United States or Yemen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
On either side of the main edifice, and somewhat in the rear, the architect had placed smaller buildings, yet all of them ornamented in the same sumptuous fashion; and these served to throw the chateau itself into relief. In these adjoining pavilions there were baths, a theatre, a 'paume' ground, swings, a chapel, billiard-rooms, and other salons.
"Oh!" said Pigoult, on whose forehead the perspiration, which had not dried, bore testimony to his efforts, "Simon has just told some news that made them all unanimous. Except five persons, Poupart, my grandfather, Mollot, Sinot, and I, all present swore, as at the Jeu de Paume, to employ every means to promote the triumph of Simon Giguet, of whom I have made a mortal enemy.
Let us imagine to ourselves the position of the President of the sitting of the "Jeu de Paume," of the first Mayor of Paris, in a city besieged by the Vendéans! We cannot presume that the unfavourable opinion of the Convention under which he was labouring, and the rigorous surveillance to which he was subjected, would have saved him from harsh treatment if the town had been taken.
It is worthy of remark, that Nantes, the principal theatre of these persecutions and murders, had been early distinguished by the attachment of its inhabitants to the revolution; insomuch, that, at the memorable epoch when the short-sighted policy of the Court excluded the Constituent Assembly from their Hall at Versailles, and they took refuge in the Jeu de Paume, with a resolution fatal to their country, never to separate until they had obtained their purposes, an express was sent to Nantes, as the place they should make choice of, if any violence obliged them to quit the neighbourhood of Paris.
And oh, Anne! yesterday, only yesterday, at this time I was riding home with Teligny from the Louvre, where we had been playing at paume with the king! And the world the world was very fair." "I saw you, or rather Croisette did," I muttered as his sorrow not for himself, but his friends forced him to stop. "Yet how, Louis, do you know that we are going to Cahors?"
Mathieu de Montmorency, first Viscount and then Duke, was born in 1766. After having been through the war in America, he had adopted the ideas of Lafayette, and had been distinguished by his extreme liberalism. He took the oath of the Jeu de Paume, and was the first to give up the privileges derived from his birth on the celebrated night of the 4th of August.
To put forward an opinion so remote from received opinions, is imposing on one's self the duty of proving its truth. After his condemnation, our colleague exclaimed, says La Fayette: "I die for the sitting of the Jeu de Paume, and not for the fatal day at the Champ de Mars."
At riding, shooting and fencing he was the better; at paume and tennis he always won. But naturally, being the elder, I had the greater strength, and when the sharp sting of his wit provoked me, I could drub him, and did so more than once.
The situation was doubly difficult, for apart from the uncertainty as to the whereabouts of the King and the possibility of civil war, there was a difficulty in regard to the Constitution. For two years past the assembly had been labouring hard to complete the work it had sworn to accomplish by the oath of the Jeu de Paume.
If any thing in the world appeared evident, even in 1793, even before the detailed revelations of the persons who took a more or less direct part in the event, it is, that Bailly did not facilitate the departure of the royal family; it is that, in proportion to the suspicions that reached him, he did all that was in his power to prevent their departure; it is, that the President of the sitting of the Jeu de Paume had not, and could never have had in any case, an intention of going to join the fugitive family in a strange country; it is that, finally, any act emanating from a public authority in which such expressions as the following could be found: "The deep wickedness of Bailly.... Bailly thirsted for the people's blood!" must have excited the disgust and indignation of good men, whatever might be their political opinions.
Word Of The Day