. Before we had completed our
repast, a little deformed elderly lady made her appearance, whose
religion had been shaken by the revolution, into a crazy and gloomy
superstition. She had scarcely seated herself, before she began a very
rapid and voluble comment upon the change of the times, and the
devastations which the late extraordinary frost had committed upon the
vineyards of France, which she positively asserted, with the confidence
which only the arrival of her tutelar saint with the intelligence ought
to have inspired, was sent as an _appropriate_ judgment upon the
republic, to punish it, for suffering the ladies of Paris to go so
thinly clothed. Monsieur O---- heard her very patiently throughout, and
then observed, that the ways of Heaven were inscrutable, that human
ingenuity was baffled, in attempting to draw inferences from its
visitations, and that it did not appear to him at least, that an offence
which was assuredly calculated to inspire sensations of warmth and
tenderness, was _appropriately_ punished by a chastisement of an
_opposite_ tendency, to which he added, that some moralists who indulged
in an endeavour to connect causes and effects, might think it rather
incompatible with their notions of eternal equity, to endeavour to
clothe the ladies, by stripping the land to nakedness--here the old lady
could not help smiling. Her amicable adversary pursued the advantage
which his pleasantry had produced, by informing her, that
prognostications had been for a long period discountenanced, and that
formerly when the ancient augurs, after the ceremonies of their
successful illusions were over, met each other by accident in the
street, impressed by the ridiculous remembrance of their impositions,
they could not help laughing in each other's faces. Madame V----laughed
too; upon which Monsieur O----, very good humouredly told her, that as a
soothsayer, she certainly would not have smiled, unless she intended to
retire for ever from the office. Previous to my taking leave of
Monsieur O----and his charming family, we walked in the gardens, where
our conversation turned upon the extraordinary genius, who in the
character of first consul of the french, unites a force, and extent of
sway unknown to the kings of France, from their first appearance, to the
final extinction of monarchy.

He told me that he had the honour of knowing him with intimacy from his
youth, and extolled, with high eulogy, his splendid abilities,