(257) The States-General did not open until May 5, 1789.

(258) The Convocation of the Notables took place the 19th of December.

(259) Armand Charles Emmanuel, Comte de Hautefort, was born in 1741; he bore the title of Grand d’Espagne through his marriage in 1761 with the Comtesse de Hochenfels de Bavere Grand d’Espagne de la premiere classe.

Richmond of to-day, with its villas and streets, a town of houses occupied by professional and business men who spend their life in London, is unlike the gay and lively resort of the last days of the eighteenth century.  Then the elite of the fashionable society of England gathered on the hill and by the river as people now do on the Riviera or in Cairo.  “Richmond is in the first request this summer,” so wrote Walpole in the very year at which we have now arrived.  “Mrs. Bouverie is settled there with a large Court.  The Sheridans are there too, and the Bunburys.  I go once or twice a week to George Selwyn late in the evening when he comes in from walking; about as often to Mrs. Ellis here and to Lady Cecilia at Hampton.”  Once in Richmond men and women stayed there walking, talking, and calling on each other, sometimes driving into London, but enjoying it as a residence, not as a mere resort for an evening’s pleasure.  Selwyn communicated the news of Richmond to his country friends as one does in these days when at some German Spa.  It may seem to us, to whom so many opportunities of enjoyment of all kinds and in all parts of the world are open, a tame kind of life to spend days and nights strolling about a London suburb, attending assemblies, playing at cards, with now and then a visit to town or a row on the river.  But our ancestors were necessarily limited in their pleasures, and to them Richmond was a God-send, especially to men like Selwyn, or Queensberry, or Walpole, who delighted in social intercourse, and liked to enjoy what they called rustic life with as much comfort as the age provided.  Something of this life we have learned from Walpole’s and Miss Berry’s letters, but no truer picture of it can be found than in the last letters of Selwyn.  To the ordinary habitues of Richmond, however, there were in 1789 and 1790 added a throng of French ladies and gentlemen.  Driven from their agreeable salons in Paris, they endeavoured to make the best of life among their English friends at Richmond.  Exiled among a people whose language few of them could understand, they’ received little of the hospitality which had been so freely extended to English visitors in Paris.  It was the last and a sad scene in that remarkable intercourse between the most cultivated people of England and France which is one characteristic of the society of both nations in the eighteenth century.  This entente was destroyed by the French Revolution.  Selwyn, who had figured in this international society more than most men of the age, lived to tell of its last days in the letters which he wrote during the two final years of his life.