—­If the persecution of this department has not been sanguinary,* it should be remembered, that it has been covered with prisons; and that the extreme submission of its inhabitants would scarcely have furnished the most merciless tyrant with a pretext for a severer regimen.—­

     * There were some priests guillotined at Amiens, but the
     circumstance was concealed from me for some months after it
     happened.

—­Dumont, I know, expects to establish a reputation by not having guillotined as an amusement, and hopes that he may here find a retreat when his revolutionary labours shall be finished.

The Convention have not yet chosen the members who are to form the new Committee.  They were yesterday solemnly employed in receiving the American Ambassador; likewise a brass medal of the tyrant Louis the Fourteenth, and some marvellous information about the unfortunate Princess’ having dressed herself in mourning at the death of Robespierre.  These legislators remind me of one of Swift’s female attendants, who, in spite of the literary taste he endeavoured to inspire her with, never could be divested of her original housewifely propensities, but would quit the most curious anecdote, as he expresses it, “to go seek an old rag in a closet.”  Their projects for the revival of their navy seldom go farther than a transposal in the stripes of the flag, and their vengeance against regal anthropophagi, and proud islanders, is infallibly diverted by a denunciation of an aristocratic quartrain, or some new mode, whose general adoption renders it suspected as the badge of a party.—­If, according to Cardinal de Retz’ opinion, elaborate attention to trifles denote a little mind, these are true Lilliputian sages.—­Yours, &c.

August, 1794.

I did not leave the Providence until some days after the date of my last:  there were so many precautions to be taken, and so many formalities to be observed—­such references from the municipality to the district, and from the district to the Revolutionary Committee, that it is evident Robespierre’s death has not banished the usual apprehension of danger from the minds of those who became responsible for acts of justice or humanity.  At length, after procuring a house-keeper to answer with his life and property for our re-appearance, and for our attempting nothing against the “unity and indivisibility” of the republic, we bade (I hope) a long adieu to our prison.