ose idle, godless abbes, and
those obese financiers, whom the secret memoirs of Grimm and Bachaumont,
and the letters of the Marquis de Lauraguais, have held up to such
unsparing ridicule and contempt. This milky and cheese-producing Brie,
this inexhaustible Io, was, at the epoch of the regent Orleans and his
deplorable successor, a literal cavern of pleasures, in the most impure
acceptation of the term; every chateau which the Black Band has not
demolished is, as it were, a half-volume of memoirs in which may be read
the entire history of the times. Here is the spot where formerly stood
the chateau of Samuel Bernard, the prodigal, it is true, of an anterior
age, but worthy of the succeeding one; there is the pavilion of Bourei,
another financier, another Jupiter of all the Danaes of the Theatre
Italien: on this side we see Vaux, the residence of that most princely
of finance ministers, whose suddenly acquired power and wealth, and as
sudden downfall, may surely point a moral for all ministers present and
to come; on that side we have the chateau of Law, the trigonometrical
thief; and Brunoy, the residence of the greatest eccentric perhaps in
the annals of French history: in a word, wherever the foot is placed,
there arises a sort of lamentation of the eighteenth century--that
celebrated century, whose limits we do not pretend to circumscribe as
the astronomers would, but whose beginning may be dated from the decline
of the reign of Louis XIV., its career closing with Barras, whose
immodest chateau still displays at the present day its restored
foundations on the soil upon which Vaux, Brunoy, and Voisenon, shone so
fatally.

It was in this last named little chateau that was born and educated the
celebrated abbe, the friend of Voltaire, of Madame Favart, and of the
Duc de la Valliere; and here it was, also, that in manhood its possessor
would occasionally resort, though not the least in the world a man who
could appreciate rural enjoyments, for the purpose of reposing from the
fatigues of some of his epicurean pilgrimages to his friends at Paris or
Montrouge, and which was his final sojourn when age and infirmities
rendered it imperatively necessary for him to breathe the pure air of
his native place, far away from the heating _petits soupers_ of the
capital, and the various other dearly cherished scenes of his earlier
years.

Claude Henri Fusee de Voisenon, Abbe of Jard, and Minister
Plenipotentiary of the Prince-Bish