I HAVE no pretension either to literary or political fame, and when my feelings led me to write what I think it now my duty to publish, it was far from my intention to compose a book for the public eye.

It was my unhappy fate to see the most powerful Queen rendered the most miserable of human beings. Having been suckled by my mother, she ever treated her with a kindness, which, I am bold to say, always bespoke a degree of filial tenderness. When she ascended the throne of France, it was her will that I fhould become a Frenchman; she obtained from the King a place of trust for me, and granted me, what was to me of more value than all the places in the world, the privilege of paying her an assiduous attendance. To the very last the Archduchess of Austria, the Queen of France, deigned to call her most devoted servant by the name of Brother. I successively beheld

her felicity and her afflictions, her beneficence and her courage, her graces and her virtues, the just homage which was paid to her, and the sacrilegious outrages with which she was assailed. I had several opportunities of observing her at those moments when, wiping away the secret tears she was shedding for the misfortunes of her family, she suddenly appeared before the public, displaying that strength of mind, which virtue always admires, and by which guilt is frequently awed. I saw and heard her for the last time on the 10th of August, 1792. On that day she observed, directed, and rewarded my zeal. On that day I hoped to die at her feet. On that day she addressed some words to me, for the last time, through MADAME ELIZABETH, during the fatal removal from the Palace of the Thuilleries to the Hall of the Assembly, having then, it may be well said, entered the avenues of death. My eyes were incessantly fixed upon her, till the door of the Hall of that Regicide Assembly shut in all the august family: and had my brave comrades, the grenadiers of the battalion of the Filles St. Thomas, been seconded, that

door would have been broken in before the 'cannon of the rebels were brought up, and rendered resistance unavailing.

When the Queen was committed to the Tower of the Temple, it was but right that her faithful servant should be thrown into the dungeons of La Force. Why, great God! were not safety and destruction, life and death, differently dispensed! Oh! that I had been sacrificed in those massacres of September, to which I seemed destined, and that, for the good of the world, life and liberty had been the lot of the King and Queen of France, of their children, of all the family of HENRY IV !

By one of those unaccountable caprices which, in the course of the French Revolution, have so often puzzled the reason of man, I was, amidst the massacres of September 2d, indebted for the preservation of my sad and comparatively useless existence, to my devotion to my protectress, in a town where she herself was doomed to meet only monsters ready to assassinate her; where a

servant or a friend dared not show himself, and could not defend her.

I determined to adhere no longer to a country such as France was become; and nothing on earth could have prevailed upon me to perform the horrible condition exacted from me for the sparing of my life, which was, to enrol myself in the army of the factious. Rather than have become a soldier of the Regicide Commune, rather than have drawn my sword against my lawful Sovereigns, I would have plunged that sword into my own heart.

I thought no longer, then, but of escaping to my native country, thenceforth my only one; to those abodes of loyalty and valour, sensibility and honour, the inhabitants of which, proud that their country had given birth to MARIA ANTOINETTA, were bitterly lamenting that such a treasure had been sent to a land so unworthy of possessing her.

Obliged to escape in a boat from Havre, I first took refuge in the common asylum of