A Gascon royalist in revolutionary Paris the Baron de Batz, 1792-1795

New York: Dodd Mead and Company, 1910. Hardcover. VG-, clean and tight but with frontis detached/laid in and college ex-lib. marks. Personal bookplate of Mildred Janney & William Sinclair Ashbrook on fep.. Red cloth/boards. Gilt lettering and insignia. xv, 288 pp. with bw frontis and 4 additonal illustrations; deckled edges. Excerpt from A Gascon Royalist in Revolutionary Paris: The Baron De Batz 1792-1795 - " 'There are two kinds of history,' said Balzac: 'the official, lying kind that is usually taught, history ad usum Delphini; and the secret kind, wherein we must look for the true causes of events - the history of shameful things ...' The portentous political struggle that staggered the world in 1793 and 1794 has furnished materials for a host of writers; but for every honest reader it none the less remains inexplicable. It is still incomprehensible that all these men of the Revolution, who were born into the political world on the same day, and won their reputations side by side, and were closely united in opinion and interests, and had no chance of keeping their feet on the heap of ruins they had made, save by holding each other's hands tightly and leaning one upon the other - it is incomprehensible, I say, that these men should have suddenly, as though in the grip of some mad hallucination, begun to hate and suspect and denounce and kill one another, and should have gone to the scaffold with a degree of resignation that amounted to fatalism. They all disappeared in less than a year.