at two sous; that we should allow them to bring up warm water and the teapot as usual; that we should not put any tea into it; that we should not eat the bread, but drink a little warm water with a morsel of sugar which remained in the bottom of the sugar-basin. Five days glided on in this manner. I was devoured with hunger; I was burning hot; sleep had wholly deserted me. I sucked some fragments of linen which I had dipped in water; I chewed grass and paper. When I passed before the bakers' shops my torments were dreadful. One severe evening in winter I stood for two hours riveted before a shop where dried fruits and smoked viands were sold, drinking in with my eyes all that I beheld. I could have eaten, not only the edibles, but the boxes, the baskets, and the paniers which contained them. On the morning of the fifth day, almost expiring from inanition, I drag myself to Hingant's house; I knock at the door, it was locked; I call Hingant, who is some time without giving any reply; at last he rises and opens it. He was laughing in a wild and unnatural manner; his riding coat was buttoned. He seats himself before the tableon which the tea things were placed. Our breakfast is just coming up,' said he, in an extraordinary tone of voice. I fancied I saw some drops of blood on his chemise; I hastily unbuttoned his riding-coat; he had given himself a stab with his penknife, about two inches deep, in his left side. I called out for help. The servant hurried out to procure a surgeon. The wound was dangerous."

Just as he has abandoned all hope, and almost resigned himself to die of hunger, he receives a letter containing forty crowns from his good uncle Bedée. He now removes to cheaper lodgings somewhere. off Tottenham Court Road, and, to eke out his money as long as possible, lives with starvation frugality. His bed is only a pallet; he has no blanket, only a coverlet, over which he places his clothes, and a chair, to give a feeling of substance. Here is a curious picture of émigré life in London:

"My cousin, De la Bouëtardais, expelled from an Irish den for not paying his lodging, although he had put his violin in pawn, came to seek a shelter with me from the constables. A Bas-Breton vicar lent him a pallet. La Bouëtardais was, as well as Hingant, a counseller in the parlement of Brittany; he was not master of a handkerchief to wrap round his head; but he had deserted with arms and baggage, that is to say, he had carried off his square cap and his red robe, and he slept under the purple by my side. Facetious, a good musician, and gifted with a fine voice, he seated himself stark naked on the side of his couch, when we were not in the humour for sleeping, put on his square cap, and sang romances, accompanying himself with his guitar, which had but three strings. One night when the poor fellow was thus thrumming 'The Hymn to Venus,' by Metastasio, 'Scendi propicia,' he was struck by a draught of wind, his mouth became twisted, and he died from the effects, but not immediately, for I rubbed his cheek vigorously. We took counsel together in our lofty chamber, we reasoned on politics, and amused ourselves with the gossip of emigration. In the evening we proceeded to the houses of our aunts and cousins to dance, after they had finished their day's work of making and trimming hats."

By-and-by he hears that a clergyman at Beccles, who is writing a.

history of Suffolk, requires a person who can decipher French manuscripts of the twelfth century. He offers his services, which are accepted. He remains for some time at the little east country parsonage, and forms the acquaintance of a gentleman named Ives, the rector of Buugay, a small town twelve miles off. Out of this acquaintance springs up a romance. The daughter falls in love with him, and the mother, perceiving her child's happiness compromised by the attachment, offers her to him for wife. All this time he has been living under an assumed name, and has carefully avoided all reference to his family or connections. Ah! if he could but accept that generous offer! For in this humble English girl he has found the ideal of his dreams, the realisation of his Sylphide. He can only cast himself at the mother's feet, confess all, and fly the house for ever.

Some years afterwards, when he was an ambassador in London, the representative of France, they met once more. She was no longer Miss Ives, but Lady Sutton, the widow of Admiral Sutton, and she came to ask his intercession with the English ministry for a provision for her sons.

What an old, old story is this! There are few hearts in which it will not find an echo, in which it will not rouse a memory. Do we ever find our ideals before it is too late? Do we ever find them at all except in our imaginations, which, like a summer's sunset, suffuses all distant objects, even the most commonplace, in mists of rose and purple? The miseries of humanity lie less in realities than in illusions; less in what we have than in what we desire.

In the meantime his Essay on Revolutions' had been published, and created considerable attention in France. The tone in which it was written was both sceptical and radical, even republican. The book was destined, however, to be associated with an exceedingly painful memory. In the midst of its success he received a letter from one of the family informing him of his mother's death, which it said was greatly hastened by the pain she had experienced upon hearing his name coupled with the enemies of monarchy and religion. So powerful was the effect produced upon his mind by this intelligence that he resolved from that time to abjure scepticism for ever, and in pursuance of this resolution at once commenced the composition of the 'Génie du Christianisme.'

After an eight years' residence in London, in the year 1800, he once more returned to France. It was almost a strange land to him, the language sounded unfamiliar to his ears, and the desolate

*The Chateaubriand family had been doomed to the fate of all royalists who were rash enough to remain in France: the Count, together with one of his sisters, had perished beneath the guillotine, while his mother and François' wife had lain in the dungeons of Paris for several months, escaping death only by an almost miraculous accident.

aspect of the country after trim, peaceful England filled him with repulsion:

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"On the road," he says, we perceived scarcely any men. Swarthy coloured and sunburnt women, with naked feet, and heads either bare or wrapped round with handkerchiefs, were tilling the fields. They might have been taken for slaves. I should rather have been struck with the independence and the manhood of this land, in which the women handled the hoe whilst the men handled the musket. One would have thought that a sheet of fire had passed over these villages. They were miserable and half demolished, everywhere mud and dust, dung-heaps and rubbish. To the right and the left of the highway were seen country seats in ruins. Of their felled plantations there remained only a few squared logs, on which some children were sporting themselves. On all sides were boundary walls demolished, churches abandoned, the dead having been expelled from their resting-places, clock towers without clocks, cemeteries without crosses, saints without heads, and stoned in their niches. On the walls were scrawled the Republican inscription, half obliterated, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, OR DEATH.' In such cases the word Death' had been erased, but the black or red letters appeared again beneath the coat of whitewash. This nation, which seemed on the point of dissolution, was recommencing a world, like those nations which issued from the dark night of barbarism and the destruction of the Middle Ages. . . . . St. Denis was unroofed, its windows were broken, the rain penetrated into its moss-grown naves, and it no longer contained any tombs."

Parisian society was still heterogeneous; the scythe of time had not yet smoothed its earthquake-rent surface, and strange uncouth débris, cast up from great social depths, was found in the most inappropriate positions, and everywhere mingling strangely with splendour and elegance. In the Faubourg St. Germain there was a little colony of the old noblesse, mummified specimens of the Court of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Louis, among others Madame d'Houdetot and her now antique lover, St. Lambert, names familiar to the readers of Rousseau's 'Confessions,' who lived in an old world that seemed centuries away, and who mercilessly mocked and satirised that parvenu world that was in perpetual quarantine to it.* In the salons of Josephine was absorbed the old society of the Directory: the pure republican patriots had pocketed Napoleon's gold, and were now the most slavish of his adulators; but there the prevailing element was military, as it was throughout the land. France was a huge camp, and the Tuileries a tent, under which gathered soldiers and soldiers' wives; the former, brave men, who had won their epaulettes by brave deeds, but whose coarse unpolished manners totally unfitted them for a court; the latter, women who had sprung from all conditions of life-some from the

* Napoleon was acutely sensitive to this ridicule, and would have done much to win the approbation of these exclusives. When crowned with the laurels of a great victory he would write to Fouché from the battle-field: What do they think of me now in the Faubourg St. Germain ?"

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palace, some from the gutter, and from all intermediate stages of the social ladder. With these were intermingled a sprinkling of vulgar bourgeoisie grown rich upon the plundering of the aristocrats, and a few of the less stiff-necked of the noblesse. The manners of such assemblies may be imagined: the men, at ease only upon the field of battle, talked camp language, while their partners, decked in splendid costumes and priceless jewels, the spoils of war, in which they could scarcely walk or sit, were yet more objectionable by their ridiculous awkwardness and attempted fine-ladyism. How they looked in their huge, hideous turbans, foreheads covered with bull's curls, narrowskirted, short-waisted dresses-the last remnants of the Classicism of the Directory-may be gathered from the pictures and caricatures of the time of our own Regency. Trénis and Vestris, the leaders of fashion and the genii of the dance, were their divinities, and the Terpsichorean the only art they could appreciate.

The masquerade ball was a species of amusement much favoured by Napoleon, as it afforded great facilities to the spy system. The police took care to inform themselves of the costume which each person would assume, so that each mask was known to them. Fouché and his myrmidons were ubiquitous; no word was lost to them, and even the Emperor himself wandered through the rooms playing the exalted part of spy.

Napoleon despised women; they brought soldiers into the world, and there, in his opinion, their use ended. "How many children has she?" was his question upon being introduced to a lady; he respected her according as the number was few or large. He required that all his officers should marry, and as husband and wife were frequently separated a day or two after the ceremony for many months together, and as the ladies had not usually been brought up in the most rigidly moral schools, the morality of this society is better left to the reader's imagination.

Nothing more splendid, however, than this parvenu Court, gorgeous in splendour and embellished with all that was exquisite in pictures and statuary, the spoils of the Italian campaign, can be conceived. Upon being created Consul for life, Napoleon restored all the Court offices, giving them, however, new names; for example, the chamberlains were called préfets du palais; he had his petites levées and his grand receptions, and days fixed for receiving each order of society. The costume of each was rigidly prescribed. Senators must be habited in velvet embroidered with gold, tribunes in velvet embroidered with silver, councillors of state in bright blue velvet; while the consuls were attired in scarlet embroidered with gold. Upon the establishment of the Empire the ceremonials were fixed with equal rigidity. Every person, upon entering and quitting the presence must make three distinct reverences to the Emperor and to the Empress and

to all members of the Bonaparte family, none of whom must be addressed without permission. During the theatrical representations frequently given at the Tuileries no person was permitted to laugh or to applaud. David, the savage Terrorist, the painter of Marat, he who offered to drink the hemlock with Robespierre, the sublime republican, debased his genius to paint the formulary of these ceremonies, while in the album of Isabey, still to be found in the Bibliothèque du Roi, are preserved pictures of all the costumes. mixture of coarseness and slavish obsequiousness to the Emperor and his belongings were the distinguishing traits of Court manners. Napoleon modelled himself partly upon Augustus partly upon Louis the Fourteenth. He caused triumphal arches to be raised, hunted at Fontainebleau, and gave magnificent fêtes at Versailles; but even these were military; representations of Marengo and other great battles being their principal features. Upon his marriage with Marie-Louise he was more anxious than ever to restore the traditions of the old court, and many of the old aristocrats, who had until now held aloof, gathered around the Austrian luminary. From that time officers were not permitted to attend the assemblies in uniform; court costume was de rigueur. Inflated titles were cast about in wholesale profusion; Cambacérès, the old regicide Jacobin, was now His Serene Highness the Prince de Parme, and that spawn of the gutter, the vile Terrorist, Fouché, His Excellence the Duke d'Otrante. Even the very Sansculottes jeered at this gutter aristocracy sprung out of itself, and England, the only power that dared, held it up to the scorn of Europe in ceaseless caricatures.

The nation was a network of espionage, and a huge military prison. "It was not order, but discipline prevailed," says Chateaubriand. It was ruled according to military code, the law was martial law, and an iron despotism crushed out all personal liberty. Drunk with vainglory, la grande nation forgot its fetters and fawned upon its gaoler until the shock of the Russian campaign sobered its besotted senses; then it discovered that he was a tyrant. Never was the censorship of the press so rigorous. Political discussion of all kind was strictly forbidden; not to heap laudations upon the Emperor in every newspaper, pamphlet, and book was an unpardonable error, which would bring down the severest censure of the police, and probably the suppression of the work.*

But as the ages of Augustus and of Louis the Fourteenth were celebrated for their literature, this vain despot, who would have crushed all talent, all genius, all fame, unless they ministered to his, who would have bestridden the world like a colossus, and would have had all mankind worship with veiled eyes before his mightiness, desired also to create a literature that should sycophantly blazon his

*Se Madame de Staël,' November part of TEMPLE BAR p. 38.