Muscadins, the bust of Marat has been expelled from the theatres and public places of Paris, and the Convention have ratified this popular judgment, by removing him also from their Hall and the Pantheon.  But reflecting on the frailty of our nature, and the levity of their countrymen, in order to obviate the disorders these premature beatifications give rise to, they have decreed that no patriot shall in future by Pantheonized until ten years after his death.  This is no long period; yet revolutionary reputations have hitherto scarcely survived as many months, and the puerile enthusiasm which is adopted, not felt, has been usually succeeded by a violence and revenge equally irrational.

It has lately been discovered that Condorcet is dead, and that he perished in a manner singularly awful.  Travelling under a mean appearance, he stopped at a public house to refresh himself, and was arrested in consequence of having no passport.  He told the people who examined him he was a servant, but a Horace, which they found about him, leading to a suspicion that he was of a superior rank, they determined to take him to the next town.  Though already exhausted, he was obliged to walk some miles farther, and, on his arrival, he was deposited in a prison, where he was forgotten, and starved to death.

Thus, perhaps at the moment the French were apotheosing an obscure demagogue, the celebrated Condorcet expired, through the neglect of a gaoler; and now, the coarse and ferocious Marat, and the more refined, yet more pernicious, philosopher, are both involved in one common obloquy.

What a theme for the moralist!—­Perhaps the gaoler, whose brutal carelessness terminated the days of Condorcet, extinguished his own humanity in the torrent of that revolution of which Condorcet himself was one of the authors; and perhaps the death of a sovereign, whom Condorcet assisted in bringing to the scaffold, might have been this man’s first lesson in cruelty, and have taught him to set little value on the lives of the rest of mankind.—­The French, though they do not analyse seriously, speak of this event as a just retribution, which will be followed by others of a similar nature. "Quelle mort," ["What an end.”] says one—­"Elle est affreuse, (says another,) mais il etoit cause que bien d’autres ont peri aussi."—­"Ils periront tous, et tant mieux," ["’Twas dreadful—­but how many people have perished by his means.”—­ “They’ll all share the same fate, and so much the better.”] reply twenty voices; and this is the only epitaph on Condorcet.

The pretended revolution of the thirty-first of May, 1792, which has occasioned so much bloodshed, and which I remember it dangerous not to hallow, though you did not understand why, is now formally erased from among the festivals of the republic; but this is only the triumph of party, and a signal that the remains of the Brissotines are gaining ground.