George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[256] time confined there,—with the guillotine in the middle of it,—and not allowed to go out of her house, any more than the rest of her family, who were all royalists. Suddenly, her husband was arrested and imprisoned. The front of the house was entirely closed up, and light, and, as far as possible, sound, were excluded. But there was no room to which the grating, rattling sound of the axe, as it fell, did not more or less penetrate, or where the shouts of the cruel multitude were not heard, as, now and then, though rarely, they expressed their triumphant satisfaction at the death of some peculiarly obnoxious victim. The dreadful thing to Mad. de Pastoret was that, being unable to get any information whatever concerning her husband, the axe never fell but she asked herself whether it might not have been for him. On one occasion she obtained special permission to go out, under surveillance, and she employed it to visit the foreign ministers, —some of whom she knew,—and obtain their intercession for her husband. The person who received her with the most kindness was the American Minister, Mr. Morris. Mons. Pastoret afterwards escaped from France, and was for some time in exile. He has since been Chancellor of France, and has published law-books of great merit.

The Countess de Ste. Aulaire's salon was the place of meeting for the Doctrinaires, Decazes' party, which triumphed while I was in Paris, and to whose triumph Mad. de Ste. Aulaire contributed not a little. She is a beautiful woman, with an elegant mind, and much practical talent; and her husband, a relation of Decazes, is one of the powerful men of their party, and a leading member in the Chamber of Deputies. Their house used to be called ‘the Ministry,’ and Mad. de Ste. Aulaire's parties, ‘the ministerial parties’; for Decazes came occasionally, and Barante, Guizot, etc., were there nearly every Tuesday night; and as this convocation happened on one of the evenings of Mad. de Duras', I two or three times witnessed singular contrasts on going from one to the other, just as the great question of the change of Ministry, which lasted above a fortnight, was in the agony of agitation. . . . .

The Princess Aldobrandini¹ was at home every night. She is not as beautiful as she was when I knew her in Italy, but she has lost none of her vivacity, and talks still as fast as ever. A good many Italians came to her hotel, and among them my old friend, Count Confalonieri of Milan; but the old Duc de la Rochefoucauld, her grandfather, was the most amusing and interesting of all the persons I met there. It is the same who was in America, and he still retains