It was this inability to escape from his indolence which turned the Chevalier de Parny from the furious aristocrat that he was into a wretched revolutionary, insulting persecuted religion and priests on the scaffold, purchasing repose at all costs, and foisting upon the muse that had sung Éléonore the language of the houses where Camille Desmoulins went to haggle for the pleasures of love. The author of the _Histoire de la literature italienne_, who crept into the Revolution in Chamfort's wake, came to visit us, thanks to the cousinship that exists among all Bretons. Ginguené lived in society upon a reputation acquired through a rather graceful set of verses, the _Confession de Zulmé_, which obtained for him a paltry place in M. de Necker's[246] offices: hence his article upon his admission to the office of the Controller-General. Somebody disputed Ginguené's claim to the authorship of the _Confession de Zulmé_ upon which his fame was based; but it was, as a matter of fact, his own. The Rennes poet was a good musician and wrote ballads. Humble as he began by being, we saw his pride grow as he succeeded in hanging upon the skirts of some well-known man. About the time of the summoning of the States-General, Chamfort employed him to scribble articles for the newspapers and speeches for the clubs: he then became arrogant. At the first Federation he said: "There's a fine entertainment! In order to light it better, we ought to burn an aristocrat at each of the four corners of the altar!" There was nothing original in this aspiration; long before him, Louis Dorléans, the Leaguer, had written in his _Banquet du Comte d'Arète_ that "one ought to fasten the Protestant ministers by way of faggots to the stake of the Midsummer's Night bonfires, and put King Henry IV. into the barrel where one put the cats." Ginguené knew of the revolutionary murders before they took place. Madame Ginguené warned my sisters and my wife of the massacre planned at the Carmelites, and gave them shelter: she lived in the Cul-de-sac Férou, near the place where throats were to be cut. After the Terror, Ginguené became a sort of head of the department of Public Instruction; it was then that he sang the _Arbre de la liberté_ at the Cadran-Bleu, to the air of _Je l'ai planté, je l'ai vu naître._ He was considered sufficiently pious, philosophically, for an embassy to the Court of one of the kings who were being discrowned. He wrote from Turin to M. de Talleyrand that he had "overcome a prejudice:" he had caused his wife to be received at Court in a _pet-en-l'air?_[247] After falling from mediocrity to importance, from importance to silliness, and from silliness to absurdity, he ended his days as a distinguished critic, and what is better, as an independent writer in the _Décade_[248]: nature had restored him to the place whence Society had to such ill purpose taken him. His information is second-hand, his prose dull, his verse correct and sometimes agreeable.