la patrie, il n’en parla jamais que pour s’en designer comme l’unique defenseur:  otez de ses longs discours tout ce qui n’a rapport qu’a son personnel, vous n’y trouverez plus que de seches applications de prinipes connus, et surtout de phrases preparees pour amener encore son eloge.  Vous l’avez juge timide, parce que son imagination, que l’on croyait ardente, qui n’etait que feroce, parassait exagerer souvent les maux de son pays.  C’etait une jonglerie:  il ne croyait ni aux conspirations don’t il faisait tant d’etalage, ni aux poignards aux-quels il feignoit de sse devouer; mais il vouloit que les citoyens fusssent constamment en defiance l’un de l’autre,” &c.

“Affecting to consider all things, even the fate of the country, as depending on himself alone, he never spoke of it but with a view to point himself out its principal defender.—­If you take away from his long harangues all that regards him personally, you will find only dry applications of familiar principles, and, above all, those studied turns, which were artfully prepared to introduce his own eternal panegyric.—­You supposed him timid because his imagination (which was not merely ardent, as was supposed, but ferocious) seemed often to exaggerate the misfortunes of his country.—­This was a mere trick:  he believed neither in the conspiracies he made so great a parade of, nor in the poignards to which he pretended to devote himself as a victim.—­His real design was to infuse into the minds of all men an unceasing diffidence of each other.”

One cannot study the characters of these men, and the revolution, without wonder; and, after an hour of such scribbling, I wake to the scene around me, and my wonder is not a little increased, at the idea that the fate of such an individual as myself should be at all dependent on either.—­My friend Mad. de ____ is ill,* and taken to the hospital, so that having no longer the care of dissipating her ennui, I am at full liberty to indulge my own.

* I have generally made use of the titles and distinctions by which the people I mention were known before the revolution; for, besides that I found it difficult to habituate my pen to the republican system of levelling, the person to whom these letters were addressed would not have known who was meant by the new appellations.  It is, however, to be observed, that, except in private aristocratic intercourse, the word Citizen was in general use; and that those who had titles relinquished them and assumed their family names.

—­Yet I know not how it is, but, as I have before observed to you, I do not ennuye—­my mind is constantly occupied, though my heart is vacant—­ curiosity serves instead of interest, and I really find it sufficiently amusing to conjecture how long my head may remain on my shoulders.—­You will, I dare say, agree with me that any doubts on such a subject are very well calculated to remove the tranquil sort of indifference which produces ennui;