Saint-Just’s flight to Paris
As translated by yours truly from Jörg Monar’s German biography of him:
In the night between 15-16 September 1786 he left in all secrecy the house of his mother, not before packing several pieces of the family’s silverware and a pair of gold-inlaid pistols which had belonged to his late father. The fact that he chose that particular date to flee - Friday night - shows that he knew exactly where he wanted to go, because every Saturday at 13:00 a post carriage to Paris left from the little village of Chauny, located 15 kilometers north of Blérancourt. As mentioned before, carriages to Paris were going regularly from Soissons as well, but Soissons was not only farther away, but the carriages would leave the city very early, which meant that he had to leave Blérancourt in the early evening, which the family would have noticed immediately.
That he had chosen Paris as the destination of his adventurous escape cannot be a surprise. In all the kingdom there was no other city which could attract with so many options a young runaway. However, it was obviously clear to the young Louis-Antoine that his Paris adventure would be tied to great costs, otherwise he would not have loaded himself so much with valuables.
After traveling on the the approx. 120 kilometers-long country road in the slow carriage, Saint-Just arrived probably in the early hours of the evening of 16 September in the big city. He obtained a furnished room in the Saint-Louis Hotel, close to the Palais Royal, on Rue Fromenteau. For this provincial young man, always raised in a clean environment, this room would have been a first dampener on his enthusiasm at his arrival in the capital, as Mercier, whom we have to thank for the most lifelike depiction of pre-revolutionary Paris, does not paint this kind of lodging in the most flattering light in his “Tableau de Paris”:
The furnished rooms are filthy. Nothing affects a poor stranger more than seeing the dirty beds, the windows through which all the winds pass through, the half-rotten tapestries, a staircase covered in garbage. (…) An Englishman and a Dutchman, who have enjoyed the most delectable property, found themselves sleeping in beds infested by uncomfortable animals. And all the nasty drafts entered their room.
Mercier also mentions that one had to pay for this room in the near of the Palais Royal usually six times more than everywhere else, for a rent that was normally already too high, so the inexperienced Saint-Just became immediately the victim of a sort of trap for foreigners. He therefore saw himself forced to sell almost all the silver he brought to a Jewish pawnbroker, who also took advantage of Saint-Just’s inexperience and gave him only 200 francs for it. The only things Saint-Just did not sell were a silver cup with the sigil of his father, a ring and the two pistols - obviously mementos of his father.
Other interesting bits from the chapter:
- Monar examines life in the city for someone on a budget (like Saint-Just) and determines that it must have been really difficult for someone like him to even get a decent meal. Restaurants were too expensive and the cheap buffets were so overtaken with aggressive people that someone well-mannered and inexperienced like Antoine would have probably not had the chance to eat a good meal there.
- Saint-Just’s explanation to his mother for his flight to Paris? He wrote a letter pretending to be a doctor by the name of Richardet and claimed that poor Saint-Just he went to Paris to treat himself of a sleep disturbance yet unknown in the medical world (!), taking the family silver with him to pay for the treatment. He did not tell anyone because he did not want to scare his mother. Hilariously, the “doctor” advises Madame Saint-Just to not let her son work for a couple of months, and that for three months she should feed him only with milk and vegetables, dissuade him from studying, because “if he continues, he only has one year to live.”
- Two weeks later, at nine o’clock in the morning, Saint-Just receives a very unpleasant surprise, as he is arrested and questioned by a police Commisioner Chenu. He answered the questions regarding his identity correctly at first, but then started to lie about why he came to Paris, claiming that he went there at the behest of his mother. He claimed to have answered everything truthfully, but at the end refused to sign the procès-verbal. He was clearly very surprised by his arrest, otherwise he would have presented a more consistent version of the story.
- As he was locked away in the House of Madame de Sainte-Colombe, his living situations were not too bad. His mother paid so that he would have powder and pomade for his toilette, and a servant would serve his meals.
- There were, however, people locked there for reasons much more serious and disturbing than running away from home - depression, suicide attempts, mentally ill people, thieves. For someone as carefully-raised and educated as Saint-Just, it must have been a highly unsettling company.
- There was a flourishing black market in the house, and Madame Saint-Just despaired that her son kept trading his clothes away. Monar theorizes that Antoine probably traded his shirts for books, to pass the time.
