he comforts necessary
to their declining years. To-day the door was opened by a girl of dirty
appearance, the house looked miserable, the furniture worn, and I found
the old couple over a slender meal of soup maigre and eggs, without wine
or bread. Our revolutionary adventures, as is usual on all meetings of
this kind, were soon communicated; and I learned, that almost before they
knew what was passing around them, Monsieur du G--------'s forty years'
service, and his croix, had rendered him suspected, and that he and his
wife were taken from their beds at midnight and carried to prison. Here
they consumed their stock of ready money, while a guard, placed in their
house, pillaged what was moveable, and spoiled what could not be
pillaged. Soon after the ninth of Thermidor they were released, but they
returned to bare walls, and their annuity, being paid in assignats, now
scarcely affords them a subsistence.--Monsieur du G-------- is near
seventy, and Madame is become helpless from a nervous complaint, the
effect of fear and confinement; and if this depreciation of the paper
should continue, these poor people may probably die of absolute want.

I dined with a relation of the Marquise's, and in the afternoon we called
by appointment on a person who is employed by the Committee of National
Domains, and who has long promised my friend to facilitate the adjustment
of some of the various claims which the government has on her property.
This man was originally a valet to the brother of the Marquise: at the
revolution he set up a shop, became a bankrupt, and a furious Jacobin,
and, in the end, a member of a Revolutionary Committee. In the last
capacity he found means to enrich himself, and intimidate his creditors
so as to obtain a discharge of his debts, without the trouble of paying
them.*

* "It was common for men in debt to procure themselves to be made
members of a revolutionary committee, and then force their creditors
to give them a receipt in full, under the fear of being imprisoned."
Clauzel's Report, Oct. 13, 1794.

I am myself acquainted with an old lady, who was confined four
months, for having asked one of these patriots for three hundred
livres which he owed her.

--Since the dissolution of the Committees, he has contrived to obtain the
situation I have mentioned, and now occupies superb apartments in an
hotel, amply furnished with the proofs of hi