decree of a day of expiation which Louis XVIII., that regal agent of the Holy Alliance, had laid on the whole French people. The 21st of December was a day when the regicide people should stand before Nôtre Dame in sackcloth and ashes, candle in hand, as a terror and warning to surrounding races. The Deputies justly voted for the abolition of a law which tended far more to humiliate the French than to console them for the national disaster which befell them on the 21st January 1793. The Chamber of Peers, by refusing to repeal the law, betrayed its irreconcilable grudge against Young France, and unmasked all its aristocratic vendetta against the children of the Revolution and the Revolution itself. The lifelong lords of the Luxembourg fought not so much for the vital interests of the day as against the principles of the Revolution. For this reason they did not reject the law proposed by Briqueville; they degraded their honour and suppressed their raging disaffection. That proposition in no degree concerned the principles of the Revolution; but the Law of Divorce could not be admitted, for it is thoroughly of a revolutionary nature, as every thoroughly Catholic gentleman can understand.
The schism which developed itself on this occasion between the Chamber of Deputies and the peerage will have the most lamentable results. It is said that the King is beginning to foresee its
