of expensive habits.  Now, this is the curious thing in Robespierre’s history.  Perhaps there was a tinge of pride in his living a life of indigence; but in fairness it is entitled to be called an honest pride, when we consider that the means of profusion were within his reach.  On his arrival in Paris, he procured a humble lodging in the Marais, a populous district in the north-eastern faubourgs; but it being represented to him some time afterwards, that, as a public man, it was unsafe to expose himself in a long walk daily to and from this obscure residence, he removed to a house in the Rue St Honore, now marked No. 396, opposite the Church of the Assumption.  Here he found a lodging with M. Duplay, a respectable but humble cabinet-maker, who had become attached to the principles of the Revolution; and here he was joined by his brother, who played an inferior part in public affairs, and is known in history as ’the Younger Robespierre.’  The selection of this dwelling seems to have fallen in with Robespierre’s notions of economy; and it suited his limited patrimony, which consisted of some rents irregularly paid by a few small farmers of his property in Artois.  These ill-paid rents, with his salary as a representative, are said to have supported three persons—­himself, his brother, and his sister; and so straitened was he in circumstances, that he had to borrow occasionally from his landlord.  Even with all his pinching, he did not make both ends meet.  We have it on authority, that at his death he was owing L.160; a small debt to be incurred during a residence of five years in Paris, by a person who figured as a leader of parties; and the insignificance of this sum attests his remarkable self-denial.

Lamartine’s account of the private life of Robespierre in the house of the Duplays is exceedingly fascinating, and we should suppose is founded on well-authorised facts.  The house of Duplay, he says, ’was low, and in a court surrounded by sheds filled with timber and plants, and had almost a rustic appearance.  It consisted of a parlour opening to the court, and communicating with a sitting-room that looked into a small garden.  From the sitting-room a door led into a small study, in which was a piano.  There was a winding-staircase to the first floor, where the master of the house lived, and thence to the apartment of Robespierre.’

Here, long acquaintance, a common table, and association for several years, ’converted the hospitality of Duplay into an attachment that became reciprocal.  The family of his landlord became a second family to Robespierre, and while they adopted his opinions, they neither lost the simplicity of their manners nor neglected their religious observances.  They consisted of a father, mother, a son yet a youth, and four daughters, the eldest of whom was twenty-five, and the youngest eighteen.  Familiar with the father, filial with the mother, paternal with the son, tender and almost brotherly with the young girls,