_Brissot de Warville_ (Vol. ix., p. 335.).--Brissot's _Memoires_ is a very
common book in the original, and has gone through several editions. The
passage quoted by N. J. A. was only an impudent excuse for an impudent
assumption. Brissot, in his early ambition, wished to pass himself off as a
gentleman, and called himself _Brissot de Warville_, as Danton did D'Anton,
and Robespierre de Robespierre; but when these worthies were endeavouring
to send _M. de Warville_ to the scaffold as an aristocrat, he invented this
fable of his father's having some landed property at _Ouarville en Beauce_
(not Beance), and that he was called, according to the custom of the
country, from this place, where, it seems, he was put out to nurse. When
the dread of the guillotine made _M. de Warville_ anxious to get rid of his
aristocratic pretensions, he confessed (in those same _Memoires_) that his
father kept a cook's shop in the town of Chartres, and was so ignorant that
he could neither read nor write. I need not add, that his having had a
landed property to justify, in any way, the son's territorial appellation,
was a gross fiction.