The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 29, no. 7 (March, 1971)

eral political dissension, the armies of Dumouriez were disorganized and unsuccessful,
as Noailles had feared they would be: outside of Lille on April 29, 1792,
the troops of General Theobald, Comte de Dillon, mutinied and murdered their
general and his supporting officers before the eyes of his colleague Noailles. The
Vicomte, to quote his relative the Marquise de Montagu, "was obliged to seek
refuge beyond the frontier, where he was immediately declared an emigre and
proscribed." This is not strictly so, since Noailles apparently continued to command
troops until after his defeat at the hands of Duke Saxe-Teschen shortly after
the horrible affair at Lille. It is here that Noailles's hope to forge a link between
the feudal past and a constitutional future was broken. Following the seizure of
government in Paris and the overturning of the monarchy by the Commune and
the Jacobin clubs on August 10, 1792, any support of reason and law on which
Noailles had relied was knocked aside as the Terror began in earnest. Possibly
traveling via Germany, Noailles emigrated to London, where it is said he worked
briefly as a banker. There, on December 27, 1792, he had occasion to write to
Miss Robinson in Newport, breaking a silence of many years:
I am so much indebted to you for the greatest satisfaction of my present situation
which is derived from the kindness you had to teach me the English language,
which I am now obliged to make use of. In the conversation we had in Newport
with Col. Ward, I told you that I thought a revolution would take place in our country,
that my love for liberty wd. support it. Everything has happened as I foretold
you but what I never had thought, is that the spirit of enmity, jealousy, and cruelty
should take the place of this mild, which was the character of the French nation.
As long as it was possible to serve the cause of liberty, I never deserted it, but when
it became criminal, I left my country, quitted the part of the world where crimes
were committed, and fled to England, where I pity the errors of the French people,
and cannot forget their cruelty. I am far from my family and connections, perhaps
parted forever, I am desirous to go to America, the pleasure to meet your family, to
see you, to travel in a country exempted of despotism, and of the scenes of revolutions,
will call me in the new continent.
To his friend Alexandre, Comte de Tilly, Noailles subsequently commented:
"Once I thought the Revolution unavoidable, but that we could guide it; later,
being carried away beyond what I had foreseen, I thought that it would be better
to follow the Revolution than to allow myself to be crushed by it." Noailles's
hopes for peaceful revolution were subsequently further proven mistaken in the
most atrocious way possible, as his father, mother, and wife were guillotined
after he failed to extricate them from France.
Once in London, despite his natural patriotic antipathy to the English, he got
in touch with staunchly anti-Jacobin members of the English government to offer
them his services. Indeed, the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, wrote George
Hammond, the English minister in Philadelphia, on July 25, 1793, that "Before
M. Noailles left England for America he made some offers of service here which
were civilly declined on account of his former connections and conduct.... He
expressed however a desire of being of service to you when he got there, and
stated himself to have the means of being so, desiring at the same time that his
disposition to that effect might be mentioned to you." Presumably Noailles had
made contact and some sort of peace with the royalist elements in Germany and
England, for it seems he was greeted in Philadelphia as their agent. Alexander
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