could procure us foils, and an _assaut d’armes_ might entertain them.” The young officer assented to the proposal with a smile of contempt: foils belonging to the brother of the lady of the house were produced, and without hesitation the hussar was preparing to shame his aged antagonist, who, politely addressing the ladies, asked them to name the buttons he should touch on his adversary’s doliman. The delighted women, glad to see a coxcomb corrected, named the number of the buttons; which St. George touched one after the other, and then whipped the foil out of the inexperienced hand of the boaster, who, infuriated by rage and shame, wanted immediate satisfaction; when St. George quietly observed, “Young man, your time is not yet come, you may still live to serve your country; but recollect you have met St. George, for I am that very person who could not at any time prove a match for you.” The lesson was a severe one: the young officer, confused and concealing his offended vanity, withdrew, and never after visited at the house. The efforts of the sovereign to reform the court, and maintain at least an appearance of propriety and good order, were more or less successful in repressing the ostentation of vice that had but lately polluted it: but the dissatisfied _roués_ of the day sought in the orgies of the Palais Royal another scene for their dissipation and excesses; where, to use the expression of a modern writer, “vice became principle, and corruption a system.” As the crusades had shed their influence on European society, operating a surprising change in its manners and ideas; so did the war of independence in the United States produce a material alteration in the French court. Several noblemen had honourably served in the armies of America, and returned home with enthusiastic notions of liberty and independence. Such was the Duc de Lauzun, a nobleman of elegant manners, and as celebrated for his duels as his _bonnes fortunes_. De Tilly, surnamed “_Le beau De Tilly_,” was another celebrated character of that period, and in his Memoirs we find the following observations on the practice of duelling: “France is the birth-place of duelling. I have roved over a great part of Europe, and travelled in the New World; I have lived with soldiers and courtiers; and nowhere else have I met with this fatal _susceptibility_, which is incessantly creating affronts, injuries, and provocations. Whence arises this disposition, so peculiar to the French, whose character is too noble to become vindictive, and which induces them to fight a duel in matters that are chiefly frivolous? It is education, and that only. “You have had a discussion with an intimate friend; although it may not have exceeded the limits of an excusable warmth, women have observed in it _injurious shades_; and you would rather expose yourself to kill your friend, or be killed by him, than to the mere suspicion, on the part of woman, of being deficient in courage.