country. Their diamonds, too, were sold well by my lord's agents, though
the London shops were stocked with jewellery, and such portable
valuables, some of rare and curious fashion, which were sold for half
their real value by emigrants who could not afford to wait. Madame de
Crequy was recovering her health, although her strength was sadly gone,
and she would never be equal to such another flight, as the perilous one
which she had gone through, and to which she could not bear the slightest
reference. For some time things continued in this state--the De Crequys
still our honoured visitors,--many houses besides our own, even among our
own friends, open to receive the poor flying nobility of France, driven
from their country by the brutal republicans, and every freshly-arrived
emigrant bringing new tales of horror, as if these revolutionists were
drunk with blood, and mad to devise new atrocities. One day Clement--I
should tell you he had been presented to our good King George and the
sweet Queen, and they had accosted him most graciously, and his beauty
and elegance, and some of the circumstances attendant on his flight, made
him be received in the world quite like a hero of romance; he might have
been on intimate terms in many a distinguished house, had he cared to
visit much; but he accompanied my lord and me with an air of indifference
and languor, which I sometimes fancied made him be all the more sought
after: Monkshaven (that was the title my eldest son bore) tried in vain
to interest him in all young men's sports. But no! it was the same
through all. His mother took far more interest in the on-dits of the
London world, into which she was far too great an invalid to venture,
than he did in the absolute events themselves, in which he might have
been an actor. One day, as I was saying, an old Frenchman of a humble
class presented himself to our servants, several of them, understood
French; and through Medlicott, I learnt that he was in some way connected
with the De Crequys; not with their Paris-life; but I fancy he had been
intendant of their estates in the country; estates which were more useful