,
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 to
believe, whenever it is consistent with his own safety, he will, by
a