ELUCIDATION. 143 



housekeeper, who, she told me, had not the will to re- 

 fuse his poor wife and children, half starved ; hence the 

 appellation .... " Starvation ! ! " Not being able or 

 willing to reciprocate our compassion he thought that 

 some calumnies, well contrived, would answer to repre- 

 sent me as a hero of abjections in the eyes of his board- 

 ers, who had temporarily broken his forced vigils, for 

 as long as they were with him he had enough to eat, and 

 after meals to help his digestion and make my panegyric 



he told them, that Mr. Louis was ad of a fellow when 



talking politics, that " The Declaration of the Eights of 

 Man " was my Mble, that I thought a man like me 

 was equal to any nobleman, according to merits, and 

 such Utopias. That when I left France I had a wife 

 and several children. I wondered he did not attribute 

 me as many as the wise King Solomon had ; it is true 

 that he could not very well do that the antithesis 

 would have been too metaphorical from a king to a 

 demagogue, and especially to make it swallow, to a pro- 

 fessor of French at the Military Academy of West 

 Point, with whom I had had a long conversation a few 

 days before, who, I understood after, told that apolo- 

 gist of my virtues, that from our conversation he had 

 had no inductions that I was such a diabolical man as he 

 depicted me, but quite the contrary, and asked him 

 who had given him such information, unless I had 

 myself, and that was not very likely. Later he told 



