baggage, after Minden, and
printed by Duke Ferdinand for public edification] make always such
an outcry about poverty, those people are trying to impose on their
enemies, and persuade them that the carved and chiselled silver of the
Kingdom will suffice for making a vigorous Campaign. I see nothing else
that can have set them on imagining the farce they are now at. There is
Munster taken from them by the English-Hanoverian people; it is affirmed
that the French, on the 25th, quitted Giessen, to march on Friedberg
and repass the Rhine [might possibly have done so;--but the Hereditary
Prince and his 12,000 come to be needed elsewhere!]--Poor we are
opposite our enemies here, cantoned in the Villages about; the last
truss of straw, the last loaf of bread will decide which of us is to
remain in Saxony. And as the Austrians are extremely squeezed together,
and can get nothing out of Bohmen,"--one hopes it will not be they!

All through November, this sending of Plate, I never knew with what
net-result of moneys coinable, goes on in Paris; till, at the highest
tables, there is nothing of silver dishes left;--and a new crockery kind
(rather clumsy; "CULS NOIRS," as we derisively call them, pigment of
BOTTOM part being BLACK) has had to be contrived instead. Under what
astonishments abroad and at home, and in the latter region under what
execrations on Silhouette, may be imagined. "TOUT LE MONDE JURE BEAUCOUP
CONTRE M. DE SILHOUETTE, All the world swears much against him," says
Barbier;--but I believe probably he was much to be pitied: "A creative
genius, you; and this is what you come to?"

November 22d, the poor man got dismissed; France swearing at him, I
know not to what depth; but howling and hissing, evidently, with all
its might. The very tailors and milliners took him up,--trousers
without pockets, dresses without flounce or fold, which they called A LA
SILHOUETTE:--and, to this day, in France and Continental Countries,
the old-fashioned Shadow-Profile (mere outline, and vacant black) is
practically called a SILHOUETTE. So that the very Dictionaries have him;
and, like bad Count Reinhart, or REYNARD, of earlier date, he has become
a Noun Appellative, and is immortalized in that way. The first of
that considerable Series of Creative Financiers, Abbe Terray and the
rest,--brought in successively with blessings, and dismissed with
cursings and hissings,--who end in Calonne, Lomenie de Brienne, and
what Mirabeau Pere call