a running commentary on the political oscillations, the intrigues of the Court, the manœuvres of the Constitutional party, the passionate eagerness of the patriots to establish firmly the conquests of the Revolution. Among other things, we hear that the Declaration of the Rights of Man was printed on pocket-handkerchiefs and distributed by thousands; that Roland, who was a first-rate pedestrian, used to go for long excursions with his friend Lanthenas, distributing little sheets and pamphlets to everyone they met by the wayside, and to the people in cottages and country inns.
On the reform of the municipal bodies all over France, the honest and patriotic Roland had been one of the first to be sent to the Hôtel de Ville of Lyons. By his whole previous training, and wide experience of affairs, he seemed eminently fitted for practical politics. When Arthur Young, passing through Lyons at the end of 1789, sought information concerning its silk manufactures, the one man everyone told him to go to was Roland de la Platière. This gentleman he consequently met, and derived so much useful information from him, that he found he had not visited Lyons in vain. "We had a great deal of conversation," he says, on agriculture, manufactures and commerce; and differed but little in our opinions, except on the treaty of commerce between England and France," adding, what is more interesting to us, "This gentleman, somewhat advanced in life, has a young and beautiful wife—the lady to whom he addressed his letters written in Italy."
The debt of Lyons, whose finances were in as deplorable a condition as those of the rest of the kingdom, amounted to nothing less than forty millions of francs. As the silk factories had suffered much during the first
