I must remark to you, that devots, and determined aristocrates, ever attend on these occasions.  The piety of the one is shocked at a mass by a priest who has taken the oaths, and the pride of the other is not yet reconciled to confusion of ranks and popular festivities.  I asked a woman who brings us fruit every day, why she had not come on the fourteenth as usual.  She told me she did not come to the town, "a cause de la foederation”—­“Vous etes aristocrate donc?”—­“Ah, mon Dieu non—­ce n’est pas que je suis aristocrate, ou democrate, mais que je suis Chretienne.*”

     "On account of the foederation.”—­“You are an aristocrate then, I
     suppose?”—­Lord, no!  It is not because I am an aristocrate, or a
     democrate, but because I am a Christian.”

This is an instance, among many others I could produce, that our legislators have been wrong, in connecting any change of the national religion with the revolution.  I am every day convinced, that this and the assignats are the great causes of the alienation visible in many who were once the warmest patriots.—­Adieu:  do not envy us our fetes and ceremonies, while you enjoy a constitution which requires no oath to make you cherish it:  and a national liberty, which is felt and valued without the aid of extrinsic decoration.—­Yours.

August 15.

The consternation and horror of which I have been partaker, will more than apologize for my silence.  It is impossible for any one, however unconnected with the country, not to feel an interest in its present calamities, and to regret them.  I have little courage to write even now, and you must pardon me if my letter should bear marks of the general depression.  All but the faction are grieved and indignant at the King’s deposition; but this grief is without energy, and this indignation silent.  The partizans of the old government, and the friends of the new, are equally enraged; but they have no union, are suspicious of each other, and are sinking under the stupor of despair, when they should be preparing for revenge.—­It would not be easy to describe our situation during the last week.  The ineffectual efforts of La Fayette, and the violences occasioned by them, had prepared us for something still more serious.  On the ninth, we had a letter from one of the representatives for this department, strongly expressive of his apprehensions for the morrow, but promising to write if he survived it.  The day, on which we expected news, came, but no post, no papers, no diligence, nor any means of information.  The succeeding night we sat up, expecting letters by the post:  still, however, none arrived; and the courier only passed hastily through, giving no detail, but that Paris was a feu et a sang.*

     * All fire and slaughter.