montagnarde1793 | And now for more of That Book About Le Bas (Reply)

Unfortunately, it's only a rather short chapter this time.

VII

What was done in the Duplay home. – The family’s evenings. – Improvised concerts. – Readings by Robespierre and Le Bas. – Maximilien’s habits and tastes.

If the Revolution was spoken of, in the family gatherings in the Duplay home, they were not occupied, as has been insinuated, with decreeing the lists of suspects. The ideas exchanged were less tragic.

More than once, after a short conversation and some idle chatter with the young girls, “Buonarotti and Le Bas would improvise a family concert” (these words, added by Ph. Le Bas to the edition of the National, were not conserved by Lamartine in his definitive text of the Girondins; yet Le Bas, who sang agreeably, could be heard in these intimate gatherings where Buonarotti played the piano).[1]

Other times Robespierre read to the family: it was, very often, plays by Racine or Corneille, whose verses Maximilien liked to accentuate, whether to practice for the tribune by declamation, or to elevate the souls of his listeners to the level of the great sentiments of antiquity.

It also happened that each of the persons present would choose a role, and, among these improvised actors, it was Maximilien and Le Bas who declaimed with the most feeling.

Robespierre dined rarely outside the house – six times at most during the three years of his stay in the Rue Saint-Honoré, Buonarotti said. – He took Mme Duplay and her daughters to the theatre two or three times a year, almost always to the Théâtre-Français, and to classical representations.

“He liked only tragic declamations,” Lamartine had written in the “National,” which recalled to him the tribune, tyranny, the people, the scaffold, great crimes, great virtues; theatrical even in his dreams and recreations.” Ph. Le Bas erased the words in italics; Lamartine removed the word “scaffold,” but kept the rest.

Often Robespierre retired early to his room to prepare his speeches (we know that they were developed and revised at length: several scraps conserved by M. Léon Le Bas are almost illegible, so much are they worked over); still, often he went for a walk in the Champs-Élysées or the environs of Paris, with only his dog Brount for a walking companion; “in moments of extreme agitation only, the typographer Nicolas, the locksmith Didier, and some friends,[2] accompanied him from afar unbeknownst to him.”

He was irritated by these precautions:

—Let me leave your house and go live alone, he said to his host; I am compromising your family, and my enemies will impute a crime to your children for having loved me.

—No, no, we will die together or the people will triumph, replied Duplay.

Sometimes on Sunday, the whole family left Paris with Robespierre, who traversed the woods of Versailles or Issy with Éléonore’s mother, sisters, and brother.

Is this the man that has been represented as creating worshipers for himself, even in the midst of his host’s family, by force of oratorical tirades? Is this the infallible being rendering oracles, the “chamber-god” breathing a cloud of incense?[3]

I see here rather – beneath the features of the fierce Jacobin, only the qualities of whom the Duplay family saw—the faithful friend, to whom one exchanges devotion for devotion, and whose innocent foibles one is happy to flatter.

Have some not gone to the point of seizing hold of the most insignificant details to inform their inane calumnies? Fréron, in his Notes on Robespierre,[4] seriously recounts: “He was choked by bile. His eyes and his yellow coloring denoted it. So they took care, in the Duplay household, to serve him for dessert, in every season of the year, a pyramid of oranges, which Robespierre ate with avidity. He was insatiable for them; no one dared to touch this sacred fruit; doubtless its acidity diminished Robespierre’s bilious humor and facilitated its circulation. It was easy to distinguish which place Robespierre had occupied at the table by the pieces of orange peal covering his plate. It was remarked that he brightened up the more of them he ate.”

Some writers (no longer buffoons, but serious men), who have not found the means of conciliating the contradictory opinion of contemporaries, have wondered to what Robespierre owed the attachment of Duplay and of his family and friends? Louis Blanc replies: “To the mildness of his character, the facility of his exchange, and the kindness of his heart.” All the time he did not consecrate to his public duties and his solitary walks, he passed with his hosts,[5] and a bond, more and more intimate, was established between them. Maximilien had been, from the beginning, seduced by the spectacle of a family whose patriarchal mores contrasted with the corruption of the time, and the Duplays’ sympathy for him grew with the confidence he showed them.

Lamartine, who must be consulted when his affirmations have been controlled, says that Robespierre paid for the services his adoptive family rendered him in affection: “He held this poor house in his heart. Conversational with the father, filial with the mother, paternal with the son, familiar and almost brotherly with the young daughters, he inspired and felt, in this interior circle formed around him, all the sentiments that an ardent soul inspires and feels in spreading widely outside. – Even love attached his heart there where work, poverty, and contemplation fixed his life…”

Nothing will better show the true place Robespierre occupied in the Duplays’ foyer than the following document by Mme Le Bas.

[1] Buonarotti even gave musical counsel to the children of his host; Duplay’s son notes, in the interrogation he underwent on 27 Floréal Year IV, during the course of Babeuf’s trial, that the Italian patriot had given him harpsichord lessons. (Procedural document from the collection Le Bas.)

[2] The words “and some friends” were substituted, by Ph. Le Bas, for the text of Lamartine, who had written “and the young Duplay, armed under their coats;” and it is the rectified text that figures in the Girondins.

[3] Taine : la Révolution, III, p. 199.

[4] Reproduced by Baudot, loc. cit. p. 278.

[5] Information given by Le Bas fils, according to his mother’s recollections.

The reference in the last sentence is, by the way, to Élisabeth's memoirs, which I have, of course, already posted.