efore I am caught in the crash of the
warring elements I have aroused. It is a humiliating reflection. I seek
consolation in the reminder of Epictetus (do you ever read Epictetus?)
that we are but actors in a play of such a part as it may please the
Director to assign us. It does not, however, console me to have been
cast for a part so contemptible, to find myself excelling ever in the
art of running away. But if I am not brave, at least I am prudent; so
that where I lack one virtue I may lay claim to possessing another
almost to excess. On a previous occasion they wanted to hang me for
sedition. Should I have stayed to be hanged? This time they may want to
hang me for several things, including murder; for I do not know whether
that scoundrel Binet be alive or dead from the dose of lead I pumped
into his fat paunch. Nor can I say that I very greatly care. If I have a
hope at all in the matter it is that he is dead--and damned. But I am
really indifferent. My own concerns are troubling me enough. I have all
but spent the little money that I contrived to conceal about me before I
fled from Nantes on that dreadful night; and both of the only two
professions of which I can claim to know anything--the law and the
stage--are closed to me, since I cannot find employment in either without
revealing myself as a fellow who is urgently wanted by the hangman. As
things are it is very possible that I may die of hunger, especially
considering the present price of victuals in this ravenous city. Again I
have recourse to Epictetus for comfort. 'It is better,' he says, 'to die
of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a
troubled spirit amid abundance.' I seem likely to perish in the estate
that he accounts so enviable. That it does not seem exactly enviable to
me merely proves that as a Stoic I am not a success."

There is also another letter of his written at about the same time
to the Marquis de La Tour d'Azyr--a letter since published by M. Emile
Quersac in his "Undercurrents of the Revolution in Brittany," unearthed
by him from the archives of Rennes, to which it had been consigned by
M. de Lesdiguieres, who had received it for justiciary purposes from the
Marquis.

"The Paris newspapers," he writes in this, "which have reported in
considerable detail the fracas at the Theatre Feydau and disclosed the
true identity of the Scaramouche who provoked it, inform me also that
you have escaped the fate I had intende