hand.  ’It is enough for you to know that I am sent hither by the committee of my section:  my orders are sufficiently proved by my presence.’—­Ah! you think so; I am of a different opinion.  Your presence here is nothing but an insult, unless you have a judiciary order to justify it; show it me, and I shall forget the name of the man, to see only the public functionary.’  Thirion raised his voice as my father lowered his—­’What is your age?—­What was the object of your going to Coblentz?’——­My father seizes a large bamboo, and makes it whistle over Thirion’s head—­at that moment my mother rushes in, and succeeds in dragging him into another room, and restoring him to something like calmness.  I remember she placed me in his arms, whispering to me to entreat him to think of me.  Meantime, Thirion had drawn up his proces verbal, and withdrawn:—­he left me weeping without knowing why I wept, but I saw that my mother and my sister were in tears too.  My father sat pale, trembling with anger,—­everything about us had a desolate aspect.”

The family escape from Paris—­and it was time.  Violent alternations of fear, anger, sorrow, terror, and disgust, with frequent disguises, flights, and all sorts of changes of residence, at length wear out the health and spirits of M. Permon—­a man, apparently, who united dull enough intellect with all the vivacity of a Frenchman’s mere temperament; and he dies in obscurity long before anything like order is re-established.  We need not dwell on the particular fortunes of a not very interesting set of people; but may quote one or two more specimens of the sort of scenes which fill the greater part of the first of these volumes.  Our authoress and her sister are at one time separated from their parents, and placed in an obscure pension in the Faubourg (no longer St.) Antoine.  Their brother, a very young man, has also remained in Paris, and frequently visits them in their retreat.

“We could not but observe, that for some days he had been very melancholy, and that he was getting more and more so.  We asked the reason, and he told us at last that the section had denounced my father in a very alarming style.  We fell a-crying, my sister and I. Albert consoled us as well as he could, but it was easy to see that the denunciation was not all—­that some immediate danger fixed his fears.  We knew afterwards, in effect, that a report had been spread of the arrest of my parents at Limoges—­happily a false one.  The horizon meanwhile was taking a bloody tint.  Judge of my brother’s anxiety! he came every day in a cabriolet, which my father had had built just before these late events; it was an elegant one, very lofty, of the kind called wiski. Already he had been all but insulted by the populace in driving through the faubourg; but liveries had not yet altogether disappeared, and nothing would persuade him to listen to our remonstrances, and make the domestic put off his.  Thus it was on the 31st of August, when he came to see us as usual.”