CHAPTER 10.
Mr.and Mrs.Edgeworth, with their daughters Maria and Charlotte, travelled through the Low Countries--'a delightful tour,' Maria writes--and at length reached Paris, where they spent the winter 1802-3.

They soon got introductions, through the Abbe Morellet, into that best circle of society, 'which was composed of all that remained of the ancient men of letters, and of the most valuable of the nobility; not of those who had accepted of places from Buonaparte, nor yet of those emigrants who have been wittily and too justly described as returning to France after the Revolution, sans avoir rien appris, ou rien oublie.'.

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'We felt,' Maria writes, 'the characteristic charms of Parisian conversation, the polish and ease which in its best days distinguished it from that of any other capital.
'During my father's former residence in France, at the time when he was engaged in directing the works of the Rhone and Saone at Lyons, as he mentions in his Memoirs, he wrote a treatise on the construction of mills.