took their departure immediately after this arrest. To prevent the escape of a man who was only half guilty, they lost the opportunity of capturing a hundred criminals; and every one agrees that this first arrest is a good hit for the judge, but not for justice." There was one very singular circumstance in the case, and which could have been met with, as the Abbé observes, only in a country so full of crime as Auvergne then was. The accuser, the person who laid the information, and the witnesses, were all more criminal than the accused himself. The first was charged by his own father with having killed his brother, with having attempted parricide, and with a hundred other crimes; the second was a convicted forger; and the others, for sundry crimes, were either at the galleys or in perpetual banishment, or actually fugitives. So that, to all appearance, the Viscount must have been acquitted for want of testimony, had not the president, by a pettifogging manœuvre, not very clearly explained but manifestly unfair, managed to turn against him his own admissions in the letters of pardon granted by M. de Caumartin, and in which it was customary to set down the criminal's full confession of his offences. Fléchier's account is, however, too disconnected and imperfect to afford us a clear view of the singular system of jurisprudence argued by this remarkable trial and sentence. The versatile Abbé does not plume himself on his legal knowledge, and indeed is rather too apt, as many will think, to turn from the rigorous and somewhat partial proceedings of the tribunal, to flowery topics of gallant gossip. The town of Clermont finds little favour in his eyes, and he doubts that there is one more disagreeable in all France, the streets being so narrow that one carriage only can pass along them; so that the meeting of two vehicles caused a terrible blaspheming of coachmen, who swear there, Fléchier thinks, better than anywhere else, and who assuredly would have set fire to the town had they been more numerous, and but for the many beautiful fountains at hand to extinguish the flames. "On the other hand, the town is well peopled, the women are ugly but prolific, and if they do not inspire love, they at least bear many children. It is an established fact, that a lady who died a short time ago, aged eighty years, made the addition of her descendants, and counted up four hundred and sixty-nine living, and more than a thousand dead, whom she had seen during her life. After that, can one doubt the prodigious propagation of Israel during the time of the captivity, and may not one ask here what the Dutch asked when they entered China and saw the immense population, whether the women of that country bore ten children at a time?" If Fléchier, when inditing the lively record of his residence in Auvergne, contemplated the probability of his manuscript some day finding its way into print, it is evident that he cared little for the suffrages of the ladies of Clermont.