* Vilate, in his pamphlet on the secret causes of the revolution of the ninth Thermidor, relates the following anecdote of the origin of the peruques blondes.  “The caprice of a revolutionary female who, on the fete in celebration of the Supreme Being, covered her own dark hair with a tete of a lighter colour, having excited the jealousy of La Demahe, one of Barrere’s mistresses, she took occasion to complain to him of this coquettry, by which she thought her own charms eclipsed.  Barrere instantly sent for Payen, the national agent, and informed him that a new counter-revolutionary sect had started up, and that its partizans distinguished themselves by wearing wigs made of light hair cut from the heads of the guillotined aristocrats.  He therefore enjoined Payen to make a speech at the municipality, and to thunder against this new mode.  The mandate was, of course, obeyed; and the women of rank, who had never before heard of these wigs, were both surprized and alarmed at an imputation so dangerous.  Barrere is said to have been highly amused at having thus solemnly stopped the progress of a fashion, only becuase it displeased one of his female favourites.—­I perfectly remember Payen’s oration against this coeffure, and every woman in Paris who had light hair, was, I doubt not, intimidated.”

This pleasantry of Barrere’s proves with what inhuman levity the government sported with the feelings of the people.  At the fall of Robespierre, the peruque blonde, no longer subject to the empire of Barrere’s favourites, became a reigning mode.

—­Madame Tallien, who is supposed occasionally to dictate decrees to the Convention, presides with a more avowed and certain sway over the realms of fashion; and the Turkish draperies that may float very gracefully on a form like hers, are imitated by rotund sesquipedal Fatimas, who make one regret even the tight lacings and unnatural diminishings of our grandmothers.

I came to Beauvais a fortnight ago with the Marquise.  Her long confinement has totally ruined her health, and I much fear she will not recover.  She has an aunt lives here, and we flattered ourselves she might benefit by change of air—­but, on the contrary, she seems worse, and we propose to return in the course of a week to Amiens.

I had a good deal of altercation with the municipality about obtaining a passport; and when they at last consented, they gave me to understand I was still a prisoner in the eye of the law, and that I was indebted to them for all the freedom I enjoyed.  This is but too true; for the decree constituting the English hostages for the Deputies at Toulon has never been repealed—­

          “Ah, what avails it that from slavery far,
          “I drew the breath of life in English air?”
          Johnson.

Yet is it a consolation, that the title by which I was made an object of mean vengeance is the one I most value.*