#but was not a provincial king himself

[starboyshoyo]

Tropes-To-Lovers

Characters: All NRC boys x fem!reader (seperately)

Fandom: Twisted Wonderland

Genre: fluff

What were you to the NRC boys, before you were lovers?

Includes: Childhood friends to lovers, best friends to lovers, strangers to lovers, enemies to lovers, exes to lovers.

Childhood Friends to Lovers

Trey Clover the boy next door

Everyone and their mother knows Trey Clover, the golden boy in your little provincial town. Sweet, intelligent, and he can bake? He’s a heartthrob in every definition of the word. But Trey’s only ever had eyes for you, his parents’ best friends’ daughter and the girl next door.

Joined at the hip from the moment you met, you’ve done it all together- but Trey’s been away at NRC for three years. You were sure he would move to the city after getting a taste of the wider world. So you’re caught off-guard when he returns to take over his family’s bakery, eight inches taller than you remember.

His eyes crinkle at the corners when he sees you, and you can feel the firmness of muscles under his shirt when you launch yourself at him, embracing him tightly. He has to bend down to hug you now, you realize. And his face is sharper now, jaw angular instead of the soft cheeks you were used to. When did that happen?

And when did he get so handsome?

Leona Kingscholar betrothed to his brother

Leona has only ever had one friend- you, the heir from the neighboring kingdom. It shouldn’t be a problem to love you the way he does, but the stars in the sky had other plans, it seemed. Because from the moment you were born, you were meant to marry Falena.

Leona has long-since learned that no matter what he does, he’ll never be enough to win the public’s love. It didn’t matter that he knew you never had feelings for Falena, or that Falena was seeing someone else in secret. His brother will be king, not him. He’ll watch you walk down the aisle towards him, and then he’ll go back to his room and take a nap, and tell himself that he won’t be upset. That’s just the way life will be.

One day, while napping behind a curtain in the royal library, he catches wind of something so very interesting. Your parents arrived in the kingdom that morning, bearing news: Falena’s engagement has been peaceably broken, by your own choice, nonetheless. It’s a huge, life-changing decision and so a formal dinner is being held, to re-discuss the terms of the treaty. Leona wants to snap you up right away to be his, but he has to bide his time. For now, he’ll meet your eye across the banquet table, scowl softening a little. He should have known that he has always been king in your heart.

Silver childhood soulmates

Right person, right place, right time. Rarely did the universe ever align so beautifully. From your first meeting at the tender age of five to the time you were accepted into NRC, Silver has always been by your side.

He’s the first thing you see when you wake up in the mornings and the final good night you say before going to sleep. When small birds land on your desk and deposit gifts of acorns and flowers to you, you know exactly who they were from and who was thinking of you at the moment. And when you look at your handsome knight, you can’t help but imagine him by your side, every step of the way for the rest of your life.

Silver is more than just your best friend and first love. He is your person, through and through.

Best Friends to Lovers

Epel Felmier first friend, first love

You met Epel on the first day of school, getting beat up by a blonde upperclassman in the hallway. Much to the surprise of both boys, you jumped in to help him- pulling him off the ground and scolding the taller boy, who merely scoffed and wandered off. Though Epel’s ego was a bit bruised, he was grateful to you for helping him.

Epel became your constant companion after that. You could listen to him talk for hours while laying on the floor of your dorm room, a bag of apple chips in hand. His roguish accent and mischievous jokes charm you a little more each day, making him more than just the rough-hewn boy you met at the entrance ceremony not long ago.

His grandparents know all about you from the letters he sends home. Even in ink, they can sense his lovestruck heart. They had felt the same way when they started courting all those years ago. The Felmier family are fools in love, it seems. You would call him your best friend if someone asked, but Epel wants to be so much more.

Ace Trappola best friends to lovers

It’s pathetic how fast Ace changed his tune. The first time he met you, he was jeering you for being a magicless human. Now, he’s in love with you? When did that happen? And why did it have to be with you of all people?

Ace isn’t fooling himself. He knows why it’s you. It’s simply because no one could ever capture his heart the same way you do, with your smiles and your laughs and the way you look at him in both disapproval and exasperated fondness when he makes a crude joke.

Don’t act surprised when he holds your hand out of the blue or when he searches your face with those eyes, wondering what it would feel like to kiss you silly right then and there. He wants you, not anyone else, and it’s driving him crazy.

Kalim Al-Asim what are we?

Everyone thinks you and Kalim are dating already. You joke about it all the time. Oh, yeah, we’re partners in crime! Soulmates! Two sides of the same coin- but the line between teasing and reality has begun to blur. Once, you even made a jibe that you’d marry him one day, and Kalim got you an actual ring! It was so extravagant- a ruby inlaid with smaller gilded gems along the edges. He told you it was a family treasure, kept in the storerooms of Scarabia and just waiting to adorn the hand of the right person.

You tried to refuse, but he insisted. Money wasn’t something the Al-Asim heir ever had to worry about. So you go along with it, the golden band rubbing between your fingers and his when you walk down the halls, hands interlaced.

How does Kalim really feel about you? You’re not sure, so one day you ask- Kalim, what are we?

He looks at you curiously. “Aren’t we engaged?”

Strangers to Lovers

Deuce Spade the hallway crush

Every day between alchemy and history of magic, Deuce finds himself scanning faces in the hallway for someone who makes his face flush and his palms turn sweaty. And every day when you catch his eye and send him a wave, he finds himself tangled up a little more in his heartstrings, tripping over his feet as he tries to return your greeting.

He’s not sure when he first noticed you. Maybe it was when he fumbled and nearly dropped a potion on the carpet, and you caught it. His heart did flutter a bit then, but maybe that was because he nearly messed up the project he had been working on all night. He wants to talk to you again so badly- more than just a ‘hello‘ or a ‘thanks.’ He wants to brighten up your day just by walking by, like you do for him. Maybe if he becomes an honors student, then you’ll finally notice him too.

Jack Howl the mysterious savior

Being hounded by a group of rogue students wasn’t in your plans for the day. Trying to slip between the mob, avoiding their prying hands and sharp words, a sudden growl makes them all look up. A tall boy with wolflike ears towers over them.

Leave them alone. His voice is sharp, like a dog's canines. Golden eyes meet yours, steely and cold, but they soften for a moment when you manage to say thank you.

Your savior rubs the back of his neck. ‘S nothing, he says gruffly, but the lingering traces of blush on his face tell a different story. Only when he leaves do you realize that you had never gotten his name. Perhaps fate will lead you to meet once again, in the near future.

Azul Ashengrotto love at first sight

One minute he’s discussing the best way to mix a potion with his lab partner. The next, he’s sitting straight in his chair, eyes blown wide when you walk into the room. You’ve ensnared Azul Ashengrotto’s attention and heart without a single word. And when you finally say hi to him, ignorant of his shady dealings and strange company, he’s caught- hook, line, and sinker.

Azul begins to do things for you. Not in the way he does for others, with a flourish of his pen and a snap of his fingers. No, you’re special. He could never ask anything of you.

It’s so obvious, the way he favors you and gives you the best of everything he has. But he can’t bring himself to care- not when this new feeling brings him such happiness.

Idia Shroud closer than he thought

Idia Shroud has never met you irl. No way. All you are to him is a profile picture on a leaderboard, telling him to dodge the next attack or that he’ll never beat you in the latest game the two of you are playing. You make his gloomy days a little brighter. And when they’re brighter, he finally takes a chance to step outside for a bit and go to class.

In class is where he met you. His charming desk partner, whose presence he enjoyed far more than he thought he would. He likes your jokes. He likes that you play the same games as him and nerd out about the same topics. But when he returns to the world of online anonymity, he can’t help but feel disloyal- so much so that he doesn’t notice the lilt of the voice in his speakers is the same one that rings in his ears when he falls asleep in class.

Malleus Draconia love from afar

No one knows who you are, a mere human who attends NRC. You could be dangerous as far as his retainers know. Malleus isn’t supposed to speak with you- but oh, does he want to.

He’s tried to ignore the pull towards you, but he just can’t. Why is this mere child of man lingering in his thoughts, ensnaring his every waking moment?

One night when Sebek is busy berating Silver for falling asleep on the job, he sneaks away and finds you beneath the moonlight, staring up at the stars. He’s caught like a fly in a web from the first hello.

Enemies to Lovers

Riddle Rosehearts academic rivals

He’s so annoying. With a loud voice, short stature, and short temper, you could consider Riddle Rosehearts to always be underfoot. But even you have to admire his academic prowess, his name topping the scores at every turn. And just under him, is you. How very frustrating.

You’re so focused on one-upping one another that you don’t even catch yourself when thoughts of him wander into your mind throughout the day. Of course you think of him, you’re trying to beat him. But slowly the competition turns into wondering. What does he do in his free time? What’s his favorite food, his favorite color?

Little do you know, he thinks of you too.

Ruggie Bucchi the goodhearted thief

You heard from your neighbors about the slum thief who steals things from their shops. It’s only a matter of time before he comes to you next, they warn, so be ready.

And ready you are. When a skinny boy with rounded ears atop his head tries to slip something into his pocket, you call him out. And when he dashes away, you scramble after him- tackling him in a paved alley near some dumpsters. Cans go crashing over to reveal several homeless youngsters, shivering in the cold and barely more than bones. The boy tosses the food to them before you can intervene- but why would you, when you’ve just seen what you saw?

When he comes into the bakery next time, you make sure he pays. But you also slip an extra loaf or two into his order, with a wink and a nod. Your conversations become a bit longer, a bit friendlier. He’s quite charming and you have to berate yourself for falling for a thief.

He’s stolen your heart, hasn’t he?

Floyd Leech the hallway bully

Floyd Leech. Just his name makes you groan and roll your eyes. It’s not just you he teases you in the hallway by holding your things over his head, but you seem to be his favorite. How are you supposed to get your notebook back when it’s dangling almost 8 feet above the ground, courtesy of his freakishly long arms?

The graceful solution you come up with is to kick him. Right in his eel, to summarize. His twin brother is by his side in an instant while you walk off.

Jade expects Floyd to be livid. But even when he’s doubled up on the ground in pain, he’s got a grin plastered across his face.

His shrimpy is such a badass.

Jamil Viper flirting rivals

For someone who’s usually level-headed and cool, you sure bring out Jamil’s temper. He can find a million ways to insult and discredit you, but still you’ll bounce back with some snarky, suggestive comment that just makes his blood boil.

He swears he can feel your eyes on him from across the hallways. It makes him want to pull his hood up over his face. But when you approach him, he’s as calm as ever. Why are you leaning closer, prefect, and running your hands over his tie? He’s not going to fall for your ruse, so don’t even try.

Still, his eyes can’t help but wander down to your lips, wondering if they would taste like he imagined.

Rook Hunt one-sided annoyance

It seems like you’ve gained yourself a one-man paparazzi recently. If Rook is meant to be a hunter, you have to wonder if he’s any good at his job. He never seems to conceal his presence, following you down the hallways brazenly while spouting off fake compliments about your demeanor and beauty.

Well, you thought they were fake. It’s hard to believe anyone is genuine in a school full of villains, but you might have caught the attention of the one person who actually is. His company isn’t so bad sometimes, especially when you can talk his ear off about anything and everything.

Sebek Zigvolt forced proximity

This was meant to be a partner project, not a threeway. But being paired with the great Malleus Draconia means putting up with his annoying, self-proclaimed bodyguard for the next week as well.

You pity Sebek’s alchemy partner, because he’s ignoring his own work in favor of hovering over you and his liege. His loud, unsolicited advice and passive-aggressive comments don’t make him any more bearable. By the time Thursday rolls around, you’re about ready to drop-kick him into the cauldron.

Thankfully, you and Malleus get your work done early. When you’re packing up your things to leave, you find Sebek quiet for once, deep in concentration as he rushes to finish his own work.

I don’t need the help of a human, he proclaims in that loud, obnoxious bark of his. But he doesn’t complain when you settle down next to him, stirring the potion while he measures out ingredients.

Exes to Lovers

Cater Diamond the one that got away

Cater knows you probably hate his guts. Hell, he hates his own guts for fucking up so badly. You were the best thing that ever happened to him and he drove you away with his constant neediness and self-deprecation. It took him years to realize that he was so focused on himself that he didn’t realize that you needed support too.

He’s been lonely for a while, working on himself and his problems in the shadows. It’s been a while since he last saw you- he knows you might not want to see him again anyways, but he’s changed now- both for himself and for you.

Cater wants you back, if you’ll have him.

Jade Leech second chance romance

Jade was nothing more than a talking stage that never got off the ground. He was fun to be around and a good hiking partner, but you stopped seeing him after first year ended and you no longer shared a class together.

You didn’t think of him much throughout your second and third year at NRC . But when you arrive at your new work study to meet your partner for the program, a tall, familiar figure greets you at the door.

“Jade?”

Vil Schoenheit right person, wrong time

Vil has no one but himself to blame for the downfall of your relationship. He broke things off with you after his manager advised him to- she said that a young, taken idol isn’t marketable. You need to think about your image.

The stage lights blinded him and he dropped you without a second thought. Any trace of you in his life was erased; smoothed over to perfection like a beauty filter.

But oh, how Vil regrets it when he scrolls on his phone late at night, your Magicam account pulled up to a photo of you laughing. What he wouldn’t give to have you smile like that at him again.

The icon for a DM request sits beside your profile picture. Vil regards it for a second, finger hovering over the button, then clicks.

Lilia Vanrouge facing the future

Lilia has always known that humans live short lives. In his time, he’s seen countless people born and died. It’s just a fact of human life; a phenomena he watches from the outside in- disconnected. It doesn’t dawn on him that yours too will run out until Malleus points it out- and then Lilia becomes scared.

He’ll cut you off, hiding in the shadows and avoiding your eyes until a great danger almost befalls you. It is then that Lilia realizes he’d rather have loved and lost you than never have known you at all.

Please, stay with him. You have the rest of your life, however short or long, to live by his side. Lilia would gladly warp time and face the consequences just for one more minute with you.

[fictionadventurer]

John's Passion narrative has a never-ending fascination for me, because it's where you get Jesus at his most divine--knowing everything that was going to happen, making the guards fall to their faces when he speaks the name of God--while the people around him are at their most human.

There's an entire political drama going on. Pilate the Roman pagan getting dragged into this provincial Jewish religious dispute. These Jewish leaders and Jesus providing different visions of truth to a politician who doesn't care what the truth is. There's extremely sharp political back-and-forth between the Roman and the Jewish authorities--the Pharisees trying to force Pilate's hand by saying that everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar, then Pilate backing them into proclaiming Caesar as their king and twisting the knife of pettiness by labeling Jesus as the Jewish king in four different languages while He hangs on the cross.

Petty, personal, political human drama taking up all their attention.

And meanwhile, God is dying.

[kwisatzworld]

Perhaps it is precisely Valentino’s precociousnes—reflected in his high-pitched voice, almost feminine face, and slender frame—that has captivated, or even unsettled, a society growing older, where people remain apprentices well into their thirties. The boy—almost a child—who began to dominate nearly ten years ago, quickly surpassing the painfully slow maturation process that was far too sluggish for him, had an almost Mozart-like effect: doubly scandalous in an era and a country of Salieris, where rigid hierarchies, faded codes, and youth are made to age before their time.

Rossi’s biographical speed—becoming a global star before he even turned twenty—evokes the pace of past generations, rich with youthful stars like James Dean, Hendrix, or Jim Morrison, whose lives flared up like shooting stars. Valentino is indeed drawn to this: he loves Morrison, fascinated by the energetic, voracious, and dangerous rush toward one’s destiny, in the classic canon of an audacious and overwhelming existentialism (which, in his case, overwhelms mostly others).

In a recent interview, as if offering a counterbalance, Rossi described himself as very patient, someone who takes his time with important decisions—reflective and cautious. This self-assessment seems particularly relevant to his future as a driver, especially given his strong interest in transitioning to F1 and Ferrari, which on paper would mark a prestigious step forward in a racer’s career. And yet, he seems hesitant, perhaps pulling back for once, as if sensing that the hyper-professionalism of F1 would promote him to adulthood in an irreversible way, tearing him away from his anarchic, provincial roots.

For Valentino, the real charm seems to be in winning and earning beyond measure while still remaining, at heart, a kid—one of the few young champions in the gerontocratic West, a boy king who can look down on everyone without having to wear a tie.

Briatore’s recent snub—essentially saying, “let him stay a child on two wheels, this is a world for serious people”—gave unconscious voice to the fear that the old have of the young. Even Alonso, the youngest world champion in F1 history, seems like Valentino’s grandfather when standing next to him. It’s not about age, but symbols. Right now, F1 simply cannot represent even a fraction of the brash, untamed youthfulness that Valentino embodies on the stage of show business.

[talonabraxas]

"Splendid You rise in the lightland of the sky, O living Aten, creator of life ! You have dawned in the eastern lightland. You fill every land with your beauty." -Great Hymn to the Aten, 1-4.

Aten/Aton Talon Abraxas

Ancient Egyptian Aten: Sun God And Creator Deity Symbols: sun disk, heat and light of the sun Cult Center: Akhetaten (Tel El-Amarna) Aten was a being who represented the god or spirit of the sun, and the actual solar disk. He was depicted as a disk with rays reaching to the earth. At the end of the rays were human hands which often extended the ankh to the pharaoh. Aten's origins are unclear and he may have been a provincial Sun-god worshipped in one of the small villages near Heliopolis. Aten was called the creator of man and the nurturing spirit of the world. In the Book of the Dead, Aten is called on by the deceased, "Hail, Aten, thou lord of beams of light, when thou shinest, all faces live." It is impossible to discuss Aten without mentioned his biggest promoter, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten. Early in his reign, Akhenaten worshipped both Amon (the chief god in Thebes at the time) and Aten. The first as part of his public duties, the latter in private. When he restored and enlarged the temple of Aten first built by his father Amenhotep III, relations between him and priests of Amon became strained. The priests were a major power in Egypt and if another god became supreme they would lose their own prestige. Eventually, relations became so strained that Akhenaten decided to built his own capital by the Nile, which he called, "Akhetaten", the Horizon of the Aten. At Akhetaten, Akhenaten formed a new state religion, focusing on the worship of the Aten. It stated that Aten was the supreme god and their were no others, save for Akhenaten himself. It has been said that Akhenaten formed the first monotheistic religion around Aten. However, this is not the case. Akhenaten himself was considered to be a creator god and like Aten was born again every day. Aten was only accessible to the people through Akhenaten because Akhenaten was both man and part of the cosmos. Akhenaten systematically began a campaign to erase all traces of the old gods, especially Amon. He erased the name of Amon from the temples and public works. He even went so far as to erase his own father's cartouche because the word "Amon" was featured in it. Even the word "gods" was unacceptable because it implied there were other deities besides Aten. It is clear that the Egyptian people never accepted their king's religion and view of the world. Even at his own capital, Akhetaten, amulets featuring Bes and Tauret have been found. Following Akhenaten's death, Atenism died rapidly. Mostly because the people never really believed in it and also because Akhenaten's successors did all they could to erase Akhenaten and Aten from the public eye. Eventually, Akhetaten became abandoned and the name "Akhenaten" conjured the dim memory of a "heretic king."

[gracehosborn]

Captain Alexander Hamilton: A Timeline

As Alexander Hamilton’s time serving as Captain of the New York Provincial Company of Artillery is about to become my main focus within The American Icarus: Volume I, I wanted to put a timeline together to share what I believe to be a super fascinating period in Hamilton's life that’s often overlooked. Both for anyone who may be interested and for my own benefit. If available to me, I've chosen to hyperlink primary materials directly for ease. My main repositories of info for this timeline were Michael E. Newton's Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton and The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series on Founders Online, and the Library of Congress, Hathitrust, and the Internet Archive. This was a lot of fun to put together and I can not wait to include fictionalizations of all this chaos in TAI (literally, 20-something chapters are dedicated to this) hehehe....

Because context is king, here is a rundown of the important events that led to Alexander Hamilton receiving his appointment as captain:

Preceding Appointment - 1775:

February 23rd: The Farmer Refuted, &c. is first published in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer. The publication was preceded by two announcements, and is a follow up to a string of pamphlet debate between Hamilton and Samuel Seabury that had started in the fall of 1774. The Farmer Refuted would have wide-reaching effects.

April 19th: Battles of Lexington and Concord — The first shots of the American War for Independence are fired in Lexington, Massachusetts, and soon followed by fighting in Concord, Massachusetts.

April 23rd: News of Lexington and Concord first reaches New York. [x] According to his friend Nicholas Fish in a later letter, "immediately after the battle of Lexington," Hamilton "attached himself to one of the uniform Companies of Militia then forming for the defense of the Country by the patriotic young men of this city." It is most likely that Hamilton enlisted in late April or May of 1775, and a later record of June shows that Hamilton had joined the Corsicans (later named the Hearts of Oak), alongside Nicholas Fish and Robert Troup (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pg. 127; for Fish's letter, Newton cites a letter from Fish to Timothy Pickering, dated December 26, 1823 within the Timothy Pickering Papers of the Massachusetts Historical Society).

June 14th: Within weeks of his enlistment, Hamilton's name appears within a list of men from the regiments throughout New York that were recommended to be promoted as officers if a Provencal Company should be raised (pp. 194-5, Historical Magazine, Vol 7).

June 15th: Congress, seated in Philadelphia, establishes the Continental Army. George Washington is unanimously nominated and accepts the post of Commander-in-Chief. [x]

Also on June 15th: Alexander Hamilton’s Remarks On the Quebec Bill: Part One is published in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer.

June 22nd: The Quebec Bill: Part Two is published in James Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer.

June 25th: On their way to Boston, General Washington and his generals make a short stop in New York City. The Provincial Congress orders Colonel John Lasher to "send one company of the militia to Powle's Hook to meet the Generals" and that Lasher "have another company at this side (of) the ferry for the same purpose; that he have the residue of his battalion ready to receive" Washington and his men. There is no confirmation that Alexander Hamilton was present at this welcoming parade, however it is likely, due to the fact that the Corsicans were apart of John Lasher's battalion. [x]

Also on June 25th: According to a diary entry by one Ewald Shewkirk, a dinner reception was held in Washington's honor. It is unknown if Hamilton was present at this dinner, however there is no evidence to suggest he could not have been (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pg. 129; Newton cites Johnston, Henry P. The Campaigns of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn, Vol. 2, pg. 103).

August 23-24th: According to his friend Hercules Mulligan decades later in his “Narrative” (being a biographical sketch, reprinted in the William & Mary Quarterly alongside a “Narrative” and letters from Robert Troup), Hamilton and himself took part in a raid upon the city's Battery with a group composed of the Corsicans and some others. They managed to haul off a good number of the cannons down in the city Battery. However, the Asia, a ship in the harbor, soon sent a barge and later came in range of the raiding party itself, firing upon them. According to Mulligan, “Hamilton at the first firing [when the barge appeared with a small gun-crew] was away with the Cannon.” Mulligan had been pulling this cannon, when Hamilton approached and asked Mulligan to take his musket for him, taking the cannon in exchange. Mulligan, out of fear left Hamilton’s musket at the Battery after retreating. Upon Hamilton’s return they crossed paths again and Hamilton asked for his musket. Being told where it had been left in the fray, “he went for it, notwithstanding the firing continued, with as much unconcern as if the vessel had not been there.”

September 14th: The Hearts of Oak first appear in the city records. [x] Within the list of officers, Fredrick Jay (John Jay’s younger brother), is listed as the 1st Lieutenant, and also appears in a record of August 9th as the 2nd Lieutenant of the Corsicans. This, alongside John C. Hamilton’s claims regarding Hamilton’s early service, has left historians to conclude that either the Corsicans reorganized into the Hearts of Oak (this more likely), or members of the Corsicans later joined the Hearts of Oak.

December 4th: In a letter to Brigadier General Alexander McDougall, John Jay writes “Be so kind as to give the enclosed to young Hamilton.” This enclosure was presumably a reply to Hamilton’s letter of November 26th (in which he raised concern for an attack upon James Rivington’s printing shop), however Jay’s reply has not been found.

December 8th: Again in a letter to McDougall, Jay mentions Hamilton: “I hope Mr. Hamilton continues busy, I have not recd. Holts paper these 3 months & therefore cannot Judge of the Progress he makes.” What this progress is, or anything written by Hamilton in John Holt’s N. Y. Journal during this period has not been definitively confirmed, leaving historians to argue over possible pieces written by Hamilton.

December 31st: Hamilton replies to Jay’s letter that McDougall likely gave him around the 14th [x]. Comparing the letters Hamilton sent in November and December I will likely save for a different post, but their differences are interesting; more so with Jay’s reply having not been found.

These mentionings of Hamilton between Jay and McDougall would become important in the next two months when, in January of 1776, the New York Provincial Congress authorized the creation of a provincial company of artillery. In the coming weeks, Hamilton would see a lot of things changing around him.

Hamilton Takes Command - 1776:

February 23rd: During a meeting of the Provincial Congress, Alexander McDougall recommends Hamilton for captain of this new artillery company, James Moore as Captain-Lieutenant (i.e: second-in-command), and Martin Johnston for 1st Lieutenant. [x]

February-March: According to Hercules Mulligan, again in his “Narrative”, "a Commission as a Capt. of Artillery was promised to" Alexander Hamilton "on the Condition that he should raise thirty men. I went with him that very afternoon and we engaged 25 men." While it is accurate that Hamilton was responsible for raising his company, as acknowledged by the New York Provincial Congress [later renamed] on August 9th 1776, Mulligan's account here is messy. Mulligan misdates this promise, and it may not have been realistic that they convinced twenty-five men to join the company in one afternoon. Nevertheless, Mulligan could have reasonably helped Hamilton recruit men between the time he was nominated for captancy and received his commission.

March 5th: Alexander Hamilton opens an account with Alsop Hunt and James Hunt to supply his company with "Buckskin breeches." The account would run through October 11th of 1776, and the final receipt would not be received until 1785, as can be seen in Hamilton's 1782-1791 cash book.

March 10th: Anticipating his appointment, Hamilton purchases fabrics and other materials for the making of uniforms from a Thomas Garider and Lieutenant James Moore. The materials included “blue Strouds [wool broadcloth]”, “long Ells for lining,” “blue Shalloon,” and thread and buttons. [x]

Hamilton later recorded in March of 1784 within his 1782-1791 cash book that he had “paid Mr. Thompson Taylor [sic: tailor] by Mr Chaloner on my [account] for making Cloaths for the said company.” This payment is listed as “34.13.9” The next entry in the cash book notes that Hamilton paid “6. 8.7” for the “ballance of Alsop Hunt and James Hunts account for leather Breeches supplied the company ⅌ Rects [per receipts].” [x]

Following is a depiction of Hamilton’s company uniform!

First up is an illustration of an officer (not Hamilton himself) as seen in An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Uniforms of The American War For Independence, 1775-1783 Smith, Digby; Kiley, Kevin F. pg. 121. By the list of supplies purchased above, this would seem to be the most accurate depiction of the general uniform.

Here is another done in 1923 of Alexander Hamilton in his company's uniform:

March 14th: The New York Provincial Congress orders that "Alexander Hamilton be, and he is hereby, appointed captain of the Provincial company of artillery of this Colony.” Alongside Hamilton, James Gilleland (alternatively spelt Gilliland) is appointed to be his 2nd Lieutenant. “As soon as his company was raised, he proceeded with indefatigable pains, to perfect it in every branch of discipline and duty,” Robert Troup recalled in a later letter to John Mason in 1820 (reprinted alongside Mulligan’s recollections in the William & Mary Quarterly), “and it was not long before it was esteemed the most beautiful model of discipline in the whole army.”

March 24th: Within a pay roll from "first March to first April, 1776," Hamilton records that Lewis Ryan, a matross (who assisted the gunners in loading, firing, and spounging the cannons), was dismissed from the company "For being subject to Fits." Also on this pay roll, it is seen that John Bane is listed as Hamilton's 3rd Lieutenant, and James Henry, Thomas Thompson, and Samuel Smith as sergeants.

March 26th: William I. Gilbert, also a matross, is dismissed from the company, "for misbehavior." [x]

March-April: At some point between March and April of 1776, Alexander Hamilton drops out of King's College to put full focus towards his new duties as an artillery captain. King's College would shut down in April as the war came to New York City, and the building would be occupied by American (and later British) forces. Hamilton would never go back to complete his college degree.

April 2nd: The Provincial Congress having decided that the company who were assigned to guard the colony's records had "been found a very expensive Colony charge" orders that Hamilton "be directed to place and keep a proper guard of his company at the Records, until further order..." (Also see the PAH) According to historian Willard Sterne Randall in an article for the Smithsonian Magazine, the records were to be "shipped by wagon from New York’s City Hall to the abandoned Greenwich Village estate of Loyalist William Bayard." [x]

Not-so-fun fact: it is likely that this is the same Bayard estate that Alexander Hamilton would spend his dying hours inside after his duel with Aaron Burr 28 years later.

April 4th: Hamilton writes a letter to Colonel Alexander McDougall acknowledging the payment of "one hundred and seventy two pounds, three shillings and five pence half penny, for the pay of the Commissioned, Non commissioned officers and privates of [his] company to the first instant, for which [he has] given three other receipts." This letter is also printed at the bottom of Hamilton’s pay roll for March and April of 1776.

April 10th: In a letter of the previous day [April 9th] from General Israel Putnam addressed to the Chairmen of the New York Committee of Safety, which was read aloud during the meeting of the New York Provincial Congress, Putnam informs the Congress that he desires another company to keep guard of the colony records, stating that "Capt. H. G. Livingston's company of fusileers will relieve the company of artillery to-morrow morning [April 10th, this date], ten o'clock." Thusly, Hamilton was relieved of this duty.

April 20th: A table appears in the George Washington Papers within the Library of Congress titled "A Return of the Company of Artillery commanded by Alexander Hamilton April 20th, 1776." The Library of Congress itself lists this manuscript as an "Artillery Company Report." The Papers of Alexander Hamilton editors calendar this table and describe the return as "in the form of a table showing the number of each rank present and fit for duty, sick, on furlough, on command duty, or taken as prisoner." [x]

The table, as seen above, shows that by this time, Hamilton’s company consisted of 69 men. Reading down the table of returns, it is seen that three matrosses are marked as “Sick [and] Present” and one matross is noted to be “Sick [and] absent,” and two bombarders and one gunner are marked as being “On Command [duty].” Most interestingly, in the row marked “Prisoners,” there are three sergeants, one corporal, and one matross listed.

Also on April 20th: Alexander Hamilton appears in General George Washington's General Orders of this date for the first time. Washington wrote that sergeants James Henry and Samuel Smith, Corporal John McKenny, and Richard Taylor (who was a matross) were "tried at a late General Court Martial whereof Col. stark was President for “Mutiny"...." The Court found both Henry and McKenny guilty, and sentenced both men to be lowered in rank, with Henry losing a month's pay, and McKenny being imprisoned for two weeks. As for Smith and Taylor, they were simply sentenced for disobedience, but were to be "reprimanded by the Captain, at the head of the company." Washington approved of the Court's decision, but further ordered that James Henry and John McKenny "be stripped and discharged [from] the Company, and [that] the sentence of the Court martial, upon serjt Smith, and Richd Taylor, to be executed to morrow morning at Guard mounting." As these numbers nearly line up with the return table shown above, it is clear that the table was written in reference to these events. What actions these men took in committing their "Mutiny" are unclear.

May 8th: In Washington's General Orders of this date, another of Hamilton's men, John Reling, is written to have been court martialed "for “Desertion,” [and] is found guilty of breaking from his confinement, and sentenced to be confin’d for six-days, upon bread and water." Washington approved of the Court's decision.

May 10th: In his General Orders of this date, General Washington recorded that "Joseph Child of the New-York Train of Artillery" was "tried at a late General Court Martial whereof Col. Huntington was President for “defrauding Christopher Stetson of a dollar, also for drinking Damnation to all Whigs, and Sons of Liberty, and for profane cursing and swearing”...." The Court found Child guilty of these charges, and "do sentence him to be drum’d out of the army." Although Hamilton was not explicitly mentioned, his company was commonly referred to as the "New York Train of Artillery" and Joseph Child is shown to have enlisted in Hamilton's company on March 28th. [x]

May 11th: In his General Orders of this date, General Washington orders that "The Regiment and Company of Artillery, to be quarter’d in the Barracks of the upper and lower Batteries, and in the Barracks near the Laboratory" which would of course include Alexander Hamilton's company. and that "As soon as the Guns are placed in the Batteries to which they are appointed, the Colonel of Artillery, will detach the proper number of officers and men, to manage them...." Where exactly Hamilton and his men were staying prior to this is unclear.

May 15th: Hamilton appears by name once more in General George Washington’s General Orders of this date. Hamilton’s artillery company is ordered “to be mustered [for a parade/demonstration] at Ten o’Clock, next Sunday morning, upon the Common, near the Laboratory.”

May 16th: In General Washington's General Orders of this date, it is written that "Uriah Chamberlain of Capt. Hamilton’s Company of Artillery," was recently court martialed, "whereof Colonel Huntington was president for “Desertion”—The Court find the prisoner guilty of the charge, and do sentence him to receive Thirty nine Lashes, on the bare back, for said offence." Washington approved of this sentence, and orders "it to be put in execution, on Saturday morning next, at guard mounting."

May 18th: Presumably, Hamilton carried out the orders given by Washington in his General Orders of May 16th, and on the morning of this date oversaw the lashing of Uriah Chamberlain at "the guard mounting."

May 19th: At 10 a.m., Hamilton and his men gathered at the Common (a large green space within the city which is now City Hall Park) to parade before Washington and some of his generals as had been ordered in Washington's General Orders of May 15th. In his Sketches of the Life and Correspondence of Nathanael Greene (on page 57), William Johnson in 1822 recounted that, (presumably around or about this event):

It was soon after Greene's arrival on Long Island, and during his command at that post, that he became acquainted with the late General Hamilton, afterwards so conspicuous in the councils of this country. It was his custom when summoned to attend the commander in chief, to walk, when accompanied by one or more of his aids, from the ferry landing to head-quarters. On one of these occasions, when passing by the place then called the park, now enclosed by the railing of the City-Hall, and which was then the parade ground of the militia corps, Hamilton was observed disciplining a juvenile corps of artillerist, who, like himself, aspired to future usefulness. Greene knew not who he was, but his attention was riveted by the vivacity of his motion, the ardour of his countenance, and not less by the proficiency and precision of movement of his little corps. Halt behind the crowd until an interval of rest afforded an opportunity, an aid was dispatched to Hamilton with a compliment from General Greene upon the proficiency of his corps and the military manner of their commander, with a request to favor him with his company to dinner on a specified day. Those who are acquainted with the ardent character and grateful feelings of Hamilton will judge how this message was received. The attention never forgotten, and not many years elapsed before an opportunity occurred and was joyfully embraced by Hamilton of exhibiting his gratitude and esteem for the man whose discerning eye had at so early a period done justice to his talents and pretensions. Greene soon made an opportunity of introducing his young acquaintance to the commander in chief, and from his first introduction Washington "marked him as his own."

Michael E. Newton notes that William Johnson never produced a citation for this tale, and goes on to give a brief historiography of it (Johnson being the first to write about this). While it is possible that General Greene could have sent an aide-de-camp to give his compliments to Hamilton after seeing his parade drill, there is no certain evidence to suggest that Greene introduced Hamilton to George Washington. Newton also notes that "John C. Hamilton failed to endorse any part of the story." (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pp. 150-152).

May 26th: Alexander Hamilton writes a letter to the New York Provincial Congress concerning the pay of his men. Hamilton points out that his men are not being paid as they should be in accordance to rules past, and states that “They do the same duty with the other companies and think themselves entitled to the same pay. They have been already comparing accounts and many marks of discontent have lately appeared on this score.” Hamilton further points out that another company, led by Captain Sebastian Bauman, were being paid accordingly and were able to more easily recruit men.

Also on May 26th: the Provencal Congress approved Hamilton’s request, resolving that Hamilton and his men would receive the same pay as the Continental artillery, and that for every man he recruited, Hamilton would receive 10 shillings. [x]

May 31st: Captain Hamilton receives orders from the Provincial Congress that he, “or any or either of his officers," are "authorized to go on board any ship or vessel in this harbour, and take with them such guard as may be necessary, and that they make strict search for any men who may have deserted from Captain Hamilton’s company.” These orders were given after "one member informed the Congress that some of Captain Hamilton’s company of artillery have deserted, and that he has some reasons to suspect that they are on board of the Continental ship, or vessel, in this harbour, under the command of Capt. Kennedy." Unfortunately, I as of writing this have been unable to find any solid information on this Captain Kennedy to better identify him, or his vessel.

June 8th: The New York Provincial Congress orders that Hamilton "furnish such a guard as may be necessary to guard the Provincial gunpowder" and that if Hamilton "should stand in need of any tents for that purpose" Colonel Curtenius would provide them. It is unknown when Hamilton's company was relieved of this duty, however three weeks later, on June 30th, the Provincial Congress "Ordered, That all the lead, powder, and other military stores" within the "city of New York be forthwith removed from thence to White Plains." [x]

Also on June 8th: the Provincial Congress further orders that "Capt. Hamilton furnish daily six of his best cartridge makers to work and assist" at the "store or elaboratory [sic] under the care of Mr. Norwood, the Commissary."

June 10th: Besides the portion of Hamilton's company that was still guarding the colony's gunpowder, it is seen in a report by Henry Knox (reprinted in Force, Peter. American Archives, 4th Series, vol. VI, pg. 920) that another portion of the company was stationed at Fort George near the Battery, in sole command of four 32-pound cannons, and another two 12-pound cannons. Simultaneously, another portion of Hamilton's company was stationed just below at the Grand Battery, where the companies of Captain Pierce, Captain Burbeck, and part of Captain Bauman's manned an assortment of cannons and mortars.

June 17th: The New York Provincial Congress resolves that "Capt. Hamilton's company of artillery be considered so many and a part of the quota of militia to be raised for furnished by the city or county of New-York."

June 29th: A return table, reprinted in Force, Peter's American Archives, 4th Series, vol. VI, pg. 1122 showcases that Alexander Hamilton's company has risen to 99 men. Eight of Hamilton's men--one bombarder, two gunners, one drummer, and four matrosses--are marked as being "Sick [but] present." One sergeant is marked as "Sick [and] absent" and two matrosses are marked as "Prisoners."

July 4th: In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress approves the Declaration of Independence.

July 9th: The Continental Army gathers in the New York City Common to hear the Declaration read aloud from City Hall. In all the excitement, a group of soldiers and the Sons of Liberty (who included Hercules Mulligan) rushed down to the Bowling Green to tear down an equestrian statue of King George III, which they would melt into musket balls. For a history of the statue, see this article from the Journal of the American Revolution.

Also on July 9th: the New York Provincial Congress approve the Declaration of Independence, and hereafter refer to themselves as the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York. [x]

July 12th: Multiple accounts record that the British ships Phoenix and Rose are sailing up the Hudson River, near the Battery, when as Hercules Mulligan stated in a later recollection, "Capt. Hamilton went on the Battery with his Company and his piece of artillery and commenced a Brisk fire upon the Phoenix and Rose then passing up the river. When his Cannon burst and killed two of his men who I distinctly recollect were buried in the Bowling Green." Mulligan's number of deaths may be incorrect however. Isac Bangs records in his journal that, "by the carelessness of our own Artilery Men Six Men were killed with our own Cannon, & several others very badly wounded." Bangs noted further that "It is said that several of the Company out of which they were killed were drunk, & neglected to Spunge, Worm, & stop the Vent, and the Cartridges took fire while they were raming them down." In a letter to his wife, General Henry Knox wrote that "We had a loud cannonade, but could not stop [the Phoenix and Rose], though I believe we damaged them much. They kept over on the Jersey side too far from our batteries. I was so unfortunate as to lose six men by accidents, and a number wounded." Matching up with Bangs and Knox, in his own journal, Lieutenant Solomon Nash records that, "we had six men cilled [sic: killed], three wound By our Cannons which went off Exedently [sic: accidentally]...." A William Douglass of Connecticut wrote to his wife on July 20th that they suffered "the loss of 4 men in loading [the] Cannon." (as seen in Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pg. 142; Newton cites Henry P. Johnston's The Campaigns of 1776 in and around New York and Brooklyn, vol. 2, pg. 67). As these accounts cobberrate each other, it is clear that at least six men were killed. Whether these were all due to Hamilton's cannon exploding is unclear, but is a possibility. Hamilton of course was not punished for this, but that is besides the point.

One of the men injured by the explosion of the cannon was William Douglass, a matross in Hamilton's company (not to be confused with the William Douglass quoted above from Connecticut). According to a later certificate written by Hamilton on September 14th, Douglass "faithfully served as a matross in my company till he lost his arm by an unfortunate accident, while engaged in firing at some of the enemy’s ships." The Papers of Alexander Hamilton editors date Douglass' injury to June 12th, but it is clear that this occurred on July 12th due to the description Hamilton provides.

July 26th: Hamilton writes a letter to the Convention of the Representatives (who he mistakenly addresses as the "The Honoruable The Provincial Congress") concerning the amount of provisions for his company. He explains that there is a difference in the supply of rations between what the Continental Army and Provisional Army and his company are receiving. He writes that "it seems Mr. Curtenius can not afford to supply us with more than his contract stipulates, which by comparison, you will perceive is considerably less than the forementioned rate. My men, you are sensible, are by their articles, entitled to the same subsistence with the Continental troops; and it would be to them an insupportable discrimination, as well as a breach of the terms of their enlistment, to give them almost a third less provisions than the whole army besides receives." Hamilton requests that the Convention "readily put this matter upon a proper footing." He also notes that previously his men had been receiving their full pay, however under an assumption by Peter Curtenius that he "should have a farther consideration for the extraordinary supply."

July 31st: The Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York read Hamilton's letter of July 26th at their meeting, and order that "as Capt. Hamilton's company was formally made a part of General Scott's brigade, that they be henceforth supplied provisions as part of that Brigade."

A Note On Captain Hamilton’s August Pay Book:

Starting in August of 1776, Hamilton began to keep another pay book. It is evident by Thomas Thompson being marked as the 3rd lieutenant that this was started around August 15th. The cover is below:

For unknown reasons, the editors of The Papers of Alexander Hamilton only included one section of the artillery pay book in their transcriptions, being a dozen or so pages of notes Hamilton wrote presumably after concluding his time as a captain on some books he was reading. The first section of the book (being the first 117 image scans per the Library of Congress) consists of payments made to and by Hamilton’s men, each receiving his own page spread, with the first few pages being a list of all men in the company as of August 1776, organized by surname alphabetically. The last section of the pay book (Image scans 181 to 185) consists of weekly company return tables starting in October of 1776.

As these sections are not transcribed, I will be including the image scans when necessary for full transparency, in case I have read something incorrectly. Now, back to the timeline....

August 3rd: John Davis and James Lilly desert from Hamilton's company. Hamilton puts out an advertisement that would reward anyone who could either "bring them to Captain Hamilton's Quarters" or "give Information that they may be apprehended." It is presumed that Hamilton wrote this notice himself (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pp. 147-148; for the notice, Newton cites The New-York Gazette; and the weekly Mercury, August 5, 12, and September 2nd, 1776 issues).

August 9th: The Convention of the Representatives resolve that "The company of artillery formally raised by Capt. Hamilton" is "considered as a part of the number ordered to be raised by the Continental Congress from the militia of this State, and therefore" Hamilton's company "hereby is incorporated into Genl. Scott's brigade." Here, Hamilton would be reunited with his old friend, Nicholas Fish, who had recently been appointed as John Scott's brigade major. [x]

August 12th: Captain Hamilton writes a letter to the Convention of the Representatives concerning a vacancy in his company. Hamilton explains that this is due to “the promotion of Lieutenant Johnson to a captaincy in one of the row-gallies, (which command, however, he has since resigned, for a very particular reason.).” He requests that his first sergeant, Thomas Thompson, be promoted as he “has discharged his duty in his present station with uncommon fidelity, assiduity and expertness. He is a very good disciplinarian, possesses the advantage of having seen a good deal of service in Germany; has a tolerable share of common sense, and is well calculated not to disgrace the rank of an officer and gentleman.…” Hamilton also requested that lieutenants James Gilleland and John Bean be moved up in rank to fill the missing spots.

August 14th: The Convention of the Representatives, upon receiving Hamilton’s letter of August 12th, order that Colonel Peter R. Livingston, "call upon [meet with] Capt. Hamilton, and inquire into this matter and report back to the House."

August 15th: Colonel Peter R. Livingston reports back to the Convention of the Representatives that, "the facts stated by Capt. Hamilton are correct..." The Convention thus resolves that "Thomas Thompson be promoted to the rank of a lieutenant in the said company; and that this Convention will exert themselves in promoting, from time to time, such privates and non-commissioned officers in the service of this State, as shall distinguish themselves...." The Convention further orders that these resolutions be published in the newspapers.

August ???: According to Hercules Mulligan in his "Narrative" account, Alexander Hamilton, along with John Mason, "Mr. Rhinelander" and Robert Troup, were at the Mulligan home for dinner. Here, Mulligan writes that, after Rhineland and Troup had "retired from the table" Hamilton and Mason were "lamenting the situation of the army on Long Island and suggesting the best plans for its removal," whereupon Mason and Hamilton decided it would be best to write "an anonymous letter to Genl. Washington pointing out their ideas of the best means to draw off the Army." Mulligan writes that he personally "saw Mr. H [Hamilton] writing the letter & heard it read after it was finished. It was delivered to me to be handed to one of the family of the General and I gave it to Col. Webb [Samuel Blachley Webb] then an aid de Champ [sic: aide-de-camp]...." Mulligan expresses that he had "no doubt he delivered it because my impression at that time was that the mode of drawing off the army which was adopted was nearly the same as that pointed out in the letter." There is no other source to contradict or challenge Hercules Mulligan's first-hand account of this event, however the letter discussed has not been found.

August 24th: Alexander Hamilton helped to prevent Lieutenant Colonel Herman Zedwitz from committing treason. On August 25th, a court martial was held (reprinted in Force, Peter. American Archives, 5th Series, vol. I, pp. 1159-1161) wherein Zedwitz was charged with "holding a treacherous correspondence with, and giving intelligence to, the enemies of the United States." In a written disposition for the trial, Augustus Stein tells the Court that on the previous day [this date, August 24th] Zedwitz had given him a letter with which Stein was directed "to go to Long-Island with [the] letter [addressed] to Governour Tryon...." Stein, however, wrote that he immediately went "to Captain Bowman's house, and broke the letter open and read it. Soon after. Captain Bowman came in, and I told him I had something to communicate to the General. We sent to Captain Hamilton, and he went to the General's, to whom the letter was delivered." By other instances in this court martial record, it is clear that Stein had meant Captain Sebastian Bauman (and to this, Zedwitz's name is also spelled many different times throughout this record), which would indicate that the "Captain Hamilton" mentioned was Alexander Hamilton, Bauman's fellow artillery captain. Bauman was the only captain serving by that name in the army at this time (see Heitman, Francis B. Historical Register of the Officers of the Continental Army during the War of the Revolution, pg. 92). It could be possible that Alexander Hamilton personally delivered this letter into Washington's hands and explained the situation, or that he passed it on to one of Washington's staff members.

August 27th: Battle of Long Island — Although Alexander Hamilton was not involved in this battle, for no primary accounts explicitly place him in the middle of this conflict, it is significant to note considering the previous entry on this timeline.

May-August: According to Robert Troup, again in his 1821 letter to John Mason, he had paid Hamilton a visit during the summer of 1776, but did not provide a specific date. Troup noted that, “at night, and in the morning, he [Hamilton] went to prayer in his usual mode. Soon after this visit we were parted by our respective duties in the Army, and we did not meet again before 1779.” This date however, may be inaccurate, for also according to Troup in another letter reprinted later in the William & Mary Quarterly, they had met again while Hamilton was in Albany to negotiate the movement of troops with General Horatio Gates in 1777.

September 7th: In his General Orders of this date, General Washington writes that John Davis, a member of Alexander Hamilton's company who had deserted in early August, was recently "tried by a Court Martial whereof Col. Malcom was President, was convicted of “Desertion” and sentenced to receive Thirty-nine lashes." Washington approved of this sentence, and ordered that it be carried out "on the regimental parade, at the usual hour in the morning."

September 8th: In his General Orders of this date, Washington writes that John Little, a member of "Col. Knox’s Regt of Artillery, [and] Capt. Hamilton’s Company," was tried at a recent court martial, and convicted of “Abusing Adjt Henly, and striking him”—ordered to receive Thirty-nine lashes...." Washington approved of this sentence, and ordered it, along with the other court martial sentences noted in these orders, to be "put in execution at the usual time & place."

September 14th: Hamilton writes a certificate to the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York regarding his matross, William Douglass, who “lost his arm by an unfortunate accident, while engaged in firing at some of the enemy’s ships” on July 12th. Hamilton recommends that a recent resolve of the Continental Congress be heeded regarding “all persons disabled in the service of the United States.”

September 15th: On this date, the Continental Army evacuated New York City for Harlem Heights as the British sought control of the city. According to the Memoirs of Aaron Burr, vol. 1, General Sullivan’s brigade had been left in the city due to miscommunication, and were “conducted by General Knox to a small fort” which was Fort Bunker Hill. Burr, then a Major and aide-de-camp to General Israel Putman, was directed with the assistance of a few dragoons “to pick up the stragglers,” inside the fort. Being that Knox was in command of the Army’s artillery, Hamilton’s company would be among those still at the fort. Major Burr and General Knox then had a brief debate (Knox wishing to continue the fight whereas Burr wished to help the brigade retreat to safety). Aaron Burr at last remarked that Fort Bunker Hill “was not bomb-proof; that it was destitute of water; and that he could take it with a single howitzer; and then, addressing himself to the men, said, that if they remained there, one half of them would be killed or wounded, and the other half hung, like dogs, before night; but, if they would place themselves under his command, he would conduct them in safety to Harlem.” (See pages 100-101). Corroborating this account are multiple certificates and letters from eyewitnesses of this event reprinted in the Memiors on pages 101-106. In a letter, Nathaniel Judson recounted that, “I was near Colonel Burr when he had the dispute with General Knox, who said it was madness to think of retreating, as we should meet the whole British army. Colonel Burr did not address himself to the men, but to the officers, who had most of them gathered around to hear what passed, as we considered ourselves as lost.” Judson also remarked that during the retreat to Harlem Heights, the brigade had “several brushes with small parties of the enemy. Colonel Burr was foremost and most active where there was danger, and his con-duct, without considering his extreme youth, was afterwards a constant subject of praise, and admiration, and gratitude.”

Alexander Hamilton himself recounted in later testimony for Major General Benedict Arnold’s court martial of 1779 that he “was among the last of our army that left the city; the enemy was then on our right flank, between us and the main body of our army.” Hamilton also recalled that upon passing the home of a Mr. Seagrove, the man left the group he was entertaining and “came up to me with strong appearances of anxiety in his looks, informed me that the enemy had landed at Harlaam, and were pushing across the island, advised us to keep as much to the left as possible, to avoid being intercepted….” Hercules Mulligan also recounted in his “Narrative” printed in the William & Mary Quarterly that Hamilton had “brought up the rear of our army,” and unfortunately lost “his baggage and one of his Cannon which broke down.” [x]

September ???: As can be seen in Hamilton's August 1776-May 1777 pay book, while stationed in Harlem Heights (often abbreviated as "HH" in the pay book), nearly all of Hamilton's men received some sort of item, whether this be shoes, cash payments, or other articles.

October 4th: A return table for this date appears in Alexander Hamilton’s pay book, in the back. These return tables are not included in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton for unknown reasons.

The table, as seen above, provides us a snapshot of Hamilton’s company at this time, as no other information survives about the company during October. His company totaled to 49 men. Going down the table, two matrosses were “Sick [and] Present,” one bombarder, four gunners, and six matrosses were marked as “Sick [and] absent,” and two matrosses were marked as “On Furlough.” Interestingly, another two matrosses were marked as having deserted, and two matrosses were marked as “Prisoners.”

October 11th: In Hamilton’s pay book, below the table of October 4th, another weekly return table appears with this date marked.

The return table, as seen above, again records that Hamilton’s company consisted of 49 men. Reading down the table, two matrosses were marked as “Sick [and] Present,” one bombarder and four matrosses were marked as “Sick [and] absent,” and one captain-lieutenant [being James Moore], one sergeant, and two matrosses were marked as being “On Furlough.”

To the right of the date header, in place of the usual list of positions, there is a note inside the box. The note likely reads:

Drivers. 2_ Drafts_l?] 9_ 4 of which went over in order to get pay & Cloaths & was detained in their Regt [regiment]

Drafts were men who were drawn away from their regular unit to aid another, and it’s clear that Hamilton had many men drafted into his company. This note tells us that four of these men were sent by Hamilton to gather clothing for the company, and it is likely that they had to return to their original regiment before they could return the clothing. This, at least, makes the most sense (a huge thank you to @my-deer-friend and everyone else who helped me decipher this)!! In the bottom left-hand corner of the page, another note is present, however I am unable to decipher what it reads. If anyone is able, feel free to take a shot!

October 25th: Another weekly returns table appears in Hamilton’s company pay book. Once more, this table of returns was not transcribed within The Papers of Alexander Hamilton.

The table, as seen above, shows that Hamilton’s company still consisted of 49 men. Reading down the table, it can be seen that one matross and one drummer/fifer were “Sick [but] present,” and one sergeant, two bombarders, one gunner, and four matrosses were marked as “Sick [and] absent.” Interestingly, one matross was noted as being “Absent without care”. Two matrosses were listed as “Prisoners” and again two matrosses were listed as having “Deserted.”

Underneath the table, a note is written for which I am only able to make out part. It is clear that two men from another captain’s company were drafted by Hamilton for his needs.

October 28th: Battle of White Plains — Like with Long Island, there is no primary evidence to explicitly place Alexander Hamilton, his men, or his artillery as being involved in this battle, contrary to popular belief. See this quartet of articles by Harry Schenawolf from the Revolutionary War Journal.

November 6th: Captain Hamilton wrote another certificate to the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York regarding his matross, William Douglass, who was injured during the attacks on July 12th. This certificate is nearly identical to the one of September 14th, and again Hamilton writes that Douglass is “intitled to the provision made by a late resolve of the Continental Congress, for those disabled in defence of American liberty.”

November 22nd: As can be seen in Hamilton's pay book, all of his men regardless of rank received payments of cash, and some men articles, on this date.

December 1st: Stationed near New Brunswick, New Jersey, General Washington wrote in a report to the President of Congress, that the British had formed along the Heights, opposite New Bunswick on the Raritan River, and notably that, "We had a smart canonade whilst we were parading our Men...." Alexander Hamilton's company pay book placed he and his men at New Brunswick in around this time (see image scans 25, 28, 34, and others) making it likely that Hamilton had been present and helped prevent the British from crossing the river while the Continental Army was still on the opposite side. In his Memoirs of My Own Life, vol. 1, James Wilkinson recorded that:

After two days halt at Newark, Lord Cornwallis on the 30th November advanced upon Brunswick, and ar- Dec. 1. rived the next evening on the opposite bank of the Rariton, which is fordable at low water. A spirited cannonade ensued across the river, in which our battery was served by Captain Alexander Hamilton,* but the effects on eitlierside, as is usual in contests between field batteries only, were inconsiderable. Genei'al Washington made a shew of resistance, but after night fall decamped...

Though Wilkinson was not present at this event, John C. Hamilton similarly recorded in both his Life of Alexander Hamilton [x] and History of the Republic [x] that Hamilton was part of the artillery firing the cannonade during this event. Though there is no firsthand account of Hamilton's presence here, it is highly likely that he and his company was involved in holding off the British so that the Continental Army could retreat.

December 4th?: Either on this date, or close to it, Alexander Hamilton’s second lieutenant, James Gilleland, left the company by resigning his commission to General Washington on account of “domestic inconveniences, and other motives,” according to a later letter Hamilton wrote on March 6th of 1777.

December 5th: Another return table appears in the George Washington Papers within the Library of Congress. This table is headed, "Return of the States of part of two Companeys of artilery Commanded by Col Henery Knox & Capt Drury & Capt Lt Moores of Capt Hamiltons Com." The Papers of Alexander Hamilton editors calendar this table, and note that Hamilton's "company had been assigned at first to General John Scott’s brigade but was soon transferred to the command of Colonel Henry Knox." They also note that the table "is in the writing of and signed by Jotham Drury...." [x]

The table, as seen above, notes part of the "Troop Strength" (as the Library of Congress notes) of Captain Jotham Drury and Captain Alexander Hamilton's men. As regards Hamilton's company, the portion that was recorded here amounted to 33 men.

December 19th: Within his Warrent Book No. 2, General George Washington wrote on this date a payment “To Capn Alexr Hamilton” for himself and his company of artillery, “from 1st Sepr to 1 Decr—1562 [dollars].” As reprinted within The Papers of Alexander Hamilton.

December 25th: Within Bucks County, Pennsylvania, hours before the famous Christmas Day crossing of the Delaware River by Washington and the Continental Army, Captain-Lieutenant James Moore passed away from a "short but excruciating fit of illness..." as Hamilton would later recount in a letter of March 6th, 1777. According to Washington Crossing Historic Park, Moore has been the only identified veteran to have been buried on the grounds during the winter encampment. His original headstone read: "To the Memory of Cap. James Moore of the New York Artillery Son of Benjamin & Cornelia Moore of New York He died Decm. the 25th A.D. 1776 Aged 24 Years & Eight Months." [x] In his aforementioned letter, Alexander Hamilton remarked that Moore was "a promising officer, and who did credit to the state he belonged to...." As Hamilton and Moore spent the majority of their time physically together (and therefore leaving no reason for there to be surviving correspondence between the two), there is no clear idea of what their working relationship may have looked like.

December 26th: Battle of Trenton — Alexander Hamilton is believed to have fought in he battle with his two six-pound cannons, having marched at the head of General Nathanael Greene's column and being placed at the end of King Street at the highest point in the town. Michael E. Newton does note however that there is no direct, explicit evidence placing Hamilton at the battle, but with the knowledge of eighteen cannons being present as ordered by George Washington in his General Orders of December 25th, it is highly likely the above was the case (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pp. 179-180; Newton cites a number of sources for circumstantial evidence: William Stryker's The Battles of Trenton and Princeton, Jac Weller's "Guns of Destiny: Field Artillery In the Trenton-Princeton Campaign" [Military Affairs, vol. 20, no. 1], and works by Broadus Mitchell).

December ???: Within Hamilton’s pay book, a note appears for December on the page dedicated to Uriah Crawford, a matross in his company. See a close up of the image scan below.

The note likely reads:

To Cash [per] for attendance during sickness [ampersand?] funeral expenses —

This note would thus indicate that Crawford likely passed away sometime during the month, and a funeral was held. That Hamilton paid the expenses for the funeral is quite a telling note. Crawford was also provided a pair of stockings in December.

Final Months - 1777:

January 2nd: Battle of Assumpink Creek — Near Trenton, the Continental Army positioned itself on one side of the Assumpink Creek to face the approaching British, who sought to cross the bridge into Trenton. In a letter of January 5th to John Hancock, Washington explained that "They attempted to pass Sanpink [sic: Assumpink] Creek, which runs through Trenton at different places, but finding the Fords guarded, halted & kindled their Fires—We were drawn up on the other side of the Creek. In this situation we remained till dark, cannonading the Enemy & receiving the fire of their Field peices [sic: pieces] which did us but little damage." According to James Wilkinson, who was present at this battle, Hamilton and his cannons were present. [x] Corroborating this, Henry Knox wrote in a letter to his wife of January 7th that, "Our army drew up with thirty or forty pieces of artillery in front", and an anonymous eyewitness account which noted that "within sevnty of eighty yards of the bridge, and directly in front of it, and in the road, as many pieces of artillery as could be managed were stationed" to stop the crossing of the British (see Raum, John. History of the City of Trenton, New Jersey, pp. 173-175). Further, another eyewitness account from a letter written by John Haslet reported a similar story (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pg. 181; for Haslet's account, Newton cites Johnston, Henry P. The Campaigns of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn, Vol. 2, pg. 157). This surely would have been a sight to behold.

January 3rd: Battle of Princeton -- Overnight, the Continental Army marched to Princeton, New Jersey with a train of artillery. Once more, Alexander Hamilton was not explicitly mentioned to have been present at the battle, however with 35 artillery pieces attacking the British (see again Henry Knox's letter of January 7th), and the large role these played in the battle, there is little doubt that Hamilton and his men played a part in this crucial victory (see Newton, Michael E. Alexander Hamilton: The Formative Years, pg. 182). According to legend, one of Hamilton's cannons fired upon Nassau Hall, destroying a painting of King George II. However, this has been disproven by many different scholars and writers, including Newton.

January 20th: In a letter to his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hansen Harrison, George Washington requests Harrison to “forward the Inclosed to Captn Hamilton….” Unfortunately, the letter Washington intended to be given to Alexander Hamilton has not been found. It is believed by both the editors of Washington and Hamilton’s papers that this letter contained Washington’s request for Hamilton to join his military family.

Also on January 20th: Many of Hamilton’s men received payments of cash on this date. Alongside cash, one man, John Martim, a matross in Hamilton’s company, was paid cash “per [Lieutenant] Thompson” for his “going to the Hospital.” The hospital in particular, and the circumstances surrounding Martim’s stay are unknown. [x]

January 25th: As printed in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, an advertisement appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post directly naming Hamilton. Only one sentence, the advertisement alerts Hamilton that he “should hear something to his advantage” by “applying to the printer of this paper….” Presumably this regarded George Washington wishing to make Hamilton his newest aide-de-camp.

January 30th: Alongside cash, a greatcoat, and cash per “Doctor [Chapman?]” and a cash balance due to him, Alexander Hamilton paid his third lieutenant Thomas Thompson for gathering “sundries in Philadelphia” and for his “journey to Camp”. See close up of the image scan below. [x]

Several other later pages in the pay book indicate that Hamilton and his men were in Philadelphia at some point in January and February. It is thus plausible that Hamilton went to see the printer of the Pennsylvania Evening Post and it may be possible that Lieutenant Thompson had accompanied him and have had picked up his items while in the city, however whether or not Hamilton actually made that journey, and Thompson’s involvement are my speculation only. It is also entirely possible that Thompson's "journey to Camp" was in reference to seeing the doctor, and had picked up the "sundries" then.

March 1st: At Morristown, New Jersey, in his General Orders of this date, George Washington announces and appoints Alexander Hamilton “Aide-De-Camp to the Commander in Chief,” and wrote that Hamilton was “to be respected and obeyed as such.”

March 6th: Alexander Hamilton writes a letter to the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York regarding his artillery company for the last time. Hamilton explains a delay in writing due to having only “recently recovered from a long and severe fit of illness.” He goes on to explain the state of the company—that only two officers, lieutenants Thomas Thompson and James Bean, remained with the company and that Lieutenant Johnson "began the enlistment of the Compan⟨y,⟩ contrary to his orders from the convention, for the term of a year, instead of during the war" which, Hamilton explained, "with deaths and desertions; reduces it [the company] at present to the small number of 25 men." Hamilton then requests that Thomas Thompson be raised to Captain-Lieutenant, for Lieutenant Bean, "is so incurably addicted to a certain failing, that I cannot, in justice, give my opinion in favour of his preferment."

Remarkably, the New York Provincial Company of Artillery still survives to this day, and is the longest (and oldest) continually serving regular army unit in the history of the United States. For a deeper history of the company up to the present day, see this article from the American Battlefield Trust. The company are commonly referred to as “Hamilton’s Own” in honor of the young man who raised the company in 1776.

[gallusrostromegalus]

Bleach is full of characters who cannot fucking stand people they ostensibly work alongside. In AEIWAM, who holds the deepest, most caustic grudge(s) in Hueco Mundo and/or Soul Society?

BOY FUCKIN' HOWDY there are some deeply caustic and fucked up relationships and I dumped battery acid on the existing ones, then made up more for AEIWAM. Pick Who you want to hear about first:

Yamamoto and his Ex-Wife (OC).

Yamamoto and every single major and minor noble house, the Shiba clan, the Urahara clan, the central 46, the Punishment squad, Every Single Provincial Governor, and One Monkey Specifically.

Mayuri in General but things are particularly fucked between him and Nemu, Jizo (his zanpaktou), Captain Unohana, Kon, Kisuke Urahara, and The Actual King Of Hell.

The mans done fuckt up.

Gin is another strong contender for Worst Coworker Of All Time, esp in regards to Matsumoto and Kira, but definitely his most bizarre relationships are with Aizen and Urahara.

Speaking of Urahara, the man is a magnet for Drama, and is currently on the Shit List of... yeah, it's actually shorter to list the people Kisuke has NOT seriously pissed off at this point.

As in, among his theoretical immediate coworkers, the only people without a *specific* axe to grind with him are Matsumoto and Zaraki, and that is soley because they have not had the opportunity to work with him directly.

Yet.

If you asked Urahara to name his greatest nemesis though, he'd probably pick Don Kanonji.

In a dark horse of Drama, Retsu Unohana has recently made a discovery that's put her already-kinda-tense relationship with her medical mentor Tenjiro Kirinji in an awful new light and that is brewing into a nasty fucking brawl.

And she's only Kirinji's Second biggest Hater :)

None of the Arrancar really get along with each other, mostly because carnivores tend to be solitary and need a lot of personal space but fucking nobody likes Nnoitra.

Aizen, who hired Nnoitra, does not like Nnoitra.

You'd think his biggest hater among the arrancar would be Harribel on account of the Misogyny, but it's actually Aaroniero and Arruruerie.

...because they're not quite what they appear to be :)

Beyond the arrancar, Zaraki Kenpachi has beef with nnoitra that transcends lifetimes

Ironically, self-described self-centered asshole Grimmjow is the most social of the Arrancar, with his gang of Adjuchas followers and his extremely one-sided homoerotic rivalry with Ulquiorra and heck, he even has borderline-normal conversations with Coyote Starrk, when Coyote is awake.

Zommari and Sayzel would each beat him to death with a chiar if give half a chance, and for the same reason: Cat Hair.

Later in the Series, Grimmjow manages to move himself to the top of Yoruichi Shihon's "To Kill" list by attending the Seireitei Flower Festival.

Barragan is generally not well-liked but his most utterly seething hatred is reserved for a Roadrunner.

Speaking of Hollow-adjacent Persons, the Visoreds get along pretty well with each other, and of them Kensei and Mashiro are probably the closest, but there is Just One Thing you cannot mention around them because it will stir up a century-old and extremely bloody argument.

I'm still forming up what's going on with Yhwach and the Sternritter but DEAR GOD there is so much fucked up shit in there. Like. It's a cult there was no way this was coming out well but HOO BOY.

Lillie barro's #1 Nemesis in the Court Guards is Yachiru Kusajishi tho. She thinks he's mildly funny.

Lots of people die but the worst death so far is probably PePe Waccabrada at the hands of Retsu Unohana. He has it coming though.

Unless you count what happens to Giselle but the issue there is really that she does not die.

Definitely the most fucked up Quincy is Kanae Ishida, whose rage not even death can stop.

And of course,

Ichigo and Isshin Kurosaki

[artist-issues]

Wait, hold up. You wanna run that by me again? People are saying he didn’t deserve to be turned into a beast? When he literally was rude for no reason to that “old lady”?

Yup. Like he was just a teenager, he should be cut some slack, she was setting him up.

But it’s like

Yeah

She was setting him up because she knew he had no love in his heart. Do you know how horrible a King with no love in his heart would be when the Prince grows up? Do you know how awful the “little poor provincial town” would have it in the shadow of a Prince who reaches adulthood with the kind of character and heart that shuts old women out in the cold? The Enchantress did. So she cursed him so that he’d develop into a kind, gentle, loving man. There’s a reason the curse lasted until his twenty-first birthday. That’s adulthood. He had till then to learn to love.

And you know what else?

Of course the castle and servants would be cursed too.

That’s the Beast’s first lesson: you’re being cursed because when you have no love for anything but yourself, it’s the people closest to you who suffer for it. His household is a living object lesson for him to be faced with, day after day, for ten years, about how the consequences of your actions affect more than just you—they affect the people who depend on you. Really important lesson for the King of a kingdom to learn.

And even if that weren’t enough, which it is, don’t come griping to me about the servants being cursed for something the Prince did. Riddle me this: why is the Prince answering the door? Why isn’t a footman doing that? Why isn’t Lumiere doing that?

Why is it they’re turned into furniture instead of little beasts? Why is the first scene they’re introduced in an old MAN begging for shelter from the bitter cold, and choosing to welcome him in despite “The Master?”

Why is their big number “Be Our GUEST?”

The answers to those questions aren’t given but it’s strongly implied that, instead of doing their jobs, and instead of standing up to their Master up to and including the incident with the Enchantress, they used to just stand to the side, making no sacrifices, taking no risks.

The theme of the movie is “true love is self-sacrifice.” Hospitality is one of the most self-sacrificial practices you can engage in. You’re literally making yourself vulnerable: you’re inviting someone into your home, you’re putting their comfort before your own, you’re giving them your hard-earned food and heat and drink and time, you’re allowing them to come into your sanctuary, your safe space, and judge it while you make them comfortable. Be Our Guest, indeed! Standing up to the Master, indeed! They’ve learned their lesson by the time Belle and her father are on the scene.

The thing is, we love to try and excuse away the responsibility of the main character because we love to try and excuse away our own character flaws. Blame it on trauma. That’s not the point. The point is, for the story to work, and for the fictional kingdom to have a happy ending with a Prince who’s like that, the Beast has to grow out of his character flaws. He has a problem, and it needs solving—how he got the problem is irrelevant.

And there’s just so little chance that a Prince, who has everything in life that he could ever want and is dependent on nobody, for anything, would ever feel the need for love. Or worse, he’d never feel the need to correct himself, or change, or grow in any way. He needed to have some discipline—some MAJOR discipline, some KINGDOM-SAVING discipline—in order to even be the kind of guy that could notice a peasant girl’s self-sacrificial loving nature, much less value her and fall in love with her.

Thank goodness for the Enchantress and the Curse. Or else this fairy tale could’ve turned into the French Revolution.

[jojo-schmo]

Beauty and the Beast, but it's Metadede?

Ohohoho-!! This one really got me thinking!! :D If I had unlimited emotional bandwidth and time this could be a fun concept to explore a BUNCH! I'm a sucker for fairy tales! I'm not capable of fully developing this idea right now, but I did brainstorm a little bit!

There's some aspects of that story that I just can't think of good parallels for (Like Gaston, Belle's dad, Belle's character motivations and such). So this is more Beauty and the Beast inspired than being a perfect retelling.

Anyways, ENOUGH TALK. LET'S GO.

So when I read this ask, I immediately got slammed with a very passionate and explosive Brain Blast: Dedede as Beast!! BUT he's got an appearance inspired by King D-Mind (And Dark Mind by extension) and a beastly demeanor like his Primal form in Forgotten Land. So this is not Shadow Dedede!! Important distinction!

Like Dedede's personality in early Kirby games, he would be selfish and arrogant enough to be cursed by an Enchantress to find true love and compassion. (So the rose and its petals are still connected to this curse's time limit.) But at his core there is a being capable of love, compassion, and self-sacrifice! It just takes a bit of character development to get there!

Meta stumps me a bit more. He doesn't strike me as the kind of guy singing about how "there must be more than this provincial life..." And who would Gaston even be?? Beats me.

So instead of being a damsel from a small town with big dreams, maybe he's some kind of traveling knight or mercenary who has always worked alone. He's got a stoic demeanor that can even come off as cold since he doesn't make many meaningful connections with others. But those walls he's put up over his life are indeed capable of coming down with a little care!

You'll also have to forgive me for how little I changed Meta's design... I did this during my lunch break and all I could think of was adding some gold flourishes to his outfit- but there is definitely more potential there than I came up with!!

Why would he get stuck being Dedede's prisoner? Perhaps he bartered someone else's imprisonment for his own. Or he found himself in debt by chance to the King, or accidentally disturbed/destroyed/or damaged something important to him and has to pay with a prison sentence.

Whatever the reason, he's truly stuck living there. And they super do not get along at first. Dedede's fiery temper and Meta's colder exterior would be at odds a lot of the time.

Jumping ahead a bit, here's that scene from the original where Beast defends Belle from a bunch of wild wolves (but here they're Primal Awoofies!)

And from there, the character development continues.... Meta warms up a little and shows more emotion and vulnerability than he ever has before. Dedede cools down in turn and learns that he is worthy of affection and genuine connection... And so on and so on~

As for the supporting character roles filled by "Beast's servants," I figure most of Kirby's allies could be in this role! I just only explored Bandee and Kirby to start with.

I had trouble coming up with household object forms for them (granted I didn't invest that much time into it). So I thought about another time-sensitive form they could take that is high-stakes enough that they'd want to turn back to normal and break the curse. So I came up with the ghostly angel form that happens when you get knocked out in Kirby Fighters. :)

So there you have it! A few days worth of daydreaming for a metadede Beauty and the Beast-type story! Hehe. If anyone happens to find themselves inspired and wants to develop this further as an exercise in AU writing or just plain having fun with it, DO IT! This is my donation to the internet, lol.

...Just please share it with me. I love reading people's stories. <3

[whencyclopedia]

Louis XIV and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes

Beginning in the 16th century, Protestants in France struggled in their rapport with royal power. Protestants owed the recognition of their rights more to sovereign decrees than to genuine tolerance or religious pluralism. The realization that the monarch held the authority to revoke what had been granted led to suspicion and mistrust toward rulers. Under Louis XIV of France (r. 1643–1715), they lost the rights gained under Henry IV of France (r. 1589–1610).

Edict of Nantes Undermined

Louis XIV, known also as the Sun King (le Roi Soleil), was one of the most illustrious French kings. His reign was marked by cultural and military achievements as well as endless wars and religious intolerance. During the reign of his grandfather Henry IV, the effects of the Edict of Nantes in 1598 allowed French Catholics and Protestants to cohabitate in an uneasy peace. After the death of Henry IV in 1610, the Catholic Church and monarchy began plotting the removal of protections provided under the Edict of Nantes leading to its Revocation in 1685.

Early in Louis XIV’s reign, there was a season of religious tranquility for Protestants. With Cardinal Mazarin (l. 1601–1661) at his side, Louis XIV initially thought that strict respect for previous edicts and the refusal to grant additional rights was the most effective way to reduce the number of Protestants in his kingdom. Mazarin himself exercised tolerance in granting employment and government positions to Protestants, and he did not give satisfaction to the complaints of Catholic clergy who protested the construction of Protestant temples. A royal declaration in 1652 recognized Protestant fidelity to the Crown and promised the maintenance of the Edict of Nantes with the enjoyment of all its benefits. In 1656 this declaration was revoked and the exercise of Reformed religion was forbidden in places where it had recently been established. Provincial synods sent a delegation to present their grievances to the king who authorized them to hold a general synod in November 1659 at Loudun. The king’s representative reproached the Protestants in attendance for their insolence and announced that this would be their last general synod.

After the death of Mazarin, Louis XIV was determined to become the absolute master of his kingdom. With hostile measures, he sought to paralyze Protestant vitality and bring about conversions to Catholicism. The king reinstated the Commissions as the principal means of repression through which he sent commissioners into the provinces to investigate reported or supposed violations of the Edict of Nantes. Reformed churches were placed in an accusatory posture and had to justify their existence while Catholic Church representatives argued systematically for the closure of Reformed churches. Dozens of churches were forcibly closed in the provinces of Bas-Languedoc and the Cévennes where there were about 140,000 Protestants, or religionnaires as they were called.

Continue reading...

[caffedrine]

Hii, I could never find any posts about it, but what was the plot or main conflict of Chevalier's sequel? I still can't seem to find any spoilers on it

Weird, I could have sworn someone was working on Chevalier's sequel.

Chevalier sequel spoilers as well as Gilbert Route spoilers below.

Getting Gilbert to agree to an alliance with Rhodolite is the central plot of Chevalier's sequel. (You know, the alliance Gilbert himself suggested in the prologue? Yeah, that one)

First of all, Gilbert has two goals, a main one, and a real/hidden one.

Remember how, in all the season one routes where the princes were able to sign a peace treaty/alliance with Obsidian? Apparently, it doesn't count since only a provincial lord/military commander/town drunk signed the treaty and not the central Obsidian government. But, Gilbert is offering to sign a real peace treaty that Obsidian would be beholden to, if only the now king of Rhodolite would come to Obsidian to sign it.

So, both Leon and Chevalier have to go to Obsidian to sign the treaty (and I'm guessing Yves too in his upcoming sequel).

When they get to Obsidian, Gilbert refuses to sign the treaty (the one that he personally invited them to Obsidian to sign). Gilbert's reason is that the entirety of Obsidian nobility isn't on board with the treaty, and he wants Chevalier and Chevalier's people to win a majority of the Obsidian Nobles over to the pro-Rhodolite alliance side.

That is Gilbert's official goal, and the conflict for the first half.

And now we get Gilbert's unofficial goal - it's all about Emma. He thinks that Chevalier has hoodwinked her into marrying him, and is trying to separate them. He tries a couple of things to separate them, but in the end, he is defeated by the power of Emma and Chevalier's love and trust for each other. That is the conflict in the second half of the route.

Emma and Chevalier also start treating Gilbert's bedroom as a save point, like in a horror RPG game, so that was pretty fun too.

[davrinassan]

Five Books That Conjure Entirely New Worlds

The best-written stories can make readers feel as if they have passed through mundane states of being and been brought over to another universe.

By Jeff VanderMeer

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

Perhaps the most effervescent and elegiacal of Nabokov’s novels, Pale Fire famously consists of a long poem written by John Shade, an English professor at a small fictional college, which is explicated in extensive endnotes by his new neighbor and self-proclaimed close friend Charles Kinbote, who has come to rural Appalachia from a country he calls Zembla. The poem itself conjures up hints and glimpses of a place after death, while Kinbote’s ongoing commentary builds up a rich and detailed story about an exiled king, an assassination plot, and an unknown European land. But Kinbote’s references and allusions, over time, become more and more unreliable, and the shape of the novel reminds us that what we think of the truth is at times completely dependent on whose perspective shapes our view of events. Pale Fire opens out beyond its central verse into a wider space that asks us to decide what is fantasy, what is fact, and whose reality to live within.

Primeval and Other Times, by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

In a series of interwoven vignettes that roam from character to character, the fearless Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk explores how folklore, ritual, and strife shape the minds of the inhabitants of a village appropriately called Primeval, over a long period starting in 1914. Dreamlike and yet viscerally real, the book feels like what you might recall in that space between sleep and wakefulness, when people are more in touch with otherwise-hidden instincts and emotions; meanwhile, the roving from one point of view to another recalls the technique of the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. The author touches on key events in 20th-century Polish history while also introducing unreal phenomena, such as archangels who watch over the village and seem truly alien. You may never know what it was really like to live in a village in Poland during the period in question, but in Tokarczuk’s skillful hands you receive something both more intimate and more fulfilling: an understanding of the life of the mind in a different time.

Brodeck, by Philippe Claudel, translated by John Cullen

The past is another country, as the famous saying goes. But novels can help us enter territories otherwise closed off to us. In Brodeck, a stranger arrives in a remote French village in the mountains, disturbing the everyday existence of its inhabitants, who have secrets to hide. Brodeck, a nature wanderer who has himself returned to the village after time away, then assembles a “report” on the clash between the world the stranger brings to the villagers and the world they try to force him to accept—a disconnect that creates a dramatic, tragic conflict between the past and the present. But Brodeck’s own experiences outside the community begin to influence the telling of the tale. As the stranger suffers from the clash of two crucially different views of reality, the report becomes an indictment and a record of human folly with political undertones. By the end, Claudel’s novel is a heartbreaking and stunning work of fiction about provincialism and secrets that I think about frequently, unable to escape the unknowable place it documents in such meticulous yet compassionate detail.

The Ravicka novels, by Renee Gladman

In understated prose, Gladman’s dispatches from an imaginary city-state remake the very idea of architecture into a new concept. One of the four books in the series, Houses of Ravicka, chronicles the quest of the city comptroller to find a house that has disappeared from its set location, while an invisible house begins to appear elsewhere. Similarly, other stories set in Ravicka address odd physics, ritual, logic, and illogic in peculiar ways that nevertheless feel modern and relevant. In a sense, Gladman defamiliarizes our world to show us how it works, and her novels wrench this kind of fantastical fiction into the 21st century by referencing the mundane municipal roles often left out of other works. It’s no wonder, then, that her exploration of Ravicka has spilled into her nonfiction and visual art, because the sociological and philosophical questions she poses feel as if they require expression in other media as well.

Dark Matter, by Aase Berg, translated by Johannes Göransson

A work of phantasmagorical, erotic, postapocalyptic unease by one of Sweden’s most important poets, Dark Matter exists in a nightmare state that entangles nature and the pollution of human-built environments in unsettling ways. A hybrid composition of prose and poetry, the book has a tactile quality that colonizes you without mercy. “I now slowly fold myself like a muscle against the wet clay to press the flesh against the sleep-gland’s mouths,” Berg writes, the terrain fusing with the speaker’s body. “I will sleep now in my bird body in the down, and a bitter star will radiate eternally above the glowing face’s watercourse.” Despite the way Berg implicates the reader in what amounts to body horror, by some alchemy she ends up transforming the reader’s initial fright into feelings of febrile fascination. Berg pulls in string theory, folklore, references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and what appear to be H. R. Giger–esque flourishes, meshing them with a contaminated yet still powerful view of nature. There is no way to describe this trenchant, uncompromising view of a transformed landscape other than to continue to quote from it: “But time runs on time and starvation and the weakness carries me in across the gray regions. And the soul’s dark night will slowly be lowered through me.” This is the ultimate other world, created from broken pieces of our own.

[lemurious]

[triumvirate]

Drabbles and ficlets for @lesmis-prompts. October 21st: Triumvirate. Also on AO3

An AU for when the revolution succeeds, if only for a brief couple of years. Honestly, I was going to make it darker, with shadows of the '93 - but somehow it kept insisting on hope instead, even if it ultimately comes at a cost.

(Might turn it into a proper AU and a much longer fic one day).

The soldiers are approaching, the heavy cannons are being rolled ahead, barely visible through the smoke, and Enjolras turns back for one last encouragement to his lieutenants – and sees the crowd.

Wine-sellers and shopkeepers, lamplighters and priests, maids and seamstresses, his fellow students and professors too, and sailors on shore leave, and ladies of the night and what even looks like a policeman, just around the corner.

Gavroche shouts something unintelligible from the roof of the Musain, god only knows how he got there, perhaps his angel’s wings have sprouted a bit prematurely, but Enjolras hears the triumph in his voice, and he knows that the streets around them must be bristling with barricades, and he takes a deep breath and starts in a clear, high voice, Allons, enfants de la Patrie, holding a flag in his right arm and wrapping his left around Courfeyrac’s shoulders, who is helping Combeferre up, and the lieutenant of the National Guard is looking confusedly behind him, and the crowd roars.

They have come when called.

--

They do not even need to kill the king. He takes care of it himself, and the cleanup goes faster and smoother than in the stories they’d heard from their parents, a noble in exile is almost a rite of passage this time.

The prisons are full, but Courfeyrac has changed the laws for the treatment of all prisoners, though they don’t have enough wardens with so many being sacked from excessive use of force, and eventually he turns to the old man who’d stood side by side with Marius during the triumph, and asks for help.

They have not rolled out the guillotine yet, though they could not get around the summary executions, always held at dawn and out of sight of the citizens, and if they got drunk on wine and philosophy after the first one, shaking in each other’s hands when the memories hit, by the time they reached the eighth they got used to the minute of silence followed by a clear command and a thought sent towards the future.

They sack the ministers, but keep the lesser bureaucrats, because the country stretches far beyond Paris, and they don’t have time to take care of it all, busy as they are with the reforms. Courfeyrac’s prisons and courts and a single, unified law code is only the beginning.  

The doctors are now paying house calls in the alleys where nobody had ever seen a doctor, unless one had been signing a death certificate, and while Combeferre gets death threats daily for the taxes that he had levied to pay for them, he shrugs them off, at least in public.

Enjolras, now, Enjolras takes up the mantle of his Patria and begins to spread the revolution beyond the borders of France, and barricades rise in Vienna and in Berlin, and Rome is on fire, and Madrid is shuddering from explosions, and London is taking a lesson from its former colony.

Their friends are all helping them run the government, but in the end, it has always been the three of them. The Triumvirate, ringing through the streets, written on the walls. Courfeyrac. Combeferre. Enjolras.

--

They think of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Couthon, and swear not to take that next step towards terror, even if the rumors from Marseilles are speaking of a new king, a relative of who knows which king or emperor, returning with the army and the backing of all provincial nobles who’d only been paying taxes when the guard was stationed outside their villas to collect them.

They think of Caesar, Crassus and Pompey, and swear to keep their Republic from falling back into the hands of those who would make it an Empire. (They refuse to even consider the other Roman triumvirs; they think themselves beyond such petty warlords.)

They had found the treasury empty, and the guards and the weapons and the medicine and the schooling and the soup and the work offices all cost money, and soon the tax-wars of France are in the front pages all through the Continent. They barely sleep, and their faces are lined with perpetual care mixed with brazen determination, and their decisions are harsher and their sentences are tougher by the day, though they still would not turn on each other. The line becomes thin, sometimes, between their Triumvirate and those they have succeeded, but it hasn’t been erased yet.

They hear of war, now – only in a few districts, only a few villages at a time, but open war, paid for from abroad, and families are torn apart and houses lie in ruins, as in every war before theirs.

And yet. The epidemics have all but stopped, in a single year of a sanitation campaign. The hovels have turned into houses; small and humble, but with a window and a fireplace, and water nearby instead of a well. The bakers and the fishmongers, and so many traders they haven’t ever really thought about before their victory, are wearing new hats, because their business is booming, because suddenly everyone can afford better wares.

There is a new song in the streets of Paris, and while it is dressing down the Triumvirate in the most scathing manner possible, they know exactly who has put it together, and can hear the hope between the lines.  

--

They last a year, and then another, until the fires go out in Europe, quenched by the iron of the sword and the coin and the machine, and the skirmishes in the provinces suddenly turn into armies marching on Paris, ready to starve them if they do not give themselves up to the new king.

They have barely raised a military, they’ve simply had other preoccupations, and secretly they all agree that they’ve paid blood enough for the revolution already, even if it hasn’t been their own.

They have the daring, and the knowledge, and the kindness, to negotiate a treaty. A simple trade. The end of the war, in exchange for the three of them.

They walk outside, together, hand in hand, and the sun is blazing down on them, just like that June morning two years ago, when they knew they had won. They do not speak as they walk towards the gates, to where the new king has stationed the guards, ready with their guns. The regime will return. All through the night they sat with heavy hearts as they wrote their wills, as courageous to speak of defeat as they did of victory.

The people are lining the streets, throwing carnations under their feet. High on the rooftops, a boyish, irreverent voice starts a song, and soon the entire Paris is singing as the Triumvirate is walking to their execution, and someone has thrown a flag in their way, and Enjolras lifts it up with a smile, bright and radiant as the dawn when they walk through the gates, side by side, and barely hear the command to fire through the words still ringing in their ears.  

[fictionadventurer]

Pieces of The Man Born to Be King that are lingering in my head lately:

After Jesus heals the man born blind, he goes back to talk to him, and the blind man rhapsodizes about how beautiful it is to see the moon for the first time and is like, "Can you imagine what it must be like to see it new like this?" And then Jesus quotes Genesis because he's remembering when He created the moon!

Pilate's hearing Jesus' case and doesn't care too much about this provincial religious dispute. Then the Jewish leaders tell him that Jesus has made himself a god, and Pilate goes back to Jesus and is like, "Where are you from?" with an almost desperate fear, because a god walking the earth is a much more real possibility to a pagan.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

By Ben Johnson

Published 30 October 2020

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot!

Fireworks can be seen all over France every July 14 as the nation celebrates Bastille Day.

Across the USA some ten days earlier on the 4th of July, Americans celebrate their Independence Day.

In Britain, the words of a children’s nursery rhyme “Remember, Remember the 5th of November, Gunpowder, Treason and Plot” are chanted as fireworks fly and bonfires gradually consume a human effigy known as the ‘Guy.’

So who was this Guy? And why is he remembered so fondly 400 years after his death?

It could be said that the story started when the Catholic Pope of the day failed to recognise England’s King Henry VIII‘s novel ideas on separation and divorce.

Henry, annoyed at this, severed ties with Rome and appointed himself head of the Protestant Church of England.

Protestant rule in England was maintained and strengthened through the long and glorious reign of his daughter Queen Elizabeth I.

When Elizabeth died without children in 1603, her cousin James VI of Scotland became King James I of England.

James had not been long on the throne before he started to upset the Catholics within his kingdom.

They appear to have been unimpressed with his failure to implement religious tolerance measures, getting a little more annoyed when he ordered all Catholic priests to leave the country.

A group of Roman Catholic nobles and gentlemen led by Robert Catesby conspired to essentially end Protestant rule with perhaps the biggest ‘bang’ in history.

Their plan was to blow up the King, Queen, church leaders, assorted nobles, and both Houses of Parliament with 36 barrels of gunpowder strategically placed in the cellars beneath the Palace of Westminster.

The plot was apparently revealed when the Catholic Lord Monteagle was sent a message warning him to stay away from Parliament as he would be in danger, the letter being presented to Robert Cecil, James I’s Chief Minister.

Some historians believe that Cecil had known about the plot for some time and had allowed the plot to ‘thicken’ to both ensure that all the conspirators were caught and to promote Catholic hatred throughout the country.

And the Guy? Guy Fawkes was born in Yorkshire on 13 April 1570.

A convert to the Catholic faith, Fawkes had been a soldier who had spent several years fighting in Italy.

It was during this period that he adopted the name Guido (Italian for Guy), perhaps to impress the ladies.

What we do know is that Guido was arrested in the early hours of the morning of November 5th 1605, in a cellar under the House of Lords, next to the 36 kegs of gunpowder, with a box of matches in his pocket and a very guilty expression on his face.

Under torture, Guy Fawkes identified the names of his co-conspirators. Many of these were the relations of a Catholic gentleman, Thomas Percy.

Catesby and three others were killed by soldiers while attempting to escape.

The remaining eight were imprisoned in the Tower of London before being tried and executed for High Treason.

They experienced that quaint English method of execution, first experienced almost 300 years earlier by William ‘Braveheart’ Wallace.

They too were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

*Hanged, drawn and quartered:

Victims were dragged on a wooden hurdle behind a horse to the place of execution where they were first of all hanged, then their genitals were removed.

They were disembowelled and beheaded.

Their bodies were finally quartered, the severed pieces often displayed in public.

—

Guy Fawkes (13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in earlier centuries often called the Gunpowder Treason Plot or the Jesuit Treason, was an unsuccessful attempted regicide against King James I by a group of English Catholics led by Robert Catesby, who considered their actions attempted tyrannicide and who sought regime change in England after decades of religious persecution.

The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605, as the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which King James's nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed as the new head of state.

[paranoid-radio]

GO AWAY J-MAN I SAID I'M NOT GOING. Oh, ex-ex princeee i've got something really good for you! Oh, really?

WHAT THE FUCK IS SHE DOING HERE.

It's your lucky day, ex-ex prince, you're going to be king! King of whatever armpit of hell the king sends me to this time after she RATS us out. Yay. You told me to do the planning, your ex-ex majesty. So i've done it all for you! Your lovely sister is going to stage her own murder and we're going to help her with it. She'll run away so the both of you will never have to interact again and then you'll be crowned king. And why on EARTH would she do that? Because. And I know this is going to be VERYY difficult for you to understand because it involves someone having an authentic feeling and not acting purely out of their own self interest, but.. i'm in love. And I can't be with them here! So, to be safe I will do whatever it takes.

...For HIM?

NOT JASON DUMBASS, MADDOX?? If you even remember who they are. Oh, god.. This brings us to what you have to do, darling. Gallantly break out the mage from the prison. ABSOLUTELY NOT. It's your fault they're in there in the first place! What do you mean? You don't know? You've recruited him to your new coup without telling him why the old one failed. I WAS GOING TO GET AROUND TO IT.

Two years ago, this DUMBASS decided to kill the king! For very good reasons. Well, either way, he decided to rope in Maddox who was just quietly practicing magic and working at an Inn. THEY APPROACHED ME THEY WANTED MAGIC TO BE LEGAL AGAIN!! EITHER WAY.. As they were getting preparations ready to ward the entire palace and kill the king in one perfectly effective spell, THIS ONE decided he was just too impatient and stormed the palace himself! Getting Maddox locked in the dungeons and himself sent to a cushy provincial town TO FUCK AROUND FOR TWO YEARS.

Theo is this like your new tumblr-exclusive copypasta

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Since today is Charlotte Robespierre’s 163’th birthday, I thought I’d attempt something I’ve not seen anyone else yet do, which is to write a mini biography over her entire life. I’ve already translated a study from the 1960s which deals with Charlotte, but since it’s a bit all over the place and spends almost more time describing the people Charlotte had any sort of connections with rather than Charlotte herself, I decided to try to make some more sense of things by a more chronological approach.

Marie Marguerite Charlotte de Robespierre was born in Arras on February 5 1760, around half past two in the afternoon. Her baptism record, written three days later, goes as follows:

”Today is the eighth day of the month of February, the year 1760. We priests of the parish of Saint-Étienne of towns and Diocese of Arras, have supplemented the ceremonies of the baptism for a girl born around half past two in the afternoon in said parish in the legitimite marriage of maître Maximilien-Barthélemy-François de Robespierre, lawyer at the Provincial Council of Artois, and of demoiselle Jacqueline-Margueritte Carraut, her father and mother; she was delivered by us parish priest the day after her birth, six of the same month and year as above, with the permission of the bishopric dated the same day signed by Le Roux, vicar general, and below, by ordinance Péchena. The godfather was master Charles-Antoine de Gouve, adviser to the King and his attorney for the town and city of Arras, subdelegate of the intendant of Flanders and Artois, in the department of Arras, of the parish of Saint-Jean in Ronville, and the godmother demoiselle Marie-Dominique Poiteau, widow of Sieur François Isambart, procurator to the said provincial council of Artois, of the parish of Saint-Aubert, who gave her the name Marie-Marguerite-Charlotte, and who signed with us the parish priest, and the father here present, the same act on the day and year mentioned above. The child was born on the fifth. Marie Dominique Poiteau     De Gouve Derobespibrre     Willart, parish priest of Saint-Etienne.”

That Charlotte wasn’t baptisted until three days after her birth may be a sign that her parents for a moment feared for her life, considering Charlotte’s three siblings — the older Maximilien (born 1758), and younger Henriette (1761) and Augustin (1763) — all were baptised the same days they had been born.

Charlotte would later recall the memory of her mother Jacqueline (1735) with fondness. ”Oh! Who would not keep the memory of this excellent mother!” she wrote in her memoirs. ”She loved us so! Nor could Maximilien recall her without emotion: every time that, in our private interviews, we spoke of her, I heard his voice alter, and I saw his eyes soften. She was no less of a good wife than a good mother.” But they did not get to keep her for long — on July 4 1764 Jacqueline gave birth to a baby who didn’t make it past his first twenty-four hours alive, and was buried in the Saint-Nicaise cemetery without having received a name. She was not to survive him for much longer, twelve days later she died as well, a few days before her twenty-ninth birthday. The funeral held the following day was, according to the mortuary act, attended by Jacqueline’s brother Augustin and Antoine-Henri Galbaut, Knight of Saint-Louis, assistant major of the Citadel, but not by her husband. In her memoirs, Charlotte reported that Jacqueline’s death had been ”a lightning strike to the heart” for him — ”He was inconsolable. Nothing could divert him from his sorrow; he no longer pleaded, nor occupied himself with business; he was entirely consumed with chagrin. He was advised to travel for some time to distract himself; he followed this advice and left: but, alas! We never saw him again; the pitiless death took him as it had already taken our mother.” 

Different documents tell us that the father actually didn’t leave Arras until December 1764, five months after Jacqueline’s death, after which he sporadically appeared in his hometown, sometimes for months at a time. The last known stay is from 1772. It is nevertheless probable that he no longer was in a state to look after his children after the death of his wife, and therefore, as Charlotte recounts in her memoirs, quickly handed them over to different relatives. Charlotte and Henriette, seperated by an age gap of less than two years, were therefore sent to live with their two unmarried paternal aunts, Henriette and Eulalie de Robespierre. According to contemporary Abbé Proyart, who knew the family, the aunts ”lived in a great reputation for piety.” Maximilien and Augustin, the latter still with his wetnurse, were in their turn taken in by their maternal grandparents. According to Charlotte, the loss of their parents had left a big mark on the former:

”He was totally changed. Before that point he had been, like all children of his age, flighty, unruly, rash; but since from this time he saw himself, in the quality of eldest, as the head of the family, he became poised, reasonable, laborious; he spoke to us with a sort of imposing gravity; if he joined in our games, it was to direct them. He loved us tenderly, and there were no caresses that he did not lavish on us […] He had been given pigeons and sparrows which he took the greatest care of, and close to which he often came to pass the moments which he did not consecrate to his studies.”

The children were reunited every Sunday, during which Maximilien would show his sisters his drawings and place his sparrows and pigeons into their cupped hands. One time, Charlotte and Henriette begged him to let them have one of his birds, and after much hesitation he gave in, much to their joy. Unfortunately, some days later the girls forgot the pigeon in the garden during a stormy night, by which it perished. When he found out about it Maximilien’s tears flowed, and he rained reproaches on Charlotte and Henriette and refused to give his birds to them when he left to study in Paris. ”It was sixty years ago,” Charlotte writes in her memoirs, ”that by a childish flightiness I was the cause of my elder brother’s chagrin and tears: and well! My heart bleeds for it still; it seems to me that I have not aged a day since the tragic end of the poor pigeon was so sensitive to Maximilien, such that I was affected by it myself.”

On December 30 1768, Charlotte was sent off to Maison des Sœurs Manarre, — “a pious foundation for poor girls, who may be admitted from the age of nine to eighteen, to be fed, brought up under some good mistress of virtue and to improve oneself in lacing and sewing or in another thing which one will judge useful; to learn to read and write until they are able to serve and earn a living,” situated just across the border in Tournai (modern-day Belgium). She was actually a few months too young to be enrolled, but an exeption was made in her favor, obtained by the influence of her godfather Charles-Antoine de Gouve. Two years later Charlotte was joined at the convent school by Henriette, who in her turn was enrolled without yet having a scolarship. Perhaps this is a sign that their relatives were struggling to provide for the four orphans and thus had to send them away as quickly as possible. On October 1769, Maximilien was enrolled at the College of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, his taste for study having awarded him with a scholarship to the prestigious school, while Augustin in his turn was sent off to the College of Duoai. The children were thus dispersed and no longer saw anything of each other, except for in the summers when they were reunited in Arras. According to Charlotte these were days of great joy that passed too quickly, even if many of these years were also ”marked by the death of something cherished.” In 1770, their paternal grandmother died, in 1775 their maternal grandmother and in 1778 their maternal grandfather. 1777 saw the death of their father, who at that point was living in Munich, but it’s unknown if Charlotte and her relatives actually found out about it or not. Finally, on March 5 1780, Henriette was buried, a little more than two months after her eighteenth birthday. According to Charlotte, the death of the sister had a big impact on Maximilien, it rendered him ”sad and melancholy” and he wrote a poem in her honor. She does not, on the other hand, report how the death affected her, Henriette undeniably being the family member she had spent the most time together with… Nevertheless, she did not get a chance to say goodbye, as the names of neither her nor her brothers feature on the mortuary act of Henriette or any of the other dead relatives.

One year after Henriette’s death, Maximilien graduated from Louis-le-Grand, nine days after his twenty-third birthday. Now a fully trained lawyer, he returned to Arras to work as such. We don’t know when Charlotte left the convent school, but she soon enough joined her older brother. Augustin, however, Charlotte continued to see very little of, as Maximilien arranged for him to take over his scholarship and started his studies at Louis-le-Grand on November 3 1781. He didn’t return until 1787.

The siblings had obtained half of the 8242 livres from when their late grandfather’s brewery was sold to their maternal uncle Augustin in 1778, but they were still in a rough financial situation. In 1768 their father had resigned from any inheritance whatsoever from his mother ”both for me and my children,” a wish he had then repeated both in 1770 and 1771. In 1766, he had also borrowed seven hundred livres from his sister Henriette which he never paid back, leading to some tension between Henriette, her husband and Maximilien in 1780.

Charlotte and Maximilien at first moved into a house on Rue du Saumon, but their stay there was short — already in late 1782 they were forced to leave the house to instead move in with aunt Henriette on Rue Teinturiers. According to the memoirs of Maurice-André Gaillard, Charlotte told him in 1794 that she and Maximilien weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms by Henriette’s husband — ”It’s strange that you didn’t often notice how much [his] brusqueness and formality made us pay dearly for the bread he gave us; but you must also have noticed that if indigence saddened us, it never degraded us and you always judged us incapable of containing money through a dubious action.” 

Eventually, Charlotte and Maximilien moved again, to Rue des Jésuites, and finally, in 1787, they moved from there Rue des Rapporteurs 9. There they were soon enough joined by Augustin, by now too a qualified lawyer. According to Charlotte’s memoirs, the bond between the three siblings was strong — ”good harmony would not have ceased for a sole instant to reign among us.” While her brothers worked, Charlotte took care of the house. We know the name of one of her domestics — Catherine Calmet, who helped Charlotte out for six months. When Calmet was arrested in Lille in 1788, Maximilien wrote a letter pleading in her favour: ”[Calmet’s] conduct appeared to me faultless during the time she stayed with me; I rejoice in her slightest recovery. As for the certificate you’re speaking to me about, my sister has told me that the girl brought it with her.”

The siblings had many friends. One of them was mademoiselle Dehay, who in 1782 gave Charlotte and Maximilien a cage of canaries which they both appriciated a lot. ”My sister asks me, in particular,” Maximilien wrote to her on January 22, to show you her gratitude for the kindness you have had in giving her this present, and all the other feelings you have inspired in her.” Mademoiselle Dehay would later also do other animal related favors for the two. ”Is the puppy you are raising for my sister as sweet as the one you showed me when I passed through Béthune?” Maximilien asked her in 1788. ”Whatever it looks like, we receive it with distinction and pleasure.” 

Charlotte leaves a long list of Maximilien’s closest friends in her memoirs. Of those included there, important for her story as well is her brother’s fellow lawyer Antoine Buissart, ”intensely estimable savant” and his wife Charlotte. The couple lived on rue du Coclipas, a ten minute walk from Rue des Rapporteurs, and would become close with all three siblings. Another one of Maximilien’s colleagues that would play an important role in Charlotte’s life was Armand Joseph Guffroy, who, like Charlotte, witnessed Maximilien’s uneasiness when it came to the death penalty while the two worked as judges together.

Then there was the family — maternal uncle Augustin Carraut who with his wife Catherine Sabine (1740) had had four children — Augustin Louis Joseph (1762), Antoine Philippe (1764), Jean-Baptiste Guislain (1768) and Sabine Josephe (1771). The two paternal aunts Eulalie and Henriette had married in 1776 and 1777 respectively — Henriette to Gabriel-François Durut, doctor of medicine in Arras at the College d’Oratoire, Eulalie to Robert Deshorties, merchant and royal notary in Arras. Deshorties had five children from his previous marriage — two sons and three daughters. One of the daughters had according to Charlotte been courting Maximilien since 1786 or 1787. ”She loved him and was loved back. […] Many times it had been talk of marriage, and it is very probable Maximilien would have wedded her, if the the suffrage of his fellow citizens had not removed him from the sweetness of private life and thrown him into a career in politics.” However, if such plans existed, they were soon broken up by the revolution, and the step-cousin instead got engaged to another lawyer, Léandre Leducq, who she married on August 7 1792.

Charlotte was perhaps also finding love. Joseph Fouché was a science professor from Nantes, a year older than herself, who had joined her uncle Durut at the College of Arras in 1788. ”Fouché”, Charlotte writes in her memoirs, ”was not handsome, but but he had a charming wit and was extremely amiable. He spoke to me of marriage, and I admit that I felt no repugnance for that bond, and that I was well enough disposed to accord my hand to he whom my brother had introduced to me as a pure democrat and his friend.” But somehow, this engagement too ran out into the sand, and Fouché got married to Bonne Jeanne Coiquaud in 1792.

Life changed on April 26 1789, when Maximilien was elected as a deputy for the Estates General and settled for Paris for an indefinite period of time. Letters from Augustin to the family friend Antoine Buissart reveal that the he went to visit his brother in September 1789, as well as from September 1790 to March 1791. Charlotte may not have been so fond of Augustin’s trips, ”My sister must be very cross with me,” Augustin wrote to Buissart on November 25 1790, ”but she easily forgets, that consoles me, I will try to bring her what she wants.” Charlotte herself couldn’t or wouldn’t join him — ”I did not see [Maximilien] for the duration of the Constituent Assembly,” she affirms in her memoirs. In November 1791, after the closing of said assembly, Maximilien made a visit back to Arras, Charlotte, Augustin and Charlotte Buissart meeting him at the coach depot in Bapaume. In her memoirs, Charlotte could still remember the pleasure of getting to embrace her brother after not having seen him for two years. However, Maximilien’s stay was short, and on November 27 he was back in Paris to never see his hometown again.

Maximilien, like Augustin, frequently wrote long letters to Buissart, telling him about the situation developing in the capital. He did however never ask him to say hello to his siblings in them, nor do we have any conserved letters adressed from him to them. Charlotte still affirms that ”we wrote to each other often, and [Maximilien] gave me the most emphatic testimony of friendship in his letters. “You (vous) are what I love the most after the patrie,” he told me.” According to Paul Villiers, who claimed to have been Maximilien’s secretary for seven months in 1790, the latter also sent part of his deputy’s salary to ”a sister in Arras, whom he had a lot of affection of for.”

But despite the extra money, Charlotte and Augustin were having a hard time. “We are in absolute destitution,” the latter wrote to Maximilien in 1790, ”remember our unfortunate household.” Joseph Lebon, a former priest soon to be mayor of Arras, wrote to Maximilien on August 28 1792 that “the bearer of this letter, Démouliez, has planned arrangements with your brother, to procure for him the execrable silver mark.” They also had to deal with the loss of some more loved ones, as Henriette and Eulalie, the aunts that had had the raising of Charlotte and her sister, both died in 1791. 

Even if Charlotte was unable to go to Paris with her younger brother, she was still politically active on a local level. This is shown through a letter dated April 9 1790 which she sent Maximilien:

”We’ve just received a letter from you, dear brother, dated April 1, and today it is the 9th. I don’t know if this delay is the fault of the person to whom you gave it. Please send it to us directly next time. At the moment, I’ve just learned that one is happy with the patriotic contribution. M. Nonot, always a good patriot, has just told me this news with this one which he has from M. de Vralie and which greatly formalizes those who love liberty. I don't know if you know that a whip-round was made about four months ago for the relief of the poor in the town. Each citizen contributed to it according to his faculties. Today the municipal officers are of the opinion that the whip-round should continue for another three months. There are many people who no longer want to pay. They give the reason that the poor should not be fed idle, that they should be made to work demolishing the rampart of the town. The mayor, who apparently knew that one would refuse to pay, said that if one refused to pay, he would obtain authorization from the National Assembly and tax himself what must be payed. If M. Nonot is not mistaken, for the remark is so ridiculous that I cannot persuade myself that it is true, M. de Fosseux will be busy, for there are those who will refuse on purpose in order to see what that will result in. I don't know if my brother has forgotten to tell you about Madame Marchand. We fell out with her! I took the liberty of telling her what the good patriots must have thought of her paper, and what you thought of it. I reproached her for her affectation of always putting infamous notes for the people, etc. She got angry, she maintained that there were no aristocrats in Arras, that she knew all the patriots, that only the hotheads found her paper aristocratic. She says a lot of nonsense to me and since then she no longer sends us her paper. Take care, dear brother, to send what you promised me. We are still in great trouble. Farewell, dear brother, I embrace you with the greatest tenderness. If you could find a position in Paris that suits me, if you knew one for my brother, because he will never be anything in this country. I am not sending you this letter by post in order to give the person who gives it to you the opportunity of getting to know you, which he has long wanted.”

However, contrary to her prediction that Augustin ”would never be something,” her younger brother was in fact elected to the council of administration of Pas-de-Calais in 1791, and in August 1792 prosecutor-syndic of the commune of Arras and president of les Amis de la Constitution. Finally, one month later, on September 16, Augustin was elected to fill a seat in France’s new government body the National Convention.

Thus, Charlotte’s hopes of going to Paris were finally coming true, as this time she was not left behind when Augustin once again set off for the capital. The first evidence of their arrival is from October 5, when Augustin’s name is first mentioned in the debates of the Jacobin Club in Paris. However, it’s possible Charlotte went to Paris still earlier, as she in her memoirs claims to have stood witness to a conversation between her older brother and his friend Jérôme Pétion ”a few days” after the Paris prison massacres between September 2-4. Maximilien would have reproached Pétion for not having interposed his authority to stop the excesses, to which the latter dryly would have replied: ”All I can tell you is that no human power could have stopped them.” Pétion also mentioned a meeting between him and Maximilien on the subject, but in his version it was rather he who accused Maximilien of doing a lot of harm — ”your denunciations, your alarms, your hatreds, your suspicions, they agitate the people; explain yourself; do you have any facts? Do you have any proof?”

Regardless, Augustin and Charlotte settled in the front of an apartment on 366 Rue Saint-Honoré, where their brother lodged since 1791. Owner of the house was one Maurice Duplay (1738), who lived there with his wife Françoise-Éleonore (1739) and their unmarried daughters Éleonore (1767/1768), Victoire (1769) and Élisabeth (1772), son Maurice (1778) and nephew Simon (1774). According to the memoirs of the youngest daughter, Élisabeth, Maximilien had become something of an additional family member — ”He was so nice! […] He had a profound respect for my father and mother; they too regarded him as a son, and we as a brother.” The letters Maximilien wrote to Maurice while on the short trip in Arras reveal that the feelings seem to have been mutual — ”Please present the testimonies of my tender friendship to Madame Duplay, to your young ladies, and to my little friend.” 

Charlotte on the other hand, soon found herself on second thoughts regarding the family, or, to be more exact, Françoise Duplay. ”I should tell the whole truth,” she writes in her memoirs, ”I have nothing but praise for the demoiselles Duplay; but I would not say the same for their mother, who did me much wrong; she looked constantly to put me in bad standing with my older brother and to monopolize him.” According to Charlotte, the family exercised an ascendancy over Maximilien — ”founded neither on wit, since Maximilien certainly had more of it than Madame Duplay, nor on great services rendered, since the family among whom my brother lived had not for some time been in a position to render them,” which her older brother was simply too kind to stand against. Before, no one had interfered with Charlotte’s management over the domestic square, but now she was subordinate to Françoise, who treated Charlotte badly — ”if I were to report everything she did to me I would fill a fat volume” — and sometimes even drove her to tears. Françoise’s daughter Élisabeth, on the contrary, wrote in her memoirs that her mother loved Charlotte a lot, never refused her anything that could please her and even treated her as a daughter of her own.

Charlotte also had a hard time getting along with Éleonore, Françoise’s oldest daughter. According to Élisabeth and Maximilien’s doctor Joseph Souberbielle, she had been ”promised,” to the latter, something which Charlotte believed to be as false as later claims of Éleonore being her brother’s mistress. ”But”, she added, ”what is certain is that Madame Duplay would have strongly desired to have my brother Maximilien for a son-in-law, and that she forget neither caresses nor seductions to make him marry her daughter. Éléonore too was very ambitious to call herself the citoyenne Robespierre, and she put into effect all that could touch Maximilien’s heart.” All of this was once again to much distress for Charlotte, and, according to her, Maximilien as well, as he had no interest whatsoever in any type of marriage.

Charlotte was however on good terms with Éleonore’s two younger sisters — Victoire and, especially, Élisabeth. ”I have nothing but praise for [Élisabeth], she was not, like like her mother and older sister, stirred up against me; many times she came to wipe away my tears, when Madame Duplay’s indignities made me cry.” Élisabeth reported back that ”I was good friends with [Charlotte], and it was a pleasure to go see her often; sometimes I even pleased myself with doing her hair and her toilette. She too seemed to have much affection for me.” Charlotte often asked Françoise for permission to bring Élisabeth with her to the Convention, something which she agreed to. It was there, on April 24 1793 that Élisabeth met her future husband Philippe Lebas, who came up and asked Charlotte who Élisabeth and her family were, after which he urged the two to come to another session. They did so, bringing sweets and oranges, Élisabeth asking Charlotte if she could offer Lebas one. During yet another session, Lebas gave Charlotte and Élisabeth a lorgnette, while Charlotte showed Lebas Élisabeth’s ring, which the latter unfortunately brought with him without returning it. Charlotte consoled Élisabeth, telling her to be calm and that she would explain to her mother of how it had happened if she was to ask. But Élisabeth didn’t get her ring back until two months later, when she and Lebas also professed their love for one another. Françoise and Maurice agreed to let them marry, however, the engagement was soon complicated by Maximilien’s old collegue Armand Joseph Guffroy. 

The lawyer had stayed in Arras at the outbreak of the revolution, authoring many pamphleths in support of the new developments. In them he often displayed radical ideas — among others things that women should have the right to be included as both electors and representatives in the new regime. He had also frequently corresponded with Maximilien about the situation in Arras (we have nine letters from 1791 conserved), before being elected to the National Convention on September 9 1792 and, like Augustin, heading to Paris in order to take a seat in the new government. Now he slandered Élisabeth to Lebas, saying that she had multiple love affairs. Élisabeth and Lebas soon discovered that he had only said so in order to get Lebas to marry his own daughter, Louise Reine, at that point already pregnant with the baby of her father’s printer. ”This malicious man was known less than favorably on more than one account,” Élisabeth bitterly stated in her memoirs, ”he knew only how to bad-mouth everyone; he was despised by all and viewed negatively by his colleagues. The Robespierre brothers had a great contempt for him…”

Six months before the marriage between Lebas and Élisabeth, Charlotte and her two brothers had dinner together with Rosalie Jullien, mother of the young Convention deputy Marc-Antoine Jullien. On February 2 1793, she wrote to her son: ”Robespierre, his brother and his sister are to dine with us today. I shall get acquainted with this patriotic family whose head has made so many friends and enemies. I am most curious to see him close up…” Eight days later, Rosalie could report that she had not been unhappy with the result: ”I was very pleased with the Robespierre family. His sister is naive and natural like your aunts. She came two hours before her brothers and we had some women’s talk. I got her to speak about their home life; it is all openness and simplicity, as with us. Her brother had as little to do with the events of August 10th as with those of September 2. He is about as suited to be a party chief as to clench the moon with his teeth. He is abstracted, like a thinker; dry, like a man of affairs; but gentle as a lamb; and as gloomy as the English poet, Young. I see that he lacks our tenderness of feeling, but I like to think that he wishes well to the human race, more from justice than from affection. Robespierre the younger is livelier, more open, an excellent patriot; but common for the spirit and of a petulance of humor which makes him make a noise unfavorable to the Mountain.”

On July 19 1793, a decree from the Committee of Public Safety tasked Augustin with the mission of going to the Army of Italy. ”It’s a painful mission,” Augustin wrote to Buissart the following day, ”I have accepted it for the good of my country; I’m convinced that I will serve it with utility, if only by destroying the calumnies with which my name has been nourished.” Perhaps Charlotte saw this mission as an opportunity also — an opportunity to escape the circumstances which her conflict with Madame Duplay had put her in and get to see new parts of the country. She asked to be brought along, which her younger brother joyfully agreed to, and the two departed together with Jean François Ricord, another representative on mission, and his wife.

Augustin was right in that the mission would be painful, something which Charlotte too would go on to carefully describe in her memoirs. On their way to the army, they made a stop in Lyon, which was currently in insurrection. Augustin and Ricord went into the Hôtel de Ville to talk to some municipal officers, while Charlotte and Madame Ricord remained in the carriage. They were soon surrounded by a growing crowd, showing them their national cockades as proof of their patriotism and asking what was said of the lyonnais in Paris. The two women answered that they knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, Augustin and Ricord conversation with the municipal officers had erupted into a quarrel, and the two representatives decided it was best both to leave Lyon as well as abandoning the main route when doing so. They set out for Manosque where they remained for two days, but their stay there, as Charlotte admitted, ”was not without danger.” They were badly regarded by the people who reconized them and had two soldiers brought along for protection. When it was time to resume the journey, said soldiers they went ahead in order to scout out the country. As the group was preparing to cross the banks of Durauce, the soldiers returned in a hurry to tell them about Marseillais armed with canons on the opposite bank. They therefore returned to Manosque from which they then went to Forcalquier without misfortune, where they were offered services and supper. But hardly had they sat down at the table after not having eaten since morning when an express from the mayor of Manosque came to tell them to take flight immidiately as the Marseillais were once again in pursuit of them. It was eleven o’clock in the evening, and the only course to take was to reach the mountains between Forcalquier and the department of Vaucluse. They took horses, since a carriage would prove useless in the mountains, and walked the whole night on horrible roads, scaling uneven cliffs where the animals had difficulty carrying them and were constantly making false steps. The next morning the group reached a village where the pastor showed them hospitality, and after having taken a few hours rest, they were on the road again, reaching Sault in the evening. After three pleasurable days spent there, they returned to Manosque, lying about being followed by six thousand troops in order to keep the situation under control. Finally, after a troublesome journey, they reached Nice in the beginning of September.

Public spirit in Nice was no better than in all of Provence, but there they at least had no counter-revolutionaries after them. The general in chief, Dumerbion, and his general staff protected Charlotte and Madame Ricord while Augustin and Jean François made frequent outings. But there was still unsafety to be reckoned with. Charlotte remembered that she and Madame Ricord stopped attending the theater after having hostile locals attempt to throw apples at them. They instead kept occupied by making shirts for the soldiers, and in the evenings they went for walks and horseback rides in the countryside. But soon, ”several journals paid by the aristocracy” back in Paris started accusing them of acting like princesses with their equestrian outings, and Maximilien wrote to let his siblings know. Augustin vetoed any more horse back rides, and Charlotte promised to abstain from riding from then on. But not long after, Madame Ricord, who according to Charlotte ”was the most frivolous and inconsiderate person in the world,” proposed they should go on yet another one. Charlotte reminded her of what her brothers had said, but Madame Ricord just laughed it off. As the coach and the horses were already prepared, Charlotte resigned and joined her on the ride.

Two days afterwards Augustin returned. When he didn’t reproach Charlotte for the carriage ride she assumed he was aware of the fact she had been forced into it. But the following day he did call her out for it, and Charlotte, feeling the need to explain herself, called Madame Ricord to testify that the ride had been her idea. To her ”surprise and indignation”, Madame Ricord, instead of telling the truth, enforced the lie that it was Charlotte that had wanted the ride and taken her with her against her will. Augustin chose to believe her, much to Charlotte’s distress. ”[Augustin] knew I was incapable of lying. Why then did he not want to believe me?” Charlotte wept much over the scene when she was alone, but refused to show anything to her brother, who didn’t speak more about the incident but kept a certain coldness in regards to Charlotte which caused her more despair. 

Then, Madame Ricord suggested to Charlotte that they should go to Grasse together, which she agreed to. But hardly had they arrived when a letter was brought to Madame Ricord. Madame Ricord told Charlotte that the letter was from Augustin and that he prayed her to return as promptly as possible to Paris. Charlotte was shocked, but nevertheless obeyed, the next morning she got into a private coach and went back to Paris.

Charlotte would later refuse to believe that Augustin had actually asked her to leave — according to her, Madame Ricord must have forged the letter and afterwards slandered her to her brother, saying that she didn’t care about him and that this was the reason for her brusque departure. But Charlotte also hints at there being something more between Madame Ricord and Augustin:

”How should one esteem a woman who knows so little of the rules of propriety and her duties as a wife to commit the gravest offenses against them? How should I have loved a person who continually compromised my younger brother with her advances, to which he believed it essential to his honor and duty not to respond? In truth, if modesty did not hold back my pen, I would say some things which would not be to Madame Ricord’s advantage.”

The memoirs of Paul Barras (1895), him too a representative to the Army of Italy at the same time as Augustin, lean in the same direction: 

”Fully convinced that women constituted a powerful aid, [Bonaparte] assiduously paid court to the wife of Ricord, knowing that she exercised great influence over Robespierre the younger, her husband's colleague. […] Robespierre the younger was particulary attached to Madame Ricord.”

If Charlotte is right and both she and Augustin fell victim to a trap set up by Madame Ricord, or if Augustin consciously sent his sister away so she wouldn’t be in the way of his love affair is something we can never know for sure…

Regardless, Charlotte returned to Paris somewhere in the fall 1793 (Mary Young, biographer of Augustin, fixes the date for her departure somewhere around October 26). According to Mauricé-André Gaillard’s memoirs, it was now that Charlotte’s grapple with Françoise and Éleonore became too much to bear, and she started persuading Maximilien that, occupying such a high rank in politics, he ought to have a home of his own. ”Maximilien recognized the fairness of my reasons,” Charlotte writes, ”but long fought my proposition that he should separate from the Duplay family, fearing to distress them.” In the end, he agreed, although hesitantly, to move into an apartment on rue Saint-Florentin. Being interrogated after thermidor, Simon Duplay revealed that Augustin too went to live there after his return from the army of Italy, although, according to Charlotte’s memoirs, he didn’t want to see his sister during his stay. Already in mid-January he was sent off on another mission. As for Maximilien, he soon enough fell ill (given his periods of illness, this most likely happened in February 1794). When Françoise came to visit, she made a great fuss over not having been informed about it. ”She said some very disobliging things to me,” writes Charlotte, ”she told me that my brother had not had all necessary care, that he would have been better cared for with her family, that he would lack nothing.” She managed to convince Maximilien into moving back to her house. ”My brother at first refused weakly; she redoubled her insistences, I should say, her obsessions. Robespierre, despite my protests, decided finally to follow her.”

Charlotte stayed behind at rue Saint-Florentin, probably feeling bitter and unloved. ”At the end of the day, should he not have considered that his preference for Madame Duplay distressed me as much at least as his refusal could have afflicted this lady? Between Madame Duplay and me should he have hesitated? Should he have sacrificed me to her?” She still went to see her brother quite assiduously — the new apartment after all only a five minute walk from the one on Rue Saint-Honoré — and sent him jams, fruit comfits or other sweets. Françoise always received her in a disgraceful (I could not use another term, Charlotte writes) manner. One time, Charlotte charged her domestic (possibly madame Delaporte) to bring Maximilien a few jars of jam. But Françoise stopped her and told her angrily: “Bring that back, I don’t want her to poison Robespierre.” Receiving news of this, Charlotte, like in the case of Augustin, chose not to tell her brother, in fear of causing him pain and provoking a scene, and instead swallowed in sadness her grief and indignation. Eventually, she too moved back to Rue Saint-Honoré, but her relationship with the Duplays hardly got any better.

But there were more things than family affairs occupying Charlotte’s mind. In an undated, anonymous letter the sender asked the receiver to inform her brother (these two are undoubtly Charlotte and Maximilien) about some pieces deposited at the Committee of Public Safety concerning Dorfeuille and Merle, two hébertists of Commune Affranchie (Lyon) and Ain and their relations with Collot d'Herbois. “The impunity still enjoyed by the counter-revolutionaries in the department of Ain raises fears that knowledge of it has been taken away from him,” the sender writes, undoubtly thinking Charlotte could have some influence over Maximilien and get him to do something about the situation.

Still more relevant is this letter, penned down on April 25 1794 and sent off to Charlotte :

”We passed through Arras without stopping; while we relayed, I acquitted myself of your commission. What has been said of your country is true; for six weeks one hundred and fifty people have been guillotined and about three thousand imprisoned. Citizens went to find a friend of your brother (Buissart); he was told: ”Only you can make the truth heard. Robespierre trusts you.” He answered them: ”How could I write, since every evening we already witness the departure of letters?” Saint-Just's report and the decree that those accused of conspiracy will be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris (the decree of 27 Germinal Year II/April 16, 1794) had given rise to some hopes; but yesterday it was published that throughout the Republic, the city of Arras alone would not enjoy the sagression of this law. It has long been agreed that a man invested with great powers does more harm than good when he is sent to his country. For a long time, we have agreed on the moral virtues of priests. What is the use of being such good theoreticians? I do not doubt that there existed in Arras counter-revolutionaries and fanatics; but terror must weigh on them alone, and the patriot must be able to rely on the impassivity of the judges and the freedom of debate and opinion. I'll spare you other details that are too atrocious to be believed, when you haven't been an eyewitness. If I had more time, I could have given you more detailed facts; I cannot tell you what I have heard from different people without having had the time to verify it. We go into the countryside tomorrow. I forgot to tell you that the prosecutor of the revolutionary tribunal is arrested and the revolutionary commissar broken. Adieu, salut et fraternité. Bruslé, employed by the citizen Richard.”

Charlotte’s hometown Arras, situated near the Belgian border with several enemy armies just a few dozen kilometers away, had since a few months back been the target of severe repression. On October 29 a Committee of Public Safety decree written by Maximilien had entrusted Joseph Lebon, Arras’ former mayor who had now become a Convention deputy, to serve as representative on mission to the department of Pas-de-Calais (of which Arras is the capital). Lebon showed great severity in dealing with offences against the revolution. Around 500 death sentences were passed in Cambrai and Arras, of which two-thirds were handed out in the latter town between March and July 1794 — a high number for an area that, unlike places like Lyon and Toulon, had never risen in revolt against Paris. One of the people most active in the repression was none other than Charlotte’s cousin Antoine-Philippe Carraut, who, according to Louis-Eùgene Poirier, amused himself with stripping, plundering and threatening the prisoners. The law of 14 frimaire had stated that all future suspects were to be tried in Paris, however, a few exceptions were made with the prisoners of Arras being one of them. It was once again Maximilien who had been the author behind the decree informing the authorities of Arras about this, dated April 19. On the same day, Lebon had issued arrests against members of the former Revolutionary Tribunal of Arras: its president Beugniet, the public prosecutor Démouliez (who, as seen above, had helped Charlotte and Augustin out financially before they moved to Paris), Gabriel Leblond, Denton and his wife. The five were taken to Paris by gendarmes on May 4 to appear before the Revolutionary Tribunal. This affair had caused great emotion in Arras. The Buissart couple had initially been positive in regards to Lebon, as shown through a letter written to Maximilien on February 2 1794, but as winter turned to spring their feelings started to cool, and on April 25 Antoine wrote to Maximilien to reproach him for his silence, claiming to have attempted to warn him for three months about what was going on in Arras.

Someone else who wasn’t fond of Lebon was Armand Joseph Guffroy, who’s position had diminished since his arrival to the Convention. On the fourth anniversity of the revolution, July 14 1793, he had founded a newspaper called le Rougyff ou le Frank en vedette, in which he had violently demanded the guillotine for anyone threatening the republic. But on March 3 1794, he had been expelled from the Jacobins after being denounced by the deputy Chasles, who called the Rougyff ”the tomb of common sense.” At the same time he had also been forced to resign from his functions as member of the Committee of General Security. Guffroy was accused of having connections with the former Marquis de Travanet, and of forcing the Revolutionary Committee of the Picques section to release Dumier, Louis XVI’s former locksmith. English letters were also found in his papers.

Guffroy, at the same time as he was expelled from the Jacobins, boldly attacked Joseph Lebon in his journal and pamphlets which he edited, printed and published himself. He was denounced by Darthé, the public prosecutor of Arras, but still wasn’t worried. On May 7, Guffroy tried to get into contact with Maximilien to try to persuade him to do something about Lebon — ”You said the other day at the Jacobins that in wanting to make virtues reign we did not want to be persecutors,” he wrote that day. ”I think you mean what you say. Why then do you protect the persecuting priest Joseph Lebon, who killed patriotism in Arras, and who made scum and crime reign there? He advised him to quickly recall Lebon and in his place send ”a firm and prudent man to restore confidence in Arras, Florent Guiot for example.” The very same day, Buissart wrote a letter to Guffroy, from which we learn that Charlotte had been in contact with both the former and the latter: “We salute the citoyenne Robespierre; my wife has just received her letter; tell her as soon as possible that I will immediately give her the clarifications she requests.” Guffroy claimed in his Secretes de Joseph Lebon et ses complices (1795) that Charlotte, along with other women, attempted to take steps in favor of the arrested deputies mentioned above:

”I was not discouraged; Leblond's sister, Demeulier's (sic) daughter, Buissart's wife, Robespierre's sister, to whom he was also almost invisible, took every means to reach him.”

Furthermore, Marc-Antoine Gaillard (1757), a friend of Charlotte’s brothers and former suitor Fouché (the latter of which he had worked together with at the College of Arras) claimed in his memoirs to have met Charlotte somewhere in May 1794 (given what we know it must have been early in the month). Gaillard had by then taken steps in favor of the magistrates of Melun, denounced by the Popular Society of the city for having signed an address to Louis XVI denouncing a demonstration of June 20, 1792. He had gone to Charlotte to hear her opinion on the subject. Charlotte would have named with great bitterness the prodigious number of very honest people dragged to the scaffold by Lebon and asked Gaillard to tell her how he had been able to save himself from prison. After Gaillard asked her for help, she raged against the Duplays:

”When my younger brother passed through Melun, the three of us were living together; I still hoped to be able to bring back Maximilien, to snatch him from the wretches who obsess over him and lead him to the scaffold. They felt that my brother would eventually escape them if I regained his confidence, they destroyed me entirely in his mind; today he hates the sister who served as his mother… For several months he has been living alone, and although lodged in the same house, I no longer have the power to approach him… I loved him tenderly, I still do… His excesses are the consequence of the domination under which he groans, I am sure of it, but knowing no way to break the yoke he has allowed himself to be placed under, and no longer able to bear the pain and the shame of to see my brother devote his name to general execration, I ardently desire his death as well as mine. Judge of my unhappiness!… But let’s return to what interests you. The addresses to the king on the events of 1792 are already far from us; it seems to me that the signatures of these addresses are persecuted less than those who protested against the day of May 31. Try to see Maximilien, you will be content; he was very glad that our younger brother saw you at Melun. On this occasion he spoke with interest of the exercises of your pupils and of the attention you had in entrusting him with presiding over them. I won’t introduce you to him, I would not succeed; I even advise you not to speak to him about me. You will be told he is out, don't believe it, insist on your visit.”

Gaillard went to the Duplays, where he was greeted by what he called ”the son of the family” (could be both Jacques-Maurice or Simon). Indeed, the first thing he was told was: ”the representative isn’t home.” Gaillard insisted and gave Jacques-Maurice/Simon a paper for him to pass to Robespierre, on which he reminded him of their former relation. After a short time, Jacques-Maurice/Simon returned, saying ”the representative didn’t know you” before violently shutting the door. Meeting up with Charlotte again, Gaillard reports her as saying:

“I prepared you for it. No one can approach my brother unless he is a friend of those Duplays, with whom we are lodging; these wretches have neither intelligence nor education, explain to me their ascendancy over Maximilien. However, I do not despair of breaking the spell that holds him under their yoke; for that I am awaiting the return of my other brother, who has the right to see Maximilien. If the discovery I just made doesn't rid us of this race of vipers forever, my family is forever lost. […] Maximilien, who makes me so unhappy, has never given a hold, as you know, in terms of delicacy. Imagiene his fury when he learns that these miserable Duplays are using his name and his credit to get themselves the rarest goods at a low price from the merchants. So while all of Paris is forced to line up at the baker's shop every morning to get a few ounces of black, disgusting bread, the Duplays eat very good bread because the Incorruptible sits at their table: the same pretext provides them with sugar, oil, soap of the first quality, which the inhabitant of Paris would seek in vain in the best shops... How my brother's pride would be humiliated if he knew the abuse that these wretches make of his name! What would become of his popularity, even among his most ardent supporters? Certainly my brother is very proud, it is in him a capital fault; you must remember, you and I have often lamented the ridicule he made for himself by his vanity, the great number of enemies he made for himself by his disdainful and contemptuous tone, but he is not bloodthirsty. Certainly he believes he can overthrow his adversaries and his enemies by the superiority of his talent.”

Afterwards, Charlotte arranged for an interview between Gaillard and Couthon. While the two men discussed the situation at hand, Charlotte and Couthon’s wife Marie stood by a window overlooking the Tuileries. But the cordial interview turned to tragedy once Gaillard exclaimed: ”Today, we are leading to the scaffold seventy unfortunates whose condemnation has no other reason than the signature of this address (to the king regarding the demonstration of June 20 1792).” Charlotte, seeing Couthon burst into fury at Gaillard’s words, threw herself upon him and held him still in the armchair he was sitting while yelling at Gaillard to escape from there and meet her up later. The two found each other at the Orangerie and walked from there to Place de la Révolution. Charlotte told Gaillard that he was a victim of the profound hypocrisy of Couthon who wanted to get to the bottom of his thoughts. But, she added, Couthon doesn’t know that he doesn’t live in Paris and probably doesn’t remember the name of the city where the accused judges sit. She therefore urged him to flee, which Gaillard also did.

If Charlotte supposed that things between her and Augustin would have patched themselves up, and that Augustin would even come to take her side in her struggle against the Duplays, as shown in Gaillard’s account, she was very wrong. In a letter to Maximilien, her younger brother wrote the following:

“My sister does not have a single drop of blood that resembles ours. I have seen and learned so much about her that I regard her as our greatest enemy. She abuses our spotless reputation to lay down the law on us and threatens to take a scandalous step in order to compromise us. We must take a decisive stand against her. We must make her leave for Arras, and thus take her away from us, a woman who causes our common despair. She would like to give us the reputation of bad brothers, her calumnies spread against us aim at this goal. I would like you to see the citoyenne La Saudraie (Augustin’s mistress), she would give you certain information on all the masks that it is interesting to know in these circumstances. A certain Saint-Félix seems to be from the clique.”

This letter is unfortunately undated, but the context allows us to fix at April-May 1794. By then, Augustin would not have seen Charlotte since January, or, if what Charlotte writes in her memoirs is true and he didn’t want to meet her during his short stay in Paris either, October. What had caused him to think this ill of his sister? Had he found out about her contacts with men that, in his and Maximilien’s eyes at least, were to be considered ”unpatriotic?” That is what Guffroy believed — ”Robespierre, speaking about me with someone, treated me like an aristocrat; he reproached his sister for frequenting a conspirator” he wrote in Secretes de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices (1795). On another occasion the same year he claimed that ”[The brothers] drove her out of their house because she did not think like they did, because she came to see my wife and because she met citizens who were sincere friends of justice and truth.”

Even if an account dated post-thermidor deserves to be treated with caution, it can nevertheless be observed that the Saint-Félix Augustin believed to have belonged to Charlotte’s ”clique” was Emmanuel Musquinet (Saint-Félix was his alias), since February 19 1794 under loose house arrest for being compromised in a case of false assignats. The arrest had caused great indignation for Hébert who spoke of “vile merchants who arrest a fine person like the friend Saint-Félix for having made the enemies of the people known.” Saint-Félix also had been a frequent visitor to the imprisoned hébertist Ronsin before the latter’s execution. His brother Musquinet-Lapagne had, according to a report dated October 24 1793, denounced Marat and Robespierre to the Popular Society of Le Havre of which he was the president. He had then been arrested in November 1793 and guillotined on March 16 1794, accused of having tried to ignite civil war between the communes of Ingouville and Le Havre, abused his functions as mayor to make home visits to the citizens of the commune and use these occasions to steal precious objects, as well as for arbitrary kidnappings. A copy of a letter written by Musquinet-Lapagne on September 6 1793, in which he attempted to justify himself, bore at the bottom the following text: ”for certified copy: Guffroy.”

On May 14, the Committee of Public Safety recalled Joseph Lebon from Arras. Robespierre was the author of the decree, but judging by its tone and content it would not appear like he was cross with Lebon after what people like Guffroy and Buissart had told him about his conduct:

”Dear Colleague,  The Committee of Public Safety needs to confer with you important objects, it does justice to the energy with which you have suppressed the enemies of the revolution, and the result of our conference will be to direct it in an even more useful way. Come as soon as possible, to return promptly to the post where you currently are.”

Lebon came back, and, after having justified his conduct, quickly set off for Arras once again, this time bringing with her none other than Charlotte. According to Guffroy, this decision was made the following way:

”Lebon returned to Paris for 24 hours. He spoke to the committee, to Lebas, to Saint-Just and to Robespierre. He was very diligent with the latter. His sister, worthy of the esteem of all good citizens, reproached him for his cruelty, he denied it, and under the pretext of making her an eyewitness, he brought Robespierre’s sister with him. Robespierre wanted to get rid of her: his correspondence proves it.”

While Guffroy’s account probably deserves to be nuanced, we can still ask ourselves if the ”more useful way” Maximilien had hinted Lebon should use his energy for was in fact the mission of bringing Charlotte back to Arras, considering how little time passed between his arrival to and departure from Paris. Was it willingly or forcibly that Charlotte boarded a carriage together with a man who she, according to Gaillard and Guffroy, had deplored of and accused of bloodlust a few days earlier? We don’t know. Nevertheless, Charlotte and Lebon reached Arras on May 17, as announced in a letter written by the deputy Darthé two days later: 

”Lebon returned from Paris the day before yesterday, the Committee of Public Safety has rendered him all the justice that he deserved and his slanderers were covered with contempt. […] He also brought with him citoyenne Robespierre.”

Charlotte’s uncle Deshorties had died in December 1792, not long after her departure for Paris, but waiting for her in Arras were Deshorties’ son Régis, brother of Maximilien’s old fiancée Anaïs, and of course Antoine and Charlotte Buissart. According to Robespierre (1935) by J.M Thompson, the house on Rue des Rapporteurs had been sold, so it’s probable Charlotte stayed with one of her friends or relatives instead.

Charlotte didn’t make known how bad the relationship with her brothers had gotten to her friends. It’s also probable she spoke ill of the Duplays once again, as a letter from Buissart to Maximilien, dated June 28, contains mistrust of them: ”This letter will be delivered to you under the address of my wife, because I do not have the greatest confidence in your secretary and in many other people that surround you. It is still friendship that makes me speak like this.” In the same letter Buissart also told Maximilien that since a month back, he, his wife and Charlotte had been insulted by one Carlier, who called the first one a conspirator and the two latter his accomplices.

Eventually Charlotte set out for Paris once again, promising step-cousin Régis Deshorties to inform him once Augustin arrived there too. She first went to Lille, where she met up with a man who then escorted her back to the capital. This was Florent Guiot, who Guffroy had suggested Robespierre should replace Lebon with in the letter cited above. Guiot had been sent to Arras by the Committee of Public Safety on November 22 1793, where he too had quickly become an enemy of Lebon. 

Charlotte’s motivation for leaving Arras is unknown, but given Buissart’s letter it is possible she felt threatened. Guffroy goes further than that and claims it was in order to evade arrest — ”Lebon had [Charlotte] denounced to the popular society of Arras, by his cutthroats, as an aristocrat. Her apparent crime, and at least the pretext for her arrest, was to have been with Payen de Neuville la Liberté, an estimable farmer, whom Lebon had guillotined, and brother of another Payen, member of the constituent assembly who had served as father and friend to Robespierre, and whom Lebon likewise had guillotined.”[…] Without Florent Guyot (sic), who brought her back to Paris, she would have been imprisoned there.” While his statement should again be treated with a grain of salt, it can nevertheless be observed that the execution date for the two mentioned Payen brothers (June 21 and 26) actually matches rather well with the time Charlotte would have departed from Arras…

She was nevertheless back in Paris by at least July 1, as a letter from the same date written by Buissart to his wife attests — ”embrace [Augustin] for me, render the same service to Maximilien and his sister.” Charlotte Buissart had she too gone to Paris together with her son in order to try and convince Maximilien to get Lebon recalled. According to Guffroy, they lived with Charlotte during their time there, although the above cited letter from Antoine is still adressed to Rue Saint-Honoré.

Charlotte had however no plans to return there, nor to go live on Rue Saint-Florentin again. Augustin was back from his last mission since at least June 28, when he’s listed as speaking at the Jacobins, and clearly had the intention of moving back into the house. We don’t know if there was a final confrontation between the two, but nevertheless, on on July 6, Charlotte sat down and authored this letter to Augustin:

”Your (votre) aversion for me, my brother, far from diminishing, as I flattered myself, has become the most implacable hatred, to the point that the mere sight of me inspires horror in you; also, I must not hope that you will ever be calm enough to listen to me, which is why I will attempt to write to you.  Crushed under the weight of my sorrow, incapable of connecting my thoughts, I will not undertake my apology. Yet, it would be so easy for me to demonstrate that I have never deserved in any way to excite this fury which blinds you, but I abandon the task of my justification to time, which unveils all perfidies, all darknesses. So, when the blindfold which covers your eyes will be torn apart, if you can distinguish the voice of remorse in the disorder of your passions, if the cry of nature can make itself heard, returned from an error which is so fatal to me, do not fear that I will ever reproach you for having guarded it for so long; I will only occupy myself with the joy of having rediscovered your heart. Ah! if you could read at the bottom of mine, you would blush for having insulted it in such a cruel manner, you would see there, with the proof of my innocence, that nothing can erase the tender attachment from it which ties me to you, and that this is the only emotion to which I relate all of my affections; without complaining about your hatred, what does it matter to me that I am hated by those who are irrelevant to me and who I despise? Their memory will never come to trouble me, but being hated by my brothers, I, for whom it is a necessity to cherish them, this is the only thing which can render me as unhappy as I am.  This passion of hatred must be atrocious, since it blinds you to the point of bringing you to slander me among my friends. Nonetheless, do not hope in your delirium to be able to make me lose the esteem of a few virtuous persons, which is the only good which remains to me, along with a pure conscience ; full of a just confidence in my virtue, I can defy you to detract it and I dare to tell you that, beside the good people who know me, you will lose your reputation rather than harming mine.  Thus, it is important to your tranquillity that I am far away from you, it is even important, as they say, to the public sake that I do not live in Paris! I still do not know what I have to do, but what seems the most urgent to me is to clear you of the sight of an odious object, also, as from tomorrow, you can return to your apartment without fearing to meet me there. I will leave from today unless you formally oppose it.  My stay in Paris should not bother you, I take care not to connect my friends to my disgrace, the misfortune which persecutes me has to be contagious, and your hatred for me is too blind in order not to fall on everyone who shows interest for me. Also, I only need a few days in order to calm the disorder of my thoughts, to decide on the place of my exile, because, in the obliteration of all of my faculties, I am in no state to take a course of action.  Therefore, I leave you since you demand it, but, in spite of your injustices, my friendship for you is so indestructible that I will not retain any bitterness from the cruel treatment which you make me endure. When, being disillusioned sooner or later, you will come to hold the feelings for me that I deserve, when shyness does not prevent you from informing me that I have recovered your friendship and, wherever I may be, may I even be beyond the seas, if I can be useful to you in anything, know how to inform me of it and I will soon be by your side.   I send you the exact summary of the expenditures which I have made since your departure for Nice. Sorrowfully, I have learned that you have singularly degraded yourself through the manner in which you have spoken of this affaire d'intérêt. Because of this, I oblige you to observe that, in all of these expenditures, there are debts for the shoemaker, the tailor, a washtub, and powder, prior to my return from Nice, you will also observe that the money that was returned to Madame Delaporte had been lent by her to René during my stay in Nice, that the 200 livres given to René are for his wages which had not been paid to him in the last year, finally, you will also distinguish postage for letters, and if you still have any doubts after this, you can share them with me, I will elucidate them, I will give all of my remaining money to you, and it this does not match my expenditures, this can only be because I have forgotten a few items.  Robespierre  PS: You will observe that the polisher is not paid, nor is the locksmith who has made a key for your secretary.   PS: You have to think that, while leaving your apartment, I will take all necessary precautions in order to not compromise my brothers. The quarter where citoyenne Laporte lives, to whose home I plan to retreat temporarily, is the place of the entire republic where I can be ignored the most.”

According to Hector Fleischmann and Albert Mathiez, Charlotte must have had someone help her write this letter, given as there are typos only in the first half of it. Both identify this person as Guffroy. Whatever the case, Charlotte left the letter in her old apartment and went to live on 200 Rue de la Réunion (today rue Beaubourg?) with Madame Delaporte (Laporte), who, as shown through the letter to Augustin, had been the siblings’ domestic while on Rue Saint-Florentin. Her husband, François Sébastien Christophe Delaporte, had recently been appointed judge for the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris, whose sessions he participated in since July 9 and forward. In his memoirs, he only had the following to say regarding Charlotte and her brothers:

”I never had relations with any member of the former government, nor with Robespierre, my wife having gotten to know his sister took her into our home, when she was proscribed by him because of her feelings which were quite opposed to his. Certainly, one could not be the friend of this implacable man, when one welcomed his enemies.”

According to the memoirs of Charlotte, she never saw her younger brother again. She found herself with Maximilien one or two more times; but then in the presence of several others, so that it was impossible for her to speak to him of personal things. She met Joseph Fouché from time to time on the Champs-Elysées, where the latter went for walks almost every day. Fouché adressed Charlotte like nothing had happened between him and Maximilien, but once Charlotte found out that he was her brother’s declared enemy she didn’t want to speak with him anymore.

Back in Arras, step-cousin Régis Deshorties wondered why Charlotte lingered with giving him information about her younger brother’s whereabouts. Confused, he wrote to Augustin on July 18 telling him: “Charlotte Robespierre had promised to inform me immediately of your arrival to the capital. Not receiving a letter from her either on this subject or on any other letter of which she should have acknowledged receipt, I imagined (as several people had assured me) that you were going to come to Arras and that this was the reason for your sister's silence.” But Charlotte was not the only person Deshorties was thinking about:

”I left Citoyenne Charlotte a memoir for you. If you see Isabelle Canone before I write to her, tell her that she will soon receive a letter from me. I must, no doubt, be very busy, since I can't find the time to reply to her last two epistles. This would be the place to tell you about my trip to Paris, if I were not quite sure that care will have been taken to inform you about it and that a citoyenne, who alone is worth more than a committee, will have attached some commentary of a half-dry playfulness to it. Be that as it may, I gave Citizene Canone a great proof of devotion, such that none of her friends, I dare say, would have wanted to do the same in the circumstances in which she found herself. However, I was sad to see that of all the people who knew of my precedent, she was the one who felt it the least. This incontestable indifference will not prevent me from being useful to her and serving her with the same zeal on all occasions, for it is in my heart to oblige the unfortunate to the fullest extent of my power. By the way she announces to me that she intends to return to Arras, I believe that she does not enter into the very business where they would have the right to express their opinion and where their advice could be of any use to her.” 

And Deshorties ended by asking Augustin to ”embrace Charlotte Robespierre and her friends for me and receive the tender greetings of your devoted fellow citizen and cordial friend.”

If Augustin received the letter, it must have been one of the very last. Nine days after it was penned down he volunteered to share his brothers fate when the latter’s arrest was issued by the Convention. The following day the two were executed along with 19 others.

This was bad news for anyone who had been allied with the brothers. The following day saw the execution of a total of 71 people declared to have been their ”accomplices.” Men were also quickly sent out to arrest other people close to the brothers — among the very first was the Duplay family, whose members were arrested on thermidor 10, 13 and 14 respectively. The person in charge of arresting Sophie and Victoire Duplay was none other than Florent Guiot, the man who had brought Charlotte back to Paris.

Charlotte herself was arrested three days after her brothers’ execution. She was by then hiding out under her mother’s name Carraut at Rue du Four, No 482 at the home of one Vincent Pierre Béguin, secretary for the commission of the representatives of the people of the Army of Italy, and his wife Marie-Joséphine. Vincent Pierre had previously been appointed by Augustin when he was in Antibes. It is likely that Charlotte got to know him during her stay in the South and that she after her return to Nice also had made made acquaintance with his wife.

The warrant states Charlotte was arrested together with many others:

”13 thermidor. Citizens Laporte, Canone, Gérard, Widow Gérard, Carraut, the Robespierre sisters. Arrest.”

The citoyenne Canone could very well be the Isabelle Canone mentioned by Régis Deshorties in his letter to Augustin.

Brought before her interrogators, Charlotte admitted who she was, while at the same time lying about her age:

”Section du Contrat-Social. The 13th of Thermidor, Year II. There was brought before us Citoyenne Carraut, who was found at Citoyenne Béguin’s in the Rue du Four, No 482, Section du Contrat-Social. She was asked her name, age, rank and residence. She replied that she was called Marie Marguerite Charlotte Robespierre, twenty-eight years of age, living on her income, and residing for about a month past at Citoyenne Laporte’s, No. 200, Rue de la Réunion.”

When interrogated, Charlotte claimed that she had been obliged to leave rue Saint-Honoré on the orders of her brothers and Madame Duplay. Madame Duplay had also reproached her for seeing revolutionaries among which was ”Guffroy, representative of the people.“ Charlotte said that ”her older brother resented her because she had the courage to let him know the danger he ran in being surrounded so badly,”  and that “the men around him were trying to deceive him.” She further added that "if she had suspected the infamous plot that was brewing, she would have denounced it rather than see her country lost.” She herself also denounced a man named Jean-Baptiste Didier, “who was for a period of time secretary to her elder brother, and that after that was appointed as juror to the Revolutionary Tribunal.” As for Delaporte, Charlotte claimed to have been unaware of the fact that he had been an appointed member of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Others arrested together with Charlotte were more blunt:

”Section du contrat social  Comité révolutionnaire  13 Thermidor, Year 2 of the Republic There appeared before us citoyennes widow Girard, residing on rue du Doyéné, section of Thulieries n. 289, and Canone, residing in the same house, arrested at the home of citoyenne Béguin, residing on rue du four Honoré. When asked what had urged them to go to citoyenne Béguin, they replied that they had learned that citoyenne Robespierre was with citoyenne Béguin and that they were going to congratulate her on the happiness she was currently enjoying when she was finally free from the infamous tyrants Robespierre who had never had another purpose but to sacrifice their sister. When asked to tell us if they knew people who more usually frequented Robespierre, they responded that they did not know the people who habitually associated with the infamous Robespierre, that they had never seen him, that they only knew their unfortunate sister;  Reading to them the protocols made of their requests and answers, they said that they contained the truth and signed:  Cannone   Widow Girard”

When Madame Béguin was interrogated, she claimed that Daillé and the juror Lebrun (Topino Lebrun) had told citoyenne Lavaux and Mérimey (Mérimet) that she should stop seeing Robespierre’s sister ”as Lebrun knew that anyone who saw her would be guillotined,” and that Fouquier-Tinville frequently went to Robespierre the older and “that one sent lists of those that one wanted to guillotined.”

We don’t know when Charlotte was released, but she was soon once again having a hard time. On November 18 1794, she wrote to her uncle Durut back in Arras the following letter. She evidently still had contacts with Antoine Buissart, who had hurried to denounce her older brother after thermidor.

28 Brumaire, year three of the French Republic  My dear uncle, I have instructed Citizen Buissart, who left here yesterday, to see you on my behalf in order to give you my news. If I had known of his departure an hour earlier I would have asked him to give you a letter which would have contained all the affections he promised to give you from me. He told me that you were in good health, and that his hasty departure from Arras had not left him time to warn you about it: I easily believed him when I did not see a letter from you, I hope you use the facility of the post office to give me news about you.  Providence always serves me very badly my dear uncle, the 400 livres note you sent me was found to be fake, a person I know who had changed it for me in time brought it back to me yesterday very affected by the affront that she had experienced; it had only been a slight accident if I had been able to give change for the note, however, the person did not want to bother me with it: she had the honesty to tell me that she would wait for the one who gave it to me to return the sum; I send it back to you in this letter so that you give it to the person who deceived you, I urge you, my dear uncle, to be very careful not to receive these counterfeit notes; and as I believe that you know them no more than I do, to have them examined before receiving them; because one is exposed to many inconveniences when one has the misfortune to present oneself with a counterfeit note and it is a loss which is very disturbing when one is not rich.  I hope you won't be long in giving me news of you. I expect from your friendship the consolations that my misfortune requires, you say yourself that one cannot expect much from men, which proves that you are of the small number of those who honor misfortune. It is in vain that I confide in Providence before making it sensitive to my pain; why leave me so mistreated by fate that there has never been on earth such a terrible position as mine, foreign to everything, I want to see my sad existence end and if I can I will drag it beyond the seas. Farewell my dear uncle, give me your news, spare your health and remember your niece who embraces you wholeheartedly.”

At some point, Charlotte was asked by Guislain Mathon (1759) commissioner of transport, to move in at his place. Mathon was him too from Arras, had been a friend of Charlotte’s brothers, and featured on ”a list of patriots with more or less talent” written by Maximilien somewhere in 1793. At first Charlotte refused his offer, but, once her situation got so bad that she lost all means of existence, she accepted it. But Mathon had him too been implicated after thermidor — the very same day as the execution of Augustin and Maximilien, a certain Godard had accused him of having “accompanied this rascal of the great Lacroix on a mission to Brussels” and to have been appointed to this position ”thanks to his childhood friend Robespierre the older.” To save her friend from the denounciation he was facing, on March 14 1795 Charlotte picked up her pen and wrote to the Committee of General Security the following letter:

”…Alas, calumny is so active, so ingenious in forging its appearances; innocence has been its victim so many times and I am so unhappy that I must suspect myself even of the most unnatural events.  I will not undertake the apology of Citizen Mathon. I will only tell you that, forced to leave my brothers, unjustly irritated against me, he had the courage to offer me an asylum with him in spite of their protests. He did not incite me into accepting it. I went to live with him when my misfortunes became greater and made me too burdensome to those who had first taken me in.  If I hadn't lost all my means of existence, I would never have exposed anyone and preferred to die rather than associate my friends with my disgrace. This is now what redoubles the horror of my situation. It is to get rid of this idea which overwhelms me that I conjure you citizens, in the name of humanity and justice, not to tolerate that those who have lavished on me the generous care of friendship are for that exposed to an unjust proscription. Seek further information from citizen Mathon and you will only find the purest patriotism and the virtues of a good man in his entire conduct.  Salut, fratérnité,  Robespierre.”

Help was coming, from none other than Guffroy who at the bottom of Charlotte’s letter wrote: ”The Committee of General Security orders that she should be left alone, as should citizen Mathon with whom she is staying, who is known by several members.” Guffroy had since the execution of Charlotte’s brothers been reinstated to the Committee of General Security. This was not the only help he would provide Charlotte with, in another, undated decree, he wrote the following:

”Guffroy, member of the Committee of General Security to his collegues:  The French people honor the unhappiness.  It is to obtain one of these acts of justice which would honor the nation, that I present the following claim:  I know that the citoyenne Caroline (sic) Robespierre, sister of the two deputies whom the sword of national justice has struck, is plunged into a state of dependence which makes her truly free soul groan. Friendship, however, has sought to soften her sorrows, but the state of destitution in which she finds herself, the deterioration of her health, caused by long sorrows, does not allow her to devote herself to assiduous work.   I am well aware of the ingratitude and injustice of her brothers towards her, while she did everything for them in the just belief that they would not abandon her. The ties of blood made it their duty, and those of gratitude made it more imperative; because I know that the Robespierres, from their mother, only had an income of 100 livres, their father who had abandoned them died in a hospital at... (the name has been left blank in the original); well, the two brothers after studying at the college of Louis Legrand (sic) sold the capital of their income to support themselves, and their generous and imprudent sister, despite the prediction of an aunt, also sold for them the capital of her 400 pounds income when it was a question of helping them get to Paris. They drove her out of their house because she did not think like they did, because she came to see my wife and because she saw citizens who were sincere friends of justice and truth. She even exposed herself to prosecution when Lebon took her to Arras, and without Florent Guyot, who brought her back to Paris, she would have been imprisoned there, because Lebon's accomplices had denounced her in their infernal club which they called popular society.  The citoyenne Robespierre had the delicate idea of ​​giving her brothers about a thousand pounds which she had saved and six silver spoons and forks, two of which, at least, belonged to her, but she didn’t even want to be suspected. She has no wealthy relative who can take her in, her good uncle, Durut, a doctor, has sent her some help.  At the moment she is staying with one of our mutual friends. She owns nothing aside from her clothes. Her sagging life, her bosom altered by grief, prevent her from making lace, on which she could make a living. She could work, but the little she does is far from procuring her even so much as bread. It seems to me to be part of the dignity and part of the justice of the Convention, to anticipate misfortune and to honor virtue in the sister of a conspirator. The nation should, in my opinion, offer her help so that she can procure furniture and a pension capable of sustaining her in the state of infirmity and languor to which grief has reduced her.  GUFFROY  I ask that the Committee of General Security be good enough to refer this memorandum to the Committee of Support with recommendation.”

A few months later, Guffroy also wrote the following decree, which was counter-signed by none other than Edme-Bonaventure Courtois, the man behind the (im)famous Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée de l’examen des papiers de Robespierre (1795).

”24 germinal, year 3 (April 13 1795)  After having received the most exact information on the patriotism of citoyenne Caroline (sic) Robespierre, the Committee declares that the results are all in her favor, that it knows that this citoyenne was persecuted by her brother and forced to leave him; that the Supervisory Committees of the sections of Paris, and the Committee of General Security have already rendered her justice, that the purity of her conduct and her civic principles stems from the Rapport de la Commission de Papiers de Robespierre made for the National Convention by the representative of the people Courtois; it therefore declares that wherever citoyenne Robespierre wishes to travel and retire, she deserves the confidence of good citizens and the protection of the constituted authorities, who are invited to lend her the aid and assistance that the purest and most civil good citizenship deserves and French loyalty must grant. The members of the Committee of General Security: Sevestre, Mathieu, Guffroy, Auguis, Thibaudeau, Lemartin, Delecloy, Perrin, Gauthier, Courtois, Monmayou, Chénier, Rovère, Clauzel.”

We don’t know if Guffroy’s idea of providing Charlotte with a pension was followed up or not. But on September 24 1803, two years after his death, we find on the other hand the following request made by ”Mademoiselle Robespierre, then residing on Rue Jacob 26”, give rise to the following decision:

“The Grand Judge will give her 600 francs once paid and 150 francs a month. Bonaparte.”

This is supplemented by a story recorded in Charlotte’s memoirs, but there the sum is much bigger. According to it, Charlotte was advised to ask for an audience with Napoleon after the latter became first consul. ”Bonaparte received me perfectly, spoke to me of my brothers in very flattering terms, and told me that he was prepared to do anything for their sister: “Speak, what do you want?” I exposed my position to him; he promised me to take it into consideration; in effect, some days later I received a certificate for a pension of 3,600 francs.” Charlotte had earlier also been friends with Napoleon’s wife Joséphine, the future empress even giving her a portrait of her in 1790 as a token of friendship. They continued to see one another after thermidor, until one day, they broke entirely, Charlotte meaning Joséphine had ”showed all the insolence of a grande dame of the court of Louis XV.”

Besides the money given by Napoleon, from an archival document we also learn that Charlotte received a “relief” of 150 francs three times during the first six months of the year XII (1803) and a relief of 200 francs on several occasions during the year XIII (1804). Finally, from February 8 1805, we find this decree, written by none other than Charlotte’s former suitor Joseph Fouché, by then Minister of Police:

Madame Collot (d’Herbois)   their titles are common Mademoiselle Robespierre   as well as their distress. Per month: 200 livres. Per year: 2400 livres. for special help.

With this pension, or to be more exact, matter of relief, Charlotte was set to live for another 29 years on Rue de la Fontaine (later rue de la Pitié and today Rue Larrey) with her ”excellent and respectable friend” Mathon and his daughter Reine-Victoire (born 1785), the latter of whom, according to Laponneraye, ”loved Charlotte like a mother.” Reine-Victoire stayed by Charlotte’s side after her father’s death in 1827. According to Pierre Joigneaux, in the 1830s, the two women occupied themselves with making underclothing together.

Perhaps Charlotte continued to hide under her mother’s lastname Carraut. According to Joigneaux and Laignelot (letter dated 1825) she also took the pseudonym of Caroline Delaroche during the Restoration. Delaroche was the name of a relative who had served as mentor for Maximilien during his first few years as a student in Paris.

Charlotte was far from universally loved. Albertine Marat, when asked about Robespierre in 1835, exclaimed: ”Oh! His sister, his sister, his bad sister!” Her hostility was confirmed by Pierre Joigneaux who wrote in Souvernirs historiques (1891) ”I recollect that, about 1833 or 1834, a sister of Marat lived on the top floor of a house on the Place Saint-Michel […] Mlle Marat disliked Robespierre’s sister, who was also still alive and in Paris, and did not associate with her. Mlle Marat had character: Charlotte Robespierre was absolutely lacking in strength of mind.” François-Vincent Raspail, the man interviewing Albertine, wrote that ”everyone knows today that [Charlotte] was the Charlotte Corday of her brothers, minus the selflessness and courage.” Likewise, Élisabeth Lebas, once Charlotte’s friend, reproached her for her name change: ”Yes, I preferred to go take in wash on a boat rather than ask assistance of our poor friends’ assassins. I feared neither death nor persecution. I was not the one who repudiated my name; it pains me to say it, but Mlle Robespierre was the one who took her mother’s name, Charlotte Carreau (sic).” Élisabeth’s son Philippe wrote in his Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l’Histore de France (1840-1845) that Charlotte ”does not blush to receive from the assassins of her brothers a pension of 6000 fr. at first, then reduced successively to 1500, which was given to her by all the succeeding governments until her death. She left memoirs which contain curious information, but where the false is too often mixed with the true.” As for the conflict between Charlotte and her mother, Élisabeth had only this to say: ”Poor mother, she thought Charlotte was as pure and sincere as her brothers. Good God, that was not the case."

By May 24 1830, it would however appear that Charlotte had gone back to her original surname, the particle included, as she used it when writing the following letter to the editor of the journal l’Universel:

”Monsieur,   In your issue of the 5th of this month, you contest the authenticity of the Memoirs of Maximilien Robespierre. In general there can be no reply to the rightness of your reasoning; but there is in this article a phrase conceived thus: “Yet the editor sought faithful documents, and, if what I have been told is true, he could have found them. An elder sister of Robespierre vegetates in Paris, in the most obscure corner of a Faubourg, and this woman is overwhelmed by age, poverty, and the weight of her dreadful name. Having bought a few rescued souvenirs from her, it was not difficult to compensate for what other biographers have omitted to rectify, errors in facts, errors in dates, etc. etc.” What you have been told, Monsieur, is not only inexact, but it is false. It is true that Maximilien Robespierre’s sister, not his eldest, but his junior by twenty months, vegetates, overwhelmed with poverty, age, and, you could have added, serious and painful infirmities, in an obscure corner of the patrie that gave her birth; but she has constantly repulsed the offers of intriguers who, for the past thirty-six years, have tried numerous times to traffic with her name; but she has sold nothing to anyone; but she had had no relation direct or indirect with the editor of her brother’s so-called Memoirs; and those who have said that Maximilien Robespierre had known need in his childhood, and that he was a choirboy in the cathedral of Arras are imposters. I regard, Monsieur, as injurious to my honor and my probity, the idea that anyone could have bought any rescued souvenirs from me. I belong to a family which has not been reproached with venality. I will bring to the tomb the name that I received from the most venerable of fathers, with the consolation that no one on earth can reproach me with a single act, in the long course of my life, which does not conform to the prescriptions of honor. As to my brothers, it is for history to pronounce definitively on them; it is for history to recognize one day whether Maximilien is really guilty of all the revolutionary excesses his colleagues accused him of after his death. I have read in the annals of Rome that two brothers were also outlawed, massacred in the public square, their bodies cast into the Tiber, their heads paid for in their weight in gold; but history does not day that their mother, who survived them, was ever blamed for having believed in their virtue.  Monsieur, I have the honor of saluting you, De Robespierre” (when this letter was published within Charlotte’s memoirs, the particle was removed).

We don’t know if Charlotte wrote this letter under the influence of Albert Laponneraye (1808). This young man had moved to Paris in 1828 to work as a private teacher, but already in 1831 he was in prison along with other republicans. He there wrote le Cours public d’Histoire de France depuis 1789 jusqu’à 1830 which appeared in 1831 and where particular tribute to Robespierre. Laponneraye was released the same year, only to again be arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. On June 27, 1833, Laponneraye was again sentenced by the Seine Court of Assizes to three months in prison and fined 50 francs for a letter written to the Proletarians from the Sainte-Pélagie on February 1, 1833.

We don’t know exactly when or how Charlotte and Laponneraye got into contact with one another. According to the latter, Charlotte wanted to get to know him after getting hold of his writings and reading the positive things he had to say about her brother. ”I will always remember the strong emotion I felt on seeing her for the first time; for her part, she was no less moved, and, unable to speak to me at first, she pressed my hands with an expression that I will never forget.” The two developed a close friendship and had long and frequent conversations. Laponneraye’s imprisonment made the interviews more rare, but Charlotte nevertheless came to visit him in the nursing home to which he’d been transferred. The one letter we have between them displays much affection. It is written by Charlotte on February 20 1834, two weeks after what would turn out to be her last birthday:

”It is not easy for me, my friend, to express to you the feeling of tenderness that you make me feel; the verbal reply I made to your lovely sister proves to you that I appreciate all its grandeur and delicacy. I repeat, you are worthy of making your offer, and you do not deserve to be refused. I therefore accept from the best, from the most human and from the most tender of sons (a thousand times happy the mother of such a son!), I accept a quarter of your offer, because I believe that that will be enough for me, given that I receive two hundred francs a year. This friend didn't promise me anything, but she is so regular in giving me her gift that I think she will continue. I shall therefore receive from him who is willing to have for me the feelings of a son, whom I regard as such, and for whom I had so much affection, I shall receive, not only with gratitude, it is a completely natural thing, but with pleasure. Receive with pleasure! this word contains everything, I believe you will be satisfied with me. A few thoughts come to me which, my friend, I must share with you. The good that you want me to enjoy will cost you trouble, work, perhaps awake hours, finally privations, and I ask you if the heart of a mother does not feel anything from making these reflections? Nevertheless, I do not deny myself of it; you no, you won't refuse me, deprive me of the means, because it is irresistible. Oh! how my brothers would have loved you! Farewell. Receive my regards for all your family, which is mine. Robespierre  A thousand kind words from Mademoiselle Mathon.”

The hard work Charlotte says Laponneraye has ahead of him may be an allusion to her memoirs, which he based on notes from and conversations with Charlotte.

Charlotte died on August 1 1834, aged 74. According to Laponneraye, she refused to have a priest visit her, saying that saying that she had practiced virtue all her life, and that she was dying with a pure and calm conscience. Four o’clock in the afternoon, she passed away in Reine-Victoire’s arms. It was the latter who announced Charlotte’s death the very same day:

”Paris, August 1, 1834 Mlle. Reine Louise Victoire Mathon has the honour to inform you of the death of Marguerite Charlotte Robespierre, who died at four o’clock yesterday (sic) afternoon. The obsequies will take place on Sunday afternoon, August 3rd. The funeral procession will leave the house of the deceased, 3, Rue de la Fontaine, at ten o’clock in the morning.”

Charlotte had already been preparing for her death, as her testament was written already in 1828:

”I, Marie-Marguerite-Charlotte de Robespierre, undersigned, enjoying all my intellectual faculties, wishing, before paying to nature the tribute that all mortals owe her, to make known my feelings towards the memory of my eldest brother, declare that I have always recognized him as a man full of virtue. I protest against all the letters contrary to his honor which have been attributed to me. In wanting to dispose of what I will leave after my death, I appoint for my universal heiress mademoiselle Louise-Victoire Mathon, by which I want that all that I will leave on my death be collected in full ownership. In faith, done and written by my hand, in Paris, February 6, 1828. De Robespierre.”

Charlotte left behind a very modest inventory, including the aforementioned portrait of Joséphine, a mahogany bed, three mattresses, a small mahogany table, a small walnut painting, six chairs and an old armchair, three silver cutlery with the family initials, a dozen old napkins, in good condition together with tablecloth, six old pairs of sheets, a dozen worn shirts, a wholesale old dress from Naples, and three other dresses in canvas, twelve aprons and dishcloths, a stove and its pipes, two dozen plates, several dishes and a few black bottles, a decanter and six glasses, various kitchen utensils, and, perhaps most conspicuous of all, a lithographed portrait of her older brother and a painted portrait of her younger. Charlotte died without leaving any debts behind.

The funeral was held on August 3, two days after Charlotte’s death. According to Laponneraye ”a considerable crowd of patriots followed the procession,” a description which was confirmed by Pierre Joigneaux, who wrote that ”a number of people accompanied Charlotte to the field of rest, on Laponneraie's [sic] recommendation.” Laponneraye, being imprisoned, was unable to attend the funeral, but he nevertheless wrote wrote a speech that was delivered by one of his friends. The speech contained nothing but praise for both Charlotte and her brother Maximilien, but also phrases that from an objective point can only be called false:

”[Charlotte] was slandered, she was reproached for having denied her brother, for having made a pact with those who immersed themselves in the blood of the martyr of Thermidor. What a horrible blasphemy! No, virtuous and unfortunate Maximilian, your sister did not deny you, she did not apostatize herself by trampling under her feet the principles which have been the gospel of her whole life.” 

Laponneraye published Charlotte’s memoirs the same year she died. And as with most memoirs, the truth was sometimes twisted in them to fit the narrative its author wished portrayed. It’s impossible to know if these distortions were the work of Charlotte, Laponneraye or both.

Perhaps the most blatant lie came when describing the circumstances regarding Charlotte’s arrest — according to the memoirs, on 10 Thermidor, Charlotte would have ran to the Conciergerie prison where her brothers had been imprisoned and begged to see them, only to be repulsed, insulted and struck by the soldiers in front of her. She was led away by a few people, having lost her reason, and once she regained it she was in prison together with another woman. The woman told Charlotte that a lot of people had been arrested at the same time as her and would probably mount the scaffold, their only crime being to have known her before thermidor. For a fortnight she begged Charlotte to write to the members of the committees who had left the last struggle victorious, and implore their pardon. She finally gave in, but asked the woman to actually write and for herself to just put her signature on the paper. They so did, and the next day both were freed. This story easily falls apart when confronted with actual documents regarding Charlotte’s arrest.

Regarding the long letter written on July 6, the memoirs not only felt the need to correctly point out that it had been adressed to Augustin and not, as told by the deputy Courtois when publishing it in his Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée de l’examen des papiers de Robespierre (1795) Maximilien, but also to falsely claim that it contained apocryphal phrases. An encounter with the fac-simile proves that it in fact did not.

As for the engagement with Fouché, ”Charlotte” now changed the story so that the wedding plans had taken place during the revolution. Fouché had only sought her out because her brother occupied the first place on the political stage, and the engagement had been broken up after Maximilien’s horrified reaction to Fouché’s actions in Lyon. This can hardly have been true considering Foché, as mentioned, was already married by the time Charlotte even arrived in Paris.

Charlotte also took her time to reveal her thoughts on people she thought had wronged her — in particular madame Ricord and the Duplays. She attacked the idea of Éleonore having had anything ressembling a romantic relationship with Maximilien – ”He told me twenty times that he felt nothing for Éléonore; her family’s obsessions, their importunities were more suited to make feel disgust for her than to make him love her. The Duplays could say what they wanted, but there is the exact truth. One can judge if he was disposed to unite himself to Madame Duplay’s eldest daughter by something I heard him say to Augustin: “You should marry Éléonore.” “My faith, no,” replied my younger brother.”

But mostly, Charlotte wanted to use the memoirs to underline her attachment to her two brothers, and sweep under the rug anything that might prove evidence to the contrary. ”I am proud to carry your name;” Charlotte wrote, ”it is glorious to be of your blood, to belong to the great Robespierre, who was the inflexible enemy of all injustice, of all corruption, and who now would be extolled by those who create history to the gages of the aristocracy, if he had made pacts with the people’s oppressors.” That she had been exiled to Arras, very likely on the order of her brothers, she made no allusion to, nor to the connections she had had with people such as Guffroy, Gaillard and Saint-Félix. Laponneraye, when publishing the memoirs, also included a preface in which his love for Charlotte and esteem for her brother truly shines through, but which from an factual point of view sometimes can’t be taken seriously…

”Charlotte Robespierre had received from nature the sweetest and loveliest of virtues. Without gall, without violent and hateful passions, she was always even-tempered, always affable in character. […] The turbulent agitations of politics would have made her flee to the ends of the earth, if the ardent tenderness which tied her to her brothers had not kept her in her homeland. Passionate about the private life, she could never bring herself to leave it, and was always careful not to imitate those women who, forgetting the role that suits their sex, throw themselves madly and ridiculously into a career that is not made for them. So she played no part in the extraordinary events that signaled the time when her older brother was in power. […] Charlotte Robespierre occupied herself with politics only as much as is necessary for her to follow her brothers with her eyes in the arena where they fight hand to hand with crime.”

Sources for this:

Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1835)

Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961) part 1, part 2  by Gabriel Pioro and Pierre Labracherie

Charlotte Robespierre et ”ses mémoirs” (1959) by Gabriel Pioro and Pierre Labracherie

Charlotte Robespierre et Guffroy (1910) by Hector Fleischmann 

Le Testament de Charlotte Robespierre (1919) by Jean Gaumont

Charlotte Robespierre et le 9 Thermidor (1920) by Albert Mathiez

Une lettre de Charlotte Robespierre (1939) by Louis Jacob

Maximilien et Charlotte Robespierre, article published in Le Petit Temps, May 28 1909 by Maurice Dumoulin, with extracts from La Révolution, la terreur, le Directoire, 1791-1799, d'après les mémoires de Gaillard (1909).  Gaillard full memoirs unfortunately can’t be found online.

Les secrets de Joseph Lebon et de ses complices (1795) by Armand Joseph Guffroy

Correspondance de Maximilien et Augustin Robespierre (1926) by George Michon

La famille de Robespierre et ses origines. Documents inédits sur le séjour des Robespierre à Vaudricourt, Béthune, Harnes, Hénin-Liétard, Carvin et Arras. (1452-1790) (1914) by A. Lavoine

La Jeunesse de Robespierre et la convocation des Etats génétaux en Artois (1870) by J.-A. Paris