tory of Jared Sparks, but which are now edited and reproduced in a complete form by Morris's granddaughter. Comparing the one narrative with the other, we are struck by their general agreement on matters of essential importance. Certainly it would be difficult to single out two contemporary witnesses of greater credibility or with better means for obtaining exact information. Both were much in Faris through the revolutionary period; Morris, indeed, hardly quitted it. Both were foreigners, and consequently should have been comparatively impartial, for although Madame de Staël became thoroughly French in tastes and sympathies, she was Swiss by birth, and always prided herself on being a Catholic-minded citizen of the world. The gifted and accomplished daughter of Necker had been brought up from her girlhood among French statesmen. Marrying the man who became Swedish Minister, she was sheltered under the flag of the sympathetic Scandinavian Power, which had been the first to recognize the Revolutionary Republic. For long she was the regular purveyor of intelligence for King Gustavus. She used, and may be said to have generously abused, her diplomatic privileges to protect the friends who were proscribed in the Terror. She voluntarily shared her father's exiles, and more than once she was forced to fly herself; but Paris was still a loadstone with perpetual attractions for her, and she would always return to the city of her predilections till Buonaparte pronounced the definite sentence of expulsion. Considering his contempt for political women, he could have paid her no greater compliment. It was a recognition of the political consequence she had asserted at no little risk, by her talents, her social gifts, and her indifference to the dangers which might have shaken firm masculine nerves. Since she had done the honors of her father's house during the illnesses of her invalid mother, she had been reigning as one of the recognized queens of the salons. When the aristocracy had closed the hotels, and her rivals had sought a refuge at Coblenz or in London, she still had her regular receptions at the Embassy, and reigned in solitary state. She drew around her politicians of every party and of all shades of opinion, short of the most extreme. Narbonne, Talleyrand, and many other men of somewhat less conspicuous mark, were her familiar friends, and made her their confidante, so far as they confided secrets to any one. Abused and assailed by the Royalist satirists for her excessive Liberalism, denounced by the orators of the clubs and the Left of the Assembly for her reactionary opinions and associates, courted by the leaders of what would now be called the Right and the Left Centres, she was enthroned in a sort of political confessional, and revelled in the luxuries of political gossip. Morris, though a man and of a very different type, was in a somewhat similar position. He was a neutral, who mixed in the most influential society, and who had made politics his passion. Strangely enough he landed at Havre in January 1789 on the very eve of the impending troubles. He brought with him the best introductions from Washington and other friends; he had been on friendly terms with most of the distinguished Frenchmen who had helped his countrymen to their independence; and, moreover, he had come to Paris at a time when Lafayette the Liberator was the idol of the populace, and when the mere fact of being an American citizen was a recommendation. He made the most of his many advantages, and he must have been a remarkable man. He had come to Paris on commercial business, although subsequently, for a short time, he was American Minister. He had always a keen eye to the main chance, and he never missed an occasion, at the tables of men in power, of turning the conversation to the contracts and concessions for which he was in treaty he cleverly labored to reconcile the vital interests of France with the legitimate profits he expected from his various speculations; and while his French acquaintances were being ruined, exiled, or guillotined, he contrived to amass a handsome fortune. But keen as he was in looking after the dollars, and though his shrewd entertainers must often have seen through him and smiled, he became as much of a personality in his way as Madame de Staël. His opinion carried great weight; it was asked and given in the highest quarters, and he was consulted in the most critical emergencies by the men at the helm of the State. After Montmorin and the other ministers came to know and appreciate him, he was never kept dancing attendance in their antechambers. He was buttonholed after official dinners, and drawn aside for quiet and confidential conversation. He even drew up memorials at the personal request of the king, containing detailed programmes of constitutions which might possibly be promulgated by way of compromise. He had always the courage of his opinions, and, in his frank expression of them, he showed sterling independence of character. If we may trust his own reports of his outspoken expostulations with Lafayette-as we believe we may—when Lafayette's constitutional sensitiveness must have been aggravated by the apprehension of a fall, the provisional dictator, with all his faults, must have been the most good-natured of men. Morris had his weaknesses also, though they helped him rather than otherwise. A good-looking man, he had an ungraceful gait, for one leg had been amputated after a carriage accident, and he stumped about on a stout piece of hickory. But he was unremitting in his attentions to the fair sex, at a time when the influence of the sex was great. He believed that he might have boasted any number of bonnes fortunes, had he been less considerate of the lovers and husbands who were his friends; and he was proud of the facility with which he could turn his compliments in the shape of indifferent verses. The compliments, the verses, and the hommage which he punctiliously paid, assured him the entrée of sundry boudoirs, and strength ened his platonic liaisons with beauties of the first fashion. When politics were of vital interest to every body, these informal gatherings of two or three intimates were so many exchanges of news, where secrets were revealed and rumors were discussed. The well-informed American gave at least as much as he got; but it is significant of the manners of the time, and of that ascendancy of feminine influence, that nowhere did he pick up information of more importance than in the boudoirs and the bedrooms he was wont to frequent. Ladies received before they rose, as a matter of course, and without provoking a shadow of scandal from the most censorious. But Morris, although in his character of man of the world he soon accustomed himself to the license of Continental manners, was somewhat taken aback by an in. cident which happened soon after his ar He rival. We mention it here, because it speaks volumes as to the moral causes, and the looseness of lives, which had been working steadily, though insensibly toward the Revolution. A Parc aux Cerfs could only have been possible in a country where such an incident could appear nothing unusual. The beautiful Comtesse de Flahault had made an appointment with him, and he found her in the bath. It is true that appearances, if not decency, had been preserved by milk having been mixed with the water to make it opaque. "She tells me it is usual to receive in the bath." may well remark elsewhere, and before the freshness of his Transatlantic innocence had been rubbed off,-" Everybody agrees that there is an utter prostration of morals -but this general position can never convey to the American mind the degree of depravity. It is not by any figure of rhetoric or force of language that the idea can be communicated. An hundred anecdotes and an hundred thousand examples are required to convey the rottenness of every member." Nor was the honesty better than the morality. He goes on to say," There is one fatal principle which pervades all ranks. It is a perfect indifference to the violation of all engagements. . . . The great mass of the people have no religion but their priests, no law but their superiors, no morals but their interest. These are the creatures who, led by drunken curates, are now in the highroad à la Liberté, and the first use they make of it is to form insurrections every ywhere." Mr. Morris had very considerable prophetical gifts, and we are the less surprised at his having been so generally consulted, when we find how often his sharp political intelligence has cast with accuracy the horoscope of the future. Here, he says and he had only been in France for three months-that, considering the materials from which the great edifice of freedom must be constructed, he fears it will fall and crush the builders. We are told that two of a trade can never agree, and Morris would seem to have intuitively foreseen the day when he and Madame de Staël, as historical portrait-painters and anecdote-mongers, would be brought in casual juxtaposition by an accident of the modern book-trade. least he was one of the very few men who was not favorably impressed by the lady at first sight. The Maréchal de Castries At had taken him to dine with the Neckers, when the ex-banker of Geneva was Premier of France. "In the salon we find Madame de Staël. She seems to be a woman of sense, and somewhat masculine in her character, but has very much the appearance of a chambermaid. A little control, had virtually become the Government of unfortunate France. That was written apropos to the murder of an innocent baker, when the mob, who had been howling for bread, with a brutal refinement of cruelty, brought the head on a pike to his unfortunate wife, who died of horror at the shock. Such were the people-half tigers, half monkeys, as their before dinner M. Necker enters. He has own sarcastic countryman described them the look and manner of the counting--who, suddenly broken loose from all house, and being dressed in embroidered velvet, he contrasts strongly with his habiliments. His bow, his address, etc., say, 'I am the man!'" Count Guibert, a friend of the family, quoted by Lady Blennerhassett, paints, on the occasion of Madame de Necker's marriage, a very different and extremely attractive portrait. He speaks of her great black eyes, sparkling with the fires of genius; of hair with the gloss of ebony falling over her shoulders in rich profusion. And Sainte-Beuve declared, judging from a veritable picture painted in her youth, that the somewhat high-flown description of Guibert was fully justified. It is certain she had won the heart of the brilliant Narbonne, and she held him under her spells till they were parted by his exile. To her devoted affection, by the way, Narbonne owed his life, when she hid him in her husband's embassy from the fury of the September mob. Lady Blennerhassett touches on their relations delicately, though giving Madame de Staël's candid confession that Narbonne was the only man she had ever loved. Morris, who had every means of learning the truth, does not beat about the bush at all, but bluntly avers that Narbonne was her lover. Though, indeed, a lady who had but a single lover in those days might well have taken credit for her character and her constancy; and the mystery-scandalous at the best, and infamous at the worst-which enveloped the birth of Narbonne himself, illustrated the morality of the preceding generation. We have already quoted Morris on the morals of the French. Here is another passage; and it must be remembered that he was by no means intolerant of vice, and little addicted to the use of strong language: "Paris is perhaps as wicked a spot as exists. Incest, murder, bestiality, fraud, rapine, oppression, baseness, cruelty; and yet this is the city which has stepped forward in the sacred cause of liberty. The pressure of incumbent despotism removed, every bad passion exerts its peculiar energy." The food question, as we have said, was at the bottom of all. The troops were told off to guard the trains of carts and wagons which carried corn and flour into the capital; there was something like a threatening of civil war when hungry Rouen stopped supplies intended for Paris; and Morris regards it as one of the most sinister signs of the times when pork was quoted at 16 sous the pound. To be sure, he was looking out for a contract for importations from America. Yet in those days of dearth, when the children were dying of sheer exhaustion, the people must be amused, and kept, if possible, in good humor. Even in 1791 and 1792 the public misery was mocked by brilliant illuminations of the Tuileries and the gardens; nor does it ever seem to have occurred to the wretches who came to stare, that it was a scandalous waste of the public money. It need scarcely be said that there was nothing to illuminate for; things were going steadily from bad to worse. The recklessness and callousness that are born of despair in times of great and general calamity, have often been remarked. We know how Boccaccio has painted society during the plague of Florence, and similar scenes of dissipation occurred when London was being depopulated by the great pestilence. As many of the lighthearted French, as had still money to squander, disported themselves on the burning volcano, when it was already enveloping them in smoke and flame. Morris tells how in 1790 the Bois de Boulogne was more frequented than ever by lovers, duellists, and idlers of all descriptions. The haunts of vice and infamy in the Palais Royal never drove a more roaring trade, though now and then their patrons might be drawn away to listen to the ferocious oratory of the demagogues who were shrieking for blood in the gardens. The very murderers themselves took life pleasantly and easily, when refreshing them selves in the intervals of their labors. When Madame de Staël at last sought safety in flight, during the September massacres, Lady Blennerhassett describes the scenes that met her eyes, as she was driven as a prisoner through the streets : "People refreshed themselves in the wine shops and coffee-houses as carelessly as if nothing unusual were going on. Songs broke through the darkness; dancing and eating went on, while dreadful forms; uttering curses in their drunken sleep, lay with their weapons across the doors or on the curbstone covered with the sanguinary traces of their day's work; and columns of smoke rising from the Tuileries suggested the dangers of fire which the plundered palace had narrowly escaped." Morris kept his diaries most carefully, so that his comparative silence as to the deeds of horror that were daily being enacted around him is ominously significant. It shows how easily good-hearted men may become familiarized to matters of every-day recurrence, however revolting they may be. He seldom cares to note the execution of any single sentence by the blood-tribunals, however illustrious or notorious the victim. He only makes exceptions in the cases of the king and queen, or occasionally of some one with whom he had lived in intimacy. But he does think it worth while to describe the massacres of September, when most of his French friends were naturally in mortal terror, and his own residence had been searched for arms by an uproarious band, supremely indifferent to the sanctity of a legation: Both Morris and Madame de Staël, while keenly interested spectators of the political aspects of an unparalleled movement, for long had believed themselves comparatively safe. Morris, as an American citizen, and afterward as the American Minister, was a persona grata to all parties. When the mob stopped his carriage in the streets, he showed his wooden leg as a certificate of identity, and was sent on his way with cheers for the Transatlantic Republic. The daughter of Necker had claims on the gratitude of the crowds, of whom the liberal distributor of grain and the advocate of reforms had once been the idol; and though the wife of the Swedish Minister might be fiercely denounced from the tribune, it was scarcely | likely that anything worse than expulsion could happen to her. Yet both showed considerable courage and nerve, for they must have been aware that, had the people and the agitators known all, the sanctity surrounding ambassadors might scarcely have saved them. Morris, Republican as he was, and because he was a Republican, was disgusted and scandalized by the excesses of the Revolution, and labored hard to reconcile the king with the nation by "This morning (Sept. 2d) I go out on busi- establishing a constitutional monarchy. ness. Madame de Flahault takes the same opportunity to visit her friends. On our return we hear, or rather see, a proclamation. She inquires into it, and learns that the enemy are at the gates of Paris, which cannot be true. She is taken ill, being affected by the fate of her friends. I observe that this proclamation produces terror and despair among the people. This afternoon they commence the murder of priests who had been shut up in the Carmes. They then go to the Abbaye and murder the prisoners there. This is horrible. "The murdering continues all day (Sept. 3d). I am told that there are about 800 men concerned in it. The Minister of Parma and Ambassadress of Sweden have been stopped as they were going away." "And still (Sept. 4th) the murders con- Indeed, when the Revolution had barely broken out, he had been too aristocratic in his ideas for many of the aristocrats. Madame de Staël, after trimming and hesitating between her fond dreams of a free Republic and the terrible realities, was swayed by her generous sympathies in favor of the falling dynasty. Both she and Morris would have gladly propped the throne; and when they saw that the throne was hopelessly undermined, they heroically risked compromising themselves in history is more dramatically exciting to save the king and his family. Nothing than the successive chances of escape offered to the vacillating and ill-advised monarch, which were obstinately and perversely rejected, as if he had been judicially blinded. The succession of acci dents which baffled him in the flight to Varennes, when he had actually got his foot on the threshold of his prison, was only the climax of a long series of mistakes and mischances. Morris had a project for the king's rescue, which is not disclosed in his papers, and he suggested a plausible scheme for at least sending away the dauphin to travel under the charge of tutors and governors. At the time the proposal was made, it appears to have been practicable. Had the direct heir to the crown been then placed in safety under the guardianship of armed Europe, events might have taken a very different course. We know exactly what Madame de Staël's plan was; it was deliberately matured, and would probably have succeeded. In the June of 1791, she wrote to Malouet: "The king and the queen are lost. I offer myself to save them. Yes; I, whom they regard as their enemy, will set my life on the chance, though on the other hand I confidently hope to place the royal family in safety without sacrificing either them or myself." Her scheme was this: she was to buy a marine residence which was for sale in the neighborhood of Dieppe. She was to travel backward and forward once or twice, taking her son with her, and accompanied by a man and a maid, who closely resembled the king and Marie Antoinette. After one or two journeys, the substitution of the royal family for their representatives would have been comparatively safe. Malouet approved, and hastened to speak to La Porte, the superintendent of the royal civil list. La Porte likewise assented, but soon came back in sad vexation to announce that the king and queen would not accept the proposal. Their reasons strangely illustrate the illusions which lured them on to remain, while escape became daily more difficult. The Court had been treating with the leaders of the Jacobins, and had persuaded them for large sums of money to promise to insure the tranquillity of the Faubourg St. Antoine. In fact, until things had gone too far, the Court relied upon bribery and corruption, although they should have known that the ordinary chiefs of the factions had no power to sell anything that was worth the buying. They were only masters of the populace so long as they were the slaves of its will and the panders to its passions. Mirabeau at one time was well worth buying, no doubt he might have done much at the beginning had he been given a free hand; but the wise counsels of the revolutionary Ahithophel were scoffed at by short-sighted courtiers, and before he died he was already discredited. Danton undoubtedly took money subsequently; but if he had the power, he could scarcely have had the desire to help ; for no one of the revolutionary leaders was more grimly in earnest or had a more rooted antipathy to monarchical institutions. It is true he had occasional moments of compunction, and would willingly have spared the life of the king, could he have done so with safety to himself. But his real mind was disclosed in his memorable answer to Ségur, who had boldly reproached him with having been the author of the September massacres, when the prisoners were in his charge as Minister of Justice. "You forget, was his reply, "whom you are addressing. You forget that we are the canaille, sprung from the gutter, that we should be driven back to it if your ideas were ever realized, and that we can only reign by force of terror." Others of the Jacobins were more or less freely bribed-men who could do nothing, and who never meant to do anything. The folly of the courtiers is almost beyond belief, when they gave credit to the professions of self-confessed traitors, whose conduct and promises were in glaring contradiction. In fact, in that atmosphere of universal intrigue and venality, we cannot withhold a certain measure of admiration for Robespierre, though he may have been kept straight by his constitution rather than his conscience. bilious and blood-thirsty little dictator, according to the testimony of his bitterest enemies, seems to have merited the epithet of the incorruptible: he coldly signed his promiscuous death-sentences without fear or favor; and he led an ascetic and irreproachable life, when his confrères of the blood-tribunals were revelling in sensuality. The The way for Napoleon's dictatorship was prepared by the faults, foibles, and failures of all his forerunners, who are portrayed in these volumes. A succession of prominent men missed the opportunities, more or less magnificent, which were offered them in the swift revolutions of the wheel of fortune. Necker was a thoroughly honest man; he was a capable |