Amiens, November, 1792.
The arrival of my friends has occasioned a short suspension of my correspondence: but though I have been negligent, I assure you, my dear brother, I have not been forgetful; and this temporary preference of the ties of friendship to those of nature, will be excused, when you consider our long separation.
My intimacy with Mrs. D____ began when I first came to this country, and at every subsequent visit to the continent it has been renewed and increased into that rational kind of attachment, which your sex seldom allow in ours, though you yourselves do not abound in examples of it. Mrs. D____ is one of those characters which are oftener loved than admired—more agreeable than handsome—good-natured, humane, and unassuming—and with no mental pretensions beyond common sense tolerably well cultivated. The shades of this portraiture are an extreme of delicacy, bordering on fastidiousness—a trifle of hauteur, not in manners, but disposition—and, perhaps, a tincture of affectation. These foibles are, however, in a great degree, constitutional: she is more an invalid than myself; and ill health naturally increases irritability, and renders the mind less disposed to bear with inconveniencies; we avoid company at first, through a sense of our infirmities, till this timidity becomes habitual, and settles almost into aversion.—The valetudinarian, who is obliged to fly the world, in time fancies herself above it, and ends by supposing there is some superiority in differing from other people. Mr. D____ is one of the best men existing—well bred and well informed; yet, without its appearing to the common observer, he is of a very singular and original turn of mind. He is most exceedingly nervous, and this effect of his physical construction has rendered him so susceptible, that he is continually agitated and hurt by circumstances which others pass by unnoticed. In other respects he is a great lover of exercise, fond of domestic life, reads much, and has an aversion from bustle of all kind.
The banishment of the Priests, which in many instances was attended with circumstances of peculiar atrocity, has not yet produced those effects which were expected from it, and which the promoters of the measure employed as a pretext for its adoption. There are indeed now no masses said but by the Constitutional Clergy; but as the people are usually as ingenious in evading laws as legislators are in forming them, many persons, instead of attending the churches, which they think profaned by priests who have taken the oaths, flock to church-yards, chapels, or other places, once appropriated to religious worship, but in disuse since the revolution, and of course not violated by constitutional masses. The cemetery of St. Denis, at Amiens, though large, is on Sundays and holidays so crouded, that it is almost difficult to enter it. Here the devotees flock in all weathers, say their mass, and return with the double satisfaction of having preserved their allegiance to the Pope, and risked persecution in a cause they deem meritorious. To say truth, it is not very surprizing that numbers should be prejudiced against the constitutional clergy. Many of them are, I doubt not, liberal and well-meaning men, who have preferred peace and submission to theological warfare, and who might not think themselves justified in opposing their opinion to a national decision: yet are there also many of profligate lives, who were never educated for the profession, and whom the circumstances of the times have tempted to embrace it as a trade, which offered subsistence without labour, and influence without wealth, and which at once supplied a veil for licentiousness, and the means of practising it. Such pastors, it must be confessed, have little claim to the confidence or respect of the people; and that there are such, I do not assert, but on the most credible information. I will only cite two instances out of many within my own knowledge.
P____n, bishop of St. Omer, was originally a priest of Arras, of vicious character, and many of his ordinations have been such as might be expected from such a patron.—A man of Arras, who was only known for his vicious pursuits, and who had the reputation of having accelerated the death of his wife by ill treatment, applied to P____n to marry him a second time. The good Bishop, preferring the interest of his friend to the salvation of his flock, advised him to relinquish the project of taking a wife, and offered to give him a cure. The proposal was accepted on the spot, and this pious associate of the Reverend P____n was immediately invested with the direction of the consciences, and the care of the morals, of an extensive parish.
Acts of this nature, it is to be imagined, were pursued by censure and ridicule; but the latter was not often more successful than on the following occasion:—Two young men, whose persons were unknown to the bishop, one day procured an audience, and requested he would recommend them to some employment that would procure them the means of subsistence. This was just a time when the numerous vacancies that had taken place were not yet supplied, and many livings were unfilled for want of candidates. The Bishop, who was unwilling that the nonjuring priests should have the triumph of seeing their benefices remain vacant, fell into the snare, and proposed their taking orders. The young men expressed their joy at the offer; but, after looking confusedly on each other, with some difficulty and diffidence, confessed their lives had been such as to preclude them from the profession, which, but for this impediment, would have satisfied them beyond their hopes. The Bishop very complaisantly endeavoured to obviate thesse objections, while they continued to accuse themselves of all the sins in the decalogue; but the Prelate at length observing he had ordained many worse, the young men smiled contemptuously, and, turning on their heels, replied, that if priests were made of worse men than they had described themselves to be, they begged to be excused from associating with such company.
Dumouriez, Custine, Biron, Dillon, &c. are doing wonders, in spite of the season; but the laurel is an ever-green, and these heroes gather it equally among the snows of the Alps, and the fogs of Belgium. If we may credit the French papers too, what they call the cause of liberty is not less successfully propagated by the pen than the sword. England is said to be on the eve of a revolution, and all its inhabitants, except the King and Mr. Pitt, become Jacobins. If I did not believe "the wish was father to the thought," I should read these assertions with much inquietude, as I have not yet discovered the excellencies of a republican form of government sufficiently to make me wish it substituted for our own.—It should seem that the Temple of Liberty, as well as the Temple of Virtue, is placed on an ascent, and that as many inflexions and retrogradations occur in endeavouring to attain it. In the ardour of reaching these difficult acclivities, a fall sometimes leaves us lower than the situation we first set out from; or, to speak without a figure, so much power is exercised by our leaders, and so much submission exacted from the people, that the French are in danger of becoming habituated to a despotism which almost sanctifies the errors of their ancient monarchy, while they suppose themselves in the pursuit of a degree of freedom more sublime and more absolute than has been enjoyed by any other nation.— Attempts at political as well as moral perfection, when carried beyond the limits compatible with a social state, or the weakness of our natures, are likely to end in a depravity which moderate governments and rational ethics would have prevented.
The debates of the Convention are violent and acrimonious. Robespierre has been accused of aspiring to the Dictatorship, and his defence was by no means calculated to exonerate him from the charge. All the chiefs reproach each other with being the authors of the late massacres, and each succeeds better in fixing the imputation on his neighbour, than in removing it from himself. General reprobation, personal invectives, and long speeches, are not wanting; but every thing which tends to examination and enquiry is treated with much more delicacy and composure: so that I fear these first legislators of the republic must, for the present, be content with the reputation they have assigned each other, and rank amongst those who have all the guilt, but want the courage, of assassins.
I subjoin an extract from a newspaper, which has lately appeared.*
*Extract from The Courier de l'Egalite, November, 1792: "There are discontented people who still venture to obtrude their sentiments on the public. One of them, in a public print, thus expresses himself— 'I assert, that the newspapers are sold and devoted to falsehood. At this price they purchase the liberty of appearing; and the exclusive privilege they enjoy, as well as the contradictory and lying assertions they all contain, prove the truth of what I advance. They are all preachers of liberty, yet never was liberty so shamefully outraged—of respect for property, and property was at no time so little held sacred—of personal security, yet when were there committed so many massacres? and, at the very moment I am writing, new ones are premeditated. They call vehemently for submission, and obedience to the laws, but the laws had never less influence; and while our compliance with such as we are even ignorant of is exacted, it is accounted a crime to execute those in force. Every municipality has its own arbitrary code—every battalion, every private soldier, exercises a sovereignty, a most absolute despotism; and yet the Gazettes do not cease to boast the excellence of such a government. They have, one and all, attributed the massacres of the tenth of August and the second of September, and the days following each, to a popular fermentation. The monsters! they have been careful not to tell us, that each of these horrid scenes (at the prisons, at La Force, at the Abbaye, &c. &c.) was presided by municipal officers in their scarfs, who pointed out the victims, and gave the signal for the assassination. It was (continue the Journals) the error of an irritated people—and yet their magistrates were at the head of it: it was a momentary error; yet this error of a moment continued during six whole days of the coolest reflection—it was only at the close of the seventh that Petion made his appearance, and affected to persuade the people to desist. The assassins left off only from fatigue, and at this moment they are preparing to begin again. The Journals do not tell us that the chief of these Scelerats [We have no term in the English language that conveys an adequate meaning for this word—it seems to express the extreme of human wickedness and atrocity.] employed subordinate assassins, whom they caused to be clandestinely murdered in their turn, as though they hoped to destroy the proof of their crime, and escape the vengeance that awaits them. But the people themselves were accomplices in the deed, for the Garde Nationale gave their assistance,'" &c. &c.