“What will be its result?”

To this moment I remember the sudden light which flashed into his cold grey eye, the gasping lip, and the elevation which even his stooped form assumed; as he answered with a tone and gesture which might have been imagined for one of the prophets of the Sistine Chapel—­

“The result,” said he, “will be the fall of the French empire, for it is a house built on the sand;—­the extinction of Napoleon, for it is his creation, and the one cannot survive the other;—­the liberation of Europe, for its united strength can be chained no longer;—­perhaps the liberty of man, for the next step for nations which have crushed foreign dominion is to extinguish domestic despotism.  Europe once free, what is to come?  A new era, a new shape of society, a new discovery of the mighty faculties of nations, of the wonders of mind, of matter, and of man; a vast shaking of the earth and its institutions; and out of this chaos, a new moral creation, fiat lux et fugient tenebrae.”

The prediction has been partly realized.  Much is yet to be fulfilled.  But, like Gentz, I live in hope, and think that I see an approach to the consummation.

But the party to whom I was now introduced were of a different order from the generality of their country.  Originally of the first education and first society of France, the strictness of the military service had produced on the the most valuable effect of years.  The natural vividness of their temperament was smoothed down, their experience of English kindness had diminished their prejudices; and adversity—­and no men bear the frowns of fortune better than their nation—­gave them almost the manly calmness of the English gentleman.  I found the old general all courtesy, and his friends all good-humour.  My conduct in the affair of the morning was after their own hearts; I had, by common consent, earned their good graces; and they gave me on the spot half a dozen invitations to the regiments and chateaus of themselves and their friends, with as much hospitable sincerity as if they had only to recross the Channel to take possession of them again.  Lafontaine was still moody, but he was in love; and, by this fact, unlike every body else, and unlike himself, from one half hour to another.

The conversation soon turned on a topic, on which the emigrants every where were peculiarly anxious to be set right with English feeling, namely, their acquittance from the charge of having fled unnecessarily.

“Men of honour,” observed the general, “understand each other in all countries.  I therefore always think it due, to both Englishmen and Frenchmen, to explain, that we are not here in the light of fugitives; that we have not given up the cause of our country; and that we are on English ground in express obedience to the commands of our sovereign.  I am at this moment, in this spot, on the king’s duty, waiting, like my gallant friends here, merely the order to join the first expedition