her in arranging the affairs of the émigrés. She sent to inform M. de Fontanes of my arrival; at the end of about eight-andforty hours he came to see me in a small room, which Mrs. Lindsay had taken for me in an inn almost at her door.

It was Sunday about three o'clock in the afternoon we entered Paris on foot, by the Barrière de l'Etoile. At present we can form no idea of the impression which the excesses of the Revolution had made on men's minds throughout Europe, and especially on the minds of those who were absent from France during the reign of Terror. It seemed to me, as if I were literally going down into hell. I had been a witness, it is true, of the beginning of the Revolution, but its great crimes had not then been committed, and I had remained under the yoke of subsequent facts, such as these facts were related in the midst of the well-regulated and peaceable society of England.

Going forward under my assumed name, and persuaded I was compromising my friend Fontanes, I heard with great astonishment, on entering the Champs Elysées, the sounds of a violin, a horn, clarionet, and drum; I saw tents, in which men and women were dancing; and, in the distance, the palace of the Tuileries appeared at the extremity of its two large woods of chestnut-trees. The Place Louis XV. was bare; it had the dilapidated, melancholy, and abandoned air of an ancient amphitheatre; people passed on quickly; I was particularly surprised at not hearing lamentations, and was afraid of putting my foot into some pool of blood, of which there remained not a trace; I found it impossible to withdraw my eyes from that quarter of the sky, where the instrument of death had been erected; I thought I saw before me in undress my brother and my sister-in-law, bound near the bloody machine; there the head of Louis XVI. had fallen. Notwithstanding all the merriment in the streets, the towers of the churches were mute; it appeared to me as if we were entering on Good Friday, the great day of our Lord's passion.

M. de Fontanes lived in the Rue St. Honoré, in the neighbourhood of Saint-Roch. He took me to his house, and presented me to his wife, and then conducted me to the house of his friend, M. Joubert, where I found a temporary asylum. I was received as a traveller, of whom they had heard some

The next day I went to the office of the police, under the assumed name of M. de Lassagne, to deposit my foreign passport, and to receive in exchange a permission to remain in Paris, which was renewed to me from month to month. At the end of a few days I took an entresol in the rue de Lille, on the side next the rue des Saints-Pères.

I had brought with me the Génie du Christianisme, and the first sheets of that work printed in London. I had been directed to M. Migneret, a worthy man, who consented to undertake the charge of the work, to proceed with the printinginterrupted in London-and to advance something for my subsistence in the meantime. Not a soul knew any thing about my Essai sur les Révolutions, notwithstanding what had been told me by M. Lemière. I found out the old philosopher, Delisle de Sales, who had just published his Mémoire en Faveur de Dieu; and I went to the house of Ginguené. The latter lived in the rue de Grenelle-Saint-Germain, near the hotel of Bon La Fontaine. There was stili legible on his door: "Here the title of citizen is regarded as an honour, and people tutoyer one another. Shut the door, if you please." I went up; M. Ginguené, who hardly recognised me, spoke to me of his great dignity, and of all that he was, and had been. I modestly withdrew, and never attempted to renew a connexion so disproportioned.

I always cherished in my heart the recollection of and regret for England. I had lived there so long, that I had adopted all its usages; I could not endure the dirtiness of our houses, stairs, and tables, our want of neatness, our noise, familiarity, and the absurdity of our talk. I had become English in manners, tastes, and, to a certain extent, in my manner of thinking; for if, as it is alleged, Lord Byron was sometimes inspired in his Childe Harold by René, it must be confessed that eight years' residence in England, preceded by a voyage to America, and the long habit of speaking, writing, and even thinking, in English, had produced a necessary effect on the turn and expression of my ideas. But by degrees I began to enjoy the sociable qualities which distinguish us, that communion of minds, so charming, so rapid, and so easy, that absence of all haughtiness and prejudice, that disregard of fortune and names, and that natural level of all ranks; that equality of mind,

which renders French society incomparable, and redeems our faults. After being established for some months amongst us, a feeling grows up that it is impossible to enjoy life except in Paris.

YEAR 1800-MY LIFE IN PARIS.

Paris, 1837.

I SHUT myself up in the depths of my entresol, and devoted myself wholly to work. In the intervals of relaxation, I made excursions round about to reconnoitre. In the middle of the Palais Royal a circus had been erected; Camille Desmoulins no longer harangued the mob in the open air; troops of prostitutes the attendant satellites of the goddess of Reasonno longer went about in processions under the direction of David as manager and leader. At the entrance of every passage, and in all the galleries, were to be met men who announced all kinds of curiosities, Ombres chinoises, vues d'optique, cabinets de physique, bétes étranges; notwithstanding all the heads that had been cut off, there still remained some idlers bursts of music continually proceeded from the cellars of the Palais-Marchand, accompanied by the noise of great drums; it was there, perhaps, that those giants dwelt for whom I was seeking, and who must necessarily have produced immense events. I went down; a subterranean ball was going on in the midst of spectators sitting and drinking beer. A little hunch-back, planted on a table, was playing the fiddle, and singing a hymn to Bonaparte, which ended with these

lines:

:

Par ses vertues, par ses attraits,

Il meritait d'être leur père!

А

A sou was given him at the close of the set. Such is the basis of that human society which bore an Alexander, and which was sustaining Napoleon.

I visited the places where I had walked during the dreams of my early years. From the convents of former times, the clubbists had been driven away after the monks. Wandering about behind the Luxembourg, I came upon the Chartreuse ; its demolition was just being completed.

The Place des Victoires and the Place Vendôme lamented the absent statues of the grand roi; the community of the Capuchins had been plundered, and the inner cloisters were used as a place for the exhibition of Robertson's fantasmagorie. At the Cordeliers, I asked in vain for the Gothic nave, where I had seen Marat and Danton in their prime. On the quay of the Théatins, the church of that body had been converted into a coffee-house, and a room for rope-dancing. At the door was an illumination representing the amusements within; and written in large letters: admission gratis. I pushed on with the crowd into this cave of iniquity: I had no sooner got a seat, than waiters entered with napkins in their hands-shouting like madmen," Consommez, Messieurs, consommez!" I did not wait to be told twice, and I stole away sadly, to avoid the jeers of the company, because I had nothing wherewith to consommer.

CHANGE OF SOCIETY.

THE Revolution may be divided into three parts, which have nothing in common among them: the Republic-the Empire-and the Restoration; these three different worldsall as completely finished, one as the other-appeared as if separated by centuries. Each of these conditions of society had a fixed principle: the principle of the Republic was equality; that of the Empire, power; and that of the Restoration, liberty. The republican period was the most original and most deeply marked, because we never have seen, nor ever shall see, physical order produced by moral disorder, unity resulting from the government of the multitude, the scaffold substituted for law, and obeyed in the name of humanity.

In 1801, I was present at the second social transformation. The confusion was ridiculous. By means of a suitable disguise, numbers of people passed for persons whom they were not: each wore his nick-name, or his borrowed one, suspended from his neck, as the Venetians, during the Carnival, carry a small mask in their hands, to indicate that they are masked. One

was reputed to be an Italian, another a Spaniard, a third a Prussian, and a fourth a Dutchman; I was a Swiss. A mother passed as the aunt of her son; a father as the uncle of his daughter; the proprietor of an estate was only its manager. This movement recalled to my mind, in an opposite sense, the movement of 1789, when the monks and various religious orders were driven out of their cloisters, and the old condition of society was overrun by the new; the latter, after having displaced the former, was again displaced in its turn.

However, an orderly society began to spring up; people deserted the cafés and the street to enter into domestic life; the remnants of the family circle were collected; the inheritance was reconstructed by gathering up the wrecks, as the rappel is beaten after a battle to see how many have been lost. All the churches that remained entire were re-opened; I had the happiness of blowing the trumpet at the door of the temple. It was easy to distinguish the old republican generation which withdrew, from the imperial generation which advanced. Generals-who had sprung up in emergencies, poor, rude in speech, and severe in mien, who had brought home nothing from all their campaigns except wounds and ragged coats-were continually coming in contact with the brilliant and laced officers of the consular army. The émigré returned home, conversed quietly with the murderers of some of his kindred. All the porters, who were great partisans of the late M. de Robespierre, regretted the spectacles of the Place Louis XV., where, as my own landlord in the Rue de Lille told me, "they cut off women's heads, whose necks were as white as a chicken's skin." The Septembriseurs, having changed their name and their quarters, had become dealers in baked apples at the corners of the streets; but they were often obliged to give up their calling, because the people, who recognised them, upset their stalls, and were disposed to abuse them. The revolutionists, who had become enriched, began to keep establishments in the large hotels in the Faubourg St. Germain, which had been sold. On the way to be created barons and counts, the Jacobins spoke of nothing but the horrors of 1793, and the necessity of chastising the working classes and putting down the excesses of the mob. Bonaparte, putting Brutuses and Scævolas in his police, was preparing to bedeck