The doomed Twelve do it; though with difficulty, with loss of road, with peril, and the mistakes of a night.  In Quimper are Girondin friends, who perhaps will harbour the homeless, till a Bourdeaux ship weigh.  Wayworn, heartworn, in agony of suspense, till Quimper friendship get warning, they lie there, squatted under the thick wet boscage; suspicious of the face of man.  Some pity to the brave; to the unhappy!  Unhappiest of all Legislators, O when ye packed your luggage, some score, or two-score months ago; and mounted this or the other leathern vehicle, to be Conscript Fathers of a regenerated France, and reap deathless laurels,—­did ye think your journey was to lead hither?  The Quimper Samaritans find them squatted; lift them up to help and comfort; will hide them in sure places.  Thence let them dissipate gradually; or there they can lie quiet, and write Memoirs, till a Bourdeaux ship sail.

And thus, in Calvados all is dissipated; Romme is out of prison, meditating his Calendar; ringleaders are locked in his room.  At Caen the Corday family mourns in silence; Buzot’s House is a heap of dust and demolition; and amid the rubbish sticks a Gallows, with this inscription, Here dwelt the Traitor Buzot who conspired against the Republic.  Buzot and the other vanished Deputies are hors la loi, as we saw; their lives free to take where they can be found.  The worse fares it with the poor Arrested visible Deputies at Paris.  ’Arrestment at home’ threatens to become ‘Confinement in the Luxembourg;’ to end:  where?  For example, what pale-visaged thin man is this, journeying towards Switzerland as a Merchant of Neuchatel, whom they arrest in the town of Moulins?  To Revolutionary Committee he is suspect.  To Revolutionary Committee, on probing the matter, he is evidently:  Deputy Brissot!  Back to thy Arrestment, poor Brissot; or indeed to strait confinement,—­whither others are fared to follow.  Rabaut has built himself a false-partition, in a friend’s house; lives, in invisible darkness, between two walls.  It will end, this same Arrestment business, in Prison, and the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Nor must we forget Duperret, and the seal put on his papers by reason of Charlotte.  One Paper is there, fit to breed woe enough:  A secret solemn Protest against that suprema dies of the Second of June!  This Secret Protest our poor Duperret had drawn up, the same week, in all plainness of speech; waiting the time for publishing it:  to which Secret Protest his signature, and that of other honourable Deputies not a few, stands legibly appended.  And now, if the seals were once broken, the Mountain still victorious?  Such Protestors, your Merciers, Bailleuls, Seventy-three by the tale, what yet remains of Respectable Girondism in the Convention, may tremble to think!—­These are the fruits of levying civil war.

Also we find, that, in these last days of July, the famed Siege of Mentz is finished; the Garrison to march out with honours of war; not to serve against the Coalition for a year!  Lovers of the Picturesque, and Goethe standing on the Chaussee of Mentz, saw, with due interest, the Procession issuing forth, in all solemnity: