The Chamber of Peers is occupied with the trial of Marshall Ney, the Conseil de Guerre, which was ordered to assemble for that purpose having declared itself incompetent. The friends of Ney advised him to claim the protection of the 12th Article of the Capitulation of Paris, and Madame Ney, it is said, applied both to the Duke of Wellington and to the Emperor of Russia; both ungenerously refused; to the former Nature has not given a heart with much sensibility, and the latter bears a petty spite against Ney on account of his title, _Prince de la Moskowa_. It is pretty generally anticipated that poor Ney will be condemned and executed; for tho' at the representation of _Cinna_ a few nights ago, at the Théâtre Français, the allusions to clemency were loudly caught hold of and applauded by the audience, yet I suspect Louis XVIII is by no means of a relenting nature, and that he is as little inclined to pardon political trespasses as his ancestor Louis IX was disposed to pardon those against religion; for, according to Gibbon, his recommendation to his followers was: _"Si quelqu'un parle contre la foi chrétienne dans votre présence, donnez lui l'épée ventre-dedans_." December 18th. I met with an emigrant this day at the Palais Royal who was acquainted with my family in London. It was the Vicomte de B*****ye.[58] He had resided some time in England and also in Switzerland. He is an amiable man, but a most incorrigible Ultra. He displayed at once the ideas that prevail among the Ultras, which must render them eternally at variance with the mass of the French nation. In speaking of the state of France, he said: "_Je n'ai jamais cessé et jamais je ne cesserai de regarder comme voleurs tous les acquéreurs des biens des émigrés. Il faudroit, pour le bonheur de la France, qu'elle fût placés dans le même état ou elle était avant la Révolution._" He would not listen to my reasons against the possibility of effecting such a plan, even were the plan just and reasonable in itself. I told him that for the emigrants to expect to get back their property was just as absurd as for the descendants of those Saxon families in England, whose ancestors were dispossessed of their estates by William the Conqueror, to think of regaining them, and to call upon the Duke of Northumberland, for instance, as a descendant of a Norman invader, to give up his property as unjustly acquired by his progenitors. We did not hold long converse after this; his ideas and mine diverged too much from each other. The English are very much out of favour with the emigrants, as well on account of the stripping of the Louvre as on account of not having shot all the _libéraux_. They had the folly to believe that the Allied troops would merely make war for the emigrants' interests, and after having put to death a considerable quantity of those who should be designated as rebels and Jacobins by them (the emigrants), would replace France in the exact position she was in 1789, and then depart.