The thirst for dissipation is not lessened; but whence the means which enable many of the French to pursue it in its present form are derived, is a mystery. If the excessive and daily increasing price of commodities be considered, nothing is more inexplicable than how those who have only stipulated incomes contrive to subsist upon them. I live with the most rigid frugality, and yet cannot bound my expences within less than 250 livres a week. It is certain that false _assignats_ abound; and the tongue of malevolence has not scrupled to assert, that many of them have been issued from the national treasury, “in order to lessen the public debt, when the day of presentation for payment shall arrive.” Remember, I do not pretend to state this as more than the whisper of party. It is evident that the habits, which this plenty of the medium of exchange, however obtained, creates, are destructive of all industry. This little town is crowded by men and women, who, like the Athenians, do nothing from morning to night “but tell and hear of some new thing.” The national fickleness demonstrates itself no less in private than in public opinion. In Paris alone, in the month of last _Nivose_, 223 divorces took place, 198 of which were solicited by the _wives_. Nothing is more specious than a facility of divorce. To render the chain of union indissoluble were, indeed, to realize the punishment of Mezentius; but to permit its separation upon every trifling and momentary caprice, is to corrupt society in its source. You know that marriage is here a civil contract only, which I have seen entered into at the _bureau_ of the municipality, and which consists merely in the parties declaring, before certain witnesses, their wish to be united, and entering their names in a register; but of late all but flaming republicans have thought it necessary to strengthen the engagement, by privately superadding the ceremony of the church. The national taste has suffered equal degradation. The dramas of Racine, and the odes and epistles of Boileau, are supplanted by crude declamatory productions, to which the revolutionary spirit has given birth. The French have been almost as ingenious as ourselves. It was a discovery reserved for the present age, that Pope was a mere versifier; and that the immortal compositions of the two before-mentioned writers are harmonious tinklings only, devoid of fire of fancy, and elevation of genius. There has been a report presented to the convention, on the _Gothicism_ which has overspread the land, and exterminated in its fury more than two thirds of the works of art and taste, which ennobled France. It will be handed down to posterity, in the chronicles of the revolution, as a fact that marks the spirit in which it has been conducted.