Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/150

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130
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

on the Assembly with a petition, and, as nothing came of this, was getting up a collective remonstrance when the recalcitrant municipality gave way.[1] This was, perhaps, due to a strong protest by Deputy Kersaint, who urged that England was the only really neutral country, and was very sensitive to violation of the laws of hospitality, yet that everything had been done by the Commune to irritate Englishmen by domiciliary visits or refusal of passports. These visits were sometimes disguised burglaries, for on the 18th September 1792 an Englishman complained to the Convention that about £20 had been thus taken from his house at Chaillot, and that the tribunals dared not arrest the malefactor. Yet in the previous month Courtenay, the joker of the House of Commons, who related his French and Italian tour in rhyme, shed tears of joy at the republican spirit of the Parisians and their determination to resist the invaders.

No Englishman perished in the storming of the Tuileries or the September massacres, though two Irish priests, Flood and Corby, narrowly escaped the latter.[2] The English had, however, to be on their guard, particularly on August 10th, for a foreigner might easily have been mistaken for a

  1. "Trip to Paris in July and August 1792." (Anonymous, but by Twiss.)
  2. Flood was presented to the Assembly by two municipal officers who had saved him, and was declared to be under the safeguard of the nation.