“The twenty-fourth of Brumaire, in the second year of the republic, the Administrators of the district of St. Lo gave orders to the municipality over which I at that time presided, to lodge the Representative of the people, Laplanche, and General Siphert, in the house of Citizen Lemonnier, who was then under arrest at Thorigni.  In introducing one of the founders of the republic, and a French General, into this hospitable mansion, we thought to put the property of our fellow-citizen under the safeguard of all the virtues; but, alas, how were we mistaken!  They had no sooner entered the house, than the provisions of every sort, the linen, clothes, furniture, trinkets, books, plate, carriages, and even title-deeds, all disappeared; and, as if they purposely insulted our wretchedness, while we were reduced to the sad necessity of distributing with a parsimonious hand a few ounces of black bread to our fellow-citizens, the best bread, pillaged from Citizen Lemonnier, was lavished by buckets full to the horses of General Siphert, and the Representative Laplanche.—­The Citizen Lemonnier, who is seventy years of age, having now recovered his liberty, which he never deserved to lose, finds himself so entirely despoiled, that he is at present obliged to live at an inn; and, of property to the amount of sixty thousand livres, he has nothing left but a single spoon, which he took with him when carried to one of the Bastilles in the department de la Manche.”

     The chief defence of Laplanche consisted in allegations that the
     said Citizen Lemonnier was rich, and a royalist, and that he had
     found emblems of royalism and fanaticism about the house.

At the house of one of our common friends, I met --------, and so little
did I imagine that he had escaped all the revolutionary perils to which
he had been exposed, that I could almost have supposed myself in the
regions of the dead, or that he had been permitted to quit them, for his
being alive scarcely seemed less miraculous or incredible.   As I had not
seen him since 1792, he gave me a very interesting detail of his
adventures, and his testimony corroborates the opinion generally
entertained by those who knew the late King, that he had much personal
courage, and that he lost his crown and his life by political indecision,
and an humane, but ill-judged, unwillingness to reduce his enemies by
force.   He assured me, the Queen might have been conveyed out of France
previous to the tenth of August, if she would have agreed to leave the
King and her children behind; that she had twice consulted him on the
subject; but, persisting in her resolution not to depart unaccompanied by
her family, nothing practicable could be devised, and she determined to
share their fate.*

* The gentleman here alluded to has great talents, and is particularly well acquainted with some of the most obscure and disastrous periods of the French revolution.  I have reason