We have not thought it necessary to preface this recital by any introduction of the preceding epochs of the Revolution. We have not re-produced, with the minute elaboration of an annalist, the numerous parliamentary and military details of all the events of these forty months. Two or three times we have, in order to group men and circumstances in masses, made unimportant anachronisms. We have written after having scrupulously investigated. facts and characters: we do not ask to be credited on our mere word only. Although we have not encumbered our work with notes, quotations, and documentary testimony, we have not made one assertion unauthorized by authentic memoirs, by unpublished manuscripts, by autograph letters, which the families of the most conspicuous persons have confided to our care, or by oral and well-confirmed statements gathered from the lips of the last survivors of this great epoch. If some errors in fact or judgment have, notwithstanding, escaped us, we shall be ready to acknowledge them and repair them in sequent editions, when the proofs have been transmitted to us. We shall not reply one by one to such 'denials and contradictions as this book may give rise to; it might be a tedious and unprofitable paper-war in the newspapers. But we will make notes of every observation, and reply en masse, by our proofs and tests, after a certain lapse of time. We seek the truth only, and should blush to make our work a calumny of the dead. As to the title of this book, we have only assumed it, as being unable to find any other which can so well define this recital, which has none of the pretensions of history, and therefore should not affect its gravity. It is an intermediate labor between history and memoirs. Events do not herein occupy so much space as men and ideas. It is full of private details, and details are the physiognomy of characters, and by them they engrave themselves on the imagination. Great writers have already written the records of this memorable epoch, and others still to follow will write them also. It would be an injustice to compare us with them. They have produced, or will produce, the history of an age. We have produced nothing more than a "study" of a group of men and a few months of the Revolution. A. L. Paris, March 1, 1847. |