CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
A WASTED EXISTENCE.
THE LAST OF THE HADDONS.
FAMOUS BRITISH REGIMENTS.
A RAILWAY TRIP IN JAPAN.
A CURATE'S HOLIDAY.
SOME UNCOMMON PETS.
THE LEAF PROPHETIC.
| No. 681. | SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1877. | Price 1½d. |
A WASTED EXISTENCE.
In every account of the French Revolution, there crop up names ofactors in that terrible drama, not to be forgotten. The very vilenessof these individuals has rendered their names imperishable. Execratedby successive generations, it would never occur to us that a timewould come when, by a distortion of principle, literature would tryto gloss over the evil deeds of these infamous personages, and holdthem up to general admiration and pity. It would be imagined thatRobespierre, Marat, St Just, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hebert,Couthon, and a number of others, were too bad—too persistentlywicked—to evoke sentiments of compassion. Time, however, brings aboutunexpected changes. For anything we can tell, some plodding enthusiastmay be ransacking archives, and gathering traditions to representRobespierre as a noble-minded hero, whose character has been altogethermisunderstood. Marat, too, may possibly soon be spoken of with gentleregret—as what a worthy young man he was when studying medicine atEdinburgh, and living in modest lodgings in the College Wynd, and soon; making him out to be a prodigy of excellence. As a commencementto this new and undesirable literature, comes a biography of CamilleDesmoulins, by a French writer, Jules Claretie, purporting to befounded on hitherto unpublished documents, and which appears beforeus as an English translation. Not a paltry-looking book is it by anymeans, but a handsomely printed octavo, of nearly five hundred pages,embellished with a portrait of the hero Camille. After that nothingwill surprise us.
Unless for a hope of drawing some useful moral for the benefit ofyoung and ardent spirits, we should not have ventured on any noticeof this extraordinary production. What the moral is, will appear aswe go along. It may be worth while in the first place to say thatClaretie, the writer of the book, almost worships his hero. He setsout by describing him as the 'gamin of genius, whom Paris attracted,seduced, and kept for ever;' and then, to let us know the fullestparticulars of the wonderful gamin, he makes a pilgrimage to thesmall town of Guise, in Picardy, where Camille was born, 2d March 1760.The antique little