wrote two letters: one to Oudard, the other to Appert. I believe I have already mentioned Appert and have said that he was almoner of the private charities of the Duchesse d'Orléans. I laid the case before them and begged them to ask for the pardon of the condemned man: the one of the king, the other of the queen. I laid great stress upon the good effect, politically, an act of clemency towards a Vendean would produce, at a time when there was reason to fear trouble from that quarter of the country. I made known to both of them that I looked upon my petition as so just that I should remain at Angers until I obtained a favourable reply. Whilst waiting, I explored all the town and neighbourhood under Pavie's guidance. Excellent fellow, Pavie! He pointed out to me, with an indignation most characteristic of his national love of art, some workmen, who, by order of the préfet, under the direction of a local architect, were busy converting the grotesque figures on the cathedral into brackets! So what you now see, to your great satisfaction, if you do not appreciate the wonderful grimacing faces which the Middle Ages fixed to its cathedrals, is a Roman entablature upheld by Grecian brackets after the model of those on the Bourse, another modern marvel, a mixture of Greek and Roman styles, with nothing French about it but its stove-pipes. Furthermore, they were scraping the cathedral remorselessly without any respect for the brown colouring that eight centuries had spread over its surface; and this scraping gave it a sickly paleness which they called "rejuvenating it"! Alas! it takes twenty-five years to complete a man: a good Swiss royalist may fire upon him, and then he is killed! It takes six or eight centuries to colour a building, and then an architect with good taste arrives, and scrapes it! ... Why does not the Swiss kill the architect? or why doesn't the architect scrape the Swiss? We went down to the promenade, and I walked past the tenth-century ancient castle, which is encircled by a moat and flanked by a dozen massive towers--the labour of a people, the asylum for an army. "Ah!" my poor Pavie said, sighing, "they are going to pull it down.... It spoils the view!" On that day I received a letter from Oudard telling me the pardon was granted, and that only the formalities to be gone through with the Minister of Justice would retard the liberation of the prisoner; so I hastened to share the letter with the person most directly interested in its contents, and, nothing further detaining me at Angers, I jumped into a passing carriage, so great was my wish to quit a town of Vandal destroyers, and I was driven to Ponts-de-Cé.