lost his crown and his life by political indecision,
and an humane, but ill-judged, unwillingness to reduce his enemies by
force. He assured me, the Queen might have been conveyed out of France
previous to the tenth of August, if she would have agreed to leave the
King and her children behind; that she had twice consulted him on the
subject; but, persisting in her resolution not to depart unaccompanied by
her family, nothing practicable could be devised, and she determined to
share their fate.*

* The gentleman here alluded to has great talents, and is
particularly well acquainted with some of the most obscure and
disastrous periods of the French revolution. I have reason to
believe, whenever it is consistent with his own safety, he will, by
a genuine relation, expose many of the popular falsehoods by which
the public have been misled.

This, as well as many other instances of tenderness and heroism, which
distinguished the Queen under her misfortunes, accord but ill with the
vices imputed to her; and were not such imputations encouraged to serve
the cause of faction, rather than that of morality, these inconsistencies
would have been interpreted in her favour, and candour have palliated or
forgotten the levities of her youth, and remembered only the sorrows and
the virtues by which they were succeeded.

I had, in compliance with your request on my first arrival in France,
made a collection of prints of all the most conspicuous actors in the
revolution; but as they could not be secreted so easily as other papers,
my fears overcame my desire of obliging you, and I destroyed them
successively, as the originals became proscribed or were sacrificed.
Desirous of repairing my loss, I persuaded some friends to accompany me
to a shop, kept by a man of whom they frequently purchased, and whom, as
his principles were known to them, I might safely ask for the articles I
wanted. He shook his head, while he ran over my list, and then told me,
that having preferred his safety to his property, he had disposed of his
prints in the same way I had disposed of mine. "At the accession of a
new party, (continued he,) I always prepare for a domiciliary visit,
clear my windows and shelves of the exploded heads, and replace them by
those of their rivals. Nay, I assure you, since the revolution, our
trade is become as precarious as that of a gamester. The
Constitutionalists, indeed, held out pretty well, bu