Paris, was a distinguished lawyer of the old-fashioned type, wedded to the traditions and faiths of the past; the influence of Voltaire, a schoolfellow and friend, and of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, made no impression on his tenacious nature, and he steadily followed the ways of his order, unconscious of a world that was changing around him. He had taken part in the prosecutions of Lally and Labarre; and a curious letter of Voltaire contained in this volume proves, if it is to be believed, that the satirist's protests against the iniquities of these trials were not genuine. The father of Pasquier was also enrolled in the Parliament as a Councillor of the Grand Chambre, and the child was thus, so to speak, cradled in the midst of ideas and associations representing the order and feudal state of the old régime. Like most of the distinguished men of that day, Etienne was brought up and formed in boyhood by priests. Molé and Arnauld-each to become eminent-were at the seminary of Juilly among his mates. We find in these pages a charming account of the vie de province of this period, much the same as that of Montesquieu at La Brède, or of Talleyrand in his boyhood at Chalais. The Pasquiers held a barony and a seigneurial domain, and when the Parliament rose for its legal vacations, the father and grandfather of the future chancellor set off from Paris for their lands at Coulans, and spent their summer in the ancient town of Le Mans. Here they received the welcome of vassals and tenants, untainted as yet by the Jacobin creed; assisted inferior magistrates in local lawsuits, or acted as arbiters in the disputes of neighbours; and joined in a round of social pleasures distinguished for brilliancy and felicitous taste. The Bishop of Mans, then a gay man of the world, but afterwards one of the fiercest of émigrés, and the noble officers of the garrison of Le Mans, were prominent ornaments of these festive meetings, the last bright glimpses of an order of things that France will never behold again.

Young Pasquier entered, in his seventeenth year, on his apprenticeship for the magisterial office; he was to tread in the path of his judicial ancestors. The Parliament of Paris had safely escaped the violence of the aged Maupeou, and, though not what it had once been, still held an imposing place in the State; and Pasquier looked forward to a dignified life of hard work and wealth as a noble of the gown. Yet Rousseau's influence was already powerful in the Conservative ranks of the legal bodies; the youth was given theContrat Social' to read, as a law student would now open

Blackstone; and doctrines fatal to the existing order of things had penetrated even the chief seats of justice. Pasquier naturally fell into the ways of the times; saw a good deal of the high life of Paris, in which the old distinctions of rank and caste were being rapidly swept away; and launched into dissipations and pleasures, which a candidate for the post of counsellor would have thought ruinous fifty years before. His picture of a state of society, which a student of the age observes, with profound and pathetic interest, gay with bright delusions on the verge of the abyss, decomposed, corrupt, and yet radiant with hope, tricked out in false philosophy and sentimental foolishness, and all unconscious of its coming doom, is impressive, and mournful, if not striking; he thus dwells on the splendours of old Paris in its still half-feudal and royal aspect:

'I have seen the pomp of the Empire; since the Restoration I witness the rise and development of increasing wealth; but nothing, in my judgement, has been equal to the glories of Paris during the years between the Peace of 1783 and 1789. Beautiful mansions were being built in the Quarter of the Marais and in the Ile Saint-Louis. What is the Faubourg St. Germain of to-day compared with the Faubourg St. Germain of those times? And, as far as the display of luxurious wealth, those who can recall the reviews of the period, the races of Longchamps, or even the look of the boulevards, must think the crowd of carriages, with their teams of two, four, or six horses, each more magnificent than the other, which filled these places of public meeting, infinitely superior to the files of coaches and cabs, interspersed with a few graceful equipages, that at present occupy the same spaces.'

The spectator of the grandeurs of Napoleon, too, made this remark, in exact accord with a remark of the exile of St. Helena :

'When I interrogate my reason and conscience as to what the France of 1789 would have been if the Revolution had not broken out; if the ten years of destruction it gave birth to had not passed over a noble country; if St. Domingo, for instance, had continued to yield us its treasures; and if progressive reforms had not been arrested by a great catastrophe, I am convinced that France, without the Revolution, would have been, as I am writing at this moment, more wealthy and powerful than she is to-day.'

The want of true political insight, to be detected in many parts of this book, appears in Pasquier's rather shallow. estimate of the characteristics of the old régime in France. He looks at an order of things about to perish, and essentially out of joint and decaying, with a contented optimism that seems to us blindness; and he cannot interpret the

signs of the times. He dwells on the increase of wealth in France, on her rapid progress in science and art, and on the improvement of her administrative system, as proofs that she enjoyed good government; and he all but adopts the absurd view that the nation rebelled because it was too blessed by fortune, because it was infected by a bad philosophy. He does not reflect how virtue had gone out from the Monarchy, and all that belonged to it; how the chief powers in the State had been long in conflict in the sight of a discontented people; how the institutions of France had become obsolete and opposed to the ideas of the age; how, under centralised despotism that effaced liberty, invidious distinctions of class prevailed; and how in every part of the frame of society there were symptoms of deepseated disease. One feature, indeed, of the old régime-the scepticism, the luxury, the sentimental silliness, and the vice that pervaded the high life of Paris-he clearly sees, and notes the effects; but he does not perceive that this most grave evil was but a sign of the complete absence of political activity, of the sense of duty, of true patriotism in the ruling orders. This résumé only touches the surface of things:

'The Court, corrupt, and believing in nothing, was composed of the descendants of the noblest houses of France, but it contained many parvenus raised by favour and not by service to the State; the loftiness of the pretensions of these people was in the inverse ratio of their merits, and their insolent pride had made them odious. Idleness, and the want of money, had caused many scandals; the memoirs of the day are full of them, and I need not dwell on the subject; unhappily, in a country like France, the Court alone cannot be corrupt, and, for a long time, the relations between Versailles and Paris had been too frequent and too intimate not to render the example of the one all powerful for the other. Shall I describe how the arrogant luxury that displayed itself in public places led to the ruin of whole families? Were I to launch into anecdotes, I should be deemed a mere satirist. Enough to say, that when I entered the great world, I was introduced, so to speak, in parallels, to the wives and the mistresses of kinsfolk and friends. I spent the evening of Monday with one class, and that of Tuesday with the other; and I was only eighteen, and belonged to a family of the magistracy.'

In 1787, when in his twentieth year, Pasquier became a Councillor of the Grand Chambre, and took part in the eventful scenes which heralded the rapid fall of the Parliament. That body still contained many eminent jurists and advocates of a high order, as coming events were soon to show; but it was full of enthusiasts fed on Rousseau and

on the philosophy of the new age; and its leading personages were not wise or able. Pasquier describes fairly the foolish contest, fatal to both, between the Court and the Parliament, and distributes justly the blame they deserved; he condemns the recklessness of Brienne and Lamoignon and the spurious liberalism of the mass of his colleagues. He tells us that he feared the approach of a second Fronde in what he saw before him; and, with a strength of character honourable to a mere youth, he steadily took the side of the few Conservatives, for the most part aged men, who dreaded the future. It was a significant mark of the times that the greatest names in the peerage of France, called by Carlyle the Anglo-maniac Dukes,' were arrayed against the Court and the Minister; their influence on the young nobles of the gown was immense:

'In 1787, almost all the distinguished peers, those who combined the highest rank with fine and cultivated intelligence, were in opposition in the Parliament. It has been impossible for me to forget what a potent attraction guides like these had on the junior magistrates. They found themselves associated with these illustrious names, with these great reputations, and everyone knows how the spirit of party unites, and even confounds, conditions of rank and class. An intimacy so

seductive, and so unexampled, easily turned many heads.'

When the demand for the States-General had become intense, the Parliament, with a false sentiment, repeatedly seen in French Assemblies-history will never forget August 4— abandoned thoughtlessly its time-honoured rights, and contributed to its own destruction ::

'The instant that our interests were evidently in question, we thought that nothing could be finer than to sacrifice them to what we deemed the public good. Generous sentiments took possession of us, and we could not be restrained.'

Yet, with a sudden and inconsiderate turn of opinion, the Parliament tried to annul the influence of the Tiers Etat-that is, of the nation-when the States-General were about to meet, by declaring for the antiquated form of 1614. It was too late to check an overwhelming tide; and, as we know, the Parliament lost all authority, and the Monarchy was deprived of what would have been a support in the Revolution already at hand :

'I perfectly recall to mind the deliberations that took place on this occasion; they bore quite a new character; there was no more precipitation or enthusiasm, no efforts or results of eloquence; we reasoned calmly, a dark veil seemed spread over the Assembly. Its importance had disappeared; nobody cared for it; it had ceased to

carry weight. The States-General were in the immediate future, and the thoughts of all turned in this direction.'

Pasquier's comments on the Revolution, in its first phases, do not require particular notice. He saw the fall of the Bastille, and describes the scene as less striking than tradition records; he was in the company of a queen of the theatre, a favourite of many of the great ladies of the day— such was the confusion of orders and ranks in Paris. He witnessed the miserable plight of the Royal Family, when, after the fatal days of October, they were dragged by the mob from Versailles to the Tuileries; and he beheld Lafayette and the National Guards in their brief hour of ill-deserved triumph. Throughout this period he lived at a club in which men opposed in politics still met; but, though a Royalist of decided views, he seems to have thought the Monarchy in no danger, after the National Assembly had made it a shadow. The cause of the King, he maintains, was by no means hopeless, even after the disastrous return from Varennes: the people of Paris, the National Guard, and the army wished, for different reasons, that the sovereign should remain in the capital; and his flight disconcerted the popular leaders :

The citizens had always considered the presence of the King in their midst a guarantee against the perils and the vengeance that might threaten them. Nearly the whole National Guard added to this sentiment a genuine regard for the person of the King and of his family, which they had the honour to approach, during two years, an honour of which the Parisian bourgeois was still very sensible. In all this there were many difficulties in the way of the revolutionists, and they did not know what to do or whom to trust. The army gave them not less anxiety. Little was needed to change the feelings of the soldiery; when they saw the King among them they might become Royalists, and even passionately so.'

Pasquier was not blind to the tremendous mistakes made on all sides from 1789 to 1791. He condemns the levity and vanity of Lafayette and his followers-curiously enough he does not refer to Mirabeau, the only true statesman in the Assembly-but he is still more severe on the imbecility of the Court, on the recklessness of the aristocratic faction who thought they saw their chance in promoting anarchy, and, above all, on the unpatriotic émigrés. He thus describes this mad and short-sighted policy :

In '89, in '90, and '91, in the case of some a real danger to be avoided; in the case of a few genuine enthusiasm; in the case of many a point of honour observed without discussion; in the case of the