a society in which it prevails may perhaps be good to live in, but can seldom be good to describe; and we shall imitate our author in drawing our materials rather from the eighteenth century, than from the nineteenth.

M. Berryer was born in the year 1757 at St Ménéhould in Champagne, a small town of 3000 inhabitants, which seems to have been a nest of lawyers, since it contained nine different courts, and all the accessories of avocats, notaires, procureurs, and greffiers." In September 1774 he commenced his legal studies in the office of a solicitor to the Parlement de Paris, which then extended its jurisdiction over the greater part of France. The state of the law was such as might have been expected in a system created, not by statesmen, but by lawyers. The forms of procedure,' says M. Berryer, were operose and intricate, and to prolong and complicate their entanglement was the business and the pride of the practitioner. Many suits were eternal; they descended from the solicitor who com'menced them to his successors, or rather to generations of 'successors, as the property-the patrimony of the office.t' The number of persons supported by this legal property was enormous. The Grand Châtelet, an inferior court having jurisdiction only over a part of Paris, gave occupation to nearly 300 attorneys.‡

6

M. Berryer was admitted to the bar in 1778. One of the first transactions in which he was engaged is so striking an instance of the pride and the despotism of the aristocracy of France, as it then was, that we shall relate it at some length.

M. du Ba man of considerable fortune, was a member of the provincial parliament of Normandy. In 1771, when the parliaments were exiled by Louis X V., he retired to Holland, leaving his affairs under the management of his wife, who, together with his son, a young man of twenty-two, resided in one of the country mansions of the family, a few leagues from Rouen. In that reign, and in that country, to be out of favour with the government was almost an exclusion from society. Neither neighbours, friends, nor even relations, visited the château, and the young man, solitary and unemployed, fell in love with his mother's maid. The mother's consent was obtained; her general powers of acting for her husband were supposed to enable her to give the father's assent, and the marriage took place in the

* Vol. i. p. 41. M. Berryer expresses a naïve regret that all the work is now done by a single tribunal.

† Ibid. p. 24.

Ibid. p. 29.

chapel of the château. Two children were born, when, in 1774, the parliaments were recalled, and M. du B- - returned. His daughter-in-law and her children fled before him and took refuge in England. The son, now in his twenty-sixth year, remained. M. du B required him to take proceedings to annul the marriage; and on his refusal obtained a lettre de cachet, under which he was confined in the prison of Saint Yon. The father visited him in his cell on the second floor of one of the towers. What passed between them is not known; but the result of the interview was, that as the father was descending the staircase, the son threw himself from the window, and was found by the father on the pavement of the court, with a fractured limb and a concussion of the brain. It does not appear that the father was softened, but the government was induced, by the horror of the catastrophe which its interference had occasioned, to revoke the lettre de cachet. The son, at liberty, but a cripple for life, fled to join his wife and children in England. In London, however, they must all have starved, or have had recourse to parish relief, unless a M. Tubeuf, a French jeweller established in England, had supported them. M. Tubeuf's advances for this purpose amounted during four years to about L.1200. They were made at the request of the mother, and with the knowledge of the father, but without his express authority. M. Tubeuf returned to France, demanded repayment from the father, was refused, commenced a suit against him in the Parliament of Paris, and engaged M. Berryer as his counsel. The first step was to obtain an order for the examination of M. du Bon interrogatories-an order which was made, as of course, without notice to the party to be examined. Armed with this order M. Berryer and M. Tubeuf travelled to the château of the magistrate. When they entered its long avenue the carriage with M. Tubeuf was left concealed by the trees, and M. Berryer proceeded on foot. The first person whom he saw was Madame du B. But such was the awe inspired by the domestic despot, that she would not venture even to hint to her husband the object of M. Berryer's mission. He was forced, therefore, to explain it himself, and to communicate to M.-du B the astonishing fact that MM. de Paris, his brethren, had subjected him to a public examination. The result, however, was, that the fear of an open discussion prevailed, where justice, compassion, and natural affection had all been powerless. M. Tubeuf was sent for, and before they recrossed the drawbridge all had been arranged. Sixty years afterwards M. Berryer again visited Rouen as an advocate, and the matter was again a family contest originating in aristocratic pride. The

château and the family of B- had long disappeared. M. Berryer interested his audience by a narrative of which he was probably the only depository; and urged them to crown his second appearance in their country with equal success.

As a further illustration of the morals of the old régime, we shall introduce in this place the notice of a more important cause of M. Berryer's, though it terminated at a later period of his career that of Madame de Pestre de Seneffe. When the events which we have to relate commenced she was between fifty and sixty years old, and resided at Brussels, a widow with seven children, and a still more numerous progeny of grandchildren; enjoying a high reputation for virtue and morals, and a very large jointure derived from property in Belgium and France. At a supper in the palace of the Prince de Soubise, a set of Parisian fashionables resolved that one of them should proceed to Brussels and marry the opulent widow. The necessary funds were supplied by a contribution, and the choice of the emissary was left to chance. The lot fell upon the Comte de Wargemont, a man of high family and of considerable property heavily encumbered. On his arrival at Brussels he introduced himself to Madame de Pestre, and secured the services of her maid and of her confessor. The maid concealed him one evening in her mistress's bed-room. In the middle of the night he showed himself. Madame de Pestre called for assistance. This was the signal for the appearance of the maid, who urged on her mistress the danger to her reputation of an éclat, and proposed that the advice of the confessor should be taken. The Count protested that his indiscretion had been forced on him by the violence of his passion; and the confessor recommended that all scandal should be avoided by an immediate marriage. Madame de Pestre was weak enough to consent; but as she yielded, not to love, but to fear, she insisted that the marriage should take place in Brussels, that she and all her estates should continue subject to the laws of Flanders, that her husband should have no power to require her to enter France, that she should continue absolute mistress of her property, and that the only benefit derived by the Count should be a life income of 20,000 francs, and 100,000 francs as capital. The marriage on these terms took place in February 1776. The husband almost immediately quitted his wife, and in June wrote to ask her whether she could suppose that he had any motive for marrying an old woman except the full command of her fortune. A few days afterwards he informed her that he intended to seize all her property in France, and to force her to join him there. His attempts to execute these threats produced a compromise, in pursuance of which a divorce

a mensa et toro, in a suit instituted by the husband, was pronounced by the ecclesiastical tribunal of Mechlin; and the Count, in exchange for all his claims under the marriage or the settlement, received 350,000 francs and an annuity of 10,000 more. The 350,000 francs, however, were soon spent, and the Count renewed his legal warfare. He attempted to set aside the divorce, succeeded in getting possession of the French estates, and kept up a never-ending litigation respecting those in Belgium. Madame de Pestre died, worn out with care and vexation. The annexation of Belgium rendered the whole property of her children subject to the jurisdiction of the French laws, and the Count spent the remainder of his life in prosecuting them from tribunal to tribunal. M. Berryer was counsel for Madame de Pestre and for her descendants; and he dwells upon his exertions in their cause as one of the most arduous, and of the most brilliant parts of his professional career. They procured him on one occasion a curious testimony of admiration. M. de Wargemont was dead, and his sister, Madame de Querrieux, had succeeded to some of his claims, and apparently to some of his litigiousness. As her brother's representative, she prosecuted an appeal against the Pestre family. An elderly lady sat behind M. Berryer while he conducted the defence. She was observed to listen with great emotion, and, as soon as he sat down, pressed him to accept, as a mark of her admiration, a ring made of the hair of her youth.

The episode of Madame de Pestre has led us to anticipate a portion of M. Berryer's history. Nature had given him the bodily qualifications most useful to an advocate, a fine voice, and health independent of exercise. In the strict discipline of a procureur's office, where the hours of business, with a few minutes' interval for breakfast and an hour for dinner, lasted from between six and seven in the morning till nine at night, he acquired intrepid diligence and the love of a sedentary life. He was stimulated too, as he tells us,* by the splendid pecuniary rewards of the profession. He saw Gerbier receiving 300,000 francs for a single cause, and Duvaudier's exertions in securing a jointure, paid by an equipage and an annuity of 4000 francs for its support. He began early to emancipate himself from the procureur's, by obtaining a set of clients of his own. ceeded first in becoming counsel to the eminent merchants constituting the India Company, in a cause which lasted many years; then in obtaining the conduct of a claim depending on an

* Vol. i. p. 87.

He suc

ancient pedigree, which appears to have remained undisposed of for more than twenty years; and lastly, in obtaining as his clients the two great ecclesiastical chapters of Brioude and Bourges. His marriage in January 1789 with Mademoiselle Gorneau, whose father, as Procureur aux Conseils, had for his clients the chief bankers and merchants of Paris, placed him at once in possession of the first mercantile practice. The heads of the great houses became his clients and his friends; and we may judge of the extent of litigation in which they were engaged, when we are told that one of them, M. Magon de la Balue, paid him a daily visit.

It does not appear that, when he married, he was aware that a time was approaching when the bravest man might wish to have no safety to provide for but his own. He had, indeed, been somewhat surprised, but not disquieted, by the anti-monarchical spirit of the press, and had felt some alarm at the opposition of the parliaments to the court; but his fears did not exceed a vague uneasiness. He does not appear, indeed, to be more of a statesman than the Carlist deputy, his son. The extent of his political sagacity may be estimated by the three causes, to which even now, after fifty years' experience, he assigns the Revolution ;—namely, financial difficulties, which he thinks might have been got out of by economy; the contest between the parliaments and the crown; and the reduction of a portion of the household troops.

His fears, however, were soon to be awakened. On the evening of Sunday, the 12th of July, he was returning with his young wife from a country holiday-that day was, in fact, the last but one of the monarchy-but so little were they aware of the real nature of the events which had disturbed the previous weeks, that they felt, as he tells us, perfect security. But at the Barrière du Trône, they heard of the sanguinary conflict between the Royal Allemand and the procession carrying the busts of Orleans and Necker; and as they passed the paper manufactory of Réveillon they saw the gates guarded by soldiery, and were told that behind them lay the bodies of those who had perished in the attack on the building. Two mornings after, M. Berryer was roused from his bed by the tocsin; he

* Vol. ii. p. 325.

†M. Berryer's recollection has misled him as to these dates. He supposes the storming of the Bastile to have taken place on the Monday, and therefore that Sunday was the 13th. But in fact Sunday was the 12th, and a day intervened between the riot of that day and the insurrection of the 14th.

VOL. LXXVI. NO. CLIII.

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