some by imprisonment, and one, the greatest, the gallant Ney, by

execution.

Most of these illustrious "traitors" were defended successively by M. Dupin. This signal fortune he did not owe, however, to professional celebrity, being still but a young lawyer of thirty-three years of age, and not even, we have seen, a Bonapartist politically. But he had the courage and the talent to attack the ordinance of proscription as a violation of the capitulation of Paris. Though this was done in the shape of a Mémoire presented to the ministry, and published only some years later in full, yet the journals of the day somehow obtained extracts and analyses which gave publicity to its merits and illustrious clientage to its author. In the incipient case, however, he was assistant-barrister, not leading advocate.

This case first in order, as in eminence, was that of the "bravest of the brave." We do not notice in the Memoirs any new disclosures on the trial of Ney which would be popularly interesting to our readers. The thirty pages given to the subject are mostly filled up with legal logic, arguing over the defeated case and discharging sarcasms at a dead dynasty. The writer has too much the air of the pensioner in Goldsmith, who

"Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won."

Only that M. Dupin has had to show, not how his field was won, but how it ought to have been won if his arguments had received fair play. The demonstration was quite superfluous, more especially in France. The flat infraction of the treaty is known or evident in every country. The terms of the amnesty embraced in fact all persons "whatsoever may have been their politics, their functions, and their conduct." The trials in question. were in most flagrant contradiction of this stipulation. All these details of the acuteness and erudition of the writer were therefore valueless, unless to glorify the subaltern advocate. So unscrupulously greedy is he, in fact, of every rag of praise, that he strips the memory of his noble client of the famous protest upon his trial which won such intellectual honour to the hero.

The defence proposing naturally to allege as quite conclusive the above clause of the Convention of Paris, the reading was ruled out by the Chamber of Peers, which was the court by which the marshal, as peer, insisted on being tried. The objection, which was technical, and pitifully technical, was instantly refuted by some noble members of the Chamber; but it was carried by a confused vote of the base body. This proceeding, which took place in the momentary absence of both the prisoner and his counsel from the Chamber, threw the

latter, on being informed of it, into legal consternation, as it showed the court determined to have its victim. On reappearing before the House, they however offered to read the article. But being forbidden by the president, who, in a word of explanation, made an allusion to the character of Frenchmen, Ney himself arose, and said in a firm voice: "Yes, I am a Frenchman, and I will die a Frenchman." He then read with the same firmness and dignity the following protest: "Hitherto my defence has appeared to be free; but I perceive that it is obstructed at this moment. I thank my generous defenders for what they have done, and for what they are still ready to do; but I prefer not to be defended at all than to have but the semblance of a defence. What! I am accused in contravention of the faith of treaties, and I am not allowed to put those treaties in evidence! I appeal upon it to Europe and to posterity!"

In this apostrophe, to which the position and circumstances of the speaker gave an immense éclát at the moment, and a still subsisting interest, the Memoirs tell us that we are to recognise the "thunder" of Dupin. He even apprizes us that it was written by him at the spur of the moment and amid the consternation, above alluded to, of the recess-comprising also, of course, the self-applied encomium on the "generous" advocates. The marshal merely copied it that he might read with more facility, and M. Dupin preserved this copy, of which he gives us a fac-simile. He even took care, he owns, to have the original of these few lines asked back from Ney, who had already very naturally thrown it in the fire. For M. Dupin would not defraud posterity of a single line of his composition.

What is somewhat more important than these puerilities of senile vanity, the author rectifies, on this occasion, a long-accredited historical error. It has been generally said that Ney, through an indignant patriotism, refused at first to be defended by the stipulations of the treaty of Paris. M. Dupin evinces clearly that this chivalrous susceptibility was a poetical embellishment of the historians. Among other decisive evidences, he refers to the three notes, of which the first had been addressed by Ney himself to the allied ambassadors, and the two others by his leading advocate and by his wife, in succession, to the Duke of Wellington alone, to claim the benefit of this treaty. But Wellington, who had the soul as well as the intellect of a drill-sergeant, was deaf at once to justice and to generosity. M. Dupin, however, thinks he was so from a very calculating and national motive. He permitted the convention to be violated in the case of Ney, that he might after have a pretext to pass himself through the open breach, and plunder Paris of the

monuments which were protected by the same treaty. Napoleon made the same accusation in a codocil to his last will.

The Duke of Wellington was personally party to a case in which Dupin was the opposing counsel for the defence. It was the ludicrously famous trial of Cantillon and Martinet, for an attempted assassination of the British general in Paris. The attempt, which consisted merely in the firing of a pistol near the carriage of the Duke of Wellington as he returned to his hotel, was believed, or at least treated at the time, as having little existence except in imagination. The court report of one of the journals was headed constantly as follows: The pistol-shot fired with or without a ball, at or near the carriage of the Duke of Wellington." In fact, the bullet or its mark could be nowhere traced upon the equipage, to prove the mere corpus delicti. Nor was there a trace of evidence to implicate the prisoners, who were accordingly acquitted with applause. On the other hand, the animus of Paris, at that moment, against the general-in-chief of the allied forces of invasion, was such as well might cause the apprehensions even of a soldier to pass for realities. This spirit found expression in Dupin upon the trial. "I do not speak," said the caustic advocate, "of the good faith of the noble duke. I examine not his manner of observing capitulations," &c. In fine Napoleon himself betrayed this animus, in his distant exile of St. Helena, by bequeathing to the accused Cantillon the sum of ten thousand francs.

M. Dupin has some redeeming reminiscences of the English. He entitles one of the most interesting of his trials, "The Three Englishmen;" and they well deserved the honour he accords them. The escape from a capital prison of the Marquis de Lavalette, by the contrivance and substitution of his beautiful and high-souled wife, is known even popularly all the world over. But it is not perhaps known so generally, that its ultimate success was solely due to three Englishmen then staying at Paris. Lavalette, after quitting prison, had to take refuge in the city, it being impossible to brave the vigilance of the Barrières. Amid this vigilance, still further sharpened by the announcement of the escape, and amid the internal exploration of the city by the police, Lavalette was kept in hopeless trembling to his hiding place for weeks, when an appeal was made on his behalf to a British officer named Bruce. The proposition was conveyed in an anonymous note as follows: "Sir,

This celebrated woman died some weeks ago in Paris. After the shock inflicted on her delicate, although heroic organization, by the condemnation to death of her husband, and the reaction of his release by her, she continued in a state of mental imbecility. She was a niece of the Empress Josephine.

FOURTH SERIES, VOL. VIII-3

I have so much confidence in your honour that I will impart to you a secret which I could reveal but to you. M. de Lavalette is still in Paris; I place his life in your hands; you alone can save him."

Bruce was still in bed. He wondered and pondered, and at length replied to the bearer that he could not give an answer then. but if the writer would choose to meet him at a place and moment ⚫ designated, he would give him his reflections on the subject. The interview took place at noon; Bruce promised to do his best; but he declined to be informed either of the name of the person who wrote him or of the hiding-place of Lavalette himself. This cool and cautious conduct would, independently of the name, announce infallibly that Bruce was born beyond the Tweed. Proceeding with the same prudent calculation to plan the rescue, he united with him two of his confidential comrades at Paris, namely MajorGeneral Wilson, whose name stamps him as English, and Captain Hely Hutchinson, who as assuredly was Irish. Thus the three members of the British Union were represented in this noble action, although our author makes them all English indiscriminately. This, it may be noted, is a general usage of the French, who confound the three nations in their grotesque notion of the AngloSaxon; yet certainly the French themselves do not so widely differ from the Irish, as the Irish do from the English, and the Scotch do from both. This latter difference, however, was seized sagaciously or fortunately, by the mystic friend of Lavalette, in first addressing himself to Bruce. Had he commenced with making the proposal to the Irishman especially, the issue of the effort would have probably been different. As planned by Bruce, it proved completely successful; and, what is equally characteristic, while the perilous execution of smuggling Lavalette in open day, not merely out of Paris, but afterward, through a score of police stations on the way to the German frontier, was committed to the Englishman and to the Irishman, the "canny Scot," on certain plausible pretences, stayed in Paris. Thus the characters kept their places to the last, qualis ab incepto. They joined, however, on being prosecuted, in a common defence, and retained M. Dupin as their collective and only advocate. He brought them off triumphantly, in a trial, which he takes care to tell us, was, for the éclât and the auditory, without rival at the Paris bar.

The other generals or marshals on the same proscription list as Ney and Lavalette, and who figured among the clients of M. Dupin, were as follows: Marshals Moncey, Brune, the Marshals of France collectively in defence of their imperial titles; Generals Travot, Allix, Caulaincourt, Hullin, Paret de Morvan, and Lieutenant

General Gilly. The Memoirs offer little respecting any of these trials that would be of interest to American readers. There is, however, in connexion with the last of these brave unfortunates, an anecdote that thrills the heart, and paints the peasantry of France, in their imperialist fidelity, amid the flush of the Restoration.

M. Dupin tells us that General Gilly, although a Catholic himself, "knowing the humanity of the Protestants," sought an asylum among them. He was received by a peasant of the commune of Anduze named Perrier, who had no other means of living than his daily labour. It was concerted that the general, whose name even was not asked, and of whom the family knew nothing but his peril and his misfortunes, should be disguised in peasant's garb and pass for a cousin of the cotter.

After several months spent in this retreat, which was not only poor, but perilous on account of the patrols which scoured the country by night and made exploratory visits to the dwellings, especially of the Protestants, the general got tired of life, and often murmured at his lot. One day Perrier, returning from the village of Anduze, undertook to console his guest and to cheer his spirits: "You complain," said he to the general, “but you are happy in comparison with those poor men whose heads I have heard cried this morning like meat in a market. For M. Brière, one of our ministers, a reward of two thousand francs; for M. Bress, an ex-mayor, two thousand four hundred francs; for General Gilly, ten thousand francs." "What!" replied the startled general, with anxiety. "Why, certainly," rejoined the peasant.

"We may judge," continues M. Dupin, "of the position of the general! However, he endeavoured to disguise his emotion; and to beguile the poor Perrier, whose fidelity he had the injustice to suspect, he assumed the air of reflecting for a moment, and then said: 'I am tired of the life I lead; I wish to be done with it. You yourself are poor, and you must desire to earn money. I know General Gilly, and where he is concealed; let us go and denounce him. For reward I will ask my liberty, and you will have to yourself the ten thousand francs.'

"At these words Perrier seemed as if thunderstruck and speechless. But all of a sudden, his eldest son, a young man of twenty-seven years, who had served in the 47th regiment of the line, and who had hitherto listened quietly to the conversation, seated by the fire, started up precipitately, and said to the general with threatening voice, and in language of which decency requires to mitigate the rustic energy: Monsieur, hitherto we thought that you were an honest man; but since you are one of those contemptible spies who sell the life of their neighbour, you see that door: get off at once or I will fling you out instantly at the window. General Gilly remonstrated against leaving, he insisted; he wished to explain his intentions; but the soldier, instead of entering on explanations, seized the general with a vigorous arm and prepared to execute his threats. Then the general, seeing the urgency of the danger, exclaimed, Well, I myself am General Gilly!'