Family
On 29 December 1790 Desmoulins married Lucile Duplessis, whom he had known for many years, describing her as “small, graceful, coy, a real Grueze.” Lucile's father long denied permission for the marriage, believing that the life of a journalist could not support any sort of family. Eventually it was, of course, Desmoulin's journalistic profession that brought both of them to execution. Among the witnesses to the marriage were Robespierre, Brissot, and Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve. The Desmoulins' only child, Horace Camille, was born on 6 July 1792; his godfather was Robespierre.
Lucile Desmoulins was arrested mere days after her husband, and condemned to the guillotine on charges of conspiring to free her husband from prison and plotting the "ruin of the Republic." She was executed on 13 April 1794 and her last words were, “A tear falls from my eyes. I shall go to sleep in the calm of innocence.”
Horace Camille Desmoulins was raised by Adèle and Annette Duplessis (the sister and mother of Lucile, respectively). He was later pensioned by the French government, and died in 1825 in Haiti.
Read more about this topic: Camille Desmoulins
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families—sometimes into no family at all. When you’re the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much.”
—Russell Baker (b. 1925)
“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“It seems to me that upbringings have themes. The parents set the theme, either explicitly or implicitly, and the children pick it up, sometimes accurately and sometimes not so accurately.... The theme may be “Our family has a distinguished heritage that you must live up to” or “No matter what happens, we are fortunate to be together in this lovely corner of the earth” or “We have worked hard so that you can have the opportunities we didn’t have.””
—Calvin Trillin (20th century)