write a series of letters upon the present character of the French
nation, and with this end in view she silently studied the people and the
course of political action. She was quick and observant, and nothing
escaped her notice. She came to Paris prepared to continue a firm
partisan of the French Revolution; but she could not be blind to the
national defects. She saw the frivolity and sensuality of the people,
their hunger for all things sweet, and the unrestrained passions of the
greater number of the Republican leaders, which made them love liberty
more than law itself. She valued their cause, but she despised the means
by which they sought to gain it. Thus, in laboring to grasp the meaning
of the movement, not as it appeared to petty factions, but as it was as a
whole, she was confronted by the greatest of all mysteries, the relation
of good and evil. Again, as when she had analyzed the rights of women,
she recognized evil to be a power which eventually works for
righteousness, thereby proving the clearness of her mental vision. Only
one of these letters, however, was written and published. It is dated
Feb. 15, 1793, so that the opinions therein expressed were not hastily
formed. As its style is that of a familiar letter, and as it gives a good
idea of the thoroughness with which she had applied herself to her task,
it may appropriately be quoted here.

"... The whole mode of life here," she writes, "tends indeed to
render the people frivolous, and, to borrow their favorite epithet,
amiable. Ever on the wing, they are always sipping the sparkling
joy on the brim of the cup, leaving satiety in the bottom for those
who venture to drink deep. On all sides they trip along, buoyed up
by animal spirits, and seemingly so void of care that often, when I
am walking on the Boulevards, it occurs to me that they alone
understand the full import of the term leisure; and they trifle
their time away with such an air of contentment, I know not how to
wish them wiser at the expense of gayety. They play before me like
motes in a sunbeam, enjoying the passing ray; whilst an English
head, searching for more solid happiness, loses in the analysis of
pleasure the volatile sweets of the moment. Their chief enjoyment,
it is true, rises from vanity; but it is not the vanity that
engenders vexation of spirit: on the contrary, it lightens the
heavy burden of life,