Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/198

178 the contrary, and that when forced into marching he laid a mine on the road, intending to blow up his own men. His real offence seems to have been a refusal to drink to Marat's health. Custine superseded him. O'Moran was at first screened by Carnot, who, however, said, "He has a prudence which makes me desperate, and which I should call pusillanimity if I did not respect his talents." Released from St. Lazare, he was rearrested, tried for "manœuvres tending to favour the enemy," and executed on the 6th March 1794. His aide-de-camp, Etienne de Jouy, charged with complicity, fled from Cassel and took refuge in the house of Robert Hamilton, a Jamaica planter claiming kinship with the Dukes of Hamilton. Hamilton had married a daughter of Lord Leven and Melville, widow of a Dr. James Walker. They had two daughters, one of whom fell in love with the refugee, a modern d'Artagnan, who had lost two fingers in battle, and who had probably many tales to tell of his adventures in America and the East. Jouy fled for greater security first to Paris, where he saw O'Moran pass on his way to execution, and then to Switzerland. Returning after the Terror, he married Miss Hamilton, but this alliance, soon followed by a separation, exposed him to imputations of intrigues with England. He threw up his commission in the army out of disgust with these repeated vexations, and became a prolific dramatist.