coming down the stairs of the Hôtel de Ville, the same soldier stuck the heart on the end of his sabre, and forced him, deponent, to carry it about -that they went through several streets of Paris, and to the Palais Royal, and that at last, while he and the soldier were getting their supper in a public-house in one of the streets that lead into the Rue St. Honoré, the people came and demanded the heart from them, and that deponent threw it out of the window to them, and does not know what became of the heart afterwards; and deponent further says, that he has nothing more to reproach himself with, in all the unlucky events that have since happened that he accompanied, indeed, M. Lafayette to Versailles on the 5th of October last, but took no part in the murder of the Royal Guards, but only possessed himself of a shoe belonging to one of those that were killed, to show it in Paris.

Asked if he was not excited to cut off M. de Launay's head, to carry M. Berthier's heart at the point of a sabre, and to attend all the mobs that have collected, and if he has not received sums of money for doing

so ?

Answers, that he has not been excited by any one in particular, but by the people in general, as he before stated; that he has received nothing for these actions-that he has ten or a dozen times played the bassoon in certain processions of women to St. Geneviève, and that he received three or four livres for each turn.'-Supplément au Journal de Paris, 26 Jan. 1790.

6

Such is the real picture of the Revolution!-the portrait ad vivum-not as outlined by Mignet or varnished by Thiers, but the living image-which to get rid of and obliterate, and to throw a veil over its authors, and clouds of suspicion over its victims, is the sole object of these pretended Histories. We need enter into no detailed observations on Denot's deposition, a strange and frightful mixture of confession and concealment-but which-as it is always the case when the criminal is allowed to talk-involuntarily reveals what it attempts to conceal. Can any one believe that it was 'fatality,' or accident,' or spontaneous excitement,' as M. Thiers indulgently phrases it, that occasioned this cook out of place to be an active leader in all these successive scenes in the insurrection of the 12th of July--in the plunder of arms on the 13th-the attack of the Bastille on the 14thin the patroles that filled Paris with terror for the ensuing week in the murderous riot of the 22nd-to be the person who sawed off and paraded M. de Launay's head on the 14th-who tore out and paraded the heart of M. Berthier on the 22ndwho for ten days was distinguished in the streets of the capital by the helmet, the trophy and the proof of the popular aggression-and who on the evening of the 22nd went to sup with his brother murderer, having on their table the heart of their victim, which, on the requisitions of the mob outside, they threw out of the window ?-Can it be doubted that this was a chain of preconcerted

preconcerted émeutes; and how can M. Thiers hope to persuade any man of common sense that 'l'or répandu' by Egalité in preparing such scenes and in hiring such actors was 'without any influence on the Revolution? Of this wonderful deposition, or of him who made it, we find no subsequent notice. The mob soon after terrified the Châtelet into an iniquitous sentence of death against M. de Favras, of which M. Thiers, in his usual ambiguous way, affects to doubt whether it was pronounced from fear or from conviction.' Certain it is that the tribunal was never again in a condition to give any further trouble to Denot or his employers. Everything about him seems to have been buried and forgotten in the universal terror that ensued, and we do not know that the proceedings of the Châtelet have ever been reprinted; but an historian ought to have examined such ordinary publications as the Moniteur and the Journal de Paris; and although the deposition of Denot shows more distinctly the general connexion and detailed atrocity of the facts, it only affords an additional and stronger proof of what was already sufficiently notorious; and its chief value, for our present purpose, is, the singular precision with which it is found to belie every portion of M. Thiers' narrative of the events, and to contradict his apologetical theory of their causes. We must add that this case of Denot, though the most curious and best detailed that we possess, is by no means a singular indication that all these enormities were prepared by the same heads and executed by the same hands. M. Thiers is forced to admit that a fellow of the name of Maillard, formerly a tipstaff or bailiff in one of the courts of law, played a great part on all these occasions-that he was at the head of an organised band of assassins-that he was the most prominent leader of the attack on the Bastille-that it was the same Maillard who led the army of Paris to Versailles on the 5th of October-and again the same Maillard-still more decidedly damned to everlasting horror for having presided over and directed the Massacre at the Abbaye. These things, at least, M. Thiers cannot pretend to have been 'accident' and ' spontaneous excitement?" Who then were the employers and paymasters of Denot and Maillard-who but the two main objects of M. Thiers' special protection and apology, Danton and Egalité?

Here, for the present, we must suspend our examination. We have got through little more than the first livraison of M. Thiers' first work, and have already exceeded our usual limits; but this portion affords the most decisive and irrefragable tests of the historian's credit. We have not selected our instances; we have, as we before said, taken what M. Thiers presented to us as his first and greatest objects; we have exhibited his mode of dealing

with the two first and most important personages of each party -the King and Queen, and the Duke of Orleans and Lafayette; the two most remarkable elections-those of 1789 and 1792; the two first émeutes of the 27th of April and 12th of July; the two first massacres of the 14th and 22nd of July; the eventful and decisive days of the 5th and 6th of October, and of the 2nd and 3rd of September;-all, in short, that was most striking, most important, and most influential in the early Revolution; all that required, in the highest degree, diligent research, careful investigation, and an impartial spirit; and in all these great cases we have proved against him what we think we cannot-on the soberest reconsideration-call by any gentler name than a deliberate system of falsehood and fraud.

On the strength of that axiom of common sense and general law, falsus in uno-or which might be, in this case, still more strongly stated, falsus in pluribus-falsus in omnibus, we believe we might here close our case against M. Thiers as an historian; but as the work proceeds, the deceptive principle on which it was originally planned exhibits itself in other and larger forms, and demands a further and more general examination, which we shall take an early opportunity of pursuing and bringing down to the latest issue of the History of the Consulate and the Empire,'-a work which, though written with a somewhat different, but, as we believe, a more personal object than the History of the Revolution, is conducted with the same habitual, if it be not natural and instinctive, bad faith, matured by political experience, and still further developed by the closer study and imitation of that most stupendous of all cheats, upon whose panegyric M. Thiers' congenial pen is now employed.

INDEX

TO THE

SEVENTY-SIXTH VOLUME OF THE QUARTERLY REVIEW.