The elder was called Jacques Dinant. I don’t know what has since become of him. The other was Félicién Herda, afterwards a celebrity in the Revolution. This latter was a young man—fair, of a light complexion—a regular child of Paris—irritable, and as nervous as a woman. The nickname which his comrades gave him, as his irritability was always dragging him into controversy, and as he used always to say “No” to every theory, was “Citizen Veto.” Need I say that the veto was the prerogative of the King, and that it was through his wrong use of this privilege on two occasions that he alienated his people. Madame Duplay appeared from the kitchen, with the first course. I was presented to her; but she paid even less attention to me than her two daughters had done. She was about thirty-eight or forty years of age, and must, at one time, have been beautiful, but with those coarse and too matured charms common to the lower orders of the people. She shared all the patriotic opinions of her husband, and was, like him, an ardent admirer of Robespierre. There was a discussion during supper concerning the relative merits of the Jacobin leaders, in which the apprentices took part as equals of their master. I fancied, somehow, that Félicién Herda regarded me with an evil eye. As the stranger, I had the seat of honor next to Mademoiselle Cornelie; and I think he must have looked upon it as an encroachment on his privileges. Although well read in antiquity, I was profoundly ignorant of modern politics, and this gained me the pity of M. Duplay. I knew the name of the famous Club of Jacobins, where Monsieur passed his patriotic evenings, but of all else I was ignorant. From that bed of aristocratic Jacobins of ’89, one could not foretell the springing up of the terrible and popular Jacobins of ’93. Robespierre alone appeared, but he began to assume that pale and impassible visage which was never forgotten, if once seen. Duplay promised to take me to the Jacobins, and to show me him who was known among them by the title of an “honest man.” Robespierre had, as yet, but on two occasions spoken; and he had obtained the name of the “Timon of public affairs.” I know not if it was the view of Robespierre, whom I saw that night for the first time, that engraved the words on my mind, but I know this—that, in sixty years, I have not forgotten one word of his biography, or one lineament of his face. I feel that I could draw his portrait now, as life-like as when he appeared first to me, on the platform, preparing to address us; and, from that time to the end, I was his most devoted admirer. Robespierre was born in 1758, in that old, sombre, ecclesiastical and judicial town of Arras, capital of Artois, a province of France only 150 years, and where may yet be seen the ruins of the immense palace of its King-Bishop.