In some places they arrested with the most barbarous caprice, even without the shadow of a reason.  At Hesden, a small town in Artois, Dumont left the Mayor carte blanche, and in one night two hundred people were thrown into prison.  Every where these low and obscure dominators reigned without controul, and so much were the people intimidated, that instead of daring to complain, they treated their new tyrants with the most servile adulation.—­I have seen a ci-devant Comtesse coquetting with all her might a Jacobin tailor, and the richest merchants of a town soliciting very humbly the good offices of a dealer in old clothes.

These ridiculous accoutrements, and this magnificent phraseology, are in themselves very harmless; but the ascendancy which such a class of people are taking has become a subject of just alarm.—­The whole administration of the country is now in the hands of uninformed and necessitous profligates, swindlers, men already condemned by the laws, and who, if the revolution had not given them “place and office,” would have been at the galleys, or in prison.*

* One of the administrators of the department de la Somme (which, however, was more decently composed than many others,) was, before the revolution, convicted of house-breaking, and another of forgery; and it has since been proved on various occasions, particularly on the trial of the ninety-four Nantais, that the revolutionary Committees were, for the most part, composed of the very refuse of society—­adventurers, thieves, and even assassins; and it would be difficult to imagine a crime that did not there find reward and protection.—­In vain were the privileges of the nobility abolished, and religion proscribed.  A new privileged order arose in the Jacobins, and guilt of every kind, without the semblance of penitence, found an asylum in these Committees, and an inviolability more sacred than that afforded by the demolished altars.

To these may be added a few men of weak character, and unsteady principles, who remain in office because they fear to resign; with a few, and but very few, ignorant fanatics, who really imagine they are free because they can molest and destroy with impunity all they have hitherto been taught to respect, and drink treble the quantity they did formerly.

Oct. 30.

For some days the guards have been so untractable, and the croud at the door has been so great, that Fleury was obliged to make various efforts before he could communicate the result of his negotiation.  He has at length found means to inform us, that his friend the tailor had exerted all his interest in our favour, but that Dumont and Le Bon (as often happens between neighbouring potentates) are at war, and their enmity being in some degree subject to their mutual fears, neither will venture to liberate any prisoner arrested by the other, lest such a disposition to clemency should be seized on by his rival as a ground of accusation.*