Fabre d'Églantine, author of a play which will live[52], displayed, quite contrary to Desmoulins, a signal weakness. Jean Roseau, public executioner of Paris under the League, who was hanged for lending his offices to the assassins of the Président Brisson[53], could not bring himself to accept the rope. It seems that one does not learn how to die by killing others. The debates at the Cordeliers established for me the fact of a state of society at the most rapid moment of its transformation. I had seen the Constituent Assembly commence the murder of the kingship in 1789 and 1790; I found the body, still quite warm, of the old monarchy handed over in 1792 to the legislative gut-workers: they disembowelled and dissected it in the cellars of their clubs, as the halberdiers cut up and burnt the body of the Balafré[54] in the garret of Blois Castle. Of all the men whom I recall, Danton, Marat. Camille Desmoulins, Fabre d'Églantine, Robespierre, not one is alive. I met them for a moment on my passage between a nascent society in America and an expiring society in Europe; between the forests of the New World and the solitudes of exile: before I had reckoned a few months on foreign soil, those lovers of death had already spent themselves in her arms. At the distance at which I now find myself from their appearance, it seems to me as though, after descending into the infernal regions of my youth, I retain a confused recollection of the shades which I vaguely saw wander by the bank of Cocytus: they complete the varied dreams of my life, and come to be inscribed on my tablets of beyond the tomb. * It was a great pleasure to meet M. de Malesherbes again and speak to him of my old projects. I stated my plans for a second journey, which was to last nine years; all I had to do first was to take another little journey to Germany: I was to run to the Army of the Princes, and come back at a run to kill the Revolution; all this would be finished in two or three months, when I should hoist my sail and return to the New World, having got rid of a revolution and enriched myself by a marriage. And yet my zeal exceeded my faith; I felt that the emigration was a stupidity and a madness: "I was shaven on all hands," says Montaigne. "To the Ghibelin I was a Guelf, to Guelf a Ghibelin[55]."