of a successful General.--Among all their important avocations,
the Convention have found time to pass a decree for obliging women to
wear the national cockade, under pain of imprisonment; and the
municipality of the superb Paris have ordered that the King's family
shall, in future, use pewter spoons and eat brown bread!

Oct. 18.

I begin to be very uneasy about Mr. and Mrs. D____. I have written
several times, and still receive no answer. I fear they are in a
confinement more severe than my own, or that our letters miscarry. A
servant of Mad. de ____'s was here this morning, and no letters had come
to Peronne, unless, as my friend endeavours to persuade me, the man would
not venture to give them in presence of the guard, who par excellence
happened to be a furious Jacobin.--We had the mortification of hearing
that a very elegant carriage of Mad. de ____'s has been put in
requisition, and taken to convey a tinman and two farriers who were going
to Paris on a mission--that two of her farmer's best horses had been
killed by hard work in taking provisions to the army, and that they are
now cutting down the young wood on her estate to make pikes.--The seals
are still on our effects, and the guard remains in possession, which has
put us to the expence of buying a variety of articles we could not well
dispense with: for, on examining the baggage after our arrival, we found
it very much diminshed; and this has happened to almost all the people
who have been arrested. Our suspicions naturally fall on the dragoons,
and it is not very surprizing that they should attempt to steal from
those whom they are certain would not dare to make any complaint.

Many of our fellow-prisoners are embarrassed by their servants having
quitted them.--One Collot d'Herbois, a member of the Commite de Salut
Public, has proposed to the Convention to collect all the gentry,
priests, and suspected people, into different buildings, which should be
previously mined for the purpose, and, on the least appearance of
insurrection, to blow them up all together.--You may perhaps conclude,
that such a project was received with horror, and the adviser of it
treated as a monster. Our humane legislature, however, very coolly sent
it to the committee to be discussed, without any regard to the terror and
apprehension which the bare idea of a similar proposal must inspire in
those who are the destined victims. I cannot myself believe that this
abominab