to think the cause of kings, and of kings of their race, wounded in the murder and exile of the branch of France, of as much importance as the killing of a brace of partridges?  If they were absolutely idle, and only eat in sloth their bread of sorrow and dependence, they would be forgotten, or at best thought of as wretches unworthy of their pretensions, which they had done nothing to support.  If they err from our interests, what care has been taken to keep them in those interests? or what desire has ever been shown to employ them in any other way than as instruments of their own degradation, shame, and ruin?

The Parliament of Paris, by whom the title of the regent is to be recognized, (not made,) according to the laws of the kingdom, is ready to recognize it, and to register it, if a place of meeting was given to them, which might be within their own jurisdiction, supposing that only locality was required for the exercise of their functions:  for it is one of the advantages of monarchy to have no local seat.  It may maintain its rights out of the sphere of its territorial jurisdiction, if other powers will suffer it.

I am well apprised that the little intriguers, and whisperers, and self-conceited, thoughtless babblers, worse than either, run about to depreciate the fallen virtue of a great nation.  But whilst they talk, we must make our choice,—­they or the Jacobins.  We have no other option.  As to those who in the pride of a prosperity not obtained by their wisdom, valor, or industry, think so well of themselves, and of their own abilities and virtues, and so ill of other men, truth obliges me to say that they are not founded in their presumption concerning themselves, nor in their contempt of the French princes, magistrates, nobility, and clergy.  Instead of inspiring me with dislike and distrust of the unfortunate, engaged with us in a common cause against our Jacobin enemy, they take away all my esteem for their own characters, and all my deference to their judgment.

There are some few French gentlemen, indeed, who talk a language not wholly different from this jargon.  Those whom I have in my eye I respect as gallant soldiers, as much as any one can do; but on their political judgment and prudence I have not the slightest reliance, nor on their knowledge of their own country, or of its laws and Constitution.  They are, if not enemies, at least not friends, to the orders of their own state,—­not to the princes, the clergy, or the nobility; they possess only an attachment to the monarchy, or rather to the persons of the late king and queen.  In all other respects their conversation is Jacobin.  I am afraid they, or some of them, go into the closets of ministers, and tell them that the affairs of France will be better arranged by the allied powers than by the landed proprietors of the kingdom, or by the princes who have a right to govern; and that, if any French are at all to be employed in the settlement of their country, it ought to be only those who have never declared any decided opinion, or taken any active part in the Revolution.[35]