To-day the report is that the Bank of France has suspended payment. The ruin of the Rothschilds is not true, though they are great losers by these catastrophes. The Provisional Government has very wisely and wittily devised, as a means of raising money, to lay a tax of six hundred francs a year upon everybody who keeps more than one servant! Can folly go beyond that?
Henry Greville showed me yesterday a letter he had received from Paris from Count Pahlen, saying that, though the guillotine was not yet erected, the reign of terror had virtually commenced; for that the pusillanimous dread that kept the whole nation in awe of a handful of pickpockets could be described as nothing else.
I am much concerned about E——'s fortune, the whole of which is, I believe, lodged in French funds. All property there must be in terrible jeopardy, I fear.
Lady G—— F—— went to Claremont two days ago, and says that Louis Philippe's deportment is that of a servant out of place. She did not add, "Pas de bonne maison." ...
Ever yours,
Fanny.
SPECIAL CONSTABLES' DAY IN 1848. [On the famous 10th of April, the day of the great Chartist meeting, I drove from King Street to Westminster Bridge in the morning, before the monster demonstration took place; and though the shops were shut and the streets deserted, everything was perfectly quiet and orderly, and nothing that appeared indicated the political disturbance with which the city was threatened—the dread of which induced people, as far as the Regent's Park from the Houses of Parliament, to pack up their valuables and plate, etc., and prepare for instant flight from London. In the evening, my friends would hardly believe my peaceful progress down Whitehall, and I heard two striking incidents, among the day's smaller occurrences: that Prince Louis Napoleon had enrolled himself among the special constables for the preservation of peace and order; and that M. Guizot, standing where men of every grade, from dandies to draymen, were flocking to accept the same service of public preservation, kept exclaiming, with tears in his eyes, "Oh, le brave peuple! le brave peuple!"—a contrast certainly to his Parisian barricaders.
In the summer of 1848 I returned to America, where my great good fortune in the success of my public readings soon enabled me to realize my long-cherished hope of purchasing a small cottage and a few acres of land in the beautiful and beloved neighborhood of Lenox.]