Note 285 — BOOK IX[283]

Charles Jean Marie Barbaroux (1767-1794), a noted Girondin orator and politician, belonged, like most of the participants in the Revolution of 1789, to the middle-classes, and was a lawyer by profession. He led the Marseillaise section in the attack on the Tuileries, on the 10th of August 1792. He was sent, as a Girondin deputy, to the Convention, where he appears to have been noted for the beauty of his person no less than for his eloquence, and soon went to loggerheads with Marat and Robespierre. In the trial of Louis XVI., he voted for the appeal to the nation. He was proscribed, on the 31st of May 1793, as a Royalist and an enemy of the Republic: he sought shelter in Calvados and took ship at Quimper for Bordeaux. Hardly had he arrived there when he was arrested and well and duly guillotined, on the 25th of July 1794 and in the twenty-eighth year of his age. Carlyle says, wrongly, I believe, that he shot himself to escape arrest.—T.