commune where the people, vexed with the charges of their
cure, have deliberately organized a Protestant chapel. They sent to the
Consistory at Paris, and got a minister, and they are doing very well!
What we want here is private liberty and public economy. The Republic
gives us neither. The Monarchy, we believe, will give us both!'

Broglie in the Eure, like La Brede in the Gironde, and Val Richer in the
Calvados, has associations of special interest to Americans. At La Brede
was born a gallant grandson of Montesquieu, De Secondat, who earned high
promotion by his valour and his conduct in the American War of
Independence, side by side with Custine, who took Speier and Metz for
the Republic, and for his guerdon got the guillotine, and with Viomenil,
who died bravely defending his King and the law in the palace of the
Tuileries. Val Richer was the home of the great French statesman to whom
we owe the best delineation of Washington we possess, and of whom Mr.
Bancroft, the historian of the American Constitution, bears witness
that, as premier of France, he unreservedly threw open to his researches
all the archives of France in any way bearing upon the history of the
United States. 'Nothing was refused me for examination,' he says, 'nor
was one line of which I desired a copy withheld.'

Broglie was the birthplace of another French soldier who learned in
America to venerate the character of Washington, and whose life paid the
forfeit under the first despotic French Republic of his loyalty to
liberty and the law. Victor Charles de Broglie was a son of the veteran
Marshal of France, 'cool and capable of anything,' whom Mr. Carlyle
perorates about as the 'war-god.' As the Chief of Staff of Biron, in the
army of the Rhine, he refused to recognise the usurpers of August 10,
1792, in a letter to his commander which is a model of common sense and
military honour. Upon this letter Carnot, then a legislative
Commissioner, or, in plain English, inspector and informer of the
Convention, on duty with the army, made a report far from creditable
either to his head or his heart. Victor Charles de Broglie was
eventually guillotined. Taking farewell of his son, a child nine years
old, he bade him 'never allow himself to believe that it was liberty
which had taken his father's life.' The child grew to manhood and to
fame, for ever mindful of this brave injunction. He was the Minister of
Louis Philippe when the claims arising out of the law