunal, however unfairly constituted, was not more so than the court of the Lord High Steward for the trial of peers was before the Eevolution. One of the most interesting of the trials before this High Court is that of Christopher Love. He was a Presby- terian divine of great eminence, and was accused of having corresponded with the Scotch Presbyterians, who acknow- ledged Charles the Second ; and of having, in the words of the charge, conspired ' to raise up foes against the present government of this nation since the same hath been settled in a commonwealth and free state, without a King and House of Lords.' The greater part of the evidence was mere hearsay ; of that which directly criminated the prisoner, some was extorted from persons under the same accusation, under a promise of pardon, 'if they dealt 190 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. ingenuously;' and other portions were mere assents from the witnesses to leading questions. The spirit and presence of mind of Love were remarkable. In the beginning of the trial he was urged by the Lord President to imitate Achan to confess and glorify God ; and by the Attorney- General, to admit that he had corresponded with the Scotch. His answer is admirable : * I will admit of nothing. I have so much of a Christian in me that I will deny nothing that is proved to be true, and so much of an Englishman that I will admit of nothing that is seemingly criminal.' * As was the case with almost all (we believe that there was but one exception) who came before that court, he was convicted. His speech from the scaffold, to which he was accompanied by Calamy and by two other eminent Presby- terian members, is a magnificent death song : ' I am not only a Christian and a preacher, but, what- ever men judge, I am a martyr. I speak it without vanity. Would I have renounced my covenant, and debauched my conscience, and ventured my soul, there might have been hopes of saving my life ; but, blessed be my God, I have made the best choice I have chosen afflic- tion rather than sin ; and therefore welcome scaffold, and welcome axe, and welcome block, and welcome death, and welcome all, because it will send me to my Father's house. I magnify his grace, that though now I come to die a violent death, yet that death is not a terror unto me through the blood of sprinkling, the fear of death is taken out of * 5 State Trials, p. 53. LOVE'S DYING SPEECH. 191 my heart. God is not a terror unto me, therefore death is not dreadful to me. I have now done ; I have no more to say, but to desire the help of all your prayers, that God would give me the continuance and supply of divine grace to carry me through this great work that I am now about ; that as I am to do a work I never did, so I may ha.ve a strength I never had ; that I may put off this body with as much quietness and comfort of mind as ever I put off my clothes to go to bed. I am now going to my long home, and you are going to your short homes ; but I will tell you I shall be at home before you ; I shall be at my Father's house before you will be at your own houses. I am now going to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of angels, to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, to spirits of just men made perfect, and to God the judge of all, in whose presence there is fullness of joy, and at whose right hand there are pleasures for evermore. I conclude with the speech of the apostle, " I am now to be offered up, and the time of my departure is at hand ; I have finished my course I have fought the good fight I have kept the faith henceforth there is a crown of righteousness laid up for me; and not for me only, but for all them that love the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ," through whose blood, when my blood is shed, I expect remission of sins and eternal salvation. And so the Lord bless you all ! ' * Lord Campbell passes over with merited brevity the * 5 State Trials, p. 262. 192 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. three first chief justices of the Eestoration Foster, Hyde, and Kelynge; when we come to a chief justice, a deserved favourite Sir Matthew Hale. He had the advantage, says Lord Campbell, of being born in the middle rank of life, and of depending on his own exertions for distinc- tion. Hale was so great and so good the qualities which we love, which we respect, and which we admire, were so united in his character that it is difficult to wish that his parentage or his education had been other than they were. Any alteration of the circumstances in which he was placed might have impaired a virtue or even have in- troduced a vice. Still we cannot help sometimes regretting that he enjoyed what Lord Campbell calls the advantage of obscure birth. If, like some of his most distinguished predecessors, Gascoigne, Fortescue, Dyer, or Crewe, or, like his great successor Murray, he had entered life among the high-born and the refined, he probably would have es- caped several weaknesses and one or two considerable errors. He would not have passed an ascetic life, avoid- ing the great and the learned. He would not, by ex- cluding his children from good society, have contaminated them by bad ; and, above all, he probably would not have married his maid. If he had lived in the world, it is possible that both his poetry and his philosophy would have been better; and that at the same time he would have prided himself on them less. Theology might perhaps have less occupied his thoughts; but, on the other hand, he might have avoided the superstition which is perhaps the principal blot on his generally illustrious HALE. 193 fame. It would not have been left to Koger North to insinuate a comparison so much to the advantage of Lord Guildford, on the trial of witches. f He began,' Lord Campbell tells us, t with the specious but impracticable rule of never pleading except on the right side, which would make the counsel decide without knowing either facts or law, and would put an end to the administration of justice. " If," says Burnet, "he saw a cause was unjust, he would not meddle further in it but to give his advice that it was so ; if the parties after that would go on they were to seek another counsellor, for he would assist none in acts of injustice." He continued to plead with the same sincerity which he displayed in the other parts of his life, and he used to say, " It is as great a dishonour as a man is capable of to be hired for a little money to speak against his conscience." ' * It must be recollected that moral certainty often co- exists with legal doubt. Every system of laws contains rules of evidence, under which, in certain cases, a certain amount or a certain kind of testimony is required or ex- cluded. Thus in England two witnesses are necessary in cases of treason ; in Germany two witnesses of one descrip- tion or four of another are required to prove every serious accusation. In England, again, the evidence of husband or wife for or against the other is excluded ; and so are privileged communications. In obedience to such a rule the judge may often be required to discharge a prisoner of whose guilt he is convinced. A counsel may be bound * VoL i. p. 519. o 194 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. to call on a jury to acquit a man who has confessed to him his crime. In fact, the issue in a criminal trial is not whether the prisoner has or has not committed a certain act, but whether there is legal evidence that he com- mitted it. In civil cases, indeed, the actual truth is often the subject of enquiry, and the court has to decide, frequently on slight indicia, between conflicting probabilities, or even between conflicting improbabilities. In such a case an advocate would not be justified in supporting a story which, from private information, he knew to be false. This would turn him into the legal prostitute which Bentham calls him. Erskine could scarcely have made his great speech in the case of Day v. Day, if Mrs. Day had confessed to him that the child whom she produced as her son had been bought from a beggar. Such difficulties, however, are rare. It is only a prisoner that unbosoms himself to his lawyer ; a party in a civil suit keeps his own secrets. The criminal feels relief in confessing his evil deed ; the fraudulent plaintiff or defendant has not yet completed his : the time of remorse is to come. Where matters of fact are not in dispute, it is seldom that the cause of either litigant can be called just or unjust. The questions generally are, whether, according to the rules of law, a given property belongs to the one or to the other, or what amount of damage one has inflicted on the other. In such cases a man of the most sensitive conscience may obviously take either side. The difference between the honourable and SCKOGGS. 195 the unscrupulous counsel shows itself not in the causes which he undertakes, but in the manner in which he con- ducts them. An honest advocate will not pledge his belief to what he knows to be false ; he will not throw suspicion on those whom he knows to be innocent ; he will not lay down rules of law which he knows to be inventions of his own. He will feel, with Hale, that f it is as great a dishonour as a man is capable of, to be hired, for a little money, to speak against his conscience.' Considering the remarkable character of Scroggs, his great talents and his atrocious crimes, and the interest which belongs to the strange national delusion which he encouraged by his judicial murders, it may be thought that Lord Campbell has passed him over rather slightly. Probably he thought that Scroggs and the Popish Plot had been sufficiently treated by Scott and Macaulay, and that it was not advisable to reproduce subjects which had been already dwelt on by the greatest novelist and the most brilliant historian of modern times. We shall imitate his prudence: but one of the trials at which Scroggs presided was marked by an incident which may be worth disinterring from the State Trials. Gravan, a Jesuit, together with several of his brethren, was indicted for having on the 24th of April, 1678, plotted to effect the king's death. Gates swore that some time, he would not say on what day, in the subsequent July, he met Gravan in London, and that they then talked over the pro- gress of the Plot, or, as he called it, the Design. Gravan o 2 196 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES. protested that he was not in London in either April or July. He clearly established an alibi in April, but the evidence as to his absence during the whole of July was not satisfactory. There being only the oath of Gates on one side and the denial of the prisoner on the other, he said that he would submit, by way of ending the controversy, only one demand. On Scroggs enquiring what it was, Gravan replied, ' " You know, that in the beginning of the Church (this learned and just court must needs know that), for 1,000 years together it was a custom, and grew to a constant law, for the trial of persons accused of any capital offence, where there was only the accuser's oath and the accused's denial, for the prisoner to put himself upon the trial of ordeal, to evidence his innocency." ' * This is probably the last time that such a request was seriously made to an English court; for though Thornton, in 1819, demanded the ordeal by battle, that was merely a special pleader's trick to defeat an appeal of murder : and the same was the case with a contemporary demand made in Ireland, men- tioned by Mr. Phillips in his * Life of Curran.' But Gravan appears to have made the proposal in perfect sincerity, and must have expected, therefore, a miraculous intervention in his favour or at least a fairer chance of escape than would have been afforded to him by Scroggs. The successor of Scroggs, C. J. Pemberton, is one of the few among Lord Campbell's heroes whose story is interest- ing from its vicissitudes. He was a man of family and of * State Trials, vol. vii. p. 382. PEMBERTON. ' 197 fortune, to which he had the misfortune to succeed as soon as he came of age. In two years he had not only spent it, but was a prisoner in the Fleet for debt and, as the law then stood, was likely to remain a prisoner during the remainder of his life.