DEATH OF CHAUVELIN.
AMONG the victims of Cholera at Paris, where the disease has taken a higher flight than here, is M. DE CHAUVBLIN; a man of
diplomatic fame, who commenced his career by an embassy to England in an early stage of the French Revolution, when Louts the Sixteenth was vacillating between a constitutional monarchy and annihilation. M. DE CHAUVELIN was chiefly selected for his youth and his rank combined. A law of the National Assembly pre- vented the appointment of M. DE TALLEYRAND; but in that crisis it was deemed peculiarly necessary that the embassy should have the benefit of his abilities and experience (forty years ago !); and M. DE CHAUVELIN, it was expected, fromthis youth, would submit to the suggestions of the accomplished ex-Bishop. The embassy was composed of CHAUVELIN, GALLOIS, GARAT, in ostensible situations; and TALLEYRAND, With DUROVERAI, the ex-Attorney- General of Geneva, and Dumosz—whose Recollections, so full of information and curious intelligence, we notice in another depart- ment of this journal,—were more or less connected with the repre- sentation of the Constitutional Government of France.
This body of superior men is supposed to have excited some apprehension in the British Government; and they were accused of a scheme of fraternization, which their intimacy with Fox and the Opposition might seem—though very erroneously, as appears from M. DUMONT.S testimony—to authorize. When the Embassy in a body appeared in public, and among other places, at Rene- lagh, it was universally avoided : it might have seemed that M. DE CHAUVELIN had the Cholera by anticipation, for he was as much shunned as if the plague had hung in his garments. The abhorrence of the British fasgionables, so plainly expressed, greatly distressed the Ambassador;. but M.. DE TALLEYRAND was un- affected by it, and left the place, as ushal, with a jokein his mouth.
When M. DE CHAUVELIN was presented at Court, the Minister, PITT, took care that the . honour should not be without its bitter- ness: Mr. PITT interposed himself between the Ambassador and the King, in such a manner as to excite the indignation of the Frenchman; who took a peculiarly polished mode of reprimanding him. He trod upon PITT'S toe, in s_uch a manner that the Minis- ter skipped almost out of the presence!
Poor M. DE CHAUVELIN has now had his toes trod upon by a fiercer enemy than an indignant ambassador! It seems, indeed, but an ignoble fate for a man who has run the career of the Revo- lution, the Empire, the Restoration, and the second Revolution, to die of a disease which, in England at least, is almost as un- genteel as the itch.
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