vouer; mais il vouloit que les
citoyens fusssent constamment en defiance l'un de l'autre," &c._

"Affecting to consider all things, even the fate of the country, as
depending on himself alone, he never spoke of it but with a view to
point himself out its principal defender.--If you take away from his
long harangues all that regards him personally, you will find only
dry applications of familiar principles, and, above all, those
studied turns, which were artfully prepared to introduce his own
eternal panegyric.--You supposed him timid because his imagination
(which was not merely ardent, as was supposed, but ferocious) seemed
often to exaggerate the misfortunes of his country.--This was a mere
trick: he believed neither in the conspiracies he made so great a
parade of, nor in the poignards to which he pretended to devote
himself as a victim.--His real design was to infuse into the minds
of all men an unceasing diffidence of each other."

One cannot study the characters of these men, and the revolution, without
wonder; and, after an hour of such scribbling, I wake to the scene around
me, and my wonder is not a little increased, at the idea that the fate of
such an individual as myself should be at all dependent on either.--My
friend Mad. de ____ is ill,* and taken to the hospital, so that having no
longer the care of dissipating her ennui, I am at full liberty to indulge
my own.

* I have generally made use of the titles and distinctions by which
the people I mention were known before the revolution; for, besides
that I found it difficult to habituate my pen to the republican
system of levelling, the person to whom these letters were addressed
would not have known who was meant by the new appellations. It is,
however, to be observed, that, except in private aristocratic
intercourse, the word Citizen was in general use; and that those who
had titles relinquished them and assumed their family names.

--Yet I know not how it is, but, as I have before observed to you, I do
not ennuye--my mind is constantly occupied, though my heart is vacant--
curiosity serves instead of interest, and I really find it sufficiently
amusing to conjecture how long my head may remain on my shoulders.--You
will, I dare say, agree with me that any doubts on such a subject are
very well calculated to remove the tranquil sort of indifferen