pliant as
member of the convention for the department of the Pays de Calais.
When I was put out of the convention, he came and took my place;
when I was liberated from prison, and voted again into the
convention, he was sent into the same prison, and took my place
there; and he went to the guillotine instead of me. He supplied my
place all the way through. One hundred and sixty-eight persons
were taken out of the Luxembourg in one night, and one hundred and
sixty of them guillotined the next day, of which I know I was to
have been one; and the manner I escaped that fate is curious, and
has all the appearance of accident. When persons by scores and
hundreds were to be taken out of prison for the guillotine, it was
always done in the night, and those who performed that office had
a private mark, or signal, by which they knew what rooms to go to,
and what number to take. We were four, and the door of our room
was marked, unobserved by us, with that number, in chalk; but it
happened, if happening is a proper word, that the mark was put on
when the door was open and flat against the wall, and thereby came
on the inside when we shut it at night, and the destroying angel
passed by it. A few days after this Robespierre fell, and the
American embassador arrived and reclaimed me, and invited me to
his house.

"During the whole of my imprisonment, prior to the fall of
Robespierre, there was no time when I could think my life worth
twenty-four hours, and my mind was made up to meet its fate. The
Americans in Paris went in a body to the convention to reclaim me,
but without success. There was no party among them with respect to
me. My only hope then rested on the government of America, that it
would remember me. But the icy heart of ingratitude, in whatever
man it may be placed, has neither feeling nor sense of honor. The
letter of Mr. Jefferson has served to wipe away the reproach, and
has done justice to the mass of the people of America.

"About two months before this event, I was seized with a fever
that, in its progress, had every symptom of becoming mortal.... I
have some reason to believe, because I can not discover any other
cause, that this illness preserved me in existence."

In these hours of death, and when he expects to be beheaded at any
moment, he is writing his AGE OF REASON. The first part he completed
just before going to prison; the second p