An Irish Protestant, an English general unacquainted with our manners and our history, a mind seeing in the French year 1793 only the English precedent of the year 1649 was charged to shape our destinies! Bonaparte's ambition had reduced us to this state of wretchedness. I rambled by myself in the gardens which the Comptroller-general Machault[348] left, at the age of ninety-three years, to go and die at the Madelonnettes; for Death, in his great review, passed none over then. I was no longer sent for; the familiarities of a common misfortune had ceased between the Sovereign and the subject: the King was getting ready to return to his palace, I to my retreat. The vacuum forms anew round monarchs so soon as they recover their power. I have rarely passed, without making serious reflexions, through the silent and uninhabited rooms of the Tuileries which led me to the King's closet: for me, deserts of another kind, infinite solitudes in which the very worlds vanished before God, the only real Being. Bread was scarce at Arnouville; but for an officer named Dubourg[349], who was hurrying away from Ghent like ourselves, we should have fasted. M. Dubourg went marauding; he brought us back half a sheep to the house of the mayor, who had run away. If the servant of the mayor, a Heroine of Beauvais left alone, had had any arms, she would have received us like Jeanne Hachette[350]. [Sidenote: Saint-Denis.] We proceeded to Saint-Denis: along both sides of the road-way stretched the bivouacs of the Prussians and English; in the distance, the eye met the spires of the abbey: into its foundations Dagobert[351] threw his jewels, in its vaults the successive dynasties buried their kings and their great men; four months since, we had laid the bones of Louis XVI. there to replace the other dust. When I returned from my first exile in 1800, I had crossed this same plain of Saint-Denis: then only Napoleon's soldiers were encamped there; Frenchmen still took the place of the old bands of the Constable de Montmorency[352].