Page:Napoleon (O'Connor 1896).djvu/151

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The Estimate if an Official.
135

impunity under the rays of a most glorious sun. Alone with my grief, I would often wander for whole days through the woods and among the hills surrounding our retreat. I looked up to heaven, calling upon it to avenge the crimes of the earth."

After months of unsuccessful attempts to cross the frontier, of hiding in all kinds of refuges, Pasquier and his wife were arrested at Amiens by some members of the Revolutionary Committee of Paris. In separate post-chaises they were brought back to Paris.

There is something very weird in the account of this strange journey. It gives a picture of the times as vivid as any that I have ever read. I know no passage, indeed, which leaves so vivid an impression, except the chapters in that wonderful but little-known book of Balzac, "Les Chouans." Pasquier's narrative is, of course, coloured by the prejudices of his class and of those awful times; but these things add point to the portraits he gives of the persons and the incidents. One sees, living before one and as it were in a microscope, the upheaval of classes, the strange transformation of parties, and the seething ideas of that terrible Revolution, in the following description of Pasquier's journey between Amiens and Paris:

"My companion was a little cripple, physically as hideous as his soul was perverse. He greatly enjoyed telling me that he had known me since child-