quagmire of blood and rapine,
into what George Sand felicitously called the 'merciless practical joke
of the Consulate,' and the stern reality of the despotic First Empire,
might easily have resulted in converting the absolute monarchy of Louis
XIV. into such a limited and constitutional monarchy as France really
enjoyed under Louis XVIII. The pathway to the Inferno of the Terror was
really paved with the good intentions of the king.

Beyond St.-Waast lies the considerable town of St.-Amand-aux-Eaux, to
which General Dumouriez transferred himself, on the pretence of taking
the waters there, while he was working out his plans for saving France
by marching on Paris and upsetting the Assembly. The plans miscarried
mainly through his own fault, but it is a curious vindication of the
patriotism of Dumouriez in making them that, while he was explaining to
the lunatics in Paris, in January 1793, the absurdity of attempting to
overthrow the English power in India, and the German empire in Europe,
before feeding and clothing their armies on the frontier, de
Beurnonville, whom Dumouriez was destined to seize and arrest at
St.-Amand, was himself writing from the headquarters at Sarrelouis to
Cochon Lapparent at Paris that everything was going to the dogs, and
that the Government was mad about chimeras. 'We think of nothing,' he
said, 'but giving liberty to people who don't ask us to do it, and with
all the will in the world to be free ourselves, we don't know how to
be!'

St.-Amand now has a population of ten or twelve thousand souls. Part of
the Anzin property lies within the communal limits, but the place is a
busy place and has industries of its own. It is connected with Anzin and
with Valenciennes by a steam tramway, and I went there with M. Guary one
fine summer morning to see what is left of the once magnificent
Benedictine monastery of the seventeenth century, which was the great
feature of St.-Amand a hundred years ago. A picture preserved in the
collection at Valenciennes gives a fair notion of the extent and
magnificence of the abbey, the demolition of which has been going on
from 1793 to this day. M. Guary remembers the stately ruins as much
more extensive in his youth than they now are, and as the good people of
St.-Amand have very recently allowed the local architect to put up,
under the very shadow of the exquisitely beautiful belfry still
standing, one of the most dismal and commonplace brick school-houses I
have