THE COMTE D'ESPINCHAL.* "THIRTEEN volumes of manuscript, comprising nearly five
thousand pages." It is from this mass of material, hidden away for many years in a provincial library, the Municipal Library of Clermont-Ferrand, that M. d'Hauterive has chosen and edited the chapters contained in the present volume. As he remarks, it is a thing to be wondered at, in these days of research, that the Journal du Comte d'Espinchal has never yet found its way into print, with the exception of certain extracts in a book called La Coalition d'Auvergne, published a dozen years ago by M. de Champ/lour. The d'Espinchal family belonged to the province of Auvergne, and it was at the Château de Massiac, in the Cantal, his old home, pillaged in 1793, that M. d'Espinchal spent his later years and died in 1823, a fervent royalist to the last. His son left the manu- scripts, invaluable as a picture of the Emigration, to the Municipality of Clermont-Ferrand.
Whatever a reader's political sympathies may be, and few will find themselves in entire agreement with this uncom- promising eighteenth-century noble of the old privileged school, there can be no doubt of the great historical interest of his journals. They throw a flood of light, often with a most unflattering result, on the princes and courtiers of the Emigration. Evidently no one followed the princes in their departure from France in 1789 with a more sincere conviction that he was doing his best for a weak, mistaken King and a distracted country than M. d'Espinchal, and in spite of the lively temper of mind and the natural love of gossip which found amusement everywhere, no one was more thoroughly disillusioned.
"I am grieved," he writes, "to see that everything is achieved, as of old, by intrigue, by favour, and by women. And more: any adventurer who chooses to come forward with some absurd proposal is more sure of a hearing than the most sensible adviser . . • the crowd of swaggering triflers in this town of Coblenz. . . . How can we hope for any future improvement or any present success, when we cannot help seeing that these same triflers . . . are always preferred above everyone else?"
But M. d'Espinchal's special hatred and contempt were reserved for those nobles who did not emigrate till 1792, having tried and failed to make the best of the Revolution; men who by taking the required oaths had gained command of the regiments deserted by their former officers, had served the National Assembly, bought Church property, disgraced their order, and only left France because it was no longer safe to stay there. That such men as these, acknowledging their errors at the eleventh hour and joining the princes, should be received and treated with favour, was too much for this thorough-going partisan of the old regime at its proudest.
Mrs. Rodolph Stawell's translation gives us these curious chronicles in an agreeable and readable form.
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