Of a poor and obscure family, young Charles would in most Protestant countries, have had few opportunities of mental improvement; but Arbois had a college for secular priests, and a monastery for friars, at both of which he could study gratuitously. He did so, and to such effect, that the superiors of the latter order prevailed on him to teach philosophy and the mathematics in their establishment at Brienne. This circumstance may have given rise to the report that he was a member of the order; but he took no vows; his vocation was widely different. At Brienne, he was the tutor of Napoleon Buonaparte.

In 1783, he forsook Euclid and Aristotle for Vauban and Cohorn, and entered as a private into a regiment of artillery. He was soon made serjeant; in 1789 adjutant; and in the three years afterwards, was placed over a battalion of volunteers, and sent to join the army of the Rhine. Here he distinguished himself so well, that in a few months he was promoted -- not only to the rank of general of division, but to the chief command of the army. Such an instance of rapid advancement is without precedent in military annals: it must have been owing to the partiality of St. Just and Lebas, the two representatives of the people, (or rather of Robespierre,) no less than to his talents as a soldier.

When Pichegru assumed this important charge, he found the army in a dreadful state of disorganization. He restored something like discipline; removed some officers, whom he replaced from the ranks; and in a very short space of time dispelled the despondency which a train of disasters had inspired. He had adopted a new system of tactics, which tended more than all other things to give confidence to his troops. He made more use of tirailleurs and flying artillery than any preceding general, and his rapid, incessant attacks did not allow the Austrians time to breathe. Wherever there was an enemy in the field, there was he; but he was averse to waste either his time or his forces in long tedious sieges. He beat whole armies, and the submission of the fortresses followed almost as a matter of course.

It is impossible to say by what process the mind of this general reverted to the interests of the royal family, or at what period the change was consummated. He certainly detested the existing state of things: he saw that violence, rapine, murder, deformed the face of his country; and he was not sure of his head a single day. All this would, doubtless, weigh with him; but more than all, perhaps, the rewards which an imitator of Monk might hope to enjoy under the restored monarchy. His conversion was nearly completed, when, in 1795, a secret emissary of the Prince of Condé ventured to visit him at his head-quarters at Altkirk.

Pichegru readily undertook to promote the royal cause, but condemned the plan which the Bourbons had formed, as one that would inevitably ruin any one concerned in its execution. He insisted on being allowed to follow his own judgment, promising to communicate with the allied generals, and to act in conjunction with them. He formed a design of his own, so judicious that it promised complete success. He had even begun to act on it, when by some means the Directory received secret information of his scheme, and on the instant summoned him to Paris. He obeyed, confident alike in the weakness of the gov-ernment, the imperfect information it had obtained, and his own popularity. He was right in his surmises that the Directors durst not lay hands on him. They deprived him, indeed, of his command, but offered him the embassy to Sweden, which he flatly refused. He on this retired to the abbey of Bellevaux, near his native town, where he passed several months in uninterrupted tranquillity, and where he would probably have continued to remain, had not the Department of the Upper Saône returned him its deputy to the legislative body in 1797.

The directors did not regard without much apprehension the accession of this friend of the Bourbons to that assembly: what must have been their feelings when they found he was elected its president? They watched, therefore, with keen eyes the nature of the propositions he made to his colleagues, and were soon satisfied that these tended to the organization of a force which should counteract the influence of the regular troops, and gradually pave the way for the restoration of the monarch. Their alarm rose to such a pitch, that in spite of all their jealousy, Buonaparte was called on for his advice and assistance; Augereau was dispatched to the capital; the revolution of the 18th fructidor was effected; and Pichegru, with many other deputies, consigned to the Temple. To reconcile the public to so extraordinary a proceeding, a correspondence, which Moreau had intercepted, was published; and soon after the directors sentenced Pichegru and about fifty other deputies to transportation.

The general, after spending eight weary months in a fortress of Guiana, at last effected his escape, in company with seven of his fellow exiles. They seized the sentinel a little after midnight, while his comrades slept; they bound and gagged him; took whatever arms they could find in the guard-room; silently left the fort; and safely reached Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam. By the good offices of the Dutch, they were provided with a passage to England; and landed at Deal, September 23, 1798, from whence Pichegru hastened to London to join the numerous royalists who had obtained a refuge in that capital; and who were at this period engaged in innumerable plots for the restoration of the Bourbons.

In January, 1804, Pichegru, at length resolved to strike a decisive blow, was landed on the French coast by an English cutter. He was there met by Georges Cadoudal, Montgaillard and Joyaut, and all four hastened to Paris. The design of Georges was to assassinate the First Consul, nor would any of the Chouan's own friends have shrunk for an instant from committing such a crime, for they were fierce, savage men, inaccessible alike to justice or pity in the execution of their desperate project. But there is little probability, and no evidence, that General Pichegru was prepared to take part in such revolting extremities.

The conspirators, however, had been already be trayed by their own associate Montgaillard, and they were all closely watched after their arrival in Paris. No doubt the police was privy to at least two interviews of Pichegru with Moreau; the moment the latter was arrested, a diligent search commenced after the other. Pichegru was now a wretched outcast: he wandered from house to house, skulking in obscurity, and venturing abroad only in the darkness. Sometimes he passed the whole night in the open air: this sort of life was worse than death; nature required support, and he ventured at length to take refuge in a house, the owner of which promised to protect him. But the fellow was in the interests of the police: he betrayed his guest; and at midnight a commissary, attended by twenty-four gensdarmes, burst open the door of Pichegru's apartment and proceeded to seize him. The dauntless soldier struggled nearly a quarter of an hour with the men; but he at length became exhausted, suffered himself to be bound, and was conveyed to the Temple.

Pichegru ere long heard, in his dungeon, of the Duke d'Enghien's murder, and of Moreau's apprehension; on which he is said to have most solemnly declared, that that general was entirely innocent of the charges brought against him. Had such a declaration been made in open court, Buonaparte would have been compelled to release Moreau, for whose destruction he yearned. Pichegru, therefore, was destined never to appear in court; and, after having been interrogated several times by the dark agents of the tyrant--not in the sanctuary of justice, but in the dungeons of the Temple -- he was at length, on the morning of April 7th, found dead in his prison. He had died by strangulation: his black silk handkerchief was tightened round his throat, by means of a small stick thrust through the folds, and used as a tourniquet; and, in spite of all the declarations of the government, the suspicion that he had not died by his own act was, and continued to be, universal. Rumour went so far as to assert that he had been strangled by four of the Mamelukes whom the First Consul had brought from Egypt. The catastrophe of Captain Wright who, in a few days afterwards, was also found dead in prison, his throat cut from ear to ear, and who was in the like manner accused of self-destruction, increased the dark suspicions of the public.

Pichegru was a brave soldier and an able general: we can assign him little further praise. He had been the friend of Robespierre, and he had betrayed the trust reposed in him by the Directors -- conduct which their contemptible administration can never justify. There is reason to hope that he was not in the bloody secret of Cadoudal; but it is certain that his fate excited little sympathy for himself, however deeply it added to the infamy of his suspected murderer.