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  This is but too true; for the decree constituting the English hostages for the Deputies at Toulon has never been repealed—­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.*

     * An English gentleman, who was asked by a republican Commissary,
     employed in examining the prisons, why he was there, replied,
     “Because I have not the misfortune to be a Frenchman!”

This is a large manufacturing town, and the capital of the department of l’Oise.  Its manufactories now owe their chief activity to the requisitions for supplying cloth to the armies.  Such commerce is by no means courted; and if people were permitted, as they are in most countries, to trade or let it alone, it would soon decline.—­The choir of the cathedral is extremely beautiful, and has luckily escaped republican devastation, though there seems to exist no hope that it will be again restored to the use of public worship.  Your books will inform you, that Beauvais was besieged in 1472 by the Duke of Burgundy, with eighty thousand men, and that he failed in the attempt.  Its modern history is not so fortunate.  It was for some time harassed