claim a heart which reciprocated my tender attachment, and revived my life with its gentle flame. All is lost, for ever lost. Terrible words, which plunge me into nothingness!"
Buzot, however, went on living as though the parting words of her he loved could have reached him, which was almost an impossibility. "You whom I dare not name," she had said, "you who never lapsed from virtue, despite the most terrible of passions, will you grieve that I precede you to those realms where we may love each other without crime? There will cease all fatal prejudices, all arbitrary distinctions, all evil passions, tyranny of every kind. I will rest and await you!" She bade him not to follow her, but live, if so he might still serve the cause of liberty, but to seek death voluntarily rather than take it from a mercenary hand. She would not bid him farewell. "From you alone I part not. To leave life is to draw closer together."
So the unhappy Buzot continued leading his precarious life, "often without bread, without food of any kind, without clothes or money," only sustained by the hope of some day "avenging his friends and his country's liberty." But he was not destined to see the fall of Robespierre, though it followed close on his own death, for he and his two companions survived till July 1794. Forced to leave a kind-hearted barber's shelter at St. Émilion, owing to the increased vigilance of commissioners sent by the Committee of Public Safety, they went forth once more. Mistaking a great crowd of harmless villagers for Jacobin troops in pursuit of them, they plunged into a pine-wood. Barbaroux, in trying to shoot himself, shattered his jaw, was discovered, taken to Bordeaux, and executed.
