—­Independent of any regret for the fate of Dillon, who is said to have been a brave and good officer, I am sorry that the first event of this war should be marked by cruelty and licentiousness.—­Military discipline has been much relaxed since the revolution, and from the length of time since the French have been engaged in a land war, many of the troops must be without that kind of courage which is the effect of habit.  The danger, therefore, of suffering them to alledge that they are betrayed, whenever they do not choose to fight, and to excuse their own cowardice by ascribing treachery to their leaders, is incalculable.—­Above all, every infraction of the laws in a country just supposing itself become free, cannot be too severely repressed.  The National Assembly have done all that humanity could suggest—­they have ordered the punishment of the assassins, and have pensioned and adopted the General’s children.  The orator expatiated both on the horror of the act and its consequences, as I should have thought, with some ingenuity, had I not been assured by a brother orator that the whole was “execrable.”  But I frequently remark, that though a Frenchman may suppose the merit of his countrymen to be collectively superior to that of the whole world, he seldom allows any individual of them to have so large a portion as himself.—­Adieu:  I have already written enough to convince you I have neither acquired the Gallomania, nor forgotten my friends in England; and I conclude with a wish a propos to my subject—­that they may long enjoy the rational liberty they possess and so well deserve.—­Yours.

May, 1792.

You, my dear _____, who live in a land of pounds, shillings, and pence,
can scarcely form an idea of our embarrassments through the want of them. 
’Tis true, these are petty evils; but when you consider that they happen
every day, and every hour, and that, if they are not very serious, they
are very frequent, you will rejoice in the splendour of your national
credit, which procures you all the accommodation of paper currency,
without diminishing the circulation of specie.   Our only currency here
consists of assignats of 5 livres, 50, 100, 200, and upwards:  therefore
in making purchases, you must accommodate your wants to the value of your
assignat, or you must owe the shopkeeper, or the shopkeeper must owe you;
and, in short, as an old woman assured me to-day, “C’est de quoi faire
perdre la tete,” and, if it lasted long, it would be the death of her. 
Within these few days, however, the municipalities have attempted to
remedy the inconvenience, by creating small paper of five, ten, fifteen,
and twenty sols, which they give in exchange for assignats of five
livres; but the number they are allowed to issue is limited, and the
demand for them so great, that the accommodation is inadequate to the
difficulty of procuring it.   On the days on which this paper (which is