hospitality; the truth, spoken at the decisive moment, did not excuse me; I had not the less been the cause of a real evil.

I returned to my work in the midst of my vexation and of my just self-reproach. I even took a liking to my labour, for the idea had occurred to me, that by acquiring renown, I should give the family less cause to repent the interest they had shown in me. Charlotte, whom I thus sought to reconcile to me through fame, presided over my studies. Her image was seated before me when I wrote. When I raised my eyes from my paper, I fixed them on the adored image, as if its original had really been there. The inhabitants of Ceylon saw the sun rise one morning in unusual splendour; its globe parted, and a brilliant creature came forth, who said to them, "I come to reign over you." Charlotte, coming forth from a ray of light, reigned over me.

But let us quit these recollections: they grow old and fade away like hopes. The course of my life is about to change, to flow into other valleys, beneath other skies. First love of my youth, thou vanishest with all thy charms! True, I have but now seen Charlotte again, but after how many years of separation! Sweet light of the past, pale rosy twilight which tinges the hem of night's robe, long after the sun has set!

London, April to September, 1822.

THE ESSAI HISTORIQUE SUR LES RÉVOLUTIONS-ITS EFFECT-LETTER FROM LEMIÈRE, NEPHEW OF THE POET.

LIFE has often been represented (and I was one of the first to do so) as a mountain which we ascend on one side and descend on the other; it would be quite as correct to compare it to one of the Alps, with its bare brow crowned with eternal snow, and from which there is no descent. Following out this image, the traveller is always ascending and descends no more; he then has a better view of the space he has traversed, of the paths which he has not selected, and which would have led him by a gentler slope; he looks back with regret and grief on the point where he went astray. Thus the publication of the Essai Historique marks my first wandering step from the path

of peace. I finished the first part of the great work I had traced out for myself; I wrote its last word between the idea of death (my illness had returned) and a vanished dream: in somnis venit imago conjugis. The Essai was printed by Baylis, and published by Deboffe in 1797. This date is that of one of the transformations of my life. There are moments when our destiny, whether yielding to society, or obeying nature, or whether it is then beginning to mould us into the form we are to retain, suddenly changes its direction, as a river alters its course.

The Essai offers a compendium of my existence as poet, moralist, civilian, and politician. It is unnecessary to say that I hoped for great success to this work, as much at least as I could hope for any thing; we authors, little prodigies of a prodigious era, aspire to commune in spirit with future generations; but I think that we do not sufficiently know the dwelling of posterity, and put the wrong address on our communications. When we stiffen in the tomb, death will so unrelentingly freeze our words, written and sung, that they will not melt like the frozen words of Rabelais.

The Essai was designed to be a sort of historical encyclopædia. The only volume published is in itself a very extensive investigation; I had the rest in manuscript; next came, after some researches and annotations of the annalist, the lays and virelays of the poet, the Natchez, &c. I can scarcely understand now how I could have carried on such extensive study amidst an active wandering life, subject to so many vicissitudes. My perseverance in labour explains this; in my youth I often wrote for twelve or fifteen hours without moving from my seat, striking out and recomposing the same page perhaps ten times. Age has in no degree weakened this faculty of application; all my diplomatic correspondence is written by my own hand, and yet it does not interfere with my literary labours.

The Essai made a sensation among the émigrés; it was not in agreement with the feelings of my companions in misfortune. My independence in my different social positions has almost always offended those in whose company I journeyed. I have in turns been the chief of different armies, the soldiers of which were not of my party: I have led old royalists to fight for public liberties, and especially for the liberty of the press, which they detested; I have rallied liberals, in the name

of this same liberty, beneath the standard of the Bourbons, whom they hold in horror. It so happened that the general opinion of the émigrés was attached, through self-love, to my person; the English reviews having mentioned me with praise, this praise was reflected upon all the faithful.

I had sent copies of the Essai to Laharpe, Ginguené, and de Sales. Lemière, the nephew of the poet of the same name, and the translator of Gray's Poems, wrote to me from Paris, July the 15th, 1797, that my Essai had had the greatest success. One thing is certain, that if it was known for a moment, it was almost instantly forgotten again; a sudden shadow engulphed the first ray of my fame.

Having almost become a personage, I was sought by the émigrés of distinction in London; I moved from street to street; first I quitted Tottenham Court Road, and settled myself in the Hampstead Road. Here I lodged for some months in the house of a Mrs. O'Larry, an Irish widow, the mother of a very pretty girl of fourteen, and who had a great partiality for cats. United by this similarity of taste, we had the misfortune to lose two elegant kittens, white as ermine, with black-tipped tails.

Mrs. O'Larry's visitors were old lady neighbours, with whom I was obliged to take tea in the old fashion. Madame de Staël has described this scene in Corinne, at the house of Lady Engermond: "My dear, do you think the water boils well enough to make the tea ?"—"My dear, I think it is a little too soon."

There came also to these tea-parties a tall, handsome, young Irishwoman, Mary Neale, under the escort of a guardian. She discerned some heart-wound in my appearance, for she said to me: "You carry your heart in a sling." I carried my heart I know not how.

Mrs. O'Larry left for Dublin; then, always getting from the district of poor émigrés in the East end, I moved from lodging to lodging till I reached the district of rich émigrés at the West end, and took up my abode amidst the bishops, the court families, and the colonists of Martinique.

Pelletier had returned; he had got married; and was still the old boasting chatterer, lavish of his complaisance, and affecting the money of his neighbours more than their persons.

I made several new acquaintances, especially in the circle where I had family connexions: Christian de Lamoignon, who was severely wounded in the leg at Quiberon, and is now my colleague in the Chamber of Peers, became my friend. He introduced me to Mrs. Lindsay, who was attached to Auguste Lamoignon, his brother: le Président Guillaume was not made more of at Basville between Boileau, Madame de Sévigné, and Bourdaloue, than I was among these three friends.

Mrs. Lindsay, of Irish family, with rather a dry wit, temperament a little brittle, elegant figure, and pleasing face, had great nobleness of soul and elevation of character; the émigrés of merit passed their evenings at the fireside of the last of the Ninons. The old monarchy was expiring, with all its abuses and all its graces. It will some day be disinterred, like those skeletons of queens decked with collars, bracelets, and earrings, which are being discovered in Etruria. At this rendezvous I met M. Malouët and Madame du Belloy, a woman worthy of esteem, Count Montlosier, and the Chevalier de Panat. The last-mentioned had a deserved reputation for talent, untidiness in his person, and epicureanism; he belonged to that group of men of taste, who formerly sat with their arms crossed before French society; idle men, whose mission was to see and judge everything, they exercised the functions now performed by the newspapers, without the harshness of the latter, but also without their great popular influence.

Montlosier had kept afloat on the fame of his renowned phrase of the croix de bois, a phrase a little harshly treated by me when I reproduced it, but true in the main. On quitting France, he went to Coblentz ; ill received by the princes, he had a quarrel, fought one night by the banks of the Rhine, and was run through. Feeling unable to move, and yet seeing no blood, he asked the witnesses whether the point of the sword came out behind.

"Three inches," replied they.

"Then it is nothing," said Montlosier, "sir, draw back your thrust."

Montlosier, received in this way as the reward of his royalist sentiments, crossed to England, and took refuge in literature, that great hospital for émigrés, in which I had a mattress near his. He obtained the editorship of the "Courrier Français.”

Besides his newspaper, he wrote physico-politico-philosophic works. In one of these he proved that blue was the colour of life, because the veins become blue after death, life coming to the surface of the body to evaporate and return to the blue sky. As I am very fond of blue, I was quite charmed with this theory.

Feudally liberal, an aristocrat and a democrat, a motley mind, made up of pieces and fragments, Montlosier is very long in giving utterance to his out-of-the-way ideas; but when he does succeed in bringing them to light, they are sometimes fine, and especially energetic: an anti-priest as one of the nobility, a Christian from sophistry, and as an amateur of antiquity, he would have been, under Paganism, a warm partisan of independence in theory and slavery in practice, throwing the slave to the fishes in the name of the liberty of the human race. A carper and caviller, obstinate and rough, the former deputy of the nobility of Riom nevertheless permits himself to pay some court to power; he knows how to take care of his interests, but does not like or allow it to be perceived, and shelters his weaknesses as a man behind his honour as a gentleman. I have no wish to speak ill of my smoky Auvernat, with his romances of the Mont d'Or, and his polemic treatise the Plaine; I have a liking for his whimsical person. His long obscure developments and circumvolutions of ideas, with parentheses, clearings of the throat, and peevish oh! oh! annoy me (any thing dark, entangled, misty, and difficult to fathom is hateful to me); but on the other hand, I am diverted by this naturalist of volcanoes, this failure of a Pascal, this gigantic orator, who speechifies from the tribune as his little fellow-countrymen sing at the top of a chimney; I like this gazetteer of turf-pits, this liberal explaining the charter through a Gothic window, this gentleman-shepherd, half-married to his milkmaid, sowing his barley himself amongst the snow, in his little field of pebbles; I shall always be grateful to him, for having dedicated to me, in his châlet at Puy-de-Dôme, an old black rock, taken from a Gaulish cemetery which he had discovered.

The Abbé Délille, another countryman of Sidonius Apollinaris, of the chancellor of the hospital, of La Fayette, Thomas, and Chamfort, driven from the continent by the torrent of the republican victories, had also come to settle in London. The