ower of appeal. The three ladies--with the help, no doubt, of the
irresistible Sieur Grimod--carried the cause into a higher court. They
brought it before the bailliage of the Temple; but the Sieur Lebrun had
some misgivings as to the impartiality of the court, and he carried it
before the judges at the Chatelet. In this court, Grimod and his party
knew they had no chance, suffered the case to go against them by
default, and finally appealed to the Grande Chambre. And the Sieur
Lebrun did all this to get back a woman that had robbed, and pillaged,
and slandered him, and preferred her _bon ami_ the Sieur Grimod, and her
_bonne amie_ the Dame Grimod, to her Misis, in spite of his ode on the
earthquake at Lisbon, and his being ranked by the Parisian critics as a
little above Pindar.

Well, to it they go, reply, replication, rejoinder--till at last we are
verily persuaded the little man tried to get her into his power again
for the express purpose of murdering her at his leisure. And what our
verdict in such a case, if we had been upon the jury, would have been,
we are not prepared to say.

The lady, in the course of her accusations, proved too much. She brought
witnesses to state, that for the whole fourteen years of her wedded life
she had been thumped and bullied worse than Cinderella; accused of
trying to poison her lord and master; and, in short, had led a life of
perfect misery. Oho! cries the Pindar of the reign of Louis the
Fifteenth, you are a pretty woman to talk of misery and ill-treatment
for fourteen years! Why, never was such a merry, happy, careless being
in France. For fourteen years you did nothing but amuse yourself and
worship me, as a good wife ought. I buried myself in my books, and wrote
astonishing odes and epigrams, corresponded with Voltaire, and
discovered grand-daughters of Corneille, and got up subscriptions for
their benefit; and all the while you attended every party, went to all
the theatres, and never missed a single masquerade. No, 'twas when I
forbade the visits of Grimod----But at that name his eloquence leaves
him, and he descends to facts. There is one fact, he says, against which
the whole plot of this separation will fall to pieces. It is the harmony
which always reigned between man and wife till about six weeks before
she went away. The witnesses of the Sieur Lebrun to this fact are
indubitable. They are her own letters--those, be it understood, which
she left behind, or rather, whic