was collecting materials in the French archives for his life of James II., but he combined pleasure with business, and Lewis Goldsmith's Paris Argus spoke of him as dancing attendance at ladies' saloons, particularly Madame Recamier's and Madame Tallien's. He met the poet Rogers, and commissioned him, as a better judge of furniture than himself, to buy fire-irons in the Palais Royal arcades, the price not to exceed a couple of louis. Rogers, too, saw Bonaparte, but only at a review, when he thought "his profile very strong, and his face one dead tint of yellow."
Erskine, who was over with his son, visited the Court of Appeal, and was loaded with attentions, but strangely enough was chiefly intimate with Barère, the most contemptible of surviving Jacobins. Barère,—indeed whose future biographer, President Carnot's father, then lying in his cradle, was destined to dwell on his unwavering enmity to England as the redeeming point in his character—seems to have been lionised by British visitors, as unconscious as himself of his cardinal virtue. Sir Francis Burdett called on him, and perhaps learned from him the poverty of Paine, who was enabled by a present of 300 louis from Burdett and Bosville to pay his debts and embark for America. This good deed may be set off against the vanity which led Burdett, applauded at Calais as the friend of Fox, to reply "No, I am the friend of the people." Burdett had seen Paris in 1793, when he sedu-
