Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/94

74 notorious Lewis Goldsmith tells an absurd story of Bonaparte having ordered her to invite Fox, in order to worm out his opinions, and of Stone having furnished the police with a full report of the conversation. Helen and Stone, he alleges, spoke strongly against Bonaparte's tyranny for the purpose of drawing Fox out, but the latter was very reserved. All this is certainly a fabrication. Helen laid by her pen till Napoleon's fall, and she welcomed the Restoration, with the English visitors which followed in its train. Lady Morgan, in 1816, found numerous guests at her Sunday-evening reception, but Stone's increasing embarrassments affected her, and she had to write, no longer for pleasure, but to eke out her resources. Athanase Coquerel, as Pastor Marron told Lady Morgan in 1829, was for a time in ignorance of her straitened circumstances. On learning them, he fetched her to Amsterdam; but separation from friends and Dutch habits brought on confirmed melancholy. He had to take her back to Paris, and settled a small annuity on her, but she died soon after her return, in 1827. An eye-witness of the greater part of the Revolution, acquainted with the leading actors, and a ready writer, she might have given us the best contemporary account of it; but her habit of moralising spoilt her as an annalist, so that of her numerous works not one has escaped oblivion, and even the few persons who may occasionally sing her hymn—