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From her memoirs we might gather that Danton was a poverty-stricken, pettifogging lawyer of the basest class. That Danton's family belong to the well-to-do upper middle ranks, we see from the object lesson before us. At the time of my visit, this large, roomy, well-built house, with coach-house, stables and half-a-dozen acres of garden, orchard and wood, was to let for 700 francs a year.
"You see, Armstrong, that pettifogging schemer told me he didn't wish me to come to his house again, and I wouldn't, even for Fanny Wyndham, force myself into any man's house. He would not let me see her when I was there, and I could not press it, because her brother was only just dead; so I'm obliged to take her refusal second hand. Now I don't believe she ever sent the message he gave me.
It was hard, he thought, to be within sight of safety and almost of home, and to be baulked by the want of a few wretched shillings and by the pettifogging mistrustfulness of paid officials.
Her scheme was, I think, to have made you that wretched pettifogging being, which they still continue to call in derision by the once respectable name of a Scottish Advocate; one of those mongrel things that must creep to learn the ultimate decision of his causes to the bar of a foreign court, instead of pleading before the independent and august Parliament of his own native kingdom.
This was no pettifogging lawyer after Sterne's pattern, but a very solid, substantial notary of Paris, one of your estimable men who do a stupid thing pompously, set down a foot heavily upon your private corn, and then ask what in the world there is to cry out about? If, by accident, they come to know the full extent of the enormity, "Upon my word," cry they, "I hadn't a notion!"
There was the thing that might have clinched me to him, had matters been other than they were; for all my life I have loathed the sordid soul, and I would rather, in these my ripe years, eat with a highwayman who takes his life in his hands than with the civilian who robs his king and the king's poor, and has no better trick than false accounts, nor better friend than the pettifogging knave.
Upon the Jeffersonian and Madisonian attempts at peaceful coercion they looked with mingled annoyance and contempt, believing, as they did, that the whole American policy was that of a weak and cowardly nation trying by pettifogging means to secure favourable trade conditions.
"'Madame Jeanne Clementine Athenais de Blamont-Chauvry, wife of M. Charles Maurice Marie Andoche, Comte de Negrepelisse, Marquis d'Espard' a very good family 'landowner, the said Mme. d'Espard living in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore, No. 104, and the said M. d'Espard in the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve, No. 22, to be sure, the President told me he lived in this part of the town 'having for her solicitor Maitre Desroches' Desroches! a pettifogging jobber, a man looked down upon by his brother lawyers, and who does his clients no good "
But, unwittingly, I have ennobled, by grand historical comparisons, this prying, pettifogging, Irish-informer of a master-at-arms.
Let us not mince matters with mealy mouths. There are in our midst certain viperous persons, like that notorious gentleman who had the sulphurous impudence to have a French father French! gentlemen; not German, ladies-mark the cunning and audacity of the fellow; like that renegade Labour leader, who has never led anything, yet, if he had his will, would lead us all into the pit of destruction; like those other high-brow emasculates who mistake their pettifogging pedantry for pearls of price, and plaster the plain issue before us with perfidious and Pacifistic platitudes.
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