of course spurious.

When Weber's _Memoirs_ were republished in the long collection of
Baudoin, Weber protested and brought an action. The defendant denied
his claim, and produced evidence to prove that the three first
chapters are by Lally Tollendal. It does not always follow that the
book is worthless because the title-page assigns it to a man who is
not the author. The real author very often is not to be trusted.
Malouet is one of those men, very rare in history, whose reputation
rises the more we know him; and Dumont of Geneva was a sage observer,
the confidant, and often the prompter, of Mirabeau. Both are
misleading, for they wrote long after, and their memory is constantly
at fault. Dumouriez wrote to excuse his defection, and Talleyrand to
cast a decent veil over actions which were injurious to him at the
Restoration. The Necker family are exasperating, because they are
generally wrong in their dates. Madame Campan wished to recover her
position, which the fall of the Empire had ruined. Therefore some who
had seen her manuscript have affirmed that the suppressed passages
were adverse to the queen; for the same reason that, in the Fersen
correspondence, certain expressions are omitted and replaced by
suspicious asterisks. Ferrieres has always been acknowledged as one of
the most trustworthy witnesses. It is he who relates that, at the
first meeting after the oath, the deputies were excluded from the
tennis-court in order that the Count d'Artois might play a match. We
now find, from the letters of a deputy recently published, that the
story of this piece of insolence is a fable. The clergy had made known
that they were coming, and it was thought unworthy of such an occasion
to receive a procession of ecclesiastics in a tennis-court; so the
deputies adjourned to a neighbouring church.

Montlosier, who was what Burke called a man of honour and a cavalier,
tells us that his own colleague from Auvergne was nearly killed in a
duel, and kept his bed for three months. Biauzat, the fellow-townsman
of the wounded man, writes home that he was absent from the Assembly
only ten days. The point of the matter is that the adversary whose
hand inflicted the wound was Montlosier himself.

The narrative which Madame Roland drew up in prison, as an appeal to
posterity, is not a discreet book, but it does not reveal the secret
of her life. It came out in 1863, when three or four letters were put
up for sale at auction, and when, s