villages several days successively without finding a single septier of corn.  The farmers who have yet been able to conceal any, refuse to dispose of it for assignats; and the poor, who have neither plate nor money, exchange their best clothes or linen for a loaf, or a small quantity of flour.  Our gates are sometimes assailed by twenty or thirty people, not to beg money, but bread; and I am frequently accosted in the street by women of decent appearance, who, when I offer them assignats, refuse them, saying, “We have enough of this sorry paper—­it is bread we want.”—­If you are asked to dine, you take your bread with you; and you travel as though you were going a voyage—­for there are not many inns on the road where you can expect to find bread, or indeed provisions of any kind.

Having procured a few six-livre pieces, we were enabled to purchase a small supply of corn, though by no means enough for our consumption, so that we are obliged to oeconomise very rigidly.  Mr. D-------- and the servants eat bread made with three-parts bran to one of flour.  The little provision we possess is, however, a great embarrassment to us, for we are not only subject to domiciliary visits, but continually liable to be pillaged by the starving poor around us; and we are often under the necessity of passing several meals without bread, because we dare not send the wheat to be ground, nor bake except at night.  While the last operation is performing, the doors are carefully shut, the bell rings in vain, and no guest is admitted till every vestige of it is removed.—­All the breweries have seals put upon the doors, and severe penal laws are issued against converting barley to any other purpose than the making of bread.  If what is allowed us were composed only of barley, or any other wholesome grain, we should not repine; but the distribution at present is a mixture of grown wheat, peas, rye, &c. which has scarcely the resemblance of bread.

I was asked to-day, by some women who had just received their portion, and in an accent of rage and despair that alarmed me, whether I thought such food fit for a human creature.—­We cannot alleviate this misery, and are impatient to escape from the sight of it.  If we can obtain passports to go from hence to Paris, we hope there to get a final release, and a permission to return to England.

My friend Madame de la F-------- has left us, and I fear is only gone
home to die.   Her health was perfectly good when we were first arrested,
though vexation, more than confinement, has contributed to undermine it. 
The revolution had, in various ways, diminished her property; but this
she would have endured with patience, had not the law of successions
involved her in difficulties which appeared every day more interminable,
and perplexed her mind by the prospect of a life of litigation and
uncertainty.   By this law, all inheritances, donations, or bequests,
since the fourteenth of July 1789, are annulled and subjected to a