isance by passing a
'Senatus-consulte' conformable to the wishes of the First Consul.
A list was drawn up of the persons styled Jacobins, who were condemned to
transportation. I was fortunate enough to obtain the erasure of the
names of several whose opinions had perhaps been violent, but whose
education and private character presented claims to recommendation. Some
of my readers may probably recollect them without my naming them, and I
shall only mention M. Tissot, for the purpose of recording, not the
service I rendered him, but an instance of grateful acknowledgment.
When in 1815 Napoleon was on the point of entering Paris M. Tissot came
to the prefecture of police, where I then was, and offered me his house
as a safe asylum; assuring me I should there run no risk of being
discovered. Though I did not accept the offer yet I gladly seize on this
opportunity of making it known. It is gratifying to find that difference
of political opinion does not always exclude sentiments of generosity and
honour! I shall never forget the way in which the author of the essays
on Virgil uttered the words 'Domus mea'.
But to return to the fatal list. Even while I write this I shudder to
think of the way in which men utterly innocent were accused of a
revolting crime without even the shadow of a proof. The name of an
individual, his opinions, perhaps only assumed, were sufficient grounds
for his banishment. A decree of the Consuls, dated 4th of January 1801,
confirmed by a 'Senates-consulte' on the next day, banished from the
territory of the Republic, and placed under special inspectors, 130
individuals, nine of whom were merely designated in the report as
Septembrizers.
The exiles, who in the reports and in the public acts were so unjustly
accused of being the authors of the infernal machine, were received at
Nantes, with so much indignation that the military were compelled to
interfere to save them from being massacred.
In the discussions which preceded the decree of the Consuls few persons
had the courage to express a doubt respecting the guilt of the accused.
Truguet was the first to mount the breach. He observed that without
denying the Government the extraordinary means for getting rid of its
enemies he could not but acknowledge that the emigrants threatened the
purchasers of national domains, that the public mind was corrupted by
pamphlets, and that--Here the First Consul, interrupting him, exclaimed,
"To what pamphlets
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