ghts. I went in pursuit of it from one party of pleasure
to another; but I did _not_ find it, and I wondered that the name of
pleasure could be given to anything of that kind.'

In his dissipated life after leaving College, he gave up saying his
prayers, and gradually he lost his belief that GOD WAS THERE. He read
unbelieving books, which said that God did not exist, and that the
Unseen world was only a delusion and a dream. For a time Etienne gave
himself up to doubt and denial as well as to dissipation. He was in
this restless state when the French Revolution broke out and caught
him, like a butterfly in a thunderstorm. New questions surged over
him. 'If there is a God after all, why should He allow these horrors
to happen?' But no answer came. Or perhaps he had forgotten how to
listen.

'Towards the close of 1791,' he writes, 'I left my dear Father's
house, and bade him, as it proved, a lasting farewell, having never
seen him since.' At this time, Etienne accompanied his brothers and
many other nobles into Germany, to join the French Princes who were
endeavouring to bring about a counter-revolution and restore the king,
Louis XVI.

On this dangerous journey the young men met with many narrow escapes.
Courage came naturally to Etienne. 'I was not the least moved,' he
writes in his diary, 'when surrounded by people and soldiers, who
lavished their abuses upon us, and threatened to hang me to the
lamp-post. I coolly stood by, my hands in my pockets, being provided
with three pairs of pistols, two of which were double-barrelled. I
concluded to wait to see what they would do, and resolved, after
destroying as many of them as I could, to take my own life with the
last.'

Happily the necessity for extreme courses did not arise. He was, he
says, 'mercifully preserved,' and no violent hands were laid upon him,
though he and his companions suffered a short detention, after which
they succeeded in safely joining the French Princes and their
adherents at the city of Coblentz on the Rhine. Here Etienne spent the
following winter and spring surrounded, he tells us, by many
temptations.

'I was fond of solitude,' continues the diary, 'and had many retired
walks through the woods and over the hills. I delighted to visit the
deserted hermitages, which formerly abounded on the Rhine. I envied
the situation of such hermits, retired from the world, and sheltered
from its many temptations; for I thought it impossible for me to liv