So many new persons, and new things, have come to occupy this France.  Her old Speech and Thought, and Activity which springs from those, are all changing; fermenting towards unknown issues.  To the dullest peasant, as he sits sluggish, overtoiled, by his evening hearth, one idea has come:  that of Chateaus burnt; of Chateaus combustible.  How altered all Coffeehouses, in Province or Capital!  The Antre de Procope has now other questions than the Three Stagyrite Unities to settle; not theatre-controversies, but a world-controversy:  there, in the ancient pigtail mode, or with modern Brutus’ heads, do well-frizzed logicians hold hubbub, and Chaos umpire sits.  The ever-enduring Melody of Paris Saloons has got a new ground-tone:  ever-enduring; which has been heard, and by the listening Heaven too, since Julian the Apostate’s time and earlier; mad now as formerly.

Ex-Censor Suard, Ex-Censor, for we have freedom of the Press; he may be seen there; impartial, even neutral.  Tyrant Grimm rolls large eyes, over a questionable coming Time.  Atheist Naigeon, beloved disciple of Diderot, crows, in his small difficult way, heralding glad dawn.  (Naigeon:  Addresse a l’Assemblee Nationale (Paris, 1790) sur la liberte des opinions.) But, on the other hand, how many Morellets, Marmontels, who had sat all their life hatching Philosophe eggs, cackle now, in a state bordering on distraction, at the brood they have brought out!  (See Marmontel, Memoires, passim; Morellet, Memoires, &c.) It was so delightful to have one’s Philosophe Theorem demonstrated, crowned in the saloons:  and now an infatuated people will not continue speculative, but have Practice?

There also observe Preceptress Genlis, or Sillery, or Sillery-Genlis,—­for our husband is both Count and Marquis, and we have more than one title.  Pretentious, frothy; a puritan yet creedless; darkening counsel by words without wisdom!  For, it is in that thin element of the Sentimentalist and Distinguished-Female that Sillery-Genlis works; she would gladly be sincere, yet can grow no sincerer than sincere-cant:  sincere-cant of many forms, ending in the devotional form.  For the present, on a neck still of moderate whiteness, she wears as jewel a miniature Bastille, cut on mere sandstone, but then actual Bastille sandstone.  M. le Marquis is one of d’Orleans’s errandmen; in National Assembly, and elsewhere.  Madame, for her part, trains up a youthful d’Orleans generation in what superfinest morality one can; gives meanwhile rather enigmatic account of fair Mademoiselle Pamela, the Daughter whom she has adopted.  Thus she, in Palais Royal saloon;—­whither, we remark, d’Orleans himself, spite of Lafayette, has returned from that English ‘mission’ of his:  surely no pleasant mission:  for the English would not speak to him; and Saint Hannah More of England, so unlike Saint Sillery-Genlis of France, saw him shunned, in Vauxhall Gardens, like one pest-struck, (Hannah More’s Life and Correspondence, ii. c. 5.) and his red-blue impassive visage waxing hardly a shade bluer.