health was perfectly good when we were first arrested,
though vexation, more than confinement, has contributed to undermine it.
The revolution had, in various ways, diminished her property; but this
she would have endured with patience, had not the law of successions
involved her in difficulties which appeared every day more interminable,
and perplexed her mind by the prospect of a life of litigation and
uncertainty. By this law, all inheritances, donations, or bequests,
since the fourteenth of July 1789, are annulled and subjected to a
general partition among the nearest relatives. In consequence, a large
estate of the Marquise's, as well as another already sold, are to be
accounted for, and divided between a variety of claimants. Two of the
number being emigrants, the republic is also to share; and as the live
stock, furniture, farming utensils, and arrears, are included in this
absurd and iniquitous regulation, the confusion and embarrassment which
it has occasioned are indescribable.

Though an unlucky combination of circumstances has rendered such a law
particularly oppressive to Madame de la F--------, she is only one of an
infinite number who are affected by it, and many of whom may perhaps be
still greater sufferers than herself. The Constituent Assembly had
attempted to form a code that might counteract the spirit of legal
disputation, for which the French are so remarkable; but this single
decree will give birth to more processes than all the _pandects, canons,_
and _droits feodaux,_ accumulated since the days of Charlemagne; and I
doubt, though one half the nation were lawyers, whether they might not
find sufficient employment in demalgamating the property of the other
half.

This mode of partition, in itself ill calculated for a rich and
commercial people, and better adapted to the republic of St. Marino than
to that of France, was introduced under pretext of favouring the system
of equality; and its transition from absurdity to injustice, by giving it
a retroactive effect, was promoted to accommodate the "virtuous" Herault
de Sechelles, who acquired a considerable addition of fortune by it. The
Convention are daily beset with petitions from all parts on this subject;
but their followers and themselves being somewhat in the style of
Falstaff's regiment--"younger sons of younger brothers," they seem
determined, as they usually are, to square their notions of justice by
what is most conducive to their ow