I shall
attempt in the following chapter to tell all that is known of the first thirty
years of Danton’s life. Our knowledge of this period in his career is extremely
slight. It is based upon a minute research, but a research under-taken only in
the latter half of this century; and it is to be feared that the scanty
materials will never be seriously augmented. Every year makes the task more
difficult, and a century has rendered impassable the gulf which Michelet,
Bougeart, and even Dr. Robinet, have been able to bridge with living voices.
He was
born at Arcis-sur-Aube[1],
a lesser town of the Champagne Pouilleuse, that great flat which stretches out
from the mountain of Rheims beyond the twin peaks, till it loses itself in the
uplands of the river-partings. Here, though it is cold in winter, there are
still vineyards making their last bastion on the covered slopes of the hills
that form the northern boundary of the plain.
The day
of his birth was the 26th of October 1759[2];
the date gives us his relation to, the drama in which he was to be a chief
actor. Five months older than Desmoulins, born some months before De Séchelles,
eight years older than St. Just, he was the junior of Robespierre by one and a
half, of Mirabeau by ten years; Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette were
respectively five and four years his seniors. He was sixteen years old when
their predecessor died in ignominy and in dirt. Born six weeks after the fall
of Quebec, he received the lasting impressions of early youth during the rapid
decline of the French monarchy—the end of a slow decay which threatened to be
that of the nation itself. But just then Rousseau was writing the Contrat
Social, to be published in two years; Voltaire was still in the full vigour
of his attack, with nineteen years of life before him; it was the year of
Candide; Diderot was founding the Encyclopaedia.
The time
of his birth coincided with the rising of a certain sun which has not yet set
upon Europe, but the boy’s eyes turned to more immediate things, and saw in a
little provincial place the break-up of a wretched, experimental reign.
This
point must be insisted upon, that a country town was the best possible place
for noting the collapse of misgovernment. The country manors were more
wretched, the provincial capitals more loud and able in their expressions of
opinion; but few places could show the fatal process of disintegration more
clearly than these little provincial centres, the sub-prefectures of to-day.
The confusion of power, the excess and the ill-working of privilege, the
complexity and weakness of government, were there apparent upon every occasion.
The wealth of the nation was diminished most especially by the interference
with exchange. This (though ultimately a source of their penury) was less
directly evident to the villagers, while the large town with its varied
production could (in another form) disguise the evil; but to the small borough
the experience was direct and terrible.
Again,
the practical equality of educated men was there more apparent and more sinned
against than in the wider societies of the large towns. In a place like
Arcis-sur-Aube, isolated specimens of classes technically distinct were
continually in contact. The less the number of their caste and order (and the
less their importance), the more do the noblesse, to this day, put on their
pride; and yet the more necessary is it, in the life of a small town, that they
should associate with those whose conversation and abilities are precisely
their own. In Paris or in Lyons, where large cliques were occupied in general
interests, such differences were often neglected; in the forgotten towns of the
provinces never.
On the
other hand, the blind and dumb anger of the peasantry would hardly reach Arcis.
All over France the town misunderstood the countryside, and in the early
Revolution actually fought against it. This will appear strange to an English
reader, who sees scarcely any contrast between a country market and an
overgrown village. In England the distinction hardly exists, but in France the
borough is very separate from the peasant society outside, and, though often
smaller than some large neighbouring village, it keeps to this day the Roman
traditions of a city.
We see,
then, that Danton’s birthplace in great part accounts for the peculiar bent of
his future politics: practical, of legal effect, inspired by no hatred, though
strongly influenced by a personal experience of misgovernment. But v his
parentage will show us still more clearly how the conditions of his origin
affected his career.
He was
of the lawyers. His father was procureur in the bailiwick of Arcis. It
is difficult to explain the functions of his office at this date and to an
English reader, for it belongs to that “Administration” which is so essentially
Latin, and which we are but just beginning to experience in England. Let it
suffice to describe him as the official whose duty it was to supply that
which in England the institution of the grand jury still in theory
provides, as it did once in reality. It was his business to “present” the cases
and the accused to the local criminal court—local, because in France the
circuit of assize is unknown. Added to this were many duties and privileges of
registration, of stamping and so forth; and the position required an accurate,
and even a minute knowledge of the royal law and provincial usage, the
complicated customary system of the old regime.
It is
perhaps of still more importance to appreciate the social position of Jacques
Danton. Belonging to the lower branches of the legal profession, and placed in
a lesser borough of Champagne, the father of Danton held something of the same
rank as would a small country solicitor in one of our market-towns, with whatever
additions of dignity might follow from a permanent office in the municipality
of the place.
As to
fortune, we do not accurately know the amount of the family income during
Danton’s boyhood, but we know that the office which was afterwards purchased for
him was worth some three to four thousand pounds; that the money was found
largely upon the credit of his father’s legacy[3],
and that the house in which the family lived was their own—a useful rule
existing throughout provincial France. It is a substantial building, among the
best pf the little town, standing in the market-place, with the principal rooms
giving upon the public square. What with the probable capital and the known
emoluments of his position, we may regard Jacques Danton as a man disposing of
an income of about four to five hundred pounds a year.
His
mother was of a somewhat lower rank. She was the daughter of a builder from the
Champagne, and her brother was a master-carpenter of the town. Of her two
sisters, one had married a postmaster and the other a shopkeeper, both in
Troyes; her brother was the priest of Barberey, near Arcis.
The
father died when the boy was two and a half years old, leaving four children. We
must presume, though we are not certain, that Danton had one brother; and we
know he had two sisters, one of whom married in Troyes; the other died a nun at
the same place in the middle of this century[4].
On both
sides of his family, through the connections and marriages of his relations,
their employment, their dwellings, their descendants, we see the origin of
Danton absolutely separate from the lower and from the higher ranks of the old
regime. Only by an effort of imagination could he later understand the workman
or the peasant; only by daily conversation could he appreciate the strange
nobles of 1790, with their absence of national pride.
In fine,
Danton came out of that middle class which has made the modern world, and which
still insecurely sustains it. “Respectability and its gig” is an epigram that
would exactly suit the dull and provincial surroundings of his first home; but
the converse of such provincialism is sanity, order, and strength, and out of
fuel so solid and so cold the bourgeoisie has time and again built a consuming
fire.
From his
father s death, before he was three years old, till his ninth year, the child
was with his mother in the house at Arcis, for she had from the little fortune
just enough revenue to keep the family together and to educate the children.
The little boy was taught his Latin elements in the town, and then sent to the
“Lower Seminary” at Troyes[5].
It was
the intention of his uncle at Barberey to make him a priest, and in that case
he would have passed through the regular stages, taking the higher forms in the
Upper Seminary, and finally being admitted to orders a year or two after
finishing his “Philosophie.” However, this programme was never completed, and
the Church lost in him the material for a vigorous, charitable, and obscure
country vicar.
The
decision was probably the result of one of those family meetings, such as were
habitually held in France to decide the career of an orphan child, and which
the Revolution raised to the dignity of an institution with legal form. Some
biographers have read the politics of a man of thirty into the action of a
little child, and have made this step a precocious protest against clericalism.
These biographers have no children.
The
uncle consented to the change, and, with Madame Danton’s two married sisters,
agreed upon the bar as his future profession. He was sent to Troyes and placed
with the Oratorians, a religious order which has had the honour of training so
many of the great reformers. In their College he went through that training
which no amount of social change or new theories in pedagogy has been able to
uproot from the secondary education of France. Little Greek, much Latin, two
years all employed in the literature of the late Roman republic and early
empire—a groundwork in the elements which gives the educated French an almost
mediaeval familiarity with Roman thought; such was the course which the
bourgeois did and does go through in the French schools. A system founded upon
the humanities of the sixteenth, but developed in the classicism of the
seventeenth century, it has lost the Hellenism, the subtlety, and the breadth
of the former, while it has preserved the rigidity, the strength, and the
clearness which the latter owes to the influence of the Jesuits. It fails to
develop that initiative coupled with originality to which we in England attach
so much importance; it achieves, upon the other hand, a strength in the
convictions, and above all a soundness in the judgment, which our public
schools often fail to produce.
From
just such a curriculum came the exaggerated classicism of Robespierre, the more
brilliant but equally Latin style of Desmoulins, though it must be admitted
that the first is a reminiscence of Cornelius Nepos, while the second is at
times well modelled upon Tacitus himself. The error of such imitation, however,
never marred the speech of Danton in his later life; he owed this singular
freedom from the spirit of his age to travel, to his vivid interest in
surrounding things and men, and to his intimacy with English and Italian[6].
Yet in a
famous speech upon public education he makes a just reference to the influence
of this schooling upon the mind of his contemporaries, and notes truly its
tendency to turn men republican[7].
Unfortunately
he did not remain at such a school long enough to receive its last and most
beneficial impressions. The head form at a French school is called “Philosophic,”
and the last year is spent largely in reading the sociology and the metaphysics
of the old world. Danton left at the age of sixteen, when he had just completed
“Rhétorique,” but what he lost in polishing he gained in being left to his own
development for one more year of his life than were his fellows.
Active,
often rebellious, full of laughter, he showed his intelligence in the final
examinations, his vigour in an escapade that endeared him to at least one of
his school-fellows[8], who has
given us, with Rousselin, the only notes we possess as to this period of his
life. He ran off in his last year to Rheims, seventy odd miles away, that he
might see the crowning of Louis XVI. Going and returning on foot, lie satisfied
the desire which he had expressed to his school-fellows of “seeing how they
made a king.” So as a boy he went to look at the making of a king, and
afterwards, when he grew older, Danton himself unmade him.
In
1780—his twenty-first year[9]—he
entered the office of a solicitor at Paris named Vinot. Apprenticed as a clerk
in order to read law, and above all to watch the procedure of the courts, he spent
the next four years in preparing for the bar. If we are to depend on a chance
phrase dropped just before his death, he was at that time entirely dependent on
his master and his pen[10].
We know, at any rate, that he received no salary, but lodged and boarded with
his employer; nor is it probable that he received any money from home, for his
mother had married again, and a short time after this second husband (a certain
Recordain) was so deeply involved that Danton was begged to hand over the most
part of his inheritance to save the family. He did so, and remained with some
five or six hundred pounds only as his share of the family fortune. It was
invested in land near Arcis, and he kept it for his ultimate purpose of buying
a barrister’s practice in one of the higher courts.
He was
called to the bar (a process in the same form as taking a degree) in 1785;[11]
choosing, with provincial patriotism, Rheims as the place in which formally to
join the profession; but he intended to practise in the capital, and returned
thither at once.
It is
not easy to render to an English public the meaning of the various courts
before 1789. Even in France (so completely has the new order supplanted the old
anarchy) their forms have been forgotten, and research purely antiquarian
cannot give us more than disjointed particulars as to their procedure[12].
There was a division corresponding to the English between Common Law and
Equity. This was to be discovered in every country of the West, and had arisen
of necessity from the imposition of the king’s power and the Canon Law over
those local customs, mixed with reminiscences of Rome, which had once been the
whole life of the early Middle Ages.
To the
body of lawyers who in Paris (or in any of the great centres) formed the courts
for all ordinary pleas, the name of “Parliament” was given. But that it
comprised more persons, that it never went upon circuit, and that it included
many barristers as well as judges, the Parliament of Paris corresponded more or
less to what the English Bench would be were our judges to form a kind of
permanent council for advising the Crown and registering its decrees, as well
as for trying the cases brought before them. To plead at their bar was no
difficult matter. It required but the taking of one’s degree in law, and the
fees of entrance wore slight. Danton determined to adopt this branch of the
profession, and to use it as a stepping-stone towards the higher court, which
he soon reached.
This
higher court, “Court of Appeal,” as we should call it, or “Cour de Cassation,” as
it is named in the modern French system, bore a title significant of the
intense conservatism of old France. It was called the “Court of the King’s
Councils”—very much what we should have to-day in England had we preserved in
fact the theory that the king in his council is the final authority. But though
it bore a name drawn from the Curia Regis of the thirteenth century, it had of
course lost all its old simplicity. It was a Bench like any other, but there
pleaded at its bar an order of lawyers strictly limited in number and highly
privileged[13]. It dealt,
as did its parallel in the English system, mainly with disputed inheritances,
especially in matters of land, and, as we shall see, it showed the true mark of
a court of Chancery, in that it took more than a hundred and thirty years to
make up its mind. To plead before this court, with its monopoly of valuable
causes, was to have at once an assured income and prestige; therefore its
vacancies were prizes to be bought and sold. Danton determined to plead so long
at the common law courts as might assure him, with economy, a substantial
addition to the few hundred pounds that formed his whole capital, and then to
seek a loan that might eke out these savings and place him at the Chancery bar.
Young,
eloquent, eminently capable of seeing a real issue, he was well fitted for the
lower practice, and he succeeded. Within two years he had a sum to offer as
part payment, which was at once a proof of his business habits and of his
talents. His family, therefore, especially those members of it who had urged
him to go to the bar, were willing to advance the necessary sums in addition to
his own savings and his little patrimony. The purchase-money was delivered, and
a bond to the amount of £3000 (a sum which he could not then have furnished)
was signed by his aunts and uncles at Troyes. It was in March 1787[14]
that this step was taken, and this date was in some sense his entry into public
life, for it brought him into direct contact with the wealthy—that is, with the
ruling class.
We have
on this date a vivid anecdote surviving, A Latin oration had to be delivered
off-hand to the assembled college on the reception of a candidate to the order.
The subject set for Danton when he entered the hall was “The Moral and
Political Situation of the Country in their relations with the Administration
of Justice.” A fine theme for 1787! Such a quaint scene the old regime
delighted in, and its older members delighted also in catching here and there a
phrase of quotation which they could understand. The genius and the memory of
their candidate seem on this occasion to have furnished something new, to have
given them less platitude than was expected. He mentioned reform; he spoke of
the struggle in which the Parliament was engaged against the ministers—a
struggle of which he wisely said, “They are fighting for the sacred centres of
civic liberty, but present no positive reform by which that liberty may be
brought into existence.” “Sacred centres” was, of course, aris et focis.
The speech was necessarily in a large measure a series of clichés, a
stringing together of the well-worn Latin mottoes. It even contained salus
populi suprema lex, but its argument was Danton’s own. There is to be
marked also this phrase, for it is the note of all his future work “Let the
government feel the gravity of the situation sufficiently to remedy it in the
simple and in the natural way downwards from its own authority.”
The
young men understood and applauded; the old men were assured that, if they had
not quite followed an unconventional harangue, it was due to the originality of
the speaker. Presumably their souls were softened by aris et focis, and salus
populi suprema lex.”
For the
next two years his forensic reputation is continually rising. No longer the
Common Law pleader, with pathetic and oratorical appeals for a shepherd against
his lord, he had shown how large a part intellect had to do with his power of
commanding attention. On the intricacies of his Chancery practice and the clearness
and ability of his analysis we have an excellent witness in one of the most
learned of the modern Parisian bar[15],
and three of his opinions, on the Amelinau, Dubonis, and De Montbarey cases,
have come down to us, and have received the favourable criticism of an
opponent.
The last
case (that of De Montbarey) shows us Danton defending the claims of an old
house and at work in the rustiest of all the legal grooves. It had been on the
stocks since 1657, and Danton, in attempting to give the quietus to this
intolerable longevity, uses a phrase which shows us the feeling that spared one
grave at least when the mob sacked St. Denis: “Jeanne d’Albret[16]
is a name dear to all Frenchmen, for it recalls the memory of that other Jeanne
d’Albret who was the mother of Henri IV.”
There
came to be his clients, among others De Barentin, the minister of justice, and
De Brienne[17]
comptroller-general; it is on his intimacy with the former that his first
recorded opinions on public affairs turn. They will be dealt with in the next
chapter.
It is,
of course, difficult to give an exact proof of a man’s private income at any
moment, but we are certain that Danton’s cannot have fallen far short at this
date of a thousand pounds a year. His immediate success at the bar, the monopoly
and privilege of the body to which he now belonged (the work certain to come to
the most inept was worth a lump sum of 60,000 francs, to which talent would add
indefinitely), his eloquence and proved ability, the name of his clients, their
importance and their wealth—everything leads to this as a certain conclusion.
Immense fortunes were not then made in the profession; his position was not an
obscure one.
He
married, on attaining this status, the daughter of a man who kept one of the
students' restaurants, Charpentier by name. It was a café (Café des Écoles)
very much frequented by the University and the younger men at the bar, and
still one of the few remaining cafés of the last century. Danton himself was a
regular customer, and there is an interesting picture, drawn by a friend, of
the avocats in their special costumes at this place. It occupied the site of
what is now the south-western corner of the Place de l'Ecole[18], nor has any change been made in it save
the raising of the road level. Looking on the river, and just over the river
from the Palais, it was the natural rendezvous for the young barristers in the
mid-day adjournment and after the court rose.
Charpentier,
the “limonadier” of Mdme. Roland, was a man worth from five to six thousand
pounds, part only invested in his business[19];
he had, moreover, a little post under the Taxes, requiring a slight amount of
work and bringing in only a hundred pounds a year. When he married his daughter
to Danton, she was given 20,000 francs[20].
As will be
seen later, it is of the first moment in proving Danton’s position to know
accurately the capital amount of which he disposed when the Revolution broke
out; for in the case of generous men in a democracy, the accusation of venality
is the most common and the hardest to rebut.
Passionately
fond of his wife, and successful in his profession, on the threshold of a great
career, I would apply to him a phrase which one of his worst enemies has given
us to describe a far lesser man, “Actif et sain, robuste et glorieux, il aima
sa femme et la parure”
We leave
him, then, at the summit of a laborious and perhaps of an arduous youth. He is
twenty-eight years old, in the best of his vigour and of his intelligence—the
age at which Jefferson ten years before had drafted his immortal paragraph; the
age at which Napoleon, with his moving island of men, was ten years later to
break five armies of the Austrians from Lodi to Campo Formio,
What
picture shall we make of him to carry with us in the scenes in which he is to
be the principal actor?
He was
tall and stout, with the forward bearing of the orator, full of gesture and of
animation. He carried a round French head upon the thick neck of energy. His face
was generous, ugly, and determined. With wide eyes and calm brows, he yet had
the quick glance which betrays the habit of appealing to an audience. His upper
lip was injured, and so was his nose[21],
and he had further been disfigured by the small-pox, with which disease that
forerunner of his, Mirabeau, had also been disfigured. His lip had been torn by
a bull when he was a child, and his nose crushed in a second adventure, they
say, with the same animal. In this the Romans would perhaps have seen a portent;
but he, the idol of our Positivists, found only a chance to repeat Mirabeau’s
expression that his “boar’s head frightened men.”
In his
dress he had something of the negligence which goes with extreme vivacity and
with a constant interest in things outside oneself; but it was invariably that
of his rank. Indeed, to the minor conventions Danton always bowed, because he
was a man, and because he was eminently sane. More than did the run of men at
that time, he understood that you cut down no tree by lopping at the leaves,
nor break up a society by throwing away a wig[22].
The decent self-respect which goes with conscious power was never absent from
his costume, though it often left his language in moments of crisis, or even of
irritation.
I will
not insist too much upon his great character of energy, because it has been so
over-emphasised as to give a false impression of him. He was admirably
sustained in his action, and his political arguments were as direct as his
physical efforts were continuous, but the banal picture of fury which is given
you by so many writers is false. For fury is empty, whereas Danton was full,
and his energy was at first the force at work upon a great mass of mind, and
later its momentum.
Save
when he had the direct purpose of convincing a crowd, his speech had no
violence, and even no metaphor; in the courts he was a close reasoner, and one
who put his points with ability and with eloquence rather than with thunder.
But in whatever he undertook, vigour appeared as the taste of salt in a dish.
He could not quite hide this vigour: his convictions, his determination, his
vision all concentrate upon whatsoever thing he has in hand.
He
possessed a singularly wide view of the Europe in which France stood. In this
he was like Mirabeau, and peculiarly unlike the men with whom revolutionary
government threw him into contact. He read and spoke English, he was acquainted
with Italian. He know that the kings were dilettanti, that the theory of the
aristocracies was liberal. He had no little sympathy with the philosophy which
a leisurely oligarchy had framed in England; it is one of the tragedies of the
Revolution that he desired to the last an alliance, or at least peace, with
this country. Where Robespierre was a maniac in foreign policy, Danton was more
than a sane—he was a just, and even a diplomatic man.
He was
fond of .wide reading, and his reading was of the philosophers; it ranged from
Rabelais to the physiocrats in his own tongue, from Adam Smith to the “Essay on
Civil Government” in that of strangers; and of the Encyclopædia he possessed
all the numbers steadily accumulated. When we consider the time, his fortune,
and the obvious personal interest in so small and individual a collection, few
shelves will be found more interesting than those which Danton delighted to
fill[23].
In his
politics he desired above all actual practical, and apparent reforms; changes
for the better expressed in material results. He differed from many of his
countrymen at that time, and from most of his political countrymen now, in thus
adopting the tangible. It was a part of something in his character which was
nearly allied to the stock of the race, something which made him save and
invest in land as does the French peasant[24],
and love, as the French peasant loves, good government, order, security, and
well-being.
There is
to be discovered in all the fragments which remain to us of his conversations
before the bursting of the storm, and still more clearly in his demand for a centre
when the invasion and the rebellion threatened the Republic, a certain
conviction that the revolutionary thing rather than the revolutionary idea
should be produced: not an inspiring creed, but a goal to be reached, sustained
him. Like all active minds, his mission was rather to realise than to plan, and
his energies were determined upon seeing the result of theories which he
unconsciously admitted, but which he was too impatient to analyse.
His
voice was loud even when his expressions were subdued. He talked no man down,
but he made many opponents sound weak and piping after his utterance. It was of
the kind that fills great halls, and whose deep note suggests hard phrases.
There was with all this a carelessness as to what his words might be made to
mean when partially repeated by others, and such carelessness has caused
historians still more careless to lend a false aspect of Bohemianism to his
character. A Bohemian he was not; he was a successful and an orderly man; but
energy he had, and if there are writers who cannot conceive of energy without
chaos, it is probably because in the studious leisure of vast endowments they
have never felt the former in themselves, nor have been compelled to control
the latter in their surroundings.
As to
his private life, affection dominated him. Upon the faith of some who did not
know him he acquired the character of a debauchee. For the support of this view
there is not a tittle of direct evidence. He certainly loved those pleasures of
the senses which Robespierre refused, and which Roland was unable to enjoy; but
that his good dinners were orgies or of any illegitimate loves (once he had
married the woman to whom he was so devotedly attached) there is no shadow of
proof. His friends also he loved, and above all, from the bottom of his soul,
he loved France. His faults—and they were many—his vices (and a severe critic
would have discovered these also) flowed from two sources: first, he was too
little of an idealist, too much absorbed in the immediate thing; secondly, he
suffered from all the evil effects that abundant energy may produce --the habit
of oaths, the rhetoric of sudden diatribes, violent and overstrained action,
with its subsequent demand for repose.
Weighted
with these conditions he enters the arena, supported by not quite thirty fruitful
years, by a happy marriage, by an intense conviction, and by the talents of a
man who has not yet tasted defeat. I repeat the sentence applied to another: “Active
and sane, robust and ready for glory, the things he loved were his wife and the
circumstance of power.”
[1] All biographers agree. The first
publication of the extract from the civil register was obtained by Bougeart in
August 1860. It was furnished to him by M. Ludot, the major at the time. There
is a ridiculous error in the Journal de la Montagne, vol. ii. No. 142, “né
à Orchie sur Aube.”
[2] The date is given in the extract
mentioned in the preceding note.
[3] See the action of the relatives
in No. VI. of the Appendix.
[4] Bougeart, p. 12. A Danton, who was
presumably the son of this brother, was an inspector of the University under
the second Empire.
[5] See Appendix No. V.; also Théâtre
de l’ancien Collège de Troyet, Babeau, published by Dufour-Bouquet, Troyes,
1881.
[6] See list of his library, Appendix
VIII., and his interview with Thomas Payne, at the beginning of Chapter VII.
[7] Speech of August 13, 1793. Printed in Moniteur of August 15.
[9] Danton,
Homme d' États, p. 29.
[10] See “Notes of Courtois de l’Aube”
in Claréties Desmoulins.
[11] Danton, Homme d’États, p.
30.
[12] An excellent reading is afforded
by the Avocat aux Concels du Roi of M. Bos (Machal & Billaud, Paris,
1881), quoted more than once in this work.
[13] Since 1728 membership of this body had been purchaseable and hereditary; a striking example of how wrongly society was moving.
[14] See Appendix VI.
[15] M. Bos, quoted above.
[16] Ibid., p. 520.
[17] See Appendix V.
[18] See Appendix II. on Danton’s
lodgings in Paris.
[19] See Robinet, Danton vie Privée,
p. 284. 1
[20] See Appendix VI.
[21] By nature his nose was small His
was one of those faces rarely seen, and always associated with energy and with
leadership, whose great forehead overhang a face that would be small, were it
not redeemed by the square jaw and the mouth. Thus Arnault “une caricature de
Socrate.”
[22] I refer to the English reformer
who, on taking ship at Bristol, cast his perruque into the water, crying, “I
have done with such baubles,” and sailed bald to the New World.
[23] See Appendix VIII.
[24] See Appendix IX.