THE ESCAPE OF COUNT DE LAVALETTE. MARIE CHAMANS LAVALETTE-a man possessed of courage and talent enough not to be wholly unworthy of remembrance, but who is better known by the presence of mind and devoted affection of his wife-was born at Paris, in 1769, and was the son of a Parisian shopkeeper, who gave him a respectable education. Young Lavalette was originally intended for the church, but the first course of theological lectures which he attended was sufficient to disgust him with ecclesiastical pursuits. He then studied the law. This, however, he abandoned after having been for some time in the offices of a notary and a special pleader; he was frightened by the mountain-like pile of folios which Dommanget, his instructor, assured him it was necessary to master, in order to acquire some idea of French jurisprudence. His next occupation was more congenial to his disposition. M. d'Ormesson, one of the presidents of the Parliament of Paris, a learned and amiable man, had been appointed the Royal Librarian. He wanted an assistant, and Lavalette was recommended to him. He approved of the

young man, and promised to provide for him, and this promise made his assistant completely happy." All I had to expect through his influence," says Lavalette, 66 was merely an inferior employment in the King's Library; but I looked upon that as the highest pitch of good fortune; and often since, when in the most brilliant situations, I have sighed in thinking of the sweet obscurity I had been promised."

The French revolution had now, forsome time, been advancing with a constantly accelerated pace. The feelings of Lavalette were naturally all on the side of reform; for the privileged classes, who had seldom if ever felt

for the people, he of course had no sympathy; but his better nature was shocked by the brutal excesses of those who profaned and sullied the name of liberty, by making it a pretext for indulging their sanguinary propensities; hs could not comprehend that carrying bleeding heads upon pikes, and pillaging and burning houses, were things which must necessarily be done to render the cause of freedom victorious; and he beheld with disgust the cowardly insults which were daily and hourly heaped upon the royal family, and especially upon the female portion of it, by an infuriated and ferocious rabble. In his sentiments with respect to the royal family he was strengthened by the constant converse and exhortations of M. d'Ormesson, who was a fanatical royalist. Lavalette, however, was only half a convert; he had no wish to see the flagrant abuses of the ancient government restored, and was, in fact, one of that party which was then distinguished as the constitutional. As one of that party, he signed the two Parisian petitions of July 1792, known as the petitions of the ten thousand and the twenty thousand, which subsequently, when the jacobins had subverted the throne, proved fatal to the majority of those who signed them. As a national guard of the battalion of the suburb of St. Anthony, he was on duty at the Tuileries, on the morning of the 10th of August, and was one of the small number who were desirous to fight for the protection of the monarch. But Louis XVI., who on that day ought to have made a last effort, and either vanquished or died, took refuge in the hall of the Legislative Assembly, and democracy, or rather mobocracy, was triumphant.

When the massacres of September began, Lavalette endeavoured to prevail upon some of his comrades in the national guard to put a stop to them. To the eternal

disgrace of these men, they were too cowardly or too cruel to interfere. He himself had a narrow escape of

becoming the victim of the murderers. Nor was he much more safe when the slaughter of the captives was over. His having signed the two petitions, and being willing to defend the Tuileries, were known, and considered as acts of treason against the sovereignty of the people. To remain at Paris would be certain death, matters were little better in the departments, and he therefore, like thousands of others at that period, determined to seek an asylum in the army. Along with four friends, who were situated as he was, he enlisted as a volunteer in a free corps, called the Legion of the Alps. Dressing themselves in a sort of marine garb, called a Carmagnole, with military caps on their heads, and knapsacks on their shoulders, they lost no time in commencing their journey to Lyons, at which city the legion was stationed. On their road, they met with an adventure; a description of which will afford some idea of the complete subversion that had been effected in France. There was a small village in the woods, near Vermanton, between Auxerre and Autun, the inhabitants of which had usually gained their living by making wooden shoes. Two days previously to the coming of the new soldiers, the villagers had stopped a coach, containing a bishop and two of his grand vicars, who were trying to escape, and had with them several hundred louis-d'or. After having murdered the three fugitives, these rustic worthies divided the spoil among themselves; and, their patriotism being stimulated into vigorous action by such a prize, they were now keeping a keen look-out for travellers and louis-d'or. Lavalette and his companions were the next who fell into their clutches. He has described, with considerable effect, the scene which took place.

"Our sailors' dresses," said he, "did not promise much, but we held our heads high, and our manners seemed proud; and therefore a little hunchbacked man, an attorney of the village, guessed that we might perchance

contribute to enrich them. Being determined to make no more wooden shoes, the inhabitants applauded the hunchback's advice. We were taken to the municipality, whither the mob followed us. The attorney got upon a large table, and began reading, in an emphatic tone and a loud voice, all our passports. Louis Amédée Auguste d'Aubonne, André Louis Leclerc de la Ronde, Marie Chamans de Lavalette. Here the rascal added the de, which was not in my passport. On hearing these aristocratical names, a clamour began; all the eyes which were turned upon us were hostile, and the hunchback exclaimed that our knapsacks ought to be examined. The harvest would have been a rich one; I was the poorest of the set, and I had five-and-twenty louis in gold. We were giving up ourselves for lost, when d'Aubonne, who was a tall man, jumped upon the table and began to harangue the bystanders. He was clever at making verses, and had, besides, the whole slang dictionary at his fingers' ends. He began with a volley of abuse and imprecations that astonished the audience; but he soon raised his style, and repeated the words country, liberty, sovereignty of the people, with such a thundering voice that the effect was prodigious. He was interrupted by unanimous applause. The giddy-brained young man did not stop here. He imperiously ordered Leclerc de la Ronde to get upon the table. La Ronde was the cleverest mimic I ever saw. He was thirty-five years of age, grotesquely shaped, and as swarthy as a Moor. His eyes were sunk in his head, and overhung with thick black eyebrows, and his nose and chin were of immeasurable length. 'Now you'll soon be able to judge whether or not we are republicans from Paris,' said d'Aubonne to the crowd. Then, turning to his companion, he said,'Answer to the republican catechism. What is God? What are the people? What is a King? The other, with a sanctified air, a nasal twang, and twisting himself

about like a harlequin, answered, 'God is nature; the people are the poor; a king is a lion, a tiger, an elephant, who tears to pieces, devours, and crushes the poor people to death.' There was no resisting this. Astonishment, shouts, enthusiasm, rose to the highest pitch. The orators were embraced, hugged, and borne in triumph. It became a matter of dispute who should have the honour of lodging us. We were obliged to drink, and were soon as much at a loss how to get away from these brutal wretches, now become our friends, as we had been to escape out of their hands while they were our enemies. Luckily, d'Aubonne again found a method of extricating us out of the scrape. He gravely remarked that we had no time to stop, as our country claimed the tribute of our courage. At last they let us go."

At the time when they enrolled their names as volunteers, they had been shown a handsome uniform, and been led to believe, that the corps into which they entered was respectable in discipline and appearance, and headed by officers who would look upon them as brothers; and they consequently hoped, not only to enjoy "the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war," but also some of the pleasures of social intercourse. On their reaching Villefranche, near Lyons, the place where their corps was quartered, their illusions vanished. Their future comrades were at drill in a field, and the first sight of them was not such as to excite any wish for a further acquaintance. They consisted of "four or five hundred wretchedlooking creatures in tattered garments," and seem, indeed, to have borne a striking resemblance to those ragamuffins with whom Falstaff was firmly resolved not to march through Coventry. None but the officers were dressed in those elegant regimentals which the new volunteers had so much admired. The first idea of Lavalette and his companions was to desert, and they would perhaps have imprudently acted upon it, had not