--The phrenzy of despair has supplied a successor to Mirabeau,
in Le Pelletier. [De St. Fargeau.] The latter had hitherto been little
heard of, but his death offered an occasion for exciting the people too
favourable to be neglected: his patriotism and his virtues immediately
increased in a ratio to the use which might be made of them;* a dying
speech proper for the purpose was composed, and it was decreed
unanimously, that he should be installed in all the rights, privileges,
and immortalities of the degraded Riquetti.--
* At the first intelligence of his death, a member of the
Convention, who was with him, and had not yet had time to study a
speech, confessed his last words to have been, "Jai froid."--"I am
cold." This, however, would nave made no figure on the banners of a
funeral procession; and Le Pelletier was made to die, like the hero
of a tragedy, uttering blank verse.
The funeral that preceded these divine awards was a farce, which tended
more to provoke a massacre of the living, than to honour the dead; and
the Convention, who vowed to sacrifice their animosities on his tomb, do
so little credit to the conciliating influence of St. Fargeau's virtues,
that they now dispute with more acrimony than ever.
The departments, who begin to be extremely submissive to Paris, thought
it incumbent on them to imitate this ceremony; but as it was rather an
act of fear than of patriotism, it was performed here with so much
oeconomy, and so little inclination, that the whole was cold and paltry.
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