horror of crime than the contemplation of its hideous face, and of the penalties that follow in its train. On the other hand"--and here we have the true reason--"the Abbé Ducreux feared to retrace these facts at a time when the descendants of the men most compromised in those terrible trials held the first places in the church, the magistracy, and the army: it would have been wounding them, he says, without utility to the public." Nearly sixty years later, M. Fabre de Narbonne allows himself to be fettered by similar unwillingness to offend the posterity of the noble and reverend criminals of 1666; for thus only can be explained his intimation of the possible imprudence of reviving those judicial records. In 1844, the librarian of Clermont writes thus: "This reason"--he refers to that alleged by Ducreux--"which I respect and approve, is extinct for us. Of all those families, two only, I think, are still in existence; and I believe that the present representatives of those once odious names are personally known in too honourable a manner to have to dread from Fléchier's narrative any lesion to their honour. I must add, moreover, that with respect to one, every thing has been long since published by Legrand d'Aussy, Taillandier;[25] and that the other has received communication from me of all relating to his family, and sees no objection to its publication." From this paragraph it is manifest, that M. Gonod was not quite at his ease as to the effect of his publication. He _thinks_ one thing, _believes_ another, assumes altogether a doubting and deprecatory tone, defending himself before attack. The worthy bibliophilist and editor was evidently in some slight trepidation as to the reception of his literary foster-child by the descendants of the dissolute and tyrannical nobility arraigned before the tribunal of the Grands-Jours. His apprehensions were not unfounded. It is certainly difficult to understand what could be risked and who offended by the resuscitation--after one hundred and eighty years, and when French institutions and society had been so completely turned upside down by successive revolutions--of these antiquated details of feudal oppression, priestly immorality, and magisterial corruption. It argues singular tenuity of epidermis on the part of French _gentilâtres_ of the nineteenth century, that they cannot bear to hear how their great grandfather, seven or eight times removed, oppressed his vassals by enforcing odious privileges, hung up his lady's page by the heels till death ensued, poisoned his wife, or confined a serf[26] in a damp closet where he could neither sit nor stand, and where his face lost its form and his garments acquired a coat of mildew. Why the disclosure of these crimes--atrocious though they are, and characteristic of a barbarous state of society--should disturb the repose or cloud the countenances of the far-removed posterity of the feudal tyrants who committed them, is no easy question to answer.