While I was undressing, I observed Angelique looked extremely discontented, and on my enquiring what was the matter, she answered, "C’est que je m’ennuie beaucoup ici," ["I am quite tired of this place.”] “Mademoiselle,” (for no state or calling is here exempt from this polite sensation.) “And why, pray?”—­"Ah quelle triste societe, tout le monde est d’un patriotisme insoutenable, la maison est remplie d’images republicaines, des Marat, des Voltaire, des Pelletier, que sais-moi? et voila jusqu’au garcon de l’ecurie qui me traite de citoyenne." ["Oh, they are a sad set—­every body is so insufferably patriotic.  The house is full from top to bottom of republican images, Marats, and Voltaires, and Pelletiers, and I don’t know who—­and I am called Citizen even by the stable boy.”] I did not think it right to satisfy her as to the real principles of our friends, and went to bed ruminating on the improvements which the revolution must have occasioned in the art of dissimulation.  Terror has drilled people of the most opposite sentiments into such an uniformity of manner and expression, that an aristocrat who is ruined and persecuted by the government is not distinguishable from the Jacobin who has made his fortune under it.

In the morning Angelique’s countenance was brightened, and I found she had slept in the same room with Madame’s femme de chambre, when an explanation of their political creeds had taken place, so that she now assured me Mad.  Augustine was "fort honnete dans le fond," [A very good girl at heart.] though she was obliged to affect republicanism.—­“All the world’s a stage,” says our great dramatic moralist.  France is certainly so at present, and we are not only necessitated to act a part, but a sorry one too; for we have no choice but to exhibit in farce, or suffer in tragedy.—­Yours, &c.

December 27, 1794.

I took the opportunity of my being here to go about four leagues farther to see an old convent acquaintance lately come to this part of the country, and whom I have not met since I was at Orleans in 1789.

The time has been when I should have thought such a history as this lady’s a romance, but tales of woe are now become familiar to us, and, if they create sympathy, they no longer excite surprize, and we hear of them as the natural effects of the revolution.

Madame de St. E__m__d is the daughter of a gentleman whose fortune was inadequate both to his rank and manner of living, and he gladly embraced the offer of Monsieur de St. E__m__d to marry her at sixteen, and to relinquish the fortune allotted her to her two younger sisters.  Monsieur de St. E__m__d, being a dissipated man, soon grew weary of any sort of domestic life, and placing his wife with her father, in less than a year after their marriage departed for Italy.—­Madame de St. E__m__d, thus left in a situation both delicate and dangerous for a young and pretty woman, became unfortunately attached