Page:Englishmen in the French Revolution.djvu/61

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AT THE BAR OF THE ASSEMBLY.
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£9000 a year realised only £70,000, he must have sold them for much less than their value. Retiring to the Continent, he lost a considerable portion of the money, through the failure of the persons to whom he had intrusted it, but was still in easy circumstances. He lived for a time at Geneva, where he appears to have known Voltaire, but shortly before the French Revolution was staying in London, where Brissot made his acquaintance. A man of "fads," as we should now say, Pigott was a vegetarian—a Pythagorean was then the term—and an ardent admirer of Graham, the notorious charlatan, brother of Mrs. Macaulay's young second husband, with whose "electric beds" the future Lady Hamilton was then associated. Graham too was a vegetarian, and had perhaps made a proselyte of Pigott. The latter had, moreover, an antipathy to hats, cocked or chimney-pot, as the invention of priests and despots, and wore a cap which at the Feast of Pikes made him the observed of all observers.[1] When Royalist deputies, suspecting the genuineness of Cloots's deputation, sent an usher who spoke English—probably Rose, a man of Scotch extraction—to test the English representative, he was answered by Pigott in "good Miltonic English," and retired in confusion. We may imagine Pigott receiving from Cloots a certificate of his presence at the Feast of Pikes, couched, with a simple altera-

  1. "Anacharsie Cloots," by G. Avenel. Paris: 1876.