observations in preceding chapters, when speaking of classic Greece and Rome. They multiply as we review the Middle-Ages, the Renaissance courts, castles, palaces and camps. It is an aristocracy of all ages of life. Gallant young Conradin of Hohenstaufen and his beloved and not less gallant cousin, Frederick of Baden, those two brave boys only in their teens, united (1268) in perhaps the most pathetic tragedy of political murder in history; Prince Eugene of Savoy; the famous Ban of Kroatia, Joseph Jellachich (1801-1859); Count Wenzel-Anton von Kaunitz (1711-1794), the colossally active, efficient, cultured chief-minister under Maria-Theresia; Prince Heinrich of Prussia, (1726-1802) the brother of Frederick the Great,—as superiour a general, as accomplished a man of letters and arts as was the great Frederick himself; Baron von Pollnitz; the philanthropic Count von Zinzendorf; Cambacérès, patriot and statesman, Count Khevenhüller, the Austrian soldier and statesman under the Maria-Theresian regime, and the victor over Turkey, Russia, France and Germany; the terrible Robespierre, whose homosexual relations with young Duplay, during his most sanguinary Revolutionary days seem to indicate his temperament as one of maniacal bloodlust and erotism.[1] Prince Kolowrat-
- ↑ During Robespierre's long sojourn in the Duplay family, his intimacy with the handsome young son—eighteen years old—was increasingly a topic of scandal and satire behind the back of the dreaded Incorruptible. For the persistent legend of any romantic tie with Eléonore Duplay, one of the daughters of the family, a girl who seems to have cultivated a sentiment for Robespierre, there is no foundation of fact—Robespierre maintaining a fraternal and rather bored attitude toward her. Of Robespierre's taking sexual interest in any woman no evidence sustains sifting. As to the lad Jacques-Michel Duplay, an indication of the scandal occurs in the fact that when the boy was hustled into the Prison of Sainte-Pélagie, on the 9-10-th Thermidor, somewhat after Robespierre had been brought thither, one of the prison-crowd called out—"Ladies and gentlemen, I beg to annonnce to you the arrival of Robespierre's ganymède—along with his Prime-Minister!" (The latter reference was to young Duplay's father).
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