122 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



the peace of our country, but rather brave all the 

 sufferings of human misery ! " After this declaration 

 of the repentant Jacobin, he pointed to the apart- 

 ment of a profligate citizen-abbe, one of their number, 

 for whose civisme they all seem to have had a peculiar 

 aversion. " He talks," said the dying man, " of civil 

 war. It is his wish. Ah, my friends, promise me 

 you will prevent it, if it be in your power ! " He 

 died soon after, and this was the fate of a man of 

 character and talent, who, if he had followed the 

 natural career of ability and honour, and shrank from 

 the abominations of rabble popularity and regicide 

 politics, would probably have passed through a long 

 life of enjoyment and honour, instead of finishing a 

 course of the trembling wretchedness of ambition in 

 France by the agonies of a premature and desolate 

 death in an American wilderness. 



Laffond died within two days, silent, but retaining 

 his senses, and painfully to the last fixing his eyes on 

 his wife's portrait. The fear of death now seized 

 upon them all. The tossings of the revolutionary 

 wave, on which they had calculated for flinging them 

 back to France, had now subsided ; the tide had even 

 set the contrary way. The Directory was in full 

 power. Death had already thinned their ranks. 

 The mere victims of one of those unprincipled and 

 fierce changes which constitute the lottery of Re- 

 publicanism, and in which prosperity is as little the 

 conscious triumph of virtue, as adversity brings the 



