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168 that their countrymen were at that moment butchered by hundreds. The shops were open, pleasure was going on in all its animation, and sloth rejoiced in its vacuity. All the vanities and seductions of luxury, voluptuousness, and dissipation, peaceably swayed their sceptre. They feigned an ignorance of cruelties which they had not the courage to oppose."

will have been seen that Lavalette's sympathies were frankly Royalist in the early days of the Revolution, but when the foreign invasion enrolled every young Frenchman of spirit in the army, Lavalette was carried away like the rest, and determined to go to the front. His opinions, however, made even this rather difficult, and he was obliged to seek a volunteer corps. Two other friends, also of suspect opinions, adopted the same tactics; and here is one of the many adventures which befell them on the way—it is an extraordinary and vivid description of the kind of things which the great upheaval had made possible:

"We set off . . . for Autun, and we arrived next day at a village, not far from Vermanton, situated amidst woods, and the inhabitants of