last seems to have been the rage for calling in the public,
that it was not even expelled from the consulting chambers of counsel
learned in the law. If a case came before an advocate that gave any
scope for his talents as a pamphleteer, his opinion immediately took the
shape of a little _historiette_, and in a few days was in print. The
attorney was no less literary in getting up his brief; and innumerable
were the sage labours of _avocats_ and _procureurs_ which rushed into
type before the trial was over, and did duty, very much to the reader's
satisfaction, as a tale of fashionable life. In fact, a very amusing
collection might be made, of the memorials of counsel which appeared in
Paris about the middle of last century. The writings, for instance,
which secured the fame of witty Beaumarchais among the gossips of the
capital, were not the _Barber of Seville_, or his comedies, but the
briefs which he composed in his lawsuit with the Goezmans and the Sieur
Bertrand. All the laughers were on his side; and though he was beat in
the trial, his triumph was complete; for it was not in the nature of
Parisian public opinion to believe a man guilty who was so prodigal of
bon-mots; or that the opposite party had right or justice on their side,
whose pleadings were as uninteresting as a sermon. But Beaumarchais was
not the only author who owed his notoriety to his legal proceedings. One
of the great lyric poets of France, who is placed by his countrymen upon
the same level as Pindar--Denis Leonchard Lebrun--was the town-talk for
several years, during his action against his wife for the restitution of
conjugal rights. And as his _Memoire_, or pleading, gives a view of
French life at the period, (1774,) of a grade in society omitted in the
_Memoires_ and _Souvenirs_ of dukes and princesses, we propose to give
some account of it, and also of the hero of the process, whose strange
eventful history was not drawn to a close till 1807. He was born in
1729, in the house of the Prince de Conti, in whose service his father
was. His talents soon recommended him to the notice of the prince; and,
before he was thirty, he had established his reputation as a poet of the
first order by an ode on the earthquake at Lisbon. Acknowledged as a man
of genius, and feared as a man of wit--for his epigrams were even more
celebrated than his lyrics--and placed in easy circumstances by the
kindness of his master, who bestowed on him the title and salary of