"On the receipt of this sum," Madame Gérard went on, "we were nearly losing our wits for joy. We were ravished, like mere children, by the glitter of the shining gold, which we kept again and again rolling through our fingers. We, who until now could not even afford to buy a common candlestick, so that we had to cut a hole in our poor wooden table to stick the rushlight in,--we now had a hundred louis!" By degrees Gérard advanced to a high European name; but those only who knew him personally could have any idea of his amiable, refined nature, of his pleasant conversation, of the various acquirements and highly intellectual peculiarities of this eminent man, who took up with equal clearness many of the most dissimilar sciences. You forgot time with him, or gladly gave him up the whole night, as he seldom made his appearance in company at his own house before ten. Before leaving the grim figure of the old Revolution for more modern sketches, we must correct the lady's statement of its victims, in which she quite exceeds the utmost latitude of feminine gossip. "_Two millions of heads_" she assigns as the food of the devouring guillotine--a number transcendent, even for lady rhetoric. It is some _five hundred_ times more than the largest estimate of those even who have done their best to aggravate the tale of its horrors. The Convention, when grown Anti-Jacobin, and anxious, of course, to justify its destruction of Robespierre and his fellows, it published lists of the sufferers, could not bring the number of the guillotined up to a full _two_ thousand. Montgaillard, who complains that the returns were incomplete, may be taken as the author of the most extreme calculation on this subject: he does not get beyond a total of _four_ thousand victims, including those who perished by _fusillades_ and _noyades_. Even an anonymous lady cannot be suffered to pass with such a terrific exaggeration unquestioned. In 1823, she was present at an opening of the Chambers by "Louis the Desired," now grown fatter, it seems, than was desirable for such an operation. Indeed--