ty and general
perfectibility of man. He was a very popular landlord, and his
generosity was equal to his wealth. During six months of a severe famine
he fed the peasants of Montsallier at his own expense. He was one of the
believers in Madame de Stael's man of destiny, her father, the Genevese
banker, Necker. In November 1790 he was elected constitutional mayor of
Apt, and inducted into office 'with much applause' by a solemn service
in the parish church. In February 1791, a local patriot named Reboulin
surnamed the 'Roman,' and an armourer named Thiebault who had joined the
Marseilles club, and consequently were in correspondence with Paris,
organised a systematic attack upon the Marquis. 'This man,' they said
at Marseilles, 'is an enemy of the constitution by reason of his rank
and of his rage at what is going on. He is a _ci-devant_ noble, who
became mayor by intrigues and cabals.'

From that moment no peace was given to the Saporta family till, one by
one, they were driven out of France. The Marquis held out bravely as
long as he could, and was the last to leave. When his wife left he gave
her a passport signed by himself as mayor, in which he described her as
the 'citoyenne Laporte,' the object of this being that no evidence
should exist to show that Madame de Saporta had really 'emigrated.' In
default of such evidence there was some chance that her property rights
might be respected.

After the fall of the Directory the Saportas ventured to come back, and
in 1800 they finally recovered so much of their property as had not
before that time been sold 'by the State.' There was not much left. A
sister of the Marquis, the Marquise d'Eyragues, who had enjoyed a very
large income before the Revolution, wrote to her nephew in 1800 that she
esteemed herself very happy to recover a 'house to live in and two
thousand francs a year.'

Here in this beautiful region around Laon and Chauny and Coucy, the
story of those evil days is told almost as instructively by the
properties which then escaped ruin as by those which, like the estate of
the Saportas, were confiscated and broken up.

In the eighteenth century it was full of fine buildings--chateaux,
churches, monasteries, hospitals. Go where you please, you come upon the
sites of edifices, once local centres of civilisation, which were
pillaged, burned, and demolished, while the 'national agents' ruled the
provinces for the benefit of the speculators at Paris. Here stood t