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time, he is unable to unpack sufficient meaning, and he proclaims: ‘all things were to me / Loose anddisjointed, and the affections left / Without a vital interest’ (IX 105-7).Leaving Paris after only five days, he travels to Orleans where he admits that he hadinitially joined in the entertainments of the aristocracy who seemed intent on ignoring what was goingon. He initially shared accommodation with Royalist troops whose only political concerns were purelyreactionary and ‘bent upon undoing what was done’ (IX 136). They tolerate Wordsworth’s presenceas a youth and as an Englishman who has no knowledge of political affairs, and they attempt to winhim over to their side. In such discussion Wordsworth represents himself as:untaught by thinking or by booksTo reason well of polity or law,And nice distinctions, then on every tongue,Of natural rights and civil; (IX 200-4)But he does propose to his Royalist companions that he has natural republican sympathies engenderedby the environment he grew up in and the political values he had been taught in his liberal education.He expresses a belief in ‘mountain liberty’ and proclaims a natural republicanism that ‘hail[s] / Asbest, the government of equal rights / And individual worth’ (IX 246-8). He then meets MichelBeaupuy, whose character epitomises the poetic fancies that Wordsworth believed in as a youth.‘Meek though enthusiastic’ (IX 299) his enthusiasm is committed to human concerns. He is a truenobleman wandering through events ‘in perfect faith’ as if ‘through a book, an old romance, or tale /Of Fairy’ (IX 305-7) and bound to service of the poor: ‘Man he loved / As man’ (IX 312-3). He cantherefore be seen as an antitype to the aristocratic attitudes of Burke. He was a philosopher as well asa soldier, raised in a family descended from Montaigne on his mother’s side. The family librarycontained all the important texts of the philosophes of the eighteenth century, and his brothers weresimilarly engaged in political reform. 22 As a Girondin he would have drawn directly on Greek andRoman political models, as well as the writings of the English Republicans. He attempts to teachWordsworth classical philosophy and an understanding of the virtue-ethics of Aristotle that stressvirtue as an activity in which man (vir), is in service to man, and such service is an act of virtue.It is Beaupuy who appears to provide Wordsworth with the vocabulary that he had beenlooking for in order to understand and debate the politics of the Revolution. Wordsworth writes:Oft in solitudeWith him did I discourse about the endOf civil government, and its wisest forms;Of ancient prejudice, and chartered rightsAllegiance, faith, and law by time matured,Custom and habit, novelty and change;Of self-respect, and virtue in the fewFor patrimonial honour set apartAnd ignorance in the labouring multitude.22 ‘The house at Mussidan in which they were born contained a huge library, where not one of the great authorsof the eighteenth century was missing, and the folios of the Encyclopaedia towered above the rest.’ Legouis,Early Life of William Wordsworth, p. 202.153