A list was drawn up of the persons styled Jacobins, who were condemned to transportation.  I was fortunate enough to obtain the erasure of the names of several whose opinions had perhaps been violent, but whose education and private character presented claims to recommendation.  Some of my readers may probably recollect them without my naming them, and I shall only mention M. Tissot, for the purpose of recording, not the service I rendered him, but an instance of grateful acknowledgment.

When in 1815 Napoleon was on the point of entering Paris M. Tissot came to the prefecture of police, where I then was, and offered me his house as a safe asylum; assuring me I should there run no risk of being discovered.  Though I did not accept the offer yet I gladly seize on this opportunity of making it known.  It is gratifying to find that difference of political opinion does not always exclude sentiments of generosity and honour!  I shall never forget the way in which the author of the essays on Virgil uttered the words ‘Domus mea’.

But to return to the fatal list.  Even while I write this I shudder to think of the way in which men utterly innocent were accused of a revolting crime without even the shadow of a proof.  The name of an individual, his opinions, perhaps only assumed, were sufficient grounds for his banishment.  A decree of the Consuls, dated 4th of January 1801, confirmed by a ‘Senates-consulte’ on the next day, banished from the territory of the Republic, and placed under special inspectors, 130 individuals, nine of whom were merely designated in the report as Septembrizers.

The exiles, who in the reports and in the public acts were so unjustly accused of being the authors of the infernal machine, were received at Nantes, with so much indignation that the military were compelled to interfere to save them from being massacred.

In the discussions which preceded the decree of the Consuls few persons had the courage to express a doubt respecting the guilt of the accused.  Truguet was the first to mount the breach.  He observed that without denying the Government the extraordinary means for getting rid of its enemies he could not but acknowledge that the emigrants threatened the purchasers of national domains, that the public mind was corrupted by pamphlets, and that—­Here the First Consul, interrupting him, exclaimed, “To what pamphlets do you allude?”—­“To pamphlets which are publicly circulated.”—­“Name them!”—­“You know them as well as I do.”

   —­[The Parallel between Caesar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte, of which I
   shall speak a little farther on, is here alluded to.—­Bourrienne.]—­

After a long and angry ebullition the First Consul abruptly dismissed the Council.  He observed that he would not be duped; that the villains were known; that they were Septembrizers, the hatchers of every mischief.  He had said at a sitting three days before, “If proof should fail, we must take advantage of the public excitement.  The event is to me merely the opportunity.  They shall be banished for the 2d September, for the 31st May, for Baboeuf’s conspiracy—­or anything else.”