(Fanny Burney to Mrs. Philips.) Aylsham, Norfolk, November 27, '92. My dearest Susanna's details of the French colony at juniper are truly interesting. I hope I may gather from them that M. de Narbonne, at least, has been able to realise some property here. I wish much to hear that poor Madame de Broglie has been permitted to join her husband.
Who is this M. Malouet(50) who has the singular courage and feeling to offer to plead the cause of a fallen monarch in the midst of his ferocious accusers? And how ventures M. de Chauvelin to transmit such a proposal? I wish your French neighbours could give some account of this. I hear that the son for whom the Duc de Liancourt has been trembling, has been reduced to subscribe to all jacobin lengths, to save his life, and retain a little property. What seasons are these for dissolving all delicacy of internal honour!
I am truly amazed, and half alarmed, to find this county with little revolution societies, which transmit their notions of Page 38
things to the larger committee at Norwich, which communicates the whole to the reformists of London. I am told there is scarce a village in Norfolk free from these meetings. . . .
My good and brilliant champion in days of old, Mr. Windham, has never been in Norfolk since I have entered it. He had a call to Bulstrode, to the installation of the Duke of Portland, just as I arrived, and he has been engaged there and at Oxford ever since. I regret missing him at Holkham: I bad no chance of him anywhere else, as I have been so situated, from the melancholy circumstances of poor Mr. Francis's illness, that I have been unable to make acquaintance where he visits.
(Miss Burney's second visit at Aylsham proved a very mournful one. Soon after her arrival, Mr. Francis, her brother-in-law, was seized with an apoplectic fit, which terminated in his death; and Miss Burney remained with her widowed sister, soothing and assisting her, till the close of the year, when she accompanied the bereaved family to London.]
DEPARTURE OF MADAME DE LA CHATRE.
(Mrs. Philips to Fanny Burney.) December 16, '92. . . .. Everything that is most shocking may, I fear, be expected for the unfortunate King of France, his queen, and perhaps all that belong to him. M. d'Arblay said it would indeed scarce have been possible to hope that M. de Narbonne could have escaped with life, had the sauf-conduit requested been granted him, for attending as a witness at the king's trial. . . .
M. de Narbonne had heard nothing new from France, but mentioned, with great concern, the indiscretion of the king, in having kept all his letters since the Revolution; that the papers lately discovered in the Tuileries would bring ruin and death on hundreds of his friends ; and that almost every one in that number "s'y trouvoient compliqus"(51) some way or other. A decree of accusation had been lanc against M. Talleyrand, not for anything found from himself, but because M. de Laporte, long since executed, and from whom, of course, no renseignemens or explanations of any kind could Page 39
be gained, had written to the king that l'Eveque d'Autun(52) was well disposed to serve him. Can there be injustice more flagrant?