"Nineteenths of them nothing.

For this act you were in turn arrested and sent to jail, and the country which won its freedom by the aid of Paine in the eighteenth century disgraced itself in the nineteenth by the imprisonment of a heretic.

"The account up to this time," (October 30, 1768,) he wrote, "will end in my having employed myself from September nineteenth to October twenty-sixth, that is, thirty-eight days, in endeavoring to procure quarters for the two regiments here to no purpose.

There is no exaggeration in these words; the sixteenth century with its St. Bartholomew and The League, the eighteenth with its reign of terror, and the nineteenth with its Commune of Paris, contain scarcely any events so sinister as those of which France was, in the reign of Charles VI., from 1380 to 1422, the theatre and the victim.