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No. 1199. Fourth Series, No. 60. 25 May, 1867.

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Pitch in Music, 522. Japanese Odes Trans

SHORT ARTICLES: American Breech-Loading Rifles, 508. Cheap Beef, 508. Pay of Magazine Writers, 508. Lord Eldon's Will, 522. lated into English, 544. Tennysonia, 544.

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From the Edinburgh Review.

Mémoires du Comte Beugnot, Ancien Ministre (1783–1815). Publiés par le Comte ALBERT BEUGNOT, son petit-fils. Deux tomes. Paris: 1866.

Memoirs may be divided into two great classes those which are really contempowith all the fluctuations and contrarary,

make up for the freshness of a recent impression. We feel in the present tense, though we reflect in the præter-perfect. And the nearer a writer can bring us to the scenes he is describing, the more completely does he master our sympathy and

our interest.

dictions of current opinion, and those which are recast afterwards when the events to which they relate are terminated. A writTHE reminiscences of a man of spirit and mon may by the latter process, leave to er with the graphic powers of a Saint-Siintelligence, who had seen the condition of posterity a more complete picture of a French society before the Revolution of great reign, or may, with the sedate wisdom 1789-who shared and survived the dan- of Count Mollieu in his invaluable records gers of 1793-who took an active part in of the First Empire, raise his personal remthe Imperial administration under Napole- iniscences to the dignity of history. But in on- and a still more active part in the res-point of vivacity and reality nothing can toration of the Bourbons and the establishment of constitutional monarchy in France, are amongst the most instructive and enter taining memorials of modern history. We opened these volumes with high expectations, which have not been disappointed. They are really a valuable addition to the literature of the French Revolution; and they supply many of those happy touches Aube, where his family belonged to the noM. Beugnot was born in 1761 at Bar-surand characteristic incidents which serve to blesse de robe of the province, and he himcomplete the picture of that extraordinary self was brought up to fill a legal office beperiod. Portions of these memoirs had al- fore the Revolution. He gives us no details, ready appeared in the Revue Francaise however, as to his early life, and the narof 1838, and the Revue Contemporaine' rative of his adventures begins with a relaof 1852; indeed the additions now made to tion of his curious acquaintance with the nothese fragments are not large, and it ap- torious Madame de Lamotte. It seemed pears that the remainder of M. Beugnot's extremely improbable that anything more autobiographical papers, to which allusion remained to be said of the affair of the Diais frequently made by himself, are no long-mond Necklace - that scandalous intrigue er in existence. The memoirs therefore retain their fragmentary character, and, for once, we are assured that we possess them in their true form. This can so rarely be said of the French memoirs of the day, that we must express our gratitude to the Beugnot family that they have not allowed any hired hand to make up' or mutilate their literary inheritance. They have published whatever had come down to them, without any attempt to supply gaps or invent transitions. These volumes appear under the sanction of the highly respectable name of the author's grandson; and although the highly epigrammatic and dramatic style in which they are written might awaken some suspicions, yet we believe in their authenticity and credibility. *

*A recent example of this most reprehensible practice of dressing up memoirs has come under our notice, which is so extraordinary that we feel bound to comment upon it. A volume appeared not long ago in Paris, entitled Anne-Paule-Dominique de Noailles, Marquise de Montagu,' purporting to be an authentic memoir of that amiable woman, the fourth daughter of the Duc d'Ayen, and a sister of Madame de Lafayette. Nothing could be more interesting and affecting than this narrative of her blameless and heroical life. It was originally printed as a 'recueil de souvenirs qui n'était point destiné au public,' by the children of Madame de

Montagu, and with the sanction of the illustrious House of Noailles. The facts and details were stated to be taken from the journal of Madame de Montagu herself, or from her correspondence with her sisters. 'On ne peut avoir,' say the editors, d'éléla vie de quelqu'un, et pour se faire une idée de ce ments plus certains et plus sincères pour raconter qui la compose et de ce qui l'entoure.' We know from the best authority that these statements are true, as far as the materials of the work are concerned; but unfortunately they were placed in the hands of a person who grossly abused the confidence of the Noailles family.

It would be incredible if the fact had not been proved in an action at law brought against the Duc de Noailles to recover an additional payment, that this work was prepared for the press by a profligate hireling named Auguste Callet, who by his own showing is as great an impostor as is to be met with in literary history. This person asserted before the Tribunal Civil de la Seine on the 7th July 1865, that the book in question was composed and written by himself; that the journal kept by Madame de Montagu had been destroyed, and was only represented by fragments of an imperfect copy, and that the authentic materials in existence were insufficient to produce more than a few pages of biography: that, accordingly, M. Callet had been reduced to conjecture, and had invented many of the most striking and affecting incidents in the book. Callet failed in his action, for the Court held that he had been already sufficiently paid for his fraud, and that his object was to extort money to which he had no legal claim, by making it known. But this circumstance has materially shaken the confidence with which the book was received, and we regret that these statements have not been publicly confuted by the Noailles family.

her house; they stayed there a year, and the eldest young lady, who might have sat for the moral traits of Mr. Thackeray's' Becky Sharp,' began her operations on mankind by making her ascendency felt in the house of this hospitable protectress, and marrying her nephew, M. de Lamotte, who was then serving in the gend'armerie of the department. The happy pair had nothing to live on but their wits; and while the bride dispatched her husband to reclaim the missing estates of the house of Valois, she lost no time herself in repairing to Paris. The portrait of this terrible adventuress is not ill drawn by M. Beugnot.

which had so disastrous an effect on the for- | young persons of quality, invited them to tunes of Marie Antoinette. But, as Madame Campan observes, of all the enemies of the Queen, this Lamotte was destined to be the worst; and a cabal which originated in vanity, lust, and avarice - in which Marie Antoinette had no part but that of a victim -was more injurious to her than her own social failings or political errors. Madame de Lamotte was probably the authoress of the whole plot, unless indeed she was aided in it by the sinister genius of Cagliostro. By a strange series of accidents, M. Beugnot, himself one of the most honest of men, was in the company of this woman at the most critical moments of her life, and might, on less evidence, have been thought to be implicated in her villany.

'Madame de Lamotte was not what is called beautiful; she was low in stature, but wellformed; her eyes were blue, full of expression, and shaded by dark rounded eyebrows. Her excellent teeth; and the peculiar stamp of her face was rather long, with a good mouth and kinda bewitching smile. Her hand was good, her foot small; her complexion remarkably fair. She had learnt nothing, but she had plenty of talent and penetration. As she had been contending from her birth against the whole order of society, she set its laws at defiance and those of morality as well. She passed clean over them all, as if she never suspected their existence. A character such as hers is a frightful spectacle to an observing eye, but se ductive enough to the common run of men who do not look at things so closely.' (P. 12.)

It must have been about the year 1765, that M. Beugnot's father, going his rounds to levy the taille in the country near Bar-surAube, was entreated by the curé of the parish of Fontete to relieve three children who were starving in a wretched hovel by the roadside. These children, a boy and two girls, were the last descendants of an illegitimate branch of the House of Valois, through a Baron de St. Remi who was a natural son of King Henry II. Their father, in spite of his high lineage, was no better than a tramp, who lived by poaching and robbing orchards. But his pedigree was incontestable and had been accepted by Chérin, the court genealogist of Louis XV. Moved by the extreme distress of these children, an effort was made by Beugnot, the to Paris for his legal studies, and he soon reMeanwhile young Beugnot had come up elder, to provide for them in the neighbour-ceived a visit from this interesting client. hood. He himself gave them some money. He looked up for her the old patent of The Bishop of Langres protected them. The King at last bestowed on the boy a pension these estates on her ancestor, wrote a meHenry II. in the archives which had settled of 1,000 livres, and an admission to the Na-morial in support of her claims, paid a bill val School of France. The girls were put for her several times over at the Hotel de to school at the Abbey of Longchamps near Paris, and so the last descendants of the Valois were brought back to civilised life. The boy, called the Baron de Valois, entered the navy, and honourably lost his life in action. The girls were destined to take religious vows; but their vocation was so small, that when the subject was broached they ran away from Longchamps, and found their way back with six livres in their pocket in 1782 to Bar-sur-Aube, where young Beng-ly, if at all.' not was then just beginning to make a figure in the world. It is evident that he was not a little taken with the elder of the young ladies, to the great alarm of his father, who regretted that he had ever dug them out of the hovel by the roadside. A benevolent lady of Bar-sur-Aube, Madame de Surmont, shocked at the destitute condition of these

Reims, and prevailed on her once or twice
a week to dine with him at the Cadran Bleu.
which generally ended in a café.
On other days they took a walk together,

The lady had a singular love of beer, and no beer came amiss to her. She would eat, out of pure inadvertence, two or three dozen tartlets; and these inadvertences were so frequent that I could not but perceive she had dined very light

However, this state of depression soon came to an end. She announced one day that Madame de Boulainvilliers had obtained for her the honour of an audience of the Cardinal de Rohan, and Beugnot lent her his carriage to go there. I must have it,' said she, for in this country there are but

were inspired, and then dropped into a tone of gallantry and ludicrous compliment. This last ed all supper-time, but all I understood was that the hero had been talking of the sky, the stars, the Grand Arcanum, Memphis, the hierophant, transcendental chemistry, giants, big beasts; of a city bigger than Paris in the interior of Africa, where he had numerous correspondents; of our ignorance of a thousand things which he had at his fingers' ends; and of the charms of Madame de Lamotte, whom he called his dove, his gazelle, his swan, &c. After supper he honoured me with a round of questions, but as I contented myself with humbly expressing my own ignorance, I was afterwards assured by Madame de Lamotte that he had conceived the most favourable impression of my person and my attainments.

two ways to go begging, either at the church everybody round the table bowed assent. When door or in a coach and pair.' The results of he began a subject he raised his voice as if he that visit were memorable in all history. The Cardinal, himself a profligate and an adventurer in his way, was completely subdued by the grace and address of the fair supplicant. It is certain from a collection of letters from him to the Lamotte, which were luckily destroyed by Beugnot after his arrest, that he was madly in love with her; and from that moment her progress in the path of vice, guilt, and success was rapid. She therefore smilingly informed her friend Beugnot (still at the Cadran Bleu) that he could no longer be of any use to her. But in this she was mistaken. For a time, however, he withdrew from her society, and she transferred her operations to Versailles, where she succeeded in making the ac- 'I returned home on foot and alone. It was quaintance of persons about the Court who one of those nights of spring, when the moon had already practised on the Queen. It soon seems to lend the softness of her light to the became evident that she had made her for- promise of the coming year. The town was tune and lost her character; but with sin- quiet and solitary, as it commonly is in the Marais after midnight. I stopped in the Place Roygular impudence she and her husband came ale to meditate on the scene which had just back to pay a visit to their old friends at passed before me. I thought with bitterness of Bar-sur-Aube, (who received them at first mankind, when I saw to what depths of extravvery coldly) with a splendid equipage, a pro-agance men sated with all the gifts of fortune fusion of money, and all the luxury of and society may descend. I thought with com great lady accessories which speedily led passion of that wretched Cardinal de Rohan, people to take a more favourable view of whom Cagliostro and the Lamotte are, I see, their condition. driving to the abyss. But is my own curiosity so venial? What have I to do in this gilded cavern of people whom I despise and whom I ought to abhor? I contrasted these scenes with the early impressions of my father's house and of my studious years; and condemning my own weakness, I resolved to separate myself from Madame de Lamotte and her band without a

a

Madame de Lamotte's house in Paris in the following year was not less brilliant and agreeable; and there Beugnot, at his own request, met Cagliostro a worthy member of such a company.

The great mountebank seemed cut in the very mould of Signor Tulifano (the Dulcamara of that day) on the Italian stage short, stout, olive-coloured, with eyes half out of his head, and a broad turned-up nose. He wore that day an iron-grey single-breasted coat embroidered with gold, a scarlet waistcoat with rich lace, red breeches, his sword under the tails of his coat, and a broad hat with a white feather

looking very like those drug-sellers and toothdrawers who perform at fairs. But Cagliostro raised the character of his dress by his lace ruf. fles, sparkling rings, and shoe-buckles looking very much like diamonds. I still looked askance at him, hardly knowing what he was like, but in spite of myself, the whole aspect of the man had something imposing about it, and I wanted to hear him talk. His language was a strange mish-mash of Italian and French, with numerous quotations, which he gave us to understand were Arabic, but which he did not

translate. He alone talked he could touch on as many subjects as he pleased, as nobody else had anything to say about them. Every moment he looked round the table, and begged to know if he was understood; at which

rupture, but altogether.' (P. 62.)

A more illustrious victim than the Cardinal de Rohan was threatened by these machinations, and by a curious accident Beugnot was again thrown into Madame de Lamotte's company at a most decisive moment. He had gone to call one evening on a person from his own province whom Madame de Lamotte had made her companion. That lady herself was out, but as the evening wore away she returned, accompanied by her husband, her secretary, and a remarkably handsome well-grown girl of about twenty-five. They were all in the highest spirits, the unknown beauty as well as the rest; and as supper was served and the wine went round, she became noisy. Villette (the secretary) said that 'it was not true that people were always betrayed by themselves; that everybody betrayed you; and that'

Here Madame de Lamotte, next whom he was sitting, put her hand to his mouth, and exclaimed, Hush! M. Beug

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