HEROES, PHILOSOPHERS, AND COURTIERS OF THE TIME OF LOUIS XVI. BY THE AUTHOR OF THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE COURT OF FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XV. by Annie Emma Carmoting) Challice IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. The right of Translation is reserved. PREFACE. "HISTORY," said M. Rollin, "is the book of Kings." It ought not less to be the book of Peoples. The history of the American Rebellion against the Crown of England,—of the contest of Right against Might in the New World, and of the time when young Democracy was about to spring from corrupt Feudalism in the Old World,-is peculiarly the book of Kings and Peoples too. It is the history of a war between France and England, and of facts which drew together, in grotesque contrast, the most distant and different members of the human family,-the courtiers of vi PREFACE. Versailles, and the savage tribes of North America. A complete narrative of the intervention of France in the American Rebellion has never yet been written from French contemporary sources. Little has been remembered, little is generally known, but the names of some of those brave Frenchmen by whose aid it was that America achieved her liberty. France herself, too soon interested and absorbed in the events of her own momentous Revolution -which was precipitated by French sympathy with American Rebellion-appears well-nigh to have forgotten these men. It was no part of England's duty to immortalize the actions of her too successful enemies. America was too much occupied in her cities and fields, repairing the wastes of the recent war, to analyze the sources of French sympathy to which she mainly owed her independence. A part, therefore, of the object of the |