at Versailles and the Å’il de BÅ“uf? Dear,
delightful fellow—and eternal shame to have
put him up in the King's Bench for that good
thing concerning her Majesty of all the Russias!
—which, if not true, was well found.
Readers who love such company as Thomas
Raikes, Esquire, and Thomas Moore, Esquire,
and the Lady Charlotte Bury, must be for
ever beholden to Sir Nathaniel Wraxall,
Bart. " But about the Queen," say the clubmen,"
gathering round him, when he comes
home from Paris,—"how about Dilou le beau,
the descampativos, or romps among the
bushes, eh?"

"Now, upon my word," says our dear
gossip, shaking his head—"upon my word,
this is too bad. A model, sir, I do assure
you,—a model wife and mother. But
indiscreet; oh! so indiscreet! That business
at the ball quite true, sir; quite true. I had
it from a person at Court. Dilon had to
join his regiment!"

"Ah!" say the club men.

"A noble woman, sir,'' continues the
baronet, " exemplary in all duties. Burke is
cracked about her. But if there be one man
more favoured than another; if there be a
lover en titre at all—whisper, whisper—it is
Coigny, or Vaudreuil. I had it from a person
very high at Court! Mark you, I say,
if———."

Prolonged whistle from the clubmen.

"I thought Dorset, the ambassador," says a
panting clubman.

"H'm," says our gossip. " I can tell you
Dorset showed me a packet of her letters,
neatly tied up. H'm! Indeed, they seemed
to be mostly about commissions for the English
millinery. But, Dilon, sir—pah! he was as
ugly as a mulatto! But a fine figure, sir.
She liked your fine-looking men, sir, like
Whitworth! " with more to that tune. Prince
of gossiping fellows!

Well! he saw the city, like the others,
when the mountain was smoking, and the
lava beginning to flow. How fair it looked,
and shone in that evening light, before being
buried, and given up to fire and convulsion;
what resource there was for diversion and
fiddling and amusement, is worth
considering, as it has been scarcely considered
before. On which head there is something
to be told, which had best be told in another
paper.

To take up, then, that mysterious subject
of Paris sleeping unconsciously on the eve
of eruption—dim, strange vision, that makes
one hold the breath, and brings up thoughts
of that ten minutes' suspense before the
criminal comes out upon the drop—and turning
to the fiddlings and disporting that went
forward while that smithy light was seen
through the chinks. It is surprising in the
midst of what gay, sprightly rioting and
bacchanalian festivity that day of wrath
surprised them. It was Belshazzar's feast over
again, and the handwriting on the wall. The
king was on his throne, and Paris population
feasting merrily, and sight-seeing—such, at
least, as were coming fast to their last sous.
To have taken a walk then through the city,
with eyes and ears open, would have been
only helping one to the conclusion, that this
was a well-kept, thriving, light-hearted,
innocent people—if ever there was innocent
people on the earth. No pandemonium in
posse here; no hell broken loose, or likely to
break loose; but everything with a bright
carnival aspect.

Gay Parisian men and women, too light of
heart, too busy a pleasure-hunting to 'think
of such coarse ideas as blood and massacre.
Pah! Only conceive those lively spiritual
petits maîtres in conjunction with such rough
notions. It were impossible. How was it,
then, with this fair city on its surface, or
upper crust, as it were, on the eve of the
great eruption?

Let us take a fat, good-humoured provincial,
one of those heavy, unsophisticated
gentlemen M. de Kock brings on so
comically, and set him down in the heart of the
bright city, to stare curiously at all things
about him. He has come either by
diligence, cabriolet, coach, wagon, chariot, little
car, long wain, pannier, imperial, berline,
express, malle-poste, for he might have had his
choice of all these conveyances, and has been
set down in due course with his mails at
the great office in Rue Notre Dame de
Victoires. Then, having found a house of
entertainment suited to his means, let our curious
provincial go forth into the streets, and look
about him.

At this time the famous Tuileries Gardens
had fallen out of fashion as a place of
promenade, and the fields called Elysian were
crowded every evening with gay throngs.
Provincial wandering along will see disposed
on the light seats portly dowagers, smooth
abbés, heavy shopkeepers with their families
about them, mincing grisettes, ladies of more
equivocal quality, and altogether about as
strange a contrast to his own settlement at
home as could well be fancied. But if he
wish real diversion let him turn his face to
the Boulevards; and of all days in the week
of a Friday.

Friday was the fashionable day at this
time: and on that day all the persons of
quality drove up and down in long tiles.
Such a show of exquisite equipages ami noble
ladies reclining in them—such a cloud of
costly vis-à-vis, berlines, désobligeantes (Mr.
Sterne's désobligeaute was lying at this date
in Dessein's courtyard at Calais), all fashioned
like glass-coaches, were enough to dazzle our
poor Provincial utterly. Those noble ladies
so reclining were duchesses, marchionesses,
and very many indeed, as may be imagined,
suggestive of the fruit M. Dumas the
younger has christened Pêches à trois sous.
Of which, however, innocent Provincial has
no thought, they being all beautiful ladies of