arrived than he dispatched a long letter to Robespierre, written in a tone bespeaking intimacy and an intention of keeping up a correspondence. He advised Robespierre to contract France to her former limits, and to convert her conquests into a fringe of free and allied States. By the irony of fate this letter, written as if to an autocrat, reached Paris on the night of the 9th Thermidor, when Robespierre, arrested but released, was making his last throw for life and power at the Hotel de Ville. It was opened by the Committee of Public Safety, perhaps at the very moment when the fallen tribune was writhing in agony, and Billaud Varennes made it the basis of an audacious or rather mendacious statement at the Jacobin Club the day after Robespierre's execution. He insinuated that Vaughan was an emissary of Pitt's, and had written a letter advocating a triumvirate—Couthon to reign in the south, Saint Just in the north, and Robespierre in the centre. Vaughan, he said, was brought to Paris after the seizure of this letter, and Robespierre wished him to be executed at once, but a hearing was claimed for him, when he told a rambling story, ended by asking for a passport for Switzerland or America, and on reaching Switzerland wrote to Robespierre, advising him to "ménager" the privileged classes, and not to put sans-culottes on a level with aristocrats.[1]
- ↑ "Journal de la Montagne," August 1794.
