* The relations or friends of the dead were prohibited, under severe
     penalties, from following their remains to the grave.

I thought, while we traversed the walk, and beheld this scene, that every thing about me bore the marks of the revolution.  The melancholy objects I held on my arm, and the feeble steps of Clementine, whom we could scarcely support, aided the impression; and I fear that, for the moment, I questioned the justice of Heaven, in permitting such a scourge to be let loose upon its works.

I quitted Madame de St. E__m__d this morning with reluctance, for we shall not meet again till I am entirely at liberty.  The village municipality where she now resides, are quiet and civil, and her misfortunes make her fearful of attracting the notice of the people in authority of a large place, so that she cannot venture to Amiens.—­You must observe, that any person who has suffered is an object of particular suspicion, and that to have had a father or a husband executed, and to be reduced to beggary, are titles to farther persecution.—­The politics of the day are, it is true, something less ferocious than they were:  but confidence is not to be restored by an essay in the Orateur du Peuple,* or an equivocal harangue from the tribune; and I perceive every where, that those who have been most injured, are most timid.

* "L’Orateur du Peuple," was a periodical paper published by Freron, many numbers of which were written with great spirit.—­ Freron was at this time supposed to have become a royalist, and his paper, which was comparatively favourable to the aristocrats, was read with great eagerness.

     The following extract from the registers of one of the popular
     commissions will prove, that the fears of those who had already
     suffered by the revolution were well founded: 

     “A.  Sourdeville, and A. N. E. Sourdeville, sisters of an emigrant
     Noble, daughters of a Count, aristocrats, and having had their
     father and brother guillotined.

     “M.  J. Sourdeville, mother of an emigrant, an aristocrat, and her
     husband and son having been guillotined.

     “Jean Marie Defille—­very suspicious—­a partizan of the Abbe Arnoud
     and La Fayette, has had a brother guillotined, and always shewn
     himself indifferent about the public welfare.”

     The commissions declare that the above are condemned to banishment.

I did not reach this place till after the family had dined, and taking my soup and a dish of coffee, have escaped, under pretext of the headache, to my own room.  I left our poet far gone in a classical description of a sort of Roman dresses, the drawings of which he had seen exhibited at the Lyceum, as models of an intended national equipment for the French citizens of both sexes; and my visit to Madame de St. E__m__d had incapacitated me for discussing revolutionary draperies.