making my fortune! Had I, though only a spectator, inscribed my name that day on the roll of the conquerors, I should have a pension now.

Crowds of expert people flocked to the autopsy of the Bastille. Temporary cafes were established under tents; people crowded thither as they would to the fairs at St. Germain and Longchamp ; numerous vehicles defiled by, or stopped at the base of the towers, from the summits of which stones detached from the walls fell, in whirlwinds of dust. Well-dressed women and fashionable young men, standing on different parts of the Gothic ruins, mingled with the half-naked workmen employed in demolishing the walls, amidst the acclamations of the crowd. To this rendezvous came the most famous orators, the best-known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most renowned actors and actresses, the danseuses most in vogue, the most illustrious foreigners, the court nobility, and the ambassadors from all parts of Europe; old France had come there to die, new France to begin its life.

No event, however miserable and odious in itself, should be treated with levity when its circumstances are serious, when it forms an epoch; what should have been seen in the taking of the Bastille (and this was not then seen) was, not the violent act of a people's emancipation, but that emancipation itself, the result of the act.

Public admiration was given to the part of this event which deserved condemnation, that which it owed to chance, and no glance was cast into the future to seek the accomplished destinies of a people, the change of manners, ideas, and political powers, the renovation of the human race, of which the taking of the Bastille, like a bloody jubilee, opened the era. Brutal rage overthrew this edifice, but beneath this rage lay the intelligence which amidst the ruins, established the foundations of a new fabric.

But although a nation may deceive itself in its estimate of the greatness of the material fact, it does not deceive itself in that of the moral fact; in its eyes the Bastille was the trophy of its servitude; it seemed to stand at the entrance to Paris, opposite the sixteen pillars of Montfauçon, like the gibbet of its liberty.* In razing a state fortress, the people thought to break the military yoke, and tacitly bound themselves to replace the army which they were dispersing; we all know what prodigies were performed when the nation became one vast army.

* After the lapse of fifty-two years, fifteen bastilles are raised, to op press that liberty in the name of which the first Bastille was destroyed. -Paris, note of 1841.

Paris, November, 1821.

EFFECT OF THE TAKING OF THE BASTILLE ON THE COURT-HEADS OF FOULON AND BERTHIER.

AROUSED by the noise of the Bastille's fall, fore-runner as it were, announcing the approaching fall of the throne, the court at Versailles had passed from boasting to despondency. The King hastened to the National Assembly, even spoke from the president's chair; announced that orders had been given for the removal of the troops, and returned to his palace amidst the benedictions of the people; useless parade! no party believes in the conversion of its opponent; liberty capitulating, or power submitting to concession, obtain no mercy from their enemies.

Eighty deputies left Versailles to announce peace to the capital -illuminations glittered in its streets. M. Bailly was appointed Mayor of Paris, and M. de la Fayette commandant of the National Guard: I only knew this poor but respectable savant by his misfortunes. Revolutions have men for all their periods: some follow their track to the end, others begin them, but do not aid in crowning them.

The courtiers were scattered in all directions in the general confusion of flight; they went to Bâle, Lausanne, Luxembourg, and Brussels. Madame de Polignac in her flight met M. Necker returning. The Count d'Artois, his sons, and the three Condés, emigrated; with them went the higher clergy and part of the nobility. The officers, threatened by their insurgent soldiers, yielded to the torrent, and left the country. Louis XVI. stood alone before the nation, with his two children and a few women, the queen, Mesdames and Madame Elisabeth. Monsieur, who remained in Paris until the flight to Varennes, was of no great use to his brother; although, by giving his vote in the National Assembly in favour of universal suffrage, he might have given the preponderance to the Revolution, the Revolution distrusted him ; he had no great liking for the king, did not understand the queen, and was not loved by them.

Louis XVI. came to the Hôtel de Ville on the 17th, and was received by 100,000 men, armed like the monks of the league. He was there harangued by MM. Bailly, Moreau de Saint Méry, and Lally-Tolendal, who wept; the latter has always been easily

moved to tears. The king was affected in his turn, and fixed an enormous tri-coloured cockade in his hat; he was instantly declared honnête homme, père des Français, roi d'un peuple librewhich people was preparing, in virtue of its liberty, to cut off the head of this worthy man, its father, and its king!

A few days after this accommodation, I was standing at the window of my apartments with my sisters and a few countrymen, when we heard the cry, "Shut the doors! shut the doors!" A ragged group appeared at one end of the street, bearing two standards, which at that distance we could not well distinguish ; as they came nearer we saw that they were two heads, with hair dishevelled and countenances distorted, borne on pikes by these forerunners of Marat-they were the heads of MM. Foulon and Berthier. Every one retired from the window except myself. The assassins stopped when they saw me, and held up the pikes, singing, capering, and leaping up to bring the pale heads as near me as possible; in one of them an eye had fallen from its socket, and hung on the livid cheek; the pike was fastened into the open mouth, whose teeth bit the iron. Murderers," cried I, unable to contain my indignation, "is it thus you understand liberty ?" If I had had a gun I would have fired on these wretches as I would on wolves. They replied with howls; and beat violently on the great gate, with the intention of breaking in and adding my head to the others. My sisters were much alarmed; the cowardly proprietors of the house overwhelmed me with reproaches. The murderers, who were being pursued, had not time to break into the house, and moved off. The sight of these heads, and of others which soon after greeted my eyes, changed my political dispositions; a horror of these cannibal festivals seized me, and the idea of quitting France for some distant land began to gain strength in my mind.

66

Paris, November, 1821.

RECAL OF M. NECKER-SITTING OF THE 4TH OF August, 1789-THE 5TH OF OCTOBER-THE KING BROUGHT TO PARIS.

M. NECKER, the third successor of Turgot (Calonne and Taboureau were the two preceding), was recalled to the ministry on the 25th of July, inaugurated, and received with fêtes in his

honour; but the events of the time soon left him in the rear, and he became unpopular. It was one of the singularities of the time that such a grave personage should have been raised to the ministry by the savoir-faire of a man of such ordinary talent and so frivolous as the Marquis de Pezay. The Compte Rendu, which substituted the system of loans for that of taxation in France, gave an impetus to ideas on this subject; even women discussed expenses and receipts; for the first time people saw, or thought they saw, something in the financial ciphering machine. These calculations, painted of a colour à la Thomas, had first established the reputation of the Director-general of Finance. An able treasurer, but an economist poor in expedients; a noble, but inflated author; a worthy man, but without any high degree of virtue, the banker was one of those old-fashioned personages who came before the curtain to explain the piece to the public, and disappeared when it rose. M. Necker was the father of Madame de Staël; but his vanity hardly permitted him to imagine that his true claim to the remembrance of posterity would lie in the fame of his daughter.

The monarchy was demolished as rapidly as the Bastille in the sitting of the National Assembly on the evening of the 4th of August. Those in the present day, who, influenced by a hatred of the past, cry out against the nobility, forget that it was a member of this nobility, Viscount Noailles, aided by the Duc d'Aiguillon and Mathieu de Montmorency, who overthrew the edifice which was the object of revolutionary ill-will. On the motion of the feudal deputy, feudal rights, the rights of the chace, of the pigeon-house and warren, tithes and field-rents, privileges of orders, towns, and provinces, personal servitude, seigneurial jurisdiction, and venality of office, were abolished. The heaviest blow struck at the old constitution came from the hands of men of rank. The patricians began the Revolution, the plebeians finished it; and as old France owed its glory to its nobility, so does young France owe its liberty-if liberty there be for France.

The troops encamped in the environs of Paris had been removed; yet by one of those contradictory councils to the opposite winds of which the king's will bent like a reed, the Flanders regiment was summoned to Versailles. The body-guards gave a banquet to the officers of this regiment-the wine had its influence; the queen made her appearance with the dauphin in the midst of the festivity; the health of the royal family was given ;

then came the king; the band played the touching and favourite air: "O Richard, O mon roi!" The news of this banquet soon reached Paris; the revolutionists immediately took it up, crying out that Louis refused his sanction to the Declaration of Rights with the intention of escaping to Metz with Count d'Estaing; Marat encouraged and spread the rumour; he was already writing "L'ami du Peuple."

The 5th of October arrived. I was not a witness of the events of that day, but early on the 6th, full accounts of it reached the capital; a visit from the king was announced at the same time. Though timid in a saloon, I was bold in public; I felt myself made for solitude or the forum; I hastened to the ChampsElysées. First came the cannon, on which every variety of disreputable women, seated astride, talked and gesticulated with disgusting indecency. Then, amidst a multitude of every age and sex, marched the king's body-guard, who had exchanged hats, swords, and belts, with the National Guard; they were on foot, and behind came their horses, on each of which were mounted two or three fish-women, dirty and drunken bacchanals; then came the deputation of the National Assembly, then the king's carriages, seen through the dusty haze of a forest of pikes and bayonets. Rag-pickers all in tatters, butchers with bloody aprons and naked knives at their belts, walked beside the carriagedoors; other black satyrs had climbed to the top; others hung on to the footmen's steps, to the coach-box. Musket and pistolshots were fired, and the mob cried: "Here are the baker, the baker's wife, and the little baker's boy!" Two guards' heads dressed and powdered by a hairdresser of Sévres, were borne aloft on Swiss halberts before the son of St. Louis, in place of a royal ensign.

The astronomer Bailly declared to the king, in the Hôtel-deVille, that the people, humane, respectful, and faithful, had just conquered their king; and the king, on his side, much touched and satisfied, declared that he had come to Paris of his own free will: unworthy falsehoods of violence and of fear, which at that time disgraced all parties and individuals. Louis XVI. was not false he was weak; weakness is not falseness, but it stands in its stead and fulfils its functions; the respect which should be inspired by the virtues and misfortunes of the saintly and martyred king renders any human judgment upon him almost sacrilegious.