Page:A French Volunteer of the War of Independence.djvu/202

178 each and all,—Constitutionalists, Conventionalists, Thermidorians, Fructidorians,—imagined that their political downfall had been brought about by some ill-chance just as their plans were within an ace of succeeding. They kept their eyes fixed on France, to which they all expected to return sooner or later and recommence what each called his great work, for there were exactly the same number of political systems as there were refugees. In the United States you might have believed yourself in the Elysian Fields described in the Sixth Book of the Æneid, where the shades still pursue the same ideas they had cherished in the other world.

But a man must live, and the most curious spectacle was to see these Frenchmen, fallen from their former greatness, and now exercising some trade or profession.

One day I entered a shop to buy some pens and paper, and found the proprietor to be Moreau de Saint-Mery, one of the