rival salon of Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed in the case of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel.  Here were for the moment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he saw some of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts.  His eye was on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the sovereign problems of human government.  A book by a member of this circle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the town, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotent measures of repression.  This was the Treatise on Tactics, by a certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion.  The important part of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examined with what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and political causes of the decline of the military art in France.  Burke read it with keen interest and energetic approval.  He was present at the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to the rival coterie by preferring Guibert’s tragedy to La Harpe’s.  To us, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word.  He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of Mademoiselle Lespinasse’s letters, so unique in their consuming intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page on which they are written.  It was perhaps at Mademoiselle Lespinasse’s that Burke met Diderot.  The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates of the Encyclopaeedia had been given to the public twelve months before, and its editor was just released from the giant’s toil of twenty years.  Voltaire was in imperial exile at Ferney.  Rousseau was copying music in a garret in the street which is now called after his name, but he had long ago cut himself off from society; and Burke was not likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known in England seven years before, and against whom he had conceived a strong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either to influence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged and eccentric vanity.

It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles.  They saw the dauphin and his brothers dine in public, before a crowd of princes of the blood, nobles, abbes, and all the miscellaneous throng of a court.  They attended mass in the chapel, where the old king, surrounded by bishops, sat in a pew just above that of Madame du Barri.  The royal mistress astonished foreigners by hair without powder and cheeks without rouge, the simplest toilettes, and the most unassuming manners.  Vice itself, in Burke’s famous words, seemed to lose half its evil by losing all its grossness.  And there, too, Burke had that