English ambassador had arrived in Paris. "War was at
end, and the world was to be at rest once more." I changed my route
immediately, and flew on the road to Paris.

My life was destined to be a succession of scenes. It had been thrown
into a whirl of memorable incidents, any one of which would have served
for the tumult of fifty years, and for the meditation of the fifty
after. But this was the period of powerful, sometimes of terrible,
vicissitudes. All ranks of men were reached by them. Kings and statesmen
only felt them first: they penetrated to the peasant; and the Continent
underwent a moral convulsion--an outpouring of the general elements of
society--like that of some vast inundation, sweeping away the landmarks,
and uprooting the produce of the soil; until it subsided, leaving the
soil in some places irreparably stripped--in others, filled with a new
fertility.

I found France in a state of the highest exultation. The national cry
was, "that she had covered herself with glory;" and to earn that cry,
probably, no Frenchman who ever existed would hesitate to march to
Timbuctoo, or swim across the Atlantic. The name of "conquest" is a
spell which no brain, from Calais to Bayonne, has ever thought of
resisting. The same spell lives, masters, domineers over the national
mind, to this hour; and will last, long after Paris has dropped into the
depths of its own catacombs, and its fifteen fortresses are calcined
under the cannon of some Austrian or Russian invader. It will be
impossible to tell future ages the scene which France then presented to
the mind. If objects are capable of record, impressions are beyond the
power of the pen. No image can be conveyed to posterity by the
sensations which crowded on Europe in the course of the French
Revolution--the rapidity, the startling lustre, and the deep despair; as
it went forth crushing all that the earth had of solid or sacred. It was
now only in its midway. The pause had come; but it was only the pause in
the hurricane--the still heavier trial was at hand. Even as a stranger,
I could see that it was but a lull. Every thing that met the eye in
Paris was a preparative for war. The soldier was every thing, and every
where. I looked in vain for the Republican costumes which I so fearfully
remembered. They had been flung aside for the uniform of the Imperial
Guard; or were to be seen only on a few haggard and desolate men, who
came out in the twilight, and sat in silence,