CAMILLE DESMOULINS.* TRI8 will be a welcome book to all
those over whom the terrible story of the French Revolution still exercises its unique fascina- tion. Amongst all the figures which flit across that lurid stage, there is none which has attracted or repelled us more than " that
• Camille Desmoulins and his Wife. By Jules Claretie. Translated by Mrs. Cashel Boey. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. poor Camille " (as Mirabeau called him) ; that " time tendre, mail bouillante," of Thiers, " l'ecrivain a la fois le plus nalf, le plus comique, et le plus eloquent de la Revolution " (Thiers, Vol. IIL, p. 70) ; that vain, thoughtless " procureur de la lanterne," who " sans etre cruel, demandait des cruautes ;" that " light, melodious creature," as Carlyle cuts him out for us, in his vivid narrative, " born," as he shall yet say with bitter tears, " to write verses ; light Apollo, so clear, soft-lucent, in this war of the Titans,. wherein he shall not conquer," yet whom we could see, by flashes which shine out here and there from La France Libre and Le Vieux Cordonnier, as well as by side-lights, falling faint, in- deed, but yet clear, from his private life on that--crimson page, to have been no mere vain and cruel literary swordsman, or reck- less cynic, or light, melodious Apollo ; but at the bottom of him an enthusiast of no ignoble type, a true worshipper of human freedom and human rights, a loyal son and faithful and devoted husband. So we seized eagerly on this life, " founded," as we read on the title-page, " on new and hitherto unpublished documents," feeling that, whether well or ill done, we were sure of material which might help us to fill up the tantalising outline, all we had hitherto been able to construct, of the enfant gate of the Revolu- tion. And we have been amply rewarded. The materials in M. Claretie's hands have been full and ample, and have been handled with excellent skill and taste. The "poor Camille " will no longer remain a piquant shadow to any genuine inquirer, for his acquaintance as a very living man can be made in this volume (to. which, by the way, is prefixed a most characteristic likeness, from a miniature in the author's possession. And the fine flavour is not lost in the translation, for Mrs. Hoey has done her part excellently well. In an expression here and there—as " Guise does not announce itself in any way to the traveller" (p. 3), "your treatment of the gravest subjects opposes itself to serious- reflection "-(p. 100)—French idioms linger, and in one or two places we fail to catch the meaning—as where Citizen Beaubourg is said to be "showing Camille up at the back" (p. 47),. where the young enthusiast is standing on the magic table and calling the crowd to arms in the Palais Royal. But as a whole the translation is bright, easy, and natural. M. Claretie brings to his work a thoroughness and an enthusiasm which are the best outfit of a biographer. Thus he starts by taking us down to Guise, the quiet little town in Picardy,. dominated by the great feudal castle, where Camille was born in- 1760, and which, when he visited it in 1870, was " full of the blue uniforms of Saxon dragoons." He finds the house of the Desmoulins- in the high-street, -with the date 1772 on it, built therefore while- Camille was a boy, by his father, the chief officer of the petty municipality, a steadfast and laborious citizen, devoted to his- family and to the compilation of an " Encyclopaedia of Law." He has sadly to admit that the memory of their celebrated townsman• has faded from the minds of the people of Guise. In the town- hall, where he has been led to expect a famous portrait of Camille, he is shown those of certain worthies, clad in cuirasses and long- curled wigs, from which to take his choice. At last, in a cup- board, he hunts out a lithograph after the painting by Bonneville, from amongst a litter of rubbish, including dusty engravings of the Duke and Duchess of Berri, Napoleon L, Louis Philippe, &c., in worm-eaten frames. This is all that remains of Camille in the. town of his birth. His parents, though poor, were bent on giving: their bright boy a thorough education, and were assisted by the presentation of a bourse in the College of Louis le Grand at Paris. Here, accordingly, the young Camille was brought up, side- by side with another boursier of his own age, Maximilian Robespierre, a passionate and successful student, steeping himself in classical literature, and learning to look on the heroes of Plutarch with a reverence near akin to worship. He took his degrees in due course, continued his legal studies both at home and in Paris, and in March, 1785, was admitted licentiate of law,. and sworn in an advocate of the Parliament of Paris. There, for the next four years, we can see him, without practice in his pro- fession, picking up a slender livelihood by copying for attorneys ; hopelessly in love with his Lucile, writing pastorals as Sylvain the Shepherd, and wandering restlessly up and down that volcanic Paris, a copy of the Rivolutions Romaines or of Cicero's- Philippics always in his pocket, while the moan of the coming storm is already in the air. The election for the States-General comes on, and Camille mourns over his father's want of ambition, who, presiding over the election of a deputy for Guise, is named himself by 297 out of 298 votes, but declines the nomination,. while applauding the one dissentient vote as the symbol of liberty. Still he writes on to the steady old lawyer, telling him now of his own work La France Libre, approaching completion, now of the progress of events, of Paris all aflame, the Palais Royal as ' full as an egg, the Duke of Orleans received with transports of applause, the King passing by in silence ; M. Bailly, the Presi- dent of the Assembly, received with storms of applause and cries of " Five la nation I" the lynching by the mob of police spies, &c.,—all this already in June, 1789 (pp. 41-44). La France Libre is finished, and goes to Momoro, " first printer of the National Liberty," too timid as yet to publish it, though in 1793 he will be denouncing Camille as a moderate. The refusal sets Camille chafing and longing for means to buy a printing-press, " so much am I disgusted at the monopoly of these rascals." But the drama unrolls rapidly. Neckar is dismissed, and the Swiss and German Guards are massed in the Champ de Mars. On Sunday, 12th of July, an excited crowd of 6,000 persons is gathered in the Palais Royal, and Camille's hour is come. He leaps on a table, pulls two pistols from his pocket ; in fiery words calls his brethren to arms, declaring that he will never be taken alive, gives them " green, the colour of hope," for their rallying-signal, and before sunset half Paris is armed and wearing green cockades or leaves from the gardens. Camille has leapt to fame, and the Revolu- tion is begun. Two days after, the Bastile fell, and the day after La France Libre was published, and added fuel to the flame. It was burnt by the common executioner by order of the Parlia- ment of Toulouse, to which Camille replied by his " Discours de la Lanterns." From this time he sails with a wet sheet on the top of the wave, in closest_ intimacy, and keenest rivalry and hostility alternately, with all the leading figures of the Revolution. In November, he has started his first journal, Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant, which lasted till July, '92, the fiercest and wittiest chronicle of the agony of a great nation. With all its power, it is sad reading,—its savage and reckless personalities, scarcely more than lighted up by such epigrammatic lightning as " priests of a proletarian God, respect that poverty which he has ennobled," " all Kings and Queens are, like the luckless Francis II., poisoned through the ear."
But even in these his worst days Camille could fairly boast that he remained a poor man, faithful to the cause of Liberty, as he understood it, though not impervious to some of the temptations which his new fame brought with it. He has been Mirabeau's guest at Versailles, and writes :—" I feel myself corrupted by his table, which is too profuse and too dainty. His Bordeaux wine and maraschino have merits which I vainly en- deavour to disguise from myself, and I find it very difficult to resume my republican simplicity, and to hate the aristocrats whose crime is to set store by these excellent dinners." (p. 82.) And yet he can turn savagely on his terrible host after his death. He had done it more than once during his life, getting only in re- turn the three words, " that poor Camille !" We would gladly blot out, were it possible, this phase of his life, which M. Claretie has so well summed up in the terse words, " this Athenian Picard had yet to learn the supreme virtue, pity."
In strange contrast to this life of the journalist stands out the idyll of his courtship, marriage, and married life. His steady love for Lucile Duplessis—that "adorable little blonde" (p. 121) —through years of rebuff from her father, his unselfishness as to her money, the marriage (with Robespierre for " best man," mut- tering " Cry, if you want to cry," when he sees the bridegroom's emotion), his occasional wistful longing for a peaceful home life, if so it might be, go far to enlist our sympathy for him, even while he was writing in his happy home Brissot Unmasked and The Secret History of the Revolution, by which, while dooming the Girondins, he was too surely preparing his own fate. Could he have drawn back into private life, to some retreat with wife and child and books, as his better nature sometimes seems to have prompted (p. 189) ? Possibly, but it was not to be. Even Lucile was carried away, and urged him on again, when he would come back from some terrible scene at the Jacobin Club or the Cordelliers, and lay his throbbing head on her lap. By August 10, when the Tuileries were stormed, he was in the full current again, and now the intimate friend of Denton, who lived in the same house, a life as domestic and far higher than his own. The agony of the two women during the long hours of fighting, while the men are abroad, is gathered up in the wail of Lucile's journal, where we hear of the baker slamming his door in the face of the two women, of men going by shouting that it is all owing to Camille ; "we want to be free. Oh God! the cost of it " (p. 185, &c.).
But now, as the scene gets daily more lurid, as Camille's posi- tion becomes more and more responsible, as secretary to the "Minister by the grace of cannon," a human heart comes back to him, with that supreme virtue, pity. He is sent to his own
district on a tour of inspection, visits Guise for the last time, and finds his grand old father undazzled by his position, preferring to see him " in peaceful possession of my places, and first among the citizens of our natal town." The Convention meets, the massacres of September follow, in which Camille saves his old preceptor of the College of Louis le Grand ; then the severance of the Gironde from " the man of September" and his followers, and the fearful period of suspicion in the early months of '93, when (as Carlyle writes) "almost I conjecture that I, Camille, am a plot." The sunniness and cynicism have disappeared ; the secretary, like his master, is becoming "sick to death of men," though royalty is no more, and the Republic established, and foreign invaders hurled back from French soil. Once more, under Robespierre's influence, the old Camille breaks out in the Histoire des Brissotins, Marat is acquitted, and a group of the noblest men of the Revolution go to their doom. "Oh, my God ! my God ! it is I who kill them," groans Camille at the trial. And now, at Danton's word, " the Seine runs blood ; too much blood has been spilt. Come, take up'your pen again, and demand clemency ; I will support you," he rouses himself once again, and his last journal, the Vieux Cordonnier, appears, to ad- vocate with all his old force a Committee of Clemency. It was too late. In vain did he plead for " the liberty that comes down from Heaven, which is no nymph of the opera ; it is not a red cap, or dirty shirt, or tatters. Liberty is happiness, reason, equality, justice." All too late. Denton is taking his last quiet days at his country home, resolved that he " would sooner be guillotined than guillotine." The " Veiux Cordelier" fights on bravely, though old friends are shrinking back, and old foes, smarting from old wounds of Camille's pen, are mustering. "I laugh no more," Lucile writes, " I never act the cat. I never touch my piano. I dream no more. I am nothing but a machine now. I see no one. I never go out." (p. 286.) The end now conies quickly. Robespierre denounces Camille to the Jacobins, and the supreme struggle has begun. On a March morning, just after he has heard of his mother's death, Camille is arrested, carried to the Luxembourg, after kissing his wife and little Horace for the last time. Strange to say, he takes Young's Night Thoughts and Hervey's Meditations as his companions. Denton is already in prison. Why follow the well-known story to its bloody end, through the mock trial to the fatal platform on which Denton, Camille, and their friends died with felons and royalists on the 5th of April, 1793? In a few days Lucile follows, writing a last line to her mother :—" Good night, my dear mamma. A tear drops from my eyes ; it is for you. I shall fall asleep in the calmness of innocence.—Lucu.s." " Look at my face," she said to Dillon in
the tumbril, when he was beginning to pity her, " is it that of a woman who needs consolation ? " (p. 363.) And so ends this life-tragedy, of deep interest throughout, and of tenderest pathos in its end. In an appendix; M. Claretie has added a selection of extracts from Camille's common-place books and fragments of unpublished writings, which add much to the value of a work which should establish his reputation as an annalist.
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