Rabbe took himself off after first making a gesture significant of future vengeance. Next day he had forgotten all about it. Brézé, however, remembered it ten years afterwards! Two explanations must follow this anecdote which ought really to have preceded it. From much study of the _Confessions_ of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rabbe had imbibed something of the character of the susceptible Genevese; he thought there was a general conspiracy organised against him: that his Catiline and Manlius and Spartacus were Latouche, Santo-Domingo and Loëve-Weymars; he even went so far as to suspect his two Pylades, Thiers and Mignet. "They are my d'Alembert and Diderot!" he said. It was quite evident he believed Brézé's suggestion was the result of a conspiracy that was just breaking out. Rabbe's life was a species of perpetual hallucination, an existence made up of dreams; and sleep, itself, the only reality. One day, he button-holed Méry; his manner was gloomy, his hand on his breast convulsively crumpled his shirt-front. "Well," he exclaimed, shaking his head up and down, "I told you so!" "What?" "That he was an enemy of mine." "Who?" "Mignet." "But, my dear Rabbe, he is nothing of the kind.... Mignet loves and admires you." "Ah! _he_ love me!" "Yes." "_He_ admire me!" "No doubt of it." "Well, do you know what the man who professes to love and admire me said of me?" "What did he say?" "Why, he said that I was a man of IMAGINATION, yes, he did." Méry assumed an air of consternation to oblige Rabbe. Rabbe, to revenge himself for Mignet's insult, wrote in the preface of a second edition of his résumés these crushing words-- "The pen of the historian ought not to be like a leaden pipe through which a stream of tepid water flows on to the paper." From this moment, his wrath against historians,--modern historians, that is, of course: he worshipped Tacitus,--knew no bounds; and, when there were friends present at his house and all historians were absent, he would declaim in thunderous tones-- "Would you believe it, gentlemen, there are in France, at the present moment and of our generation and rank, historians who take it into their heads to copy the style of the veterans, Berruyer, Catrou and Rouille? Yes, in each line of their modern battles they will tell you that thirty thousand men were _cut in pieces_, or that they _bit the dust_, or that they _were left lying strewn upon the scene._ How behind the times these youngsters are! The other day, one of them, in describing the battle of Austerlitz, wrote this sentence: 'Twenty-five thousand Russians were drawn up in battle upon a vast frozen lake; Napoléon gave orders that firing should be directed against this lake. Bullets broke through the ice and the twenty-five thousand Russians BIT THE DUST!'"