During the first moments of the Revolution it was the rendezvous of the desperate, the ambitious and the cut-throat. Political mountebanks, mounted on tables, harangued the people on the Rights of Man. The Palais Royale became the arsenal wherein were forged the instruments of anarchy and murder. Here could an unsophisticated provincial, newly arrived in Paris, listen to provocatives to civil discord and learn those arts by which the repose of France has been disturbed for above ten years. The orators had the words Liberty and Virtue continually in their mouths, but their hearts were rank and rotten to the core, and the real objects they courted were licentiousness and vice. Their ignorance was only equalled by their effrontery; they talked of subjects they did not understand; they encouraged their countrymen to revolt, they passed their days in exciting the populace to murder, and rioted away their nights in taverns and styes of prostitution. They promoted confusion and civil strife; covetous without economy, and bold without courage, they were deaf to the voice of honour and honesty. The frequenters of this place are in the present day[1] no better than their predecessors. The former march of the Parisian cannibals to Versailles was arranged at and begun from this spot, it was also the rendezvous of the apostles of Marat and the sbirri of Robespierre. I remember the last interview had in this garden with the mad Colonel Oswald, who asserted that a representation of the people was as great a despotism as absolute monarchy. He asserted as a man could not _eat_ by proxy, so he could not _think_ by proxy. He proposed, therefore, that men and women should assemble in an open plain and there make and repeal laws. I endeavoured to persuade him that his plan was not sufficiently extensive, as he had excluded from this grand assembly the most populous portion of his fellow creatures, _i.e._, cats, dogs, horses, chickens, sheep, cattle, &c. Oswald was originally a captain of a Highland regiment in the British service, and when quartered in India lived some considerable time with some Brahmins, who turned his head. From that period he never tasted flesh meat. He did not, however, embrace the whole Brahmin theology, for he was a professed atheist and denied the metempsychosis, and drank plentifully of wine. Such a man, living in a fermented capital, was capable of doing much mischief. He dined on his roots one day at a party of some members of the Convention at which I was present, and coolly proposed, as the most effectual way of averting civil war, to put to death every suspected man in France. I was deeply shocked to hear such a sentiment proceed from the mouth of an Englishman. The expression was not suffered to pass unnoticed, and the famous Thomas Paine remarked: “Oswald, you have lived so long without tasting flesh that you have now a most voracious appetite for blood.” [Sidenote: GARDEN OF THE PALAIS ROYALE]