iled up a little last Monday, when I
had to petition Mons. de Calonne for the restoration of some trifles
detained in the custom-house at Calais. His politeness, indeed, and the
sight of others performing like acts of humiliation, reconciled me in
some measure to the drudgery of running from subaltern to subaltern,
intreating, in pathetic terms, the remission of a law which is at last
either just or unjust; if just, no felicitation should, methinks, be
permitted to change it; if unjust, what can be so grating as the
obligation to solicit?

We mean to quit Paris to-morrow; I therefore enquired this evening, what
was become of our aerial travellers. A very grave man replied, "_Je
crois, Madame, qu'ils sont deja arrives ces Messieurs la, au lieu ou
les vents se forment_[D]."

[Footnote D: I fancy, Ma'am, the gentlemen are gone to see the place
where all the winds blow from.]

LYONS.

Sept. 25, 1784.

We left the capital at our intended time, and put into the carriage, for
amusement, a book seriously recommended by Mr. Goldoni; but which
diverted me only by the fanfaronades that it contained. The author has,
however, got the premium by this performance, which the Academy of
Berlin promised to whoever wrote best this year on any Belles Lettres
subject. This gentleman judiciously chose to give reasons for the
universality of the French language, and has been so gaily insolent to
every other European nation in his flimsy pamphlet, that some will
probably praise, many reply to, all read, and all forget it. I will
confess myself so seized on by his sprightly impertinence, that I wished
for leisure to translate, and wit to answer him at first, but the want
of one solid thought by which to recollect his existence has cured me;
and I now find that he was deliciously cool and sharp, like the ordinary
wine of the country we are passing through, which having _no body_, can
neither keep its little power long, nor even use it while fresh to any
sensible effect.

The country is really beautiful; but descriptions are _so_ fallacious,
one half despairs of communicating one's ideas as they are: for either
well-chosen words do not present themselves, or being well-chosen they
detain the reader, and fix his mind on _them_, instead of the things
described. Certain it is that I had formed no adequate notion of the
fine river called the Yonne, with cattle grazing on its fertile banks:
those banks not clothed indeed with our soft ve