Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/49

Rh The Revolution had thus already become too stormy for Gower to sing pæans over it; but Huskisson, a witness of the capture of the Bastille, who became his private secretary, was warmly interested in it. Huskisson had been brought up by his great-uncle. Dr. Richard Gem, a Worcestershire man, who went to Paris as physician to the Embassy in 1762. Almost the first time Gem spoke to Horace Walpole, who met him in Paris in 1765, he said to him, "Sir, I am serious, I am of a very serious turn," and this seems to have been his stereotyped expression. A rigid disciplinarian and parsimonious, he allowed no eating between breakfast and the five or six o'clock dinner. An avowed materialist, he was enchanted with the Revolution, and was doubtless the "Ghym, anglais," who in 1792 presented 1000 francs to the Patriotic Fund. This did not save him from being arrested, like other Englishmen, in October 1793, as a hostage for Toulon. He appears in the Prefecture of Police records as "Gesme," and as having, after nine days at the Luxembourg, been transferred to the Scotch College. The entry of his release is missing, but he was probably released under the decree of the 3rd November 1793, which, on account of the scarcity of doctors, exempted foreign practitioners from imprisonment. He seems to have gone to live outside Paris, at Meudon, and there to have been rearrested by the Versailles authorities. He was for several months