REMINISCENCES OF A REGICIDE.* THE motto chosen by the remarkable

man whose reminiscences Mrs. Simpson has edited with singular skill and success, is a contradiction of that well-known saying in which most of us believe,—" The looker-on sees most of the game." Sergent, the conventionnel, held with Montaigne that "the only good histories are those written by the very people who were at the head of the movements described, or who, at any rate, took part in their conduct." If the memoranda (they are hardly more), from which his careful and laborious editor has evolved a profoundly interesting narrative, do in truth constitute a " good " history of the events in which he took a part, then have we read, with more or less confidence, or credulity, a great many bad histories of the terrible revolutionary drama and the actors in it. Since the discovery of the narrative of The Last Days of

the Consulate, written by Fauriel, and containing the secret history of the Moreau and Pichegru " a•ffair "—thus antici-

pating some of the disclosures of those Memoirs of Talleyrand which will have lost their savour by the long delay of publica- tion—there has been no such strange, seemingly hap-hazard revelation as that made by the patient piecing, arranging, and supplementing of Sergent's MSS. In 1846, Mr. and Mrs. Davenport, friends of Lord Brougham, while staying at his chateau at Nice, were taken by M. Carnot (father of the

present President of the French Republic) to visit one Sergent-

Marceau—he had added his wife's name to his own—who had been an active figure in the Revolution, and was then living at Nice, in full possession of his health and faculties at over ninety years of age. There was a fascination about speaking face to face with a man who had seen and shared in events that had not yet receded into the far past, and the English visitors were soon taken into his confidence.

Here is Mrs. Simpson's account of how she came to under- take the task she has so ably accomplished:— "With so much that was interesting to communicate, no one can wonder at Sergent's wishing at the same time to vindicate his own character, by putting his reminiscences into a substantial form. He had already written a short memoir in 1801, and he dictated another to Mrs. Davenport in the winter of 1846.47. Mignet, the historian, was consulted by Mr. Davenport on his return to Paris, on the proposed publication of Sergent's papers ; but the design was frustrated by the death of the writer, and

• Reminiscences of a Reeky' le. Edited from the Original MSS. of Sergent- Marceau, Member of the Conrention and Administrator of Police in the French Revolution of 1789. By M. C. M. Simpson. London: Chapman and Hall.

that of Mr. Davenport, within a few weeks of each other. Some time ago, her attention having been called to the subject by some publications on the French Revolution, the Dowager Lady Hatberton (formerly Mrs. Davenport) brought Sergent's papers to me, and I was so much interested by them that she kindly intrusted me with the task of unravelling them."

Between the memoir written in 1801, and that dictated to Mrs. Davenport in 1846-47, in which Sergent always speaks of himself in the third person, there is, naturally, great disparity. The latter lacks the freshness of the former; but, on the other hand, the writer's retrospective self-exculpation gives it a strong personal interest ; while the whole of his life is per- vaded by the charm of that love-story which took sixty years in the telling. Sergent was an engraver by profession, and Marie Marceau Desgraviers, with whom he was in love for two years before he ever spoke to her, and whose second husband he became, learned the art of engraving from him, and became a proficient in it. She was, no doubt, hand- some, attractive, and estimable; but there is no trace in the Memoirs of her having tried to keep him out of the revo- lutionary excesses, or been more capable than himself of seeing two sides to any of the questions of the time. He tells the story of their early years prettily enough ; but his concluding apostrophe to her is laboured and mannered :—

"Oh, Emira ! I watched thy first steps in a life which already was to thee a vale of tears ! Child that I was, I knew not—when the mere sight of thee filled my heart with joy—I knew not that that heart would be thine and thine only till death. I knew not that one day thy heart would beat with equal ardour, and that I should hear from thy lips the dear avowal that its beatings had been reserved for me ! I knew not that I should this very day, two hundred leagues from our birthplace, shed tears over thy tomb, and lay on it wreaths of myrtle and cypress !"

We have met with the name of Sergent in several works relating to the Revolution, and have a general notion of his playing a ferocious part in the sanguinary drama ; but he is never distinct or impressive. Mrs. Simpson, who has really written a succinct history of the Revolution in supplying the connecting links of his disjointed Memoirs, places the regicide, against whom other accusations also existed, in a strongly in-

dividual light. On the whole, we do not take Sergent to have been a bad or a deliberately cruel man ; but it is evident that he was little-minded, petulantly vain, and devoid of sensitive- ness. That he was a sincere believer in the principles of the Revolution, is beyond a doubt; that he ever practically con- demned their perversion, we are by no means convinced. His extraordinary display of memory, eloquence, and power (at ninety) so persuaded Mr. Davenport, that he accepted Sergent's explanations without hesitation. Says Mr. Davenport, ad- dressing " those who without reference to politics respect inflexibility of principles :"—

" His whole life has been devoted to politics and the fine arts.

His walls are covered by likenesses of the two objects of his idolatry, Emira, and her brother, the celebrated General Marceau. In the memory of these two his soul seems constantly entranced, and he dwells on their rare and delightful qualities in a manner totally inconsistent with any other than the most refined and benevolent nature."

This generalisation does more credit to Mr. Davenport's heart than to his head, and rather predisposes the reader to regard Sergent's explanations with suspicion, especially when he comes to the most interesting portion of the book,—Mrs. Simpson's admirable summary of the events which led to the 10th of August, and Sergent's own account of his share in them. It is evident that an oversight of the King's, which

Sargent regarded and resented as a slight (see page 165), was the chief incentive to his subsequent treatment of the un- happy Sovereign. It is impossible to believe that Sergent believed in the "plots" of the helpless Court, the "conspiracies " of the wretched prisoners, and "the gold of Pitt ;" yet we find him gravely recording all these fictions, and declaring that the King's " friends" tried to assassinate him (Sergent), "pretending not to have seen him turning the mob out of the apartments in which the King was besieged." The thread of foolishness which runs through every version of the notions and the ' conduct of the conventionnels, and, indeed, of all the parties concerned in the great struggle, after 1791, is not missing from the Sergent Memoirs, but it runs side by side with many threads of shrewdness, foresight, and good sense. His sketches of the Rolands, husband and wife, are ex- tremely interesting. He unhesitatingly imputes the dis- asters of the Girondins to Madame Roland, and handles her with an almost contemptuous severity. He stands up for Danton, trying to clear him of the odium of having planned the September massacres ; but his own account of his own conduct on that dreadful occasion is so strange, that nothing which he says about it carries conviction, We have not space for extracts, but assure our readers that this portion of the book will interest them deeply; it is, as Sergent's own compatriots would say, " of palpitating actuality." The pages are studded with names which respectively awaken in us, after a hundred years, keen sentiments of admiration, pity, horror, indignation, and disgust. Nowhere have we found the story of Lafayette, his leap into the river, his flight—surely the most dramatic, though the least tragic finale of them all— so graphically told. Here are the men of the time drawn in strong, clear colours by one of themselves, and retouched, after long years, without change, without misgiving respecting either them or himself. He said to M. Carnot, a week before his death—he was then ninety-six,—" They [the priests who had visited•the old man] want me to repudiate my con- duct in the Revolution. They have made indirect overtures to me, and would not be particular as to the form, if only they might say that Old Sergent has abjured his errors. Old Sergent turns a deaf ear, because he does not think he was in error ; because, far from repenting, he considers the part he took in the Revolution as his chief title of honour." He had been exiled in 1801 for his supposed participation in the plot of the Rue Nicaise (the infernal machine), although he was entirely guiltless in the matter, and had voluntarily perpetuated his exile. Since then, the Empire had risen, flourished, fallen, passed away ; the Bourbon Restoration was a thing of the past ; the " Monarchy of July " was actually tottering to its fall ; the scenes in which he had played a part were ancient history,—but he imagined himself a political personage still !

There is something enigmatical, and much that is interest- ing, about this man, who seems to have almost persuaded the very able editor of his memoranda that he was not what all the hard facts at which we get in his own narrative prove him to have been,—a hard-hearted, doctrinaire politician of the cold, keen, resolute kind. But the Reminiscences of this Regicide have the fascination of a romance of the time when romances were romantic.