Are these susceptible descendants apprehensive lest the crimes of the French aristocracy, two hundred years ago, should acquire a peculiarly swart hue, in the eyes of existing generations, by contrast with the immaculate purity of corresponding classes in the nineteenth century? The misdeeds of a Senegas and a Montvallat, extenuated by the circumstances of the times, by a ruder state of society and greater laxity of morals, might well be forgotten in the infamy of a Praslin and a Teste. Whatever the reason, however, the fact is that the publication of the Grands-Jours was viewed with displeasure by various Auvergnat families. The edition consisted, we believe, of seven or eight hundred copies, of which the public bought a portion, and the remainder were purchased and destroyed by those whom the contents of the volume offended. The book is now unobtainable; and there appears little probability of a reprint in France. Under these circumstances, it is surprising that the Brussels publishers--whom no trashy French novel can escape--have not laid their piratical claws upon a book of such attractive interest. Written during the four months that Fléchier passed at Clermont as one of the household of M. de Caumartin, the _Mémoires_ are intended less as an historical record of the assizes than as a general diary of all the amiable Abbé saw, heard, and collected during his stay in Auvergne. Their nature scarcely admitting publication during the author's lifetime, we must consider their composition to have been a pastime, a manner of dispelling the tedium of long mornings in a provincial town. "Assuredly," a clever French critic has said, "no author ever wrote for himself alone; in literature, as on the stage, monologues are purely conventional; in reality, one speaks to the public, without seeming so to do." If ever there was an exception to this rule, it was in the case of Fléchier. During the Grands-Jours, Clermont, crowded with functionaries and their families, with plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses, from every part of the extensive district[27] over which the court had jurisdiction, was a grand focus of gossip and scandal; and by this, Fléchier, as one of the household of so important a person as M. de Caumartin, was in the best possible position to benefit. It is by no means improbable, that a desire to retain the many pungent anecdotes that reached his ear, and also the more important and striking of the proceedings before the court, stimulated him to indite the four hundred and fourteen folio pages of manuscript now printed, with introduction, notes, and appendix, in an octavo volume of four hundred and sixty. He may have anticipated lively gratification in refreshing his memory, at some later and more tranquil period of his life, by a reference to the annals of those gay and bustling days. He may have had in view the delectation of the witty Parisian _coteries_ by whom he was already held in high and well-merited esteem. And