he must be content to wait
while a messenger is dispatched to have it rectified, and the officers
establish the severity of their patriotism at the expence of the
stranger.
Our traveller, at length, permitted to depart, feels his patience
wonderfully diminished, execrates the regulations of the coast, and the
ignorance of small towns, and determines to stop a few days and observe
the progress of freedom at Ameins. Being a large commercial place, he
here expects to behold all the happy effects of the new constitution; he
congratulates himself on travelling at a period when he can procure
information, and discuss his political opinions, unannoyed by fears of
state prisons, and spies of the police. His landlord, however, acquaints
him, that his appearance at the Town House cannot be dispensed with--he
attends three or four different hours of appointment, and is each time
sent away, (after waiting half an hour with the valets de ville in the
antichamber,) and told that the municipal officers are engaged. As an
Englishman, he has little relish for these subordinate sovereigns, and
difficult audiences--he hints at the next coffee-house that he had
imagined a stranger might have rested two days in a free country, without
being measured, and questioned, and without detailing his history, as
though he were suspected of desertion; and ventures on some implied
comparison between the ancient "Monsieur le Commandant," and the modern
"Citoyen Maire."--To his utter astonishment he finds, that though there
are no longer emissaries of the police, there are Jacobin informers; his
discourse is reported to the municipality, his business in the town
becomes the subject of conjecture, he is concluded to be _"un homme sans
aveu,"_ [One that can't give a good account of himself.] and arrested as
"suspect;" and it is not without the interference of the people to whom
he may have been recommended at Paris, that he is released, and enabled
to continue his journey.
At Paris he lives in perpetual alarm. One night he is disturbed by a
visite domiciliaire, another by a riot--one day the people are in
insurrection for bread, and the next murdering each other at a public
festival; and our country-man, even after making every allowance for the
confusion of a recent change, thinks himself very fortunate if he reaches
England in safety, and will, for the rest of his life, be satisfied with
such a degree of liberty as is secured to him by the consti
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