At
present he is lodged in the tower of the Temple, the last prison of
Louis the Sixteenth, and the last but one of Marie Antoinette of
Austria,--the prison of Louis the Seventeenth,--the prison of Elizabeth
of Bourbon. There he lies, unpitied by the grand philanthropy, to
meditate upon the fate of those who are faithful to their king and
country. Whilst this prisoner, secluded from intercourse, was indulging
in these cheering reflections, he might possibly have had the further
consolation of learning (by means of the insolent exultation of his
guards) that there was an English ambassador at Paris; he might have had
the proud comfort of hearing that this ambassador had the honor of
passing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of a
Regicide pettifogger, and that in the evening he relaxed in the
amusements of the opera, and in the spectacle of an audience totally
new,--an audience in which he had the pleasure of seeing about him not a
single face that he could formerly have known in Paris, but, in the
place of that company, one indeed more than equal to it in display of
gayety, splendor, and luxury,--a set of abandoned wretches, squandering
in insolent riot the spoils of their bleeding country: a subject of
profound reflection both to the prisoner and to the ambassador.
Whether all the matter upon which I have grounded my opinion of this
last party be fully authenticated or not must be left to those who have
had the opportunity of a nearer view of its conduct, and who have been
more attentive in their perusal of the writings which have appeared in
its favor.
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