The Rhetoric of Historical Representation

About this book

In Book 47 of his history of the Girondins (1847), Lamartine recounts how Verniaud's brother-in-law, a certain M. Alluaud, came to Paris from Limoges in order to bring money to the imprisoned Girondin leader, who had already been stripped of his worldly possessions and was soon afterwards to die on the scaffold; how he was accompanied by his ten-year-old son who, terrified, hid from the sight of the famished, pale face of his uncle, with his torn and dirty clothes, his unkempt hair and his long beard; how the child clung to his father, but how Vergniaud took him up in his arms: 'Mon enfant, lui dit le prisonnier en le prenant dans ses bras, rassuretoi et regarde-moi bien; quand tu seras homme, tu diras que tu as vu Vergniaud, le fondateur de la Republique, dans le plus beau temps et dans le plus glorieux costume de sa vie: celui ou il souffrait la persecution des scelerats, et ou il se preparait a mourir pour les hommes libres'.