Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/254

234 back, for the escape was not ostensibly discovered till a week afterwards, when Smith had reached London. Arndt in 1799 found Smith's rooms as much visited by the curious as those of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette. They still contained pictures which he had hung on the walls, and Arndt was told that Smith not only had the run of the building, but used to receive numerous callers of both sexes.

Tromelin afterwards served under Smith in Syria, was captured in 1804 at Stuttgart together with Spencer Smith, abjured royalism, entered the French army, fought at Waterloo, and was deputed by the provisional Government to apply to the Duke of Wellington for a passport for Napoleon. He was certainly a man who played many parts. Smith, too, had a singular influence on Napoleon's career. "That man," Napoleon when at the height of his power used to say, "spoilt my fortune. If St. Jean d'Acre had fallen I should have been Emperor of all the East." Supremacy in Europe did not apparently console him for the evaporation of his Oriental dreams. Yet newspapers sent to him by Smith while negotiating an exchange of prisoners are said to have induced him to return to France, by convincing him that the Directory was so unpopular that it could easily be overturned. Indeed, Nakoula, a Syrian in the service of the Emir of the Druses, who was in Egypt at the time, states in an Arabic book translated by Desgranges in 1839 that on returning to