Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/129

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IMMIGRANTS AND EMIGRANTS
109

the packet to the shore. One of these waders, unequal to the weight of a stout traveller who had been reserved till the last, dropped him midway. This curious scene took place at night, dimly illuminated by lanterns. At Montreuil Hunter's carriage was surrounded by half-a-dozen drunken soldiers (National Guards?), who shouted "Voilà des aristocrates," but on being assured that the travellers were English and good patriots, they wished them a pleasant journey. Hunter, whom the Assembly reminded of an English pothouse, everybody talking and nobody listening, went on to Marseilles and Turkey.

Charles Wollaston, a naval lieutenant, son of the eminent scientist, and his stepbrother, James Frampton, at the last stage before reaching Paris in October 1791, had their carriage surrounded and opened by fishwives, who hailed them as friends, shook hands with them, and had to be got rid of by a five-franc note—attentions which they by no means reciprocated, for Frampton, Wollaston wrote, was in love with the queen, and vowed he would go every day to see her pass on her way to mass;[1] yet in August 1790 he had carried off a fragment of the Bastille.

Lingard, the future historian, driven from Douai by the revolutionary ferment, yet anxious to see something of Paris before re crossing the Channel,

  1. Journal of Mary Frampton.