As the Ultras of France bear a great hatred towards the inhabitants of the Canton de Vaud, on account of the asylum given and sympathy shown to the proscrits, they have been at the pains of trumping up and printing a pretended petition from the inhabitants of the department of the Doubs, praying that the French Government would endeavor to obtain the removal of these proscrits from the Canton de Vaud, and stating that the said Canton was the foyer of Jacobinical principles, and the place where Napoleon’s return from Elba was planned and accelerated, and thro’ which the conveyance of intelligence backwards and forwards was conducted.  I have no doubt that in this petition more is meant than meets the ear; that the Oligarchs of Bern, as well as the Ultras of France, have a share in it, and that it may be considered not so much as an attempt to compel the Canton to refuse asylum to these exiles, as to excite the Great Powers to enforce the abolition of the independence of Vaud, and to replace it under the dominion and authority of the Canton of Bern.

Everybody here, however, sees thro’ the drift of this petition, and many persons whose names are put down as having signed it, have written to their friends at Lausanne, to declare not only that they never signed such a petition, but their entire ignorance even of the agitation of the question till they saw the petition itself in print.  The French government, however, has not ventured to act any further upon it, than to make a pompous display of the royalist zeal and bon esprit that pervades the Department of the Doubs.

I see a good deal of Mlle Michaud.  I find her conversation extremely agreeable.  She had lent to me an Italian work by Verri entitled Le notti Romane al sepolcro di Stipione.  She is a very rigid Catholic, having been educated by a priest of very strict ideas.  Her devotion however does not render her less cheerful or less amiable.  She having expressed a wish to hear the Protestant church service, I offered to accompany her and we went together one Sunday to the Cathedral Church at Lausanne.  But it unfortunately happened that on that day a sermon was preached which must have given a great deal of pain to her filial feelings.  Mr Levade, the minister, took it into his head to give a political sermon, in which, after a great deal of commonplace abuse of Voltaire, Rousseau and the French Revolution, and very fulsome adulation towards the English government (a subject which was brought in by the head and shoulders), of that island (as he termed it) surrounded by the Ocean, he lavished a great deal of still more fulsome adulation on the Bourbons; and then most wantonly and unnecessarily began a furious declamation against the regicides as he termed them, who had taken refuge in the Canton, and intimated pretty plainly how pleasing it would be to God Almighty that they should be expelled from it.  This intolerant