Father Billaud, good Father Billaud, as he was called at Juilly, was a young man of twenty-one years. He was the son of a lawyer of La Rochelle who had neither fortune nor clients. He had scarcely left college when he abducted a young girl and then became a member of a troupe of comedians. He was a failure on the stage and returned to La Rochelle. There he put on the stage a satirical comedy: _La Femme comme il n'y en a plus_, in which he defamed all the women of his town. It was hissed off the boards and he had to flee to Paris. As he was penniless, he entered the Oratory; and, as the Oratory needed regents for its colleges, they sent him to Juilly as prefect of studies. His pupils loved his good fellowship. But his superiors had very quickly seen what was under the mask. "Billaud--To judge by the way in which he reads Latin, he does not know it very well. Has he brains? I have not had sufficient time to find out. But he has a high opinion of himself, and I regard him as only a worldly man, clothed in the habit of the Oratory, coolly regular and honest, who has tried hard not to compromise himself in the last few? months, for when he first came here his behavior was not of the best. Though he may be judicious in his conduct, I do not think that he is suited to the Oratory, because of his age, of what he has been, and of what he is." Such was the judgment passed upon him by his superior, for the Superior General of the congregation, in 1784. Shortly afterward it was learned that Father Billaud had offered a tragedy to the comedian Larive: he was expelled.... We know what followed: his entry of the bar at Paris, his marriage to the natural daughter of a farmer-general, his friendship with Marat and Robespierre, his complicity in the massacres of September, his ferocities and cowardices, his turnabout on the ninth of Thermidor, his banishment to Guiana, his escape, his death in San Domingo. He ended his career as a teacher of parrots.