,
and whose distinguished air would have become the person of Coligni
himself. On casually inquiring the name of this gentleman, we learnt
that he had been one among the many imprisoned during the reign of
terror, and would have fallen by the guillotine, had the fall of
Robespierre happened four-and-twenty hours later. This, it must be
owned, is a trite and common story; but it is, perhaps, by the very
triteness and frequency of such hair-breadth escapes, more than by any
other circumstance, that the extent and ferocity of the revolutionary
massacres are brought home to the imagination. The appointed victims,
whom the delay of a day or an hour preserved from destruction at this
crisis, still survive in all parts of France, like widely-scattered
land-marks, to remind one of the numbers swept away in the previous
deluge of murder.

May 1.--To Rochepot twenty-one miles. We were not sorry to leave the
Hotel de Poste, at Arnay le Duc, which, with higher pretensions than the
inn at Rouvray, only differs from it in the ratio of "dear and nasty" to
"cheap and nasty;" and to commence a stage which promised more to the
eye than any part of our former route. The country still continues to
rise in this direction, and soon assumes the air of an extensive forest
or chase, enlivened by half-wild herds of cattle, and opening into green
glades and vistas of distant ranges of hills. At Ivry, we wound up a
steep hill; the summit of which, a wide naked common, might match most
parts of Dartmoor in height and bleakness. I had observed heaps of
granite and micaceous stone at a much lower elevation in the course of
the day before; and conclude that we were now on one of the highest
inhabited points which occur in the interior of France. We had not
leisure to walk to a telegraph on the right, which, to judge from the
occasional glimpses which we had, must command a splendid map of the
country near Autun. It had been recommended to us to take the route to
Chalons through the latter town, as affording the most objects of
interest; but, on the whole, I doubt whether that which we had adopted
as the least circuitous, be not also preferable, as possessing the
striking panoramic point to which we had climbed. After two or three
more miles over an expanse of parched turf, we reached what geologists
would call the bluff escarpment of the stratum. The descent before us
was so precipitous, as to leave us at first at a loss to make out how
the road coul