the city as Pisistratus did Athens, with a fictitious deity at his side, but he permitted Hebert and Chaumette to introduce this goddess of Reason to the convention, and to install her upon the principal altar of Notre Dame. The former archbishop of Paris had already devested himself of his episcopal ornaments before the convention, asserting, that all religion was founded on imposture, and requesting forgiveness for having so long contributed to abuse the credulity of the people. When Chaumette, who had been formerly a schoolmaster, and Hebert, who had been a priest, approached at the head of a procession composed principally of the dregs of the capital, and presented to the representatives of the French nation the object, which, as they said, was alone worthy of adoration; let men no longer, cried Hebert, tremble at the imaginary thunders of a deity, whom their terrors have created. Let Reason be the only divinity in France; and behold, the goddess in person offers herself to our adoration! So saying, he removed a veil from the face of a beautiful woman, properly habited for the occasion. The multitude now shouted, the convention applauded, and the new religion was established. The next step was to celebrate the rites of the goddess; and that her triumph might be more complete, the scene chosen for the purpose was the cathedral of Notre Dame. The feast given to the people of Paris on that day, was the greatest outrage upon decency, that perhaps ever took place; it combined the operation of every vice, and was equal to all that the Roman poets have related or invented of the unhallowed rites of Isis or Osiris. The same scandalous scenes, with inferior means of celebration indeed, but with all possible profanation, took place at the same time in all the principal cities of the republic. Some young female, distinguished for her personal attractions, and frequently the weeping daughter of parents who had fallen victims to the revolution, saw herself surrounded by the vilest of her sex, and was compelled to perform the principal part upon these occasions; while a troop of peasants bore along with every mark of derision, and as sacrifices to be laid upon the altar of Reason, all that had ever been considered as sacred to the purposes of religion by the piety of their ancestors. It was at this same period of the revolution, and while the supposed efforts of France in the cause of liberty, commanded the sympathy and good wishes of so many of us in America, that these vile scenes were exhibited, and that those devastations were committed, of which the museum at the Petits Augustins has received the remains.

By far the greater part of the sepulchral and other monuments were mutilated or destroyed, and the great body of the people, as if infected by the madness of the government, which had ordered the

royal vaults at St. Denis to be opened, and all their ancient kings and princes, all the Valois, and the Bourbons, to be thrown promiscuously into one common pit, proceeded to violate all the burial places of the republic, where the remains of persons of rank and fortune had been deposited. The lady who represented the goddess of Reason, was a Mademoiselle Oliva of the opera, the same who had been employed some time before on account of her resemblance to the queen to personate that unfortunate princess in the affair of the diamond necklace. I am willing to believe, that she was in both cases the reluctant instrument of some unprincipled men, and that she had performed her part upon the stage of the opera with infinitely more satisfaction than in either of the two last instances. Like the princess, whose name had been so scandalously abused, she was made to finish her days at the guillotine: such also was the fate of Hebert and of Chaumette, and of the apostate archbishop. It must have been a striking lesson, to compare the guilty terrors that overwhelmed this wretch, with the smile of serenity with which Madame Rolland and the princess of Monaco went to execution.

Adjoining the cathedral is the archiepiscopal palace, where the cardinal de Retz once fortified himself against the court, during the regency of Anne of Austria, and whence he marched almost in battle array to the palace of justice, where the prince of Condé might as it was supposed, had he been unable to defend himself, have made some attempt upon his person. You will see a well-drawn character of this famous cardinal by Monsieur de la Rochefoucault, in one of Madame de Sevigne's letters; but I know of no book within your reach that can give you a proper idea of the war of the Fronde, which he was chiefly the occasion of: such a mixture of pleasantry and atrociousness, of songs and assassinations, of epigrams and battles, the world never before saw; and far better would it have been for mankind, if a similar spirit had prevailed during the late revolution. The memoirs of the cardinal de Retz are less read than they deserve to be; they paint the inclinations and principles of a very extraordinary man, who, without acrimony, hatred, or low-minded jealousy, could lavish his fortune, risk his person, and devote his time, in order to excite a civil war. It was to him a frolic, and an amusement that he was fond of. Conspirators were the only characters he admired in history. He was at the same time a distinguished preacher, and a dissolute man of pleasure, and never so happy as when he was preparing for an insurrection of the people, or haranguing them from the top of a carriage. His wish to be extraordinary carried him at last into retirement, when he might still have enjoyed for many years the reasonable pleasures of society: nor was even his resolution to pay his debts so scrupulously devoid of a

certain affectation of singularity. I cannot here deny myself the satisfaction of doing homage to the virtues of a good man, of whose death I have been informed since I began this letter, and whose epitaph might with the utmost propriety be taken from a Latin sentence which the cardinal applied to his own case, on a particular occasion, before the parliament of Paris, as a quotation from Cicero, but of which he was himself the composer. He had been accused by the keeper of the seals, and not without reason, of throwing every thing into confusion, for the promotion of his own interested views: to have entered into the particulars of a public justification might have embarrassed him; he did better. I will not condescend, said he, to answer such calumnies; but I will say, for I may say truly, with the Roman orator (and here he applied the words in Latin) that in the worst of times I would not desert the state, in its prosperity I asked nothing for myself, and in its most adverse moments I never lost my hopes. These words, which have infinitely more grace in the original than in the translation I have been able to give of them, might, with the strictest regard to truth, be engraven upon the tomb-stone of general Gadsden, of South-Carolina; of whom it may also be said, that having been one of the first to raise the standard of revolt against the parent government, he was the first to advise an act of oblivion in favour of those who had differed from him in opinion, and would never give his consent to any act of confiscation.

The palace of Justice, which is towards the other extremity of the island, was formerly the residence of the kings of France, and it was here that Charles VI suffered those indignities, which were repeated at the expense of Louis XVI, in '92. It has been at different times enlarged and embellished, and now presents a noble facade on an ascent of several steps; in front is a court, which is enclosed by an iron railing, very handsomely finished and decorated, and said to be 130 feet in length. It was here that the parliament of Paris held their sittings, a body resembling the parliament of England only in name, being simply, notwithstanding their pretensions to be something more, a court of justice, divided into different chambers. You will see, if I remember right, a short but accurate account of their history and constitution, in the letters of lord Chesterfield. Without having any share by right in the legislative authority, the parliament acted as a court of record for the king's edicts; refusing to be governed by those they had not recorded, and frequently refusing to give them that sanction. In that case the king held what was called a bed of justice; he attended the parliament in person, and ordered the proper officer to

• In difficillimis reipublicæ temporibus urbem nunquam deserui, in prosperis nihil de publico delibavi, in desperatis nihil timui.

register his edict. There were ten of these parliaments throughout the kingdom, and they are accused, those of the distant provinces in particular, of having in many instances exercised a very unjustifiable authority, and of having indulged, I speak of the individual members, in a degree of aristocratic superiority which gave great offence. How far that may have been the case I know not, but they certainly provoked their fate by refusing their concurrence to the general land tax, which was proposed by Monsieur de Calonne, and by urging the king to assemble the states general, which led to the horrors of the revolution, and to those convulsions which have disfigured the face of Europe. Except in cases where the court exerted its influence, and even then also, justice was well administered by the parliaments, though the members purchased their places, and transmitted them like any other property to their heirs. It seems contrary to all ideas of propriety, that a man should purchase a right to judge, and that such an office should be hereditary; but purchase gave a degree of independence, not unfavourable to the administration of justice in an absolute monarchy; and those who could foresee their future situation in life with certainty, were not unlikely to qualify themselves for filling it with honour.

There were other parts of the kingdom, not within the jurisdiction of any parliament, which had a provincial, and in some respects a representative government of their own; and it was one of M. Necker's best ideas, to extend this mode of internal administration to all France. Had it been established at an early period, the great body of the representatives when assembled, would not have remained so entirely at the mercy of a few eloquent and designing men, who from habits of public speaking, and from some knowledge of business, soon rendered themselves masters of the general opinion. The greater part of the members of the various parliaments of the kingdom fell victims to the revolution, and among them Monsieur de Lamoignon, better known by his family name of Malesherbes. He had filled with distinguished reputation the Highest judicial office, and had lived in retirement since the commencement of the revolution, until he was informed that it was intended to bring the king to trial; but though upwards of eighty years of age he would not, as he expresses himself in his letter to the president of the convention, he would not desert the king in the hour of distress, for he had shared in his prosperity. Posterity will to the end of time honour the memory of Malesherbes, and will see with horror how useless his generous offer was to the king, and how fatal to himself. The chamber of vacations, which was in the nature of a committee of the parliament during its recess, having some time before signed a protest against the measures of the national assembly, an act of amnesty had been passed for this and every offence of the sort, but the paper containing

the protest was known to be at the house of Monsieur de Malesherbes in the country, where he had returned after the death of the king, and lived remote from the world, with his children and grandchildren. It was pretended also, that an emigrant had been concealed by some of the family; and it was upon these pretexts that the venerable magistrate was dragged to execution, after the mockery of a trial, together with his sister, his daughter and her husband, and the husband of his granddaughter. One might have supposed that the sight of Malesherbes, so long the love and veneration of all ranks and orders, exposed upon the scaffold in the midst of his family, would have excited in the breast of every spectator, an emotion that no guards or bayonets could have resisted; but the people of France, of late so ferocious and ungovernable, seemed now in a state of torpid insensibility: they quietly submitted to see upwards of 90 persons a day conveyed to the guillotine, and would have submitted to see the daily number of victims increased to 150, which it was intended should be the case, if Robespierre had not been cut off. Fortunately for France, the monster who might with impunity have continued to destroy all that was venerable and respectable, all that was distinguished, or noble, or rich in the republic, began to throw out hints against certain committees, and manifest dissatisfaction with Tallien and others, so long the instruments of his cruelty. He was even supposed to have placed them upon his list, which was known to be the list of death. A party was now formed, strong enough for his destruction; and the very assembly which, a few weeks before, had ordered a day of thanksgiving throughout the republic to the supreme being, so lately acknowledged, for the safety of Robespierre, were at present as unanimous in declaring him a public enemy. Domitian was himself cut off, says Juvenal, as soon as he became dangerous to the outcasts of society.

I have often rejoiced that my excursion to France had not been made at an earlier period, at any period indeed between the death of the king and the power of the directory. There are circumstances now, that I could wish otherwise; but the laws appear to be fairly administered between man and man; a ferocious officer of the police but rarely breaks in upon the rest of a private family; humanity is not insulted by the daily exhibition of numbers carried to execution; there is some semblance of religion, and an individual, who resolutely avoids all interference with politics, except what the Moniteur puts him in possession of, pursues his object, be it pleasure, or business, or science, with as little fear of being molested as under the old government. The emperor too, for justice is due to all men, gains not a little upon being compared to the tyrants of '93 and '94, or to the profligate directory which preceded him. Had I arrived in France at any time during the period abovementioned, I should have found the provincial towns