In brief, then, I will tell you that he was the younger son of an old and noble house, and, for seven years, page to Louis Seize. He must have been strikingly handsome; and young as he was at the time of the first revolution, he seems already to have found the court a very agreeable residence. He had held a commission in the army about two years, when his father, and his only brother, his elder by ten years, were obliged to leave the country, to save their lives. The family was not a wealthy one, and great sacrifices were necessary to enable them to live in England. What remained became eventually the property of our friend, both father and brother having died in exile. With this remnant of fortune he married, not very prudently; and having lost his wife and disposed of his daughter in marriage, he is now living in his large dilapidated château, with one female servant, and an old man as major-domo, valet, and cook, who served with him in La Vendée, and who, by his description, must be a perfect Corporal Trim. I would give a good deal to be able to accept the invitation I have received to pay him a visit at his castle. I think I should find just such a _ménage_ as that which Scott so beautifully describes in one of his prefaces. But the wish is vain, such an excursion being quite impossible; so I must do without the castle, and content myself with the long morning visits that its agreeable owner is so kind as to make us. I have seen him frequently, and listened with great interest to his little history; but it was only this morning that the conversation took a speculative turn. I was quite persuaded, but certainly from my own preconceived notions only, and not from anything I have heard him say, that M. de B---- was a devoted legitimate. An old noble--page to Louis Seize--a royalist soldier in La Vendée,--how could I think otherwise? Yet he talked to me as ... you shall hear. Our conversation began by his asking me if I was conscious of much material change in Paris since I last visited it. I replied, that I certainly saw some, but perhaps suspected more. "I dare say you do," said he; "it is what your nation is very apt to do: but take my advice,--believe what you see, and nothing else." "But what one can see in the course of a month or two is so little, and I hear so much." "That is true; but do you not find that what you hear from one person is often contradicted by another?" "Constantly," I replied. "Then what can you do at last but judge by what you see?" "Why, it appears to me that the better plan would be to listen to all parties, and let my balancing belief incline to the testimony that has most weight." "Then be careful that this weight be not false. There are some who will tell you that the national feeling which for so many centuries has kept France together as a powerful and predominating people is loosened, melted, and gone;--that though there are Frenchmen left, there is no longer a French people."