ble boy."] I did not think it right to satisfy her as to the real
principles of our friends, and went to bed ruminating on the improvements
which the revolution must have occasioned in the art of dissimulation.
Terror has drilled people of the most opposite sentiments into such an
uniformity of manner and expression, that an aristocrat who is ruined and
persecuted by the government is not distinguishable from the Jacobin who
has made his fortune under it.

In the morning Angelique's countenance was brightened, and I found she
had slept in the same room with Madame's _femme de chambre,_ when an
explanation of their political creeds had taken place, so that she now
assured me Mad. Augustine was _"fort honnete dans le fond,"_ [A very good
girl at heart.] though she was obliged to affect republicanism.--"All the
world's a stage," says our great dramatic moralist. France is certainly
so at present, and we are not only necessitated to act a part, but a
sorry one too; for we have no choice but to exhibit in farce, or suffer
in tragedy.--Yours, &c.

December 27, 1794.

I took the opportunity of my being here to go about four leagues farther
to see an old convent acquaintance lately come to this part of the
country, and whom I have not met since I was at Orleans in 1789.

The time has been when I should have thought such a history as this
lady's a romance, but tales of woe are now become familiar to us, and, if
they create sympathy, they no longer excite surprize, and we hear of them
as the natural effects of the revolution.

Madame de St. E__m__d is the daughter of a gentleman whose fortune was
inadequate both to his rank and manner of living, and he gladly embraced
the offer of Monsieur de St. E__m__d to marry her at sixteen, and to
relinquish the fortune allotted her to her two younger sisters. Monsieur
de St. E__m__d, being a dissipated man, soon grew weary of any sort of
domestic life, and placing his wife with her father, in less than a year
after their marriage departed for Italy.--Madame de St. E__m__d, thus
left in a situation both delicate and dangerous for a young and pretty
woman, became unfortunately attached to a gentleman who was her distant
relation: yet, far from adopting the immoral principles not unjustly
ascribed to your country, she conducted herself with a prudence and
reserve, which even in France made her an object of general respect.
About three years after her husband's departure the revolu