the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city, kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with her.  She then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating, and he introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior dancers.  Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged as a supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however, never above twelve hundred livres in the year—­which was four hundred livres more than her husband received.

He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers, quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his nation.  His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d’Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion.  With all other terrorists, he was imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some amateurs had constructed a French theatre.

It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and the English and emigrant loyalists on the other.  Having no money to continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play on that night.  She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear to the most advantage, and was deservedly applauded.  The very next evening the Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted that Madame Chevalier should be given a regular engagement.  He replied that no place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public had hitherto declared their satisfaction.  The Jacobins continued inflexible, and here, as well as everywhere else, supported injustice by violence.  As the patriotism of the husband, more than the charms of the wife, was known to have produced this indecent fracas, which for upwards of a week interrupted the plays, all anti-Jacobins united to restore order.  In this they would, perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the bayonets of the Hamburg soldiers interfered, and forced this precious piece of revolutionary furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.

After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of the Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping by a then rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present of a richly and elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten thousand louis d’or on her, before he had a mortifying conviction that some other had partaken of those favours for which he had so dearly paid.