Page:Memoirs of Baron Hyde de Neuville; outlaw, exile, ambassador; (IA memoirsofbaronhy01hyde).pdf/74

50 was regarded. Her high character and her beneficence had inspired such veneration in the district, that no word of denunciation was ever raised to betray her, although she lived in the midst of a population strongly imbued with revolutionary passions.

The reaction of the 9th Thermidor was welcomed in the departments no less than in Paris; they had been forcibly carried along by the impetus of the Revolution, without entirely joining in it.

[In 1794, not long after the death of Robespierre, M. Hyde de Neuville married Mile. Rouillé de Marigny, whose father had fed from Paris at the outbreak of the Revolution, and sought refuge, with his only daughter, in the little town of Sancerre, where one of his sisters was living. His wife, Madame Rouillé, did not leave Paris, where her large fortunc, and her refined and literary tastes, which she retained to an advanced age, had won for her adistinguished position. She had lived, for eighteen years, in the glorious reign of Louis XIV, and preserved the manners and conversation of that age. ]

In the Niévre, as all over France, an outcry was raised against the criminal agents of the Convention, and a member of the Convention, Guillemardet, the same who afterwards became Ambassador at Madrid, was sent into the department to repair, to some extent, the evil that had been done. He himself denounced some of the agents, and a few guilty men, who attempted resistance, were disarmed by his orders. The sane part of the population seconded the movement of reparation, in which I myself joined. Other men, Jaden with crime, were merely imprisoned, a very light punishment for what they had done; and in the very district to which Fouché had come to choose the members of the temporary revolutionary commissioners of Lyons, where the most respected citizens had been dragged away to execution,—the children