think, myself among the rest, assembled to see the valiant brothers,
Robert and Charles, mount yesterday into the air, in company with a
certain Pilâtre de Rosier, who conducted them in the new-invented flying
chariot fastened to an air-balloon. It was from the middle of the
Tuilleries that they set out, a place very favourable and well-contrived
for such public purposes. But all was so nicely managed, so cleverly
carried on somehow, that the order and decorum of us who remained on
firm ground, struck me more than even the very strange sight of human
creatures floating in the wind: but I have really been witness to ten
times as much bustle and confusion at a crowded theatre in London, than
what these peaceable Parisians made when the whole city was gathered
together. Nobody was hurt, nobody was frighted, nobody could even
pretend to feel themselves incommoded. Such are among the few comforts
that result from a despotic government.

My republican spirit, however, boiled up a little last Monday, when I
had to petition Mons. de Calonne for the restoration of some trifles
detained in the custom-house at Calais. His politeness, indeed, and the
sight of others performing like acts of humiliation, reconciled me in
some measure to the drudgery of running from subaltern to subaltern,
intreating, in pathetic terms, the remission of a law which is at last
either just or unjust; if just, no felicitation should, methinks, be
permitted to change it; if unjust, what can be so grating as the
obligation to solicit?

We mean to quit Paris to-morrow; I therefore enquired this evening, what
was become of our aërial travellers. A very grave man replied, "_Je
crois, Madame, qu'ils sont dejá arrivès ces Messieurs là, au lieu ou
les vents se forment_[D]."