The resigned and pious votaries, who once supposed themselves secure from all the vicissitudes of fortune, and whose union seemed dissoluble only by the common lot of mortality, are now many of them dispersed, wandering, friendless, and miserable.  The religion which they cherished as a comfort, and practised as a duty, is now pursued as a crime; and it is not yet certain that they will not have to choose between an abjuration of their principles, and the relinquishment of the means of existence.—­The military occupiers offered nothing very alleviating to such unpleasant reflections; and I beheld with as much regret the collection of these scattered individuals, as the separation of those whose habitations they fill.  They are most of them extremely young, taken from villages and the service of agriculture, and are going to risk their lives in a cause detested perhaps by more than three parts of the nation, and only to secure impunity to its oppressors.

It has usually been a maxim in all civilized states, that when the general welfare necessitates some act of partial injustice, it shall be done with the utmost consideration for the sufferer, and that the required sacrifice of moral to political expediency shall be palliated, as much as the circumstances will admit, by the manner of carrying it into execution.  But the French legislators, in this respect, as in most others, truly original, disdain all imitation, and are rarely guided by such confined motives.  With them, private rights are frequently violated, only to facilitate the means of public oppressions—­and cruel and iniquitous decrees are rendered still more so by the mode of enforcing them.

I have met with no person who could conceive the necessity of expelling the female religious from their convents.  It was, however, done, and that with a mixture of meanness and barbarity which at once excites contempt and detestation.  The ostensible, reasons were, that these communities afforded an asylum to the superstitious, and that by their entire suppression, a sale of the houses would enable the nation to afford the religious a more liberal support than had been assigned them by the Constituent Assembly.  But they are shallow politicians who expect to destroy superstition by persecuting those who practise it:  and so far from adding, as the decree insinuates, to the pensions of the nuns, they have now subjected them to an oath which, to those at least whose consciences are timid, will act as a prohibition to their receiving what they were before entitled to.

The real intention of the legislature in thus entirely dispersing the female religious, besides the general hatred of every thing connected with religion, is, to possess itself of an additional resource in the buildings and effects, and, as is imagined by some, to procure numerous and convenient state prisons.  But, I believe, the latter is only an aristocratic apprehension, suggested by the appropriation of the