The excerpt below appeared in the final issue of Le Vieux Cordelier at the height of the Terror.[*] It represents Desmoulins' final piece of published correspondence, and as such it is clearly exceptional. Surprisingly, though, the erratic style of the piece is not out of the ordinary for Desmoulins, who was notorious for his flighty prose. Note that he mixes breathless Romanticism with the more mundane matters of everyday life. Note as well the appeals to the sentimental (especially in the editorial remarks on his tears, all of which appeared in the original).

What can the letter tell us about the course of the Revolution? What can we say about the revolutionary "style," or the poses the various revolutionaries assumed? And, lastly, what can we make of the overt appeals to family and of a loving father and husband? Why, in short, does Camille Desmoulins write this letter – a letter that is destined not for the private consumption of his wife but for public scrutiny?
 
 

           This welcome sunlight has suspended my torment: one is free when one sleeps and no longer able to sense captivity. Heaven has taken pity on me. For only a moment, I saw you in a dream, and the four of us embraced – you, me, Horace, and Duroupe – at the house. But our little one had lost an eye due to a fever that had only recently struck him, and the unhappiness of this accident awakened me.
          I found myself once again in my cell. Daylight was just breaking. I no longer saw you nor heard your responses, for you and your mother spoke to me in my dream. I arose so that I could, at least, speak and write to you. But upon opening my windows, the thought of my solitude, these terrible bars, the locks that separate you from me, overwhelmed any fortitude in my soul. I collapsed in tears, and soon I sobbed, crying in my tomb: “Lucile! Lucile! Oh my dear Lucile! Where are you?”
          (Here one notices traces of a tear.)
          Last night, I had one such moment, and my heart was equally rent when I spied your mother in the garden. I automatically fell to my knees against the bars and joined my hands, as if begging her pity; her voice was plaintive, I am certain of it, frozen in her chest. I saw her sadness yesterday (here again a trace of tears), behind her kerchief and veil, which she had lowered to keep this spectacle from me. When you come next, have her sit closer to me, so that I can see you both better. There is nothing to fear, it seems to me.
      One lens of my glasses is no longer any good. I would like you to buy me a pair of glasses like those I owned six months ago, not made of silver, but of steel and having two legs which attach at the head: ask for no. 15; the merchant knows what that will mean. But above all, I implore you, Lolotte,[2] with all my undying love, send me your portrait. How your painter takes pity on me – I who suffer only for having taken too much pity on others. Make him give you two sittings per day, for the day I receive your portrait will be a day of feasting, practically a day of drunkenness and excess. While I wait, send me clippings of your hair, which I will keep close to my heart.
          My dear Lucile! I remember when we were young lovers, when strangers seemed interesting to me only because they came from your house. Yesterday, when the Citizen who carried my letter to you returned, I asked: “Alas! Have you seen her?” just as I asked the abbé Laudreville earlier, and I found myself studying him to discover if any trace of your presence – of you – could be seen on his clothes or on his person. He is a charitable soul, considering he delivered my letter without delay. I see him, it occurs to me, twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. This messenger of our unhappiness has become as dear to me as he would had he been the messenger of our love.
          I discovered a crack in my cell wall to which I applied my ear. I heard sobbing, and I hazarded some words. What I heard was the voice of one who suffered greatly. He asked me my name, and I gave it. “O my God!” he cried at the sound of my name, and he fell back onto his bed, from which he had risen. I recognized distinctly the voice of Fabre d’Eglantine:[3] “Yes, it is I, Fabre,” he said to me. “What, you here! The counter-revolution has gone that far?” We dared not continue our conversation, for fear of the anger we might arouse for having engaged in this minor consolation, and for fear that if someone overheard us, we would be separated and placed further apart, for Fabre’s chamber has a fireplace, and mine is equally accommodating – if solitary confinement can be called that.
          But, my dear friend! You cannot imagine what it is to be confined alone, without knowing the reason, without having been interrogated, without receiving a single journal! It is as if one lived and had died at one and the same time. This existence makes one feel as if encased in a coffin.
          People say that innocence makes one calm and courageous. Ah! My dear Lucile! My good friend! Very often my own innocence makes me weak; it is the innocence of a husband, or that of a father, or a son! If only it were Pitt or Cobourg who now treats me so harshly: but it is my colleagues; Robespierre, who signed the order for my imprisonment himself; the Republic, after all I have done for her! This is the reward I receive for so much virtue and so many sacrifices!
          On coming here, I saw Hérault-Séchelle, Simond, Ferroux, Chaumette,[4] Antonnelle; they are more happy than I, for none is in solitary confinement. It is I, who have subjected myself over the last five years to such hatred and perils for the republic; I, who have retained my purity throughout the revolution; I, who need demand pardon only of you, my dear Lolotte, and to whom you gave it, because you know that my heart, despite all its weaknesses, is not unworthy of you; it is I that these men – who call themselves my friends, and are called republicans – have thrown in a cell, into solitary confinement, as though I were a conspirator!
          Socrates drank hemlock, but at least he saw his friends and his wife while imprisoned. It is so much harder to be separated from you! The greatest criminal would find himself too harshly punished if he were torn from a Lucile, unless it were through death, when one experiences only a moment’s sadness at such a separation. But such a criminal would not have been your husband, and you have loved me only because I exist solely for the happiness of my fellow Citizens.......
          Someone calls me.....
          The commissioners from the Revolutionary Tribunal have just interrogated me. They asked me only this question, if I had “conspired against the Republic.” What utter derision. How they insult the most pure republicanism. I see very clearly what end awaits me. Adieu, my Lucile, my dear Lolotte, my little one.[5] Say goodbye to my father! My example reveals the barbarity and the ingratitude of men. My last moments will not dishonor you. You see that my fears were well founded, and that our predictions have come true!
          I married a woman of virtue. I was a good husband, a good son. I would have been a good father. I retain the esteem of all the true republicans, of all men. Virtue and liberty!
          I die a thirty-four years of age. But it is remarkable that I have stood, over the last five years, on the various precipices thrown up by the revolution, without falling over, and I continue to exist. I rest comfortable in the satisfaction of my too numerous writings, all of which breathe the same philanthropy, the same desire to render my fellow Citizens happy and free, and which the butchery of tyrants will never destroy.[6]
          I understand very well that power inebriates almost everyone it touches. As Denis of Syracuse said: “Tyranny is a fine epitaph.” But console yourself, my disconsolate widow. The epitaph of your poor Camille will be more glorious: it will be that of Brutus and Cato, tyrannicides both. O, my dear Lucile! I was born for writing verse, for defending the unhappy, to make you happy, for composing with your mother and my father, and those close to our hearts, an Otaïti!
          I dreamed of a republic that all the world would love! I could never have believed that men were so ferocious and so unjust! How could I believe that some pleasantries in my writing against colleagues who had provoked me would efface the memory of my services! I cannot conceal the fact that I die a victim of my pleasantries and for having been a friend of Danton. I thank my assassins for allowing me to die alongside him and Philippeaux. And considering that our colleagues are so cowardly to abandon us and to bend their ears to these calumnies that I cannot understand, but which are surely the most grotesque possible, I see now that we die victims of our own courageous denunciation of traitors and our love of the truth! We can die assured that we are the last of the republicans!
          Pardon, dear friend! My true love![7] For I forgot for the moment that they had separated us, so caught up was I with my memories. I ought to endeavor to make you forget me, my Lucile! My Loulou! My little one! I beg you, do not linger over my passing! Do not call out to me with your cries! They would tear at my heart in the depths of my tomb!
          Live for my little Horace. Speak of me to him. You must explain to him what he cannot understand! That I would have loved him very much! Despite my sufferings, I believe there is a God! My blood will wash away my faults, the weaknesses of my nature, and that which was good in me. My virtues, my love of liberty and God will offer me some recompense.
          I will dream of you one day, O Lucile! O Annette, as sensible as I was of it, death – which will deliver me from such crimes – is it so great an evil? Adieu Loulou, goodbye life, my soul, my share of divinity on earth. I leave you in the hands of good friends, and all that is virtuous and sensible! Adieu, Lucile! My dear Lucile! Adieu, Horace, Annette. Goodbye father. My life flees before my very eyes. I see once again my Lucile! I see her! My arms hold you tight! My hands bring you into my embrace! And my head, separated from my body, remains with you! I go to my death!
 
 

[*] This letter was translated and edited by Sean C. Goodlett from the original, which appears in the Newberry Library's French Revolution Collection [FRC 5.1402, pp. 165-172]. 

[1] This is the note provided by Le Vieux Cordelier [ed.]: “The letter was not sent from Luxembourg. Camille, having been transferred to the Conciergerie, handed it to Citizen Groslé Beauregard, then detained in this prison, a fact that Camille learned upon finding himself at dinner with him at the home of Citizen Paré, the Minister of the Interior. The wife of Camille having been sacrificed, Beauregard, who had escaped from the Revolutionary Tribunal, handed this letter to Citizen Paré, who is now in possession of it.”

[2] Camille’s familiar name for Lucile. See below, note 5 and supra.

[3] Fabre d’Eglantine was arrested on 12 January, 1794. Robespierre himself denounced d’Eglantine on 8 January. Only Danton defended him. See Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 268ff.

[4] Of these Anaxagoras Chaumette (1763-1794) is perhaps the most famous. Suspected of sympathy for the Hébertistes, Chaumette and his compatriots went to the guillotine on 13 April, 1794. See Doyle, 271.

[5] Here Camille calls his wife “mon bon loup,” a diminutive meant to express his affection. Literally translated, it would make no sense. But, as with Loulou (which is merely a foreshortening and repetition of “loup”), it was a common enough expression in the eighteenth century. See the Grand Robert, vol. 4, 156-157, under “LOULOU.”

[6] Camille’s language is too idiomatic to render exactly into English. I have nevertheless striven to retain both the spirit and the overall construction of the phrasing: “J’appuie encore ma tête avec calme sur l’oreiller de mes écrits trop nombreux, mais qui respirent tous la même philantropie, le même désir de rendre mes concitoyens heureux et libres, et que la hache des tyrans ne frappera pas!”

[7] The original reads: “ma véritable vie.”