f Citizen Boismartin against Citizen
Laplanche, member of the National Convention:

"The twenty-fourth of Brumaire, in the second year of the republic,
the Administrators of the district of St. Lo gave orders to the
municipality over which I at that time presided, to lodge the
Representative of the people, Laplanche, and General Siphert, in the
house of Citizen Lemonnier, who was then under arrest at Thorigni.
In introducing one of the founders of the republic, and a French
General, into this hospitable mansion, we thought to put the
property of our fellow-citizen under the safeguard of all the
virtues; but, alas, how were we mistaken! They had no sooner
entered the house, than the provisions of every sort, the linen,
clothes, furniture, trinkets, books, plate, carriages, and even
title-deeds, all disappeared; and, as if they purposely insulted our
wretchedness, while we were reduced to the sad necessity of
distributing with a parsimonious hand a few ounces of black bread to
our fellow-citizens, the best bread, pillaged from Citizen
Lemonnier, was lavished by buckets full to the horses of General
Siphert, and the Representative Laplanche.--The Citizen Lemonnier,
who is seventy years of age, having now recovered his liberty, which
he never deserved to lose, finds himself so entirely despoiled, that
he is at present obliged to live at an inn; and, of property to the
amount of sixty thousand livres, he has nothing left but a single
spoon, which he took with him when carried to one of the Bastilles
in the department de la Manche."

The chief defence of Laplanche consisted in allegations that the
said Citizen Lemonnier was rich, and a royalist, and that he had
found emblems of royalism and fanaticism about the house.

At the house of one of our common friends, I met --------, and so little
did I imagine that he had escaped all the revolutionary perils to which
he had been exposed, that I could almost have supposed myself in the
regions of the dead, or that he had been permitted to quit them, for his
being alive scarcely seemed less miraculous or incredible. As I had not
seen him since 1792, he gave me a very interesting detail of his
adventures, and his testimony corroborates the opinion generally
entertained by those who knew the late King, that he had much personal
courage, and that he