The occasion of this speech was a dispute which he had with Haudet and Désessarts of the French theatre, and the miserable man had only anticipated his impending fate, doomed soon after to fall under the rival power of Robespierre. Such were the morbid views of honour entertained during the atrocious phases of the French Revolution: the most noble and generous sentiments were professed by the most implacable monsters of the epoch; and while the murder of innocent men on the scaffold was called by Danton the _justice of the people_, a duel was denominated “_the argument of an assassin_,”--when Marat was called the _Divine_, and Robespierre the _Incorruptible_!--The Revolution might fairly be denominated a moral pestilence caused by former corruption; the national atmosphere had been tainted by the putrescency of the Court, and the fever that it produced was marked by a homicidic delirium which from its diffusion in every class of society might have been considered contagious. The history of those momentous times presents us a series of causes and effects so closely linked in their fatal catenation, that the bloody annals of that era should constitute the chief study of every diplomatist. It is to be deeply lamented that these records do not become the text-book of diplomatic tuition. When the nobility dropped their swords and the people picked them up, the meanest comprehension could have foreseen the sanguinary results. The apathy in which the possessors of power and wealth slumbered could only be compared to the perfidious calm of gangrene that precedes dissolution. A blind confidence in the prestige of authority hurled the nobility into a vortex which swept them down the torrent of popular reaction. The hatred in which duels were held, simply arose from their not being the practice of fashionable men, and was a strong illustration of the morbid temper of the nation, and the successful efforts of the philosophic school. The history of the progress of liberal ideas gradually casting off the restraints of rank and fortune might be studied in the dedication of writers. Where could we find an author in the present day, who, like Dryden, would compare the pustules of small-pox on the corpse of a deceased young nobleman, the son of his protector, to bright constellations in the firmament? As men grow wise, the prejudices of barbarism will gradually disappear; and certainly, with very few exceptions, we cannot trace much sapience in those persons who have been engaged in personal conflicts of late years. CHAPTER XIII. DUELS DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.