A Gascon Royalist in Revolutionary Paris

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: put right. Cambon and Bamel are doing their best, and Fabre d'lglantine is also hard at work: we too must put our shoulders to the wheel. You would not think there was any harm, would you, in working for our interests, while caring at the same time for those of the Republic ? Danton, Lacroix, and several others have been doing business with my friend Benoit, a safe man. Our names do not appear at all: it is he who speculates to our advantage, by gambling with the rise and fall of stock.1"1 Chabot, on receiving these confidences, did not know what attitude to assume. He pretended afterwards that he at once determined to profess agreement with Delaunay'.i views, in order to defeat him. But this is the excuse that all prevaricators and traitors put forward when they know they are unmasked. Moreover the rest of the story will show very plainly that Chabofs mind was full of quite other things than indignation or stratagem. Delaunay continued: " A new opportunity for an honest speculation is about to occur. You know there has been a demand put forward that foreigners'1 property shall be confiscated. Now this word has a double meaning: property may be real or movable. This ambiguity is very alarming to the bankers; so they are being told: ' If you want only real property to be involved, you must pay a million francs?otherwise everything will be confiscated and you will be ruined.1 One of the bills that de Batz is drawing up for Luillier makes no mention of any but real property."2 De Batz Chabot was haunted by this name. The reports read in the Convention had been thought out in the house at Charonne This financial policy on the part of the Mountain had been inspired by de Batz Whata revelation for an incorruptible politician like Chabot What an opportunity to cry once m...