Although his image is inseparable from the turmoil of the French Revolution, Saint-Just envisioned a time when it would come to an end, and he would no longer be necessary. How did that time look to him?
His friend Gateau reports that Saint-Just sighed after the end of the Revolution to … enjoy the repose of private life in a country haven, with a person whom the sky destined as his companion, and whose mind and heart he himself had liked to form, far from the poisoned eyes of the inhabitants of the city.
Lejeune reports as well something similar he heard from Saint-Just, one year before being chosen for the Convention: For me, my ambition is to live one day in the countryside, within the limits that nature has marked. A wife, children for my heart, study for my leisure, my superfluous for my good neighbors if they are poor.
This young man, the icy, living blade of the revolution, wanted nothing more than to return to his privacy, form a family and live a simple life somewhere in the countryside. It was not to be.
Saint-Just’s post-revolutionary dreams
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