To the right and left of the road appeared overthrown country mansions; of their levelled thickets there remained only some squared trunks, upon which children played. One saw battered enclosure walls, deserted churches, from which the dead had been expelled, steeples without bells, cemeteries without crosses, headless saints that had been stoned in their niches. The walls were smeared with those Republican inscriptions that had already grown old: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, OR DEATH. Sometimes they had attempted to efface the word DEATH, but the red or black letters showed through the coating of lime. This nation, which seemed on the point of extinction, was commencing a new world, like those peoples which issued from the dusk of the savagery and destruction of the Middle Ages. Approaching the capital, between Écouen and Paris, the elms had not been cut down; I was struck by those fine roadside avenues, unknown on English soil. France was as new to me, as in former days, the forests of America. Saint-Denis was laid bare, its windows were broken; the rain penetrated into its grass-grown naves, and there were no more tombs: I have since seen there the bones of Louis XVI., the Cossacks, the coffin of the Duc de Berry, and the catafalque of Louis XVIII. Auguste de Lamoignon came to meet Mrs. Lindsay. His well-appointed carriage formed a contrast with the clumsy carts, the dirty, broken-down diligences, drawn by hacks harnessed with ropes, which I had met since leaving Calais. Mrs. Lindsay lived at the Ternes. I was put down on the Chemin de la Révolte, and made my way to my hostess' house across the fields. I stayed with her for four-and-twenty hours; I there met a great fat Monsieur Lasalle, whom she employed in arranging emigrant business. She sent to inform M. de Fontanes of my arrival; in eight-and-forty hours he came to fetch me in a little room which Mrs. Lindsay had hired for me at an inn almost at her door. [Sidenote: Paris once more.] It was a Sunday: we entered Paris on foot by the Barrière de l'Étoile at about three o'clock in the afternoon. We have no idea to-day of the impression which the excesses of the Revolution had made on men's minds in Europe, and chiefly among those absent from France during the Terror: I felt literally as though I were about to descend into Hell. I had, it is true, witnessed the beginnings of the Revolution; but the great crimes had then not yet been accomplished, and I had remained under the yoke of subsequent events as these had been related in the midst of the peaceful and orderly society of England.