ve, that those who are merely
itinerant have not opportunities of observing the modes of familiar life
so well as one who is stationary, and travellers are in general too much
occupied by more important observations to enter into the minute and
trifling details which are the subject of my communications to you. But
if your attention be sometimes fatigued by occurrences or relations too
well known, or of too little consequence to be interesting, I claim some
merit in never having once described the proportions of a building, nor
given you the history of a town; and I might have contrived as well to
tax your patience by an erudite description, as a superficial reflection,
or a female remark. The truth is, my pen is generally guided by
circumstances as they rise, and my ideas have seldom any deeper origin
than the scene before me. I have no books here, and I am apt to think if
professed travellers were deprived of this resource, many learned
etymologies and much profound compilation would be lost to the modern
reader.

The insurgents of La Vendee continue to have frequent and decided
successes, but the insurrections in the other departments languish. The
avowed object of liberating the Convention is not calculated to draw
adherents, and if any better purpose be intended, while a faction are the
promoters of it, it will be regarded with too much suspicion to procure
any effectual movement. Yet, however partial and unconnected this revolt
may be, it is an object of great jealousy and inquietude: all the
addresses or petitions brought in favour of it are received with
disapprobation, and suppressed in the official bulletin of the
legislature; but those which express contrary sentiments are ordered to
be inserted with the usual terms of "applaudi, adopte, et mention
honorable."--In this manner the army and the people, who derive their
intelligence from these accounts (which are pasted up in the streets,)
are kept in ignorance of the real state of distant provinces, and, what
is still more important for the Convention, the communication of
examples, which they know so many are disposed to imitate, is retarded.

The people here are nearly in the same state they have been in for some
time--murmuring in secret, and submitting in public; expecting every
thing from that energy in others which they have not themselves, and
accumulating the discontents they are obliged to suppress. The
Convention call them the brave republicans