place of Kearney against whom the commissioners of the Commune made a report and the municipality dismissed. Blackwell and his peers denounced Kearney to the Committee of Public Safety, accusing him of encouraging the students to join the army of the Princes and of giving them money and letters of recommendation for that purpose; of receiving refractory priests, giving them food and lodgings, allowing them to preach against the constitution and 'poison the minds of the students with aristocratic maxims' and permitting ordinations by refractory bishops; of misappropriating and squandering college revenues, running the college into debt, reducing the bursary-holders to destitution and failing to present accounts; and finally of receiving and harbouring the property of émigrés. Swords suggests that: "It was probably Madgett who advised the rebels to appeal the decision to restore Kearney to the National Convention [and that] in this they were supported by two deputies, Santhonax and Léonard-Bourdon." The latter was a deputy at the National Convention where he always voted for extreme measures. He took a special interest in the Irish colleges on which he seemed particularly well informed. Marriage, and The Terror It was at this time that Blackwell met Sophie Wade, an Englishwoman, and was instrumental in rescuing her and her father, Colonel Wade of Somersetshire, from the horrors of a trial before a Revolutionary Tribunal presided over by the well-known Jacobin Jean Bon Saint-André. During the height of the Reign of Terror in 1794, being of English nationality, they were imprisoned at Arras for several months. At a meeting of the Council of that town in July 1794, Blackwell, accompanied by a few of his comrades insisted on their immediate acquittal. Miss Wade and James Blackwell were married soon after. Hayes suggests that: "Some time after, Murat began to pay his respects rather too ostentatiously to Madame Blackwell, and this led to a duel between the two officers." Consequently, divisions occurred among the other officers of the regiment. Of them one party, led by Murat, attacked both Blackwell and Landrieux on the basis that although Blackwell had been placed in the original Poacher Hussars as Surgeon-Major, Landrieux had promoted him to a captaincy out of friendship alone. "But subsequently," Hayes continues, "at the height of the Terror, when Murat was in danger from his enemies, who tried to bring him under the law of suspects by proving that he was of aristocratic