The serious war is at last absolutely blown over.  Spain has sent us word she is disarming.  So are we.  Who would have expected that a courtesan at Paris would have prevented a general conflagration?  Madame du Barri has compensated for Madame Helen, and is optima pacis causa.  I will not swear that the torch she snatched from the hands of Spain may not light up a civil war in France.  The Princes of the Blood[1] are forbidden the Court, twelve dukes and peers, of the most complaisant, are banished, or going to be banished; and even the captains of the guard.  In short, the King, his mistress, and the Chancellor, have almost left themselves alone at Versailles.  But as the most serious events in France have always a ray of ridicule mixed with them, some are to be exiled to Paris, and some to St. Germain.  How we should laugh at anybody being banished to Soho Square and Hammersmith?  The Chancellor desired to see the Prince of Conti; the latter replied, “Qu’il lui donnoit rendezvous a la Greve."[2]

[Footnote 1:  The “Princes of the Blood” in France were those who, though of Royal descent, were not children of a king—­such, for instance, as the Dukes of Orleans and Bourbon; and they were reckoned of a rank so inferior to the princes of the Royal Family, that, as Marie Antoinette on one occasion told the Duke of Orleans, in a well-deserved reproof for his factious insolence, Princes of the Blood had never pretended to the honour of supping with the King and herself. (See the Editor’s “Life of Marie Antoinette,” c. 10).  Their offence, in this instance, was having protested against the holding and the proceedings of a Lit de Justice, which had been held on April 15th, about three months after the banishment of all the members of Parliament (Lacretelle, c. 13).]

[Footnote 2:  La Greve was the place of execution in Paris.

    Who has e’er been at Paris must needs know the Greve,
    The fatal retreat of th’ unfortunate brave;
    Where honour and justice most oddly contribute
    To ease hero’s pains by a halter and gibbet (PRIOR).]

If we laugh at the French, they stare at us.  Our enormous luxury and expense astonishes them.  I carried their Ambassador, and a Comte de Levi, the other morning to see the new winter Ranelagh [The Pantheon] in Oxford Road, which is almost finished.  It amazed me myself.  Imagine Balbec in all its glory!  The pillars are of artificial giallo antico.  The ceilings, even of the passages, are of the most beautiful stuccos in the best taste of grotesque.  The ceilings of the ball-rooms and the panels painted like Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican.  A dome like the pantheon, glazed.  It is to cost fifty thousand pounds.  Monsieur de Guisnes said to me, “Ce n’est qu’a Londres qu’on peut faire tout cela.”  It is not quite a proof of the same taste, that two views of Verona, by Canaletti, have been sold by auction for five hundred and fifty guineas; and, what is worse, it is come out that they are copies by Marlow, a disciple of Scott.  Both master and scholar are indeed better painters than the Venetian; but the purchasers did not mean to be so well cheated.