we proceed, we may as well mention that there is not one word in the present volume in reply to the remarks we made on his former Defence, nor the slightest additional information in corroboration of the statements to which we took exception in our review of his book. On that score, therefore, we have nothing to correct or retract.

M. Douville, instead of confining himself to the press for the reparation of his wounded reputation, (as M. Lacordaire had recommended,) thought proper in the first instance to resort to the more doubtful course of an appeal to arms; "he resolved," he says, "to take the lives of the

editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and of M. Lacordaire, or to die by their hands." He sent each of them a challenge, which was refused by both; by the first on the score of illness, and by the second, because the challenger's character was such as to deprive him of all claim to the satisfaction of a gentleman. This refusal being repeated a second and a third time, and M. Douville having threatened M. Lacordaire with personal chastisement of the most insulting kind, the latter turned him over to the police, who exacted from him a promise of abstaining from all farther provocation. With this result he appears in the end very well satisfied; he had heard that his antagonist was "beaucoup plus grand et surtout plus robuste" than himself, and the reflection with which he concludes his account of the affair is so ingenuously stated, as to deserve transcription for the benefit of future challengers. "Au reste," says he, "je suis bien aisé qu'il ait refusé le defi que je lui ai envoyé. La chance d'un cartel est toujours douteuse, et combien j'aurais eu à gémir d'être atteint par la balle d'un être aussi vil."

The real points at issue between the parties are only two; the first, whether M. Douville was at Rio Janeiro from the beginning of 1827 up to the 15th of October of that year, as he told us in his Voyage au Congo,--or whether he was at Buenos Ayres during the greater part of that time, as M. Lacordaire has informed us; and the second, whether in 1828 he was in the interior of Africa, performing that first journey of which the first and second volumes of the Voyage au Congo give the details, or was at Rio Janeira, as asserted by M. Lacordaire, who declares that he then and there saw both him and his wife. We are fortunately enabled to set both those questions at rest, in favour of M. Lacordaire, on the most indubitable authority, namely, that of M. Douville himself.

In the Nouvelles Annales des Voyages for June, 1831, (tom. 1. p. 392,) there is a notice of M. Douville's recent arrival at Havre, and of his African travels, which it appears, by a subsequent number of the same work, (tom. li. p. 194,) was transmitted from Havre by M. Douville himself. In this notice we find the following words: -

"Revenu alors (1826) en Europe, il repartit de France avec l'intention d'aller en Chine; les évènemens le forcèrent de rester à Buenos-Ayres. Il parcourut jusqu'en 1828 une partie de l'Amérique Meridionale. En 1828 il se dirigea sur le Congo, debarqua à St. Philippe de Benguela," &c. &c.

The first point is also admitted in the volume before us, one half of it, indeed, being devoted to a narrative of what happened to him during his

residence at Buenos Ayres. All the circumstances stated by M. Lacordaire respecting his arrival there, his occupations, and his imprisonment on a charge of forging bank notes, are admitted by M. Douville himself, with the addition, however, that he was acquitted of the charge by the tribunals, of whose sentences he gives copies.

On the second point, M. Douville here falsifies his own first statement in the Annales des Voyages, and stoutly adheres to the one given in his travels. In confirmation of that he now produces the following documents: 1. a declaration or certificate of two persons now at Paris, who say that they knew him (Douville) at Loanda about the beginning of 1828; that he shortly after departed for the interior of Africa to explore the country as a naturalist, and that his wife died there of the fever of the country; 2. copies of two letters addressed to him by the Portuguese governor of those settlements, while he was in the interior, the first dated March 1st, the second April 20, 1828. Here also M. Douville saves us the trouble of weighing the credibility of his witnesses, or the probable authenticity of the letters he has printed; at p. 386, in a letter addressed to the Editor of the Revue des deux Mondes, he states, (in proof that he really had been in Africa, a fact which M. Lacordaire had disputed,) that he has in his possession, among other documents, a passport which he thus describes :

"A passport which was delivered to me at Loanda on the 16th of February, 1829, on my departure from that city for my second journey into the interior of Africa, which passport, as is therein stated, was delivered to me upon the deposit of a Brazilian passport, dated 9th October, 1827, and with which I had arrived on the 15th December of the same year.'

As it appears by this that M. Douville preserves his documents, we were at first a little puzzled to account for his producing only the passport for his second journey, and not that for the first. But on turning to the "Voyage au Congo," our puzzle was increased, for we there found it stated in plain terms, (and the statement has been transferred to our own pages, No. xix. pp. 173, 174,) that the governor was determined not to allow him to travel a second time into the interior, and that, in order to get over this difficulty, he embarked on board a vessel nominally bound to the Brazils, but secretly destined to touch at Ambriz, from which he proceeded into the interior, to make those wonderful discoveries which are destined to immortalize his name. What possible credit can be given to an author whose statements are in such complete opposition to one another? After a few minutes' reflection, the truth of the matter flashed upon us at once. By the simple conversion of an 8 into a 7 in the Brazilian passport, M. Douville has contrived to antedate his arrival in Africa by a year, and as a part of the same bungling and barefaced system of fraud, he has altered the dates of the governor's two letters from 1829 to 1828. Our belief therefore is, that M. Douville and his spouse left Rio in October and arrived at Loanda in December, 1828, and that his first and only journey into the interior was performed between the 16th of February, 1829, and May, 1830, the dates which he assigns in his book for the second. After this, what becomes of the

splendid discoveries for which the Geographical Society of Paris awarded him its honours and pecuniary rewards?

We will now, in as few words as possible, put our readers in possession of our own theory as to the occasion of M. Douville's African travels, formed upon a careful comparison of the statements in the volume before us with those of his Voyage to Congo.

M. Jean Baptiste Douville appears, by his own account, to have occupied, before these travels, rather a doubtful position in society. Not having succeeded in Europe, or in whatever quarter of the Old World he had exercised his talents (see hereafter) in raising himself to that eminence to which he evidently thinks his merits entitle him, he turned his back upon it in August, 1826, and proceeded to the New in quest of better fortune. His first experiment, at Buenos Ayres, it has been seen, was not very successful one, and our conjecture is that the second, at Rio Janeiro, was not more so. M. Douville, by his own account, had the misfortune to come twice into contact with the officers of justice there, and his description of the miseries and horrors of a Brazilian prison has all the vividness and force of personal experience. Disappointed in his hopes, he was, probably as a last and desperate resource, induced to embark in a speculation to bring slaves from Angola. It will be recollected that by the convention between Great Britain and Brazil of November, 1826, the slave trade was to cease on the part of the latter at the end of three years, after which it was to be considered piracy; the consequence of which was, that as the termination of this horrible traffic approached, the Brazilian slave-traders redoubled their activity in all directions, in order to procure an additional supply for the market. Of this fact we have abundant evidence in the little work of Mr. Leonard, surgeon on board of one of the British cruizers, recently published; he states that in the year 1829, the number of slaves liberated by our cruizers was 5350, a number more than double that of the preceding, or what it was in the following year, when the Brazilian flag had disappeared. Keeping this circumstance in view, there is one passage in the second letter of the governor, addressed to M. Douville, which clearly enough explains the views and position of the person to whom it was addressed. We give it in the original Portugueze, along with M. Douville's French translation, which however leaves out the words in italics.

"Sintindo muito, que as circumstancias me não permittâo poder condescender com os seus dezejos, de lever carregadores até âo pais dos Moluâs, para o que me obsta a consideração de que actualmente se torna absolutamente indispensavel o emprego de grande numero delles para o servizo do commercio, per isso que se acha em seu ultimo prazo o commercio da escravatura. E alem disso, sendo o pais dos Muluâs de una tão longa distancia, que apenas ali tem chegado alguns habitantes deste pais, vira por isso a ser muito terrivel esta viagem para os carregadores delle, è a muitos respeitos perigoso e prejudicial.”

["Je regrette beaucoup que les circonstances ne me permettent pas de vous laisser conduire ces porteurs jusque chez les Molaus, par la consideration que dans ce moment la fin de l'esclavage approche, et qu'alors le commerce en requiert un tres grand nombre. D'ailleurs, les pais des Moluas est si eloigné, qu'à peine si l'on peut dire que quelqu'un de ce royaume y ait jamais penétré :

par conséquent ce voyage sera terrible pour les porteurs, et sans tous les rapports, dangereux et prejudiciable pour eux."]

This passage also is important, as exhibiting the utter impossibility of M. Douville's ever having gone near the country of the Molooas, as the governor puts a distinct negative on his proposal of going thither. The tone of the letters, we may also remark, is that of a superior to an inferior, whose movements are regulated by his directions; he sends him orders on the regents of the different districts through which he has to pass, to furnish the necessary porters to forward him on his journey; there is no question of paying them at the rate of so much per day. The whole fabric of M. Douville's enormous expenditure in the interior crumbles to atoms; on his own account we dare say he did not expend a franc, and it need not be matter of doubt that the governor had a share in the profits of this unholy traffic. We have not had time to trace (nor if we had, would it be worth while to waste it on the inquiry) how far the substitution of the year 1828 for 1829 has led to the strange confusion of dates which was so remarkable and suspicious a feature in the Voyage; that it has been one of the main causes of it, we have no doubt.

The readers of the "Trente Mois de ma Vie," will find that, in what precedes, we have not troubled ourselves with the amusing and monstrous figments with which M. Douville has embroidered the fragment of his real history that M. Lacordaire had supplied us with, but have at once gone to the marrow of the controversy. We shall, however, briefly notice the account of the previous portion of his life, as given by himself, and conclude by filling up a vacuum in it, on authority for the accuracy of which we can pledge ourselves.

He is a native of Hambye, in the arrondissement of Coutances and department of La Manche; born in February, 1794, the son of J. M. Douville, a thread merchant and bleacher; educated at Rennes in Britanny; having from his earliest age a decided passion for locomotion, which, at the termination of his studies, a fortunate chance enabled him

very early to indulge. A very wealthy relation left him his whole property, and he immediately began travelling. In his "Voyage au Congo" he had informed us that he had visited both North and South America, South Africa, Egypt, Italy, and some portion of Asia; in his new version the field of peregrination is even more extensive, but differing in important parts from the first. He traversed Europe; next South America; then went by sea (!) into Asia; traversed part of India and Cashmir, and returned through Khorasan and Persia to Trebizond, where he took shipping for Genoa. He passed the end of 1824 and 1825 in Italy and in Germany; returned to Paris in the spring of 1826, and after a rest of three months, again started (as we have seen) for Buenos Ayres, with the ultimate view of proceeding from thence to the Isle of Bourbon, and from that to Java, from which, he says, there are frequent opportunities of getting to China. To a man of his immense fortune these long voyages occasion no disbursements productive of the least inconvenience. On this occasion he provided himself with the following ample stock of money and merchandize.

1. Hardware, glassware, and other articles, to exchange with the Patagonians (!)

the

francs.

2. China, cut glass, clocks, physical instruments and other costly articles, for the Chinese.

45,000

3. English Bank notes of the Bank of England (!) (£3000)

75,000

4. Spanish dollars, concealed in a double bottom of one of the cases of

glassware

5. A note of the Bank of France

10,000 1,000

(£5240 sterling) 131,000

He lost his 76,000 francs in paper money in the trajet from Havre to Rouen; the vessel, in which he was a passenger, was seized by the Brazilian squadron and condemned for attempting to break the blockade of Buenos Ayres, whereby he lost all his cases of hardware, china, &c. and his remaining stock of dollars. We must refer to the book itself for the wonderful details respecting these misfortunes, and the manner in which our hero contrived to bear up against them: the gravity with which they are told is really more amusing and a better preservative against the spleen than any thing we have met with for a long time. Of the Buenos Ayres, Brazilian, and African portions of his adventures, it is needless to say another word. But there is a little episode of his previous life, in which for five years at least he was stationary, over which he has thrown a veil, of which " nous tacherons de lever un coin."

In the year 1819, a Frenchman named J. B. Le Comte became first known to our informant, as the keeper of a small French school, in the first floor of a house in Titchborne Street, Piccadilly, the ground floor of which was occupied as a shop by Mrs. Ward, a straw-bonnet maker. M. Le Comte, after some time, gave it to be understood, that he had not always been in the humble situation he then was; that in fact he was the son of no less a personage than the Marquis de Douville, and, in order not to disgrace the family during his probation of adversity, had assumed the name of Le Comte. After a time, M. Le Comte and Mrs. Ward became husband and wife, and about the year 1821 M. Le Comte removed to No. 9, Gerrard Street, Sobo, (the large house which was for a number of years occupied by the Linnean Society) and converted it into an academy, which for a time appeared to prosper. M. Le Comte, however, got into pecuniary difficulties, and was obliged to require time from his creditors to meet their demands; this was given to him, and it is but right to say that he discharged these engagements honourably. Mrs. Le Comte subsequently died, and it was not long before the widower was understood to be paying his addresses to a lady of fortune; the match, however, was suddenly broken off, and handbills were circulated immediately after about the neighbourhood, offering a reward of 100 guineas from M. Le Comte to any one who would discover the writer of some anonymous letters which had been written to his prejudice. About the end of 1823, he had, on the strength of his previous payments, got into debt with our informant to a more considerable amount than the latter was altogether satisfied with, and he therefore pressed him rather urgently to liquidate it. M. Le Comte,