“You murdered Philippe de Vilmorin because you feared what you described as his very dangerous gift of eloquence, I took an oath that day that your evil deed should be fruitless; that I would render it so; that the voice you had done murder to stifle should in spite of that ring like a trumpet through the land.  That was my conception of revenge.  Do you realize how I have been fulfilling it, how I shall continue to fulfil it as occasion offers?  In the speech with which I fired the people of Rennes on the very morrow of that deed, did you not hear the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin uttering the ideas that were his with a fire and a passion greater than he could have commanded because Nemesis lent me her inflaming aid?  In the voice of Omnes Omnibus at Nantes my voice again — demanding the petition that sounded the knell of your hopes of coercing the Third Estate, did you not hear again the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin?  Did you not reflect that it was the mind of the man you had murdered, resurrected in me his surviving friend, which made necessary your futile attempt under arms last January, wherein your order, finally beaten, was driven to seek sanctuary in the Cordelier Convent?  And that night when from the stage of the Feydau you were denounced to the people, did you not hear yet again, in the voice of Scaramouche, the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin, using that dangerous gift of eloquence which you so foolishly imagined you could silence with a sword-thrust?  It is becoming a persecution — is it not? — this voice from the grave that insists upon making itself heard, that will not rest until you have been cast into the pit.  You will be regretting by now that you did not kill me too, as I invited you on that occasion.  I can picture to myself the bitterness of this regret, and I contemplate it with satisfaction.  Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit, particularly such a soul as yours.  It is because of this that I am glad to know that you survived the riot at the Feydau, although at the time it was no part of my intention that you should.  Because of this I am content that you should live to enrage and suffer in the shadow of your evil deed, knowing at last — since you had not hitherto the wit to discern it for yourself — that the voice of Philippe de Vilmorin will follow you to denounce you ever more loudly, ever more insistently, until having lived in dread you shall go down in blood under the just rage which your victim’s dangerous gift of eloquence is kindling against you.”

I find it odd that he should have omitted from this letter all mention of Mlle. Binet, and I am disposed to account it at least a partial insincerity that he should have assigned entirely to his self-imposed mission, and not at all to his lacerated feelings in the matter of Climene, the action which he had taken at the Feydau.

Those two letters, both written in April of that year 1789, had for only immediate effect to increase the activity with which Andre-Louis Moreau was being sought.