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During the following night the "Sans Culottes" quitted the French fleet. The wind continued southerly, both fleets standing to the westward, the crippled "Ça Ira" being taken in tow by the "Censeur," of seventy-four guns. At daylight of March 14, being about twenty miles southwest from Genoa, these two were found to be much astern and to leeward, of their main body, that is, northeast from it.
They will beg of blacks more provident and industrious than themselves, or they will steal their poultry and rob their provision grounds at night; but they would disdain to associate with them. Doubtless these sans culottes swell in their dangling rags with the haughty consciousness that they possess white skins.
Gouverneur Morris, American minister to the court of Louis XVI, was considerably enriched, at the close of the reign of terror, by plate, jewels, furniture, paintings, coaches, and so on, left in his charge by members of the French nobility, that they might not be confiscated in the sack of the city by the sans culottes; for so many of the aristocracy were killed and so many went into exile or disguised their names, that it was impossible to find heirs or owners for these effects.
"You're wrong this time, my dear Cuffe," he said; "for 'sans' means 'without' in French, and 'culottes' means 'breeches. Think of naming a three-decker the 'Without Breeches'! I do not see how any respectable flag-officer can mention such names in his despatches without a feeling of awkwardness that must come near to capsizing all his philosophy.
"Her Majesty and I laughed till the very tears ran down our cheeks. The Duke of Dorset, to keep up the joke, said there really were some counties in England where they called 'culottes irresistibles.
The Belgians had always been stubbornly opposed to conscription; it will be remembered that they resisted all attempts at enforcing it in the past and that it was the main cause of the War of Peasants against the "Sans Culottes."
In Versailles, Lyons, Orleans, and other towns, there were like massacres. The victims of these massacres numbered about two thousand. The monarchy was abolished, and France was declared a republic. Just, Billaud-Varenne, Barere, were supported by the clubs and the city council, and by the savage populace of the sections, the sans culottes.
They are represented by the chiefs of the latter, as well as those of the Delawares, as supplicants for protection, not against the Iroquois, but against the Creeks and Seminoles, or some other southern tribes, who had driven them from Florida, and they are said to have been literally sans provat et sans culottes."
When Champfleury visited the college years afterwards, the only person who remembered Balzac was the old Father who had charge of these cells, and he spoke of the boy's "great black eyes." Confinement in these culottes de bois, as they were called, was much dreaded by the boys, and the punishment seems barbarous and senseless, except from the point of view of getting rid of troublesome pupils.
"'Pray what are they, please Your Majesty? "'Well, I will give you an instance. For example, 'les culottes' what do you call them? "'Small clothes, replied her ladyship. "'Ma foi! how can they be called small clothes for one large man? Now I do look in the dictionary, and I find, for the word culottes breeches. "'Oh, please Your Majesty, we never call them by that name in England.