bons, who never forgot and never forgave-the sister of the Robespierres! This poor old woman, buried alive under the weight of 74 years-of complicated ill health*-and of her intolerable name-must have been surprised, to the whole extent of her remaining faculties, at hearing that name again publicly pronounced, not only without horror but with the extravagant admiration of the palmy days of the Jacobins. Laponneraye gives a vague and pompous account of the sympathy that soon united their heartsof the tender friendship to which their common affection for the humane and virtuous' Maximilian gave sudden birth. He solicited the honour of being allowed to call himself her son, and she, it seems, complied with the rational request. On her death, in August, 1834, the bookseller states, that she left these Memoirs to M. Laponneraye qui nous a cédé'—not gratuitously, we suppose the right of publication.'

In England the assertion of any man of letters, and of any respectable publisher, that a work was printed from the MS. of a person lately deceased would never be questioned-we regret to repeat that it is quite the reverse in France, and that the assurances given us of the authenticity of the Memoirs of Mlle. de Robespierre, not only create no confidence, but would have excited our suspicions even had there been no other evidence.

In the first place they are found in a catch-penny collection called the Mémoires de Tous, which appears in livraisons of one volume each (we are now at the third), and which professes to be a kind of asylum for short memoirs and details of particular transactions not bulky enough to claim a separate existence. The idea is a good one-but the materials have hitherto been contemptible either for their inanity, their folly, or their falsehood ;-there is not in the three volumes a single tract of the smallest value. According therefore to the old proverb, Dis moi qui tu hantes, et je te dirai qui tu es,' this work has no great claim to respect.

In the next place, the publisher, in an anonymous advertisement prefixed to the editor Laponneraye's preface, says that Mile. Robespierre left the MS. to Laponneraye. Why does not Laponneraye say so himself? The truth is, he could not; for Mlle. Robespierre's will is preserved, and it bequeaths everything she leaves behind in the world to Mlle. Mathon, a person whose family had received and protected, and who herself had attended, the poor old woman to her last hour.

Again: the publisher talks of Memoirs-but the editor himself pretends to nothing but some few scattered Notes, which he admits

* Cette fille estimable a vendu sa portion de patrimoine pour soutenir ses frères. Des chagrins nés antérieurement à leur punition ont altéré sa santé au point de la rendre incapable d'un long travail.-Lettre de Guffroy à la Convention 1794, p. 181.

that

that he has put together according to his own discretion. But even this very small degree of authority we must question: a few scattered notes arranged at the discretion of such a person as Laponneraye would not be worth much; but we are satisfied that not a line of the work could have been written by the pen of Mlle. Robespierre. The style, in our judgment, is evidently that of Laponneraye; at all events, it is that of a journalist of this day, and not of a poor old recluse. The modern slang-the neology-the thoughts and phrases all smelling of the Three Great Days-are no more like what old Charlotte Robespierre would have hammered out than they are to Marot or Rabelais. The work professes to have been written between 1827 and 1832. Now in 1827 Mlle. Robespierre was, by her own account, sixtyseven-and in 1832, seventy-two-rather late to set about writing memoirs; and the impatient and declamatory earnestness of the opening chapter forms a singular contrast with the fact that the supposed writer had for forty years, in which she had nothing else to do, neglected this duty. A woman who had felt so strong a passion for writing about her brother could never have deferred till 1827 to make even a beginning. But there are some other circumstances still more conclusive. Mlle. Robespierre is made to say, that her brother belonged to two legislative assemblies successively. This is a slip of M. Laponneraye's youthful memory, which could not have happened to the contemporary and sister. Robespierre was indeed member of two legislative assemblies, but not successively-he belonged only to the first and the last; and to that intermediate one, which is called for distinction' the Legislative Assembly,' and to which reference is made, it happens that Robespierre did not belong. And again-Mlle. Robespierre complains-and Laponneraye, in his own character, repeats and presses the complaint that Le Vasseur, in his Memoirs, recently published, should have been guilty of the indiscretion of printing a letter from Mlle. Robespierre to her brother, which was found after his death, and which, she says, has been maliciously garbled and altered, so as to give a very false idea of the said brother's character, and of their fraternal relations. Le Vasseur's Memoirs were a fabrication (proved to be so in a court of justice), made by one Roche, and published from 1829 to 1832.* But Laponneraye, this last historian of the Revolution, seems so stupendously ignorant of the subject he was writing about, as not to be aware that this letter, and with it another from the younger Robespierre

* See Quarterly Review, vol. xlix. p. 29.

to

+ As this letter is short, and not so generally known as the other, we insert it:— ‘No. XLII. A.—Robespierre the younger to his Brother.

'My sister has not a drop of our blood in her veins. I have heard and seen enough VOL. LIV. NO. CVIII.

2 M

of

to the elder, concerning their sister, appears in the celebrated Rapport sur les papiers trouvés chez Robespierre, par Courtois'— read in the Convention soon after Robespierre's death, printed both in quarto and octavo, and distributed all over Europe, sixand-thirty years before Le Vasseur's pretended Memoirs appeared.

The way Laponneraye deals with this letter is very characteristic of the spirit of fraud and falsification in which his work has been concocted. The letter has been always quoted as undeniable evidence of the malevolence and malignity of Robespierre's personal character; but, Laponneraye's object being to extol this misrepresented patriot as the acme of all public virtue and private amiability, he boldly puts into Charlotte's mouth a double assertion, first, that all the passages attributing to Robespierre blind hatred,' implacability,'' dreadful passion,' outrageous cruelty,' &c., were interpolations of their enemies, and not to be found in the original; and secondly, that it was not addressed to Maximilian, but to the younger brother. On the first point we observe, that the attempt to get rid of the force of a letter which has been forty years before the public by denying a phrase here and there is ridiculous; the whole context is consistent, and a word, more or less, would not in any degree affect its general character. As to the second point, though addressed to one brother, it refers to the common enmity of both, and whether addressed to Maximilian or Augustin, the effect would be nearly the same; but who can believe that it was written to any other than the supreme power? If the quarrel had been with Augustin alone, is it not plain that she would have appealed to Maximilian-his master and hers? And we see that the terms of Augustin's letter, which Laponneraye does not seem to have known, imply that Charlotte was compromising in some public way their political reputation, and threatening some public and scandalous exposure which would have endangered their political position.

We insist on these points rather more than at first sight they may seem to deserve, because it is evident that there exists at least one other letter of Mlle. Robespierre, which Laponneraye wishes also

of her to satisfy me that she is our greatest enemy. She turns our spotless reputation to her own account, in order to rule us, and to threaten us with some scandalous proceedings on her part which may compromise us.

'We must take some decided steps against her. She must be sent back to Arras [their native town], that we may be relieved from the presence of a woman who is become our common plague. She tries to give us the character of being bad brothers; her calumnies-widely spread-have no other object.

'I wish you would see La Citoyenne Lasaudraie; she could give you full informa tion concerning all the impostors by whom we are surrounded, and whom it is most important to detect. A certain St. Felix seems to be of the clique......'-Rapport de Courtois, p. 177.

to

to invalidate. He makes Mlle. Robespierre say, that having been sent to prison on the Tenth Thermidor, she was then over-persuaded by a female spy, who seemed to be a fellow-prisoner, to sign some paper, she knows not what; but she has, alas! but too much reason to fear that it may have contained assertions unworthy of her and which her heart abjures!'-(p. 128.)

We are not aware to what this may allude; and we really believe that Mlle. Robespierre's revelations, either in 1794 or in 1834, would not elucidate in any essential point the history of her brother; but-valeant quantum-we enter our protest against Laponneraye's fraudulent attempt to discredit the written testimonies of the time.

As to these Memoirs, we have said, and we repeat, that we do not believe that Mlle. Robespierre wrote one line of them; but we think it possible that Laponneraye may have obtained from her, in conversation, a few trivial circumstances and meagre anecdotes, which he has expanded into an hundred pages: we believe, however, that even this communication could have existed but to a very small extent indeed.

But whatever his materials may have been, whether written notes or verbal communications, it is evident that they are scanty and trivial to a wonderful degree. We cannot understand how any man could have talked even for two hours with the sister of Robespierre without having learned something more interesting, and above all something more individual and characteristic, than the trash which is here given. The only evidence of its approach to truth is its entire unimportance. Laponneraye seems to be a very silly, as he certainly is a very unprincipled, fellow; but if he had been altogether fabricating, he would certainly have invented something more suitable to the double purpose of panegyrizing Jacobins and selling his book. We therefore conclude that some of the facts he may have had from Mlle. Robespierre; while the ridiculous eloquence with which he embroiders these trivial matters is entirely his own.

In looking over-as the examination of these worthless publications obliged us to do-the more respectable works on the French Revolution, we could not but observe how vague, unsatisfactory, and even inconsistent, are all the accounts of Robespierre. His name, indeed, occurs in every page-his speeches fill the Moniteur-his ambition and his crimes are the commonplaces of the historian and the moralist; but the real objects and extent of that ambition-his motives and actual share in those crimes, are still involved in contradiction and obscurity. To this obscurity four circumstances have mainly contributed :-1. the natural reserve and mystery of his own personal character; 2. the humble position 2M 2

of

of his family and connexions; 3. the simultaneous death of all those who were interested in giving any explanation of his motives; and, lastly, his being made the scape-goat of all the surviving villains, who loaded his memory with their crimes as well as his own, and were careful to stifle any inquiries which might lead to the separation of his real from his imputed offences.

From all these causes it is probable that we shall never obtain a full insight into Robespierre's character, the individual motives of his actions, and the exact scope and aim of his ulterior designs. But something may yet be done-some of his contemporaries are still alive. There exists an immense mass of ephemeral publications which have been but imperfectly examined; and the public archives of France do, or at least did lately, contain a great deal of curious and unpublished matter; all of which, we think, if duły examined, sifted, and arranged, would throw very important lights on this most interesting-and, we must say, still unwritten-history. We have not the pretension of being able to contribute anything to such a work; but in the following hasty and, we are well aware, very imperfect sketch of the events of Robespierre's life, we shall indicate some of the doubts and difficulties which have struck our minds, in the hope of directing, to their elucidation, the attention of those who may have more leisure and better opportunities of investigation.

Francis Maximilian Joseph Isidore DE Robespierre* was born on the 6th of April, 1759. His father was an advocate at Arras; he lost his mother (Mary Carreau, a brewer's daughter) when he, the eldest of four children, was seven years old; and his father, soon after his wife's death, fled his own country for debt-kept for a short time a French school at Cologne-thence passed over, it is said, to England-and, finally, to America, and there disappeared. Laponneraye (for it would be idle to keep up the farce of attributing these Memoirs to Charlotte Robespierre) tells us that the father had acquired great consideration by his integrity and his virtues, and was at once honoured and beloved by the

*When Robespierre first appeared in the world he prefixed the feudal particle de to his name. He was entered at college as de Robespierre-he was elected to the States-General as de Robespierre; after the abolition of all feudal distinctions he rejected the de, and called himself Robespierre. Of this these Memoirs take no notice; yet it is not an unimportant circumstance; Camille Desmoulins, in one of his publications, recalled this disagreeable fact to Robespierre's memory in an aigre-dour tone -half sneer, half flattery-which we suspect was more likely to have contributed to his proscription even than the Vieux Cordelier itself. At the moment that Camilie revived this unlucky proof of the aristocracy of M. de Robespierre, it was an imputation that would have sent a less popular man to the guillotine; and Robespierre might well have remembered it with mortal resentment.

This is the statement in the first public mention that ever was made of himthe general list of the members of the States-General; and it would seem as if that statement was made by himself: all the late biographies give the year 1760.

whole