The disposition of the people is very inconsistent, but it is not bad.

Pens and tongues utter a great many things which are not in their heart.

The proof that they do not cherish hatred is that on the very slightest occasion they speak well of one, and even praise one much more than one deserves.

I have just this moment myself had experience of this.
There had been a terrible fire in Paris in the Palace of Justice, and the same day I was to have gone to the opera, so I did not go, but sent two hundred louis to relieve the most pressing cases of distress;[8] and ever since the fire, the very same people who had been circulating libels and songs against me[9] have been extolling me to the skies." These revelations of her inmost thoughts to her mother show how real and warm was her affection for the French as a nation, as well as how little she claimed any merit for her endeavors to benefit them; though a subsequent passage in the same letter also shows that she had been so much annoyed by some pasquinades and libels, of which she had been the subject, that she had become careful not to furnish fresh opportunities to her enemies: "We have had here such a quantity of snow as has not been seen for many years, so that people are going about in sledges, as they do at Vienna.

We were out in them yesterday about this place; and to-day there is to be a grand procession of them through Paris.