it may please the Director to assign us.  It does not, however, console me to have been cast for a part so contemptible, to find myself excelling ever in the art of running away.  But if I am not brave, at least I am prudent; so that where I lack one virtue I may lay claim to possessing another almost to excess.  On a previous occasion they wanted to hang me for sedition.  Should I have stayed to be hanged?  This time they may want to hang me for several things, including murder; for I do not know whether that scoundrel Binet be alive or dead from the dose of lead I pumped into his fat paunch.  Nor can I say that I very greatly care.  If I have a hope at all in the matter it is that he is dead — and damned.  But I am really indifferent.  My own concerns are troubling me enough.  I have all but spent the little money that I contrived to conceal about me before I fled from Nantes on that dreadful night; and both of the only two professions of which I can claim to know anything — the law and the stage — are closed to me, since I cannot find employment in either without revealing myself as a fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman.  As things are it is very possible that I may die of hunger, especially considering the present price of victuals in this ravenous city.  Again I have recourse to Epictetus for comfort.  ‘It is better,’ he says, ’to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit amid abundance.’  I seem likely to perish in the estate that he accounts so enviable.  That it does not seem exactly enviable to me merely proves that as a Stoic I am not a success.”

There is also another letter of his written at about the same time to the Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr — a letter since published by M. Emile Quersac in his “Undercurrents of the Revolution in Brittany,” unearthed by him from the archives of Rennes, to which it had been consigned by M. de Lesdiguieres, who had received it for justiciary purposes from the Marquis.

“The Paris newspapers,” he writes in this, “which have reported in considerable detail the fracas at the Theatre Feydau and disclosed the true identity of the Scaramouche who provoked it, inform me also that you have escaped the fate I had intended for you when I raised that storm of public opinion and public indignation.  I would not have you take satisfaction in the thought that I regret your escape.  I do not.  I rejoice in it.  To deal justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him.  Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber.  Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone.  You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its bitterness.