The joy of the Princess on seeing me safe again brought tears into her eyes; and, when I related the scene I played off before Gamin against my servant, she laughed most heavily.  “But surely,” said she, “you have not really discharged the poor man?”—­“Oh, no,” replied I; “he acted his part so well before the locksmith, that I should be very sorry to lose such an apt scholar.”

“You must perform this ’buffa scena’,” observed Her Highness, “to the Queen.  She has been very anxious to know the result; but her spirits are so depressed that I fear she will not come to my party this evening.  However, if she do not, I will see her to-morrow, and you shall make her laugh.  It would be a charity, for she has not done so from the heart for many a day!”

SECTION IX.

Editor in continuation: 

Every one who has read at all is familiar with the immortal panegyric of the great Edmund Burke upon Marie Antoinette.  It is known that this illustrious man was not mean enough to flatter; yet his eloquent praises of her as a Princess, a woman, and a beauty, inspiring something beyond what any other woman could excite, have been called flattery by those who never knew her; those who did, must feel them to be, if possible, even below the truth.  But the admiration of Mr. Burke was set down even to a baser motive, and, like everything else, converted into a source of slander for political purposes, long before that worthy palladium of British liberty had even thought of interesting himself for the welfare of France, which his prophetic eye saw plainly was the common cause of all Europe.

But, keenly as that great statesman looked into futurity, little did he think, when he visited the Queen in all her splendour at Trianon, and spoke so warmly of the cordial reception he had met with at Versailles from the Duc and Duchesse de Polignac, that he should have so soon to deplore their tragic fate!

Could his suggestions to Her Majesty, when he was in France, have been put in force, there is scarcely a doubt that the Revolution might have been averted, or crushed.  But he did not limit his friendship to personal advice.  It is not generally known that the Queen carried on, through the medium of the Princesse de Lamballe, a very extensive correspondence with Mr. Burke.  He recommended wise and vast plans; and these, if possible, would have been adopted.  The substance of some of the leading ones I can recall from the journal of Her Highness and letters which I have myself frequently deciphered.  I shall endeavour, succinctly, to detail such of them as I remember.

Mr. Burke recommended the suppression of all superfluous religious institutions, which had not public seminaries to support.  Their lands, he advised, should be divided, without regard to any distinction but that of merit, among such members of the army and other useful classes of society, as, after having served the specified time, should have risen, through their good conduct, to either civil or military preferment.  By calculations upon the landed interest, it appeared that every individual under the operation of this bounty would, in the course of twenty years, possess a yearly income of from five to seven hundred francs.