le. At the fall of
Robespierre, the peruque blonde, no longer subject to the empire of
Barrere's favourites, became a reigning mode.

--Madame Tallien, who is supposed occasionally to dictate decrees to the
Convention, presides with a more avowed and certain sway over the realms
of fashion; and the Turkish draperies that may float very gracefully on a
form like hers, are imitated by rotund sesquipedal Fatimas, who make one
regret even the tight lacings and unnatural diminishings of our
grandmothers.

I came to Beauvais a fortnight ago with the Marquise. Her long
confinement has totally ruined her health, and I much fear she will not
recover. She has an aunt lives here, and we flattered ourselves she
might benefit by change of air--but, on the contrary, she seems worse,
and we propose to return in the course of a week to Amiens.

I had a good deal of altercation with the municipality about obtaining a
passport; and when they at last consented, they gave me to understand I
was still a prisoner in the eye of the law, and that I was indebted to
them for all the freedom I enjoyed. This is but too true; for the decree
constituting the English hostages for the Deputies at Toulon has never
been repealed--

"Ah, what avails it that from slavery far,
"I drew the breath of life in English air?"
Johnson.

Yet is it a consolation, that the title by which I was made an object of
mean vengeance is the one I most value.*

* An English gentleman, who was asked by a republican Commissary,
employed in examining the prisons, why he was there, replied,
"Because I have not the misfortune to be a Frenchman!"

This is a large manufacturing town, and the capital of the department of
l'Oise. Its manufactories now owe their chief activity to the
requisitions for supplying cloth to the armies. Such commerce is by no
means courted; and if people were permitted, as they are in most
countries, to trade or let it alone, it would soon decline.--The choir of
the cathedral is extremely beautiful, and has luckily escaped republican
devastation, though there seems to exist no hope that it will be again
restored to the use of public worship. Your books will inform you, that
Beauvais was besieged in 1472 by the Duke of Burgundy, with eighty
thousand men, and that he failed in the attempt. Its modern history is
not so fortunate. It was for some time harassed by a revolutionary army,
whos