Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/263

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PARIS RE-OPENED.
243

John, and by his future biographer, Trotter, and he met his brother, General Fox, his nephew. Lord Holland, General Fitzpatrick,[1] and Lord Robert Spencer. (The two last were M.P.s for Tavistock.) He stayed, as already mentioned, at the hotel Richelieu, which had still an air of grandeur, and had a pretty garden. A caricature of the time represented Fox and his wife as prostrate in slavish adoration before Bonaparte. The truth, however, was, that the Consul's character inspired him with distrust, and that he felt much more in his element with Lafayette in his retreat at Lagrange, where Lally Tollendal, another disillusioned revolutionist, and a born orator, recited his French translation of Shakespere. Yet Fox and Lord Holland (as a youth he had seen something of the Revolution) dined with Bonaparte, who was so anxious to make a good impression on his guest that long afterwards at Elba he asked Lord Ebrington what Fox had thought of him, and being told that he was flattered by his reception, replied, "He had reason to be so; he was everywhere received as a god, because he was known to be for peace." Fox, indeed, Trotter assures us, was more applauded at the theatre than Bonaparte himself. He went over the Louvre with Sir Benjamin West and Opie, saw Kosciusko and Sieyes, and took tea with Helen Williams. He

  1. Page to Queen Charlotte in 1761, Secretary at War, 1806; died 1813, aged sixty-six.