Her devotion however does not
render her less cheerful or less amiable. She having expressed a wish to
hear the Protestant church service, I offered to accompany her and we went
together one Sunday to the Cathedral Church at Lausanne. But it
unfortunately happened that on that day a sermon was preached which must
have given a great deal of pain to her filial feelings. Mr Levade, the
minister, took it into his head to give a political sermon, in which, after
a great deal of commonplace abuse of Voltaire, Rousseau and the French
Revolution, and very fulsome adulation towards the English government (a
subject which was brought in by the head and shoulders), of that _island_
(as he termed it) _surrounded by the Ocean_, he lavished a great deal of
still more fulsome adulation on the Bourbons; and then most wantonly and
unnecessarily began a furious declamation against the _regicides_ as he
termed them, who had taken refuge in the Canton, and intimated pretty
plainly how pleasing it would be to God Almighty that they should be
expelled from it. This intolerant discourse, more worthy of a raving Jesuit
than of a Protestant minister, was deservedly scouted by the inhabitants of
Lausanne; but this did not hinder poor Mlle Michaud from being much
affected at the opprobrious tirade directed against a set of men, among
whom her father bore a conspicuous part, and who acted from patriotic
motives.
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