the royal armies decidedly transferred victory to the republicans. There no longer remained any obstacle to a measure which destroyed every hope; to that levée en masse, that general levy of the people, which, as was observed in a memoir addressed to the Count de Mercy, a child might have foreseen, and a man might have prevented. The armies of La Vendée were enclosed in a circle, where they could not but consume themselves. Lyons created as much affliction as it had inspired hope and admiration. The Dowager of LOUIS XVI. was abandoned to a band of assassins, viler still than those of her unfortunate consort, and equally feroci

ous.

The 16th of October, 1793, surpassed in horror the 21st of January; Germany was plunged into mourning; and the whole world, struck with astonishment, were moved with pity, and enflamed with indignation.

In speaking of a general misfortune, I should not dare to mention my private affliction, had I not to tell that it was the cause of my writing what I did not foresee would one day be committed to the press.

To lament as an individual the individual loss I had sustained, was but natural. A prey to despair, my sufferings for a long time admitted no other relief than constantly pondering upon them; or rather they became the habitual and involuntary meditations of my mind. The recollections and misfortunes, the life and death of my august benefactress, were ever present to my imagination, and appeared to me in every object. I saw her every where, and ever in those contrasted situations, the idea of which cannot be suppressed, and is not to be borne; I saw her in the two extremes of the lot of mankind, now sipping the exquisite delights of prosperity, now draining the cup of adversity of its very dregs! such greatness! such beauty! a soul so generous! a heart so benevolent! Then her sufferings! the brutality exercised against her, the accumulation of outrages, the excess of degradation, horrors on which respect forbids to dwell, even long enough to curse them! Lastly, the sacrifice, in which the blow of death was the slightest crime of the murderers, the slightest pang of the victim!

Amid these paintings of a tortured imagination it was that I took up the pen, without any regular design, and meaning only to` state the grounds of the devotion paid by myself and my family, to the memory of her whom it was our custom to call by the name of THE MARTYR. I wrote without connexion, without order, just as memory, conversation, or the homage of the day recalled to my mind instances of beneficence or acts of courage, a festival or a tragedy, a moment of hope or some new disaster. At one time I committed to paper what I had seen and heard myself, at another what had been told me by witnesses, in whom I had as much confidence as in myself, and sometimes I penned the result of my reading when, in the course of it, I had found a fact to collect, a mistake to rectify, or a calumny to confound; for where shall we find the character, however angelic, which calumny dares not attack, even in ordinary times? and at periods when every criminal passion breaks loose, can that restrain itself more than any other?

These recitals, however, these fragments, for I dare not say these Memoirs, did not con

tinue so strictly confined to my own family, as I imagined they would. At first, some friends, then some fellow-sufferers, and after wards persons eminently distinguished for all that in society bestows a right to respect and homage, for rank, science, talents, and especially for virtue, desired to see my manuscripts. I have received them back bathed with the tears of my countrymen. - Worthy Germans! first nation among those who have the least departed from nature! you have not yet thought it right to abjure the native and characteristic affections of mankind! you think a people may be powerful without ceasing to be good; you do more, you prove it. You consider insensibility the reverse rather than the test of genius; among you love is the attendant of admiration. You do not hold it necessary to mock those who fly to the support of truth rejected, and of justice deserted. You have neither learned to laugh at the compassion of feeling hearts, nor to despise the esteem of worthy men. To you the narratives of misfortune, the overflowings of grief, the cries of innocence, and the precepts of virtue, are not tiresome; for these in your country find no corrupt and

hardened hearts to glance upon and bound off, but pure and feeling minds into which they penetrate.

I not only found myself solicited, and urged on every side to publish what I had written, but I was favoured by persons of the purest mind and highest rank, with the gift of documents the most precious in my work. Thus I became possessed of the most circumstantial account yet communicated of the flight of Louis XVI. and MARIA ANTOINETTA in 1791, of their deplorable arrest at Varennes, in a word, of the whole of that event, from the day the project was conceived, to the termination of the captivity which was the melancholy result of it; an account which, I might say, was dictated by the Queen. It has been my good fortune also to obtain another paper, relative to this event, which decided the fate of the French empire, a paper that has been in that has been in my possession for seven years, and on which I have never been able to cast my eyes, without experiencing a sudden emotion of sorrow, respect, and pity, similar to what I felt at the mo