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+Project Gutenberg’s Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete,
+by Lewis Goldsmith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete
+       Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+Author: Lewis Goldsmith
+
+Release Date: September 11, 2006 [EBook #3899]
+Last Updated: August 23, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT OF ST. CLOUD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+By Lewis Goldsmith
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS’ NOTE.
+
+
+The present work contains particulars of the great Napoleon not to be
+found in any other publication, and forms an interesting addition to the
+information generally known about him.
+
+The writer of the Letters (whose name is said to have been Stewarton, and
+who had been a friend of the Empress Josephine in her happier, if less
+brilliant days) gives full accounts of the lives of nearly all Napoleon’s
+Ministers and Generals, in addition to those of a great number of other
+characters, and an insight into the inner life of those who formed
+Napoleon’s Court.
+
+All sorts and conditions of men are dealt with--adherents who have come
+over from the Royalist camp, as well as those who have won their way
+upwards as soldiers, as did Napoleon himself.  In fact, the work abounds
+with anecdotes of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Fouche, and a host of others, and
+astounding particulars are given of the mysterious disappearance of those
+persons who were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+At Cardinal Caprara’s
+
+Cardinal Fesch
+
+Episode at Mme. Miot’s
+
+Napoleon’s Guard
+
+A Grand Dinner
+
+Chaptal
+
+Turreaux
+
+Carrier
+
+Barrere
+
+Cambaceres
+
+Pauline Bonaparte
+
+
+
+
+SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+
+THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD.
+
+INTRODUCTORY LETTER.
+
+
+PARIS, November 10th, 1805.
+
+MY LORD,--The Letters I have written to you were intended for the private
+entertainment of a liberal friend, and not for the general perusal of a
+severe public.  Had I imagined that their contents would have penetrated
+beyond your closet or the circle of your intimate acquaintance, several
+of the narratives would have been extended, while others would have been
+compressed; the anecdotes would have been more numerous, and my own
+remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left out, others drawn, and
+all better finished.  I should then have attempted more frequently to
+expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to abhorrence; should have
+lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and oftener held out to ridicule
+puerile vanity and outrageous ambition.  In short, I should then have
+studied more to please than to instruct, by addressing myself seldomer to
+the reason than to the passions.
+
+I subscribe, nevertheless, to your observation, “that the late long war
+and short peace, with the enslaved state of the Press on the Continent,
+would occasion a chasm in the most interesting period of modern history,
+did not independent and judicious travellers or visitors abroad collect
+and forward to Great Britain (the last refuge of freedom) some materials
+which, though scanty and insufficient upon the whole, may, in part, rend
+the veil of destructive politics, and enable future ages to penetrate
+into mysteries which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+to the just reprobation of honour and of virtue.”  If, therefore, my
+humble labours can preserve loyal subjects from the seduction of
+traitors, or warn lawful sovereigns and civilized society of the alarming
+conspiracy against them, I shall not think either my time thrown away, or
+fear the dangers to which publicity might expose me were I only suspected
+here of being an Anglican author.  Before the Letters are sent to the
+press I trust, however, to your discretion the removal of everything that
+might produce a discovery, or indicate the source from which you have
+derived your information.
+
+Although it is not usual in private correspondence to quote authorities,
+I have sometimes done so; but satisfied, as I hope you are, with my
+veracity, I should have thought the frequent productions of any better
+pledge than the word of a man of honour an insult to your feelings.  I
+have, besides, not related a fact that is not recent and well known in
+our fashionable and political societies; and of ALL the portraits I have
+delineated, the originals not only exist, but are yet occupied in the
+present busy scene of the Continent, and figuring either at Courts, in
+camps, or in Cabinets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I promised you not to pronounce in haste on persons and events
+passing under my eyes; thirty-one months have quickly passed away since I
+became an attentive spectator of the extraordinary transactions, and of
+the extraordinary characters of the extraordinary Court and Cabinet of
+St. Cloud.  If my talents to delineate equal my zeal to inquire and my
+industry to examine; if I am as able a painter as I have been an
+indefatigable observer, you will be satisfied, and with your approbation
+at once sanction and reward my labours.
+
+With most Princes, the supple courtier and the fawning favourite have
+greater influence than the profound statesman and subtle Minister; and
+the determinations of Cabinets are, therefore, frequently prepared in
+drawing-rooms, and discussed in the closet.  The politician and the
+counsellor are frequently applauded or censured for transactions which
+the intrigues of antechambers conceived, and which cupidity and favour
+gave power to promulgate.
+
+It is very generally imagined, but falsely, that Napoleon Bonaparte
+governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity,
+caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole
+consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited
+authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and
+his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who
+marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that
+disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to
+himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the same
+genius, unbiased and unsupported, crushed factions, erected a throne, and
+reconstructed racks; that the same mind restored and protected
+Christianity, and proscribed and assassinated a D’Enghien.
+
+All these contradictions, all these virtues and vices, may be found in
+the same person; but Bonaparte, individually or isolated, has no claim to
+them.  Except on some sudden occasions that call for immediate decision,
+no Sovereign rules less by himself than Bonaparte; because no Sovereign
+is more surrounded by favourites and counsellors, by needy adventurers
+and crafty intriguers.
+
+What Sovereign has more relatives to enrich, or services to recompense;
+more evils to repair, more jealousies to dread, more dangers to fear,
+more clamours to silence; or stands more in need of information and
+advice?  Let it be remembered that he, who now governs empires and
+nations, ten years ago commanded only a battery; and five years ago was
+only a military chieftain.  The difference is as immense, indeed, between
+the sceptre of a Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise
+legislator who protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and
+the hireling robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder
+at the expense and misery of generations.  The lower classes of all
+countries have produced persons who have distinguished themselves as
+warriors; but what subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence
+and achievements, without infringing on the laws and liberties of his
+country, proved himself worthy to reign?  Besides, the education which
+Bonaparte received was entirely military; and a man (let his innate
+abilities be ever so surprising or excellent) who, during the first
+thirty years of his life, has made either military or political tactics
+or exploits his only study, certainly cannot excel equally in the Cabinet
+and in the camp.  It would be as foolish to believe, as absurd to expect,
+a perfection almost beyond the reach of any man; and of Bonaparte more
+than of any one else.  A man who, like him, is the continual slave of his
+own passions, can neither be a good nor a just, an independent nor
+immaculate master.
+
+Among the courtiers who, ever since Bonaparte was made First Consul, have
+maintained a great ascendency over him, is the present Grand Marshal of
+his Court, the general of division, Duroc.  With some parts, but greater
+presumption, this young man is destined by his master to occupy the most
+confidential places near his person; and to his care are entrusted the
+most difficult and secret missions at foreign Courts.  When he is absent
+from France, the liberty of the Continent is in danger; and when in the
+Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, Bonaparte thinks himself always safe.
+
+Gerard Christophe Michel Duroc was born at Ponta-Mousson, in the
+department of Meurthe, on the 25th of October, 1772, of poor but honest
+parents.  His father kept a petty chandler’s shop; but by the interest
+and generosity of Abbe Duroc, a distant relation, he was so well educated
+that, in March, 1792, he became a sub-lieutenant of the artillery.  In
+1796 he served in Italy, as a captain, under General Andreossy, by whom
+he was recommended to General l’Espinasse, then commander of the
+artillery of the army of Italy, who made him an aide-de-camp.  In that
+situation Bonaparte remarked his activity, and was pleased with his
+manners, and therefore attached him as an aide-de-camp to himself.  Duroc
+soon became a favourite with his chief, and, notwithstanding the
+intrigues of his rivals, he has continued to be so to this day.
+
+It has been asserted, by his enemies no doubt, that by implicit obedience
+to his general’s orders, by an unresisting complacency, and by executing,
+without hesitation, the most cruel mandates of his superior, he has fixed
+himself so firmly in his good opinion that he is irremovable.  It has
+also been stated that it was Duroc who commanded the drowning and burying
+alive of the wounded French soldiers in Italy, in 1797; and that it was
+he who inspected their poisoning in Syria, in 1799, where he was wounded
+during the siege of St. Jean d’ Acre.  He was among the few officers whom
+Bonaparte selected for his companions when he quitted the army of Egypt,
+and landed with him in France in October, 1799.
+
+Hitherto Duroc had only shown himself as a brave soldier and obedient
+officer; but after the revolution which made Bonaparte a First Consul, he
+entered upon another career.  He was then, for the first time, employed
+in a diplomatic mission to Berlin, where he so far insinuated himself
+into the good graces of their Prussian Majesties that the King admitted
+him to the royal table, and on the parade at Potsdam presented him to his
+generals and officers as an aide-de-camp ‘du plus grand homme que je
+connais; whilst the Queen gave him a scarf knitted by her own fair hands.
+
+The fortunate result of Duroc’s intrigues in Prussia, in 1799, encouraged
+Bonaparte to despatch him, in 1801, to Russia; where Alexander I.
+received him with that noble condescension so natural, to this great and
+good Prince.  He succeeded at St. Petersburg in arranging the political
+and commercial difficulties and disagreements between France and Russia;
+but his proposal for a defensive alliance was declined.
+
+An anecdote is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the
+barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the
+inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little
+displeased the military diplomatist.
+
+Among Talleyrand’s female agents sent to cajole Paul I. during the latter
+part of his reign, was a Madame Bonoeil, whose real name is De F-----.
+When this unfortunate Prince was no more, most of the French male and
+female intriguers in Russia thought it necessary to shift their quarters,
+and to expect, on the territory of neutral Prussia, farther instructions
+from Paris, where and how to proceed.  Madame Bonoeil had removed to
+Konigsberg.  In the second week of May, 1801, when Duroc passed through
+that town for St. Petersburg, he visited this lady, according to the
+orders of Bonaparte, and obtained from her a list of the names of the
+principal persons who were inclined to be serviceable to France, and
+might be trusted by him upon the present occasion.  By inattention or
+mistake she had misspelled the name of one of the most trusty and active
+adherents of Bonaparte; and Duroc, therefore, instead of addressing
+himself to the Polish Count de S--------lz, went to the Polish Count de
+S-----tz.  This latter was as much flattered as surprised, upon seeing an
+aide-de-camp and envoy of the First Consul of France enter his
+apartments, seldom visited before but by usurers, gamesters, and
+creditors; and, on hearing the object of this visit, began to think
+either the envoy mad or himself dreaming.  Understanding, however, that
+money would be of little consideration, if the point desired by the First
+Consul could be carried, he determined to take advantage of this
+fortunate hit, and invited Duroc to sup with him the same evening; when
+he promised him he should meet with persons who could do his business,
+provided his pecuniary resources were as ample as he had stated.
+
+This Count de S-----tz was one of the most extravagant and profligate
+subjects that Russia had acquired by the partition of Poland.  After
+squandering away his own patrimony, he had ruined his mother and two
+sisters, and subsisted now entirely by gambling and borrowing.  Among his
+associates, in similar circumstances with himself, was a Chevalier de
+Gausac, a French adventurer, pretending to be an emigrant from the
+vicinity of Toulouse.  To him was communicated what had happened in the
+morning, and his advice was asked how to act in the evening.  It was soon
+settled that De Gausac should be transformed into a Russian Count de
+W-----, a nephew and confidential secretary of the Chancellor of the same
+name; and that one Caumartin, another French adventurer, who taught
+fencing at St. Petersburg, should act the part of Prince de M-----, an
+aide-de-camp of the Emperor; and that all three together should strip
+Duroc, and share the spoil.  At the appointed hour Bonaparte’s agent
+arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered
+him of twelve hundred thousand livres.  Though not many days passed
+before he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from
+denouncing the impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret
+between himself, Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses
+of Caumartin excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who
+soon discovered the source from which they had flowed.  De Gausac had the
+imprudence to return to this capital last spring, and is now shut up in
+the Temple, where he probably will be forgotten.
+
+As this loss was more ascribed to the negligence of Madame Bonoeil than
+to the mismanagement of Duroc, or his want of penetration, his reception
+at the Tuileries, though not so gracious as on his return from Berlin,
+nineteen months before, was, however, such as convinced him that if he
+had not increased, he had at the same time not lessened, the confidence
+of his master; and, indeed, shortly afterwards, Bonaparte created him
+first prefect of his palace, and procured him for a wife the only
+daughter of a rich Spanish banker.  Rumour, however, says that Bonaparte
+was not quite disinterested when he commanded and concluded this match,
+and that the fortune of Madame Duroc has paid for the expensive supper of
+her husband with Count de S-----tz at St.  Petersburg.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though the Treaty of Luneville will probably soon be buried in
+the rubbish of the Treaty of Amiens, the influence of their parents in
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud is as great as ever: I say their parents,
+because the crafty ex-Bishop, Talleyrand, foreseeing the short existence
+of these bastard diplomatic acts, took care to compliment the innocent
+Joseph Bonaparte with a share in the parentage, although they were his
+own exclusive offspring.
+
+Joseph Bonaparte, who in 1797, from an attorney’s clerk at Ajaccio, in
+Corsica, was at once transformed into an Ambassador to the Court of Rome,
+had hardly read a treaty, or seen a despatch written, before he was
+himself to conclude the one, and to dictate the other.  Had he not been
+supported by able secretaries, Government would soon have been convinced
+that it is as impossible to confer talents as it is easy to give places
+to men to whom Nature has refused parts, and on whom a scanty or
+neglected education has bestowed no improvements.  Deep and reserved,
+like a true Italian, but vain and ambitious, like his brothers, under the
+character of a statesman, he has only been the political puppet of
+Talleyrand.  If he has sometimes been applauded upon the stages where he
+has been placed, he is also exposed to the hooting and hisses of the
+suffering multitude; while the Minister pockets undisturbed all the
+entrance-money, and conceals his wickedness and art under the cloak of
+Joseph; which protects him besides against the anger and fury of
+Napoleon.  No negotiation of any consequence is undertaken, no diplomatic
+arrangements are under consideration, but Joseph is always consulted, and
+Napoleon informed of the consultation.  Hence none of Bonaparte’s
+Ministers have suffered less from his violence and resentment than
+Talleyrand, who, in the political department, governs him who governs
+France and Italy.
+
+As early as 1800, Talleyrand determined to throw the odium of his own
+outrages against the law of nations upon the brother of his master.
+Lucien Bonaparte was that year sent Ambassador to Spain, but not sharing
+with the Minister the large profits of his appointment, his diplomatic
+career was but short.  Joseph is as greedy and as ravenous as Lucien, but
+not so frank or indiscreet.  Whether he knew or not of Talleyrand’s
+immense gain by the pacification at Luneville in February, 1801, he did
+not neglect his own individual interest.  The day previous to the
+signature of this treaty, he despatched a courier to the rich army
+contractor, Collot, acquainting him in secret of the issue of the
+negotiation, and ordering him at the same time to purchase six millions
+of livres--L 250,000--in the stocks on his account.  On Joseph’s arrival
+at Paris, Collot sent him the State bonds for the sum ordered, together
+with a very polite letter; but though he waited on the grand pacificator
+several times afterwards, all admittance was refused, until a douceur of
+one million of livres--nearly L 42,000--of Collot’s private profit opened
+the door.  In return, during the discussions between France and England
+in the summer of 1801, and in the spring of 1802, Collot was continued
+Joseph’s private agent, and shared with his patron, within twelve months,
+a clear gain of thirty-two millions of livres.
+
+Some of the secret articles of the Treaty of Luneville gave Austria,
+during the insurrection in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1802, an
+opportunity and a right to make representations against the interference
+of France; a circumstance which greatly displeased Bonaparte, who
+reproached Talleyrand for his want of foresight, and of having been
+outwitted by the Cabinet of Vienna.  The Minister, on the very next day,
+laid before his master the correspondence that had passed between him and
+Joseph Bonaparte, during the negotiation concerning these secret
+articles, which were found to have been entirely proposed and settled by
+Joseph; who had been induced by his secretary and factotum (a creature of
+Talleyrand) to adopt sentiments for which that Minister had been paid,
+according to report, six hundred thousand livres--L25,000.  Several other
+tricks have in the same manner been played upon Joseph, who,
+notwithstanding, has the modesty to consider himself (much to the
+advantage and satisfaction of Talleyrand) the first statesman in Europe,
+and the good fortune to be thought so by his brother Napoleon.
+
+When a rupture with England was apprehended, in the spring of 1803,
+Talleyrand never signed a despatch that was not previously communicated
+to, and approved by Joseph, before its contents were sanctioned by
+Napoleon.  This precaution chiefly continued him in place when Lord
+Whitworth left this capital,--a departure that incensed Napoleon to such
+a degree that he entirely forgot the dignity of his rank amidst his
+generals, a becoming deportment to the members of the diplomatic corps,
+and his duty to his mother and brothers, who all more or less experienced
+the effects of his violent passions.  He thus accosted Talleyrand, who
+purposely arrived late at his circle:
+
+“Well! the English Ambassador is gone; and we must again go to war.  Were
+my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers, I should despair
+indeed of the issue of my contest with these insolent islanders.  Many
+believe that had I been more ably supported in my Cabinet, I should not
+have been under the necessity of taking the field, as a rupture might
+have been prevented.”
+
+“Such, Citizen First Consul!” answered the trembling and bowing Minister,
+“is not the opinion of the Counsellor of State, Citizen Joseph
+Bonaparte.”
+
+“Well, then,” said Napoleon, as recollecting himself, “England wishes for
+war, and she shall suffer for it.  This shall be a war of extermination,
+depend upon it.”
+
+The name of Joseph alone moderated Napoleon’s fury, and changed its
+object.  It is with him what the harp of David was with Saul.  Talleyrand
+knows it, and is no loser by that knowledge.  I must, however, in
+justice, say that, had Bonaparte followed his Minister’s advice, and
+suffered himself to be entirely guided by his counsel, all hostilities
+with England at that time might have been avoided; her Government would
+have been lulled into security by the cession of Malta, and some
+commercial regulations, and her future conquest, during a time of peace,
+have been attempted upon plans duly organized, that might have ensured
+success.  He never ceased to repeat, “Citizen First Consul!  some few
+years longer peace with Great Britain, and the ‘Te Deums’ of modern
+Britons for the conquest and possession of Malta, will be considered by
+their children as the funeral hymns of their liberty and independence.”
+
+It was upon this memorable occasion of Lord Whitworth’s departure, that
+Bonaparte is known to have betrayed the most outrageous acts of passion;
+he rudely forced his mother from his closet, and forbade his own sisters
+to approach his person; he confined Madame Bonaparte for several hours to
+her chamber; he dismissed favourite generals; treated with ignominy
+members of his Council of State; and towards his physician, secretaries,
+and principal attendants, he committed unbecoming and disgraceful marks
+of personal outrage.  I have heard it affirmed that, though her husband,
+when shutting her up in her dressing-room, put the key in his pocket,
+Madame Napoleon found means to resent the ungallant behaviour of her
+spouse, with the assistance of Madame Remusat.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No act of Bonaparte’s government has occasioned so many, so
+opposite, and so violent debates, among the remnants of revolutionary
+factions comprising his Senate and Council of State, as the introduction
+and execution of the religious concordat signed with the Pope.  Joseph
+was here again the ostensible negotiator, though he, on this as well as
+on former occasions, concluded nothing that had not been prepared and
+digested by Talleyrand.
+
+Bonaparte does not in general pay much attention to the opinions of
+others when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or
+coincide with his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public
+career professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the
+worshipper of Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those
+who, after deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their
+youth, continued constant and firm in their apostasy.  Of those who
+deliberated concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and
+the acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz,
+Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real,
+Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis,
+Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte
+for Christianity.  Besides the sentiments of these confidential
+counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
+religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
+counsellors,--all differing as much from one another as the members of
+his own Privy Council.
+
+Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing
+that to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of
+the priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ.  She certainly
+is the most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and
+of her name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced
+Napoleon of the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen
+centuries, had preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations
+of republicans and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very
+probable that her representations would have been as ineffective as her
+piety or her prayers.  So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of
+Napoleon for the Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the
+Pope and the papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were
+laying waste and ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both
+incorporated with his new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his
+first acts of sovereignty, in the name of the then sovereign people, was
+the confiscation of Church lands and the sale of the estates of the
+clergy.
+
+Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
+Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
+intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
+in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
+of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes.  The
+former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
+this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
+its bosom and its doctrine.  With capacity to figure as a country curate,
+he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
+though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
+Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte’s promise of
+succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and
+expect to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than
+himself.  It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of
+Pius VII. in France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertake a
+journey that has caused so much scandal among the truly faithful; and
+which, should ever Austria regain its former supremacy in Italy, will
+send the present Pope to end his days in a convent, and make the
+successors of St. Peter what this Apostle was himself, a Bishop of Rome,
+and nothing more.
+
+Bernier was a curate in La Vendee before the Revolution, and one of those
+priests who lighted the torch of civil war in that unfortunate country,
+under pretence of defending the throne of his King and the altars of his
+God.  He not only possessed great popularity among the lower classes, but
+acquired so far the confidence of the Vendean chiefs that he was
+appointed one of the supreme and directing Council of the Royalists and
+Chouans.  Even so late as the summer of 1799 he continued not only
+unsuspected, but trusted by the insurgents in the Western departments. In
+the winter, however, of the same year he had been gained over by
+Bonaparte’s emissaries, and was seen at his levies in the Tuileries.  It
+is stated that General Brune made him renounce his former principles,
+desert his former companions, and betray to the then First Consul of the
+French Republic the secrets of the friends of lawful monarchy, of the
+faithful subjects of Louis XVIII.  His perfidy has been rewarded with one
+hundred and fifty thousand livres in ready money, with the see of
+Orleans, and with a promise of a cardinal’s hat.  He has also, with the
+Cardinals Gonsalvi, Caprara, Fesch, Cambaceres, and Mauri, Bonaparte’s
+promise, and, of course, the expectation of the Roman tiara.  He was one
+of the prelates who officiated at the late coronation, and is now
+confided in as a person who has too far committed himself with his
+legitimate Prince, and whose past treachery, therefore, answers for his
+future fidelity.
+
+This religious concordat of the 10th September, 1801, as well as all
+other constitutional codes emating from revolutionary authorities,
+proscribes even in protecting.  The professors and protectors of the
+religion of universal peace, benevolence, and forgiveness banish in this
+concordat from France forever the Cardinals Rohan and Montmorency, and
+the Bishop of Arras, whose dutiful attachment to their unfortunate Prince
+would, in better times and in a more just and generous nation, have been
+recompensed with distinctions, and honoured even by magnanimous foes.
+
+When Madame Napoleon was informed by her husband of the necessity of
+choosing her almoner and chaplain, and of attending regularly the Mass,
+she first fell a-laughing, taking it merely for a joke; the serious and
+severe looks, and the harsh and threatening expressions of the First
+Consul soon, however, convinced her how much she was mistaken.  To evince
+her repentance, she on the very next day attended her mother-in-law to
+church, who was highly edified by the sudden and religious turn of her
+daughter, and did not fail to ascribe to the efficacious interference of
+one of her favourite saints this conversion of a profane sinner.  But
+Napoleon was not the dupe of this church-going mummery of his wife, whom
+he ordered his spies to watch; these were unfortunate enough to discover
+that she went to the Mass more to fill her appointments with her lovers
+than to pray to her Saviour; and that even by the side of her mother she
+read billets-doux and love-letters when that pious lady supposed that she
+read her prayers, because her eyes were fixed upon her breviary.  Without
+relating to any one this discovery of his Josephine’s frailties,
+Napoleon, after a violent connubial fracas and reprimand, and after a
+solitary confinement of her for six days, gave immediate orders to have
+the chapels of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud repaired; and until these
+were ready, Cardinal Cambaceres and Bernier, by turns, said the Mass, in
+her private apartments; where none but selected favourites or favoured
+courtiers were admitted.  Madame Napoleon now never neglects the Mass,
+but if not accompanied by her husband is escorted by a guard of honour,
+among whom she knows that he has several agents watching her motions and
+her very looks.
+
+In the month of June, 1803; I dined with Viscomte de Segur, and Joseph
+and Lucien Bonaparte were among the guests.  The latter jocosely remarked
+with what facility the French Christians had suffered themselves to be
+hunted in and out of their temples, according to the fanaticism or policy
+of their rulers; which he adduced as a proof of the great progress of
+philosophy and toleration in France.  A young officer of the party,
+Jacquemont, a relation of the former husband of the present Madame
+Lucien, observed that he thought it rather an evidence of the
+indifference of the French people to all religion; the consequence of the
+great havoc the tenets of infidelity and of atheism had made among the
+flocks of the faithful.  This was again denied by Bonaparte’s
+aide-de-camp, Savary, who observed that, had this been the case, the
+First Consul (who certainly was as well acquainted with the religious
+spirit of Frenchmen as anybody else) would not have taken the trouble to
+conclude a religious concordat, nor have been at the expense of providing
+for the clergy.  To this assertion Joseph nodded an assent.
+
+When the dinner was over, De Segur took me to a window, expressing his
+uneasiness at what he called the imprudence of Jacquemont, who, he
+apprehended, from Joseph’s silence and manner, would not escape
+punishment for having indirectly blamed both the restorer of religion and
+his plenipotentiary.  These apprehensions were justified.  On the next
+day Jacquemont received orders to join the colonial depot at Havre; but
+refusing to obey, by giving in his resignation as a captain, he was
+arrested, shut up in the Temple, and afterwards transported to Cayenne or
+Madagascar.  His relatives and friends are still ignorant whether he is
+dead or alive, and what is or has been his place of exile.  To a petition
+presented by Jacquemont’s sister, Madame de Veaux, Joseph answered that
+“he never interfered with the acts of the haute police of his brother
+Napoleon’s Government, being well convinced both of its justice and
+moderation.”
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That Bonaparte had, as far back as February, 1803 (when the
+King of Prussia proposed to Louis XVIII. the formal renunciation of his
+hereditary rights in favour of the First Consul), determined to assume
+the rank and title, with the power of a Sovereign, nobody can doubt. Had
+it not been for the war with England, he would, in the spring of that
+year, or twelve months earlier, have proclaimed himself Emperor of the
+French, and probably would have been acknowledged as such by all other
+Princes.  To a man so vain and so impatient, so accustomed to command and
+to intimidate, this suspension of his favourite plan was a considerable
+disappointment, and not a little increased his bitter and irreconcilable
+hatred of Great Britain.
+
+Here, as well as in foreign countries, the multitude pay homage only to
+Napoleon’s uninterrupted prosperity; without penetrating or considering
+whether it be the consequence of chance or of well-digested plans;
+whether he owes his successes to his own merit or to a blind fortune. He
+asserted in his speech to the constitutional authorities, immediately
+after hostilities had commenced with England, that the war would be of
+short duration, and he firmly believed what he said.  Had he by his
+gunboats, or by his intrigues or threats, been enabled to extort a second
+edition of the Peace of Amiens, after a warfare of some few months, all
+mouths would have been ready to exclaim, “Oh, the illustrious warrior!
+Oh, the profound politician!”  Now, after three ineffectual campaigns on
+the coast, when the extravagance and ambition of our Government have
+extended the contagion of war over the Continent; when both our direct
+offers of peace, and the negotiations and mediations of our allies, have
+been declined by, or proved unavailing with, the Cabinet of St. James,
+the inconsistency, the ignorance, and the littleness of the fortunate
+great man seem to be not more remembered than the outrages and
+encroachments that have provoked Austria and Russia to take the field.
+Should he continue victorious, and be in a position to dictate another
+Peace of Luneville, which probably would be followed by another pacific
+overture to or from England, mankind will again be ready to call out,
+“Oh, the illustrious warrior!  Oh, the profound politician!  He foresaw,
+in his wisdom, that a Continental war was necessary to terrify or to
+subdue his maritime foe; that a peace with England could be obtained only
+in Germany; and that this war must be excited by extending the power of
+France on the other side of the Alps.  Hence his coronation as a King of
+Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence
+his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!”
+ Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray
+as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences
+resulting from preconcerted plans and well-organized designs.
+
+Only rogues can disseminate and fools believe that the disgrace of
+Moreau, and the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, of Pichegru, and Georges,
+were necessary as footsteps to Bonaparte’s Imperial throne; and that
+without the treachery of Mehee de la Touche, and the conspiracy he
+pretended to have discovered, France would still have been ruled by a
+First Consul.  It is indeed true, that this plot is to be counted (as the
+imbecility of Melas, which lost the battle of Marengo) among those
+accidents presenting themselves apropos to serve the favourite of fortune
+in his ambitious views; but without it, he would equally have been hailed
+an Emperor of the French in May, 1804.  When he came from the coast, in
+the preceding winter, and was convinced of the impossibility of making
+any impression on the British Islands with his flotilla, he convoked his
+confidential Senators, who then, with Talleyrand, settled the Senatus
+Consultum which appeared five months afterwards.  Mehee’s correspondence
+with Mr. Drake was then known to him; but he and the Minister of Police
+were both unacquainted with the residence and arrival of Pichegru and
+Georges in France, and of their connection with Moreau; the particulars
+of which were first disclosed to them in the February following, when
+Bonaparte had been absent from his army of England six weeks.  The
+assumption of the Imperial dignity procured him another decent
+opportunity of offering his olive-branch to those who had caused his
+laurels to wither, and by whom, notwithstanding his abuse, calumnies, and
+menaces, he would have been more proud to be saluted Emperor than by all
+the nations upon the Continent.  His vanity, interest, and policy, all
+required this last degree of supremacy and elevation at that period.
+
+Bonaparte had so well penetrated the weak side of Moreau’s character
+that, although he could not avoid doing justice to this general’s
+military talents and exploits, he neither esteemed him as a citizen nor
+dreaded him as a rival.  Moreau possessed great popularity; but so did
+Dumourier and Pichegru before him: and yet neither of them had found
+adherents enough to shake those republican governments with which they
+avowed themselves openly discontented, and against which they secretly
+plotted.  I heard Talleyrand say, at Madame de Montlausier’s, in the
+presence of fifty persons, “Napoleon Bonaparte had never anything to
+apprehend from General Moreau, and from his popularity, even at the head
+of an army.  Dumourier, too, was at the head of an army when he revolted
+against the National Convention; but had he not saved himself by flight
+his own troops would have delivered him up to be punished as a traitor.
+Moreau, and his popularity, could only be dangerous to the Bonaparte
+dynasty were he to survive Napoleon, had not this Emperor wisely averted
+this danger.”  From this official declaration of Napoleon’s confidential
+Minister, in a society of known anti-imperialists, I draw the conclusion
+that Moreau will never more, during the present reign, return to France.
+How very feeble, and how badly advised must this general have been, when,
+after his condemnation to two years’ imprisonment, he accepted a
+perpetual exile, and renounced all hopes of ever again entering his own
+country.  In the Temple, or in any other prison, if he had submitted to
+the sentence pronounced against him, he would have caused Bonaparte more
+uneasiness than when at liberty, and been more a point of rally to his
+adherents and friends than when at his palace of Grosbois, because
+compassion and pity must have invigorated and sharpened their feelings.
+
+If report be true, however, he did not voluntarily exchange imprisonment
+for exile; racks were shown him; and by the act of banishment was placed
+a poisonous draught.  This report gains considerable credit when it is
+remembered that, immediately after his condemnation, Moreau furnished his
+apartments in the Temple in a handsome manner, so as to be lodged well,
+if not comfortably, with his wife and child, whom, it is said, he was not
+permitted to see before he had accepted Bonaparte’s proposal of
+transportation.
+
+It may be objected to this supposition that the man in power, who did not
+care about the barefaced murder of the Duc d’Enghien, and the secret
+destruction of Pichegru, could neither much hesitate, nor be very
+conscientious about adding Moreau to the number of his victims.  True,
+but the assassin in authority is also generally a politician.  The
+untimely end of the Duc d’Enghien and of Pichegru was certainly lamented
+and deplored by the great majority of the French people; but though they
+had many who pitied their fate, but few had any relative interest to
+avenge it; whilst in the assassination of Moreau, every general, every
+officer, and every soldier of his former army, might have read the
+destiny reserved for himself by that chieftain, who did not conceal his
+preference of those who had fought under him in Italy and Egypt, and his
+mistrust and jealousy of those who had vanquished under Moreau in
+Germany; numbers of whom had already perished at St. Domingo, or in the
+other colonies, or were dispersed in separate and distant garrisons of
+the mother country.  It has been calculated that of eighty-four generals
+who made, under Moreau, the campaign of 1800, and who survived the Peace
+of Lundville, sixteen had been killed or died at St. Domingo, four at
+Guadeloupe, ten in Cayenne, nine at Ile de France, and eleven at l’Ile
+Reunion and in Madagascar.  The mortality among the officers and men has
+been in proportion.
+
+An anecdote is related of Pichegru, which does honour to the memory of
+that unfortunate general.  Fouche paid him a visit in prison the day
+before his death, and offered him “Bonaparte’s commission as a
+Field-marshal, and a diploma as a grand officer of the Legion of Honour,
+provided he would turn informer against Moreau, of whose treachery
+against himself in 1797 he was reminded.  On the other hand, he was
+informed that, in consequence of his former denials, if he persisted in
+his refractory conduct, he should never more appear before any judge, but
+that the affairs of State and the safety of the country required that he
+should be privately despatched in his gaol.”
+
+“So,” answered this virtuous and indignant warrior, “you will spare my
+life only upon condition that I prove myself unworthy to live.  As this
+is the case, my choice is made without hesitation; I am prepared to
+become your victim, but I will never be numbered among your accomplices.
+Call in your executioners; I am ready to die as I have lived, a man of
+honour, and an irreproachable citizen.”
+
+Within twenty-four hours after this answer, Pichegru was no more.
+
+That the Duc d’Enghien was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804,
+in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even
+by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown.  Some
+assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte’s Italian guard;
+others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d’Elite; and others again,
+that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat,
+hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the
+executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by
+riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol.  Certain it is
+that Murat was the first, and Louis Bonaparte the second in command, on
+this dreadful occasion.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Thanks to Talleyrand’s political emigration, our Government has
+never been in ignorance of the characters and foibles of the leading
+members among the emigrants in England.  Otto, however, finished their
+picture, but added, some new groups to those delineated by his
+predecessor.  It was according to his plan that the expedition of Mehee
+de la Touche was undertaken, and it was in following his instructions
+that the campaign of this traitor succeeded so well in Great Britain.
+
+Under the Ministry of Vergennes, of Montmorin, and of Delessart, Mehee
+had been employed as a spy in Russia, Sweden, and Poland, and acquitted
+himself perfectly to the satisfaction of his masters.  By some accident
+or other, Delessart discovered, however, in December, 1791, that he had,
+while pocketing the money of the Cabinet of Versailles, sold its secrets
+to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.  He, of course, was no longer trusted
+as a spy, and therefore turned a Jacobin, and announced himself to
+Brissot as a persecuted patriot.  All the calumnies against this Minister
+in Brissot’s daily paper, Le Patriote Francois, during January, February,
+and March, 1792, were the productions of Mehee’s malicious heart and able
+pen.  Even after they had sent Delessart a State prisoner to Orleans, his
+inveteracy continued, and in September the same year he went to
+Versailles to enjoy the sight of the murder of his former master.  Some
+go so far as to say that the assassins were headed by this monster, who
+aggravated cruelty by insult, and informed the dying Minister of the
+hands that stabbed him, and to whom he was indebted for a premature
+death.
+
+To these and other infamous and barbarous deeds, Talleyrand was not a
+stranger when he made Mehee his secret agent, and entrusted him with the
+mission to England.  He took, therefore, such steps that neither his
+confidence could be betrayed, nor his money squandered.  Mehee had
+instructions how to proceed in Great Britain, but he was ignorant of the
+object Government had in view by his mission; and though large sums were
+promised if successful, and if he gave satisfaction by his zeal and
+discretion, the money advanced him was a mere trifle, and barely
+sufficient to keep him from want.  He was, therefore, really distressed,
+when he fixed upon some necessitous and greedy emigrants for his
+instruments to play on the credulity of the English Ministers in some of
+their unguarded moments.  Their generosity in forbearing to avenge upon
+the deluded French exiles the slur attempted to be thrown upon their
+official capacity, and the ridicule intended to be cast on their private
+characters, has been much approved and admired here by all liberal-minded
+persons; but it has also much disappointed Bonaparte and Talleyrand, who
+expected to see these emigrants driven from the only asylum which
+hospitality has not refused to their misfortunes and misery.
+
+Mehee had been promised by Talleyrand double the amount of the sums which
+he could swindle from your Government; but though he did more mischief to
+your country than was expected in this, and though he proved that he had
+pocketed upwards of ten thousand English guineas, the wages of his
+infamy, when he hinted about the recompense he expected here, Durant,
+Talleyrand’s chef du bureau, advised him, as a friend, not to remind the
+Minister of his presence in France, as Bonaparte never pardoned a
+Septembrizer, and the English guineas he possessed might be claimed and
+seized as national property, to compensate some of the sufferers by the
+unprovoked war with England.  In vain did he address himself to his
+fellow labourer in revolutionary plots, the Counsellor of State, Real,
+who had been the intermedium between him and Talleyrand, when he was
+first enlisted among the secret agents; instead of receiving money he
+heard threats; and, therefore, with as good grace as he could, he made
+the best of his disappointment; he sported a carriage, kept a mistress,
+went to gambling-houses, and is now in a fair way to be reduced to the
+status quo before his brilliant exploits in Great Britain.
+
+Real, besides the place of a Counsellor of State, occupies also the
+office of a director of the internal police.  Having some difference with
+my landlord, I was summoned to appear before him at the prefecture of the
+police.  My friend, M. de Sab-----r, formerly a counsellor of the
+Parliament at Rouen, happened to be with me when the summons was
+delivered, and offered to accompany me, being acquainted with Real.
+Though thirty persons were waiting in the antechamber at our arrival, no
+sooner was my friend’s name announced than we were admitted, and I
+obtained not only more justice than I expected, or dared to claim, but an
+invitation to Madame Real’s tea-party the same evening.  This justice and
+this politeness surprised me, until my friend showed me an act of forgery
+in his possession, committed by Real in 1788, when an advocate of the
+Parliament, and for which the humanity of my friend alone prevented him
+from being struck off the rolls, and otherwise punished.
+
+As I conceived my usual societies and coteries could not approve my
+attendance at the house of such a personage, I was intent upon sending an
+apology to Madame Real.  My friend, however, assured me that I should
+meet in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I
+little expected to see associating together.  I went late, and found the
+assembly very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated
+Princesses Joseph and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame
+Roederer, the cidevant Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont. They
+were conversing with M. Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a
+ci-devant lackey) Collot, the ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the
+legislator Martin, a ci-devant porter: several groups in the several
+apartments were composed of a similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant
+nobles and ci-devant valets, of ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses,
+Countesses and Baronesses, and of ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and
+poissardes.  Round a gambling-table, by the side of the ci-devant Bishop
+of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant
+shoeblack, has, by the purchase of national property, made a fortune of
+nine millions of livres--L375,000.  Opposite them were seated the
+ci-devant Prince de Chalais, and the present Prince Cambaceres with the
+ci-devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame Fauve, the daughter of a
+fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant barber.  In another
+room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with the spy Mehee de la
+Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche’s secretary, Desmarets, the
+son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years a known spy.  When I was
+just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot, and her sister, Madame
+de Soubray, joined me.  You have perhaps known them in England, where,
+before their marriage, they resided for five years with their parents,
+the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired by the
+loungers in Bond Street.  The one married for money, Gillot, a ci-devant
+drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has, as a
+general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a
+ci-devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
+who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me. I
+was handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase,
+Madame de Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a
+man whom she detested, and wished to avoid.  We had hardly turned round,
+when Mehee offered her his arm, and she exclaimed with indignation, “How
+dare you, infamous wretch, approach me, when I have forbidden you ever to
+speak to me?  Had you been reduced to become a highwayman, or a
+housebreaker, I might have pitied your infamy; but a spy is a villain who
+aggravates guilt by cowardice and baseness, and can inspire no noble soul
+with any other sentiment but abhorrence, and the most sovereign
+contempt.”  Without being disconcerted, Mehee silently returned to the
+company, amidst bursts of laughter from fifty servants, and as many
+masters, waiting for their carriages.  M. de Cetto was among the latter,
+but, though we all fixed our eyes steadfastly upon him, no alteration
+could be seen on his diplomatic countenance: his face must surely be made
+of brass or his heart of marble.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The day on which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an
+Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband’s
+Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable
+in her life.  After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the
+drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library,
+where her husband shut her up and confined her.
+
+The discipline of the Court of St. Cloud is as singular as its
+composition is unique.  It is, by the regulation of Napoleon, entirely
+military.  From the Empress to her lowest chambermaid, from the Emperor’s
+first aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or
+negligence is punished with confinement, either public or private.  In
+the former case the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in
+the latter they are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in
+the dark galleries at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens,
+where they are guarded day and night by sentries, who answer for their
+persons, and that nobody visits them.
+
+When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
+Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
+with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from
+their principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
+Imperial couple.  She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn,
+consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame
+de Montbrune.  This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
+desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry
+and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices.  She was not
+therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
+vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
+overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
+ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
+level with their circumstances.  These, however, either suspecting her
+intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
+disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
+to encounter.  Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
+following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
+French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour
+to wait on his wife.
+
+On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional
+republican authorities to present their homage as subjects, Napoleon
+asked his Josephine who were the persons, of both sexes, she had engaged,
+according to his carte blanche given her, as necessary and as unavoidable
+decorations of the drawing-room of an Emperor and Empress, as thrones and
+as canopies of State.  She referred him to Madame Remusat, who, though
+but half-dressed, was instantly ordered to appear before him.  This lady
+avowed that his grand master of the ceremonies, De Segur, had been
+entrusted by her with the whole arrangement, but that she feared that he
+had not yet been able to complete the full establishment of the Imperial
+Court.  The aide-de-camp Rapp was then despatched after De Segur, who, as
+usual, presented himself smiling and cringing.
+
+“Give me the list,” said Napoleon, “of the ladies and gentlemen you have
+no doubt engaged for our household.”
+
+“May it please Your Majesty,” answered De Segur, trembling with fear, “I
+humbly supposed that they were not requisite before the day of Your
+Majesty’s coronation.”
+
+“You supposed!” retorted Napoleon.  “How dare you suppose differently
+from our commands?  Is the Emperor of the Great Nation not to be
+encompassed with a more numerous retinue, or with more lustre, than a
+First Consul?  Do you not see the immense difference between the
+Sovereign Monarch of an Empire, and the citizen chief magistrate of a
+commonwealth?  Are there not starving nobles in my empire enough to
+furnish all the Courts in Europe with attendants, courtiers, and valets?
+Do you not believe that with a nod, with a single nod, I might have them
+all prostrated before my throne?  What can, then, have occasioned this
+impertinent delay?”
+
+“Sire!” answered De Segur, “it is not the want of numbers, but the
+difficulty of the choice among them.  I will never recommend a single
+individual upon whom I cannot depend; or who, on some future day, may
+expose me to the greatest of all evils, the displeasure of my Prince.”
+
+“But,” continued Napoleon, “what is to be done to-day that I may augment
+the number of my suite, and by it impose upon the gaping multitude and
+the attending deputations?”--“Command,” said De Segur, “all the officers
+of Your Majesty’s staff, and of the staff of the Governor of Paris,
+General Murat, to surround Your Majesty’s sacred person, and order them
+to accoutre themselves in the most shining and splendid manner possible.
+The presence of so many military men will also, in a political point of
+view, be useful.  It will lessen the pretensions of the constituted
+authorities, by telling them indirectly, ‘It is not to your Senatus
+Consultum, to your decrees, or to your votes, that I am indebted for my
+present Sovereignty; I owe it exclusively to my own merit and valour, and
+to the valour of my brave officers and men, to whose arms I trust more
+than to your counsels.’”
+
+This advice obtained Napoleon’s entire approbation, and was followed.  De
+Segur was permitted to retire, but when Madame Remusat made a curtsey
+also to leave the room, she was stopped with his terrible ‘aux arrets’
+and left under the care and responsibility of his aide-de-camp, Lebrun,
+who saw her safe into her room, at the door of which he placed two
+grenadiers.  Napoleon then went out, ordering his wife, at her peril, to
+be in time, ready and brilliantly dressed, for the drawing-room.
+
+Dreading the consequences of her husband’s wrath, Madame Napoleon was not
+only punctual, but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and
+ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her
+beauty, honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity.  She thought
+that even in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation.  When
+all the troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when
+Senators, legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a
+model of female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied
+him in silence through six different apartments before he came to her
+library, where he surlily ordered her to enter and to remain until
+further orders.
+
+“What have I done, Sire! to deserve such treatment?” exclaimed Josephine,
+trembling.
+
+“If,” answered Napoleon, “Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool
+of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me:
+Had not De Segur fortunately for him--had the ingenuity to extricate us
+from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had
+brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of
+my emperorship.  Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to
+divert you, but you must remain where you are until I am inclined to
+release you.”  So saying, Napoleon locked the door and put the key in his
+pocket.
+
+It was near two o’clock in the afternoon when she was thus shut up.
+Remembering the recent flattery of her courtiers, and comparing it with
+the unfeeling treatment of her husband, she found herself so much the
+more unfortunate, as the expressions of the former were regarded by her
+as praise due to her merit, while the unkindness of the latter was
+unavailingly resented as the undeserved oppression of a capricious
+despot.
+
+Business, or perhaps malice, made Napoleon forget to send her any dinner;
+and when, at eight o’clock, his brothers and sisters came, according to
+invitation, to take tea, he said coldly:
+
+“Apropos, I forgot it.  My wife has not dined yet; she is busy, I
+suppose, in her philosophical meditations in her study.”
+
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, her daughter, flew directly towards the study,
+and her mother could scarcely, for her tears, inform her that--she was a
+prisoner, and that her husband was her gaoler.
+
+“Oh, Sire!” said Madame Louis, returning, “even this remarkable day is a
+day of mourning for my poor mother!”
+
+“She deserves worse,” answered Napoleon, “but, for your sake, she shall
+be released; here is the key, let her out.”
+
+Madame Napoleon was, however, not in a situation to wish to appear before
+her envious brothers and sisters-in-law.  Her eyes were so swollen with
+crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those
+Imperial robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a
+certain preservative against sorrow and affliction.  At nine o’clock,
+however, another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave
+her the choice either to accompany him back to the study or to join the
+family party of the Bonapartes.
+
+In deploring her mother’s situation, Madame Louis Bonaparte informed her
+former governess, Madame Cam---n, of these particulars, which I heard her
+relate at Madame de M----r’s, almost verbatim as I report them to you.
+Such, and other scenes, nearly of the same description, are neither rare
+nor singular, in the most singular Court that ever existed in civilized
+Europe.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though Government suffer a religious, or, rather,
+anti-religious liberty of the Press, the authors who libel or ridicule
+the Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic, religion, are excluded
+from all prospect of advancement, or if in place, are not trusted or
+liked. Cardinal Caprara, the nuncio of the Pope, proposed last year, in a
+long memorial, the same severe restrictions on the discussions or
+publications in religious matters as were already ordered in those
+concerning politics.  But both Bonaparte and his Minister in the affairs
+of the Church, Portalis, refused the introduction of what they called a
+tyranny on the conscience.  Caprara then addressed himself to the
+ex-Bishop Talleyrand, who, on this occasion, was more explicit than he
+generally is.
+
+“Bonaparte,” said he, “rules not only over a fickle, but a gossiping
+(bavard) people, whom he has prudently forbidden all conversation and
+writing concerning government of the State.  They would soon (accustomed
+as they are, since the Revolution, to verbal and written debates) be
+tired of talking about fine weather or about the opera.  To occupy them
+and their attention, some ample subject of diversion was necessary, and
+religion was surrendered to them at discretion; because, enlightened as
+the world now is, even athiests or Christian fanatics can do but little
+harm to society.  They may spend rivers of ink, but they will be unable
+to shed a drop of blood.”
+
+“True,” answered the Cardinal, “but only to a certain degree.  The
+licentiousness of the Press, with regard to religious matters, does it
+not also furnish infidelity with new arms to injure the faith?  And have
+not the horrors from which France has just escaped proved the danger and
+evil consequences of irreligion, and the necessity of encouraging and
+protecting Christianity?  By the recall of the clergy, and by the
+religious concordat, Bonaparte has shown himself convinced of this
+truth.”
+
+“So he is,” interrupted Talleyrand; “but he abhors intoleration and
+persecution” (not in politics).  “I shall, however, to please Your
+Eminence, lay the particulars of your conversation before him.”
+
+Some time afterwards, when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed
+about some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the
+Senators Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of
+the senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and
+remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal
+Caprara for two hours.  What was determined on this occasion has not
+transpired, as even the Cardinal, who is not the most discreet person
+when provoked, and his religious zeal gets the better of his political
+prudence, has remained silent, though seemingly contented.
+
+Two rather insignificant authors, of the name of Varennes and Beaujou,
+who published some scandalous libels on Christianity, have since been
+taken up, and after some months’ imprisonment in the Temple been
+condemned to transportation to Cayenne for life,--not as infidels or
+atheists, but as conspirators against the State, in consequence of some
+unguarded expressions which prejudice or ill-will alone would judge
+connected with politics.  Nothing is now permitted to be printed against
+religion but with the author’s name; but on affixing his name, he may
+abuse the worship and Gospel as much as he pleases.  Since the example of
+severity alluded to above, however, this practice is on the decline. Even
+Pigault-Lebrun, a popular but immoral novel writer, narrowly escaped
+lately a trip to Cayenne for one of his blasphemous publications, and
+owes to the protection of Madame Murat exclusively that he was not sent
+to keep Varennes and Beaujou company.  Some years ago, when Madame Murat
+was neither so great nor so rich as at present, he presented her with a
+copy of his works, and she had been unfashionable enough not only to
+remember the compliment, but wished to return it by nominating him her
+private secretary; which, however, the veto of Napoleon prevented.
+
+Of Napoleon Bonaparte’s religious sentiments, opinions are not divided in
+France.  The influence over him of the petty, superstitious Cardinal
+Caprara is, therefore, inexplicable.  This prelate has forced from him
+assent to transactions which had been refused both to his mother and his
+brother Joseph, who now often employ the Cardinal with success, where
+they either dare not or will not show themselves.  It is true His
+Eminence is not easily rebuked, but returns to the charge unabashed by
+new repulses; and be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a
+man by whom Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no
+insignificant favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites
+cunning with devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to
+corruption as tormented by ambition.
+
+As most ecclesiastical promotions passed through his pure and
+disinterested hands, Madame Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Portalis, who also
+wanted some douceurs for their extraordinary expenses, united together
+last spring to remove him from France.  Napoleon was cajoled to nominate
+him a grand almoner of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Cardinal set out for
+Milan.  He was, however, artful enough to convince his Sovereign of the
+propriety of having his grand almoner by his side; and he is, therefore,
+obliged to this intrigue of his enemies that he now disposes of the
+benefices in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as those of the French Empire.
+
+During the Pope’s residence in this capital, His Holiness often made use
+of Cardinal Caprara in his secret negotiations with Bonaparte; and
+whatever advantages were obtained by the Roman Pontiff for the Gallican
+Church His Eminence almost extorted; for he never desisted, where his
+interest or pride were concerned, till he had succeeded.  It is said that
+one day last January, after having been for hours exceedingly teasing and
+troublesome, Bonaparte lost his patience, and was going to treat His
+Eminence as he frequently does his relatives, his Ministers, and
+counsellors,--that is to say, to kick him from his presence; but suddenly
+recollecting himself, he said: “Cardinal, remain here in my closet until
+my return, when I shall have more time to listen to what you have to
+relate.”  It was at ten o’clock in the morning, and a day of great
+military audience and grand review.  In going out he put the key in his
+pocket, and told the guards in his antechamber to pay no attention if
+they should hear any noise in his closet.
+
+It was dark before the review was over, and Bonaparte had a large party
+to dinner.  When his guests retired, he went into his wife’s
+drawing-room, where one of the Pope’s chamberlains waited on him with the
+information that His Holiness was much alarmed about the safety of
+Cardinal Caprara, of whom no account could be obtained, even with the
+assistance of the police, to whom application had been made, since His
+Eminence had so suddenly disappeared.
+
+“Oh!  how absent I am,” answered Napoleon, as with surprise; “I entirely
+forgot that I left the Cardinal in my closet this morning.  I will go
+myself and make an apology for my blunder.”
+
+His Eminence, quite exhausted, was found fast asleep; but no sooner was
+he a little recovered than he interrupted Bonaparte’s affected apology
+with the repetition of the demand he had made in the morning; and so well
+was Napoleon pleased with him, for neglecting his personal inconvenience
+only to occupy himself with the affairs of his Sovereign, that he
+consented to what was asked, and in laying his hand upon the shoulders of
+the prelate, said:
+
+“Faithful Minister!  were every Prince as well served as your Sovereign
+is by you, many evils might be prevented, and much good effected.”
+
+The same evening Duroc brought him, as a present, a snuffbox with
+Bonaparte’s portrait, set round with diamonds, worth one thousand louis
+d’or.  The adventures of this day certainly did not lessen His Eminence
+in the favour of Napoleon or of Pius VII.
+
+Last November, some not entirely unknown persons intended to amuse
+themselves at the Cardinal’s expense.  At seven o’clock one evening, a
+young Abbe presented himself at the Cardinal’s house, Hotel de Montmorin,
+Rue Plumet, as by appointment of His Eminence, and was, by his secretary,
+ushered into the study and asked to wait there.  Hardly half an hour
+afterwards, two persons, pretending to be agents of the police, arrived
+just as the Cardinal’s carriage had stopped.  They informed him that the
+woman introduced into his house in the dress of an Abby was connected
+with a gang of thieves and housebreakers, and demanded his permission to
+arrest her.  He protested that, except the wife of his porter, no woman
+in any dress whatever could be in his house, and that, to convince
+themselves, they were very welcome to accompany his valet-de-chambre into
+every room they wished to see.  To the great surprise of his servant, a
+very pretty girl was found in the bed of His Eminence’s bed-chamber,
+which joined his study, who, though the pretended police agents insisted
+on her getting up, refused, under pretence that she was there waiting for
+her ‘bon ami’, the Cardinal.
+
+His Eminence was no sooner told of this than he shut the gate of his
+house, after sending his secretary to the commissary of police of the
+section.  In the meantime, both the police agents and the girl entreated
+him to let them out, as the whole was merely a badinage; but he remained
+inflexible, and they were all three carried by the real police commissary
+to prison.
+
+Upon a complaint made by His Eminence to Bonaparte, the Police Minister,
+Fouche, received orders to have those who had dared thus to violate the
+sacred character of the representative of the Holy Pontiff immediately,
+and without further ceremony, transported to Cayenne.  The Cardinal
+demanded, and obtained, a process verbal of what had occurred, and of the
+sentence on the culprits, to be laid before his Sovereign.  As Eugene de
+Beauharnais interested himself so much for the individuals involved in
+this affair as both to implore Bonaparte’s pardon and the Cardinal’s
+interference for them, many were inclined to believe that he was in the
+secret, if not the contriver of this unfortunate joke.  This supposition
+gained credit when, after all his endeavours to save them proved vain, he
+sent them seventy-two livres L 3,000--to Rochefort, that they might, on
+their arrival at Cayenne, be able to buy a plantation.  He procured them
+also letters to the Governor, Victor Hughes, recommending that they
+should be treated differently from other transported persons.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I was particularly attentive in observing the countenances and
+demeanour of the company at the last levee which Madame Napoleon
+Bonaparte held, previous to her departure with her husband to meet the
+Pope at Fontainebleau.  I had heard from good authority that “to those
+whose propensities were known, Duroc’s information that the Empress was
+visible was accompanied with a kind of admonitory or courtly hint, that
+the strictest decency in dress and manners, and a conversation chaste,
+and rather of an unusually modest turn, would be highly agreeable to
+their Sovereigns, in consideration of the solemn occasion of a Sovereign
+Pontiff’s arrival in France,--an occurrence that had not happened for
+centuries, and probably would not happen for centuries to come.”  I went
+early, and was well rewarded for my punctuality.
+
+There came the Senator Fouche, handing his amiable and chaste spouse,
+walking with as much gravity as formerly, when a friar, he marched in a
+procession.  Then presented themselves the Senators Sieyes and Roederer,
+with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the
+confessor of the latter.  Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before
+I had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of
+fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin.  She was
+followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was
+sighing deeply and loudly.  After her came limping the godly Talleyrand,
+dragging his pure moiety by his side, both with downcast and edifying
+looks.  The Christian patriots, Gravina and Lima, Dreyer and Beust,
+Dalberg and Cetto, Malsburgh and Pappenheim, with the Catholic
+Schimmelpenninck and Mohammed Said Halel Effendi,--all presented
+themselves as penitent sinners imploring absolutions, after undergoing
+mortifications.
+
+But it would become tedious and merely a repetition, were I to depict
+separately the figures and characters of all the personages at this
+politico-comical masquerade.  Their conversation was, however, more
+uniform, more contemptible, and more laughable, than their accoutrements
+and grimaces were ridiculous.  To judge from what they said, they
+belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and
+they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the
+eve of the day of the Last Judgment.  The truly devout Madame Napoleon
+spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the
+vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII.,
+His vicar.  Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic
+commentaries of her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry
+out, as soon as she had finished, “Amen!  Amen!  Amen!”
+
+Napoleon had placed himself between the old Cardinal de Bellois and the
+not young Cardinal Bernier, so as to prevent the approach of any profane
+sinner or unrepentant infidel.  Round him and their clerical chiefs, all
+the curates and grand vicars, almoners and chaplains of the Court, and
+the capitals of the Princess, Princesses, and grand officers of State,
+had formed a kind of cordon.  “Had,” said the young General Kellerman to
+me, “Bonaparte always been encompassed by troops of this description, he
+might now have sung hymns as a saint in heaven, but he would never have
+reigned as an Emperor upon earth.”  This indiscreet remark was heard by
+Louis Bonaparte, and on the next morning Kellerman received orders to
+join the army in Hanover, where he was put under the command of a general
+younger than himself.  He would have been still more severely punished,
+had not his father, the Senator (General Kellerman), been in so great
+favour at the Court of St. Cloud, and so much protected by Duroc, who had
+made, in 1792, his first campaign under this officer, then
+commander-in-chief of the army of the Ardennes.
+
+When this devout assembly separated, which was by courtesy an hour
+earlier than usual, I expected every moment to hear a chorus of
+horse-laughs, because I clearly perceived that all of them were tired of
+their assumed parts, and, with me, inclined to be gay at the expense of
+their neighbours.  But they all remembered also that they were watched by
+spies, and that an imprudent look or an indiscreet word, gaiety instead
+of gravity, noise when silence was commanded, might be followed by an
+airing in the wilderness of Cayenne.  They, therefore, all called out,
+“Coachman, to our hotel!” as if to say, “We will to-day, in compliment to
+the new-born Christian zeal of our Sovereigns, finish our evening as
+piously as we have begun it.”  But no sooner were they out of sight of
+the palace than they hurried to the scenes of dissipation, all
+endeavouring, in the debauchery and excesses so natural to them, to
+forget their unnatural affectation and hypocrisy.
+
+Well you know the standard of the faith even of the members of the
+Bonaparte family.  Two days before this Christian circle at Madame
+Napoleon’s, Madame de Chateaureine, with three other ladies, visited the
+Princesse Borghese.  Not seeing a favourite parrot they had often
+previously admired, they inquired what was become of it.
+
+“Oh, the poor creature!”  answered the Princess; “I have disposed of it,
+as well as of two of my monkeys.  The Emperor has obliged me to engage an
+almoner and two chaplains, and it would be too extravagant in me to keep
+six useless animals in my hotel.  I must now submit to hearing the
+disgusting howlings of my almoner instead of the entertaining chat of my
+parrot, and to see the awkward bows and kneelings of my chaplains instead
+of the amusing capering of my monkeys.  Add to this, that I am forced to
+transform into a chapel my elegant and tasty boudoir, on the
+ground-floor, where I have passed so many delicious tete-a-tetes.  Alas!
+what a change!  what a shocking fashion, that we are now all again to be
+Christians!”
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding what was inserted in our public prints to the
+contrary, the reception Bonaparte experienced from his army of England in
+June last year, the first time he presented himself to them as an
+Emperor, was far from such as flattered either his vanity or views.  For
+the first days, some few solitary voices alone accompanied the “Vive
+l’Empereur!” of his generals, and of his aides-de-camp.  This
+indifference, or, as he called it, mutinous spirit, was so much the more
+provoking as it was unexpected.  He did not, as usual, ascribe it to the
+emissaries or gold of England, but to the secret adherents of Pichegru
+and Moreau amongst the brigades or divisions that had served under these
+unfortunate generals.  He ordered, in consequence, his Minister Berthier
+to make out a list of all these corps.  Having obtained this, he
+separated them by ordering some to Italy, others to Holland, and the rest
+to the frontiers of Spain and Germany.  This act of revenge or jealousy
+was regarded, both by the officers and men, as a disgrace and as a doubt
+thrown out against their fidelity, and the murmur was loud and general.
+In consequence of this, some men were shot, and many more arrested.
+
+Observing, however, that severity had not the desired effect, Bonaparte
+suddenly changed his conduct, released the imprisoned, and rewarded with
+the crosses of his Legion of Honour every member of the so lately
+suspected troops who had ever performed any brilliant or valorous
+exploits under the proscribed generals.  He even incorporated among his
+own bodyguards and guides men who had served in the same capacity under
+these rival commanders, and numbers of their children were received in
+the Prytanees and military free schools.  The enthusiastic exclamation
+that soon greeted his ears convinced him that he had struck upon the
+right string of his soldiers’ hearts.  Men who, some few days before,
+wanted only the signal of a leader to cut an Emperor they hated to
+pieces, would now have contended who should be foremost to shed their
+last drop of blood for a chief they adored.
+
+This affected liberality towards the troops who had served under his
+rivals roused some slight discontent among those to whom he was chiefly
+indebted for his own laurels.  But if he knew the danger of reducing to
+despair slighted men with arms in their hands, he also was well aware of
+the equal danger of enduring licentiousness or audacity among troops who
+had, on all occasions, experienced his preference and partiality; and he
+gave a sanguinary proof of his opinion on this subject at the grand
+parade of the 12th of July, 1804, preparatory to the grand fete of the
+14th.
+
+A grenadier of the 21st Regiment (which was known in Italy under the name
+of the Terrible), in presetting arms to him, said: “Sire! I have served
+under you four campaigns, fought under you in ten battles or engagements;
+have received in your service seven wounds, and am not a member of your
+Legion of Honour; whilst many who served under Moreau, and are not able
+to show a scratch from an enemy, have that distinction.”
+
+Bonaparte instantly ordered this man to be shot by his own comrades in
+the front of the regiment.  The six grenadiers selected to fire, seeming
+to hesitate, he commanded the whole corps to lay down their arms, and
+after being disbanded, to be sent to the different colonial depots.  To
+humiliate them still more, the mutinous grenadier was shot by the
+gendarmes.  When the review was over, “Vive l’Empereur!”  resounded from
+all parts, and his popularity among the troops has since rather increased
+than diminished.  Nobody can deny that Bonaparte possesses a great
+presence of mind, an undaunted firmness, and a perfect knowledge of the
+character of the people over whom he reigns.  Could but justice and
+humanity be added to his other qualities, but, unfortunately for my
+nation, I fear that the answer of General Mortier to a remark of a friend
+of mine on this subject is not problematical: “Had,” said this Imperial
+favourite, “Napoleon Bonaparte been just and humane, he would neither
+have vanquished nor reigned.”
+
+All these scenes occurred before Bonaparte, seated on a throne, received
+the homage, as a Sovereign, of one hundred and fifty thousand warriors,
+who now bowed as subjects, after having for years fought for liberty and
+equality, and sworn hatred to all monarchical institutions; and who
+hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals.  What
+an inconsistency!  The splendour and show that accompanied him
+everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the
+decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he
+distributed with bombastic speeches among troops--to whom those political
+impositions and social cajoleries were novelties--made such an impression
+upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover,
+brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and
+independence of your country.  The heads and imagination of the soldiers,
+I know from the best authority, were then so exalted that, though they
+might have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or
+routed.  I pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and
+happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled
+people of soldiers,--easy tools in the hands of every impostor or
+mountebank.
+
+The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of
+grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed
+with uneasiness and vexation.  Except at Berlin, in all the other great
+Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your
+country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such lightness
+and such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his boasts and
+defied his threats.  Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of St. James
+more opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the impertinence of
+his menaces, and the folly of his parade for the invasion of your
+country, than by declaring all the ports containing his invincible armada
+in a state of blockade.  I have heard from an officer who witnessed his
+fury when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat from before St. Jean
+d’Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at Boulogne when a despatch
+informed him of this circumstance, that it was nothing compared to the
+violent rage into which he flew upon reading it.  For an hour afterwards
+not even his brother Joseph dared approach him; and his passion got so
+far the better of his policy, that what might still have long been
+concealed from the troops was known within the evening to the whole camp.
+He dictated to his secretary orders for his Ministers at Vienna, Berlin,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and couriers were sent away with them; but half an
+hour afterwards other couriers were despatched after them with other
+orders, which were revoked in their turn, when at last Joseph had
+succeeded in calming him a little.  He passed, however, the whole
+following night full dressed and agitated; lying down only for an
+instant, but having always in his room Joseph and Duroc, and deliberating
+on a thousand methods of destroying the insolent islanders; all equally
+violent, but all equally impracticable.
+
+The next morning, when, as usual, he went to see the manoeuvres of his
+flotilla, and the embarkation and landing of his troops, he looked so
+pale that he almost excited pity.  Your cruisers, however, as if they had
+been informed of the situation of our hero, approached unusually near, to
+evince, as it were, their contempt and, derision.  He ordered instantly
+all the batteries to fire, and went himself to that which carried its
+shot farthest; but that moment six of your vessels, after taking down
+their sails, cast anchors, with the greatest sang-froid, just without the
+reach of our shot.  In an unavailing anger he broke upon the spot six
+officers of artillery, and pushed one, Captain d’ Ablincourt, down the
+precipice under the battery, where he narrowly escaped breaking his neck
+as well as his legs; for which injury he was compensated by being made an
+officer of the Legion of Honour.  Bonaparte then convoked upon the spot a
+council of his generals of artillery and of the engineers, and, within an
+hour’s time, some guns and mortars of still heavier metal and greater
+calibre were carried up to replace the others; but, fortunately for the
+generals, before a trial could be made of them the tide changed, and your
+cruisers sailed.
+
+In returning to breakfast at General Soult’s, he observed the
+countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath;
+and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of
+encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment
+with which your navy had inspired his troops.  The occurrences of these
+two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where
+the cringing of his courtiers consoled him, in part, for the want of
+respect or gallantry in your English tars.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles, it was
+the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who principally
+influenced the determination of Francis II.  to assume the hereditary
+title of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon Emperor of the
+French.
+
+Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
+but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
+number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
+delicate political transactions.  In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
+with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to
+receive him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a proclamation,
+in which Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his predecessor, Joseph
+II., which had been the principal cause of the troubles; and
+reestablished everything upon the same footing as during the reign of
+Maria Theresa.  In 1791 he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St.
+Petersburg, where his conduct obtained the approbation of his own Prince
+and of the Empress of Russia.
+
+In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
+Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte.  His mission was to excite
+the Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence
+to the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides.  He was
+therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near
+the lake of Chiavenne.  A rumour was very prevalent at this time that
+some papers were found in De Semonville’s portfolio implicating Count von
+Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals.  The
+continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
+inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
+jealousy.
+
+In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor, a
+treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
+plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom,
+on the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio.  In the
+same capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress broke
+up, he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
+
+After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of experience
+and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister, Talleyrand, the
+Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France, where, with all
+other representatives of Princes, he has experienced more of the frowns
+and rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of our present
+Sovereign.
+
+Count von Cobenzl’s foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
+reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
+assist him frequently in his amours.  Some adventures of this sort, which
+occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count’s expense.
+Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
+merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
+that “the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable
+to his official notes.”
+
+So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at
+Aix-la-Chapelle last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him,
+with the Marquis de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another
+plenipotentiary at Udine), to visit the camps of his army of England on
+the coast.  It is true that this condescension was, perhaps, as much a
+boast, or a threat, as a compliment.
+
+The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
+proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
+of Bonaparte’s for your mandate of blockade.  Rumour states that this
+measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
+your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
+Napoleon.  For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
+Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
+objections or representations.  “But what absurdities do I not sign!”
+ exclaimed the pliant Minister.
+
+Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
+command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
+waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor.  Charlemagne
+had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
+before,--an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
+Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
+to gratify his impertinent vanity.  Every spot where Charlemagne had
+walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
+great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
+representatives, and by his side his wife.  To a peasant who presented
+him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave
+nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
+crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
+bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
+louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
+but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
+manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute
+for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many
+believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was
+registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor
+to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of
+sixty years’ standing.  But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt
+about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe!  A German professor,
+Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise,
+addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his
+intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne
+were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of
+this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured
+within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years.  The night after
+Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary, accompanied by
+four gendarmes, entered the professor’s bedroom, forced him to dress, and
+ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under escort to the
+left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under pain of
+death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire.  This
+expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and
+antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such
+numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that
+we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by
+the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine.  A ballad, written in
+monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne
+at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish
+professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of
+Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres--L 500.  This
+ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum
+Charlemagne.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame
+Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health by
+using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor as
+low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied.  Napoleon himself was
+neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her
+extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy
+of the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great
+condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her
+drawing-room and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were
+only fit to be seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as associates
+with her valets or chambermaids.
+
+The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these
+gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they
+were her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued
+debtor to them she could not decently--or rather, she dared not prevent
+them from being visitors to her.  By confiding her situation to her old
+friend, Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those
+troublesome personages.  When the Minister was informed of the occasion
+of the attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to
+Bonaparte not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them
+examples of severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only
+sure means to prevent, for the future, people of the same description
+from being familiar or audacious.
+
+When, thanks to Talleyrand’s interference, these family arrangements were
+settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour; and
+her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to think
+of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever.  I am assured
+that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at Aix-la-Chapelle,
+he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her three times, and
+abused her once a day.
+
+It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at last
+completed the composition of their household, and laid before them the
+list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their
+livery.  This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist
+nor a republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a disaffected
+subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth, ridiculing
+both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives; no exact
+definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed professions, of
+his real moral and political character.  One thing only is certain;--he
+was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a submissive slave under
+Napoleon the First.
+
+Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth,
+and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his ancestors
+had been a Field-marshal.  Being early introduced at Court, he acquired,
+with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and
+by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de
+Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the
+Court of St. Petersburg.  With some reading and genius, but with more
+boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French men of letters,
+and was therefore as such received with distinction by Catharine II., on
+whom, and on whose Government, he in return published a libel.  He was a
+valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been under every
+succeeding King of faction.  The partisans of the Revolution pointed him
+out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of Prussia; and
+he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick William II.
+refused him admittance to his person, and, after some ineffectual
+intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he returned to
+Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for another libel
+on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh, which he
+printed in 1796.  Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much admired,
+he was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving under the
+Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to subsist on. In
+1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a Counsellor of
+State,--a place which he resigned last year for that of a grand master of
+the ceremonies at the present Imperial Court.  His ancient inveteracy
+against your country has made him a favourite with Bonaparte.  The
+indelicate and scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797, against Lord
+Malmesbury, in the then official journal, Le Redacteur, were the
+offspring of his malignity and pen; and the philippics and abusive notes
+in our present official Moniteur, against your Government and country,
+are frequently his patriotic progeny, or rather, he often shares with
+Talleyrand and Hauterive their paternity.
+
+The Revolution has not made Comte de Segur more happy with regard to his
+family, than in his circumstances, which, notwithstanding his brilliant
+grand-mastership, are far from being affluent.  His amiable wife died of
+terror, and brokenhearted from the sufferings she had experienced, and
+the atrocities she had witnessed; and when he had enticed his eldest son
+to accept the place of a sub-prefect under Bonaparte, his youngest son,
+who never approved our present regeneration, challenged his brother to
+fight, and, after killing him in a duel, destroyed himself.  Comte de
+Segur is therefore, at present, neither a husband nor a father, but only
+a grand master of ceremonies!  What an indemnification!
+
+Madame Napoleon and her husband are both certainly under much obligation
+to this nobleman for his care to procure them comparatively decent
+persons to decorate their levees and drawing-rooms, who, though they have
+no claim either to morality or virtue, either to honour or chastity, are
+undoubtedly a great acquisition at the Court of St. Cloud, because none
+of them has either been accused of murder, or convicted of plunder; which
+is the case with some of the Ministers, and most of the generals,
+Senators and counsellors.  It is true that they are a mixture of beggared
+nobles and enriched valets, of married courtesans and divorced wives,
+but, for all that, they can with justice demand the places of honour of
+all other Imperial courtiers of both sexes.
+
+When Bonaparte had read over the names of these Court recruits, engaged
+and enlisted by De Segur, he said, “Well, this lumber must do until we
+can exchange it for better furniture.”  At that time, young Comte d’
+Arberg (of a German family, on the right bank of the Rhine), but whose
+mother is one of Madame Bonaparte’s Maids of Honour, was travelling for
+him in Germany and in Prussia, where, among other negotiations, he was
+charged to procure some persons of both sexes, of the most ancient
+nobility, to augment Napoleon’s suite, and to figure in his livery.  More
+individuals presented themselves for this honour than he wanted, but they
+were all without education and without address: ignorant of the world as
+of books; not speaking well their own language, much less understanding
+French or Italian; vain of their birth, but not ashamed of their
+ignorance, and as proud as poor.  This project was therefore relinquished
+for the time; but a number of the children of the principal ci-devant
+German nobles, who, by the Treaty of Luneville and Ratisbon, had become
+subjects of Bonaparte, were, by the advice of Talleyrand, offered places
+in French Prytanees, where the Emperor promised to take care of their
+future advancement.  Madame Bonaparte, at the same time, selected
+twenty-five young girls of the same families, whom she also offered to
+educate at her expense.  Their parents understood too well the meaning of
+these generous offers to dare decline their acceptance.  These children
+are the plants of the Imperial nursery, intended to produce future pages,
+chamberlains, equerries, Maids of Honour and ladies in waiting, who for
+ancestry may bid defiance to all their equals of every Court in
+Christendom.  This act of benevolence, as it was called in some German
+papers, is also an indirect chastisement of the refractory French
+nobility, who either demanded too high prices for their degradation, or
+abruptly refused to disgrace the names of their forefathers.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has been as profuse in his disposal of the Imperial
+diadem of Germany, as in his promises of the papal tiara of Rome.  The
+Houses of Austria and Brandenburgh, the Electors of Bavaria and Baden,
+have by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive support towards
+obtaining it at the first vacancy.  Those, however, who have paid
+attention to his machinations, and studied his actions; who remember his
+pedantic affectation of being considered a modern, or rather a second
+Charlemagne; and who have traced his steps through the labyrinth of folly
+and wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art, corruption, and
+policy, which have seated him on the present throne, can entertain little
+doubt but that he is seriously bent on seizing and adding the sceptre of
+Germany to the crowns of France and Italy.
+
+During his stay last autumn at Mentz, all those German Electors who had
+spirit and dignity enough to refuse to attend on him there in person were
+obliged to send Extraordinary Ambassadors to wait on him, and to
+compliment him on their part.  Though hardly one corner of the veil that
+covered the intrigues going forward there is yet lifted up, enough is
+already seen to warn Europe and alarm the world.  The secret treaties he
+concluded there with most of the petty Princes of Germany, against the
+Chief of the German Empire which not only entirely detached them from
+their country and its legitimate Sovereign, but made their individual
+interests hostile and totally opposite to that of the German
+Commonwealth, transforming them also from independent Princes into
+vassals of France, both directly increased has already gigantic power,
+and indirectly encouraged him to extend it beyond what his most sanguine
+expectation had induced him to hope.  I do not make this assertion from a
+mere supposition in consequence of ulterior occurrences.  At a supper
+with Madame Talleyrand last March, I heard her husband, in a gay,
+unguarded, or perhaps premeditated moment, say, when mentioning his
+proposed journey to Italy:
+
+“I prepared myself to pass the Alps last October at Mentz.  The first
+ground-stone of the throne of Italy was, strange as it may seem, laid on
+the banks of the Rhine: with such an extensive foundation, it must be
+difficult to shake, and impossible to overturn it.”
+
+We were, in the whole, twenty-five persons at table when he spoke thus,
+many of whom, he well knew, were intimately acquainted both with the
+Austrian and Prussian Ambassadors, who by the bye, both on the next day
+sent couriers to their respective Courts.
+
+The French Revolution is neither seen in Germany in that dangerous light
+which might naturally be expected from the sufferings in which it has
+involved both Princes and subjects, nor are its future effects dreaded
+from its past enormities.  The cause of this impolitic and anti-patriotic
+apathy is to be looked for in the palaces of Sovereigns, and not in the
+dwellings of their people.  There exists hardly a single German Prince
+whose Ministers, courtiers and counsellors are not numbered, and have
+long been notorious among the anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati:
+most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction
+of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which
+bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their
+sophistry and imposture as inspiration.
+
+Among Princes thus encompassed, the Elector of Bavaria must be allowed
+the first place.  A younger brother of a younger branch, and a colonel in
+the service of Louis XVI., he neither acquired by education, nor
+inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality
+that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a
+lady’s drawing-room.  He made himself justly suspected of a moral
+corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his
+approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of
+France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of
+one hundred thousand livres.  Immediately after his unexpected accession
+to the Electorate of Bavaria, he concluded a subsidiary treaty with your
+country, and his troops were ordered to combat rebellion, under the
+standard of Austrian loyalty.  For some months it was believed that the
+Elector wished by his conduct to obliterate the memory of the errors,
+vices, and principles of the Duc de Deux-Ponts (his former title).  But
+placing all his confidence in a political adventurer and revolutionary
+fanatic, Montgelas, without either consistency or firmness, without being
+either bent upon information or anxious about popularity, he threw the
+whole burden of State on the shoulders of this dangerous man, who soon
+showed the world that his master, by his first treaties, intended only to
+pocket your money without serving your cause or interest.
+
+This Montgelas is, on account of his cunning and long standing among
+them, worshipped by the gang of German Illuminati as an idol rather than
+revered as an apostle.  He is their Baal, before whom they hope to oblige
+all nations upon earth to prostrate themselves as soon as infidelity has
+entirely banished Christianity; for the Illuminati do not expect to reign
+till the last Christian is buried under the rubbish of the last altar of
+Christ.  It is not the fault of Montgelas if such an event has not
+already occurred in the Electorate of Bavaria.
+
+Within six months after the Treaty of Lundville, Montgelas began in that
+country his political and religious innovations.  The nobility and the
+clergy were equally attacked; the privileges of the former were invaded,
+and the property of the latter confiscated; and had not his zeal carried
+him too far, so as to alarm our new nobles, our new men of property, and
+new Christians, it is very probable that atheism would have already,
+without opposition, reared its head in the midst of Germany, and
+proclaimed there the rights of man, and the code of liberty and equality.
+
+The inhabitants of Bavaria are, as you know, all Roman Catholics, and the
+most superstitious and ignorant Catholics of Germany.  The step is but
+short from superstition to infidelity; and ignorance has furnished in
+France more sectaries of atheism than perversity.  The Illuminati,
+brothers and friends of Montgelas, have not been idle in that country.
+Their writings have perverted those who had no opportunity to hear their
+speeches, or to witness their example; and I am assured by Count von
+Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the
+lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these
+emissaries have laboured.  To any one looking on the map of the
+Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious
+focus of illumination must be ominous.
+
+Among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, there exists not the
+least doubt but that this Montgelas, as well as Bonaparte’s Minister at
+Munich, Otto, was acquainted with the treacherous part Mehde de la Touche
+played against your Minister, Drake; and that it was planned between him
+and Talleyrand as the surest means to break off all political connections
+between your country and Bavaria.  Mr. Drake was personally liked by the
+Elector, and was not inattentive either to the plans and views of
+Montgelas or to the intrigues of Otto.  They were, therefore, both doubly
+interested to remove such a troublesome witness.
+
+M. de Montgelas is now a grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour,
+and he is one of the few foreigners nominated the most worthy of such a
+distinction.  In France he would have been an acquisition either to the
+factions of a Murat, of a Brissot, or of a Robespierre; and the Goddess
+of Reason, as well as the God of the Theophilanthropists, might have been
+sure of counting him among their adorers.  At the clubs of the Jacobins
+or Cordeliers, in the fraternal societies, or in a revolutionary
+tribunal; in the Committee of Public Safety, or in the council chamber of
+the Directory, he would equally have made himself notorious and been
+equally in his place.  A stoic sans-culotte under Du Clots, a stanch
+republican under Robespierre, he would now have been the most pliant and
+brilliant courtier of Bonaparte.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Queen of France ever saw so many foreign Princes and
+Princesses in her drawing-rooms as the first Empress of the French did
+last year at Mentz; and no Sovereign was ever before so well paid, or
+accepted with less difficulty donations and presents for her gracious
+protection.  Madame Napoleon herself, on her return to this capital last
+October, boasted that she was ten millions of livres--richer in diamonds;
+two millions of livres richer in pearls, and three million of livres
+richer in plate and china, than in the June before, when she quitted it.
+She acknowledged that she left behind her some creditors and some money
+at Aix-la-Chapelle; but at Mentz she did not want to borrow, nor had she
+time to gamble.  The gallant ultra Romans provided everything, even to
+the utmost extent of her wishes; and she, on her part, could not but
+honour those with her company as much as possible, particularly as they
+required nothing else for their civilities.  Such was the Empress’s
+expression to her lady in waiting, the handsome Madame Seran, with whom
+no confidence, no tale, no story, and no scandal expires; and who was in
+a great hurry to inform, the same evening, the tea-party at Madame de
+Beauvais’s of this good news, complaining at the same time of not having
+had the least share in this rich harvest.
+
+Nowhere, indeed, were bribery and corruption carried to a greater extent,
+or practised with more effrontery, than at Mentz.  Madame Napoleon had as
+much her fixed price for every favourable word she spoke, as Talleyrand
+had for every line he wrote.  Even the attendants of the former, and the
+clerks of the latter, demanded, or rather extorted, douceurs from the
+exhausted and almost ruined German petitioners; who in the end were
+rewarded for all their meanness and for all their expenses with promises
+at best; as the new plan of supplementary indemnities was, on the very
+day proposed for its final arrangement, postponed by the desire of the
+Emperor of the French, until further orders.  This provoking delay could
+no more be foreseen by the Empress than by the Minister, who, in return
+for their presents and money almost overpowered the German Princes with
+his protestations of regret at their disappointments.  Nor was Madame
+Bonaparte less sorry or less civil.  She sent her chamberlain, Daubusson
+la Feuillad, with regular compliments of condolence to every Prince who
+had enjoyed her protection.  They returned to their homes, therefore, if
+not wealthier, at least happier; flattered by assurances and
+condescensions, confiding in hope as in certainties.  Within three
+months, however, it is supposed that they would willingly have disposed
+both of promises and expectations at a loss of fifty per cent.
+
+By the cupidity and selfishness of these and other German Princes, and
+their want of patriotism, Talleyrand was become perfectly acquainted with
+the value and production of every principality, bishopric, county, abbey,
+barony, convent, and even village in the German Empire; and though most
+national property in France was disposed of at one or two years’
+purchase, he required five years’ purchase-money for all the estates and
+lands on the other side of the Rhine, of which, under the name of
+indemnities, he stripped the lawful owners to gratify the ambition or
+avidity of intruders.  This high price has cooled the claims of the
+bidders, and the plan of the supplementary indemnities is still
+suspended, and probably will continue so until our Minister lowers his
+terms.  A combination is supposed to have been entered into by the chief
+demanders of indemnities, by which they have bound themselves to resist
+all farther extortions.  They do not, however, know the man they have to
+deal with; he will, perhaps, find out some to lay claim to their own
+private and hereditary property whom he will produce and support, and who
+certainly will have the same right to pillage them as they had to the
+spoils of others.
+
+It was reported in our fashionable circles last autumn, and smiled at by
+Talleyrand, that he promised the Comtesse de L------ an abbey, and the
+Baroness de S-----z a convent, for certain personal favours, and that he
+offered a bishopric to the Princesse of Hon----- the same terms, but this
+lady answered that “she would think of his offers after he had put her
+husband in possession of the bishopric.”  It is not necessary to observe
+that both the Countess and the Baroness are yet waiting to enjoy his
+liberal donations, and to be indemnified for their prostitution.
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a fit of jealousy at Mentz.  The young
+nephew of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, Comte de L----ge, was very
+assiduous about the Empress, who, herself, at first mistook the motive.
+Her confidential secretary, Deschamps, however, afterwards informed her
+that this nobleman wanted to purchase the place of a coadjutor to his
+uncle, so as to be certain of succeeding him.  He obtained, therefore,
+several private audiences, no doubt to regulate the price, when Napoleon
+put a stop to this secret negotiation by having the Count carried by
+gendarmes, with great politeness, to the other side of the Rhine.  When
+convinced of his error, Bonaparte asked his wife what sum had been
+promised for her protection, and immediately gave her an order on his
+Minister of the Treasury (Marbois) for the amount.  This was an act of
+justice, and a reparation worthy of a good and tender husband; but when,
+the very next day, he recalled this order, threw it into the fire before
+her eyes, and confined her for six hours in her bedroom; because she was
+not dressed in time to take a walk with him on the ramparts, one is apt
+to believe that military despotism has erased from his bosom all
+connubial affection, and that a momentary effusion of kindness and
+generosity can but little alleviate the frequent pangs caused by repeated
+insults and oppression.  Fortunately, Madame Napoleon’s disposition is
+proof against rudeness as well as against brutality.  If what her friend
+and consoler, Madame Delucay, reports of her is not exaggerated, her
+tranquillity is not much disturbed nor her happiness affected by these
+explosions of passionate authority, and she prefers admiring, in
+undisturbed solitude, her diamond box to the most beautiful prospects in
+the most agreeable company; and she inspects with more pleasure in
+confinement, her rich wardrobe, her beautiful china, and her heavy plate,
+than she would find satisfaction, surrounded with crowds, in
+comtemplating Nature, even in its utmost perfection.  “The paradise of
+Madame Napoleon,” says her friend, “must be of metal, and lighted by the
+lustre of brilliants, else she would decline it for a hell and accept
+Lucifer himself for a spouse, provided gold flowed in his infernal
+domains, though she were even to be scorched by its heat.”
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe that I have mentioned to you, when in England, that I
+was an old acquaintance of Madame Napoleon, and a visitor at the house of
+her first husband.  When introduced to her after some years’ absence,
+during which fortune had treated us very differently, she received me
+with more civility than I was prepared to expect, and would, perhaps,
+have spoken to me more than she did, had not a look of her husband
+silenced her.  Madame Louis Bonaparte was still more condescending, and
+recalled to my memory what I had not forgotten how often she had been
+seated, when a child, on my lap, and played on my knees with her doll.
+Thus they behaved to me when I saw them for the first time in their
+present elevation; I found them afterwards, in their drawing-rooms or at
+their routs and parties, more shy and distant.  This change did not much
+surprise me, as I hardly knew any one that had the slightest pretension
+to their acquaintance who had not troubled them for employment or
+borrowed their money, at the same time that they complained of their
+neglect and their breach of promises.  I continued, however, as much as
+etiquette and decency required, assiduous, but never familiar: if they
+addressed me, I answered with respect, but not with servility; if not, I
+bowed in silence when they passed.  They might easily perceive that I did
+not intend to become an intruder, nor to make the remembrance of what was
+past an apology or a reason for applying for present favours.  A lady, on
+intimate terms with Madame Napoleon, and once our common friend, informed
+me, shortly after the untimely end of the lamented Duc d’ Enghien, that
+she had been asked whether she knew anything that could be done for me,
+or whether I would not be flattered by obtaining a place in the
+Legislative Body or in the Tribunate?  I answered as I thought, that were
+I fit for a public life nothing could be more agreeable or suit me
+better; but, having hitherto declined all employments that might restrain
+that independence to which I had accustomed myself from my youth, I was
+now too old to enter upon a new career.  I added that, though the
+Revolution had reduced my circumstances, it had not entirely ruined me. I
+was still independent, because my means were the boundaries of my wants.
+
+A week after this conversation General Murat, the governor of this
+capital, and Bonaparte’s favourite-brother-in-law, invited me to a
+conversation in a note delivered to me by an aide-de-camp, who told me
+that he was ordered to wait for my company, or, which was the same, he
+had orders not to lose sight of me, as I was his prisoner.  Having
+nothing with which to reproach myself, and all my written remarks being
+deposited with a friend, whom none of the Imperial functionaries could
+suspect, I entered a hackney coach without any fear or apprehension; and
+we drove to the governor’s hotel.
+
+From the manner in which Murat addressed me, I was soon convinced that if
+I had been accused of any error or indiscretion, the accusation could not
+be very grave in his eyes.  He entered with me into his closet and
+inquired whether I had any enemies at the police office.  I told him not
+to my knowledge.
+
+“Is the Police Minister and Senator, Fouche, your friend?”  continued he.
+
+“Fouche,” said I, “has bought an estate that formerly belonged to me; may
+he enjoy it with the same peace of mind as I have lost it.  I have never
+spoken to him in my life.”
+
+“Have you not complained at Madame de la Force’s of the execution of the
+ci-devant Duc d’Enghien, and agreed with the other members of her coterie
+to put on mourning for him?”
+
+“I have never been at the house of that lady since the death of the
+Prince, nor more than once in my life.”
+
+“Where did you pass the evening last Saturday?”--“At the hotel, and in
+the assembly of Princesse Louis Bonaparte.”
+
+“Did she see you?”
+
+“I believe that she did, because she returned my salute.”
+
+“You have known Her Imperial Highness a long time?”
+
+“From her infancy.”
+
+“Well, I congratulate you.  You have in her a generous protectress.  But
+for her you would now have been on the way to Cayenne.  Here you see the
+list of persons condemned yesterday, upon the report of Fouche, to
+transportation.  Your name is at the head of them.  You were not only
+accused of being an agent of the Bourbons, but of having intrigued to
+become a member of the Legislature, or the Tribunate, that you might have
+so much the better opportunity to serve them.  Fortunately for you, the
+Emperor remembered that the Princesse Louis had demanded such a favour
+for you, and he informed her of the character of her protege.  This
+brought forward your innocence, because it was discovered that, instead
+of asking for, you had declined the offer she had made you through the
+Empress.  Write the Princess a letter of thanks.  You have, indeed, had a
+narrow escape, but it has been so far useful to you, that Government is
+now aware of your having some secret enemy in power, who is not delicate
+about the means of injuring you.”
+
+In quitting General Murat, I could not help deploring the fate of a
+despot, even while I abhorred his unnatural power.  The curses, the
+complaints, and reproaches for all the crimes, all the violence, all the
+oppression perpetrated in his name, are entirely thrown upon him, while
+his situation and occupation do not admit the seeing and hearing
+everything and everybody himself.  He is often forced, therefore, to
+judge according to the report of an impostor; to sanction with his name
+the hatred, malignity, or vengeance of culpable individuals; and to
+sacrifice innocence to gratify the vile passions of his vilest slave. I
+have not so bad an opinion of Bonaparte as to think him capable of
+wilfully condemning any person to death or transportation, of whose
+innocence he was convinced, provided that person stood not in the way of
+his interest and ambition; but suspicion and tyranny are inseparable
+companions, and injustice their common progeny.  The unfortunate beings
+on the long list General Murat showed me were, I dare say, most of them
+as innocent as myself, and all certainly condemned unheard.  But suppose,
+even, that they had been indiscreet enough to put on mourning for a
+Prince of the blood of their former Kings, did their imprudence deserve
+the same punishment as the deed of the robber, the forger, or the
+housebreaker? and, indeed, it was more severe than what our laws inflict
+on such criminals, who are only condemned to transportation for some few
+years, after a public trial and conviction; while the exile of these
+unconvicted, untried, and most probably innocent persons is continued for
+life, on charges as unknown to themselves as their destiny and residence
+remain to their families and friends.  Happy England! where no one is
+condemned unheard, and no one dares attempt to make the laws subservient
+to his passions or caprice.
+
+As to Fouche’s enmity, at which General Murat so plainly hinted, I had
+long apprehended it from what others, in similar circumstances with
+myself, had suffered.  He has, since the Revolution, bought no less, than
+sixteen national estates, seven of the former proprietors of which have
+suddenly disappeared since his Ministry, probably in the manner he
+intended to remove me.  This man is one of the most immoral characters
+the Revolution has dragged forward from obscurity.  It is more difficult
+to mention a crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good or
+just action that he ever performed.  He is so notorious a villain that
+even the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and
+since his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased
+country, to extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities.  In a
+nation so greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is more than negative
+evidence.
+
+As a friar before the Revolution he has avowed, in his correspondence
+with the National Convention, that he never believed in a God; and as one
+of the first public functionaries of a Republic he has officially denied
+the existence of virtue.  He is, therefore, as unmoved by tears as by
+reproaches, and as inaccessible to remorse as hardened against
+repentance.  With him interest and bribes are everything, and honour and
+honesty nothing.  The supplicant or the pleader who appears before him
+with no other support than the justice of his cause is fortunate indeed
+if, after being cast, he is not also confined or ruined, and perhaps
+both; while a line from one of the Bonapartes, or a purse of gold,
+changes black to white, guilt to innocence, removes the scaffold waiting
+for the assassin, and extinguishes the faggots lighted for the parricide.
+His authority is so extensive that on the least signal, with one blow,
+from the extremities of France to her centre, it crushes the cot and the
+palace; and his decisions, against which there is no appeal, are so
+destructive that they never leave any traces behind them, and Bonaparte,
+Bonaparte alone, can prevent or arrest their effect.
+
+Though a traitor to his former benefactor, the ex-Director Barras, he
+possesses now the unlimited confidence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as far
+as is known, has not yet done anything to forfeit it,--if private acts of
+cruelty cannot, in the agent of a tyrant, be called breach of trust or
+infidelity.  He shares with Talleyrand the fraternity of the vigilant,
+immoral, and tormenting secret police; and with Real, and Dubois, the
+prefect of police, the reproduction, or rather the invention, of new
+tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are wells or pits dug
+under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works of his own
+infernal genius.  They are covered with trap-doors, and any person whom
+the rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose return to
+society is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is suspected; who has
+been imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be innocent; who is
+disagreeable to the Bonapartes, their favourites, or the mistresses of
+their favourites; who has displeased Fouche, or offended some other
+placeman; any who have refused to part with their property for the
+recovery of their liberty, are all precipitated into these artificial
+abysses there to be forgotten; or worse, to be starved to death, if they
+have not been fortunate enough to break their necks and be killed by the
+fall.
+
+The property Fouche has acquired by his robberies within these last
+twelve years is at the lowest rate valued at fifty million livres--which
+must increase yearly; as a man who disposes of the liberty of fifty
+millions of people is also, in a great part, master of their wealth.
+Except the chiefs of the Governments and their officers of State, there
+exists not an inhabitant of France, Italy, Holland, or Switzerland who
+can consider himself secure for an instant of not being seized,
+imprisoned, plundered, tortured, or exterminated by the orders of Fouche
+and by the hands of his agents.
+
+You will no doubt exclaim, “How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he
+confide, in such a man?”  Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with
+the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents.  There is
+no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he
+will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it.  He is, therefore, a
+most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what
+is said to the contrary in France, and believed abroad, would cease to
+rule the day he became just, and the reign of laws and of humanity
+banished terror and tyranny.
+
+It is reported that some person, pious or revengeful, presented some time
+ago to the devout mother of Napoleon a long memorial containing some
+particulars of the crimes and vices of Fouche and Talleyrand, and
+required of her, if she wished to prevent the curses of Heaven from
+falling on her son, to inform him of them, that he might cease to employ
+men so unworthy of him, and so repugnant to a Divinity.  Napoleon, after
+reading through the memorial, is stated to have answered his mother, who
+was always pressing him to dismiss these Ministers: The memorial, Madame,
+contains nothing of what I was not previously informed.  Louis XVI. did
+not select any but those whom he thought the most virtuous and moral of
+men for his Ministers and counsellors; and where did their virtues and
+morality bring him?  If the writer of the memorial will mention two
+honest and irreproachable characters, with equal talents and zeal to
+serve me, neither Fouche nor Talleyrand shall again be admitted into my
+presence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have with some reason in England complained of the conduct
+of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, when the
+pretended correspondence between Mr. Drake and Mehee de la Touche was
+published in our official gazette.  Had you, however, like myself, been
+in a situation to study the characters and appreciate the worth of most
+of them, this conduct would have excited no surprise, and pity would have
+taken the place both of accusation and reproach.  Hardly one of them,
+except Count Philipp von Cobenzl, the Austrian Ambassador (and even he is
+considerably involved), possesses any property, or has anything else but
+his salary to depend upon for subsistence.  The least offence to
+Bonaparte or Talleyrand would instantly deprive them of their places;
+and, unless they were fortunate enough to obtain some other appointment,
+reduce them to live in obscurity, and perhaps in want, upon a trifling
+pension in their own country.
+
+The day before Mr. Drake’s correspondence appeared in the Moniteur, in
+March, 1804, Talleyrand gave a grand diplomatic dinner; in the midst of
+which, as was previously agreed with Bonaparte, Duroc called him out on
+the part of the First Consul.  After an absence of near an hour, which
+excited great curiosity and some alarm among the diplomatists, he
+returned, very thoughtful and seemingly very low-spirited.
+
+“Excuse me, gentlemen,” said he, “I have been impolite against my
+inclination.  The First Consul knew that you honoured me with your
+company today, and would therefore not have interrupted me by his orders
+had not a discovery of a most extraordinary nature against the law of
+nations just been made; a discovery which calls for the immediate
+indignation against the Cabinet of St. James, not only of France, but of
+every nation that wishes for the preservation of civilized society. After
+dinner I shall do myself the honour of communicating to you the
+particulars, well convinced that you will all enter with warmth into the
+just resentment of the First Consul.”
+
+During the repast the bottle went freely round, and as soon as they had
+drunk their coffee and liqueurs, Talleyrand rang a bell, and Hauterive
+presented himself with a large bundle of papers.  The pretended original
+letters of Mr. Drake were handed about with the commentaries of the
+Minister and his secretary.  Their heads heated with wine, it was not
+difficult to influence their minds, or to mislead their judgment, and
+they exclaimed, as in a chorus, “C’est abominable!  Cela fait fremir!”
+
+Talleyrand took advantage of their situation, as well as of their
+indiscretion.  “I am glad, gentlemen,” said he, “and shall not fail to
+inform the First Consul of your unanimous sentiments on this disagreeable
+subject; but verbal expressions are not sufficient in an affair of such
+great consequence.  I have orders to demand your written declarations,
+which, after what you have already expressed, you cannot hesitate about
+sending to me to-night, that they may accompany the denunciation which
+the First Consul despatches, within some few hours, to all the Courts on
+the Continent.  You would much please the First Consul were you to write
+as near as possible according to the formula which my secretary has drawn
+up.  It states nothing either against convenance, or against the customs
+of Sovereigns, or etiquettes of Courts, and I am certain is also
+perfectly congenial with your individual feelings.”
+
+A silence of some moments now followed (as all the diplomatists were
+rather taken by surprise with regard to a written declaration), which the
+Swedish Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, interrupted by saying that, “though
+he personally might have no objection to sign such a declaration, he must
+demand some time to consider whether he had a right to, write in the name
+of his Sovereign, without his orders, on a subject still unknown to him.”
+
+This remark made the Austrian Ambassador, Count von Cobenzl, propose a
+private consultation among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps at
+one of their hotels, at which the Russian charge d’affaires, D’Oubril,
+who was not at the dinner--party, was invited to assist.  They met
+accordingly, at the Hotel de Montmorency, Rue de Lille, occupied by Count
+von Cobenzl; but they came to no other unanimous determination than that
+of answering a written communication of Talleyrand by a written note,
+according as every one judged most proper and prudent, and corresponding
+with the supposed sentiments of his Sovereign.
+
+As all this official correspondence has been published in England, you
+may, upon reading the notes presented by Baron de Dreyer, and Mr.
+Livingstone,
+
+[In consequence of this conduct, Livingstone was recalled by his
+Government, and lives now in obscurity and disgrace in America.  To
+console him, however, in his misfortune, Bonaparte, on his departure,
+presented him with his portrait, enamelled on the lid of a snuff-box, set
+round with diamonds, and valued at one thousand louis d’or.]
+
+the neutral Ambassadors of Denmark and America, form some tolerably just
+idea of Talleyrand’s formula.  Their impolitic servility was blamed even
+by the other members of the diplomatic corps.
+
+Livingstone you know, and perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch
+republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and
+though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of
+the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism
+more, in Europe.  Without talents, and almost without education, he
+thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity
+are synonymous.  He was called here “the courier of Talleyrand,” on
+account of his voyages to England, and his journeys to Holland, where
+this Minister sent him to intrigue, with less ceremony than one of his
+secret agents.  He acknowledged that no Government was more liberal, and
+no nation more free, than the British; but he hated the one as much as he
+abused the other; and he did not conceal sentiments that made him always
+so welcome to Bonaparte and Talleyrand.  Never over nice in the choice of
+his companions, Arthur O’Connor, and other Irish traitors and vagabonds,
+used his house as their own; so much so that, when he invited other
+Ambassadors to dine with him, they, before they accepted the invitation,
+made a condition that no outlaws or adventurers should be of the party.
+
+In your youth, Baron de Dreyer was an Ambassador from the Court of
+Copenhagen to that of St. James.  He has since been in the same capacity
+to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Madrid.  Born a Norwegian, of a poor
+and obscure family, he owes his advancement to his own talents; but
+these, though they have procured him rank, have left him without a
+fortune.  When he came here, in June, 1797, from Spain, he brought a
+mistress with him, and several children he had had by her during his
+residence in that country.  He also kept an English mistress some thirty
+years ago in London, by whom he had a son, M. Guillaumeau, who is now his
+secretary.  Thus encumbered, and thus situated at the age of seventy, it
+is no surprise if he strives to die at his post, and that fear to offend
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand sometimes gets the better of his prudence.
+
+In Denmark, as well as in all other Continental States, the pensions of
+diplomatic invalids are more scanty than those of military ones, and
+totally insufficient for a man who, during half a century nearly, has
+accustomed himself to a certain style of life, and to expenses requisite
+to represent his Prince with dignity.  No wonder, therefore, that Baron
+de Dreyer prefers Paris to Copenhagen, and that the cunning Talleyrand
+takes advantage of this preference.
+
+It was reported here among our foreign diplomatists, that the English
+Minister in Denmark complained of the contents of Baron de Dreyer’s note
+concerning Mr. Drake’s correspondence; and that the Danish Prime
+Minister, Count von Bernstorff, wrote to him in consequence, by the order
+of the Prince Royal, a severe reprimand.  This act of political justice
+is, however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of Copenhagen
+has laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand, but always to
+displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be discontented.
+Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better served by his
+representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one seldomer changes
+or removes them.
+
+While I am speaking of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short
+sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to
+particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously
+complimented by Talleyrand with the title of “The Prince of Neutrality,
+the Sully of Prussia.”  Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who,
+until lately, has been the chief director of the political conscience of
+His Prussian Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, was born
+in Silesia, and is the son of a nobleman who was a General in the
+Austrian service when Frederick the Great made the conquest of that
+country.  At the death of this King in 1786, Count von Haugwitz occupied
+an inferior place in the foreign office, where Count von Herzburg
+observed his zeal and assiduity, and recommended him to the notice of the
+late King Frederick William II.  By the interest of the celebrated
+Bishopswerder, he procured, in 1792, the appointment of an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, where he succeeded Baron von Jacobi, the present
+Prussian Minister in your country.  In the autumn of the same year he
+went to Ratisbon, to cooperate with the Austrian Ambassador, and to
+persuade the Princes of the German Empire to join the coalition against
+France.  In the month of March, 1794, he was sent to the Hague, where he
+negotiated with Lord Malmesbury concerning the affairs of France; shortly
+afterwards his nomination as a Minister of State took place, and from
+that time his political sentiments seem to have undergone a revolution,
+for which it is not easy to account; but, whatever were the causes of his
+change of opinions, the Treaty of Basle, concluded between France and
+Prussia in 1795, was certainly negotiated under his auspices; and in
+August, 1796, he signed, with the French Minister at Berlin, Citizen
+Caillard, the first and famous Treaty of Neutrality; and a Prussian
+cordon was accordingly drawn, to cause the neutrality of the North to be
+observed and protected.  Had the Count von Haugwitz of 1795 been the same
+as the Count von Haugwitz of 1792, it is probable we should no longer
+have heard of either a French Republic or a French Empire; but a
+legitimate Monarch of the kingdom of France would have ensured that
+security to all other legitimate Sovereigns, the want of which they
+themselves, or their children, will feel and mourn in vain, as long as
+unlimited usurpations tyrannize over my wretched country.  It is to be
+hoped, however, that the good sense of the Count will point out to him,
+before it is too late, the impolicy of his present connections; and that
+he will use his interest with his Prince to persuade him to adopt a line
+of conduct suited to the grandeur and dignity of the Prussian Monarchy,
+and favourable to the independence of insulted Europe.
+
+When his present Prussian Majesty succeeded to the throne, Count von
+Haugwitz continued in office, with increased influence; but he some time
+since resigned, in consequence, it is said, of a difference of opinion
+with the other Prussian Ministers on the subject of a family alliance,
+which Bonaparte had the modesty to propose, between the illustrious house
+of Napoleon the First and the royal line of Brandenburgh.
+
+On this occasion his King, to evince his satisfaction with his past
+conduct, bestowed on him not only a large pension, but an estate in
+Silesia, where he before possessed some property.  Bonaparte also, to
+express his regret at his retreat, proclaimed His Excellency a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour.
+
+Talleyrand insolently calls the several cordons, or ribands, distributed
+by Bonaparte among the Prussian Ministers and Generals, “his
+leading-strings.”  It is to be hoped that Frederick William III.  is
+sufficiently upon his guard to prevent these strings from strangling the
+Prussian Monarchy and the Brandenburgh dynasty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Upwards of two months after my visit to General Murat, I was
+surprised at the appearance of M. Darjuson, the chamberlain of Princesse
+Louis Bonaparte.  He told me that he came on the part of Prince Louis,
+who honoured me with an invitation to dine with him the day after. Upon
+my inquiry whether he knew if the party would be very numerous, he
+answered, between forty and fifty; and that it was a kind of farewell
+dinner, because the Prince intended shortly to set out for Compiegne to
+assume the command of the camp, formed in its vicinity, of the dragoons
+and other light troops of the army of England.
+
+The principal personages present at this dinner were Joseph Bonaparte and
+his wife, General and Madame Murat, the Ministers Berthier, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, Chaptal, and Portalis.  The conversation was entirely military,
+and chiefly related to the probable conquest or subjugation of Great
+Britain, and the probable consequence to mankind in general of such a
+great event.  No difference of opinion was heard with regard to its
+immediate benefit to France and gradual utility to all other nations; but
+Berthier seemed to apprehend that, before France could have time to
+organize this valuable conquest, she would be obliged to support another
+war, with a formidable league, perhaps, of all other European nations.
+The issue, however, he said, would be glorious to France, who, by her
+achievements, would force all people to acknowledge her their mother
+country; and then, first, Europe would constitute but one family.
+
+Chaptal was as certain as everybody else of the destruction of the
+tyrants of the seas; but he thought France would never be secure against
+the treachery of modern Carthage until she followed the example of Rome
+towards ancient Carthage; and therefore, after reducing London to ashes,
+it would be proper to disperse round the universe all the inhabitants of
+the British Islands, and to re-people them with nations less
+evil-disposed and less corrupted.  Portalis observed that it was more
+easy to conceive than to execute such a vast plan.  It would not be an
+undertaking of five, of ten, nor of twenty years, to transplant these
+nations; that misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+and obstinacy, but desperation.
+
+“No people,” continued he, “are more attached to their customs and
+countries than islanders in general; and though British subjects are the
+greatest travellers, and found everywhere, they all suppose their country
+the best, and always wish to return to it and finish their days amidst
+their native fogs and smoke.  Neither the Saxons, nor the Danes, nor
+Norman conquerors transplanted them, but, after reducing them,
+incorporated themselves by marriages among the vanquished, and in some
+few generations were but one people.  It is asserted by all persons who
+have lately visited Great Britain, that, though the civilization of the
+lower classes is much behind that of the same description in France, the
+higher orders, the rich and the fashionable, are, with regard to their,
+manners, more French than English, and might easily be cajoled into
+obedience and subjection to the sovereignty of a nation whose customs, by
+free choice, they have adopted in preference to their own, and whose
+language forms a necessary part of their education, and, indeed, of the
+education of almost every class in the British Empire.  The universality
+of the French language is the best ally France has in assisting her to
+conquer a universal dominion.  He wished, therefore, that when we were in
+a situation to dictate in England, instead of proscribing Englishmen we
+should proscribe the English language, and advance and reward, in
+preference, all those parents whose children were sent to be educated in
+France, and all those families who voluntarily adopted in their houses
+and societies exclusively the French language.”
+
+Murat was afraid that if France did not transplant the most stubborn
+Britons, and settle among them French colonies, when once their military
+and commercial navy was annihilated, they would turn pirates, and,
+perhaps, within half a century, lay all other nations as much under
+contribution by their piracies as they now do by their industry; and
+that, like the pirates on the coast of Barbary, the instant they had no
+connections with other civilized nations, cut the throats of each other,
+and agree in nothing but in plundering, and considering all other people
+in the, world their natural enemies and purveyors.
+
+To this opinion Talleyrand, by nodding assent, seemed to adhere; but he
+added: “Earthquakes are generally dreaded as destructive; but such a
+convulsion of nature as would swallow up the British Islands, with all
+their inhabitants, would be the greatest blessing Providence ever
+conferred on mankind.”
+
+Louis Bonaparte then addressed himself to me and to the Marquis de F----.
+“Gentlemen,” said he, “you have been in England; what is your opinion of
+the character of these islanders, and of the probability of their
+subjugation?”
+
+I answered that, during the fifteen months I resided in London I was too
+much occupied to prevent myself from starving, to meditate about anything
+else; that my stomach was my sole meditation as well as anxiety.  That,
+however, I believed that in England, as everywhere else, a mixture of
+good and bad qualities was to be found; but which prevailed, it would be
+presumption in me, from my position, to decide.  But I did not doubt that
+if we cordially hated the English they returned us the compliment with
+interest, and, therefore, the contest with them would be a severe one.
+The Marquis de F---- imprudently attempted to convince the company that
+it was difficult, if not impossible, for our army to land in England,
+much more to conquer it, until we were masters of the seas by a superior
+navy.  He would, perhaps, have been still more indiscreet, had not Madame
+Louis interrupted him, and given another turn to the conversation by
+inquiring about the fair sex in England, and if it was true that handsome
+women were more numerous there than in France?  Here again the Marquis,
+instead of paying her a compliment, as she perhaps expected, roundly
+assured her that for one beauty in France, hundreds might be counted in
+England, where gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and
+that a woman regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a
+first-rate beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of
+them here.
+
+“You must excuse the Marquis, ladies,” said I, in my turn; “he has not
+been in love in England.  There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel
+than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her
+insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:
+
+“I apply to M. de Talleyrand,” answered the Marquis; “he has been longer
+in England than myself.”
+
+“I am not a competent judge,” retorted the Minister; “Madame de
+Talleyrand is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I
+dare say the Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the British
+Islands, among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties, or
+admired greater accomplishments or more perfection.”
+
+To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks
+the party present, of course, was not included.  All the ladies, who were
+well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very
+good-humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would
+give her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a gallant
+Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt to make
+up their difference.  “She is no more, Madame,” said the Marquis; “she
+was, unfortunately, guillotined two days before----” the father of Madame
+Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted him with a
+significant look, and said, “Before the fall of Robespierre, you mean.”
+
+From these and other traits of the Marquis’s character, you may see that
+he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give
+offence.  He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from
+Fouche, which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris
+without further orders from the Minister of Police.  I know, from high
+authority, that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he
+indebted for not being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported
+to our colonies, for having depreciated the power and means of France to
+invade England.  I am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on
+the subject of the invasion expressed anything but what they really
+thought; and that, of the whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the
+Marquis, and myself, entertained the least doubt of the success of the
+expedition; so firmly did they rely on the former fortune of Bonaparte,
+his boastings, and his assurance.
+
+After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that
+she is not happy.  Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the
+best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached
+to her.  She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked,
+notwithstanding, uncommonly well.  I have heard that Louis is inclined to
+inebriation, and when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and
+very indelicate with other women before her eyes.  He intrigues with her
+own servants and the number of his illegitimate children is said to be as
+many as his years.  She asked General Murat to present me and recommend
+me to Fouche, which he did with great politeness; and the Minister
+assured me that he should be glad to see me at his hotel, which I much
+doubt.  The last words Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a princely
+crown, richly set with diamonds, and given her by her brother-in-law,
+Napoleon, were, “Alas!  grandeur is not always happiness, nor the most
+elevated the most fortunate lot.”
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a grand
+epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the annals of
+Europe.  The debates in the Sacred College for and against this journey,
+and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to have been
+long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires of
+Cardinal Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres distributed
+apropos among its pious members.  Of this money the Cardinals Mattei,
+Pamphili, Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia, Pacca,
+Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to
+have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent
+anti-Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of
+Napoleon the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real
+worth.
+
+The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
+intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
+brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
+second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
+husband.
+
+Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
+March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
+choeur) in a convent of his native place.  In 1782, whilst he was on a
+visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
+fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
+captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers.  Here
+he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
+professor of, the Alcoran.  In that year he found an opportunity to
+escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
+renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
+constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
+In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
+his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
+gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
+customers.  After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
+the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
+after Napoleon’s proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
+of Lyons.  In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
+is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
+tiara.  If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
+name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he
+must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate his
+own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France.
+Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the manner
+already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this pontiff
+would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.
+
+While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
+tinker, by whom he had three children.  This marriage, according to the
+republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
+Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
+left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
+himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor.  But Madame
+Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband’s promotion to the
+Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
+children reduced to great misery.  Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
+letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres--informing her that the
+same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
+with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
+instant she left that island.  Either thinking herself not sufficiently
+paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte
+family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she
+remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope.  On the first day His
+Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the
+crowd, and to approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by his side.
+Profiting by a moment’s silence, she called out loudly, throwing herself
+at his feet: “Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of Cardinal Fesch, and
+these are our children; he cannot, he dares not, deny this truth.  Had he
+behaved liberally to me, I should not have disturbed him in his present
+grandeur; I supplicate you, Holy Father, not to restore me my husband,
+but to force him to provide for his wife and children, according to his
+present circumstances.”--“Matta--ella e matta, santissimo padre!  She is
+mad--she is mad, Holy Father,” said the Cardinal; and the good pontiff
+ordered her to be taken care of, to prevent her from doing herself or the
+children any mischief.  She was, indeed, taken care of, because nobody
+ever since heard what has become either of her or her children; and as
+they have not returned to Corsica, probably some snug retreat has been
+allotted them in France.
+
+The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal
+Fesch: his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in
+disagreeable scrapes.  He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons,
+which has since made his stay in that city but short.  Having thrown his
+handkerchief at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she
+accepted it, and gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the
+evening when her husband usually went to the play.  His Eminence arrived
+in disguise, and was received with open arms.  But he was hardly seated
+by her side before the door of a closet was burst open, and his shoulders
+smarted from the lashes inflicted by an offended husband.  In vain did he
+mention his name and rank; they rather increased than decreased the fury
+of Girot, who pretended it was utterly impossible for a Cardinal and
+Archbishop to be thus overtaken with the wife of one of his flock; at
+last Madame Girot proposed a pecuniary accommodation, which, after some
+opposition, was acceded to; and His Eminence signed a bond for one
+hundred thousand livres--upon condition that nothing should transpire of
+this intrigue--a high price enough for a sound drubbing.  On the day when
+the bond was due, Girot and his wife were both arrested by the police
+commissary, Dubois (a brother of the prefect of police at Paris), accused
+of being connected with the coiners, a capital crime at present in this
+country.  In a search made in their house, bad money to the amount of
+three thousand livres was discovered; which they had received the day
+before from a man who called himself a merchant from Paris, but who was a
+police spy sent to entrap them.  After giving up the bond of the
+Cardinal, the Emperor graciously remitted the capital punishment, upon
+condition that they should be transported for life to Cayenne.
+
+This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
+and to constitute a successor of St. Peter.  It would not be the least
+remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
+were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
+boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
+from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle of
+an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a member of
+the Sacred College.
+
+His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
+elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres--and
+his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
+Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
+at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of
+the French.
+
+The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his death
+Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
+expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The amiable and accomplished Amelia Frederique, Princess
+Dowager of the late Electoral Prince, Charles Louis of Baden, born a
+Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, has procured the Electoral House of Baden
+the singular honour of giving consorts to three reigning and Sovereign
+Princes,--to an Emperor of Russia, to a King of Sweden, and to the
+Elector of Bavaria.  Such a distinction, and such alliances, called the
+attention of those at the head of our Revolution; who, after attempting
+in vain to blow up hereditary thrones by the aid of sans-culotte
+incendiaries, seated sans-culottes upon thrones, that they might degrade
+what was not yet ripe for destruction.
+
+Charles Frederick, the reigning Elector of Baden, is now near fourscore
+years of age.  At this period of life if any passions remain, avarice is
+more common than ambition; because treasures may be hoarded without
+bustle, while activity is absolutely necessary to push forward to the
+goal of distinction.  Having bestowed a new King on Tuscany, Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand also resolved to confer new Electors on Germany.  A more
+advantageous fraternity could not be established between the innovators
+here and their opposers in other countries, than by incorporating the
+grandfather-in-law of so many Sovereigns with their own revolutionary
+brotherhood; to humble him by a new rank, and to disgrace him by
+indemnities obtained from their hands.  An intrigue between our Minister,
+Talleyrand, and the Baden Minister, Edelsheim, transformed the oldest
+Margrave of Germany into its youngest Elector, and extended his dominions
+by the spoils obtained at the expense of the rightful owners.  The
+invasion of the Baden territory in time of peace, and the seizure of the
+Duc d’Enghien, though under the protection of the laws of nations and
+hospitality, must have soon convinced Baron Edelsheim what return his
+friend Talleyrand expected, and that Bonaparte thought he had a natural
+right to insult by his attacks those he had dishonoured by his
+connections.
+
+The Minister, Baron Edelsheim, is half an illuminato, half a philosopher,
+half a politician, and half a revolutionist.  He was, long before he was
+admitted into the council chamber of his Prince, half an atheist, half an
+intriguer, and half a spy, in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
+His entry upon the stage at Berlin, and particularly the first parts he
+was destined to act, was curious and extraordinary; whether he acquitted
+himself better in this capacity than he has since in his political one is
+not known.  He was afterwards sent to this capital to execute a
+commission, of which he acquitted himself very ill; exposing himself
+rashly, without profit or service to his employer.  Frederick II.,
+dreading the tediousness of a proposed congress at Augsburg, wished to
+send a private emissary to sound the King of France.  For this purpose he
+chose Edelsheim as a person least liable to suspicion.  The project of
+Frederick was to idemnify the King of Poland for his first losses by
+robbing the ecclesiastical Princes of Germany.  This, Louis XV. totally
+rejected; and Edelsheim returned with his answer to the Prussian Monarch,
+then at Freyburg.  From thence he afterwards departed for London, made
+his communications, and was once again sent back to Paris, on pretence
+that he had left some of his travelling trunks there; and the Bailli de
+Foulay, the Ambassador of the Knights of Malta, being persuaded that the
+Cabinet of Versailles was effectually desirous of peace, was, as he had
+been before, the mediator.  The Bailli was deceived.  The Duc de
+Choiseul, the then Prime Minister, indecently enough threw Edelsheim into
+the Bastille, in order to search or seize his papers, which, however,
+were secured elsewhere.  Edelsheim was released on the morrow, but
+obliged to depart the kingdom by the way of Turin, as related by
+Frederick II. in his “History of the Seven Years’ War.”  On his return he
+was disgraced, and continued so until 1778; when he again was used as
+emissary to various Courts of Germany.  In 1786 the Elector of Baden sent
+him to Berlin, on the ascension of Frederick William II., as a
+complimentary envoy.  This Monarch, when he saw him, could not forbear
+laughing at the high wisdom of the Court that selected such a personage
+for such an embassy, and of his own sagacity in accepting it.  He quitted
+the capital of Prussia as he came there, with an opinion of himself that
+the royal smiles of contempt had neither altered nor diminished.
+
+You see, by this account, that Edelsheim has long been a partisan of the
+pillage of Germany called indemnities; and long habituated to affronts,
+as well as to plots.  To all his other half qualities, half modesty can
+hardly be added, when he calls himself, or suffers himself to be called,
+“the Talleyrand of Carlsrhue.”  He accompanied his Prince last year to
+Mentz; where this old Sovereign was not treated by Bonaparte in the most
+decorous or decent manner, being obliged to wait for hours in his
+antechamber, and afterwards stand during the levees, or in the
+drawing-rooms of Napoleon or of his wife, without the offer of a chair,
+or an invitation to sit down.  It was here where, by a secret treaty,
+Bonaparte became the Sovereign of Baden, if sovereignty consists in the
+disposal of the financial and military resources of a State; and they
+were agreed to be assigned over to him whenever he should deem it proper
+or necessary to invade the German Empire, in return for his protection
+against the Emperor of Germany, who can have no more interest than intent
+to attack a country so distant from his hereditary dominions, and whose
+Sovereign is, besides, the grandfather of the consort of his nearest and
+best ally.
+
+Talleyrand often amused himself at Mentz with playing on the vanity and
+affected consequence of Edelsheim, who was delighted if at any time our
+Minister took him aside, or whispered to him as in confidence.  One
+morning, at the assembly of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, where Edelsheim
+was creeping and cringing about him as usual, he laid hold of his arm and
+walked with him to the upper part of the room.  In a quarter of an hour
+they both joined the company, Edelsheim unusually puffed up with vanity.
+
+“I will lay and bet, gentlemen,” said Talleyrand, “that you cannot, with
+all your united wits, guess the grand subject of my conversation with the
+good Baron Edelsheim.”  Without waiting for an answer, he continued: “As
+the Baron is a much older and more experienced traveller than myself, I
+asked him which, of all the countries he had visited, could boast the
+prettiest and kindest women.  His reply was really very instructive, and
+it would be a great pity if justice were not done to his merit by its
+publicity.”
+
+Here the Baron, red as a turkey-cock and trembling with anger,
+interrupted.  “His Excellency,” said he, “is to-night in a humour to
+joke; what we spoke of had nothing to do with women.”
+
+“Nor with men, either,” retorted Talleyrand, going away.
+
+This anecdote, Baron Dahlberg, the Minister of the Elector of Baden to
+our Court, had the ingenuity to relate at Madame Chapui’s as an evidence
+of Edelsheim’s intimacy with Talleyrand; only he left out the latter
+part, and forgot to mention the bad grace with which this impertinence of
+Talleyrand was received; but this defect of memory Count von Beust, the
+envoy of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, kindly supplied.
+
+Baron Edelsheim is a great amateur of knighthoods.  On days of great
+festivities his face is, as it were, illuminated with the lustre of his
+stars; and the crosses on his coat conceal almost its original colour.
+Every petty Prince of Germany has dubbed him a chevalier; but Emperors
+and Kings have not been so unanimous in distinguishing his desert, or in
+satisfying his desires.
+
+At Mentz no Prince or Minister fawned more assiduously upon Bonaparte
+than this hero of chivalry.  It could not escape notice, but need not
+have alarmed our great man, as was the case.  The prefect of the palace
+was ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim’s moral
+and political character.  He applied to the police commissary, who,
+within twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was
+the most inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that
+ever entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword,
+worn a dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about
+his real character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as
+nowhere they allowed him common sense, much less a character; all blamed
+his presumption, but none defended his capacity.
+
+After the perusal of this report, Bonaparte asked Talleyrand: “What can
+Edelsheim mean by his troublesome assiduities?  Does he want any
+indemnities, or does he wish me to make him a German Prince?  Can he have
+the impudence to hope that I shall appoint him a tribune, a legislator,
+or a Senator in France, or that I shall give him a place in my Council of
+State?”
+
+“No such thing,” answered the Minister; “did not Your Majesty condescend
+to notice at the last fete that this eclipsed moon was encompassed in a
+firmanent of stars.  You would, Sire, make him the happiest of mortals
+were you to nominate him a member of your Legion of Honour.”
+
+“Does he want nothing else?”  said Napoleon, as if relieved at once of an
+oppressive burden.  “Write to my chancellor of the Legion of Honour,
+Lacepede, to send him a patent, and do you inform him of this favour.”
+
+It is reported at Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim
+has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because
+under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into an
+Electorate!!!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The sensation that the arrival of the Pope in this country
+caused among the lower classes of people cannot be expressed, and if
+expressed, would not be believed.  I am sorry, however, to say that,
+instead of improving their morals or increasing their faith, this journey
+has shaken both morality and religion to their foundation.
+
+According to our religious notions, as you must know, the Roman pontiff
+is the vicar of Christ, and infallible; he can never err.  The atheists
+of the National Convention and the Theophilanthropists of the Directory
+not only denied his demi-divinity, but transformed him into a satyr; and
+in pretending to tear the veil of superstition, annihilated all belief in
+a God.  The ignorant part of our nation, which, as everywhere else,
+constitutes the majority, witnessing the impunity and prosperity of
+crime, and bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals, first
+doubted of His omnipotence in not crushing guilt, and afterwards of His
+existence in not exterminating the blasphemous from among the living.
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes here, and
+hope of a reward hereafter for unmerited sufferings upon earth, they all
+hailed as a blessing the restoration of Christianity; and by this
+political act Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories
+he had procured admirers.
+
+Bonaparte’s character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and
+his crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description.
+Should he continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave,
+future ages may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his
+contemporaries it will always be doubtful whether mankind has not
+suffered more from his ambition and cruelties than benefited by his
+services.  Had he satisfied himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of
+a Commonwealth; or, if he judged that a monarchical Government alone was
+suitable to the spirit of this country, had he recalled our legitimate
+King, he would have occupied a principal, if not the first, place in the
+history of France,--a place much more exalted than he can ever expect to
+fill as an Emperor of the French.  Let his prosperity be ever so
+uninterrupted, he cannot be mentioned but as an usurper, an appellation
+never exciting esteem, frequently inspiring contempt, and always odious.
+
+The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
+perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve
+an authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme
+Pontiff, whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the
+representative of their God, but who, by this act of scandal and
+sacrilege, descends to a level with the most culpable of men?  I have
+heard, not only in this city but in villages, where sincerity is more
+frequent than corruption, and where hypocrites are as little known as
+infidels, these remarks made by the people:
+
+“Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
+injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of
+bestowing as a sacred donation what belongs to another; and what he has
+no power, no authority, to dispose of?  Can Pius VII. confer on Napoleon
+the First what belongs to Louis XVIII.?  Would Jesus Christ, if upon
+earth, have acted thus?  Would his immediate successors, the Apostles,
+not have preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any
+injury?  If the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his
+Master and predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar of our
+Saviour?”
+
+These and many similar reflections the common people have made, and make
+yet.  The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up
+in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII. to
+be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists and
+freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of God, and that God
+is only the invention of fear.
+
+The fact is, that by the Pope’s performance of the coronation of an
+Emperor of the French, a religious as well as a political revolution was
+effected; and the usurper in power, whatever his creed may be, will
+hereafter, without much difficulty, force it on his slaves.  You may,
+perhaps, object that Pius VII., in his official account to the Sacred
+College of his journey to France, speaks with enthusiasm of the
+Catholicism of the French people.  But did not the Goddess of Reason, did
+not Robespierre as a high priest of a Supreme Being, speak as highly of
+their sectaries?  Read the Moniteur of 1793 and 1794, and you will be
+convinced of the truth of this assertion.  They, like the Pope, spoke of
+what they saw, and they, like him, did not see an individual who was not
+instructed how to perform his part, so as to give satisfaction to him
+whom he was to please, and to those who employed him.  As you have
+attended to the history of our Revolution, you have found it in great
+part a cruel masquerade, where none but the unfortunate Louis XVI.
+appeared in his native and natural character and without a mask.
+
+The countenance of Pius VII. is placid and benign, and a kind of calmness
+and tranquillity pervades his address and manners, which are, however,
+far from being easy or elegant.  The crowds that he must have been
+accustomed to see since his present elevation have not lessened a
+timidity the consequence of early seclusion.  Nothing troubled him more
+than the numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body, Tribunate,
+National Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every occasion.
+He never was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative;
+and his best quality is, not to do good, but to prevent evil.  His piety
+is sincere and unaffected, and it is not difficult to perceive that he
+has been more accustomed to address his God than to converse with men. He
+is nowhere so well in his place as before the altar; when imploring the
+blessings of Providence on his audience he speaks with confidence, as to
+a friend to whom his purity is known, and who is accustomed to listen
+favourably to his prayers.  He is zealous but not fanatical, but equally
+superstitious as devout.  His closet was crowded with relics, rosaries,
+etc., but there he passed generally eight hours of the twenty-four upon
+his knees in prayer and meditation.  He often inflicted on himself
+mortifications, observed fast-days, and kept his vows with religious
+strictness.
+
+None of the promises made him by Cardinal Fesch, in the name of Napoleon
+the First, were performed, but all were put off until a general
+pacification.  He was promised indemnity for Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara,
+and Ravenna; the ancient supremacy and pecuniary contributions of the
+Gallican Church, and the restoration of certain religious orders, both in
+France and Italy; but notwithstanding his own representations, and the
+activity of his Cardinal, Caprara, nothing was decided, though nothing
+was refused.
+
+By some means or other he was made perfectly acquainted with the crimes
+and vices of most of our public functionaries.  Talleyrand was surprised
+when Cardinal Caprara explained to him the reason why the Pope refused to
+admit some persons to his presence, and why he wished others even not to
+be of the party when he accepted the invitations of Bonaparte and his
+wife to their private societies.  Many are, however, of opinion that
+Talleyrand, from malignity or revenge, often heightened and confirmed His
+Holiness’s aversion.  This was at least once the case with regard to De
+Lalande.  When Duroc inquired the cause of the Pope’s displeasure against
+this astronomer, and hinted that it would be very agreeable to the
+Emperor were His Holiness to permit him the honour of prostrating
+himself, he was answered that men of talents and learning would always be
+welcome to approach his person; that he pitied the errors and prayed for
+the conversion of this savant, but was neither displeased nor offended
+with him.  Talleyrand, when informed of the Pope’s answer, accused
+Cardinal Caprara of having misinterpreted his master’s communications;
+and this prelate, in his turn, censured our Minister’s bad memory.
+
+You must have read that this De Lalande is regarded in France as the
+first astronomer of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists; he
+is said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called “The
+Bible of a People who acknowledge no God.”  He implored the ferocious
+Robespierre to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet pretended
+to be discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian.  In a letter
+of congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present elevation,
+he also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by styling
+himself Jesus Christ the First, Emperor of the French, instead of
+Napoleon the First.  But it was not his known impiety that made
+Talleyrand wish to exclude him from insulting with his presence a
+Christian pontiff.  In the summer of 1799, when the Minister was in a
+momentary disgrace, De Lalande was at the head of those who imputed to
+his treachery, corruptions, and machinations all the evils France then
+suffered, both from external enemies and internal factions.  If
+Talleyrand has justly been reproached for soon forgetting good offices
+and services done him, nobody ever denied that he has the best
+recollection in the world of offences or attacks, and that he is as
+revengeful as unforgiving.
+
+The only one of our great men whom Pius VII. remained obstinate and
+inflexible in not receiving, was the Senator and Minister of Police,
+Fouche.  As His Holiness was not so particular with regard to other
+persons who, like Fouche, were both apostate priests and regicide
+subjects, the following is reported to be the cause of his aversion and
+obduracy:
+
+In November, 1793, the remains of a wretch of the name of
+Challiers--justly called, for his atrocities, the Murat of Lyons--were
+ordered by Fouche, then a representative of the people in that city, to
+be produced and publicly worshipped; and, under his particular auspices,
+a grand fete was performed to the memory of this republican martyr, who
+had been executed as an assassin.  As part of this impious ceremony, an
+ass, covered with a Bishop’s vestments, having on his head a mitre, and
+the volumes of Holy Writ tied to his tail, paraded the streets.  The
+remains of Challiers were then burnt, and the ashes distributed among his
+adorers; while the books were also consumed, and the ashes scattered in
+the wind.  Fouche proposed, after giving the ass some water to drink in a
+sacred chalice, to terminate the festivity of the day by murdering all
+the prisoners, amounting to seven thousand five hundred; but a sudden
+storm prevented the execution of this diabolical proposition, and
+dispersed the sacrilegious congregation.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though all the Bonapartes were great favourites with Pius VII.,
+Madame Letitia, their mother, had a visible preference.  In her
+apartments he seemed most pleased to meet the family parties, as they
+were called, because to them, except the Bonapartes, none but a few
+select favourites were invited,--a distinction as much wished for and
+envied as any other Court honour.  After the Pope had fixed the evening
+he would appear among them, Duroc made out a list, under the dictates of
+Napoleon, of the chosen few destined to partake of the blessing of His
+Holiness’s presence; this list was merely pro form, or as a compliment,
+laid before him; and after his tacit approbation, the individuals were
+informed, from the first chamberlain’s office, that they would be
+honoured with admittance at such an hour, to such a company, and in such
+an apartment.  The dress in which they were to appear was also
+prescribed.  The parties usually met at six o’clock in the evening.  On
+the Pope’s entrance all persons, of both sexes, kneeled to receive his
+blessing.  Tea, ice, liqueurs, and confectionery were then served.  In
+the place of honour were three elevated elbow-chairs, and His Holiness
+was seated between the Emperor and Empress, and seldom spoke to any one
+to whom Napoleon did not previously address the word.  The exploits of
+Bonaparte, particularly his campaigns in Egypt, were the chief subjects
+of conversation.  Before eight o’clock the Pope always retired,
+distributing his blessing to the kneeling audience, as on his entry. When
+he was gone, card-tables were brought in, and play was permitted. Duroc
+received his master’s orders how to distribute the places at the
+different tables, what games were to be played, and the amount of the
+sums to be staked.  These were usually trifling and small compared to
+what is daily risked in our fashionable circles.
+
+Often, after the Pope had returned to his own rooms, Madame Letitia
+Bonaparte was admitted to assist at his private prayers.  This lady,
+whose intrigues and gallantry are proverbial in Corsica, has, now that
+she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee, and is surrounded
+by hypocrites and impostors, who, under the mask of sanctity, deceive and
+plunder her.  Her antechambers are always full of priests; and her closet
+and bedroom are crowded with relics, which she collected during her
+journey to Italy last year.  She might, if she chose, establish a
+Catholic museum, and furnish it with a more curious collection, in its
+sort, than any of our other museums contain.  Of all the saints in our
+calendar, there is not one of any notoriety who has not supplied her with
+a finger, a toe, or some other part; or with a piece of a shirt, a
+handkerchief, a sandal, or a winding-sheet.  Even a bit of a pair of
+breeches, said to have belonged to Saint Mathurin, whom many think was a
+sans-cullotte, obtains her adoration on certain occasions.  As none of
+her children have yet arrived at the same height of faith as herself, she
+has, in her will, bequeathed to the Pope all her relics, together with
+eight hundred and seventy-nine Prayer-books, and four hundred and
+forty-six Bibles, either in manuscript or of different editions.  Her
+favourite breviary, used only on great solemnities, was presented to her
+by Cardinal Maury at Rome, and belonged, as it is said, formerly to Saint
+Francois, whose commentary, written with his own hand, fills the margins;
+though many, who with me adore him as a saint, doubt whether he could
+either read or write.
+
+Not long ago she made, as she thought, an exceedingly valuable
+acquisition.  A priest arrived direct from the Holy City of Jerusalem,
+well recommended by the inhabitants of the convents there, with whom he
+pretended to have passed his youth.  After prostrating himself before the
+Pope, he waited on Madame Letitia Bonaparte.  He told her that he had
+brought with him from Syria the famous relic, the shoulder-bone of Saint
+John the Baptist; but that, being in want of money for his voyage, he
+borrowed upon it from a Grecian Bishop in Montenegro two hundred louis
+d’or.  This sum, and one hundred louis d’or besides, was immediately
+given him; and within three months, for a large sum in addition to those
+advanced, this precious relic was in Madame Letitia’s possession.
+
+Notwithstanding this lady’s care not to engage in her service any person
+of either sex who cannot produce, not a certificate of civism from the
+municipality as was formerly the case, but a certificate of Christianity,
+and a billet of confession signed by the curate of the parish, she had
+often been robbed, and the robbers had made particularly free with those
+relics which were set in gold or in diamonds.  She accused her daughter,
+the Princesse Borghese, who often rallies the devotion of her mamma, and
+who is more an amateur of the living than of the dead, of having played
+her these tricks.  The Princess informed Napoleon of her mother’s losses,
+as well as of her own innocence, and asked him to apply to the police to
+find out the thief, who no doubt was one of the pious rogues who almost
+devoured their mother.
+
+On the next day Napoleon invited Madame Letitia to dinner, and Fouche had
+orders to make a strict search, during her absence, among the persons
+composing her household.  Though he, on this occasion, did not find what
+he was looking for, he made a discovery which very much mortified Madame
+Letitia.
+
+Her first chambermaid, Rosina Gaglini, possessed both her esteem and
+confidence, and had been sent for purposely from Ajaccio, in Corsica, on
+account of her general renown for great piety, and a report that she was
+an exclusive favourite with the Virgin Mary, by whose interference she
+had even performed, it was said, some miracles; such as restoring stolen
+goods, runaway cattle, lost children, and procuring prizes in the
+lottery.  Rosina was as relic-mad as her mistress; and as she had no
+means to procure them otherwise, she determined to partake of her lady’s
+by cutting off a small part of each relic of Madame Letitia’s principal
+saints.  These precious ‘morceaux’ she placed in a box upon which she
+kneeled to say her prayers during the day; and which, for a
+mortification, served her as a pillow during the night.  Upon each of the
+sacred bits she had affixed a label with the name of the saint it
+belonged to, which occasioned the disclosure.  When Madame Letitia heard
+of this pious theft, she insisted on having the culprit immediately and
+severely punished; and though the Princesse Borghese, as the innocent
+cause of poor Rosina’s misfortune, interfered, and Rosina herself
+promised never more to plunder saints, she was without mercy turned away,
+and even denied money sufficient to carry her back to Corsica.  Had she
+made free with Madame Letitia’s plate or wardrobe, there is no doubt but
+that she had been forgiven; but to presume to share with her those sacred
+supports on her way to Paradise was a more unpardonable act with a
+devotee than to steal from a lover the portrait of an adored mistress.
+
+In the meantime the police were upon the alert to discover the person
+whom they suspected of having stolen the relics for the diamonds, and not
+the diamonds for the relics.  Among our fashionable and new saints,
+surprising as you may think it, Madame de Genlis holds a distinguished
+place; and she, too, is an amateur and collector of relics in proportion
+to her means; and with her were found those missed by Madame Letitia.
+Being asked to give up the name of him from whom she had purchased them,
+she mentioned Abbe Saladin, the pretended priest from Jerusalem.  He, in
+his turn, was questioned, and by his answers gave rise to suspicion that
+he himself was the thief.  The person of whom he pretended to have bought
+them was not to be found, nor was any one of such a description
+remembered to have been seen anywhere.  On being carried to prison, he
+claimed the protection of Madame Letitia, and produced a letter in which
+this lady had promised him a bishopric either in France or in Italy. When
+she was informed of his situation, she applied to her son Napoleon for
+his liberty, urging that a priest who from Jerusalem had brought with him
+to Europe such an extraordinary relic as the shoulder of Saint John,
+could not be culpable.
+
+Abbe Saladin had been examined by Real, who concluded, from the accent
+and perfection with which he spoke the French language, that he was some
+French adventurer who had imposed on the credulity and superstition of
+Madame Letitia; and, therefore, threatened him with the rack if he did
+not confess the truth.  He continued, however, in his story, and was
+going to be released upon an order from the Emperor, when a gendarme
+recognized him as a person who, eight years before, had, under the name
+of Lanoue, been condemned for theft and forgery to the galleys, whence he
+had made his escape.  Finding himself discovered, he avowed everything.
+He said he had served in Egypt, in the guides of Bonaparte, but deserted
+to the Turks and turned Mussulman, but afterwards returned to the bosom
+of the Church at Jerusalem.  There he persuaded the friars that he had
+been a priest, and obtained the certificates which introduced him to the
+Pope and to the Emperor’s mother; from whom he had received twelve
+thousand livres for part of the jaw bone of a whale, which he had sold
+her for the shoulder-bone of a saint.  As the police believe the
+certificates he has produced to be also forged, he is detained in prison
+until an answer arrives from our Consul in Syria.
+
+Madame Letitia did not resign without tears the relic he had sold her;
+and there is reason to believe that many other pieces of her collections,
+worshipped by her as remains of saints, are equally genuine as this
+shoulder-bone of Saint John.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That the population of this capital has, since the Revolution,
+decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be lamented.  This
+focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous, though the
+inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am well
+persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are
+committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of
+time in all other European capitals put together.  From not reading in
+our newspapers, as we do in yours, of the robberies, murders, and frauds
+discovered and punished, you may, perhaps, be inclined to suppose my
+assertion erroneous or exaggerated; but it is the policy of our present
+Government to labour as much as possible in the dark; that is to say, to
+prevent, where it can be done, all publicity of anything directly or
+indirectly tending to inculpate it of oppression, tyranny, or even
+negligence; and to conceal the immorality of the people so nearly
+connected with its own immoral power.  It is true that many vices and
+crimes here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the natural
+consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without
+attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the
+mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit,
+uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be
+mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect
+of police, who very seldom grants it.
+
+Most of the enormities now deplored in this country are the consequence
+of moral and religious licentiousness, that have succeeded to political
+anarchy, or rather were produced by it, and survive it.  Add to this the
+numerous examples of the impunity of guilt, prosperity of infamy, misery
+of honesty, and sufferings of virtue, and you will not think it
+surprising that, notwithstanding half a million of spies, our roads and
+streets are covered with robbers and assassins, and our scaffolds with
+victims.
+
+The undeniable TRUTH that this city alone is watched by one hundred
+thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason
+to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the
+governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter
+good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed,
+wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish
+by its own pestilential breath.
+
+According to the official registers published by Manuel in 1792, the
+number of spies all over France during the reign of Louis XVI. was
+nineteen thousand three hundred (five thousand less than under Louis
+XV.); and of this number six thousand were distributed in Paris, and in a
+circle of four leagues around it, including Versailles.  You will
+undoubtedly ask me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what
+can be the cause of this disproportionate increase of distrust and
+depravity?  I will explain it as far as my abilities admit, according to
+the opinions of others compared with my own remarks.
+
+When factions usurped the supremacy of the Kings, vigilance augmented
+with insecurity; and almost everybody who was not an opposer, who refused
+being an accomplice, or feared to be a victim, was obliged to serve as an
+informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy.  The rapidity with which
+parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals as numerous
+as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I am sorry to
+say few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness and
+constancy were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who, to
+preserve their lives, did not renounce their principles and probity.
+
+Under the reign of Robespierre and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+every member of Government, of the clubs, of the tribunals, and of the
+communes, had his private spies; but no regular register was kept of
+their exact number.  Under the Directory a Police Minister was nominated,
+and a police office established.  According to the declaration of the
+Police Minister, Cochon, in 1797, the spies, who were then regularly
+paid, amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand; and of these, thirty
+thousand did duty in this capital.  How many there were in 1799, when
+Fouche, for the first time, was appointed a chief of the department of
+police, is not known, but suppose them doubled within two years; their
+increase since is nevertheless immense, considering that France has
+enjoyed upwards of four years’ uninterrupted Continental peace, and has
+not been exposed to any internal convulsions during the same period.
+
+You may, perhaps, object that France is not rich enough to keep up as
+numerous an army of spies as of soldiers; because the expense of the
+former must be triple the amount of the latter.  Were all these spies,
+now called police agents, or agents of the secret police, paid regular
+salaries, your objection would stand, but most of them have no other
+reward than the protection of the police; being employed in
+gambling--houses, in coffee--houses, in taverns, at the theatres, in the
+public gardens, in the hotels, in lottery offices, at pawnbrokers’, in
+brothels, and in bathing-houses, where the proprietors or masters of
+these establishments pay them.  They receive nothing from the police, but
+when they are enabled to make any great discoveries, those who have been
+robbed or defrauded, and to whom they have been serviceable, are, indeed,
+obliged to present them with some douceur, fixed by the police at the
+rate of the value recovered; but such occurrences are merely accidental.
+To these are to be added all individuals of either sex who by the law are
+obliged to obtain from the police licenses to exercise their trade, as
+pedlars, tinkers, masters of puppet-shows, wild beasts, etc.  These, on
+receiving their passes, inscribe themselves, and take the oaths as spies;
+and are forced to send in their regular reports of what they hear or see.
+Prostitutes, who, all over this country, are under the necessity of
+paying for regular licenses, are obliged also to give information, from
+time to time, to the nearest police commissary of what they observe or
+what they know respecting their visitors, neighbours, etc.  The number of
+unfortunate women of this description who had taken out licenses during
+the year 12, or from September, 1803, to September, 1804, is officially
+known to have amounted to two hundred and twenty thousand, of whom forty
+thousand were employed by the armies.
+
+It is no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte has his secret spies upon his
+wife, his brothers, his sisters, his Ministers, Senators, and other
+public functionaries, and also upon his public spies.  These are all
+under his own immediate control and that of Duroc, who does the duty of
+his private Police Minister, and in whom he confides more than even in
+the members of his own family.  In imitation of their master, each of the
+other Bonapartes, and each of the Ministers, have their individual spies,
+and are watched in their turn by the spies of their secretaries, clerks,
+etc.  This infamous custom of espionage goes ad infinitum, and appertains
+almost to the establishment and to the suite of each man in place, who
+does not think himself secure a moment if he remains in ignorance of the
+transactions of his rivals, as well as of those of his equals and
+superiors.
+
+Fouche and Talleyrand are reported to have disagreed before Bonaparte on
+some subject or other, which is frequently the case.  The former,
+offended at some doubts thrown out about his intelligence, said to the
+latter:
+
+“I am so well served that I can tell you the name of every man or woman
+you have conversed with, both yesterday and today; where you saw them,
+and how long you remained with them or they with you.”
+
+“If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit,” retorted Talleyrand,
+“I am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already
+passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter.  I can
+inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who provided
+these dinners, and who is expected to provide your meats to-morrow and
+the day after.  I can whisper you, in confidence, who slept with Madame
+Fouche last night, and who has an appointment with her to-night.”
+
+Here Bonaparte interrupted them, in his usual dignified language: “Hold
+both your tongues; you are both great rogues, but I am at a loss to
+decide which is the greatest.”
+
+Without uttering a single syllable, Talleyrand made a profound reverence
+to Fouche.  Bonaparte smiled, and advised them to live upon good terms if
+they were desirous of keeping their places.
+
+A man of the name of Ducroux, who, under Robespierre, had from a barber
+been made a general, and afterwards broken for his ignorance, was engaged
+by Bonaparte as a private spy upon Fouche, who employed him in the same
+capacity upon Bonaparte.  His reports were always written, and delivered
+in person into the hands both of the Emperor and of his Minister.  One
+morning he, by mistake, gave to Bonaparte the report of him instead of
+that intended for him.  Bonaparte began to read: “Yesterday, at nine
+o’clock, the Emperor acted the complete part of a madman; he swore,
+stamped, kicked, foamed, roared--“, here poor Ducroux threw himself at
+Bonaparte’s feet, and called for mercy for the terrible blunder he had
+committed.
+
+“For whom,” asked Bonaparte, “did you intend this treasonable
+correspondence?  I suppose it is composed for some English or Russian
+agent, for Pitt or for Marcoff.  How long have you conspired with my
+enemies, and where are your accomplices?”
+
+“For God’s sake, hear me, Sire,” prayed Ducroux.  “Your Majesty’s enemies
+have always been mine.  The report is for one of your best friends; but
+were I to mention his name, he will ruin me.”
+
+“Speak out, or you die!” vociferated Bonaparte.
+
+“Well, Sire, it is for Fouche--for nobody else but Fouche.”
+
+Bonaparte then rang the bell for Duroc, whom he ordered to see Ducroux
+shut up in a dungeon, and afterwards to send for Fouche.  The Minister
+denied all knowledge of Ducroux, who, after undergoing several tortures,
+expiated his blunder upon the rack.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Pope, during his stay here, rose regularly every morning at
+five o’clock, and went to bed every night before ten.  The first hours of
+the day he passed in prayers, breakfasted after the Mass was over,
+transacted business till one, and dined at two.  Between three and four
+he took--his siesta, or nap; afterwards he attended the vespers, and when
+they were over he passed an hour with the Bonapartes, or admitted to his
+presence some members of the clergy.  The day was concluded, as it was
+begun, with some hours of devotion.
+
+Had Pius VII. possessed the character of a Pius VI., he would never have
+crossed the Alps; or had he been gifted with the spirit and talents of
+Sextus V. or Leo X., he would never have entered France to crown
+Bonaparte, without previously stipulating for himself that he should be
+put in possession of the sovereignty of Italy.  You can form no idea what
+great stress was laid on this act of His Holiness by the Bonaparte
+family, and what sacrifices were destined to be made had any serious and
+obstinate resistance been apprehended.  Threats were, indeed, employed
+personally against the Pope, and bribes distributed to the refractory
+members of the Sacred College; but it was no secret, either here or at
+Milan, that Cardinal Fesch had carte blanche with regard to the
+restoration of all provinces seized, since the war, from the Holy See, or
+full territorial indemnities in their place, at the expense of Naples and
+Tuscany; and, indeed, whatever the Roman pontiff has lost in Italy has
+been taken from him by Bonaparte alone, and the apparent generosity which
+policy and ambition required would, therefore, have merely been an act of
+justice.  Confiding foolishly in the honour and rectitude of Napoleon,
+without any other security than the assertion of Fesch, Pius VII., within
+a fortnight’s stay in France, found the great difference between the
+promises held out to him when residing as a Sovereign at Rome, and their
+accomplishment when he had so far forgotten himself and his sacred
+dignity as to inhabit as a guest the castle of the Tuileries.
+
+Pius VII. mentioned, the day after his arrival at Fontainebleau, that it
+would be a gratification to his own subjects were he enabled to
+communicate to them the restoration of the former ecclesiastical domains,
+as a free gift of the Emperor of the French, at their first conference,
+as they would then be as well convinced of Napoleon’s good faith as he
+was himself.  In answer, His Holiness was informed that the Emperor was
+unprepared to discuss political subjects, being totally occupied with the
+thoughts how to entertain worthily his high visitor, and to acknowledge
+becomingly the great honour done and the great happiness conferred on him
+by such a visit.  As soon as the ceremony of the coronation was over,
+everything, he hoped, would be arranged to the reciprocal satisfaction of
+both parties.
+
+About the middle of last December, Bonaparte was again asked to fix a day
+when the points of negotiation between him and the Pope could be
+discussed and settled.  Cardinal Caprara, who made this demand, was
+referred to Talleyrand, who denied having yet any instructions, though in
+daily expectation of them.  Thus the time went on until February, when
+Bonaparte informed the Pope of his determination to assume the crown of
+Italy, and of some new changes necessary, in consequence on the other
+side of the Alps.
+
+Either seduced by caresses, or blinded by his unaccountable partiality
+for Bonaparte, Pius VII., if left to himself, would not only have
+renounced all his former claims, but probably have made new sacrifices to
+this idol of his infatuation.  Fortunately, his counsellors were wiser
+and less deluded, otherwise the remaining patrimony of Saint Peter might
+now have constituted a part of Napoleon’s inheritance, in Italy.  “Am I
+not, Holy Father!” exclaimed the Emperor frequently, “your son, the work
+of your hand?  And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it
+not be shared with you--or rather, do you not share it with me?  Anything
+that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power uncertain
+or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you.  With me you will
+shine or be obscured, rise or fall.  Could you, therefore, hesitate (were
+I to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure) to remove the
+Papal See to Avignon, where it formerly was and continued for centuries,
+and to enlarge the limits of my kingdom of Italy with the Ecclesiastical
+States?  Can you believe my throne at Milan safe as long as it is not the
+sole throne of Italy?  Do you expect to govern at Rome when I cease to
+reign at Milan?  No, Holy Father! the pontiff who placed the crown on my
+head, should it be shaken, will fall to rise no more.”  If what Cardinal
+Caprara said can be depended upon, Bonaparte frequently used to
+intimidate or flatter the Pope in this manner.
+
+The representations of Cardinal Caprara changed Napoleon’s first
+intention of being again crowned by the Pope as a King of Italy.  His
+crafty Eminence observed that, according to the Emperor’s own
+declaration, it was not intended that the crowns of France and Italy
+should continue united.  But were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by
+the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the
+factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion
+of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps
+make even the crown of the French Empire unstable.  He did not deny that
+Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was
+performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the
+Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy.
+Might not circumstances turn out so favourably for Napoleon the First
+that he also might be inaugurated an Emperor of the Germans as well as of
+the French?  This last compliment, or prophecy, as Bonaparte’s courtiers
+call it (what a prophet a Caprara!), had the desired effect, as it
+flattered equally Napoleon’s ambition and vanity.  For fear, however, of
+Talleyrand and other anti-Catholic counsellors, who wanted him to
+consider the Pope merely as his first almoner, and to treat him as all
+other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as
+possible packing for Rome.  Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet,
+should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental
+Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can,
+without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second
+Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time
+death does not put a period to his encroachments and gigantic plans.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereigns have, since the Revolution, displayed more
+grandeur of soul, and evinced more firmness of character, than the
+present King and Queen of Naples.  Encompassed by a revolutionary volcano
+more dangerous than the physical one, though disturbed at home and
+defeated abroad, they have neither been disgraced nor dishonoured. They
+have, indeed, with all other Italian Princes, suffered territorial and
+pecuniary losses; but these were not yielded through cowardice or
+treachery, but enforced by an absolute necessity, the consequence of the
+desertion or inefficacy of allies.
+
+But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were
+able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian
+philosophers.  Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved
+himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured
+him, and of the hatred with which he has been honoured by all
+revolutionists--the natural and irreconcilable enemies of all legitimate
+sovereignty.
+
+Chevalier Acton is the son of an Irish physician, who first was
+established at Besancon in France, and afterwards at Leghorn in Italy. He
+is indebted for his present elevation to his own merit and to the
+penetration of the Queen of Sardinia, who discovered in him, when young,
+those qualities which have since distinguished him as a faithful
+counsellor and an able Minister.  As loyal as wise, he was, from 1789, an
+enemy to the French Revolution.  He easily foresaw that the specious
+promise of regeneration held out by impostors or fools to delude the
+ignorant, the credulous and the weak, would end in that universal
+corruption and general overthrow which we since have witnessed, and the
+effects of which our grandchildren will mourn.
+
+When our Republic, in April, 1792, declared war against Austria, and
+when, in the September following, the dominions of His Sardinian Majesty
+were invaded by our troops, the neutrality of Naples continued, and was
+acknowledged by our Government.  On the 16th of December following, our
+fleet from Toulon, however, cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, and a
+grenadier of the name of Belleville was landed as an Ambassador of the
+French Republic, and threatened a bombardment in case the demands he
+presented in a note were not acceded to within twenty-four hours.  Being
+attacked in time of peace, and taken by surprise, the Court of Naples was
+unable to make any resistance, and Chevalier Acton informed our grenadier
+Ambassador that this note had been laid before his Sovereign, who had
+ordered him to sign an agreement in consequence.
+
+When in February, 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own
+safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with
+your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our
+Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to
+Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking
+Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of our emissary.
+
+Whenever our Government has, by the success of our arms, been enabled to
+dictate to Naples, the removal of Acton has been insisted upon; but
+though he has ceased to transact business ostensibly as a Minister, his
+influence has always, and deservedly, continued unimpaired, and he still
+enjoys the just confidence and esteem of his Prince.
+
+But is His Sicilian Majesty equally well represented at the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud as served in his own capital?  I have told you before that
+Bonaparte is extremely particular in his acceptance of foreign diplomatic
+agents, and admits none near his person whom he does not believe to be
+well inclined to him.
+
+Marquis de Gallo, the Ambassador of the King of the Two Sicilies to the
+Emperor of the French, is no novice in the diplomatic career.  His
+Sovereign has employed him for these fifteen years in the most delicate
+negotiations, and nominated him in May, 1795, a Minister of the Foreign
+Department, and a successor of Chevalier Acton, an honour which he
+declined.  In the summer and autumn, 1797, Marquis de Gallo assisted at
+the conferences at Udine, and signed, with the Austrian
+plenipotentiaries, the Peace of Campo Formio, on the 17th of October,
+1797.
+
+During 1798, 1799, and 1800 he resided as Neapolitan Ambassador at
+Vienna, and was again entrusted by his Sovereign with several important
+transactions with Austria and Russia.  After a peace had been agreed to
+between France and the Two Sicilies, in March, 1801, and the Court of
+Naples had every reason to fear, and of course to please, the Court of
+St. Cloud, he obtained his present appointment, and is one of the few
+foreign Ambassadors here who has escaped both Bonaparte’s private
+admonitions in the diplomatic circle and public lectures in Madame
+Bonaparte’s drawing-room.
+
+This escape is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government
+is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls
+it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and
+enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has
+resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity that demand
+our admiration.
+
+It is said that the Marquis de Gallo is not entirely free from some
+taints of modern philosophy, and that he, therefore, does not consider
+the consequences of our innovations so fatal as most loyal men judge
+them; nor thinks a sans-culotte Emperor more dangerous to civilized
+society than a sans-culotte sovereign people.
+
+It is evident from the names and rank of its partisans that the
+Revolution of Naples in 1799 was different in many respects from that of
+every other country in Europe; for, although the political convulsions
+seem to have originated among the middle classes of the community, the
+extremes of society were everywhere else made to act against each other;
+the rabble being the first to triumph, and the nobles to succumb.  But
+here, on the contrary, the lazzaroni, composed of the lowest portion of
+the population of a luxurious capital, appear to have been the most
+strenuous, and, indeed, almost the only supporters of royalty; while the
+great families, instead of being indignant at novelties which levelled
+them, in point of political rights, with the meanest subject, eagerly
+embraced the opportunity of altering that form of Government which alone
+made them great.  It is, however, but justice to say that, though Marquis
+de Gallo gained the good graces of Bonaparte and of France in 1797, he
+was never, directly or indirectly, inculpated in the revolutionary
+transactions of his countrymen in 1799, when he resided at Vienna; and
+indeed, after all, it is not improbable that he disguises his real
+sentiments the better to, serve his country, and by that means has
+imposed on Bonaparte and acquired his favour.
+
+The address and manners of a courtier are allowed Marquis de Gallo by all
+who know him, though few admit that he possesses any talents as a
+statesman.  He is said to have read a great deal, to possess a good
+memory and no bad judgment; but that, notwithstanding this, all his
+knowledge is superficial.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have perhaps heard that Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his
+brothers and sisters, was last Christmas married by the Pope according to
+the Roman Catholic rite, being previously only united according to the
+municipal laws of the French Republic, which consider marriage only as a
+civil contract.  During the last two months of His Holiness’s residence
+here, hardly a day passed that he was not petitioned to perform the same
+ceremony for our conscientious grand functionaries and courtiers, which
+he, however, according to the Emperor’s desire, declined.  But his
+Cardinals were not under the same restrictions, and to an attentive
+observer who has watched the progress of the Revolution and not lost
+sight of its actors, nothing could appear more ridiculous, nothing could
+inspire more contempt of our versatility and inconsistency, than to
+remark among the foremost to demand the nuptial benediction, a
+Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Real, an Augereau, a Chaptal, a Reubel, a Lasnes,
+a Bessieres, a Thuriot, a Treilhard, a Merlin, with a hundred other
+equally notorious revolutionists, who were, twelve or fifteen years ago,
+not only the first to declaim against religious ceremonies as ridiculous,
+but against religion itself as useless, whose motives produced, and whose
+votes sanctioned, those decrees of the legislature which proscribed the
+worship, together with its priests and sectaries. But then the fashion of
+barefaced infidelity was as much the order of the day as that of external
+sanctity is at present.  I leave to casuists the decision whether to the
+morals of the people, naked atheism, exposed with all its deformities, is
+more or less hurtful than concealed atheism, covered with the garb of
+piety; but for my part I think the noonday murderer less guilty and much
+less detestable than the midnight assassin who stabs in the dark.
+
+A hundred anecdotes are daily related of our new saints and fashionable
+devotees.  They would be laughable were they not scandalous, and
+contemptible did they not add duplicity to our other vices.
+
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass, and on every
+Sunday or holiday they regularly attend at vespers, when, of course, all
+those who wish to be distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their
+flattery never neglect to be present.  In the evening of last Christmas
+Day, the Imperial chapel was, as usual, early crowded in expectation of
+Their Majesties, when the chamberlain, Salmatoris, entered, and said to
+the captain of the guard, loud enough to be heard by the audience, “The
+Emperor and the Empress have just resolved not to come here to-night, His
+Majesty being engaged by some unexpected business, and the Empress not
+wishing to come without her consort.”  In ten minutes the chapel was
+emptied of every person but the guards, the priests, and three old women
+who had nowhere else to pass an hour.  At the arrival of our Sovereigns,
+they were astonished at the unusual vacancy, and indignantly regarded
+each other.  After vespers were over, one of Bonaparte’s spies informed
+him of the cause, when, instead of punishing the despicable and
+hypocritical courtiers, or showing them any signs of his displeasure, he
+ordered Salmatoris under arrest, who would have experienced a complete
+disgrace had not his friend Duroc interfered and made his peace.
+
+At another time, on a Sunday, Fouche entered the chapel in the midst of
+the service, and whispered to Bonaparte, who immediately beckoned to his
+lord-in-waiting and to Duroc.  These both left the Imperial chapel, and
+returning in a few minutes at the head of five grenadiers, entered the
+grand gallery, generally frequented by the most scrupulous devotees, and
+seized every book.  The cause of this domiciliary visit was an anonymous
+communication received by the Minister of Police, stating that libels
+against the Imperial family, bound in the form of Prayer-books, had been
+placed there.  No such libels were, however, found; but of one hundred
+and sixty pretended breviaries, twenty-eight were volumes of novels,
+sixteen were poems, and eleven were indecent books.  It is not necessary
+to add that the proprietors of these edifying works never reclaimed them.
+The opinions are divided here, whether this curious discovery originated
+in the malice of Fouche, or whether Talleyrand took this method of duping
+his rival, and at the same time of gratifying his own malignity.  Certain
+it is that Fouche was severely reprimanded for the transaction, and that
+Bonaparte was highly offended at the disclosure.
+
+The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously
+devout, nor so basely perverse.  They go to church as to the play, to
+gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to
+admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their
+attendance.  Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of
+religious duties.  Our revolutionary charlatans have as much brutalized
+their understanding as corrupted their hearts.  They heard the Grand Mass
+said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly heard
+Robespierre proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and they
+looked at the Imperial processions with the same insensibility as they
+once saw the daily caravans of victims passing for execution.
+
+Even in Bonaparte’s own guard, and among the officers of his household
+troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go to
+any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now,
+after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the Mass
+as to a parade or to a review.  With any other people, Bonaparte would
+not so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and forced
+military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day were
+encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.
+
+On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes
+d’Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the
+sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell
+into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy.  After being a
+little recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would
+injure him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause
+of his accident and terror: “Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d of
+September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from
+which I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the
+sacrament from my hands.”  When this occurrence was reported to
+Bonaparte, Ledoux was dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported, and
+the Grand Vicar Clauset sent to the Temple, for the scandal their
+indiscretion had caused.  This act was certainly as unjust towards him
+who was bayoneted at the altar, as towards those who served the altar
+under the protection of the bayonets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your
+country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could
+nowhere justly excite surprise.  We had crossed the Rhine seven months
+before to seize the Duc d’Enghien; and when any prey invited, the passing
+of the Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former outrage, of
+audacity on our part, and of endurance or indifference on the part of
+other Continental States.  Talleyrand’s note at Aix-la-Chapelle had also
+informed Europe that we had adopted a new and military diplomacy, and, in
+confounding power with right, would respect no privileges at variance
+with our ambition, interest or, suspicions, nor any independence it was
+thought useful or convenient for us to invade.
+
+It was reported here, at the time, that Bonaparte was much offended with
+General Frere, who commanded this political expedition, for permitting
+Sir George’s servant to accompany his master, as Fouche and Real had
+already tortures prepared and racks waiting, and after forcing your agent
+to speak out, would have announced his sudden death, either by his own
+hands or by a coup-de-sang, before any Prussian note could require his
+release.  The known morality of our Government must have removed all
+doubts of the veracity of this assertion; a man might, besides, from the
+fatigues of a long journey, or from other causes, expire suddenly; but
+the exit of two, in the same circumstances, would have been thought at
+least extraordinary, even by our friends, and suspicious by our enemies.
+
+The official declaration of Rheinhard (our Minister to the Circle of
+Lower Saxony) to the Senate at Hamburg, in which he disavowed all
+knowledge on the subject of the capture of Sir George Rumbold, occasioned
+his disgrace.  This man, a subject of the Elector of Wurtemberg by birth,
+is one of the negative accomplices of the criminals of France who, since
+the Revolution, have desolated Europe.  He began in 1792 his diplomatic
+career, under Chauvelin and Talleyrand, in London, and has since been the
+tool of every faction in power.  In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to
+the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of
+rally to all the philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other
+revolutionary amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark,
+and Sweden then abounded.
+
+A citizen of Hamburg--or rather, of the world--of the name of Seveking,
+bestowed on him the hand of a sister; and though he is not accused of
+avarice, some of the contributions extorted by our Government from the
+neutral Hanse Towns are said to have been left behind in his coffers
+instead of being forwarded to this capital.  Either on this account, or
+for some other reason, he was recalled from Hamburg in January, 1797, and
+remained unemployed until the latter part of 1798, when he was sent as
+Minister to Tuscany.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, Talleyrand was forced by the Jacobins to
+resign his place as a Minister of the Foreign Department, he had the
+adroitness to procure Rheinhard to be nominated his successor, so that,
+though no longer nominally the Minister, he still continued to influence
+the decisions of our Government as much as if still in office, because,
+though not without parts, Rheinhard has neither energy of character nor
+consistency of conduct.  He is so much accustomed, and wants so much to
+be governed, that in 1796, at Hamburg, even the then emigrants, Madame de
+Genlis and General Valence, directed him, when he was not ruled or
+dictated to by his wife or brother-in-law.
+
+In 1800 Bonaparte sent him as a representative to the Helvetian Republic,
+and in 1802, again to Hamburg, where he was last winter superseded by
+Bourrienne, and ordered to an inferior station at the: Electoral Court at
+Dresden.  Rheinhard will never become one of those daring diplomatic
+banditti whom revolutionary Governments always employ in preference.  He
+has some moral principles, and, though not religious, is rather
+scrupulous.  He would certainly sooner resign than undertake to remove by
+poison, or by the steel of a bravo, a rival of his own or a person
+obnoxious to his employers.  He would never, indeed, betray the secrets
+of his Government if he understood they intended to rob a despatch or to
+atop a messenger; but no allurements whatever would induce him to head
+the parties perpetrating these acts of our modern diplomacy.
+
+Our present Minister at Hamburg (Bourrienne) is far from being so nice. A
+revolutionist from the beginning of the Revolution, he shared, with the
+partisans of La Fayette, imprisonment under Robespierre, and escaped
+death only by emigration.  Recalled afterwards by his friend, the late
+Director (Barras), he acted as a kind of secretary to him until 1796,
+when Bonaparte demanded him, having known him at the military college.
+During all Bonaparte’s campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he was his
+sole and confidential secretary--a situation which he lost in 1802, when
+Talleyrand denounced his corruption and cupidity because he had rivalled
+him in speculating in the funds and profiting by the information which
+his place afforded him.  He was then made a Counsellor of State, but in
+1803 he was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of one of our principal
+houses to the amount of a million of livres--and, from his correspondence
+with it, some reasons appeared for the suspicion that he frequently had
+committed a breach of confidence against his master, who, after erasing
+his name from among the Counsellors of State, had him conveyed a prisoner
+to the Temple, where he remained six months.  A small volume, called Le
+Livre Rouge of the Consular Court, made its appearance about that time,
+and contained some articles which gave Bonaparte reason to suppose that
+Bourrienne was its author.  On being questioned by the Grand Judge
+Regnier and the Minister Fouce, before whom he was carried, he avowed
+that he had written it, but denied that he had any intention of making it
+public.  As to its having found its way to the press during his
+confinement, that could only be ascribed to the ill-will or treachery of
+those police agents who inspected his papers and put their seals upon
+them.  “Tell Bonaparte,” said he, “that, had I been inclined to injure
+him in the public opinion, I should not have stooped to such trifles as
+Le Livre Rouge, while I have deposited with a friend his original orders,
+letters, and other curious documents as materials for an edifying history
+of our military hospitals during the campaigns of Italy and Syria all
+authentic testimonies of his humanity for the wounded and dying French
+soldiers.”
+
+After the answers of this interrogatory had been laid before Bonaparte,
+his brother Joseph was sent to the Temple to negotiate with Bourrienne,
+who was offered his liberty and a prefecture if he would give up all the
+original papers that, as a private secretary, he had had opportunity to
+collect.
+
+“These papers,” answered Bourrienne, “are my only security against your
+brother’s wrath and his assassins.  Were I weak enough to deliver them up
+to-day, to-morrow, probably, I should no longer be counted among the
+living; but I have now taken my measures so effectually that, were I
+murdered to-day, these originals would be printed to-morrow.  If Napoleon
+does not confide in my word of honour, he may trust to an assurance of
+discretion, with which my own interest is nearly connected.  If he
+suspects me of having wronged him, he is convinced also of the eminent
+services I have rendered him, sufficient surely to outweigh his present
+suspicion.  Let him again employ me in any post worthy of him and of me,
+and he shall soon see how much I will endeavour to regain his
+confidence.”
+
+Shortly afterwards Bourrienne was released, and a pension, equal to the
+salary of a Counsellor of State; was granted him until some suitable
+place became vacant.  On Champagny’s being appointed a Minister of the
+Home Department, the embassy at Vienna was demanded by Bourrienne, but
+refused, as previously promised to La Rochefoucauld, our late Minister at
+Dresden.  When Rheinhard, in a kind of disgrace, was transferred to that
+relatively insignificant post, Bourrienne was ordered, with extensive
+instructions, to Hamburg.  The Senate soon found the difference between a
+timid and honest Minister, and an unprincipled and crafty intriguer.  New
+loans were immediately required from Hanover; but hardly were these
+acquitted, than fresh extortions were insisted on.  In some secret
+conferences Bourrienne is, however, said to have hinted that some
+douceurs were expected for alleviating the rigour of his instructions.
+This hint has, no doubt, been taken, because he suddenly altered his
+conduct, and instead of hunting the purses of the Germans, pursued the
+persons of his emigrated countrymen; and, in a memorial, demanded the
+expulsion of all Frenchmen who were not registered and protected by him,
+under pretence that every one of them who declined the honour of being a
+subject of Bonaparte, must be a traitor against the French Government and
+his country.
+
+Bourrienne is now stated to have connected himself with several
+stock-jobbers, both in Germany, Holland, and England; and already to have
+pocketed considerable sums by such connections.  It is, however, not to
+be forgotten that several houses have been ruined in this capital by the
+profits allowed him, who always refused to share their losses, but,
+whatever were the consequences, enforced to its full amount the payment
+of that value which he chose to set on his communications.
+
+A place in France would, no doubt, have been preferable to Bourrienne,
+particularly one near the person of Bonaparte.  But if nothing else
+prevented the accomplishment of his wishes, his long familiarity with all
+the Bonapartes, whom he always treated as equals, and even now (with the
+exception of Napoleon) does not think his superiors, will long remain an
+insurmountable barrier.
+
+I cannot comprehend how Bonaparte (who is certainly no bad judge of men)
+could so long confide in Bourrienne, who, with the usual presumption of
+my countrymen, is continually boasting, to a degree that borders on
+indiscretion, and, by an artful questioner, may easily be lead to
+overstep those bounds.  Most of the particulars of his quarrel with
+Napoleon I heard him relate himself, as a proof of his great consequence,
+in a company of forty individuals, many of whom were unknown to him. On
+the first discovery which Bonaparte made of Bourrienne’s infidelity,
+Talleyrand complimented him upon not having suffered from it.  “Do you
+not see,” answered Bonaparte, “that it is also one of the extraordinary
+gifts of my extraordinary good fortune?
+
+“Even traitors are unable to betray me.  Plots respect me as much as
+bullets.”  I need not tell you that Fortune is the sole divinity
+sincerely worshipped by Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Joseph Bonaparte leads a much more retired life, and sees less
+company, than any of his brothers or sisters.  Except the members of his
+own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph those
+regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame Louis
+Bonaparte have.  His hospitality is, however, greater at his countryseat
+Morfontaine than at his hotel here.  Those whom he likes, or does not
+mistrust (who, by the bye, are very few), may visit him without much
+formality in the country, and prolong their stay, according to their own
+inclination or discretion; but they must come without their servants, or
+send them away on their arrival.
+
+As soon as an agreeable visitor presents himself, it is the etiquette of
+the house to consider him as an inmate; but to allow him at the same time
+a perfect liberty to dispose of his hours and his person as suits his
+convenience or caprice.  In this extensive and superb mansion a suite of
+apartments is assigned him, with a valet-de--chambre, a lackey, a
+coachman, a groom, and a jockey, all under his own exclusive command. He
+has allotted him a chariot, a gig, and riding horses, if he prefers such
+an exercise.  A catalogue is given him of the library of the chateau; and
+every morning he is informed what persons compose the company at
+breakfast, dinner, and supper, and of the hours of these different
+repasts.  A bill of fare is at the same time presented to him, and he is
+asked to point out those dishes to which he gives the preference, and to
+declare whether he chooses to join the company or to be served in his own
+rooms.
+
+During the summer season, players from the different theatres of Paris
+are paid to perform three times in the week; and each guest, according to
+the period of his arrival, is asked, in his turn, to command either a
+comedy or a tragedy, a farce or a ballet.  Twice in the week concerts are
+executed by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the
+week invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or
+accepted from them.
+
+Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge
+et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games
+of hazard.  The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who
+advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the loss.
+Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from night
+till morning, without interruption, as no one interferes.  Should Joseph
+hear that any person has been too severely treated by Fortune, or
+suspects that he has not much cash remaining, some rouleaux of napoleons
+d’or are placed on the table of his dressing-room, which he may use or
+leave untouched, as he judges proper.
+
+The hours of Joseph Bonaparte are neither so late as yours in England,
+nor so early as they were formerly in France.  Breakfast is ready served
+at ten o’clock, dinner at four, and supper at nine.  Before midnight he
+retires to bed with his family, but visitors do as they like and follow
+their own usual hours, and their servants are obliged to wait for them.
+
+When any business calls Joseph away, either to preside in the Senate
+here, or to travel in the provinces, he notifies the visitors, telling
+them at the same time not to displace themselves on account of his
+absence, but wait till his return, as they would not observe any
+difference in the economy of his house, of which Madame Joseph always
+does the honours, or, in her absence, some lady appointed by her.
+
+Last year, when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly
+four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant.  On his
+return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of
+Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the
+bottle.  Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors
+and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and burgundy
+so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not heartily
+intoxicated.  But the best of the story is that he employed his mornings
+in composing a poem holding out to abhorrence the disgusting vice of
+drunkenness, and presented it to Joseph, requesting permission to
+dedicate it to him when published.  To those who have read it, or only
+seen extracts from it, the compilation appears far from being
+contemptible, but Joseph still keeps the copy, though he has made the
+author a present of one hundred napoleons d’or, and procured him a place
+of an amanuensis in the chancellory of the Senate, having resolved never
+to accept any dedication, but wishing also not to hurt the feelings of
+the author by a refusal.
+
+In a chateau where so many visitors of licentious and depraved morals
+meet, of both sexes, and where such an unlimited liberty reigns,
+intrigues must occur, and have of course not seldom furnished materials
+for the scandalous chronicle.  Even Madame Joseph herself has either been
+gallant or calumniated.  Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of
+Eugene de Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively
+indebted to the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even
+fought a duel concerning the right of paternity.  Eugene de Beauharnais
+never was a great favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved manners
+and prudence form too great a contrast to his noisy and blundering way to
+accord with each other.  Before he set out for Italy, it was well known
+in our fashionable circles that he had been interdicted the house of his
+uncle, and that no reconciliation took place, notwithstanding the
+endeavours of Madame Napoleon.  To humble him still more, Joseph even
+nominated la Fond-Blaniac an equerry to his wife, who, therefore, easily
+consoled herself for the departure of her dear nephew.
+
+The husband of Madame Miot (one of Madame Joseph’s ladies-in-waiting) was
+not so patient, nor such a philosopher as Joseph Bonaparte.  Some
+charitable person having reported in the company of a ‘bonne amie’ of
+Miot, that his wife did not pass her nights in solitude, but that she
+sought consolation among the many gallants and disengaged visitors at
+Morfontaine, he determined to surprise her.  It was past eleven o’clock
+at night when his arrival was announced to Joseph, who had just retired
+to his closet.  Madame Miot had been in bed ever since nine, ill of a
+migraine, and her husband was too affectionate not to be the first to
+inform her of his presence, without permitting anybody previously to
+disturb her.  With great reluctance, Madame Miot’s maid delivered the key
+of her rooms, while she accompanied him with a light.  In the antechamber
+he found a hat and a greatcoat, and in the closet adjoining the bedroom,
+a coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and
+slippers.  Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and
+her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband
+began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the
+closet.  A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so
+vigorously, that the husband called out “Murder! murder!”  with all his
+might.  The chateau was instantly in an uproar, and the apartments
+crowded with half-dressed and half-naked lovers.  Joseph Bonaparte alone
+was able to separate the combatants; and inquiring the cause of the riot,
+assured them that he would suffer no scandal and no intrigues in his
+house, without seriously resenting it.  An explanation being made, Madame
+Miot was looked for but in vain; and the maid declared that, being warned
+by a letter from Paris of her husband’s jealousy and determination to
+surprise her, her mistress had reposed herself in her room; while, to
+punish the ungenerous suspicions of her husband, she had persuaded
+Captain d’ Horteuil to occupy her place in her own bed.  The maid had no
+sooner finished her deposition, than her mistress made her appearance and
+upbraided her husband severely, in which she was cordially joined by the
+spectators.  She inquired if, on seeing the dress of a gentleman, he had
+also discovered the attire of a female; and she appealed to Captain d’
+Horteuil whether he had not the two preceding nights also slept in her
+bed.  To this he, of course, assented; adding that, had M. Miot attacked
+him the first night, he would not then perhaps have been so roughly
+handled as now; for then he was prepared for a visit, which this night
+was rather unexpected.  This connubial farce ended by Miot begging pardon
+of his wife and her gallant; the former of whom, after much entreaty by
+Joseph, at last consented to share with him her bed.  But being
+disfigured with two black eyes and suffering from several bruises, and
+also ashamed of his unfashionable behaviour, he continued invisible for
+ten days afterwards, and returned to this city as he had left it, by
+stealth.
+
+This Niot was a spy under Robespierre, and is a Counsellor of State under
+Bonaparte.  Without bread, as well as without a home, he was, from the
+beginning of the Revolution, one of the most ardent patriots, and the
+first republican Minister in Tuscany.  After the Sovereign of that
+country had, in 1793, joined the League, Miot returned to France, and
+was, for his want of address to negotiate as a Minister, shut up to
+perform the part of a spy in the Luxembourg,  then transformed into a
+prison for suspected persons.  Thanks to his patriotism, upwards of two
+hundred individuals of both sexes were denounced, transferred to the
+Conciergerie prison, and afterwards guillotined.  After that, until 1799,
+he continued so despised that no faction would accept him for an
+accomplice; but in the November of that year, after Bonaparte had
+declared himself a First Consul, Miot was appointed a tribune, an office
+from which he was advanced, in 1802, to be a Counsellor of State. As Miot
+squanders away his salary with harlots and in gambling-houses, and is
+pursued by creditors he neither will nor can pay, it was merely from
+charity that his wife was received among the other ladies of Madame
+Joseph Bonaparte’s household.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding the ties of consanguinity, honour, duty,
+interest, and gratitude, which bound the Spanish Bourbons to the cause of
+the Bourbons of France, no monarch has rendered more service to the cause
+of rebellion, and done more harm to the cause of royalty, than the King
+of Spain.
+
+But here, again, you must understand me.  When I speak of Princes whose
+talents are known not to be brilliant, whose intellects are known to be
+feeble, and whose good intentions are rendered null by a want of firmness
+of character or consistency of conduct; while I deplore their weakness
+and the consequent misfortunes of their contemporaries, I lay all the
+blame on their wicked or ignorant counsellors; because, if no Ministers
+were fools or traitors, no Sovereigns would tremble on their thrones, and
+no subjects dare to shake their foundation.  Had Providence blessed
+Charles IV. of Spain with the judgment in selecting his Ministers, and
+the constancy of persevering in his choice, possessed by your George
+III.; had the helm of Spain been in the firm and able hands of a
+Grenville, a Windham, and a Pitt, the Cabinet of Madrid would never have
+been oppressed by the yoke of the Cabinet of St. Cloud, nor paid a heavy
+tribute for its bondage, degrading as well as ruinous.
+
+“This is the age of upstarts,” said Talleyrand to his cousin, Prince de
+Chalais, who reproached him for an unbecoming servility to low and vile
+personages; “and I prefer bowing to them to being trampled upon and
+crushed by them.”  Indeed, as far as I remember, nowhere in history are
+hitherto recorded so many low persons who, from obscurity and meanness,
+have suddenly and at once attained rank and notoriety.  Where do we read
+of such a numerous crew of upstart Emperors, Kings, grand pensionaries,
+directors, Imperial Highnesses, Princes, Field-marshals, generals,
+Senators, Ministers, governors, Cardinals, etc., as we now witness
+figuring upon the theatre of Europe, and who chiefly decide on the
+destiny of nations?  Among these, several are certainly to be found whose
+superior parts have made them worthy to pierce the crowd and to shake off
+their native mud; but others again, and by far the greatest number of
+these ‘novi homines’, owe their present elevation to shameless intrigues
+or atrocious crimes.
+
+The Prime Minister--or rather, the viceroy of Spain, the Prince of
+Peace--belongs to the latter class.  From a man in the ranks of the
+guards he was promoted to a general-in-chief, and from a harp player in
+antechambers to a president of the councils of a Prince; and that within
+the short period of six years.  Such a fortune is not common; but to be
+absolutely without capacity as well as virtue, genius as well as good
+breeding, and, nevertheless, to continue in an elevation so little
+merited, and in a place formerly so subject to changes and so unstable,
+is a fortune that no upstart ever before experienced in Spain.
+
+An intrigue of his elder brother with the present Queen, then Princess of
+Asturia, which was discovered by the King, introduced him first at Court
+as a harp player, and, when his brother was exiled, he was entrusted with
+the correspondence of the Princess with her gallant.  After she had
+ascended the throne, he thought it more profitable to be the lover than
+the messenger, and contrived, therefore, to supplant his brother in the
+royal favour.  Promotions and riches were consequently heaped upon him,
+and, what is surprising, the more undisguised the partiality of the Queen
+was, the greater the attachment of the King displayed itself; and it has
+ever since been an emulation between the royal couple who should the most
+forget and vilify birth and supremacy by associating this man not only in
+the courtly pleasures, but in the functions of Sovereignty.  Had he been
+gifted with sound understanding, or possessed any share of delicacy,
+generosity, or discretion, he would, while he profited by their imprudent
+condescension, have prevented them from exposing their weaknesses and
+frailties to a discussion and ridicule among courtiers, and from becoming
+objects of humiliation and scandal among the people.  He would have
+warned them of the danger which at all times attends the publicity of
+foibles and vices of Princes, but particularly in the present times of
+trouble and innovations.  He would have told them: “Make me great and
+wealthy, but not at the expense of your own grandeur or of the loyalty of
+your people.  Do not treat an humble subject as an equal, nor suffer Your
+Majesties, whom Providence destined to govern a high-spirited nation, to
+be openly ruled by one born to obey.  I am too dutiful not to lay aside
+my private vanity when the happiness of my King and the tranquillity of
+my fellow subjects are at stake.  I am already too high.  In descending a
+little, I shall not only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in
+the opinion of posterity.  Every step I am advancing undermines your
+throne.  In retreating a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never
+injure it.”  But I beg your pardon for this digression, and for putting
+the language of dignified reason into the mouth of a man as corrupt as he
+is imbecile.
+
+Do not suppose, because the Prince of Peace is no friend of my nation,
+that I am his enemy.  No!  Had he shown himself a true patriot, a friend
+of his own country, and of his too liberal Prince, or even of monarchy in
+general, or of anybody else but himself--although I might have
+disapproved of his policy, if he has any--I would never have lashed the
+individual for the acts of the Minister.  But you must have observed,
+with me, that never before his administration was the Cabinet of Madrid
+worse conducted at home or more despised abroad; the Spanish Monarch more
+humbled or Spanish subjects more wretched; the Spanish power more
+dishonoured or the Spanish resources worse employed.  Never, before the
+treaty with France of 1796, concluded by this wiseacre (which made him a
+Prince of Peace, and our Government the Sovereign of Spain), was the
+Spanish monarchy reduced to such a lamentable dilemma as to be forced
+into an expensive war without a cause, and into a disgraceful peace, not
+only unprofitable, but absolutely disadvantageous.  Never before were its
+treasures distributed among its oppressors to support their tyranny, nor
+its military and naval forces employed to fight the battles of rebellion.
+The loyal subjects of Spain have only one hope left.  The delicate state
+of his present Majesty’s health does not promise a much longer
+continuance of his reign, and the Prince of Asturia is too well informed
+to endure the guidance of the most ignorant Minister that ever was
+admitted into the Cabinet and confidence of a Sovereign.  It is more than
+probable that under a new reign the misfortunes of the Prince of Peace
+will inspire as much compassion as his rapid advancement has excited
+astonishment and indignation.
+
+A Cabinet thus badly directed cannot be expected to have representatives
+abroad either of abilities or patriotism.  The Admiral and General
+Gravina, who but lately left this capital as an Ambassador from the Court
+of Spain to assume the command of a Spanish fleet, is more valiant than
+wise, and more an enemy of your country than a friend of his own.  He is
+a profound admirer of Bonaparte’s virtues and successes, and was, during
+his residence, one of the most ostentatiously awkward courtiers of
+Napoleon the First.  It is said that he has the modesty and loyalty to
+wish to become a Spanish Bonaparte, and that he promises to restore by
+his genius and exploits the lost lustre of the Spanish monarchy.  When
+this was reported to Talleyrand, he smiled with contempt; but when it was
+told to Bonaparte, he stamped with rage at the impudence of the Spaniard
+in daring to associate his name of acquired and established greatness
+with his own impertinent schemes of absurdities and impossibilities.
+
+In the summer of 1793, Gravina commanded a division of the Spanish
+fleet in the Mediterranean, of which Admiral Langara was the
+commander-in-chief.  At the capitulation of Toulon, after the combined
+English and Spanish forces had taken possession of it, when Rear-Admiral
+Goodall was declared governor, Gravina was made the commandant of the
+troops.  At the head of these he often fought bravely in different
+sorties, and on the 1st of October was wounded at the re-capture of Fort
+Pharon.  He complains still of having suffered insults or neglect from
+the English, and even of having been exposed unnecessarily to the fire
+and sword of the enemy merely because he was a patriot as well as an
+envied or suspected ally.  His inveteracy against your country takes its
+date, no doubt, from the siege of Toulon, or perhaps, from its
+evacuation.
+
+When, in May, 1794, our troops were advancing towards Collioure, he was
+sent with a squadron to bring it succours, but he arrived too late, and
+could not save that important place.  He was not more successful at the
+beginning of the campaign of 1795 at Rosa, where he had only time to
+carry away the artillery before the enemy entered.  In August, that year,
+during the absence of Admiral Massaredo, he assumed ad interim the
+command of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean; but in the December
+following he was disgraced, arrested, and shut up as a State prisoner.
+
+During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the
+autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and
+after the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St.
+Cloud, Chevalier d’ Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was
+nominated both his successor and a representative of the King of Etruria.
+Among the members of our diplomatic corps, he was considered somewhat of
+a Spanish gasconader and a bully.  He more frequently boasted of his
+wounds and battles than of his negotiations or conferences, though he
+pretended, indeed, to shine as much in the Cabinet as in the field.
+
+In his suite were two Spanish women, one about forty, and the other about
+twenty years of age.  Nobody knew what to make of them, as they were
+treated neither as wives, mistresses, nor servants; and they avowed
+themselves to be no relations.  After a residence here of some weeks, he
+was, by superior orders, waylaid one night at the opera, by a young and
+beautiful dancing girl of the name of Barrois, who engaged him to take
+her into keeping.  He hesitated, indeed, for some time; at last, however,
+love got the better of his scruples, and he furnished for her an elegant
+apartment on the new Boulevard.  On the day he carried her there, he was
+accompanied by the chaplain of the Spanish Legation; and told her that,
+previous to any further intimacy, she must be married to him, as his
+religious principles did not permit him to cohabit with a woman who was
+not his wife.  At the same time he laid before her an agreement to sign,
+by which she bound herself never to claim him as a husband before her
+turn--that is to say, until sixteen other women, to whom he had been
+previously married, were dead.  She made no opposition, either to the
+marriage or to the conditions annexed to it.  This girl had a sweetheart
+of the name of Valere, an actor at one of the little theatres on the
+Boulevards, to whom she communicated her adventure.  He advised her to be
+scrupulous in her turn, and to ask a copy of the agreement.  After some
+difficulty this was obtained.  In it no mention was made of her
+maintenance, nor in what manner her children were to be regarded, should
+she have any.  Valere had, therefore, another agreement drawn up, in
+which all these points were arranged, according to his own interested
+views.  Gravina refused to subscribe to what he plainly perceived were
+only extortions; and the girl, in her turn, not only declined any further
+connection with him, but threatened to publish the act of polygamy.
+Before they had done discussing this subject, the door was suddenly
+opened and the two Spanish ladies presented themselves.  After severely
+upbraiding Gravina, who was struck mute by surprise, they announced to
+the girl that whatever promise or contract of marriage she had obtained
+from him was of no value, as, before they came with him to France, he had
+bound himself, before a public notary at Madrid, not to form any more
+connections, nor to marry any other woman, without their written consent.
+One of these ladies declared that she had been married to Gravina
+twenty-two years, and was his oldest wife but one; the other said that
+she had been married to him six years.  They insisted upon his following
+them, which he did, after putting a purse of gold into Barrois’s hand.
+
+When Valere heard from his mistress this occurrence, he advised her to
+make the most money she could of the Spaniard’s curious scruples.  A
+letter was, therefore, written to him, demanding one hundred thousand
+livres--as the price of secrecy and withholding the particulars of this
+business from the knowledge of the tribunals and the police; and an
+answer was required within twenty-four hours.  The same night Gravina
+offered one thousand Louis, which were accepted, and the papers returned;
+but the next day Valere went to his hotel, Rue de Provence, where he
+presented himself as a brother of Barrois.  He stated that he still
+possessed authenticated copies of the papers returned, and that he must
+have either the full sum first asked by his sister, or an annuity of
+twelve thousand livres settled upon her.  Instead of an answer, Gravina
+ordered him to be turned out of the house.  An attorney then waited on
+His Excellency, on the part of the brother and the sister, and repeated
+their threats and their demands, adding that he would write a memorial
+both to the Emperor of the French and to the King of Spain, were justice
+refused to his principals any longer.
+
+Gravina was well aware that this affair, though more laughable than
+criminal, would hurt both his character and credit if it were known in
+France; he therefore consented to pay seventy-six thousand livres more,
+upon a formal renunciation by the party of all future claims.  Not having
+money sufficient by him, he went to borrow it from a banker, whose clerk
+was one of Talleyrand’s secret agents.  Our Minister, therefore, ordered
+every step of Gravina to be watched; but he soon discovered that, instead
+of wanting this money for a political intrigue, it was necessary to
+extricate him out of an amorous scrape.  Hearing, however, in what a
+scandalous manner the Ambassador had been duped and imposed upon, he
+reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche orders to have Valere, Barrois,
+and the attorney immediately transported to Cayenne, and to restore
+Gravina his money.  The former part of this order the Minister of Police
+executed the more willingly, as it was according to his plan that Barrois
+had pitched upon Gravina for a lover.  She had been intended by him as a
+spy on His Excellency, but had deceived him by her reports--a crime for
+which transportation was a usual punishment.
+
+Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this
+affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our
+fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists.  But these
+artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to
+chastise genius than to silence tongues.  The declaration of war by Spain
+against your country was a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit with
+honour a Court where he was an object of ridicule, to assume the command
+of a fleet which might one day make him an object of terror.  When he
+took leave of Bonaparte, he was told to return to France victorious, or
+never to return any more; and Talleyrand warned him as a friend,
+“whenever he returned to his post in France to leave his marriage mania
+behind him in Spain.  Here,” said he, “you may, without ridicule,
+intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a great risk by marrying even
+one.”
+
+I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say, so
+far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious.  But
+infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--It cannot have escaped the observation of the most superficial
+traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of morals is not
+atoned for by good breeding or good manners.  The hideousness of vice,
+the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of favour, and
+the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil, that gloss of
+virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity of corruption and
+the scandal of depravity.  Duplicity and hypocrisy are here very common
+indeed, more so than dissimulation anywhere else; but barefaced knaves
+and impostors must always make indifferent courtiers.  Here the Minister
+tells you, I must have such a sum for a place; and the chamberlain tells
+you, Count down so much for my protection.  The Princess requires a
+necklace of such a value for interesting herself for your advancement;
+and the lady-in-waiting demands a diamond of such worth on the day of
+your promotion.  This tariff of favours and of infamy descends ‘ad
+infinitum’.  The secretary for signing, and the clerk for writing your
+commission; the cashier for delivering it, and the messenger for
+informing you of it, have all their fixed prices.  Have you a lawsuit,
+the judge announces to you that so much has been offered by your
+opponent, and so much is expected from you, if you desire to win your
+cause.  When you are the defendant against the Crown, the attorney or
+solicitor-general lets you know that such a douceur is requisite to
+procure such an issue.  Even in criminal proceedings, not only honour,
+but life, may be saved by pecuniary sacrifices.
+
+A man of the name of Martin, by profession a stock-jobber, killed, in
+1803, his own wife; and for twelve thousand livres--he was acquitted, and
+recovered his liberty.  In November last year, in a quarrel with his own
+brother, he stabbed him through the heart, and for another sum of twelve
+thousand livres he was acquitted, and released before last Christmas.
+This wretch is now in prison again, on suspicion of having poisoned his
+own daughter, with whom he had an incestuous intercourse, and he boasts
+publicly of soon being liberated.  Another person, Louis de Saurac, the
+younger son of Baron de Saurac, who together with his eldest son had
+emigrated, forged a will in the name of his parent, whom he pretended to
+be dead, which left him the sole heir of all the disposable property, to
+the exclusion of two sisters.  After the nation had shared its part as
+heir of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder.  In 1802,
+both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and returned to
+France.  To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis had, by his
+ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them even the
+common necessaries of life.  After upbraiding him for his want of duty,
+the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of the unsold
+part of his estates.  On the day fixed for settling the accounts and
+entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a conspirator
+and imprisoned in the Temple.  He had been denounced as having served in
+the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII.  To
+disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from
+America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon
+the rack he denied the latter.  During his arrest, the eldest son
+discovered that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means
+of the will he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he
+who had been unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days.  With
+the wreck of their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father’s
+release; who, being acquainted with the perversity of his younger son,
+addressed himself to the department to be reinstated in his property.
+This was opposed by Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the
+revolutionary maxim which had passed into a law, enacting that all
+emigrants should be considered as politically dead.  Hitherto Baron de
+Saurac had, from affection, declined to mention the forged will; but
+shocked by his son’s obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his
+counsellor produced this document, which not only went to deprive Louis
+of his property, but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.
+
+This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
+revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
+the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen.  He addressed
+himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte’s Imperial
+attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe
+of fifty thousand livres--obtained for him, after he had been defeated in
+every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of
+cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being,
+according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of
+any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the
+family.
+
+This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the
+Abbey of the same name.  One of the monks, observing in him some
+application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
+bestowed on him some previous education.  Not satisfied with this
+generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of
+Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the
+Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him.  By his
+dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors;
+who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as
+representative of the people to our First National Assembly.  They soon,
+however, had reason to repent of their generosity.  He joined the Orleans
+faction and became one of the most persevering, violent, and cruel
+persecutors of the privileged classes, particularly of the clergy, to
+whom he was indebted for everything.  In 1792 he was elected a member of
+the National Convention, where he voted for the death of his King. It was
+he who proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme, the production of the
+deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected persons; which was decreed
+on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused the imprisonment or
+proscription of two hundred thousand families.  This decree procured him
+the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of Merlin Potence.  In 1795 he was
+appointed a Minister of Police, and soon afterwards a Minister of
+Justice.  After the revolution in favour of the Jacobins of the 4th of
+September, 1797, he was made a director, a place which he was obliged by
+the same Jacobins to resign, in June, 1799.  Bonaparte expressed, at
+first, the most sovereign contempt for this Merlin, but on account of one
+of his sons, who was his aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when
+First Consul, his attorney-general.
+
+As nothing paints better the true features of a Government than the
+morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man’s portrait
+with the following characteristic touches.
+
+Merlin de Douai has been successively the counsel of the late Duc d’
+Orleans, the friend of Danton, of Chabot, and of Hebert, the admirer of
+Murat, and the servant of Robespierre.  An accomplice of Rewbell, Barras,
+and la Reveilliere, an author of the law of suspected persons, an
+advocate of the Septembrizers, and an ardent apostle of the St.
+Guillotine.  Cunning as a fog and ferocious as a tiger, he has outlived
+all the factions with which he has been connected.  It has been his
+policy to keep in continual fermentation rivalships, jealousies,
+inquietudes, revenge and all other odious passions; establishing, by such
+means, his influence on the terror of some, the ambition of others, and
+the credulity of them all.  Had I, when Merlin proposed his law
+concerning suspected persons, in the name of liberty and equality, been
+free and his equal, I should have said to him, “Monster, this, your
+atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it has brought thousands of
+innocent persons to an untimely end; you shall die by my hands as a
+victim, if the tribunals do not condemn you to the scaffold as an
+executioner or as a criminal.”
+
+Merlin has bought national property to the amount of fifteen million of
+livress--and he is supposed to possess money nearly to the same amount,
+in your or our funds.  For a man born a beggar, and educated by charity,
+this fortune, together with the liberal salaries he enjoys, might seem
+sufficient without selling justice, protecting guilt, and oppressing or
+persecuting innocence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The household troops of Napoleon the First are by thousands
+more numerous than those even of Louis XIV. were.  Grenadiers on foot and
+on horseback, riflemen on foot and on horseback, heavy and light
+artillery, dragoons and hussars, mamelukes and sailors, artificers and
+pontoneers, gendarmes, gendarmes d’Alite, Velites and veterans, with
+Italian grenadiers, riflemen, dragoons, etc., etc., compose all together
+a not inconsiderable army.
+
+Though it frequently happens that the pay of the other troops is in
+arrears, those appertaining to Bonaparte’s household are as regularly
+paid as his Senators, Counsellors of State, and other public
+functionaries.  All the men are picked, and all the officers as much as
+possible of birth, or at least of education.  In the midst of this
+voluptuous and seductive capital, they are kept very strict, and the
+least negligence or infraction of military discipline is more severely
+punished than if committed in garrison or in an encampment.  They are
+both better clothed, accoutred, and paid, than the troops of the line,
+and have everywhere the precedency of them.  All the officers, and many
+of the soldiers, are members of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, and carry
+arms of honour distributed to them by Imperial favour, or for military
+exploits.  None of them are quartered upon the citizens; each corps has
+its own spacious barracks, hospitals, drilling-ground, riding or
+fencing-houses, gardens, bathing-houses, billiard-table, and even
+libraries. A chapel has lately been constructed near each barrack, and
+almoners are already appointed.  In the meantime, they attend regularly
+at Mass, either in the Imperial Chapel or in the parish churches.
+Bonaparte discourages much all marriages among the military in general,
+but particularly among those of his household troops.  That they may not,
+however, be entirely deprived of the society of women, he allows five to
+each company, with the same salaries as the men, under the name of
+washerwomen.
+
+With a vain and fickle people, fond of shows and innovations, nothing in
+a military despotism has a greater political utility, gives greater
+satisfaction, and leaves behind a more useful terror and awe, than
+Bonaparte’s grand military reviews.  In the beginning of his consulate,
+they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of
+Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has been
+proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month.  This ostentatious
+exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review of
+the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those occasions
+their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully has seized,
+and continues to usurp, the authority of his own Sovereign.  What an
+example for ambition! what a lesson to treachery!
+
+Besides the household troops, this capital and its vicinity have, for
+these three years past, never contained less than from fifteen to twenty
+thousand men of the regiments of the line, belonging to what is called
+the first military division of the Army of the Interior.  These troops
+are selected from among the brigades that served under Bonaparte in Italy
+and Egypt with the greatest eclat, and constitute a kind of depot for
+recruiting his household troops with tried and trusty men.  They are also
+regularly paid, and generally better accoutred than their comrades
+encamped on the coast, or quartered in Italy or Holland.
+
+But a standing army, upon which all revolutionary rulers can depend, and
+that always will continue their faithful support, unique in its sort and
+composition, exists in the bosom as well as in the extremities of this
+country.  I mean, one hundred and twenty thousand invalids, mostly young
+men under thirty, forced by conscription against their will into the
+field, quartered and taken care of by our Government, and all possessed
+with the absurd prejudice that, as they have been maimed in fighting the
+battles of rebellion, the restoration of legitimate sovereignty would to
+them be an epoch of destruction, or at least of misery and want; and this
+prejudice is kept alive by emissaries employed on purpose to mislead
+them.  Of these, eight thousand are lodged and provided for in this city;
+ten thousand at Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and
+in the conquered departments on the left bank of the Abine; countries
+where the inhabitants are discontented and disaffected, and require,
+therefore, to be watched, and to have a better spirit infused.
+
+Those whose wounds permit it are also employed to do garrison duty in
+fortified places not exposed to an attack by enemies, and to assist in
+the different arsenals and laboratories, foundries, and depots of
+military or naval stores.  Others are attached to the police offices, and
+some as gendarmes, to arrest suspected or guilty individuals; or as
+garnissaires, to enforce the payment of contributions from the unwilling
+or distressed.  When the period for the payment of taxes is expired, two
+of these janissaires present themselves at the house of the persons in
+arrears, with a billet signed by the director of the contributions and
+countersigned by the police commissary.  If the money is not immediately
+paid, with half a crown to each of them besides, they remain quartered in
+the house, where they are to be boarded and to receive half a crown a day
+each until an order from those who sent them informs them that what was
+due to the state has been acquitted.  After their entrance into a house,
+and during their stay, no furniture or effects whatever can be removed or
+disposed of, nor can the master or mistress go out-of-doors without being
+accompanied by one of them.
+
+In the houses appropriated to our invalids, the inmates are very well
+treated, and Government takes great care to make them satisfied with
+their lot.  The officers have large halls, billiards, and reading-room to
+meet in; and the common men are admitted into apartments adjoining
+libraries, from-which they can borrow what books they contain, and read
+them at leisure.  This is certainly a very good and even a humane
+institution, though these libraries chiefly contain military histories or
+novels.
+
+As to the morals of these young invalids, they may be well conceived when
+you remember the morality of our Revolution; and that they, without any
+religious notions or restraints, were not only permitted, but encouraged
+to partake of the debauchery and licentiousness which were carried to
+such an extreme in our armies and encampments.  In an age when the
+passions are strongest, and often blind reason and silence conscience,
+they have not the means nor the permission to marry; in their vicinity it
+is, therefore, more difficult to discover one honest woman or a dutiful
+wife, than hundreds of harlots and of adulteresses.  Notwithstanding that
+many of them have been accused before the tribunals of seductions, rape,
+and violence against the sex, not one has been punished for what the
+morality of our Government consider merely as bagatelles.  Even in cases
+where husbands, brothers, and lovers have been killed by them while
+defending or avenging the honour of their wives, sisters, and mistresses,
+our tribunals have been ordered by our grand judge, according to the
+commands of the Emperor, not to proceed.  As most of them have no
+occupation, the vice of idleness augments the mass of their corruption;
+for men of their principles, when they have nothing to do, never do
+anything good.
+
+I do not know if my countrywomen feel themselves honoured by or obliged
+to Bonaparte, for leaving their virtue and honour unprotected, except by
+their own prudence and strength; but of this I am certain, that all our
+other troops, as well as the invalids, may live on free quarters with the
+sex without fearing the consequences; provided they keep at a distance
+from the females of our Imperial Family, and of those of our grand
+officers of State and principal functionaries.  The wives and the
+daughters of the latter have, however, sometimes declined the advantage
+of these exclusive privileges.
+
+A horse grenadier of Bonaparte’s Imperial Guard, of the name of Rabais,
+notorious for his amours and debauchery, was accused before the Imperial
+Judge Thuriot, at one and the same time by several husbands and fathers,
+of having seduced the affections of their wives and of their daughters.
+As usual, Thuriot refused to listen to their complaints; at the same time
+insultingly advising them to retake their wives and children, and for the
+future to be more careful of them.  Triumphing, as it were, in his
+injustice, he inconsiderately mentioned the circumstance to his own wife,
+observing that he never knew so many charges of the same sort exhibited
+against one man.
+
+Madame Thuriot, who had been a servant-maid to her husband before he made
+her his wife, instead of being disgusted at the recital, secretly
+determined to see this Rabais.  An intrigue was then begun, and carried
+on for four months, if not with discretion, at least without discovery;
+but the lady’s own imprudence at last betrayed her, or I should say,
+rather, her jealousy.  But for this she might still have been admired
+among our modest women, and Thuriot among fortunate husbands and happy
+fathers; for the lady, for the first time since her marriage, proved, to
+the great joy and pride of her husband, in the family way.  Suspecting,
+however, the fidelity of her paramour, she watched his motions so closely
+that she discovered an intrigue between him and the chaste spouse of a
+rich banker; but the consequence of this discovery was the detection of
+her own crime.
+
+On the discovery of this disgrace, Thuriot obtained an audience of
+Bonaparte, in which he exposed his misfortune, and demanded punishment on
+his wife’s gallant.  As, however, he also acknowledged that his own
+indiscretion was an indirect cause of their connection, he received the
+same advice which he had given to other unfortunate husbands: to retake,
+and for the future guard better, his dear moiety.
+
+Thuriot had, however, an early opportunity of wreaking his vengeance on
+this gallant Rabais.  It seems his prowess had reached the ears of Madame
+Baciocchi, the eldest sister of Bonaparte.  This lady has a children
+mania, which is very troublesome to her husband, disagreeable to her
+relations, and injurious to herself.  She never beholds any lady,
+particularly any of her family, in the way which women wish to be who
+love their lords, but she is absolutely frantic.  Now, Thuriot’s worthy
+friend Fouche had discovered, by his spies, that Rabais paid frequent and
+secret visits to the hotel Baciocchi, and that Madame Baciocchi was the
+object of these visits.  Thuriot, on this discovery, instantly denounced
+him to Bonaparte.
+
+Had Rabais ruined all the women of this capital, he would not only have
+been forgiven, but applauded by Napoleon, and his counsellors and
+courtiers; but to dare to approach, or only to cast his eyes on one of
+our Imperial Highnesses, was a crime nothing could extenuate or avenge,
+but the most exemplary punishment.  He was therefore arrested, sent to
+the Temple, and has never since been heard of; so that his female friends
+are still in the cruel uncertainty whether he has died on the rack, been
+buried alive in the oubliettes, or is wandering an exile in the wilds of
+Cayenne.
+
+In examining his trunk, among the curious effects discovered by the
+police were eighteen portraits and one hundred billets-doux, with
+medallions, rings, bracelets, tresses of hair, etc., as numerous.  Two of
+the portraits occasioned much scandal, and more gossiping.  They were
+those of two of our most devout and most respectable Court ladies, Maids
+of Honour to our Empress, Madame Ney and Madame Lasnes; who never miss an
+opportunity of going to church, who have received the private blessing of
+the Pope, and who regularly confess to some Bishop or other once in a
+fortnight.  Madame Napoleon cleared them, however, of all suspicion, by
+declaring publicly in her drawing-room that these portraits had come into
+the possession of Rabais by the infidelity of their maids; who had
+confessed their faults, and, therefore, had been charitably pardoned.
+Whether the opinions of Generals Ney and Lasnes coincide with Madame
+Napoleon’s assertion is uncertain; but Lasnes has been often heard to say
+that, from the instant his wife began to confess, he was convinced she
+was inclined to dishonour him; so that nothing surprised him.
+
+One of the medallions in Rabais’s collection contained on one side the
+portrait of Thuriot, and on the other that of his wife; both set with
+diamonds, and presented to her by him on their last wedding day.  For the
+supposed theft of this medallion, two of Thuriot’s servants were in
+prison, when the arrest of Rabais explained the manner in which it had
+been lost.  This so enraged him that he beat and kicked his wife so
+heartily that for some time even her life was in danger, and Thuriot lost
+all hopes of being a father.
+
+Before the Revolution, Thuriot had been, for fraud and forgery, struck
+off the roll as an advocate, and therefore joined it as a patriot.  In
+1791, he was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly, and in 1792 to the
+National Convention.  He always showed himself one of the most ungenerous
+enemies of the clergy, of monarchy, and of his King, for whose death he
+voted.  On the 25th of May, 1792, in declaiming against Christianity and
+priesthood, he wished them both, for the welfare of mankind, at the
+bottom of the sea; and on the 18th of December the same year, he declared
+in the Jacobin Club that, if the National Convention evinced any signs of
+clemency towards Louis XVI., he would go himself to the Temple and blow
+out the brains of this unfortunate King.  He defended in the tribune the
+massacres of the prisoners, affirming that the tree of liberty could
+never flourish without being inundated with the blood of aristocrats and
+other enemies of the Revolution.  He has been convicted by rival factions
+of the most shameful robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so
+notorious that neither Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory
+would or could employ him.  After the Revolution of the 9th of November,
+1799, Bonaparte gave him the office of judge of the criminal tribunal,
+and in 1804 made him a Commander of his Legion of Honour.  He is now one
+of our Emperor’s most faithful subjects and most sincere Christians. Such
+is now his tender conscientiousness, that he was among those who were the
+first to be married again by some Cardinal to their present wives, to
+whom they had formerly been united only by the municipality. This new
+marriage, however, took place before Madame Thuriot had introduced
+herself to the acquaintance of the Imperial Grenadier Rabais.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Regarding me as a connoisseur, though I have no pretensions but
+that of being an amateur, Lucien Bonaparte, shortly before his disgrace,
+invited me to pass some days with him in the country, and to assist him
+in arranging his very valuable collection of pictures--next our public
+ones, the most curious and most valuable in Europe, and, of course, in
+the world.  I found here, as at Joseph Bonaparte’s, the same splendour,
+the same etiquette, and the same liberty, which latter was much enhanced
+by the really engaging and unassuming manners and conversation of the
+host.  At Joseph’s, even in the midst of abundance and of liberty, in
+seeing the person or meditating on the character of the host, you feel
+both your inferiority of fortune and the humiliation of dependence, and
+that you visit a master instead of a friend, who indirectly tells you,
+“Eat, drink, and rejoice as long and as much as you like; but remember
+that if you are happy, it is to my generosity you are indebted, and if
+unhappy, that I do not care a pin about you.”  With Lucien it is the very
+reverse.  His conduct seems to indicate that by your company you confer
+an obligation on him, and he is studious to remove, on all occasions,
+that distance which fortune has placed between him and his guests; and as
+he cannot compliment them upon being wealthier than himself, he seizes
+with delicacy every opportunity to chew that he acknowledges their
+superiority in talents and in genius as more than an equivalent for the
+absence of riches.
+
+He is, nevertheless, himself a young man of uncommon parts, and, as far
+as I could judge from my short intercourse with the reserved Joseph and
+with the haughty Napoleon, he is abler and better informed than either,
+and much more open and sincere.  His manners are also more elegant, and
+his language more polished, which is the more creditable to him when it
+is remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the
+Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were,
+like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble.  It is
+not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart
+soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the
+most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant
+sans-culotte.  He has, besides, other qualities (and those more
+estimable) which will place him much above his elder brothers in the
+opinion of posterity.  He is extremely compassionate and liberal to the
+truly distressed, serviceable to those whom he knows are not his friends,
+and forgiving and obliging even to those who have proved and avowed
+themselves his enemies.  These are virtues commonly very scarce, and
+hitherto never displayed by any other member of the Bonaparte family.
+
+An acquaintance of yours, and--a friend of mine, Count de T-----, at his
+return here from emigration, found, of his whole former fortune,
+producing once eighty thousand livres--in the year, only four farms
+unsold, and these were advertised for sale.  A man who had once been his
+servant, but was then a groom to Lucien, offered to present a memorial
+for him to his master, to prevent the disposal of the only support which
+remained to subsist himself, with a wife and four children.  Lucien asked
+Napoleon to prohibit the sale, and to restore the Count the farms, and
+obtained his consent; but Fouche, whose cousin wanted them, having
+purchased other national property in the neighbourhood, prevailed upon
+Napoleon to forget his promise, and the farms were sold.  As soon as
+Lucien heard of it he sent for the Count, delivered into his hands an
+annuity of six thousand livres--for the life of himself, his wife, and
+his children, as an indemnity for the inefficacy of his endeavours to
+serve him, as he expressed himself.  Had the Count recovered the farms,
+they would not have given him a clear profit of half the amount, all
+taxes paid.
+
+A young author of the name of Gauvan, irritated by the loss of parents
+and fortune by the Revolution, attacked, during 1799, in the public
+prints, as well as in pamphlets, every Revolutionist who had obtained
+notoriety or popularity.  He was particularly vehement against Lucien,
+and laid before the public all his crimes and all his errors, and
+asserted, as facts, atrocities which were either calumnies or merely
+rumours.  When, after Napoleon’s assumption of the Consulate, Lucien was
+appointed a Minister of the Interior, he sent for Gauvan, and said to
+him, “Great misfortunes have early made you wretched and unjust, and you
+have frequently revenged yourself on those who could not prevent them,
+among whom I am one.  You do not want capacity, nor, I believe, probity.
+Here is a commission which makes you a Director of Contributions in the
+Departments of the Rhine and Moselle, an office with a salary of twelve
+thousand livres but producing double that sum.  If you meet with any
+difficulties, write to me; I am your friend.  Take those one hundred
+louis d’or for the expenses of your journey.  Adieu!”  This anecdote I
+have read in Gauvan’s own handwriting, in a letter to his sister.  He
+died in 1802; but Mademoiselle Gauvan, who is not yet fifteen, has a
+pension of three thousand livres a year--from Lucien, who, has never seen
+her.
+
+Lucien Bonaparte has another good quality: he is consistent in his
+political principles.  Either from conviction or delusion he is still a
+Republican, and does not conceal that, had he suspected Napoleon of any
+intent to reestablish monarchy, much less tyranny, he would have joined
+those deputies who, on the 9th of November, 1799, in the sitting at St.
+Cloud, demanded a decree of outlawry against him.  If the present quarrel
+between these two brothers were sifted to the bottom, perhaps it would be
+found to originate more from Lucien’s Republicanism than from his
+marriage.
+
+I know, with all France and Europe, that Lucien’s youth has been very
+culpable; that he has committed many indiscretions, much injustice, many
+imprudences, many errors, and, I fear, even some crimes.  I know that he
+has been the most profligate among the profligate, the most debauched
+among libertines, the most merciless among the plunderers, and the most
+perverse among rebels.  I know that he is accused of being a
+Septembrizer; of having murdered one wife and poisoned another; of having
+been a spy, a denouncer, a persecutor of innocent persons in the Reign of
+Terror.  I know that he is accused of having fought his brothers-in-law;
+of having ill-used his mother, and of an incestuous commerce with his own
+sisters.
+
+I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far be
+it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them.  But suppose all this
+infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it never has
+been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be--what are
+the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to the
+enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted?  Is the
+poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of
+wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons,
+suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold
+blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners?  Is incest with a sister more
+shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not
+continue the disgusting comparison.  As long as Napoleon is unable to
+acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right
+to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have
+Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the
+Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise the
+latter for crimes which lose their enormity when compared to the horrid
+perpetrations of his Imperial brother.
+
+An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien’s wife, and a person in whose
+veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he
+always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has repeated
+to me many of their conversations.  She assures me that Lucien deplores
+frequently the want of a good and religious education, and the tempting
+examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance upon the
+revolutionary scene.  He says that he determined to get rich ‘per fas aut
+nefas’, because he observed that money was everything, and that most
+persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be enabled to gather
+treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much above their desert
+and expectation, instead of being satiated or even satisfied, they
+bustled and intrigued for more, until success made them unguarded and
+prosperity indiscreet, and they became with their wealth the easy prey of
+rival factions.  Such was the case of Danton, of Fabre d’Eglantine, of
+Chabot, of Chaumette, of Stebert, and other contemptible wretches,
+butchered by Robespierre and his partisans--victims in their turn to men
+as unjust and sanguinary as themselves.  He had, therefore, laid out a
+different plan of conduct for himself.  He had fixed upon fifty millions
+of livres--as the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in
+his possession, he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and
+employment, and to enjoy ‘otium cum dignitate’.  He had kept to his
+determination, and so regulated his income that; with the expenses, pomp,
+and retinue of a Prince, he is enabled to make more persons happy and
+comfortable than his extortions have ruined or even embarrassed.  He now
+lives like a philosopher, and endeavours to forget the past, to delight
+in the present, and to be indifferent about futurity.  He chose,
+therefore, for a wife, a lady whom he loved and esteemed, in preference
+to one whose birth would have been a continual reproach to the meanness
+of his own origin.
+
+You must, with me, admire the modesty of a citizen sans-culotte, who,
+without a shilling in the world, fixes upon fifty millions as a reward
+for his revolutionary achievements, and with which he would be satisfied
+to sit down and begin his singular course of singular philosophy.  But
+his success is more extraordinary that his pretensions were extravagant.
+This immense sum was amassed by him in the short period of four years,
+chiefly by bribes from foreign Courts, and by selling his protections in
+France.
+
+But most of the other Bonapartes have made as great and as rapid fortunes
+as Lucien, and yet, instead of being generous, contented, or even
+philosophers, they are still profiting by every occasion to increase
+their ill-gotten treasures, and no distress was ever relieved, no talents
+encouraged, or virtues recompensed by them.  The mind of their garrets
+lodges with them in their palaces, while Lucien seems to ascend as near
+as possible to a level with his circumstances.  I have myself found him
+beneficent without ostentation.
+
+Among his numerous pictures, I observed four that had formerly belonged
+to my father’s, and afterwards to my own cabinet.  I inquired how much he
+had paid for them, without giving the least hint that they had been my
+property, and were plundered from me by the nation.  He had, indeed, paid
+their full value.  In a fortnight after I had quitted him, these, with
+six other pictures, were deposited in my room, with a very polite note,
+begging my acceptance of them, and assuring me that he had but the day
+before heard from his picture dealer that they had belonged to me.  He
+added that he would never retake them, unless he received an assurance
+from me that I parted with them without reluctance, and at the same time
+affixed their price.  I returned them, as I knew they were desired by him
+for his collection, but he continued obstinate.  I told him, therefore,
+that, as I was acquainted with his inclination to perform a generous
+action, I would, instead of payment for the pictures, indicate a person
+deserving his assistance.  I mentioned the old Duchesse de ------, who is
+seventy-four years of age and blind; and, after possessing in her youth
+an income of eight hundred thousand livres--is now, in her old age,
+almost destitute.  He did for this worthy lady more than I expected; but
+happening, in his visits to relieve my friend, to cast his eye on the
+daughter of the landlady where she lodged, he found means to prevail on
+the simplicity of the poor girl, and seduced her.  So much do I know
+personally of Lucien Bonaparte, who certainly is a composition of good
+and bad qualities, but which of them predominate I will not take upon me
+to decide.  This I can affirm--Lucien is not the worst member of the
+Bonaparte family.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--As long as Austria ranks among independent nations, Bonaparte
+will take care not to offend or alarm the ambition and interest of
+Prussia by incorporating the Batavian Republic with the other provinces
+of his Empire.  Until that period, the Dutch must continue (as they have
+been these last ten years) under the appellation of allies, oppressed
+like subjects and plundered like foes.  Their mock sovereignty will
+continue to weigh heavier on them than real servitude does on their
+Belgic and Flemish neighbours, because Frederick the Great pointed out to
+his successors the Elbe and the Tegel as the natural borders of the
+Prussian monarchy, whenever the right bank of the Rhine should form the
+natural frontiers of the kingdom of France.
+
+That during the present summer a project for a partition treaty of
+Holland has by the Cabinet of St. Cloud been laid before the Cabinet of
+Berlin is a fact, though disseminated only as a rumour by the secret
+agents of Talleyrand.  Their object was on this, as on all previous
+occasions when any names, rights, or liberties of people were intended to
+be erased from among the annals of independence, to sound the ground, and
+to prepare by such rumours the mind of the public for another outrage and
+another overthrow.  But Prussia, as well as France, knows the value of a
+military and commercial navy, and that to obtain it good harbours and
+navigable rivers are necessary, and therefore, as well as from principles
+of justice, perhaps, declined the acceptance of a plunder, which, though
+tempting, was contrary to the policy of the House of Brandenburgh.
+
+According to a copy circulated among the members of our diplomatic corps,
+this partition treaty excluded Prussia from all the Batavian seaports
+except Delfzig, and those of the river Ems, but gave her extensive
+territories on the side of Guelderland, and a rich country in Friesland.
+Had it been acceded to by the Court of Berlin, with the annexed condition
+of a defensive and offensive alliance with the Court of St. Cloud, the
+Prussian monarchy would, within half a century, have been swallowed up in
+the same gulf with the Batavian Commonwealth and the Republic of Poland;
+and by some future scheme of some future Bonaparte or Talleyrand, be
+divided in its turn, and serve as a pledge of reconciliation or
+inducement of connection between some future rulers of the French and
+Russian Empires.
+
+Talleyrand must, indeed, have a very mean opinion of the capacity of the
+Prussian Ministers, or a high notion of his own influence over them, if
+he was serious in this overture.  For my part, I am rather inclined to
+think that it was merely thrown out to discover whether Frederick William
+III.  had entered into any engagement contrary to the interest of
+Napoleon the First; or to allure His Prussian Majesty into a negotiation
+which would suspend, or at least interfere with, those supposed to be
+then on the carpet with Austria, Russia, or perhaps even with England.
+
+The late Batavian Government had, ever since the beginning of the present
+war with England, incurred the displeasure of Bonaparte.  When it
+apprehended a rupture from the turn which the discussion respecting the
+occupation of Malta assumed, the Dutch Ambassadors at St. Petersburg and
+Berlin were ordered to demand the interference of these two Cabinets for
+the preservation of the neutrality of Holland, which your country had
+promised to acknowledge, if respected by France.  No sooner was Bonaparte
+informed of this step, than he marched troops into the heart of the
+Batavian Republic, and occupied its principal forts, ports, and arsenals.
+When, some time afterwards, Count Markof received instructions from his
+Court, according to the desire of the Batavian Directory, and demanded,
+in consequence, an audience from Bonaparte, a map was laid before him,
+indicating the position of the French troops in Holland, and plans of the
+intended encampment of our army of England on the coast of Flanders and
+France; and he was asked whether he thought it probable that our
+Government would assent to a neutrality so injurious to its offensive
+operations against Great Britain.
+
+“But,” said the Russian Ambassador, “the independence of Holland has been
+admitted by you in formal treaties.”
+
+“So has the cession of Malta by England,” interrupted Bonaparte, with
+impatience.
+
+“True,” replied Markof, “but you are now at war with England for this
+point; while Holland, against which you have no complaint, has not only
+been invaded by your troops, but, contrary both to its inclination and
+interest, involved in a war with you, by which it has much to lose and
+nothing to gain.”
+
+“I have no account to render to anybody for my transactions, and I desire
+to hear nothing more on this subject,” said Bonaparte, retiring furious,
+and leaving Markof to meditate on our Sovereign’s singular principles of
+political justice and of ‘jus pentium’.
+
+From that period Bonaparte resolved on another change of the executive
+power of the Batavian Republic.  But it was more easy to displace one set
+of men for another than to find proper ones to occupy a situation in
+which, if they do their duty as patriots, they must offend France; and if
+they are our tools, instead of the independent governors of their
+country, they must excite a discontent among their fellow citizens,
+disgracing themselves as individuals, and exposing themselves as chief
+magistrates to the fate of the De Witts, should ever fortune forsake our
+arms or desert Bonaparte.
+
+No country has of late been less productive of great men than Holland.
+The Van Tromps, the Russel, and the William III.  all died without
+leaving any posterity behind them; and the race of Batavian heroes seems
+to have expired with them, as that of patriots with the De, Witts and
+Barneveldt.  Since the beginning of the last century we read, indeed, of
+some able statesmen, as most, if not all, the former grand pensionaries
+have been; but the name of no warrior of any great eminence is recorded.
+This scarcity, of native genius and valour has not a little contributed
+to the present humbled, disgraced, and oppressed state of wretched
+Batavia.
+
+Admiral de Winter certainly neither wants courage nor genius, but his
+private character has a great resemblance to that of General Moreau.
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern.  He may direct as
+ably and as valiantly the manoeuvres of a fleet as Moreau does those of
+an army, but neither the one nor the other at the head of his nation
+would render himself respected, his country flourishing, or his
+countrymen happy and tranquil.
+
+Destined from his youth for the navy, Admiral de Winter entered into the
+naval service of his country before he was fourteen, and was a second
+lieutenant when the Batavian patriots, in rebellion against the
+Stadtholder, were, in 1787, reduced to submission by the Duke of
+Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army that invaded Holland.  His
+parents and family being of the anti-Orange party, he emigrated to
+France, where he was made an officer in the legion of Batavian refugees.
+During the campaign of 1793 and 1794, he so much distinguished himself
+under that competent judge of merit, Pichegru, that this commander
+obtained for him the commission of a general of brigade in the service of
+the French; which, after the conquest of Holland in January, 1795, was
+exchanged for the rank of a vice-admiral of the Batavian Republic.  His
+exploits as commander of the Dutch fleet, during the battle of the 11th
+of October, 1797, with your fleet, under Lord Duncan, I have heard
+applauded even in your presence, when in your country.  Too honest to be
+seduced, and too brave to be intimidated, he is said to have incurred
+Bonaparte’s hatred by resisting both his offers and his threats, and
+declining to sell his own liberty as well as to betray the liberty of his
+fellow subjects.  When, in 1800, Bonaparte proposed to him the presidency
+and consulate of the United States, for life, on condition that he should
+sign a treaty, which made him a vassal of France, he refused, with
+dignity and with firmness, and preferred retirement to a supremacy so
+dishonestly acquired, and so dishonourably occupied.
+
+General Daendels, another Batavian revolutionist of some notoriety, from
+an attorney became a lieutenant-colonel, and served as a spy under
+Dumouriez in the winter of 1792 and in the spring of 1793.  Under
+Pichegru he was made a general, and exhibited those talents in the field
+which are said to have before been displayed in the forum.  In June,
+1795, he was made a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic, and he
+was the commander-in-chief of the Dutch troops combating in 1799 your
+army under the Duke of York.  In this place he did not much distinguish
+himself, and the issue of the contest was entirely owing to our troops
+and to our generals.
+
+After the Peace of Amiens, observing that Bonaparte intended to
+annihilate instead of establishing universal liberty, Daendels gave in
+his resignation and retired to obscurity, not wishing to be an instrument
+of tyranny, after having so long fought for freedom.  Had he possessed
+the patriotism of a Brutus or a Cato, he would have bled or died for his
+cause and country sooner than have deserted them both; or had the
+ambition and love of glory of a Caesar held a place in his bosom, he
+would have attempted to be the chief of his country, and by generosity
+and clemency atone, if possible, for the loss of liberty.  Upon the line
+of baseness,--the deserter is placed next to the traitor.
+
+Dumonceau, another Batavian general of some publicity, is not by birth a
+citizen of the United States, but was born at Brussels in 1758, and was
+by profession a stonemason when, in 1789, he joined, as a volunteer, the
+Belgian insurgents.  After their dispersion in 1790 he took refuge and
+served in France, and was made an officer in the corps of Belgians,
+formed after the declaration of war against Austria in 1792.  Here he
+frequently distinguished himself, and was, therefore, advanced to the
+rank of a general; but the Dutch general officers being better paid than
+those of the French Republic, he was, with the permission of our
+Directory, received, in 1795, as a lieutenant-general of the Batavian
+Republic.  He has often evinced bravery, but seldom great capacity.  His
+natural talents are considered as but indifferent, and his education is
+worse.
+
+These are the only three military characters who might, with any prospect
+of success, have tried to play the part of a Napoleon Bonaparte in
+Holland.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Not to give umbrage to the Cabinet of Berlin, Bonaparte
+communicated to it the necessity he was under of altering the form of
+Government in Holland, and, if report be true, even condescended to ask
+advice concerning a chief magistrate for that country.  The young Prince
+of Orange, brother-in-law of His Prussian Majesty, naturally presented
+himself; but, after some time, Talleyrand’s agents discovered that great
+pecuniary sacrifices could not be expected from that quarter, and perhaps
+less submission to France experienced than from the former governors. An
+eye was then cast on the Elector of Bavaria, whose past patriotism, as
+well as that of his Ministers, was a full guarantee for future obedience.
+Had he consented to such an arrangement, Austria might have aggrandized
+herself on the Inn, Prussia in Franconia, and France in Italy; and the
+present bone of contest would have been chiefly removed.
+
+This intrigue, for it was nothing else, was carried on by the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud in March, 1804, about the time that Germany was invaded and the
+Duc d’Enghien seized.  This explains to you the reason why the Russian
+note, delivered to the Diet of Ratisbon on the 8th of the following May,
+was left without any support, except the ineffectual one from the King of
+Sweden.  How any Cabinet could be dupe enough to think Bonaparte serious,
+or the Elector of Bavaria so weak as to enter into his schemes, is
+difficult to be conceived, had not Europe witnessed still greater
+credulity on one side, and still greater effrontery on the other.
+
+In the meantime Bonaparte grew every day more discontented with the
+Batavian Directory, and more irritated against the members who composed
+it.  Against his regulations for excluding the commerce and productions
+of your country, they resented with spirit instead of obeying them
+without murmur as was required.  He is said to have discovered, after his
+own soldiers had forced the custom-house officers to obey his orders,
+that, while in their proclamations the directors publicly prohibited the
+introduction of British goods, some of them were secret insurers of this
+forbidden merchandise, introduced by fraud and by smuggling; and that
+while they officially wished for the success of the French arms and
+destruction of England, they withdrew by stealth what property they had
+in the French funds, to place it in the English.  This refractory and, as
+Bonaparte called it, mercantile spirit, so enraged him, that he had
+already signed an order for arresting and transferring en masse his high
+allies, the Batavian directors, to his Temple, when the representations
+of Talleyrand moderated his fury, and caused the order to be recalled,
+which Fouche was ready to execute.
+
+Had Jerome Bonaparte not offended his brother by his transatlantic
+marriage, he would long ago have been the Prince Stadtholder of Holland;
+but his disobedience was so far useful to the Cabinet of St. Cloud as it
+gave it an opportunity of intriguing with, or deluding, other Cabinets
+that might have any pretensions to interfere in the regulation of the
+Batavian Government.  By the choice finally made, you may judge how
+difficult it was to find a suitable subject to represent it, and that
+this representation is intended only to be temporary.
+
+Schimmelpenninck, the present grand pensionary of the Batavian Republic,
+was destined by his education for the bar, but by his natural parts to
+await in quiet obscurity the end of a dull existence.  With some
+property, little information, and a tolerably good share of common sense,
+he might have lived and died respected, and even regretted, without any
+pretension, or perhaps even ambition, to shine.  The anti-Orange faction,
+to which his parents and family appertained, pushed him forward, and
+elected him, in 1795, a member of the First Batavian National Convention,
+where, according to the spirit of the times, his speeches were rather
+those of a demagogue than those of a Republican.  Liberty, Equality, and
+Fraternity were the constant themes of his political declamations,
+infidelity his religious profession, and the examples of immorality, his
+social lessons; so rapid and dangerous are the strides with which
+seduction frequently advances on weak minds.
+
+In 1800 he was appointed an Ambassador to Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles
+Maurice Talleyrand.  The latter used him as a stockbroker, and the former
+for anything he thought proper; and he was the humble and submissive
+valet of both.  More ignorant than malicious, and a greater fool than a
+rogue, he was more laughed at and despised than trusted or abused.
+
+His patience being equal to his phlegm, nothing either moved or
+confounded him; and he was, as Talleyrand remarked, “a model of an
+Ambassador, according to which he and Bonaparte wished that all other
+independent Princes and States would choose their representatives to the
+French Government.”
+
+When our Minister and his Sovereign were discussing the difficulty of
+properly filling up the vacancy, of the Dutch Government, judged
+necessary by both, the former mentioned Schimmelpenninck with a smile;
+and serious as Bonaparte commonly is, he could not help laughing. “I
+should have been less astonished,” said he, “had you proposed my
+Mameluke, Rostan.”
+
+This rebuke did not deter Talleyrand (who had settled his terms with
+Schimmelpenninck) from continuing to point out the advantage which France
+would derive from this nomination.  “Because no man could easier be
+directed when in office, and no man easier turned out of office when
+disagreeable or unnecessary.  Both as a Batavian plenipotentiary at
+Amiens, and as Batavian Ambassador in England, he had proved himself as
+obedient and submissive to France as when in the same capacity at Paris.”
+
+By returning often to the charge, with these and other remarks,
+Talleyrand at last accustomed Bonaparte to the idea, which had once
+appeared so humiliating, of writing to a man so much inferior in
+everything, “Great and dear Friend!”  and therefore said to the Minister:
+
+“Well!  let us then make him a grand pensionary and a locum tenens for
+five years; or until Jerome, when he repents, returns to his duty, and is
+pardoned.”
+
+“Is he, then, not to be a grand pensionary for life?”  asked Talleyrand;
+“whether for one month or for life, he would be equally obedient to
+resign when, commanded; but the latter would be more popular in Holland,
+where they were tired of so many changes.”
+
+“Let them complain, if they dare,” replied Bonaparte.  “Schimmelpenninck
+is their chief magistrate only for five years, if so long; but you may
+add that they may reelect him.”
+
+It was not before Talleyrand had compared the pecuniary proposal made to
+his agents by foreign Princes with those of Schimmelpenninck to himself,
+that the latter obtained the preference.  The exact amount of the
+purchase-money for the supreme magistracy in Holland is not well known to
+any but the contracting parties.  Some pretended that the whole was paid
+down beforehand, being advanced by a society of merchants at Amsterdam,
+the friends or relatives of the grand pensionary; others, that it is to
+be paid by annual instalments of two millions of livres--for a certain
+number of years.  Certain it is, that this high office was sold and
+bought; and that, had it been given for life, its value would have been
+proportionately enhanced; which was the reason that Talleyrand
+endeavoured to have it thus established.
+
+Talleyrand well knew the precarious state of Schimmelpenninck’s grandeur;
+that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had long been
+intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome.  Another Dutchman asked
+him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he was well aware
+could never be called a sinecure place, and was so precarious in its
+tenure.  “Foolish vanity,” answered the Minister, “can never pay enough
+for the gratification of its desires.  All the Schimmelpennincks in the
+world do not possess property enough to recompense me for the sovereign
+honours which I have procured for one of their name and family, were he
+deposed within twenty-four hours.  What treasures can indemnify me for
+connecting such a name and such a personage with the great name of the
+First Emperor of the French?”
+
+I have only twice in my life been in Schimmelpenninck’s company, and I
+thought him both timid and reserved; but from what little he said, I
+could not possibly judge of his character and capacity.  His portrait and
+its accompaniments have been presented to me; such as delivered to you by
+one of his countrymen, a Mr. M---- (formerly an Ambassador also), who was
+both his schoolfellow and his comrade at the university.  I shall add the
+following traits, in his own words as near as possible:
+
+“More vain than ambitious, Schimmelpenninck from his youth, and,
+particularly, from his entrance into public life, tried every means to
+make a noise, but found none to make a reputation.  He caressed in
+succession all the systems of the French Revolution, without adopting one
+for himself.  All the Kings of faction received in their turns his homage
+and felicitations.  It was impossible to mention to him a man of any
+notoriety, of whom he did not become immediately a partisan.  The virtues
+or the vices, the merit or defects, of the individual were of no
+consideration; according to his judgment it was sufficient to be famous.
+Yet with all the extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes, and of a
+heart spoiled by modern philosophy, added to a habit of licentiousness,
+he had no idea of becoming an instrument for the destruction of liberty
+in his own country, much less of becoming its tyrant, in submitting to be
+the slave of France.  It was but lately that he took the fancy, after so
+long admiring all other great men of our age, to be at any rate one of
+their number, and of being admired as a great man in his turn.  On this
+account many accuse him of hypocrisy, but no one deserves that
+appellation less, his vanity and exaltation never permitting him to
+dissimulate; and no presumption, therefore, was less disguised than his,
+to those who studied the man.  Without acquired ability, without natural
+genius, or political capacity, destitute of discretion and address, as
+confident and obstinate as ignorant, he is only elevated to fall and to
+rise no more.”
+
+Madame Schimmelpenninck, I was informed, is as amiable and accomplished
+as her husband is awkward and deficient; though well acquainted with his
+infidelities and profligacy, she is too virtuous to listen to revenge,
+and too generous not to forgive.  She is, besides, said to be a lady of
+uncommon abilities, and of greater information than she chooses to
+display.  She has never been the worshipper of Bonaparte, or the friend
+of Talleyrand; she loved her country, and detested its tyrants.  Had she
+been created a grand pensionary, she would certainly have swayed with
+more glory than her husband; and been hailed by contemporaries, as well
+as posterity, if not a heroine, at least a patriot,--a title which in our
+times, though often prostituted, so few have any claim to, and which,
+therefore, is so much the more valuable.
+
+When it was known at Paris that Schimmelpenninck had set out for his new
+sovereignty, no less than sixteen girls of the Palais Royal demanded
+passes for Holland.  Being questioned by Fouche as to their business in
+that country, they answered that they intended to visit their friend, the
+grand pensionary, in his new dominions.  Fouche communicated to
+Talleyrand both their demands and their business, and asked his advice.
+He replied:
+
+“Send two, and those of whose vigilance and intelligence you are sure.
+Refuse, by all means, the other fourteen.  Schimmelpenninck’s time is
+precious, and were they at the Hague, he would neglect everything for
+them.  If they are fond of travelling, and are handsome and adroit,
+advise them to set out for London or for St. Petersburg; and if they
+consent, order them to my office, and they shall be supplied, if approved
+of, both with instructions, and with their travelling expenses.”
+
+Fouche answered his colleague that “they were in every respect the very
+reverse of his description; they seemed to have passed their lives in the
+lowest stage of infamy, and they could neither read nor write.”  You have
+therefore, no reason to fear that these belles will be sent to
+disseminate corruption in your happy island.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Italian subjects of Napoleon the First were far from
+displaying the same zeal and the same gratitude for his paternal care and
+kindness in taking upon himself the trouble of governing them, as we good
+Parisians have done.  Notwithstanding that a brigade of our police agents
+and spies, drilled for years to applaud and to excite enthusiasm,
+proceeded as his advanced guard to raise the public spirit, the reception
+at Milan was cold and everything else but cordial and pleasing. The
+absence of duty did not escape his observation and resentment. Convinced,
+in his own mind, of the great blessing, prosperity, and liberty his
+victories and sovereignty have conferred on the inhabitants of the other
+side of the Alps, he ascribed their present passive or mutinous behaviour
+to the effect of foreign emissaries from Courts envious of his glory and
+jealous of his authority.
+
+He suspected particularly England and Russia of having selected this
+occasion of a solemnity that would complete his grandeur to humble his
+just pride.  He also had some idea within himself that even Austria might
+indirectly have dared to influence the sentiments and conduct of her
+ci-devant subjects of Lombardy; but his own high opinion of the awe which
+his very name inspired at Vienna dispersed these thoughts, and his wrath
+fell entirely on the audacity of Pitt and Markof.  Strict orders were
+therefore issued to the prefects and commissaries of police to watch
+vigilantly all foreigners and strangers, who might have arrived, or who
+should arrive, to witness the ceremony of the coronation, and to arrest
+instantly any one who should give the least reason to suppose that he was
+an enemy instead of an admirer of His Imperial and Royal Majesty.  He
+also commanded the prefects of his palace not to permit any persons to
+approach his sacred person, of whose morality and politics they had not
+previously obtained a good account.
+
+These great measures of security were not entirely unnecessary.
+Individual vengeance and individual patriotism sharpened their daggers,
+and, to use Senator Roederer’s language, “were near transforming the most
+glorious day of rejoicing into a day of universal mourning.”
+
+All our writers on the Revolution agree that in France, within the first
+twelve years after we had reconquered our lost liberty, more conspiracies
+have been denounced than during the six centuries of the most brilliant
+epoch of ancient and free Rome.  These facts and avowals are speaking
+evidences of the eternal tranquillity of our unfortunate country, of our
+affection to our rulers, and of the unanimity with which all the changes
+of Government have been, notwithstanding our printed votes, received and
+approved.
+
+The frequency of conspiracies not only shows the discontent of the
+governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors.  This
+truth has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an
+expeditious and secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators,
+and to bury the conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup d’etat
+is to be struck; or, to excite the passions of hatred, any proofs can be
+found, or must be fabricated, involving an inimical or rival foreign
+Government in an odious plot.  Since the farce which Mehee de la Touche
+exhibited, you have, therefore, not read in the Moniteur either of the
+danger our Emperor has incurred several times since from the machinations
+of implacable or fanatical foes, or of the alarm these have caused his
+partisans.  They have, indeed, been hinted at in some speeches of our
+public functionaries, and in some paragraphs of our public prints, but
+their particulars will remain concealed from historians, unless some one
+of those composing our Court, our fashionable, or our political circles,
+has taken the trouble of noting them down; but even to these they are but
+imperfectly or incorrectly known.
+
+Could the veracity of a Fouche, a Real, a Talleyrand, or a Duroc (the
+only members of this new secret and invisible tribunal for expediting
+conspirators) be depended upon, they would be the most authentic
+annalists of these and other interesting secret occurrences.
+
+What I intend relating to you on this subject are circumstances such as
+they have been reported in our best informed societies by our most
+inquisitive companions.  Truth is certainly the foundation of these
+anecdotes; but their parts may be extenuated, diminished, altered, or
+exaggerated.  Defective or incomplete as they are, I hope you will not
+judge them unworthy of a page in a letter, considering the grand
+personage they concern, and the mystery with which he and his Government
+encompass themselves, or in which they wrap up everything not agreeable
+concerning them.
+
+A woman is said to have been at the head of the first plot against
+Napoleon since his proclamation as an Emperor of the French.  She called
+herself Charlotte Encore; but her real name is not known.  In 1803 she
+lived and had furnished a house at Abbeville, where she passed for a
+young widow of property, subsisting on her rents.  About the same time
+several other strangers settled there; but though she visited the
+principal inhabitants, she never publicly had any connection with the
+newcomers.
+
+In the summer of 1803, a girl at Amiens--some say a real enthusiast of
+Bonaparte’s, but, according to others, engaged by Madame Bonaparte to
+perform the part she did demanded, upon her knees, in a kind of paroxysm
+of joy, the happiness of embracing him, in doing which she fainted, or
+pretended to faint away, and a pension of three thousand livres--was
+settled on her for her affection.
+
+Madame Encore, at Abbeville, to judge of her discourse and conversation,
+was also an ardent friend and well-wisher of the Emperor; and when, in
+July, 1804, he passed through Abbeville, on his journey to the coast,
+she, also, threw herself at his feet, and declared that she would die
+content if allowed the honour of embracing him.  To this he was going to
+assent, when Duroc stepped between them, seized her by the arm, and
+dragged her to an adjoining room, whither Bonaparte, near fainting from
+the sudden alarm his friend’s interference had occasioned, followed him,
+trembling.  In the right sleeve of Madame Encore’s gown was found a
+stiletto, the point of which was poisoned.  She was the same day
+transported to this capital, under the inspection of Duroc, and
+imprisoned in the Temple.  In her examination she denied having
+accomplices, and she expired on the rack without telling even her name.
+The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once famous Andre Dumont, was ordered
+to disseminate a report that she was shut up as insane in a madhouse.
+
+In the strict search made by the police in the house occupied by her, no
+papers or any, other indications were discovered that involved other
+persons, or disclosed who she was, or what induced her to attempt such a
+rash action.  Before the secret tribunal she is reported to have said,
+“that being convinced of Bonaparte’s being one of the greatest criminals
+that ever breathed upon the earth, she took upon herself the office of a
+volunteer executioner; having, with every other good or loyal person, a
+right to punish him whom the law could not, or dared not, reach.” When,
+however, some repairs were made in the house at Abbeville by a new
+tenant, a bundle of papers was found, which proved that a M.
+Franquonville, and about thirty, other individuals (many, of whom were
+the late newcomers there), had for six months been watching an
+opportunity to seize Bonaparte in his journeys between Abbeville and
+Montreuil, and to carry him to some part of the coast, where a vessel was
+ready to sail for England with him.  Had he, however, made resistance, he
+would have been shot in France, and his assassins have saved themselves
+in the vessel.
+
+The numerous escort that always, since he was an Emperor, accompanied
+him, and particularly his concealment of the days of his journeys,
+prevented the execution of this plot; and Madame Encore, therefore, took
+upon her to sacrifice herself for what she thought the welfare of her
+country.  How Duroc suspected or discovered her intent is not known; some
+say that an anonymous letter informed him of it, while others assert
+that, in throwing herself at Bonaparte’s feet, this prefect observed the
+steel through the sleeve of her muslin gown.  Most of her associates were
+secretly executed; some, however, were carried to Boulogne and shot at
+the head of the army of England as English spies.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--After the discovery of Charlotte Encore’s attempt, Bonaparte,
+who hitherto had flattered himself that he possessed the good wishes, if
+not the affection, of his female subjects, made a regulation according to
+which no women who had not previously given in their names to the
+prefects of his palaces, and obtained previous permission, can approach
+his person or throw themselves at his feet, without incurring his
+displeasure, and even arrest.  Of this Imperial decree, ladies, both of
+the capital and of the provinces, when he travels, are officially
+informed.  Notwithstanding this precaution, he was a second time last
+spring, at Lyons, near falling the victim of the vengeance or malice of a
+woman.
+
+In his journey to be crowned King of Italy, he occupied his uncle’s
+episcopal palace at Lyons during the forty-eight hours he remained there.
+Most of the persons of both sexes composing the household of Cardinal
+Fesch were from his own country, Corsica; among these was one of the name
+of Pauline Riotti, who inspected the economy of the kitchens.  It is
+Bonaparte’s custom to take a dish of chocolate in the forenoon, which
+she, on the morning of his departure, against her custom, but under
+pretence of knowing the taste of the family, desired to prepare.  One of
+the cooks observed that she mixed it with something from her pocket, but,
+without saying a word to her that indicated suspicion, he warned
+Bonaparte, in a note, delivered to a page, to be upon his guard.  When
+the chamberlain carried in the chocolate, Napoleon ordered the person who
+had prepared it to be brought before him.  This being told Pauline, she
+fainted away, after having first drunk the remaining contents of the
+chocolate pot.  Her convulsions soon indicated that she was poisoned,
+and, notwithstanding the endeavours of Bonaparte’s physician, Corvisart,
+she expired within an hour; protesting that her crime was an act of
+revenge against Napoleon, who had seduced her, when young, under a
+promise of marriage; but who, since his elevation, had not only neglected
+her, but reduced her to despair by refusing an honest support for herself
+and her child, sufficient to preserve her from the degradation of
+servitude.  Cardinal Fesch received a severe reprimand for admitting
+among his domestics individuals with whose former lives he was not better
+acquainted, and the same day he dismissed every Corsican in his service.
+The cook was, with the reward of a pension, made a member of the Legion
+of Honour, and it was given out by Corvisart that Pauline died insane.
+
+Within three weeks after this occurrence, Bonaparte was, at Milan, again
+exposed to an imminent danger.  According to his commands, the vigilance
+of the police had been very strict, and even severe.  All strangers who
+could not give the most satisfactory account of themselves, had either
+been sent out of the country, or were imprisoned.  He never went out
+unless strongly attended, and during his audiences the most trusty
+officers always surrounded him; these precautions increased in proportion
+as the day of his coronation approached.  On the morning of that day,
+about nine o’clock, when full dressed in his Imperial and royal robes,
+and all the grand officers of State by his side, a paper was delivered to
+him by his chamberlain, Talleyrand, a nephew of the Minister.  The
+instant he had read it, he flew into the arms of Berthier, exclaiming:
+“My friend, I am betrayed; are you among the number of conspirators?
+Jourdan, Lasnes, Mortier, Bessieres, St. Cyr, are you also forsaking your
+friend and benefactor?”  They all instantly encompassed him, begging that
+he would calm himself; that they all were what they always had been,
+dutiful and faithful subjects.  “But read this paper from my prefect,
+Salmatoris; he says that if I move a step I may cease to live, as the
+assassins are near me, as well as before me.”
+
+The commander of his guard then entered with fifty grenadiers, their
+bayonets fixed, carrying with them a prisoner, who pointed out four
+individuals not far from Bonaparte’s person, two of whom were Italian
+officers of the Royal Italian Guard, and two were dressed in Swiss
+uniforms.  They were all immediately seized, and at their feet were found
+three daggers.  One of those in Swiss regimentals exclaimed, before he
+was taken: “Tremble, tyrant of my country!  Thousands of the descendants
+of William Tell have, with me, sworn your destruction.  You, escape this
+day, but the just vengeance of outraged humanity follows you like your
+shade.  Depend upon it an untimely end is irremediably reserved you.”  So
+saying, he pierced his heart and fell a corpse into the arms of the
+grenadiers who came to arrest him.
+
+This incident suspended the procession to the cathedral for an hour, when
+Berthier announced that the conspirators were punished.  Bonaparte
+evinced on this occasion the same absence of mind and of courage as on
+the 9th of November, 1799, when Arena and other deputies drew their
+daggers against him at St. Cloud.  As this scene did not redound much to
+the honour of the Emperor and King, all mention of the conspiracy was
+severely prohibited, and the deputations ready to congratulate him on his
+escape were dispersed to attend their other duties.
+
+The conspirators are stated to have been four young men, who had lost
+their parents and fortunes by the Revolutions effected by Bonaparte in
+Italy and Switzerland, and who had sworn fidelity to each other, and to
+avenge their individual wrongs with the injuries of their countries at
+the same time.  They were all prepared and resigned to die, expecting to
+be cut to pieces the moment Bonaparte fell by their hands; but one of the
+Italians, rather superstitious, had, before he went to the drawing-room,
+confessed and received absolution from a priest, whom he knew to be an
+enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in hope of reward, disclosed the
+conspiracy to the master of ceremonies, Salmatoris.  The three surviving
+conspirators are said to have been literally torn to pieces by the
+engines of torture, and the priest was shot for having given absolution
+to an assassin, and for having concealed his knowledge of the plot an
+hour after he was acquainted with it.  Even Salmatoris had some
+difficulty to avoid being disgraced for having written a terrifying note,
+which had exposed the Emperor’s weakness, and shown that his life was
+dearer to him at the head of Empires than when only at the head of
+armies.
+
+My narrative of this event I have from an officer present, whose veracity
+I can guarantee.  He also informed me that, in consequence of it, all the
+officers of the Swiss brigades in the French service that were quartered
+or encamped in Italy were, to the number of near fifty, dismissed at
+once.  Of the Italian guards, every officer who was known to have
+suffered any losses by the new order of things in his country, was
+ordered to resign, if he would not enter into the regiments of the line.
+
+Whatever the police agents did to prevent it, and in spite of some unjust
+and cruel chastisement, Bonaparte continued, during his stay in Italy, an
+object of ridicule in conversation, as well as in pamphlets and
+caricatures.  One of these represented him in the ragged garb of a
+sans-culotte, pale and trembling on his knees, with bewildered looks and
+his hair standing upright on his head like pointed horns, tearing the map
+of the world to pieces, and, to save his life, offering each of his
+generals a slice, who in return regarded him with looks of contempt mixed
+with pity.
+
+I have just heard of a new plot, or rather a league against Bonaparte’s
+ambition.  At its head the Generals Jourdan, Macdonald, Le Courbe, and
+Dessolles are placed, though many less victorious generals and officers,
+civil as well as military, are reported to be its members.  Their object
+is not to remove or displace Bonaparte as an Emperor of the French; on
+the contrary, they offer their lives to strengthen his authority and to
+resist his enemies; but they ask and advise him to renounce, for himself,
+for his relations, and for France, all possessions on the Italian side of
+the Alps, as the only means to establish a permanent peace, and to avoid
+a war with other States, whose safety is endangered by our great
+encroachments.  A mutinous kind of address to this effect has been sent
+to the camp of Boulogne and to all other encampments of our troops, that
+those generals and other military persons there, who chose, might both
+see the object and the intent of the associates.  It is reported that
+Bonaparte ordered it to be burnt by the hands of the common executioner
+at Boulogne; that sixteen officers there who had subscribed their names
+in appropriation of the address were broken, and dismissed with disgrace;
+that Jourdan is deprived of his command in Italy, and ordered to render
+an account of his conduct to the Emperor.  Dessolles is also said to be
+dismissed, and with Macdonald, Le Courbe, and eighty-four others of His
+Majesty’s subjects, whose names appeared under the remonstrance (or
+petition, as some call it), exiled to different departments of this
+country, where they are to expect their Sovereign’s further
+determination, and, in the meantime, remain under the inspection and
+responsibility of his constituted authorities and commissaries of police.
+As it is as dangerous to inquire as to converse on this and other
+subjects, which the mysterious policy of our Government condemns to
+silence or oblivion, I have not yet been able to gather any more or
+better information concerning this league, or unconstitutional opposition
+to the executive power; but as I am intimate with one of the actors,
+should he have an opportunity, he will certainly write to me at full
+length, and be very explicit.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe I have before remarked that, under the Government of
+Bonaparte, causes relatively the most insignificant have frequently
+produced effects of the greatest consequence.  A capricious or whimsical
+character, swaying with unlimited power, is certainly the most dangerous
+guardian of the prerogatives of sovereignty, as well as of the rights and
+liberties of the people.  That Bonaparte is as vain and fickle as a
+coquette, as obstinate as a mule, and equally audacious and unrelenting,
+every one who has witnessed his actions or meditated on his transactions
+must be convinced.  The least opposition irritates his pride, and he
+determines and commands, in a moment of impatience or vivacity, what may
+cause the misery of millions for ages, and, perhaps, his own repentance
+for years.
+
+When Bonaparte was officially informed by his Ambassador at Vienna, the
+young La Rochefoucauld, that the Emperor of Germany had declined being
+one of his grand officers of the Legion of Honour, he flew into a rage,
+and used against this Prince the most gross, vulgar, and unbecoming
+language.  I have heard it said that he went so far as to say, “Well,
+Francis II. is tired of reigning.  I hope to have strength enough to
+carry a third crown.  He who dares refuse to be and continue my equal,
+shall soon, as a vassal, think himself honoured with the regard which, as
+a master, I may condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him.”  Though
+forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with
+the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so
+furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of
+the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and
+for the honour of our nation thus represented.
+
+When the diplomatic audience was over, he said to Talleyrand, in a
+commanding and harsh tone of voice, in the presence of all his
+aides-de-camp and generals:
+
+“Write this afternoon, by an extraordinary courier, to my Minister at
+Genoa, Salicetti, to prepare the Doge and the people for the immediate
+incorporation of the Ligurian Republic with my Empire.  Should Austria
+dare to murmur, I shall, within three months, also incorporate the
+ci-devant Republic of Venice with my Kingdom of Italy!”
+
+“But--but--Sire!” uttered the Minister, trembling.
+
+“There exists no ‘but,’ and I will listen to no ‘but,’” interrupted His
+Majesty.  “Obey my orders without further discussions.  Should Austria
+dare to arm, I shall, before next Christmas, make Vienna the headquarters
+of a fiftieth military division.  In an hour I expect you with the
+despatches ready for Salicetti.”
+
+This Salicetti is a Corsican of a respectable family, born at Bastia, in
+1758, and it was he who, during the siege of Toulon in 1793, introduced
+his countryman, Napoleon Bonaparte, his present Sovereign, to the
+acquaintance of Barras, an occurrence which has since produced
+consequences so terribly notorious.
+
+Before the Revolution an advocate of the superior council of Corsica, he
+was elected a member to the First National Assembly, where, on the 30th
+of November, 1789, he pressed the decree which declared the Island of
+Corsica an integral part of the French monarchy.  In 1792, he was sent by
+his fellow citizens as a deputy to the National Convention, where he
+joined the terrorist faction, and voted for the death of his King.  In
+May, 1793, he was in Corsica, and violently opposed the partisans of
+General Paoli.  Obliged to make his escape in August from that island, to
+save himself, he joined the army of General Carteaux, then marching
+against the Marseilles insurgents, whence he was sent by the National
+Convention with Barras, Gasparin, Robespierre the younger, and Ricrod, as
+a representative of the people, to the army before Toulon, where, as well
+as at Marseilles, he shared in all the atrocities committed by his
+colleagues and by Bonaparte; for which, after the death of the
+Robespierres, he was arrested with him as a terrorist.
+
+He had not known Bonaparte much in Corsica, but, finding him and his
+family in great distress, with all other Corsican refugees, and observing
+his adroitness as a captain of artillery, he recommended him to Barras,
+and upon their representation to the Committee of Public Safety, he was
+promoted to a chef de brigade, or colonel.  In 1796, when Barras gave
+Bonaparte the command of the army of Italy, Salicetti was appointed a
+Commissary of Government to the same army, and in that capacity behaved
+with the greatest insolence towards all the Princes of Italy, and most so
+towards the Duke of Modena, with whom he and Bonaparte signed a treaty of
+neutrality, for which they received a large sum in ready money; but
+shortly afterwards the duchy was again invaded, and an attempt made to
+surprise and seize the Duke.  In 1797 he was chosen a member of the
+Council of Five Hundred, where he always continued a supporter of violent
+measures.
+
+When, in 1799, his former protege, Bonaparte, was proclaimed a First
+Consul, Salicetti desired to be placed in the Conservative Senate; but
+his familiarity displeased Napoleon, who made him first a commercial
+agent, and afterwards a Minister to the Ligurian Republic, so as to keep
+him at a distance.  During his several missions, he has amassed a
+fortune, calculated, at the lowest, of six millions of livres.
+
+The order Salicetti received to prepare the incorporation of Genoa with
+France, would not, without the presence of our troops, have been very
+easy to execute, particularly as he, six months before, had prevailed on
+the Doge and the Senate to resign all sovereignty to Lucien Bonaparte,
+under the title of a Grand Duke of Genoa.
+
+The cause of Napoleon’s change of opinion with regard to his brother
+Lucien, was that the latter would not separate from a wife he loved, but
+preferred domestic happiness to external splendour frequently accompanied
+with internal misery.  So that this act of incorporation of the Ligurian
+Republic, in fact, originated, notwithstanding the great and deep
+calculations of our profound politicians and political schemers, in
+nothing else but in the keeping of a wife, and in the refusal of a
+riband.
+
+That corruption, seduction, and menaces seconded the intrigues and
+bayonets which convinced the Ligurian Government of the honour and
+advantage of becoming subjects of Bonaparte, I have not the least doubt;
+but that the Doge, Girolamo Durazzo, and the senators Morchio, Maglione,
+Travega, Maghella, Roggieri, Taddei, Balby, and Langlade sold the
+independence of their country for ten millions of livres--though it has
+been positively asserted, I can hardly believe; and, indeed, money was as
+little necessary as resistance would have been unavailing, all the forts
+and strong positions being in the occupation of our troops.  A general
+officer present when the Doge of Genoa, at the head of the Ligurian
+deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at Milan, and exchanged
+liberty for bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief magistrate
+spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and that
+indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the deputation
+thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to vilify their
+sentiments as patriots.
+
+When Salicetti, with his secretary, Milhaud, had arranged this honourable
+affair, they set out from Genoa to announce to Bonaparte, at Milan, their
+success.  Not above a league from the former city their carriage was
+stopped, their persons stripped, and their papers and effects seized by a
+gang, called in the country the gang of PATRIOTIC ROBBERS, commanded by
+Mulieno.  This chief is a descendant of a good Genoese family, proscribed
+by France, and the men under him are all above the common class of
+people.  They never commit any murders, nor do they rob any but
+Frenchmen, or Italians known to be adherents of the French party.  Their
+spoils they distribute among those of their countrymen who, like
+themselves, have suffered from the revolutions in Italy within these last
+nine years.  They usually send the amount destined to relieve these
+persons to the curates of the several parishes, signifying in what manner
+it is to be employed.  Their conduct has procured them many friends among
+the low and the poor, and, though frequently pursued by our gendarmes,
+they have hitherto always escaped.  The papers captured by them on this
+occasion from Salicetti are said to be of a most curious nature, and
+throw great light on Bonaparte’s future views of Italy.  The original act
+of consent of the Ligurian Government to the incorporation with France
+was also in this number.  It is reported that they were deposited with
+the Austrian Minister at Genoa, who found means to forward them to his
+Court; and it is supposed that their contents did not a little to hasten
+the present movements of the Emperor of Germany.
+
+Another gang, known under the appellation of the PATRIOTIC AVENGERS, also
+desolates the Ligurian Republic.  They never rob, but always murder those
+whom they consider as enemies of their country.  Many of our officers,
+and even our sentries on duty, have been wounded or killed by them; and,
+after dark, therefore, no Frenchman dares walk out unattended.  Their
+chief is supposed to be a ci-devant Abbe, Sagati, considered a political
+as well as a religious fanatic.  In consequence of the deeds of these
+patriotic avengers, Bonaparte’s first act, as a Sovereign of Liguria, was
+the establishment of special military commissions, and a law prohibiting,
+under pain of death, every person from carrying arms who could not show a
+written permission of our commissary of police.  Robbers and assassins
+are, unfortunately, common to all nations, and all people of all ages;
+but those of the above description are only the production and progeny of
+revolutionary and troublesome times.  They pride themselves, instead of
+violating the laws, on supplying their inefficacy and counteracting their
+partiality.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte is now the knight of more Royal Orders than any other
+Sovereign in Europe, and were he to put them on all at once, their
+ribands would form stuff enough for a light summer coat of as many
+different colours as the rainbow.  The Kings of Spain, of Naples, of
+Prussia, of Portugal, and of Etruria have admitted him a
+knight-companion, as well as the Electors of Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden,
+and the Pope of Rome.  In return he has appointed these Princes his grand
+officers of HIS Legion of Honour, the highest rank of his newly
+instituted Imperial Order.  It is even said that some of these Sovereigns
+have been honoured by him with the grand star and broad riband of the
+Order of His Iron Crown of the Kingdom of Italy.
+
+Before Napoleon’s departure for Milan last spring, Talleyrand intimated
+to the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here, that their presence
+would be agreeable to the Emperor of the French at his coronation at
+Milan as a King of Italy.  In the preceding summer a similar hint, or
+order, had been given by him for a diplomatic trip to Aix-la-Chapelle,
+and all Their Excellencies set a-packing instantly; but some legitimate
+Sovereigns, having since discovered that it was indecent for their
+representatives to be crowding the suite of an insolently and proudly
+travelling usurper, under different pretences declined the honour of an
+invitation and journey to Italy.  It would, besides, have been pleasant
+enough to have witnessed the Ambassadors of Austria and Prussia, whose
+Sovereigns had not acknowledged Bonaparte’s right to his assumed title of
+King of Italy, indirectly approving it by figuring at the solemnity which
+inaugurated him as such.  Of this inconsistency and impropriety
+Talleyrand was well aware; but audacity on one side, and endurance and
+submission on the other, had so often disregarded these considerations
+before, that he saw no indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal.  His
+master had, however, the gratification to see at his levee, and in his
+wife’s drawing-room, the Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and
+Bavaria, who laid at the Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of
+their own Princes, to the nor little entertainment of His Imperial and
+Royal Majesty, and to the great edification of his dutiful subjects on
+the other side of the Alps.
+
+The expenses of Bonaparte’s journey to Milan, and his coronation there
+(including also those of his attendants from France), amounted to no less
+a sum than fifteen millions of livres--of which one hundred and fifty
+thousand livres--was laid out in fireworks, double that sum in
+decorations of the Royal Palace and the cathedral, and three millions of
+livres--in presents to different generals, grand officers, deputations,
+etc.  The poor also shared his bounty; medals to the value of fifty
+thousand livres--were thrown out among them on the day of the ceremony,
+besides an equal sum given by Madame Napoleon to the hospitals and
+orphan-houses.  These last have a kind of hereditary or family claim on
+the purse of our Sovereign; their parents were the victims of the
+Emperor’s first step towards glory and grandeur.
+
+Another three millions of livres was expended for the march of troops
+from France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more was
+requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during two
+months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men composing
+them two million livres’ worth of rings, watches, snuff-boxes, portraits
+set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets, as evidences of His
+Majesty’s satisfaction with their behaviour, presence, and performances.
+
+These troops were under the command of Bonaparte’s Field-marshal,
+Jourdan, a general often mentioned in the military annals of our
+revolutionary war.  During the latter part of the American war, he served
+under General Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in 1783, after
+the peace, his discharge.  He then turned a pedlar, in which situation
+the Revolution found him.  He had also married, for her fortune, a lame
+daughter of a tailor, who brought him a fortune of two thousand
+livres--from whom he has since been divorced, leaving her to shift for
+herself as she can, in a small milliner’s shop at Limoges, where her
+husband was born in 1763.
+
+Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
+organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in the
+National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel.  His known
+love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public Safety, in
+1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of Ardennes and
+of the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard.  On the 17th of October
+the same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies, which obliged the
+united forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to raise the siege of
+Maubeuge.  The jealous Republican Government, in reward, deposed him and
+appointed Pichegru his successor, which was the origin of that enmity and
+malignity with which Jourdan pursued this unfortunate general, even to
+his grave.  He never forgave Pichegru the acceptance of a command which
+he could not decline without risking his life; and when he should have
+avenged his disgrace on the real causes of it, he chose to resent it on
+him who, like himself, was merely an instrument, or a slave, in the hands
+and under the whip of a tyrannical power.
+
+After the imprisonment of General Hoche, in March, 1794, Jourdan
+succeeded him as chief of the army of the Moselle.  In June he joined,
+with thirty thousand men, the right wing of the army of the North,
+forming a new one, under the name of the army of the Sambre and Meuse. On
+the 16th of the same month he gained a complete victory over the Prince
+of Coburg, who tried to raise the siege of Charleroy.  This battle, which
+was fought near Trasegnies, is, nevertheless, commonly called the battle
+of Fleurus.  After Charleroy had surrendered on the 25th, Jourdan and his
+army were ordered to act under the direction of General Pichegru, who had
+drawn the plan of that brilliant campaign. Always envious of this
+general, Jourdan did everything to retard his progress, and at last
+intrigued so well that the army of the Sambre and the Meuse was separated
+from that of the North.
+
+With the former of these armies Jourdan pursued the retreating
+confederates, and, after driving them from different stands and
+positions, he repulsed them to the banks of the Rhine, which river they
+were obliged to pass.  Here ended his successes this year, successes that
+were not obtained without great loss on our side.
+
+Jourdan began the campaigns of 1795 and 1796 with equal brilliancy, and
+ended them with equal disgrace.  After penetrating into Germany with
+troops as numerous as well-disciplined, he was defeated at the end of
+them by Archduke Charles, and retreated always with such precipitation,
+and in such confusion, that it looked more like the flight of a
+disorderly rabble than the retreat of regular troops; and had not Moreau,
+in 1796, kept the enemy in awe, few of Jourdan’s officers or men would
+again have seen France; for the inhabitants of Franconia rose on these
+marauders, and cut them to pieces, wherever they could surprise or waylay
+them.
+
+In 1797, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the
+Jacobin faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a
+chief; and he had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride himself
+upon having procured the transportation of that patriotic general to
+Cayenne.  In 1799, he again assumed the command of the army of Alsace and
+of Switzerland; but he crossed the Rhine and penetrated into Suabia only
+to be again routed by the Archduke Charles, and to repass this river in
+disorder.  Under the necessity of resigning as a general-in-chief, he
+returned to the Council of Five Hundred, more violent than ever, and
+provoked there the most oppressive measures against his fellow citizens.
+Previous to the revolution effected by Bonaparte in November of that
+year, he had entered with Garreau and Santerre into a conspiracy, the
+object of which was to restore the Reign of Terror, and to prevent which
+Bonaparte said he made those changes which placed him at the head of
+Government.  The words were even printed in the papers of that period,
+which Bonaparte on the 10th of November addressed to the then deputy of
+Mayenne, Prevost: “If the plot entered into by Jourdan and others, and of
+which they have not blushed to propose to me the execution, had not been
+defeated, they would have surrounded the place of your sitting, and to
+crush all future opposition, ordered a number of deputies to be
+massacred.  That done, they were to establish the sanguinary despotism of
+the Reign of Terror.”  But whether such was Jourdan’s project, or whether
+it was merely given out to be such by the consular faction, to extenuate
+their own usurpation, he certainly had connected himself with the most
+guilty and contemptible of the former terrorists, and drew upon himself
+by such conduct the hatred and blame even of those whose opinion had long
+been suspended on his account.
+
+General Jourdan was among those terrorists whom the Consular Government
+condemned to transportation; but after several interviews with Bonaparte
+he was not only pardoned, but made a Counsellor of State of the military
+section; and afterwards, in 1801, an administrator-general of Piedmont,
+where he was replaced by General Menou in 1803, being himself entrusted
+with the command in Italy.  This place he has preserved until last month,
+when he was ordered to resign it to Massena, with whom he had a quarrel,
+and would have fought him in a duel, had not the Viceroy, Eugene de
+Beauharnais, put him under arrest and ordered him back hither, where he
+is daily expected.  If Massena’s report to Bonaparte be true, the army of
+Italy was very far from being as orderly and numerous as Jourdan’s
+assertions would have induced us to believe.  But this accusation of a
+rival must be listened to with caution; because, should Massena meet with
+repulse, he will no doubt make use of it as an apology; and should he be
+victorious, hold it out as a claim for more honour and praise.
+
+The same doubts which still continue of Jourdan’s political opinions
+remain also with regard to his military capacity.  But the unanimous
+declaration of those who have served under his orders as a general must
+silence both his blind admirers and unjust slanderers.  They all allow
+him some military ability; he combines and prepares in the Cabinet a plan
+of defence and attack, with method and intelligence, but he does not
+possess the quick coup d’oeil, and that promptitude which perceives, and
+rectifies accordingly, an error on the field of battle.  If, on the day
+of action, some accident, or some manoeuvre, occurs, which has not been
+foreseen by him, his dull and heavy genius does not enable him to alter
+instantly his dispositions, or to remedy errors, misfortunes, or
+improvidences.  This kind of talent, and this kind of absence of talent,
+explain equally the causes of his advantages, as well as the origin of
+his frequent disasters.  Nobody denies him courage, but, with most of our
+other republican generals, he has never been careful of the lives of the
+troops under him.  I have heard an officer of superior talents and rank
+assert, in the presence of Carnot, that the number of wounded and killed
+under Jourdan, when victorious, frequently surpassed the number of
+enemies he had defeated.  I fear it is too true that we are as much, if
+not more, indebted for our successes to the superior number as to the
+superior valour of our troops.
+
+Jourdan is, with regard to fortune, one of our poorest republican
+generals who have headed armies.  He has not, during all his campaigns,
+collected more than a capital of eight millions of livres--a mere trifle
+compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions of Le
+Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of
+Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte.  It is also
+true that Jourdan is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and
+women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to
+business, he passed the remainder of his time either at the
+gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio--I say seraglio,
+because he kept, in the extensive house joining his palace as governor
+and commander, ten women-three French, three Italians, two Germans, two
+Irish or English girls.  He supported them all in style; but they were
+his slaves, and he was their sultan, whose official mutes (his
+aides-de-camp) both watched them, and, if necessary, chastised them.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I can truly defy the world to produce a corps of such a
+heterogeneous composition as our Conservative Senate, when I except the
+members composing Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour.  Some of our Senators
+have been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks, physicians,
+barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers, mountebanks,
+Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors, counsellors, or presidents
+of Parliament, admirals, barristers, Bishops, sailors, attorneys,
+authors, Barons, spies, painters, professors, Ministers, sans-culottes,
+atheists, stonemasons, robbers, mathematicians, philosophers, regicides,
+and a long et cetera.  Any person reading through the official list of
+the members of the Senate, and who is acquainted with their former
+situations in life, may be convinced of this truth.  Should he even be
+ignorant of them, let him but inquire, with the list in his hand, in any
+of our fashionable or political circles; he will meet with but few
+persons who are not able or willing to remove his doubts, or to gratify
+his curiosity.  There are not many of them whom it is possible to
+elevate, but those are still more numerous whom it is impossible to
+degrade.  Their past lives, vices, errors, or crimes, have settled their
+characters and reputation; and they must live and die in ‘statu quo’,
+either as fools or as knaves, and perhaps as both.
+
+I do not mean to say that they are all criminals or all equally criminal,
+if insurrection against lawful authority and obedience to usurped tyranny
+are not to be considered as crimes; but there are few indeed who can lay
+their hands on their bosoms and say, ‘vitam expendere vero’.  Some of
+them, as a Lagrange, Berthollet, Chaptal, Laplace, Francois de
+Neuf-Chateau, Tronchet, Monge, Lacepede, and Bougainville, are certainly
+men of talents; but others, as a Porcher, Resnier, Vimar, Auber, Perk,
+Sera, Vernier, Vien, Villetard, Tascher, Rigal, Baciocchi, Beviere,
+Beauharnais, De Luynea (a ci-devant duke, known under the name of Le Gros
+Cochon), nature never destined but to figure among those half-idiots and
+half-imbeciles who are, as it were, intermedial between the brute and
+human creation.
+
+Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche,
+Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d’Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer
+form another class,--some of them regicides, others assassins and
+plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning
+of the Revolution.  They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge,
+and of great presumption.  As to their morality, it is on a level with
+their religion and loyalty.  They betrayed their King, and had denied
+their God already in 1789.
+
+After these come some others, who again have neither talents to boast of
+nor crimes of which they have to be ashamed.  They have but little
+pretension to genius, none to consistency, and their honesty equals their
+capacity.  They joined our political revolution as they might have done a
+religious procession.  It was at that time a fashion; and they applauded
+our revolutionary innovations as they would have done the introduction of
+a new opera, of a new tragedy, of a new comedy, or of a new farce.  To
+this fraternity appertain a ci-devant Comte de Stult-Tracy,
+Dubois--Dubay, Kellerman, Lambrechts, Lemercier, Pleville--Le Pelley,
+Clement de Ris, Peregeaux, Berthelemy, Vaubois, Nrignon, D’Agier, Abrial,
+De Belloy, Delannoy, Aboville, and St. Martin La Motte.
+
+Such are the characteristics of men whose ‘senatus consultum’ bestows an
+Emperor on France, a King on Italy, makes of principalities departments
+of a Republic, and transforms Republics into provinces or principalities.
+To show the absurdly fickle and ridiculously absurd appellations of our
+shamefully perverted institutions, this Senate was called the
+Conservative Senate; that is to say, it was to preserve the republican
+consular constitution in its integrity, both against the; encroachments
+of the executive and legislative power, both against the manoeuvres of
+the factions, the plots of the royalists or monarchists, and the clamours
+of a populace of levellers.  But during the five years that these honest
+wiseacres have been preserving, everything has perished--the Republic,
+the Consuls, free discussions, free election, the political liberty, and
+the liberty of the Press; all--all are found nowhere but in old, useless,
+and rejected codes.  They have, however, in a truly patriotic manner
+taken care of their own dear selves.  Their salaries are more than
+doubled since 1799.
+
+Besides mock Senators, mock praetors, mock quaestors, other ‘nomina
+libertatis’ are revived, so as to make the loss of the reality so much
+the more galling.  We have also two curious commissions; one called “the
+Senatorial Commission of Personal Liberty,” and the other “the Senatorial
+Commission of the Liberty of the Press.”  The imprisonment without cause,
+and transportation without trial, of thousands of persons of both sexes
+weekly, show the grand advantages which arise from the former of these
+commissions; and the contents of our new books and daily prints evince
+the utility and liberality of the latter.
+
+But from the past conduct of these our Senators, members of these
+commissions, one may easily conclude what is to be expected in future
+from their justice and patriotism.  Lenoin Laroche, at the head of the
+one, was formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to
+politics than to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at the
+end of the session of the first assembly (of which he was a member),
+forced, for subsistence, to become the editor of an insignificant
+journal.  Here he preached licentiousness, under the name of Liberty, and
+the agrarian law in recommending Equality.  A prudent courtier of all
+systems in fashion, and of all factions in power, he escaped
+proscription, though not accusation of having shared in the national
+robberies.  A short time in the summer of 1797, after the dismissal of
+Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins
+elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he, with other
+deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return, rewarded with a
+place in the Senate.  Under monarchy he was a republican, and under a
+Republic he extolled monarchical institutions.  He wished to be singular,
+and to be rich.  Among so many shocking originals, however, he was not
+distinguished; and among so many philosophical marauders, he had no
+opportunity to pillage above two millions of livres.  This friend of
+liberty is now one of the most despotic Senators, and this lover of
+equality never answers when spoken to, if not addressed as “His
+Excellency,” or “Monseigneur.”
+
+Boissy d’ Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the
+Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was
+chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions, and
+in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that dishonoured
+the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution.  A member afterwards
+of the National Convention, he was sent in mission to Lyons, where,
+instead of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he inflicted new ones.
+When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he
+pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in
+his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take
+it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First!  He pronounced
+the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat.  “The soul,”
+ said he, “was moved and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the
+Supreme Being with philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;” and he
+signed the removal of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to
+humanity!  In September, 1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to
+transportation by the Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made
+him first a tribune and afterwards a Senator.
+
+Boissy d’ Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
+neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself,
+he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and
+friends.
+
+Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
+bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the
+same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
+attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a
+motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France.  He
+seconded another motion of Bonaparte’s prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a
+corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
+Princes.  At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on
+having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and
+boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary
+justice, those who had escaped the laws.  After meeting with well-merited
+contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a
+handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of
+Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of
+his Senate.  Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense
+when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
+him by Nature.  Without education, as well as without parts, he for a
+long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
+eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent.  His ideas of liberty
+are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
+arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
+because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.
+
+Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
+commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
+four are slaves.
+
+Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
+liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal.  The former
+is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
+sentence of his good King’s death, while declaring himself a royalist. A
+mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
+enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
+caused to be massacred or guillotined.  When, as a Minister of Justice,
+he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
+affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices,
+whose nature had not much of tenderness.  As a member of the first
+assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the
+Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press. “The
+laws, you say” (exclaimed he, in the Council), “punish libellers; so they
+do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors
+unbolted?  Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a
+citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press,
+you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think.
+The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain.  Were you,
+therefore, determined to decree the motion for this dangerous and
+impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that conviction of having
+written a libel carries with it capital punishment, and that a label be
+fastened on the breast of the libeller, when carried to execution, with
+this inscription: ‘A social murderer,’ or ‘A murderer of characters!’”
+
+Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all
+political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after
+approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them,
+or betrayed them.  Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at
+Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the
+Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court.  Immoral and
+unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only
+equalled by his perversity and cruelty.  It was he who, on the 10th of
+August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of
+their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act. After
+he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties
+and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a
+Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and
+afterwards as a Senator.  His own and only daughter died in a
+miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural
+parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his
+father’s baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to
+marry.
+
+With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one
+period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the
+preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as
+well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a
+constitutional Government.  At another time he wrote that, as it was
+impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness
+of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the
+liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one
+wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to
+preserve.  To show his indifference about his own character, as well as
+about the opinion of the public, these opposite declarations were
+inserted in one of our daily papers, and both were signed “Roederer.”
+
+In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand
+livres--and he now possesses national property purchased for seven
+millions of livres--and he avows himself to be worth three millions more
+in money placed in our public funds.  He often says, laughingly, that he
+is under great obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted in
+one day all his debts.  All his creditors, after being denounced for
+their aristocracy, were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.
+
+Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have
+had the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most
+affected, silly, and disgusting.  His wrinkled face, and effeminate and
+childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his
+confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear
+such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and
+enervated person, that I have frequently been ready to laugh at him in
+his face, had not indignation silenced all other feeling.  A
+light-coloured wig covers a bald head; his cheeks and eyelids are
+painted, and his teeth false; and I have seen a woman faint away from the
+effect of his breath, notwithstanding that he infects with his musk and
+perfumes a whole house only with his presence.  When on the ground floor
+you may smell him in the attic.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The reciprocal jealousy and even interest of Austria, France,
+and Russia have hitherto prevented the tottering Turkish Empire from
+being partitioned, like Poland, or seized, like Italy; to serve as
+indemnities, like the German empire; or to be shared, as reward to the
+allies, like the Empire of Mysore.
+
+When we consider the anarchy that prevails, both in the Government and
+among the subjects, as well in the capital as in the provinces of the
+Ottoman Porte; when we reflect on the mutiny and cowardice of its armies
+and navy, the ignorance and incapacity of its officers and military and
+naval commanders, it is surprising, indeed, as I have heard Talleyrand
+often declare, that more foreign political intrigues should be carried on
+at Constantinople alone than in all other capitals of Europe taken
+together.  These intrigues, however, instead of doing honour to the,
+sagacity and patriotism of the members of the Divan, expose only their
+corruption and imbecility; and, instead of indicating a dread of the
+strength of the Sublime Sultan, show a knowledge of his weakness, of
+which the gold of the most wealthy, and the craft of the most subtle, by
+turns are striving to profit.
+
+Beyond a doubt the enmity of the Ottoman Porte can do more mischief than
+its friendship can do service.  Its neutrality is always useful, while
+its alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no
+advantage.  It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than
+from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe.
+The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or
+nugatory in this assertion.
+
+As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in
+1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to
+invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion
+in favour of this country.  Our Ambassador in Turkey at that time, Comte
+de Choiseul-Gouffier, though an admirer of the Revolution, was not a
+republican, and, therefore, secretly counteracted what he officially
+seemed to wish to effect.  The Imperial Court succeeded, therefore, in
+establishing a neutrality of the Ottoman Porte, but Comte de Choiseul was
+proscribed by the Convention.  As academician, he was, however, at St.
+Petersburg, liberally recompensed by Catherine II. for the services the
+Ambassador had performed at Constantinople.
+
+In May, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety determined to expedite
+another embassy to the Grand. Seignior, at the head of which was the
+famous intriguer, De Semonville, whose revolutionary diplomacy had,
+within three years, alarmed the Courts of Madrid, Naples, and Turin, as
+well as the republican Government of Genoa.  His career towards Turkey
+was stopped in the Grisons Republic, on the 25th of July following, where
+he, with sixteen other persons of his suite, was arrested, and sent a
+prisoner, first to Milan, and afterwards to Mantua.  He carried with him
+presents of immense value, which were all seized by the Austrians.  Among
+them were four superb coaches, highly finished, varnished, and gilt; what
+is iron or brass in common carriages was here gold or silver-gilt.  Two
+large chests were filled with stuff of gold brocade, India gold muslins,
+and shawls and laces of very great value.  Eighty thousand louis d’or in
+ready money; a service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly
+belonged to the Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and
+brilliants, the intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight
+millions of livres--and a great number of jewels; among others, the crown
+diamond, called here the Regents’, and in your country the Pitt Diamond,
+fell, with other riches, into the hands of the captors. Notwithstanding
+this loss and this disappointment, we contrived in vain to purchase the
+hostility of the Turks against our enemies, though with the sacrifice of
+no less a sum (according to the report of Saint Just, in June, 1794,)
+than seventy millions of livres:  These official statements prove the
+means which our so often extolled economical and moral republican
+Governments have employed in their negotiations.
+
+After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the Sultan
+became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
+friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war. The
+preliminaries of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were,
+however, soon followed with a renewal of our former friendly intercourse
+with the Ottoman Porte. The voyage of Sebastiani into Egypt and Syria, in
+the autumn of 1802, showed that our tenderness for the inhabitants of
+these countries had not diminished, and that we soon intended to bestow
+on them new hugs of fraternity.  Your pretensions to Malta impeded our
+prospects in the East, and your obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so
+well planned schemes of encroachments.  It was then that Bonaparte first
+selected for his representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune,
+commonly called by Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of
+military merit, an intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time
+of peace when seated in the Council chamber.
+
+This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married
+to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from
+starving, for he was as vicious as idle.  The money he gained when he
+chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among
+prostitutes.  To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest
+means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of
+types and of paper.
+
+In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an
+acceptable associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the
+Orleans faction, bought him a printing-office, and he printed the so
+dreadfully well-known journal, called ‘L’Amie du Peuple’.  From the
+principles of this atrocious paper, and from those of his sanguinary
+patron, he formed his own political creed.  He distinguished himself
+frequently at the clubs of the Cordeliers, and of the Jacobins, by his
+extravagant motions, and by provoking laws of proscription against a
+wealth he did not possess, and against a rank he would have dishonoured,
+but did not see without envy.  On the 30th of June, 1791, he said, in the
+former of these clubs:
+
+“We hear everywhere complaints of poverty; were not our eyes so often
+disgusted with the sight of unnatural riches, our hearts would not so
+often be shocked at the unnatural sufferings of humanity.  The blessings
+of our Revolution will never be felt by the world, until we in France are
+on a level, with regard to rank as well as to fortune.  I, for my part,
+know too well the dignity of human nature ever to bow to a superior; but,
+brothers and friends, it is not enough that we are all politically equal,
+we must also be all equally rich or equally poor--we must either all
+strive to become men of property, or reduce men of property to become
+sans-culottes.  Believe me, the aristocracy of property is more dangerous
+than the aristocracy of prerogative or fanaticism, because it is more
+common.  Here is a list sent to ‘L’ Amie du People’, but of which
+prudence yet prohibits the publication.  It contains the names of all the
+men of property of Paris, and of the Department of the Seine, the amount
+of their fortunes, and a proposal how to reduce and divide it among our
+patriots.  Of its great utility in the moment when we have been striking
+our grand blows, nobody dares doubt; I, therefore, move that a brotherly
+letter be sent to every society of our brothers and friends in the
+provinces, inviting each of them to compose one of similar contents and
+of similar tendency, in their own districts, with what remarks they think
+proper to affix, and to forward them to us, to be deposited, in the
+mother club, after taking copies of them for the archives of their own
+society.”
+
+His motion was decreed.
+
+Two days afterwards, he again ascended the tribune.  “You approved,” said
+he, “of the measures I lately proposed against the aristocracy of
+property; I will now tell you of another aristocracy which we must also
+crush--I mean that of religion, and of the clergy.  Their supports are
+folly, cowardice, and ignorance.  All priests are to be proscribed as
+criminals, and despised as impostors or idiots; and all altars must be
+reduced to dust as unnecessary.  To prepare the public mind for such
+events, we must enlighten it; which can only be done by disseminating
+extracts from ‘L’ Amie du People’, and other philosophical publications.
+I have here some ballads of my own composition, which have been sung in
+my quarter; where all superstitious persons have already trembled, and
+all fanatics are raving.  If you think proper, I will, for a mere trifle,
+print twenty thousand copies of them, to be distributed and disseminated
+gratis all over France.”
+
+After some discussion, the treasurer of the club was ordered to advance
+Citizen Brune the sum required, and the secretary to transmit the ballads
+to the fraternal societies in the provinces.
+
+Brune put on his first regimentals as an aide-decamp to General Santerre
+in December, 1792, after having given proofs of his military prowess the
+preceding September, in the massacre of the prisoners in the Abbey.  In
+1793 he was appointed a colonel in the revolutionary army, which, during
+the Reign of Terror, laid waste the departments of the Gironde, where he
+was often seen commanding his corps, with a human head fixed on his
+sword.  On the day when he entered Bordeaux with his troops, a new-born
+child occupied the same place, to the great horror of the inhabitants.
+During this brilliant expedition he laid the first foundation of his
+present fortune, having pillaged in a most unmerciful manner, and
+arrested or shot every suspected person who could not, or would not,
+exchange property for life.  On his return to Paris, his patriotism was
+recompensed with a commission of a general of brigade.  On the death of
+Robespierre, he was arrested as a terrorist, but, after some months’
+imprisonment, again released.
+
+In October, 1795, he assisted Napoleon Bonaparte in the massacre of the
+Parisians, and obtained for it, from the director Barras, the rank of a
+general of division.  Though occupying, in time of war, such a high
+military rank, he had hitherto never seen an enemy, or witnessed an
+engagement.
+
+After Bonaparte had planned the invasion and pillage of Switzerland,
+Brune was charged to execute this unjust outrage against the law of
+nations.  His capacity to intrigue procured him this distinction, and he
+did honour to the choice of his employers.  You have no doubt read that,
+after lulling the Government of Berne into security by repeated proposals
+of accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops during a
+truce, and obtained by treachery successes which his valour did not
+promise him.  The pillage, robberies, and devastations in Helvetia added
+several more millions to his previously great riches.
+
+It was after his campaign in Holland, during the autumn of 1799, that he
+first began to claim some military glory.  He owed, however, his
+successes to the superior number of his troops, and to the talents of the
+generals and officers serving under him.  Being made a Counsellor of
+State by Bonaparte, he was entrusted with the command of the army against
+the Chouans.  Here he again seduced by his promises, and duped by his
+intrigues, acted infamously--but was successful.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Three months before Brune set out on his embassy to
+Constantinople, Talleyrand and Fouche were collecting together all the
+desperadoes of our Revolution, and all the Italian, Corsican, Greek, and
+Arabian renegadoes and vagabonds in our country, to form him a set of
+attendants agreeable to the real object of his mission.
+
+You know too much of our national character and of my own veracity to
+think it improbable, when I assure you that most of our great men in
+place are as vain as presumptuous, and that sometimes vanity and
+presumption get the better of their discretion and prudence.  What I am
+going to tell you I did not hear myself, but it was reported to me by a
+female friend, as estimable for her virtues as admired for her
+accomplishments.  She is often honoured with invitations to Talleyrand’s
+familiar parties, composed chiefly of persons whose fortunes are as
+independent as their principles, who, though not approving the
+Revolution, neither joined its opposers nor opposed its adherents,
+preferring tranquillity and obscurity to agitation and celebrity.  Their
+number is not much above half a dozen, and the Minister calls them the
+only honest people in France with whom he thinks himself safe.
+
+When it was reported here that two hundred persons of Brune’s suite had
+embarked at Marseilles and eighty-four at Genoa, and when it was besides
+known that nearly fifty individuals accompanied him in his outset, this
+unusual occurrence caused much conversation and many speculations in all
+our coteries and fashionable circles.  About that time my friend dined
+with Talleyrand, and, by chance, also mentioned this grand embassy,
+observing, at the same time, that it was too much honour done to the
+Ottoman Porte, and too much money thrown away upon splendour, to honour
+such an imbecile and tottering Government.
+
+“How people talk,” interrupted Talleyrand, “about what they do not
+comprehend.  Generous as Bonaparte is, he does not throw away his
+expenses; perhaps within twelve months all these renegadoes or
+adventurers, whom you all consider as valets of Brune, will be
+three-tailed Pachas or Beys, leading friends of liberty, who shall have
+gloriously broken their fetters as slaves of a Selim to become the
+subjects of a Napoleon.  The Eastern Empire has, indeed, long expired,
+but it may suddenly be revived.”
+
+“Austria and Russia,” replied my friend, “would never suffer it, and
+England would sooner ruin her navy and exhaust her Treasury than permit
+such a revolution.”
+
+“So they have tried to do,” retorted Talleyrand, “to bring about a
+counter revolution in France.  But though only a moment is requisite to
+erect the standard of revolt, ages often are necessary to conquer and
+seize it.  Turkey has long been ripe for a revolution. It wanted only
+chiefs and directors.  In time of war, ten thousand Frenchmen landed in
+the Dardanelles would be masters of Constantinople, and perhaps of the
+Empire.  In time of peace, four hundred bold and well-informed men may
+produce the same effect.  Besides, with some temporary cession of a
+couple of provinces to each of the Imperial Courts, and with the
+temporary present of an island to Great Britain, everything may be
+settled ‘pro tempore’, and a Joseph Bonaparte be permitted to reign at
+Constantinople, as a Napoleon does at Paris.”
+
+That the Minister made use of this language I can take upon me to affirm;
+but whether purposely or unintentionally, whether to give a high opinion
+of his plans or to impose upon his company, I will not and cannot assert.
+
+On the subject of this numerous suite of Brune, Markof is said to have
+obtained several conferences with Talleyrand and several audiences of
+Bonaparte, in which representations, as just as energetic, were made,
+which, however, did not alter the intent of our Government or increase
+the favour of the Russian Ambassador at the Court of St. Cloud.  But it
+proved that our schemes of subversion are suspected, and that our agents
+of overthrow would be watched and their manoeuvres inspected.
+
+Count Italinski, the Russian Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, is one of
+those noblemen who unite rank and fortune, talents and modesty, honour
+and patriotism, wealth and liberality.  His personal character and his
+individual virtues made him, therefore, more esteemed and revered by the
+members of the Divan, than the high station he occupied, and the powerful
+Prince he represented, made him feared or respected.  His warnings had
+created prejudices against Brune which he found difficult to remove. To
+revenge himself in his old way, our Ambassador inserted several
+paragraphs in the Moniteur and in our other papers, in which Count
+Italinski was libelled, and his transactions or views calumniated.
+
+After his first audience with the Grand Seignior, Brune complained
+bitterly, of not having learned the Turkish language, and of being under
+the necessity, therefore, of using interpreters, to whom he ascribed the
+renewed obstacles he encountered in every step he took, while his hotel
+was continually surrounded with spies, and the persons of his suite
+followed everywhere like criminals when they went out.  Even the valuable
+presents he carried with him, amounting in value to twenty-four millions
+of livres--were but indifferently received, the acceptors, seeming to
+suspect the object and the honesty of the donor.
+
+In proportion as our politics became embroiled with those of Russia, the
+post of Brune became of more importance; but the obstacles thrown in his
+way augmented daily, and he was forced to avow that Russia and England
+had greater influence and more credit than the French Republic and its
+chief.  When Bonaparte was proclaimed an Emperor of the French, Brune
+expected that his acknowledgment as such at Constantinople would be a
+mere matter of course and announced officially on the day he presented a
+copy of his new credentials.  Here again he was disappointed, and
+therefore demanded his recall from a place where there was no
+probability, under the present circumstances, of either exciting the
+subjects to revolt, of deluding the Prince into submission, or seducing
+Ministers who, in pocketing his bribes, forgot for what they were given.
+
+It was then that Bonaparte sent Joubert with a letter in his own
+handwriting, to be delivered into the hands of the Grand Seignior
+himself.  This Joubert is a foundling, and, was from his youth destined
+and educated to be one of the secret agents of our secret diplomacy. You
+already, perhaps, have heard that our Government selects yearly a number
+of young foundlings or orphans, whom it causes to be brought up in
+foreign countries at its expense, so as to learn the language as natives
+of the nation, where, when grown up, they are chiefly to be employed.
+Joubert had been educated under the inspection of our consuls at Smyrna,
+and, when he assumes the dress of a Turk, from his accent and manners
+even the Mussulmans mistake him for one of their own creed and of their
+country.  He was introduced to Bonaparte in 1797, and accompanied him to
+Egypt, where his services were of the greatest utility to the army.  He
+is now a kind of undersecretary in the office of our secret diplomacy,
+and a member of the Legion of Honour.  Should ever Joseph Bonaparte be an
+Emperor or Sultan of the East, Joubert will certainly be his Grand
+Vizier.  There is another Joubert (with whom you must not confound him),
+who was; also a kind of Dragoman at Constantinople some years ago, and
+who is still somewhere on a secret mission in the East Indies.
+
+Joubert’s arrival at Constantinople excited both curiosity among the
+people and suspicion among the Ministry.  There is no example in the
+Ottoman history of a chief of a Christian nation having written to the
+Sultan by a private messenger, or of His Highness having condescended to
+receive the letter from the bearer, or to converse with him.  The Grand
+Vizier demanded a copy of Bonaparte’s letter, before an audience could be
+granted.  This was refused by Joubert; and as Brune threatened to quit
+the capital of Turkey if any longer delay were experienced, the letter
+was delivered in a garden near Constantinople, where the Sultan met
+Bonaparte’s agent, as if by chance, who, it seems, lost all courage and
+presence of mind, and did not utter four words, to which no answer was
+given.
+
+This impertinent intrigue, and this novel diplomacy, therefore, totally
+miscarried, to the great shame and greater disappointment of the schemers
+and contrivers.  I must, however, do Talleyrand the justice to say that
+he never approved of it, and even foretold the issue to his intimate
+friends.  It was entirely the whim and invention of Bonaparte himself,
+upon a suggestion of Brune, who was far from being so well acquainted
+with the spirit and policy of the Divan as he had been with the genius
+and plots of Jacobinism.  Not rebuked, however, Joubert was ordered away
+a second time with a second letter, and, after an absence of four months,
+returned again as he went, less satisfied with the second than with his
+first journey.
+
+In these trips to Turkey, he had always for travelling companions some of
+our emissaries to Austria, Hungary, and in particular to Servia, where
+the insurgents were assisted by our councils, and even guided by some of
+our officers.  The principal aide-de-camp of Czerni George, the Servian
+chieftain, is one Saint Martin, formerly a captain in our artillery,
+afterwards an officer of engineers in the Russian service, and finally a
+volunteer in the army of Conde.  He and three other officers of artillery
+were, under fictitious names, sent by our Government, during the spring
+of last year, to the camp of the insurgents.  They pretended to be of the
+Grecian religion, and formerly Russian officers, and were immediately
+employed.  Saint Martin has gained great influence over Czerni George,
+and directs both his political councils and military operations.  Besides
+the individuals left behind by Joubert; it is said that upwards of one
+hundred persons of Brune’s suite have been ordered for the same
+destination.  You see how great the activity of our Government is, and
+that nothing is thought unworthy of its vigilance or its machinations. In
+the staff of Paswan Oglou, six of my countrymen have been serving ever
+since 1796, always in the pay of our Government.
+
+It was much against the inclination and interest of our Emperor that his
+Ambassador at Constantinople should leave the field of battle there to
+the representatives of Russia, Austria, and England.  But his dignity was
+at stake.  After many threats to deprive the Sultan of the honour of his
+presence, and even after setting out once for some leagues on his return,
+Brune, observing that these marches and countermarches excited more mirth
+than terror, at last fixed a day, when, finally, either Bonaparte must be
+acknowledged by the Divan as an Emperor of the French, or his departure
+would take place.  On that day he, indeed, began his retreat, but, under
+different pretexts, be again stopped, sent couriers to his secretaries,
+waited for their return, and sent new couriers again,--but all in vain,
+the Divan continued refractory.
+
+At his first audience after his return, the reception Bonaparte gave him
+was not very cordial.  He demanded active employment, in case of a
+continental war, either in Italy or in Germany, but received neither.
+When our army of England was already on its march towards the Rhine, and
+Bonaparte returned here, Brune was ordered to take command on the coast,
+and to organize there an army of observation, destined to succour Holland
+in case of an invasion, or to invade England should a favourable occasion
+present itself.  The fact is, he was charged to intrigue rather than to
+fight; and were Napoleon able to force upon Austria another Peace of
+Luneville, Brune would probably be the plenipotentiary that would ask
+your acceptance of another Peace of Amiens.  It is here a general belief
+that his present command signifies another pacific overture from
+Bonaparte before your Parliament meets, or, at least, before the New
+Year.  Remember that our hero is more to be dreaded as a Philip than as
+an Alexander.
+
+General Brune has bought landed property for nine millions of livres--and
+has, in different funds, placed ready money to the same amount.  His own
+and his wife’s diamonds are valued by him at three millions; and when he
+has any parties to dinner, he exhibits them with great complaisance as
+presents forced upon him during his campaign in Switzerland and Holland,
+for the protection he gave the inhabitants.  He is now so vain of his
+wealth and proud of his rank, that he not only disregards all former
+acquaintances, but denies his own brothers and sisters,--telling them
+frankly that the Fieldmarshal Brune can have no shoemaker for a brother,
+nor a sister married to a chandler; that he knows of no parents, and of
+no relatives, being the maker of his own fortune, and of what he is; that
+his children will look no further back for ancestry than their father.
+One of his first cousins, a postilion, who insisted, rather obstinately,
+on his family alliance, was recommended by Brune to his friend Fouche,
+who sent him on a voyage of discovery to Cayenne, from which he probably
+will not return very soon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XL.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Madame de C------n is now one of our most fashionable ladies.
+Once in the week she has a grand tea-party; once in a fortnight a grand
+dinner; and once in the month a grand ball.  Foreign gentlemen are
+particularly well received at her house, which, of course, is much
+frequented by them.  As you intend to visit this country after a peace,
+it may be of some service to you not to be unacquainted with the portrait
+of a lady whose invitation to see the original you may depend upon the
+day after your arrival.
+
+Madame de C----n is the widow of the great and useless traveller, Comte
+de C----n, to whom his relatives pretend that she was never married. Upon
+his death-bed he acknowledged her, however, for his wife, and left her
+mistress of a fortune of three hundred thousand livres a year. The first
+four years of her widowhood she passed in lawsuits before the tribunals,
+where the plaintiffs could not prove that she was unmarried, nor she
+herself that she was married.  But Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, for a small
+douceur, speaking in her favour, the consciences of the juries, and the
+understanding of the judges, were all convinced at once that she had been
+the lawful wife, and was the lawful heiress, of Comte de C----n, who had
+no children, or nearer relatives than third cousins.
+
+Comte de C----n was travelling in the East Indies when the Revolution
+broke out.  His occupation there was a very innocent one; he drew
+countenances, being one of the most enthusiastic sectaries of Lavater,
+and modestly called himself the first physiognomist in the world. Indeed,
+he had been at least the most laborious one; for he left behind him a
+collection of six thousand two hundred portraits, drawn by himself in the
+four quarters of the world, during a period of thirty years.
+
+He never engaged a servant, nor dealt with a tradesman, whose physiognomy
+had not been examined by him.  In his travels he preferred the worst
+accommodation in a house where he approved of the countenance of the
+host, to the best where the traits or lines of the landlord’s face were
+irregular, or did not coincide with his ideas of physiognomical
+propriety.  The cut of a face, its expression, the length of the nose,
+the width or smallness of the mouth, the form of the eyelids or of the
+ears, the colour or thickness of the hair, with the shape and tout
+ensemble of the head, were always minutely considered and discussed
+before he entered into any agreement, on any subject, with any individual
+whatever.  Whatever recommendations, or whatever attestations were
+produced, if they did not correspond with his own physiognomical remarks
+and calculations, they were disregarded; while a person whose physiognomy
+pleased him required no other introduction to obtain his confidence.
+Whether he thought himself wiser than his forefathers, he certainly did
+not grow richer than they were.  Charlatans who imposed upon his
+credulity and impostors who flattered his mania, servants who robbed him
+and mistresses who deceived him, proved that if his knowledge of
+physiognomy was great, it was by no means infallible.  At his death, of
+the fortune left him by his parents only the half remained.
+
+His friends often amused themselves at the expense of his foibles. When
+he prepared for a journey to the East, one of them recommended him a
+servant, upon whose fidelity he could depend.  After examining with
+minute scrupulosity the head of the person, he wrote: “My friend, I
+accept your valuable present.  From calculations, which never deceive me,
+Manville (the servant’s name) possesses, with the fidelity of a dog, the
+intrepidity of the lion.  Chastity itself is painted on his front,
+modesty in his looks, temperance on his cheek, and his mouth and nose
+bespeak honesty itself.”  Shortly after the Count had landed at
+Pondicherry, Mauville, who was a girl, died, in a condition which showed
+that chastity had not been the divinity to whom she had chiefly
+sacrificed.  In her trunk were found several trinkets belonging to her
+master, which she honestly had appropriated to herself.  His
+miscalculation on this subject the Count could not but avow; he added,
+however, that it was the entire fault of his friend, who had duped him
+with regard to the sex.
+
+Madame de C----n was, on account of her physiognomy, purchased by her
+late husband, then travelling in Turkey, from a merchant of Circassian
+slaves, when she was under seven years of age, and sent for her education
+to a relative of the Count, an Abbess of a convent in Languedoc.  On his
+return from Turkey, some years afterwards, he took her under his own
+care, and she accompanied him all over Asia, and returned first to France
+in 1796, where her husband’s name was upon the list of emigrants, though
+he had not been in Europe for ten years before the Revolution.
+
+However, by some pecuniary arrangements with Barras, he recovered his
+property, which he did not long enjoy, for he died in 1798.  The suitors
+of Madame de C----n, mistress of a large fortune, with some remnants of
+beauty and elegance of manners, have been numerous, and among them
+several Senators and generals, and even the Minister Chaptal.  But she
+has politely declined all their offers, preferring her liberty and the
+undisturbed right of following her own inclination to the inconvenient
+ties of Hymen.  A gentleman, whom she calls, and who passes for, her
+brother, Chevalier de M de T----, a Knight of Malta, assists her in doing
+the honours of her house, and is considered as her favourite lover;
+though report and the scandalous chronicle say that she bestows her
+favours on every person who wishes to bestow on her his name, and that,
+therefore, her gallants are at least as numerous as her suitors.
+
+Such is the true statement of the past, as well as the present, with
+regard to Madame de C----n.  She relates, however, a different story. She
+says that she is the daughter of the Marquis de M de T-----, of a
+Languedoc family; that she sailed, when a child, with her mother in a
+felucca from Nice to Malta, there to visit her brother; was captured by
+an Algerine pilot, separated from her mother, and carried to
+Constantinople by a merchant of slaves; there she was purchased by Comte
+de C----n, who restored her to her family, and whom, therefore,
+notwithstanding the difference of their ages, she married from gratitude.
+This pretty, romantic story is ordered in our Court circles to be
+officially believed; and, of course, is believed by nobody, not even by
+the Emperor and Empress themselves, who would not give her the place of a
+lady-in-waiting, though her request was accompanied with a valuable
+diamond to the latter.  The present was kept, but the offer declined.
+
+All the members of the Bonaparte family, female as well as male, honour
+her house with their visits and with the acceptance of her invitations;
+and it is, therefore, among our fashionables, the ‘haut ton’ to be of the
+society and circle of Madame de C----n.
+
+Last February, Madame de P----t (the wife of Comte de P----t, a relative,
+by her husband’s side, of Madame de C----n, and who by the Revolution
+lost all their property, and now live with her as companions) was brought
+to bed of a son; the child was baptized by the Cardinal de Belloy, and
+Madame Joseph and Prince Louis Bonaparte stood sponsors. This occurrence
+was celebrated with great pomp, and a fete was given to nearly one
+hundred and fifty per sons of both sexes,--as usual, a mixture of
+ci-devant nobles and of ci-devant sans-culottes; of rank and meanness; of
+upstart wealth and beggared dignity.
+
+What that day struck me most was the audacity of the Senator Villetard in
+teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with his impertinent
+conversation and affected piety.  This Villetard was, before the
+Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789 by the mob from
+the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined for theft.  In 1791 his
+patriotism was so well known in the Department of Yonne, that he was
+deputed by the Jacobins there to the Jacobins of the capital with an
+address, encouraging and advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in
+1792 he was chosen a member of the National Convention, where the most
+sanguinary and most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon
+him in the number of their adherents.
+
+In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph Bonaparte at
+Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and
+liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the
+Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna. In
+the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the
+littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind.  The wooden
+image of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her,
+together with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic
+faithful have for ages believed to have been used by her, were presented
+by him to the Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a
+horribly blasphemous letter.  He passed the next night, after he had
+perpetrated this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of the
+Holy Virgin; and, on the next morning, placed one of them, naked, on the
+pedestal where the statue of the Virgin had formerly stood, and ordered
+all the devotees at Loretto, and two leagues round, to prostrate
+themselves before her.  This shocking command occasioned the premature
+death of fifteen ladies, two of whom, who were nuns, died on the spot on
+beholding the horrid outrage; and many more were deprived of their
+reason.  How barbarously unfeeling must that wretch be who, in bereaving
+the religious, the pious, and the conscientious of their consolation and
+hope, adds the tormenting reproach of apostasy, by forcing virtue upon
+its knees to bow before what it knows to be guilt and infamy.
+
+A traitor to his associates as to his God, it was he who, in November,
+1799, presented at St. Cloud the decree which excluded all those who
+opposed Bonaparte’s authority from the Council of Five Hundred, and
+appointed the two committees which made him a First Consul.  In reward
+for this act of treachery, he was nominated to a place in the
+Conservative Senate.  He has now ranked himself among our modern saints,
+goes regularly to Mass and confesses; has made a brother of his, who was
+a drummer, an Abbe; and his assiduity about the Cardinal was probably
+with a view to obtain advancement for this edifying priest.
+
+The Cardinal de Belloy is now ninety-six years of age, being born in
+1709, and has been a Bishop for fifty-three years, but, during the
+Revolution, was proscribed, with all other prelates.  He remained,
+however, in France, where his age saved him from the guillotine, but not
+from being reduced to the greatest want.  A descendant of a noble family,
+and possessing an unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one
+of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him
+an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from
+Rome.  But he is now in his second childhood, entirely directed by his
+grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and
+absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte.  An innocent instrument in their hands,
+of those impious compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the
+Empress, he did not, perhaps, even understand the meaning.  From such a
+man the vile and artful Villetard might extort any promise.  I observed,
+however, with pleasure, that he was watched by the grand vicar, Malaret,
+who seldom loses sight of His Eminence.
+
+These two so opposite characters--I mean De Belloy and Villetard--are
+already speaking evidences of the composition of the society at Madame de
+C----n’s.  But I will tell you something still more striking.  This lady
+is famous for her elegant services of plate, as much as for her delicate
+taste in entertaining her parties.  After the supper on this night,
+eleven silver and four gold plates, besides numerous silver and gold
+spoons, forks, etc., were missed.  She informed Fouche of her loss, who
+had her house surrounded by spies, with orders not to let any servant
+pass without undergoing a strict search.  The first gentleman who called
+for his carriage was His Excellency the Counsellor of State and grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, Treilhard.  His servants were stopped
+and the cause explained.  They willingly, and against the protest of
+their master, suffered themselves to be searched.  Nothing was found upon
+them; but the police agents, observing the full-dress hat of their master
+rather bulky under his arm, took the liberty to look into it, where they
+found one of Madame de C----n’s gold plates and two of her spoons.  His
+Excellency immediately ordered his servants to be arrested, for having
+concealed their theft there.  Fouche, however, when called out, advised
+his friend to forgive them for misplacing them, as the less said on the
+subject the better.  When Madame de C----n heard of this discovery, she
+asked Fouche to recall his order or to alter it.  “A repetition of such
+misplacings in the hats or in the pockets of the masters,” said she,
+“would injure the reputation of my house and company.”  She never
+recovered the remainder of her loss, and that she might not be exposed in
+future to the same occurrences, she bought two services of china the
+following day, to be used when she had mixed society.
+
+Treilhard had, before the Revolution, the reputation of being an honest
+man and an able advocate; but has since joined the criminals of all
+factions, being an accomplice in their guilt and a sharer of their
+spoils.  In the convention, he voted for the death of Louis XVI. and
+pursued without mercy the unfortunate Marie Antoinette to the scaffold.
+During his missions in the departments, wherever he went the guillotine
+was erected and blood flowed in streams.  He was, nevertheless, accused
+by Robespierre of moderatism.  At Lille, in 1797, and at Rastadt, in
+1798, he negotiated as a plenipotentiary with the representatives of
+Princes, and in 1799 corresponded as a director with Emperors and Kings,
+to whom he wrote as his great and dear friends.  He is now a Counsellor
+of State, in the section of legislation, and enjoys a fortune of several
+millions of livres, arising from estates in the country, and from leases
+in the capital.  As this accident at Madame de C----n’s soon became
+public, his friends gave out that he had of late been exceedingly absent,
+and, from absence of mind, puts everything he can lay hold of into his
+pocket.  He is not a favourite with Madame Bonaparte, and she asked her
+husband to dismiss and disgrace him for an act so disgraceful to a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, but was answered, “Were I to turn away
+all the thieves and rogues that encompass me I should soon cease to
+reign.  I despise them, but I must employ them.”
+
+It is whispered that the police have discovered another of Madame de C
+n’s lost gold plates at a pawnbroker’s, where it had been pledged by the
+wife of another Counsellor of State, Francois de Nantes.
+
+This I give you merely as a report!  though the fact is, that Madame
+Francois is very fond of gambling, but very unfortunate; and she, with
+other of our fashionable ladies, has more than once resorted to her
+charms for the payment of her gambling debts.
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since my return here, I have never neglected to present myself
+before our Sovereign, on his days of grand reviews and grand diplomatic
+audiences.  I never saw him more condescending, more agreeable, or, at
+least, less offensive, than on the day of his last levee, before he set
+out to be inaugurated a King of Italy; nor worse tempered, more petulant,
+agitated, abrupt, and rude than at his first grand audience after his
+arrival from Milan, when this ceremony had been performed.  I am not the
+only one who has made this remark; he did not disguise either his good or
+ill-humour; and it was only requisite to have eyes and ears to see and be
+disgusted at the difference of behaviour.
+
+I have heard a female friend of Madame Bonaparte explain, in part, the
+cause of this alteration.  Just before he set out for Italy, the
+agreeable news of the success of the first Rochefort squadron in the West
+Indies, and the escape of our Toulon fleet from the vigilance of your
+Lord Nelson, highly elevated his spirits, as it was the first naval
+enterprise of any consequence since his reign.  I am certain that one
+grand naval victory would flatter his vanity and ambition more than all
+the glory of one of his most brilliant Continental campaigns.  He had
+also, at that time, great expectations that another negotiation with
+Russia would keep the Continent submissive under his dictature, until he
+should find an opportunity of crushing your power.  You may be sure that
+he had no small hopes of striking a blow in your country, after the
+junction of our fleet with the Spanish, not by any engagement between our
+Brest fleet and your Channel fleet, but under a supposition that you
+would detach squadrons to the East and West Indies in search of the
+combined fleet, which, by an unexpected return, according to orders,
+would have then left us masters of the Channel, and, if joined with the
+Batavian fleet, perhaps even of the North Sea.  By the incomprehensible
+activity of Lord Nelson, and by the defeat (or as we call it here, the
+negative victory) of Villeneuve and Gravina, all this first prospect had
+vanished.  Our vengeance against a nation of shopkeepers we were not only
+under the necessity of postponing, but, from the unpolite threats and
+treaties of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg with those of Vienna and St.
+James, we were on the eve of a Continental war, and our gunboats, instead
+of being useful in carrying an army to the destruction of the tyrants of
+the seas, were burdensome, as an army was necessary to guard them, and to
+prevent these tyrants from capturing or destroying them.  Such changes,
+in so short a period of time as three months, might irritate a temper
+less patient than that of Napoleon the First.
+
+At his grand audience here, even after the army, of England had moved
+towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should, therefore,
+have been made up, he was almost insupportable.  The low bows, and the
+still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador, the Marquis da
+Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon Ambassador, Count von
+Buneau, was addressed in a language that no well-bred master ever uses in
+speaking to a menial servant.  He did not cast a look, or utter a word,
+that was not an insult to the audience and a disgrace to his rank. I
+never before saw him vent his rage and disappointment so
+indiscriminately.  We were, indeed (if I may use the term), humbled and
+trampled upon en masse.  Some he put out of countenance by staring
+angrily at them; others he shocked by his hoarse voice and harsh words;
+and all--all of us--were afraid, in our turn, of experiencing something
+worse than our neighbours.  I observed more than one Minister, and more
+than one general, change colour, and even perspire, at His Majesty’s
+approach.
+
+I believe the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here will all agree
+with me that, at a future congress, the restoration of the ancient and
+becoming etiquette of the Kings of France would be as desirable a point
+to demand from the Emperor of the French as the restoration of the
+balance of power.
+
+Before his army of England quitted its old quarters on the coast, the
+officers and men often felt the effects of his ungovernable temper. When
+several regiments of grenadiers, of the division of Oudinot, were
+defiling before him on the 25th of last month, he frequently and
+severely, though without cause, reprobated their manner of marching, and
+once rode up to Captain Fournois, pushed him forwards with the point of a
+small cane, calling out, “Sacre Dieu!  Advance; you walk like a turkey.”
+ In the first moment of indignation, the captain, striking at the cane
+with his sword, made a push, or a gesture, as if threatening the person
+of Bonaparte, who called out to his aide-de-camp, Savary:
+
+“Disarm the villain, and arrest him!”
+
+“It is unnecessary,” the captain replied, “I have served a tyrant, and
+merit my fate!”  So saying, he passed his sword through his heart.
+
+His whole company stopped instantly, as at a word of command, and a
+general murmur was heard.
+
+“Lay down your arms, and march out of the file instantly,” commanded
+Bonaparte, “or you shall be cut down for your mutiny by my guides.”
+
+They hesitated for a moment, but the guides advancing to surround them,
+they obeyed, and were disarmed.  On the following afternoon, by a special
+military commission, each tenth man was condemned to be shot; but
+Bonaparte pardoned them upon condition of serving for life in the
+colonies; and the whole company was ordered to the colonial depots. The
+widow and five children of Captain Fournois the next morning threw
+themselves at the Emperor’s feet, presenting a petition, in which they
+stated that the pay of the captain had been their only support.
+
+“Well,” replied Bonaparte to the kneeling petitioners, “Fournois was both
+a fool and a traitor; but, nevertheless, I will take care of you.”
+ Indeed, they have been so well taken care of that nobody knows what has
+become of them.
+
+I am almost certain that I am not telling you what you did not know
+beforehand in informing you that the spirit of our troops is greatly
+different from that of the Germans, and even from that of your own
+country.  Every, one of our soldiers would prefer being shot to being
+beaten or caned.  Flogging, with us, is out of the question.  It may,
+perhaps, be national vanity, but I am doubtful whether any other army is,
+or can be, governed, with regard to discipline, in a less violent and
+more delicate manner, and, nevertheless, be kept in subordination, and
+perform the most brilliant exploits.  Remember, I speak of our spirit of
+subordination and discipline, and not of our character as citizens, as
+patriots, or as subjects.  I have often hinted it, but I believe I have
+not explained myself so fully before; but my firm opinion and persuasion
+is that, with regard to our loyalty, our duty, and our moral and
+political principles, another equally inconsistent and despicable people
+does not exist in the universe.
+
+The condition of the slave is certainly in itself that of vileness; but
+is that slave a vile being who, for a blow, pierces his bosom because he
+is unable to avenge it?  And what epithet can be given him who braves
+voluntarily a death seemingly certain, not from the love of his country,
+but from a principle of honour, almost incompatible with the dishonour of
+bondage?
+
+During the siege of Yorktown, in America, we had, during one night,
+erected a battery, with intent to blow up a place which, according to the
+report of our spies, was your magazine of ammunition, etc.  We had not
+time to finish it before daylight; but one loaded twenty-four pounder was
+mounted, and our cannoneer, the moment he was about to fire it, was
+killed.  Six more of our men, in the same attempt, experienced the same
+fate.  My regiment constituted the advanced guard nearest to the spot,
+and La Fayette brought me the order from the commander-in-chief to engage
+some of my men upon that desperate undertaking.  I spoke to them, and two
+advanced, but were both instantly shot by your sharpshooters.  I then
+looked at my grenadiers, without uttering anything, when, to my sorrow,
+one of my best and most orderly men advanced, saying, “My colonel, permit
+me to try my fortune!”  I assented, and he went coldly amidst hundreds of
+bullets whistling around his ears, set fire to the cannon, which blew up
+a depot of powder, as was expected, and in the confusion returned unhurt.
+La Fayette then presented him with his purse.  “No, monsieur,” replied
+he, “money did not make me venture upon such a perilous undertaking.”  I
+understood my man, promoted him to a sergeant, and recommended him to
+Rochambeau, who, in some months, procured him the commission of a
+sub-lieutenant.  He is now one of Bonaparte’s Field-marshals, and the
+only one of that rank who has no crimes to reproach himself with.  This
+man was the soldier of a despot; but was not his action that of a man of
+honour, which a stanch republican of ancient Rome would have been proud
+of?  Who can explain this contradiction?
+
+This anecdote about Fournois I heard General Savary relate at Madame
+Duchatel’s, as a proof of Bonaparte’s generosity and clemency, which, he
+affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at Boulogne.  I do not
+suppose this officer to be above thirty years of age, of which he has
+passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses or in watch-houses; but no
+tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or a more abject courtier.  His
+affectation to extol everything that Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is
+at last become so habitual that it is naturalized, and you may mistake
+for sincerity that which is nothing but imposture or flattery. This son
+of a Swiss porter is now one of Bonaparte’s adjutants-general, a colonel
+of the Gendarmes d’Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to
+valour or merit, but to abjectness, immorality, and servility.  When an
+aide-de-camp with Bonaparte in Egypt, he served him as a spy on his
+comrades and on the officers of the staff, and was so much detested that,
+near Aboukir, several shots were fired at him in his tent by his own
+countrymen.  He is supposed still to continue the same espionage; and as
+a colonel of the Gendarmes d’Elite, he is charged with the secret
+execution of all proscribed persons or State prisoners, who have been
+secretly condemned,--a commission that a despot gives to a man he trusts,
+but dares not offer to a man he esteems.  He is so well known that the
+instant he enters a society silence follows, and he has the whole
+conversation to himself.  This he is stupid enough to take for a
+compliment, or for a mark of respect, or an acknowledgment of his
+superior parts and intelligence, when, in fact, it is a direct reproach
+with which prudence arms itself against suspected or known dishonesty.
+Besides his wife, he has to support six other women whom he has seduced
+and ruined; and, notwithstanding the numerous opportunities his master
+has procured him of pillaging and enriching himself, he is still much in
+debt; but woe to his creditors were they indiscreet enough to ask for
+their payments!  The Secret Tribunal would soon seize them and transport
+them, or deliver them over to the hands of their debtor, to be shot as
+traitors or conspirators.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I am told that it was the want of pecuniary resources that made
+Bonaparte so ill-tempered on his last levee day.  He would not have come
+here at all, but preceded his army to Strasburg, had his Minister of
+Finances, Gaudin, and his Minister of the Public Treasury, Marbois, been
+able to procure forty-four millions of livres--to pay a part of the
+arrears of the troops; and for the speedy conveyance of ammunition and
+artillery towards the Rhine.
+
+Immediately after his arrival here, Bonaparte sent for the directors of
+the Bank of France, informing them that within twenty-four hours they
+must advance him thirty-six millions of livres--upon the revenue of the
+last quarter of 1808.  The president of the bank, Senator Garrat,
+demanded two hours to lay before the Emperor the situation of the bank,
+that His Majesty might judge what sum it was possible to spare without
+ruining the credit of an establishment hitherto so useful to the commerce
+of the Empire.  To this Bonaparte replied that he was not ignorant of the
+resources, or of the credit of the bank, any more than of its public
+utility; but that the affairs of State suffered from every hour’s delay,
+and that, therefore, he insisted upon having the sum demanded even within
+two hours, partly in paper and partly in cash; and were they to show any
+more opposition, he would order the bank and all its effects to be seized
+that moment.  The directors bowed and returned to the bank; whither they
+were followed by four waggons escorted by hussars, and belonging to the
+financial department of the army of England.  In these were placed eight
+millions of livres in cash; and twenty-eight millions in bank-notes were
+delivered to M. Lefevre, the Secretary-General of Marbois, who presented,
+in exchange, Bonaparte’s bond and security for the amount, bearing an
+interest of five per cent. yearly.
+
+When this money transaction was known to the public, the alarm became
+general, and long before the hour the bank usually opens the adjoining
+streets were crowded with persons desiring to exchange their notes for
+cash.  During the night the directors had taken care to pay themselves
+for the banknotes in their own possession with silver or gold, and, as
+they expected a run, they ordered all persons to be paid in copper coin,
+as long as any money of this metal remained.  It required a long time to
+count those halfpennies and centimes (five of which make a sou, or
+halfpenny), but the people were not tired with waiting until towards
+three o’clock in the afternoon, when the bank is shut up.  They then
+became so clamorous that a company of gendarmes was placed for protection
+at the entrance of the bank; but, as the tumult increased, the street was
+surrounded by the police guards, and above six hundred individuals, many
+of them women, were carried, under an escort, to different police
+commissaries, and to the prefecture of the police.  There most of them,
+after being examined, were reprimanded and released.  The same night, the
+police spies reported in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, and on
+the Boulevards, that this run on the bank was encouraged, and paid for,
+by English emissaries, some of whom were already taken, and would be
+executed on the next day.  In the morning, however, the streets adjoining
+the bank were still more crowded, and the crowd still more tumultuous,
+because payment was refused for all notes but those of five hundred
+livres.  The activity of the police agents, supported by the gendarmes
+and police soldiers, again restored order, after several hundred persons
+had been again taken up for their mutinous conduct.  Of these many were,
+on the same evening, loaded with chains, and, placed in carts under
+military escort, paraded about near the bank and the Palais Royal; the
+police having, as a measure of safety, under suspicion that they were
+influenced by British gold, condemned them to be transported to Cayenne;
+and the carts set out on the same night for Rochefort, the place of their
+embarkation.
+
+On the following day, not an individual approached the bank, but all
+trade and all payments were at a stand; nobody would sell but for ready
+money, and nobody who had bank-notes would part with cash.  Some Jews and
+money-brokers in the Palais Royal offered cash for these bills, at a
+discount of from ten to twenty per cent.  But these usurers were, in
+their turn, taken up and transported, as agents of Pitt.  An interview
+was then demanded by the directors and principal bankers with the
+Ministers of Finance and of the Public Treasury.  In this conference it
+was settled that, as soon as the two millions of dollars on their way
+from Spain had arrived at Paris, the bank should reassume its payments.
+These dollars Government would lend the bank for three months, and take
+in return its notes, but the bank was, nevertheless, to pay an interest
+of six per cent. during that period.  All the bankers agreed not to press
+unnecessarily for any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the
+credit of the bank even by the individual credit of their own houses.
+
+You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but two
+sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres--and those of five hundred
+livres.  At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of livres--of the
+former, and fifteen millions of livres--of the latter, were in
+circulation; and I have heard a banker assert that the bank had not then
+six millions of livres--in money and bullion, to satisfy the claims of
+its creditors, or to honour its bills.
+
+The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition of
+Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty ever be
+repaired under his despotic government.  Even now, when the bank pays in
+cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten per cent. between
+purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and this mistrust will not
+be lessened hereafter.  You may, perhaps, object that, as long as the
+bank pays, it is absurd for any one possessing its bills to pay dearer
+than with cash, which might so easily be obtained.  This objection would
+stand with regard to your, or any other free country, but here, where no
+payments are made in gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a
+cart to carry away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of
+these metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
+these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our
+Government.  With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction,
+and chastisement follows it as its shadow.
+
+A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St. Martin,
+where he had for years carried on business in the woollen line, went to
+the bank two days after it had begun to pay.  He demanded, and obtained,
+exchange for twenty-four thousand livres--in notes, necessary for him to
+pay what was due by him to his workmen.  The same afternoon six of our
+custom-house officers, accompanied by police agents and gendarmes, paid
+him a domiciliary visit under pretence of searching for English goods.
+Several bales were seized as being of that description, and Debrais was
+carried a prisoner to La Force.  On being examined by Fouche, he offered
+to prove, by the very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that
+they were not English.  The Minister silenced him by saying that
+Government had not only evidence of the contrary, but was convinced that
+he was employed as an English agent to hurt the credit of the bank, and
+therefore, if he did not give up his accomplices or employers, had
+condemned him to transportation.  In vain did his wife and daughters
+petition to Madame Bonaparte; Debrais is now at Rochefort, if not already
+embarked for our colonies.
+
+When he was arrested, a seal, as usual, was put on his house, from which
+his wife and family were turned out, until the police should have time to
+take an inventory of his effects, and had decided on his fate.  When
+Madame Debrais, after much trouble and many pecuniary sacrifices, at last
+obtained permission to have the seals removed, and reenter her house, she
+found that all her plate and more than half her goods and furniture had
+been stolen and carried away.  Upon her complaint of this theft she was
+thrown into prison for not being able to support her complaint with
+proofs, and for attempting to vilify the characters of the agents of our
+Government.  She is still in prison, but her daughters are by her orders
+disposing of the remainder of their parents’ property, and intend to join
+their father as soon as their mother has recovered her liberty.
+
+The same tyranny that supports the credit of our bank also keeps up the
+price of our stocks.  Any of our great stockholders who sell out to any
+large amount, if they are unable to account for, or unwilling to declare
+the manner in which they intend to employ, their money, are immediately
+arrested, sometimes transported to the colonies, but more frequently
+exiled into the country, to remain under the inspection of some police
+agent, and are not allowed to return here without the previous permission
+of our Government.  Those of them who are upstarts, and have made their
+fortune since the Revolution by plunder or as contractors, are still more
+severely treated, and are often obliged to renounce part of their
+ill-gotten wealth to save the remainder, or to preserve their liberty or
+lives.  A revisal of their former accounts, or an inspection of their
+past transactions, is a certain and efficacious threat to keep them in
+silent submission, as they all well understand the meaning of them.
+
+Even foreigners, whom our numerous national bankruptcies have not yet
+disheartened, are subject to these measures of rigour or vigour requisite
+to preserve our public credit.  In the autumn of last year a Dutchman of
+the name of Van der Winkle sold out by his agent for three millions of
+livres--in our stock on one day, for which he bought up bills upon
+Hamburg and London.  He lodged in the Hotel des Quatre Nations, Rue
+Grenelle, where the landlord, who is a patriot, introduced some police
+agents into his apartments during his absence.  These broke open all his
+trunks, drawers, and even his writing-desk, and when he entered, seized
+his person, and carried him to the Temple.  By his correspondence it was
+discovered that all this money was to be brought over to England; a
+reason more than sufficient to incur the suspicion of our Government. Van
+der Winkle spoke very little French, and he continued, therefore, in
+confinement three weeks before he was examined, as our secret police had
+not at Paris any of its agents who spoke Dutch.  Carried before Fouche,
+he avowed that the money was destined for England, there to pay for some
+plantations which he desired to purchase in Surinam and Barbice.  His
+interpreter advised him, by the orders of Fouche, to alter his mind, and,
+as he was fond of colonial property, lay out his money in plantations at
+Cayenne, which was in the vicinity of Surinam, and where Government would
+recommend him advantageous purchases.  It was hinted to him, also, that
+this was a particular favour, and a proof of the generosity of our
+Government, as his papers contained many matters that might easily be
+construed to be of a treasonable nature.  After consulting with
+Schimmelpenninck, the Ambassador of his country, he wrote for his wife
+and children, and was seen safe with them to Bordeaux by our police
+agents, who had hired an American vessel to carry them all to Cayenne.
+This certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its
+generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites.  According to the
+boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it
+within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the
+Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century
+of peace can restore to that unfortunate country.  It is reported here
+that each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the
+Continental States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover
+in courtesy to Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to
+make certain douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has
+received from Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte
+two hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our
+military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.
+
+General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who
+have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau,
+without ever serving under him.  Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son
+of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768.  He was a shopman with
+his father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a
+lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first
+battalion of volunteers of the Department of the North.  His first sight
+of an enemy was on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had
+a horse killed under him.  He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of
+Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg.  At the battle of Houdscoote he
+distinguished himself so much as to be promoted to an adjutant general.
+He was wounded at the battle of Fleures, and again at the passage of the
+Rhine, in 1795, under General Moreau.  During 1796 and 1797 he continued
+to serve in Germany, but in 1798 and 1799 he headed a division in
+Switzerland from which Bonaparte recalled him in 1800, to command the
+troops in the capital and its environs.  His address to Bonaparte,
+announcing the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for
+life and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and
+abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more
+self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the fire of
+a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as their
+contents are, procured him the Field-marshal’s staff.  Mortier well knew
+his man, and that his cringing in antechambers would be better rewarded
+than his services in the field.  I was not present when Mortier spoke so
+shamefully, but I have heard from persons who witnessed this farce, that
+he had his eyes fixed on the ground the whole time, as if to say, “I
+grant that I speak as a despicable being, and I grant that I am so; but
+what shall I do, tormented as I am by ambition to figure among the great,
+and to riot among the wealthy?  Have compassion on my weakness, or, if
+you have not, I will console myself with the idea that my meanness is
+only of the duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will
+be permanent.”
+
+Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle
+Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest
+of her father.  She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage
+of her husband’s complaisance to console herself both for his absence and
+infidelities.  When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier
+positively declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and
+the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de
+chambre.  The child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and
+the Empress were the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch.
+Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond
+necklace valued at one hundred and fifty thousand livres.
+
+During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious
+campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven
+millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands.  He is considered by
+other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among
+our fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as a model of connubial
+fidelity--satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only.
+
+There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in
+consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of
+Bonaparte’s confidence and attachment.  He was recalled to take the
+command of the artillery of Bonaparte’s, household troops the moment
+Pichegru, George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial tide
+had been resolved on.  More resistance against this innovation was at
+that time expected than experienced.
+
+Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in Hanover,
+is a man of a different stamp.  His father was a chair-man, and he was
+born at Paris in 1763.  In 1779 he enlisted in the regiment called La
+Vieille Harine, where the Revolution found him a sergeant.  This regiment
+was then quartered at Toulon, and the emissaries of anarchy and
+licentiousness engaged him as one of their agents.  His activity soon
+destroyed all discipline, and the troops, instead of attending to their
+military duty, followed him to the debates and discussions of the Jacobin
+clubs.  Being arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous,
+scandalous behaviour, an insurrection liberated him, and forced his
+accusers to save their lives by flight.  In April, 1790, he headed the
+banditti who murdered the Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles,
+and who afterwards occasioned the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he
+served under Jourdan, known by the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who
+made him a colonel and his aide-de-camp.  In 1794, he was employed, as a
+general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the
+campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the general,
+without much distinction,--except that he was accused by him of being the
+cause of all the disasters of the last campaign, by the complete rout he
+suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August, 1796.  His division was
+ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the laws of nations, he arrested
+M. d’ Antraigues, who was attached to the Russian legation.  When the
+Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice,
+and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied:
+“There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right
+and justice of power, and I am here the strongest.  M. d’Antraigues is
+our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot.  I
+repeat, I am here the strongest, ‘et nous verrons’.”
+
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of Jacobin
+propagators.  Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose
+lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet of Vienna had
+spared, he thought that he might attempt anything; and, therefore, on the
+anniversary day of the fete for the levy en masse of the inhabitants of
+the capital, he insulted the feelings of the loyal, and excited the
+discontented to rebellion, by placing over the door and in the windows of
+his house the tri-coloured flag.  This outrage the Emperor was unable to
+prevent his subjects from resenting.  Bernadotte’s house was invaded, his
+furniture broken to pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the
+house of the Spanish Ambassador.  As a satisfaction for this attack,
+provoked by his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the
+Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to
+leave Vienna, which he did on the next day.  So disgraceful was his
+conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little
+impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse
+with the Austrian Government.
+
+In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from
+which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed.  When Bonaparte intended
+to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an
+implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand
+livres--calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not
+infallible or their government the best of all possible governments. In
+1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department, where
+he exercised the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom he
+accused of being still chouans and royalists.
+
+With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer.  In the
+summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of
+Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within
+twenty-four hours, two millions of livres.  With much difficulty this sum
+was collected.  The day after he had received it, he insisted upon
+another sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing
+in case of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his
+troops. Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them
+from the execution of his threats.  The troops under him were, both in
+Italy and in Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated
+were, from their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts.  Bernadotte
+has by these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten
+millions of livres.
+
+Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in
+the wrong.  Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the
+first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him.  The many massacres under
+Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no
+doubt display a most sanguinary character.  A lady, however, in whose
+house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to
+judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his
+imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he
+knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs
+others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from
+stabbing him.  Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity
+as well as justice.  Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the
+Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black
+Eagle.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his
+“Life of Louis XIV.,” that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the
+well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign
+countries.  According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of
+the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
+country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners.  Though the names
+of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I
+have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two
+or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and
+scurrilous party pamphlets.  I made this observation to Fontanes, who
+replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been
+very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and
+that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men
+of greater talents.  He granted also that men of true genius and literary
+eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character
+than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He
+added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a
+literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from
+that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
+
+To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted
+to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal.  Some he has made tribunes,
+prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in
+foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given
+places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of
+this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a
+De Crebillon, a D’ Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our
+literature and honours to our nation.  This liberality is often carried
+too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery
+displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To
+a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the
+First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that
+ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a
+place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve
+thousand livres in the year--besides a present, in ready money, of one
+hundred napoleons d’or.  Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and
+sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty
+lines on Bonaparte’s birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand
+livres in the year--and one hundred napoleons d’or for his travelling
+expenses.
+
+The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte’s agents for
+dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than
+those fixed for regular literary pensions.  Instead of discouraging these
+foolish and impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity,
+necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them.
+His name is, therefore, found in more dedications published within these
+last five years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken
+together for the last century.  In a man whose name, unfortunately for
+humanity, must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable
+weakness to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality
+which some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
+
+During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu’s, in
+company with Duroc.  The question turned upon literary productions and
+the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign
+authors.  “As to the merits or the quality,” said Duroc, “I will not take
+upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to
+their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will
+not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion.  I am
+convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than
+those of my own country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what
+I have witnessed and experienced for some years past, that of every book
+or publication printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is
+dedicated to the Emperor.  Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German
+and seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His
+Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only
+sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their Sovereign.”
+ For my part I think Duroc’s conclusion tolerably just.
+
+Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed,
+or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more
+than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein.  The former
+presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte
+family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred
+years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that
+of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the
+Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore,
+relatives of the Bourbons; and the sceptre of the French Empire is still
+in the same family, though in a more worthy branch.  Spanicetti received
+one thousand louis--in gold, a pension of six thousand livres--for life,
+and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home department
+of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres yearly.
+
+Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the
+Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the
+friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he
+exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet
+family, the last branch of which has since been extinguished by its
+intermarriage and incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that,
+therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign
+Princes of Europe, but has more right to the throne of Great Britain than
+George the Third, being descended from the male branch of the Stuarts;
+while this Prince is only descended from the female branch of the same
+royal house.  Ritterstein was presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte’s
+portrait set with diamonds, valued at twelve thousand livres, and
+received twenty-four thousand livres ready money, together with a pension
+of nine thousand livres--in the year, until he could be better provided
+for.  He was, besides, nominated a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It
+cannot be denied but that Bonaparte rewards like a real Emperor.
+
+But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same encouragement,
+and experience the same liberality.  In our different museums we,
+therefore, already, see and admire upwards of two hundred pictures,
+representing the different actions, scenes, and achievements of
+Bonaparte’s public life.  It is true they are not all highly finished or
+well composed or delineated, but they all strike the spectators more or
+less with surprise or admiration; and it is with us, as, I suppose, with
+you, and everywhere else, the multitude decide: for one competent judge
+or real connoisseur, hundreds pass, who stare, gape, are charmed, and
+inspire thousands of their acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with
+their own satisfaction.  Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the
+age, his contemporaries, and, I fear, even posterity.
+
+That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous patron, the
+numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy, and Germany,
+having him for their object, seem to evince.  Ten sculptors have already
+represented his passage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his passage
+over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that over Pont d’ Arcole.  At Rome,
+Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are statues of him representing his
+natural size; and our ten thousand municipalities have each one of his
+busts; without mentioning the thousands of busts all over Europe, not
+excepting even your own country.  When Bonaparte sees under the windows
+of the Tuileries the statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that
+palace, he cannot help saying to himself: “Marble lives longer than man.”
+ Have you any doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
+
+The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for
+his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte,
+was a German of the name of Schumacher.  It is, indeed, allowed that he
+was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or
+considerate.  He did not consider that it would be no compliment to give
+the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man.  Schumacher had employed
+near three years in planning and executing in marble the prettiest model
+of a sepulchral monument I have ever seen, read or heard of.  He had
+inscribed it: “The Future Tomb of Bonaparte the Great.”  Under the
+patronage of Count von Beast, he arrived here; and I saw the model in the
+house of this Minister of the German Elector Arch--Chancellor, where also
+many French artists went to inspect it.  Count von Beast asked De Segur,
+the grand master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant
+Schumacher the honour of showing him his performance.  De Segur advised
+him to address himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon, who, after
+looking at it, could not help paying a just tribute to the execution and
+to the talents of the artist, though he disapproved of the subject, and
+declined mentioning it to the Emperor.  After three months’ attendance in
+this capital, and all petitions and memorials to our great folks
+remaining unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which
+he asked permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte’s tomb to the
+public for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
+
+“Where is it now?”  asked Fouche.
+
+“At the Minister’s of the Elector Arch-Chancellor,” answered the artist.
+
+“But where do you intend to show it for money?”  continued Fouche.
+
+“In the Palais Royal.”
+
+“Well, bring it there,” replied Fouche.
+
+The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a
+police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the
+care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the
+Rhine.  Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his
+home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model
+of a grand tomb for a little man.  I have just heard that one of your
+countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d’or.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of
+the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
+the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
+believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
+in Europe.  But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our
+hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans
+and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful
+necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere,
+comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery.  And it is
+not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty
+are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and,
+I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged
+classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but
+who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
+to both.
+
+When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
+exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or
+want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper
+to you: “Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise--on
+the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;” and you
+sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre
+that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness,
+you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to
+relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious
+warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that
+eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some
+few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
+capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
+ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
+tyranny.
+
+Some author has written that “want is the parent of industry, and
+wretchedness the mother of ingenuity.”  I know that you have often
+approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
+countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
+disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
+the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no
+other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide.  How many
+have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no
+expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their
+necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final
+prospect of all their sufferings.
+
+Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
+ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
+his uncle’s porter.  Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
+by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
+their business.  Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
+less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses.  I have
+seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
+and the other a Counsellor of Parliament.  Every, day you may bestow your
+penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
+one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
+Marquis, a general under Louis XVI.  They, are usually placed, the one on
+the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
+woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand.  I am told one of
+the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies.  What a
+recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
+
+On the day of Bonaparte’s coronation, and a little before he set out with
+his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
+Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
+hat with this inscription: “I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
+years of age, and I request alms.”  Many individuals, even some of
+Bonaparte’s soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
+he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am
+told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose
+property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time
+he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since
+for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
+supported himself lately entirely by begging.  The value of the dress of
+one of Bonaparte’s running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve
+him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and
+agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to
+renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the
+remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived
+me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and
+illuminating Bonaparte’s palace of the Tuileries.
+
+Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
+whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
+officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for
+years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army
+of Conde.  Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte’s household troops,
+where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in
+combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now
+made a knight of Napoleon’s Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for
+bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.  As he is a man of
+real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced
+that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it,
+but prove that he has never been misplaced.  Another emigrant who, after
+being a page to the Duc d’Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of
+the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded
+with the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion
+of Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French.
+Four more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common
+Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of
+Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde.  It were to be wished that the whole
+of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants.  I am sure
+they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
+never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
+
+While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
+are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
+domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
+governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or
+ladies-in-waiting.  Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de
+R------, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat,
+which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a
+companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet
+of Comte de Brienne.  Her father and brother suffered for this choice and
+preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be
+transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a
+coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the
+wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant
+assassin and Septembrizer.  It was only by a valuable present to Madame
+Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not
+included in the act of proscription against her father and brother.
+
+I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
+frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes.  But they are
+proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
+without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
+Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
+the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
+of what they were.  The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
+an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last
+three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
+vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
+vices, opinions are various, and even opposite.  Most persons, who have
+long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
+have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities.  On the other
+hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
+rumours, which certainly are exaggerated.  It is true, indeed, that it
+was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her
+hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome,
+and had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms.  Her
+husband’s conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into
+a proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence
+of his affection towards her.  As he knew who she was when he received
+her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her
+subsequent intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt--policy may
+influence a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem.  He may
+choose to live with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
+
+A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me
+that, had it not been for Napoleon’s singular inclination for his
+youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of
+his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already
+been made her by Talleyrand.  It was then reported that Bonaparte had his
+eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which
+the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were
+expected to be encountered at St. Petersburg.  The untimely end of this
+Prince, and the supplications of his wife and daughter, have since
+altered his intent, and Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I
+may use the expression, incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte
+family.
+
+But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that
+Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex.  You read last
+summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the Interior
+(Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded by our
+Ambassador at Vienna Champagny.  This promotion was the consequence of a
+disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress,
+Mademoiselle George, one of the handsomest women of this capital.  He was
+informed by his spies that this lady frequently, in the dusk of the
+evening, or when she thought him employed in his office, went to the
+house of a famous milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in
+an adjoining passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face,
+always entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as
+she continued there.  The house was then by his orders beset with spies,
+who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner.  To be
+near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the
+very next day her visit to the milliner’s was announced to him.  While
+his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner’s house
+through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door
+of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant
+was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his
+companions.  He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected
+appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of
+this enraged lover.  The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte
+himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial
+portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate,
+had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair
+which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
+
+Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
+according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour
+of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant.  The quantity of jewels
+with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much
+ostentation in the new tragedy, ‘The Templars’, indicate, however, a
+Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover.  And, indeed, she already
+treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public,
+more as a real than a theatrical Princess.  Without any cause whatever,
+but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out,
+without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very
+day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off
+for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
+
+When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors
+of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no
+notice should be taken of this ‘etourderie’, which should not occur
+again.
+
+Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier,
+having ruined himself in search after the philosopher’s stone.  To
+persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but
+no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion,
+and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first
+speech at the Jacobin Club.  Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking
+of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and
+the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which
+the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without
+resistance.  He was denounced by the municipality to the National
+Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and
+other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment.  During
+1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the
+armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and
+other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of
+livres--but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres--himself.
+He was, under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage,
+but bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes.  In 1799, he
+advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres--to bribe adherents for the
+new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of interest,
+appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in
+September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him
+in the Ministry of the Interior.  You may see by this short account that
+the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical
+stone.  He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive
+(from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a
+separate establishment.  This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
+character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither
+committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I have read a copy of a letter from Madrid, circulated among
+the members of our foreign diplomatic corps, which draws a most
+deplorable picture of the Court and Kingdom of Spain.  Forced into an
+unprofitable and expensive war, famine ravaging some, and disease other
+provinces, experiencing from allies the treatment of tyrannical foes,
+disunion in his family and among his Ministers, His Spanish Majesty
+totters on a throne exposed to the combined attacks of internal
+disaffection and external plots, with no other support than the advice of
+a favourite, who is either a fool or a traitor, and perhaps both.
+
+As the Spanish monarchy has been more humbled and reduced during the
+twelve years’ administration of the Prince of Peace than during the whole
+period that it has been governed by Princes of the House of Bourbon, the
+heir of the throne, the young Prince of Asturias, has, with all the
+moderation consistent with duty, rank, and consanguinity, tried to remove
+an upstart, universally despised for his immorality as, well as for his
+incapacity; and who, should he continue some years longer to rule in the
+name of Charles IV., will certainly involve his King and his country in
+one common ruin.  Ignorant and presumptuous, even beyond upstarts in
+general, the Prince of Peace treats with insolence all persons raised
+above him by birth or talents, who refuse to be his accomplices or
+valets.  Proud and certain of the protection of the Queen, and of the
+weakness of the King, the Spanish nobility is not only humbled, provoked,
+and wronged by him, but openly defied and insulted.
+
+You know the nice principles of honour and loyalty that have always
+formerly distinguished the ancient families of Spain.  Believe me that,
+notwithstanding what appearances indicate to the contrary, the Spanish
+grandee who ordered his house to be pulled down because the rebel
+constable had slept in it, has still many descendants, but loyal men
+always decline to use that violence to which rebels always resort.  Soon
+after the marriage of the Prince of Asturias, in October, 1801, to his
+cousin, the amiable Maria Theresa, Princess Royal of Naples, the ancient
+Spanish families sent some deputies to Their Royal Highnesses, not for
+the purpose of intriguing, but to lay before them the situation of the
+kingdom, and to inform them of the real cause of all disasters.  They
+were received as faithful subjects and true patriots, and Their Royal
+Highnesses promised every support in their power towards remedying the
+evil complained of, and preventing, if possible, the growth of others.
+
+The Princess of Asturias is a worthy granddaughter of Maria Theresa of
+Austria, and seems to inherit her character as well as her virtues.  She
+agreed with her royal consort that, after having gained the affection of
+the Queen by degrees, it would be advisable for her to insinuate some
+hints of the danger that threatened their country and the discontent that
+agitated the people.  The Prince of Asturias was to act the same part
+with his father as the Princess did with his mother.  As there is no one
+about the person of Their Spanish Majesties, from the highest lord to the
+lowest servant, who is not placed there by the favourite, and act as his
+spies, he was soon aware that he had no friend in the heir to the throne.
+His conversation with Their Majesties confirmed him in this supposition,
+and that some secret measures were going on to deprive him of the place
+he occupied, if not of the royal favour.  All visitors to the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias were, therefore, watched by his emissaries; and all
+the letters or memorials sent to them by the post were opened, read, and;
+if contrary to his interest, destroyed, and their writers imprisoned in
+Spain or banished to the colonies.  These measures of injustice created
+suspicion, disunion, and, perhaps, fear, among the members of the
+Asturian cabal, as it was called; all farther pursuit, therefore, was
+deferred until more propitious times, and the Prince of Peace remained
+undisturbed and in perfect security until the rupture with your country
+last autumn.
+
+It is to be lamented that, with all their valuable qualities and feelings
+of patriotism, the Prince and Princess of Asturias do not possess a
+little dissimulation and more knowledge of the world.  The favourite
+tried by all means to gain their good opinion, but his advances met with
+that repulse they morally deserved, but which, from policy, should have
+been suspended or softened, with the hope of future accommodation.
+
+Beurnonville, the Ambassador of our Court to the Court of Madrid, was
+here upon leave of absence when war was declared by Spain against your
+country, and his first secretary, Herman, acted as charge d’affaires.
+This Herman has been brought up in Talleyrand’s office, and is both abler
+and more artful than Beurnonville; he possesses also the full confidence
+of our Minister, who, in several secret and pecuniary transactions, has
+obtained many proofs of this secretary’s fidelity as well as capacity.
+The views of the Cabinet of St. Cloud were, therefore, not lost sight of,
+nor its interest neglected at Madrid.
+
+I suppose you have heard that the Prince of Peace, like all other
+ignorant and illiberal people, believes no one can be a good or clever
+man who is not also his countryman, and that all the ability and probity
+of the world is confined within the limits of Spain.  On this principle
+he equally detests France and England, Germany and Russia, and is,
+therefore, not much liked by our Government, except for his imbecility,
+which makes him its tool and dupe.  His disgrace would not be much
+regretted here, where we have it in our power to place or displace
+Ministers in certain States, whenever and as often as we like.  On this
+occasion, however, we supported him, and helped to dissolve the cabal
+formed against him; and that for the following reasons:
+
+By the assurances of Beurnonville, Bonaparte and Talleyrand had been led
+to believe that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were well affected to
+France, and to them personally; and conceiving themselves much more
+certain of this than of the good disposition of the favourite, though
+they did not take a direct part against him, at the same time they did
+not disclose what they knew was determined on to remove him from the helm
+of affairs.  During Beurnonville’s absence, however, Herman had formed an
+intrigue with a Neapolitan girl, in the suite of Asturias, who,
+influenced by love or bribes, introduced him into the Cabinet where her
+mistress kept her correspondence with her royal parents.  With a
+pick-lock key he opened all the drawers, and even the writing-desk, in
+which he is said to have discovered written evidence that, though the
+Princess was not prejudiced against France, she had but an indifferent
+opinion of the morality and honesty of our present Government and of our
+present governors.  One of these original papers Herman appropriated to
+himself, and despatched to this capital by an extraordinary courier,
+whose despatches, more than the rupture with your country, forced
+Beurnonville away in a hurry from the agreeable society of gamesters and
+prostitutes, chiefly frequented by him in this capital.
+
+It is not and cannot be known yet what was the exact plan of the Prince
+and Princess of Asturias and their adherents; but a diplomatic gentleman,
+who has just arrived from Madrid, and who can have no reason to impose
+upon me, has informed me of the following particulars:
+
+Their Royal Highnesses succeeded perfectly in their endeavours to gain
+the well-merited tenderness and approbation of their Sovereigns in
+everything else but when the favourite was mentioned with any slight, or
+when any insinuations were thrown out concerning the mischief arising
+from his tenacity of power, and incapacity of exercising it with
+advantage to the State.  The Queen was especially irritated when such was
+the subject of conversation or of remark; and she finally prohibited it
+under pain of her displeasure.  A report even reached Their Royal
+Highnesses, that the Prince of Peace had demanded their separation and
+separate confinement.  Nothing could, therefore, be effected to impede
+the progress of wickedness and calamity, but by some temporary measure of
+severity.  In this disagreeable dilemma, it was resolved by the cabal to
+send the Queen to a convent, until her favourite had been arrested and
+imprisoned; to declare the Prince of Asturias Regent during the King’s
+illness (His Majesty then still suffered from several paralytic strokes),
+and to place men of talents and patriotism in the place of the creatures
+of the Prince of Peace.  As soon as this revolution was organized, the
+Queen would have been restored to full liberty and to that respect due to
+her rank.
+
+This plan had been communicated to our Ambassador, and approved of by our
+Government; but when Herman in such an honest manner had inspected the
+confidential correspondence of the Princess of Asturias, Beurnonville was
+instructed by Talleyrand to, warn the favourite of the impending danger,
+and to advise him to be beforehand with his enemies.  Instead of telling
+the truth, the Prince of Peace alarmed the King and Queen with the most
+absurd fabrications; and assured Their Majesties that their son and their
+daughter-in-law had determined not only to dethrone them, but to keep
+them prisoners for life, after they had been forced to witness his
+execution.
+
+Indolence and weakness are often more fearful than guilt.  Everything he
+said was at once believed; the Prince and Princess were ordered under
+arrest in their own apartments, without permission to see or correspond
+with anybody; and so certain was the Prince of Peace of a complete and
+satisfactory revenge for the attempt against his tyranny, that a frigate
+at Cadiz was ready waiting to carry the Princess of Asturias back to
+Naples.  All Spaniards who had the honour of their Sovereigns and of
+their country at heart lamented these rash proceedings; but no one dared
+to take any measures to counteract them.  At last, however, the Duke of
+Montemar, grand officer to the Prince of Asturias, demanded an audience
+of Their Majesties, in the presence of the favourite.  He began by
+begging his Sovereign to recollect that for the place he occupied he was
+indebted to the Prince of Peace; and he called upon him to declare
+whether he had ever had reason to suspect him either of ingratitude or
+disloyalty.  Being answered in the negative, he said that, though his
+present situation and office near the heir to the throne was the pride
+and desire of his life, he would have thrown it up the instant that he
+had the least ground to suppose that this Prince ceased to be a dutiful
+son and subject; but so far from this being the case, he had observed him
+in his most unguarded moments--in moments of conviviality had heard him
+speak of his royal parents with as much submission and respect as if he
+had been in their presence.  “If,” continued he, “the Prince of Peace has
+said otherwise, he has misled his King and his Queen, being, no doubt,
+deceived himself.  To overthrow a throne and to seize it cannot be done
+without accomplices, without arms, without money.  Who are the
+conspirators hailing the Prince as their chief?  I have heard no name but
+that of the lovely Princess, his consort, the partaker of his sentiments
+as well as of his heart.  And his arms?  They are in the hands of those
+guards his royal parent has given to augment the necessary splendour of
+his rank.  And as to his money?  He has none but what is received from
+royal and paternal munificence and bounty.  You, my Prince,” said he to
+the favourite (who seemed much offended at the impression the speech made
+on Their Majesties), “will one day thank me, if I am happy enough to
+dissuade dishonourable, impolitic, or unjust sentiments.  Of the
+approbation of posterity I am certain--”
+
+“If,” interrupted the favourite, “the Prince of Asturias and his consort
+will give up their bad counsellors, I hope Their Majesties will forget
+and forgive everything with myself.”
+
+“Whether Their Royal Highnesses,” replied the Duke of Montemar, “have
+done anything that deserves forgiveness, or whether they have any
+counsellors, I do not know, and am incompetent to judge; but I am much
+mistaken in the character of Their Royal Highnesses if they wish to
+purchase favour at the expense of confidence and honour.  An order from
+His Majesty may immediately clear up this doubt.”
+
+The Prince of Peace was then ordered to write, in the name of the King,
+to his children in the manner he proposed, and to command an answer by
+the messenger.  In half an hour the messenger returned with a letter
+addressed to the favourite, containing only these lines:
+
+“A King of Spain is well aware that a Prince and Princess of Asturias can
+have no answer to give to such proposals or to such questions.”
+
+After six days’ arrest, and after the Prince of Peace had in vain
+endeavoured to discover something to inculpate Their Royal Highnesses,
+they were invited to Court, and reconciled both to him and their royal
+parents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I will add in this letter, to the communication of the
+gentlemen mentioned in my last, what I remember myself of the letter
+which was circulated among our diplomatists, concerning the intrigues at
+Madrid.
+
+The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of
+Montemar, had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence, and as
+much as possible all noise.  This accounts for the favourite’s pretended
+moderation on this occasion.  But though he was externally reconciled,
+and, as was reported at Madrid, had sworn his reconciliation even by
+taking the sacrament, all the undertakings of the Prince and Princess of
+Asturias were strictly observed and reported by the spies whom he had
+placed round Their Royal Highnesses.  Vain of his success and victory, he
+even lost that respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred
+subject always shows to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related
+to his Sovereign.  He sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity,
+and with an insolence provoking or defying resentment.  It was on the
+days of great festivities, when the Court was most brilliant, and the
+courtiers most numerous, that he took occasion to be most arrogant to
+those whom he traitorously and audaciously dared to call his rivals.  On
+the 9th of last December, at the celebration of the Queen’s birthday, his
+conduct towards Their Royal Highnesses excited such general indignation
+that the remembrance of the occasion of the fete, and the presence of
+their Sovereigns, could not repress a murmur, which made the favourite
+tremble.  A signal from the Prince of Asturias would then have been
+sufficient to have caused the insolent upstart to be seized and thrown
+out of the window.  I am told that some of the Spanish grandees even laid
+their hands on their swords, fixing their eyes on the heir to the throne,
+as if to say: “Command, and your unworthy enemy shall exist no more.”
+
+To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which
+contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate, the
+Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way and
+manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and unnatural
+Philip II.; but the Queen’s confessor, though, like all her other
+domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire with reproof,
+saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the grand and powerful
+Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin; adding that no laws,
+human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy whatever, could authorize
+a parent to stain his hands in the blood of his children.  These
+anecdotes are sufficient both to elucidate the inveteracy of the
+favourite, the abject state of the heir to the throne, and the
+incomprehensible infatuation of the King and Queen.
+
+Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he disapproved
+of those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he neither offered to
+put an end to them nor to be a mediator for a perfect reconciliation with
+their Sovereigns.  He was guided by no other motive but to keep the
+favourite in subjection and alarm by preserving a correspondence with his
+rivals.  That this was the case and the motive cannot be doubted from the
+financial intrigue he carried on in the beginning of last month.
+
+Foreigners have but an imperfect or erroneous idea of the amount of the
+immense sums Spain has paid to our Government in loans, in contributions,
+in donations, and in subsidies.  Since the reign of Bonaparte, or for
+these last five years, upwards of half the revenue of the Spanish
+monarchy has either been brought into our National Treasury or into the
+privy purse of the Bonaparte family.  Without the aid of Spanish money,
+neither would our gunboats have been built, our fleets equipped, nor our
+armies paid.  The dreadful situation of the Spanish finances is,
+therefore, not surprising--it is, indeed, still more surprising that a
+general bankruptcy has not already involved the Spanish nation in a
+general ruin.
+
+When, on his return from Italy, the recall of the Russian negotiator and
+the preparations of Austria convinced Bonaparte of the probability of a
+Continental war, our troops on the coast had not been paid for two
+months, and his Imperial Ministers of Finances had no funds either to
+discharge the arrears or to provide for future payments until the
+beginning of the year 14, or the 22d instant.  Beurnonville was,
+therefore, ordered to demand peremptorily from the Cabinet of Madrid
+forty millions of livres--in advance upon future subsidies.  Half of that
+sum had, indeed, shortly before arrived at Cadiz from America, but much
+more was due by the Spanish Government to its own creditors, and promised
+them in payment of old debts.  The Prince of Peace, in consequence,
+declared that, however much he wished to oblige the French Government, it
+was utterly impossible to procure, much less to advance such sums.
+Beurnonville then became more assiduous than ever about the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and he had the impudence to assert that they had
+promised, if their friends were at the head of affairs, to satisfy the
+wishes and expectation of the Emperor of the French, by seizing the
+treasury at Cadiz, and paying the State creditors in vales deinero; notes
+hitherto payable in cash, and never at a discount.  The stupid favourite
+swallowed the palpable bait; four millions in dollars were sent under an
+escort to this country, while the Spanish notes instantly fell to a
+discount at first of four and afterwards of six per cent., and probably
+will fall lower still, as no treasures are expected from America this
+autumn.  It was with two millions of these dollars that the credit of the
+Bank of France was restored, or at least for some time enabled to resume
+its payments in specie.  Thus wretched Spain pays abroad for the forging
+of those disgraceful fetters which oppress her at home; and supports a
+foreign tyranny, which finally must produce domestic misery as well as
+slavery.
+
+When the Prince and Princess of Asturias were informed of the scandalous
+and false assertion of Beurnonville, they and their adherents not only
+publicly, and in all societies, contradicted it, but affirmed that,
+rather than obtain authority or influence on such ruinous terms, they
+would have consented to remain discarded and neglected during their
+lives.  They took the more care to have their sentiments known on this
+subject, as our Ambassador’s calumny had hurt their popularity.  It was
+then first that, to revenge the shame with which his duplicity had
+covered him, Beurnonville permitted and persuaded the Prince of Peace to
+begin the chastisement of Their Royal Highnesses in the persons of their
+favourites.  Duke of Montemar, the grand officer to the Prince of
+Asturias; Marquis of Villa Franca, the grand equerry to the Princess of
+Asturias; Count of Miranda, chamberlain to the King; and the Countess
+Dowager del Monte, with six other Court ladies and four other noblemen,
+were, therefore, exiled from Madrid into different provinces, and
+forbidden to reside in any place within twenty leagues of the residence
+of the royal family.  According to the last letters and communications
+from Spain, the Prince and Princess of Asturias had not appeared at Court
+since the insult offered them in the disgrace of their friends, and were
+resolved not to appear in any place where they might be likely to meet
+with the favourite.
+
+Among our best informed politicians here, it is expected that a
+revolution and a change of dynasty will be the issue of this our
+political embryo in Spain.  Napoleon has more than once indirectly hinted
+that the Bonaparte dynasty will never be firm and fixed in France as long
+as any Bourbons reign in Spain or Italy.  Should he prove victorious in
+the present Continental contest, another peace, and not the most
+advantageous, will again be signed with your country--a peace which, I
+fear, will leave him absolute master of all Continental States.  His
+family arrangements are publicly avowed to be as follow: His third
+brother, Louis, and his sons, are to be the heirs of the French Empire.
+Joseph Bonaparte is, at the death or resignation of Napoleon, to succeed
+to the Kingdom of Italy, including Naples.  Lucien, though at present in
+disgrace, is considered as the person destined to supplant the Bourbons
+in Spain, where, during his embassy in 1800, and in 1801, he formed
+certain connections which Napoleon still keeps up and preserves.  Holland
+will be the inheritance of Jerome should Napoleon not live long enough to
+extend his power in Great Britain.  Such are the modest pretensions our
+Imperial courtiers bestow upon the family of our Sovereign.
+
+As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the hands
+of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as long as they
+find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be the case, they break
+and throw away.  This idiot is made to believe that both his political
+and physical existence depends entirely upon our support, and he has
+infused the same ridiculous notion into his accomplices and adherents.
+Guilt, ignorance, and cowardice thus misled may, directed by art,
+interest, and craft, perform wonders to entangle themselves in the
+destruction of their country.
+
+Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a porter,
+and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a soldier in one
+of our regiments serving in the East Indies.  Having there collected some
+pillage, he purchased the place of a major in the militia of the Island
+of Bourbon, but was, for his immorality, broken by the governor.
+Returning to France, he bitterly complained of this injustice, and, after
+much cringing in the antechambers of Ministers, he obtained at last the
+Cross of St. Louis as a kind of indemnity.  About the same time he also
+bought with his Indian wealth the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard
+of Monsieur, the present Louis XVIII.  Being refused admittance into any
+genteel societies, he resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to
+gambling-houses, and he even kept to himself when the Revolution took
+place.  He had at the same time, and for a certain interest, advanced
+Madame d’Estainville money to establish her famous, or rather infamous,
+house in the Rue de Bonnes Enfants, near the Palais Royal,--a house that
+soon became the fashionable resort of our friends of Liberty and
+Equality.
+
+In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our then
+hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who declined the
+honour.  The Jacobins were not so nice.  In 1792, they appointed him a
+general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax.  This modern Ajax,
+having obtained a separate command, attacked Treves in a most ignorant
+manner, and was worsted with great loss.  The official reports of our
+revolutionary generals have long been admired for their modesty as well
+as veracity; but Beurnonville has almost outdone them all, not excepting
+our great Bonaparte.  In a report to the National Convention concerning a
+terrible engagement of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville
+declares that, though the number of the enemy killed was immense, his
+troops got out of the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of
+one of his riflemen.  On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the
+execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War
+Department--a place which he refused, under a pretence that he was better
+able to serve his country with his sword than with his pen, having
+already been in one hundred and twenty battles (where, he did not
+enumerate or state). On the 14th of the following March, however, he
+accepted the ministerial portfolio, which he did not keep long, being
+delivered up by his Hector, Dumouriez, to the Austrians.  He remained a
+prisoner at Olmutz until the 22d of November, 1795, when he was included
+among the persons exchanged for the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present
+Royal Highness, the Duchess of Angouleme.
+
+In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed
+remnants of Jourdan’s army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French commander
+to Holland.  In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to the Court
+of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the Court of
+Madrid.  In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be dreaded, nor his
+personal qualities make him esteemed.  In France, he is laughed at as a
+boaster, but not trusted as a warrior.  In Spain, he is neither dreaded
+nor esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there universally
+despised.  He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter
+breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness.
+Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency
+of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy
+dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation,
+teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even
+the most inattentive observer.
+
+The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of
+age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother
+who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another
+to a merchant who cries dogs’ and cats’ meat in our streets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him
+when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her
+tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his
+resolution.  Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be
+in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis
+Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.
+
+During the Emperor’s absence, the former is the President of the Senate,
+and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops
+in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case
+of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil
+determinations with his military forces.  Even with the army in Germany,
+Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte
+dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an
+Imperial diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as
+a viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena.  It must be
+granted that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is
+almost certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his
+death; and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition,
+carried into execution.  These very precautions evince, however, how
+uncertain and precarious he considers his existence to be, and that,
+notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte
+dynasty will not survive him.
+
+Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own creation,
+or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which they might
+consider unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte.  The superior
+officers, not included in the above description, are such insignificant
+characters that, though he makes use of their experience and courage, he
+does not fear their views or ambition.  Among the inferior officers, and
+even among the men, all those who have displayed, either at reviews or in
+battles, capacity, activity, or valour, are all members of his Legion of
+Honour; and are bound to him by the double tie of gratitude and
+self-interest.  They look to him alone for future advancements, and for
+the preservation of the distinction they have obtained from him.  His
+emissaries artfully disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow
+everything a Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil
+officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be
+discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII.  Any
+person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the
+impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and
+retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an
+emissary of the Bourbons.
+
+I have often amused myself in conversing with our new generals and new
+officers; there is such a curious mixture of ignorance and information,
+of credulity and disbelief, of real boasting and affected modesty, in
+everything they say or do in company; their manners are far from being
+elegant, but also very distant from vulgarity; they do not resemble those
+of what we formerly called ‘gens comme il faut’, and ‘la bonne societe’!
+nor those of the bourgeoisie, or the lower classes.  They form a new
+species of fashionables, and a ‘haut ton militaire’, which strikes a
+person accustomed to Courts at first with surprise, and perhaps with
+indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become
+reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of military
+frankness interwoven with the military roughness.  Our ladies, however (I
+mean those who have seen other Courts, or remember our other coteries),
+complain loudly of this alteration of address, and of this fashionable
+innovation; and pretend that our military, under the notion of being
+frank, are rude, and by the negligence of their manners and language, are
+not only offensive, but inattentive and indelicate.  This is so much the
+more provoking to them, as our Imperial courtiers and Imperial placemen
+do not think themselves fashionable without imitating our military
+gentry, who take Napoleon for their exclusive model and chief in
+everything, even in manners.
+
+What I have said above applies only to those officers whose parents are
+not of the lowest class, or who entered so early or so young into the
+army that they may be said to have been educated there, and as they
+advanced, have assumed the ‘ton’ of their comrades of the same rank. I
+was invited, some time ago, to a wedding, by a jeweller whose sister had
+been my nurse, and whose daughter was to be married to a captain of
+hussars quartered here.  The bridegroom had engaged several other
+officers to assist at the ceremony, and to partake of the fete and ball
+that followed.  A general of the name of Liebeau was also of the party,
+and obtained the place of honour by the side of the bride’s mother.  At
+his entrance into the apartment I formed an opinion of him which his
+subsequent conduct during the ball confirmed.
+
+During the dinner he seemed to forget that he had a knife and a fork, and
+he did not eat of a dish (and he ate of them all, numerous as they were)
+without bespattering or besmearing himself or his neighbours.  He broke
+two glasses and one plate, and, for equality’s sake, I suppose, when he
+threw the wine on the lady to his right, the lady to his left was
+inundated with sauces.  In getting up from dinner to take coffee and
+liqueurs, according to our custom, as he took the hand of the mistress of
+the house, he seized at the same time a corner of the napkin, and was not
+aware of his blunder till the destruction of bottles, glasses, and plate,
+and the screams of the ladies, informed him of the havoc and terror his
+awkward gallantry had occasioned.  When the ball began, he was too vain
+of his rank and precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride down
+the first dance; but she was not, I believe, much obliged to him for his
+politeness; it cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and a broken nail,
+and she continued lame during the remainder of the night.  In making an
+apology to her for his want of dexterity, and assuring her that he was
+not so awkward in handling the enemies of his country in battle as in
+handling friends he esteemed in a dance, he gave no quarter to an old
+maid aunt, whom, in the violence of his gesticulation, he knocked down
+with his elbow and laid sprawling on the ground.  He was sober when these
+accidents literally occurred.
+
+Of this original I collected the following particulars: Before the
+Revolution he was a soldier in the regiment of Flanders, from which he
+deserted and became a corporal in another regiment; in 1793 he was a
+drum-major in one of the battalions in garrison in Paris.  You remember
+the struggles of factions in the latter part of May and in the beginning
+of June, the same year, when Brissot and his accomplices were contending
+with Marat, Robespierre, and their adherents for the reins of power.  On
+the 1st of June the latter party could not get a drummer to beat the
+alarm, though they offered money and advancement.  At last Robespierre
+stepped forward to Liebeau and said, “Citizen, beat the alarm march, and
+to-day you shall be nominated a general.”  Liebeau obeyed, Robespierre
+became victorious and kept his promise, and thus my present associate
+gained his rank.  He has since been employed under Jourdan in Germany,
+and under Le Courbe in Switzerland.  When, under the former, he was
+ordered to retreat towards the Rhine, he pointed out the march route to
+his division according to his geographical knowledge, but mistook upon
+the map the River Main for a turnpike road, and commanded the retreat
+accordingly.  Ever since, our troops have called that river ‘La chausee
+de Liebeau’.  He was not more fortunate in Helvetia.  Being ordered to
+cross one of the mountains, he marched his men into a glacier, where
+twelve perished before he was aware of his mistake.
+
+Being afterwards appointed a governor of Blois, he there became a petty,
+insupportable tyrant, and laid all the inhabitants indiscriminately under
+arbitrary contribution.  Those who refused to pay were imprisoned as
+aristocrats, and their property confiscated in the name and on the part
+of the nation; that is to say, he appropriated to himself in the name of
+the nation everything that struck his fancy; and if any complaints were
+made, the owners were seized and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal at
+Paris to be condemned as the correspondents or adherents of the royalists
+of La Vendee.  After the death of Robespierre he was deprived of this
+profitable place, in which, during the short space of eleven months, he
+amassed five millions of livres.  The Directory, then gave him a
+division, first under Jourdan, and afterwards under Le Courbe.
+
+Bonaparte, after witnessing his incapacity in Italy, in 1800, put him on
+the full half-pay, and has lately made him a commander of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+His dear spouse, Madame Liebeau, is his counterpart.  When he married
+her, she was crying mackerel and herrings in our streets; but she told me
+in confidence, during the dinner, being seated by my side, that her
+father was an officer of fortune, and a Chevalier of the Order of St.
+Louis.  She assured me that her husband had done greater services to his
+country than Bonaparte; and that, had it not been for his patriotism in
+1793, the Austrians would have taken Paris.  She was very angry with
+Madame Napoleon, to whom she had been presented, but who had not shown
+her so much attention and civility, as was due to her husband’s rank,
+having never invited her to more than one supper and two tea-parties; and
+when invited by her, had sent Duroc with an apology that she was unable
+to come, though the same evening she went to the opera.
+
+Another guest, in the regimentals of a colonel, seemed rather bashful
+when I spoke to him.  I could not comprehend the reason, and therefore
+inquired of our host who he was.  (You know that with us it is not the
+custom to introduce persons by name, etc., as in your country, when
+meeting in mixed companies.) He answered:
+
+“Do you not remember your brother’s jockey, Prial?”
+
+“Yes,” said I, “but he was established by my brother as a hairdresser.”
+
+“He is the very same person,” replied the jeweller.  “He has fought very
+bravely, and is now a colonel of dragoons, a great favourite with
+Bonaparte, and will be a general at the first promotion.”
+
+As the colonel did not seem to desire a renewal of acquaintance with me,
+I did not intrude myself upon him.
+
+During the supper the military gentlemen were encouraged by the
+bridegroom, and the bottle went round very freely; and the more they
+drank, the greater and more violent became their political discussions.
+Liebeau vociferated in favour of republican and revolutionary measures,
+and avowed his approbation of requisitions, confiscations, and the
+guillotine; while Frial inclined to the regular and organized despotism
+of one, to secret trial, and still more secret executions; defending
+arbitrary imprisonments, exiles, and transportations.  This displeased
+Madame Liebeau, who exclaimed:
+
+“Since the colonel is so fond of an Imperial Government, he can have no
+objection to remain a faithful subject whenever my husband, Liebeau,
+becomes, an Antoine the First, Emperor of the French.”
+
+Frial smiled with contempt.
+
+“You seem to think it improbable,” said Liebeau.  “I, Antoine Liebeau, I
+have more prospect of being an Emperor than Napoleon Bonaparte had ten
+years ago, when he was only a colonel, and was arrested as a terrorist.
+And am I not a Frenchman?  And is he not a foreigner?  Come, shake hands
+with me; as soon as I am Emperor, depend upon it you shall be a general,
+and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour.”
+
+“Ah!  my jewel,” interrupted Madame Liebeau, “how happy will France then
+be.  You are such a friend of peace.  We will then have no wars, no
+contributions; all the English milords may then come here and spend their
+money, nobody cares about where or how.  Will you not, then, my sweet
+love, make all the gentlemen here your chamberlains, and permit me to
+accept all the ladies of the company for my Maids of Honour or
+ladies-in-waiting?”
+
+“Softly, softly,” cried Frial, who now began to be as intoxicated and as
+ambitious as the general;  “whenever Napoleon dies, I have more hope,
+more: claim, and more right than you to the throne.  I am in actual
+service; and had not Bonaparte been the same, he might have still
+remained upon the half-pay, obscure and despised.  Were not most of the
+Field-marshals and generals under him now, above him ten years ago?  May
+I not, ten years hence, if I am satisfied with you, General Liebeau, make
+you also a Field-marshal, or my Minister of War; and you, Madame Liebeau,
+a lady of my wife’s wardrobe, as soon as I am married?  I, too, have my
+plans and my views, and perhaps one day you will recollect this
+conversation, and not be sorry for my acquaintance.”
+
+“What!  you a colonel, an Emperor, before me, who have so long been a
+general?”  howled Liebeau, who was no longer able to speak.  “I would
+sooner knock your brains out with this bottle than suffer such a
+precedence; and my wife a lady of your wardrobe! she who has possessed
+from her birth the soul of an Empress!  No, sir! never will I take the
+oath to you, nor suffer anybody else to take it.”
+
+“Then I will punish you as a rebel,” retorted Frial; “and as sure as you
+stand here you shall be shot.”
+
+Liebeau then rose up to fetch his sword, but the company interfered, and
+the dispute about the priority of claim to the throne of France between
+the ci-devant drummer and ci-devant jockey was left undecided.  From the
+words and looks of several of the captains present, I think that they
+seemed, in their own opinions, to have as much prospect and expectation
+to reign over the French Empire as either General Liebeau or Colonel
+Frial.
+
+As soon as I returned home I wrote down this curious conversation and
+this debate about supremacy.  To what a degradation is the highest rank
+in my unfortunate country reduced when two such personages seriously
+contend about it!  I collected more subjects for meditation and
+melancholy in this low company (where, by the bye, I witnessed more
+vulgarity and more indecencies than I had before seen during my life)
+than from all former scenes of humiliation and disgust since my return
+here.  When I the next day mentioned it to General de M------, whom you
+have known as an emigrant officer in your service, but whom policy has
+since ranged under the colours of Bonaparte, he assured me that these
+discussions about the Imperial throne are very frequent among the
+superior officers, and have caused many bloody scenes; and that hardly
+any of our generals of any talent exist who have not the same ‘arriere
+pensee of some day or other.  Napoleon cannot, therefore, well be
+ignorant of the many other dynasties here now rivalling that of the
+Bonapartes, and who wait only for his exit to tear his Senatus Consultum,
+his will, and his family, as well as each other, to pieces.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our rich
+upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by Bonaparte,
+transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and
+possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of livres.  In this
+house I saw for the first time the famous Madame Chevalier, the mistress,
+and the indirect cause of the untimely end, of the unfortunate Paul the
+First.  She is very short, fat, and coarse.  I do not know whether
+prejudice, from what I have heard of her vile, greedy, and immoral
+character, influenced my feelings, but she appeared to me a most artful,
+vain, and disagreeable woman.  She looked to be about thirty-six years of
+age; and though she might when younger have been well made, it is
+impossible that she could ever have been handsome.  The features of her
+face are far from being regular.  Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow,
+and her nose short.  Her language is that of brothels, and her manners
+correspond with her expressions.  She is the daughter of a workman at a
+silk manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had
+attained the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city,
+kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with
+her.  She then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating, and
+he introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior
+dancers.  Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged
+as a supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however,
+never above twelve hundred livres in the year--which was four hundred
+livres more than her husband received.
+
+He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers,
+quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and
+instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his
+nation.  His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at
+Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d’Herbois, and other
+wicked offsprings of rebellion.  With all other terrorists, he was
+imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as
+restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some
+amateurs had constructed a French theatre.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in
+the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical
+war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and
+the English and emigrant loyalists on the other.  Having no money to
+continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the
+French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play
+on that night.  She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear
+to the most advantage, and was deservedly applauded.  The very next
+evening the Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted
+that Madame Chevalier should be given a regular engagement.  He replied
+that no place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be
+ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public
+had hitherto declared their satisfaction.  The Jacobins continued
+inflexible, and here, as well as everywhere else, supported injustice by
+violence.  As the patriotism of the husband, more than the charms of the
+wife, was known to have produced this indecent fracas, which for upwards
+of a week interrupted the plays, all anti-Jacobins united to restore
+order.  In this they would, perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the
+bayonets of the Hamburg soldiers interfered, and forced this precious
+piece of revolutionary furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.
+
+After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of the
+Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping by a then
+rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present of a richly and
+elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten thousand louis d’or
+on her, before he had a mortifying conviction that some other had
+partaken of those favours for which he had so dearly paid.  A countryman
+of yours then showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene,
+and made his debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his
+theatrical goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with
+large and valuable diamonds.  Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards
+hearing that her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy,
+and that his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his
+portrait changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving,
+however, the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the
+stage, by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her
+bosom.  The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which
+he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had put the
+whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which all her
+numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had won it.
+
+The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his
+turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.
+She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry,
+during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to
+France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand
+livres.  Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the
+decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect
+money, and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances.  She had
+always lists of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play
+in her lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her,
+by the assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.
+
+I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of
+Talleyrand’s secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of
+the other sex.  I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our
+Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who
+instructed her how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg.  I need not
+repeat what is so well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined
+the domestic happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his
+political transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely
+end, in procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and
+jewels, the recall of one of the principal conspirators against the
+unfortunate Paul.
+
+The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short period
+of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of roubles.  For
+money she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon innocence the
+punishment merited by guilt.  The scaffolds of Russia were bleeding, and
+the roads to Siberia crowded with the victims of the avarice of this
+female demon, who often promised what she was unable to perform, and, to
+silence complaint, added cruelty to fraud, and, after pocketing the
+bribe, resorted to the executioner to remove those whom she had duped.
+The shocking anecdote of the Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out
+of nearly a hundred thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards
+persuaded her Imperial lover to inflict capital punishment, is too recent
+and too public to be unknown or forgotten.  A Russian nobleman has
+assured me that the number of unfortunate individuals whom her and her
+husband’s intrigues have caused to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801
+was forty-six; and that nearly three hundred persons besides, who could
+not or would not pay their extortionate demands, were exiled to Siberia
+during the same period of time.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such great and
+terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as well as of
+acquired accomplishments.  As I have already stated, she can have no
+pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating, sings tolerably
+well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an unusually good share
+of cunning, presumption, and duplicity.  Her husband, also, everywhere
+took care to make her fashionable; and the vanity of the first of their
+dupes increased the number of her admirers and engaged the vanity of
+others in their turn to sacrifice themselves at her shrine.
+
+The immorality of our age, also, often procured her popularity for what
+deserved, and in better times would have encountered, the severest
+reprobation.  In 1797, an emigrant lodged at an inn at Hamburg where
+another traveller was robbed of a large sum in ready money and jewels.
+The unfortunate is always suspected; and in the visit made to his room by
+the magistrates was found a key that opened the door of the apartment
+where the theft had been committed.  In vain did he represent that had he
+been the thief he should not have kept an instrument which was, or might
+be, construed into an argument of guilt; he was carried to prison, and,
+though none of the property was discovered in his possession, would have
+been condemned, had he not produced Madame Chevalier, who avowed that the
+key opened the door of her bedroom, which the smith who had made it
+confirmed, and swore that he had fabricated eight keys for the same
+actress and for the same purpose.
+
+At that time this woman lived in the same house with her husband, but
+cohabited there with the husband of another woman.  She had also places
+of assignation with other gallants at private apartments, both in Hamburg
+and at Altona.  All these, her scandalous intrigues, were known even to
+the common porters of these cities.  The first time, after the affair of
+the key had become public, she acted in a play where a key was mentioned,
+and the audience immediately repeated, “The key! the key!”  Far from
+being ashamed, she appeared every night in pieces selected by her, where
+there was mention of keys, and thus tired the jokes of the public.  This
+impudence might have been expected from her, but it was little to be
+supposed that her barefaced vices should, as really was the case, augment
+the crowd of suitors, and occasion even some duels, which latter she both
+encouraged and rewarded.
+
+Two brothers, of the name of De S-----, were both in love with her, and
+the eldest, as the richest, became her choice.  Offended at his refusal
+of too large a sum of money, she wrote to the younger De S-----, and
+offered to accede to his proposals if, like a gentleman, he would avenge
+the affront she had experienced from his brother.  He consulted a friend,
+who, to expose her infamy, advised him to send some confidential person
+to inform her that he had killed his elder brother, and expected the
+recompense on the same night.  He went and was received with open arms,
+and had just retired with her, when the elder brother, accompanied by his
+friend, entered the room.  Madame Chevalier, instead of upbraiding,
+laughed, and the next day the public laughed with her, and applauded her
+more than ever.  She knew very well what she was doing.  The stories of
+the key and the duel produced for her more than four thousand louis d’or
+by the number of new gallants they enticed.  It was a kind of emulation
+among all young men in the North who should be foremost to dishonour and
+ruin himself with this infamous woman.
+
+Madame Chevalier and her husband now live here in grand style, and have
+their grand parties, grand teas, grand assemblies, and grand balls. Their
+hotel, I am assured, is even visited by the Bonapartes and by the members
+of the foreign diplomatic corps.  In the house where I saw her, I
+observed that Louis Bonaparte and two foreign Ambassadors spoke to her as
+old acquaintances.  Though rich, to the amount of ten millions of
+livres--she, or rather her husband, keeps a gambling-house, and her
+superannuated charms are still to be bought for money, at the disposal of
+those amateurs who are fond of antiques.  Both her husband and herself
+are still members of our secret diplomacy, though she complains loudly
+that, of the two millions of livres--promised her in 1799 by Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand if she could succeed in persuading Paul I. to withdraw
+from his alliance with England and Austria, only six hundred thousand
+livres--has been paid her.
+
+I cannot finish this letter without telling you that before our military
+forces had reached the Rhine, our political incendiaries had already
+taken the field, and were in full march towards the Austrian, Russian,
+and Prussian capitals.  The advanced guard of this dangerous corps
+consists entirely of females, all gifted with beauty and parts as much
+superior to those of Madame Chevalier as their instructions are better
+digested.  Bonaparte and Talleyrand have more than once regretted that
+Madame Chevalier was not ordered to enter into the conspiracy against
+Paul (whose inconsistency and violence they foresaw would make his reign
+short), that she might have influenced the conspirators to fix upon a
+successor more pliable and less scrupulous, and who would have suffered
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud to dictate to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.
+
+I dined in company several times this last spring with two ladies who,
+rumour said, have been destined for your P----- of W---- and D--- of
+Y---ever since the Peace of Amiens.  Talleyrand is well informed what
+figures and what talents are requisite to make an impression on these
+Princes, and has made his choice accordingly.  These ladies have lately
+disappeared, and when inquired after are stated to be in the country,
+though I do not consider it improbable that they have already arrived at
+headquarters.  They are both rather fair and lusty, above the middle
+size, and about twenty-five years of age.  They speak, besides French,
+the English and Italian languages.  They are good drawers, good
+musicians, good singers, and, if necessary, even good drinkers.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Had the citizens of the United States been as submissive to the
+taxation of your Government as to the vexations of our ruler, America
+would, perhaps, have been less free and Europe more tranquil. After the
+treaty of Amiens had Produced a general pacification, our Government was
+seriously determined to reconquer from America a part of those treasures
+its citizens had gained during the Revolutionary War, by a neutrality
+which our policy and interest required, and which the liberality of your
+Government endured.  Hence the acquisition we made of New Orleans from
+Spain, and hence the intrigues of our emissaries in that colony, and the
+peremptory requisitions of provision for St. Domingo by our Minister and
+generals.  Had we been victorious in St. Domingo, most of our troops
+there were destined for the American Continent, to invade, according to
+circumstances, either the Spanish colonies on the terra firma or the
+States of the American Commonwealth.  The unforeseen rupture with your
+country postponed a plan that is far from being laid aside.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that since we sold Louisiana we have no footing
+in America that can threaten the peace or independence of the United
+States; but may not the same dictates that procured us at Madrid the
+acquisition of New Orleans, also make us masters of Spanish Florida?  And
+do you believe it improbable that the present disagreement between
+America and Spain is kept up by our intrigues and by our future views?
+Would not a word from us settle in an instant at Madrid the differences
+as well as the frontiers of the contending parties in America?  And does
+it not seem to be the regular and systematic plan of our Government to
+provoke the retaliation of the Americans, and to show our disregard of
+their privilege of neutrality and rights of independence; and that we
+insult them only because we despise them, and despise them only because
+we do not apprehend their resentment.
+
+I have heard the late American Minister here assert that the American
+vessels captured by our cruisers and condemned by our tribunals, only
+during the last war, amounted to about five hundred; and their cargoes
+(all American property) to one hundred and fifty millions of
+livres--L6,000,000.  Some few days ago I saw a printed list, presented by
+the American consul to our Minister of the Marine Department, claiming
+one hundred and twelve American ships captured in the West Indies and on
+the coast of America within these last two years, the cargoes of which
+have all been confiscated, and most of the crews still continue prisoners
+at Martinico, Gaudeloupe, or Cayenne.  Besides these, sixty-six American
+ships, after being plundered in part of their cargoes at sea by our
+privateers, had been released; and their claims for property thus lost,
+or damage thus done, amounting to one million three hundred thousand
+livres.
+
+You must have read the proclamations of our governors in the West Indies,
+and therefore remember that one dated at Guadeloupe, and another dated at
+the City of San Domingo, both declare, without farther ceremony, all
+American and other neutral ships and cargoes good and lawful prizes, when
+coming from or destined to any port in the Island of St. Domingo, because
+Bonaparte’s subjects there were in a state of rebellion.  What would
+these philosophers who, twelve years ago, wrote so many libels against
+your Ministers for their pretended system of famine, have said, had they,
+instead of prohibiting the carrying of ammunition and provisions to the
+ports of France, thus extended their orders without discrimination or
+distinction?  How would the neutral Americans, and the neutral Danes, and
+their then allies, philosophers, and Jacobins of all colours and classes,
+have complained and declaimed against the tyrants of the seas; against
+the enemies of humanity, liberty, and equality.  Have not the negroes
+now, as much as our Jacobins had in 1793, a right to call upon all those
+tender-hearted schemers, dupes, or impostors, to interest humanity in
+their favour?  But, as far as I know, no friends of liberty have yet
+written a line in favour of these oppressed and injured men, whose former
+slavery was never doubtful, and who, therefore, had more reason to rise
+against their tyrants, and to attempt to shake off their yoke, than our
+French insurgents, who, free before, have never since they revolted
+against lawful authority enjoyed an hour’s freedom.  But the Emperor
+Jacques the First has no propagators, no emissaries, no learned savans
+and no secret agents to preach insurrection in other States, while
+defending his own usurpation; besides, his treasury is not in the most
+brilliant and flourishing situation, and the crew of our white
+revolutionists are less attached to liberty than to cash.
+
+Our Ambassador to the United States, General Turreaux, is far from being
+contented with our friend, the President Jefferson, whose patriotic
+notions have not yet soared to the level of our patriotic transactions.
+He refused both to prevent the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte with a female
+American citizen, and to detain her after her marriage when her husband
+returned to Europe.  To our continual representation against the
+liberties which the American newspapers take with our Government, with
+our Emperor, with our Imperial Family, and with our Imperial Ministers,
+the answer has always been, “Prosecute the libeller, and as soon as he is
+convicted he will be punished.”  This tardy and negative justice is so
+opposite to our expeditious and summary mode of proceeding, of punishing
+first and trying afterwards, that it must be both humiliating and
+offensive.  In return, when the Americans have complained to Turreaux
+against the piracy of our privateers, he has sent them here to seek
+redress, where they also will, to their cost, discover that in civil
+cases our justice has not the same rapid march as when it is a question
+of arresting or transporting suspected persons, or of tormenting,
+shooting, or guillotining a pretended spy, or supposed conspirator.
+
+Had the peace of Europe continued, Bernadotte was the person selected by
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we
+then intended to strike, and not to negotiate.  But during the present
+embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than
+either a warrior or a politician.  A man who has passed through all the
+mire of our own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an
+accomplice of all our factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument
+where factions are to be created and directed, where wealth is designed
+for pillage, and a State for overthrow.  General Turreaux is, therefore,
+in his place, and at his proper post, as our Ambassador in America.
+
+The son of a valet of the late Duc de Bouillon, Turreaux called himself
+before the Revolution Chevalier de Grambonville, and was, in fact, a
+‘chevalier d’industrie’ (a swindler), who supported himself by gambling
+and cheating.  An associate of Beurnonville, Barras, and other vile
+characters, he with them joined the colours of rebellion, and served
+under the former in 1792, in the army of the Moselle, first as a
+volunteer, and afterwards as an aide-de-camp.  In a speech at the Jacobin
+Club at Quesnoy, on the 20th of November, 1792, he made a motion--“That,
+throughout the whole republican army, all hats should be prohibited, and
+red caps substituted in their place; and that, not only portable
+guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs, should accompany the soldiers of
+Liberty and Equality.”
+
+A cousin of his was a member of the National Convention, and one of those
+called Mountaineers, or sturdy partisans of Marat and Robespierre.  It
+was to the influence of this cousin, that he was indebted, first for a
+commission as an adjutant-general, and afterwards for his promotion to a
+general of brigade.  In 1793, he was ordered to march, under the command
+of Santerre, to La Vendee, where he shared in the defeat of the
+republicans at Vihiers.  At the engagement near Roches d’Erigne he
+commanded, for the first time, a separate column, and the capacity and
+abilities which he displayed on that occasion were such as might have
+been expected from a man who had passed the first thirty years of his
+life in brothels and gambling-houses.  So pleasant were his dispositions,
+that almost the whole army narrowly escaped having been thrown and pushed
+into the River Loire.  The battle of Doux was the only one in which he
+had a share where the republicans were not routed; but some few days
+afterwards, near Coron, all the troops under him were cut to pieces, and
+he was himself wounded.
+
+The confidence of his friends, the Jacobins, increased, however, in
+proportion to his disasters, and he was, in 1794, after the superior
+number of the republican soldiers had forced the remnants of the
+Royalists to evacuate what was properly called La Vendee, appointed a
+commander-in-chief.  He had now an opportunity to display his infamy and
+barbarity.  Having established his headquarters at Mantes, where he was
+safe, amidst the massacres of women and children ordered by his friend
+Carriere, he commanded the republican army to enter La Vendee in twelve
+columns, preceded by fire and sword; and within four weeks, one of the
+most populous departments of France, to the extent and circumference of
+sixty leagues, was laid waste-not a house, not a cottage, not a tree was
+spared, all was reduced to ashes; and the unfortunate inhabitants, who
+had not perished amid the ruin of their dwellings, were shot or stabbed;
+while attempting to save themselves from the common conflagration.  On
+the 22d of January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of
+the National Convention: “Citizen Representatives!--A country of sixty
+leagues extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a perfect
+desert; not a dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes; and of one
+hundred and eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a soul breathes
+any longer.  Men and women, old men and children, have all experienced
+the national vengeance, and are no more.  It was a pleasure to a true
+republican to see upon the bayonets of each of our brave republicans the
+children of traitors, or their, heads.  According to the lowest
+calculation, I have despatched, within three months, two hundred thousand
+individuals of both sexes, and of all ages.  Vive la Republique!!!” In
+the works of Prudhomme and our republican writers, are inserted hundreds
+of letters, still more cruelly extravagant, from this ci-devant friend of
+Liberty and Equality, and at present faithful subject, and grand officer
+of the Legion of Honour, of His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First.
+
+After the death of Robespierre, Turreaux, then a governor at Belleisle,
+was arrested as a terrorist, and shut up at Du Plessis until the general
+amnesty released him in 1795.  During his imprisonment he amused himself
+with writing memoirs of the war of La Vendee, in which he tried to prove
+that all his barbarities had been perpetrated for the sake of humanity,
+and to save the lives of republicans.  He had also the modesty to
+announce that, as a military work, his production would be equally
+interesting as those of a Folard and Guibert.  These memoirs, however,
+proved nothing but that he was equally ignorant and wicked, presumptuous
+and ferocious.
+
+During the reign of the Directory he was rather discarded, or only
+employed as a kind of recruiting officer to hunt young conscripts, but in
+1800 Bonaparte gave him a command in the army of reserve; and in 1802,
+another in the army of the interior.  He then became one of the most
+assiduous and cringing courtiers at the Emperor’s levies; while in the
+Empress’s drawing-room he assumed his former air and ton of a chevalier,
+in hopes of imposing upon those who did not remember the nickname which
+his soldiers gave him ten years before, of Chevalier of the Guillotine.
+
+At a ball of the Bonaparte family to which he was invited, the Emperor
+took the fancy to dance with his stepdaughter, Madame Louis.  He,
+therefore, unhooked his sword, which he handed to a young colonel, D’
+Avry, standing by his side.  This colonel, who had been a page at the
+Court of Louis XVI., knew that it would have been against etiquette, and
+even unbecoming of him, to act as a valet to Napoleon while there were
+valets in the room; he therefore retreated, looking round for a servant.
+“Oh!” said the Emperor, “I see that I am mistaken; here, generals,”
+ continued he (addressing himself to half a dozen, with whose independent
+principles and good breeding he was acquainted), “take this sword during
+my dance.”  They all pushed forward, but Turreaux and La Grange, another
+general and intriguer, were foremost; the latter, however, received the
+preference.  On the next day, D’ Avry was ordered upon service to
+Cayenne.
+
+Turreaux has acquired, by his patriotic deeds in La Vendee, a fortune of
+seven millions of livres.  He has the highest opinion of his own
+capacity, while a moment’s conversation will inform a man of sense that
+he is only a conceited fool.  As to his political transactions, he has by
+his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a
+diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on
+him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business.  During a European
+war, Turreaux’s post is of little relative consequence; but should
+Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States
+will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same
+outrages their commercial navy now experiences on the main.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy, has assured
+me that, so far from Bonaparte’s subjects on the other side of the Alps
+being contented and attached to his person and Government, were a
+victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of Lombardy a general
+insurrection would be the consequence.  During these last nine years the
+inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment’s tranquillity or safety.  Every
+relation or favourite whom Napoleon wished to provide for, or to enrich,
+he has saddled upon them as in free quarters; and since 1796, when they
+first had the honour of our Emperor’s acquaintance, they have paid more
+in taxes, in forced loans, requisitions, and extortions of every
+description, than their ancestors or themselves had paid during the one
+hundred and ninety-six preceding years.
+
+Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the
+people in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse off.
+Having more national character and more fidelity towards their Sovereign
+than their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated. Their
+governor, General De Menou, has caused most of the departments to be
+declared under martial law, and without right to claim the protection of
+our happy constitution.  In every city or town are organized special
+tribunals, the progeny of our revolutionary tribunals, against the
+sentences of which no appeal can be made, though these sentences are
+always capital ones.  Before these, suspicion is evidence, and an
+imprudent word is subject to the same punishment as a murderous deed.
+Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he who complains is shot as a
+conspirator.
+
+There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape these
+legal assassinations.  They must either desert their country or sacrifice
+a part of their property.  In the former case, if retaken, they are
+condemned as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the risk that those
+to whom they have already given a part of their possessions will also
+require the remainder, and having obtained it, to enjoy in security the
+spoil, will send them to the tribunals and to death.  De Menou has a
+fixed tariff for his protection, regulated according to the riches of
+each person; and the tax-gatherers collect these arbitrary contributions
+with the regular ones, so little pains are taken to conceal or to
+disguise these robberies.
+
+De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
+Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment
+or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately.  He
+calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous
+action he proposes to commit, and determines accordingly.  He owed some
+riches and the rank of the major-general to the bounty of Louis XVI., but
+when he considered the immense value of the revolutionary plunder, called
+national property, and that those who confiscated could also promote, he
+did not hesitate what party to take.  A traitor is generally a coward; he
+has everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his Royalist
+countrymen in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by your
+countrymen in 1801.
+
+Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one
+Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are
+obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection,
+and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours.  He has also in his
+hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
+themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
+if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business
+done.  He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money,
+and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have
+the same privilege.  Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of
+the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of
+those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit.  All
+the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
+by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
+weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying.  He is a
+grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
+that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
+a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
+France, and to create in their place only a national one.  Always an
+incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
+Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
+Alcoran.
+
+The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
+complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First.  If persons of
+rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
+birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
+dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
+might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
+death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
+of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
+of lowest birth and basest morals.  If their revolutionary mania were not
+incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
+duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
+being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
+preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.
+
+The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
+Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections.  Wealthy as well as
+elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
+enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
+esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
+his own conscience.  Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
+made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
+works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
+reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
+charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
+attempted to be put into practice.  Returned to his own country, his
+acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
+with his religion, and with himself.  In our Revolution he thought that
+he saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species,
+and that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society
+as was promised in books.  With our own regenerators he extenuated the
+crimes which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them
+even necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete.  When,
+therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was
+among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer.
+The numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
+commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.
+“The faults and sufferings of individuals,” he said, “are nothing to the
+goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole.”  To
+him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of
+thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with
+the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and
+instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers.  In recompense for so
+much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in
+1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at
+Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic. As Melzi
+was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much
+approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that
+annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people.  In a conference,
+however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced
+that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
+intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the
+point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it
+should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he
+advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and
+equality.  Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi
+to sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he
+occupied.
+
+The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his
+philosophy and his schemes of regeneration.  He trusted so much to the
+promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined
+to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was
+ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais
+as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy.  He was not
+philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad
+grace to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred
+seeing in that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general. To
+soften his disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and
+with that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons,
+where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of
+Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.
+
+Immediately after Bonaparte’s return to France, Melzi left Milan, and
+retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to Talleyrand a
+letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave to pass the
+remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives.  An answer was
+presented him by an officer of Bonaparte’s Gendarmes d’Elite, in which he
+was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to return with the officer to
+Milan, and there occupy his office of Arch-Chancellor to which he had
+been nominated.  Enraged at such treatment, he endeavoured to kill
+himself with a dose of poison, but his attempt did not succeed.  His
+health was, however, so much injured by it that it is not supposed he can
+live long.  What, a lesson for reformers and innovators!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A ridiculous affair lately occasioned a great deal of bustle
+among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps.  When Bonaparte
+demanded for himself and for his wife the title of Imperial Majesty, and
+for his brothers and sisters that of Imperial Highness, he also insisted
+on the salutation of a Serene Highness being given to his
+Arch-Chancellor, Cambaceres, and his Arch-Treasurer, Lebrun.  The
+political consciences of the independent representatives of independent
+Continental Princes immediately took the alarm at the latter innovation,
+as the appellation of Serene Highness has never hitherto been bestowed on
+persons who had not princely rank.  They complained to Talleyrand, they
+petitioned Bonaparte, and they even despatched couriers to their
+respective Courts.  The Minister smiled, the Emperor cursed, and their
+own Cabinets deliberated.  All routs, all assemblies, all circles, and
+all balls were at a stop.  Cambaceres applied to his Sovereign to support
+his pretensions, as connected with his own dignity; and the diplomatic
+corps held forward their dignity as opposing the pretensions of
+Cambaceres.  In this dilemma Bonaparte ordered all the Ambassadors,
+Ministers, envoys, and agents ‘en masse’ to the castle of the Tuileries.
+After hearing, with apparent patience, their arguments in favour of
+established etiquette and customs, he remained inflexible, upon the
+ground that he, as master, had a right to confer what titles he chose
+within his own dominions on his own subjects; and that those foreigners
+who refused to submit to his regulations might return to their own
+country.  This plain explanation neither effecting a conversion nor
+making any, impression, he grew warm, and left the refractory
+diplomatists with these remarkable words: “Were I to create my Mameluke
+Rostan a King, both you and your masters should acknowledge him in that
+rank.”
+
+After this conference most of Their Excellencies were seized with terror
+and fear, and would, perhaps, have subscribed to the commands of our
+Emperor had not some of the wisest among them proposed, and obtained the
+consent of the rest, to apply, once more to Talleyrand, and purchase by
+some douceur his assistance in this great business.  The heart of our
+Minister is easily softened; and he assented, upon certain conditions, to
+lay the whole before his Sovereign in such a manner that Cambaceres
+should be made a Prince as well as a Serene Highness.
+
+It is said that Bonaparte was not easily persuaded to this measure, and
+did not consent to it before the Minister remarked that his condescension
+in this insignificant opposition to his will would proclaim his
+moderation and generosity, and empower him to insist on obedience when
+matters of the greatest consequence should be in question or disputed.
+Thus our regicide, Cambaceres, owes his princely title to the shallow
+intrigues of the agents of legitimate Sovereigns.  Their nicety in
+talking of innovations with regard to him, after they had without
+difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an Emperor, and other sans-culottes
+Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd as improper.  Report, however, states,
+what is very probable, that they were merely the duped tools of
+Cambaceres’s ambition and vanity, and of Talleyrand’s corruption and
+cupidity.
+
+Cambaceres expected to have been elevated to a Prince on the same day
+that he was made a Serene Highness; but Joseph Bonaparte represented to
+his brother that too many other princedoms would diminish the respect and
+value of the princedoms of the Bonaparte family.  Cambaceres knew that
+Talleyrand had some reason at that period to be discontented with Joseph,
+and, therefore, asked his advice how to get made a Prince against the
+wishes of this Grand Elector.  After some consideration, the Minister
+replied that he was acquainted with one way, which would, with his
+support, certainly succeed; but it required a million of livres to set
+the wheels in motion, and keep them going afterwards.  The hint was
+taken, and an agreement signed for one million, payable on the day when
+the princely patent should be delivered to the Arch-Chancellor.
+
+Among the mistresses provided by our Minister for the members of the
+foreign diplomatic corps, Madame B----s is one of the ablest in the way
+of intrigue.  She was instructed to alarm her ‘bon ami’, the Bavarian
+Minister, Cetto, who is always bustling and pushing himself forward in
+the grand questions of etiquette.  A fool rather than a rogue, and an
+intriguer while he thinks himself a negotiator, he was happy to have this
+occasion to prove his penetrating genius and astonishing information. A
+convocation of the diplomatic corps was therefore called, and the
+suggestions of Cetto were regarded as an inspiration, and approved, with
+a resolution to persevere unanimously.  At their first audience with
+Talleyrand on this subject, he seemed to incline in their favour; but, as
+soon as he observed how much they showed themselves interested about this
+trifling punctilio, it occurred to him that they, as well as Cambaceres,
+might in some way or other reward the service he intended to perform.
+Madame B----s was again sent for; and she once more advised her lover,
+who again advised his colleagues.  Their scanty purses were opened, and a
+subscription entered into for a very valuable diamond, which, with the
+millions of the Arch-Chancellor, gave satisfaction to all parties; and
+even Joseph Bonaparte was reconciled, upon the consideration that
+Cambaceres has no children, and that, therefore, the Prince will expire
+with the Grand Officer of State.
+
+Cambaceres, though before the Revolution a nobleman of a Parliamentary
+family, was so degraded and despised for his unnatural and beastly
+propensities, that to see him in the ranks of rebellion was not
+unexpected.  Born in Languedoc, his countrymen were the first to suffer
+from his revolutionary proceedings, and reproached him as one of the most
+active instruments of persecution against the clergy of Toulouse, and as
+one of the causes of all the blood that flowed in consequence.  A coward
+as well as a traitor, after the death of Louis XVI. he never dared ascend
+the tribune of the National Convention, but always gave a silent vote to
+all the atrocious laws proposed and carried by Marat, Robespierre, and
+their accomplices.  It was in 1795, when the Reign of Terror had ceased,
+that he first displayed his zeal for anarchy, and his hatred to royalty;
+his contemptible and disgusting vices were, however, so publicly
+reprobated, that even the Directory dared not nominate him a Minister of
+Justice, a place for which he intrigued in vain, from 1796 to 1799; when
+Bonaparte, either not so scrupulous, or setting himself above the public
+opinion, caused him to be called to the Consulate; which, in 1802, was
+ensured him for life, but exchanged, in 1804, for the office of an
+Arch-Chancellor.
+
+He is now worth thirty millions of livres--all honestly obtained by his
+revolutionary industry.  Besides a Prince, a Serene Highness, an
+Arch-Chancellor, a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, he is also a
+Knight of the Prussian Black Eagle!  For his brother, who was for a long
+time an emigrant clergyman, and whom he then renounced as a fanatic, he
+has now procured the Archbishopric of Rouen and a Cardinal’s hat.  His
+Eminence is also a grand officer of the Legion of Honour in France, and a
+Pope in petto at Rome.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereign Prince has more incurred the hatred of Bonaparte
+than the present King of Sweden; and I have heard from good authority
+that our Government spares neither bribes nor intrigues to move the tails
+of those factions which were dissolved, but not crushed, after the murder
+of Gustavus III.  The Swedes are generally brave and loyal, but their
+history bears witness that they are easily misled; all their grand
+achievements are their own, and the consequence of their national spirit
+and national valour, while all their disasters have been effected by the
+influence of foreign gold and of foreign machinations.  Had they not been
+the dupes of the plots and views of the Cabinets of Versailles and St.
+Petersburg, their country might have been as powerful in the nineteenth
+century as it was in the seventeenth.
+
+That Gustavus IV. both knew the danger of Europe, and indicated the
+remedy, His Majesty’s notes, as soon as he came of age, presented by the
+able and loyal Minister Bildt to the Diet of Ratisbon, evince.  Had they
+been more attended to during 1798 and 1799, Bonaparte would not, perhaps,
+have now been so great, but the Continent would have remained more free
+and more independent.  They were the first causes of our Emperor’s
+official anger against the Cabinet of Stockholm.
+
+When, however, His Swedish Majesty entered into the Northern league, his
+Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, was for some time treated with no insults
+distinct or different from those to which all foreign diplomatic agents
+have been accustomed during the present reign; but when he demanded
+reparation for the piracies committed during the last war by our
+privateers on the commerce of his nation, the tone was changed; and when
+his Sovereign, in 1803, was on a visit to his father-in-law, the Elector
+of Baden, and there preferred the agreeable company of the unfortunate
+Duc d’Enghien to the society of our Minister, Baron Ehrensward never
+entered Napoleon’s diplomatic circle or Madame Napoleon’s drawing-room
+without hearing rebukes and experiencing disgusts.  One day, when more
+than usually attacked, he said, on leaving the apartment, to another
+Ambassador, and in the hearing of Duroc, “that it required more real
+courage to encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming
+provocations, which the person who gave them knew could not be resented,
+than to brave a death which the mouths of cannon vomit or the points of
+bayonets inflict.”  Duroc reported to his master what he heard, and but
+for Talleyrand’s interference, the Swedish Ambassador would, on the same
+night, have been lodged in the Temple.  Orders were already given to that
+purpose, but were revoked.
+
+This Baron Ehrensward, who is also a general in the service of his
+country, has almost from his youth passed his time at Courts; first in
+his own country, and afterwards in Spain, where he resided twelve years
+as our Ambassador.  Frank as a soldier, but also polite as a courtier, he
+was not a little surprised at the new etiquette of our new court, and at
+the endurance of all the members of the diplomatic corps, of whom hardly
+one had spirit enough to remember that he was the representative of one,
+at least nominally, independent Prince or State.  It must be added that
+he was the only foreign diplomatist, with Count Markof, who was not the
+choice of our Cabinet, and, therefore, was not in our secrets.
+
+As soon as His Swedish Majesty heard of the unexpected and unlawful
+seizure of the Duc d’Enghien, he wrote a letter with his own hand to
+Bonaparte, which he sent by his adjutant-general, Tawast; but this
+officer arrived too late, and only in time to hear of the execution of
+the Prince he intended to save, and the indecent expressions of Napoleon
+when acquainted with the object of his mission.  Baron Ehrensward was
+then recalled, and a Court mourning was proclaimed by Gustavus IV., as
+well as by Alexander the First, for the lamented victim of the violated
+laws of nations and humanity.  This so, enraged our ruler that General
+Caulincourt (the same who commanded the expedition which crossed the
+Rhine and captured the Duc d’ Enghien) was engaged to head and lead fifty
+other banditti, who were destined to pass in disguise into Baden, and to
+bring the King of Sweden a prisoner to this capital.  Fortunately, His
+Majesty had some suspicion of the attempt, and removed to a greater
+distance from our frontiers than Carlsruhe.  So certain was our
+Government of the success of this shameful enterprise, that our charge
+d’affaires in Sweden was preparing to engage the discontented and
+disaffected there for the convocation of a diet and the establishment of
+a regency.
+
+According to the report in our diplomatic circle.  Bonaparte and
+Talleyrand intended nevermore to, release their royal captive when once
+in their power; but, after forcing him to resign the throne to his son,
+keep him a prisoner for the remainder of his days, which they would have
+taken care should not have been long.  The Duke of Sudermania was to have
+been nominated a regent until the majority of the young King, not yet six
+years of age.  The Swedish diets were to recover that influence, or,
+rather, that licentiousness, to which Gustavus III., by the revolution of
+the 19th of August, 1772, put an end.  All exiled regicides, or traitors,
+were to be recalled, and a revolutionary focus organized in the North,
+equally threatening Russia and Denmark.  The dreadful consequences of
+such an event are incalculable.  Thanks to the prudence of His Swedish
+Majesty, all these schemes evaporated in air.
+
+Not being able to dethrone a Swedish Monarch, our Cabinet resolved to
+partition the Swedish territory, to which effect I am assured that
+proposals were last summer made to the Cabinets of St. Petersburg,
+Berlin, and Copenhagen.  Swedish Finland was stated to have been offered
+to Russia, Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, and Scania and Blekinge to
+Denmark; but the overture was rejected.
+
+The King of Sweden possesses both talents and information superior to
+most of his contemporaries, and he has surrounded himself with
+counsellors who, with their experience, make wisdom more firm, more
+useful, and more valuable.  His chancellor, D’Ehrenheim, unites modesty
+with sagacity; he is a most able statesman, an accomplished gentleman,
+and the most agreeable of men.  He knows the languages, as well as the
+constitutions, of every country in Europe, with equal perfection as his
+native tongue and national code.  Had his Sovereign the same ascendency
+over the European politics as Christina had during the negotiation of the
+Treaty of Munster, other States would admire, and Sweden be proud of,
+another Axel Oxenstiern.
+
+Count Fersen, who also has, and is worthy of, the confidence of his
+Prince, is a nobleman, the honour and pride of his rank.  A colonel
+before the Revolution of the regiment Royal Suedois, in the service of my
+country, his principles were so well appreciated that he was entrusted by
+Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when so many were so justly suspected,
+and served royalty in distress, at the risk of his own existence.  This
+was so much the more generous in him as he was a foreigner, of one of the
+most ancient families, and one of the richest noblemen in his own
+country.  To him Louis XVIII. is indebted for his life; and he brought
+consolation to the deserted Marie Antoinette even in the dungeon of the
+Conciergerie, when a discovery would have been a sentence of death. In
+1797, he was appointed by his King plenipotentiary to the Congress of
+Rastadt, and arrived there just at the time when Bonaparte, after the
+destruction of happiness in Italy, had resolved on the ruin of liberty in
+Switzerland, and came there proud of past exploits and big with future
+schemes of mischief.  His reception from the conquerer of Italy was such
+as might have been expected by distinguished loyalty from successful
+rebellion.  He was told that the Congress of Rastadt was not his place!
+and this was true; for what can be common between honour and infamy,
+between virtue and vice?  On his return to Sweden, Count Fersen was
+rewarded with the dignity of a Grand Officer of State.
+
+Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of His Swedish Majesty, Baron
+d’Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced in saying that he was the
+friend of Gustavus III.  From a page to that chevalier of royalty he was
+advanced to the rank of general; and during the war with Russia, in 1789
+and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his Prince and benefactor. It
+was to him that his King said, when wounded mortally, by the hand of a
+regicide, at a masquerade in March, 1792, “Don’t be alarmed, my friend.
+You know as well as myself that all wounds are not dangerous.”
+ Unfortunately, his were not of that description.
+
+In the will of this great Monarch, Baron d’Armfeldt was nominated one of
+the guardians of his present Sovereign, and a governor of the capital;
+but the Duke Regent, who was a weak Prince, guided by philosophical
+adventurers, by Illuminati and Freemasons, most of whom had imbibed the
+French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a kind of honourable exile, as
+an Ambassador to Italy.  Shortly afterwards, under pretence of having
+discovered a conspiracy, in which the Baron was implicated, he was
+outlawed.  He then took refuge in Russia, where he was made a general,
+and as such distinguished him self under Suwarow during the campaign of
+1799.  He was then recalled to his country, and restored to all his
+former places and dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and
+obtain the favour, friendship, and approbation of his King.  He is said
+to be one of the Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with
+the Russian troops expected in Pomerania.  Wherever he is employed, I am
+convinced that he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero.  Last
+spring he was offered the place of a lieutenant-general in the Austrian
+service, which, with regard to salary and emoluments, is greatly superior
+to what he enjoys in Sweden; he declined it, however, because, with a
+warrior of his stamp, interest is the last consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Believe me, Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than
+all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes for
+his destruction.  He is aware of the fatal consequences all former
+factions suffered from the public exposure of their past crimes and
+future views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their
+boasts and promises.  He does not doubt but that a faithful account of
+all the actions and intrigues of his Government, its imposition, fraud,
+duplicity, and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public
+opinion; and that even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being
+tired of our revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity, have
+been his adherents, might alter their sentiments when they read of
+enormities which must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one that he
+who waded through rivers of blood to seize power will never hesitate
+about the means of preserving it.
+
+There is not a printing-office, from the banks of the Elbe to the Gulf of
+Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection of our
+police agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France, Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work which, if contrary to
+our policy or our fears, is not either confiscated, or purchased on the
+day it, makes its appearance.  Besides our regular emissaries, we have
+persons travelling from the beginning to the end of the year, to pick up
+information of what literary productions are printing; of what authors
+are popular; of their political opinions and private circumstances.  This
+branch of our haute police extends even to your country.
+
+Before the Revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers, but
+from 1789 to 1799 never less than thirty, and frequently sixty journals
+were daily printed.  After Bonaparte had assumed the consular authority,
+they were reduced to ten.  But though these were under a very strict
+inspection of our Minister of Police, they were regarded still as too
+numerous, and have lately been diminished to eight, by the incorporation
+of ‘Le Clef du Cabinet’ and ‘Le Bulletin de l’Europe’ with the ‘Gazette
+de France’, a paper of which the infamously famous Barrere is the editor.
+According to a proposal of Bonaparte, it was lately debated in the
+Council of State whether it would not be politic to suppress all daily
+prints, with the sole exception of the Moniteur.  Fouche and Talleyrand
+spoke much in favour of this measure of security.  Real, however, is said
+to have suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our Government,
+instead of prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has resolved
+by degrees to purchase them all, and to entrust them entirely to the
+direction of Barrere, who now is consulted in everything concerning books
+or newspapers.
+
+All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have
+previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary
+censor, Barrere.  Any person offending against this law is most severely
+punished.  An American gentlemen, of the name of Campbell, was last
+spring sent to the Temple for lending one of your old daily papers to a
+person who lodged in the same hotel with him.  After an imprisonment of
+ten weeks he made some pecuniary sacrifices to obtain his liberty, but
+was carried to Havre, under an escort of gendarmes, put on board a
+neutral vessel, and forbidden, under pain of death, ever to set his foot
+on French ground again.  An American vessel was, about the same time,
+confiscated at Bordeaux, and the captain and crew imprisoned, because
+some English books were found on board, in which Bonaparte, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, and some of our great men were rather ill-treated.  The crew have
+since been liberated, but the captain has been brought here, and is still
+in the Temple.  The vessel and the cargo have been sold as lawful
+captures, though the captain has proved from the names written in the
+books that they belonged to a passenger.  A young German student in
+surgery, who came here to improve himself, has been nine months in the
+same state prison, for having with him a book, printed in Germany during
+Bonaparte’s expedition to Egypt, wherein the chief and the undertaking
+are ridiculed.  His mother, the widow of a clergyman, hearing of the
+misfortune of her son, came here, and has presented to the Emperor and
+Empress half a dozen petitions, without any effect whatever, and has
+almost ruined herself and her other children by the expenses of the
+journey.  During a stay of four months she has not yet been able to gain
+admittance into the Temple, to visit or see her son, who perhaps expired
+in tortures, or died brokenhearted before she came here.
+
+A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the Duc d’Enghien had found their
+way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at last the
+police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of having read
+them was arrested.  The number of these unfortunate persons, according to
+some, amounted to one hundred and thirty, while others say that they were
+only eighty-four, of whom twelve died suddenly in the Temple, and the
+remainder were transported to Cayenne; upwards of half of them were
+women, some of the ci-devant highest rank among subjects.
+
+A Prussian, of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of
+Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives of
+Bonaparte and of some of his generals.  Every day such and other examples
+of the severity of our Government are related; and foreigners who visit
+us continue, nevertheless, to be off their guard.  They would be less
+punished had they with them forged bills than, printed books or
+newspapers, in which our Imperial Family and public functionaries are not
+treated with due respect.  Bonaparte is convinced that in every book
+where he is not spoken of with praise, the intent is to blame him; and
+such intents or negative guilt never escape with impunity.
+
+As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more fond of
+foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own,
+official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and
+at Mentz, where the ‘Gazette de Leyden’, ‘Hamburg Correspondenten’, and
+‘Journal de Frankfort’ are reprinted; some articles left out, and others
+inserted in their room.  It was intended to reprint also the ‘Courier de
+Londres’, but our types, and particularly, our paper, would detect the
+fraud.  I have read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were
+extracts from this French paper, printed in your country, which I
+strongly suspect are of our own manufacture.  I am told that several new
+books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant
+Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will
+soon be laid before the public as foreign productions.
+
+A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention, during
+his dinner at the restaurateur’s of ‘Cadran Vert’, on the Boulevards,
+some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the ‘Moniteur’. As
+he left the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of
+being an English agent, and before supper-time he was on the road to
+Rochefort on his way to Cayenne.  As soon as the banker Tournon was
+informed of this expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on
+Fouche, who threatened even to transport him if he dared to interfere
+with the transactions of the police.  This banker was himself seized in
+the spring of last year by a police agent and some gendarmes, and carried
+into exile forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six.
+months, until a pecuniary douceur procured him a recall.  His crime was
+having inquired after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having
+left his card there.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of the
+Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleon the First, and is
+now in Germany, making his first campaign.  A descendant of a wealthy and
+ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was easily
+deluded into the ranks of the revolutionists of his own country, by a
+Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse
+Borghese, his mother.  He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin
+club established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the
+same year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States,
+he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa
+Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat.  To show his love
+of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company of
+which the captain was a fellow that sold cats’ meat and tripe in the
+streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother’s kitchen.
+Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as
+insupportable for his pride and vanity as he, some years ago, was
+contemptible for his meanness.  He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who,
+between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband--a space
+of twelve months--had twice been in a fair way to become a mother.  Her
+portion was estimated at eighteen millions of livres--a sum sufficient to
+palliate many ‘faux pas’ in the eyes of a husband more sensible and more
+delicate than her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince
+Borghese.
+
+The lady is the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also the
+most wicked of the female Bonapartes.  She had, almost from her infancy,
+passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery, and profligacy
+before she attained her present elevation; rank, however, has not altered
+her morals, but only procured her the means of indulging in new excesses.
+Ever since the wedding night the Prince Borghese has been excluded from
+her bed; for she declared frankly to him, as well as to her brother, that
+she would never endure the approach of a man with a bad breath; though
+many who, from the opportunities they have had of judging, certainly
+ought to know, pretend that her own breath is not the sweetest in the
+world.  When her husband had marched towards the Rhine, she asked her
+brother, as a favour, to procure the Prince Borghese, after a useless
+life, a glorious death.  This curious demand of a wife was, made in
+Madame Bonaparte’s drawing-room, in the presence of fifty persons.  “You
+are always ‘etourdie’,” replied Napoleon, smiling.
+
+If Bonaparte, however, overlooks the intrigues of his sisters, he is not
+so easily pacified when any reports reach him inculpating the virtues of
+his sisters-in-law.  Some gallants of Madame Joseph Bonaparte have
+already disappeared to return no more, or are wandering in the wilds of
+Cayenne; but the Emperor is particularly attentive to everything
+concerning the morality of Madame Louis, whose descendants are destined
+to continue the Bonaparte dynasty.  Two officers, after being cashiered,
+were, with two of Madame Louis’s maids, shut up last month in the Temple,
+and have not since been heard of, upon suspicion that the Princess
+preferred their society to that of her husband.
+
+Louis Bonaparte, whose constitution has been much impaired by his
+debaucheries, was, last July, advised by his physicians to use the baths
+at St. Amand.  After his wife had accompanied him as far as Lille, she
+went to visit one of her friends, Madame Ney, the wife of General Ney,
+who commanded the camp near Montreuil.  This lady resided in a castle
+called Leek, in the vicinity, where dinners, concerts, balls, and other
+festivities celebrated the arrival of the Princess; and to these the
+principal officers of the camp were invited.  One morning, about an hour
+after the company had retired to bed, the whole castle was disturbed and
+alarmed by an uproar in the anteroom of Princesse Louis’s bedchamber. On
+coming to the scene of riot, two officers were found there fighting, and
+the Princesse Louis, more than half undressed, came out and called the
+sentries on duty to separate the combatants, who were both wounded. This
+affair occasioned great scandal; and General Ney, after having put the
+officers under arrest, sent a courier to Napoleon at Boulogne, relating
+the particulars and demanding His Majesty’s orders.  It was related and
+believed as a fact that the quarrel originated about two of the maids of
+the Princess (whose virtue was never suspected), with whom the officers
+were intriguing.  The Emperor ordered the culprits to be broken and
+delivered up to his Minister of Police, who knew how to proceed.  The
+Princesse Louis also received an invitation to join her sister-in-law,
+Madame Murat, then in the camp at Boulogne, and to remain under her care
+until her husband’s return from St. Amand.
+
+General Murat was then at Paris, and his lady was merely on a visit to
+her Imperial brother, who made her responsible for Madame Louis, whom he
+severely reprimanded for the misconduct of her maids.  The bedrooms of
+the two sisters were on the same floor.  One night, Princesse Louis
+thought she heard the footsteps of a person on the staircase, not like
+those of a female, and afterwards the door of Madame Murat’s room opened
+softly.  This occurrence deprived her of all desire to sleep; and
+curiosity, or perhaps revenge, excited her to remove her doubts
+concerning the virtue of her guardian.  In about an hour afterwards, she
+stole into Madame Murat’s bedroom, by the way of their sitting-room, the
+door in the passage being bolted.  Passing her hand over the pillow, she
+almost pricked herself with the strong beard of a man, and, screaming
+out, awoke her sister, who inquired what she could want at such an
+unusual hour.
+
+“I believe,” replied the Princess, “my room is haunted.  I have not shut
+my eyes, and intended to ask for a place by your side, but I find it is
+already engaged:
+
+“My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent,” said Madame
+Murat.
+
+“It is very rude of your maid to go to bed with her mistress without
+first shaving herself,” said the Princess, and left the room.
+
+The next morning an explanation took place; the ladies understood each
+other, and each, during the remaining part of her husband’s absence, had
+for consolation a maid for a bedfellow.  Madame Murat also convinced the
+Emperor that his suspicions with regard to the Princesse Louis were
+totally unfounded; and he with some precious presents, indemnified her
+for his harsh treatment.
+
+It is reported that the two maids of the Princesse Louis, when before
+Fouche, first denied all acquaintance with the officers; but, being
+threatened with tortures, they signed a ‘proces verbal’, acknowledging
+their guilt.  This valuable and authentic document the Minister sent by
+an extra courier to the Emperor, who showed it to his stepdaughter.  Her
+generosity is proverbial here, and therefore nobody is surprised that she
+has given a handsome sum of money to the parents of her maids, who had in
+vain applied to see their children; Fouche having told them that affairs
+of State still required their confinement.  One of them, Mariothe, has
+been in the service of the Princess ever since her marriage, and is known
+to possess all her confidence; though during that period of four years
+she has twice been in a state of pregnancy, through the condescending
+attention of her princely master.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--When preparations were made for the departure of our army of
+England for Germany, it excited both laughter and murmuring among the
+troops.  Those who had always regarded the conquest of England as
+impracticable in present circumstances, laughed, and those who had in
+their imagination shared the wealth of your country, showed themselves
+vexed at their disappointment.  To keep them in good spirits, the company
+of the theatre of the Vaudevilles was ordered from hence to Boulogne, and
+several plays, composed for the occasion, were performed, in which the
+Germans were represented as defeated, and the English begging for peace
+on their knees, which the Emperor of the French grants upon condition
+that one hundred guineas ready money should be paid to each of his
+soldiers and sailors.  Every corps in its turn was admitted gratis to
+witness this exhibition of the end of all their labours; and you can form
+no idea what effect it produced, though you are not a stranger to our
+fickle and inconsiderate character.  Ballads, with the same predictions
+and the same promises, were written and distributed among the soldiers,
+and sung by women sent by Fouche to the coast.  As all productions of
+this sort were, as usual, liberally rewarded by the Emperor, they poured
+in from all parts of his Empire.
+
+Three poets and authors of the theatre of the Vaudevilles, Barrel, Radet,
+and Desfontaines, each received two hundred napoleons d’or for their
+common production of a ballad, called “Des Adieux d’un Grenadier au Camp
+de Boulogne.”  From this I have extracted the following sample, by which
+you may judge of the remainder:
+
+THE GRENADIER’S ADIEU
+
+TO THE CAMP AT BOULOGNE
+
+The drum is beating, we must march, We’re summon’d to another field, A
+field that to our conq’ring swords Shall soon a laurel harvest yield. If
+English folly light the torch Of war in Germany again The loss is
+theirs--the gain is ours March! march! commence the bright campaign.
+
+There, only by their glorious deeds Our chiefs and gallant bands are
+known; There, often have they met their foes, And victory was all their
+own: There, hostile ranks, at our approach, Prostrate beneath our feet
+shall bow; There, smiling conquest waits to twine A laurel wreath round
+every brow.
+
+Adieu, my pretty turf-built hut * Adieu, my little garden, too! I made, I
+deck’d you all myself, And I am loth to part with you: But since my arms
+I must resume, And leave your comforts all behind, Upon the hostile
+frontier soon My tent shall flutter in the wind.
+
+My pretty fowls and doves, adieu! Adieu, my playful cat, to thee! Who
+every morning round me came, And were my little family. But thee, my dog,
+I shall not leave No, thou shalt ever follow me, Shalt share my toils,
+shaft share my fame For thou art called VICTORY.
+
+But no farewell I bid to you, Ye prams and boats, which, o’er the wave,
+Were doom’d to waft to England’s shore Our hero chiefs, our soldiers
+brave. To you, good gentlemen of Thames, Soon, soon our visit shall be
+paid, Soon, soon your merriment be o’er ‘T is but a few short hours
+delay’d.
+
+     * During the long continuance of the French encampment at
+     Boulogne the troops had formed, as it were, a romantic town
+     of huts.  Every hut had a garden surrounding it, kept in
+     neat order and stocked with vegetables and flowers.  They
+     had, besides, fowls, pigeons, and rabbits; and these, with a
+     cat and a dog, generally formed the little household of
+     every soldier.
+
+As I am writing on the subject of poetical agents, I will also say some
+words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons frequently
+occupy both the one office and the other.  A man of the name of Richaud,
+who has sung previously the glory of Marat and Robespierre, offered to
+Bonaparte, on the evening preceding his departure for Strasburg, the
+following lines; and was in return presented with a purse full of gold,
+and an order to the Minister of the Interior, Champagny, to be employed
+in his offices, until better provided for.
+
+STANZAS
+
+ON THE RUMOUR OF A WAR WITH AUSTRIA
+
+Kings who, so often vanquish’d, vainly dare
+Menace the victor that has laid you low--
+Look now at France--and view your own despair
+In the majestic splendour of your foe.
+
+What miserable pride, ye foolish kings,
+Still your deluded reason thus misleads?
+Provoke the storm--the bolt with lightning wings
+Shall fall--but fall on your devoted heads.
+
+And thou, Napoleon, if thy mighty sword
+Shall for thy people conquer new renown;
+Go--Europe shall attest, thy heart preferr’d
+The modest olive to the laurel crown.
+
+But thee, lov’d chief, to new achievements bold
+
+The aroused spirit of the soldier calls;
+Speak!--and Vienna cowering shall behold
+Our banners waving o’er her prostrate walls.
+
+I received, four days afterwards, at the circle of Madame Joseph
+Bonaparte, with all other visitors, a copy of these stanzas.  Most of the
+foreign Ambassadors were of the party, and had also a share of this
+patriotic donation.  Count von Cobenzl had prudently absented himself;
+otherwise, this delenda of the Austrian Carthage would have been
+officially announced to him.
+
+Another poetaster, of the name of Brouet, in a long, dull, disgusting
+poem, after comparing Bonaparte with all great men of antiquity, and
+proving that he surpasses them all, tells his countrymen that their
+Emperor is the deputy Divinity upon earth--the mirror of wisdom, a
+demi-god to whom future ages will erect statues, build temples, burn
+incense, fall down and adore.  A proportionate share of abuse is, of
+course, bestowed on your nation.  He says:
+
+A Londres on vit briller d’un eclat ephemere Le front tout radieux d’un
+ministre influent; Mais pour faire palir l’etoile d’Angleterre, Un SOLEIL
+tout nouveau parut au firmament, Et ce soleil du peuple franc Admire de
+l’Europe entiere Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE LE GRAND.
+
+For this delicate compliment Brouet was made deputy postmaster-general in
+Italy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It must be granted that, if
+Bonaparte is fond of flattery, he does not receive it gratis, but pays
+for it like a real Emperor.
+
+It has lately become the etiquette, not only in our Court circle and
+official assemblies, but even in fashionable societies of persons who
+are, or wish to become, Bonaparte’s public functionaries, to distribute
+and have read and applauded these disinterested effusions of our poetical
+geniuses.  This fashion occasioned lately a curious blunder at a
+tea-party in the hotel of Madame de Talleyrand.  The same printer who had
+been engaged by this lady had also been employed by Chenier, or some
+other poet, to print a short satire against several of our literary
+ladies, in which Madame de Genlis and Madame de Stael (who has just
+arrived here from her exile) were, with others, very severely handled. By
+mistake, a bundle of this production was given to the porter of Madame de
+Talleyrand, and a copy was handed to each visitor, even to Madame de
+Genlis and Madame de Stael, who took them without noticing their
+contents.  Picard, after reading an act of a new play, was asked by the
+lady of the house to read this poetic worship of the Emperor of the
+French.  After the first two lines he stopped short, looking round him
+confused, suspecting a trick had been played upon him.  This induced the
+audience to read what had been given them, and Madame de Talleyrand with
+the rest; who, instead of permitting Picard to continue with another.
+scene of his play, as he had adroitly begun, made the most awkward
+apology in the world, and by it exposed the ladies still more who were
+the objects of the satire; which, an hour afterwards, was exchanged for
+the verses intended for the homage of the Emperor, and the cause of the
+error was cleared up.
+
+I have read somewhere of a tyrant of antiquity who forced all his
+subjects to furnish one room of their houses in the best possible manner,
+according to their circumstances, and to have it consecrated for the
+reception of his bust, before which, under pain of death, they were
+commanded to prostrate themselves, morning, noon, and night.  They were
+to enter this room, bareheaded and barefooted, to remain there only on
+their knees, and to leave it without turning their back towards the
+sacred representative of their Prince.  All laughing, sneezing, coughing,
+speaking, or even whispering, were capitally prohibited; but crying was
+not only permitted, but commanded, when His Majesty was offended, angry,
+or unwell.  Should our system of cringing continue progressively to
+increase as it has done these last three years, we, too, shall very soon
+have rooms consecrated, and an idol to adore.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Portugal has suffered more from the degraded state of Spain,
+under the administration of the Prince of Peace, than we have yet gained
+by it in France.  Engaged by her, in 1793, in a war against its
+inclination and interest, it was not only deserted afterwards, but
+sacrificed.  But for the dictates of the Court of Madrid, supported,
+perhaps, by some secret influence of the Court of St. James, the Court of
+Lisbon would have preserved its neutrality, and, though not a well-wisher
+of the French Republic, never have been counted among her avowed enemies.
+
+In the peace of 1795, and in the subsequent treaty of 1796, which
+transformed the family compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons into a
+national alliance between France and Spain, there was no question about
+Portugal.  In 1797, indeed, our Government condescended to receive a
+Portuguese plenipotentiary, but merely for the purpose of plundering his
+country of some millions of money, and to insult it by shutting up its
+representative as a State prisoner in the Temple.  Of this violation of
+the laws of civilized nations, Spain never complained, nor had Portugal
+any means to avenge it.  After four years of negotiation, and an
+expenditure of thirty millions, the imbecile Spanish premier supported
+demands made by our Government, which, if assented to, would have left
+Her Most Faithful Majesty without any territory in Europe, and without
+any place of refuge in America.  Circumstances not permitting your
+country to send any but pecuniary succours, Portugal would have become an
+easy prey to the united Spanish and French forces, had the marauders
+agreed about the partition of the spoil.  Their disunion, the consequence
+of their avidity, saved it from ruin, but not from pillage.  A province
+was ceded to Spain, the banks and the navigation of a river to France,
+and fifty millions to the private purse of the Bonaparte family.
+
+It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such offerings,
+would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but, though the
+Cabinet of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+pretensions and encroachments of the latter left the former no rest.
+While pocketing tributes it required commercial monopolies, and when its
+commerce was favoured, it demanded seaports to ensure the security of its
+trade.  Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions of the
+State it, oppressed.  With the money and the value of the diamonds which
+Portugal has paid in loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in
+donations, in tributes, and in presents, it might have supported, during
+ten years, an army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have
+been worse situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?
+
+But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort, were
+more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the extortions
+themselves were injurious to its resources.  The first revolutionary
+Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his
+contempt.
+
+Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more
+vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes.  The son of a publican
+and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a
+postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin, and a terrorist;
+and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of these different
+trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and
+disgusts.  He seems to say, “I am a villain.  I know that I am so, and I
+am proud of being so.  To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no
+human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance.  I might be
+murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me.  On a gibbet or
+in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with
+Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same.  Infamy
+cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me.”
+ General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will
+always be the same polluted, but daring individual; a stranger to remorse
+and repentance, as well as to honour and virtue.  Where Bonaparte sends a
+banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction.
+
+A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes’s first
+mission to Portugal.  When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he
+had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest,
+and, as a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador, as he said himself.
+His resentment against Bonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent
+of Portugal.  Without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the
+Court of Lisbon, he brought the sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of
+the Tuileries with him, and determined to fraternize with a foreign and
+legitimate Sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and
+First Consul; and, what is the more surprising, he carried his point. The
+Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor
+to his child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before he was
+divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince’s consort, a
+Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to associate.
+
+Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an Ambassador, his
+former business of a smuggler, and, instead of being ashamed of a
+discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not reprimanded
+in France, but was, without apology, received back again in Portugal. His
+conduct afterwards could not be surprising.  He only insisted that some
+faithful and able Ministers should be removed, and others appointed in
+their place, more complaisant and less honest.
+
+New plans of Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but
+what did it obtain in return?--another grenadier Ambassador, less brutal
+but more cunning, as abandoned but more dissimulating.
+
+Gendral Junot is the son of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of this
+capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789.  Having committed some
+pilfering, he was turned out of the parental dwelling, and therefore
+lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club.  In 1792, he entered, as
+a soldier, in a regiment of the army marching against the county of Nice;
+and, in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted with
+Bonaparte, whom he, in January, 1794, assisted in despatching the
+unfortunate Toulonese; and with whom, also, in the autumn of the same
+year, he, therefore, was arrested as a terrorist.
+
+In 1796, when commander-in-chief, Bonaparte made Junot his aide-de-camp;
+and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to Egypt.  There, as
+well as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no particular opportunity of
+distinguishing himself.  He was not one of those select few whom Napoleon
+brought with him to Europe in 1799, but returned first to France in 1801,
+when he was nominated a general of division and commander of this
+capital, a place he resigned last year to General Murat.
+
+His despotic and cruel behaviour while commander of Paris made him not
+much regretted.  Fouche lost in him, indeed, an able support, but none of
+us here ever experienced from him justice, much less protection.  As with
+all other of our modern public functionaries, without money nothing was
+obtained from him.  It required as much for not doing any harm as if, in
+renouncing his usual vexatious oppressions, he had conferred benefits. He
+was much suspected of being, with Fouche, the patron of a gang of street
+robbers and housebreakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested this
+capital, and who, when finally discovered, were screened from justice and
+suffered to escape punishment.
+
+I will tell you what I personally have seen of him.  Happening one
+evening to enter the rooms at Frascati, where the gambling-tables are
+kept, I observed him, undressed, out of regimentals, in company with at
+young man, who afterwards avowed himself an aide-de-camp of this general,
+and who was playing with rouleaux of louis d’or, supposed to contain
+fifty each, at Rouge et Noir.  As long as he lost, which he did several
+times, he took up the rouleau on the table, and gave another from his
+pocket.  At last he won, when he asked the bankers to look at their loss,
+and count the money in his rouleau before they paid him.  On opening it,
+they found it contained one hundred bank-notes of one thousand livres
+each--folded in a manner to resemble the form and size of louis d’or. The
+bankers refused to pay, and applied to the company whether they were not
+in the right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the
+person who now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual manner.
+Before any answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking the bankers
+whether they knew who he was.  Upon their answering in the negative, he
+said: “I am General Junot, the commander of Paris, and this officer who
+has won the money is my aide-de-camp; and I insist upon your paying him
+this instant, if you do not wish to have your bank confiscated and your
+persons arrested.”  They refused to part with money which they protested
+was not their own, and most of the individuals present joined them in
+their resistance.  “You are altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers,”
+ interrupted Junot; “your business shall soon be done.”
+
+So saying, he seized all the money on the table, and a kind of
+boxing-match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being a
+tall and strong man, got the better of them.  The tumult, however,
+brought in the guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to prison
+sixteen persons he pointed out.  Fortunately, I was not of the number--I
+say fortunately, for I have heard that most of them remained in prison
+six months before this delicate affair was cleared up and settled.  In
+the meantime, Junot not only pocketed all the money he pretended was due
+to his aide-de-camp, but the whole sum contained in the bank, which was
+double that amount.  It was believed by every one present that this was
+an affair arranged between him and his aide-de-camp beforehand to pillage
+the bank.  What a commander, what a general, and what an Ambassador!
+
+Fitte, the secretary of our Embassy to Portugal, was formerly an Abbe,
+and must be well remembered in your country, where he passed some years
+as an emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand.  I am told that,
+by his intrigues, he even succeeded in swindling your Ministers out of a
+sum of money by some plausible schemes he proposed to them.  He is, as
+well as all other apostate priests, a very dangerous man, and an immoral
+and unprincipled wretch.  During the time of Robespierre he is said to
+have caused the murder of his elder brother and younger sister; the
+former he denounced to appropriate to himself his wealth, and the latter
+he accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him.  He
+daily boasts of the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand.
+‘Qualis rex, talis grex’.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In some of the ancient Republics, all citizens who, in time of
+danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as traitors or
+treated as enemies.  When, by our Revolution, civilized society and the
+European Commonwealth were menaced with a total overthrow, had each
+member of it been considered in the same light, and subjected to the same
+laws, some individual States might, perhaps, have been less wealthy, but
+the whole community would have been more happy and more tranquil, which
+would have been much better.  It was a great error in the powerful league
+of 1793 to admit any neutrality at all; every Government that did not
+combat rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally. The
+man who continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are wanted
+to preserve the vessel from sinking, deserves to be thrown overboard, to
+be swallowed up by the waves and to perish the first. Had all other
+nations been united and unanimous, during 1793 and 1794, against the
+monster, Jacobinism, we should not have heard of either Jacobin
+directors, Jacobin consuls, or a Jacobin Emperor.  But then, from a petty
+regard to a temporary profit, they entered into a truce with a
+revolutionary volcano, which, sooner or later, will consume them all; for
+I am afraid it is now too late for all human power, with all human means,
+to preserve any State, any Government, or any people, from suffering by
+the threatening conflagration.  Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and
+Tuscany have already gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality.
+Let but Bonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years
+longer, and you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and
+neutral Denmark visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and
+destruction, and the independence of the nations in the North will be
+buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the South of
+Europe.
+
+These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents
+pronounce, and their dupes repeat: “Oh!  the wise Government of Denmark!
+Oh, what a wise statesman the Danish Minister, Count von Bernstorff!” I
+do not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a great politician;
+but I assert, also, that his was a greatness more calculated for regular
+times than for periods of unusual political convulsion.  Like your Pitt,
+the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to
+judge soundly and to act rightly, according to the present situation of
+affairs.  He adhered too much to the old routine, and did not perceive
+the immense difference between the Government of a revolutionary ruler
+and the Government of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV.  I am certain, had he
+still been alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have
+repaired them.
+
+His son, the present Danish Minister, follows his father’s plans, and
+adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while the
+alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more affected
+the real and relative power and weakness of States than all the
+revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars, and
+pacifications of the two preceding centuries.  He has even gone farther,
+in some parts of his administration, than his father ever intended.
+Without remembering the political TRUTH, that a weak State which courts
+the alliance of a powerful neighbour always becomes a vassal, while
+desiring to become an ally, he has attempted to exchange the connections
+of Denmark and Russia for new ones with Prussia; and forgotten the
+obligations of the Cabinet of Copenhagen to the Cabinet of St.
+Petersburg, and the interested policy of the House of Brandenburgh. That,
+on the contrary, Russia has always been a generous ally of Denmark, the
+flourishing state of the Danish dominions since the beginning of the last
+century evinces.  Its distance and geographical position prevent all
+encroachments from being feared or attempted; while at the same time it
+affords protection equally against the rivalry of Sweden and ambition of
+Prussia.
+
+The Prince Royal of Denmark is patriotic as well as enlightened, and
+would rule with more true policy and lustre were he to follow seldomer
+the advice of his counsellors, and oftener the dictates of his own mind.
+Count von Schimmelmann, Count von Reventlow, and Count von Bernstorff,
+are all good and moral characters; but I fear that their united capacity
+taken together will not fill up the vacancy left in the Danish Cabinet by
+the death of its late Prime Minister.  I have been personally acquainted
+with them all three, but I draw my conclusions from the acts of their
+administration, not from my own knowledge.  Had the late Count von
+Bernstorff held the ministerial helm in 1803, a paragraph in the Moniteur
+would never have disbanded a Danish army in Holstein; nor would, in 1805,
+intriguers have been endured who preached neutrality, after witnessing
+repeated violation of the law of nations, not on the remote banks of the
+Rhine, but on the Danish frontiers, on the Danish territory, on the banks
+of the Elbe.
+
+It certainly was no compliment to His Danish Majesty when our Government
+sent Grouvelle as a representative to Copenhagen, a man who owed his
+education and information to the Conde branch of the Bourbons, and who
+afterwards audaciously and sacrilegiously read the sentence of death on
+the chief of that family, on his good and legitimate King, Louis XVI. It
+can neither be called dignity nor prudence in the Cabinet of Denmark to
+suffer this regicide to serve as a point of rally to sedition and
+innovation; to be the official propagator of revolutionary doctrines, and
+an official protector of all proselytes and sectaries of this anti-social
+faith.
+
+Before the Revolution a secretary to the Prince of Conde, Grouvelle was
+trusted and rewarded by His Serene Highness, and in return betrayed his
+confidence, and repaid benefactions and generosity with calumny and
+persecution, when his patron was obliged to seek safety in emigration
+against the assassins of successful rebellion.  When the national seals
+were put on the estates of the Prince, he appropriated to himself not
+only the whole of His Highness’s library, but a part of his plate.  Even
+the wardrobe and the cellar were laid under contributions by this
+domestic marauder.
+
+With natural genius and acquired experience, Grouvelle unites impudence
+and immorality; and those on whom he fixes for his prey are, therefore,
+easily duped, and irremediably undone.  He has furnished disciples to all
+factions, and to all sects, assassins to the revolutionary tribunals, as
+well as victims for the revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to
+Robespierre, Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies
+to Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a
+tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc d’
+Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly
+condemned and privately executed in France.
+
+Our present Minister at the Court of Copenhagen, D’ Aguesseau, has no
+virtues to boast of, but also no crimes to blush for.  With inferior
+capacity, he is only considered by Talleyrand as an inferior intriguer,
+employed in a country ruled by an inferior policy, neither feared nor
+esteemed by our Government.  His secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our
+real and confidential firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep
+burning those materials of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our
+incendiaries have lighted and illuminated in Holstein, Denmark, Sweden,
+and Norway.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The insatiable avarice of all the members of the Bonaparte
+family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of our
+philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude from the
+mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the passion of covetousness; that he pillages
+only to get money to pay his military plunderers, and hoards treasures
+only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the associates and instruments
+of his authority.
+
+Whether their assertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself to
+decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal palaces,
+from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal domains; from the
+immense and valuable quantity of diamonds, jewels, pictures, statues,
+libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and self-denial are certainly
+not among Napoleon’s virtues.
+
+In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and extensive
+demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by national.
+property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial Treasury, or
+confiscated by Imperial decrees.  In Italy, he has, by an official act,
+declared to be the property of his crown, first, the royal palace at
+Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls Villa Bonaparte; second, the
+palace of Monza and its dependencies; third, the palace of Mantua, the
+palace of The, and the ci-devant ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace
+situated in the vicinity of Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity
+of Bologna; fifth, the ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza;
+sixth, the beautiful forest of Tesin.  Ten millions were, besides,
+ordered to be drawn out of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands
+for the formation of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.
+
+To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former Kings
+of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of Flanders, of the
+German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons, etc., who, before the
+last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of the Rhine.  I have seen a
+list, according to which the number of palaces and chateaux appertaining
+to Napoleon as Emperor and King, are stated to be seventy-nine; so that
+he may change his habitations six times in the month, without occupying
+during the same year the same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at
+home.
+
+In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of the
+Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte.  Madame
+Napoleon has purchased, since her husband’s consulate, in her own name,
+or in the name of her children, nine estates with their chateaux, four
+national forests, and six hotels at Paris.  Joseph Bonaparte possesses
+four estates and chateaux in France, three hotels at Paris and at
+Brussels, three chateaux and estates in Italy, and one hotel at Milan,
+and another at Turin.  Lucien Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel
+at Paris, another at Bonne, and a third at Chambery.  He has one estate
+in Burgundy, two in Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital.
+At Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in
+the Papal States he has obtained, in exchange for property in France,
+three chateaux with their dependencies.  Louis Bonaparte has three hotels
+at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons.  He has two
+estates in Flanders, three in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte, and another
+in Alsace.  He has also a chateau four leagues from this city.  At Genoa
+he has a beautiful hotel, and upon the Genoese territory a large estate.
+He has bought three plantations at Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe.  To
+Jerome Bonaparte has hitherto been presented only an estate in Brabant,
+and a hotel in this capital.  Some of the former domains of the House of
+Orange, in the Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of
+our Government, and are said to be intended for him.
+
+But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and his
+brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left
+unprovided for.  Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at Paris,
+one at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome.  Her estates in France are
+four, and in Italy two.  Madame Bacciochi, Princess of Piombino and
+Lucca, possesses two hotels in this capital, and one palace at Piombino
+and another at Lucca.  Of her estates in France, she has only retained
+two, but she has three in the Kingdom of Italy, and four in her husband’s
+and her own dominions.  The Princess Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at
+Rome and four chateaux in the papal territory.  At Milan she has, as well
+as at Turin and at Paris, hotels given her by her Imperial brother,
+together with two estates in France, one in Piedmont, and two in
+Lombardy.  The Princesse Murat is mistress of two hotels here, one at
+Brussels, one at Tours, and one at Bordeaux, together with three estates
+on this, and five on the other side of the Alps.  The Princesse Borghese
+has purchased three plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with
+a part of the treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc.  With her
+present husband she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates on
+the Roman territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her with one
+hotel at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at Genoa, together
+with three estates in France and five in Italy.  For his mother, and for
+each of his sisters, Napoleon has also purchased estates, or lands to
+form estates, in their native island of Corsica.
+
+The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have also
+experienced his bounty.  Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris, Milan,
+Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and Italy. Seventeen,
+either first, second, or third cousins, by his father’s or mother’s side,
+have all obtained estates either in the French Empire, or in the Kingdom
+of Italy, as well as all brothers, sisters, or cousins of his own wife,
+and the wives of his brothers, or of the husbands of his sisters.  Their
+exact number cannot well be known, but a gentleman who has long been
+collecting materials for some future history of the House of Bonaparte,
+and of the French Empire, has already shown me sixty-six names of
+individuals of that description, and of both sexes, who all, thanks to
+the Imperial liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become people of
+property.
+
+When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and
+distributed within the short period of five years, it is not hazardous to
+say that, in the annals of Europe, another such revolution in property,
+as well as in power, is not to be found.
+
+The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together does
+not amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have acquired and
+possess.
+
+Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at this
+revolution of property.  Richer than any other nation, you have more to
+apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our frequent enemies
+and as our national rivals; as a barrier against our plans of universal
+dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary resources.  May we never live
+to see the day when the mandates of Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured
+at London, as at Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, and Rome.  The misery of ages
+to come will then be certain, and posterity will regard as comparative
+happiness, the sufferings of their forefathers.  It is not probable that
+those who have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest
+contented until you are involved in the same ruin.  Union among
+yourselves only can preserve you from perishing in the universal wreck;
+by this you will at least gain time, and may hope to profit by probable
+changes and unexpected accidents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil
+list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in
+Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres--which was divided
+between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte,
+Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese. By
+this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched
+inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine.  This Daru is too good a
+calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master
+of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have
+enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the
+Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose.  On his return
+here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an
+annuity of one hundred thousand livres--not to play; but as this sum
+would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this
+Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain
+of being transported to Cayenne.  He obeyed, but the bankers soon
+experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other
+side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations hither, Fouche
+recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of
+Bonaparte’s civil list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly,
+injuring our gambling-banks.  He has kept his promise with regard to
+France, but made, last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany,
+which, he avows, produced him nine millions of livres.  He always points,
+but never keeps a bank.  He begins to be so well known in many parts of
+the Continent, that the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and
+remain so until his departure.  This was the case at Florence last April.
+He travels always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four
+servants.  He is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
+
+He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
+calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
+than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
+been felt and lamented for these ten years past.  Augereau, Bernadotte,
+Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
+terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.
+
+In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
+Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary
+brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a
+common soldier before the Revolution.  But he has this merit above
+Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and
+finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign
+countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting,
+he was also again taken and again flogged.  Italy has, indeed, since he
+has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than
+Germany.  Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he
+butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with
+blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion
+had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers of an assassin, or
+decorate the bosom of a harlot.  The outrages he committed during 1796
+and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even
+were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable
+to be believed.  He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity
+into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
+themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into dens
+of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided
+himself.  In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the
+sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or
+imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he
+paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night at Pavia, with a
+draft for fifty louis d’or on the municipality of that town, who dared
+not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to
+Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.
+
+The general and grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
+is another of our military heroes of the same stamp.  A barber, and son
+of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
+to be hanged.  The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
+but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
+doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life.  The Revolution broke his
+fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
+he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
+guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family.  He
+was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
+and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
+and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand
+livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the
+Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a
+commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders.  In landed property, in
+jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from
+prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to
+eight millions of livres.  For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and
+galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth which,
+from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you our
+generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the
+catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our
+soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and
+surpassing often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those
+authorized by our Government itself, or by its civil and military
+representatives.  It comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded
+and enforced, whether as loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in
+money as an equivalent for both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and
+carriages; corvees of all kinds; the emptying of magazines for the
+service of our armies; in short, whatever was required for the
+maintenance, a portion of the pay, and divers wants of those armies, from
+the time they had posted themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy,
+Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine.  Add to this the pillage of
+public or private warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging
+to individuals, to the State, to societies, to towns, to hospitals, and
+even to orphan-houses.
+
+But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of
+subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for
+accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite
+consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of our
+civil or military commanders.  Most of those articles were delivered in
+kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready
+money, and divided among the plunderers.
+
+In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
+Imperial city of Wetzlar.  He there put in requisition all private stores
+of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon
+another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.
+Leather and linen underwent the same operation.  Volumes might be filled
+with similar examples, all of public notoriety.
+
+This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
+Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790,
+and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in
+1765.  Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to
+escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some
+Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the men into an
+insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate.  From that
+period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs,
+and was, therefore, by his associates, promoted by one step to an
+adjutant-general.  Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement, and
+greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and
+enrich himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a
+short time made a general of division, and acquired a property of several
+millions.  This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously
+served only under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.
+
+He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be
+attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced
+into his interest.  In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic
+attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed
+commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Ambassador from
+the First Consul to the Helvetic Government.  He there conducted himself
+so much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your
+country, he was made commander of the camp near Montreuil; and last year
+his wife was received as a Maid of Honour to the Empress of the French.
+
+This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept by a
+man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with Ney.  With
+him she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the municipality of
+Coblentz made her his wife.  Her conduct since has corresponded with that
+of her husband.  When he publicly lived with mistresses, she did not live
+privately with her gallants, but the instant the Emperor of the French
+told him to save appearances, if he desired a place for his wife at the
+Imperial Court, he showed himself the most attentive and faithful of
+husbands, and she the most tender and dutiful of wives.  Her manners are
+not polished, but they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her
+person, she is lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her
+society agreeable.  The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of
+her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires.  She has a fault common
+with most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity
+presents itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from being
+fortunate.  Report says that more than once she has been reduced to
+acquit her gambling debts by personal favours.
+
+Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now serving
+under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat.  According to some,
+he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin, robber, and assassin,
+long before he obtained his first commission as an officer, which was
+given him by the recommendation of Marat, whom he in return afterwards
+wished to immortalize, by the exchange of one letter in his own name, and
+by calling himself Marat instead of Murat.  Others, however, declare that
+his father was an honest cobbler, very superstitious, residing at
+Bastide, near Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and
+that he was in his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange
+the frock of the monk for the regimentals of a soldier.  In what manner,
+or by what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796
+he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he
+went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married
+him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of
+Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.
+
+The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by
+his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of
+livres.  The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him
+forty--two millions--and it is whispered that the estates bought in the
+name of his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less. A
+brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator; and an
+uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate.  A cousin of his,
+who was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an
+apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor’s
+chamberlains.  He has been very generous to all his relations, and would
+not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial
+Court, had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank,
+lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy.  The
+millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to
+gain.  His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of
+livres.
+
+It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:
+
+“It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of
+liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution--its promoters,
+its accomplices, and its instruments.  Wherever they penetrate, plunder
+follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but
+the means.  The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
+nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence.”
+
+General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor’s secret deeds
+of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice.  It was under his
+private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
+and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way
+to his place of exile.  After the seizure and trial of the Duc d’
+Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of
+his Italian guard would fire at this Prince.  “If they hesitate,” said
+Murat, who commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, “my pistols
+are loaded, and I will blow out his brains.”
+
+His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family.  Murat was, at
+first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law, Lucien,
+whom he even fought; but Napoleon having assured him, upon his word of
+honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model of
+complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as
+numerous as Madame Murat’s favourites.  He has a young aide-de-camp of
+the name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the
+then Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to
+have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was
+desolating Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte’s departure for Germany, the vigilance of the
+police has much increased: our patrols are doubled during the night, and
+our spies more numerous and more insolent during the day.  Many suspected
+persons have also been exiled to some distance from this capital, while
+others, for a measure of safety, have been shut up in the Temple, or in
+the Castle of Vincennes.  These ‘lettres de cachet’, or mandates of
+arrest, are expedited during the Emperor’s absence exclusively by his
+brother Louis, after a report, or upon a request, of the Minister of
+Police, Fouche.
+
+I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a drunkard
+and a libertine.  When a young and unprincipled man of such propensities
+enjoys an unrestrained authority, it cannot be surprising to hear that he
+has abused it.  He had not been his brother’s military viceroy for
+twenty-four hours before one set of our Parisians were amused, while
+others were shocked and scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised
+by His Imperial Highness.
+
+Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the boxes,
+he despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the ground, and to
+find out who she was.  All gentlemen attached to his person or household
+are also his pimps, and are no novices in forming or executing plans of
+seduction.  Caulincourt (the officer he employed in this affair) returned
+soon, but had succeeded only in one part of the business.  He had not
+been able to speak to the lady, but was informed that she had only been
+married a fortnight to a manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her
+side, jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress.  He gave at the
+same time as his opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police
+commissary to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some
+pretext or other, while some of the friends of Prince Louis took
+advantage of the confusion to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel.
+An order was directly signed by Louis, according to which the police
+commissary, Chazot, was to arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of Lyons, and
+put him into a post-chaise, under the care of two gendarmes, who were to
+see him safe to Lyons, where he was to sign a promise of not returning to
+Paris without the permission of Government, being suspected of
+stockjobbing (agiotage).  Everything succeeded according to the proposal
+of Caulincourt, and Louis found Madame Leboure crying in his saloon.  It
+is said that she promised to surrender her virtue upon condition of only
+once more seeing her husband, to be certain that he was not murdered, but
+that Louis refused, and obtained by brutal force, and the assistance of
+his infamous associates, that conquest over her honour which had not been
+yielded to his entreaties or threats.  His enjoyment, however, was but of
+short continuance; he had no sooner fallen asleep than his poor injured
+victim left the bed, and, flying into his anteroom, stabbed herself with
+his sword.  On the next morning she was found a corpse, weltering in her
+blood.  In the hope of burying this infamy in secrecy, her corpse was, on
+the next evening, when it was dark, put into a sack, and thrown into the
+river, where, being afterwards discovered, the police agents gave out
+that she had fallen the victim of assassins.  But when Madame Leboure was
+thus seized at the opera, besides her husband, her parents and a brother
+were in her company, and the latter did not lose sight of the carriage in
+which his sister was placed till it had entered the hotel of Louis
+Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with his father, in vain claimed
+her.  As soon as the husband was informed of the untimely end of his
+wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot himself immediately
+afterwards through the head, but his own head was not the place where he
+should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it the cause of his
+wretchedness would only have been an act of retaliation, in a country
+where power forces the law to lie dormant, and where justice is invoked
+in vain when the criminal is powerful.
+
+I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our
+fashionable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe the
+word ‘amuse’ is not improperly employed in this instance.  At a dozen
+parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure has always
+been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of blame, except
+at Madame Fouche’s, where Madame Leboure was very much blamed indeed for
+having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.
+
+Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end
+tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier.
+A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal
+tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six
+hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work
+in the galleys for twenty years.  His daughter, a young girl under
+fifteen, who lived with her grandmother (having lost her mother), went,
+accompanied by the old lady, and presented a petition to Louis, in favour
+of her father.  Her youth and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the
+unprincipled libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the
+colour of clemency to guilt.  He ordered her to call on his chamberlain,
+Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer.  There, either
+seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by
+delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of
+release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that
+he added her to the number of his regular mistresses.
+
+As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter in
+her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the Imperial
+Treasury, for twelve thousand livres--destined to pay the upholsterer who
+had furnished her apartment.  This gave him, no doubt, the idea of making
+the Prince pay a higher value for his child, and he forged another order
+for sixty thousand livres--so closely resembling it that it was without
+suspicion acquitted by the Imperial Treasurer.  Possessing this money, he
+fabricated a pass, in the name of Louis, as a courier carrying despatches
+to the Emperor in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived safe on the
+other side of the Rhine.  His forgeries were only discovered after he had
+written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his daughter of all
+knowledge of what he had done.  In the first moment of anger, her
+Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since forgiven her,
+and taken her back to his favour.  This trick of Deroux has pleased
+Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of his dangerous
+talent and vicious character.  He had once before released himself with a
+forged order from the Minister of Police, whose handwriting he had only
+seen for a minute upon his own mandate of imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though loudly complained of by the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+Cabinet of St. Petersburg has conducted itself in these critical times
+with prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy. In
+its connections with our Government it has never lost sight of its own
+dignity, and, therefore, never endured without resentment those
+impertinent innovations in the etiquette of our Court, and in the manner
+and language of our Emperor to the representatives of legitimate
+Sovereigns.  Had similar becoming sentiments directed the councils of all
+other Princes and the behaviour of their Ambassadors here, spirited
+remonstrances might have moderated the pretensions or passions of upstart
+vanity, while a forbearance and silence, equally impolitic and shameful,
+have augmented insolence by flattering the pride of an insupportable and
+outrageous ambition.
+
+The Emperor of Russia would not have been so well represented here, had
+he not been so wisely served and advised in his council chamber at St.
+Petersburg.  Ignorance and folly commonly select fools for their agents,
+while genius and capacity employ men of their own mould, and of their own
+cast.  It is a remarkable truth that, notwithstanding the frequent
+revolutions in Russia, since the death of Peter the First the ministerial
+helm has always been in able hands; the progressive and uninterrupted
+increase of the real and relative power of the Russian Empire evinces the
+reality of this assertion.
+
+The Russian Chancellor, Count Alexander Woronzoff, may be justly called
+the chief of political veterans, whether his talents or long services are
+considered.  Catherine II., though a voluptuous Princess, was a great
+Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and it was her unbiased choice
+that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet young, in her councils.  Though
+the intrigues of favourites have sometimes removed him, he always retired
+with the esteem of his Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or
+cringing to return.  He is admired by all who have the honour of
+approaching him, as much for his obliging condescension as for his great
+information.  No petty views, no petty caprices, no petty vengeances find
+room in his generous bosom.  He is known to have conferred benefactions,
+not only on his enemies, but on those who, at the very time, were
+meditating his destruction.  His opinion is that a patriotic Minister
+should regard no others as his enemies but those conspiring against their
+country, and acknowledge no friends or favourites incapable of well
+serving the State.  Prince de Z-------- waited on him one day, and, after
+hesitating some time, began to compliment him on his liberal sentiments,
+and concluded by asking the place of a governor for his cousin, with whom
+he had reason to suppose the Count much offended.  “I am happy,” said His
+Excellency, “to oblige you, and to do my duty at the same time.  Here is
+a libel he wrote against me, and presented to the Empress, who graciously
+has communicated it to me, in answer to my recommendation of him
+yesterday to the place you ask for him to-day.  Read what I have written
+on the libel, and you will be convinced that it will not be my fault if
+he is not to-day a governor.”  In two hours afterwards the nomination was
+announced to Prince de Z--------, who was himself at the head of a cabal
+against the Minister.  In any country such an act would have been
+laudable, but where despotism rules with unopposed sway, it is both
+honourable and praiseworthy.
+
+Prince Adam Czartorinsky, the assistant of Count Woronzoff, and Minister
+of the foreign department, unites, with the vigour of youth, the
+experience of age.  He has travelled in most countries of Europe, not
+solely to figure at Courts, to dance at balls, to look at pictures, or to
+collect curiosities, but to study the character of the people, the laws
+by which they are governed, and their moral or social influence with
+regard to their comforts or misery.  He therefore brought back with him a
+stock of knowledge not to be acquired from books, but only found in the
+world by frequenting different and opposite societies with observation,
+penetration, and genius.  With manners as polished as his mind is well
+informed, he not only, possesses the favour, but the friendship of his
+Prince, and, what is still more rare, is worthy of both.  All Sovereigns
+have favourites, few ever had any friends; because it is more easy to
+flatter vanity, than to display a liberal disinterestedness; to bow
+meanly than to instruct or to guide with delicacy and dignity; to abuse
+the confidence of the Prince than to use it to his honour, and to the
+advantage of his Government.
+
+That such a Monarch as an Alexander, and such Ministers as Count
+Woronzoff and Prince Czartorinsky, should appoint a Count Markof to a
+high and important post, was not unexpected by any one not ignorant of
+his merit.
+
+Count Markof was, early in the reign of Catherine II., employed in the
+office of the foreign department at St. Petersburg, and was, whilst
+young, entrusted with several important negotiations at the Courts of
+Berlin and Vienna., when Prussia had proposed the first partition of
+Poland.  He afterward went on his travels, from which he was recalled to
+fill the place of an Ambassador to the late King of Sweden, Gustavus III.
+He was succeeded, in 1784, at Stockholm, by Count Muschin Puschin, after
+being appointed a Secretary of State in his own country, a post he
+occupied with distinction, until the death of Catherine II., when Paul
+the First revenged upon him, as well as on most others of the faithful
+servants of this Princess, his discontent with his mother.  He was then
+exiled to his estates, where he retired with the esteem of all those who
+had known him.  In 1801, immediately after his accession to the throne,
+Alexander invited Count Markof to his Court and Council, and the trusty
+but difficult task of representing a legitimate Sovereign at the Court of
+our upstart usurper was conferred on him.  I imagine that I see the great
+surprise of this nobleman, when, for the first time, he entered the
+audience-chamber of our little great man, and saw him fretting, staring,
+swearing, abusing to right and to left, for one smile conferring twenty
+frowns, and for one civil word making use of fifty hard expressions,
+marching in the diplomatic audience as at the head of his troops, and
+commanding foreign Ambassadors as his French soldiers.  I have heard that
+the report of Count Markof to his Court, describing this new and rare
+show, is a chef-d’oeuvre of wit, equally amusing and instructive.  He is
+said to have requested of his Cabinet new and particular orders how to
+act--whether as the representative of an independent Sovereign, or, as
+most of the other members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, like
+a valet of the First Consul; and that, in the latter case, he implored as
+a favour, an immediate recall; preferring, had he no other choice left,
+sooner to work in the mines at Siberia than to wear, in France the
+disgraceful fetters of a Bonaparte.  His subsequent dignified conduct
+proves the answer of his Court.
+
+Talleyrand’s craft and dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of
+Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by
+the First Consul.  All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery
+was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador.  Sometimes
+he was reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time
+protection was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that he
+was a Sardinian subject.  Russian travellers were insulted, and detained
+on the most frivolous pretences.  Two Russian noblemen were even arrested
+on our side of the Rhine, because Talleyrand had forgotten to sign his
+name to their passes, which were otherwise in order.  The fact was that
+our Minister suspected them of carrying some papers which he wanted to
+see, and, therefore, wrote his name with an ink of such a composition
+that, after a certain number of days, everything written with it
+disappeared.  Their effects and papers were strictly searched by an agent
+preceding them from this capital, but nothing was found, our Minister
+being misinformed by his spies.
+
+When Count Markof left Sweden, he carried with him an actress of the
+French theatre at Stockholm, Madame Hus, an Alsatian by birth, but who
+had quitted her country twelve years before the Revolution, and could,
+therefore, never be included among emigrants.  She had continued as a
+mistress with this nobleman, is the mother of several children by him,
+and an agreeable companion to him, who has never been married.  As I have
+often said, Talleyrand is much obliged to any foreign diplomatic agent
+who allows him to be the indirect provider or procurer of his mistresses.
+After in vain tempting Count Markof with new objects, he introduced to
+the acquaintance of Madame Hus some of his female emissaries.  Their
+manoeuvres, their insinuations, and even their presents were all thrown
+away.  The lady remained the faithful friend, and therefore refused with
+indignation to degrade herself into a spy on her lover.  Our Minister
+then first discovered that, not only was Madame Hus an emigrant, but had
+been a great benefactress and constant companion of emigrants at St.
+Petersburg, and, of course, deserved to be watched, if not punished.
+Count Markof is reported to have said to Talleyrand on this grave
+subject, in the presence of two other foreign Ambassadors:
+
+“Apropos!  what shall I do to prevent my poor Madame Hus from being shot
+as an emigrant, and my poor children from becoming prematurely orphans?”
+
+“Monsieur,” said our diplomatic oracle, “she should have petitioned the
+First Consul for a permission to return, to France before she entered it;
+but out of regard for you, if she is prudent, she will not, I daresay, be
+troubled by our Government.”
+
+“I should be sorry if she was not,” replied the Count, with a significant
+look; and here this grand affair ended, to the great entertainment of
+those foreign agents who dared to smile or to laugh.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Legion of Honour, though only proclaimed upon Bonaparte’s
+assumption of the Imperial rank, dates from the first year of his
+consulate.  To prepare the public mind for a progressive elevation of
+himself, and for consequential distinctions among all classes of his
+subjects, he distributed among the military, arms of honour, to which
+were attached precedence and privileges granted by him, and, therefore,
+liable to cease with his power or life.  The number of these arms
+increased in proportion to the approach of the period fixed for the
+change of his title and the erection of his throne.  When he judged them
+numerous enough to support his changes, he made all these wearers of arms
+of honour knights.  Never before were so many chevaliers created en
+masse; they amounted to no less than twenty-two thousand four hundred,
+distributed in the different corps of different armies, but principally
+in the army of England.  To these were afterwards joined five thousand
+nine hundred civil functionaries, men of letters, artists, etc.  To
+remove, however, all ideas of equality, even among the members of the
+Legion of Honour, they were divided into four classes--grand officers,
+commanders, officers, and simple legionaries.
+
+Every one who has observed Bonaparte’s incessant endeavours to intrude
+himself among the Sovereigns of Europe, was convinced that he would
+cajole, or force, as many of them as he could into his revolutionary
+knighthood; but I heard men, who are not ignorant of the selfishness and
+corruption of our times, deny the possibility of any independent Prince
+suffering his name to be registered among criminals of every description,
+from the thief who picked the pockets of his fellow citizens in the
+street, down to the regicide who sat in judgment and condemned his King;
+from the plunderers who have laid waste provinces, republics, and
+kingdoms, down to the assassins who shot, drowned, or guillotined their
+countrymen en masse.  For my part, I never had but one opinion, and,
+unfortunately, it has turned out a just one.  I always was convinced that
+those Princes who received other presents from Bonaparte could have no
+plausible excuse to decline his ribands, crosses, and stars.  But who
+could have presumed to think that, in return for these blood-stained
+baubles, they would have sacrificed those honourable and dignified
+ornaments which, for ages past, have been the exclusive distinction of
+what birth had exalted, virtue made eminent, talents conspicuous, honour
+illustrious, or valour meritorious?  Who would have dared to say that the
+Prussian Eagle and the Spanish Golden Fleece should thus be prostituted,
+thus polluted?  I do not mean by this remark to throw any blame on the
+conferring those and other orders on Napoleon Bonaparte, or even on his
+brothers; I know it is usual, between legitimate Sovereigns in alliance,
+sometimes to exchange their knighthoods; but to debase royal orders so
+much as to present them to a Cambaceres, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a
+Bernadotte, a Fesch, and other vile and criminal wretches, I do not deny
+to have excited my astonishment as well as my indignation.  What
+honest--I do not say what noble--subjects of Prussia, or of Spain, will
+hereafter think themselves rewarded for their loyalty, industry,
+patriotism, or zeal, when they remember that their Sovereigns have
+nothing to give but what the rebel has obtained, the robber worn, the
+murderer vilified, and the regicide debased?
+
+The number of grand officers of the Legion of Honour does not yet amount
+to more than eighty, according to a list circulated at Milan last spring,
+of which I have seen a copy.  Of these grand officers, three had been
+shoemakers, two tailors, four bakers, four barbers, six friars, eight
+abbes, six officers, three pedlers, three chandlers, seven drummers,
+sixteen soldiers, and eight regicides; four were lawful Kings, and the
+six others, Electors or Princes of the most ancient houses in Europe. I
+have looked over our, own official list, and, as far as I know, the
+calculation is exact, both with regard to the number and to the quality.
+
+This new institution of knighthood produced a singular effect on my vain
+and giddy, countrymen, who, for twelve years before, had scarcely seen a
+star or a riband, except those of foreign Ambassadors, who were
+frequently insulted when wearing them.  It became now the fashion to be a
+knight, and those who really were not so, put pinks, or rather blooms, or
+flowers of a darker red, in their buttonholes, so as to resemble, and to
+be taken at a distance for, the red ribands of the members of the Legion
+of Honour.
+
+A man of the name of Villeaume, an engraver by profession, took advantage
+of this knightly fashion and mania, and sold for four louis d’or, not
+only the stars, but pretended letters of knighthood, said to be procured
+by his connection with persons of the household of the Emperor.  In a
+month’s time, according to a register kept by him, he had made twelve
+hundred and fifty knights.  When his fraud was discovered, he was already
+out of the way, safe with his money; and, notwithstanding the researches
+of the police, has not since been taken.
+
+A person calling himself Baron von Rinken, a subject and an agent of one
+of the many Princes of Hohenlohe, according to his own assertion, arrived
+here with real letters and patents of knighthood, which he offered for
+sale for three hundred livres.  The stars of this Order were as large as
+the star of the grand officers of the Legion of Honour, and nearly
+resembled it; but the ribands were of a different colour.  He had already
+disposed of a dozen of these stars, when he was taken up by the police
+and shut up in the Temple, where he still remains.  Four other agents of
+inferior petty German Princes have also been arrested for offering the
+Orders of their Sovereigns for sale.
+
+A Captain Rouvais, who received six wounds in his campaign under Pichegru
+in 1794, wore the star of the Legion of Honour without being nominated a
+knight.  He has been tried by a military commission, deprived of his
+pension, and condemned to four years’ imprisonment in irons.  He proved
+that he had presented fourteen petitions to Bonaparte for obtaining this
+mark of distinction, but in vain; while hundreds of others, who had
+hardly seen an enemy, or, at the most, made but one campaign, or been
+once wounded, had succeeded in their demands.  As soon as sentence had
+been pronounced against him, he took a small pistol from his pocket, and
+shot himself through the head, saying, “Some one else will soon do the
+same for Bonaparte.”
+
+A cobbler, of the name of Matthieu, either in a fit of madness or from
+hatred to the new order of things, decorated himself with the large
+riband of the Legion of Honour, and had an old star fastened on his coat.
+Thus accoutred, he went into the Palais Royal, in the middle of the day,
+got upon a chair, and began to speak to his audience of the absurdity of
+true republicans not being on a level, even under an Emperor, and putting
+on, like him, all his ridiculous ornaments.  “We are here,” said he,
+“either all grand officers, or there exist no grand officers at all; we
+have all fought and paid for liberty, and for the Revolution, as much as
+Bonaparte, and have, therefore, the same right and claim with him.”  Here
+a police agent and some gendarmes interrupted his eloquence by taking him
+into custody.  When Fouche asked him what he meant by such rebellious
+behaviour, he replied that it was only a trial to see whether destiny had
+intended him to become an Emperor or to remain a cobbler.  On the next
+day he was shot as a conspirator.  I saw the unfortunate man in the
+Palais Royal; his eyes looked wild, and his words were often incoherent.
+He was certainly a subject more deserving a place in a madhouse than in a
+tomb.
+
+Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing too
+much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing it in
+preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour.  He was given to understand
+that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial etiquette did not
+permit any subjects to display their knighthood of the Prussian Order. In
+Madame Bonaparte’s last drawing-room, before His Imperial Majesty set out
+for the Rhine, he was ornamented with the Spanish, Neapolitan, Prussian,
+and Portuguese orders, together with those of the French Legion of Honour
+and of the Italian Iron Crown.  I have seen the Emperor Paul, who was
+also an amateur of ribands and stars, but never with so many at once.  I
+have just heard that the Grand Master of Malta has presented Napoleon
+with the Grand Cross of the Maltese Order.  This is certainly a negative
+compliment to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then
+sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, “that the Grand Master, Commanders,
+Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more.”
+
+I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies,
+that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of
+female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our
+Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc.,
+are to be members.  The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are
+to be hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses,
+Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into
+this revolutionary sisterhood.  Had the Continent remained tranquil, it
+would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum.  I
+should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and
+brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only
+say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in
+petto.  Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has
+been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
+it is truly superb.  The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at
+six hundred thousand livres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte’s departure for Germany, fifteen individuals
+have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the--Western
+Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple.  Their crime is not
+exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that they
+were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were
+entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis
+XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia,
+Sweden, and England to support his claims.
+
+These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit.  Had the
+prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they
+would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed
+without a trial.  I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our
+Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments
+during our armies’ occupation elsewhere.  We have, nevertheless, two
+movable columns of six thousand men each in the country, or in its
+vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but a cruelty, to engage or
+allure the unfortunate people of these wretched countries into any plots,
+which, situated as affairs now are, would be productive of great and
+certain evil to them, without even the probability of any benefit to the
+cause of royalty and of the Bourbons.  I do not mean to say that there
+are not those who rebel against Bonaparte’s tyranny, or that the Bourbons
+have no friends; on the contrary, the latter are not few, and the former
+very numerous.  But a kind of apathy, the effect of unavailing resistance
+to usurpation and oppression, has seized on most minds, and annihilated
+what little remained of our never very great public spirit.  We are tired
+of everything, even of our existence, and care no more whether we are
+governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a
+Barras or by Louis XVIII.  Except, perhaps, among the military, or among
+some ambitious schemers, remnants of former factions, I do not believe a
+Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the
+Emperor, and formerly popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in
+all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized
+in their present formidable manner.  Should anything happen to our
+present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and
+raise our characters from their present torpid state.  But until such an
+event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing
+our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor.
+I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when
+one million desperados of civil and military banditti are suffered to
+govern, tyrannize, and pillage, at their ease and undisturbed, thirty
+millions of people, to whom their past crimes are known, and who have
+every reason to apprehend their future wickedness.
+
+This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does not
+deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
+poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
+people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
+contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
+submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
+appearance.  I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who
+formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of
+twelve or eighteen hundred livres--per year, with which they are obliged
+to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere
+labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows
+on the necessitous.  You know that here all trade and all commerce are at
+a stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling
+as their manners are vulgar and brutal.
+
+A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
+revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres--subsist now on fifteen
+hundred livres--per year; and this sum must support six individuals--the
+father and mother, with four children!  It does so, indeed, by an
+arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
+supper three times, in the week.  They endure their distress with
+tolerable cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the
+garrets of a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once
+their groom, but who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve
+years, as a conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and
+Flanders, twelve millions of livres.  He has kindly let my friend
+understand that his youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid
+to his wife, being informed that she has a good education.  All the four
+daughters are good musicians, good drawers, and very able with their
+needles.  By their talents they supported their parents and themselves
+during their emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use
+or advantage.  Those upstarts who want instruction or works of this sort
+apply to the first, most renowned, and fashionable masters or mistresses;
+while others, and those the greatest number, cannot afford even to pay
+the inferior ones and the most cheap.  This family is one of the many
+that regret having returned from their emigration.  But, you may ask, why
+do they not go back again to Germany?  First, it would expose them to
+suspicion, and, perhaps, to ruin, were they to demand passes; and if this
+danger or difficulty were removed, they have no money for such a long
+journey.
+
+But this sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the families
+of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen.  Paper money, a maximum,
+and requisitions, have reduced those that did not share in the crimes and
+pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility.  And,
+contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in
+commercial speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a
+general stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital,
+protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of
+1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines
+put together.  The expenses of these new merchants are, however, much
+greater than sixteen years ago, the profit less, and the credit still
+less than the profit.  Hence numerous bankruptcies, frauds, swindling,
+forgeries, and other evils of immorality, extravagance, and misery.  The
+fair and honest dealers suffer most from the intrusion of these infamous
+speculators, who expecting, like other vile men wallowing in wealth under
+their eyes, to make rapid fortunes, and to escape detection as well as
+punishment--commit crimes to soothe disappointment.  Nothing is done but
+for ready money, and even bankers’ bills, or bills accepted by bankers,
+are not taken in payment before the signatures are avowed by the parties
+concerned.  You can easily conceive what confusion, what expenses, and
+what; loss of time these precautions must occasion; but the numerous
+forgeries and fabrications have made them absolutely necessary.
+
+The farmers and landholders are better off, but they also complain of the
+heavy taxes, and low price paid for what they bring to the market, which
+frequently, for want of ready money, remains long unsold.  They take
+nothing but cash in payment; for, notwithstanding the endeavours of our
+Government, the notes of the Bank of France have never been in
+circulation among them.  They have also been subject to losses by the
+fluctuation of paper money, by extortions, requisitions, and by the
+maximum.  In this class of my countrymen remains still some little
+national spirit and some independence of character; but these are far
+from being favourable to Bonaparte, or to the Imperial Government, which
+the yearly increase of taxes, and, above all, the conscription, have
+rendered extremely odious.  You may judge of the great difference in the
+taxation of lands and landed property now and under our Kings, when I
+inform you that a friend of mine, who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the
+Western Departments, twenty-one farms, paid less in contribution for them
+all than he does now for the three farms he has recovered from the wreck
+of his fortune.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In a military empire, ruled by a military despot, it is a
+necessary policy that the education of youth should also be military. In
+all our public schools or prytanees, a boy, from the moment of entering,
+is registered in a company, and regularly drilled, exercised, and
+reviewed, punished for neglect or fault according to martial law, and
+advanced if displaying genius or application.  All our private schools
+that wish for the protection of Government are forced to submit to the
+same military rules, and, therefore, most of our conscripts, so far from
+being recruits, are fit for any service as soon as put into requisition.
+The fatal effects to the independence of Europe to be dreaded from this
+sole innovation, I apprehend, have been too little considered by other
+nations.  A great Power, that can, without obstacle, and with but little
+expense, in four weeks increase its disposable military force from one
+hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty thousand young men,
+accustomed to military duty from their youth, must finally become the
+master of all other or rival Powers, and dispose at leisure of empires,
+kingdoms, principalities, and republics.  NOTHING CAN SAVE THEM BUT THE
+ADOPTION OF SIMILAR MEASURES FOR THEIR PRESERVATION AS HAVE BEEN ADOPTED
+FOR THEIR SUBJUGATION.
+
+When l’Etat Militaire for the year 13 (a work containing the official
+statement of our military forces) was presented to Bonaparte by Berthier,
+the latter said: “Sire, I lay before Your Majesty the book of the destiny
+of the world, which your hands direct as the sovereign guide of the
+armies of your empire.”  This compliment is a truth, and therefore no
+flattery.  It might as justly have been addressed to a Moreau, a
+Macdonald, a Le Courbe, or to any other general, as to Bonaparte, because
+a superior number of well disciplined troops, let them be well or even
+indifferently commanded, will defeat those inferior in number. Three to
+one would even overpower an army of giants.  Add to it the unity of
+plans, of dispositions, and of execution, which Bonaparte enjoys
+exclusively over such a great number of troops, while ten, or perhaps
+fifty, will direct or contradict every movement of his opponents.  I
+tremble when I meditate on Berthier’s assertion; may I never live to see
+it realized, and to see all hitherto independent nations prostrated,
+acknowledge that Bonaparte and destiny are the same, and the same
+distributor of good and evil.
+
+One of the bad consequences of this our military education of youth is a
+total absence of all religious and moral lessons.  Arnaud had, last
+August, the courage to complain of this infamous neglect, in the National
+Institute.  “The youth,” said he, “receive no other instruction but
+lessons to march, to fire, to bow, to dance, to sit, to lie, and to
+impose with a good grace.  I do not ask for Spartans or Romans, but we
+want Athenians, and our schools are only forming Sybarites.”  Within
+twenty-four hours afterwards, Arnaud was visited by a police agent,
+accompanied by two gendarmes, with an order signed by Fouche, which
+condemned him to reside at Orleans, and not to return to Paris without
+the permission of the Government,--a punishment regarded here as very
+moderate for such an indiscreet zeal.
+
+A schoolmaster at Auteuil, near this capital, of the name of Gouron, had
+a private seminary, organized upon the footing of our former colleges. In
+some few months he was offered more pupils than he could well attend to,
+and his house shortly became very fashionable, even for our upstarts, who
+sent their children there in preference.  He was ordered before Fouche
+last Christmas, and commanded to change the hours hitherto employed in
+teaching religion and morals, to a military exercise and instruction, as
+both more necessary and more salubrious for French youth. Having replied
+that such an alteration was contrary to his plan and agreement with the
+parents of his scholars, the Minister stopped him short by telling him
+that he must obey what had been prescribed by Government, or stand the
+consequences of his refractory spirit.  Having consulted with his friends
+and patrons, he divided the hours, and gave half of the time usually
+allotted to religion or morality to the study of military exercise.  His
+pupils, however, remained obstinate, broke the drum, and tore and burnt
+the colours he had bought.  As this was not his fault, he did not expect
+any further disturbance, particularly after having reported to the police
+both his obedience and the unforeseen result.  But last March his house
+was suddenly surrounded in the night by gendarmes, and some police agents
+entered it.  All the boys were ordered to dress and to pack up their
+effects, and to follow the gendarmes to several other schools, where the
+Government had placed them, and of which their parents would be informed.
+Gouron, his wife, four ushers, and six servants, were all arrested and
+carried to the police office, where Fouche, after reproaching them for
+their fanatical behaviour, as he termed it, told them, as they were so
+fond of teaching religious and moral duties, a suitable situation had
+been provided for them in Cayenne, where the negroes stood sadly in need
+of their early arrival, for which reason they would all set out on that
+very morning for Rochefort.  When Gouron asked what was to become of his
+property, furniture, etc., he was told that his house was intended by
+Government for a preparatory school, and would, with its contents, be
+purchased, and the amount paid him in lands in Cayenne.  It is not
+necessary to say that this example of Imperial justice had the desired
+effect on all other refractory private schoolmasters.
+
+The parents of Gouron’s pupils were, with a severe reprimand, informed
+where their sons had been placed, and where they would be educated in a
+manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them not to remove them,
+without a previous notice to the police.  A hatter, of the name of
+Maille, however, ordered his son home, because he had been sent to a
+dearer school than the former.  In his turn he was carried before the
+police, and, after a short examination of a quarter of an hour, was
+permitted, with his wife and two children, to join their friend Gouron at
+Rochefort, and to settle with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be
+given him for his property, in France.  These particulars were related to
+me by a neighbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been
+under Gouron’s care, but who was now among those placed out by our
+Government.  The boy’s present master, he said, was a man of a
+notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was intimidated, and weak
+enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt, his personal safety to
+the future happiness of his child.  In your country, you little
+comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the hands of our
+rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has been mistaken abroad
+for affection and content.
+
+All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of petty
+tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time, and that,
+therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful, is also the
+most occupied of his colleagues.  So he certainly is, but, last year, a
+new organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche
+was allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors of State, and an
+augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries.  The French Empire was
+then divided into four arrondissements, with regard to the general
+police, not including Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of
+police under the Minister.  Of the first of these arrondissements, the
+Counsellor of State, Real, is a kind of Deputy Minister; the Counsellor
+of State, Miot, is the same of the second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet
+de la Lozere, of the third; and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the
+fourth.  The secret police agents, formerly called spies, were also
+considerably increased.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope’s Nuncio was
+for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame Bonaparte’s
+drawing-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness
+to think himself fortunate in continuing to govern the Ecclesiastical
+States, without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangements that
+might be thought necessary or proper by the Government in France.
+
+Bonaparte’s policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the
+Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military
+supporters; Cambacere’s brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and
+Cardinal, and one of Lebrun’s, and two of Berthier’s cousins are Bishops.
+As, however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or generals,
+have, like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous
+scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes hesitated about
+sanctioning their promotions.  This was the case last summer, when
+General Dessolles’s brother was transferred from the Bishopric of Digne
+to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother
+of General Miollis, who was a curate of Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix.
+This curate had not only been one of the first to throw up his letters of
+priesthood at the Jacobin Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied
+the divinity of the Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of
+Parisian atheists, the worship of a Goddess of Reason in a common
+prostitute with whom he lived.  The notoriety of these abominations made
+even his parishioners at Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to
+regard him as their pastor, though several of them had been imprisoned,
+fined, and even transported as fanatics, or as refractory.
+
+During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had been
+promised, among other things, that, for the future, his conscience should
+not be wounded by having presented to him for the prelacy any persons but
+those of the purest morals of the French Empire; and that all his
+objections should be attended to, in case of promotions; his scruples
+removed, or his refusal submitted to.  When Cardinal Fesch demanded His
+Holiness’s Bull for the curate Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State,
+Gonsalvi, showed no less than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy,
+which made him unworthy of such a dignity.  To this was replied that,
+having obtained an indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper
+subject; above all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the
+French.  The Pope’s Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of
+the Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to
+Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he,
+nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of this
+request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new Imperial
+etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the representatives of
+Sovereigns.  On the same evening the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome,
+and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confirmed by
+the Pope.
+
+From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge of the
+intention of our Government to adhere to its other engagements; but at
+Rome, as well as in most other Continental capitals, the Sovereign is the
+dupe of the perversity of his Counsellors and Ministers, who are the
+tools, and not seldom the pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.
+
+But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if possible,
+still worse served than in this country.  Some of the Bishops there,
+after having done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and
+fought against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, from
+their intrigues, are the terror of all the married part of their flock.
+The Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a merchant, by whom he has two
+children; and, that the public may not be mistaken as to their real
+father, the merchant received a sum of money to establish himself at
+Brescia, and has not seen his wife for these two years past.  General
+Gourion, who was last spring in Italy, has assured me that he read the
+advertisement of a curate after his concubine, who had eloped with
+another curate; and that the Police Minister at Milan openly licensed
+women to be the housekeepers of priests.
+
+A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but
+relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary
+for the musket.  He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured
+a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another,
+deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and
+eloped from her husband.  Last spring he returned to the bosom of the
+Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a valuable diamond cross,
+of which he had pillaged the statue of a Madonna, he obtained the dignity
+of a grand vicar, to the great edification, no doubt, of all those who
+had seen him before the altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the
+hospital.
+
+Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the name of
+Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys in the same
+cathedral where he officiates as a priest.  Their mother is dead, but her
+daughter, by another priest, is now their father’s mistress.  This
+incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the girl does the honours
+of the grand vicar’s house, and, with naivete enough, tells the guests
+and visitors of her happiness in having succeeded her mother.  I have
+this anecdote from an officer who heard her make use of that expression.
+
+In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and
+unprincipled; but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they take
+care to save the appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt is the
+same, the scandal is less.  Bonaparte pretends to be severe against all
+those ecclesiastics who are accused of any irregularities after having
+made their peace with the Church.  A curate of Picardy, suspected of
+gallantry, and another of Normandy, accused of inebriety, were last
+month, without further trial or ceremony than the report of the Minister
+Portalis, delivered over to Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne,
+after they had been stripped of their gowns.  At the same time, Cardinal
+Cambaceres and Cardinal Fesch, equally notorious for their excesses, were
+taken no notice of, except that they were laughed at in our Court
+circles.
+
+I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government is
+totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious establishment
+when the present race of priests is extinguished; which, in the course of
+nature, must happen in less than thirty years.  Our military system and
+our military education discourage all young men from entering into
+orders; while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and
+more profitable than the Church.  Already we want curates, though several
+have been imported from Germany and Spain, and, in some departments,
+four, and even six parishes have only one curate to serve them all.  The
+Bishops exhort, and the parents advise their children to study theology;
+but then the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well
+as the student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the
+ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they are
+either unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else.  The
+Pope, with all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was unable to
+procure an exception from the conscription of young men preparing
+themselves for priesthood.  Bonaparte always answered: “Holy Father, were
+I to consent to your demand, I should soon have an army of priests,
+instead of an army of soldiers.”  Our Emperor is not unacquainted with
+the real character and spirit of his Volunteers.  When the Pope
+represented the danger of religion expiring in France, for want of
+priests to officiate at the altars, he was answered that Bonaparte, at
+the beginning of his consulate, found neither altars nor priests in
+France; that if his reign survived the latter, the former would always be
+standing, and survive his reign.  He trusted that the chief of the Church
+would prevent them from being deserted.  He assured him that when once he
+had restored the liberties of the seas, and an uninterrupted tranquillity
+on the Continent, he should attend more, and perhaps entirely, to the
+affairs of the Church.  He consented, however, that the Pope might
+institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary for two hundred young
+Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military conscription.  This is the
+stock from which our Church establishment is to be supplied!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna, and the long
+stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin, had already caused
+here many speculations, not quite corresponding with the views and,
+perhaps, interests of our Court, when our violation of the Prussian
+territory made our courtiers exclaim: “This act proves that the Emperor
+of the French is in a situation to bid defiance to all the world, and,
+therefore, no longer courts the neutrality of a Prince whose power is
+merely artificial; who has indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no
+regard to claims.”  Such was the language of those very men who, a month
+before, declared “that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or
+war in his hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch
+ever was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of
+the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to his
+powerful mediation for the return of peace.”
+
+The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers’ political jargon has
+not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered without any
+official publication.  Bonaparte had the adroitness to cajole the Cabinet
+of Berlin into his interest, in the first month of his consulate,
+notwithstanding his own critical situation, as well as the critical
+situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it
+to his triumphal car and to inculpate it indirectly in his outrages and
+violations.  Convinced, as he thought, of the selfishness which guided
+all its resolutions, all his attacks and invasions against the law of
+nations, or independence of States, were either preceded or followed with
+some offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance.
+His political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia than
+his military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in laying the
+Hanse Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover; or, rather, all
+these acts of violence and injustice were merely the effects of his
+ascendency in Prussia.  When it is, besides, remembered what provinces
+Prussia accepted from his bounty, what exchange of presents, of ribands,
+of private letters passed between Napoleon the First and Frederick
+William III., between the Empress of the French and the Queen of Prussia,
+it is not surprising if the Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of
+the submission of the Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to
+fear it, or to think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even
+honour to feel, the numerous Provocations offered.
+
+Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or assert to the contrary, their
+gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise more that
+State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense they are
+liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or meanness into
+their snares.  The more legitimate Sovereigns descend from their true
+dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they approach the baseness of
+usurpation and the Machiavellism of rebellion.  Like other upstarts, they
+never suffer an equal.  If you do not keep yourself above them, they will
+crush you beneath them.  If they have no reason to fear you, they will
+create some quarrel to destroy you.
+
+It is said here that Duroc’s journey to Berlin was merely to demand a
+passage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in
+Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops from passing through the
+Prussian territory in Poland.  This request is such as might have been
+expected from our Emperor and his Minister.  Whether, however, the tone
+in which this curious negotiation with a neutral power was begun, or
+that, at last, the generosity of the Russian Monarch awakened a sense of
+duty in the Cabinet of Berlin, the arrival of our pacific envoy was
+immediately followed with warlike preparations.  Fortunate, indeed, was
+it for Prussia to have resorted to her military strength instead of
+trusting any longer to our friendly assurances.  The disasters that have
+since befallen the Austrian armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our
+forced marches through neutral Prussia, would otherwise soon have been
+felt in Westphalia, in Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania.  But should His
+Prussian Majesty not order his troops to act in conjunction with Russia,
+Austria, England, and Sweden, and that very soon, all efforts against
+Bonaparte will be vain, as those troops which have dispersed the
+Austrians and repulsed the Russians will be more than equal to master the
+Prussians, and one campaign may be sufficient to convince the Prussian
+Ministers of their folly and errors for years, and to punish them for
+their ignorance or selfishness.
+
+Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his
+affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number of
+spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that
+Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and inclined to join the
+confederacy against France.  At the last assembly at our Prince
+Cambaceres’s, a rumour circulated that preliminary articles for an
+offensive alliance with your country had already been signed by the
+Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg, on one side, and by your
+Minister to the Court of Berlin on the other; according to which you were
+to take sixty thousand Prussians and twelve thousand Hessians into your
+pay, for five years certain.  A courier from Duroc was said to have
+brought this news, which at first made some impression, but it wore away
+by degrees; and our Government, to judge from the expressions of persons
+in its confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with
+Prussia.  Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the
+North of Europe, Bonaparte’s numerous and young generals are impatient to
+enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of
+Germany are almost exhausted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The provocations of our Government must have been extraordinary
+indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of Berlin from its long
+and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to the friendly intentions
+of honest Talleyrand, and to the disinterested policy of our generous
+Bonaparte.  To judge its intents from its acts, the favour of the Cabinet
+of St. Cloud was not only its wish but its want.  You must remember that,
+last year, besides his ordinary Ambassador, Da Lucchesini, His Prussian
+Majesty was so ill advised as to despatch General Knobelsdorff as his
+extra representative, to assist at Napoleon’s coronation, a degradation
+of lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples, though
+surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as last
+June, the same Knobelsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the honours
+at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our army in Hanover
+who chose to attend there.  On this occasion the King lodged in a
+farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of Koestelith, while our
+sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte & Co., were quartered and treated in
+style at the castle of Putzbull, fitted up for their accommodation.  This
+was certainly very hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent
+nor politic.  Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are
+convinced that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not
+merit to be esteemed.
+
+Do not confound this Knobelsdorff with the late Field-marshal of that
+name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then Ambassador at
+Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him, NON ET SANS
+PHRASE, the very words this regicide used when he sat in judgment on his
+King, and voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE.  This Knobelsdorff is a very
+different character.  He pretends to be equally conspicuous in the
+Cabinet as in the field, in the boudoir as in the study.  A
+demi-philosopher, a demi-savant, a demi-gallant and a demi-politician,
+constitute, all taken together, nothing except an insignificant courtier.
+I do not know whether he was among those Prussian officers who, in 1798,
+CRIED when it was inserted in the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte
+had been killed in an insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain,
+that were Knobelsdorff to survive Napoleon the First, none of His
+Imperial Majesty’s own dutiful subjects would mourn him more sincerely
+than this subject of the King of Prussia.  He is said to possess a great
+share of the confidence of his King, who has already employed him in
+several diplomatic missions.  The principal and most requisite qualities
+in a negotiator are political information, inviolable fidelity,
+penetrating but unbiased judgment, a dignified firmness, and
+condescending manners.  I have not been often enough in the society of
+General Knobelsdorff to assert whether nature and education have destined
+him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian monarchy.
+
+I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von
+Haugwitz who, in 1792, as Prussian Ambassador at Vienna, arranged the
+treaty which then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles against the
+Jacobin Cap of Liberty.  It is now said in our diplomatic circle that his
+second mission to the same capital has for an object the renewal of these
+ties, which the Treaty of Basle dissolved; and that our Government, to
+impede his success, or to occasion his recall, before he could have time
+to conclude, had proposed to Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions
+of liveres--which it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality.
+The present respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that
+whether the mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His
+Prussian Majesty confides in his army in preference to our parchments.
+
+Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the foreign
+department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a friend of the
+system of neutrality as his predecessor.  All the transactions of his
+administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim that, if he wished his
+country to take an active part in the present conflict, it would not have
+been against France, had she not begun the attack with the invasion of
+Anspach and Bayreuth.  Let it be recollected that, since his Ministry,
+Prussia has acknowledged Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has
+exchanged orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be
+present at his coronation,--not common compliments, even between Princes
+connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity.  Under his
+administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc d’Enghien, and
+the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been
+pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against, all
+these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor a
+becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on
+the 5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe
+all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters?  It is not
+probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if
+self-preservation does not require it.
+
+Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
+statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice
+of his Prince.  The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister
+of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet.  On the 26th of January, 1792,
+as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of
+Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants
+swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their
+new Sovereign.--He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these
+States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator
+with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling
+all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former
+post at Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his
+Government.
+
+The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place
+he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such
+information as would enable him to fill it with distinction.  I have
+heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid
+private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports
+of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations.  One of
+these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I
+to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very
+judicious in his selection of private correspondents.  Figure to yourself
+a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high,
+deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a
+sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made
+unintelligible.  His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular,
+and his manners corresponded with both.  He called himself Baron von
+Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with
+the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic
+mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters
+and instructions from his principal.  As might be expected, he had the
+adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told,
+the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented him from starving.
+
+No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more
+knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador, Marquis
+of Lucchesini.  He went with several other philosophers of Italy to
+admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great,
+who received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed
+him.  I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis’s name for the
+place of a governor of some province that this Monarch said, “My subjects
+of that province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule
+in my name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend
+to chastise.”  This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his
+sectaries.
+
+During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of
+Lucchesini was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but he
+was neither his friend nor his favourite, but his listener.  It was first
+under Frederick William II.  that he began his diplomatic career, with an
+appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late King of Poland.  His
+first act in this post was a treaty signed on the 29th of March, 1790,
+with the King and Republic of Poland, which changed an elective monarchy
+into an hereditary one; but, notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had
+guaranteed this alteration, and the constitution decreed in consequence,
+in 1791, three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated
+both, and selfishness banished faith.
+
+In July, 1790, he assisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the
+conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch
+Ambassadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and Turkey.
+In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers to the
+Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the Treaty of Peace
+between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of Germany.  In June, 1792, he
+was a second time sent as a Minister to Warsaw, where he remained until
+January, 1793, when he was promoted to the post of Ambassador at the
+Court of Vienna.  He continued, however, to reside with His Prussian
+Majesty during the greatest part of the campaign on the Rhine, and
+signed, on the 24th of June, 1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive
+and defensive alliance with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy
+respected not above eighteen months.  In October, 1796, he requested his
+recall, but this his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious
+expressions; and he could not obtain it until March, 1797.  Some
+disapprobation of the new political plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz
+in the Cabinet at Berlin is supposed to have occasioned his determination
+to retire from public employment.  As he, however, continued to reside in
+the capital of Prussia, and, as many believed, secretly intrigued to
+appear again upon the scene, the nomination, in 1800, to his present
+important post was as much the consequence of his own desire as of the
+favour of his King.
+
+The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful
+Hotel de l’Infantado, where his lady’s routs, assemblies, and circles are
+the resort of our most fashionable gentry.  Madame da Lucchesini is more
+agreeable than handsome, more fit to shine at Berlin than at Paris; for
+though her manners are elegant, they want that ease, that finish which a
+German or Italian education cannot teach, nor a German or Italian society
+confer.  To judge from the number of her admirers, she seems to know that
+she is married to a philosopher.  Her husband was born at Lucca, in
+Italy, and is, therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte’s
+brother-in-law, Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a
+marker at a billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a
+shilling, as well as many a box on the ear.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your countryman,
+Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of our generals and
+public functionaries, as unjust as well as disgraceful.  At a future
+General Congress, should ever Bonaparte suffer one to be convoked, except
+under his auspices and dictature, the distinction and treatment of
+prisoners of war require to be again regulated, that the valiant warrior
+may not for the future be confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous
+spy; nor innocent travellers, provided with regular passes, visiting a
+country either for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men
+taken while combating with arms in their hands.
+
+You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our ships--that,
+during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and Scotland,
+and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were
+captured on their return or on their passage; and that your Government
+never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State
+criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower.  If I am not
+mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and
+his suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and
+men experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow
+prisoners of war; though the distance is immense between the crime of
+plotting against the lawful Government of the Princes of the House of
+Brunswick, and the attempt to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the
+House of Bonaparte.  But, even during the last war, how many of our ships
+of the line, frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed
+rebels in Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and
+yet your generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time when
+your Sir Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain Wright, were
+confined in our State prison of the Temple!  It is with Governments as
+with individuals, they ought to be just before they are generous.  Had
+you in 1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages so patiently, you would
+not now have to lament, nor we to blush for, the untimely end of Captain
+Wright.
+
+From the last time that this officer had appeared before the criminal
+tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was determined on
+by our Government.  His firmness offended, and his patriotism displeased;
+and as he seemed to possess the confidence of his own Government, it was
+judged that he was in its secrets; it was, therefore, resolved that, if
+he refused to become a traitor, he should perish a victim.  Desmarets,
+Fouche’s private secretary, who is also the secretary of the secret and
+haute police, therefore ordered him to another private interrogatory.
+Here he was offered a considerable sum of money, and the rank of an
+admiral in our service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of
+his Government, of its connections with the discontented in this country,
+and of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them.  He replied,
+as might have been expected, with indignation, to such offers and to such
+proposals, but as they were frequently repeated with new allurements, he
+concluded with remaining silent and giving no answers at all.  He was
+then told that the torture would soon restore him his voice, and some
+select gendarmes seized him and laid him on the rack; there he uttered no
+complaint, not even a sigh, though instruments the most diabolical were
+employed, and pains the most acute must have been endured.  When
+threatened that he should expire in torments, he said:
+
+“I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder, while my
+God receives my soul.”  During the two hours of the first day that he was
+stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg were broken, and his
+nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then passed into the hands of a
+surgeon, and was under his care for five weeks, but, before he was
+perfectly cured, he was carried to another private interrogatory, at
+which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real were present.
+
+The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated state of
+his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he must be
+convinced that it was not the intention of the French Government ever to
+restore him to his native country, where he might relate occurrences
+which the policy of France required to be buried in oblivion; he,
+therefore, had no choice between serving the Emperor of the French, or
+perishing within the walls of the prison where he was confined.  He
+replied that he was resigned to his destiny, and would die as he had
+lived, faithful to his King and to his country.
+
+The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal strength
+is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate being whose mind
+is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is weakened by wants.  For
+five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants,
+executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his
+food had been bread and his drink water.  The man who, thus situated and
+thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is
+more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator,
+the victor, or the saint.
+
+This interrogatory was the last undergone by Captain Wright.  He was then
+again stretched on the rack, and what is called by our regenerators the
+INFERNAL torments, were inflicted on him.  After being pinched with
+red-hot irons all over his body, brandy, mixed with gunpowder, was
+infused in the numerous wounds and set fire to several times until nearly
+burned to the bones.  In the convulsions, the consequence of these
+terrible sufferings, he is said to have bitten off a part of his tongue,
+though, as before, no groans were heard.  As life still remained, he was
+again put under the care of his former surgeon; but, as he was
+exceedingly exhausted, a spy, in the dress of a Protestant clergyman,
+presented himself as if to read prayers with him.  Of this offer he
+accepted; but when this man began to ask some insidious questions, he
+cast on him a look of contempt and never spoke to him more.  At last,
+seeing no means to obtain any information from him, a mameluke last week
+strangled him in his bed.  Thus expired a hero whose fate has excited
+more compassion, and whose character has received more admiration here,
+than any of our great men who have fallen fighting for our Emperor.
+Captain Wright has diffused new rays of renown and glory on the British
+name, from his tomb as well as from his dungeon.
+
+You have certainly a right to call me to an account for all the
+particulars I have related of this scandalous and abominable transaction,
+and, though I cannot absolutely guarantee the truth of the narration, I
+am perfectly satisfied of it myself, and I hope to explain myself to your
+satisfaction.  Your unfortunate countryman was attended by and under the
+care of a surgeon of the name of Vaugeard, who gained his confidence, and
+was worthy of it, though employed in that infamous gaol.  Either from
+disgust of life, or from attachment to Captain Wright, he survived him
+only twelve hours, during which he wrote the shocking details I have
+given you, and sent them to three of the members of the foreign
+diplomatic corps, with a prayer to have them forwarded to Sir Sidney
+Smith or to Mr. Windham, that those his friends might be informed that,
+to his last moment, Captain Wright was worthy of their protection and
+kindness.  From one of those Ministers I have obtained the original in
+Vaugeard’s own handwriting.
+
+I know that Bonaparte and Talleyrand promised the release of Captain
+Wright to the Spanish Ambassador; but, at that time, he had already
+suffered once on the rack, and this liberality on their part was merely a
+trick to impose upon the credulity of the Spaniard or to get rid of his
+importunities.  Had it been otherwise, Captain Wright, like Sir George
+Rumbold, would himself have been the first to announce in your country
+the recovery of his liberty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Should Bonaparte again return here victorious, and a
+pacificator, great changes in our internal Government and constitution
+are expected, and will certainly occur.  Since the legislative corps has
+completed the Napoleon code of civil and criminal justice, it is
+considered by the Emperor not only as useless, but troublesome and
+superfluous.  For the same reasons the tribunate will also be laid aside,
+and His Majesty will rule the French Empire, with the assistance of his
+Senate, and with the advice of his Council of State, exclusively.  You
+know that the Senators, as well as the Councillors of State, are
+nominated by the Emperor; that he changes the latter according to his
+whim, and that, though the former, according to the present constitution,
+are to hold their offices for life, the alterations which remove entirely
+the legislature and the tribunate may also make Senators movable.  But as
+all members of the Senate are favourites or relatives, he will probably
+not think it necessary to resort to such a measure of policy.
+
+In a former letter I have already mentioned the heterogeneous composition
+of the Senate.  The tribunate and legislative corps are worthy to figure
+by its side; their members are also ci-devant mechanics of all
+descriptions, debased attorneys or apostate priests, national spoilers or
+rebellious regicides, degraded nobles or dishonoured officers. The nearly
+unanimous vote of these corps for a consulate for life, and for an
+hereditary Emperor, cannot, therefore, either be expressive of the
+national will, or constitute the legality of Bonaparte’s sovereignty.
+
+In the legislature no vote opposed, and no voice declaimed against,
+Bonaparte’s Imperial dignity; but in the tribunate, Carnot--the
+infamously notorious Carnot--‘pro forma’, and with the permission of the
+Emperor ‘in petto’, spoke against the return of a monarchical form of
+Government.  This farce of deception and roguery did not impose even on
+our good Parisians, otherwise, and so frequently, the dupes of all our
+political and revolutionary mountebanks.  Had Carnot expressed a
+sentiment or used a word not previously approved by Bonaparte, instead of
+reposing himself in the tribunate, he would have been wandering in
+Cayenne.
+
+Son of an obscure attorney at Nolay, in Burgundy, he was brought up, like
+Bonaparte, in one of those military schools established by the
+munificence of the French Monarchs; and had obtained, from the late King,
+the commission of a captain of engineers when the Revolution broke out.
+He was particularly indebted to the Prince of Conde for his support
+during the earlier part of his life, and yet he joined the enemies of his
+house, and voted for the death of Louis XVI.  A member, with Robespierre
+and Barrere, of the Committee of Public Safety, he partook of their
+power, as well as of their crimes, though he has been audacious enough to
+deny that he had anything to do with other transactions than those of the
+armies.  Were no other proofs to the contrary collected, a letter of his
+own hand to the ferocious Lebon, at Arras, is a written evidence which he
+is unable to refute.  It is dated November 16th, 1793.  “You must take,”
+ says he, “in your energy, all measures of terror commanded or required by
+present circumstances.  Continue your revolutionary attitude; never mind
+the amnesty pronounced with the acceptance of the absurd constitution of
+1791; it is a crime which cannot extenuate other crimes. Anti-republicans
+can only expiate their folly under the age of the guillotine. The public
+Treasury will always pay the journeys and expenses of informers, because
+they have deserved well of their country.  Let all suspected traitors
+expire by the sword or by fire; continue to march upon that revolutionary
+line so well delineated by you.  The committee applauds all your
+undertakings, all your measures of vigour; they are not only all
+permitted, but commanded by your mission.”  Most of the decrees
+concerning the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, and particularly
+that for the organization of the atrocious military commission at Orange,
+were signed by him.
+
+Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without talents; but
+his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of those plans of
+campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and 1796, were so
+triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and Bonaparte, is impertinent,
+as well as unfounded.  At the risk of his own life, Pichegru entirely
+altered the plan sent him by the Committee of Public Safety; and it was
+Moreau’s masterly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe,
+that made this general so famous.  The surprising successes of Bonaparte
+in Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and,
+according to Berthier’s assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief,
+during the first four months, to change five times his plans of
+proceedings and undertakings.
+
+During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made
+a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to
+live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of
+the name of Aublin, as his mistresses.  He was the friend of the father
+of these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in
+1793, to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both
+before either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796,
+reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to
+a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant. He
+has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
+
+Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well
+aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the
+Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would,
+with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as
+he did for that of Louis XVI.  He has waded too far in blood and crime to
+retrograde.
+
+To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
+legislator.  Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
+officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of
+Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National
+Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a
+faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre.  After the evacuation of
+Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the
+Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were
+arrested and executed.  Among these were twenty-two young girls, under
+twenty years of age, whose crime was the having presented nosegays to the
+late King of Prussia on his entry after the surrender of Verdun.  He was
+afterwards a national commissary with the armies on the coast near Brest,
+on the Rhine, and in Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized
+himself by unheard of ferocities and sanguinary deeds.  The following
+anecdote, printed and published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme,
+will give you some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and
+Imperial Solon: “Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet,” writes Prudhomme,
+“had ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on
+the evening they expected to arrive in that town.  Entering very late,
+they found two soldiers, who had seen the box empty, placed in its front.
+These they ordered immediately to be arrested, and condemned them, for
+having outraged the national representation, to be guillotined on the
+next day, when they both were accordingly executed!”  Labarrere, a
+provost of the Marechaussee at Dax, was in prison as a suspected person.
+His daughter, a very handsome girl of seventeen, lived with an aunt at
+Severe.  The two pro-consuls passing through that place, she threw
+herself at their feet, imploring mercy for her parent.  This they not
+only promised, but offered her a place in their carriage to Dax, that she
+might see him restored to liberty.  On the road the monsters insisted on
+a ransom for the blood of her father.  Waiting, afflicted and ashamed, at
+a friend’s house at Dag, the accomplishment of a promise so dearly
+purchased, she heard the beating of the alarm drum, and looked, from
+curiosity, through the window, when she saw her unfortunate parent
+ascending the scaffold!  After having remained lifeless for half an hour,
+she recovered her senses an instant, when she exclaimed:
+
+“Oh, the barbarians! they violated me while flattering me with the hope
+of saving my father!” and then expired.  In October, 1795, Cavaignac
+assisted Barras and Bonaparte in the destruction of some thousands of
+men, women, and children in the streets of this capital, and was,
+therefore, in 1796, made by the Directory an inspector-general of the
+customs; and, in 1803, nominated by Bonaparte a legislator.  His
+colleague, Citizen Pinet, is now one of our Emperor’s Counsellors of
+State, and both are commanders of His Majesty’s Legion of Honour; rich,
+respected, and frequented by our most fashionable ladies and gentlemen.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I suppose your Government too vigilant and too patriotic not to
+be informed of the great and uninterrupted activity which reigns in our
+arsenals, dockyards, and seaports.  I have seen a plan, according to
+which Bonaparte is enabled, and intends, to build twenty ships of the
+line and ten frigates, besides cutters, in the year, for ten years to
+come.  I read the calculation of the expenses, the names of the forests
+where the timber is to be cut, of the foreign countries where a part of
+the necessary materials are already engaged, and of our own departments
+which are to furnish the remainder.  The whole has been drawn up in a
+precise and clear manner by Bonaparte’s Maritime Prefect at Antwerp, M.
+Malouet, well known in your country, where he long remained as an
+emigrant, and, I believe, was even employed by your Ministers.
+
+You may, perhaps, smile at this vast naval scheme of Bonaparte; but if
+you consider that he is the master of all the forests, mines, and
+productions of France, Italy, and of a great part of Germany, with all
+the navigable rivers and seaports of these countries and Holland, and
+remember also the character of the man, you will, perhaps, think it less
+impracticable.  The greatest obstacle he has to encounter, and to remove,
+is want of experienced naval officers, though even in this he has
+advanced greatly since the present war, during which he has added to his
+naval forces twenty--nine ships of the line, thirty--four frigates,
+twenty-one cutters, three thousand prams, gunboats, pinnaces, etc., with
+four thousand naval officers and thirty-seven thousand sailors, according
+to the same account, signed by Malouet.  It is true that most of our new
+naval heroes have never ventured far from our coast, and all their naval
+laurels have been gathered under our land batteries; but the impulse is
+given to the national spirit, and our conscripts in the maritime
+departments prefer, to a man, the navy to the army, which was not
+formerly the case.
+
+It cannot have escaped your observation that the incorporation of Genoa
+procured us, in the South of our Empire, a naval station and arsenal, as
+a counterpoise to Antwerp, our new naval station in the North, where
+twelve ships of the line have been built, or are building, since 1803,
+and where timber and other materials are collected for eight more.  At
+Genoa, two ships of the line and four frigates have lately been launched,
+and four ships and two frigates are on the stocks; and the Genoese
+Republic has added sixteen thousand seafaring men to our navy.  Should
+Bonaparte terminate successfully the present war, Naples and Venice will
+increase the number of our seaports and resources on the borders of the
+Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.  All his courtiers say that he will
+conquer Italy in Germany, and determine at Vienna--the fate of London.
+
+Of all our admirals, however, we have not one to compare with your
+Nelson, your Hood, your St. Vincent, and your Cornwallis.  By the
+appointment of Murat as grand admiral, Bonaparte seems to indicate that
+he is inclined to imitate the example of Louis. XVI., in the beginning of
+his reign, and entrust the chief command of his fleets and squadrons to
+military men of approved capacity and courage, officers of his land
+troops.  Last June, when he expected a probable junction of the fleet
+under Villeneuve with the squadron under Admiral Winter, and the union of
+both with Ganteaume at Brest, Murat was to have had the chief command of
+the united French, Spanish, and Batavian fleets, and to support the
+landing of our troops in your country; but the arrival of Lord Nelson in
+the West Indies, and the victory of Admiral Calder, deranged all our
+plans and postponed all our designs, which the Continental war has
+interrupted; to be commenced, God knows when.
+
+The best amongst our bad admirals is certainly Truguet; but he was
+disgraced last year, and exiled twenty leagues from the coast, for having
+declared too publicly “that our flotillas would never be serviceable
+before our fleets were superior to yours, when they would become
+useless.”  An intriguer by long habit and by character, having neither
+property nor principles, he joined the Revolution, and was the second in
+command under Latouche, in the first republican fleet that left our
+harbours.  He directed the expedition against Sardinia, in January, 1793,
+during which he acquired neither honour nor glory, being repulsed with
+great loss by the inhabitants.  After being imprisoned under Robespierre,
+the Directory made him a Minister of the marine, an Ambassador to Spain,
+and a Vice-Admiral of France.  In this capacity he commanded at Brest,
+during the first eighteen months of the present war.  He has an
+irreconcilable foe in Talleyrand, with whom he quarrelled, when on his
+embassy in Spain, about some extortions at Madrid, which he declined to
+share with his principal at Paris.  Such was our Minister’s inveteracy
+against him in 1798, that a directorial decree placed him on the list of
+emigrants, because he remained in Spain after having been recalled to
+France.  In 1799, during Talleyrand’s disgrace, Truguet returned here,
+and, after in vain challenging his enemy to fight, caned him in the
+Luxembourg gardens, a chastisement which our premier bore with true
+Christian patience.  Truguet is not even a member of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+Villeneuve is supposed not much inferior in talents, experience, and
+modesty to Truguet.  He was, before the Revolution, a lieutenant of the
+royal navy; but his principles did not prevent him from deserting to the
+colours of the enemies of royalty, who promoted him first to a captain
+and afterwards to an admiral.
+
+His first command as such was over a division of the Toulon fleet, which,
+in the winter of 1797, entered Brest.  In the battle at Aboukir he was
+the second in command; and, after the death of Admiral Brueys, he rallied
+the ships which had escaped, and sailed for Malta, where, two years
+afterwards, he signed, with General Vaubois, the capitulation of that
+island.  When hostilities again broke out, he commanded in the West
+Indies, and, leaving his station, escaped your cruisers, and was
+appointed first to the chief command of the Rochefort, and afterwards the
+Toulon fleet, on the death of Admiral Latouche.  Notwithstanding the
+gasconade of his report of his negative victory over Admiral Calder,
+Villeneuve is not a Gascon by birth, but only, by sentiment.
+
+Ganteaume does not possess either the intriguing character of Truguet or
+the valorous one of Villeneuve.
+
+Before the Revolution he was a mate of a merchantman, but when most of
+the officers of the former royal navy had emigrated or perished, he was,
+in 1793, made a captain of the republican navy, and in 1796 an admiral.
+During the battle of Aboukir he was the chief of the staff, under Admiral
+Brueys, and saved himself by swimming, when l’Orient took fire and blew
+up.  Bonaparte wrote to him on this occasion: “The picture you have sent
+me of the disaster of l’Orient, and of your own dreadful situation, is
+horrible; but be assured that, having such a miraculous escape, DESTINY
+intends you to avenge one day our navy and our friends.”  This note was
+written in August, 1798, shortly after Bonaparte had professed himself a
+Mussulman.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, our general-in-chief had determined to leave
+his army of Egypt to its destiny, Ganteaume equipped and commanded the
+squadron of frigates which brought him to Europe, and was, after his
+consulate, appointed a Counsellor of State and commander at Brest.  In
+1800 he escaped with a division of the Brest fleet to Toulon, and, in the
+summer of 1801, when he was ordered to carry succours to Egypt, your ship
+Skitsure fell in with him, and was captured.  As he did not, however,
+succeed in landing in Egypt the troops on board his ships, a temporary
+disgrace was incurred, and he was deprived of the command, but made a
+maritime prefect.  Last year favour was restored him, with the command of
+our naval forces at Brest.  All officers who have served under Ganteaume
+agree that, let his fleet be ever so superior, he will never fight if he
+can avoid it, and that, in orderly times, his capacity would, at the
+utmost, make him regarded as a good master of a merchantman, and nothing
+else.
+
+Of the present commander of our, flotilla at Boulogne, Lacrosse, I will
+also say some few words.  A lieutenant before the Revolution, he became,
+in 1789, one of the most ardent and violent Jacobins, and in 1792 was
+employed by the friend of the Blacks, and our Minister, Monge, as an
+emissary in the West Indies, to preach there to the negroes the rights of
+man and insurrection against the whites, their masters.  In 1800,
+Bonaparte advanced him to a captain-general at Guadeloupe, an island
+which his plots, eight years before, had involved in all the horrors of
+anarchy, and where, when he now attempted to restore order, his former
+instruments rose against him and forced him to escape to one of your
+islands--I believe Dominico.  Of this island, in return for his
+hospitable reception, he took plans, according to which our General
+Lagrange endeavoured to conquer it last spring.  Lacrosse is a perfect
+revolutionary fanatic, unprincipled, cruel, unfeeling, and intolerant.
+His presumption is great, but his talents are trifling.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The defeat of the Austrians has excited great satisfaction
+among our courtiers and public functionaries; but the mass of the
+inhabitants here are too miserable to feel for anything else but their
+own sufferings.  They know very well that every victory rivets their
+fetters, that no disasters can make them more heavy, and no triumph
+lighter.  Totally indifferent about external occurrences, as well as
+about internal oppressions, they strive to forget both the past and the
+present, and to be indifferent as to the future; they would be glad could
+they cease to feel that they exist.  The police officers were now, with
+their gendarmes, bayoneting them into illuminations for Bonaparte’s
+successes, as they dragooned them last year into rejoicings for his
+coronation. I never observed before so much apathy; and in more than one
+place I heard the people say, “Oh!  how much better we should be with
+fewer victories and more tranquillity, with less splendour and more
+security, with an honest peace instead of a brilliant war.”  But in a
+country groaning under a military government, the opinions of the people
+are counted for nothing.
+
+At Madame Joseph Bonaparte’s circle, however, the countenances were not
+so gloomy.  There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual
+dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in
+honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to
+inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude
+towards our Emperor.  It is certainly neither philosophical nor
+philanthropical not to exclude the vilest of all passions, HATRED, on
+such a happy occasion.  Martin, in the dress of a conscript, sang six
+long couplets against the tyrants of the seas; of which I was only able
+to retain the following one:
+
+Je deteste le peuple anglais, Je deteste son ministere; J’aime l’Empereur
+des Francais, J’aime la paix, je hais la guerre; Mais puisqu’il faut la
+soutenir Contre une Nation Sauvage, Mon plus doux, mon plus grand desir
+Est de montrer tout mon courage.
+
+But what arrested my attention, more than anything else which occurred in
+this circle on that evening, was a printed paper mysteriously handed
+about, and of which, thanks to the civility of a Counsellor of State, I
+at last got a sight.  It was a list of those persons, of different
+countries, whom the Emperor of the French has fixed upon, to replace all
+the ancient dynasties of Europe within twenty years to come.  From the
+names of these individuals, some of whom are known to me, I could
+perceive that Bonaparte had more difficulty to select proper Emperors,
+Kings, and Electors, than he would have had, some years ago, to choose
+directors or consuls.  Our inconsistency is, however, evident even here;
+I did not read a name that is not found in the annals of Jacobinism and
+republicanism.  We have, at the same time, taken care not to forget
+ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy.  France is to furnish
+the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and
+Sweden.  What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject
+of King Arthur O’Connor the First?  You would, I dare say, be even more
+surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First.
+You know, I suppose, that O’Connor is a general of division, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour,--the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and
+courting, at this moment, a young lady, a relation of our Empress, whose
+portion may one day be an Empire.  But I am told that, notwithstanding
+Talleyrand’s recommendations, and the approbation of Her Majesty, the
+lady prefers a colonel, her own countryman, to the Irish general. Should,
+however, our Emperor announce his determination, she would be obliged to
+marry as he commands, were he even to give her his groom, or his horse,
+for a spouse.
+
+You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels are
+here.  O’Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to
+General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on with a
+sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with
+poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France.  When
+I was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally
+considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to
+profligacy and drunkenness, and, when once drunk, more cruelly ferocious
+than even our Jacobins.  I thought it then, and I still believe it, a
+national prejudice, because I am convinced that the vices or virtues of
+all civilized nations are relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we
+have seen here, and who must be, like our Jacobins, the very dregs of
+their country, have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only
+mistrust but abhorrence.  It is also an undeniable truth that they were
+greatly disappointed by our former and present Government.  They expected
+to enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but our
+police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gendarmes escorted
+them as criminals to their place of destination, and there they received
+just enough to prevent them from starving.  If they complained they were
+put in irons, and if they attempted to escape they were sent to the
+galleys as malefactors or shot as spies.  Despair, therefore, no doubt
+induced many to perpetrate acts of which they were accused, and to rob,
+swindle, and murder, because they were punished as thieves and assassins.
+But, some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly,
+hospitable, and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves
+ungrateful, as well as infamous.  A lady of my acquaintance, of a once
+large fortune, had nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence
+depended upon what she got by letting furnished lodgings.  Mischance
+brought three young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily
+expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from
+Bonaparte.  During six months she not only lodged and supported them, but
+embarrassed herself to procure them linen and a decent apparel.  At last
+she was informed that each of, them had been allowed sixty livres--in the
+month, and that arrears had been paid them for nine months.  Their debt
+to her was above three thousand livres--but the day after she asked for
+payment they decamped, and one of them persuaded her daughter, a girl of
+fourteen, to elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of
+all her plate.--He has, indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the
+galleys for eight years; but this punishment neither restored the
+daughter her virtue nor the mother her property.  The other two denied
+their debts, and, as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of
+accounts, they could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and
+infamy, however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they
+delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and the
+Minister of Police ordered them to be transported as rogues and vagabonds
+to the colonies.  The daughter died shortly after, in consequence of a
+miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her more than a month, and
+ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our common hospitals.  Thus,
+these depraved young men ruined and murdered their benefactress and her
+child; and displayed, before they were thirty, such a consummate villainy
+as few wretches grown hoary in vice have perpetrated.  This act of
+scandalous notoriety injured the Irish reputation very much in this
+country; for here, as in many other places, inconsiderate people are apt
+to judge a whole nation according to the behaviour of some few of its
+outcasts.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible
+to all our military men--not on account of its profundity, but on account
+of its absurdity or incoherency.  In the present circumstances,
+half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike
+strongly and firmly than justly.  To invade Bavaria without disarming the
+Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality of
+Switzerland, are such political and military errors as require long
+successes to repair, but which such an enemy as Bonaparte always takes
+care not to leave unpunished.
+
+The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as much
+surprised us as the defeat of the army under General von Mack; but from
+what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would long since have
+pushed forward had not his movements been unfortunately combined with
+those of the latter.  The House of Lorraine never produced a more valiant
+warrior, nor Austria a more liberal or better instructed statesman, than
+this Prince.  Heir to the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded,
+with glory, against France during the revolutionary war; and, although he
+sometimes experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the
+chief of his House by his courage, by his activity, by his constancy, and
+by that salutary firmness which, in calling the generals and superior
+officers to their duty, has often reanimated the confidence and the
+ardour of the soldier.
+
+The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under the Prince
+of Coburg, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian armies in Brabant,
+where he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished himself by a
+valour sometimes bordering on temerity, but which, by degrees, acquired
+him that esteem and popularity, among the troops often very advantageous
+to him afterwards.  He was, in 1794, appointed governor and
+captain-general of the Low Countries, and a Field-marshal lieutenant of
+the army of the German Empire.  In April, 1796, he took the
+command-in-chief of the armies of Austria and of the Empire, and, in the
+following June, engaged in several combats with General Moreau, in which
+he was repulsed, but in a manner that did equal honour to the victor and
+to the vanquished.
+
+The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben, having,
+about this time, been nearly dispersed by General Jourdan, the Archduke
+left some divisions of his forces under General Latour, to impede the
+progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into Franconia, where he
+defeated Jourdan near Amberg and Wurzburg, routed his army entirely, and
+forced him to repass the Rhine in the greatest confusion, and with
+immense loss.  The retreat of Moreau was the consequence of the victories
+of this Prince.  After the capture of Kehl, in January, 1797, he assumed
+the command of the army of Italy, where he in vain employed all his
+efforts to put a stop to the victorious progress of Bonaparte, with whom,
+at last, he signed the preliminaries of peace at Leoben.  In the spring
+of 1799, he again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years
+before in Franconia; but in Switzerland he met with an abler adversary in
+General Massena; still, I am inclined to think that he displayed there
+more real talents than anywhere else; and that this part of his campaign
+of 1799 was the most interesting, in a military point of view.
+
+The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria
+render justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of
+Archduke Charles; and, what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who have
+commanded against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the true
+manner of combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least, his proclamations
+are the only ones composed with adroitness, and are what they ought to
+be, because in them an appeal is made to the public opinion at a time
+when opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies.
+
+The present opposer of this Prince in Italy is one of our best, as well
+as most fortunate, generals.  A Sardinian subject, and a deserter from
+the Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our commander, General
+Anselm, in the conquest of the county of Nice, rather as a spy than as a
+soldier.  His knowledge of the Maritime Alps obtained, in 1793, a place
+on our staff, where, from the services he rendered, the rank of a general
+of brigade was soon conferred on him.  In 1796 he was promoted to serve
+as a general of division under Bonaparte in Italy, where he distinguished
+himself so much that when, in 1798, General Berthier was ordered to
+accompany the army of the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as
+commander-in-chief of our troops in the temporary Roman Republic.  But
+his merciless pillage, and, perhaps, the idea of his being a foreigner,
+brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was obliged to recall him.  It was
+his campaign in Switzerland of 1799, and his defence of Genoa in 1800,
+that principally ranked him high as a military chief.  After the battle
+of Marengo he received the command of the army of Italy; but his
+extortions produced a revolt among the inhabitants, and he lived for some
+time in retreat and disgrace, after a violent quarrel with Bonaparte,
+during which many severe truths were said and heard on both sides.
+
+After the Peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau, and
+other discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of views
+and union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris, where
+Bonaparte visited him, after the rupture with your country, and made him,
+we may conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave his retreat.  Last
+year he was nominated one of our Emperor’s Field-marshals, and as such he
+relieved Jourdan of the command in the kingdom of Italy.  He has
+purchased with a part of his spoil, for fifteen millions of
+livres--property in France and Italy; and is considered worth double that
+sum in jewels, money, and other valuables.
+
+Massena is called, in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as
+Bonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confidence in
+fortune than in merit, he is, perhaps, more indebted to the former than
+to the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has made him
+disliked at our Imperial Court, where he never addresses Napoleon and
+Madame Bonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress without smiling.
+
+General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also an
+officer of great talents and distinctions.  He was, in 1791, only a
+cornet, but in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the army of
+the Rhine.  In his report to the Directory, during the famous retreat of
+1796, Moreau speaks highly of this general, and admits that his.
+achievements, in part, saved the republican army.  During 1799 he served
+in Italy, and in 1800 he commanded the centre of the army of the Rhine,
+and assisted in gaining the victory of Hohenlinden.  After the Peace of
+Lundville, he was appointed a Counsellor of State of the military
+section, a place he still occupies, notwithstanding his present
+employment.  Though under forty years of age, he is rather infirm, from
+the fatigues he has undergone and the wounds he has received.  Although
+he has never combated as a general-in-chief, there is no doubt but that
+he would fill such a place with honour to himself and advantage to his
+country.
+
+Of the general officers who command under Archduke Charles, Comte de
+Bellegarde is already known by his exploits during the last war.  He had
+distinguished himself already in 1793, particularly when Valenciennes and
+Maubeuge were besieged by the united Austrian and English forces; and, in
+1794, he commanded the column at the head of which the Emperor marched,
+when Landrecy was invested.  In 1796, he was one of the members of the
+Council of the Archduke Charles, when this Prince commanded for the first
+time as a general-in-chief, on which occasion he was promoted to a
+Field-marshal lieutenant.
+
+He displayed again great talents during the campaign of 1799, when he
+headed a small corps, placed between General Suwarow in Italy, and
+Archduke Charles in Switzerland; and in this delicate post he contributed
+equally to the success of both.  After the Peace of Luneville he was
+appointed a commander-in-chief for the Emperor in the ci-devant Venetian
+States, where the troops composing the army under the Archduke Charles
+were, last summer, received and inspected by him, before the arrival of
+the Prince.  He is considered by military men as greatly superior to most
+of the generals now employed by the Emperor of Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--“I would give my brother, the Emperor of Germany, one further
+piece of advice.  Let him hasten to make peace.  This is the crisis when,
+he must recollect, all States must have an end.  The idea of the
+approaching extinction of the, dynasty of Lorraine must impress him with
+horror.”  When Bonaparte ordered this paragraph to be inserted in the
+Moniteur, he discovered an ‘arriere pensee’, long suspected by
+politicians, but never before avowed by himself, or by his Ministers.
+“That he has determined on the universal change of dynasties, because a
+usurper can never reign with safety or honour as long as any legitimate
+Prince may disturb his power, or reproach him for his rank.”  Elevated
+with prosperity, or infatuated with vanity and pride, he spoke a language
+which his placemen, courtiers, and even his brother Joseph at first
+thought premature, if not indiscreet.  If all lawful Sovereigns do not
+read in these words their proscription, and the fate which the most
+powerful usurper that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it
+may be ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath,
+sometimes strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the vicissitudes
+of human life.
+
+“Had Talleyrand,” said Louis Bonaparte, in his wife’s drawing-room, “been
+by my brother’s side, he would not have unnecessarily alarmed or awakened
+those whom it should have been his policy to keep in a soft slumber,
+until his blows had laid them down to rise no more; but his soldier-like
+frankness frequently injures his political views.”  This I myself heard
+Louis say to Abbe Sieyes, though several foreign Ambassadors were in the
+saloon, near enough not to miss a word.  If it was really meant as a
+reflection on Napoleon, it was imprudent; if designed as a defiance to
+other Princes, it was unbecoming and impertinent.  I am inclined to
+believe it, considering the individual to whom it was addressed, a
+premeditated declaration that our Emperor expected a universal war, was
+prepared for it, and was certain of its fortunate issue.
+
+When this Sieyes is often consulted, and publicly flattered, our
+politicians say, “Woe to the happiness of Sovereigns and to the
+tranquillity of subjects; the fiend of mankind is busy, and at work,”
+ and, in fact, ever since 1789, the infamous ex-Abbe has figured, either
+as a plotter or as an actor, in all our dreadful and sanguinary
+revolutionary epochas.  The accomplice of La Fayette in 1789, of Brissot
+in 1791, of Marat in 1792, of Robespierre in 1793, of Tallien in 1794, of
+Barras in 1795, of Rewbel in 1797, and of Bonaparte in 1799, he has
+hitherto planned, served, betrayed, or deserted all factions.  He is one
+of the few of our grand criminals, who, after enticing and sacrificing
+his associates, has been fortunate enough to survive them.  Bonaparte has
+heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property,
+senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not
+supposed one of our Emperor’s most dutiful subjects, because many of the
+late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation,
+of regeneration, and of overthrow.  He has too high an opinion of his own
+deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a
+contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his
+labours and dangers.  His modesty has, for these sixteen years past,
+ascribed to his talents all the glory and prosperity of France, and all
+her misery and misfortunes to the disregard of his counsels, and to the
+neglect of his advice.  Bonaparte knows it; and that he is one of those
+crafty, sly, and dark conspirators, more dangerous than the bold
+assassin, who, by sophistry, art, and perseverance insinuate into the
+minds of the unwary and daring the ideas of their plots, in such an
+insidious manner that they take them and foster them as the production of
+their own genius; he is, therefore, watched by our Imperial spies, and
+never consulted but when any great blow is intended to be struck, or some
+enormous atrocities perpetrated.  A month before the seizure of the Duc
+d’Enghien, and the murder of Pichegru, he was every day shut up for some
+hours with Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Cloud, or in the Tuileries; where he
+has hardly been seen since, except after our Emperor’s return from his
+coronation as a King of Italy.
+
+Sieyes never was a republican, and it was cowardice alone that made him
+vote for the death of his King and benefactor; although he is very fond
+of his own metaphysical notions, he always has preferred the preservation
+of his life to the profession or adherence to his systems.  He will not
+think the Revolution complete, or the constitution of his country a good
+one, until some Napoleon, or some Louis, writes himself an Emperor or
+King of France, by the grace of Sieyes.  He would expose the lives of
+thousands to obtain such a compliment to his hateful vanity and excessive
+pride; but he would not take a step that endangered his personal safety,
+though it might eventually lead him to the possession of a crown.
+
+From the bounty of his King, Sieyes had, before the Revolution, an income
+of fifteen thousand livres--per annum; his places, pensions, and landed
+estates produce now yearly five hundred thousand livres--not including
+the interest of his money in the French and foreign funds.
+
+Two years ago he was exiled, for some time, to an estate of his in
+Touraine, and Bonaparte even deliberated about transporting him to
+Cayenne, when Talleyrand observed “that such a condemnation would
+endanger that colony of France, as he would certainly organize there a
+focus of revolutions, which might also involve Surinam and the Brazils,
+the colonies of our allies, in one common ruin.  In the present
+circumstances,” added the Minister, “if Sieyes is to be transported, I
+wish we could land him in England, Scotland, or Ireland, or even in
+Russia.”
+
+I have just heard from a general officer the following anecdote, which he
+read to me from a letter of another general, dated Ulm, the 25th instant,
+and, if true, it explains in part Bonaparte’s apparent indiscretion in
+the threat thrown out against all ancient dynasties.
+
+Among his confidential generals (and hitherto the most irreproachable of
+all our military commanders), Marmont is particularly distinguished.
+Before Napoleon left this capital to head his armies in Germany, he is
+stated to have sent despatches to all those traitors dispersed in
+different countries whom he has selected to commence the new dynasties,
+under the protection of the Bonaparte Dynasty.  They were, no doubt,
+advised of this being the crisis when they had to begin their
+machinations against thrones.  A courier from Talleyrand at Strasburg to
+Bonaparte at Ulm was ordered to pass by the corps under the command of
+Marmont, to whom, in case the Emperor had advanced too far into Germany,
+he was to deliver his papers.  This courier was surprised and interrupted
+by some Austrian light troops; and, as it was only some few hours after
+being informed of this capture that Bonaparte expressed himself frankly,
+as related above, it was supposed by his army that the Austrian
+Government had already in its power despatches which made our schemes of
+improvement at Paris no longer any secrets at Vienna.  The writer of this
+letter added that General Marmont was highly distressed on account of
+this accident, which might retard the prospect of restoring to Europe its
+long lost peace and tranquillity.
+
+This officer made his first campaign under Pichegru in 1794, and was, in
+1796, appointed by Bonaparte one of his aides-de-camp.  His education had
+been entirely military, and in the practice the war afforded him he soon
+evinced how well he remembered the lessons of theory.  In the year 1796,
+at the battle of Saint-Georges, before Mantua, he charged at the head of
+the eighth battalion of grenadiers, and contributed much to its fortunate
+issue.  In October of the same year, Bonaparte, as a mark of his
+satisfaction, sent him to present to the Directory the numerous colours
+which the army of Italy had conquered; from whom he received in return a
+pair of pistols, with a fraternal hug from Carnot.  On his return to
+Italy he was, for the first time, employed by his chief in a political
+capacity.  A republic, and nothing but a republic, being then the order
+of the day, some Italian patriots were convoked at Reggio to arrange a
+plan for a Cisalpine Republic, and for the incorporation with it of
+Modena, Bologna, and other neutral States; Marmont was nominated a French
+republican plenipotentiary, and assisted as such in the organization of a
+Commonwealth, which since has been by turns a province of Austria or a
+tributary State of France.
+
+Marmont, though combating for a bad cause, is an honest man; his hands
+are neither soiled with plunder, nor stained with blood.  Bonaparte,
+among his other good qualities, wishes to see every one about him rich;
+and those who have been too delicate to accumulate wealth by pillage, he
+generally provides for, by putting into requisition some great heiress.
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bonaparte arrived at Paris, where he
+demanded in marriage for his aide-de-camp Marmont, Mademoiselle
+Perregeaux, the sole child of the first banker in France, a well-educated
+and accomplished young lady, who would be much more agreeable did not her
+continual smiles and laughing indicate a degree of self-satisfaction and
+complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published.
+
+The banker, Perregeaux, is one of those fortunate beings who, by drudgery
+and assiduity, has succeeded in some few years to make an ample fortune.
+A Swiss by birth, like Necker, he also, like him, after gratifying the
+passion of avidity, showed an ambition to shine in other places than in
+the counting-house and upon the exchange.  Under La Fayette, in 1790, he
+was the chief of a battalion of the Parisian National Guards; under
+Robespierre, a commissioner for purchasing provisions; and under
+Bonaparte he is become a Senator and a commander of the Legion of Honour.
+I am told that he has made all his money by his connection with your
+country; but I know that the favourite of Napoleon can never be the
+friend of Great Britain.  He is a widower; but Mademoiselle Mars, of the
+Emperor’s theatre, consoles him for the loss of his wife.
+
+General Marmont accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and distinguished himself
+at the capture of Malta, and when, in the following year, the siege of
+St. Jean d’Acre was undertaken, he was ordered to extend the
+fortifications of Alexandria; and if, in 1801, they retarded your
+progress, it was owing to his abilities, being an officer of engineers as
+well as of the artillery.  He returned with Bonaparte to Europe, and was,
+after his usurpation, made a Counsellor of State.  At the battle of
+Marengo he commanded the artillery, and signed afterwards, with the
+Austrian general, Count Hohenzollern, the Armistice of Treviso, which
+preceded shortly the Peace of Luneville.  Nothing has abated Bonaparte’s
+attachment to this officer, whom he appointed a commander-in-chief in
+Holland, when a change of Government was intended there, and whom he will
+entrust everywhere else, where sovereignty is to be abolished, or thrones
+and dynasties subverted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Many wise people are of the opinion that the revolution of
+another great Empire is necessary to combat or oppose the great impulse
+occasioned by the Revolution of France, before Europe can recover its
+long-lost order and repose.  Had the subjects of Austria been as
+disaffected as they are loyal, the world might have witnessed such a
+terrible event, and been enabled to judge whether the hypothesis was the
+production of an ingenious schemer or of a profound statesman.  Our
+armies under Bonaparte have never before penetrated into the heart of a
+country where subversion was not prepared, and where subversion did not
+follow.
+
+How relatively insignificant, in the eyes of Providence, must be the
+independence of States and the liberties of nations, when such a
+relatively insignificant personage as General von Mack can shake them?
+Have, then, the Austrian heroes--a Prince Eugene, a Laudon, a Lasci, a
+Beaulieu, a Haddick, a Bender, a Clairfayt, and numerous other valiant
+and great warriors--left no posterity behind them; or has the presumption
+of General von Mack imposed upon the judgment of the Counsellors of his
+Prince?  This latter must have been the case; how otherwise could the
+welfare of their Sovereign have been entrusted to a military quack, whose
+want of energy and bad disposition had, in 1799, delivered up the capital
+of another Sovereign to his enemies.  How many reputations are gained by
+an impudent assurance, and lost when the man of talents is called upon to
+act and the fool presents himself.
+
+Baron von Mack served as an aide-de-camp under Field-marshal Laudon,
+during the last war between Austria and Turkey, and displayed some
+intrepidity, particularly before Lissa.  The Austrian army was encamped
+eight leagues from that place, and the commander-in-chief hesitated to
+attack it, believing it to be defended by thirty thousand men.  To decide
+him upon making this attack, Baron von Mack left him at nine o’clock at
+night, crossed the Danube, accompanied only by a single Uhlan, and
+penetrated into the suburb of Lissa, where he made prisoner a Turkish
+officer, whom, on the next morning at seven o’clock, he presented to his
+general, and from whom it was learnt that the garrison contained only six
+thousand, men.  This personal temerity, and the applause of Field-marshal
+Laudon, procured him then a kind of reputation, which he has not since
+been able to support.  Some theoretical knowledge of the art of war, and
+a great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor
+Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been
+proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is
+immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of
+Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp or in the field.
+
+Preceded by a certain celebrity, Baron von Mack served, in 1793, under
+the Prince of Coburg, as an adjutant-general, and was called to assist at
+the Congress at Antwerp, where the operations of the campaign were
+regulated.  Everywhere he displayed activity and bravery; was wounded
+twice in the month of May; but he left the army without having performed
+anything that evinced the talents which fame had bestowed on him.  In
+February, 1794, the Emperor sent him to London to arrange, in concert
+with your Government, the plans of the campaign then on the eve of being
+opened; and when he returned to the Low Countries he was advanced to a
+quartermaster-general of the army of Flanders, and terminated also this
+unfortunate campaign without having done anything to justify the
+reputation he had before acquired or usurped.  His Sovereign continued,
+nevertheless, to employ him in different armies; and in January, 1797, he
+was appointed a Field-marshal lieutenant and a quartermaster-general of
+the army of the Rhine.  In February he conducted fifteen thousand of the
+troops of this army to reinforce the army of Italy; but when Bonaparte in
+April penetrated into Styria and Carinthia, he was ordered to Vienna as a
+second in command of the levy ‘en masse’.
+
+Real military characters had already formed their opinion of this
+officer, and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired an
+able warrior.  His own conduct soon convinced them that they neither had
+been rash nor mistaken.  The King of Naples demanding, in 1798, from his
+son-in-law, the Emperor of Germany, a general to organize and head his
+troops, Baron von Mack was presented to him.  After war had been declared
+against France he obtained some success in partial engagements, but was
+defeated in a general battle by an enemy inferior in number.  In the
+Kingdom of Naples, as well as in the Empire of Germany, the fury of
+negotiation seized him when he should have fought, and when he should
+have remembered that no compacts can ever be entered into with political
+and military earthquakes, more than with physical ones.  This imprudence,
+particularly as he was a foreigner, excited suspicion among his troops,
+whom, instead of leading to battle, he deserted, under the pretence that
+his life was in danger, and surrendered himself and his staff to our
+commander, Championnet.
+
+A general who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp, much
+less to command armies; and a military chief who does not consider the
+happiness and honour of the State as his first passion and his first
+duty, and prefers existence to glory, deserves to be shot as a traitor,
+or drummed out of the army as a dastardly coward.  Without mentioning the
+numerous military faults committed by General von Mack during this
+campaign, it is impossible to deny that, with respect to his own troops,
+he conducted himself in the most pusillanimous manner.  It has often been
+repeated that martial valour does not always combine with it that courage
+and that necessary presence of mind which knows how to direct or repress
+multitudes, how to command obedience and obtain popularity; but when a
+man is entrusted with the safety of an Empire, and assumes such a
+brilliant situation, he must be weak-minded and despicable indeed, if he
+does not show himself worthy of it by endeavouring to succeed, or perish
+in the attempt.  The French emigrant, General Dumas, evinced what might
+have been done, even with the dispirited Neapolitan troops, whom he
+neither deserted, nor with whom he offered to capitulate.
+
+Baron von Mack is in a very infirm state of health, and is often under
+the necessity of being carried on a litter; and his bodily complaints
+have certainly not increased the vigour of his mind.  His love of life
+seems to augment in proportion as its real value diminishes.  As to the
+report here of his having betrayed his trust in exchanging honour for
+gold, I believe it totally unfounded.  Our intriguers may have deluded
+his understanding, but our traitors would never have been able to seduce
+or shake his fidelity.  His head is weak, but his heart is honest.
+Unfortunately, it is too true that, in turbulent times, irresolution and
+weakness in a commander or a Minister operate the same, and are as
+dangerous as, treason.
+
+
+
+
+THE ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Bourrienne
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery--pays for it like a real Emperor
+Indifference about futurity
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Marble lives longer than man
+May change his habitations six times in the month--yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+Military diplomacy
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+More vain than ambitious
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats’ meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Suspicion is evidence
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+“This is the age of upstarts,” said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon’s outrages
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+Want is the parent of industry
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud,
+Complete, by Lewis Goldsmith
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+
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      MEMOIRS COURT OF ST. CLOUD, By Lewis Goldsmith
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
+    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
+    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
+    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
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+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 100%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 1 }
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <h2>
+      MEMOIRS COURT OF ST. CLOUD, By Lewis Goldsmith
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete,
+by Lewis Goldsmith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete
+       Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+Author: Lewis Goldsmith
+
+
+Release Date: September 11, 2006 [EBook #3899]
+Last Updated: August 23, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT OF ST. CLOUD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="bookcover.jpg (144K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (52K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PUBLISHERS&rsquo; NOTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present work contains particulars of the great Napoleon not to be
+      found in any other publication, and forms an interesting addition to the
+      information generally known about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The writer of the Letters (whose name is said to have been Stewarton, and
+      who had been a friend of the Empress Josephine in her happier, if less
+      brilliant days) gives full accounts of the lives of nearly all Napoleon&rsquo;s
+      Ministers and Generals, in addition to those of a great number of other
+      characters, and an insight into the inner life of those who formed
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All sorts and conditions of men are dealt with&mdash;adherents who have
+      come over from the Royalist camp, as well as those who have won their way
+      upwards as soldiers, as did Napoleon himself. In fact, the work abounds
+      with anecdotes of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Fouche, and a host of others, and
+      astounding particulars are given of the mysterious disappearance of those
+      persons who were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="napoleon.jpg (54K)" src="images/napoleon.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>ILLUSTRATIONS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#p078">At Cardinal Caprara&rsquo;s</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p146">Cardinal
+        Fesch</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p214">Episode at Mme. Miot&rsquo;s</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#p236">Napoleon&rsquo;s Guard</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p338">A Grand
+        Dinner</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb064">Chaptal</a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#pb114">Turreaux</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb118">Carrier</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#pb146">Barrere</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb214">Cambaceres</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#pauline">Pauline Bonaparte</a><br /><br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD. <br /><br />INTRODUCTORY LETTER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, November 10th, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD,&mdash;The Letters I have written to you were intended for the
+      private entertainment of a liberal friend, and not for the general perusal
+      of a severe public. Had I imagined that their contents would have
+      penetrated beyond your closet or the circle of your intimate acquaintance,
+      several of the narratives would have been extended, while others would
+      have been compressed; the anecdotes would have been more numerous, and my
+      own remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left out, others drawn,
+      and all better finished. I should then have attempted more frequently to
+      expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to abhorrence; should have
+      lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and oftener held out to ridicule
+      puerile vanity and outrageous ambition. In short, I should then have
+      studied more to please than to instruct, by addressing myself seldomer to
+      the reason than to the passions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I subscribe, nevertheless, to your observation, &ldquo;that the late long war
+      and short peace, with the enslaved state of the Press on the Continent,
+      would occasion a chasm in the most interesting period of modern history,
+      did not independent and judicious travellers or visitors abroad collect
+      and forward to Great Britain (the last refuge of freedom) some materials
+      which, though scanty and insufficient upon the whole, may, in part, rend
+      the veil of destructive politics, and enable future ages to penetrate into
+      mysteries which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable to the
+      just reprobation of honour and of virtue.&rdquo; If, therefore, my humble
+      labours can preserve loyal subjects from the seduction of traitors, or
+      warn lawful sovereigns and civilized society of the alarming conspiracy
+      against them, I shall not think either my time thrown away, or fear the
+      dangers to which publicity might expose me were I only suspected here of
+      being an Anglican author. Before the Letters are sent to the press I
+      trust, however, to your discretion the removal of everything that might
+      produce a discovery, or indicate the source from which you have derived
+      your information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although it is not usual in private correspondence to quote authorities, I
+      have sometimes done so; but satisfied, as I hope you are, with my
+      veracity, I should have thought the frequent productions of any better
+      pledge than the word of a man of honour an insult to your feelings. I
+      have, besides, not related a fact that is not recent and well known in our
+      fashionable and political societies; and of ALL the portraits I have
+      delineated, the originals not only exist, but are yet occupied in the
+      present busy scene of the Continent, and figuring either at Courts, in
+      camps, or in Cabinets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I promised you not to pronounce in haste on persons and
+      events passing under my eyes; thirty-one months have quickly passed away
+      since I became an attentive spectator of the extraordinary transactions,
+      and of the extraordinary characters of the extraordinary Court and Cabinet
+      of St. Cloud. If my talents to delineate equal my zeal to inquire and my
+      industry to examine; if I am as able a painter as I have been an
+      indefatigable observer, you will be satisfied, and with your approbation
+      at once sanction and reward my labours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With most Princes, the supple courtier and the fawning favourite have
+      greater influence than the profound statesman and subtle Minister; and the
+      determinations of Cabinets are, therefore, frequently prepared in
+      drawing-rooms, and discussed in the closet. The politician and the
+      counsellor are frequently applauded or censured for transactions which the
+      intrigues of antechambers conceived, and which cupidity and favour gave
+      power to promulgate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very generally imagined, but falsely, that Napoleon Bonaparte
+      governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity,
+      caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole
+      consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited
+      authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and
+      his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who
+      marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that
+      disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to
+      himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the same
+      genius, unbiased and unsupported, crushed factions, erected a throne, and
+      reconstructed racks; that the same mind restored and protected
+      Christianity, and proscribed and assassinated a D&rsquo;Enghien.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these contradictions, all these virtues and vices, may be found in the
+      same person; but Bonaparte, individually or isolated, has no claim to
+      them. Except on some sudden occasions that call for immediate decision, no
+      Sovereign rules less by himself than Bonaparte; because no Sovereign is
+      more surrounded by favourites and counsellors, by needy adventurers and
+      crafty intriguers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Sovereign has more relatives to enrich, or services to recompense;
+      more evils to repair, more jealousies to dread, more dangers to fear, more
+      clamours to silence; or stands more in need of information and advice? Let
+      it be remembered that he, who now governs empires and nations, ten years
+      ago commanded only a battery; and five years ago was only a military
+      chieftain. The difference is as immense, indeed, between the sceptre of a
+      Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise legislator who
+      protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and the hireling
+      robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder at the expense
+      and misery of generations. The lower classes of all countries have
+      produced persons who have distinguished themselves as warriors; but what
+      subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence and achievements,
+      without infringing on the laws and liberties of his country, proved
+      himself worthy to reign? Besides, the education which Bonaparte received
+      was entirely military; and a man (let his innate abilities be ever so
+      surprising or excellent) who, during the first thirty years of his life,
+      has made either military or political tactics or exploits his only study,
+      certainly cannot excel equally in the Cabinet and in the camp. It would be
+      as foolish to believe, as absurd to expect, a perfection almost beyond the
+      reach of any man; and of Bonaparte more than of any one else. A man who,
+      like him, is the continual slave of his own passions, can neither be a
+      good nor a just, an independent nor immaculate master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the courtiers who, ever since Bonaparte was made First Consul, have
+      maintained a great ascendency over him, is the present Grand Marshal of
+      his Court, the general of division, Duroc. With some parts, but greater
+      presumption, this young man is destined by his master to occupy the most
+      confidential places near his person; and to his care are entrusted the
+      most difficult and secret missions at foreign Courts. When he is absent
+      from France, the liberty of the Continent is in danger; and when in the
+      Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, Bonaparte thinks himself always safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gerard Christophe Michel Duroc was born at Ponta-Mousson, in the
+      department of Meurthe, on the 25th of October, 1772, of poor but honest
+      parents. His father kept a petty chandler&rsquo;s shop; but by the interest and
+      generosity of Abbe Duroc, a distant relation, he was so well educated
+      that, in March, 1792, he became a sub-lieutenant of the artillery. In 1796
+      he served in Italy, as a captain, under General Andreossy, by whom he was
+      recommended to General l&rsquo;Espinasse, then commander of the artillery of the
+      army of Italy, who made him an aide-de-camp. In that situation Bonaparte
+      remarked his activity, and was pleased with his manners, and therefore
+      attached him as an aide-de-camp to himself. Duroc soon became a favourite
+      with his chief, and, notwithstanding the intrigues of his rivals, he has
+      continued to be so to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been asserted, by his enemies no doubt, that by implicit obedience
+      to his general&rsquo;s orders, by an unresisting complacency, and by executing,
+      without hesitation, the most cruel mandates of his superior, he has fixed
+      himself so firmly in his good opinion that he is irremovable. It has also
+      been stated that it was Duroc who commanded the drowning and burying alive
+      of the wounded French soldiers in Italy, in 1797; and that it was he who
+      inspected their poisoning in Syria, in 1799, where he was wounded during
+      the siege of St. Jean d&rsquo; Acre. He was among the few officers whom
+      Bonaparte selected for his companions when he quitted the army of Egypt,
+      and landed with him in France in October, 1799.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto Duroc had only shown himself as a brave soldier and obedient
+      officer; but after the revolution which made Bonaparte a First Consul, he
+      entered upon another career. He was then, for the first time, employed in
+      a diplomatic mission to Berlin, where he so far insinuated himself into
+      the good graces of their Prussian Majesties that the King admitted him to
+      the royal table, and on the parade at Potsdam presented him to his
+      generals and officers as an aide-de-camp &lsquo;du plus grand homme que je
+      connais; whilst the Queen gave him a scarf knitted by her own fair hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fortunate result of Duroc&rsquo;s intrigues in Prussia, in 1799, encouraged
+      Bonaparte to despatch him, in 1801, to Russia; where Alexander I. received
+      him with that noble condescension so natural, to this great and good
+      Prince. He succeeded at St. Petersburg in arranging the political and
+      commercial difficulties and disagreements between France and Russia; but
+      his proposal for a defensive alliance was declined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An anecdote is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the
+      barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the
+      inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little displeased
+      the military diplomatist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among Talleyrand&rsquo;s female agents sent to cajole Paul I. during the latter
+      part of his reign, was a Madame Bonoeil, whose real name is De F&mdash;&mdash;-.
+      When this unfortunate Prince was no more, most of the French male and
+      female intriguers in Russia thought it necessary to shift their quarters,
+      and to expect, on the territory of neutral Prussia, farther instructions
+      from Paris, where and how to proceed. Madame Bonoeil had removed to
+      Konigsberg. In the second week of May, 1801, when Duroc passed through
+      that town for St. Petersburg, he visited this lady, according to the
+      orders of Bonaparte, and obtained from her a list of the names of the
+      principal persons who were inclined to be serviceable to France, and might
+      be trusted by him upon the present occasion. By inattention or mistake she
+      had misspelled the name of one of the most trusty and active adherents of
+      Bonaparte; and Duroc, therefore, instead of addressing himself to the
+      Polish Count de S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;lz, went to the Polish Count
+      de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz. This latter was as much flattered as surprised,
+      upon seeing an aide-de-camp and envoy of the First Consul of France enter
+      his apartments, seldom visited before but by usurers, gamesters, and
+      creditors; and, on hearing the object of this visit, began to think either
+      the envoy mad or himself dreaming. Understanding, however, that money
+      would be of little consideration, if the point desired by the First Consul
+      could be carried, he determined to take advantage of this fortunate hit,
+      and invited Duroc to sup with him the same evening; when he promised him
+      he should meet with persons who could do his business, provided his
+      pecuniary resources were as ample as he had stated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Count de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz was one of the most extravagant and
+      profligate subjects that Russia had acquired by the partition of Poland.
+      After squandering away his own patrimony, he had ruined his mother and two
+      sisters, and subsisted now entirely by gambling and borrowing. Among his
+      associates, in similar circumstances with himself, was a Chevalier de
+      Gausac, a French adventurer, pretending to be an emigrant from the
+      vicinity of Toulouse. To him was communicated what had happened in the
+      morning, and his advice was asked how to act in the evening. It was soon
+      settled that De Gausac should be transformed into a Russian Count de W&mdash;&mdash;-,
+      a nephew and confidential secretary of the Chancellor of the same name;
+      and that one Caumartin, another French adventurer, who taught fencing at
+      St. Petersburg, should act the part of Prince de M&mdash;&mdash;-, an
+      aide-de-camp of the Emperor; and that all three together should strip
+      Duroc, and share the spoil. At the appointed hour Bonaparte&rsquo;s agent
+      arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered
+      him of twelve hundred thousand livres. Though not many days passed before
+      he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from denouncing the
+      impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret between himself,
+      Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses of Caumartin
+      excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who soon discovered
+      the source from which they had flowed. De Gausac had the imprudence to
+      return to this capital last spring, and is now shut up in the Temple,
+      where he probably will be forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As this loss was more ascribed to the negligence of Madame Bonoeil than to
+      the mismanagement of Duroc, or his want of penetration, his reception at
+      the Tuileries, though not so gracious as on his return from Berlin,
+      nineteen months before, was, however, such as convinced him that if he had
+      not increased, he had at the same time not lessened, the confidence of his
+      master; and, indeed, shortly afterwards, Bonaparte created him first
+      prefect of his palace, and procured him for a wife the only daughter of a
+      rich Spanish banker. Rumour, however, says that Bonaparte was not quite
+      disinterested when he commanded and concluded this match, and that the
+      fortune of Madame Duroc has paid for the expensive supper of her husband
+      with Count de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz at St. Petersburg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though the Treaty of Luneville will probably soon be buried
+      in the rubbish of the Treaty of Amiens, the influence of their parents in
+      the Cabinet of St. Cloud is as great as ever: I say their parents, because
+      the crafty ex-Bishop, Talleyrand, foreseeing the short existence of these
+      bastard diplomatic acts, took care to compliment the innocent Joseph
+      Bonaparte with a share in the parentage, although they were his own
+      exclusive offspring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Bonaparte, who in 1797, from an attorney&rsquo;s clerk at Ajaccio, in
+      Corsica, was at once transformed into an Ambassador to the Court of Rome,
+      had hardly read a treaty, or seen a despatch written, before he was
+      himself to conclude the one, and to dictate the other. Had he not been
+      supported by able secretaries, Government would soon have been convinced
+      that it is as impossible to confer talents as it is easy to give places to
+      men to whom Nature has refused parts, and on whom a scanty or neglected
+      education has bestowed no improvements. Deep and reserved, like a true
+      Italian, but vain and ambitious, like his brothers, under the character of
+      a statesman, he has only been the political puppet of Talleyrand. If he
+      has sometimes been applauded upon the stages where he has been placed, he
+      is also exposed to the hooting and hisses of the suffering multitude;
+      while the Minister pockets undisturbed all the entrance-money, and
+      conceals his wickedness and art under the cloak of Joseph; which protects
+      him besides against the anger and fury of Napoleon. No negotiation of any
+      consequence is undertaken, no diplomatic arrangements are under
+      consideration, but Joseph is always consulted, and Napoleon informed of
+      the consultation. Hence none of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Ministers have suffered less
+      from his violence and resentment than Talleyrand, who, in the political
+      department, governs him who governs France and Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As early as 1800, Talleyrand determined to throw the odium of his own
+      outrages against the law of nations upon the brother of his master. Lucien
+      Bonaparte was that year sent Ambassador to Spain, but not sharing with the
+      Minister the large profits of his appointment, his diplomatic career was
+      but short. Joseph is as greedy and as ravenous as Lucien, but not so frank
+      or indiscreet. Whether he knew or not of Talleyrand&rsquo;s immense gain by the
+      pacification at Luneville in February, 1801, he did not neglect his own
+      individual interest. The day previous to the signature of this treaty, he
+      despatched a courier to the rich army contractor, Collot, acquainting him
+      in secret of the issue of the negotiation, and ordering him at the same
+      time to purchase six millions of livres&mdash;L 250,000&mdash;in the
+      stocks on his account. On Joseph&rsquo;s arrival at Paris, Collot sent him the
+      State bonds for the sum ordered, together with a very polite letter; but
+      though he waited on the grand pacificator several times afterwards, all
+      admittance was refused, until a douceur of one million of livres&mdash;nearly
+      L 42,000&mdash;of Collot&rsquo;s private profit opened the door. In return,
+      during the discussions between France and England in the summer of 1801,
+      and in the spring of 1802, Collot was continued Joseph&rsquo;s private agent,
+      and shared with his patron, within twelve months, a clear gain of
+      thirty-two millions of livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the secret articles of the Treaty of Luneville gave Austria,
+      during the insurrection in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1802, an
+      opportunity and a right to make representations against the interference
+      of France; a circumstance which greatly displeased Bonaparte, who
+      reproached Talleyrand for his want of foresight, and of having been
+      outwitted by the Cabinet of Vienna. The Minister, on the very next day,
+      laid before his master the correspondence that had passed between him and
+      Joseph Bonaparte, during the negotiation concerning these secret articles,
+      which were found to have been entirely proposed and settled by Joseph; who
+      had been induced by his secretary and factotum (a creature of Talleyrand)
+      to adopt sentiments for which that Minister had been paid, according to
+      report, six hundred thousand livres&mdash;L25,000. Several other tricks
+      have in the same manner been played upon Joseph, who, notwithstanding, has
+      the modesty to consider himself (much to the advantage and satisfaction of
+      Talleyrand) the first statesman in Europe, and the good fortune to be
+      thought so by his brother Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a rupture with England was apprehended, in the spring of 1803,
+      Talleyrand never signed a despatch that was not previously communicated
+      to, and approved by Joseph, before its contents were sanctioned by
+      Napoleon. This precaution chiefly continued him in place when Lord
+      Whitworth left this capital,&mdash;a departure that incensed Napoleon to
+      such a degree that he entirely forgot the dignity of his rank amidst his
+      generals, a becoming deportment to the members of the diplomatic corps,
+      and his duty to his mother and brothers, who all more or less experienced
+      the effects of his violent passions. He thus accosted Talleyrand, who
+      purposely arrived late at his circle:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! the English Ambassador is gone; and we must again go to war. Were
+      my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers, I should despair
+      indeed of the issue of my contest with these insolent islanders. Many
+      believe that had I been more ably supported in my Cabinet, I should not
+      have been under the necessity of taking the field, as a rupture might have
+      been prevented.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such, Citizen First Consul!&rdquo; answered the trembling and bowing Minister,
+      &ldquo;is not the opinion of the Counsellor of State, Citizen Joseph Bonaparte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; said Napoleon, as recollecting himself, &ldquo;England wishes for
+      war, and she shall suffer for it. This shall be a war of extermination,
+      depend upon it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The name of Joseph alone moderated Napoleon&rsquo;s fury, and changed its
+      object. It is with him what the harp of David was with Saul. Talleyrand
+      knows it, and is no loser by that knowledge. I must, however, in justice,
+      say that, had Bonaparte followed his Minister&rsquo;s advice, and suffered
+      himself to be entirely guided by his counsel, all hostilities with England
+      at that time might have been avoided; her Government would have been
+      lulled into security by the cession of Malta, and some commercial
+      regulations, and her future conquest, during a time of peace, have been
+      attempted upon plans duly organized, that might have ensured success. He
+      never ceased to repeat, &ldquo;Citizen First Consul! some few years longer peace
+      with Great Britain, and the &lsquo;Te Deums&rsquo; of modern Britons for the conquest
+      and possession of Malta, will be considered by their children as the
+      funeral hymns of their liberty and independence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was upon this memorable occasion of Lord Whitworth&rsquo;s departure, that
+      Bonaparte is known to have betrayed the most outrageous acts of passion;
+      he rudely forced his mother from his closet, and forbade his own sisters
+      to approach his person; he confined Madame Bonaparte for several hours to
+      her chamber; he dismissed favourite generals; treated with ignominy
+      members of his Council of State; and towards his physician, secretaries,
+      and principal attendants, he committed unbecoming and disgraceful marks of
+      personal outrage. I have heard it affirmed that, though her husband, when
+      shutting her up in her dressing-room, put the key in his pocket, Madame
+      Napoleon found means to resent the ungallant behaviour of her spouse, with
+      the assistance of Madame Remusat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;No act of Bonaparte&rsquo;s government has occasioned so many, so
+      opposite, and so violent debates, among the remnants of revolutionary
+      factions comprising his Senate and Council of State, as the introduction
+      and execution of the religious concordat signed with the Pope. Joseph was
+      here again the ostensible negotiator, though he, on this as well as on
+      former occasions, concluded nothing that had not been prepared and
+      digested by Talleyrand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte does not in general pay much attention to the opinions of others
+      when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or coincide with
+      his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public career
+      professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the worshipper of
+      Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those who, after
+      deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their youth,
+      continued constant and firm in their apostasy. Of those who deliberated
+      concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and the
+      acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz,
+      Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real,
+      Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis,
+      Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte
+      for Christianity. Besides the sentiments of these confidential
+      counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
+      religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
+      counsellors,&mdash;all differing as much from one another as the members
+      of his own Privy Council.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing that
+      to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of the
+      priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ. She certainly is the
+      most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and of her
+      name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced Napoleon of
+      the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen centuries, had
+      preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations of republicans
+      and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very probable that her
+      representations would have been as ineffective as her piety or her
+      prayers. So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of Napoleon for the
+      Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the Pope and the
+      papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were laying waste and
+      ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both incorporated with his
+      new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his first acts of sovereignty,
+      in the name of the then sovereign people, was the confiscation of Church
+      lands and the sale of the estates of the clergy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
+      Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
+      intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
+      in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
+      of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes. The
+      former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
+      this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
+      its bosom and its doctrine. With capacity to figure as a country curate,
+      he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
+      though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
+      Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte&rsquo;s promise of
+      succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and expect
+      to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than himself.
+      It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of Pius VII. in
+      France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertake a journey that
+      has caused so much scandal among the truly faithful; and which, should
+      ever Austria regain its former supremacy in Italy, will send the present
+      Pope to end his days in a convent, and make the successors of St. Peter
+      what this Apostle was himself, a Bishop of Rome, and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bernier was a curate in La Vendee before the Revolution, and one of those
+      priests who lighted the torch of civil war in that unfortunate country,
+      under pretence of defending the throne of his King and the altars of his
+      God. He not only possessed great popularity among the lower classes, but
+      acquired so far the confidence of the Vendean chiefs that he was appointed
+      one of the supreme and directing Council of the Royalists and Chouans.
+      Even so late as the summer of 1799 he continued not only unsuspected, but
+      trusted by the insurgents in the Western departments. In the winter,
+      however, of the same year he had been gained over by Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      emissaries, and was seen at his levies in the Tuileries. It is stated that
+      General Brune made him renounce his former principles, desert his former
+      companions, and betray to the then First Consul of the French Republic the
+      secrets of the friends of lawful monarchy, of the faithful subjects of
+      Louis XVIII. His perfidy has been rewarded with one hundred and fifty
+      thousand livres in ready money, with the see of Orleans, and with a
+      promise of a cardinal&rsquo;s hat. He has also, with the Cardinals Gonsalvi,
+      Caprara, Fesch, Cambaceres, and Mauri, Bonaparte&rsquo;s promise, and, of
+      course, the expectation of the Roman tiara. He was one of the prelates who
+      officiated at the late coronation, and is now confided in as a person who
+      has too far committed himself with his legitimate Prince, and whose past
+      treachery, therefore, answers for his future fidelity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This religious concordat of the 10th September, 1801, as well as all other
+      constitutional codes emating from revolutionary authorities, proscribes
+      even in protecting. The professors and protectors of the religion of
+      universal peace, benevolence, and forgiveness banish in this concordat
+      from France forever the Cardinals Rohan and Montmorency, and the Bishop of
+      Arras, whose dutiful attachment to their unfortunate Prince would, in
+      better times and in a more just and generous nation, have been recompensed
+      with distinctions, and honoured even by magnanimous foes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Madame Napoleon was informed by her husband of the necessity of
+      choosing her almoner and chaplain, and of attending regularly the Mass,
+      she first fell a-laughing, taking it merely for a joke; the serious and
+      severe looks, and the harsh and threatening expressions of the First
+      Consul soon, however, convinced her how much she was mistaken. To evince
+      her repentance, she on the very next day attended her mother-in-law to
+      church, who was highly edified by the sudden and religious turn of her
+      daughter, and did not fail to ascribe to the efficacious interference of
+      one of her favourite saints this conversion of a profane sinner. But
+      Napoleon was not the dupe of this church-going mummery of his wife, whom
+      he ordered his spies to watch; these were unfortunate enough to discover
+      that she went to the Mass more to fill her appointments with her lovers
+      than to pray to her Saviour; and that even by the side of her mother she
+      read billets-doux and love-letters when that pious lady supposed that she
+      read her prayers, because her eyes were fixed upon her breviary. Without
+      relating to any one this discovery of his Josephine&rsquo;s frailties, Napoleon,
+      after a violent connubial fracas and reprimand, and after a solitary
+      confinement of her for six days, gave immediate orders to have the chapels
+      of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud repaired; and until these were ready,
+      Cardinal Cambaceres and Bernier, by turns, said the Mass, in her private
+      apartments; where none but selected favourites or favoured courtiers were
+      admitted. Madame Napoleon now never neglects the Mass, but if not
+      accompanied by her husband is escorted by a guard of honour, among whom
+      she knows that he has several agents watching her motions and her very
+      looks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the month of June, 1803; I dined with Viscomte de Segur, and Joseph and
+      Lucien Bonaparte were among the guests. The latter jocosely remarked with
+      what facility the French Christians had suffered themselves to be hunted
+      in and out of their temples, according to the fanaticism or policy of
+      their rulers; which he adduced as a proof of the great progress of
+      philosophy and toleration in France. A young officer of the party,
+      Jacquemont, a relation of the former husband of the present Madame Lucien,
+      observed that he thought it rather an evidence of the indifference of the
+      French people to all religion; the consequence of the great havoc the
+      tenets of infidelity and of atheism had made among the flocks of the
+      faithful. This was again denied by Bonaparte&rsquo;s aide-de-camp, Savary, who
+      observed that, had this been the case, the First Consul (who certainly was
+      as well acquainted with the religious spirit of Frenchmen as anybody else)
+      would not have taken the trouble to conclude a religious concordat, nor
+      have been at the expense of providing for the clergy. To this assertion
+      Joseph nodded an assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the dinner was over, De Segur took me to a window, expressing his
+      uneasiness at what he called the imprudence of Jacquemont, who, he
+      apprehended, from Joseph&rsquo;s silence and manner, would not escape punishment
+      for having indirectly blamed both the restorer of religion and his
+      plenipotentiary. These apprehensions were justified. On the next day
+      Jacquemont received orders to join the colonial depot at Havre; but
+      refusing to obey, by giving in his resignation as a captain, he was
+      arrested, shut up in the Temple, and afterwards transported to Cayenne or
+      Madagascar. His relatives and friends are still ignorant whether he is
+      dead or alive, and what is or has been his place of exile. To a petition
+      presented by Jacquemont&rsquo;s sister, Madame de Veaux, Joseph answered that
+      &ldquo;he never interfered with the acts of the haute police of his brother
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s Government, being well convinced both of its justice and
+      moderation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;That Bonaparte had, as far back as February, 1803 (when the
+      King of Prussia proposed to Louis XVIII. the formal renunciation of his
+      hereditary rights in favour of the First Consul), determined to assume the
+      rank and title, with the power of a Sovereign, nobody can doubt. Had it
+      not been for the war with England, he would, in the spring of that year,
+      or twelve months earlier, have proclaimed himself Emperor of the French,
+      and probably would have been acknowledged as such by all other Princes. To
+      a man so vain and so impatient, so accustomed to command and to
+      intimidate, this suspension of his favourite plan was a considerable
+      disappointment, and not a little increased his bitter and irreconcilable
+      hatred of Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as well as in foreign countries, the multitude pay homage only to
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s uninterrupted prosperity; without penetrating or considering
+      whether it be the consequence of chance or of well-digested plans; whether
+      he owes his successes to his own merit or to a blind fortune. He asserted
+      in his speech to the constitutional authorities, immediately after
+      hostilities had commenced with England, that the war would be of short
+      duration, and he firmly believed what he said. Had he by his gunboats, or
+      by his intrigues or threats, been enabled to extort a second edition of
+      the Peace of Amiens, after a warfare of some few months, all mouths would
+      have been ready to exclaim, &ldquo;Oh, the illustrious warrior! Oh, the profound
+      politician!&rdquo; Now, after three ineffectual campaigns on the coast, when the
+      extravagance and ambition of our Government have extended the contagion of
+      war over the Continent; when both our direct offers of peace, and the
+      negotiations and mediations of our allies, have been declined by, or
+      proved unavailing with, the Cabinet of St. James, the inconsistency, the
+      ignorance, and the littleness of the fortunate great man seem to be not
+      more remembered than the outrages and encroachments that have provoked
+      Austria and Russia to take the field. Should he continue victorious, and
+      be in a position to dictate another Peace of Luneville, which probably
+      would be followed by another pacific overture to or from England, mankind
+      will again be ready to call out, &ldquo;Oh, the illustrious warrior! Oh, the
+      profound politician! He foresaw, in his wisdom, that a Continental war was
+      necessary to terrify or to subdue his maritime foe; that a peace with
+      England could be obtained only in Germany; and that this war must be
+      excited by extending the power of France on the other side of the Alps.
+      Hence his coronation as a King of Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma
+      and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his
+      brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!&rdquo; Nowhere in history have I read of men of
+      sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding
+      fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans and
+      well-organized designs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only rogues can disseminate and fools believe that the disgrace of Moreau,
+      and the execution of the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, of Pichegru, and Georges, were
+      necessary as footsteps to Bonaparte&rsquo;s Imperial throne; and that without
+      the treachery of Mehee de la Touche, and the conspiracy he pretended to
+      have discovered, France would still have been ruled by a First Consul. It
+      is indeed true, that this plot is to be counted (as the imbecility of
+      Melas, which lost the battle of Marengo) among those accidents presenting
+      themselves apropos to serve the favourite of fortune in his ambitious
+      views; but without it, he would equally have been hailed an Emperor of the
+      French in May, 1804. When he came from the coast, in the preceding winter,
+      and was convinced of the impossibility of making any impression on the
+      British Islands with his flotilla, he convoked his confidential Senators,
+      who then, with Talleyrand, settled the Senatus Consultum which appeared
+      five months afterwards. Mehee&rsquo;s correspondence with Mr. Drake was then
+      known to him; but he and the Minister of Police were both unacquainted
+      with the residence and arrival of Pichegru and Georges in France, and of
+      their connection with Moreau; the particulars of which were first
+      disclosed to them in the February following, when Bonaparte had been
+      absent from his army of England six weeks. The assumption of the Imperial
+      dignity procured him another decent opportunity of offering his
+      olive-branch to those who had caused his laurels to wither, and by whom,
+      notwithstanding his abuse, calumnies, and menaces, he would have been more
+      proud to be saluted Emperor than by all the nations upon the Continent.
+      His vanity, interest, and policy, all required this last degree of
+      supremacy and elevation at that period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte had so well penetrated the weak side of Moreau&rsquo;s character that,
+      although he could not avoid doing justice to this general&rsquo;s military
+      talents and exploits, he neither esteemed him as a citizen nor dreaded him
+      as a rival. Moreau possessed great popularity; but so did Dumourier and
+      Pichegru before him: and yet neither of them had found adherents enough to
+      shake those republican governments with which they avowed themselves
+      openly discontented, and against which they secretly plotted. I heard
+      Talleyrand say, at Madame de Montlausier&rsquo;s, in the presence of fifty
+      persons, &ldquo;Napoleon Bonaparte had never anything to apprehend from General
+      Moreau, and from his popularity, even at the head of an army. Dumourier,
+      too, was at the head of an army when he revolted against the National
+      Convention; but had he not saved himself by flight his own troops would
+      have delivered him up to be punished as a traitor. Moreau, and his
+      popularity, could only be dangerous to the Bonaparte dynasty were he to
+      survive Napoleon, had not this Emperor wisely averted this danger.&rdquo; From
+      this official declaration of Napoleon&rsquo;s confidential Minister, in a
+      society of known anti-imperialists, I draw the conclusion that Moreau will
+      never more, during the present reign, return to France. How very feeble,
+      and how badly advised must this general have been, when, after his
+      condemnation to two years&rsquo; imprisonment, he accepted a perpetual exile,
+      and renounced all hopes of ever again entering his own country. In the
+      Temple, or in any other prison, if he had submitted to the sentence
+      pronounced against him, he would have caused Bonaparte more uneasiness
+      than when at liberty, and been more a point of rally to his adherents and
+      friends than when at his palace of Grosbois, because compassion and pity
+      must have invigorated and sharpened their feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If report be true, however, he did not voluntarily exchange imprisonment
+      for exile; racks were shown him; and by the act of banishment was placed a
+      poisonous draught. This report gains considerable credit when it is
+      remembered that, immediately after his condemnation, Moreau furnished his
+      apartments in the Temple in a handsome manner, so as to be lodged well, if
+      not comfortably, with his wife and child, whom, it is said, he was not
+      permitted to see before he had accepted Bonaparte&rsquo;s proposal of
+      transportation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be objected to this supposition that the man in power, who did not
+      care about the barefaced murder of the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, and the secret
+      destruction of Pichegru, could neither much hesitate, nor be very
+      conscientious about adding Moreau to the number of his victims. True, but
+      the assassin in authority is also generally a politician. The untimely end
+      of the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien and of Pichegru was certainly lamented and deplored
+      by the great majority of the French people; but though they had many who
+      pitied their fate, but few had any relative interest to avenge it; whilst
+      in the assassination of Moreau, every general, every officer, and every
+      soldier of his former army, might have read the destiny reserved for
+      himself by that chieftain, who did not conceal his preference of those who
+      had fought under him in Italy and Egypt, and his mistrust and jealousy of
+      those who had vanquished under Moreau in Germany; numbers of whom had
+      already perished at St. Domingo, or in the other colonies, or were
+      dispersed in separate and distant garrisons of the mother country. It has
+      been calculated that of eighty-four generals who made, under Moreau, the
+      campaign of 1800, and who survived the Peace of Lundville, sixteen had
+      been killed or died at St. Domingo, four at Guadeloupe, ten in Cayenne,
+      nine at Ile de France, and eleven at l&rsquo;Ile Reunion and in Madagascar. The
+      mortality among the officers and men has been in proportion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An anecdote is related of Pichegru, which does honour to the memory of
+      that unfortunate general. Fouche paid him a visit in prison the day before
+      his death, and offered him &ldquo;Bonaparte&rsquo;s commission as a Field-marshal, and
+      a diploma as a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, provided he would
+      turn informer against Moreau, of whose treachery against himself in 1797
+      he was reminded. On the other hand, he was informed that, in consequence
+      of his former denials, if he persisted in his refractory conduct, he
+      should never more appear before any judge, but that the affairs of State
+      and the safety of the country required that he should be privately
+      despatched in his gaol.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; answered this virtuous and indignant warrior, &ldquo;you will spare my
+      life only upon condition that I prove myself unworthy to live. As this is
+      the case, my choice is made without hesitation; I am prepared to become
+      your victim, but I will never be numbered among your accomplices. Call in
+      your executioners; I am ready to die as I have lived, a man of honour, and
+      an irreproachable citizen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Within twenty-four hours after this answer, Pichegru was no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804,
+      in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even
+      by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown. Some
+      assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Italian guard;
+      others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d&rsquo;Elite; and others again,
+      that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat,
+      hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the
+      executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by
+      riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol. Certain it is
+      that Murat was the first, and Louis Bonaparte the second in command, on
+      this dreadful occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Thanks to Talleyrand&rsquo;s political emigration, our Government
+      has never been in ignorance of the characters and foibles of the leading
+      members among the emigrants in England. Otto, however, finished their
+      picture, but added, some new groups to those delineated by his
+      predecessor. It was according to his plan that the expedition of Mehee de
+      la Touche was undertaken, and it was in following his instructions that
+      the campaign of this traitor succeeded so well in Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the Ministry of Vergennes, of Montmorin, and of Delessart, Mehee had
+      been employed as a spy in Russia, Sweden, and Poland, and acquitted
+      himself perfectly to the satisfaction of his masters. By some accident or
+      other, Delessart discovered, however, in December, 1791, that he had,
+      while pocketing the money of the Cabinet of Versailles, sold its secrets
+      to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg. He, of course, was no longer trusted as
+      a spy, and therefore turned a Jacobin, and announced himself to Brissot as
+      a persecuted patriot. All the calumnies against this Minister in Brissot&rsquo;s
+      daily paper, Le Patriote Francois, during January, February, and March,
+      1792, were the productions of Mehee&rsquo;s malicious heart and able pen. Even
+      after they had sent Delessart a State prisoner to Orleans, his inveteracy
+      continued, and in September the same year he went to Versailles to enjoy
+      the sight of the murder of his former master. Some go so far as to say
+      that the assassins were headed by this monster, who aggravated cruelty by
+      insult, and informed the dying Minister of the hands that stabbed him, and
+      to whom he was indebted for a premature death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these and other infamous and barbarous deeds, Talleyrand was not a
+      stranger when he made Mehee his secret agent, and entrusted him with the
+      mission to England. He took, therefore, such steps that neither his
+      confidence could be betrayed, nor his money squandered. Mehee had
+      instructions how to proceed in Great Britain, but he was ignorant of the
+      object Government had in view by his mission; and though large sums were
+      promised if successful, and if he gave satisfaction by his zeal and
+      discretion, the money advanced him was a mere trifle, and barely
+      sufficient to keep him from want. He was, therefore, really distressed,
+      when he fixed upon some necessitous and greedy emigrants for his
+      instruments to play on the credulity of the English Ministers in some of
+      their unguarded moments. Their generosity in forbearing to avenge upon the
+      deluded French exiles the slur attempted to be thrown upon their official
+      capacity, and the ridicule intended to be cast on their private
+      characters, has been much approved and admired here by all liberal-minded
+      persons; but it has also much disappointed Bonaparte and Talleyrand, who
+      expected to see these emigrants driven from the only asylum which
+      hospitality has not refused to their misfortunes and misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mehee had been promised by Talleyrand double the amount of the sums which
+      he could swindle from your Government; but though he did more mischief to
+      your country than was expected in this, and though he proved that he had
+      pocketed upwards of ten thousand English guineas, the wages of his infamy,
+      when he hinted about the recompense he expected here, Durant, Talleyrand&rsquo;s
+      chef du bureau, advised him, as a friend, not to remind the Minister of
+      his presence in France, as Bonaparte never pardoned a Septembrizer, and
+      the English guineas he possessed might be claimed and seized as national
+      property, to compensate some of the sufferers by the unprovoked war with
+      England. In vain did he address himself to his fellow labourer in
+      revolutionary plots, the Counsellor of State, Real, who had been the
+      intermedium between him and Talleyrand, when he was first enlisted among
+      the secret agents; instead of receiving money he heard threats; and,
+      therefore, with as good grace as he could, he made the best of his
+      disappointment; he sported a carriage, kept a mistress, went to
+      gambling-houses, and is now in a fair way to be reduced to the status quo
+      before his brilliant exploits in Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Real, besides the place of a Counsellor of State, occupies also the office
+      of a director of the internal police. Having some difference with my
+      landlord, I was summoned to appear before him at the prefecture of the
+      police. My friend, M. de Sab&mdash;&mdash;-r, formerly a counsellor of the
+      Parliament at Rouen, happened to be with me when the summons was
+      delivered, and offered to accompany me, being acquainted with Real. Though
+      thirty persons were waiting in the antechamber at our arrival, no sooner
+      was my friend&rsquo;s name announced than we were admitted, and I obtained not
+      only more justice than I expected, or dared to claim, but an invitation to
+      Madame Real&rsquo;s tea-party the same evening. This justice and this politeness
+      surprised me, until my friend showed me an act of forgery in his
+      possession, committed by Real in 1788, when an advocate of the Parliament,
+      and for which the humanity of my friend alone prevented him from being
+      struck off the rolls, and otherwise punished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I conceived my usual societies and coteries could not approve my
+      attendance at the house of such a personage, I was intent upon sending an
+      apology to Madame Real. My friend, however, assured me that I should meet
+      in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I little
+      expected to see associating together. I went late, and found the assembly
+      very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated Princesses Joseph
+      and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame Roederer, the cidevant
+      Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont. They were conversing with M.
+      Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a ci-devant lackey) Collot, the
+      ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the legislator Martin, a ci-devant
+      porter: several groups in the several apartments were composed of a
+      similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant nobles and ci-devant valets, of
+      ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses, Countesses and Baronesses, and of
+      ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and poissardes. Round a gambling-table,
+      by the side of the ci-devant Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame
+      Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant shoeblack, has, by the purchase of
+      national property, made a fortune of nine millions of livres&mdash;L375,000.
+      Opposite them were seated the ci-devant Prince de Chalais, and the present
+      Prince Cambaceres with the ci-devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame
+      Fauve, the daughter of a fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant
+      barber. In another room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with
+      the spy Mehee de la Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche&rsquo;s
+      secretary, Desmarets, the son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years
+      a known spy. When I was just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot,
+      and her sister, Madame de Soubray, joined me. You have perhaps known them
+      in England, where, before their marriage, they resided for five years with
+      their parents, the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired
+      by the loungers in Bond Street. The one married for money, Gillot, a
+      ci-devant drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has,
+      as a general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a
+      ci-devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
+      who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me. I was
+      handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase, Madame de
+      Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a man whom she
+      detested, and wished to avoid. We had hardly turned round, when Mehee
+      offered her his arm, and she exclaimed with indignation, &ldquo;How dare you,
+      infamous wretch, approach me, when I have forbidden you ever to speak to
+      me? Had you been reduced to become a highwayman, or a housebreaker, I
+      might have pitied your infamy; but a spy is a villain who aggravates guilt
+      by cowardice and baseness, and can inspire no noble soul with any other
+      sentiment but abhorrence, and the most sovereign contempt.&rdquo; Without being
+      disconcerted, Mehee silently returned to the company, amidst bursts of
+      laughter from fifty servants, and as many masters, waiting for their
+      carriages. M. de Cetto was among the latter, but, though we all fixed our
+      eyes steadfastly upon him, no alteration could be seen on his diplomatic
+      countenance: his face must surely be made of brass or his heart of marble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The day on which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an
+      Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband&rsquo;s
+      Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable
+      in her life. After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the
+      drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library,
+      where her husband shut her up and confined her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discipline of the Court of St. Cloud is as singular as its composition
+      is unique. It is, by the regulation of Napoleon, entirely military. From
+      the Empress to her lowest chambermaid, from the Emperor&rsquo;s first
+      aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or negligence
+      is punished with confinement, either public or private. In the former case
+      the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in the latter they
+      are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in the dark galleries
+      at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens, where they are guarded
+      day and night by sentries, who answer for their persons, and that nobody
+      visits them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
+      Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
+      with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from their
+      principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
+      Imperial couple. She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn, consulted
+      her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame de
+      Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
+      desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry and
+      honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not
+      therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
+      vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
+      overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
+      ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
+      level with their circumstances. These, however, either suspecting her
+      intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
+      disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
+      to encounter. Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
+      following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
+      French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour to
+      wait on his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional
+      republican authorities to present their homage as subjects, Napoleon asked
+      his Josephine who were the persons, of both sexes, she had engaged,
+      according to his carte blanche given her, as necessary and as unavoidable
+      decorations of the drawing-room of an Emperor and Empress, as thrones and
+      as canopies of State. She referred him to Madame Remusat, who, though but
+      half-dressed, was instantly ordered to appear before him. This lady avowed
+      that his grand master of the ceremonies, De Segur, had been entrusted by
+      her with the whole arrangement, but that she feared that he had not yet
+      been able to complete the full establishment of the Imperial Court. The
+      aide-de-camp Rapp was then despatched after De Segur, who, as usual,
+      presented himself smiling and cringing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give me the list,&rdquo; said Napoleon, &ldquo;of the ladies and gentlemen you have
+      no doubt engaged for our household.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May it please Your Majesty,&rdquo; answered De Segur, trembling with fear, &ldquo;I
+      humbly supposed that they were not requisite before the day of Your
+      Majesty&rsquo;s coronation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You supposed!&rdquo; retorted Napoleon. &ldquo;How dare you suppose differently from
+      our commands? Is the Emperor of the Great Nation not to be encompassed
+      with a more numerous retinue, or with more lustre, than a First Consul? Do
+      you not see the immense difference between the Sovereign Monarch of an
+      Empire, and the citizen chief magistrate of a commonwealth? Are there not
+      starving nobles in my empire enough to furnish all the Courts in Europe
+      with attendants, courtiers, and valets? Do you not believe that with a
+      nod, with a single nod, I might have them all prostrated before my throne?
+      What can, then, have occasioned this impertinent delay?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sire!&rdquo; answered De Segur, &ldquo;it is not the want of numbers, but the
+      difficulty of the choice among them. I will never recommend a single
+      individual upon whom I cannot depend; or who, on some future day, may
+      expose me to the greatest of all evils, the displeasure of my Prince.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; continued Napoleon, &ldquo;what is to be done to-day that I may augment
+      the number of my suite, and by it impose upon the gaping multitude and the
+      attending deputations?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Command,&rdquo; said De Segur, &ldquo;all the officers
+      of Your Majesty&rsquo;s staff, and of the staff of the Governor of Paris,
+      General Murat, to surround Your Majesty&rsquo;s sacred person, and order them to
+      accoutre themselves in the most shining and splendid manner possible. The
+      presence of so many military men will also, in a political point of view,
+      be useful. It will lessen the pretensions of the constituted authorities,
+      by telling them indirectly, &lsquo;It is not to your Senatus Consultum, to your
+      decrees, or to your votes, that I am indebted for my present Sovereignty;
+      I owe it exclusively to my own merit and valour, and to the valour of my
+      brave officers and men, to whose arms I trust more than to your
+      counsels.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This advice obtained Napoleon&rsquo;s entire approbation, and was followed. De
+      Segur was permitted to retire, but when Madame Remusat made a curtsey also
+      to leave the room, she was stopped with his terrible &lsquo;aux arrets&rsquo; and left
+      under the care and responsibility of his aide-de-camp, Lebrun, who saw her
+      safe into her room, at the door of which he placed two grenadiers.
+      Napoleon then went out, ordering his wife, at her peril, to be in time,
+      ready and brilliantly dressed, for the drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dreading the consequences of her husband&rsquo;s wrath, Madame Napoleon was not
+      only punctual, but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and
+      ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her beauty,
+      honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity. She thought that even
+      in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation. When all the
+      troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when Senators,
+      legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a model of
+      female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied him in
+      silence through six different apartments before he came to her library,
+      where he surlily ordered her to enter and to remain until further orders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have I done, Sire! to deserve such treatment?&rdquo; exclaimed Josephine,
+      trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If,&rdquo; answered Napoleon, &ldquo;Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool
+      of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me:
+      Had not De Segur fortunately for him&mdash;had the ingenuity to extricate
+      us from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had
+      brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of my
+      emperorship. Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to divert
+      you, but you must remain where you are until I am inclined to release
+      you.&rdquo; So saying, Napoleon locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was near two o&rsquo;clock in the afternoon when she was thus shut up.
+      Remembering the recent flattery of her courtiers, and comparing it with
+      the unfeeling treatment of her husband, she found herself so much the more
+      unfortunate, as the expressions of the former were regarded by her as
+      praise due to her merit, while the unkindness of the latter was
+      unavailingly resented as the undeserved oppression of a capricious despot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Business, or perhaps malice, made Napoleon forget to send her any dinner;
+      and when, at eight o&rsquo;clock, his brothers and sisters came, according to
+      invitation, to take tea, he said coldly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apropos, I forgot it. My wife has not dined yet; she is busy, I suppose,
+      in her philosophical meditations in her study.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Louis Bonaparte, her daughter, flew directly towards the study, and
+      her mother could scarcely, for her tears, inform her that&mdash;she was a
+      prisoner, and that her husband was her gaoler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, Sire!&rdquo; said Madame Louis, returning, &ldquo;even this remarkable day is a
+      day of mourning for my poor mother!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She deserves worse,&rdquo; answered Napoleon, &ldquo;but, for your sake, she shall be
+      released; here is the key, let her out.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Napoleon was, however, not in a situation to wish to appear before
+      her envious brothers and sisters-in-law. Her eyes were so swollen with
+      crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those Imperial
+      robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a certain
+      preservative against sorrow and affliction. At nine o&rsquo;clock, however,
+      another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave her the
+      choice either to accompany him back to the study or to join the family
+      party of the Bonapartes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In deploring her mother&rsquo;s situation, Madame Louis Bonaparte informed her
+      former governess, Madame Cam&mdash;-n, of these particulars, which I heard
+      her relate at Madame de M&mdash;&mdash;r&rsquo;s, almost verbatim as I report
+      them to you. Such, and other scenes, nearly of the same description, are
+      neither rare nor singular, in the most singular Court that ever existed in
+      civilized Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though Government suffer a religious, or, rather,
+      anti-religious liberty of the Press, the authors who libel or ridicule the
+      Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic, religion, are excluded from
+      all prospect of advancement, or if in place, are not trusted or liked.
+      Cardinal Caprara, the nuncio of the Pope, proposed last year, in a long
+      memorial, the same severe restrictions on the discussions or publications
+      in religious matters as were already ordered in those concerning politics.
+      But both Bonaparte and his Minister in the affairs of the Church,
+      Portalis, refused the introduction of what they called a tyranny on the
+      conscience. Caprara then addressed himself to the ex-Bishop Talleyrand,
+      who, on this occasion, was more explicit than he generally is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bonaparte,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;rules not only over a fickle, but a gossiping
+      (bavard) people, whom he has prudently forbidden all conversation and
+      writing concerning government of the State. They would soon (accustomed as
+      they are, since the Revolution, to verbal and written debates) be tired of
+      talking about fine weather or about the opera. To occupy them and their
+      attention, some ample subject of diversion was necessary, and religion was
+      surrendered to them at discretion; because, enlightened as the world now
+      is, even athiests or Christian fanatics can do but little harm to society.
+      They may spend rivers of ink, but they will be unable to shed a drop of
+      blood.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; answered the Cardinal, &ldquo;but only to a certain degree. The
+      licentiousness of the Press, with regard to religious matters, does it not
+      also furnish infidelity with new arms to injure the faith? And have not
+      the horrors from which France has just escaped proved the danger and evil
+      consequences of irreligion, and the necessity of encouraging and
+      protecting Christianity? By the recall of the clergy, and by the religious
+      concordat, Bonaparte has shown himself convinced of this truth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So he is,&rdquo; interrupted Talleyrand; &ldquo;but he abhors intoleration and
+      persecution&rdquo; (not in politics). &ldquo;I shall, however, to please Your
+      Eminence, lay the particulars of your conversation before him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some time afterwards, when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed about
+      some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the Senators
+      Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of the
+      senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and
+      remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal
+      Caprara for two hours. What was determined on this occasion has not
+      transpired, as even the Cardinal, who is not the most discreet person when
+      provoked, and his religious zeal gets the better of his political
+      prudence, has remained silent, though seemingly contented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two rather insignificant authors, of the name of Varennes and Beaujou, who
+      published some scandalous libels on Christianity, have since been taken
+      up, and after some months&rsquo; imprisonment in the Temple been condemned to
+      transportation to Cayenne for life,&mdash;not as infidels or atheists, but
+      as conspirators against the State, in consequence of some unguarded
+      expressions which prejudice or ill-will alone would judge connected with
+      politics. Nothing is now permitted to be printed against religion but with
+      the author&rsquo;s name; but on affixing his name, he may abuse the worship and
+      Gospel as much as he pleases. Since the example of severity alluded to
+      above, however, this practice is on the decline. Even Pigault-Lebrun, a
+      popular but immoral novel writer, narrowly escaped lately a trip to
+      Cayenne for one of his blasphemous publications, and owes to the
+      protection of Madame Murat exclusively that he was not sent to keep
+      Varennes and Beaujou company. Some years ago, when Madame Murat was
+      neither so great nor so rich as at present, he presented her with a copy
+      of his works, and she had been unfashionable enough not only to remember
+      the compliment, but wished to return it by nominating him her private
+      secretary; which, however, the veto of Napoleon prevented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Napoleon Bonaparte&rsquo;s religious sentiments, opinions are not divided in
+      France. The influence over him of the petty, superstitious Cardinal
+      Caprara is, therefore, inexplicable. This prelate has forced from him
+      assent to transactions which had been refused both to his mother and his
+      brother Joseph, who now often employ the Cardinal with success, where they
+      either dare not or will not show themselves. It is true His Eminence is
+      not easily rebuked, but returns to the charge unabashed by new repulses;
+      and be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a man by whom
+      Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no insignificant
+      favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites cunning with
+      devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to corruption as
+      tormented by ambition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As most ecclesiastical promotions passed through his pure and
+      disinterested hands, Madame Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Portalis, who also
+      wanted some douceurs for their extraordinary expenses, united together
+      last spring to remove him from France. Napoleon was cajoled to nominate
+      him a grand almoner of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Cardinal set out for
+      Milan. He was, however, artful enough to convince his Sovereign of the
+      propriety of having his grand almoner by his side; and he is, therefore,
+      obliged to this intrigue of his enemies that he now disposes of the
+      benefices in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as those of the French Empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the Pope&rsquo;s residence in this capital, His Holiness often made use
+      of Cardinal Caprara in his secret negotiations with Bonaparte; and
+      whatever advantages were obtained by the Roman Pontiff for the Gallican
+      Church His Eminence almost extorted; for he never desisted, where his
+      interest or pride were concerned, till he had succeeded. It is said that
+      one day last January, after having been for hours exceedingly teasing and
+      troublesome, Bonaparte lost his patience, and was going to treat His
+      Eminence as he frequently does his relatives, his Ministers, and
+      counsellors,&mdash;that is to say, to kick him from his presence; but
+      suddenly recollecting himself, he said: &ldquo;Cardinal, remain here in my
+      closet until my return, when I shall have more time to listen to what you
+      have to relate.&rdquo; It was at ten o&rsquo;clock in the morning, and a day of great
+      military audience and grand review. In going out he put the key in his
+      pocket, and told the guards in his antechamber to pay no attention if they
+      should hear any noise in his closet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dark before the review was over, and Bonaparte had a large party to
+      dinner. When his guests retired, he went into his wife&rsquo;s drawing-room,
+      where one of the Pope&rsquo;s chamberlains waited on him with the information
+      that His Holiness was much alarmed about the safety of Cardinal Caprara,
+      of whom no account could be obtained, even with the assistance of the
+      police, to whom application had been made, since His Eminence had so
+      suddenly disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! how absent I am,&rdquo; answered Napoleon, as with surprise; &ldquo;I entirely
+      forgot that I left the Cardinal in my closet this morning. I will go
+      myself and make an apology for my blunder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His Eminence, quite exhausted, was found fast asleep; but no sooner was he
+      a little recovered than he interrupted Bonaparte&rsquo;s affected apology with
+      the repetition of the demand he had made in the morning; and so well was
+      Napoleon pleased with him, for neglecting his personal inconvenience only
+      to occupy himself with the affairs of his Sovereign, that he consented to
+      what was asked, and in laying his hand upon the shoulders of the prelate,
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Faithful Minister! were every Prince as well served as your Sovereign is
+      by you, many evils might be prevented, and much good effected.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The same evening Duroc brought him, as a present, a snuffbox with
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s portrait, set round with diamonds, worth one thousand louis
+      d&rsquo;or. The adventures of this day certainly did not lessen His Eminence in
+      the favour of Napoleon or of Pius VII.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last November, some not entirely unknown persons intended to amuse
+      themselves at the Cardinal&rsquo;s expense. At seven o&rsquo;clock one evening, a
+      young Abbe presented himself at the Cardinal&rsquo;s house, Hotel de Montmorin,
+      Rue Plumet, as by appointment of His Eminence, and was, by his secretary,
+      ushered into the study and asked to wait there. Hardly half an hour
+      afterwards, two persons, pretending to be agents of the police, arrived
+      just as the Cardinal&rsquo;s carriage had stopped. They informed him that the
+      woman introduced into his house in the dress of an Abby was connected with
+      a gang of thieves and housebreakers, and demanded his permission to arrest
+      her. He protested that, except the wife of his porter, no woman in any
+      dress whatever could be in his house, and that, to convince themselves,
+      they were very welcome to accompany his valet-de-chambre into every room
+      they wished to see. To the great surprise of his servant, a very pretty
+      girl was found in the bed of His Eminence&rsquo;s bed-chamber, which joined his
+      study, who, though the pretended police agents insisted on her getting up,
+      refused, under pretence that she was there waiting for her &lsquo;bon ami&rsquo;, the
+      Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p078" id="p078"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="p078.jpg (84K)" src="images/p078.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      His Eminence was no sooner told of this than he shut the gate of his
+      house, after sending his secretary to the commissary of police of the
+      section. In the meantime, both the police agents and the girl entreated
+      him to let them out, as the whole was merely a badinage; but he remained
+      inflexible, and they were all three carried by the real police commissary
+      to prison.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon a complaint made by His Eminence to Bonaparte, the Police Minister,
+      Fouche, received orders to have those who had dared thus to violate the
+      sacred character of the representative of the Holy Pontiff immediately,
+      and without further ceremony, transported to Cayenne. The Cardinal
+      demanded, and obtained, a process verbal of what had occurred, and of the
+      sentence on the culprits, to be laid before his Sovereign. As Eugene de
+      Beauharnais interested himself so much for the individuals involved in
+      this affair as both to implore Bonaparte&rsquo;s pardon and the Cardinal&rsquo;s
+      interference for them, many were inclined to believe that he was in the
+      secret, if not the contriver of this unfortunate joke. This supposition
+      gained credit when, after all his endeavours to save them proved vain, he
+      sent them seventy-two livres L 3,000&mdash;to Rochefort, that they might,
+      on their arrival at Cayenne, be able to buy a plantation. He procured them
+      also letters to the Governor, Victor Hughes, recommending that they should
+      be treated differently from other transported persons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I was particularly attentive in observing the countenances
+      and demeanour of the company at the last levee which Madame Napoleon
+      Bonaparte held, previous to her departure with her husband to meet the
+      Pope at Fontainebleau. I had heard from good authority that &ldquo;to those
+      whose propensities were known, Duroc&rsquo;s information that the Empress was
+      visible was accompanied with a kind of admonitory or courtly hint, that
+      the strictest decency in dress and manners, and a conversation chaste, and
+      rather of an unusually modest turn, would be highly agreeable to their
+      Sovereigns, in consideration of the solemn occasion of a Sovereign
+      Pontiff&rsquo;s arrival in France,&mdash;an occurrence that had not happened for
+      centuries, and probably would not happen for centuries to come.&rdquo; I went
+      early, and was well rewarded for my punctuality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There came the Senator Fouche, handing his amiable and chaste spouse,
+      walking with as much gravity as formerly, when a friar, he marched in a
+      procession. Then presented themselves the Senators Sieyes and Roederer,
+      with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the
+      confessor of the latter. Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before I
+      had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of
+      fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin. She was
+      followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was
+      sighing deeply and loudly. After her came limping the godly Talleyrand,
+      dragging his pure moiety by his side, both with downcast and edifying
+      looks. The Christian patriots, Gravina and Lima, Dreyer and Beust, Dalberg
+      and Cetto, Malsburgh and Pappenheim, with the Catholic Schimmelpenninck
+      and Mohammed Said Halel Effendi,&mdash;all presented themselves as
+      penitent sinners imploring absolutions, after undergoing mortifications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it would become tedious and merely a repetition, were I to depict
+      separately the figures and characters of all the personages at this
+      politico-comical masquerade. Their conversation was, however, more
+      uniform, more contemptible, and more laughable, than their accoutrements
+      and grimaces were ridiculous. To judge from what they said, they belonged
+      no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and they
+      considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the eve of
+      the day of the Last Judgment. The truly devout Madame Napoleon spoke with
+      rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the vespers, of
+      Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII., His vicar. Had
+      not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic commentaries of
+      her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry out, as soon as she
+      had finished, &ldquo;Amen! Amen! Amen!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Napoleon had placed himself between the old Cardinal de Bellois and the
+      not young Cardinal Bernier, so as to prevent the approach of any profane
+      sinner or unrepentant infidel. Round him and their clerical chiefs, all
+      the curates and grand vicars, almoners and chaplains of the Court, and the
+      capitals of the Princess, Princesses, and grand officers of State, had
+      formed a kind of cordon. &ldquo;Had,&rdquo; said the young General Kellerman to me,
+      &ldquo;Bonaparte always been encompassed by troops of this description, he might
+      now have sung hymns as a saint in heaven, but he would never have reigned
+      as an Emperor upon earth.&rdquo; This indiscreet remark was heard by Louis
+      Bonaparte, and on the next morning Kellerman received orders to join the
+      army in Hanover, where he was put under the command of a general younger
+      than himself. He would have been still more severely punished, had not his
+      father, the Senator (General Kellerman), been in so great favour at the
+      Court of St. Cloud, and so much protected by Duroc, who had made, in 1792,
+      his first campaign under this officer, then commander-in-chief of the army
+      of the Ardennes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this devout assembly separated, which was by courtesy an hour earlier
+      than usual, I expected every moment to hear a chorus of horse-laughs,
+      because I clearly perceived that all of them were tired of their assumed
+      parts, and, with me, inclined to be gay at the expense of their
+      neighbours. But they all remembered also that they were watched by spies,
+      and that an imprudent look or an indiscreet word, gaiety instead of
+      gravity, noise when silence was commanded, might be followed by an airing
+      in the wilderness of Cayenne. They, therefore, all called out, &ldquo;Coachman,
+      to our hotel!&rdquo; as if to say, &ldquo;We will to-day, in compliment to the
+      new-born Christian zeal of our Sovereigns, finish our evening as piously
+      as we have begun it.&rdquo; But no sooner were they out of sight of the palace
+      than they hurried to the scenes of dissipation, all endeavouring, in the
+      debauchery and excesses so natural to them, to forget their unnatural
+      affectation and hypocrisy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well you know the standard of the faith even of the members of the
+      Bonaparte family. Two days before this Christian circle at Madame
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s, Madame de Chateaureine, with three other ladies, visited the
+      Princesse Borghese. Not seeing a favourite parrot they had often
+      previously admired, they inquired what was become of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the poor creature!&rdquo; answered the Princess; &ldquo;I have disposed of it, as
+      well as of two of my monkeys. The Emperor has obliged me to engage an
+      almoner and two chaplains, and it would be too extravagant in me to keep
+      six useless animals in my hotel. I must now submit to hearing the
+      disgusting howlings of my almoner instead of the entertaining chat of my
+      parrot, and to see the awkward bows and kneelings of my chaplains instead
+      of the amusing capering of my monkeys. Add to this, that I am forced to
+      transform into a chapel my elegant and tasty boudoir, on the ground-floor,
+      where I have passed so many delicious tete-a-tetes. Alas! what a change!
+      what a shocking fashion, that we are now all again to be Christians!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Notwithstanding what was inserted in our public prints to
+      the contrary, the reception Bonaparte experienced from his army of England
+      in June last year, the first time he presented himself to them as an
+      Emperor, was far from such as flattered either his vanity or views. For
+      the first days, some few solitary voices alone accompanied the &ldquo;Vive
+      l&rsquo;Empereur!&rdquo; of his generals, and of his aides-de-camp. This indifference,
+      or, as he called it, mutinous spirit, was so much the more provoking as it
+      was unexpected. He did not, as usual, ascribe it to the emissaries or gold
+      of England, but to the secret adherents of Pichegru and Moreau amongst the
+      brigades or divisions that had served under these unfortunate generals. He
+      ordered, in consequence, his Minister Berthier to make out a list of all
+      these corps. Having obtained this, he separated them by ordering some to
+      Italy, others to Holland, and the rest to the frontiers of Spain and
+      Germany. This act of revenge or jealousy was regarded, both by the
+      officers and men, as a disgrace and as a doubt thrown out against their
+      fidelity, and the murmur was loud and general. In consequence of this,
+      some men were shot, and many more arrested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Observing, however, that severity had not the desired effect, Bonaparte
+      suddenly changed his conduct, released the imprisoned, and rewarded with
+      the crosses of his Legion of Honour every member of the so lately
+      suspected troops who had ever performed any brilliant or valorous exploits
+      under the proscribed generals. He even incorporated among his own
+      bodyguards and guides men who had served in the same capacity under these
+      rival commanders, and numbers of their children were received in the
+      Prytanees and military free schools. The enthusiastic exclamation that
+      soon greeted his ears convinced him that he had struck upon the right
+      string of his soldiers&rsquo; hearts. Men who, some few days before, wanted only
+      the signal of a leader to cut an Emperor they hated to pieces, would now
+      have contended who should be foremost to shed their last drop of blood for
+      a chief they adored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This affected liberality towards the troops who had served under his
+      rivals roused some slight discontent among those to whom he was chiefly
+      indebted for his own laurels. But if he knew the danger of reducing to
+      despair slighted men with arms in their hands, he also was well aware of
+      the equal danger of enduring licentiousness or audacity among troops who
+      had, on all occasions, experienced his preference and partiality; and he
+      gave a sanguinary proof of his opinion on this subject at the grand parade
+      of the 12th of July, 1804, preparatory to the grand fete of the 14th.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grenadier of the 21st Regiment (which was known in Italy under the name
+      of the Terrible), in presetting arms to him, said: &ldquo;Sire! I have served
+      under you four campaigns, fought under you in ten battles or engagements;
+      have received in your service seven wounds, and am not a member of your
+      Legion of Honour; whilst many who served under Moreau, and are not able to
+      show a scratch from an enemy, have that distinction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte instantly ordered this man to be shot by his own comrades in the
+      front of the regiment. The six grenadiers selected to fire, seeming to
+      hesitate, he commanded the whole corps to lay down their arms, and after
+      being disbanded, to be sent to the different colonial depots. To humiliate
+      them still more, the mutinous grenadier was shot by the gendarmes. When
+      the review was over, &ldquo;Vive l&rsquo;Empereur!&rdquo; resounded from all parts, and his
+      popularity among the troops has since rather increased than diminished.
+      Nobody can deny that Bonaparte possesses a great presence of mind, an
+      undaunted firmness, and a perfect knowledge of the character of the people
+      over whom he reigns. Could but justice and humanity be added to his other
+      qualities, but, unfortunately for my nation, I fear that the answer of
+      General Mortier to a remark of a friend of mine on this subject is not
+      problematical: &ldquo;Had,&rdquo; said this Imperial favourite, &ldquo;Napoleon Bonaparte
+      been just and humane, he would neither have vanquished nor reigned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All these scenes occurred before Bonaparte, seated on a throne, received
+      the homage, as a Sovereign, of one hundred and fifty thousand warriors,
+      who now bowed as subjects, after having for years fought for liberty and
+      equality, and sworn hatred to all monarchical institutions; and who
+      hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals. What
+      an inconsistency! The splendour and show that accompanied him everywhere,
+      the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the decorations of
+      the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he distributed with
+      bombastic speeches among troops&mdash;to whom those political impositions
+      and social cajoleries were novelties&mdash;made such an impression upon
+      them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover, brave as
+      your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and
+      independence of your country. The heads and imagination of the soldiers, I
+      know from the best authority, were then so exalted that, though they might
+      have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or routed. I
+      pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and happiness
+      will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled people of
+      soldiers,&mdash;easy tools in the hands of every impostor or mountebank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of
+      grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed
+      with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other great
+      Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your
+      country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such lightness and
+      such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his boasts and defied
+      his threats. Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of St. James more
+      opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the impertinence of his
+      menaces, and the folly of his parade for the invasion of your country,
+      than by declaring all the ports containing his invincible armada in a
+      state of blockade. I have heard from an officer who witnessed his fury
+      when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat from before St. Jean
+      d&rsquo;Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at Boulogne when a despatch
+      informed him of this circumstance, that it was nothing compared to the
+      violent rage into which he flew upon reading it. For an hour afterwards
+      not even his brother Joseph dared approach him; and his passion got so far
+      the better of his policy, that what might still have long been concealed
+      from the troops was known within the evening to the whole camp. He
+      dictated to his secretary orders for his Ministers at Vienna, Berlin,
+      Lisbon, and Madrid, and couriers were sent away with them; but half an
+      hour afterwards other couriers were despatched after them with other
+      orders, which were revoked in their turn, when at last Joseph had
+      succeeded in calming him a little. He passed, however, the whole following
+      night full dressed and agitated; lying down only for an instant, but
+      having always in his room Joseph and Duroc, and deliberating on a thousand
+      methods of destroying the insolent islanders; all equally violent, but all
+      equally impracticable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning, when, as usual, he went to see the manoeuvres of his
+      flotilla, and the embarkation and landing of his troops, he looked so pale
+      that he almost excited pity. Your cruisers, however, as if they had been
+      informed of the situation of our hero, approached unusually near, to
+      evince, as it were, their contempt and, derision. He ordered instantly all
+      the batteries to fire, and went himself to that which carried its shot
+      farthest; but that moment six of your vessels, after taking down their
+      sails, cast anchors, with the greatest sang-froid, just without the reach
+      of our shot. In an unavailing anger he broke upon the spot six officers of
+      artillery, and pushed one, Captain d&rsquo; Ablincourt, down the precipice under
+      the battery, where he narrowly escaped breaking his neck as well as his
+      legs; for which injury he was compensated by being made an officer of the
+      Legion of Honour. Bonaparte then convoked upon the spot a council of his
+      generals of artillery and of the engineers, and, within an hour&rsquo;s time,
+      some guns and mortars of still heavier metal and greater calibre were
+      carried up to replace the others; but, fortunately for the generals,
+      before a trial could be made of them the tide changed, and your cruisers
+      sailed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In returning to breakfast at General Soult&rsquo;s, he observed the countenances
+      of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath; and he heard
+      some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of encampments, and which
+      informed him that contempt was not the sentiment with which your navy had
+      inspired his troops. The occurrences of these two days hastened his
+      departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where the cringing of his
+      courtiers consoled him, in part, for the want of respect or gallantry in
+      your English tars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles, it
+      was the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who principally
+      influenced the determination of Francis II. to assume the hereditary title
+      of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon Emperor of the French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
+      but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
+      number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
+      delicate political transactions. In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
+      with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to receive
+      him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a proclamation, in which
+      Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his predecessor, Joseph II., which
+      had been the principal cause of the troubles; and reestablished everything
+      upon the same footing as during the reign of Maria Theresa. In 1791 he was
+      appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg, where his conduct
+      obtained the approbation of his own Prince and of the Empress of Russia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
+      Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. His mission was to excite the
+      Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence to
+      the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides. He was
+      therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near the
+      lake of Chiavenne. A rumour was very prevalent at this time that some
+      papers were found in De Semonville&rsquo;s portfolio implicating Count von
+      Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals. The
+      continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
+      inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
+      jealousy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor, a
+      treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
+      plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom, on
+      the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. In the same
+      capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress broke up,
+      he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of experience
+      and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister, Talleyrand, the
+      Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France, where, with all other
+      representatives of Princes, he has experienced more of the frowns and
+      rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of our present Sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Count von Cobenzl&rsquo;s foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
+      reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
+      assist him frequently in his amours. Some adventures of this sort, which
+      occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count&rsquo;s expense.
+      Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
+      merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
+      that &ldquo;the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable to
+      his official notes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at Aix-la-Chapelle
+      last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him, with the Marquis
+      de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another plenipotentiary at Udine),
+      to visit the camps of his army of England on the coast. It is true that
+      this condescension was, perhaps, as much a boast, or a threat, as a
+      compliment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
+      proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
+      of Bonaparte&rsquo;s for your mandate of blockade. Rumour states that this
+      measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
+      your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
+      Napoleon. For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
+      Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
+      objections or representations. &ldquo;But what absurdities do I not sign!&rdquo;
+       exclaimed the pliant Minister.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
+      command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
+      waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor. Charlemagne
+      had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
+      before,&mdash;an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
+      Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but to
+      gratify his impertinent vanity. Every spot where Charlemagne had walked,
+      sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with great
+      ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign representatives, and
+      by his side his wife. To a peasant who presented him a stone upon which
+      Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave nearly half its weight
+      in gold; on a priest who offered him a small crucifix, before which that
+      Prince was reported to have prayed, he bestowed an episcopal see; to a
+      manufacturer he ordered one thousand louis for a portrait of Charlemagne,
+      said to be drawn by his daughter, but which, in fact, was from the pencil
+      of the daughter of the manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of
+      the National Institute for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by
+      Charlemagne, who many believed was not able to write; and a German Baron,
+      Krigge, was registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by
+      this Emperor to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known
+      not to be of sixty years&rsquo; standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest
+      any doubt about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German
+      professor, Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than
+      wise, addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from
+      his intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of
+      Charlemagne were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a
+      drawing of this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix
+      manufactured within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years. The
+      night after Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary,
+      accompanied by four gendarmes, entered the professor&rsquo;s bedroom, forced him
+      to dress, and ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under
+      escort to the left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under
+      pain of death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire.
+      This expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and
+      antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such
+      numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that
+      we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by
+      the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in
+      monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne
+      at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish
+      professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of
+      Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres&mdash;L 500.
+      This ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or
+      Lyceum Charlemagne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame
+      Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health by
+      using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor as
+      low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied. Napoleon himself was
+      neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her
+      extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy of
+      the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great
+      condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her drawing-room
+      and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were only fit to be
+      seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as associates with her valets
+      or chambermaids.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these
+      gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they were
+      her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued debtor
+      to them she could not decently&mdash;or rather, she dared not prevent them
+      from being visitors to her. By confiding her situation to her old friend,
+      Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those troublesome
+      personages. When the Minister was informed of the occasion of the
+      attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to Bonaparte
+      not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them examples of
+      severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only sure means to
+      prevent, for the future, people of the same description from being
+      familiar or audacious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, thanks to Talleyrand&rsquo;s interference, these family arrangements were
+      settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour; and
+      her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to think
+      of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever. I am assured
+      that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at Aix-la-Chapelle,
+      he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her three times, and
+      abused her once a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at last
+      completed the composition of their household, and laid before them the
+      list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their livery.
+      This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist nor a
+      republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a disaffected
+      subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth, ridiculing
+      both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives; no exact
+      definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed professions, of
+      his real moral and political character. One thing only is certain;&mdash;he
+      was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a submissive slave under
+      Napoleon the First.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth,
+      and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his ancestors
+      had been a Field-marshal. Being early introduced at Court, he acquired,
+      with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and
+      by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de
+      Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the
+      Court of St. Petersburg. With some reading and genius, but with more
+      boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French men of letters,
+      and was therefore as such received with distinction by Catharine II., on
+      whom, and on whose Government, he in return published a libel. He was a
+      valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been under every
+      succeeding King of faction. The partisans of the Revolution pointed him
+      out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of Prussia; and
+      he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick William II.
+      refused him admittance to his person, and, after some ineffectual
+      intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he returned to
+      Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for another libel
+      on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh, which he
+      printed in 1796. Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much admired, he
+      was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving under the
+      Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to subsist on. In
+      1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a Counsellor of State,&mdash;a
+      place which he resigned last year for that of a grand master of the
+      ceremonies at the present Imperial Court. His ancient inveteracy against
+      your country has made him a favourite with Bonaparte. The indelicate and
+      scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797, against Lord Malmesbury, in the then
+      official journal, Le Redacteur, were the offspring of his malignity and
+      pen; and the philippics and abusive notes in our present official
+      Moniteur, against your Government and country, are frequently his
+      patriotic progeny, or rather, he often shares with Talleyrand and
+      Hauterive their paternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Revolution has not made Comte de Segur more happy with regard to his
+      family, than in his circumstances, which, notwithstanding his brilliant
+      grand-mastership, are far from being affluent. His amiable wife died of
+      terror, and brokenhearted from the sufferings she had experienced, and the
+      atrocities she had witnessed; and when he had enticed his eldest son to
+      accept the place of a sub-prefect under Bonaparte, his youngest son, who
+      never approved our present regeneration, challenged his brother to fight,
+      and, after killing him in a duel, destroyed himself. Comte de Segur is
+      therefore, at present, neither a husband nor a father, but only a grand
+      master of ceremonies! What an indemnification!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Napoleon and her husband are both certainly under much obligation
+      to this nobleman for his care to procure them comparatively decent persons
+      to decorate their levees and drawing-rooms, who, though they have no claim
+      either to morality or virtue, either to honour or chastity, are
+      undoubtedly a great acquisition at the Court of St. Cloud, because none of
+      them has either been accused of murder, or convicted of plunder; which is
+      the case with some of the Ministers, and most of the generals, Senators
+      and counsellors. It is true that they are a mixture of beggared nobles and
+      enriched valets, of married courtesans and divorced wives, but, for all
+      that, they can with justice demand the places of honour of all other
+      Imperial courtiers of both sexes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Bonaparte had read over the names of these Court recruits, engaged
+      and enlisted by De Segur, he said, &ldquo;Well, this lumber must do until we can
+      exchange it for better furniture.&rdquo; At that time, young Comte d&rsquo; Arberg (of
+      a German family, on the right bank of the Rhine), but whose mother is one
+      of Madame Bonaparte&rsquo;s Maids of Honour, was travelling for him in Germany
+      and in Prussia, where, among other negotiations, he was charged to procure
+      some persons of both sexes, of the most ancient nobility, to augment
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s suite, and to figure in his livery. More individuals presented
+      themselves for this honour than he wanted, but they were all without
+      education and without address: ignorant of the world as of books; not
+      speaking well their own language, much less understanding French or
+      Italian; vain of their birth, but not ashamed of their ignorance, and as
+      proud as poor. This project was therefore relinquished for the time; but a
+      number of the children of the principal ci-devant German nobles, who, by
+      the Treaty of Luneville and Ratisbon, had become subjects of Bonaparte,
+      were, by the advice of Talleyrand, offered places in French Prytanees,
+      where the Emperor promised to take care of their future advancement.
+      Madame Bonaparte, at the same time, selected twenty-five young girls of
+      the same families, whom she also offered to educate at her expense. Their
+      parents understood too well the meaning of these generous offers to dare
+      decline their acceptance. These children are the plants of the Imperial
+      nursery, intended to produce future pages, chamberlains, equerries, Maids
+      of Honour and ladies in waiting, who for ancestry may bid defiance to all
+      their equals of every Court in Christendom. This act of benevolence, as it
+      was called in some German papers, is also an indirect chastisement of the
+      refractory French nobility, who either demanded too high prices for their
+      degradation, or abruptly refused to disgrace the names of their
+      forefathers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte has been as profuse in his disposal of the
+      Imperial diadem of Germany, as in his promises of the papal tiara of Rome.
+      The Houses of Austria and Brandenburgh, the Electors of Bavaria and Baden,
+      have by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive support towards
+      obtaining it at the first vacancy. Those, however, who have paid attention
+      to his machinations, and studied his actions; who remember his pedantic
+      affectation of being considered a modern, or rather a second Charlemagne;
+      and who have traced his steps through the labyrinth of folly and
+      wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art, corruption, and policy,
+      which have seated him on the present throne, can entertain little doubt
+      but that he is seriously bent on seizing and adding the sceptre of Germany
+      to the crowns of France and Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his stay last autumn at Mentz, all those German Electors who had
+      spirit and dignity enough to refuse to attend on him there in person were
+      obliged to send Extraordinary Ambassadors to wait on him, and to
+      compliment him on their part. Though hardly one corner of the veil that
+      covered the intrigues going forward there is yet lifted up, enough is
+      already seen to warn Europe and alarm the world. The secret treaties he
+      concluded there with most of the petty Princes of Germany, against the
+      Chief of the German Empire which not only entirely detached them from
+      their country and its legitimate Sovereign, but made their individual
+      interests hostile and totally opposite to that of the German Commonwealth,
+      transforming them also from independent Princes into vassals of France,
+      both directly increased has already gigantic power, and indirectly
+      encouraged him to extend it beyond what his most sanguine expectation had
+      induced him to hope. I do not make this assertion from a mere supposition
+      in consequence of ulterior occurrences. At a supper with Madame Talleyrand
+      last March, I heard her husband, in a gay, unguarded, or perhaps
+      premeditated moment, say, when mentioning his proposed journey to Italy:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I prepared myself to pass the Alps last October at Mentz. The first
+      ground-stone of the throne of Italy was, strange as it may seem, laid on
+      the banks of the Rhine: with such an extensive foundation, it must be
+      difficult to shake, and impossible to overturn it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were, in the whole, twenty-five persons at table when he spoke thus,
+      many of whom, he well knew, were intimately acquainted both with the
+      Austrian and Prussian Ambassadors, who by the bye, both on the next day
+      sent couriers to their respective Courts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The French Revolution is neither seen in Germany in that dangerous light
+      which might naturally be expected from the sufferings in which it has
+      involved both Princes and subjects, nor are its future effects dreaded
+      from its past enormities. The cause of this impolitic and anti-patriotic
+      apathy is to be looked for in the palaces of Sovereigns, and not in the
+      dwellings of their people. There exists hardly a single German Prince
+      whose Ministers, courtiers and counsellors are not numbered, and have long
+      been notorious among the anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati: most of
+      them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction of
+      ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which bow
+      to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their sophistry and
+      imposture as inspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among Princes thus encompassed, the Elector of Bavaria must be allowed the
+      first place. A younger brother of a younger branch, and a colonel in the
+      service of Louis XVI., he neither acquired by education, nor inherited
+      from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality that
+      fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a lady&rsquo;s
+      drawing-room. He made himself justly suspected of a moral corruption, as
+      well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his approbation of the
+      Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of France, who, besides a
+      regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of one hundred thousand
+      livres. Immediately after his unexpected accession to the Electorate of
+      Bavaria, he concluded a subsidiary treaty with your country, and his
+      troops were ordered to combat rebellion, under the standard of Austrian
+      loyalty. For some months it was believed that the Elector wished by his
+      conduct to obliterate the memory of the errors, vices, and principles of
+      the Duc de Deux-Ponts (his former title). But placing all his confidence
+      in a political adventurer and revolutionary fanatic, Montgelas, without
+      either consistency or firmness, without being either bent upon information
+      or anxious about popularity, he threw the whole burden of State on the
+      shoulders of this dangerous man, who soon showed the world that his
+      master, by his first treaties, intended only to pocket your money without
+      serving your cause or interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Montgelas is, on account of his cunning and long standing among them,
+      worshipped by the gang of German Illuminati as an idol rather than revered
+      as an apostle. He is their Baal, before whom they hope to oblige all
+      nations upon earth to prostrate themselves as soon as infidelity has
+      entirely banished Christianity; for the Illuminati do not expect to reign
+      till the last Christian is buried under the rubbish of the last altar of
+      Christ. It is not the fault of Montgelas if such an event has not already
+      occurred in the Electorate of Bavaria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within six months after the Treaty of Lundville, Montgelas began in that
+      country his political and religious innovations. The nobility and the
+      clergy were equally attacked; the privileges of the former were invaded,
+      and the property of the latter confiscated; and had not his zeal carried
+      him too far, so as to alarm our new nobles, our new men of property, and
+      new Christians, it is very probable that atheism would have already,
+      without opposition, reared its head in the midst of Germany, and
+      proclaimed there the rights of man, and the code of liberty and equality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The inhabitants of Bavaria are, as you know, all Roman Catholics, and the
+      most superstitious and ignorant Catholics of Germany. The step is but
+      short from superstition to infidelity; and ignorance has furnished in
+      France more sectaries of atheism than perversity. The Illuminati, brothers
+      and friends of Montgelas, have not been idle in that country. Their
+      writings have perverted those who had no opportunity to hear their
+      speeches, or to witness their example; and I am assured by Count von
+      Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the
+      lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these
+      emissaries have laboured. To any one looking on the map of the Continent,
+      and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious focus of
+      illumination must be ominous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, there exists not the
+      least doubt but that this Montgelas, as well as Bonaparte&rsquo;s Minister at
+      Munich, Otto, was acquainted with the treacherous part Mehde de la Touche
+      played against your Minister, Drake; and that it was planned between him
+      and Talleyrand as the surest means to break off all political connections
+      between your country and Bavaria. Mr. Drake was personally liked by the
+      Elector, and was not inattentive either to the plans and views of
+      Montgelas or to the intrigues of Otto. They were, therefore, both doubly
+      interested to remove such a troublesome witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M. de Montgelas is now a grand officer of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Legion of Honour,
+      and he is one of the few foreigners nominated the most worthy of such a
+      distinction. In France he would have been an acquisition either to the
+      factions of a Murat, of a Brissot, or of a Robespierre; and the Goddess of
+      Reason, as well as the God of the Theophilanthropists, might have been
+      sure of counting him among their adorers. At the clubs of the Jacobins or
+      Cordeliers, in the fraternal societies, or in a revolutionary tribunal; in
+      the Committee of Public Safety, or in the council chamber of the
+      Directory, he would equally have made himself notorious and been equally
+      in his place. A stoic sans-culotte under Du Clots, a stanch republican
+      under Robespierre, he would now have been the most pliant and brilliant
+      courtier of Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;No Queen of France ever saw so many foreign Princes and
+      Princesses in her drawing-rooms as the first Empress of the French did
+      last year at Mentz; and no Sovereign was ever before so well paid, or
+      accepted with less difficulty donations and presents for her gracious
+      protection. Madame Napoleon herself, on her return to this capital last
+      October, boasted that she was ten millions of livres&mdash;richer in
+      diamonds; two millions of livres richer in pearls, and three million of
+      livres richer in plate and china, than in the June before, when she
+      quitted it. She acknowledged that she left behind her some creditors and
+      some money at Aix-la-Chapelle; but at Mentz she did not want to borrow,
+      nor had she time to gamble. The gallant ultra Romans provided everything,
+      even to the utmost extent of her wishes; and she, on her part, could not
+      but honour those with her company as much as possible, particularly as
+      they required nothing else for their civilities. Such was the Empress&rsquo;s
+      expression to her lady in waiting, the handsome Madame Seran, with whom no
+      confidence, no tale, no story, and no scandal expires; and who was in a
+      great hurry to inform, the same evening, the tea-party at Madame de
+      Beauvais&rsquo;s of this good news, complaining at the same time of not having
+      had the least share in this rich harvest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nowhere, indeed, were bribery and corruption carried to a greater extent,
+      or practised with more effrontery, than at Mentz. Madame Napoleon had as
+      much her fixed price for every favourable word she spoke, as Talleyrand
+      had for every line he wrote. Even the attendants of the former, and the
+      clerks of the latter, demanded, or rather extorted, douceurs from the
+      exhausted and almost ruined German petitioners; who in the end were
+      rewarded for all their meanness and for all their expenses with promises
+      at best; as the new plan of supplementary indemnities was, on the very day
+      proposed for its final arrangement, postponed by the desire of the Emperor
+      of the French, until further orders. This provoking delay could no more be
+      foreseen by the Empress than by the Minister, who, in return for their
+      presents and money almost overpowered the German Princes with his
+      protestations of regret at their disappointments. Nor was Madame Bonaparte
+      less sorry or less civil. She sent her chamberlain, Daubusson la Feuillad,
+      with regular compliments of condolence to every Prince who had enjoyed her
+      protection. They returned to their homes, therefore, if not wealthier, at
+      least happier; flattered by assurances and condescensions, confiding in
+      hope as in certainties. Within three months, however, it is supposed that
+      they would willingly have disposed both of promises and expectations at a
+      loss of fifty per cent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the cupidity and selfishness of these and other German Princes, and
+      their want of patriotism, Talleyrand was become perfectly acquainted with
+      the value and production of every principality, bishopric, county, abbey,
+      barony, convent, and even village in the German Empire; and though most
+      national property in France was disposed of at one or two years&rsquo; purchase,
+      he required five years&rsquo; purchase-money for all the estates and lands on
+      the other side of the Rhine, of which, under the name of indemnities, he
+      stripped the lawful owners to gratify the ambition or avidity of
+      intruders. This high price has cooled the claims of the bidders, and the
+      plan of the supplementary indemnities is still suspended, and probably
+      will continue so until our Minister lowers his terms. A combination is
+      supposed to have been entered into by the chief demanders of indemnities,
+      by which they have bound themselves to resist all farther extortions. They
+      do not, however, know the man they have to deal with; he will, perhaps,
+      find out some to lay claim to their own private and hereditary property
+      whom he will produce and support, and who certainly will have the same
+      right to pillage them as they had to the spoils of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was reported in our fashionable circles last autumn, and smiled at by
+      Talleyrand, that he promised the Comtesse de L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; an
+      abbey, and the Baroness de S&mdash;&mdash;-z a convent, for certain
+      personal favours, and that he offered a bishopric to the Princesse of Hon&mdash;&mdash;-
+      the same terms, but this lady answered that &ldquo;she would think of his offers
+      after he had put her husband in possession of the bishopric.&rdquo; It is not
+      necessary to observe that both the Countess and the Baroness are yet
+      waiting to enjoy his liberal donations, and to be indemnified for their
+      prostitution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a fit of jealousy at Mentz. The young
+      nephew of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, Comte de L&mdash;&mdash;ge, was
+      very assiduous about the Empress, who, herself, at first mistook the
+      motive. Her confidential secretary, Deschamps, however, afterwards
+      informed her that this nobleman wanted to purchase the place of a
+      coadjutor to his uncle, so as to be certain of succeeding him. He
+      obtained, therefore, several private audiences, no doubt to regulate the
+      price, when Napoleon put a stop to this secret negotiation by having the
+      Count carried by gendarmes, with great politeness, to the other side of
+      the Rhine. When convinced of his error, Bonaparte asked his wife what sum
+      had been promised for her protection, and immediately gave her an order on
+      his Minister of the Treasury (Marbois) for the amount. This was an act of
+      justice, and a reparation worthy of a good and tender husband; but when,
+      the very next day, he recalled this order, threw it into the fire before
+      her eyes, and confined her for six hours in her bedroom; because she was
+      not dressed in time to take a walk with him on the ramparts, one is apt to
+      believe that military despotism has erased from his bosom all connubial
+      affection, and that a momentary effusion of kindness and generosity can
+      but little alleviate the frequent pangs caused by repeated insults and
+      oppression. Fortunately, Madame Napoleon&rsquo;s disposition is proof against
+      rudeness as well as against brutality. If what her friend and consoler,
+      Madame Delucay, reports of her is not exaggerated, her tranquillity is not
+      much disturbed nor her happiness affected by these explosions of
+      passionate authority, and she prefers admiring, in undisturbed solitude,
+      her diamond box to the most beautiful prospects in the most agreeable
+      company; and she inspects with more pleasure in confinement, her rich
+      wardrobe, her beautiful china, and her heavy plate, than she would find
+      satisfaction, surrounded with crowds, in comtemplating Nature, even in its
+      utmost perfection. &ldquo;The paradise of Madame Napoleon,&rdquo; says her friend,
+      &ldquo;must be of metal, and lighted by the lustre of brilliants, else she would
+      decline it for a hell and accept Lucifer himself for a spouse, provided
+      gold flowed in his infernal domains, though she were even to be scorched
+      by its heat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      LETTER XIV.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I believe that I have mentioned to you, when in England,
+      that I was an old acquaintance of Madame Napoleon, and a visitor at the
+      house of her first husband. When introduced to her after some years&rsquo;
+      absence, during which fortune had treated us very differently, she
+      received me with more civility than I was prepared to expect, and would,
+      perhaps, have spoken to me more than she did, had not a look of her
+      husband silenced her. Madame Louis Bonaparte was still more condescending,
+      and recalled to my memory what I had not forgotten how often she had been
+      seated, when a child, on my lap, and played on my knees with her doll.
+      Thus they behaved to me when I saw them for the first time in their
+      present elevation; I found them afterwards, in their drawing-rooms or at
+      their routs and parties, more shy and distant. This change did not much
+      surprise me, as I hardly knew any one that had the slightest pretension to
+      their acquaintance who had not troubled them for employment or borrowed
+      their money, at the same time that they complained of their neglect and
+      their breach of promises. I continued, however, as much as etiquette and
+      decency required, assiduous, but never familiar: if they addressed me, I
+      answered with respect, but not with servility; if not, I bowed in silence
+      when they passed. They might easily perceive that I did not intend to
+      become an intruder, nor to make the remembrance of what was past an
+      apology or a reason for applying for present favours. A lady, on intimate
+      terms with Madame Napoleon, and once our common friend, informed me,
+      shortly after the untimely end of the lamented Duc d&rsquo; Enghien, that she
+      had been asked whether she knew anything that could be done for me, or
+      whether I would not be flattered by obtaining a place in the Legislative
+      Body or in the Tribunate? I answered as I thought, that were I fit for a
+      public life nothing could be more agreeable or suit me better; but, having
+      hitherto declined all employments that might restrain that independence to
+      which I had accustomed myself from my youth, I was now too old to enter
+      upon a new career. I added that, though the Revolution had reduced my
+      circumstances, it had not entirely ruined me. I was still independent,
+      because my means were the boundaries of my wants.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A week after this conversation General Murat, the governor of this
+      capital, and Bonaparte&rsquo;s favourite-brother-in-law, invited me to a
+      conversation in a note delivered to me by an aide-de-camp, who told me
+      that he was ordered to wait for my company, or, which was the same, he had
+      orders not to lose sight of me, as I was his prisoner. Having nothing with
+      which to reproach myself, and all my written remarks being deposited with
+      a friend, whom none of the Imperial functionaries could suspect, I entered
+      a hackney coach without any fear or apprehension; and we drove to the
+      governor&rsquo;s hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the manner in which Murat addressed me, I was soon convinced that if
+      I had been accused of any error or indiscretion, the accusation could not
+      be very grave in his eyes. He entered with me into his closet and inquired
+      whether I had any enemies at the police office. I told him not to my
+      knowledge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is the Police Minister and Senator, Fouche, your friend?&rdquo; continued he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fouche,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;has bought an estate that formerly belonged to me; may
+      he enjoy it with the same peace of mind as I have lost it. I have never
+      spoken to him in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you not complained at Madame de la Force&rsquo;s of the execution of the
+      ci-devant Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, and agreed with the other members of her coterie
+      to put on mourning for him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never been at the house of that lady since the death of the
+      Prince, nor more than once in my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you pass the evening last Saturday?&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;At the hotel, and
+      in the assembly of Princesse Louis Bonaparte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she see you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe that she did, because she returned my salute.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have known Her Imperial Highness a long time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From her infancy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I congratulate you. You have in her a generous protectress. But for
+      her you would now have been on the way to Cayenne. Here you see the list
+      of persons condemned yesterday, upon the report of Fouche, to
+      transportation. Your name is at the head of them. You were not only
+      accused of being an agent of the Bourbons, but of having intrigued to
+      become a member of the Legislature, or the Tribunate, that you might have
+      so much the better opportunity to serve them. Fortunately for you, the
+      Emperor remembered that the Princesse Louis had demanded such a favour for
+      you, and he informed her of the character of her protege. This brought
+      forward your innocence, because it was discovered that, instead of asking
+      for, you had declined the offer she had made you through the Empress.
+      Write the Princess a letter of thanks. You have, indeed, had a narrow
+      escape, but it has been so far useful to you, that Government is now aware
+      of your having some secret enemy in power, who is not delicate about the
+      means of injuring you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In quitting General Murat, I could not help deploring the fate of a
+      despot, even while I abhorred his unnatural power. The curses, the
+      complaints, and reproaches for all the crimes, all the violence, all the
+      oppression perpetrated in his name, are entirely thrown upon him, while
+      his situation and occupation do not admit the seeing and hearing
+      everything and everybody himself. He is often forced, therefore, to judge
+      according to the report of an impostor; to sanction with his name the
+      hatred, malignity, or vengeance of culpable individuals; and to sacrifice
+      innocence to gratify the vile passions of his vilest slave. I have not so
+      bad an opinion of Bonaparte as to think him capable of wilfully condemning
+      any person to death or transportation, of whose innocence he was
+      convinced, provided that person stood not in the way of his interest and
+      ambition; but suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions, and
+      injustice their common progeny. The unfortunate beings on the long list
+      General Murat showed me were, I dare say, most of them as innocent as
+      myself, and all certainly condemned unheard. But suppose, even, that they
+      had been indiscreet enough to put on mourning for a Prince of the blood of
+      their former Kings, did their imprudence deserve the same punishment as
+      the deed of the robber, the forger, or the housebreaker? and, indeed, it
+      was more severe than what our laws inflict on such criminals, who are only
+      condemned to transportation for some few years, after a public trial and
+      conviction; while the exile of these unconvicted, untried, and most
+      probably innocent persons is continued for life, on charges as unknown to
+      themselves as their destiny and residence remain to their families and
+      friends. Happy England! where no one is condemned unheard, and no one
+      dares attempt to make the laws subservient to his passions or caprice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to Fouche&rsquo;s enmity, at which General Murat so plainly hinted, I had
+      long apprehended it from what others, in similar circumstances with
+      myself, had suffered. He has, since the Revolution, bought no less, than
+      sixteen national estates, seven of the former proprietors of which have
+      suddenly disappeared since his Ministry, probably in the manner he
+      intended to remove me. This man is one of the most immoral characters the
+      Revolution has dragged forward from obscurity. It is more difficult to
+      mention a crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good or
+      just action that he ever performed. He is so notorious a villain that even
+      the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and since
+      his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased country, to
+      extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities. In a nation so
+      greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is more than negative evidence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a friar before the Revolution he has avowed, in his correspondence with
+      the National Convention, that he never believed in a God; and as one of
+      the first public functionaries of a Republic he has officially denied the
+      existence of virtue. He is, therefore, as unmoved by tears as by
+      reproaches, and as inaccessible to remorse as hardened against repentance.
+      With him interest and bribes are everything, and honour and honesty
+      nothing. The supplicant or the pleader who appears before him with no
+      other support than the justice of his cause is fortunate indeed if, after
+      being cast, he is not also confined or ruined, and perhaps both; while a
+      line from one of the Bonapartes, or a purse of gold, changes black to
+      white, guilt to innocence, removes the scaffold waiting for the assassin,
+      and extinguishes the faggots lighted for the parricide. His authority is
+      so extensive that on the least signal, with one blow, from the extremities
+      of France to her centre, it crushes the cot and the palace; and his
+      decisions, against which there is no appeal, are so destructive that they
+      never leave any traces behind them, and Bonaparte, Bonaparte alone, can
+      prevent or arrest their effect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though a traitor to his former benefactor, the ex-Director Barras, he
+      possesses now the unlimited confidence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as far
+      as is known, has not yet done anything to forfeit it,&mdash;if private
+      acts of cruelty cannot, in the agent of a tyrant, be called breach of
+      trust or infidelity. He shares with Talleyrand the fraternity of the
+      vigilant, immoral, and tormenting secret police; and with Real, and
+      Dubois, the prefect of police, the reproduction, or rather the invention,
+      of new tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are wells or
+      pits dug under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works of his own
+      infernal genius. They are covered with trap-doors, and any person whom the
+      rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose return to society
+      is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is suspected; who has been
+      imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be innocent; who is disagreeable
+      to the Bonapartes, their favourites, or the mistresses of their
+      favourites; who has displeased Fouche, or offended some other placeman;
+      any who have refused to part with their property for the recovery of their
+      liberty, are all precipitated into these artificial abysses there to be
+      forgotten; or worse, to be starved to death, if they have not been
+      fortunate enough to break their necks and be killed by the fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The property Fouche has acquired by his robberies within these last twelve
+      years is at the lowest rate valued at fifty million livres&mdash;which
+      must increase yearly; as a man who disposes of the liberty of fifty
+      millions of people is also, in a great part, master of their wealth.
+      Except the chiefs of the Governments and their officers of State, there
+      exists not an inhabitant of France, Italy, Holland, or Switzerland who can
+      consider himself secure for an instant of not being seized, imprisoned,
+      plundered, tortured, or exterminated by the orders of Fouche and by the
+      hands of his agents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You will no doubt exclaim, &ldquo;How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he
+      confide, in such a man?&rdquo; Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with the
+      most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents. There is no
+      infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he will
+      hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it. He is, therefore, a most
+      useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what is
+      said to the contrary in France, and believed abroad, would cease to rule
+      the day he became just, and the reign of laws and of humanity banished
+      terror and tyranny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is reported that some person, pious or revengeful, presented some time
+      ago to the devout mother of Napoleon a long memorial containing some
+      particulars of the crimes and vices of Fouche and Talleyrand, and required
+      of her, if she wished to prevent the curses of Heaven from falling on her
+      son, to inform him of them, that he might cease to employ men so unworthy
+      of him, and so repugnant to a Divinity. Napoleon, after reading through
+      the memorial, is stated to have answered his mother, who was always
+      pressing him to dismiss these Ministers: The memorial, Madame, contains
+      nothing of what I was not previously informed. Louis XVI. did not select
+      any but those whom he thought the most virtuous and moral of men for his
+      Ministers and counsellors; and where did their virtues and morality bring
+      him? If the writer of the memorial will mention two honest and
+      irreproachable characters, with equal talents and zeal to serve me,
+      neither Fouche nor Talleyrand shall again be admitted into my presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;You have with some reason in England complained of the
+      conduct of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, when the
+      pretended correspondence between Mr. Drake and Mehee de la Touche was
+      published in our official gazette. Had you, however, like myself, been in
+      a situation to study the characters and appreciate the worth of most of
+      them, this conduct would have excited no surprise, and pity would have
+      taken the place both of accusation and reproach. Hardly one of them,
+      except Count Philipp von Cobenzl, the Austrian Ambassador (and even he is
+      considerably involved), possesses any property, or has anything else but
+      his salary to depend upon for subsistence. The least offence to Bonaparte
+      or Talleyrand would instantly deprive them of their places; and, unless
+      they were fortunate enough to obtain some other appointment, reduce them
+      to live in obscurity, and perhaps in want, upon a trifling pension in
+      their own country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day before Mr. Drake&rsquo;s correspondence appeared in the Moniteur, in
+      March, 1804, Talleyrand gave a grand diplomatic dinner; in the midst of
+      which, as was previously agreed with Bonaparte, Duroc called him out on
+      the part of the First Consul. After an absence of near an hour, which
+      excited great curiosity and some alarm among the diplomatists, he
+      returned, very thoughtful and seemingly very low-spirited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me, gentlemen,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I have been impolite against my
+      inclination. The First Consul knew that you honoured me with your company
+      today, and would therefore not have interrupted me by his orders had not a
+      discovery of a most extraordinary nature against the law of nations just
+      been made; a discovery which calls for the immediate indignation against
+      the Cabinet of St. James, not only of France, but of every nation that
+      wishes for the preservation of civilized society. After dinner I shall do
+      myself the honour of communicating to you the particulars, well convinced
+      that you will all enter with warmth into the just resentment of the First
+      Consul.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      During the repast the bottle went freely round, and as soon as they had
+      drunk their coffee and liqueurs, Talleyrand rang a bell, and Hauterive
+      presented himself with a large bundle of papers. The pretended original
+      letters of Mr. Drake were handed about with the commentaries of the
+      Minister and his secretary. Their heads heated with wine, it was not
+      difficult to influence their minds, or to mislead their judgment, and they
+      exclaimed, as in a chorus, &ldquo;C&rsquo;est abominable! Cela fait fremir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand took advantage of their situation, as well as of their
+      indiscretion. &ldquo;I am glad, gentlemen,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;and shall not fail to
+      inform the First Consul of your unanimous sentiments on this disagreeable
+      subject; but verbal expressions are not sufficient in an affair of such
+      great consequence. I have orders to demand your written declarations,
+      which, after what you have already expressed, you cannot hesitate about
+      sending to me to-night, that they may accompany the denunciation which the
+      First Consul despatches, within some few hours, to all the Courts on the
+      Continent. You would much please the First Consul were you to write as
+      near as possible according to the formula which my secretary has drawn up.
+      It states nothing either against convenance, or against the customs of
+      Sovereigns, or etiquettes of Courts, and I am certain is also perfectly
+      congenial with your individual feelings.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence of some moments now followed (as all the diplomatists were
+      rather taken by surprise with regard to a written declaration), which the
+      Swedish Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, interrupted by saying that, &ldquo;though
+      he personally might have no objection to sign such a declaration, he must
+      demand some time to consider whether he had a right to, write in the name
+      of his Sovereign, without his orders, on a subject still unknown to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This remark made the Austrian Ambassador, Count von Cobenzl, propose a
+      private consultation among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps at
+      one of their hotels, at which the Russian charge d&rsquo;affaires, D&rsquo;Oubril, who
+      was not at the dinner&mdash;party, was invited to assist. They met
+      accordingly, at the Hotel de Montmorency, Rue de Lille, occupied by Count
+      von Cobenzl; but they came to no other unanimous determination than that
+      of answering a written communication of Talleyrand by a written note,
+      according as every one judged most proper and prudent, and corresponding
+      with the supposed sentiments of his Sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As all this official correspondence has been published in England, you
+      may, upon reading the notes presented by Baron de Dreyer, and Mr.
+      Livingstone,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      [In consequence of this conduct, Livingstone was recalled by his
+      Government, and lives now in obscurity and disgrace in America. To console
+      him, however, in his misfortune, Bonaparte, on his departure, presented
+      him with his portrait, enamelled on the lid of a snuff-box, set round with
+      diamonds, and valued at one thousand louis d&rsquo;or.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      the neutral Ambassadors of Denmark and America, form some tolerably just
+      idea of Talleyrand&rsquo;s formula. Their impolitic servility was blamed even by
+      the other members of the diplomatic corps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Livingstone you know, and perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch
+      republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and
+      though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of the
+      Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism more, in
+      Europe. Without talents, and almost without education, he thinks intrigues
+      negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity are synonymous. He
+      was called here &ldquo;the courier of Talleyrand,&rdquo; on account of his voyages to
+      England, and his journeys to Holland, where this Minister sent him to
+      intrigue, with less ceremony than one of his secret agents. He
+      acknowledged that no Government was more liberal, and no nation more free,
+      than the British; but he hated the one as much as he abused the other; and
+      he did not conceal sentiments that made him always so welcome to Bonaparte
+      and Talleyrand. Never over nice in the choice of his companions, Arthur
+      O&rsquo;Connor, and other Irish traitors and vagabonds, used his house as their
+      own; so much so that, when he invited other Ambassadors to dine with him,
+      they, before they accepted the invitation, made a condition that no
+      outlaws or adventurers should be of the party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In your youth, Baron de Dreyer was an Ambassador from the Court of
+      Copenhagen to that of St. James. He has since been in the same capacity to
+      the Courts of St. Petersburg and Madrid. Born a Norwegian, of a poor and
+      obscure family, he owes his advancement to his own talents; but these,
+      though they have procured him rank, have left him without a fortune. When
+      he came here, in June, 1797, from Spain, he brought a mistress with him,
+      and several children he had had by her during his residence in that
+      country. He also kept an English mistress some thirty years ago in London,
+      by whom he had a son, M. Guillaumeau, who is now his secretary. Thus
+      encumbered, and thus situated at the age of seventy, it is no surprise if
+      he strives to die at his post, and that fear to offend Bonaparte and
+      Talleyrand sometimes gets the better of his prudence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Denmark, as well as in all other Continental States, the pensions of
+      diplomatic invalids are more scanty than those of military ones, and
+      totally insufficient for a man who, during half a century nearly, has
+      accustomed himself to a certain style of life, and to expenses requisite
+      to represent his Prince with dignity. No wonder, therefore, that Baron de
+      Dreyer prefers Paris to Copenhagen, and that the cunning Talleyrand takes
+      advantage of this preference.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was reported here among our foreign diplomatists, that the English
+      Minister in Denmark complained of the contents of Baron de Dreyer&rsquo;s note
+      concerning Mr. Drake&rsquo;s correspondence; and that the Danish Prime Minister,
+      Count von Bernstorff, wrote to him in consequence, by the order of the
+      Prince Royal, a severe reprimand. This act of political justice is,
+      however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of Copenhagen has
+      laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand, but always to
+      displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be discontented.
+      Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better served by his
+      representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one seldomer changes
+      or removes them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While I am speaking of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short
+      sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to
+      particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously complimented
+      by Talleyrand with the title of &ldquo;The Prince of Neutrality, the Sully of
+      Prussia.&rdquo; Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who, until lately,
+      has been the chief director of the political conscience of His Prussian
+      Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, was born in Silesia,
+      and is the son of a nobleman who was a General in the Austrian service
+      when Frederick the Great made the conquest of that country. At the death
+      of this King in 1786, Count von Haugwitz occupied an inferior place in the
+      foreign office, where Count von Herzburg observed his zeal and assiduity,
+      and recommended him to the notice of the late King Frederick William II.
+      By the interest of the celebrated Bishopswerder, he procured, in 1792, the
+      appointment of an Ambassador to the Court of Vienna, where he succeeded
+      Baron von Jacobi, the present Prussian Minister in your country. In the
+      autumn of the same year he went to Ratisbon, to cooperate with the
+      Austrian Ambassador, and to persuade the Princes of the German Empire to
+      join the coalition against France. In the month of March, 1794, he was
+      sent to the Hague, where he negotiated with Lord Malmesbury concerning the
+      affairs of France; shortly afterwards his nomination as a Minister of
+      State took place, and from that time his political sentiments seem to have
+      undergone a revolution, for which it is not easy to account; but, whatever
+      were the causes of his change of opinions, the Treaty of Basle, concluded
+      between France and Prussia in 1795, was certainly negotiated under his
+      auspices; and in August, 1796, he signed, with the French Minister at
+      Berlin, Citizen Caillard, the first and famous Treaty of Neutrality; and a
+      Prussian cordon was accordingly drawn, to cause the neutrality of the
+      North to be observed and protected. Had the Count von Haugwitz of 1795
+      been the same as the Count von Haugwitz of 1792, it is probable we should
+      no longer have heard of either a French Republic or a French Empire; but a
+      legitimate Monarch of the kingdom of France would have ensured that
+      security to all other legitimate Sovereigns, the want of which they
+      themselves, or their children, will feel and mourn in vain, as long as
+      unlimited usurpations tyrannize over my wretched country. It is to be
+      hoped, however, that the good sense of the Count will point out to him,
+      before it is too late, the impolicy of his present connections; and that
+      he will use his interest with his Prince to persuade him to adopt a line
+      of conduct suited to the grandeur and dignity of the Prussian Monarchy,
+      and favourable to the independence of insulted Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When his present Prussian Majesty succeeded to the throne, Count von
+      Haugwitz continued in office, with increased influence; but he some time
+      since resigned, in consequence, it is said, of a difference of opinion
+      with the other Prussian Ministers on the subject of a family alliance,
+      which Bonaparte had the modesty to propose, between the illustrious house
+      of Napoleon the First and the royal line of Brandenburgh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On this occasion his King, to evince his satisfaction with his past
+      conduct, bestowed on him not only a large pension, but an estate in
+      Silesia, where he before possessed some property. Bonaparte also, to
+      express his regret at his retreat, proclaimed His Excellency a grand
+      officer of the Legion of Honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand insolently calls the several cordons, or ribands, distributed
+      by Bonaparte among the Prussian Ministers and Generals, &ldquo;his
+      leading-strings.&rdquo; It is to be hoped that Frederick William III. is
+      sufficiently upon his guard to prevent these strings from strangling the
+      Prussian Monarchy and the Brandenburgh dynasty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Upwards of two months after my visit to General Murat, I
+      was surprised at the appearance of M. Darjuson, the chamberlain of
+      Princesse Louis Bonaparte. He told me that he came on the part of Prince
+      Louis, who honoured me with an invitation to dine with him the day after.
+      Upon my inquiry whether he knew if the party would be very numerous, he
+      answered, between forty and fifty; and that it was a kind of farewell
+      dinner, because the Prince intended shortly to set out for Compiegne to
+      assume the command of the camp, formed in its vicinity, of the dragoons
+      and other light troops of the army of England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The principal personages present at this dinner were Joseph Bonaparte and
+      his wife, General and Madame Murat, the Ministers Berthier, Talleyrand,
+      Fouche, Chaptal, and Portalis. The conversation was entirely military, and
+      chiefly related to the probable conquest or subjugation of Great Britain,
+      and the probable consequence to mankind in general of such a great event.
+      No difference of opinion was heard with regard to its immediate benefit to
+      France and gradual utility to all other nations; but Berthier seemed to
+      apprehend that, before France could have time to organize this valuable
+      conquest, she would be obliged to support another war, with a formidable
+      league, perhaps, of all other European nations. The issue, however, he
+      said, would be glorious to France, who, by her achievements, would force
+      all people to acknowledge her their mother country; and then, first,
+      Europe would constitute but one family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chaptal was as certain as everybody else of the destruction of the tyrants
+      of the seas; but he thought France would never be secure against the
+      treachery of modern Carthage until she followed the example of Rome
+      towards ancient Carthage; and therefore, after reducing London to ashes,
+      it would be proper to disperse round the universe all the inhabitants of
+      the British Islands, and to re-people them with nations less evil-disposed
+      and less corrupted. Portalis observed that it was more easy to conceive
+      than to execute such a vast plan. It would not be an undertaking of five,
+      of ten, nor of twenty years, to transplant these nations; that misfortunes
+      and proscription would not only inspire courage and obstinacy, but
+      desperation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No people,&rdquo; continued he, &ldquo;are more attached to their customs and
+      countries than islanders in general; and though British subjects are the
+      greatest travellers, and found everywhere, they all suppose their country
+      the best, and always wish to return to it and finish their days amidst
+      their native fogs and smoke. Neither the Saxons, nor the Danes, nor Norman
+      conquerors transplanted them, but, after reducing them, incorporated
+      themselves by marriages among the vanquished, and in some few generations
+      were but one people. It is asserted by all persons who have lately visited
+      Great Britain, that, though the civilization of the lower classes is much
+      behind that of the same description in France, the higher orders, the rich
+      and the fashionable, are, with regard to their, manners, more French than
+      English, and might easily be cajoled into obedience and subjection to the
+      sovereignty of a nation whose customs, by free choice, they have adopted
+      in preference to their own, and whose language forms a necessary part of
+      their education, and, indeed, of the education of almost every class in
+      the British Empire. The universality of the French language is the best
+      ally France has in assisting her to conquer a universal dominion. He
+      wished, therefore, that when we were in a situation to dictate in England,
+      instead of proscribing Englishmen we should proscribe the English
+      language, and advance and reward, in preference, all those parents whose
+      children were sent to be educated in France, and all those families who
+      voluntarily adopted in their houses and societies exclusively the French
+      language.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Murat was afraid that if France did not transplant the most stubborn
+      Britons, and settle among them French colonies, when once their military
+      and commercial navy was annihilated, they would turn pirates, and,
+      perhaps, within half a century, lay all other nations as much under
+      contribution by their piracies as they now do by their industry; and that,
+      like the pirates on the coast of Barbary, the instant they had no
+      connections with other civilized nations, cut the throats of each other,
+      and agree in nothing but in plundering, and considering all other people
+      in the, world their natural enemies and purveyors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this opinion Talleyrand, by nodding assent, seemed to adhere; but he
+      added: &ldquo;Earthquakes are generally dreaded as destructive; but such a
+      convulsion of nature as would swallow up the British Islands, with all
+      their inhabitants, would be the greatest blessing Providence ever
+      conferred on mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Louis Bonaparte then addressed himself to me and to the Marquis de F&mdash;&mdash;.
+      &ldquo;Gentlemen,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;you have been in England; what is your opinion of
+      the character of these islanders, and of the probability of their
+      subjugation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered that, during the fifteen months I resided in London I was too
+      much occupied to prevent myself from starving, to meditate about anything
+      else; that my stomach was my sole meditation as well as anxiety. That,
+      however, I believed that in England, as everywhere else, a mixture of good
+      and bad qualities was to be found; but which prevailed, it would be
+      presumption in me, from my position, to decide. But I did not doubt that
+      if we cordially hated the English they returned us the compliment with
+      interest, and, therefore, the contest with them would be a severe one. The
+      Marquis de F&mdash;&mdash; imprudently attempted to convince the company
+      that it was difficult, if not impossible, for our army to land in England,
+      much more to conquer it, until we were masters of the seas by a superior
+      navy. He would, perhaps, have been still more indiscreet, had not Madame
+      Louis interrupted him, and given another turn to the conversation by
+      inquiring about the fair sex in England, and if it was true that handsome
+      women were more numerous there than in France? Here again the Marquis,
+      instead of paying her a compliment, as she perhaps expected, roundly
+      assured her that for one beauty in France, hundreds might be counted in
+      England, where gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and
+      that a woman regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a
+      first-rate beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of
+      them here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must excuse the Marquis, ladies,&rdquo; said I, in my turn; &ldquo;he has not
+      been in love in England. There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel
+      than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her
+      insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I apply to M. de Talleyrand,&rdquo; answered the Marquis; &ldquo;he has been longer
+      in England than myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am not a competent judge,&rdquo; retorted the Minister; &ldquo;Madame de Talleyrand
+      is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I dare say the
+      Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the British Islands,
+      among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties, or admired greater
+      accomplishments or more perfection.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks
+      the party present, of course, was not included. All the ladies, who were
+      well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very
+      good-humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would
+      give her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a gallant
+      Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt to make up
+      their difference. &ldquo;She is no more, Madame,&rdquo; said the Marquis; &ldquo;she was,
+      unfortunately, guillotined two days before&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; the father of
+      Madame Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted him with a
+      significant look, and said, &ldquo;Before the fall of Robespierre, you mean.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From these and other traits of the Marquis&rsquo;s character, you may see that
+      he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give offence.
+      He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from Fouche,
+      which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris without
+      further orders from the Minister of Police. I know, from high authority,
+      that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he indebted for not
+      being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported to our colonies,
+      for having depreciated the power and means of France to invade England. I
+      am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on the subject of the
+      invasion expressed anything but what they really thought; and that, of the
+      whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the Marquis, and myself, entertained
+      the least doubt of the success of the expedition; so firmly did they rely
+      on the former fortune of Bonaparte, his boastings, and his assurance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with
+      Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that
+      she is not happy. Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the
+      best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached to
+      her. She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked, notwithstanding,
+      uncommonly well. I have heard that Louis is inclined to inebriation, and
+      when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and very indelicate
+      with other women before her eyes. He intrigues with her own servants and
+      the number of his illegitimate children is said to be as many as his
+      years. She asked General Murat to present me and recommend me to Fouche,
+      which he did with great politeness; and the Minister assured me that he
+      should be glad to see me at his hotel, which I much doubt. The last words
+      Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a princely crown, richly set with
+      diamonds, and given her by her brother-in-law, Napoleon, were, &ldquo;Alas!
+      grandeur is not always happiness, nor the most elevated the most fortunate
+      lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My LORD:&mdash;The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a
+      grand epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the annals
+      of Europe. The debates in the Sacred College for and against this journey,
+      and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to have been
+      long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires of Cardinal
+      Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres distributed apropos
+      among its pious members. Of this money the Cardinals Mattei, Pamphili,
+      Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia, Pacca, Brancadoro, Litta,
+      Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to have shared the
+      greatest part; and from the most violent anti-Bonapartists, they instantly
+      became the strenuous adherents of Napoleon the First, who, of course,
+      cannot be ignorant of their real worth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
+      intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
+      brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
+      second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
+      husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
+      March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
+      choeur) in a convent of his native place. In 1782, whilst he was on a
+      visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
+      fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
+      captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers. Here he
+      turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
+      professor of, the Alcoran. In that year he found an opportunity to escape
+      from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his renegacy,
+      exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
+      constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
+      In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of his
+      Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he gained a
+      small capital by the number and liberality of his English customers. After
+      the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during the following year,
+      he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and after Napoleon&rsquo;s
+      proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop of Lyons. In 1802,
+      Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he is now a pillar of
+      the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman tiara. If letters from
+      Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the name of the Emperor of
+      the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he must either retire to a
+      convent or travel to France, either abdicate his own sovereignty, or
+      inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France. Without the decision
+      of the Sacred College, effected in the manner already stated, the majority
+      of the faithful believe that this pontiff would have preferred obscurity
+      to disgrace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p146" id="p146"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="p146.jpg (48K)" src="images/p146.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
+      tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the
+      republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
+      Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
+      left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
+      himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor. But Madame
+      Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband&rsquo;s promotion to the
+      Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
+      children reduced to great misery. Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
+      letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres&mdash;informing her that
+      the same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
+      with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
+      instant she left that island. Either thinking herself not sufficiently
+      paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte family,
+      she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she remained
+      unknown until the arrival of the Pope. On the first day His Holiness gave
+      there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the crowd, and to
+      approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by his side. Profiting by a
+      moment&rsquo;s silence, she called out loudly, throwing herself at his feet:
+      &ldquo;Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of Cardinal Fesch, and these are our
+      children; he cannot, he dares not, deny this truth. Had he behaved
+      liberally to me, I should not have disturbed him in his present grandeur;
+      I supplicate you, Holy Father, not to restore me my husband, but to force
+      him to provide for his wife and children, according to his present
+      circumstances.&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;Matta&mdash;ella e matta, santissimo padre! She is
+      mad&mdash;she is mad, Holy Father,&rdquo; said the Cardinal; and the good
+      pontiff ordered her to be taken care of, to prevent her from doing herself
+      or the children any mischief. She was, indeed, taken care of, because
+      nobody ever since heard what has become either of her or her children; and
+      as they have not returned to Corsica, probably some snug retreat has been
+      allotted them in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal Fesch:
+      his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in disagreeable
+      scrapes. He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons, which has
+      since made his stay in that city but short. Having thrown his handkerchief
+      at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she accepted it, and
+      gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the evening when her
+      husband usually went to the play. His Eminence arrived in disguise, and
+      was received with open arms. But he was hardly seated by her side before
+      the door of a closet was burst open, and his shoulders smarted from the
+      lashes inflicted by an offended husband. In vain did he mention his name
+      and rank; they rather increased than decreased the fury of Girot, who
+      pretended it was utterly impossible for a Cardinal and Archbishop to be
+      thus overtaken with the wife of one of his flock; at last Madame Girot
+      proposed a pecuniary accommodation, which, after some opposition, was
+      acceded to; and His Eminence signed a bond for one hundred thousand livres&mdash;upon
+      condition that nothing should transpire of this intrigue&mdash;a high
+      price enough for a sound drubbing. On the day when the bond was due, Girot
+      and his wife were both arrested by the police commissary, Dubois (a
+      brother of the prefect of police at Paris), accused of being connected
+      with the coiners, a capital crime at present in this country. In a search
+      made in their house, bad money to the amount of three thousand livres was
+      discovered; which they had received the day before from a man who called
+      himself a merchant from Paris, but who was a police spy sent to entrap
+      them. After giving up the bond of the Cardinal, the Emperor graciously
+      remitted the capital punishment, upon condition that they should be
+      transported for life to Cayenne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
+      and to constitute a successor of St. Peter. It would not be the least
+      remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
+      were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
+      boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
+      from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle of
+      an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a member of
+      the Sacred College.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
+      elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres&mdash;and
+      his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
+      Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
+      at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
+      officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of the
+      French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his death
+      Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
+      expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Paris, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The amiable and accomplished Amelia Frederique, Princess
+      Dowager of the late Electoral Prince, Charles Louis of Baden, born a
+      Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, has procured the Electoral House of Baden the
+      singular honour of giving consorts to three reigning and Sovereign
+      Princes,&mdash;to an Emperor of Russia, to a King of Sweden, and to the
+      Elector of Bavaria. Such a distinction, and such alliances, called the
+      attention of those at the head of our Revolution; who, after attempting in
+      vain to blow up hereditary thrones by the aid of sans-culotte
+      incendiaries, seated sans-culottes upon thrones, that they might degrade
+      what was not yet ripe for destruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charles Frederick, the reigning Elector of Baden, is now near fourscore
+      years of age. At this period of life if any passions remain, avarice is
+      more common than ambition; because treasures may be hoarded without
+      bustle, while activity is absolutely necessary to push forward to the goal
+      of distinction. Having bestowed a new King on Tuscany, Bonaparte and
+      Talleyrand also resolved to confer new Electors on Germany. A more
+      advantageous fraternity could not be established between the innovators
+      here and their opposers in other countries, than by incorporating the
+      grandfather-in-law of so many Sovereigns with their own revolutionary
+      brotherhood; to humble him by a new rank, and to disgrace him by
+      indemnities obtained from their hands. An intrigue between our Minister,
+      Talleyrand, and the Baden Minister, Edelsheim, transformed the oldest
+      Margrave of Germany into its youngest Elector, and extended his dominions
+      by the spoils obtained at the expense of the rightful owners. The invasion
+      of the Baden territory in time of peace, and the seizure of the Duc
+      d&rsquo;Enghien, though under the protection of the laws of nations and
+      hospitality, must have soon convinced Baron Edelsheim what return his
+      friend Talleyrand expected, and that Bonaparte thought he had a natural
+      right to insult by his attacks those he had dishonoured by his
+      connections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Minister, Baron Edelsheim, is half an illuminato, half a philosopher,
+      half a politician, and half a revolutionist. He was, long before he was
+      admitted into the council chamber of his Prince, half an atheist, half an
+      intriguer, and half a spy, in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
+      His entry upon the stage at Berlin, and particularly the first parts he
+      was destined to act, was curious and extraordinary; whether he acquitted
+      himself better in this capacity than he has since in his political one is
+      not known. He was afterwards sent to this capital to execute a commission,
+      of which he acquitted himself very ill; exposing himself rashly, without
+      profit or service to his employer. Frederick II., dreading the tediousness
+      of a proposed congress at Augsburg, wished to send a private emissary to
+      sound the King of France. For this purpose he chose Edelsheim as a person
+      least liable to suspicion. The project of Frederick was to idemnify the
+      King of Poland for his first losses by robbing the ecclesiastical Princes
+      of Germany. This, Louis XV. totally rejected; and Edelsheim returned with
+      his answer to the Prussian Monarch, then at Freyburg. From thence he
+      afterwards departed for London, made his communications, and was once
+      again sent back to Paris, on pretence that he had left some of his
+      travelling trunks there; and the Bailli de Foulay, the Ambassador of the
+      Knights of Malta, being persuaded that the Cabinet of Versailles was
+      effectually desirous of peace, was, as he had been before, the mediator.
+      The Bailli was deceived. The Duc de Choiseul, the then Prime Minister,
+      indecently enough threw Edelsheim into the Bastille, in order to search or
+      seize his papers, which, however, were secured elsewhere. Edelsheim was
+      released on the morrow, but obliged to depart the kingdom by the way of
+      Turin, as related by Frederick II. in his &ldquo;History of the Seven Years&rsquo;
+      War.&rdquo; On his return he was disgraced, and continued so until 1778; when he
+      again was used as emissary to various Courts of Germany. In 1786 the
+      Elector of Baden sent him to Berlin, on the ascension of Frederick William
+      II., as a complimentary envoy. This Monarch, when he saw him, could not
+      forbear laughing at the high wisdom of the Court that selected such a
+      personage for such an embassy, and of his own sagacity in accepting it. He
+      quitted the capital of Prussia as he came there, with an opinion of
+      himself that the royal smiles of contempt had neither altered nor
+      diminished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You see, by this account, that Edelsheim has long been a partisan of the
+      pillage of Germany called indemnities; and long habituated to affronts, as
+      well as to plots. To all his other half qualities, half modesty can hardly
+      be added, when he calls himself, or suffers himself to be called, &ldquo;the
+      Talleyrand of Carlsrhue.&rdquo; He accompanied his Prince last year to Mentz;
+      where this old Sovereign was not treated by Bonaparte in the most decorous
+      or decent manner, being obliged to wait for hours in his antechamber, and
+      afterwards stand during the levees, or in the drawing-rooms of Napoleon or
+      of his wife, without the offer of a chair, or an invitation to sit down.
+      It was here where, by a secret treaty, Bonaparte became the Sovereign of
+      Baden, if sovereignty consists in the disposal of the financial and
+      military resources of a State; and they were agreed to be assigned over to
+      him whenever he should deem it proper or necessary to invade the German
+      Empire, in return for his protection against the Emperor of Germany, who
+      can have no more interest than intent to attack a country so distant from
+      his hereditary dominions, and whose Sovereign is, besides, the grandfather
+      of the consort of his nearest and best ally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand often amused himself at Mentz with playing on the vanity and
+      affected consequence of Edelsheim, who was delighted if at any time our
+      Minister took him aside, or whispered to him as in confidence. One
+      morning, at the assembly of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, where Edelsheim
+      was creeping and cringing about him as usual, he laid hold of his arm and
+      walked with him to the upper part of the room. In a quarter of an hour
+      they both joined the company, Edelsheim unusually puffed up with vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will lay and bet, gentlemen,&rdquo; said Talleyrand, &ldquo;that you cannot, with
+      all your united wits, guess the grand subject of my conversation with the
+      good Baron Edelsheim.&rdquo; Without waiting for an answer, he continued: &ldquo;As
+      the Baron is a much older and more experienced traveller than myself, I
+      asked him which, of all the countries he had visited, could boast the
+      prettiest and kindest women. His reply was really very instructive, and it
+      would be a great pity if justice were not done to his merit by its
+      publicity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here the Baron, red as a turkey-cock and trembling with anger,
+      interrupted. &ldquo;His Excellency,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;is to-night in a humour to joke;
+      what we spoke of had nothing to do with women.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor with men, either,&rdquo; retorted Talleyrand, going away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This anecdote, Baron Dahlberg, the Minister of the Elector of Baden to our
+      Court, had the ingenuity to relate at Madame Chapui&rsquo;s as an evidence of
+      Edelsheim&rsquo;s intimacy with Talleyrand; only he left out the latter part,
+      and forgot to mention the bad grace with which this impertinence of
+      Talleyrand was received; but this defect of memory Count von Beust, the
+      envoy of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, kindly supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Baron Edelsheim is a great amateur of knighthoods. On days of great
+      festivities his face is, as it were, illuminated with the lustre of his
+      stars; and the crosses on his coat conceal almost its original colour.
+      Every petty Prince of Germany has dubbed him a chevalier; but Emperors and
+      Kings have not been so unanimous in distinguishing his desert, or in
+      satisfying his desires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Mentz no Prince or Minister fawned more assiduously upon Bonaparte than
+      this hero of chivalry. It could not escape notice, but need not have
+      alarmed our great man, as was the case. The prefect of the palace was
+      ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim&rsquo;s moral and
+      political character. He applied to the police commissary, who, within
+      twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was the most
+      inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that ever
+      entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword, worn a
+      dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about his real
+      character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as nowhere they
+      allowed him common sense, much less a character; all blamed his
+      presumption, but none defended his capacity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the perusal of this report, Bonaparte asked Talleyrand: &ldquo;What can
+      Edelsheim mean by his troublesome assiduities? Does he want any
+      indemnities, or does he wish me to make him a German Prince? Can he have
+      the impudence to hope that I shall appoint him a tribune, a legislator, or
+      a Senator in France, or that I shall give him a place in my Council of
+      State?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No such thing,&rdquo; answered the Minister; &ldquo;did not Your Majesty condescend
+      to notice at the last fete that this eclipsed moon was encompassed in a
+      firmanent of stars. You would, Sire, make him the happiest of mortals were
+      you to nominate him a member of your Legion of Honour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he want nothing else?&rdquo; said Napoleon, as if relieved at once of an
+      oppressive burden. &ldquo;Write to my chancellor of the Legion of Honour,
+      Lacepede, to send him a patent, and do you inform him of this favour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is reported at Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim
+      has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because
+      under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into an
+      Electorate!!!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The sensation that the arrival of the Pope in this country
+      caused among the lower classes of people cannot be expressed, and if
+      expressed, would not be believed. I am sorry, however, to say that,
+      instead of improving their morals or increasing their faith, this journey
+      has shaken both morality and religion to their foundation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to our religious notions, as you must know, the Roman pontiff is
+      the vicar of Christ, and infallible; he can never err. The atheists of the
+      National Convention and the Theophilanthropists of the Directory not only
+      denied his demi-divinity, but transformed him into a satyr; and in
+      pretending to tear the veil of superstition, annihilated all belief in a
+      God. The ignorant part of our nation, which, as everywhere else,
+      constitutes the majority, witnessing the impunity and prosperity of crime,
+      and bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals, first doubted of
+      His omnipotence in not crushing guilt, and afterwards of His existence in
+      not exterminating the blasphemous from among the living. Feeling, however,
+      the want of consolation in their misfortunes here, and hope of a reward
+      hereafter for unmerited sufferings upon earth, they all hailed as a
+      blessing the restoration of Christianity; and by this political act
+      Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories he had procured
+      admirers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and his
+      crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description. Should he
+      continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave, future ages
+      may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his contemporaries it
+      will always be doubtful whether mankind has not suffered more from his
+      ambition and cruelties than benefited by his services. Had he satisfied
+      himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of a Commonwealth; or, if he
+      judged that a monarchical Government alone was suitable to the spirit of
+      this country, had he recalled our legitimate King, he would have occupied
+      a principal, if not the first, place in the history of France,&mdash;a
+      place much more exalted than he can ever expect to fill as an Emperor of
+      the French. Let his prosperity be ever so uninterrupted, he cannot be
+      mentioned but as an usurper, an appellation never exciting esteem,
+      frequently inspiring contempt, and always odious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
+      perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve an
+      authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme Pontiff,
+      whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the representative of
+      their God, but who, by this act of scandal and sacrilege, descends to a
+      level with the most culpable of men? I have heard, not only in this city
+      but in villages, where sincerity is more frequent than corruption, and
+      where hypocrites are as little known as infidels, these remarks made by
+      the people:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
+      injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of
+      bestowing as a sacred donation what belongs to another; and what he has no
+      power, no authority, to dispose of? Can Pius VII. confer on Napoleon the
+      First what belongs to Louis XVIII.? Would Jesus Christ, if upon earth,
+      have acted thus? Would his immediate successors, the Apostles, not have
+      preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any injury? If
+      the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his Master and
+      predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar of our Saviour?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These and many similar reflections the common people have made, and make
+      yet. The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up
+      in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII. to
+      be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists and
+      freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of God, and that God
+      is only the invention of fear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is, that by the Pope&rsquo;s performance of the coronation of an
+      Emperor of the French, a religious as well as a political revolution was
+      effected; and the usurper in power, whatever his creed may be, will
+      hereafter, without much difficulty, force it on his slaves. You may,
+      perhaps, object that Pius VII., in his official account to the Sacred
+      College of his journey to France, speaks with enthusiasm of the
+      Catholicism of the French people. But did not the Goddess of Reason, did
+      not Robespierre as a high priest of a Supreme Being, speak as highly of
+      their sectaries? Read the Moniteur of 1793 and 1794, and you will be
+      convinced of the truth of this assertion. They, like the Pope, spoke of
+      what they saw, and they, like him, did not see an individual who was not
+      instructed how to perform his part, so as to give satisfaction to him whom
+      he was to please, and to those who employed him. As you have attended to
+      the history of our Revolution, you have found it in great part a cruel
+      masquerade, where none but the unfortunate Louis XVI. appeared in his
+      native and natural character and without a mask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The countenance of Pius VII. is placid and benign, and a kind of calmness
+      and tranquillity pervades his address and manners, which are, however, far
+      from being easy or elegant. The crowds that he must have been accustomed
+      to see since his present elevation have not lessened a timidity the
+      consequence of early seclusion. Nothing troubled him more than the
+      numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body, Tribunate, National
+      Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every occasion. He never
+      was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative; and his best
+      quality is, not to do good, but to prevent evil. His piety is sincere and
+      unaffected, and it is not difficult to perceive that he has been more
+      accustomed to address his God than to converse with men. He is nowhere so
+      well in his place as before the altar; when imploring the blessings of
+      Providence on his audience he speaks with confidence, as to a friend to
+      whom his purity is known, and who is accustomed to listen favourably to
+      his prayers. He is zealous but not fanatical, but equally superstitious as
+      devout. His closet was crowded with relics, rosaries, etc., but there he
+      passed generally eight hours of the twenty-four upon his knees in prayer
+      and meditation. He often inflicted on himself mortifications, observed
+      fast-days, and kept his vows with religious strictness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None of the promises made him by Cardinal Fesch, in the name of Napoleon
+      the First, were performed, but all were put off until a general
+      pacification. He was promised indemnity for Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara, and
+      Ravenna; the ancient supremacy and pecuniary contributions of the Gallican
+      Church, and the restoration of certain religious orders, both in France
+      and Italy; but notwithstanding his own representations, and the activity
+      of his Cardinal, Caprara, nothing was decided, though nothing was refused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By some means or other he was made perfectly acquainted with the crimes
+      and vices of most of our public functionaries. Talleyrand was surprised
+      when Cardinal Caprara explained to him the reason why the Pope refused to
+      admit some persons to his presence, and why he wished others even not to
+      be of the party when he accepted the invitations of Bonaparte and his wife
+      to their private societies. Many are, however, of opinion that Talleyrand,
+      from malignity or revenge, often heightened and confirmed His Holiness&rsquo;s
+      aversion. This was at least once the case with regard to De Lalande. When
+      Duroc inquired the cause of the Pope&rsquo;s displeasure against this
+      astronomer, and hinted that it would be very agreeable to the Emperor were
+      His Holiness to permit him the honour of prostrating himself, he was
+      answered that men of talents and learning would always be welcome to
+      approach his person; that he pitied the errors and prayed for the
+      conversion of this savant, but was neither displeased nor offended with
+      him. Talleyrand, when informed of the Pope&rsquo;s answer, accused Cardinal
+      Caprara of having misinterpreted his master&rsquo;s communications; and this
+      prelate, in his turn, censured our Minister&rsquo;s bad memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must have read that this De Lalande is regarded in France as the first
+      astronomer of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists; he is
+      said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called &ldquo;The Bible
+      of a People who acknowledge no God.&rdquo; He implored the ferocious Robespierre
+      to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet pretended to be
+      discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian. In a letter of
+      congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present elevation, he
+      also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by styling himself
+      Jesus Christ the First, Emperor of the French, instead of Napoleon the
+      First. But it was not his known impiety that made Talleyrand wish to
+      exclude him from insulting with his presence a Christian pontiff. In the
+      summer of 1799, when the Minister was in a momentary disgrace, De Lalande
+      was at the head of those who imputed to his treachery, corruptions, and
+      machinations all the evils France then suffered, both from external
+      enemies and internal factions. If Talleyrand has justly been reproached
+      for soon forgetting good offices and services done him, nobody ever denied
+      that he has the best recollection in the world of offences or attacks, and
+      that he is as revengeful as unforgiving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only one of our great men whom Pius VII. remained obstinate and
+      inflexible in not receiving, was the Senator and Minister of Police,
+      Fouche. As His Holiness was not so particular with regard to other persons
+      who, like Fouche, were both apostate priests and regicide subjects, the
+      following is reported to be the cause of his aversion and obduracy:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In November, 1793, the remains of a wretch of the name of Challiers&mdash;justly
+      called, for his atrocities, the Murat of Lyons&mdash;were ordered by
+      Fouche, then a representative of the people in that city, to be produced
+      and publicly worshipped; and, under his particular auspices, a grand fete
+      was performed to the memory of this republican martyr, who had been
+      executed as an assassin. As part of this impious ceremony, an ass, covered
+      with a Bishop&rsquo;s vestments, having on his head a mitre, and the volumes of
+      Holy Writ tied to his tail, paraded the streets. The remains of Challiers
+      were then burnt, and the ashes distributed among his adorers; while the
+      books were also consumed, and the ashes scattered in the wind. Fouche
+      proposed, after giving the ass some water to drink in a sacred chalice, to
+      terminate the festivity of the day by murdering all the prisoners,
+      amounting to seven thousand five hundred; but a sudden storm prevented the
+      execution of this diabolical proposition, and dispersed the sacrilegious
+      congregation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though all the Bonapartes were great favourites with Pius
+      VII., Madame Letitia, their mother, had a visible preference. In her
+      apartments he seemed most pleased to meet the family parties, as they were
+      called, because to them, except the Bonapartes, none but a few select
+      favourites were invited,&mdash;a distinction as much wished for and envied
+      as any other Court honour. After the Pope had fixed the evening he would
+      appear among them, Duroc made out a list, under the dictates of Napoleon,
+      of the chosen few destined to partake of the blessing of His Holiness&rsquo;s
+      presence; this list was merely pro form, or as a compliment, laid before
+      him; and after his tacit approbation, the individuals were informed, from
+      the first chamberlain&rsquo;s office, that they would be honoured with
+      admittance at such an hour, to such a company, and in such an apartment.
+      The dress in which they were to appear was also prescribed. The parties
+      usually met at six o&rsquo;clock in the evening. On the Pope&rsquo;s entrance all
+      persons, of both sexes, kneeled to receive his blessing. Tea, ice,
+      liqueurs, and confectionery were then served. In the place of honour were
+      three elevated elbow-chairs, and His Holiness was seated between the
+      Emperor and Empress, and seldom spoke to any one to whom Napoleon did not
+      previously address the word. The exploits of Bonaparte, particularly his
+      campaigns in Egypt, were the chief subjects of conversation. Before eight
+      o&rsquo;clock the Pope always retired, distributing his blessing to the kneeling
+      audience, as on his entry. When he was gone, card-tables were brought in,
+      and play was permitted. Duroc received his master&rsquo;s orders how to
+      distribute the places at the different tables, what games were to be
+      played, and the amount of the sums to be staked. These were usually
+      trifling and small compared to what is daily risked in our fashionable
+      circles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Often, after the Pope had returned to his own rooms, Madame Letitia
+      Bonaparte was admitted to assist at his private prayers. This lady, whose
+      intrigues and gallantry are proverbial in Corsica, has, now that she is
+      old (as is generally the case), turned devotee, and is surrounded by
+      hypocrites and impostors, who, under the mask of sanctity, deceive and
+      plunder her. Her antechambers are always full of priests; and her closet
+      and bedroom are crowded with relics, which she collected during her
+      journey to Italy last year. She might, if she chose, establish a Catholic
+      museum, and furnish it with a more curious collection, in its sort, than
+      any of our other museums contain. Of all the saints in our calendar, there
+      is not one of any notoriety who has not supplied her with a finger, a toe,
+      or some other part; or with a piece of a shirt, a handkerchief, a sandal,
+      or a winding-sheet. Even a bit of a pair of breeches, said to have
+      belonged to Saint Mathurin, whom many think was a sans-cullotte, obtains
+      her adoration on certain occasions. As none of her children have yet
+      arrived at the same height of faith as herself, she has, in her will,
+      bequeathed to the Pope all her relics, together with eight hundred and
+      seventy-nine Prayer-books, and four hundred and forty-six Bibles, either
+      in manuscript or of different editions. Her favourite breviary, used only
+      on great solemnities, was presented to her by Cardinal Maury at Rome, and
+      belonged, as it is said, formerly to Saint Francois, whose commentary,
+      written with his own hand, fills the margins; though many, who with me
+      adore him as a saint, doubt whether he could either read or write.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not long ago she made, as she thought, an exceedingly valuable
+      acquisition. A priest arrived direct from the Holy City of Jerusalem, well
+      recommended by the inhabitants of the convents there, with whom he
+      pretended to have passed his youth. After prostrating himself before the
+      Pope, he waited on Madame Letitia Bonaparte. He told her that he had
+      brought with him from Syria the famous relic, the shoulder-bone of Saint
+      John the Baptist; but that, being in want of money for his voyage, he
+      borrowed upon it from a Grecian Bishop in Montenegro two hundred louis
+      d&rsquo;or. This sum, and one hundred louis d&rsquo;or besides, was immediately given
+      him; and within three months, for a large sum in addition to those
+      advanced, this precious relic was in Madame Letitia&rsquo;s possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding this lady&rsquo;s care not to engage in her service any person
+      of either sex who cannot produce, not a certificate of civism from the
+      municipality as was formerly the case, but a certificate of Christianity,
+      and a billet of confession signed by the curate of the parish, she had
+      often been robbed, and the robbers had made particularly free with those
+      relics which were set in gold or in diamonds. She accused her daughter,
+      the Princesse Borghese, who often rallies the devotion of her mamma, and
+      who is more an amateur of the living than of the dead, of having played
+      her these tricks. The Princess informed Napoleon of her mother&rsquo;s losses,
+      as well as of her own innocence, and asked him to apply to the police to
+      find out the thief, who no doubt was one of the pious rogues who almost
+      devoured their mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the next day Napoleon invited Madame Letitia to dinner, and Fouche had
+      orders to make a strict search, during her absence, among the persons
+      composing her household. Though he, on this occasion, did not find what he
+      was looking for, he made a discovery which very much mortified Madame
+      Letitia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her first chambermaid, Rosina Gaglini, possessed both her esteem and
+      confidence, and had been sent for purposely from Ajaccio, in Corsica, on
+      account of her general renown for great piety, and a report that she was
+      an exclusive favourite with the Virgin Mary, by whose interference she had
+      even performed, it was said, some miracles; such as restoring stolen
+      goods, runaway cattle, lost children, and procuring prizes in the lottery.
+      Rosina was as relic-mad as her mistress; and as she had no means to
+      procure them otherwise, she determined to partake of her lady&rsquo;s by cutting
+      off a small part of each relic of Madame Letitia&rsquo;s principal saints. These
+      precious &lsquo;morceaux&rsquo; she placed in a box upon which she kneeled to say her
+      prayers during the day; and which, for a mortification, served her as a
+      pillow during the night. Upon each of the sacred bits she had affixed a
+      label with the name of the saint it belonged to, which occasioned the
+      disclosure. When Madame Letitia heard of this pious theft, she insisted on
+      having the culprit immediately and severely punished; and though the
+      Princesse Borghese, as the innocent cause of poor Rosina&rsquo;s misfortune,
+      interfered, and Rosina herself promised never more to plunder saints, she
+      was without mercy turned away, and even denied money sufficient to carry
+      her back to Corsica. Had she made free with Madame Letitia&rsquo;s plate or
+      wardrobe, there is no doubt but that she had been forgiven; but to presume
+      to share with her those sacred supports on her way to Paradise was a more
+      unpardonable act with a devotee than to steal from a lover the portrait of
+      an adored mistress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime the police were upon the alert to discover the person whom
+      they suspected of having stolen the relics for the diamonds, and not the
+      diamonds for the relics. Among our fashionable and new saints, surprising
+      as you may think it, Madame de Genlis holds a distinguished place; and
+      she, too, is an amateur and collector of relics in proportion to her
+      means; and with her were found those missed by Madame Letitia. Being asked
+      to give up the name of him from whom she had purchased them, she mentioned
+      Abbe Saladin, the pretended priest from Jerusalem. He, in his turn, was
+      questioned, and by his answers gave rise to suspicion that he himself was
+      the thief. The person of whom he pretended to have bought them was not to
+      be found, nor was any one of such a description remembered to have been
+      seen anywhere. On being carried to prison, he claimed the protection of
+      Madame Letitia, and produced a letter in which this lady had promised him
+      a bishopric either in France or in Italy. When she was informed of his
+      situation, she applied to her son Napoleon for his liberty, urging that a
+      priest who from Jerusalem had brought with him to Europe such an
+      extraordinary relic as the shoulder of Saint John, could not be culpable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abbe Saladin had been examined by Real, who concluded, from the accent and
+      perfection with which he spoke the French language, that he was some
+      French adventurer who had imposed on the credulity and superstition of
+      Madame Letitia; and, therefore, threatened him with the rack if he did not
+      confess the truth. He continued, however, in his story, and was going to
+      be released upon an order from the Emperor, when a gendarme recognized him
+      as a person who, eight years before, had, under the name of Lanoue, been
+      condemned for theft and forgery to the galleys, whence he had made his
+      escape. Finding himself discovered, he avowed everything. He said he had
+      served in Egypt, in the guides of Bonaparte, but deserted to the Turks and
+      turned Mussulman, but afterwards returned to the bosom of the Church at
+      Jerusalem. There he persuaded the friars that he had been a priest, and
+      obtained the certificates which introduced him to the Pope and to the
+      Emperor&rsquo;s mother; from whom he had received twelve thousand livres for
+      part of the jaw bone of a whale, which he had sold her for the
+      shoulder-bone of a saint. As the police believe the certificates he has
+      produced to be also forged, he is detained in prison until an answer
+      arrives from our Consul in Syria.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Letitia did not resign without tears the relic he had sold her; and
+      there is reason to believe that many other pieces of her collections,
+      worshipped by her as remains of saints, are equally genuine as this
+      shoulder-bone of Saint John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;That the population of this capital has, since the
+      Revolution, decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be
+      lamented. This focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous,
+      though the inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am
+      well persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are
+      committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of time
+      in all other European capitals put together. From not reading in our
+      newspapers, as we do in yours, of the robberies, murders, and frauds
+      discovered and punished, you may, perhaps, be inclined to suppose my
+      assertion erroneous or exaggerated; but it is the policy of our present
+      Government to labour as much as possible in the dark; that is to say, to
+      prevent, where it can be done, all publicity of anything directly or
+      indirectly tending to inculpate it of oppression, tyranny, or even
+      negligence; and to conceal the immorality of the people so nearly
+      connected with its own immoral power. It is true that many vices and
+      crimes here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the natural
+      consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without
+      attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the
+      mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit,
+      uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be
+      mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect
+      of police, who very seldom grants it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of the enormities now deplored in this country are the consequence of
+      moral and religious licentiousness, that have succeeded to political
+      anarchy, or rather were produced by it, and survive it. Add to this the
+      numerous examples of the impunity of guilt, prosperity of infamy, misery
+      of honesty, and sufferings of virtue, and you will not think it surprising
+      that, notwithstanding half a million of spies, our roads and streets are
+      covered with robbers and assassins, and our scaffolds with victims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The undeniable TRUTH that this city alone is watched by one hundred
+      thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason
+      to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the
+      governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter
+      good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed,
+      wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish
+      by its own pestilential breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the official registers published by Manuel in 1792, the
+      number of spies all over France during the reign of Louis XVI. was
+      nineteen thousand three hundred (five thousand less than under Louis XV.);
+      and of this number six thousand were distributed in Paris, and in a circle
+      of four leagues around it, including Versailles. You will undoubtedly ask
+      me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what can be the cause of
+      this disproportionate increase of distrust and depravity? I will explain
+      it as far as my abilities admit, according to the opinions of others
+      compared with my own remarks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When factions usurped the supremacy of the Kings, vigilance augmented with
+      insecurity; and almost everybody who was not an opposer, who refused being
+      an accomplice, or feared to be a victim, was obliged to serve as an
+      informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy. The rapidity with which
+      parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals as numerous
+      as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I am sorry to say
+      few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness and constancy
+      were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who, to preserve
+      their lives, did not renounce their principles and probity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the reign of Robespierre and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+      every member of Government, of the clubs, of the tribunals, and of the
+      communes, had his private spies; but no regular register was kept of their
+      exact number. Under the Directory a Police Minister was nominated, and a
+      police office established. According to the declaration of the Police
+      Minister, Cochon, in 1797, the spies, who were then regularly paid,
+      amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand; and of these, thirty thousand
+      did duty in this capital. How many there were in 1799, when Fouche, for
+      the first time, was appointed a chief of the department of police, is not
+      known, but suppose them doubled within two years; their increase since is
+      nevertheless immense, considering that France has enjoyed upwards of four
+      years&rsquo; uninterrupted Continental peace, and has not been exposed to any
+      internal convulsions during the same period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may, perhaps, object that France is not rich enough to keep up as
+      numerous an army of spies as of soldiers; because the expense of the
+      former must be triple the amount of the latter. Were all these spies, now
+      called police agents, or agents of the secret police, paid regular
+      salaries, your objection would stand, but most of them have no other
+      reward than the protection of the police; being employed in gambling&mdash;houses,
+      in coffee&mdash;houses, in taverns, at the theatres, in the public
+      gardens, in the hotels, in lottery offices, at pawnbrokers&rsquo;, in brothels,
+      and in bathing-houses, where the proprietors or masters of these
+      establishments pay them. They receive nothing from the police, but when
+      they are enabled to make any great discoveries, those who have been robbed
+      or defrauded, and to whom they have been serviceable, are, indeed, obliged
+      to present them with some douceur, fixed by the police at the rate of the
+      value recovered; but such occurrences are merely accidental. To these are
+      to be added all individuals of either sex who by the law are obliged to
+      obtain from the police licenses to exercise their trade, as pedlars,
+      tinkers, masters of puppet-shows, wild beasts, etc. These, on receiving
+      their passes, inscribe themselves, and take the oaths as spies; and are
+      forced to send in their regular reports of what they hear or see.
+      Prostitutes, who, all over this country, are under the necessity of paying
+      for regular licenses, are obliged also to give information, from time to
+      time, to the nearest police commissary of what they observe or what they
+      know respecting their visitors, neighbours, etc. The number of unfortunate
+      women of this description who had taken out licenses during the year 12,
+      or from September, 1803, to September, 1804, is officially known to have
+      amounted to two hundred and twenty thousand, of whom forty thousand were
+      employed by the armies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte has his secret spies upon his
+      wife, his brothers, his sisters, his Ministers, Senators, and other public
+      functionaries, and also upon his public spies. These are all under his own
+      immediate control and that of Duroc, who does the duty of his private
+      Police Minister, and in whom he confides more than even in the members of
+      his own family. In imitation of their master, each of the other
+      Bonapartes, and each of the Ministers, have their individual spies, and
+      are watched in their turn by the spies of their secretaries, clerks, etc.
+      This infamous custom of espionage goes ad infinitum, and appertains almost
+      to the establishment and to the suite of each man in place, who does not
+      think himself secure a moment if he remains in ignorance of the
+      transactions of his rivals, as well as of those of his equals and
+      superiors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fouche and Talleyrand are reported to have disagreed before Bonaparte on
+      some subject or other, which is frequently the case. The former, offended
+      at some doubts thrown out about his intelligence, said to the latter:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am so well served that I can tell you the name of every man or woman
+      you have conversed with, both yesterday and today; where you saw them, and
+      how long you remained with them or they with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit,&rdquo; retorted Talleyrand, &ldquo;I
+      am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already
+      passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter. I can
+      inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who provided
+      these dinners, and who is expected to provide your meats to-morrow and the
+      day after. I can whisper you, in confidence, who slept with Madame Fouche
+      last night, and who has an appointment with her to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Bonaparte interrupted them, in his usual dignified language: &ldquo;Hold
+      both your tongues; you are both great rogues, but I am at a loss to decide
+      which is the greatest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without uttering a single syllable, Talleyrand made a profound reverence
+      to Fouche. Bonaparte smiled, and advised them to live upon good terms if
+      they were desirous of keeping their places.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man of the name of Ducroux, who, under Robespierre, had from a barber
+      been made a general, and afterwards broken for his ignorance, was engaged
+      by Bonaparte as a private spy upon Fouche, who employed him in the same
+      capacity upon Bonaparte. His reports were always written, and delivered in
+      person into the hands both of the Emperor and of his Minister. One morning
+      he, by mistake, gave to Bonaparte the report of him instead of that
+      intended for him. Bonaparte began to read: &ldquo;Yesterday, at nine o&rsquo;clock,
+      the Emperor acted the complete part of a madman; he swore, stamped,
+      kicked, foamed, roared&mdash;&ldquo;, here poor Ducroux threw himself at
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s feet, and called for mercy for the terrible blunder he had
+      committed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For whom,&rdquo; asked Bonaparte, &ldquo;did you intend this treasonable
+      correspondence? I suppose it is composed for some English or Russian
+      agent, for Pitt or for Marcoff. How long have you conspired with my
+      enemies, and where are your accomplices?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For God&rsquo;s sake, hear me, Sire,&rdquo; prayed Ducroux. &ldquo;Your Majesty&rsquo;s enemies
+      have always been mine. The report is for one of your best friends; but
+      were I to mention his name, he will ruin me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Speak out, or you die!&rdquo; vociferated Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,'Sire, it is for Fouche&mdash;for nobody else but Fouche.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte then rang the bell for Duroc, whom he ordered to see Ducroux
+      shut up in a dungeon, and afterwards to send for Fouche. The Minister
+      denied all knowledge of Ducroux, who, after undergoing several tortures,
+      expiated his blunder upon the rack.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The Pope, during his stay here, rose regularly every
+      morning at five o&rsquo;clock, and went to bed every night before ten. The first
+      hours of the day he passed in prayers, breakfasted after the Mass was
+      over, transacted business till one, and dined at two. Between three and
+      four he took&mdash;his siesta, or nap; afterwards he attended the vespers,
+      and when they were over he passed an hour with the Bonapartes, or admitted
+      to his presence some members of the clergy. The day was concluded, as it
+      was begun, with some hours of devotion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Pius VII. possessed the character of a Pius VI., he would never have
+      crossed the Alps; or had he been gifted with the spirit and talents of
+      Sextus V. or Leo X., he would never have entered France to crown
+      Bonaparte, without previously stipulating for himself that he should be
+      put in possession of the sovereignty of Italy. You can form no idea what
+      great stress was laid on this act of His Holiness by the Bonaparte family,
+      and what sacrifices were destined to be made had any serious and obstinate
+      resistance been apprehended. Threats were, indeed, employed personally
+      against the Pope, and bribes distributed to the refractory members of the
+      Sacred College; but it was no secret, either here or at Milan, that
+      Cardinal Fesch had carte blanche with regard to the restoration of all
+      provinces seized, since the war, from the Holy See, or full territorial
+      indemnities in their place, at the expense of Naples and Tuscany; and,
+      indeed, whatever the Roman pontiff has lost in Italy has been taken from
+      him by Bonaparte alone, and the apparent generosity which policy and
+      ambition required would, therefore, have merely been an act of justice.
+      Confiding foolishly in the honour and rectitude of Napoleon, without any
+      other security than the assertion of Fesch, Pius VII., within a
+      fortnight&rsquo;s stay in France, found the great difference between the
+      promises held out to him when residing as a Sovereign at Rome, and their
+      accomplishment when he had so far forgotten himself and his sacred dignity
+      as to inhabit as a guest the castle of the Tuileries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pius VII. mentioned, the day after his arrival at Fontainebleau, that it
+      would be a gratification to his own subjects were he enabled to
+      communicate to them the restoration of the former ecclesiastical domains,
+      as a free gift of the Emperor of the French, at their first conference, as
+      they would then be as well convinced of Napoleon&rsquo;s good faith as he was
+      himself. In answer, His Holiness was informed that the Emperor was
+      unprepared to discuss political subjects, being totally occupied with the
+      thoughts how to entertain worthily his high visitor, and to acknowledge
+      becomingly the great honour done and the great happiness conferred on him
+      by such a visit. As soon as the ceremony of the coronation was over,
+      everything, he hoped, would be arranged to the reciprocal satisfaction of
+      both parties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About the middle of last December, Bonaparte was again asked to fix a day
+      when the points of negotiation between him and the Pope could be discussed
+      and settled. Cardinal Caprara, who made this demand, was referred to
+      Talleyrand, who denied having yet any instructions, though in daily
+      expectation of them. Thus the time went on until February, when Bonaparte
+      informed the Pope of his determination to assume the crown of Italy, and
+      of some new changes necessary, in consequence on the other side of the
+      Alps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Either seduced by caresses, or blinded by his unaccountable partiality for
+      Bonaparte, Pius VII., if left to himself, would not only have renounced
+      all his former claims, but probably have made new sacrifices to this idol
+      of his infatuation. Fortunately, his counsellors were wiser and less
+      deluded, otherwise the remaining patrimony of Saint Peter might now have
+      constituted a part of Napoleon&rsquo;s inheritance, in Italy. &ldquo;Am I not, Holy
+      Father!&rdquo; exclaimed the Emperor frequently, &ldquo;your son, the work of your
+      hand? And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it not be
+      shared with you&mdash;or rather, do you not share it with me? Anything
+      that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power uncertain
+      or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you. With me you will
+      shine or be obscured, rise or fall. Could you, therefore, hesitate (were I
+      to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure) to remove the Papal
+      See to Avignon, where it formerly was and continued for centuries, and to
+      enlarge the limits of my kingdom of Italy with the Ecclesiastical States?
+      Can you believe my throne at Milan safe as long as it is not the sole
+      throne of Italy? Do you expect to govern at Rome when I cease to reign at
+      Milan? No, Holy Father! the pontiff who placed the crown on my head,
+      should it be shaken, will fall to rise no more.&rdquo; If what Cardinal Caprara
+      said can be depended upon, Bonaparte frequently used to intimidate or
+      flatter the Pope in this manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The representations of Cardinal Caprara changed Napoleon&rsquo;s first intention
+      of being again crowned by the Pope as a King of Italy. His crafty Eminence
+      observed that, according to the Emperor&rsquo;s own declaration, it was not
+      intended that the crowns of France and Italy should continue united. But
+      were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by the sacred hands of a pontiff,
+      the partisans of the Bourbons, or the factions in France, would then take
+      advantage to diminish in the opinion of the people his right and the
+      sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps make even the crown of the French
+      Empire unstable. He did not deny that Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff
+      in Italy, but this ceremony was performed at Rome, where that Prince was
+      proclaimed an Emperor of the Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a
+      King of Lombardy and Italy. Might not circumstances turn out so favourably
+      for Napoleon the First that he also might be inaugurated an Emperor of the
+      Germans as well as of the French? This last compliment, or prophecy, as
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s courtiers call it (what a prophet a Caprara!), had the desired
+      effect, as it flattered equally Napoleon&rsquo;s ambition and vanity. For fear,
+      however, of Talleyrand and other anti-Catholic counsellors, who wanted him
+      to consider the Pope merely as his first almoner, and to treat him as all
+      other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as
+      possible packing for Rome. Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet,
+      should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental
+      Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can,
+      without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second
+      Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time death
+      does not put a period to his encroachments and gigantic plans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;No Sovereigns have, since the Revolution, displayed more
+      grandeur of soul, and evinced more firmness of character, than the present
+      King and Queen of Naples. Encompassed by a revolutionary volcano more
+      dangerous than the physical one, though disturbed at home and defeated
+      abroad, they have neither been disgraced nor dishonoured. They have,
+      indeed, with all other Italian Princes, suffered territorial and pecuniary
+      losses; but these were not yielded through cowardice or treachery, but
+      enforced by an absolute necessity, the consequence of the desertion or
+      inefficacy of allies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were able,
+      to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian
+      philosophers. Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved
+      himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured
+      him, and of the hatred with which he has been honoured by all
+      revolutionists&mdash;the natural and irreconcilable enemies of all
+      legitimate sovereignty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chevalier Acton is the son of an Irish physician, who first was
+      established at Besancon in France, and afterwards at Leghorn in Italy. He
+      is indebted for his present elevation to his own merit and to the
+      penetration of the Queen of Sardinia, who discovered in him, when young,
+      those qualities which have since distinguished him as a faithful
+      counsellor and an able Minister. As loyal as wise, he was, from 1789, an
+      enemy to the French Revolution. He easily foresaw that the specious
+      promise of regeneration held out by impostors or fools to delude the
+      ignorant, the credulous and the weak, would end in that universal
+      corruption and general overthrow which we since have witnessed, and the
+      effects of which our grandchildren will mourn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When our Republic, in April, 1792, declared war against Austria, and when,
+      in the September following, the dominions of His Sardinian Majesty were
+      invaded by our troops, the neutrality of Naples continued, and was
+      acknowledged by our Government. On the 16th of December following, our
+      fleet from Toulon, however, cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, and a
+      grenadier of the name of Belleville was landed as an Ambassador of the
+      French Republic, and threatened a bombardment in case the demands he
+      presented in a note were not acceded to within twenty-four hours. Being
+      attacked in time of peace, and taken by surprise, the Court of Naples was
+      unable to make any resistance, and Chevalier Acton informed our grenadier
+      Ambassador that this note had been laid before his Sovereign, who had
+      ordered him to sign an agreement in consequence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When in February, 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own
+      safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with
+      your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our
+      Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to
+      Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking
+      Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of our emissary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whenever our Government has, by the success of our arms, been enabled to
+      dictate to Naples, the removal of Acton has been insisted upon; but though
+      he has ceased to transact business ostensibly as a Minister, his influence
+      has always, and deservedly, continued unimpaired, and he still enjoys the
+      just confidence and esteem of his Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But is His Sicilian Majesty equally well represented at the Cabinet of St.
+      Cloud as served in his own capital? I have told you before that Bonaparte
+      is extremely particular in his acceptance of foreign diplomatic agents,
+      and admits none near his person whom he does not believe to be well
+      inclined to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marquis de Gallo, the Ambassador of the King of the Two Sicilies to the
+      Emperor of the French, is no novice in the diplomatic career. His
+      Sovereign has employed him for these fifteen years in the most delicate
+      negotiations, and nominated him in May, 1795, a Minister of the Foreign
+      Department, and a successor of Chevalier Acton, an honour which he
+      declined. In the summer and autumn, 1797, Marquis de Gallo assisted at the
+      conferences at Udine, and signed, with the Austrian plenipotentiaries, the
+      Peace of Campo Formio, on the 17th of October, 1797.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During 1798, 1799, and 1800 he resided as Neapolitan Ambassador at Vienna,
+      and was again entrusted by his Sovereign with several important
+      transactions with Austria and Russia. After a peace had been agreed to
+      between France and the Two Sicilies, in March, 1801, and the Court of
+      Naples had every reason to fear, and of course to please, the Court of St.
+      Cloud, he obtained his present appointment, and is one of the few foreign
+      Ambassadors here who has escaped both Bonaparte&rsquo;s private admonitions in
+      the diplomatic circle and public lectures in Madame Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This escape is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government
+      is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls it)
+      of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and
+      enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has
+      resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity that demand
+      our admiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said that the Marquis de Gallo is not entirely free from some taints
+      of modern philosophy, and that he, therefore, does not consider the
+      consequences of our innovations so fatal as most loyal men judge them; nor
+      thinks a sans-culotte Emperor more dangerous to civilized society than a
+      sans-culotte sovereign people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is evident from the names and rank of its partisans that the Revolution
+      of Naples in 1799 was different in many respects from that of every other
+      country in Europe; for, although the political convulsions seem to have
+      originated among the middle classes of the community, the extremes of
+      society were everywhere else made to act against each other; the rabble
+      being the first to triumph, and the nobles to succumb. But here, on the
+      contrary, the lazzaroni, composed of the lowest portion of the population
+      of a luxurious capital, appear to have been the most strenuous, and,
+      indeed, almost the only supporters of royalty; while the great families,
+      instead of being indignant at novelties which levelled them, in point of
+      political rights, with the meanest subject, eagerly embraced the
+      opportunity of altering that form of Government which alone made them
+      great. It is, however, but justice to say that, though Marquis de Gallo
+      gained the good graces of Bonaparte and of France in 1797, he was never,
+      directly or indirectly, inculpated in the revolutionary transactions of
+      his countrymen in 1799, when he resided at Vienna; and indeed, after all,
+      it is not improbable that he disguises his real sentiments the better to,
+      serve his country, and by that means has imposed on Bonaparte and acquired
+      his favour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The address and manners of a courtier are allowed Marquis de Gallo by all
+      who know him, though few admit that he possesses any talents as a
+      statesman. He is said to have read a great deal, to possess a good memory
+      and no bad judgment; but that, notwithstanding this, all his knowledge is
+      superficial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;You have perhaps heard that Napoleon Bonaparte, with all
+      his brothers and sisters, was last Christmas married by the Pope according
+      to the Roman Catholic rite, being previously only united according to the
+      municipal laws of the French Republic, which consider marriage only as a
+      civil contract. During the last two months of His Holiness&rsquo;s residence
+      here, hardly a day passed that he was not petitioned to perform the same
+      ceremony for our conscientious grand functionaries and courtiers, which
+      he, however, according to the Emperor&rsquo;s desire, declined. But his
+      Cardinals were not under the same restrictions, and to an attentive
+      observer who has watched the progress of the Revolution and not lost sight
+      of its actors, nothing could appear more ridiculous, nothing could inspire
+      more contempt of our versatility and inconsistency, than to remark among
+      the foremost to demand the nuptial benediction, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a
+      Real, an Augereau, a Chaptal, a Reubel, a Lasnes, a Bessieres, a Thuriot,
+      a Treilhard, a Merlin, with a hundred other equally notorious
+      revolutionists, who were, twelve or fifteen years ago, not only the first
+      to declaim against religious ceremonies as ridiculous, but against
+      religion itself as useless, whose motives produced, and whose votes
+      sanctioned, those decrees of the legislature which proscribed the worship,
+      together with its priests and sectaries. But then the fashion of barefaced
+      infidelity was as much the order of the day as that of external sanctity
+      is at present. I leave to casuists the decision whether to the morals of
+      the people, naked atheism, exposed with all its deformities, is more or
+      less hurtful than concealed atheism, covered with the garb of piety; but
+      for my part I think the noonday murderer less guilty and much less
+      detestable than the midnight assassin who stabs in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hundred anecdotes are daily related of our new saints and fashionable
+      devotees. They would be laughable were they not scandalous, and
+      contemptible did they not add duplicity to our other vices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass, and on every
+      Sunday or holiday they regularly attend at vespers, when, of course, all
+      those who wish to be distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their
+      flattery never neglect to be present. In the evening of last Christmas
+      Day, the Imperial chapel was, as usual, early crowded in expectation of
+      Their Majesties, when the chamberlain, Salmatoris, entered, and said to
+      the captain of the guard, loud enough to be heard by the audience, &ldquo;The
+      Emperor and the Empress have just resolved not to come here to-night, His
+      Majesty being engaged by some unexpected business, and the Empress not
+      wishing to come without her consort.&rdquo; In ten minutes the chapel was
+      emptied of every person but the guards, the priests, and three old women
+      who had nowhere else to pass an hour. At the arrival of our Sovereigns,
+      they were astonished at the unusual vacancy, and indignantly regarded each
+      other. After vespers were over, one of Bonaparte&rsquo;s spies informed him of
+      the cause, when, instead of punishing the despicable and hypocritical
+      courtiers, or showing them any signs of his displeasure, he ordered
+      Salmatoris under arrest, who would have experienced a complete disgrace
+      had not his friend Duroc interfered and made his peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At another time, on a Sunday, Fouche entered the chapel in the midst of
+      the service, and whispered to Bonaparte, who immediately beckoned to his
+      lord-in-waiting and to Duroc. These both left the Imperial chapel, and
+      returning in a few minutes at the head of five grenadiers, entered the
+      grand gallery, generally frequented by the most scrupulous devotees, and
+      seized every book. The cause of this domiciliary visit was an anonymous
+      communication received by the Minister of Police, stating that libels
+      against the Imperial family, bound in the form of Prayer-books, had been
+      placed there. No such libels were, however, found; but of one hundred and
+      sixty pretended breviaries, twenty-eight were volumes of novels, sixteen
+      were poems, and eleven were indecent books. It is not necessary to add
+      that the proprietors of these edifying works never reclaimed them. The
+      opinions are divided here, whether this curious discovery originated in
+      the malice of Fouche, or whether Talleyrand took this method of duping his
+      rival, and at the same time of gratifying his own malignity. Certain it is
+      that Fouche was severely reprimanded for the transaction, and that
+      Bonaparte was highly offended at the disclosure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously
+      devout, nor so basely perverse. They go to church as to the play, to gape
+      at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to admire
+      the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their
+      attendance. Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of
+      religious duties. Our revolutionary charlatans have as much brutalized
+      their understanding as corrupted their hearts. They heard the Grand Mass
+      said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly heard Robespierre
+      proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and they looked at the
+      Imperial processions with the same insensibility as they once saw the
+      daily caravans of victims passing for execution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even in Bonaparte&rsquo;s own guard, and among the officers of his household
+      troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go to
+      any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now,
+      after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the Mass
+      as to a parade or to a review. With any other people, Bonaparte would not
+      so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and forced
+      military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day were
+      encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes
+      d&rsquo;Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the
+      sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell
+      into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy. After being a little
+      recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would injure
+      him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause of his
+      accident and terror: &ldquo;Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d of
+      September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from which
+      I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the sacrament
+      from my hands.&rdquo; When this occurrence was reported to Bonaparte, Ledoux was
+      dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported, and the Grand Vicar Clauset
+      sent to the Temple, for the scandal their indiscretion had caused. This
+      act was certainly as unjust towards him who was bayoneted at the altar, as
+      towards those who served the altar under the protection of the bayonets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your
+      country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could nowhere
+      justly excite surprise. We had crossed the Rhine seven months before to
+      seize the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien; and when any prey invited, the passing of the
+      Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former outrage, of audacity on
+      our part, and of endurance or indifference on the part of other
+      Continental States. Talleyrand&rsquo;s note at Aix-la-Chapelle had also informed
+      Europe that we had adopted a new and military diplomacy, and, in
+      confounding power with right, would respect no privileges at variance with
+      our ambition, interest or, suspicions, nor any independence it was thought
+      useful or convenient for us to invade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was reported here, at the time, that Bonaparte was much offended with
+      General Frere, who commanded this political expedition, for permitting Sir
+      George&rsquo;s servant to accompany his master, as Fouche and Real had already
+      tortures prepared and racks waiting, and after forcing your agent to speak
+      out, would have announced his sudden death, either by his own hands or by
+      a coup-de-sang, before any Prussian note could require his release. The
+      known morality of our Government must have removed all doubts of the
+      veracity of this assertion; a man might, besides, from the fatigues of a
+      long journey, or from other causes, expire suddenly; but the exit of two,
+      in the same circumstances, would have been thought at least extraordinary,
+      even by our friends, and suspicious by our enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The official declaration of Rheinhard (our Minister to the Circle of Lower
+      Saxony) to the Senate at Hamburg, in which he disavowed all knowledge on
+      the subject of the capture of Sir George Rumbold, occasioned his disgrace.
+      This man, a subject of the Elector of Wurtemberg by birth, is one of the
+      negative accomplices of the criminals of France who, since the Revolution,
+      have desolated Europe. He began in 1792 his diplomatic career, under
+      Chauvelin and Talleyrand, in London, and has since been the tool of every
+      faction in power. In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to the Hanse Towns,
+      and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of rally to all the
+      philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other revolutionary
+      amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden
+      then abounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A citizen of Hamburg&mdash;or rather, of the world&mdash;of the name of
+      Seveking, bestowed on him the hand of a sister; and though he is not
+      accused of avarice, some of the contributions extorted by our Government
+      from the neutral Hanse Towns are said to have been left behind in his
+      coffers instead of being forwarded to this capital. Either on this
+      account, or for some other reason, he was recalled from Hamburg in
+      January, 1797, and remained unemployed until the latter part of 1798, when
+      he was sent as Minister to Tuscany.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, in the summer of 1799, Talleyrand was forced by the Jacobins to
+      resign his place as a Minister of the Foreign Department, he had the
+      adroitness to procure Rheinhard to be nominated his successor, so that,
+      though no longer nominally the Minister, he still continued to influence
+      the decisions of our Government as much as if still in office, because,
+      though not without parts, Rheinhard has neither energy of character nor
+      consistency of conduct. He is so much accustomed, and wants so much to be
+      governed, that in 1796, at Hamburg, even the then emigrants, Madame de
+      Genlis and General Valence, directed him, when he was not ruled or
+      dictated to by his wife or brother-in-law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1800 Bonaparte sent him as a representative to the Helvetian Republic,
+      and in 1802, again to Hamburg, where he was last winter superseded by
+      Bourrienne, and ordered to an inferior station at the: Electoral Court at
+      Dresden. Rheinhard will never become one of those daring diplomatic
+      banditti whom revolutionary Governments always employ in preference. He
+      has some moral principles, and, though not religious, is rather
+      scrupulous. He would certainly sooner resign than undertake to remove by
+      poison, or by the steel of a bravo, a rival of his own or a person
+      obnoxious to his employers. He would never, indeed, betray the secrets of
+      his Government if he understood they intended to rob a despatch or to atop
+      a messenger; but no allurements whatever would induce him to head the
+      parties perpetrating these acts of our modern diplomacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our present Minister at Hamburg (Bourrienne) is far from being so nice. A
+      revolutionist from the beginning of the Revolution, he shared, with the
+      partisans of La Fayette, imprisonment under Robespierre, and escaped death
+      only by emigration. Recalled afterwards by his friend, the late Director
+      (Barras), he acted as a kind of secretary to him until 1796, when
+      Bonaparte demanded him, having known him at the military college. During
+      all Bonaparte&rsquo;s campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he was his sole and
+      confidential secretary&mdash;a situation which he lost in 1802, when
+      Talleyrand denounced his corruption and cupidity because he had rivalled
+      him in speculating in the funds and profiting by the information which his
+      place afforded him. He was then made a Counsellor of State, but in 1803 he
+      was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of one of our principal houses
+      to the amount of a million of livres&mdash;and, from his correspondence
+      with it, some reasons appeared for the suspicion that he frequently had
+      committed a breach of confidence against his master, who, after erasing
+      his name from among the Counsellors of State, had him conveyed a prisoner
+      to the Temple, where he remained six months. A small volume, called Le
+      Livre Rouge of the Consular Court, made its appearance about that time,
+      and contained some articles which gave Bonaparte reason to suppose that
+      Bourrienne was its author. On being questioned by the Grand Judge Regnier
+      and the Minister Fouce, before whom he was carried, he avowed that he had
+      written it, but denied that he had any intention of making it public. As
+      to its having found its way to the press during his confinement, that
+      could only be ascribed to the ill-will or treachery of those police agents
+      who inspected his papers and put their seals upon them. &ldquo;Tell Bonaparte,&rdquo;
+       said he, &ldquo;that, had I been inclined to injure him in the public opinion, I
+      should not have stooped to such trifles as Le Livre Rouge, while I have
+      deposited with a friend his original orders, letters, and other curious
+      documents as materials for an edifying history of our military hospitals
+      during the campaigns of Italy and Syria all authentic testimonies of his
+      humanity for the wounded and dying French soldiers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the answers of this interrogatory had been laid before Bonaparte,
+      his brother Joseph was sent to the Temple to negotiate with Bourrienne,
+      who was offered his liberty and a prefecture if he would give up all the
+      original papers that, as a private secretary, he had had opportunity to
+      collect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These papers,&rdquo; answered Bourrienne, &ldquo;are my only security against your
+      brother&rsquo;s wrath and his assassins. Were I weak enough to deliver them up
+      to-day, to-morrow, probably, I should no longer be counted among the
+      living; but I have now taken my measures so effectually that, were I
+      murdered to-day, these originals would be printed to-morrow. If Napoleon
+      does not confide in my word of honour, he may trust to an assurance of
+      discretion, with which my own interest is nearly connected. If he suspects
+      me of having wronged him, he is convinced also of the eminent services I
+      have rendered him, sufficient surely to outweigh his present suspicion.
+      Let him again employ me in any post worthy of him and of me, and he shall
+      soon see how much I will endeavour to regain his confidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Shortly afterwards Bourrienne was released, and a pension, equal to the
+      salary of a Counsellor of State; was granted him until some suitable place
+      became vacant. On Champagny&rsquo;s being appointed a Minister of the Home
+      Department, the embassy at Vienna was demanded by Bourrienne, but refused,
+      as previously promised to La Rochefoucauld, our late Minister at Dresden.
+      When Rheinhard, in a kind of disgrace, was transferred to that relatively
+      insignificant post, Bourrienne was ordered, with extensive instructions,
+      to Hamburg. The Senate soon found the difference between a timid and
+      honest Minister, and an unprincipled and crafty intriguer. New loans were
+      immediately required from Hanover; but hardly were these acquitted, than
+      fresh extortions were insisted on. In some secret conferences Bourrienne
+      is, however, said to have hinted that some douceurs were expected for
+      alleviating the rigour of his instructions. This hint has, no doubt, been
+      taken, because he suddenly altered his conduct, and instead of hunting the
+      purses of the Germans, pursued the persons of his emigrated countrymen;
+      and, in a memorial, demanded the expulsion of all Frenchmen who were not
+      registered and protected by him, under pretence that every one of them who
+      declined the honour of being a subject of Bonaparte, must be a traitor
+      against the French Government and his country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bourrienne is now stated to have connected himself with several
+      stock-jobbers, both in Germany, Holland, and England; and already to have
+      pocketed considerable sums by such connections. It is, however, not to be
+      forgotten that several houses have been ruined in this capital by the
+      profits allowed him, who always refused to share their losses, but,
+      whatever were the consequences, enforced to its full amount the payment of
+      that value which he chose to set on his communications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A place in France would, no doubt, have been preferable to Bourrienne,
+      particularly one near the person of Bonaparte. But if nothing else
+      prevented the accomplishment of his wishes, his long familiarity with all
+      the Bonapartes, whom he always treated as equals, and even now (with the
+      exception of Napoleon) does not think his superiors, will long remain an
+      insurmountable barrier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot comprehend how Bonaparte (who is certainly no bad judge of men)
+      could so long confide in Bourrienne, who, with the usual presumption of my
+      countrymen, is continually boasting, to a degree that borders on
+      indiscretion, and, by an artful questioner, may easily be lead to overstep
+      those bounds. Most of the particulars of his quarrel with Napoleon I heard
+      him relate himself, as a proof of his great consequence, in a company of
+      forty individuals, many of whom were unknown to him. On the first
+      discovery which Bonaparte made of Bourrienne&rsquo;s infidelity, Talleyrand
+      complimented him upon not having suffered from it. &ldquo;Do you not see,&rdquo;
+       answered Bonaparte, &ldquo;that it is also one of the extraordinary gifts of my
+      extraordinary good fortune?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even traitors are unable to betray me. Plots respect me as much as
+      bullets.&rdquo; I need not tell you that Fortune is the sole divinity sincerely
+      worshipped by Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Joseph Bonaparte leads a much more retired life, and sees
+      less company, than any of his brothers or sisters. Except the members of
+      his own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph
+      those regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame
+      Louis Bonaparte have. His hospitality is, however, greater at his
+      countryseat Morfontaine than at his hotel here. Those whom he likes, or
+      does not mistrust (who, by the bye, are very few), may visit him without
+      much formality in the country, and prolong their stay, according to their
+      own inclination or discretion; but they must come without their servants,
+      or send them away on their arrival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as an agreeable visitor presents himself, it is the etiquette of
+      the house to consider him as an inmate; but to allow him at the same time
+      a perfect liberty to dispose of his hours and his person as suits his
+      convenience or caprice. In this extensive and superb mansion a suite of
+      apartments is assigned him, with a valet-de&mdash;chambre, a lackey, a
+      coachman, a groom, and a jockey, all under his own exclusive command. He
+      has allotted him a chariot, a gig, and riding horses, if he prefers such
+      an exercise. A catalogue is given him of the library of the chateau; and
+      every morning he is informed what persons compose the company at
+      breakfast, dinner, and supper, and of the hours of these different
+      repasts. A bill of fare is at the same time presented to him, and he is
+      asked to point out those dishes to which he gives the preference, and to
+      declare whether he chooses to join the company or to be served in his own
+      rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the summer season, players from the different theatres of Paris are
+      paid to perform three times in the week; and each guest, according to the
+      period of his arrival, is asked, in his turn, to command either a comedy
+      or a tragedy, a farce or a ballet. Twice in the week concerts are executed
+      by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the week
+      invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or accepted
+      from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge et
+      Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games of
+      hazard. The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who
+      advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the loss.
+      Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from night
+      till morning, without interruption, as no one interferes. Should Joseph
+      hear that any person has been too severely treated by Fortune, or suspects
+      that he has not much cash remaining, some rouleaux of napoleons d&rsquo;or are
+      placed on the table of his dressing-room, which he may use or leave
+      untouched, as he judges proper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hours of Joseph Bonaparte are neither so late as yours in England, nor
+      so early as they were formerly in France. Breakfast is ready served at ten
+      o&rsquo;clock, dinner at four, and supper at nine. Before midnight he retires to
+      bed with his family, but visitors do as they like and follow their own
+      usual hours, and their servants are obliged to wait for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When any business calls Joseph away, either to preside in the Senate here,
+      or to travel in the provinces, he notifies the visitors, telling them at
+      the same time not to displace themselves on account of his absence, but
+      wait till his return, as they would not observe any difference in the
+      economy of his house, of which Madame Joseph always does the honours, or,
+      in her absence, some lady appointed by her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last year, when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly
+      four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant. On his
+      return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of
+      Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the
+      bottle. Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors
+      and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and burgundy
+      so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not heartily
+      intoxicated. But the best of the story is that he employed his mornings in
+      composing a poem holding out to abhorrence the disgusting vice of
+      drunkenness, and presented it to Joseph, requesting permission to dedicate
+      it to him when published. To those who have read it, or only seen extracts
+      from it, the compilation appears far from being contemptible, but Joseph
+      still keeps the copy, though he has made the author a present of one
+      hundred napoleons d&rsquo;or, and procured him a place of an amanuensis in the
+      chancellory of the Senate, having resolved never to accept any dedication,
+      but wishing also not to hurt the feelings of the author by a refusal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a chateau where so many visitors of licentious and depraved morals
+      meet, of both sexes, and where such an unlimited liberty reigns, intrigues
+      must occur, and have of course not seldom furnished materials for the
+      scandalous chronicle. Even Madame Joseph herself has either been gallant
+      or calumniated. Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of Eugene de
+      Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively indebted to
+      the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even fought a duel
+      concerning the right of paternity. Eugene de Beauharnais never was a great
+      favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved manners and prudence form
+      too great a contrast to his noisy and blundering way to accord with each
+      other. Before he set out for Italy, it was well known in our fashionable
+      circles that he had been interdicted the house of his uncle, and that no
+      reconciliation took place, notwithstanding the endeavours of Madame
+      Napoleon. To humble him still more, Joseph even nominated la Fond-Blaniac
+      an equerry to his wife, who, therefore, easily consoled herself for the
+      departure of her dear nephew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p214" id="p214"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="p214.jpg (77K)" src="images/p214.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      The husband of Madame Miot (one of Madame Joseph&rsquo;s ladies-in-waiting) was
+      not so patient, nor such a philosopher as Joseph Bonaparte. Some
+      charitable person having reported in the company of a &lsquo;bonne amie&rsquo; of
+      Miot, that his wife did not pass her nights in solitude, but that she
+      sought consolation among the many gallants and disengaged visitors at
+      Morfontaine, he determined to surprise her. It was past eleven o&rsquo;clock at
+      night when his arrival was announced to Joseph, who had just retired to
+      his closet. Madame Miot had been in bed ever since nine, ill of a
+      migraine, and her husband was too affectionate not to be the first to
+      inform her of his presence, without permitting anybody previously to
+      disturb her. With great reluctance, Madame Miot&rsquo;s maid delivered the key
+      of her rooms, while she accompanied him with a light. In the antechamber
+      he found a hat and a greatcoat, and in the closet adjoining the bedroom, a
+      coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and
+      slippers. Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her
+      gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband began
+      to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the closet.
+      A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that
+      the husband called out &ldquo;Murder! murder!&rdquo; with all his might. The chateau
+      was instantly in an uproar, and the apartments crowded with half-dressed
+      and half-naked lovers. Joseph Bonaparte alone was able to separate the
+      combatants; and inquiring the cause of the riot, assured them that he
+      would suffer no scandal and no intrigues in his house, without seriously
+      resenting it. An explanation being made, Madame Miot was looked for but in
+      vain; and the maid declared that, being warned by a letter from Paris of
+      her husband&rsquo;s jealousy and determination to surprise her, her mistress had
+      reposed herself in her room; while, to punish the ungenerous suspicions of
+      her husband, she had persuaded Captain d&rsquo; Horteuil to occupy her place in
+      her own bed. The maid had no sooner finished her deposition, than her
+      mistress made her appearance and upbraided her husband severely, in which
+      she was cordially joined by the spectators. She inquired if, on seeing the
+      dress of a gentleman, he had also discovered the attire of a female; and
+      she appealed to Captain d&rsquo; Horteuil whether he had not the two preceding
+      nights also slept in her bed. To this he, of course, assented; adding
+      that, had M. Miot attacked him the first night, he would not then perhaps
+      have been so roughly handled as now; for then he was prepared for a visit,
+      which this night was rather unexpected. This connubial farce ended by Miot
+      begging pardon of his wife and her gallant; the former of whom, after much
+      entreaty by Joseph, at last consented to share with him her bed. But being
+      disfigured with two black eyes and suffering from several bruises, and
+      also ashamed of his unfashionable behaviour, he continued invisible for
+      ten days afterwards, and returned to this city as he had left it, by
+      stealth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Niot was a spy under Robespierre, and is a Counsellor of State under
+      Bonaparte. Without bread, as well as without a home, he was, from the
+      beginning of the Revolution, one of the most ardent patriots, and the
+      first republican Minister in Tuscany. After the Sovereign of that country
+      had, in 1793, joined the League, Miot returned to France, and was, for his
+      want of address to negotiate as a Minister, shut up to perform the part of
+      a spy in the Luxembourg, then transformed into a prison for suspected
+      persons. Thanks to his patriotism, upwards of two hundred individuals of
+      both sexes were denounced, transferred to the Conciergerie prison, and
+      afterwards guillotined. After that, until 1799, he continued so despised
+      that no faction would accept him for an accomplice; but in the November of
+      that year, after Bonaparte had declared himself a First Consul, Miot was
+      appointed a tribune, an office from which he was advanced, in 1802, to be
+      a Counsellor of State. As Miot squanders away his salary with harlots and
+      in gambling-houses, and is pursued by creditors he neither will nor can
+      pay, it was merely from charity that his wife was received among the other
+      ladies of Madame Joseph Bonaparte&rsquo;s household.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Notwithstanding the ties of consanguinity, honour, duty,
+      interest, and gratitude, which bound the Spanish Bourbons to the cause of
+      the Bourbons of France, no monarch has rendered more service to the cause
+      of rebellion, and done more harm to the cause of royalty, than the King of
+      Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here, again, you must understand me. When I speak of Princes whose
+      talents are known not to be brilliant, whose intellects are known to be
+      feeble, and whose good intentions are rendered null by a want of firmness
+      of character or consistency of conduct; while I deplore their weakness and
+      the consequent misfortunes of their contemporaries, I lay all the blame on
+      their wicked or ignorant counsellors; because, if no Ministers were fools
+      or traitors, no Sovereigns would tremble on their thrones, and no subjects
+      dare to shake their foundation. Had Providence blessed Charles IV. of
+      Spain with the judgment in selecting his Ministers, and the constancy of
+      persevering in his choice, possessed by your George III.; had the helm of
+      Spain been in the firm and able hands of a Grenville, a Windham, and a
+      Pitt, the Cabinet of Madrid would never have been oppressed by the yoke of
+      the Cabinet of St. Cloud, nor paid a heavy tribute for its bondage,
+      degrading as well as ruinous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the age of upstarts,&rdquo; said Talleyrand to his cousin, Prince de
+      Chalais, who reproached him for an unbecoming servility to low and vile
+      personages; &ldquo;and I prefer bowing to them to being trampled upon and
+      crushed by them.&rdquo; Indeed, as far as I remember, nowhere in history are
+      hitherto recorded so many low persons who, from obscurity and meanness,
+      have suddenly and at once attained rank and notoriety. Where do we read of
+      such a numerous crew of upstart Emperors, Kings, grand pensionaries,
+      directors, Imperial Highnesses, Princes, Field-marshals, generals,
+      Senators, Ministers, governors, Cardinals, etc., as we now witness
+      figuring upon the theatre of Europe, and who chiefly decide on the destiny
+      of nations? Among these, several are certainly to be found whose superior
+      parts have made them worthy to pierce the crowd and to shake off their
+      native mud; but others again, and by far the greatest number of these
+      &lsquo;novi homines&rsquo;, owe their present elevation to shameless intrigues or
+      atrocious crimes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prime Minister&mdash;or rather, the viceroy of Spain, the Prince of
+      Peace&mdash;belongs to the latter class. From a man in the ranks of the
+      guards he was promoted to a general-in-chief, and from a harp player in
+      antechambers to a president of the councils of a Prince; and that within
+      the short period of six years. Such a fortune is not common; but to be
+      absolutely without capacity as well as virtue, genius as well as good
+      breeding, and, nevertheless, to continue in an elevation so little
+      merited, and in a place formerly so subject to changes and so unstable, is
+      a fortune that no upstart ever before experienced in Spain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An intrigue of his elder brother with the present Queen, then Princess of
+      Asturia, which was discovered by the King, introduced him first at Court
+      as a harp player, and, when his brother was exiled, he was entrusted with
+      the correspondence of the Princess with her gallant. After she had
+      ascended the throne, he thought it more profitable to be the lover than
+      the messenger, and contrived, therefore, to supplant his brother in the
+      royal favour. Promotions and riches were consequently heaped upon him,
+      and, what is surprising, the more undisguised the partiality of the Queen
+      was, the greater the attachment of the King displayed itself; and it has
+      ever since been an emulation between the royal couple who should the most
+      forget and vilify birth and supremacy by associating this man not only in
+      the courtly pleasures, but in the functions of Sovereignty. Had he been
+      gifted with sound understanding, or possessed any share of delicacy,
+      generosity, or discretion, he would, while he profited by their imprudent
+      condescension, have prevented them from exposing their weaknesses and
+      frailties to a discussion and ridicule among courtiers, and from becoming
+      objects of humiliation and scandal among the people. He would have warned
+      them of the danger which at all times attends the publicity of foibles and
+      vices of Princes, but particularly in the present times of trouble and
+      innovations. He would have told them: &ldquo;Make me great and wealthy, but not
+      at the expense of your own grandeur or of the loyalty of your people. Do
+      not treat an humble subject as an equal, nor suffer Your Majesties, whom
+      Providence destined to govern a high-spirited nation, to be openly ruled
+      by one born to obey. I am too dutiful not to lay aside my private vanity
+      when the happiness of my King and the tranquillity of my fellow subjects
+      are at stake. I am already too high. In descending a little, I shall not
+      only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in the opinion of
+      posterity. Every step I am advancing undermines your throne. In retreating
+      a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never injure it.&rdquo; But I beg your
+      pardon for this digression, and for putting the language of dignified
+      reason into the mouth of a man as corrupt as he is imbecile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do not suppose, because the Prince of Peace is no friend of my nation,
+      that I am his enemy. No! Had he shown himself a true patriot, a friend of
+      his own country, and of his too liberal Prince, or even of monarchy in
+      general, or of anybody else but himself&mdash;although I might have
+      disapproved of his policy, if he has any&mdash;I would never have lashed
+      the individual for the acts of the Minister. But you must have observed,
+      with me, that never before his administration was the Cabinet of Madrid
+      worse conducted at home or more despised abroad; the Spanish Monarch more
+      humbled or Spanish subjects more wretched; the Spanish power more
+      dishonoured or the Spanish resources worse employed. Never, before the
+      treaty with France of 1796, concluded by this wiseacre (which made him a
+      Prince of Peace, and our Government the Sovereign of Spain), was the
+      Spanish monarchy reduced to such a lamentable dilemma as to be forced into
+      an expensive war without a cause, and into a disgraceful peace, not only
+      unprofitable, but absolutely disadvantageous. Never before were its
+      treasures distributed among its oppressors to support their tyranny, nor
+      its military and naval forces employed to fight the battles of rebellion.
+      The loyal subjects of Spain have only one hope left. The delicate state of
+      his present Majesty&rsquo;s health does not promise a much longer continuance of
+      his reign, and the Prince of Asturia is too well informed to endure the
+      guidance of the most ignorant Minister that ever was admitted into the
+      Cabinet and confidence of a Sovereign. It is more than probable that under
+      a new reign the misfortunes of the Prince of Peace will inspire as much
+      compassion as his rapid advancement has excited astonishment and
+      indignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Cabinet thus badly directed cannot be expected to have representatives
+      abroad either of abilities or patriotism. The Admiral and General Gravina,
+      who but lately left this capital as an Ambassador from the Court of Spain
+      to assume the command of a Spanish fleet, is more valiant than wise, and
+      more an enemy of your country than a friend of his own. He is a profound
+      admirer of Bonaparte&rsquo;s virtues and successes, and was, during his
+      residence, one of the most ostentatiously awkward courtiers of Napoleon
+      the First. It is said that he has the modesty and loyalty to wish to
+      become a Spanish Bonaparte, and that he promises to restore by his genius
+      and exploits the lost lustre of the Spanish monarchy. When this was
+      reported to Talleyrand, he smiled with contempt; but when it was told to
+      Bonaparte, he stamped with rage at the impudence of the Spaniard in daring
+      to associate his name of acquired and established greatness with his own
+      impertinent schemes of absurdities and impossibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the summer of 1793, Gravina commanded a division of the Spanish fleet
+      in the Mediterranean, of which Admiral Langara was the commander-in-chief.
+      At the capitulation of Toulon, after the combined English and Spanish
+      forces had taken possession of it, when Rear-Admiral Goodall was declared
+      governor, Gravina was made the commandant of the troops. At the head of
+      these he often fought bravely in different sorties, and on the 1st of
+      October was wounded at the re-capture of Fort Pharon. He complains still
+      of having suffered insults or neglect from the English, and even of having
+      been exposed unnecessarily to the fire and sword of the enemy merely
+      because he was a patriot as well as an envied or suspected ally. His
+      inveteracy against your country takes its date, no doubt, from the siege
+      of Toulon, or perhaps, from its evacuation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, in May, 1794, our troops were advancing towards Collioure, he was
+      sent with a squadron to bring it succours, but he arrived too late, and
+      could not save that important place. He was not more successful at the
+      beginning of the campaign of 1795 at Rosa, where he had only time to carry
+      away the artillery before the enemy entered. In August, that year, during
+      the absence of Admiral Massaredo, he assumed ad interim the command of the
+      Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean; but in the December following he was
+      disgraced, arrested, and shut up as a State prisoner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the
+      autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and after
+      the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St. Cloud,
+      Chevalier d&rsquo; Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was nominated both
+      his successor and a representative of the King of Etruria. Among the
+      members of our diplomatic corps, he was considered somewhat of a Spanish
+      gasconader and a bully. He more frequently boasted of his wounds and
+      battles than of his negotiations or conferences, though he pretended,
+      indeed, to shine as much in the Cabinet as in the field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his suite were two Spanish women, one about forty, and the other about
+      twenty years of age. Nobody knew what to make of them, as they were
+      treated neither as wives, mistresses, nor servants; and they avowed
+      themselves to be no relations. After a residence here of some weeks, he
+      was, by superior orders, waylaid one night at the opera, by a young and
+      beautiful dancing girl of the name of Barrois, who engaged him to take her
+      into keeping. He hesitated, indeed, for some time; at last, however, love
+      got the better of his scruples, and he furnished for her an elegant
+      apartment on the new Boulevard. On the day he carried her there, he was
+      accompanied by the chaplain of the Spanish Legation; and told her that,
+      previous to any further intimacy, she must be married to him, as his
+      religious principles did not permit him to cohabit with a woman who was
+      not his wife. At the same time he laid before her an agreement to sign, by
+      which she bound herself never to claim him as a husband before her turn&mdash;that
+      is to say, until sixteen other women, to whom he had been previously
+      married, were dead. She made no opposition, either to the marriage or to
+      the conditions annexed to it. This girl had a sweetheart of the name of
+      Valere, an actor at one of the little theatres on the Boulevards, to whom
+      she communicated her adventure. He advised her to be scrupulous in her
+      turn, and to ask a copy of the agreement. After some difficulty this was
+      obtained. In it no mention was made of her maintenance, nor in what manner
+      her children were to be regarded, should she have any. Valere had,
+      therefore, another agreement drawn up, in which all these points were
+      arranged, according to his own interested views. Gravina refused to
+      subscribe to what he plainly perceived were only extortions; and the girl,
+      in her turn, not only declined any further connection with him, but
+      threatened to publish the act of polygamy. Before they had done discussing
+      this subject, the door was suddenly opened and the two Spanish ladies
+      presented themselves. After severely upbraiding Gravina, who was struck
+      mute by surprise, they announced to the girl that whatever promise or
+      contract of marriage she had obtained from him was of no value, as, before
+      they came with him to France, he had bound himself, before a public notary
+      at Madrid, not to form any more connections, nor to marry any other woman,
+      without their written consent. One of these ladies declared that she had
+      been married to Gravina twenty-two years, and was his oldest wife but one;
+      the other said that she had been married to him six years. They insisted
+      upon his following them, which he did, after putting a purse of gold into
+      Barrois&rsquo;s hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Valere heard from his mistress this occurrence, he advised her to
+      make the most money she could of the Spaniard&rsquo;s curious scruples. A letter
+      was, therefore, written to him, demanding one hundred thousand livres&mdash;as
+      the price of secrecy and withholding the particulars of this business from
+      the knowledge of the tribunals and the police; and an answer was required
+      within twenty-four hours. The same night Gravina offered one thousand
+      Louis, which were accepted, and the papers returned; but the next day
+      Valere went to his hotel, Rue de Provence, where he presented himself as a
+      brother of Barrois. He stated that he still possessed authenticated copies
+      of the papers returned, and that he must have either the full sum first
+      asked by his sister, or an annuity of twelve thousand livres settled upon
+      her. Instead of an answer, Gravina ordered him to be turned out of the
+      house. An attorney then waited on His Excellency, on the part of the
+      brother and the sister, and repeated their threats and their demands,
+      adding that he would write a memorial both to the Emperor of the French
+      and to the King of Spain, were justice refused to his principals any
+      longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gravina was well aware that this affair, though more laughable than
+      criminal, would hurt both his character and credit if it were known in
+      France; he therefore consented to pay seventy-six thousand livres more,
+      upon a formal renunciation by the party of all future claims. Not having
+      money sufficient by him, he went to borrow it from a banker, whose clerk
+      was one of Talleyrand&rsquo;s secret agents. Our Minister, therefore, ordered
+      every step of Gravina to be watched; but he soon discovered that, instead
+      of wanting this money for a political intrigue, it was necessary to
+      extricate him out of an amorous scrape. Hearing, however, in what a
+      scandalous manner the Ambassador had been duped and imposed upon, he
+      reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche orders to have Valere, Barrois,
+      and the attorney immediately transported to Cayenne, and to restore
+      Gravina his money. The former part of this order the Minister of Police
+      executed the more willingly, as it was according to his plan that Barrois
+      had pitched upon Gravina for a lover. She had been intended by him as a
+      spy on His Excellency, but had deceived him by her reports&mdash;a crime
+      for which transportation was a usual punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this affair
+      in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our fashionable
+      circles, and subjects for our caricaturists. But these artists were soon
+      seized by the police, who found it more easy to chastise genius than to
+      silence tongues. The declaration of war by Spain against your country was
+      a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit with honour a Court where he was
+      an object of ridicule, to assume the command of a fleet which might one
+      day make him an object of terror. When he took leave of Bonaparte, he was
+      told to return to France victorious, or never to return any more; and
+      Talleyrand warned him as a friend, &ldquo;whenever he returned to his post in
+      France to leave his marriage mania behind him in Spain. Here,&rdquo; said he,
+      &ldquo;you may, without ridicule, intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a
+      great risk by marrying even one.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say, so
+      far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious. But
+      infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;It cannot have escaped the observation of the most
+      superficial traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of
+      morals is not atoned for by good breeding or good manners. The hideousness
+      of vice, the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of
+      favour, and the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil,
+      that gloss of virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity of
+      corruption and the scandal of depravity. Duplicity and hypocrisy are here
+      very common indeed, more so than dissimulation anywhere else; but
+      barefaced knaves and impostors must always make indifferent courtiers.
+      Here the Minister tells you, I must have such a sum for a place; and the
+      chamberlain tells you, Count down so much for my protection. The Princess
+      requires a necklace of such a value for interesting herself for your
+      advancement; and the lady-in-waiting demands a diamond of such worth on
+      the day of your promotion. This tariff of favours and of infamy descends
+      &lsquo;ad infinitum&rsquo;. The secretary for signing, and the clerk for writing your
+      commission; the cashier for delivering it, and the messenger for informing
+      you of it, have all their fixed prices. Have you a lawsuit, the judge
+      announces to you that so much has been offered by your opponent, and so
+      much is expected from you, if you desire to win your cause. When you are
+      the defendant against the Crown, the attorney or solicitor-general lets
+      you know that such a douceur is requisite to procure such an issue. Even
+      in criminal proceedings, not only honour, but life, may be saved by
+      pecuniary sacrifices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man of the name of Martin, by profession a stock-jobber, killed, in
+      1803, his own wife; and for twelve thousand livres&mdash;he was acquitted,
+      and recovered his liberty. In November last year, in a quarrel with his
+      own brother, he stabbed him through the heart, and for another sum of
+      twelve thousand livres he was acquitted, and released before last
+      Christmas. This wretch is now in prison again, on suspicion of having
+      poisoned his own daughter, with whom he had an incestuous intercourse, and
+      he boasts publicly of soon being liberated. Another person, Louis de
+      Saurac, the younger son of Baron de Saurac, who together with his eldest
+      son had emigrated, forged a will in the name of his parent, whom he
+      pretended to be dead, which left him the sole heir of all the disposable
+      property, to the exclusion of two sisters. After the nation had shared its
+      part as heir of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder. In
+      1802, both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and
+      returned to France. To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis
+      had, by his ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing
+      them even the common necessaries of life. After upbraiding him for his
+      want of duty, the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of
+      the unsold part of his estates. On the day fixed for settling the accounts
+      and entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a
+      conspirator and imprisoned in the Temple. He had been denounced as having
+      served in the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII.
+      To disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from
+      America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon the
+      rack he denied the latter. During his arrest, the eldest son discovered
+      that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means of the will
+      he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he who had been
+      unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days. With the wreck of
+      their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father&rsquo;s release; who, being
+      acquainted with the perversity of his younger son, addressed himself to
+      the department to be reinstated in his property. This was opposed by
+      Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the revolutionary maxim
+      which had passed into a law, enacting that all emigrants should be
+      considered as politically dead. Hitherto Baron de Saurac had, from
+      affection, declined to mention the forged will; but shocked by his son&rsquo;s
+      obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his counsellor produced this
+      document, which not only went to deprive Louis of his property, but
+      exposed him to a criminal prosecution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
+      revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
+      the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen. He addressed
+      himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte&rsquo;s Imperial
+      attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe
+      of fifty thousand livres&mdash;obtained for him, after he had been
+      defeated in every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal
+      of cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being,
+      according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of
+      any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the
+      family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the
+      Abbey of the same name. One of the monks, observing in him some
+      application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
+      bestowed on him some previous education. Not satisfied with this generous
+      act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of Cambray, to
+      subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the Parliament
+      of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him. By his
+      dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors;
+      who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as representative
+      of the people to our First National Assembly. They soon, however, had
+      reason to repent of their generosity. He joined the Orleans faction and
+      became one of the most persevering, violent, and cruel persecutors of the
+      privileged classes, particularly of the clergy, to whom he was indebted
+      for everything. In 1792 he was elected a member of the National
+      Convention, where he voted for the death of his King. It was he who
+      proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme, the production of the
+      deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected persons; which was decreed
+      on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused the imprisonment or
+      proscription of two hundred thousand families. This decree procured him
+      the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of Merlin Potence. In 1795 he was
+      appointed a Minister of Police, and soon afterwards a Minister of Justice.
+      After the revolution in favour of the Jacobins of the 4th of September,
+      1797, he was made a director, a place which he was obliged by the same
+      Jacobins to resign, in June, 1799. Bonaparte expressed, at first, the most
+      sovereign contempt for this Merlin, but on account of one of his sons, who
+      was his aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when First Consul, his
+      attorney-general.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As nothing paints better the true features of a Government than the
+      morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man&rsquo;s portrait
+      with the following characteristic touches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Merlin de Douai has been successively the counsel of the late Duc d&rsquo;
+      Orleans, the friend of Danton, of Chabot, and of Hebert, the admirer of
+      Murat, and the servant of Robespierre. An accomplice of Rewbell, Barras,
+      and la Reveilliere, an author of the law of suspected persons, an advocate
+      of the Septembrizers, and an ardent apostle of the St. Guillotine. Cunning
+      as a fog and ferocious as a tiger, he has outlived all the factions with
+      which he has been connected. It has been his policy to keep in continual
+      fermentation rivalships, jealousies, inquietudes, revenge and all other
+      odious passions; establishing, by such means, his influence on the terror
+      of some, the ambition of others, and the credulity of them all. Had I,
+      when Merlin proposed his law concerning suspected persons, in the name of
+      liberty and equality, been free and his equal, I should have said to him,
+      &ldquo;Monster, this, your atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it has
+      brought thousands of innocent persons to an untimely end; you shall die by
+      my hands as a victim, if the tribunals do not condemn you to the scaffold
+      as an executioner or as a criminal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Merlin has bought national property to the amount of fifteen million of
+      livress&mdash;and he is supposed to possess money nearly to the same
+      amount, in your or our funds. For a man born a beggar, and educated by
+      charity, this fortune, together with the liberal salaries he enjoys, might
+      seem sufficient without selling justice, protecting guilt, and oppressing
+      or persecuting innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Paris, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The household troops of Napoleon the First are by thousands
+      more numerous than those even of Louis XIV. were. Grenadiers on foot and
+      on horseback, riflemen on foot and on horseback, heavy and light
+      artillery, dragoons and hussars, mamelukes and sailors, artificers and
+      pontoneers, gendarmes, gendarmes d&rsquo;Alite, Velites and veterans, with
+      Italian grenadiers, riflemen, dragoons, etc., etc., compose all together a
+      not inconsiderable army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though it frequently happens that the pay of the other troops is in
+      arrears, those appertaining to Bonaparte&rsquo;s household are as regularly paid
+      as his Senators, Counsellors of State, and other public functionaries. All
+      the men are picked, and all the officers as much as possible of birth, or
+      at least of education. In the midst of this voluptuous and seductive
+      capital, they are kept very strict, and the least negligence or infraction
+      of military discipline is more severely punished than if committed in
+      garrison or in an encampment. They are both better clothed, accoutred, and
+      paid, than the troops of the line, and have everywhere the precedency of
+      them. All the officers, and many of the soldiers, are members of
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s Legion of Honour, and carry arms of honour distributed to them
+      by Imperial favour, or for military exploits. None of them are quartered
+      upon the citizens; each corps has its own spacious barracks, hospitals,
+      drilling-ground, riding or fencing-houses, gardens, bathing-houses,
+      billiard-table, and even libraries. A chapel has lately been constructed
+      near each barrack, and almoners are already appointed. In the meantime,
+      they attend regularly at Mass, either in the Imperial Chapel or in the
+      parish churches. Bonaparte discourages much all marriages among the
+      military in general, but particularly among those of his household troops.
+      That they may not, however, be entirely deprived of the society of women,
+      he allows five to each company, with the same salaries as the men, under
+      the name of washerwomen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a vain and fickle people, fond of shows and innovations, nothing in a
+      military despotism has a greater political utility, gives greater
+      satisfaction, and leaves behind a more useful terror and awe, than
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s grand military reviews. In the beginning of his consulate,
+      they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of
+      Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has been
+      proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month. This ostentatious
+      exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review of
+      the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those occasions
+      their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully has seized, and
+      continues to usurp, the authority of his own Sovereign. What an example
+      for ambition! what a lesson to treachery!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides the household troops, this capital and its vicinity have, for
+      these three years past, never contained less than from fifteen to twenty
+      thousand men of the regiments of the line, belonging to what is called the
+      first military division of the Army of the Interior. These troops are
+      selected from among the brigades that served under Bonaparte in Italy and
+      Egypt with the greatest eclat, and constitute a kind of depot for
+      recruiting his household troops with tried and trusty men. They are also
+      regularly paid, and generally better accoutred than their comrades
+      encamped on the coast, or quartered in Italy or Holland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a standing army, upon which all revolutionary rulers can depend, and
+      that always will continue their faithful support, unique in its sort and
+      composition, exists in the bosom as well as in the extremities of this
+      country. I mean, one hundred and twenty thousand invalids, mostly young
+      men under thirty, forced by conscription against their will into the
+      field, quartered and taken care of by our Government, and all possessed
+      with the absurd prejudice that, as they have been maimed in fighting the
+      battles of rebellion, the restoration of legitimate sovereignty would to
+      them be an epoch of destruction, or at least of misery and want; and this
+      prejudice is kept alive by emissaries employed on purpose to mislead them.
+      Of these, eight thousand are lodged and provided for in this city; ten
+      thousand at Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and in the
+      conquered departments on the left bank of the Abine; countries where the
+      inhabitants are discontented and disaffected, and require, therefore, to
+      be watched, and to have a better spirit infused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those whose wounds permit it are also employed to do garrison duty in
+      fortified places not exposed to an attack by enemies, and to assist in the
+      different arsenals and laboratories, foundries, and depots of military or
+      naval stores. Others are attached to the police offices, and some as
+      gendarmes, to arrest suspected or guilty individuals; or as garnissaires,
+      to enforce the payment of contributions from the unwilling or distressed.
+      When the period for the payment of taxes is expired, two of these
+      janissaires present themselves at the house of the persons in arrears,
+      with a billet signed by the director of the contributions and
+      countersigned by the police commissary. If the money is not immediately
+      paid, with half a crown to each of them besides, they remain quartered in
+      the house, where they are to be boarded and to receive half a crown a day
+      each until an order from those who sent them informs them that what was
+      due to the state has been acquitted. After their entrance into a house,
+      and during their stay, no furniture or effects whatever can be removed or
+      disposed of, nor can the master or mistress go out-of-doors without being
+      accompanied by one of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the houses appropriated to our invalids, the inmates are very well
+      treated, and Government takes great care to make them satisfied with their
+      lot. The officers have large halls, billiards, and reading-room to meet
+      in; and the common men are admitted into apartments adjoining libraries,
+      from-which they can borrow what books they contain, and read them at
+      leisure. This is certainly a very good and even a humane institution,
+      though these libraries chiefly contain military histories or novels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the morals of these young invalids, they may be well conceived when
+      you remember the morality of our Revolution; and that they, without any
+      religious notions or restraints, were not only permitted, but encouraged
+      to partake of the debauchery and licentiousness which were carried to such
+      an extreme in our armies and encampments. In an age when the passions are
+      strongest, and often blind reason and silence conscience, they have not
+      the means nor the permission to marry; in their vicinity it is, therefore,
+      more difficult to discover one honest woman or a dutiful wife, than
+      hundreds of harlots and of adulteresses. Notwithstanding that many of them
+      have been accused before the tribunals of seductions, rape, and violence
+      against the sex, not one has been punished for what the morality of our
+      Government consider merely as bagatelles. Even in cases where husbands,
+      brothers, and lovers have been killed by them while defending or avenging
+      the honour of their wives, sisters, and mistresses, our tribunals have
+      been ordered by our grand judge, according to the commands of the Emperor,
+      not to proceed. As most of them have no occupation, the vice of idleness
+      augments the mass of their corruption; for men of their principles, when
+      they have nothing to do, never do anything good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know if my countrywomen feel themselves honoured by or obliged to
+      Bonaparte, for leaving their virtue and honour unprotected, except by
+      their own prudence and strength; but of this I am certain, that all our
+      other troops, as well as the invalids, may live on free quarters with the
+      sex without fearing the consequences; provided they keep at a distance
+      from the females of our Imperial Family, and of those of our grand
+      officers of State and principal functionaries. The wives and the daughters
+      of the latter have, however, sometimes declined the advantage of these
+      exclusive privileges.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A horse grenadier of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Imperial Guard, of the name of Rabais,
+      notorious for his amours and debauchery, was accused before the Imperial
+      Judge Thuriot, at one and the same time by several husbands and fathers,
+      of having seduced the affections of their wives and of their daughters. As
+      usual, Thuriot refused to listen to their complaints; at the same time
+      insultingly advising them to retake their wives and children, and for the
+      future to be more careful of them. Triumphing, as it were, in his
+      injustice, he inconsiderately mentioned the circumstance to his own wife,
+      observing that he never knew so many charges of the same sort exhibited
+      against one man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Thuriot, who had been a servant-maid to her husband before he made
+      her his wife, instead of being disgusted at the recital, secretly
+      determined to see this Rabais. An intrigue was then begun, and carried on
+      for four months, if not with discretion, at least without discovery; but
+      the lady&rsquo;s own imprudence at last betrayed her, or I should say, rather,
+      her jealousy. But for this she might still have been admired among our
+      modest women, and Thuriot among fortunate husbands and happy fathers; for
+      the lady, for the first time since her marriage, proved, to the great joy
+      and pride of her husband, in the family way. Suspecting, however, the
+      fidelity of her paramour, she watched his motions so closely that she
+      discovered an intrigue between him and the chaste spouse of a rich banker;
+      but the consequence of this discovery was the detection of her own crime.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the discovery of this disgrace, Thuriot obtained an audience of
+      Bonaparte, in which he exposed his misfortune, and demanded punishment on
+      his wife&rsquo;s gallant. As, however, he also acknowledged that his own
+      indiscretion was an indirect cause of their connection, he received the
+      same advice which he had given to other unfortunate husbands: to retake,
+      and for the future guard better, his dear moiety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thuriot had, however, an early opportunity of wreaking his vengeance on
+      this gallant Rabais. It seems his prowess had reached the ears of Madame
+      Baciocchi, the eldest sister of Bonaparte. This lady has a children mania,
+      which is very troublesome to her husband, disagreeable to her relations,
+      and injurious to herself. She never beholds any lady, particularly any of
+      her family, in the way which women wish to be who love their lords, but
+      she is absolutely frantic. Now, Thuriot&rsquo;s worthy friend Fouche had
+      discovered, by his spies, that Rabais paid frequent and secret visits to
+      the hotel Baciocchi, and that Madame Baciocchi was the object of these
+      visits. Thuriot, on this discovery, instantly denounced him to Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Rabais ruined all the women of this capital, he would not only have
+      been forgiven, but applauded by Napoleon, and his counsellors and
+      courtiers; but to dare to approach, or only to cast his eyes on one of our
+      Imperial Highnesses, was a crime nothing could extenuate or avenge, but
+      the most exemplary punishment. He was therefore arrested, sent to the
+      Temple, and has never since been heard of; so that his female friends are
+      still in the cruel uncertainty whether he has died on the rack, been
+      buried alive in the oubliettes, or is wandering an exile in the wilds of
+      Cayenne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In examining his trunk, among the curious effects discovered by the police
+      were eighteen portraits and one hundred billets-doux, with medallions,
+      rings, bracelets, tresses of hair, etc., as numerous. Two of the portraits
+      occasioned much scandal, and more gossiping. They were those of two of our
+      most devout and most respectable Court ladies, Maids of Honour to our
+      Empress, Madame Ney and Madame Lasnes; who never miss an opportunity of
+      going to church, who have received the private blessing of the Pope, and
+      who regularly confess to some Bishop or other once in a fortnight. Madame
+      Napoleon cleared them, however, of all suspicion, by declaring publicly in
+      her drawing-room that these portraits had come into the possession of
+      Rabais by the infidelity of their maids; who had confessed their faults,
+      and, therefore, had been charitably pardoned. Whether the opinions of
+      Generals Ney and Lasnes coincide with Madame Napoleon&rsquo;s assertion is
+      uncertain; but Lasnes has been often heard to say that, from the instant
+      his wife began to confess, he was convinced she was inclined to dishonour
+      him; so that nothing surprised him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the medallions in Rabais&rsquo;s collection contained on one side the
+      portrait of Thuriot, and on the other that of his wife; both set with
+      diamonds, and presented to her by him on their last wedding day. For the
+      supposed theft of this medallion, two of Thuriot&rsquo;s servants were in
+      prison, when the arrest of Rabais explained the manner in which it had
+      been lost. This so enraged him that he beat and kicked his wife so
+      heartily that for some time even her life was in danger, and Thuriot lost
+      all hopes of being a father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the Revolution, Thuriot had been, for fraud and forgery, struck off
+      the roll as an advocate, and therefore joined it as a patriot. In 1791, he
+      was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly, and in 1792 to the National
+      Convention. He always showed himself one of the most ungenerous enemies of
+      the clergy, of monarchy, and of his King, for whose death he voted. On the
+      25th of May, 1792, in declaiming against Christianity and priesthood, he
+      wished them both, for the welfare of mankind, at the bottom of the sea;
+      and on the 18th of December the same year, he declared in the Jacobin Club
+      that, if the National Convention evinced any signs of clemency towards
+      Louis XVI., he would go himself to the Temple and blow out the brains of
+      this unfortunate King. He defended in the tribune the massacres of the
+      prisoners, affirming that the tree of liberty could never flourish without
+      being inundated with the blood of aristocrats and other enemies of the
+      Revolution. He has been convicted by rival factions of the most shameful
+      robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so notorious that neither
+      Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory would or could employ him.
+      After the Revolution of the 9th of November, 1799, Bonaparte gave him the
+      office of judge of the criminal tribunal, and in 1804 made him a Commander
+      of his Legion of Honour. He is now one of our Emperor&rsquo;s most faithful
+      subjects and most sincere Christians. Such is now his tender
+      conscientiousness, that he was among those who were the first to be
+      married again by some Cardinal to their present wives, to whom they had
+      formerly been united only by the municipality. This new marriage, however,
+      took place before Madame Thuriot had introduced herself to the
+      acquaintance of the Imperial Grenadier Rabais.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Regarding me as a connoisseur, though I have no pretensions
+      but that of being an amateur, Lucien Bonaparte, shortly before his
+      disgrace, invited me to pass some days with him in the country, and to
+      assist him in arranging his very valuable collection of pictures&mdash;next
+      our public ones, the most curious and most valuable in Europe, and, of
+      course, in the world. I found here, as at Joseph Bonaparte&rsquo;s, the same
+      splendour, the same etiquette, and the same liberty, which latter was much
+      enhanced by the really engaging and unassuming manners and conversation of
+      the host. At Joseph&rsquo;s, even in the midst of abundance and of liberty, in
+      seeing the person or meditating on the character of the host, you feel
+      both your inferiority of fortune and the humiliation of dependence, and
+      that you visit a master instead of a friend, who indirectly tells you,
+      &ldquo;Eat, drink, and rejoice as long and as much as you like; but remember
+      that if you are happy, it is to my generosity you are indebted, and if
+      unhappy, that I do not care a pin about you.&rdquo; With Lucien it is the very
+      reverse. His conduct seems to indicate that by your company you confer an
+      obligation on him, and he is studious to remove, on all occasions, that
+      distance which fortune has placed between him and his guests; and as he
+      cannot compliment them upon being wealthier than himself, he seizes with
+      delicacy every opportunity to chew that he acknowledges their superiority
+      in talents and in genius as more than an equivalent for the absence of
+      riches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is, nevertheless, himself a young man of uncommon parts, and, as far as
+      I could judge from my short intercourse with the reserved Joseph and with
+      the haughty Napoleon, he is abler and better informed than either, and
+      much more open and sincere. His manners are also more elegant, and his
+      language more polished, which is the more creditable to him when it is
+      remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the
+      Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were,
+      like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble. It is
+      not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart
+      soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the
+      most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant
+      sans-culotte. He has, besides, other qualities (and those more estimable)
+      which will place him much above his elder brothers in the opinion of
+      posterity. He is extremely compassionate and liberal to the truly
+      distressed, serviceable to those whom he knows are not his friends, and
+      forgiving and obliging even to those who have proved and avowed themselves
+      his enemies. These are virtues commonly very scarce, and hitherto never
+      displayed by any other member of the Bonaparte family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An acquaintance of yours, and&mdash;a friend of mine, Count de T&mdash;&mdash;-,
+      at his return here from emigration, found, of his whole former fortune,
+      producing once eighty thousand livres&mdash;in the year, only four farms
+      unsold, and these were advertised for sale. A man who had once been his
+      servant, but was then a groom to Lucien, offered to present a memorial for
+      him to his master, to prevent the disposal of the only support which
+      remained to subsist himself, with a wife and four children. Lucien asked
+      Napoleon to prohibit the sale, and to restore the Count the farms, and
+      obtained his consent; but Fouche, whose cousin wanted them, having
+      purchased other national property in the neighbourhood, prevailed upon
+      Napoleon to forget his promise, and the farms were sold. As soon as Lucien
+      heard of it he sent for the Count, delivered into his hands an annuity of
+      six thousand livres&mdash;for the life of himself, his wife, and his
+      children, as an indemnity for the inefficacy of his endeavours to serve
+      him, as he expressed himself. Had the Count recovered the farms, they
+      would not have given him a clear profit of half the amount, all taxes
+      paid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A young author of the name of Gauvan, irritated by the loss of parents and
+      fortune by the Revolution, attacked, during 1799, in the public prints, as
+      well as in pamphlets, every Revolutionist who had obtained notoriety or
+      popularity. He was particularly vehement against Lucien, and laid before
+      the public all his crimes and all his errors, and asserted, as facts,
+      atrocities which were either calumnies or merely rumours. When, after
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s assumption of the Consulate, Lucien was appointed a Minister of
+      the Interior, he sent for Gauvan, and said to him, &ldquo;Great misfortunes have
+      early made you wretched and unjust, and you have frequently revenged
+      yourself on those who could not prevent them, among whom I am one. You do
+      not want capacity, nor, I believe, probity. Here is a commission which
+      makes you a Director of Contributions in the Departments of the Rhine and
+      Moselle, an office with a salary of twelve thousand livres but producing
+      double that sum. If you meet with any difficulties, write to me; I am your
+      friend. Take those one hundred louis d&rsquo;or for the expenses of your
+      journey. Adieu!&rdquo; This anecdote I have read in Gauvan&rsquo;s own handwriting, in
+      a letter to his sister. He died in 1802; but Mademoiselle Gauvan, who is
+      not yet fifteen, has a pension of three thousand livres a year&mdash;from
+      Lucien, who, has never seen her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lucien Bonaparte has another good quality: he is consistent in his
+      political principles. Either from conviction or delusion he is still a
+      Republican, and does not conceal that, had he suspected Napoleon of any
+      intent to reestablish monarchy, much less tyranny, he would have joined
+      those deputies who, on the 9th of November, 1799, in the sitting at St.
+      Cloud, demanded a decree of outlawry against him. If the present quarrel
+      between these two brothers were sifted to the bottom, perhaps it would be
+      found to originate more from Lucien&rsquo;s Republicanism than from his
+      marriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know, with all France and Europe, that Lucien&rsquo;s youth has been very
+      culpable; that he has committed many indiscretions, much injustice, many
+      imprudences, many errors, and, I fear, even some crimes. I know that he
+      has been the most profligate among the profligate, the most debauched
+      among libertines, the most merciless among the plunderers, and the most
+      perverse among rebels. I know that he is accused of being a Septembrizer;
+      of having murdered one wife and poisoned another; of having been a spy, a
+      denouncer, a persecutor of innocent persons in the Reign of Terror. I know
+      that he is accused of having fought his brothers-in-law; of having
+      ill-used his mother, and of an incestuous commerce with his own sisters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far be
+      it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them. But suppose all this
+      infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it never has
+      been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be&mdash;what
+      are the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to the
+      enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted? Is the
+      poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of
+      wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons,
+      suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold blood
+      of thousands of disarmed prisoners? Is incest with a sister more shocking
+      to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not continue
+      the disgusting comparison. As long as Napoleon is unable to acquit himself
+      of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right to pronounce
+      Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have Frenchmen, as long as
+      they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the Continent, as long as it
+      salutes him as such, any reason to despise the latter for crimes which
+      lose their enormity when compared to the horrid perpetrations of his
+      Imperial brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien&rsquo;s wife, and a person in whose
+      veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he
+      always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has repeated
+      to me many of their conversations. She assures me that Lucien deplores
+      frequently the want of a good and religious education, and the tempting
+      examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance upon the
+      revolutionary scene. He says that he determined to get rich &lsquo;per fas aut
+      nefas&rsquo;, because he observed that money was everything, and that most
+      persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be enabled to gather
+      treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much above their desert
+      and expectation, instead of being satiated or even satisfied, they bustled
+      and intrigued for more, until success made them unguarded and prosperity
+      indiscreet, and they became with their wealth the easy prey of rival
+      factions. Such was the case of Danton, of Fabre d&rsquo;Eglantine, of Chabot, of
+      Chaumette, of Stebert, and other contemptible wretches, butchered by
+      Robespierre and his partisans&mdash;victims in their turn to men as unjust
+      and sanguinary as themselves. He had, therefore, laid out a different plan
+      of conduct for himself. He had fixed upon fifty millions of livres&mdash;as
+      the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in his possession,
+      he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and employment, and to enjoy
+      &lsquo;otium cum dignitate&rsquo;. He had kept to his determination, and so regulated
+      his income that; with the expenses, pomp, and retinue of a Prince, he is
+      enabled to make more persons happy and comfortable than his extortions
+      have ruined or even embarrassed. He now lives like a philosopher, and
+      endeavours to forget the past, to delight in the present, and to be
+      indifferent about futurity. He chose, therefore, for a wife, a lady whom
+      he loved and esteemed, in preference to one whose birth would have been a
+      continual reproach to the meanness of his own origin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must, with me, admire the modesty of a citizen sans-culotte, who,
+      without a shilling in the world, fixes upon fifty millions as a reward for
+      his revolutionary achievements, and with which he would be satisfied to
+      sit down and begin his singular course of singular philosophy. But his
+      success is more extraordinary that his pretensions were extravagant. This
+      immense sum was amassed by him in the short period of four years, chiefly
+      by bribes from foreign Courts, and by selling his protections in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But most of the other Bonapartes have made as great and as rapid fortunes
+      as Lucien, and yet, instead of being generous, contented, or even
+      philosophers, they are still profiting by every occasion to increase their
+      ill-gotten treasures, and no distress was ever relieved, no talents
+      encouraged, or virtues recompensed by them. The mind of their garrets
+      lodges with them in their palaces, while Lucien seems to ascend as near as
+      possible to a level with his circumstances. I have myself found him
+      beneficent without ostentation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among his numerous pictures, I observed four that had formerly belonged to
+      my father&rsquo;s, and afterwards to my own cabinet. I inquired how much he had
+      paid for them, without giving the least hint that they had been my
+      property, and were plundered from me by the nation. He had, indeed, paid
+      their full value. In a fortnight after I had quitted him, these, with six
+      other pictures, were deposited in my room, with a very polite note,
+      begging my acceptance of them, and assuring me that he had but the day
+      before heard from his picture dealer that they had belonged to me. He
+      added that he would never retake them, unless he received an assurance
+      from me that I parted with them without reluctance, and at the same time
+      affixed their price. I returned them, as I knew they were desired by him
+      for his collection, but he continued obstinate. I told him, therefore,
+      that, as I was acquainted with his inclination to perform a generous
+      action, I would, instead of payment for the pictures, indicate a person
+      deserving his assistance. I mentioned the old Duchesse de &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+      who is seventy-four years of age and blind; and, after possessing in her
+      youth an income of eight hundred thousand livres&mdash;is now, in her old
+      age, almost destitute. He did for this worthy lady more than I expected;
+      but happening, in his visits to relieve my friend, to cast his eye on the
+      daughter of the landlady where she lodged, he found means to prevail on
+      the simplicity of the poor girl, and seduced her. So much do I know
+      personally of Lucien Bonaparte, who certainly is a composition of good and
+      bad qualities, but which of them predominate I will not take upon me to
+      decide. This I can affirm&mdash;Lucien is not the worst member of the
+      Bonaparte family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;As long as Austria ranks among independent nations,
+      Bonaparte will take care not to offend or alarm the ambition and interest
+      of Prussia by incorporating the Batavian Republic with the other provinces
+      of his Empire. Until that period, the Dutch must continue (as they have
+      been these last ten years) under the appellation of allies, oppressed like
+      subjects and plundered like foes. Their mock sovereignty will continue to
+      weigh heavier on them than real servitude does on their Belgic and Flemish
+      neighbours, because Frederick the Great pointed out to his successors the
+      Elbe and the Tegel as the natural borders of the Prussian monarchy,
+      whenever the right bank of the Rhine should form the natural frontiers of
+      the kingdom of France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That during the present summer a project for a partition treaty of Holland
+      has by the Cabinet of St. Cloud been laid before the Cabinet of Berlin is
+      a fact, though disseminated only as a rumour by the secret agents of
+      Talleyrand. Their object was on this, as on all previous occasions when
+      any names, rights, or liberties of people were intended to be erased from
+      among the annals of independence, to sound the ground, and to prepare by
+      such rumours the mind of the public for another outrage and another
+      overthrow. But Prussia, as well as France, knows the value of a military
+      and commercial navy, and that to obtain it good harbours and navigable
+      rivers are necessary, and therefore, as well as from principles of
+      justice, perhaps, declined the acceptance of a plunder, which, though
+      tempting, was contrary to the policy of the House of Brandenburgh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to a copy circulated among the members of our diplomatic corps,
+      this partition treaty excluded Prussia from all the Batavian seaports
+      except Delfzig, and those of the river Ems, but gave her extensive
+      territories on the side of Guelderland, and a rich country in Friesland.
+      Had it been acceded to by the Court of Berlin, with the annexed condition
+      of a defensive and offensive alliance with the Court of St. Cloud, the
+      Prussian monarchy would, within half a century, have been swallowed up in
+      the same gulf with the Batavian Commonwealth and the Republic of Poland;
+      and by some future scheme of some future Bonaparte or Talleyrand, be
+      divided in its turn, and serve as a pledge of reconciliation or inducement
+      of connection between some future rulers of the French and Russian
+      Empires.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand must, indeed, have a very mean opinion of the capacity of the
+      Prussian Ministers, or a high notion of his own influence over them, if he
+      was serious in this overture. For my part, I am rather inclined to think
+      that it was merely thrown out to discover whether Frederick William III.
+      had entered into any engagement contrary to the interest of Napoleon the
+      First; or to allure His Prussian Majesty into a negotiation which would
+      suspend, or at least interfere with, those supposed to be then on the
+      carpet with Austria, Russia, or perhaps even with England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late Batavian Government had, ever since the beginning of the present
+      war with England, incurred the displeasure of Bonaparte. When it
+      apprehended a rupture from the turn which the discussion respecting the
+      occupation of Malta assumed, the Dutch Ambassadors at St. Petersburg and
+      Berlin were ordered to demand the interference of these two Cabinets for
+      the preservation of the neutrality of Holland, which your country had
+      promised to acknowledge, if respected by France. No sooner was Bonaparte
+      informed of this step, than he marched troops into the heart of the
+      Batavian Republic, and occupied its principal forts, ports, and arsenals.
+      When, some time afterwards, Count Markof received instructions from his
+      Court, according to the desire of the Batavian Directory, and demanded, in
+      consequence, an audience from Bonaparte, a map was laid before him,
+      indicating the position of the French troops in Holland, and plans of the
+      intended encampment of our army of England on the coast of Flanders and
+      France; and he was asked whether he thought it probable that our
+      Government would assent to a neutrality so injurious to its offensive
+      operations against Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said the Russian Ambassador, &ldquo;the independence of Holland has been
+      admitted by you in formal treaties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So has the cession of Malta by England,&rdquo; interrupted Bonaparte, with
+      impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;True,&rdquo; replied Markof, &ldquo;but you are now at war with England for this
+      point; while Holland, against which you have no complaint, has not only
+      been invaded by your troops, but, contrary both to its inclination and
+      interest, involved in a war with you, by which it has much to lose and
+      nothing to gain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no account to render to anybody for my transactions, and I desire
+      to hear nothing more on this subject,&rdquo; said Bonaparte, retiring furious,
+      and leaving Markof to meditate on our Sovereign&rsquo;s singular principles of
+      political justice and of &lsquo;jus pentium&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From that period Bonaparte resolved on another change of the executive
+      power of the Batavian Republic. But it was more easy to displace one set
+      of men for another than to find proper ones to occupy a situation in
+      which, if they do their duty as patriots, they must offend France; and if
+      they are our tools, instead of the independent governors of their country,
+      they must excite a discontent among their fellow citizens, disgracing
+      themselves as individuals, and exposing themselves as chief magistrates to
+      the fate of the De Witts, should ever fortune forsake our arms or desert
+      Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No country has of late been less productive of great men than Holland. The
+      Van Tromps, the Russel, and the William III. all died without leaving any
+      posterity behind them; and the race of Batavian heroes seems to have
+      expired with them, as that of patriots with the De, Witts and Barneveldt.
+      Since the beginning of the last century we read, indeed, of some able
+      statesmen, as most, if not all, the former grand pensionaries have been;
+      but the name of no warrior of any great eminence is recorded. This
+      scarcity, of native genius and valour has not a little contributed to the
+      present humbled, disgraced, and oppressed state of wretched Batavia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Admiral de Winter certainly neither wants courage nor genius, but his
+      private character has a great resemblance to that of General Moreau.
+      Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern. He may direct as ably
+      and as valiantly the manoeuvres of a fleet as Moreau does those of an
+      army, but neither the one nor the other at the head of his nation would
+      render himself respected, his country flourishing, or his countrymen happy
+      and tranquil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Destined from his youth for the navy, Admiral de Winter entered into the
+      naval service of his country before he was fourteen, and was a second
+      lieutenant when the Batavian patriots, in rebellion against the
+      Stadtholder, were, in 1787, reduced to submission by the Duke of
+      Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army that invaded Holland. His
+      parents and family being of the anti-Orange party, he emigrated to France,
+      where he was made an officer in the legion of Batavian refugees. During
+      the campaign of 1793 and 1794, he so much distinguished himself under that
+      competent judge of merit, Pichegru, that this commander obtained for him
+      the commission of a general of brigade in the service of the French;
+      which, after the conquest of Holland in January, 1795, was exchanged for
+      the rank of a vice-admiral of the Batavian Republic. His exploits as
+      commander of the Dutch fleet, during the battle of the 11th of October,
+      1797, with your fleet, under Lord Duncan, I have heard applauded even in
+      your presence, when in your country. Too honest to be seduced, and too
+      brave to be intimidated, he is said to have incurred Bonaparte&rsquo;s hatred by
+      resisting both his offers and his threats, and declining to sell his own
+      liberty as well as to betray the liberty of his fellow subjects. When, in
+      1800, Bonaparte proposed to him the presidency and consulate of the United
+      States, for life, on condition that he should sign a treaty, which made
+      him a vassal of France, he refused, with dignity and with firmness, and
+      preferred retirement to a supremacy so dishonestly acquired, and so
+      dishonourably occupied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Daendels, another Batavian revolutionist of some notoriety, from
+      an attorney became a lieutenant-colonel, and served as a spy under
+      Dumouriez in the winter of 1792 and in the spring of 1793. Under Pichegru
+      he was made a general, and exhibited those talents in the field which are
+      said to have before been displayed in the forum. In June, 1795, he was
+      made a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic, and he was the
+      commander-in-chief of the Dutch troops combating in 1799 your army under
+      the Duke of York. In this place he did not much distinguish himself, and
+      the issue of the contest was entirely owing to our troops and to our
+      generals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Peace of Amiens, observing that Bonaparte intended to annihilate
+      instead of establishing universal liberty, Daendels gave in his
+      resignation and retired to obscurity, not wishing to be an instrument of
+      tyranny, after having so long fought for freedom. Had he possessed the
+      patriotism of a Brutus or a Cato, he would have bled or died for his cause
+      and country sooner than have deserted them both; or had the ambition and
+      love of glory of a Caesar held a place in his bosom, he would have
+      attempted to be the chief of his country, and by generosity and clemency
+      atone, if possible, for the loss of liberty. Upon the line of baseness,&mdash;the
+      deserter is placed next to the traitor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dumonceau, another Batavian general of some publicity, is not by birth a
+      citizen of the United States, but was born at Brussels in 1758, and was by
+      profession a stonemason when, in 1789, he joined, as a volunteer, the
+      Belgian insurgents. After their dispersion in 1790 he took refuge and
+      served in France, and was made an officer in the corps of Belgians, formed
+      after the declaration of war against Austria in 1792. Here he frequently
+      distinguished himself, and was, therefore, advanced to the rank of a
+      general; but the Dutch general officers being better paid than those of
+      the French Republic, he was, with the permission of our Directory,
+      received, in 1795, as a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic. He
+      has often evinced bravery, but seldom great capacity. His natural talents
+      are considered as but indifferent, and his education is worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are the only three military characters who might, with any prospect
+      of success, have tried to play the part of a Napoleon Bonaparte in
+      Holland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Not to give umbrage to the Cabinet of Berlin, Bonaparte
+      communicated to it the necessity he was under of altering the form of
+      Government in Holland, and, if report be true, even condescended to ask
+      advice concerning a chief magistrate for that country. The young Prince of
+      Orange, brother-in-law of His Prussian Majesty, naturally presented
+      himself; but, after some time, Talleyrand&rsquo;s agents discovered that great
+      pecuniary sacrifices could not be expected from that quarter, and perhaps
+      less submission to France experienced than from the former governors. An
+      eye was then cast on the Elector of Bavaria, whose past patriotism, as
+      well as that of his Ministers, was a full guarantee for future obedience.
+      Had he consented to such an arrangement, Austria might have aggrandized
+      herself on the Inn, Prussia in Franconia, and France in Italy; and the
+      present bone of contest would have been chiefly removed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This intrigue, for it was nothing else, was carried on by the Cabinet of
+      St. Cloud in March, 1804, about the time that Germany was invaded and the
+      Duc d&rsquo;Enghien seized. This explains to you the reason why the Russian
+      note, delivered to the Diet of Ratisbon on the 8th of the following May,
+      was left without any support, except the ineffectual one from the King of
+      Sweden. How any Cabinet could be dupe enough to think Bonaparte serious,
+      or the Elector of Bavaria so weak as to enter into his schemes, is
+      difficult to be conceived, had not Europe witnessed still greater
+      credulity on one side, and still greater effrontery on the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the meantime Bonaparte grew every day more discontented with the
+      Batavian Directory, and more irritated against the members who composed
+      it. Against his regulations for excluding the commerce and productions of
+      your country, they resented with spirit instead of obeying them without
+      murmur as was required. He is said to have discovered, after his own
+      soldiers had forced the custom-house officers to obey his orders, that,
+      while in their proclamations the directors publicly prohibited the
+      introduction of British goods, some of them were secret insurers of this
+      forbidden merchandise, introduced by fraud and by smuggling; and that
+      while they officially wished for the success of the French arms and
+      destruction of England, they withdrew by stealth what property they had in
+      the French funds, to place it in the English. This refractory and, as
+      Bonaparte called it, mercantile spirit, so enraged him, that he had
+      already signed an order for arresting and transferring en masse his high
+      allies, the Batavian directors, to his Temple, when the representations of
+      Talleyrand moderated his fury, and caused the order to be recalled, which
+      Fouche was ready to execute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had Jerome Bonaparte not offended his brother by his transatlantic
+      marriage, he would long ago have been the Prince Stadtholder of Holland;
+      but his disobedience was so far useful to the Cabinet of St. Cloud as it
+      gave it an opportunity of intriguing with, or deluding, other Cabinets
+      that might have any pretensions to interfere in the regulation of the
+      Batavian Government. By the choice finally made, you may judge how
+      difficult it was to find a suitable subject to represent it, and that this
+      representation is intended only to be temporary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Schimmelpenninck, the present grand pensionary of the Batavian Republic,
+      was destined by his education for the bar, but by his natural parts to
+      await in quiet obscurity the end of a dull existence. With some property,
+      little information, and a tolerably good share of common sense, he might
+      have lived and died respected, and even regretted, without any pretension,
+      or perhaps even ambition, to shine. The anti-Orange faction, to which his
+      parents and family appertained, pushed him forward, and elected him, in
+      1795, a member of the First Batavian National Convention, where, according
+      to the spirit of the times, his speeches were rather those of a demagogue
+      than those of a Republican. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were the
+      constant themes of his political declamations, infidelity his religious
+      profession, and the examples of immorality, his social lessons; so rapid
+      and dangerous are the strides with which seduction frequently advances on
+      weak minds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1800 he was appointed an Ambassador to Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles
+      Maurice Talleyrand. The latter used him as a stockbroker, and the former
+      for anything he thought proper; and he was the humble and submissive valet
+      of both. More ignorant than malicious, and a greater fool than a rogue, he
+      was more laughed at and despised than trusted or abused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His patience being equal to his phlegm, nothing either moved or confounded
+      him; and he was, as Talleyrand remarked, &ldquo;a model of an Ambassador,
+      according to which he and Bonaparte wished that all other independent
+      Princes and States would choose their representatives to the French
+      Government.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When our Minister and his Sovereign were discussing the difficulty of
+      properly filling up the vacancy, of the Dutch Government, judged necessary
+      by both, the former mentioned Schimmelpenninck with a smile; and serious
+      as Bonaparte commonly is, he could not help laughing. &ldquo;I should have been
+      less astonished,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;had you proposed my Mameluke, Rostan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This rebuke did not deter Talleyrand (who had settled his terms with
+      Schimmelpenninck) from continuing to point out the advantage which France
+      would derive from this nomination. &ldquo;Because no man could easier be
+      directed when in office, and no man easier turned out of office when
+      disagreeable or unnecessary. Both as a Batavian plenipotentiary at Amiens,
+      and as Batavian Ambassador in England, he had proved himself as obedient
+      and submissive to France as when in the same capacity at Paris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By returning often to the charge, with these and other remarks, Talleyrand
+      at last accustomed Bonaparte to the idea, which had once appeared so
+      humiliating, of writing to a man so much inferior in everything, &ldquo;Great
+      and dear Friend!&rdquo; and therefore said to the Minister:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well! let us then make him a grand pensionary and a locum tenens for five
+      years; or until Jerome, when he repents, returns to his duty, and is
+      pardoned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is he, then, not to be a grand pensionary for life?&rdquo; asked Talleyrand;
+      &ldquo;whether for one month or for life, he would be equally obedient to resign
+      when, commanded; but the latter would be more popular in Holland, where
+      they were tired of so many changes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let them complain, if they dare,&rdquo; replied Bonaparte. &ldquo;Schimmelpenninck is
+      their chief magistrate only for five years, if so long; but you may add
+      that they may reelect him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not before Talleyrand had compared the pecuniary proposal made to
+      his agents by foreign Princes with those of Schimmelpenninck to himself,
+      that the latter obtained the preference. The exact amount of the
+      purchase-money for the supreme magistracy in Holland is not well known to
+      any but the contracting parties. Some pretended that the whole was paid
+      down beforehand, being advanced by a society of merchants at Amsterdam,
+      the friends or relatives of the grand pensionary; others, that it is to be
+      paid by annual instalments of two millions of livres&mdash;for a certain
+      number of years. Certain it is, that this high office was sold and bought;
+      and that, had it been given for life, its value would have been
+      proportionately enhanced; which was the reason that Talleyrand endeavoured
+      to have it thus established.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand well knew the precarious state of Schimmelpenninck&rsquo;s grandeur;
+      that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had long been
+      intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome. Another Dutchman asked
+      him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he was well aware could
+      never be called a sinecure place, and was so precarious in its tenure.
+      &ldquo;Foolish vanity,&rdquo; answered the Minister, &ldquo;can never pay enough for the
+      gratification of its desires. All the Schimmelpennincks in the world do
+      not possess property enough to recompense me for the sovereign honours
+      which I have procured for one of their name and family, were he deposed
+      within twenty-four hours. What treasures can indemnify me for connecting
+      such a name and such a personage with the great name of the First Emperor
+      of the French?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have only twice in my life been in Schimmelpenninck&rsquo;s company, and I
+      thought him both timid and reserved; but from what little he said, I could
+      not possibly judge of his character and capacity. His portrait and its
+      accompaniments have been presented to me; such as delivered to you by one
+      of his countrymen, a Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; (formerly an Ambassador also),
+      who was both his schoolfellow and his comrade at the university. I shall
+      add the following traits, in his own words as near as possible:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More vain than ambitious, Schimmelpenninck from his youth, and,
+      particularly, from his entrance into public life, tried every means to
+      make a noise, but found none to make a reputation. He caressed in
+      succession all the systems of the French Revolution, without adopting one
+      for himself. All the Kings of faction received in their turns his homage
+      and felicitations. It was impossible to mention to him a man of any
+      notoriety, of whom he did not become immediately a partisan. The virtues
+      or the vices, the merit or defects, of the individual were of no
+      consideration; according to his judgment it was sufficient to be famous.
+      Yet with all the extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes, and of a
+      heart spoiled by modern philosophy, added to a habit of licentiousness, he
+      had no idea of becoming an instrument for the destruction of liberty in
+      his own country, much less of becoming its tyrant, in submitting to be the
+      slave of France. It was but lately that he took the fancy, after so long
+      admiring all other great men of our age, to be at any rate one of their
+      number, and of being admired as a great man in his turn. On this account
+      many accuse him of hypocrisy, but no one deserves that appellation less,
+      his vanity and exaltation never permitting him to dissimulate; and no
+      presumption, therefore, was less disguised than his, to those who studied
+      the man. Without acquired ability, without natural genius, or political
+      capacity, destitute of discretion and address, as confident and obstinate
+      as ignorant, he is only elevated to fall and to rise no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Schimmelpenninck, I was informed, is as amiable and accomplished as
+      her husband is awkward and deficient; though well acquainted with his
+      infidelities and profligacy, she is too virtuous to listen to revenge, and
+      too generous not to forgive. She is, besides, said to be a lady of
+      uncommon abilities, and of greater information than she chooses to
+      display. She has never been the worshipper of Bonaparte, or the friend of
+      Talleyrand; she loved her country, and detested its tyrants. Had she been
+      created a grand pensionary, she would certainly have swayed with more
+      glory than her husband; and been hailed by contemporaries, as well as
+      posterity, if not a heroine, at least a patriot,&mdash;a title which in
+      our times, though often prostituted, so few have any claim to, and which,
+      therefore, is so much the more valuable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was known at Paris that Schimmelpenninck had set out for his new
+      sovereignty, no less than sixteen girls of the Palais Royal demanded
+      passes for Holland. Being questioned by Fouche as to their business in
+      that country, they answered that they intended to visit their friend, the
+      grand pensionary, in his new dominions. Fouche communicated to Talleyrand
+      both their demands and their business, and asked his advice. He replied:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Send two, and those of whose vigilance and intelligence you are sure.
+      Refuse, by all means, the other fourteen. Schimmelpenninck&rsquo;s time is
+      precious, and were they at the Hague, he would neglect everything for
+      them. If they are fond of travelling, and are handsome and adroit, advise
+      them to set out for London or for St. Petersburg; and if they consent,
+      order them to my office, and they shall be supplied, if approved of, both
+      with instructions, and with their travelling expenses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Fouche answered his colleague that &ldquo;they were in every respect the very
+      reverse of his description; they seemed to have passed their lives in the
+      lowest stage of infamy, and they could neither read nor write.&rdquo; You have
+      therefore, no reason to fear that these belles will be sent to disseminate
+      corruption in your happy island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The Italian subjects of Napoleon the First were far from
+      displaying the same zeal and the same gratitude for his paternal care and
+      kindness in taking upon himself the trouble of governing them, as we good
+      Parisians have done. Notwithstanding that a brigade of our police agents
+      and spies, drilled for years to applaud and to excite enthusiasm,
+      proceeded as his advanced guard to raise the public spirit, the reception
+      at Milan was cold and everything else but cordial and pleasing. The
+      absence of duty did not escape his observation and resentment. Convinced,
+      in his own mind, of the great blessing, prosperity, and liberty his
+      victories and sovereignty have conferred on the inhabitants of the other
+      side of the Alps, he ascribed their present passive or mutinous behaviour
+      to the effect of foreign emissaries from Courts envious of his glory and
+      jealous of his authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He suspected particularly England and Russia of having selected this
+      occasion of a solemnity that would complete his grandeur to humble his
+      just pride. He also had some idea within himself that even Austria might
+      indirectly have dared to influence the sentiments and conduct of her
+      ci-devant subjects of Lombardy; but his own high opinion of the awe which
+      his very name inspired at Vienna dispersed these thoughts, and his wrath
+      fell entirely on the audacity of Pitt and Markof. Strict orders were
+      therefore issued to the prefects and commissaries of police to watch
+      vigilantly all foreigners and strangers, who might have arrived, or who
+      should arrive, to witness the ceremony of the coronation, and to arrest
+      instantly any one who should give the least reason to suppose that he was
+      an enemy instead of an admirer of His Imperial and Royal Majesty. He also
+      commanded the prefects of his palace not to permit any persons to approach
+      his sacred person, of whose morality and politics they had not previously
+      obtained a good account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These great measures of security were not entirely unnecessary. Individual
+      vengeance and individual patriotism sharpened their daggers, and, to use
+      Senator Roederer&rsquo;s language, &ldquo;were near transforming the most glorious day
+      of rejoicing into a day of universal mourning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All our writers on the Revolution agree that in France, within the first
+      twelve years after we had reconquered our lost liberty, more conspiracies
+      have been denounced than during the six centuries of the most brilliant
+      epoch of ancient and free Rome. These facts and avowals are speaking
+      evidences of the eternal tranquillity of our unfortunate country, of our
+      affection to our rulers, and of the unanimity with which all the changes
+      of Government have been, notwithstanding our printed votes, received and
+      approved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The frequency of conspiracies not only shows the discontent of the
+      governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors. This truth
+      has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an expeditious and
+      secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators, and to bury the
+      conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup d&rsquo;etat is to be struck;
+      or, to excite the passions of hatred, any proofs can be found, or must be
+      fabricated, involving an inimical or rival foreign Government in an odious
+      plot. Since the farce which Mehee de la Touche exhibited, you have,
+      therefore, not read in the Moniteur either of the danger our Emperor has
+      incurred several times since from the machinations of implacable or
+      fanatical foes, or of the alarm these have caused his partisans. They
+      have, indeed, been hinted at in some speeches of our public functionaries,
+      and in some paragraphs of our public prints, but their particulars will
+      remain concealed from historians, unless some one of those composing our
+      Court, our fashionable, or our political circles, has taken the trouble of
+      noting them down; but even to these they are but imperfectly or
+      incorrectly known.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Could the veracity of a Fouche, a Real, a Talleyrand, or a Duroc (the only
+      members of this new secret and invisible tribunal for expediting
+      conspirators) be depended upon, they would be the most authentic annalists
+      of these and other interesting secret occurrences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What I intend relating to you on this subject are circumstances such as
+      they have been reported in our best informed societies by our most
+      inquisitive companions. Truth is certainly the foundation of these
+      anecdotes; but their parts may be extenuated, diminished, altered, or
+      exaggerated. Defective or incomplete as they are, I hope you will not
+      judge them unworthy of a page in a letter, considering the grand personage
+      they concern, and the mystery with which he and his Government encompass
+      themselves, or in which they wrap up everything not agreeable concerning
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A woman is said to have been at the head of the first plot against
+      Napoleon since his proclamation as an Emperor of the French. She called
+      herself Charlotte Encore; but her real name is not known. In 1803 she
+      lived and had furnished a house at Abbeville, where she passed for a young
+      widow of property, subsisting on her rents. About the same time several
+      other strangers settled there; but though she visited the principal
+      inhabitants, she never publicly had any connection with the newcomers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the summer of 1803, a girl at Amiens&mdash;some say a real enthusiast
+      of Bonaparte&rsquo;s, but, according to others, engaged by Madame Bonaparte to
+      perform the part she did demanded, upon her knees, in a kind of paroxysm
+      of joy, the happiness of embracing him, in doing which she fainted, or
+      pretended to faint away, and a pension of three thousand livres&mdash;was
+      settled on her for her affection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Encore, at Abbeville, to judge of her discourse and conversation,
+      was also an ardent friend and well-wisher of the Emperor; and when, in
+      July, 1804, he passed through Abbeville, on his journey to the coast, she,
+      also, threw herself at his feet, and declared that she would die content
+      if allowed the honour of embracing him. To this he was going to assent,
+      when Duroc stepped between them, seized her by the arm, and dragged her to
+      an adjoining room, whither Bonaparte, near fainting from the sudden alarm
+      his friend&rsquo;s interference had occasioned, followed him, trembling. In the
+      right sleeve of Madame Encore&rsquo;s gown was found a stiletto, the point of
+      which was poisoned. She was the same day transported to this capital,
+      under the inspection of Duroc, and imprisoned in the Temple. In her
+      examination she denied having accomplices, and she expired on the rack
+      without telling even her name. The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once
+      famous Andre Dumont, was ordered to disseminate a report that she was shut
+      up as insane in a madhouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the strict search made by the police in the house occupied by her, no
+      papers or any, other indications were discovered that involved other
+      persons, or disclosed who she was, or what induced her to attempt such a
+      rash action. Before the secret tribunal she is reported to have said,
+      &ldquo;that being convinced of Bonaparte&rsquo;s being one of the greatest criminals
+      that ever breathed upon the earth, she took upon herself the office of a
+      volunteer executioner; having, with every other good or loyal person, a
+      right to punish him whom the law could not, or dared not, reach.&rdquo; When,
+      however, some repairs were made in the house at Abbeville by a new tenant,
+      a bundle of papers was found, which proved that a M. Franquonville, and
+      about thirty, other individuals (many, of whom were the late newcomers
+      there), had for six months been watching an opportunity to seize Bonaparte
+      in his journeys between Abbeville and Montreuil, and to carry him to some
+      part of the coast, where a vessel was ready to sail for England with him.
+      Had he, however, made resistance, he would have been shot in France, and
+      his assassins have saved themselves in the vessel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The numerous escort that always, since he was an Emperor, accompanied him,
+      and particularly his concealment of the days of his journeys, prevented
+      the execution of this plot; and Madame Encore, therefore, took upon her to
+      sacrifice herself for what she thought the welfare of her country. How
+      Duroc suspected or discovered her intent is not known; some say that an
+      anonymous letter informed him of it, while others assert that, in throwing
+      herself at Bonaparte&rsquo;s feet, this prefect observed the steel through the
+      sleeve of her muslin gown. Most of her associates were secretly executed;
+      some, however, were carried to Boulogne and shot at the head of the army
+      of England as English spies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;After the discovery of Charlotte Encore&rsquo;s attempt,
+      Bonaparte, who hitherto had flattered himself that he possessed the good
+      wishes, if not the affection, of his female subjects, made a regulation
+      according to which no women who had not previously given in their names to
+      the prefects of his palaces, and obtained previous permission, can
+      approach his person or throw themselves at his feet, without incurring his
+      displeasure, and even arrest. Of this Imperial decree, ladies, both of the
+      capital and of the provinces, when he travels, are officially informed.
+      Notwithstanding this precaution, he was a second time last spring, at
+      Lyons, near falling the victim of the vengeance or malice of a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his journey to be crowned King of Italy, he occupied his uncle&rsquo;s
+      episcopal palace at Lyons during the forty-eight hours he remained there.
+      Most of the persons of both sexes composing the household of Cardinal
+      Fesch were from his own country, Corsica; among these was one of the name
+      of Pauline Riotti, who inspected the economy of the kitchens. It is
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s custom to take a dish of chocolate in the forenoon, which she,
+      on the morning of his departure, against her custom, but under pretence of
+      knowing the taste of the family, desired to prepare. One of the cooks
+      observed that she mixed it with something from her pocket, but, without
+      saying a word to her that indicated suspicion, he warned Bonaparte, in a
+      note, delivered to a page, to be upon his guard. When the chamberlain
+      carried in the chocolate, Napoleon ordered the person who had prepared it
+      to be brought before him. This being told Pauline, she fainted away, after
+      having first drunk the remaining contents of the chocolate pot. Her
+      convulsions soon indicated that she was poisoned, and, notwithstanding the
+      endeavours of Bonaparte&rsquo;s physician, Corvisart, she expired within an
+      hour; protesting that her crime was an act of revenge against Napoleon,
+      who had seduced her, when young, under a promise of marriage; but who,
+      since his elevation, had not only neglected her, but reduced her to
+      despair by refusing an honest support for herself and her child,
+      sufficient to preserve her from the degradation of servitude. Cardinal
+      Fesch received a severe reprimand for admitting among his domestics
+      individuals with whose former lives he was not better acquainted, and the
+      same day he dismissed every Corsican in his service. The cook was, with
+      the reward of a pension, made a member of the Legion of Honour, and it was
+      given out by Corvisart that Pauline died insane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within three weeks after this occurrence, Bonaparte was, at Milan, again
+      exposed to an imminent danger. According to his commands, the vigilance of
+      the police had been very strict, and even severe. All strangers who could
+      not give the most satisfactory account of themselves, had either been sent
+      out of the country, or were imprisoned. He never went out unless strongly
+      attended, and during his audiences the most trusty officers always
+      surrounded him; these precautions increased in proportion as the day of
+      his coronation approached. On the morning of that day, about nine o&rsquo;clock,
+      when full dressed in his Imperial and royal robes, and all the grand
+      officers of State by his side, a paper was delivered to him by his
+      chamberlain, Talleyrand, a nephew of the Minister. The instant he had read
+      it, he flew into the arms of Berthier, exclaiming: &ldquo;My friend, I am
+      betrayed; are you among the number of conspirators? Jourdan, Lasnes,
+      Mortier, Bessieres, St. Cyr, are you also forsaking your friend and
+      benefactor?&rdquo; They all instantly encompassed him, begging that he would
+      calm himself; that they all were what they always had been, dutiful and
+      faithful subjects. &ldquo;But read this paper from my prefect, Salmatoris; he
+      says that if I move a step I may cease to live, as the assassins are near
+      me, as well as before me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The commander of his guard then entered with fifty grenadiers, their
+      bayonets fixed, carrying with them a prisoner, who pointed out four
+      individuals not far from Bonaparte&rsquo;s person, two of whom were Italian
+      officers of the Royal Italian Guard, and two were dressed in Swiss
+      uniforms. They were all immediately seized, and at their feet were found
+      three daggers. One of those in Swiss regimentals exclaimed, before he was
+      taken: &ldquo;Tremble, tyrant of my country! Thousands of the descendants of
+      William Tell have, with me, sworn your destruction. You, escape this day,
+      but the just vengeance of outraged humanity follows you like your shade.
+      Depend upon it an untimely end is irremediably reserved you.&rdquo; So saying,
+      he pierced his heart and fell a corpse into the arms of the grenadiers who
+      came to arrest him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This incident suspended the procession to the cathedral for an hour, when
+      Berthier announced that the conspirators were punished. Bonaparte evinced
+      on this occasion the same absence of mind and of courage as on the 9th of
+      November, 1799, when Arena and other deputies drew their daggers against
+      him at St. Cloud. As this scene did not redound much to the honour of the
+      Emperor and King, all mention of the conspiracy was severely prohibited,
+      and the deputations ready to congratulate him on his escape were dispersed
+      to attend their other duties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conspirators are stated to have been four young men, who had lost
+      their parents and fortunes by the Revolutions effected by Bonaparte in
+      Italy and Switzerland, and who had sworn fidelity to each other, and to
+      avenge their individual wrongs with the injuries of their countries at the
+      same time. They were all prepared and resigned to die, expecting to be cut
+      to pieces the moment Bonaparte fell by their hands; but one of the
+      Italians, rather superstitious, had, before he went to the drawing-room,
+      confessed and received absolution from a priest, whom he knew to be an
+      enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in hope of reward, disclosed the
+      conspiracy to the master of ceremonies, Salmatoris. The three surviving
+      conspirators are said to have been literally torn to pieces by the engines
+      of torture, and the priest was shot for having given absolution to an
+      assassin, and for having concealed his knowledge of the plot an hour after
+      he was acquainted with it. Even Salmatoris had some difficulty to avoid
+      being disgraced for having written a terrifying note, which had exposed
+      the Emperor&rsquo;s weakness, and shown that his life was dearer to him at the
+      head of Empires than when only at the head of armies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My narrative of this event I have from an officer present, whose veracity
+      I can guarantee. He also informed me that, in consequence of it, all the
+      officers of the Swiss brigades in the French service that were quartered
+      or encamped in Italy were, to the number of near fifty, dismissed at once.
+      Of the Italian guards, every officer who was known to have suffered any
+      losses by the new order of things in his country, was ordered to resign,
+      if he would not enter into the regiments of the line.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever the police agents did to prevent it, and in spite of some unjust
+      and cruel chastisement, Bonaparte continued, during his stay in Italy, an
+      object of ridicule in conversation, as well as in pamphlets and
+      caricatures. One of these represented him in the ragged garb of a
+      sans-culotte, pale and trembling on his knees, with bewildered looks and
+      his hair standing upright on his head like pointed horns, tearing the map
+      of the world to pieces, and, to save his life, offering each of his
+      generals a slice, who in return regarded him with looks of contempt mixed
+      with pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have just heard of a new plot, or rather a league against Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      ambition. At its head the Generals Jourdan, Macdonald, Le Courbe, and
+      Dessolles are placed, though many less victorious generals and officers,
+      civil as well as military, are reported to be its members. Their object is
+      not to remove or displace Bonaparte as an Emperor of the French; on the
+      contrary, they offer their lives to strengthen his authority and to resist
+      his enemies; but they ask and advise him to renounce, for himself, for his
+      relations, and for France, all possessions on the Italian side of the
+      Alps, as the only means to establish a permanent peace, and to avoid a war
+      with other States, whose safety is endangered by our great encroachments.
+      A mutinous kind of address to this effect has been sent to the camp of
+      Boulogne and to all other encampments of our troops, that those generals
+      and other military persons there, who chose, might both see the object and
+      the intent of the associates. It is reported that Bonaparte ordered it to
+      be burnt by the hands of the common executioner at Boulogne; that sixteen
+      officers there who had subscribed their names in appropriation of the
+      address were broken, and dismissed with disgrace; that Jourdan is deprived
+      of his command in Italy, and ordered to render an account of his conduct
+      to the Emperor. Dessolles is also said to be dismissed, and with
+      Macdonald, Le Courbe, and eighty-four others of His Majesty&rsquo;s subjects,
+      whose names appeared under the remonstrance (or petition, as some call
+      it), exiled to different departments of this country, where they are to
+      expect their Sovereign&rsquo;s further determination, and, in the meantime,
+      remain under the inspection and responsibility of his constituted
+      authorities and commissaries of police. As it is as dangerous to inquire
+      as to converse on this and other subjects, which the mysterious policy of
+      our Government condemns to silence or oblivion, I have not yet been able
+      to gather any more or better information concerning this league, or
+      unconstitutional opposition to the executive power; but as I am intimate
+      with one of the actors, should he have an opportunity, he will certainly
+      write to me at full length, and be very explicit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I believe I have before remarked that, under the Government
+      of Bonaparte, causes relatively the most insignificant have frequently
+      produced effects of the greatest consequence. A capricious or whimsical
+      character, swaying with unlimited power, is certainly the most dangerous
+      guardian of the prerogatives of sovereignty, as well as of the rights and
+      liberties of the people. That Bonaparte is as vain and fickle as a
+      coquette, as obstinate as a mule, and equally audacious and unrelenting,
+      every one who has witnessed his actions or meditated on his transactions
+      must be convinced. The least opposition irritates his pride, and he
+      determines and commands, in a moment of impatience or vivacity, what may
+      cause the misery of millions for ages, and, perhaps, his own repentance
+      for years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Bonaparte was officially informed by his Ambassador at Vienna, the
+      young La Rochefoucauld, that the Emperor of Germany had declined being one
+      of his grand officers of the Legion of Honour, he flew into a rage, and
+      used against this Prince the most gross, vulgar, and unbecoming language.
+      I have heard it said that he went so far as to say, &ldquo;Well, Francis II. is
+      tired of reigning. I hope to have strength enough to carry a third crown.
+      He who dares refuse to be and continue my equal, shall soon, as a vassal,
+      think himself honoured with the regard which, as a master, I may
+      condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him.&rdquo; Though forty-eight hours
+      had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with the Austrian
+      Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that,
+      observing his grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic
+      corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour
+      of our nation thus represented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the diplomatic audience was over, he said to Talleyrand, in a
+      commanding and harsh tone of voice, in the presence of all his
+      aides-de-camp and generals:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Write this afternoon, by an extraordinary courier, to my Minister at
+      Genoa, Salicetti, to prepare the Doge and the people for the immediate
+      incorporation of the Ligurian Republic with my Empire. Should Austria dare
+      to murmur, I shall, within three months, also incorporate the ci-devant
+      Republic of Venice with my Kingdom of Italy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;but&mdash;Sire!&rdquo; uttered the Minister, trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There exists no &lsquo;but,&rsquo; and I will listen to no &lsquo;but,&rsquo;&rdquo; interrupted His
+      Majesty. &ldquo;Obey my orders without further discussions. Should Austria dare
+      to arm, I shall, before next Christmas, make Vienna the headquarters of a
+      fiftieth military division. In an hour I expect you with the despatches
+      ready for Salicetti.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This Salicetti is a Corsican of a respectable family, born at Bastia, in
+      1758, and it was he who, during the siege of Toulon in 1793, introduced
+      his countryman, Napoleon Bonaparte, his present Sovereign, to the
+      acquaintance of Barras, an occurrence which has since produced
+      consequences so terribly notorious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the Revolution an advocate of the superior council of Corsica, he
+      was elected a member to the First National Assembly, where, on the 30th of
+      November, 1789, he pressed the decree which declared the Island of Corsica
+      an integral part of the French monarchy. In 1792, he was sent by his
+      fellow citizens as a deputy to the National Convention, where he joined
+      the terrorist faction, and voted for the death of his King. In May, 1793,
+      he was in Corsica, and violently opposed the partisans of General Paoli.
+      Obliged to make his escape in August from that island, to save himself, he
+      joined the army of General Carteaux, then marching against the Marseilles
+      insurgents, whence he was sent by the National Convention with Barras,
+      Gasparin, Robespierre the younger, and Ricrod, as a representative of the
+      people, to the army before Toulon, where, as well as at Marseilles, he
+      shared in all the atrocities committed by his colleagues and by Bonaparte;
+      for which, after the death of the Robespierres, he was arrested with him
+      as a terrorist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not known Bonaparte much in Corsica, but, finding him and his
+      family in great distress, with all other Corsican refugees, and observing
+      his adroitness as a captain of artillery, he recommended him to Barras,
+      and upon their representation to the Committee of Public Safety, he was
+      promoted to a chef de brigade, or colonel. In 1796, when Barras gave
+      Bonaparte the command of the army of Italy, Salicetti was appointed a
+      Commissary of Government to the same army, and in that capacity behaved
+      with the greatest insolence towards all the Princes of Italy, and most so
+      towards the Duke of Modena, with whom he and Bonaparte signed a treaty of
+      neutrality, for which they received a large sum in ready money; but
+      shortly afterwards the duchy was again invaded, and an attempt made to
+      surprise and seize the Duke. In 1797 he was chosen a member of the Council
+      of Five Hundred, where he always continued a supporter of violent
+      measures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, in 1799, his former protege, Bonaparte, was proclaimed a First
+      Consul, Salicetti desired to be placed in the Conservative Senate; but his
+      familiarity displeased Napoleon, who made him first a commercial agent,
+      and afterwards a Minister to the Ligurian Republic, so as to keep him at a
+      distance. During his several missions, he has amassed a fortune,
+      calculated, at the lowest, of six millions of livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The order Salicetti received to prepare the incorporation of Genoa with
+      France, would not, without the presence of our troops, have been very easy
+      to execute, particularly as he, six months before, had prevailed on the
+      Doge and the Senate to resign all sovereignty to Lucien Bonaparte, under
+      the title of a Grand Duke of Genoa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cause of Napoleon&rsquo;s change of opinion with regard to his brother
+      Lucien, was that the latter would not separate from a wife he loved, but
+      preferred domestic happiness to external splendour frequently accompanied
+      with internal misery. So that this act of incorporation of the Ligurian
+      Republic, in fact, originated, notwithstanding the great and deep
+      calculations of our profound politicians and political schemers, in
+      nothing else but in the keeping of a wife, and in the refusal of a riband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That corruption, seduction, and menaces seconded the intrigues and
+      bayonets which convinced the Ligurian Government of the honour and
+      advantage of becoming subjects of Bonaparte, I have not the least doubt;
+      but that the Doge, Girolamo Durazzo, and the senators Morchio, Maglione,
+      Travega, Maghella, Roggieri, Taddei, Balby, and Langlade sold the
+      independence of their country for ten millions of livres&mdash;though it
+      has been positively asserted, I can hardly believe; and, indeed, money was
+      as little necessary as resistance would have been unavailing, all the
+      forts and strong positions being in the occupation of our troops. A
+      general officer present when the Doge of Genoa, at the head of the
+      Ligurian deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at Milan, and
+      exchanged liberty for bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief
+      magistrate spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and
+      that indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the
+      deputation thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to
+      vilify their sentiments as patriots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Salicetti, with his secretary, Milhaud, had arranged this honourable
+      affair, they set out from Genoa to announce to Bonaparte, at Milan, their
+      success. Not above a league from the former city their carriage was
+      stopped, their persons stripped, and their papers and effects seized by a
+      gang, called in the country the gang of PATRIOTIC ROBBERS, commanded by
+      Mulieno. This chief is a descendant of a good Genoese family, proscribed
+      by France, and the men under him are all above the common class of people.
+      They never commit any murders, nor do they rob any but Frenchmen, or
+      Italians known to be adherents of the French party. Their spoils they
+      distribute among those of their countrymen who, like themselves, have
+      suffered from the revolutions in Italy within these last nine years. They
+      usually send the amount destined to relieve these persons to the curates
+      of the several parishes, signifying in what manner it is to be employed.
+      Their conduct has procured them many friends among the low and the poor,
+      and, though frequently pursued by our gendarmes, they have hitherto always
+      escaped. The papers captured by them on this occasion from Salicetti are
+      said to be of a most curious nature, and throw great light on Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      future views of Italy. The original act of consent of the Ligurian
+      Government to the incorporation with France was also in this number. It is
+      reported that they were deposited with the Austrian Minister at Genoa, who
+      found means to forward them to his Court; and it is supposed that their
+      contents did not a little to hasten the present movements of the Emperor
+      of Germany.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another gang, known under the appellation of the PATRIOTIC AVENGERS, also
+      desolates the Ligurian Republic. They never rob, but always murder those
+      whom they consider as enemies of their country. Many of our officers, and
+      even our sentries on duty, have been wounded or killed by them; and, after
+      dark, therefore, no Frenchman dares walk out unattended. Their chief is
+      supposed to be a ci-devant Abbe, Sagati, considered a political as well as
+      a religious fanatic. In consequence of the deeds of these patriotic
+      avengers, Bonaparte&rsquo;s first act, as a Sovereign of Liguria, was the
+      establishment of special military commissions, and a law prohibiting,
+      under pain of death, every person from carrying arms who could not show a
+      written permission of our commissary of police. Robbers and assassins are,
+      unfortunately, common to all nations, and all people of all ages; but
+      those of the above description are only the production and progeny of
+      revolutionary and troublesome times. They pride themselves, instead of
+      violating the laws, on supplying their inefficacy and counteracting their
+      partiality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte is now the knight of more Royal Orders than any
+      other Sovereign in Europe, and were he to put them on all at once, their
+      ribands would form stuff enough for a light summer coat of as many
+      different colours as the rainbow. The Kings of Spain, of Naples, of
+      Prussia, of Portugal, and of Etruria have admitted him a knight-companion,
+      as well as the Electors of Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden, and the Pope of
+      Rome. In return he has appointed these Princes his grand officers of HIS
+      Legion of Honour, the highest rank of his newly instituted Imperial Order.
+      It is even said that some of these Sovereigns have been honoured by him
+      with the grand star and broad riband of the Order of His Iron Crown of the
+      Kingdom of Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Napoleon&rsquo;s departure for Milan last spring, Talleyrand intimated to
+      the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here, that their presence
+      would be agreeable to the Emperor of the French at his coronation at Milan
+      as a King of Italy. In the preceding summer a similar hint, or order, had
+      been given by him for a diplomatic trip to Aix-la-Chapelle, and all Their
+      Excellencies set a-packing instantly; but some legitimate Sovereigns,
+      having since discovered that it was indecent for their representatives to
+      be crowding the suite of an insolently and proudly travelling usurper,
+      under different pretences declined the honour of an invitation and journey
+      to Italy. It would, besides, have been pleasant enough to have witnessed
+      the Ambassadors of Austria and Prussia, whose Sovereigns had not
+      acknowledged Bonaparte&rsquo;s right to his assumed title of King of Italy,
+      indirectly approving it by figuring at the solemnity which inaugurated him
+      as such. Of this inconsistency and impropriety Talleyrand was well aware;
+      but audacity on one side, and endurance and submission on the other, had
+      so often disregarded these considerations before, that he saw no
+      indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal. His master had, however, the
+      gratification to see at his levee, and in his wife&rsquo;s drawing-room, the
+      Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and Bavaria, who laid at the
+      Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of their own Princes, to the
+      nor little entertainment of His Imperial and Royal Majesty, and to the
+      great edification of his dutiful subjects on the other side of the Alps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The expenses of Bonaparte&rsquo;s journey to Milan, and his coronation there
+      (including also those of his attendants from France), amounted to no less
+      a sum than fifteen millions of livres&mdash;of which one hundred and fifty
+      thousand livres&mdash;was laid out in fireworks, double that sum in
+      decorations of the Royal Palace and the cathedral, and three millions of
+      livres&mdash;in presents to different generals, grand officers,
+      deputations, etc. The poor also shared his bounty; medals to the value of
+      fifty thousand livres&mdash;were thrown out among them on the day of the
+      ceremony, besides an equal sum given by Madame Napoleon to the hospitals
+      and orphan-houses. These last have a kind of hereditary or family claim on
+      the purse of our Sovereign; their parents were the victims of the
+      Emperor&rsquo;s first step towards glory and grandeur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another three millions of livres was expended for the march of troops from
+      France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more was
+      requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during two
+      months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men composing
+      them two million livres&rsquo; worth of rings, watches, snuff-boxes, portraits
+      set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets, as evidences of His
+      Majesty&rsquo;s satisfaction with their behaviour, presence, and performances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These troops were under the command of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Field-marshal, Jourdan,
+      a general often mentioned in the military annals of our revolutionary war.
+      During the latter part of the American war, he served under General
+      Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in 1783, after the peace, his
+      discharge. He then turned a pedlar, in which situation the Revolution
+      found him. He had also married, for her fortune, a lame daughter of a
+      tailor, who brought him a fortune of two thousand livres&mdash;from whom
+      he has since been divorced, leaving her to shift for herself as she can,
+      in a small milliner&rsquo;s shop at Limoges, where her husband was born in 1763.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
+      organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in the
+      National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel. His known
+      love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public Safety, in
+      1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of Ardennes and of
+      the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard. On the 17th of October the
+      same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies, which obliged the united
+      forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to raise the siege of Maubeuge.
+      The jealous Republican Government, in reward, deposed him and appointed
+      Pichegru his successor, which was the origin of that enmity and malignity
+      with which Jourdan pursued this unfortunate general, even to his grave. He
+      never forgave Pichegru the acceptance of a command which he could not
+      decline without risking his life; and when he should have avenged his
+      disgrace on the real causes of it, he chose to resent it on him who, like
+      himself, was merely an instrument, or a slave, in the hands and under the
+      whip of a tyrannical power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the imprisonment of General Hoche, in March, 1794, Jourdan succeeded
+      him as chief of the army of the Moselle. In June he joined, with thirty
+      thousand men, the right wing of the army of the North, forming a new one,
+      under the name of the army of the Sambre and Meuse. On the 16th of the
+      same month he gained a complete victory over the Prince of Coburg, who
+      tried to raise the siege of Charleroy. This battle, which was fought near
+      Trasegnies, is, nevertheless, commonly called the battle of Fleurus. After
+      Charleroy had surrendered on the 25th, Jourdan and his army were ordered
+      to act under the direction of General Pichegru, who had drawn the plan of
+      that brilliant campaign. Always envious of this general, Jourdan did
+      everything to retard his progress, and at last intrigued so well that the
+      army of the Sambre and the Meuse was separated from that of the North.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the former of these armies Jourdan pursued the retreating
+      confederates, and, after driving them from different stands and positions,
+      he repulsed them to the banks of the Rhine, which river they were obliged
+      to pass. Here ended his successes this year, successes that were not
+      obtained without great loss on our side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jourdan began the campaigns of 1795 and 1796 with equal brilliancy, and
+      ended them with equal disgrace. After penetrating into Germany with troops
+      as numerous as well-disciplined, he was defeated at the end of them by
+      Archduke Charles, and retreated always with such precipitation, and in
+      such confusion, that it looked more like the flight of a disorderly rabble
+      than the retreat of regular troops; and had not Moreau, in 1796, kept the
+      enemy in awe, few of Jourdan&rsquo;s officers or men would again have seen
+      France; for the inhabitants of Franconia rose on these marauders, and cut
+      them to pieces, wherever they could surprise or waylay them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1797, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the Jacobin
+      faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a chief; and he
+      had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride himself upon having
+      procured the transportation of that patriotic general to Cayenne. In 1799,
+      he again assumed the command of the army of Alsace and of Switzerland; but
+      he crossed the Rhine and penetrated into Suabia only to be again routed by
+      the Archduke Charles, and to repass this river in disorder. Under the
+      necessity of resigning as a general-in-chief, he returned to the Council
+      of Five Hundred, more violent than ever, and provoked there the most
+      oppressive measures against his fellow citizens. Previous to the
+      revolution effected by Bonaparte in November of that year, he had entered
+      with Garreau and Santerre into a conspiracy, the object of which was to
+      restore the Reign of Terror, and to prevent which Bonaparte said he made
+      those changes which placed him at the head of Government. The words were
+      even printed in the papers of that period, which Bonaparte on the 10th of
+      November addressed to the then deputy of Mayenne, Prevost: &ldquo;If the plot
+      entered into by Jourdan and others, and of which they have not blushed to
+      propose to me the execution, had not been defeated, they would have
+      surrounded the place of your sitting, and to crush all future opposition,
+      ordered a number of deputies to be massacred. That done, they were to
+      establish the sanguinary despotism of the Reign of Terror.&rdquo; But whether
+      such was Jourdan&rsquo;s project, or whether it was merely given out to be such
+      by the consular faction, to extenuate their own usurpation, he certainly
+      had connected himself with the most guilty and contemptible of the former
+      terrorists, and drew upon himself by such conduct the hatred and blame
+      even of those whose opinion had long been suspended on his account.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Jourdan was among those terrorists whom the Consular Government
+      condemned to transportation; but after several interviews with Bonaparte
+      he was not only pardoned, but made a Counsellor of State of the military
+      section; and afterwards, in 1801, an administrator-general of Piedmont,
+      where he was replaced by General Menou in 1803, being himself entrusted
+      with the command in Italy. This place he has preserved until last month,
+      when he was ordered to resign it to Massena, with whom he had a quarrel,
+      and would have fought him in a duel, had not the Viceroy, Eugene de
+      Beauharnais, put him under arrest and ordered him back hither, where he is
+      daily expected. If Massena&rsquo;s report to Bonaparte be true, the army of
+      Italy was very far from being as orderly and numerous as Jourdan&rsquo;s
+      assertions would have induced us to believe. But this accusation of a
+      rival must be listened to with caution; because, should Massena meet with
+      repulse, he will no doubt make use of it as an apology; and should he be
+      victorious, hold it out as a claim for more honour and praise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same doubts which still continue of Jourdan&rsquo;s political opinions
+      remain also with regard to his military capacity. But the unanimous
+      declaration of those who have served under his orders as a general must
+      silence both his blind admirers and unjust slanderers. They all allow him
+      some military ability; he combines and prepares in the Cabinet a plan of
+      defence and attack, with method and intelligence, but he does not possess
+      the quick coup d&rsquo;oeil, and that promptitude which perceives, and rectifies
+      accordingly, an error on the field of battle. If, on the day of action,
+      some accident, or some manoeuvre, occurs, which has not been foreseen by
+      him, his dull and heavy genius does not enable him to alter instantly his
+      dispositions, or to remedy errors, misfortunes, or improvidences. This
+      kind of talent, and this kind of absence of talent, explain equally the
+      causes of his advantages, as well as the origin of his frequent disasters.
+      Nobody denies him courage, but, with most of our other republican
+      generals, he has never been careful of the lives of the troops under him.
+      I have heard an officer of superior talents and rank assert, in the
+      presence of Carnot, that the number of wounded and killed under Jourdan,
+      when victorious, frequently surpassed the number of enemies he had
+      defeated. I fear it is too true that we are as much, if not more, indebted
+      for our successes to the superior number as to the superior valour of our
+      troops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jourdan is, with regard to fortune, one of our poorest republican generals
+      who have headed armies. He has not, during all his campaigns, collected
+      more than a capital of eight millions of livres&mdash;a mere trifle
+      compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions of Le Clerc,
+      the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of Augereau; not
+      to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte. It is also true that Jourdan
+      is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and women; and that in
+      Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to business, he passed the
+      remainder of his time either at the gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of
+      his seraglio&mdash;I say seraglio, because he kept, in the extensive house
+      joining his palace as governor and commander, ten women-three French,
+      three Italians, two Germans, two Irish or English girls. He supported them
+      all in style; but they were his slaves, and he was their sultan, whose
+      official mutes (his aides-de-camp) both watched them, and, if necessary,
+      chastised them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I can truly defy the world to produce a corps of such a
+      heterogeneous composition as our Conservative Senate, when I except the
+      members composing Bonaparte&rsquo;s Legion of Honour. Some of our Senators have
+      been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks, physicians,
+      barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers, mountebanks,
+      Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors, counsellors, or presidents
+      of Parliament, admirals, barristers, Bishops, sailors, attorneys, authors,
+      Barons, spies, painters, professors, Ministers, sans-culottes, atheists,
+      stonemasons, robbers, mathematicians, philosophers, regicides, and a long
+      et cetera. Any person reading through the official list of the members of
+      the Senate, and who is acquainted with their former situations in life,
+      may be convinced of this truth. Should he even be ignorant of them, let
+      him but inquire, with the list in his hand, in any of our fashionable or
+      political circles; he will meet with but few persons who are not able or
+      willing to remove his doubts, or to gratify his curiosity. There are not
+      many of them whom it is possible to elevate, but those are still more
+      numerous whom it is impossible to degrade. Their past lives, vices,
+      errors, or crimes, have settled their characters and reputation; and they
+      must live and die in &lsquo;statu quo&rsquo;, either as fools or as knaves, and
+      perhaps as both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not mean to say that they are all criminals or all equally criminal,
+      if insurrection against lawful authority and obedience to usurped tyranny
+      are not to be considered as crimes; but there are few indeed who can lay
+      their hands on their bosoms and say, &lsquo;vitam expendere vero&rsquo;. Some of them,
+      as a Lagrange, Berthollet, Chaptal, Laplace, Francois de Neuf-Chateau,
+      Tronchet, Monge, Lacepede, and Bougainville, are certainly men of talents;
+      but others, as a Porcher, Resnier, Vimar, Auber, Perk, Sera, Vernier,
+      Vien, Villetard, Tascher, Rigal, Baciocchi, Beviere, Beauharnais, De
+      Luynea (a ci-devant duke, known under the name of Le Gros Cochon), nature
+      never destined but to figure among those half-idiots and half-imbeciles
+      who are, as it were, intermedial between the brute and human creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche,
+      Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d&rsquo;Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer
+      form another class,&mdash;some of them regicides, others assassins and
+      plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning
+      of the Revolution. They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge,
+      and of great presumption. As to their morality, it is on a level with
+      their religion and loyalty. They betrayed their King, and had denied their
+      God already in 1789.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After these come some others, who again have neither talents to boast of
+      nor crimes of which they have to be ashamed. They have but little
+      pretension to genius, none to consistency, and their honesty equals their
+      capacity. They joined our political revolution as they might have done a
+      religious procession. It was at that time a fashion; and they applauded
+      our revolutionary innovations as they would have done the introduction of
+      a new opera, of a new tragedy, of a new comedy, or of a new farce. To this
+      fraternity appertain a ci-devant Comte de Stult-Tracy, Dubois&mdash;Dubay,
+      Kellerman, Lambrechts, Lemercier, Pleville&mdash;Le Pelley, Clement de
+      Ris, Peregeaux, Berthelemy, Vaubois, Nrignon, D&rsquo;Agier, Abrial, De Belloy,
+      Delannoy, Aboville, and St. Martin La Motte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such are the characteristics of men whose &lsquo;senatus consultum&rsquo; bestows an
+      Emperor on France, a King on Italy, makes of principalities departments of
+      a Republic, and transforms Republics into provinces or principalities. To
+      show the absurdly fickle and ridiculously absurd appellations of our
+      shamefully perverted institutions, this Senate was called the Conservative
+      Senate; that is to say, it was to preserve the republican consular
+      constitution in its integrity, both against the; encroachments of the
+      executive and legislative power, both against the manoeuvres of the
+      factions, the plots of the royalists or monarchists, and the clamours of a
+      populace of levellers. But during the five years that these honest
+      wiseacres have been preserving, everything has perished&mdash;the
+      Republic, the Consuls, free discussions, free election, the political
+      liberty, and the liberty of the Press; all&mdash;all are found nowhere but
+      in old, useless, and rejected codes. They have, however, in a truly
+      patriotic manner taken care of their own dear selves. Their salaries are
+      more than doubled since 1799.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides mock Senators, mock praetors, mock quaestors, other &lsquo;nomina
+      libertatis&rsquo; are revived, so as to make the loss of the reality so much the
+      more galling. We have also two curious commissions; one called &ldquo;the
+      Senatorial Commission of Personal Liberty,&rdquo; and the other &ldquo;the Senatorial
+      Commission of the Liberty of the Press.&rdquo; The imprisonment without cause,
+      and transportation without trial, of thousands of persons of both sexes
+      weekly, show the grand advantages which arise from the former of these
+      commissions; and the contents of our new books and daily prints evince the
+      utility and liberality of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But from the past conduct of these our Senators, members of these
+      commissions, one may easily conclude what is to be expected in future from
+      their justice and patriotism. Lenoin Laroche, at the head of the one, was
+      formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to politics than
+      to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at the end of the
+      session of the first assembly (of which he was a member), forced, for
+      subsistence, to become the editor of an insignificant journal. Here he
+      preached licentiousness, under the name of Liberty, and the agrarian law
+      in recommending Equality. A prudent courtier of all systems in fashion,
+      and of all factions in power, he escaped proscription, though not
+      accusation of having shared in the national robberies. A short time in the
+      summer of 1797, after the dismissal of Cochon, he acted as a Minister of
+      Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins elected him a member of the Council of
+      Ancients, where he, with other deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and
+      was, in return, rewarded with a place in the Senate. Under monarchy he was
+      a republican, and under a Republic he extolled monarchical institutions.
+      He wished to be singular, and to be rich. Among so many shocking
+      originals, however, he was not distinguished; and among so many
+      philosophical marauders, he had no opportunity to pillage above two
+      millions of livres. This friend of liberty is now one of the most despotic
+      Senators, and this lover of equality never answers when spoken to, if not
+      addressed as &ldquo;His Excellency,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Monseigneur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Boissy d&rsquo; Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the
+      Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was
+      chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions, and
+      in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that dishonoured
+      the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution. A member afterwards of
+      the National Convention, he was sent in mission to Lyons, where, instead
+      of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he inflicted new ones. When, on
+      the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he pronounced the
+      oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in his heart,
+      otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take it; and he is
+      now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First! He pronounced the panegyric of
+      Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat. &ldquo;The soul,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;was moved
+      and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the Supreme Being with
+      philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;&rdquo; and he signed the removal
+      of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to humanity! In September,
+      1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to transportation by the Directory;
+      but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made him first a tribune and
+      afterwards a Senator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Boissy d&rsquo; Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
+      neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself,
+      he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and
+      friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
+      bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the
+      same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
+      attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a
+      motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France. He
+      seconded another motion of Bonaparte&rsquo;s prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a
+      corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
+      Princes. At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on
+      having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and
+      boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary
+      justice, those who had escaped the laws. After meeting with well-merited
+      contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a
+      handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of
+      Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of
+      his Senate. Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense
+      when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
+      him by Nature. Without education, as well as without parts, he for a long
+      time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
+      eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent. His ideas of liberty
+      are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
+      arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
+      because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
+      commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
+      four are slaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
+      liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal. The former is
+      a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the sentence
+      of his good King&rsquo;s death, while declaring himself a royalist. A mere valet
+      to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to enrich himself
+      with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots caused to be
+      massacred or guillotined. When, as a Minister of Justice, he informed
+      Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an affected and
+      atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices, whose nature
+      had not much of tenderness. As a member of the first assembly, as a
+      Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the Council of Five
+      Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press. &ldquo;The laws, you say&rdquo;
+       (exclaimed he, in the Council), &ldquo;punish libellers; so they do thieves and
+      housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors unbolted? Is not
+      the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a citizen preferable to
+      his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press, you leave them at the
+      mercy of every scribbler who can write or think. The wound inflicted may
+      heal, but the scar will always remain. Were you, therefore, determined to
+      decree the motion for this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this
+      amendment, that conviction of having written a libel carries with it
+      capital punishment, and that a label be fastened on the breast of the
+      libeller, when carried to execution, with this inscription: &lsquo;A social
+      murderer,&rsquo; or &lsquo;A murderer of characters!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all
+      political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after
+      approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them,
+      or betrayed them. Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at
+      Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the
+      Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court. Immoral and
+      unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only
+      equalled by his perversity and cruelty. It was he who, on the 10th of
+      August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of
+      their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act. After
+      he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties
+      and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a
+      Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and
+      afterwards as a Senator. His own and only daughter died in a miscarriage,
+      the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural parent; and
+      his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his father&rsquo;s baseness
+      in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to marry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one
+      period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the
+      preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as
+      well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a
+      constitutional Government. At another time he wrote that, as it was
+      impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness of
+      the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the
+      liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one wished
+      to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to preserve.
+      To show his indifference about his own character, as well as about the
+      opinion of the public, these opposite declarations were inserted in one of
+      our daily papers, and both were signed &ldquo;Roederer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand livres&mdash;and
+      he now possesses national property purchased for seven millions of livres&mdash;and
+      he avows himself to be worth three millions more in money placed in our
+      public funds. He often says, laughingly, that he is under great
+      obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted in one day all his
+      debts. All his creditors, after being denounced for their aristocracy,
+      were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have had
+      the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most affected,
+      silly, and disgusting. His wrinkled face, and effeminate and childish air;
+      his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his confidence in
+      his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear such a curious
+      contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and enervated person,
+      that I have frequently been ready to laugh at him in his face, had not
+      indignation silenced all other feeling. A light-coloured wig covers a bald
+      head; his cheeks and eyelids are painted, and his teeth false; and I have
+      seen a woman faint away from the effect of his breath, notwithstanding
+      that he infects with his musk and perfumes a whole house only with his
+      presence. When on the ground floor you may smell him in the attic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The reciprocal jealousy and even interest of Austria,
+      France, and Russia have hitherto prevented the tottering Turkish Empire
+      from being partitioned, like Poland, or seized, like Italy; to serve as
+      indemnities, like the German empire; or to be shared, as reward to the
+      allies, like the Empire of Mysore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we consider the anarchy that prevails, both in the Government and
+      among the subjects, as well in the capital as in the provinces of the
+      Ottoman Porte; when we reflect on the mutiny and cowardice of its armies
+      and navy, the ignorance and incapacity of its officers and military and
+      naval commanders, it is surprising, indeed, as I have heard Talleyrand
+      often declare, that more foreign political intrigues should be carried on
+      at Constantinople alone than in all other capitals of Europe taken
+      together. These intrigues, however, instead of doing honour to the,
+      sagacity and patriotism of the members of the Divan, expose only their
+      corruption and imbecility; and, instead of indicating a dread of the
+      strength of the Sublime Sultan, show a knowledge of his weakness, of which
+      the gold of the most wealthy, and the craft of the most subtle, by turns
+      are striving to profit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond a doubt the enmity of the Ottoman Porte can do more mischief than
+      its friendship can do service. Its neutrality is always useful, while its
+      alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no advantage. It
+      is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than from expectation
+      of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe. The map of the
+      Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or nugatory in this
+      assertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in
+      1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to
+      invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion
+      in favour of this country. Our Ambassador in Turkey at that time, Comte de
+      Choiseul-Gouffier, though an admirer of the Revolution, was not a
+      republican, and, therefore, secretly counteracted what he officially
+      seemed to wish to effect. The Imperial Court succeeded, therefore, in
+      establishing a neutrality of the Ottoman Porte, but Comte de Choiseul was
+      proscribed by the Convention. As academician, he was, however, at St.
+      Petersburg, liberally recompensed by Catherine II. for the services the
+      Ambassador had performed at Constantinople.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In May, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety determined to expedite
+      another embassy to the Grand. Seignior, at the head of which was the
+      famous intriguer, De Semonville, whose revolutionary diplomacy had, within
+      three years, alarmed the Courts of Madrid, Naples, and Turin, as well as
+      the republican Government of Genoa. His career towards Turkey was stopped
+      in the Grisons Republic, on the 25th of July following, where he, with
+      sixteen other persons of his suite, was arrested, and sent a prisoner,
+      first to Milan, and afterwards to Mantua. He carried with him presents of
+      immense value, which were all seized by the Austrians. Among them were
+      four superb coaches, highly finished, varnished, and gilt; what is iron or
+      brass in common carriages was here gold or silver-gilt. Two large chests
+      were filled with stuff of gold brocade, India gold muslins, and shawls and
+      laces of very great value. Eighty thousand louis d&rsquo;or in ready money; a
+      service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly belonged to the
+      Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and brilliants, the
+      intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight millions of livres&mdash;and
+      a great number of jewels; among others, the crown diamond, called here the
+      Regents&rsquo;, and in your country the Pitt Diamond, fell, with other riches,
+      into the hands of the captors. Notwithstanding this loss and this
+      disappointment, we contrived in vain to purchase the hostility of the
+      Turks against our enemies, though with the sacrifice of no less a sum
+      (according to the report of Saint Just, in June, 1794,) than seventy
+      millions of livres: These official statements prove the means which our so
+      often extolled economical and moral republican Governments have employed
+      in their negotiations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the Sultan
+      became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
+      friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war. The preliminaries
+      of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were, however, soon followed
+      with a renewal of our former friendly intercourse with the Ottoman Porte.
+      The voyage of Sebastiani into Egypt and Syria, in the autumn of 1802,
+      showed that our tenderness for the inhabitants of these countries had not
+      diminished, and that we soon intended to bestow on them new hugs of
+      fraternity. Your pretensions to Malta impeded our prospects in the East,
+      and your obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so well planned schemes of
+      encroachments. It was then that Bonaparte first selected for his
+      representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune, commonly called by
+      Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of military merit, an
+      intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time of peace when
+      seated in the Council chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married
+      to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from
+      starving, for he was as vicious as idle. The money he gained when he chose
+      to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among prostitutes. To
+      supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest means, and was shut
+      up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of types and of paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an acceptable
+      associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the Orleans faction,
+      bought him a printing-office, and he printed the so dreadfully well-known
+      journal, called &lsquo;L&rsquo;Amie du Peuple&rsquo;. From the principles of this atrocious
+      paper, and from those of his sanguinary patron, he formed his own
+      political creed. He distinguished himself frequently at the clubs of the
+      Cordeliers, and of the Jacobins, by his extravagant motions, and by
+      provoking laws of proscription against a wealth he did not possess, and
+      against a rank he would have dishonoured, but did not see without envy. On
+      the 30th of June, 1791, he said, in the former of these clubs:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We hear everywhere complaints of poverty; were not our eyes so often
+      disgusted with the sight of unnatural riches, our hearts would not so
+      often be shocked at the unnatural sufferings of humanity. The blessings of
+      our Revolution will never be felt by the world, until we in France are on
+      a level, with regard to rank as well as to fortune. I, for my part, know
+      too well the dignity of human nature ever to bow to a superior; but,
+      brothers and friends, it is not enough that we are all politically equal,
+      we must also be all equally rich or equally poor&mdash;we must either all
+      strive to become men of property, or reduce men of property to become
+      sans-culottes. Believe me, the aristocracy of property is more dangerous
+      than the aristocracy of prerogative or fanaticism, because it is more
+      common. Here is a list sent to &lsquo;L&rsquo; Amie du People&rsquo;, but of which prudence
+      yet prohibits the publication. It contains the names of all the men of
+      property of Paris, and of the Department of the Seine, the amount of their
+      fortunes, and a proposal how to reduce and divide it among our patriots.
+      Of its great utility in the moment when we have been striking our grand
+      blows, nobody dares doubt; I, therefore, move that a brotherly letter be
+      sent to every society of our brothers and friends in the provinces,
+      inviting each of them to compose one of similar contents and of similar
+      tendency, in their own districts, with what remarks they think proper to
+      affix, and to forward them to us, to be deposited, in the mother club,
+      after taking copies of them for the archives of their own society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His motion was decreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two days afterwards, he again ascended the tribune. &ldquo;You approved,&rdquo; said
+      he, &ldquo;of the measures I lately proposed against the aristocracy of
+      property; I will now tell you of another aristocracy which we must also
+      crush&mdash;I mean that of religion, and of the clergy. Their supports are
+      folly, cowardice, and ignorance. All priests are to be proscribed as
+      criminals, and despised as impostors or idiots; and all altars must be
+      reduced to dust as unnecessary. To prepare the public mind for such
+      events, we must enlighten it; which can only be done by disseminating
+      extracts from &lsquo;L&rsquo; Amie du People&rsquo;, and other philosophical publications. I
+      have here some ballads of my own composition, which have been sung in my
+      quarter; where all superstitious persons have already trembled, and all
+      fanatics are raving. If you think proper, I will, for a mere trifle, print
+      twenty thousand copies of them, to be distributed and disseminated gratis
+      all over France.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After some discussion, the treasurer of the club was ordered to advance
+      Citizen Brune the sum required, and the secretary to transmit the ballads
+      to the fraternal societies in the provinces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brune put on his first regimentals as an aide-decamp to General Santerre
+      in December, 1792, after having given proofs of his military prowess the
+      preceding September, in the massacre of the prisoners in the Abbey. In
+      1793 he was appointed a colonel in the revolutionary army, which, during
+      the Reign of Terror, laid waste the departments of the Gironde, where he
+      was often seen commanding his corps, with a human head fixed on his sword.
+      On the day when he entered Bordeaux with his troops, a new-born child
+      occupied the same place, to the great horror of the inhabitants. During
+      this brilliant expedition he laid the first foundation of his present
+      fortune, having pillaged in a most unmerciful manner, and arrested or shot
+      every suspected person who could not, or would not, exchange property for
+      life. On his return to Paris, his patriotism was recompensed with a
+      commission of a general of brigade. On the death of Robespierre, he was
+      arrested as a terrorist, but, after some months&rsquo; imprisonment, again
+      released.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In October, 1795, he assisted Napoleon Bonaparte in the massacre of the
+      Parisians, and obtained for it, from the director Barras, the rank of a
+      general of division. Though occupying, in time of war, such a high
+      military rank, he had hitherto never seen an enemy, or witnessed an
+      engagement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Bonaparte had planned the invasion and pillage of Switzerland, Brune
+      was charged to execute this unjust outrage against the law of nations. His
+      capacity to intrigue procured him this distinction, and he did honour to
+      the choice of his employers. You have no doubt read that, after lulling
+      the Government of Berne into security by repeated proposals of
+      accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops during a truce,
+      and obtained by treachery successes which his valour did not promise him.
+      The pillage, robberies, and devastations in Helvetia added several more
+      millions to his previously great riches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was after his campaign in Holland, during the autumn of 1799, that he
+      first began to claim some military glory. He owed, however, his successes
+      to the superior number of his troops, and to the talents of the generals
+      and officers serving under him. Being made a Counsellor of State by
+      Bonaparte, he was entrusted with the command of the army against the
+      Chouans. Here he again seduced by his promises, and duped by his
+      intrigues, acted infamously&mdash;but was successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p236" id="p236"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="p236.jpg (68K)" src="images/p236.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Three months before Brune set out on his embassy to
+      Constantinople, Talleyrand and Fouche were collecting together all the
+      desperadoes of our Revolution, and all the Italian, Corsican, Greek, and
+      Arabian renegadoes and vagabonds in our country, to form him a set of
+      attendants agreeable to the real object of his mission.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know too much of our national character and of my own veracity to
+      think it improbable, when I assure you that most of our great men in place
+      are as vain as presumptuous, and that sometimes vanity and presumption get
+      the better of their discretion and prudence. What I am going to tell you I
+      did not hear myself, but it was reported to me by a female friend, as
+      estimable for her virtues as admired for her accomplishments. She is often
+      honoured with invitations to Talleyrand&rsquo;s familiar parties, composed
+      chiefly of persons whose fortunes are as independent as their principles,
+      who, though not approving the Revolution, neither joined its opposers nor
+      opposed its adherents, preferring tranquillity and obscurity to agitation
+      and celebrity. Their number is not much above half a dozen, and the
+      Minister calls them the only honest people in France with whom he thinks
+      himself safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When it was reported here that two hundred persons of Brune&rsquo;s suite had
+      embarked at Marseilles and eighty-four at Genoa, and when it was besides
+      known that nearly fifty individuals accompanied him in his outset, this
+      unusual occurrence caused much conversation and many speculations in all
+      our coteries and fashionable circles. About that time my friend dined with
+      Talleyrand, and, by chance, also mentioned this grand embassy, observing,
+      at the same time, that it was too much honour done to the Ottoman Porte,
+      and too much money thrown away upon splendour, to honour such an imbecile
+      and tottering Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How people talk,&rdquo; interrupted Talleyrand, &ldquo;about what they do not
+      comprehend. Generous as Bonaparte is, he does not throw away his expenses;
+      perhaps within twelve months all these renegadoes or adventurers, whom you
+      all consider as valets of Brune, will be three-tailed Pachas or Beys,
+      leading friends of liberty, who shall have gloriously broken their fetters
+      as slaves of a Selim to become the subjects of a Napoleon. The Eastern
+      Empire has, indeed, long expired, but it may suddenly be revived.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Austria and Russia,&rdquo; replied my friend, &ldquo;would never suffer it, and
+      England would sooner ruin her navy and exhaust her Treasury than permit
+      such a revolution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So they have tried to do,&rdquo; retorted Talleyrand, &ldquo;to bring about a counter
+      revolution in France. But though only a moment is requisite to erect the
+      standard of revolt, ages often are necessary to conquer and seize it.
+      Turkey has long been ripe for a revolution. It wanted only chiefs and
+      directors. In time of war, ten thousand Frenchmen landed in the
+      Dardanelles would be masters of Constantinople, and perhaps of the Empire.
+      In time of peace, four hundred bold and well-informed men may produce the
+      same effect. Besides, with some temporary cession of a couple of provinces
+      to each of the Imperial Courts, and with the temporary present of an
+      island to Great Britain, everything may be settled &lsquo;pro tempore&rsquo;, and a
+      Joseph Bonaparte be permitted to reign at Constantinople, as a Napoleon
+      does at Paris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That the Minister made use of this language I can take upon me to affirm;
+      but whether purposely or unintentionally, whether to give a high opinion
+      of his plans or to impose upon his company, I will not and cannot assert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the subject of this numerous suite of Brune, Markof is said to have
+      obtained several conferences with Talleyrand and several audiences of
+      Bonaparte, in which representations, as just as energetic, were made,
+      which, however, did not alter the intent of our Government or increase the
+      favour of the Russian Ambassador at the Court of St. Cloud. But it proved
+      that our schemes of subversion are suspected, and that our agents of
+      overthrow would be watched and their manoeuvres inspected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Count Italinski, the Russian Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, is one of
+      those noblemen who unite rank and fortune, talents and modesty, honour and
+      patriotism, wealth and liberality. His personal character and his
+      individual virtues made him, therefore, more esteemed and revered by the
+      members of the Divan, than the high station he occupied, and the powerful
+      Prince he represented, made him feared or respected. His warnings had
+      created prejudices against Brune which he found difficult to remove. To
+      revenge himself in his old way, our Ambassador inserted several paragraphs
+      in the Moniteur and in our other papers, in which Count Italinski was
+      libelled, and his transactions or views calumniated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After his first audience with the Grand Seignior, Brune complained
+      bitterly, of not having learned the Turkish language, and of being under
+      the necessity, therefore, of using interpreters, to whom he ascribed the
+      renewed obstacles he encountered in every step he took, while his hotel
+      was continually surrounded with spies, and the persons of his suite
+      followed everywhere like criminals when they went out. Even the valuable
+      presents he carried with him, amounting in value to twenty-four millions
+      of livres&mdash;were but indifferently received, the acceptors, seeming to
+      suspect the object and the honesty of the donor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In proportion as our politics became embroiled with those of Russia, the
+      post of Brune became of more importance; but the obstacles thrown in his
+      way augmented daily, and he was forced to avow that Russia and England had
+      greater influence and more credit than the French Republic and its chief.
+      When Bonaparte was proclaimed an Emperor of the French, Brune expected
+      that his acknowledgment as such at Constantinople would be a mere matter
+      of course and announced officially on the day he presented a copy of his
+      new credentials. Here again he was disappointed, and therefore demanded
+      his recall from a place where there was no probability, under the present
+      circumstances, of either exciting the subjects to revolt, of deluding the
+      Prince into submission, or seducing Ministers who, in pocketing his
+      bribes, forgot for what they were given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was then that Bonaparte sent Joubert with a letter in his own
+      handwriting, to be delivered into the hands of the Grand Seignior himself.
+      This Joubert is a foundling, and, was from his youth destined and educated
+      to be one of the secret agents of our secret diplomacy. You already,
+      perhaps, have heard that our Government selects yearly a number of young
+      foundlings or orphans, whom it causes to be brought up in foreign
+      countries at its expense, so as to learn the language as natives of the
+      nation, where, when grown up, they are chiefly to be employed. Joubert had
+      been educated under the inspection of our consuls at Smyrna, and, when he
+      assumes the dress of a Turk, from his accent and manners even the
+      Mussulmans mistake him for one of their own creed and of their country. He
+      was introduced to Bonaparte in 1797, and accompanied him to Egypt, where
+      his services were of the greatest utility to the army. He is now a kind of
+      undersecretary in the office of our secret diplomacy, and a member of the
+      Legion of Honour. Should ever Joseph Bonaparte be an Emperor or Sultan of
+      the East, Joubert will certainly be his Grand Vizier. There is another
+      Joubert (with whom you must not confound him), who was; also a kind of
+      Dragoman at Constantinople some years ago, and who is still somewhere on a
+      secret mission in the East Indies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joubert&rsquo;s arrival at Constantinople excited both curiosity among the
+      people and suspicion among the Ministry. There is no example in the
+      Ottoman history of a chief of a Christian nation having written to the
+      Sultan by a private messenger, or of His Highness having condescended to
+      receive the letter from the bearer, or to converse with him. The Grand
+      Vizier demanded a copy of Bonaparte&rsquo;s letter, before an audience could be
+      granted. This was refused by Joubert; and as Brune threatened to quit the
+      capital of Turkey if any longer delay were experienced, the letter was
+      delivered in a garden near Constantinople, where the Sultan met
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s agent, as if by chance, who, it seems, lost all courage and
+      presence of mind, and did not utter four words, to which no answer was
+      given.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This impertinent intrigue, and this novel diplomacy, therefore, totally
+      miscarried, to the great shame and greater disappointment of the schemers
+      and contrivers. I must, however, do Talleyrand the justice to say that he
+      never approved of it, and even foretold the issue to his intimate friends.
+      It was entirely the whim and invention of Bonaparte himself, upon a
+      suggestion of Brune, who was far from being so well acquainted with the
+      spirit and policy of the Divan as he had been with the genius and plots of
+      Jacobinism. Not rebuked, however, Joubert was ordered away a second time
+      with a second letter, and, after an absence of four months, returned again
+      as he went, less satisfied with the second than with his first journey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these trips to Turkey, he had always for travelling companions some of
+      our emissaries to Austria, Hungary, and in particular to Servia, where the
+      insurgents were assisted by our councils, and even guided by some of our
+      officers. The principal aide-de-camp of Czerni George, the Servian
+      chieftain, is one Saint Martin, formerly a captain in our artillery,
+      afterwards an officer of engineers in the Russian service, and finally a
+      volunteer in the army of Conde. He and three other officers of artillery
+      were, under fictitious names, sent by our Government, during the spring of
+      last year, to the camp of the insurgents. They pretended to be of the
+      Grecian religion, and formerly Russian officers, and were immediately
+      employed. Saint Martin has gained great influence over Czerni George, and
+      directs both his political councils and military operations. Besides the
+      individuals left behind by Joubert; it is said that upwards of one hundred
+      persons of Brune&rsquo;s suite have been ordered for the same destination. You
+      see how great the activity of our Government is, and that nothing is
+      thought unworthy of its vigilance or its machinations. In the staff of
+      Paswan Oglou, six of my countrymen have been serving ever since 1796,
+      always in the pay of our Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was much against the inclination and interest of our Emperor that his
+      Ambassador at Constantinople should leave the field of battle there to the
+      representatives of Russia, Austria, and England. But his dignity was at
+      stake. After many threats to deprive the Sultan of the honour of his
+      presence, and even after setting out once for some leagues on his return,
+      Brune, observing that these marches and countermarches excited more mirth
+      than terror, at last fixed a day, when, finally, either Bonaparte must be
+      acknowledged by the Divan as an Emperor of the French, or his departure
+      would take place. On that day he, indeed, began his retreat, but, under
+      different pretexts, be again stopped, sent couriers to his secretaries,
+      waited for their return, and sent new couriers again,&mdash;but all in
+      vain, the Divan continued refractory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At his first audience after his return, the reception Bonaparte gave him
+      was not very cordial. He demanded active employment, in case of a
+      continental war, either in Italy or in Germany, but received neither. When
+      our army of England was already on its march towards the Rhine, and
+      Bonaparte returned here, Brune was ordered to take command on the coast,
+      and to organize there an army of observation, destined to succour Holland
+      in case of an invasion, or to invade England should a favourable occasion
+      present itself. The fact is, he was charged to intrigue rather than to
+      fight; and were Napoleon able to force upon Austria another Peace of
+      Luneville, Brune would probably be the plenipotentiary that would ask your
+      acceptance of another Peace of Amiens. It is here a general belief that
+      his present command signifies another pacific overture from Bonaparte
+      before your Parliament meets, or, at least, before the New Year. Remember
+      that our hero is more to be dreaded as a Philip than as an Alexander.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Brune has bought landed property for nine millions of livres&mdash;and
+      has, in different funds, placed ready money to the same amount. His own
+      and his wife&rsquo;s diamonds are valued by him at three millions; and when he
+      has any parties to dinner, he exhibits them with great complaisance as
+      presents forced upon him during his campaign in Switzerland and Holland,
+      for the protection he gave the inhabitants. He is now so vain of his
+      wealth and proud of his rank, that he not only disregards all former
+      acquaintances, but denies his own brothers and sisters,&mdash;telling them
+      frankly that the Fieldmarshal Brune can have no shoemaker for a brother,
+      nor a sister married to a chandler; that he knows of no parents, and of no
+      relatives, being the maker of his own fortune, and of what he is; that his
+      children will look no further back for ancestry than their father. One of
+      his first cousins, a postilion, who insisted, rather obstinately, on his
+      family alliance, was recommended by Brune to his friend Fouche, who sent
+      him on a voyage of discovery to Cayenne, from which he probably will not
+      return very soon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XL.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My LORD:&mdash;Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;n is now one of our most
+      fashionable ladies. Once in the week she has a grand tea-party; once in a
+      fortnight a grand dinner; and once in the month a grand ball. Foreign
+      gentlemen are particularly well received at her house, which, of course,
+      is much frequented by them. As you intend to visit this country after a
+      peace, it may be of some service to you not to be unacquainted with the
+      portrait of a lady whose invitation to see the original you may depend
+      upon the day after your arrival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p338" id="p338"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="p338.jpg (75K)" src="images/p338.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n is the widow of the great and useless
+      traveller, Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n, to whom his relatives pretend that
+      she was never married. Upon his death-bed he acknowledged her, however,
+      for his wife, and left her mistress of a fortune of three hundred thousand
+      livres a year. The first four years of her widowhood she passed in
+      lawsuits before the tribunals, where the plaintiffs could not prove that
+      she was unmarried, nor she herself that she was married. But Madame
+      Napoleon Bonaparte, for a small douceur, speaking in her favour, the
+      consciences of the juries, and the understanding of the judges, were all
+      convinced at once that she had been the lawful wife, and was the lawful
+      heiress, of Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n, who had no children, or nearer
+      relatives than third cousins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n was travelling in the East Indies when the
+      Revolution broke out. His occupation there was a very innocent one; he
+      drew countenances, being one of the most enthusiastic sectaries of
+      Lavater, and modestly called himself the first physiognomist in the world.
+      Indeed, he had been at least the most laborious one; for he left behind
+      him a collection of six thousand two hundred portraits, drawn by himself
+      in the four quarters of the world, during a period of thirty years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He never engaged a servant, nor dealt with a tradesman, whose physiognomy
+      had not been examined by him. In his travels he preferred the worst
+      accommodation in a house where he approved of the countenance of the host,
+      to the best where the traits or lines of the landlord&rsquo;s face were
+      irregular, or did not coincide with his ideas of physiognomical propriety.
+      The cut of a face, its expression, the length of the nose, the width or
+      smallness of the mouth, the form of the eyelids or of the ears, the colour
+      or thickness of the hair, with the shape and tout ensemble of the head,
+      were always minutely considered and discussed before he entered into any
+      agreement, on any subject, with any individual whatever. Whatever
+      recommendations, or whatever attestations were produced, if they did not
+      correspond with his own physiognomical remarks and calculations, they were
+      disregarded; while a person whose physiognomy pleased him required no
+      other introduction to obtain his confidence. Whether he thought himself
+      wiser than his forefathers, he certainly did not grow richer than they
+      were. Charlatans who imposed upon his credulity and impostors who
+      flattered his mania, servants who robbed him and mistresses who deceived
+      him, proved that if his knowledge of physiognomy was great, it was by no
+      means infallible. At his death, of the fortune left him by his parents
+      only the half remained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His friends often amused themselves at the expense of his foibles. When he
+      prepared for a journey to the East, one of them recommended him a servant,
+      upon whose fidelity he could depend. After examining with minute
+      scrupulosity the head of the person, he wrote: &ldquo;My friend, I accept your
+      valuable present. From calculations, which never deceive me, Manville (the
+      servant&rsquo;s name) possesses, with the fidelity of a dog, the intrepidity of
+      the lion. Chastity itself is painted on his front, modesty in his looks,
+      temperance on his cheek, and his mouth and nose bespeak honesty itself.&rdquo;
+       Shortly after the Count had landed at Pondicherry, Mauville, who was a
+      girl, died, in a condition which showed that chastity had not been the
+      divinity to whom she had chiefly sacrificed. In her trunk were found
+      several trinkets belonging to her master, which she honestly had
+      appropriated to herself. His miscalculation on this subject the Count
+      could not but avow; he added, however, that it was the entire fault of his
+      friend, who had duped him with regard to the sex.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n was, on account of her physiognomy, purchased
+      by her late husband, then travelling in Turkey, from a merchant of
+      Circassian slaves, when she was under seven years of age, and sent for her
+      education to a relative of the Count, an Abbess of a convent in Languedoc.
+      On his return from Turkey, some years afterwards, he took her under his
+      own care, and she accompanied him all over Asia, and returned first to
+      France in 1796, where her husband&rsquo;s name was upon the list of emigrants,
+      though he had not been in Europe for ten years before the Revolution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      However, by some pecuniary arrangements with Barras, he recovered his
+      property, which he did not long enjoy, for he died in 1798. The suitors of
+      Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n, mistress of a large fortune, with some
+      remnants of beauty and elegance of manners, have been numerous, and among
+      them several Senators and generals, and even the Minister Chaptal. But she
+      has politely declined all their offers, preferring her liberty and the
+      undisturbed right of following her own inclination to the inconvenient
+      ties of Hymen. A gentleman, whom she calls, and who passes for, her
+      brother, Chevalier de M de T&mdash;&mdash;, a Knight of Malta, assists her
+      in doing the honours of her house, and is considered as her favourite
+      lover; though report and the scandalous chronicle say that she bestows her
+      favours on every person who wishes to bestow on her his name, and that,
+      therefore, her gallants are at least as numerous as her suitors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the true statement of the past, as well as the present, with
+      regard to Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n. She relates, however, a different
+      story. She says that she is the daughter of the Marquis de M de T&mdash;&mdash;-,
+      of a Languedoc family; that she sailed, when a child, with her mother in a
+      felucca from Nice to Malta, there to visit her brother; was captured by an
+      Algerine pilot, separated from her mother, and carried to Constantinople
+      by a merchant of slaves; there she was purchased by Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n,
+      who restored her to her family, and whom, therefore, notwithstanding the
+      difference of their ages, she married from gratitude. This pretty,
+      romantic story is ordered in our Court circles to be officially believed;
+      and, of course, is believed by nobody, not even by the Emperor and Empress
+      themselves, who would not give her the place of a lady-in-waiting, though
+      her request was accompanied with a valuable diamond to the latter. The
+      present was kept, but the offer declined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the members of the Bonaparte family, female as well as male, honour
+      her house with their visits and with the acceptance of her invitations;
+      and it is, therefore, among our fashionables, the &lsquo;haut ton&rsquo; to be of the
+      society and circle of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last February, Madame de P&mdash;&mdash;t (the wife of Comte de P&mdash;&mdash;t,
+      a relative, by her husband&rsquo;s side, of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n, and who
+      by the Revolution lost all their property, and now live with her as
+      companions) was brought to bed of a son; the child was baptized by the
+      Cardinal de Belloy, and Madame Joseph and Prince Louis Bonaparte stood
+      sponsors. This occurrence was celebrated with great pomp, and a fete was
+      given to nearly one hundred and fifty per sons of both sexes,&mdash;as
+      usual, a mixture of ci-devant nobles and of ci-devant sans-culottes; of
+      rank and meanness; of upstart wealth and beggared dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What that day struck me most was the audacity of the Senator Villetard in
+      teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with his impertinent
+      conversation and affected piety. This Villetard was, before the
+      Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789 by the mob from
+      the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined for theft. In 1791 his
+      patriotism was so well known in the Department of Yonne, that he was
+      deputed by the Jacobins there to the Jacobins of the capital with an
+      address, encouraging and advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in
+      1792 he was chosen a member of the National Convention, where the most
+      sanguinary and most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon
+      him in the number of their adherents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph Bonaparte at
+      Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and
+      liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the
+      Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna. In
+      the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the
+      littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind. The wooden image
+      of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her, together
+      with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic faithful have for
+      ages believed to have been used by her, were presented by him to the
+      Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a horribly
+      blasphemous letter. He passed the next night, after he had perpetrated
+      this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of the Holy Virgin;
+      and, on the next morning, placed one of them, naked, on the pedestal where
+      the statue of the Virgin had formerly stood, and ordered all the devotees
+      at Loretto, and two leagues round, to prostrate themselves before her.
+      This shocking command occasioned the premature death of fifteen ladies,
+      two of whom, who were nuns, died on the spot on beholding the horrid
+      outrage; and many more were deprived of their reason. How barbarously
+      unfeeling must that wretch be who, in bereaving the religious, the pious,
+      and the conscientious of their consolation and hope, adds the tormenting
+      reproach of apostasy, by forcing virtue upon its knees to bow before what
+      it knows to be guilt and infamy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A traitor to his associates as to his God, it was he who, in November,
+      1799, presented at St. Cloud the decree which excluded all those who
+      opposed Bonaparte&rsquo;s authority from the Council of Five Hundred, and
+      appointed the two committees which made him a First Consul. In reward for
+      this act of treachery, he was nominated to a place in the Conservative
+      Senate. He has now ranked himself among our modern saints, goes regularly
+      to Mass and confesses; has made a brother of his, who was a drummer, an
+      Abbe; and his assiduity about the Cardinal was probably with a view to
+      obtain advancement for this edifying priest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cardinal de Belloy is now ninety-six years of age, being born in 1709,
+      and has been a Bishop for fifty-three years, but, during the Revolution,
+      was proscribed, with all other prelates. He remained, however, in France,
+      where his age saved him from the guillotine, but not from being reduced to
+      the greatest want. A descendant of a noble family, and possessing an
+      unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one of the pillars for
+      the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him an Archbishop of
+      Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from Rome. But he is now in
+      his second childhood, entirely directed by his grand vicaries, Malaret, De
+      Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and absolutely devoted to,
+      Bonaparte. An innocent instrument in their hands, of those impious
+      compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the Empress, he did not,
+      perhaps, even understand the meaning. From such a man the vile and artful
+      Villetard might extort any promise. I observed, however, with pleasure,
+      that he was watched by the grand vicar, Malaret, who seldom loses sight of
+      His Eminence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two so opposite characters&mdash;I mean De Belloy and Villetard&mdash;are
+      already speaking evidences of the composition of the society at Madame de
+      C&mdash;&mdash;n&rsquo;s. But I will tell you something still more striking.
+      This lady is famous for her elegant services of plate, as much as for her
+      delicate taste in entertaining her parties. After the supper on this
+      night, eleven silver and four gold plates, besides numerous silver and
+      gold spoons, forks, etc., were missed. She informed Fouche of her loss,
+      who had her house surrounded by spies, with orders not to let any servant
+      pass without undergoing a strict search. The first gentleman who called
+      for his carriage was His Excellency the Counsellor of State and grand
+      officer of the Legion of Honour, Treilhard. His servants were stopped and
+      the cause explained. They willingly, and against the protest of their
+      master, suffered themselves to be searched. Nothing was found upon them;
+      but the police agents, observing the full-dress hat of their master rather
+      bulky under his arm, took the liberty to look into it, where they found
+      one of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n&rsquo;s gold plates and two of her spoons. His
+      Excellency immediately ordered his servants to be arrested, for having
+      concealed their theft there. Fouche, however, when called out, advised his
+      friend to forgive them for misplacing them, as the less said on the
+      subject the better. When Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n heard of this
+      discovery, she asked Fouche to recall his order or to alter it. &ldquo;A
+      repetition of such misplacings in the hats or in the pockets of the
+      masters,&rdquo; said she, &ldquo;would injure the reputation of my house and company.&rdquo;
+       She never recovered the remainder of her loss, and that she might not be
+      exposed in future to the same occurrences, she bought two services of
+      china the following day, to be used when she had mixed society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Treilhard had, before the Revolution, the reputation of being an honest
+      man and an able advocate; but has since joined the criminals of all
+      factions, being an accomplice in their guilt and a sharer of their spoils.
+      In the convention, he voted for the death of Louis XVI. and pursued
+      without mercy the unfortunate Marie Antoinette to the scaffold. During his
+      missions in the departments, wherever he went the guillotine was erected
+      and blood flowed in streams. He was, nevertheless, accused by Robespierre
+      of moderatism. At Lille, in 1797, and at Rastadt, in 1798, he negotiated
+      as a plenipotentiary with the representatives of Princes, and in 1799
+      corresponded as a director with Emperors and Kings, to whom he wrote as
+      his great and dear friends. He is now a Counsellor of State, in the
+      section of legislation, and enjoys a fortune of several millions of
+      livres, arising from estates in the country, and from leases in the
+      capital. As this accident at Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n&rsquo;s soon became
+      public, his friends gave out that he had of late been exceedingly absent,
+      and, from absence of mind, puts everything he can lay hold of into his
+      pocket. He is not a favourite with Madame Bonaparte, and she asked her
+      husband to dismiss and disgrace him for an act so disgraceful to a grand
+      officer of the Legion of Honour, but was answered, &ldquo;Were I to turn away
+      all the thieves and rogues that encompass me I should soon cease to reign.
+      I despise them, but I must employ them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is whispered that the police have discovered another of Madame de C n&rsquo;s
+      lost gold plates at a pawnbroker&rsquo;s, where it had been pledged by the wife
+      of another Counsellor of State, Francois de Nantes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This I give you merely as a report! though the fact is, that Madame
+      Francois is very fond of gambling, but very unfortunate; and she, with
+      other of our fashionable ladies, has more than once resorted to her charms
+      for the payment of her gambling debts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      BOOK 2.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Since my return here, I have never neglected to present
+      myself before our Sovereign, on his days of grand reviews and grand
+      diplomatic audiences. I never saw him more condescending, more agreeable,
+      or, at least, less offensive, than on the day of his last levee, before he
+      set out to be inaugurated a King of Italy; nor worse tempered, more
+      petulant, agitated, abrupt, and rude than at his first grand audience
+      after his arrival from Milan, when this ceremony had been performed. I am
+      not the only one who has made this remark; he did not disguise either his
+      good or ill-humour; and it was only requisite to have eyes and ears to see
+      and be disgusted at the difference of behaviour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have heard a female friend of Madame Bonaparte explain, in part, the
+      cause of this alteration. Just before he set out for Italy, the agreeable
+      news of the success of the first Rochefort squadron in the West Indies,
+      and the escape of our Toulon fleet from the vigilance of your Lord Nelson,
+      highly elevated his spirits, as it was the first naval enterprise of any
+      consequence since his reign. I am certain that one grand naval victory
+      would flatter his vanity and ambition more than all the glory of one of
+      his most brilliant Continental campaigns. He had also, at that time, great
+      expectations that another negotiation with Russia would keep the Continent
+      submissive under his dictature, until he should find an opportunity of
+      crushing your power. You may be sure that he had no small hopes of
+      striking a blow in your country, after the junction of our fleet with the
+      Spanish, not by any engagement between our Brest fleet and your Channel
+      fleet, but under a supposition that you would detach squadrons to the East
+      and West Indies in search of the combined fleet, which, by an unexpected
+      return, according to orders, would have then left us masters of the
+      Channel, and, if joined with the Batavian fleet, perhaps even of the North
+      Sea. By the incomprehensible activity of Lord Nelson, and by the defeat
+      (or as we call it here, the negative victory) of Villeneuve and Gravina,
+      all this first prospect had vanished. Our vengeance against a nation of
+      shopkeepers we were not only under the necessity of postponing, but, from
+      the unpolite threats and treaties of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg with
+      those of Vienna and St. James, we were on the eve of a Continental war,
+      and our gunboats, instead of being useful in carrying an army to the
+      destruction of the tyrants of the seas, were burdensome, as an army was
+      necessary to guard them, and to prevent these tyrants from capturing or
+      destroying them. Such changes, in so short a period of time as three
+      months, might irritate a temper less patient than that of Napoleon the
+      First.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At his grand audience here, even after the army, of England had moved
+      towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should, therefore,
+      have been made up, he was almost insupportable. The low bows, and the
+      still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador, the Marquis da
+      Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon Ambassador, Count von
+      Buneau, was addressed in a language that no well-bred master ever uses in
+      speaking to a menial servant. He did not cast a look, or utter a word,
+      that was not an insult to the audience and a disgrace to his rank. I never
+      before saw him vent his rage and disappointment so indiscriminately. We
+      were, indeed (if I may use the term), humbled and trampled upon en masse.
+      Some he put out of countenance by staring angrily at them; others he
+      shocked by his hoarse voice and harsh words; and all&mdash;all of us&mdash;were
+      afraid, in our turn, of experiencing something worse than our neighbours.
+      I observed more than one Minister, and more than one general, change
+      colour, and even perspire, at His Majesty&rsquo;s approach.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I believe the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here will all agree
+      with me that, at a future congress, the restoration of the ancient and
+      becoming etiquette of the Kings of France would be as desirable a point to
+      demand from the Emperor of the French as the restoration of the balance of
+      power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before his army of England quitted its old quarters on the coast, the
+      officers and men often felt the effects of his ungovernable temper. When
+      several regiments of grenadiers, of the division of Oudinot, were defiling
+      before him on the 25th of last month, he frequently and severely, though
+      without cause, reprobated their manner of marching, and once rode up to
+      Captain Fournois, pushed him forwards with the point of a small cane,
+      calling out, &ldquo;Sacre Dieu! Advance; you walk like a turkey.&rdquo; In the first
+      moment of indignation, the captain, striking at the cane with his sword,
+      made a push, or a gesture, as if threatening the person of Bonaparte, who
+      called out to his aide-de-camp, Savary:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Disarm the villain, and arrest him!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is unnecessary,&rdquo; the captain replied, &ldquo;I have served a tyrant, and
+      merit my fate!&rdquo; So saying, he passed his sword through his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His whole company stopped instantly, as at a word of command, and a
+      general murmur was heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lay down your arms, and march out of the file instantly,&rdquo; commanded
+      Bonaparte, &ldquo;or you shall be cut down for your mutiny by my guides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They hesitated for a moment, but the guides advancing to surround them,
+      they obeyed, and were disarmed. On the following afternoon, by a special
+      military commission, each tenth man was condemned to be shot; but
+      Bonaparte pardoned them upon condition of serving for life in the
+      colonies; and the whole company was ordered to the colonial depots. The
+      widow and five children of Captain Fournois the next morning threw
+      themselves at the Emperor&rsquo;s feet, presenting a petition, in which they
+      stated that the pay of the captain had been their only support.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; replied Bonaparte to the kneeling petitioners, &ldquo;Fournois was both
+      a fool and a traitor; but, nevertheless, I will take care of you.&rdquo; Indeed,
+      they have been so well taken care of that nobody knows what has become of
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am almost certain that I am not telling you what you did not know
+      beforehand in informing you that the spirit of our troops is greatly
+      different from that of the Germans, and even from that of your own
+      country. Every, one of our soldiers would prefer being shot to being
+      beaten or caned. Flogging, with us, is out of the question. It may,
+      perhaps, be national vanity, but I am doubtful whether any other army is,
+      or can be, governed, with regard to discipline, in a less violent and more
+      delicate manner, and, nevertheless, be kept in subordination, and perform
+      the most brilliant exploits. Remember, I speak of our spirit of
+      subordination and discipline, and not of our character as citizens, as
+      patriots, or as subjects. I have often hinted it, but I believe I have not
+      explained myself so fully before; but my firm opinion and persuasion is
+      that, with regard to our loyalty, our duty, and our moral and political
+      principles, another equally inconsistent and despicable people does not
+      exist in the universe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The condition of the slave is certainly in itself that of vileness; but is
+      that slave a vile being who, for a blow, pierces his bosom because he is
+      unable to avenge it? And what epithet can be given him who braves
+      voluntarily a death seemingly certain, not from the love of his country,
+      but from a principle of honour, almost incompatible with the dishonour of
+      bondage?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the siege of Yorktown, in America, we had, during one night,
+      erected a battery, with intent to blow up a place which, according to the
+      report of our spies, was your magazine of ammunition, etc. We had not time
+      to finish it before daylight; but one loaded twenty-four pounder was
+      mounted, and our cannoneer, the moment he was about to fire it, was
+      killed. Six more of our men, in the same attempt, experienced the same
+      fate. My regiment constituted the advanced guard nearest to the spot, and
+      La Fayette brought me the order from the commander-in-chief to engage some
+      of my men upon that desperate undertaking. I spoke to them, and two
+      advanced, but were both instantly shot by your sharpshooters. I then
+      looked at my grenadiers, without uttering anything, when, to my sorrow,
+      one of my best and most orderly men advanced, saying, &ldquo;My colonel, permit
+      me to try my fortune!&rdquo; I assented, and he went coldly amidst hundreds of
+      bullets whistling around his ears, set fire to the cannon, which blew up a
+      depot of powder, as was expected, and in the confusion returned unhurt. La
+      Fayette then presented him with his purse. &ldquo;No, monsieur,&rdquo; replied he,
+      &ldquo;money did not make me venture upon such a perilous undertaking.&rdquo; I
+      understood my man, promoted him to a sergeant, and recommended him to
+      Rochambeau, who, in some months, procured him the commission of a
+      sub-lieutenant. He is now one of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Field-marshals, and the only
+      one of that rank who has no crimes to reproach himself with. This man was
+      the soldier of a despot; but was not his action that of a man of honour,
+      which a stanch republican of ancient Rome would have been proud of? Who
+      can explain this contradiction?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This anecdote about Fournois I heard General Savary relate at Madame
+      Duchatel&rsquo;s, as a proof of Bonaparte&rsquo;s generosity and clemency, which, he
+      affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at Boulogne. I do not
+      suppose this officer to be above thirty years of age, of which he has
+      passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses or in watch-houses; but no
+      tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or a more abject courtier. His
+      affectation to extol everything that Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is at
+      last become so habitual that it is naturalized, and you may mistake for
+      sincerity that which is nothing but imposture or flattery. This son of a
+      Swiss porter is now one of Bonaparte&rsquo;s adjutants-general, a colonel of the
+      Gendarmes d&rsquo;Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a commander of
+      the Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to valour or merit,
+      but to abjectness, immorality, and servility. When an aide-de-camp with
+      Bonaparte in Egypt, he served him as a spy on his comrades and on the
+      officers of the staff, and was so much detested that, near Aboukir,
+      several shots were fired at him in his tent by his own countrymen. He is
+      supposed still to continue the same espionage; and as a colonel of the
+      Gendarmes d&rsquo;Elite, he is charged with the secret execution of all
+      proscribed persons or State prisoners, who have been secretly condemned,&mdash;a
+      commission that a despot gives to a man he trusts, but dares not offer to
+      a man he esteems. He is so well known that the instant he enters a society
+      silence follows, and he has the whole conversation to himself. This he is
+      stupid enough to take for a compliment, or for a mark of respect, or an
+      acknowledgment of his superior parts and intelligence, when, in fact, it
+      is a direct reproach with which prudence arms itself against suspected or
+      known dishonesty. Besides his wife, he has to support six other women whom
+      he has seduced and ruined; and, notwithstanding the numerous opportunities
+      his master has procured him of pillaging and enriching himself, he is
+      still much in debt; but woe to his creditors were they indiscreet enough
+      to ask for their payments! The Secret Tribunal would soon seize them and
+      transport them, or deliver them over to the hands of their debtor, to be
+      shot as traitors or conspirators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My LORD:&mdash;I am told that it was the want of pecuniary resources that
+      made Bonaparte so ill-tempered on his last levee day. He would not have
+      come here at all, but preceded his army to Strasburg, had his Minister of
+      Finances, Gaudin, and his Minister of the Public Treasury, Marbois, been
+      able to procure forty-four millions of livres&mdash;to pay a part of the
+      arrears of the troops; and for the speedy conveyance of ammunition and
+      artillery towards the Rhine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after his arrival here, Bonaparte sent for the directors of
+      the Bank of France, informing them that within twenty-four hours they must
+      advance him thirty-six millions of livres&mdash;upon the revenue of the
+      last quarter of 1808. The president of the bank, Senator Garrat, demanded
+      two hours to lay before the Emperor the situation of the bank, that His
+      Majesty might judge what sum it was possible to spare without ruining the
+      credit of an establishment hitherto so useful to the commerce of the
+      Empire. To this Bonaparte replied that he was not ignorant of the
+      resources, or of the credit of the bank, any more than of its public
+      utility; but that the affairs of State suffered from every hour&rsquo;s delay,
+      and that, therefore, he insisted upon having the sum demanded even within
+      two hours, partly in paper and partly in cash; and were they to show any
+      more opposition, he would order the bank and all its effects to be seized
+      that moment. The directors bowed and returned to the bank; whither they
+      were followed by four waggons escorted by hussars, and belonging to the
+      financial department of the army of England. In these were placed eight
+      millions of livres in cash; and twenty-eight millions in bank-notes were
+      delivered to M. Lefevre, the Secretary-General of Marbois, who presented,
+      in exchange, Bonaparte&rsquo;s bond and security for the amount, bearing an
+      interest of five per cent. yearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this money transaction was known to the public, the alarm became
+      general, and long before the hour the bank usually opens the adjoining
+      streets were crowded with persons desiring to exchange their notes for
+      cash. During the night the directors had taken care to pay themselves for
+      the banknotes in their own possession with silver or gold, and, as they
+      expected a run, they ordered all persons to be paid in copper coin, as
+      long as any money of this metal remained. It required a long time to count
+      those halfpennies and centimes (five of which make a sou, or halfpenny),
+      but the people were not tired with waiting until towards three o&rsquo;clock in
+      the afternoon, when the bank is shut up. They then became so clamorous
+      that a company of gendarmes was placed for protection at the entrance of
+      the bank; but, as the tumult increased, the street was surrounded by the
+      police guards, and above six hundred individuals, many of them women, were
+      carried, under an escort, to different police commissaries, and to the
+      prefecture of the police. There most of them, after being examined, were
+      reprimanded and released. The same night, the police spies reported in the
+      coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards, that this run on
+      the bank was encouraged, and paid for, by English emissaries, some of whom
+      were already taken, and would be executed on the next day. In the morning,
+      however, the streets adjoining the bank were still more crowded, and the
+      crowd still more tumultuous, because payment was refused for all notes but
+      those of five hundred livres. The activity of the police agents, supported
+      by the gendarmes and police soldiers, again restored order, after several
+      hundred persons had been again taken up for their mutinous conduct. Of
+      these many were, on the same evening, loaded with chains, and, placed in
+      carts under military escort, paraded about near the bank and the Palais
+      Royal; the police having, as a measure of safety, under suspicion that
+      they were influenced by British gold, condemned them to be transported to
+      Cayenne; and the carts set out on the same night for Rochefort, the place
+      of their embarkation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the following day, not an individual approached the bank, but all trade
+      and all payments were at a stand; nobody would sell but for ready money,
+      and nobody who had bank-notes would part with cash. Some Jews and
+      money-brokers in the Palais Royal offered cash for these bills, at a
+      discount of from ten to twenty per cent. But these usurers were, in their
+      turn, taken up and transported, as agents of Pitt. An interview was then
+      demanded by the directors and principal bankers with the Ministers of
+      Finance and of the Public Treasury. In this conference it was settled
+      that, as soon as the two millions of dollars on their way from Spain had
+      arrived at Paris, the bank should reassume its payments. These dollars
+      Government would lend the bank for three months, and take in return its
+      notes, but the bank was, nevertheless, to pay an interest of six per cent.
+      during that period. All the bankers agreed not to press unnecessarily for
+      any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the credit of the bank
+      even by the individual credit of their own houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but two
+      sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres&mdash;and those of five
+      hundred livres. At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of livres&mdash;of
+      the former, and fifteen millions of livres&mdash;of the latter, were in
+      circulation; and I have heard a banker assert that the bank had not then
+      six millions of livres&mdash;in money and bullion, to satisfy the claims
+      of its creditors, or to honour its bills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition of
+      Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty ever be
+      repaired under his despotic government. Even now, when the bank pays in
+      cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten per cent. between
+      purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and this mistrust will not
+      be lessened hereafter. You may, perhaps, object that, as long as the bank
+      pays, it is absurd for any one possessing its bills to pay dearer than
+      with cash, which might so easily be obtained. This objection would stand
+      with regard to your, or any other free country, but here, where no
+      payments are made in gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a
+      cart to carry away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of
+      these metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
+      these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our Government.
+      With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction, and
+      chastisement follows it as its shadow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St. Martin,
+      where he had for years carried on business in the woollen line, went to
+      the bank two days after it had begun to pay. He demanded, and obtained,
+      exchange for twenty-four thousand livres&mdash;in notes, necessary for him
+      to pay what was due by him to his workmen. The same afternoon six of our
+      custom-house officers, accompanied by police agents and gendarmes, paid
+      him a domiciliary visit under pretence of searching for English goods.
+      Several bales were seized as being of that description, and Debrais was
+      carried a prisoner to La Force. On being examined by Fouche, he offered to
+      prove, by the very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that they
+      were not English. The Minister silenced him by saying that Government had
+      not only evidence of the contrary, but was convinced that he was employed
+      as an English agent to hurt the credit of the bank, and therefore, if he
+      did not give up his accomplices or employers, had condemned him to
+      transportation. In vain did his wife and daughters petition to Madame
+      Bonaparte; Debrais is now at Rochefort, if not already embarked for our
+      colonies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he was arrested, a seal, as usual, was put on his house, from which
+      his wife and family were turned out, until the police should have time to
+      take an inventory of his effects, and had decided on his fate. When Madame
+      Debrais, after much trouble and many pecuniary sacrifices, at last
+      obtained permission to have the seals removed, and reenter her house, she
+      found that all her plate and more than half her goods and furniture had
+      been stolen and carried away. Upon her complaint of this theft she was
+      thrown into prison for not being able to support her complaint with
+      proofs, and for attempting to vilify the characters of the agents of our
+      Government. She is still in prison, but her daughters are by her orders
+      disposing of the remainder of their parents&rsquo; property, and intend to join
+      their father as soon as their mother has recovered her liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same tyranny that supports the credit of our bank also keeps up the
+      price of our stocks. Any of our great stockholders who sell out to any
+      large amount, if they are unable to account for, or unwilling to declare
+      the manner in which they intend to employ, their money, are immediately
+      arrested, sometimes transported to the colonies, but more frequently
+      exiled into the country, to remain under the inspection of some police
+      agent, and are not allowed to return here without the previous permission
+      of our Government. Those of them who are upstarts, and have made their
+      fortune since the Revolution by plunder or as contractors, are still more
+      severely treated, and are often obliged to renounce part of their
+      ill-gotten wealth to save the remainder, or to preserve their liberty or
+      lives. A revisal of their former accounts, or an inspection of their past
+      transactions, is a certain and efficacious threat to keep them in silent
+      submission, as they all well understand the meaning of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even foreigners, whom our numerous national bankruptcies have not yet
+      disheartened, are subject to these measures of rigour or vigour requisite
+      to preserve our public credit. In the autumn of last year a Dutchman of
+      the name of Van der Winkle sold out by his agent for three millions of
+      livres&mdash;in our stock on one day, for which he bought up bills upon
+      Hamburg and London. He lodged in the Hotel des Quatre Nations, Rue
+      Grenelle, where the landlord, who is a patriot, introduced some police
+      agents into his apartments during his absence. These broke open all his
+      trunks, drawers, and even his writing-desk, and when he entered, seized
+      his person, and carried him to the Temple. By his correspondence it was
+      discovered that all this money was to be brought over to England; a reason
+      more than sufficient to incur the suspicion of our Government. Van der
+      Winkle spoke very little French, and he continued, therefore, in
+      confinement three weeks before he was examined, as our secret police had
+      not at Paris any of its agents who spoke Dutch. Carried before Fouche, he
+      avowed that the money was destined for England, there to pay for some
+      plantations which he desired to purchase in Surinam and Barbice. His
+      interpreter advised him, by the orders of Fouche, to alter his mind, and,
+      as he was fond of colonial property, lay out his money in plantations at
+      Cayenne, which was in the vicinity of Surinam, and where Government would
+      recommend him advantageous purchases. It was hinted to him, also, that
+      this was a particular favour, and a proof of the generosity of our
+      Government, as his papers contained many matters that might easily be
+      construed to be of a treasonable nature. After consulting with
+      Schimmelpenninck, the Ambassador of his country, he wrote for his wife and
+      children, and was seen safe with them to Bordeaux by our police agents,
+      who had hired an American vessel to carry them all to Cayenne. This
+      certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its
+      generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites. According to the
+      boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it
+      within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the
+      Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century of
+      peace can restore to that unfortunate country. It is reported here that
+      each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the Continental
+      States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover in courtesy to
+      Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to make certain
+      douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has received from
+      Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte two hundred and
+      fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our military
+      commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who have
+      distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau, without
+      ever serving under him. Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son of a
+      shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768. He was a shopman with his
+      father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a lieutenant of
+      carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first battalion of
+      volunteers of the Department of the North. His first sight of an enemy was
+      on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had a horse killed
+      under him. He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of Nerwinde, and of
+      Pellenberg. At the battle of Houdscoote he distinguished himself so much
+      as to be promoted to an adjutant general. He was wounded at the battle of
+      Fleures, and again at the passage of the Rhine, in 1795, under General
+      Moreau. During 1796 and 1797 he continued to serve in Germany, but in 1798
+      and 1799 he headed a division in Switzerland from which Bonaparte recalled
+      him in 1800, to command the troops in the capital and its environs. His
+      address to Bonaparte, announcing the votes of the troops under him
+      respecting the consulate for life and the elevation to the Imperial
+      throne, contain such mean and abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it
+      must have required more self-command and more courage to pronounce them
+      than to brave the fire of a hundred cannons; but these very addresses,
+      contemptible as their contents are, procured him the Field-marshal&rsquo;s
+      staff. Mortier well knew his man, and that his cringing in antechambers
+      would be better rewarded than his services in the field. I was not present
+      when Mortier spoke so shamefully, but I have heard from persons who
+      witnessed this farce, that he had his eyes fixed on the ground the whole
+      time, as if to say, &ldquo;I grant that I speak as a despicable being, and I
+      grant that I am so; but what shall I do, tormented as I am by ambition to
+      figure among the great, and to riot among the wealthy? Have compassion on
+      my weakness, or, if you have not, I will console myself with the idea that
+      my meanness is only of the duration of half an hour, while its
+      recompense-my rank-will be permanent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle
+      Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest
+      of her father. She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage of
+      her husband&rsquo;s complaisance to console herself both for his absence and
+      infidelities. When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier positively
+      declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and the babe
+      has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de chambre. The
+      child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and the Empress were
+      the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch. Bonaparte presented
+      Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond necklace valued at one
+      hundred and fifty thousand livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious
+      campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven
+      millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands. He is considered by
+      other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among our
+      fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as a model of connubial
+      fidelity&mdash;satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in
+      consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s confidence and attachment. He was recalled to take the command
+      of the artillery of Bonaparte&rsquo;s, household troops the moment Pichegru,
+      George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial tide had been
+      resolved on. More resistance against this innovation was at that time
+      expected than experienced.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in Hanover,
+      is a man of a different stamp. His father was a chair-man, and he was born
+      at Paris in 1763. In 1779 he enlisted in the regiment called La Vieille
+      Harine, where the Revolution found him a sergeant. This regiment was then
+      quartered at Toulon, and the emissaries of anarchy and licentiousness
+      engaged him as one of their agents. His activity soon destroyed all
+      discipline, and the troops, instead of attending to their military duty,
+      followed him to the debates and discussions of the Jacobin clubs. Being
+      arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous, scandalous behaviour,
+      an insurrection liberated him, and forced his accusers to save their lives
+      by flight. In April, 1790, he headed the banditti who murdered the
+      Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles, and who afterwards occasioned
+      the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he served under Jourdan, known by
+      the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who made him a colonel and his
+      aide-de-camp. In 1794, he was employed, as a general of brigade, in the
+      army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the campaigns of 1795 and 1796,
+      he served under another Jourdan, the general, without much distinction,&mdash;except
+      that he was accused by him of being the cause of all the disasters of the
+      last campaign, by the complete rout he suffered near Neumark on the 23d of
+      August, 1796. His division was ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against
+      the laws of nations, he arrested M. d&rsquo; Antraigues, who was attached to the
+      Russian legation. When the Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade him from
+      committing this injustice, and this violation of the rights of privileged
+      persons, he replied: &ldquo;There is no question here of any other right or
+      justice than the right and justice of power, and I am here the strongest.
+      M. d&rsquo;Antraigues is our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to
+      be shot. I repeat, I am here the strongest, &lsquo;et nous verrons&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Ambassador to
+      the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of Jacobin
+      propagators. Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose
+      lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet of Vienna had spared,
+      he thought that he might attempt anything; and, therefore, on the
+      anniversary day of the fete for the levy en masse of the inhabitants of
+      the capital, he insulted the feelings of the loyal, and excited the
+      discontented to rebellion, by placing over the door and in the windows of
+      his house the tri-coloured flag. This outrage the Emperor was unable to
+      prevent his subjects from resenting. Bernadotte&rsquo;s house was invaded, his
+      furniture broken to pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the house
+      of the Spanish Ambassador. As a satisfaction for this attack, provoked by
+      his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the Austrian
+      Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to leave
+      Vienna, which he did on the next day. So disgraceful was his conduct
+      regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little
+      impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse with
+      the Austrian Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from
+      which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed. When Bonaparte intended
+      to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an
+      implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres&mdash;calmed
+      him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not infallible or
+      their government the best of all possible governments. In 1801, he was
+      made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department, where he exercised
+      the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom he accused of being
+      still chouans and royalists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer. In the
+      summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of
+      Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within
+      twenty-four hours, two millions of livres. With much difficulty this sum
+      was collected. The day after he had received it, he insisted upon another
+      sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing in case
+      of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his troops.
+      Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them from the
+      execution of his threats. The troops under him were, both in Italy and in
+      Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated were, from their
+      pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts. Bernadotte has by these means
+      within ten years become master of a fortune of ten millions of livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in
+      the wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the
+      first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him. The many massacres under
+      Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no
+      doubt display a most sanguinary character. A lady, however, in whose house
+      in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to judge
+      from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his imagination
+      is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he knows that his
+      crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs others, he thinks
+      it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing him. Were
+      he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity as well as justice.
+      Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but a
+      knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in
+      his &ldquo;Life of Louis XIV.,&rdquo; that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to
+      the well&mdash;distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in
+      foreign countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president
+      of the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
+      country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names
+      of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I have
+      never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two or
+      three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and scurrilous
+      party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who replied that
+      these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been very useful,
+      and would be still more so after another pacification; and that Bonaparte
+      must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men of greater
+      talents. He granted also that men of true genius and literary eminence
+      were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character than
+      those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He added
+      that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a literary
+      mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from that which
+      was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted
+      to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal. Some he has made tribunes,
+      prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in foreign
+      countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given places,
+      he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of this country
+      allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a De Crebillon, a
+      D&rsquo; Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our literature and honours
+      to our nation. This liberality is often carried too far, and thrown away
+      upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery displays absence of taste and
+      genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee,
+      who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most
+      disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing
+      neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the
+      forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year&mdash;besides
+      a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d&rsquo;or. Another
+      poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former
+      factions, received, for an ode of forty lines on Bonaparte&rsquo;s birthday, an
+      office at Milan, worth twenty thousand livres in the year&mdash;and one
+      hundred napoleons d&rsquo;or for his travelling expenses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte&rsquo;s agents for dedications
+      to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than those fixed
+      for regular literary pensions. Instead of discouraging these foolish and
+      impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity, necessity, or
+      intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them. His name is,
+      therefore, found in more dedications published within these last five
+      years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken together
+      for the last century. In a man whose name, unfortunately for humanity,
+      must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable weakness to
+      pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality which some dull
+      or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu&rsquo;s, in
+      company with Duroc. The question turned upon literary productions and the
+      comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign
+      authors. &ldquo;As to the merits or the quality,&rdquo; said Duroc, &ldquo;I will not take
+      upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to their
+      size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will not,
+      therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion. I am convinced
+      that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than those of my own
+      country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what I have witnessed
+      and experienced for some years past, that of every book or publication
+      printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is dedicated to the
+      Emperor. Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German and seventy-one
+      Italian authors have inscribed their works to His Majesty, and been
+      rewarded for it; while during the same period only sixty-six Frenchmen
+      have presented their offerings to their Sovereign.&rdquo; For my part I think
+      Duroc&rsquo;s conclusion tolerably just.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed,
+      or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more
+      than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein. The former
+      presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte
+      family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred
+      years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that
+      of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the
+      Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore,
+      relatives of the Bourbons; and the sceptre of the French Empire is still
+      in the same family, though in a more worthy branch. Spanicetti received
+      one thousand louis&mdash;in gold, a pension of six thousand livres&mdash;for
+      life, and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home
+      department of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres
+      yearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the Bonapartes
+      as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the friend of
+      Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he exchanged
+      the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet family, the
+      last branch of which has since been extinguished by its intermarriage and
+      incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that, therefore, Napoleon
+      Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign Princes of Europe, but has
+      more right to the throne of Great Britain than George the Third, being
+      descended from the male branch of the Stuarts; while this Prince is only
+      descended from the female branch of the same royal house. Ritterstein was
+      presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte&rsquo;s portrait set with diamonds,
+      valued at twelve thousand livres, and received twenty-four thousand livres
+      ready money, together with a pension of nine thousand livres&mdash;in the
+      year, until he could be better provided for. He was, besides, nominated a
+      Knight of the Legion of Honour. It cannot be denied but that Bonaparte
+      rewards like a real Emperor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same encouragement, and
+      experience the same liberality. In our different museums we, therefore,
+      already, see and admire upwards of two hundred pictures, representing the
+      different actions, scenes, and achievements of Bonaparte&rsquo;s public life. It
+      is true they are not all highly finished or well composed or delineated,
+      but they all strike the spectators more or less with surprise or
+      admiration; and it is with us, as, I suppose, with you, and everywhere
+      else, the multitude decide: for one competent judge or real connoisseur,
+      hundreds pass, who stare, gape, are charmed, and inspire thousands of
+      their acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with their own satisfaction.
+      Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the age, his contemporaries,
+      and, I fear, even posterity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous patron, the
+      numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy, and Germany,
+      having him for their object, seem to evince. Ten sculptors have already
+      represented his passage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his passage
+      over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that over Pont d&rsquo; Arcole. At Rome,
+      Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are statues of him representing his natural
+      size; and our ten thousand municipalities have each one of his busts;
+      without mentioning the thousands of busts all over Europe, not excepting
+      even your own country. When Bonaparte sees under the windows of the
+      Tuileries the statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that palace, he
+      cannot help saying to himself: &ldquo;Marble lives longer than man.&rdquo; Have you
+      any doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for
+      his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, was
+      a German of the name of Schumacher. It is, indeed, allowed that he was
+      more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or considerate. He
+      did not consider that it would be no compliment to give the immortal hero
+      a hint of being a mortal man. Schumacher had employed near three years in
+      planning and executing in marble the prettiest model of a sepulchral
+      monument I have ever seen, read or heard of. He had inscribed it: &ldquo;The
+      Future Tomb of Bonaparte the Great.&rdquo; Under the patronage of Count von
+      Beast, he arrived here; and I saw the model in the house of this Minister
+      of the German Elector Arch&mdash;Chancellor, where also many French
+      artists went to inspect it. Count von Beast asked De Segur, the grand
+      master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant Schumacher the
+      honour of showing him his performance. De Segur advised him to address
+      himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon, who, after looking at it,
+      could not help paying a just tribute to the execution and to the talents
+      of the artist, though he disapproved of the subject, and declined
+      mentioning it to the Emperor. After three months&rsquo; attendance in this
+      capital, and all petitions and memorials to our great folks remaining
+      unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which he asked
+      permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte&rsquo;s tomb to the public for
+      money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where is it now?&rdquo; asked Fouche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the Minister&rsquo;s of the Elector Arch-Chancellor,&rdquo; answered the artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But where do you intend to show it for money?&rdquo; continued Fouche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the Palais Royal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, bring it there,&rdquo; replied Fouche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a
+      police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the
+      care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the
+      Rhine. Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his
+      home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model
+      of a grand tomb for a little man. I have just heard that one of your
+      countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d&rsquo;or.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court,
+      of the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
+      the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
+      believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
+      in Europe. But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our hospitals,
+      who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans and of
+      criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful necessity to
+      reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere, comparatively, can there be
+      found so much collective misery. And it is not here, as in other States,
+      that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty are persons of the lowest
+      classes of society; on the contrary, many, and, I fear, the far greater
+      part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged classes, descended from
+      ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but who by the Revolution have
+      been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps to both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something exposed
+      for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or want,
+      persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper to you:
+      &ldquo;Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise&mdash;on the
+      Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;&rdquo; and you
+      sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre that,
+      while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness, you are
+      not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to relieve with a
+      trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious warrior, before whom
+      nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that eminent statesman who
+      often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some few solitary walks,
+      incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his capital, would perhaps be
+      the best preservative against unbounded ambition and confident success
+      that philosophy could present to unfeeling tyranny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some author has written that &ldquo;want is the parent of industry, and
+      wretchedness the mother of ingenuity.&rdquo; I know that you have often approved
+      and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated countrymen in
+      England; but here their labours and their endeavours are disregarded; and
+      if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter the pride or
+      appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no other choice left
+      but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide. How many have I heard repent of
+      ever returning to a country where they have no expectation of justice in
+      their claims, no hope of relief in their necessities, where death by
+      hunger, or by their own hands, is the final prospect of all their
+      sufferings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a ci-devant
+      Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of his uncle&rsquo;s
+      porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined by the Counts,
+      by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all their business.
+      Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact less honesty, are
+      employed in our billiard and gambling-houses. I have seen two
+      music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry, and the
+      other a Counsellor of Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your penny or
+      halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp&mdash;the one
+      the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant Marquis, a
+      general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on the
+      Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old woman by
+      her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one of the women
+      has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a recollection, if she
+      thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the day of Bonaparte&rsquo;s coronation, and a little before he set out with
+      his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
+      Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his hat
+      with this inscription: &ldquo;I had sixty thousand livres rent&mdash;I am eighty
+      years of age, and I request alms.&rdquo; Many individuals, even some of
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
+      he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am
+      told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose
+      property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time
+      he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since
+      for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
+      supported himself lately entirely by begging. The value of the dress of
+      one of Bonaparte&rsquo;s running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve
+      him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and
+      agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to
+      renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the
+      remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived
+      me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and
+      illuminating Bonaparte&rsquo;s palace of the Tuileries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
+      whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
+      officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for
+      years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army
+      of Conde. Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte&rsquo;s household troops,
+      where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in
+      combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now
+      made a knight of Napoleon&rsquo;s Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for
+      bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress. As he is a man of
+      real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced
+      that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it,
+      but prove that he has never been misplaced. Another emigrant who, after
+      being a page to the Duc d&rsquo;Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of
+      the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded with
+      the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion of
+      Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French. Four
+      more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common
+      Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of
+      Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde. It were to be wished that the whole
+      of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants. I am sure
+      they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
+      never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
+      are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
+      domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
+      governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or
+      ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, daughter of
+      Marquis de R&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour
+      to Princesse Murat, which she declined, but accepted at the same time the
+      offer of being a companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a
+      ci-devant valet of Comte de Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for
+      this choice and preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered
+      them both to be transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter
+      had said in a coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the
+      housemaid of the wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of
+      a ci-devant assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a valuable present
+      to Madame Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B&mdash;&mdash;-
+      was not included in the act of proscription against her father and
+      brother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
+      frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But they are
+      proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
+      without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
+      Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
+      the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
+      of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
+      an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last three
+      years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
+      vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
+      vices, opinions are various, and even opposite. Most persons, who have
+      long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
+      have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities. On the other
+      hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
+      rumours, which certainly are exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it was
+      to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her hand
+      ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome, and
+      had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms. Her husband&rsquo;s
+      conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into a proof of
+      indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence of his
+      affection towards her. As he knew who she was when he received her from
+      the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her subsequent
+      intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt&mdash;policy may influence
+      a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem. He may choose to live
+      with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me that,
+      had it not been for Napoleon&rsquo;s singular inclination for his youthful
+      stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of his
+      consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already been
+      made her by Talleyrand. It was then reported that Bonaparte had his eyes
+      fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which the late
+      Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were expected to
+      be encountered at St. Petersburg. The untimely end of this Prince, and the
+      supplications of his wife and daughter, have since altered his intent, and
+      Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I may use the expression,
+      incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb064" id="pb064"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pb064.jpg (63K)" src="images/pb064.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that Bonaparte
+      is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex. You read last summer in the
+      public prints of the then Minister of the Interior (Chaptal) being made a
+      Senator; and that he was succeeded by our Ambassador at Vienna Champagny.
+      This promotion was the consequence of a disgrace, occasioned by his
+      jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress, Mademoiselle George, one of
+      the handsomest women of this capital. He was informed by his spies that
+      this lady frequently, in the dusk of the evening, or when she thought him
+      employed in his office, went to the house of a famous milliner in the Rue
+      St. Honor, where, through a door in an adjoining passage, a person, who
+      carefully avoided showing his face, always entered immediately before or
+      after her, and remained as long as she continued there. The house was then
+      by his orders beset with spies, who were to inform him the next time she
+      went to the milliner. To be near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the
+      neighbourhood, where the very next day her visit to the milliner&rsquo;s was
+      announced to him. While his secretary, with four other persons, entered
+      the milliner&rsquo;s house through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his
+      spies, forced the door of the passage open, which was no sooner done than
+      the disguised gallant was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by
+      the Minister and his companions. He would have been still worse used had
+      not the unexpected appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop
+      to the fury of this enraged lover. The incognito is said to have been
+      Bonaparte himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his
+      ministerial portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to
+      the Senate, had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to
+      an affair which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
+      according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour
+      of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant. The quantity of jewels with
+      which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much
+      ostentation in the new tragedy, &lsquo;The Templars&rsquo;, indicate, however, a
+      Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover. And, indeed, she already
+      treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public,
+      more as a real than a theatrical Princess. Without any cause whatever, but
+      from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out, without
+      leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very day she was
+      to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off for three
+      weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors
+      of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no
+      notice should be taken of this &lsquo;etourderie&rsquo;, which should not occur again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier,
+      having ruined himself in search after the philosopher&rsquo;s stone. To persons
+      in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but no
+      principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion, and
+      crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first speech at
+      the Jacobin Club. Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking of the
+      Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and the
+      suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which the
+      governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without resistance.
+      He was denounced by the municipality to the National Assembly, for these
+      and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and other Jacobins defended
+      him, and he escaped even imprisonment. During 1793 and 1794, he
+      monopolized the contract for making and providing the armies with
+      gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and other members
+      of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of livres&mdash;but by
+      which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres&mdash;himself. He was,
+      under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage, but
+      bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes. In 1799, he
+      advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres&mdash;to bribe adherents for
+      the new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of
+      interest, appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte,
+      in September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him
+      in the Ministry of the Interior. You may see by this short account that
+      the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical
+      stone. He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive
+      (from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a
+      separate establishment. This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
+      character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither committed
+      a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I have read a copy of a letter from Madrid, circulated
+      among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps, which draws a most
+      deplorable picture of the Court and Kingdom of Spain. Forced into an
+      unprofitable and expensive war, famine ravaging some, and disease other
+      provinces, experiencing from allies the treatment of tyrannical foes,
+      disunion in his family and among his Ministers, His Spanish Majesty
+      totters on a throne exposed to the combined attacks of internal
+      disaffection and external plots, with no other support than the advice of
+      a favourite, who is either a fool or a traitor, and perhaps both.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As the Spanish monarchy has been more humbled and reduced during the
+      twelve years&rsquo; administration of the Prince of Peace than during the whole
+      period that it has been governed by Princes of the House of Bourbon, the
+      heir of the throne, the young Prince of Asturias, has, with all the
+      moderation consistent with duty, rank, and consanguinity, tried to remove
+      an upstart, universally despised for his immorality as, well as for his
+      incapacity; and who, should he continue some years longer to rule in the
+      name of Charles IV., will certainly involve his King and his country in
+      one common ruin. Ignorant and presumptuous, even beyond upstarts in
+      general, the Prince of Peace treats with insolence all persons raised
+      above him by birth or talents, who refuse to be his accomplices or valets.
+      Proud and certain of the protection of the Queen, and of the weakness of
+      the King, the Spanish nobility is not only humbled, provoked, and wronged
+      by him, but openly defied and insulted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You know the nice principles of honour and loyalty that have always
+      formerly distinguished the ancient families of Spain. Believe me that,
+      notwithstanding what appearances indicate to the contrary, the Spanish
+      grandee who ordered his house to be pulled down because the rebel
+      constable had slept in it, has still many descendants, but loyal men
+      always decline to use that violence to which rebels always resort. Soon
+      after the marriage of the Prince of Asturias, in October, 1801, to his
+      cousin, the amiable Maria Theresa, Princess Royal of Naples, the ancient
+      Spanish families sent some deputies to Their Royal Highnesses, not for the
+      purpose of intriguing, but to lay before them the situation of the
+      kingdom, and to inform them of the real cause of all disasters. They were
+      received as faithful subjects and true patriots, and Their Royal
+      Highnesses promised every support in their power towards remedying the
+      evil complained of, and preventing, if possible, the growth of others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Princess of Asturias is a worthy granddaughter of Maria Theresa of
+      Austria, and seems to inherit her character as well as her virtues. She
+      agreed with her royal consort that, after having gained the affection of
+      the Queen by degrees, it would be advisable for her to insinuate some
+      hints of the danger that threatened their country and the discontent that
+      agitated the people. The Prince of Asturias was to act the same part with
+      his father as the Princess did with his mother. As there is no one about
+      the person of Their Spanish Majesties, from the highest lord to the lowest
+      servant, who is not placed there by the favourite, and act as his spies,
+      he was soon aware that he had no friend in the heir to the throne. His
+      conversation with Their Majesties confirmed him in this supposition, and
+      that some secret measures were going on to deprive him of the place he
+      occupied, if not of the royal favour. All visitors to the Prince and
+      Princess of Asturias were, therefore, watched by his emissaries; and all
+      the letters or memorials sent to them by the post were opened, read, and;
+      if contrary to his interest, destroyed, and their writers imprisoned in
+      Spain or banished to the colonies. These measures of injustice created
+      suspicion, disunion, and, perhaps, fear, among the members of the Asturian
+      cabal, as it was called; all farther pursuit, therefore, was deferred
+      until more propitious times, and the Prince of Peace remained undisturbed
+      and in perfect security until the rupture with your country last autumn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to be lamented that, with all their valuable qualities and feelings
+      of patriotism, the Prince and Princess of Asturias do not possess a little
+      dissimulation and more knowledge of the world. The favourite tried by all
+      means to gain their good opinion, but his advances met with that repulse
+      they morally deserved, but which, from policy, should have been suspended
+      or softened, with the hope of future accommodation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beurnonville, the Ambassador of our Court to the Court of Madrid, was here
+      upon leave of absence when war was declared by Spain against your country,
+      and his first secretary, Herman, acted as charge d&rsquo;affaires. This Herman
+      has been brought up in Talleyrand&rsquo;s office, and is both abler and more
+      artful than Beurnonville; he possesses also the full confidence of our
+      Minister, who, in several secret and pecuniary transactions, has obtained
+      many proofs of this secretary&rsquo;s fidelity as well as capacity. The views of
+      the Cabinet of St. Cloud were, therefore, not lost sight of, nor its
+      interest neglected at Madrid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose you have heard that the Prince of Peace, like all other ignorant
+      and illiberal people, believes no one can be a good or clever man who is
+      not also his countryman, and that all the ability and probity of the world
+      is confined within the limits of Spain. On this principle he equally
+      detests France and England, Germany and Russia, and is, therefore, not
+      much liked by our Government, except for his imbecility, which makes him
+      its tool and dupe. His disgrace would not be much regretted here, where we
+      have it in our power to place or displace Ministers in certain States,
+      whenever and as often as we like. On this occasion, however, we supported
+      him, and helped to dissolve the cabal formed against him; and that for the
+      following reasons:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the assurances of Beurnonville, Bonaparte and Talleyrand had been led
+      to believe that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were well affected to
+      France, and to them personally; and conceiving themselves much more
+      certain of this than of the good disposition of the favourite, though they
+      did not take a direct part against him, at the same time they did not
+      disclose what they knew was determined on to remove him from the helm of
+      affairs. During Beurnonville&rsquo;s absence, however, Herman had formed an
+      intrigue with a Neapolitan girl, in the suite of Asturias, who, influenced
+      by love or bribes, introduced him into the Cabinet where her mistress kept
+      her correspondence with her royal parents. With a pick-lock key he opened
+      all the drawers, and even the writing-desk, in which he is said to have
+      discovered written evidence that, though the Princess was not prejudiced
+      against France, she had but an indifferent opinion of the morality and
+      honesty of our present Government and of our present governors. One of
+      these original papers Herman appropriated to himself, and despatched to
+      this capital by an extraordinary courier, whose despatches, more than the
+      rupture with your country, forced Beurnonville away in a hurry from the
+      agreeable society of gamesters and prostitutes, chiefly frequented by him
+      in this capital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not and cannot be known yet what was the exact plan of the Prince
+      and Princess of Asturias and their adherents; but a diplomatic gentleman,
+      who has just arrived from Madrid, and who can have no reason to impose
+      upon me, has informed me of the following particulars:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their Royal Highnesses succeeded perfectly in their endeavours to gain the
+      well-merited tenderness and approbation of their Sovereigns in everything
+      else but when the favourite was mentioned with any slight, or when any
+      insinuations were thrown out concerning the mischief arising from his
+      tenacity of power, and incapacity of exercising it with advantage to the
+      State. The Queen was especially irritated when such was the subject of
+      conversation or of remark; and she finally prohibited it under pain of her
+      displeasure. A report even reached Their Royal Highnesses, that the Prince
+      of Peace had demanded their separation and separate confinement. Nothing
+      could, therefore, be effected to impede the progress of wickedness and
+      calamity, but by some temporary measure of severity. In this disagreeable
+      dilemma, it was resolved by the cabal to send the Queen to a convent,
+      until her favourite had been arrested and imprisoned; to declare the
+      Prince of Asturias Regent during the King&rsquo;s illness (His Majesty then
+      still suffered from several paralytic strokes), and to place men of
+      talents and patriotism in the place of the creatures of the Prince of
+      Peace. As soon as this revolution was organized, the Queen would have been
+      restored to full liberty and to that respect due to her rank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This plan had been communicated to our Ambassador, and approved of by our
+      Government; but when Herman in such an honest manner had inspected the
+      confidential correspondence of the Princess of Asturias, Beurnonville was
+      instructed by Talleyrand to, warn the favourite of the impending danger,
+      and to advise him to be beforehand with his enemies. Instead of telling
+      the truth, the Prince of Peace alarmed the King and Queen with the most
+      absurd fabrications; and assured Their Majesties that their son and their
+      daughter-in-law had determined not only to dethrone them, but to keep them
+      prisoners for life, after they had been forced to witness his execution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indolence and weakness are often more fearful than guilt. Everything he
+      said was at once believed; the Prince and Princess were ordered under
+      arrest in their own apartments, without permission to see or correspond
+      with anybody; and so certain was the Prince of Peace of a complete and
+      satisfactory revenge for the attempt against his tyranny, that a frigate
+      at Cadiz was ready waiting to carry the Princess of Asturias back to
+      Naples. All Spaniards who had the honour of their Sovereigns and of their
+      country at heart lamented these rash proceedings; but no one dared to take
+      any measures to counteract them. At last, however, the Duke of Montemar,
+      grand officer to the Prince of Asturias, demanded an audience of Their
+      Majesties, in the presence of the favourite. He began by begging his
+      Sovereign to recollect that for the place he occupied he was indebted to
+      the Prince of Peace; and he called upon him to declare whether he had ever
+      had reason to suspect him either of ingratitude or disloyalty. Being
+      answered in the negative, he said that, though his present situation and
+      office near the heir to the throne was the pride and desire of his life,
+      he would have thrown it up the instant that he had the least ground to
+      suppose that this Prince ceased to be a dutiful son and subject; but so
+      far from this being the case, he had observed him in his most unguarded
+      moments&mdash;in moments of conviviality had heard him speak of his royal
+      parents with as much submission and respect as if he had been in their
+      presence. &ldquo;If,&rdquo; continued he, &ldquo;the Prince of Peace has said otherwise, he
+      has misled his King and his Queen, being, no doubt, deceived himself. To
+      overthrow a throne and to seize it cannot be done without accomplices,
+      without arms, without money. Who are the conspirators hailing the Prince
+      as their chief? I have heard no name but that of the lovely Princess, his
+      consort, the partaker of his sentiments as well as of his heart. And his
+      arms? They are in the hands of those guards his royal parent has given to
+      augment the necessary splendour of his rank. And as to his money? He has
+      none but what is received from royal and paternal munificence and bounty.
+      You, my Prince,&rdquo; said he to the favourite (who seemed much offended at the
+      impression the speech made on Their Majesties), &ldquo;will one day thank me, if
+      I am happy enough to dissuade dishonourable, impolitic, or unjust
+      sentiments. Of the approbation of posterity I am certain&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If,&rdquo; interrupted the favourite, &ldquo;the Prince of Asturias and his consort
+      will give up their bad counsellors, I hope Their Majesties will forget and
+      forgive everything with myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whether Their Royal Highnesses,&rdquo; replied the Duke of Montemar, &ldquo;have done
+      anything that deserves forgiveness, or whether they have any counsellors,
+      I do not know, and am incompetent to judge; but I am much mistaken in the
+      character of Their Royal Highnesses if they wish to purchase favour at the
+      expense of confidence and honour. An order from His Majesty may
+      immediately clear up this doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince of Peace was then ordered to write, in the name of the King, to
+      his children in the manner he proposed, and to command an answer by the
+      messenger. In half an hour the messenger returned with a letter addressed
+      to the favourite, containing only these lines:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A King of Spain is well aware that a Prince and Princess of Asturias can
+      have no answer to give to such proposals or to such questions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After six days&rsquo; arrest, and after the Prince of Peace had in vain
+      endeavoured to discover something to inculpate Their Royal Highnesses,
+      they were invited to Court, and reconciled both to him and their royal
+      parents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I will add in this letter, to the communication of the
+      gentlemen mentioned in my last, what I remember myself of the letter which
+      was circulated among our diplomatists, concerning the intrigues at Madrid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of Montemar,
+      had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence, and as much as
+      possible all noise. This accounts for the favourite&rsquo;s pretended moderation
+      on this occasion. But though he was externally reconciled, and, as was
+      reported at Madrid, had sworn his reconciliation even by taking the
+      sacrament, all the undertakings of the Prince and Princess of Asturias
+      were strictly observed and reported by the spies whom he had placed round
+      Their Royal Highnesses. Vain of his success and victory, he even lost that
+      respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred subject always shows
+      to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related to his Sovereign. He
+      sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity, and with an insolence
+      provoking or defying resentment. It was on the days of great festivities,
+      when the Court was most brilliant, and the courtiers most numerous, that
+      he took occasion to be most arrogant to those whom he traitorously and
+      audaciously dared to call his rivals. On the 9th of last December, at the
+      celebration of the Queen&rsquo;s birthday, his conduct towards Their Royal
+      Highnesses excited such general indignation that the remembrance of the
+      occasion of the fete, and the presence of their Sovereigns, could not
+      repress a murmur, which made the favourite tremble. A signal from the
+      Prince of Asturias would then have been sufficient to have caused the
+      insolent upstart to be seized and thrown out of the window. I am told that
+      some of the Spanish grandees even laid their hands on their swords, fixing
+      their eyes on the heir to the throne, as if to say: &ldquo;Command, and your
+      unworthy enemy shall exist no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which
+      contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate, the
+      Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way and
+      manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and unnatural
+      Philip II.; but the Queen&rsquo;s confessor, though, like all her other
+      domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire with reproof,
+      saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the grand and powerful
+      Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin; adding that no laws,
+      human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy whatever, could authorize a
+      parent to stain his hands in the blood of his children. These anecdotes
+      are sufficient both to elucidate the inveteracy of the favourite, the
+      abject state of the heir to the throne, and the incomprehensible
+      infatuation of the King and Queen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince and
+      Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he disapproved of
+      those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he neither offered to put
+      an end to them nor to be a mediator for a perfect reconciliation with
+      their Sovereigns. He was guided by no other motive but to keep the
+      favourite in subjection and alarm by preserving a correspondence with his
+      rivals. That this was the case and the motive cannot be doubted from the
+      financial intrigue he carried on in the beginning of last month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foreigners have but an imperfect or erroneous idea of the amount of the
+      immense sums Spain has paid to our Government in loans, in contributions,
+      in donations, and in subsidies. Since the reign of Bonaparte, or for these
+      last five years, upwards of half the revenue of the Spanish monarchy has
+      either been brought into our National Treasury or into the privy purse of
+      the Bonaparte family. Without the aid of Spanish money, neither would our
+      gunboats have been built, our fleets equipped, nor our armies paid. The
+      dreadful situation of the Spanish finances is, therefore, not surprising&mdash;it
+      is, indeed, still more surprising that a general bankruptcy has not
+      already involved the Spanish nation in a general ruin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, on his return from Italy, the recall of the Russian negotiator and
+      the preparations of Austria convinced Bonaparte of the probability of a
+      Continental war, our troops on the coast had not been paid for two months,
+      and his Imperial Ministers of Finances had no funds either to discharge
+      the arrears or to provide for future payments until the beginning of the
+      year 14, or the 22d instant. Beurnonville was, therefore, ordered to
+      demand peremptorily from the Cabinet of Madrid forty millions of livres&mdash;in
+      advance upon future subsidies. Half of that sum had, indeed, shortly
+      before arrived at Cadiz from America, but much more was due by the Spanish
+      Government to its own creditors, and promised them in payment of old
+      debts. The Prince of Peace, in consequence, declared that, however much he
+      wished to oblige the French Government, it was utterly impossible to
+      procure, much less to advance such sums. Beurnonville then became more
+      assiduous than ever about the Prince and Princess of Asturias; and he had
+      the impudence to assert that they had promised, if their friends were at
+      the head of affairs, to satisfy the wishes and expectation of the Emperor
+      of the French, by seizing the treasury at Cadiz, and paying the State
+      creditors in vales deinero; notes hitherto payable in cash, and never at a
+      discount. The stupid favourite swallowed the palpable bait; four millions
+      in dollars were sent under an escort to this country, while the Spanish
+      notes instantly fell to a discount at first of four and afterwards of six
+      per cent., and probably will fall lower still, as no treasures are
+      expected from America this autumn. It was with two millions of these
+      dollars that the credit of the Bank of France was restored, or at least
+      for some time enabled to resume its payments in specie. Thus wretched
+      Spain pays abroad for the forging of those disgraceful fetters which
+      oppress her at home; and supports a foreign tyranny, which finally must
+      produce domestic misery as well as slavery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the Prince and Princess of Asturias were informed of the scandalous
+      and false assertion of Beurnonville, they and their adherents not only
+      publicly, and in all societies, contradicted it, but affirmed that, rather
+      than obtain authority or influence on such ruinous terms, they would have
+      consented to remain discarded and neglected during their lives. They took
+      the more care to have their sentiments known on this subject, as our
+      Ambassador&rsquo;s calumny had hurt their popularity. It was then first that, to
+      revenge the shame with which his duplicity had covered him, Beurnonville
+      permitted and persuaded the Prince of Peace to begin the chastisement of
+      Their Royal Highnesses in the persons of their favourites. Duke of
+      Montemar, the grand officer to the Prince of Asturias; Marquis of Villa
+      Franca, the grand equerry to the Princess of Asturias; Count of Miranda,
+      chamberlain to the King; and the Countess Dowager del Monte, with six
+      other Court ladies and four other noblemen, were, therefore, exiled from
+      Madrid into different provinces, and forbidden to reside in any place
+      within twenty leagues of the residence of the royal family. According to
+      the last letters and communications from Spain, the Prince and Princess of
+      Asturias had not appeared at Court since the insult offered them in the
+      disgrace of their friends, and were resolved not to appear in any place
+      where they might be likely to meet with the favourite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among our best informed politicians here, it is expected that a revolution
+      and a change of dynasty will be the issue of this our political embryo in
+      Spain. Napoleon has more than once indirectly hinted that the Bonaparte
+      dynasty will never be firm and fixed in France as long as any Bourbons
+      reign in Spain or Italy. Should he prove victorious in the present
+      Continental contest, another peace, and not the most advantageous, will
+      again be signed with your country&mdash;a peace which, I fear, will leave
+      him absolute master of all Continental States. His family arrangements are
+      publicly avowed to be as follow: His third brother, Louis, and his sons,
+      are to be the heirs of the French Empire. Joseph Bonaparte is, at the
+      death or resignation of Napoleon, to succeed to the Kingdom of Italy,
+      including Naples. Lucien, though at present in disgrace, is considered as
+      the person destined to supplant the Bourbons in Spain, where, during his
+      embassy in 1800, and in 1801, he formed certain connections which Napoleon
+      still keeps up and preserves. Holland will be the inheritance of Jerome
+      should Napoleon not live long enough to extend his power in Great Britain.
+      Such are the modest pretensions our Imperial courtiers bestow upon the
+      family of our Sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the hands
+      of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as long as they
+      find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be the case, they break
+      and throw away. This idiot is made to believe that both his political and
+      physical existence depends entirely upon our support, and he has infused
+      the same ridiculous notion into his accomplices and adherents. Guilt,
+      ignorance, and cowardice thus misled may, directed by art, interest, and
+      craft, perform wonders to entangle themselves in the destruction of their
+      country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a porter,
+      and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a soldier in one of
+      our regiments serving in the East Indies. Having there collected some
+      pillage, he purchased the place of a major in the militia of the Island of
+      Bourbon, but was, for his immorality, broken by the governor. Returning to
+      France, he bitterly complained of this injustice, and, after much cringing
+      in the antechambers of Ministers, he obtained at last the Cross of St.
+      Louis as a kind of indemnity. About the same time he also bought with his
+      Indian wealth the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard of Monsieur, the
+      present Louis XVIII. Being refused admittance into any genteel societies,
+      he resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to gambling-houses, and
+      he even kept to himself when the Revolution took place. He had at the same
+      time, and for a certain interest, advanced Madame d&rsquo;Estainville money to
+      establish her famous, or rather infamous, house in the Rue de Bonnes
+      Enfants, near the Palais Royal,&mdash;a house that soon became the
+      fashionable resort of our friends of Liberty and Equality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our then
+      hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who declined the
+      honour. The Jacobins were not so nice. In 1792, they appointed him a
+      general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax. This modern Ajax,
+      having obtained a separate command, attacked Treves in a most ignorant
+      manner, and was worsted with great loss. The official reports of our
+      revolutionary generals have long been admired for their modesty as well as
+      veracity; but Beurnonville has almost outdone them all, not excepting our
+      great Bonaparte. In a report to the National Convention concerning a
+      terrible engagement of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville
+      declares that, though the number of the enemy killed was immense, his
+      troops got out of the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of
+      one of his riflemen. On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the
+      execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War Department&mdash;a
+      place which he refused, under a pretence that he was better able to serve
+      his country with his sword than with his pen, having already been in one
+      hundred and twenty battles (where, he did not enumerate or state). On the
+      14th of the following March, however, he accepted the ministerial
+      portfolio, which he did not keep long, being delivered up by his Hector,
+      Dumouriez, to the Austrians. He remained a prisoner at Olmutz until the
+      22d of November, 1795, when he was included among the persons exchanged
+      for the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present Royal Highness, the Duchess of
+      Angouleme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed
+      remnants of Jourdan&rsquo;s army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French commander
+      to Holland. In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to the Court of
+      Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the Court of
+      Madrid. In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be dreaded, nor his
+      personal qualities make him esteemed. In France, he is laughed at as a
+      boaster, but not trusted as a warrior. In Spain, he is neither dreaded nor
+      esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there universally
+      despised. He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter
+      breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness.
+      Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency
+      of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy
+      dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation,
+      teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even
+      the most inattentive observer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of age;
+      is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother who is
+      a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another to a
+      merchant who cries dogs&rsquo; and cats&rsquo; meat in our streets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER IX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him
+      when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her tenderness
+      and apprehension for his person, at last altered his resolution. Madame
+      Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be in the power of
+      Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis Bonaparte, should any
+      accident make her a widow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the Emperor&rsquo;s absence, the former is the President of the Senate,
+      and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops
+      in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case
+      of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil
+      determinations with his military forces. Even with the army in Germany,
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte dynasty,
+      and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an Imperial
+      diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as a
+      viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena. It must be granted
+      that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is almost
+      certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his death;
+      and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition, carried
+      into execution. These very precautions evince, however, how uncertain and
+      precarious he considers his existence to be, and that, notwithstanding
+      addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte dynasty will not
+      survive him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own creation,
+      or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which they might consider
+      unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte. The superior officers, not
+      included in the above description, are such insignificant characters that,
+      though he makes use of their experience and courage, he does not fear
+      their views or ambition. Among the inferior officers, and even among the
+      men, all those who have displayed, either at reviews or in battles,
+      capacity, activity, or valour, are all members of his Legion of Honour;
+      and are bound to him by the double tie of gratitude and self-interest.
+      They look to him alone for future advancements, and for the preservation
+      of the distinction they have obtained from him. His emissaries artfully
+      disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow everything a
+      Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil officers rewarded
+      or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be discarded, but
+      disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII. Any person who would be
+      imprudent enough to attempt to prove the impossibility, as well as the
+      absurdity, of these impolitic and retrospective measures, would be
+      instantly taken up and shot as an emissary of the Bourbons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have often amused myself in conversing with our new generals and new
+      officers; there is such a curious mixture of ignorance and information, of
+      credulity and disbelief, of real boasting and affected modesty, in
+      everything they say or do in company; their manners are far from being
+      elegant, but also very distant from vulgarity; they do not resemble those
+      of what we formerly called &lsquo;gens comme il faut&rsquo;, and &lsquo;la bonne societe&rsquo;!
+      nor those of the bourgeoisie, or the lower classes. They form a new
+      species of fashionables, and a &lsquo;haut ton militaire&rsquo;, which strikes a
+      person accustomed to Courts at first with surprise, and perhaps with
+      indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become
+      reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of military
+      frankness interwoven with the military roughness. Our ladies, however (I
+      mean those who have seen other Courts, or remember our other coteries),
+      complain loudly of this alteration of address, and of this fashionable
+      innovation; and pretend that our military, under the notion of being
+      frank, are rude, and by the negligence of their manners and language, are
+      not only offensive, but inattentive and indelicate. This is so much the
+      more provoking to them, as our Imperial courtiers and Imperial placemen do
+      not think themselves fashionable without imitating our military gentry,
+      who take Napoleon for their exclusive model and chief in everything, even
+      in manners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What I have said above applies only to those officers whose parents are
+      not of the lowest class, or who entered so early or so young into the army
+      that they may be said to have been educated there, and as they advanced,
+      have assumed the &lsquo;ton&rsquo; of their comrades of the same rank. I was invited,
+      some time ago, to a wedding, by a jeweller whose sister had been my nurse,
+      and whose daughter was to be married to a captain of hussars quartered
+      here. The bridegroom had engaged several other officers to assist at the
+      ceremony, and to partake of the fete and ball that followed. A general of
+      the name of Liebeau was also of the party, and obtained the place of
+      honour by the side of the bride&rsquo;s mother. At his entrance into the
+      apartment I formed an opinion of him which his subsequent conduct during
+      the ball confirmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the dinner he seemed to forget that he had a knife and a fork, and
+      he did not eat of a dish (and he ate of them all, numerous as they were)
+      without bespattering or besmearing himself or his neighbours. He broke two
+      glasses and one plate, and, for equality&rsquo;s sake, I suppose, when he threw
+      the wine on the lady to his right, the lady to his left was inundated with
+      sauces. In getting up from dinner to take coffee and liqueurs, according
+      to our custom, as he took the hand of the mistress of the house, he seized
+      at the same time a corner of the napkin, and was not aware of his blunder
+      till the destruction of bottles, glasses, and plate, and the screams of
+      the ladies, informed him of the havoc and terror his awkward gallantry had
+      occasioned. When the ball began, he was too vain of his rank and
+      precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride down the first dance;
+      but she was not, I believe, much obliged to him for his politeness; it
+      cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and a broken nail, and she continued
+      lame during the remainder of the night. In making an apology to her for
+      his want of dexterity, and assuring her that he was not so awkward in
+      handling the enemies of his country in battle as in handling friends he
+      esteemed in a dance, he gave no quarter to an old maid aunt, whom, in the
+      violence of his gesticulation, he knocked down with his elbow and laid
+      sprawling on the ground. He was sober when these accidents literally
+      occurred.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of this original I collected the following particulars: Before the
+      Revolution he was a soldier in the regiment of Flanders, from which he
+      deserted and became a corporal in another regiment; in 1793 he was a
+      drum-major in one of the battalions in garrison in Paris. You remember the
+      struggles of factions in the latter part of May and in the beginning of
+      June, the same year, when Brissot and his accomplices were contending with
+      Marat, Robespierre, and their adherents for the reins of power. On the 1st
+      of June the latter party could not get a drummer to beat the alarm, though
+      they offered money and advancement. At last Robespierre stepped forward to
+      Liebeau and said, &ldquo;Citizen, beat the alarm march, and to-day you shall be
+      nominated a general.&rdquo; Liebeau obeyed, Robespierre became victorious and
+      kept his promise, and thus my present associate gained his rank. He has
+      since been employed under Jourdan in Germany, and under Le Courbe in
+      Switzerland. When, under the former, he was ordered to retreat towards the
+      Rhine, he pointed out the march route to his division according to his
+      geographical knowledge, but mistook upon the map the River Main for a
+      turnpike road, and commanded the retreat accordingly. Ever since, our
+      troops have called that river &lsquo;La chausee de Liebeau&rsquo;. He was not more
+      fortunate in Helvetia. Being ordered to cross one of the mountains, he
+      marched his men into a glacier, where twelve perished before he was aware
+      of his mistake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Being afterwards appointed a governor of Blois, he there became a petty,
+      insupportable tyrant, and laid all the inhabitants indiscriminately under
+      arbitrary contribution. Those who refused to pay were imprisoned as
+      aristocrats, and their property confiscated in the name and on the part of
+      the nation; that is to say, he appropriated to himself in the name of the
+      nation everything that struck his fancy; and if any complaints were made,
+      the owners were seized and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris to
+      be condemned as the correspondents or adherents of the royalists of La
+      Vendee. After the death of Robespierre he was deprived of this profitable
+      place, in which, during the short space of eleven months, he amassed five
+      millions of livres. The Directory, then gave him a division, first under
+      Jourdan, and afterwards under Le Courbe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte, after witnessing his incapacity in Italy, in 1800, put him on
+      the full half-pay, and has lately made him a commander of the Legion of
+      Honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His dear spouse, Madame Liebeau, is his counterpart. When he married her,
+      she was crying mackerel and herrings in our streets; but she told me in
+      confidence, during the dinner, being seated by my side, that her father
+      was an officer of fortune, and a Chevalier of the Order of St. Louis. She
+      assured me that her husband had done greater services to his country than
+      Bonaparte; and that, had it not been for his patriotism in 1793, the
+      Austrians would have taken Paris. She was very angry with Madame Napoleon,
+      to whom she had been presented, but who had not shown her so much
+      attention and civility, as was due to her husband&rsquo;s rank, having never
+      invited her to more than one supper and two tea-parties; and when invited
+      by her, had sent Duroc with an apology that she was unable to come, though
+      the same evening she went to the opera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another guest, in the regimentals of a colonel, seemed rather bashful when
+      I spoke to him. I could not comprehend the reason, and therefore inquired
+      of our host who he was. (You know that with us it is not the custom to
+      introduce persons by name, etc., as in your country, when meeting in mixed
+      companies.) He answered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you not remember your brother&rsquo;s jockey, Prial?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;but he was established by my brother as a hairdresser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is the very same person,&rdquo; replied the jeweller. &ldquo;He has fought very
+      bravely, and is now a colonel of dragoons, a great favourite with
+      Bonaparte, and will be a general at the first promotion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the colonel did not seem to desire a renewal of acquaintance with me, I
+      did not intrude myself upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the supper the military gentlemen were encouraged by the
+      bridegroom, and the bottle went round very freely; and the more they
+      drank, the greater and more violent became their political discussions.
+      Liebeau vociferated in favour of republican and revolutionary measures,
+      and avowed his approbation of requisitions, confiscations, and the
+      guillotine; while Frial inclined to the regular and organized despotism of
+      one, to secret trial, and still more secret executions; defending
+      arbitrary imprisonments, exiles, and transportations. This displeased
+      Madame Liebeau, who exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Since the colonel is so fond of an Imperial Government, he can have no
+      objection to remain a faithful subject whenever my husband, Liebeau,
+      becomes, an Antoine the First, Emperor of the French.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Frial smiled with contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to think it improbable,&rdquo; said Liebeau. &ldquo;I, Antoine Liebeau, I
+      have more prospect of being an Emperor than Napoleon Bonaparte had ten
+      years ago, when he was only a colonel, and was arrested as a terrorist.
+      And am I not a Frenchman? And is he not a foreigner? Come, shake hands
+      with me; as soon as I am Emperor, depend upon it you shall be a general,
+      and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah! my jewel,&rdquo; interrupted Madame Liebeau, &ldquo;how happy will France then
+      be. You are such a friend of peace. We will then have no wars, no
+      contributions; all the English milords may then come here and spend their
+      money, nobody cares about where or how. Will you not, then, my sweet love,
+      make all the gentlemen here your chamberlains, and permit me to accept all
+      the ladies of the company for my Maids of Honour or ladies-in-waiting?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Softly, softly,&rdquo; cried Frial, who now began to be as intoxicated and as
+      ambitious as the general; &ldquo;whenever Napoleon dies, I have more hope, more:
+      claim, and more right than you to the throne. I am in actual service; and
+      had not Bonaparte been the same, he might have still remained upon the
+      half-pay, obscure and despised. Were not most of the Field-marshals and
+      generals under him now, above him ten years ago? May I not, ten years
+      hence, if I am satisfied with you, General Liebeau, make you also a
+      Field-marshal, or my Minister of War; and you, Madame Liebeau, a lady of
+      my wife&rsquo;s wardrobe, as soon as I am married? I, too, have my plans and my
+      views, and perhaps one day you will recollect this conversation, and not
+      be sorry for my acquaintance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What! you a colonel, an Emperor, before me, who have so long been a
+      general?&rdquo; howled Liebeau, who was no longer able to speak. &ldquo;I would sooner
+      knock your brains out with this bottle than suffer such a precedence; and
+      my wife a lady of your wardrobe! she who has possessed from her birth the
+      soul of an Empress! No, sir! never will I take the oath to you, nor suffer
+      anybody else to take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I will punish you as a rebel,&rdquo; retorted Frial; &ldquo;and as sure as you
+      stand here you shall be shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Liebeau then rose up to fetch his sword, but the company interfered, and
+      the dispute about the priority of claim to the throne of France between
+      the ci-devant drummer and ci-devant jockey was left undecided. From the
+      words and looks of several of the captains present, I think that they
+      seemed, in their own opinions, to have as much prospect and expectation to
+      reign over the French Empire as either General Liebeau or Colonel Frial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as I returned home I wrote down this curious conversation and this
+      debate about supremacy. To what a degradation is the highest rank in my
+      unfortunate country reduced when two such personages seriously contend
+      about it! I collected more subjects for meditation and melancholy in this
+      low company (where, by the bye, I witnessed more vulgarity and more
+      indecencies than I had before seen during my life) than from all former
+      scenes of humiliation and disgust since my return here. When I the next
+      day mentioned it to General de M&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, whom you have known
+      as an emigrant officer in your service, but whom policy has since ranged
+      under the colours of Bonaparte, he assured me that these discussions about
+      the Imperial throne are very frequent among the superior officers, and
+      have caused many bloody scenes; and that hardly any of our generals of any
+      talent exist who have not the same &lsquo;arriere pensee of some day or other.
+      Napoleon cannot, therefore, well be ignorant of the many other dynasties
+      here now rivalling that of the Bonapartes, and who wait only for his exit
+      to tear his Senatus Consultum, his will, and his family, as well as each
+      other, to pieces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER X.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My LORD:&mdash;I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our rich
+      upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by Bonaparte,
+      transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and
+      possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of livres. In this
+      house I saw for the first time the famous Madame Chevalier, the mistress,
+      and the indirect cause of the untimely end, of the unfortunate Paul the
+      First. She is very short, fat, and coarse. I do not know whether
+      prejudice, from what I have heard of her vile, greedy, and immoral
+      character, influenced my feelings, but she appeared to me a most artful,
+      vain, and disagreeable woman. She looked to be about thirty-six years of
+      age; and though she might when younger have been well made, it is
+      impossible that she could ever have been handsome. The features of her
+      face are far from being regular. Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow, and
+      her nose short. Her language is that of brothels, and her manners
+      correspond with her expressions. She is the daughter of a workman at a
+      silk manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had attained
+      the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city, kept by a
+      Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with her. She
+      then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating, and he
+      introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior dancers.
+      Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged as a
+      supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however, never
+      above twelve hundred livres in the year&mdash;which was four hundred
+      livres more than her husband received.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers,
+      quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and
+      instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his
+      nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at
+      Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d&rsquo;Herbois, and other
+      wicked offsprings of rebellion. With all other terrorists, he was
+      imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as
+      restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some
+      amateurs had constructed a French theatre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in
+      the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical war
+      between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and the
+      English and emigrant loyalists on the other. Having no money to continue
+      her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the French
+      theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play on that
+      night. She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear to the
+      most advantage, and was deservedly applauded. The very next evening the
+      Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted that Madame
+      Chevalier should be given a regular engagement. He replied that no place
+      suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be ungenerous to
+      turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public had hitherto
+      declared their satisfaction. The Jacobins continued inflexible, and here,
+      as well as everywhere else, supported injustice by violence. As the
+      patriotism of the husband, more than the charms of the wife, was known to
+      have produced this indecent fracas, which for upwards of a week
+      interrupted the plays, all anti-Jacobins united to restore order. In this
+      they would, perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the bayonets of the
+      Hamburg soldiers interfered, and forced this precious piece of
+      revolutionary furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of the
+      Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping by a then
+      rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present of a richly and
+      elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten thousand louis d&rsquo;or on
+      her, before he had a mortifying conviction that some other had partaken of
+      those favours for which he had so dearly paid. A countryman of yours then
+      showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene, and made his
+      debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his theatrical
+      goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with large and
+      valuable diamonds. Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards hearing that
+      her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy, and that his
+      credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his portrait changed for
+      that of another and richer lover, preserving, however, the diamonds; and
+      she exposed this inconstancy even upon the stage, by suspending, as if in
+      triumph, the new portrait fastened on her bosom. The Englishman, wishing
+      to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which he protested only to have lent
+      his belle, found that she had put the whole equipage into a kind of
+      lottery, or raffle, to which all her numerous friends had subscribed, and
+      that an Altona Jew had won it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his
+      turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.
+      She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry,
+      during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to
+      France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand
+      livres. Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the
+      decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect money,
+      and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances. She had always lists
+      of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play in her
+      lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her, by the
+      assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of Talleyrand&rsquo;s
+      secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of the other sex. I
+      am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our Ministers who
+      engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who instructed her
+      how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg. I need not repeat what is so
+      well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined the domestic
+      happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his political
+      transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely end, in
+      procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and jewels, the
+      recall of one of the principal conspirators against the unfortunate Paul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short period
+      of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of roubles. For money
+      she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon innocence the punishment
+      merited by guilt. The scaffolds of Russia were bleeding, and the roads to
+      Siberia crowded with the victims of the avarice of this female demon, who
+      often promised what she was unable to perform, and, to silence complaint,
+      added cruelty to fraud, and, after pocketing the bribe, resorted to the
+      executioner to remove those whom she had duped. The shocking anecdote of
+      the Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out of nearly a hundred
+      thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards persuaded her Imperial lover
+      to inflict capital punishment, is too recent and too public to be unknown
+      or forgotten. A Russian nobleman has assured me that the number of
+      unfortunate individuals whom her and her husband&rsquo;s intrigues have caused
+      to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801 was forty-six; and that nearly
+      three hundred persons besides, who could not or would not pay their
+      extortionate demands, were exiled to Siberia during the same period of
+      time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such great and
+      terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as well as of
+      acquired accomplishments. As I have already stated, she can have no
+      pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating, sings tolerably
+      well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an unusually good share
+      of cunning, presumption, and duplicity. Her husband, also, everywhere took
+      care to make her fashionable; and the vanity of the first of their dupes
+      increased the number of her admirers and engaged the vanity of others in
+      their turn to sacrifice themselves at her shrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immorality of our age, also, often procured her popularity for what
+      deserved, and in better times would have encountered, the severest
+      reprobation. In 1797, an emigrant lodged at an inn at Hamburg where
+      another traveller was robbed of a large sum in ready money and jewels. The
+      unfortunate is always suspected; and in the visit made to his room by the
+      magistrates was found a key that opened the door of the apartment where
+      the theft had been committed. In vain did he represent that had he been
+      the thief he should not have kept an instrument which was, or might be,
+      construed into an argument of guilt; he was carried to prison, and, though
+      none of the property was discovered in his possession, would have been
+      condemned, had he not produced Madame Chevalier, who avowed that the key
+      opened the door of her bedroom, which the smith who had made it confirmed,
+      and swore that he had fabricated eight keys for the same actress and for
+      the same purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that time this woman lived in the same house with her husband, but
+      cohabited there with the husband of another woman. She had also places of
+      assignation with other gallants at private apartments, both in Hamburg and
+      at Altona. All these, her scandalous intrigues, were known even to the
+      common porters of these cities. The first time, after the affair of the
+      key had become public, she acted in a play where a key was mentioned, and
+      the audience immediately repeated, &ldquo;The key! the key!&rdquo; Far from being
+      ashamed, she appeared every night in pieces selected by her, where there
+      was mention of keys, and thus tired the jokes of the public. This
+      impudence might have been expected from her, but it was little to be
+      supposed that her barefaced vices should, as really was the case, augment
+      the crowd of suitors, and occasion even some duels, which latter she both
+      encouraged and rewarded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two brothers, of the name of De S&mdash;&mdash;-, were both in love with
+      her, and the eldest, as the richest, became her choice. Offended at his
+      refusal of too large a sum of money, she wrote to the younger De S&mdash;&mdash;-,
+      and offered to accede to his proposals if, like a gentleman, he would
+      avenge the affront she had experienced from his brother. He consulted a
+      friend, who, to expose her infamy, advised him to send some confidential
+      person to inform her that he had killed his elder brother, and expected
+      the recompense on the same night. He went and was received with open arms,
+      and had just retired with her, when the elder brother, accompanied by his
+      friend, entered the room. Madame Chevalier, instead of upbraiding,
+      laughed, and the next day the public laughed with her, and applauded her
+      more than ever. She knew very well what she was doing. The stories of the
+      key and the duel produced for her more than four thousand louis d&rsquo;or by
+      the number of new gallants they enticed. It was a kind of emulation among
+      all young men in the North who should be foremost to dishonour and ruin
+      himself with this infamous woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Chevalier and her husband now live here in grand style, and have
+      their grand parties, grand teas, grand assemblies, and grand balls. Their
+      hotel, I am assured, is even visited by the Bonapartes and by the members
+      of the foreign diplomatic corps. In the house where I saw her, I observed
+      that Louis Bonaparte and two foreign Ambassadors spoke to her as old
+      acquaintances. Though rich, to the amount of ten millions of livres&mdash;she,
+      or rather her husband, keeps a gambling-house, and her superannuated
+      charms are still to be bought for money, at the disposal of those amateurs
+      who are fond of antiques. Both her husband and herself are still members
+      of our secret diplomacy, though she complains loudly that, of the two
+      millions of livres&mdash;promised her in 1799 by Bonaparte and Talleyrand
+      if she could succeed in persuading Paul I. to withdraw from his alliance
+      with England and Austria, only six hundred thousand livres&mdash;has been
+      paid her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot finish this letter without telling you that before our military
+      forces had reached the Rhine, our political incendiaries had already taken
+      the field, and were in full march towards the Austrian, Russian, and
+      Prussian capitals. The advanced guard of this dangerous corps consists
+      entirely of females, all gifted with beauty and parts as much superior to
+      those of Madame Chevalier as their instructions are better digested.
+      Bonaparte and Talleyrand have more than once regretted that Madame
+      Chevalier was not ordered to enter into the conspiracy against Paul (whose
+      inconsistency and violence they foresaw would make his reign short), that
+      she might have influenced the conspirators to fix upon a successor more
+      pliable and less scrupulous, and who would have suffered the Cabinet of
+      St. Cloud to dictate to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I dined in company several times this last spring with two ladies who,
+      rumour said, have been destined for your P&mdash;&mdash;- of W&mdash;&mdash;
+      and D&mdash;- of Y&mdash;- ever since the Peace of Amiens. Talleyrand is
+      well informed what figures and what talents are requisite to make an
+      impression on these Princes, and has made his choice accordingly. These
+      ladies have lately disappeared, and when inquired after are stated to be
+      in the country, though I do not consider it improbable that they have
+      already arrived at headquarters. They are both rather fair and lusty,
+      above the middle size, and about twenty-five years of age. They speak,
+      besides French, the English and Italian languages. They are good drawers,
+      good musicians, good singers, and, if necessary, even good drinkers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Had the citizens of the United States been as submissive to
+      the taxation of your Government as to the vexations of our ruler, America
+      would, perhaps, have been less free and Europe more tranquil. After the
+      treaty of Amiens had Produced a general pacification, our Government was
+      seriously determined to reconquer from America a part of those treasures
+      its citizens had gained during the Revolutionary War, by a neutrality
+      which our policy and interest required, and which the liberality of your
+      Government endured. Hence the acquisition we made of New Orleans from
+      Spain, and hence the intrigues of our emissaries in that colony, and the
+      peremptory requisitions of provision for St. Domingo by our Minister and
+      generals. Had we been victorious in St. Domingo, most of our troops there
+      were destined for the American Continent, to invade, according to
+      circumstances, either the Spanish colonies on the terra firma or the
+      States of the American Commonwealth. The unforeseen rupture with your
+      country postponed a plan that is far from being laid aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may, perhaps, think that since we sold Louisiana we have no footing in
+      America that can threaten the peace or independence of the United States;
+      but may not the same dictates that procured us at Madrid the acquisition
+      of New Orleans, also make us masters of Spanish Florida? And do you
+      believe it improbable that the present disagreement between America and
+      Spain is kept up by our intrigues and by our future views? Would not a
+      word from us settle in an instant at Madrid the differences as well as the
+      frontiers of the contending parties in America? And does it not seem to be
+      the regular and systematic plan of our Government to provoke the
+      retaliation of the Americans, and to show our disregard of their privilege
+      of neutrality and rights of independence; and that we insult them only
+      because we despise them, and despise them only because we do not apprehend
+      their resentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have heard the late American Minister here assert that the American
+      vessels captured by our cruisers and condemned by our tribunals, only
+      during the last war, amounted to about five hundred; and their cargoes
+      (all American property) to one hundred and fifty millions of livres&mdash;L6,000,000.
+      Some few days ago I saw a printed list, presented by the American consul
+      to our Minister of the Marine Department, claiming one hundred and twelve
+      American ships captured in the West Indies and on the coast of America
+      within these last two years, the cargoes of which have all been
+      confiscated, and most of the crews still continue prisoners at Martinico,
+      Gaudeloupe, or Cayenne. Besides these, sixty-six American ships, after
+      being plundered in part of their cargoes at sea by our privateers, had
+      been released; and their claims for property thus lost, or damage thus
+      done, amounting to one million three hundred thousand livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You must have read the proclamations of our governors in the West Indies,
+      and therefore remember that one dated at Guadeloupe, and another dated at
+      the City of San Domingo, both declare, without farther ceremony, all
+      American and other neutral ships and cargoes good and lawful prizes, when
+      coming from or destined to any port in the Island of St. Domingo, because
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s subjects there were in a state of rebellion. What would these
+      philosophers who, twelve years ago, wrote so many libels against your
+      Ministers for their pretended system of famine, have said, had they,
+      instead of prohibiting the carrying of ammunition and provisions to the
+      ports of France, thus extended their orders without discrimination or
+      distinction? How would the neutral Americans, and the neutral Danes, and
+      their then allies, philosophers, and Jacobins of all colours and classes,
+      have complained and declaimed against the tyrants of the seas; against the
+      enemies of humanity, liberty, and equality. Have not the negroes now, as
+      much as our Jacobins had in 1793, a right to call upon all those
+      tender-hearted schemers, dupes, or impostors, to interest humanity in
+      their favour? But, as far as I know, no friends of liberty have yet
+      written a line in favour of these oppressed and injured men, whose former
+      slavery was never doubtful, and who, therefore, had more reason to rise
+      against their tyrants, and to attempt to shake off their yoke, than our
+      French insurgents, who, free before, have never since they revolted
+      against lawful authority enjoyed an hour&rsquo;s freedom. But the Emperor
+      Jacques the First has no propagators, no emissaries, no learned savans and
+      no secret agents to preach insurrection in other States, while defending
+      his own usurpation; besides, his treasury is not in the most brilliant and
+      flourishing situation, and the crew of our white revolutionists are less
+      attached to liberty than to cash.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb114" id="pb114"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pb114.jpg (55K)" src="images/pb114.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our Ambassador to the United States, General Turreaux, is far from being
+      contented with our friend, the President Jefferson, whose patriotic
+      notions have not yet soared to the level of our patriotic transactions. He
+      refused both to prevent the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte with a female
+      American citizen, and to detain her after her marriage when her husband
+      returned to Europe. To our continual representation against the liberties
+      which the American newspapers take with our Government, with our Emperor,
+      with our Imperial Family, and with our Imperial Ministers, the answer has
+      always been, &ldquo;Prosecute the libeller, and as soon as he is convicted he
+      will be punished.&rdquo; This tardy and negative justice is so opposite to our
+      expeditious and summary mode of proceeding, of punishing first and trying
+      afterwards, that it must be both humiliating and offensive. In return,
+      when the Americans have complained to Turreaux against the piracy of our
+      privateers, he has sent them here to seek redress, where they also will,
+      to their cost, discover that in civil cases our justice has not the same
+      rapid march as when it is a question of arresting or transporting
+      suspected persons, or of tormenting, shooting, or guillotining a pretended
+      spy, or supposed conspirator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had the peace of Europe continued, Bernadotte was the person selected by
+      Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we then
+      intended to strike, and not to negotiate. But during the present embroiled
+      state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than either a
+      warrior or a politician. A man who has passed through all the mire of our
+      own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an accomplice of all our
+      factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument where factions are to be
+      created and directed, where wealth is designed for pillage, and a State
+      for overthrow. General Turreaux is, therefore, in his place, and at his
+      proper post, as our Ambassador in America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The son of a valet of the late Duc de Bouillon, Turreaux called himself
+      before the Revolution Chevalier de Grambonville, and was, in fact, a
+      &lsquo;chevalier d&rsquo;industrie&rsquo; (a swindler), who supported himself by gambling
+      and cheating. An associate of Beurnonville, Barras, and other vile
+      characters, he with them joined the colours of rebellion, and served under
+      the former in 1792, in the army of the Moselle, first as a volunteer, and
+      afterwards as an aide-de-camp. In a speech at the Jacobin Club at Quesnoy,
+      on the 20th of November, 1792, he made a motion&mdash;&ldquo;That, throughout
+      the whole republican army, all hats should be prohibited, and red caps
+      substituted in their place; and that, not only portable guillotines, but
+      portable Jacobin clubs, should accompany the soldiers of Liberty and
+      Equality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A cousin of his was a member of the National Convention, and one of those
+      called Mountaineers, or sturdy partisans of Marat and Robespierre. It was
+      to the influence of this cousin, that he was indebted, first for a
+      commission as an adjutant-general, and afterwards for his promotion to a
+      general of brigade. In 1793, he was ordered to march, under the command of
+      Santerre, to La Vendee, where he shared in the defeat of the republicans
+      at Vihiers. At the engagement near Roches d&rsquo;Erigne he commanded, for the
+      first time, a separate column, and the capacity and abilities which he
+      displayed on that occasion were such as might have been expected from a
+      man who had passed the first thirty years of his life in brothels and
+      gambling-houses. So pleasant were his dispositions, that almost the whole
+      army narrowly escaped having been thrown and pushed into the River Loire.
+      The battle of Doux was the only one in which he had a share where the
+      republicans were not routed; but some few days afterwards, near Coron, all
+      the troops under him were cut to pieces, and he was himself wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The confidence of his friends, the Jacobins, increased, however, in
+      proportion to his disasters, and he was, in 1794, after the superior
+      number of the republican soldiers had forced the remnants of the Royalists
+      to evacuate what was properly called La Vendee, appointed a
+      commander-in-chief. He had now an opportunity to display his infamy and
+      barbarity. Having established his headquarters at Mantes, where he was
+      safe, amidst the massacres of women and children ordered by his friend
+      Carriere, he commanded the republican army to enter La Vendee in twelve
+      columns, preceded by fire and sword; and within four weeks, one of the
+      most populous departments of France, to the extent and circumference of
+      sixty leagues, was laid waste-not a house, not a cottage, not a tree was
+      spared, all was reduced to ashes; and the unfortunate inhabitants, who had
+      not perished amid the ruin of their dwellings, were shot or stabbed; while
+      attempting to save themselves from the common conflagration. On the 22d of
+      January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the National
+      Convention: &ldquo;Citizen Representatives!&mdash;A country of sixty leagues
+      extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a perfect desert; not a
+      dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes; and of one hundred and
+      eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a soul breathes any longer. Men
+      and women, old men and children, have all experienced the national
+      vengeance, and are no more. It was a pleasure to a true republican to see
+      upon the bayonets of each of our brave republicans the children of
+      traitors, or their, heads. According to the lowest calculation, I have
+      despatched, within three months, two hundred thousand individuals of both
+      sexes, and of all ages. Vive la Republique!!!&rdquo; In the works of Prudhomme
+      and our republican writers, are inserted hundreds of letters, still more
+      cruelly extravagant, from this ci-devant friend of Liberty and Equality,
+      and at present faithful subject, and grand officer of the Legion of
+      Honour, of His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb118" id="pb118"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pb118.jpg (126K)" src="images/pb118.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of Robespierre, Turreaux, then a governor at Belleisle,
+      was arrested as a terrorist, and shut up at Du Plessis until the general
+      amnesty released him in 1795. During his imprisonment he amused himself
+      with writing memoirs of the war of La Vendee, in which he tried to prove
+      that all his barbarities had been perpetrated for the sake of humanity,
+      and to save the lives of republicans. He had also the modesty to announce
+      that, as a military work, his production would be equally interesting as
+      those of a Folard and Guibert. These memoirs, however, proved nothing but
+      that he was equally ignorant and wicked, presumptuous and ferocious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the reign of the Directory he was rather discarded, or only
+      employed as a kind of recruiting officer to hunt young conscripts, but in
+      1800 Bonaparte gave him a command in the army of reserve; and in 1802,
+      another in the army of the interior. He then became one of the most
+      assiduous and cringing courtiers at the Emperor&rsquo;s levies; while in the
+      Empress&rsquo;s drawing-room he assumed his former air and ton of a chevalier,
+      in hopes of imposing upon those who did not remember the nickname which
+      his soldiers gave him ten years before, of Chevalier of the Guillotine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At a ball of the Bonaparte family to which he was invited, the Emperor
+      took the fancy to dance with his stepdaughter, Madame Louis. He,
+      therefore, unhooked his sword, which he handed to a young colonel, D&rsquo;
+      Avry, standing by his side. This colonel, who had been a page at the Court
+      of Louis XVI., knew that it would have been against etiquette, and even
+      unbecoming of him, to act as a valet to Napoleon while there were valets
+      in the room; he therefore retreated, looking round for a servant. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+       said the Emperor, &ldquo;I see that I am mistaken; here, generals,&rdquo; continued he
+      (addressing himself to half a dozen, with whose independent principles and
+      good breeding he was acquainted), &ldquo;take this sword during my dance.&rdquo; They
+      all pushed forward, but Turreaux and La Grange, another general and
+      intriguer, were foremost; the latter, however, received the preference. On
+      the next day, D&rsquo; Avry was ordered upon service to Cayenne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Turreaux has acquired, by his patriotic deeds in La Vendee, a fortune of
+      seven millions of livres. He has the highest opinion of his own capacity,
+      while a moment&rsquo;s conversation will inform a man of sense that he is only a
+      conceited fool. As to his political transactions, he has by his side, as a
+      secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a diplomatic
+      education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on him, no
+      doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business. During a European war,
+      Turreaux&rsquo;s post is of little relative consequence; but should Napoleon
+      live to dictate another general pacification, the United States will be
+      exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same outrages
+      their commercial navy now experiences on the main.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy, has
+      assured me that, so far from Bonaparte&rsquo;s subjects on the other side of the
+      Alps being contented and attached to his person and Government, were a
+      victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of Lombardy a general
+      insurrection would be the consequence. During these last nine years the
+      inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment&rsquo;s tranquillity or safety. Every
+      relation or favourite whom Napoleon wished to provide for, or to enrich,
+      he has saddled upon them as in free quarters; and since 1796, when they
+      first had the honour of our Emperor&rsquo;s acquaintance, they have paid more in
+      taxes, in forced loans, requisitions, and extortions of every description,
+      than their ancestors or themselves had paid during the one hundred and
+      ninety-six preceding years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the people
+      in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse off. Having
+      more national character and more fidelity towards their Sovereign than
+      their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated. Their governor,
+      General De Menou, has caused most of the departments to be declared under
+      martial law, and without right to claim the protection of our happy
+      constitution. In every city or town are organized special tribunals, the
+      progeny of our revolutionary tribunals, against the sentences of which no
+      appeal can be made, though these sentences are always capital ones. Before
+      these, suspicion is evidence, and an imprudent word is subject to the same
+      punishment as a murderous deed. Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he who
+      complains is shot as a conspirator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape these
+      legal assassinations. They must either desert their country or sacrifice a
+      part of their property. In the former case, if retaken, they are condemned
+      as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the risk that those to whom
+      they have already given a part of their possessions will also require the
+      remainder, and having obtained it, to enjoy in security the spoil, will
+      send them to the tribunals and to death. De Menou has a fixed tariff for
+      his protection, regulated according to the riches of each person; and the
+      tax-gatherers collect these arbitrary contributions with the regular ones,
+      so little pains are taken to conceal or to disguise these robberies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
+      Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment or
+      of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately. He calculates
+      with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous action he
+      proposes to commit, and determines accordingly. He owed some riches and
+      the rank of the major-general to the bounty of Louis XVI., but when he
+      considered the immense value of the revolutionary plunder, called national
+      property, and that those who confiscated could also promote, he did not
+      hesitate what party to take. A traitor is generally a coward; he has
+      everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his Royalist countrymen
+      in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by your countrymen in
+      1801.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one
+      Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are
+      obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection, and,
+      perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours. He has also in his hotel
+      several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
+      themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
+      if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business done.
+      He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money, and all
+      persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have the same
+      privilege. Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of the
+      special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of those
+      refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit. All the
+      money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out by his
+      agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and weak
+      constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying. He is a grand
+      officer of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to that
+      distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made a
+      motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
+      France, and to create in their place only a national one. Always an
+      incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
+      Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
+      Alcoran.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
+      complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First. If persons of
+      rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
+      birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
+      dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
+      might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
+      death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip of
+      some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud, of
+      lowest birth and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not
+      incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
+      duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
+      being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
+      preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
+      Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections. Wealthy as well as
+      elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
+      enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
+      esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
+      his own conscience. Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
+      made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
+      works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
+      reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
+      charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
+      attempted to be put into practice. Returned to his own country, his
+      acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
+      with his religion, and with himself. In our Revolution he thought that he
+      saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species, and
+      that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society as
+      was promised in books. With our own regenerators he extenuated the crimes
+      which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them even
+      necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete. When,
+      therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was
+      among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer. The
+      numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
+      commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.
+      &ldquo;The faults and sufferings of individuals,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;are nothing to the
+      goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole.&rdquo; To
+      him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of
+      thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with
+      the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and
+      instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers. In recompense for so
+      much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in
+      1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at
+      Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic. As Melzi
+      was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much
+      approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that
+      annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people. In a conference,
+      however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced
+      that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
+      intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the
+      point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it
+      should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he
+      advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and
+      equality. Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi to
+      sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he
+      occupied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his
+      philosophy and his schemes of regeneration. He trusted so much to the
+      promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined to
+      reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was
+      ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais
+      as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy. He was not
+      philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad grace
+      to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred seeing in
+      that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general. To soften his
+      disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and with that rank
+      indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons, where it is known
+      that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of Talleyrand,
+      determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after Bonaparte&rsquo;s return to France, Melzi left Milan, and
+      retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to Talleyrand a
+      letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave to pass the
+      remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives. An answer was
+      presented him by an officer of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Gendarmes d&rsquo;Elite, in which he
+      was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to return with the officer to
+      Milan, and there occupy his office of Arch-Chancellor to which he had been
+      nominated. Enraged at such treatment, he endeavoured to kill himself with
+      a dose of poison, but his attempt did not succeed. His health was,
+      however, so much injured by it that it is not supposed he can live long.
+      What, a lesson for reformers and innovators!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;A ridiculous affair lately occasioned a great deal of
+      bustle among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps. When Bonaparte
+      demanded for himself and for his wife the title of Imperial Majesty, and
+      for his brothers and sisters that of Imperial Highness, he also insisted
+      on the salutation of a Serene Highness being given to his Arch-Chancellor,
+      Cambaceres, and his Arch-Treasurer, Lebrun. The political consciences of
+      the independent representatives of independent Continental Princes
+      immediately took the alarm at the latter innovation, as the appellation of
+      Serene Highness has never hitherto been bestowed on persons who had not
+      princely rank. They complained to Talleyrand, they petitioned Bonaparte,
+      and they even despatched couriers to their respective Courts. The Minister
+      smiled, the Emperor cursed, and their own Cabinets deliberated. All routs,
+      all assemblies, all circles, and all balls were at a stop. Cambaceres
+      applied to his Sovereign to support his pretensions, as connected with his
+      own dignity; and the diplomatic corps held forward their dignity as
+      opposing the pretensions of Cambaceres. In this dilemma Bonaparte ordered
+      all the Ambassadors, Ministers, envoys, and agents &lsquo;en masse&rsquo; to the
+      castle of the Tuileries. After hearing, with apparent patience, their
+      arguments in favour of established etiquette and customs, he remained
+      inflexible, upon the ground that he, as master, had a right to confer what
+      titles he chose within his own dominions on his own subjects; and that
+      those foreigners who refused to submit to his regulations might return to
+      their own country. This plain explanation neither effecting a conversion
+      nor making any, impression, he grew warm, and left the refractory
+      diplomatists with these remarkable words: &ldquo;Were I to create my Mameluke
+      Rostan a King, both you and your masters should acknowledge him in that
+      rank.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this conference most of Their Excellencies were seized with terror
+      and fear, and would, perhaps, have subscribed to the commands of our
+      Emperor had not some of the wisest among them proposed, and obtained the
+      consent of the rest, to apply, once more to Talleyrand, and purchase by
+      some douceur his assistance in this great business. The heart of our
+      Minister is easily softened; and he assented, upon certain conditions, to
+      lay the whole before his Sovereign in such a manner that Cambaceres should
+      be made a Prince as well as a Serene Highness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said that Bonaparte was not easily persuaded to this measure, and
+      did not consent to it before the Minister remarked that his condescension
+      in this insignificant opposition to his will would proclaim his moderation
+      and generosity, and empower him to insist on obedience when matters of the
+      greatest consequence should be in question or disputed. Thus our regicide,
+      Cambaceres, owes his princely title to the shallow intrigues of the agents
+      of legitimate Sovereigns. Their nicety in talking of innovations with
+      regard to him, after they had without difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an
+      Emperor, and other sans-culottes Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd as
+      improper. Report, however, states, what is very probable, that they were
+      merely the duped tools of Cambaceres&rsquo;s ambition and vanity, and of
+      Talleyrand&rsquo;s corruption and cupidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cambaceres expected to have been elevated to a Prince on the same day that
+      he was made a Serene Highness; but Joseph Bonaparte represented to his
+      brother that too many other princedoms would diminish the respect and
+      value of the princedoms of the Bonaparte family. Cambaceres knew that
+      Talleyrand had some reason at that period to be discontented with Joseph,
+      and, therefore, asked his advice how to get made a Prince against the
+      wishes of this Grand Elector. After some consideration, the Minister
+      replied that he was acquainted with one way, which would, with his
+      support, certainly succeed; but it required a million of livres to set the
+      wheels in motion, and keep them going afterwards. The hint was taken, and
+      an agreement signed for one million, payable on the day when the princely
+      patent should be delivered to the Arch-Chancellor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the mistresses provided by our Minister for the members of the
+      foreign diplomatic corps, Madame B&mdash;&mdash;s is one of the ablest in
+      the way of intrigue. She was instructed to alarm her &lsquo;bon ami&rsquo;, the
+      Bavarian Minister, Cetto, who is always bustling and pushing himself
+      forward in the grand questions of etiquette. A fool rather than a rogue,
+      and an intriguer while he thinks himself a negotiator, he was happy to
+      have this occasion to prove his penetrating genius and astonishing
+      information. A convocation of the diplomatic corps was therefore called,
+      and the suggestions of Cetto were regarded as an inspiration, and
+      approved, with a resolution to persevere unanimously. At their first
+      audience with Talleyrand on this subject, he seemed to incline in their
+      favour; but, as soon as he observed how much they showed themselves
+      interested about this trifling punctilio, it occurred to him that they, as
+      well as Cambaceres, might in some way or other reward the service he
+      intended to perform. Madame B&mdash;&mdash;s was again sent for; and she
+      once more advised her lover, who again advised his colleagues. Their
+      scanty purses were opened, and a subscription entered into for a very
+      valuable diamond, which, with the millions of the Arch-Chancellor, gave
+      satisfaction to all parties; and even Joseph Bonaparte was reconciled,
+      upon the consideration that Cambaceres has no children, and that,
+      therefore, the Prince will expire with the Grand Officer of State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cambaceres, though before the Revolution a nobleman of a Parliamentary
+      family, was so degraded and despised for his unnatural and beastly
+      propensities, that to see him in the ranks of rebellion was not
+      unexpected. Born in Languedoc, his countrymen were the first to suffer
+      from his revolutionary proceedings, and reproached him as one of the most
+      active instruments of persecution against the clergy of Toulouse, and as
+      one of the causes of all the blood that flowed in consequence. A coward as
+      well as a traitor, after the death of Louis XVI. he never dared ascend the
+      tribune of the National Convention, but always gave a silent vote to all
+      the atrocious laws proposed and carried by Marat, Robespierre, and their
+      accomplices. It was in 1795, when the Reign of Terror had ceased, that he
+      first displayed his zeal for anarchy, and his hatred to royalty; his
+      contemptible and disgusting vices were, however, so publicly reprobated,
+      that even the Directory dared not nominate him a Minister of Justice, a
+      place for which he intrigued in vain, from 1796 to 1799; when Bonaparte,
+      either not so scrupulous, or setting himself above the public opinion,
+      caused him to be called to the Consulate; which, in 1802, was ensured him
+      for life, but exchanged, in 1804, for the office of an Arch-Chancellor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is now worth thirty millions of livres&mdash;all honestly obtained by
+      his revolutionary industry. Besides a Prince, a Serene Highness, an
+      Arch-Chancellor, a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, he is also a
+      Knight of the Prussian Black Eagle! For his brother, who was for a long
+      time an emigrant clergyman, and whom he then renounced as a fanatic, he
+      has now procured the Archbishopric of Rouen and a Cardinal&rsquo;s hat. His
+      Eminence is also a grand officer of the Legion of Honour in France, and a
+      Pope in petto at Rome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;No Sovereign Prince has more incurred the hatred of
+      Bonaparte than the present King of Sweden; and I have heard from good
+      authority that our Government spares neither bribes nor intrigues to move
+      the tails of those factions which were dissolved, but not crushed, after
+      the murder of Gustavus III. The Swedes are generally brave and loyal, but
+      their history bears witness that they are easily misled; all their grand
+      achievements are their own, and the consequence of their national spirit
+      and national valour, while all their disasters have been effected by the
+      influence of foreign gold and of foreign machinations. Had they not been
+      the dupes of the plots and views of the Cabinets of Versailles and St.
+      Petersburg, their country might have been as powerful in the nineteenth
+      century as it was in the seventeenth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That Gustavus IV. both knew the danger of Europe, and indicated the
+      remedy, His Majesty&rsquo;s notes, as soon as he came of age, presented by the
+      able and loyal Minister Bildt to the Diet of Ratisbon, evince. Had they
+      been more attended to during 1798 and 1799, Bonaparte would not, perhaps,
+      have now been so great, but the Continent would have remained more free
+      and more independent. They were the first causes of our Emperor&rsquo;s official
+      anger against the Cabinet of Stockholm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, His Swedish Majesty entered into the Northern league, his
+      Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, was for some time treated with no insults
+      distinct or different from those to which all foreign diplomatic agents
+      have been accustomed during the present reign; but when he demanded
+      reparation for the piracies committed during the last war by our
+      privateers on the commerce of his nation, the tone was changed; and when
+      his Sovereign, in 1803, was on a visit to his father-in-law, the Elector
+      of Baden, and there preferred the agreeable company of the unfortunate Duc
+      d&rsquo;Enghien to the society of our Minister, Baron Ehrensward never entered
+      Napoleon&rsquo;s diplomatic circle or Madame Napoleon&rsquo;s drawing-room without
+      hearing rebukes and experiencing disgusts. One day, when more than usually
+      attacked, he said, on leaving the apartment, to another Ambassador, and in
+      the hearing of Duroc, &ldquo;that it required more real courage to encounter
+      with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations, which the person
+      who gave them knew could not be resented, than to brave a death which the
+      mouths of cannon vomit or the points of bayonets inflict.&rdquo; Duroc reported
+      to his master what he heard, and but for Talleyrand&rsquo;s interference, the
+      Swedish Ambassador would, on the same night, have been lodged in the
+      Temple. Orders were already given to that purpose, but were revoked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Baron Ehrensward, who is also a general in the service of his
+      country, has almost from his youth passed his time at Courts; first in his
+      own country, and afterwards in Spain, where he resided twelve years as our
+      Ambassador. Frank as a soldier, but also polite as a courtier, he was not
+      a little surprised at the new etiquette of our new court, and at the
+      endurance of all the members of the diplomatic corps, of whom hardly one
+      had spirit enough to remember that he was the representative of one, at
+      least nominally, independent Prince or State. It must be added that he was
+      the only foreign diplomatist, with Count Markof, who was not the choice of
+      our Cabinet, and, therefore, was not in our secrets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as His Swedish Majesty heard of the unexpected and unlawful
+      seizure of the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, he wrote a letter with his own hand to
+      Bonaparte, which he sent by his adjutant-general, Tawast; but this officer
+      arrived too late, and only in time to hear of the execution of the Prince
+      he intended to save, and the indecent expressions of Napoleon when
+      acquainted with the object of his mission. Baron Ehrensward was then
+      recalled, and a Court mourning was proclaimed by Gustavus IV., as well as
+      by Alexander the First, for the lamented victim of the violated laws of
+      nations and humanity. This so, enraged our ruler that General Caulincourt
+      (the same who commanded the expedition which crossed the Rhine and
+      captured the Duc d&rsquo; Enghien) was engaged to head and lead fifty other
+      banditti, who were destined to pass in disguise into Baden, and to bring
+      the King of Sweden a prisoner to this capital. Fortunately, His Majesty
+      had some suspicion of the attempt, and removed to a greater distance from
+      our frontiers than Carlsruhe. So certain was our Government of the success
+      of this shameful enterprise, that our charge d&rsquo;affaires in Sweden was
+      preparing to engage the discontented and disaffected there for the
+      convocation of a diet and the establishment of a regency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to the report in our diplomatic circle. Bonaparte and Talleyrand
+      intended nevermore to, release their royal captive when once in their
+      power; but, after forcing him to resign the throne to his son, keep him a
+      prisoner for the remainder of his days, which they would have taken care
+      should not have been long. The Duke of Sudermania was to have been
+      nominated a regent until the majority of the young King, not yet six years
+      of age. The Swedish diets were to recover that influence, or, rather, that
+      licentiousness, to which Gustavus III., by the revolution of the 19th of
+      August, 1772, put an end. All exiled regicides, or traitors, were to be
+      recalled, and a revolutionary focus organized in the North, equally
+      threatening Russia and Denmark. The dreadful consequences of such an event
+      are incalculable. Thanks to the prudence of His Swedish Majesty, all these
+      schemes evaporated in air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not being able to dethrone a Swedish Monarch, our Cabinet resolved to
+      partition the Swedish territory, to which effect I am assured that
+      proposals were last summer made to the Cabinets of St. Petersburg, Berlin,
+      and Copenhagen. Swedish Finland was stated to have been offered to Russia,
+      Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, and Scania and Blekinge to Denmark; but the
+      overture was rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The King of Sweden possesses both talents and information superior to most
+      of his contemporaries, and he has surrounded himself with counsellors who,
+      with their experience, make wisdom more firm, more useful, and more
+      valuable. His chancellor, D&rsquo;Ehrenheim, unites modesty with sagacity; he is
+      a most able statesman, an accomplished gentleman, and the most agreeable
+      of men. He knows the languages, as well as the constitutions, of every
+      country in Europe, with equal perfection as his native tongue and national
+      code. Had his Sovereign the same ascendency over the European politics as
+      Christina had during the negotiation of the Treaty of Munster, other
+      States would admire, and Sweden be proud of, another Axel Oxenstiern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Count Fersen, who also has, and is worthy of, the confidence of his
+      Prince, is a nobleman, the honour and pride of his rank. A colonel before
+      the Revolution of the regiment Royal Suedois, in the service of my
+      country, his principles were so well appreciated that he was entrusted by
+      Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when so many were so justly suspected,
+      and served royalty in distress, at the risk of his own existence. This was
+      so much the more generous in him as he was a foreigner, of one of the most
+      ancient families, and one of the richest noblemen in his own country. To
+      him Louis XVIII. is indebted for his life; and he brought consolation to
+      the deserted Marie Antoinette even in the dungeon of the Conciergerie,
+      when a discovery would have been a sentence of death. In 1797, he was
+      appointed by his King plenipotentiary to the Congress of Rastadt, and
+      arrived there just at the time when Bonaparte, after the destruction of
+      happiness in Italy, had resolved on the ruin of liberty in Switzerland,
+      and came there proud of past exploits and big with future schemes of
+      mischief. His reception from the conquerer of Italy was such as might have
+      been expected by distinguished loyalty from successful rebellion. He was
+      told that the Congress of Rastadt was not his place! and this was true;
+      for what can be common between honour and infamy, between virtue and vice?
+      On his return to Sweden, Count Fersen was rewarded with the dignity of a
+      Grand Officer of State.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of His Swedish Majesty, Baron
+      d&rsquo;Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced in saying that he was the
+      friend of Gustavus III. From a page to that chevalier of royalty he was
+      advanced to the rank of general; and during the war with Russia, in 1789
+      and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his Prince and benefactor. It
+      was to him that his King said, when wounded mortally, by the hand of a
+      regicide, at a masquerade in March, 1792, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be alarmed, my friend.
+      You know as well as myself that all wounds are not dangerous.&rdquo;
+       Unfortunately, his were not of that description.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the will of this great Monarch, Baron d&rsquo;Armfeldt was nominated one of
+      the guardians of his present Sovereign, and a governor of the capital; but
+      the Duke Regent, who was a weak Prince, guided by philosophical
+      adventurers, by Illuminati and Freemasons, most of whom had imbibed the
+      French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a kind of honourable exile, as
+      an Ambassador to Italy. Shortly afterwards, under pretence of having
+      discovered a conspiracy, in which the Baron was implicated, he was
+      outlawed. He then took refuge in Russia, where he was made a general, and
+      as such distinguished him self under Suwarow during the campaign of 1799.
+      He was then recalled to his country, and restored to all his former places
+      and dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and obtain the favour,
+      friendship, and approbation of his King. He is said to be one of the
+      Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with the Russian
+      troops expected in Pomerania. Wherever he is employed, I am convinced that
+      he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero. Last spring he was offered
+      the place of a lieutenant-general in the Austrian service, which, with
+      regard to salary and emoluments, is greatly superior to what he enjoys in
+      Sweden; he declined it, however, because, with a warrior of his stamp,
+      interest is the last consideration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Believe me, Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press
+      than all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes
+      for his destruction. He is aware of the fatal consequences all former
+      factions suffered from the public exposure of their past crimes and future
+      views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their boasts
+      and promises. He does not doubt but that a faithful account of all the
+      actions and intrigues of his Government, its imposition, fraud, duplicity,
+      and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public opinion; and
+      that even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being tired of our
+      revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity, have been his
+      adherents, might alter their sentiments when they read of enormities which
+      must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one that he who waded through
+      rivers of blood to seize power will never hesitate about the means of
+      preserving it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is not a printing-office, from the banks of the Elbe to the Gulf of
+      Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection of our police
+      agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
+      Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work which, if contrary to our policy
+      or our fears, is not either confiscated, or purchased on the day it, makes
+      its appearance. Besides our regular emissaries, we have persons travelling
+      from the beginning to the end of the year, to pick up information of what
+      literary productions are printing; of what authors are popular; of their
+      political opinions and private circumstances. This branch of our haute
+      police extends even to your country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the Revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers, but
+      from 1789 to 1799 never less than thirty, and frequently sixty journals
+      were daily printed. After Bonaparte had assumed the consular authority,
+      they were reduced to ten. But though these were under a very strict
+      inspection of our Minister of Police, they were regarded still as too
+      numerous, and have lately been diminished to eight, by the incorporation
+      of &lsquo;Le Clef du Cabinet&rsquo; and &lsquo;Le Bulletin de l&rsquo;Europe&rsquo; with the &lsquo;Gazette de
+      France&rsquo;, a paper of which the infamously famous Barrere is the editor.
+      According to a proposal of Bonaparte, it was lately debated in the Council
+      of State whether it would not be politic to suppress all daily prints,
+      with the sole exception of the Moniteur. Fouche and Talleyrand spoke much
+      in favour of this measure of security. Real, however, is said to have
+      suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our Government, instead of
+      prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has resolved by degrees to
+      purchase them all, and to entrust them entirely to the direction of
+      Barrere, who now is consulted in everything concerning books or
+      newspapers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb146" id="pb146"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pb146.jpg (95K)" src="images/pb146.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have
+      previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary
+      censor, Barrere. Any person offending against this law is most severely
+      punished. An American gentlemen, of the name of Campbell, was last spring
+      sent to the Temple for lending one of your old daily papers to a person
+      who lodged in the same hotel with him. After an imprisonment of ten weeks
+      he made some pecuniary sacrifices to obtain his liberty, but was carried
+      to Havre, under an escort of gendarmes, put on board a neutral vessel, and
+      forbidden, under pain of death, ever to set his foot on French ground
+      again. An American vessel was, about the same time, confiscated at
+      Bordeaux, and the captain and crew imprisoned, because some English books
+      were found on board, in which Bonaparte, Talleyrand, Fouche, and some of
+      our great men were rather ill-treated. The crew have since been liberated,
+      but the captain has been brought here, and is still in the Temple. The
+      vessel and the cargo have been sold as lawful captures, though the captain
+      has proved from the names written in the books that they belonged to a
+      passenger. A young German student in surgery, who came here to improve
+      himself, has been nine months in the same state prison, for having with
+      him a book, printed in Germany during Bonaparte&rsquo;s expedition to Egypt,
+      wherein the chief and the undertaking are ridiculed. His mother, the widow
+      of a clergyman, hearing of the misfortune of her son, came here, and has
+      presented to the Emperor and Empress half a dozen petitions, without any
+      effect whatever, and has almost ruined herself and her other children by
+      the expenses of the journey. During a stay of four months she has not yet
+      been able to gain admittance into the Temple, to visit or see her son, who
+      perhaps expired in tortures, or died brokenhearted before she came here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien had found their
+      way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at last the
+      police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of having read them
+      was arrested. The number of these unfortunate persons, according to some,
+      amounted to one hundred and thirty, while others say that they were only
+      eighty-four, of whom twelve died suddenly in the Temple, and the remainder
+      were transported to Cayenne; upwards of half of them were women, some of
+      the ci-devant highest rank among subjects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Prussian, of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of
+      Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives of
+      Bonaparte and of some of his generals. Every day such and other examples
+      of the severity of our Government are related; and foreigners who visit us
+      continue, nevertheless, to be off their guard. They would be less punished
+      had they with them forged bills than, printed books or newspapers, in
+      which our Imperial Family and public functionaries are not treated with
+      due respect. Bonaparte is convinced that in every book where he is not
+      spoken of with praise, the intent is to blame him; and such intents or
+      negative guilt never escape with impunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more fond of
+      foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own, official
+      presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and at Mentz,
+      where the &lsquo;Gazette de Leyden&rsquo;, &lsquo;Hamburg Correspondenten&rsquo;, and &lsquo;Journal de
+      Frankfort&rsquo; are reprinted; some articles left out, and others inserted in
+      their room. It was intended to reprint also the &lsquo;Courier de Londres&rsquo;, but
+      our types, and particularly, our paper, would detect the fraud. I have
+      read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were extracts from this
+      French paper, printed in your country, which I strongly suspect are of our
+      own manufacture. I am told that several new books, written by foreigners,
+      in praise of our present brilliant Government, are now in the presses of
+      those our frontier towns, and will soon be laid before the public as
+      foreign productions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention, during
+      his dinner at the restaurateur&rsquo;s of &lsquo;Cadran Vert&rsquo;, on the Boulevards, some
+      doubt of the veracity of an official article in the &lsquo;Moniteur&rsquo;. As he left
+      the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of being an
+      English agent, and before supper-time he was on the road to Rochefort on
+      his way to Cayenne. As soon as the banker Tournon was informed of this
+      expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on Fouche, who
+      threatened even to transport him if he dared to interfere with the
+      transactions of the police. This banker was himself seized in the spring
+      of last year by a police agent and some gendarmes, and carried into exile
+      forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six. months, until a
+      pecuniary douceur procured him a recall. His crime was having inquired
+      after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having left his card
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of
+      the Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleon the First, and
+      is now in Germany, making his first campaign. A descendant of a wealthy
+      and ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was
+      easily deluded into the ranks of the revolutionists of his own country, by
+      a Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse
+      Borghese, his mother. He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin club
+      established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the same
+      year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States, he,
+      with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa
+      Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat. To show his love
+      of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company of
+      which the captain was a fellow that sold cats&rsquo; meat and tripe in the
+      streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother&rsquo;s kitchen.
+      Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as
+      insupportable for his pride and vanity as he, some years ago, was
+      contemptible for his meanness. He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who,
+      between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband&mdash;a
+      space of twelve months&mdash;had twice been in a fair way to become a
+      mother. Her portion was estimated at eighteen millions of livres&mdash;a
+      sum sufficient to palliate many &lsquo;faux pas&rsquo; in the eyes of a husband more
+      sensible and more delicate than her present Serene Idiot, as she styles
+      the Prince Borghese.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady is the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also the
+      most wicked of the female Bonapartes. She had, almost from her infancy,
+      passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery, and profligacy
+      before she attained her present elevation; rank, however, has not altered
+      her morals, but only procured her the means of indulging in new excesses.
+      Ever since the wedding night the Prince Borghese has been excluded from
+      her bed; for she declared frankly to him, as well as to her brother, that
+      she would never endure the approach of a man with a bad breath; though
+      many who, from the opportunities they have had of judging, certainly ought
+      to know, pretend that her own breath is not the sweetest in the world.
+      When her husband had marched towards the Rhine, she asked her brother, as
+      a favour, to procure the Prince Borghese, after a useless life, a glorious
+      death. This curious demand of a wife was, made in Madame Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      drawing-room, in the presence of fifty persons. &ldquo;You are always
+      &lsquo;etourdie&rsquo;,&rdquo; replied Napoleon, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Bonaparte, however, overlooks the intrigues of his sisters, he is not
+      so easily pacified when any reports reach him inculpating the virtues of
+      his sisters-in-law. Some gallants of Madame Joseph Bonaparte have already
+      disappeared to return no more, or are wandering in the wilds of Cayenne;
+      but the Emperor is particularly attentive to everything concerning the
+      morality of Madame Louis, whose descendants are destined to continue the
+      Bonaparte dynasty. Two officers, after being cashiered, were, with two of
+      Madame Louis&rsquo;s maids, shut up last month in the Temple, and have not since
+      been heard of, upon suspicion that the Princess preferred their society to
+      that of her husband.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Louis Bonaparte, whose constitution has been much impaired by his
+      debaucheries, was, last July, advised by his physicians to use the baths
+      at St. Amand. After his wife had accompanied him as far as Lille, she went
+      to visit one of her friends, Madame Ney, the wife of General Ney, who
+      commanded the camp near Montreuil. This lady resided in a castle called
+      Leek, in the vicinity, where dinners, concerts, balls, and other
+      festivities celebrated the arrival of the Princess; and to these the
+      principal officers of the camp were invited. One morning, about an hour
+      after the company had retired to bed, the whole castle was disturbed and
+      alarmed by an uproar in the anteroom of Princesse Louis&rsquo;s bedchamber. On
+      coming to the scene of riot, two officers were found there fighting, and
+      the Princesse Louis, more than half undressed, came out and called the
+      sentries on duty to separate the combatants, who were both wounded. This
+      affair occasioned great scandal; and General Ney, after having put the
+      officers under arrest, sent a courier to Napoleon at Boulogne, relating
+      the particulars and demanding His Majesty&rsquo;s orders. It was related and
+      believed as a fact that the quarrel originated about two of the maids of
+      the Princess (whose virtue was never suspected), with whom the officers
+      were intriguing. The Emperor ordered the culprits to be broken and
+      delivered up to his Minister of Police, who knew how to proceed. The
+      Princesse Louis also received an invitation to join her sister-in-law,
+      Madame Murat, then in the camp at Boulogne, and to remain under her care
+      until her husband&rsquo;s return from St. Amand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Murat was then at Paris, and his lady was merely on a visit to her
+      Imperial brother, who made her responsible for Madame Louis, whom he
+      severely reprimanded for the misconduct of her maids. The bedrooms of the
+      two sisters were on the same floor. One night, Princesse Louis thought she
+      heard the footsteps of a person on the staircase, not like those of a
+      female, and afterwards the door of Madame Murat&rsquo;s room opened softly. This
+      occurrence deprived her of all desire to sleep; and curiosity, or perhaps
+      revenge, excited her to remove her doubts concerning the virtue of her
+      guardian. In about an hour afterwards, she stole into Madame Murat&rsquo;s
+      bedroom, by the way of their sitting-room, the door in the passage being
+      bolted. Passing her hand over the pillow, she almost pricked herself with
+      the strong beard of a man, and, screaming out, awoke her sister, who
+      inquired what she could want at such an unusual hour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I believe,&rdquo; replied the Princess, &ldquo;my room is haunted. I have not shut my
+      eyes, and intended to ask for a place by your side, but I find it is
+      already engaged:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent,&rdquo; said Madame
+      Murat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is very rude of your maid to go to bed with her mistress without first
+      shaving herself,&rdquo; said the Princess, and left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning an explanation took place; the ladies understood each
+      other, and each, during the remaining part of her husband&rsquo;s absence, had
+      for consolation a maid for a bedfellow. Madame Murat also convinced the
+      Emperor that his suspicions with regard to the Princesse Louis were
+      totally unfounded; and he with some precious presents, indemnified her for
+      his harsh treatment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is reported that the two maids of the Princesse Louis, when before
+      Fouche, first denied all acquaintance with the officers; but, being
+      threatened with tortures, they signed a &lsquo;proces verbal&rsquo;, acknowledging
+      their guilt. This valuable and authentic document the Minister sent by an
+      extra courier to the Emperor, who showed it to his stepdaughter. Her
+      generosity is proverbial here, and therefore nobody is surprised that she
+      has given a handsome sum of money to the parents of her maids, who had in
+      vain applied to see their children; Fouche having told them that affairs
+      of State still required their confinement. One of them, Mariothe, has been
+      in the service of the Princess ever since her marriage, and is known to
+      possess all her confidence; though during that period of four years she
+      has twice been in a state of pregnancy, through the condescending
+      attention of her princely master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;When preparations were made for the departure of our army
+      of England for Germany, it excited both laughter and murmuring among the
+      troops. Those who had always regarded the conquest of England as
+      impracticable in present circumstances, laughed, and those who had in
+      their imagination shared the wealth of your country, showed themselves
+      vexed at their disappointment. To keep them in good spirits, the company
+      of the theatre of the Vaudevilles was ordered from hence to Boulogne, and
+      several plays, composed for the occasion, were performed, in which the
+      Germans were represented as defeated, and the English begging for peace on
+      their knees, which the Emperor of the French grants upon condition that
+      one hundred guineas ready money should be paid to each of his soldiers and
+      sailors. Every corps in its turn was admitted gratis to witness this
+      exhibition of the end of all their labours; and you can form no idea what
+      effect it produced, though you are not a stranger to our fickle and
+      inconsiderate character. Ballads, with the same predictions and the same
+      promises, were written and distributed among the soldiers, and sung by
+      women sent by Fouche to the coast. As all productions of this sort were,
+      as usual, liberally rewarded by the Emperor, they poured in from all parts
+      of his Empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three poets and authors of the theatre of the Vaudevilles, Barrel, Radet,
+      and Desfontaines, each received two hundred napoleons d&rsquo;or for their
+      common production of a ballad, called &ldquo;Des Adieux d&rsquo;un Grenadier au Camp
+      de Boulogne.&rdquo; From this I have extracted the following sample, by which
+      you may judge of the remainder:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE GRENADIER&rsquo;S ADIEU
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      TO THE CAMP AT BOULOGNE
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The drum is beating, we must march, We&rsquo;re summon&rsquo;d to another field, A
+      field that to our conq&rsquo;ring swords Shall soon a laurel harvest yield. If
+      English folly light the torch Of war in Germany again The loss is theirs&mdash;the
+      gain is ours March! march! commence the bright campaign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, only by their glorious deeds Our chiefs and gallant bands are
+      known; There, often have they met their foes, And victory was all their
+      own: There, hostile ranks, at our approach, Prostrate beneath our feet
+      shall bow; There, smiling conquest waits to twine A laurel wreath round
+      every brow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Adieu, my pretty turf-built hut * Adieu, my little garden, too! I made, I
+      deck&rsquo;d you all myself, And I am loth to part with you: But since my arms I
+      must resume, And leave your comforts all behind, Upon the hostile frontier
+      soon My tent shall flutter in the wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My pretty fowls and doves, adieu! Adieu, my playful cat, to thee! Who
+      every morning round me came, And were my little family. But thee, my dog,
+      I shall not leave No, thou shalt ever follow me, Shalt share my toils,
+      shaft share my fame For thou art called VICTORY.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no farewell I bid to you, Ye prams and boats, which, o&rsquo;er the wave,
+      Were doom&rsquo;d to waft to England&rsquo;s shore Our hero chiefs, our soldiers
+      brave. To you, good gentlemen of Thames, Soon, soon our visit shall be
+      paid, Soon, soon your merriment be o&rsquo;er &lsquo;T is but a few short hours
+      delay&rsquo;d.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      * During the long continuance of the French encampment at Boulogne the
+      troops had formed, as it were, a romantic town of huts. Every hut had a
+      garden surrounding it, kept in neat order and stocked with vegetables and
+      flowers. They had, besides, fowls, pigeons, and rabbits; and these, with a
+      cat and a dog, generally formed the little household of every soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I am writing on the subject of poetical agents, I will also say some
+      words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons frequently
+      occupy both the one office and the other. A man of the name of Richaud,
+      who has sung previously the glory of Marat and Robespierre, offered to
+      Bonaparte, on the evening preceding his departure for Strasburg, the
+      following lines; and was in return presented with a purse full of gold,
+      and an order to the Minister of the Interior, Champagny, to be employed in
+      his offices, until better provided for.
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>
+        STANZAS
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        ON THE RUMOUR OF A WAR WITH AUSTRIA
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Kings who, so often vanquish&rsquo;d, vainly dare <br /> Menace the victor that
+        has laid you low&mdash; <br /> Look now at France&mdash;and view your own
+        despair <br /> In the majestic splendour of your foe.
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What miserable pride, ye foolish kings, <br /> Still your deluded reason
+      thus misleads? <br /> Provoke the storm&mdash;the bolt with lightning wings
+      <br /> Shall fall&mdash;but fall on your devoted heads.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And thou, Napoleon, if thy mighty sword <br /> Shall for thy people conquer
+      new renown; <br /> Go&mdash;Europe shall attest, thy heart preferr&rsquo;d <br />
+      The modest olive to the laurel crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But thee, lov&rsquo;d chief, to new achievements bold
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The aroused spirit of the soldier calls; <br /> Speak!&mdash;and Vienna
+      cowering shall behold <br /> Our banners waving o&rsquo;er her prostrate walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I received, four days afterwards, at the circle of Madame Joseph
+      Bonaparte, with all other visitors, a copy of these stanzas. Most of the
+      foreign Ambassadors were of the party, and had also a share of this
+      patriotic donation. Count von Cobenzl had prudently absented himself;
+      otherwise, this delenda of the Austrian Carthage would have been
+      officially announced to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another poetaster, of the name of Brouet, in a long, dull, disgusting
+      poem, after comparing Bonaparte with all great men of antiquity, and
+      proving that he surpasses them all, tells his countrymen that their
+      Emperor is the deputy Divinity upon earth&mdash;the mirror of wisdom, a
+      demi-god to whom future ages will erect statues, build temples, burn
+      incense, fall down and adore. A proportionate share of abuse is, of
+      course, bestowed on your nation. He says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Londres on vit briller d&rsquo;un eclat ephemere Le front tout radieux d&rsquo;un
+      ministre influent; Mais pour faire palir l&rsquo;etoile d&rsquo;Angleterre, Un SOLEIL
+      tout nouveau parut au firmament, Et ce soleil du peuple franc Admire de
+      l&rsquo;Europe entiere Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE LE GRAND.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For this delicate compliment Brouet was made deputy postmaster-general in
+      Italy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour. It must be granted that, if
+      Bonaparte is fond of flattery, he does not receive it gratis, but pays for
+      it like a real Emperor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has lately become the etiquette, not only in our Court circle and
+      official assemblies, but even in fashionable societies of persons who are,
+      or wish to become, Bonaparte&rsquo;s public functionaries, to distribute and
+      have read and applauded these disinterested effusions of our poetical
+      geniuses. This fashion occasioned lately a curious blunder at a tea-party
+      in the hotel of Madame de Talleyrand. The same printer who had been
+      engaged by this lady had also been employed by Chenier, or some other
+      poet, to print a short satire against several of our literary ladies, in
+      which Madame de Genlis and Madame de Stael (who has just arrived here from
+      her exile) were, with others, very severely handled. By mistake, a bundle
+      of this production was given to the porter of Madame de Talleyrand, and a
+      copy was handed to each visitor, even to Madame de Genlis and Madame de
+      Stael, who took them without noticing their contents. Picard, after
+      reading an act of a new play, was asked by the lady of the house to read
+      this poetic worship of the Emperor of the French. After the first two
+      lines he stopped short, looking round him confused, suspecting a trick had
+      been played upon him. This induced the audience to read what had been
+      given them, and Madame de Talleyrand with the rest; who, instead of
+      permitting Picard to continue with another. scene of his play, as he had
+      adroitly begun, made the most awkward apology in the world, and by it
+      exposed the ladies still more who were the objects of the satire; which,
+      an hour afterwards, was exchanged for the verses intended for the homage
+      of the Emperor, and the cause of the error was cleared up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have read somewhere of a tyrant of antiquity who forced all his subjects
+      to furnish one room of their houses in the best possible manner, according
+      to their circumstances, and to have it consecrated for the reception of
+      his bust, before which, under pain of death, they were commanded to
+      prostrate themselves, morning, noon, and night. They were to enter this
+      room, bareheaded and barefooted, to remain there only on their knees, and
+      to leave it without turning their back towards the sacred representative
+      of their Prince. All laughing, sneezing, coughing, speaking, or even
+      whispering, were capitally prohibited; but crying was not only permitted,
+      but commanded, when His Majesty was offended, angry, or unwell. Should our
+      system of cringing continue progressively to increase as it has done these
+      last three years, we, too, shall very soon have rooms consecrated, and an
+      idol to adore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Portugal has suffered more from the degraded state of
+      Spain, under the administration of the Prince of Peace, than we have yet
+      gained by it in France. Engaged by her, in 1793, in a war against its
+      inclination and interest, it was not only deserted afterwards, but
+      sacrificed. But for the dictates of the Court of Madrid, supported,
+      perhaps, by some secret influence of the Court of St. James, the Court of
+      Lisbon would have preserved its neutrality, and, though not a well-wisher
+      of the French Republic, never have been counted among her avowed enemies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the peace of 1795, and in the subsequent treaty of 1796, which
+      transformed the family compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons into a
+      national alliance between France and Spain, there was no question about
+      Portugal. In 1797, indeed, our Government condescended to receive a
+      Portuguese plenipotentiary, but merely for the purpose of plundering his
+      country of some millions of money, and to insult it by shutting up its
+      representative as a State prisoner in the Temple. Of this violation of the
+      laws of civilized nations, Spain never complained, nor had Portugal any
+      means to avenge it. After four years of negotiation, and an expenditure of
+      thirty millions, the imbecile Spanish premier supported demands made by
+      our Government, which, if assented to, would have left Her Most Faithful
+      Majesty without any territory in Europe, and without any place of refuge
+      in America. Circumstances not permitting your country to send any but
+      pecuniary succours, Portugal would have become an easy prey to the united
+      Spanish and French forces, had the marauders agreed about the partition of
+      the spoil. Their disunion, the consequence of their avidity, saved it from
+      ruin, but not from pillage. A province was ceded to Spain, the banks and
+      the navigation of a river to France, and fifty millions to the private
+      purse of the Bonaparte family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such offerings,
+      would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but, though the Cabinet
+      of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the pretensions and
+      encroachments of the latter left the former no rest. While pocketing
+      tributes it required commercial monopolies, and when its commerce was
+      favoured, it demanded seaports to ensure the security of its trade. Its
+      pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions of the State it,
+      oppressed. With the money and the value of the diamonds which Portugal has
+      paid in loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in donations, in
+      tributes, and in presents, it might have supported, during ten years, an
+      army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have been worse
+      situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort, were
+      more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the extortions
+      themselves were injurious to its resources. The first revolutionary
+      Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his
+      contempt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more
+      vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes. The son of a publican
+      and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a
+      postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin, and a terrorist;
+      and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of these different trades,
+      a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and disgusts. He
+      seems to say, &ldquo;I am a villain. I know that I am so, and I am proud of
+      being so. To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no human laws, and
+      I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but
+      it is impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince,
+      seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I
+      must, always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the
+      power of grandeur to exalt me.&rdquo; General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First
+      Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will always be the same polluted, but daring
+      individual; a stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour and
+      virtue. Where Bonaparte sends a banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved
+      on destruction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes&rsquo;s first
+      mission to Portugal. When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he had
+      appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest, and, as
+      a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador, as he said himself. His
+      resentment against Bonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent of
+      Portugal. Without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the Court of
+      Lisbon, he brought the sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of the
+      Tuileries with him, and determined to fraternize with a foreign and
+      legitimate Sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and
+      First Consul; and, what is the more surprising, he carried his point. The
+      Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor
+      to his child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before he was
+      divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince&rsquo;s consort, a
+      Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to associate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an Ambassador, his
+      former business of a smuggler, and, instead of being ashamed of a
+      discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not reprimanded
+      in France, but was, without apology, received back again in Portugal. His
+      conduct afterwards could not be surprising. He only insisted that some
+      faithful and able Ministers should be removed, and others appointed in
+      their place, more complaisant and less honest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New plans of Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but
+      what did it obtain in return?&mdash;another grenadier Ambassador, less
+      brutal but more cunning, as abandoned but more dissimulating.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gendral Junot is the son of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of this
+      capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789. Having committed some
+      pilfering, he was turned out of the parental dwelling, and therefore
+      lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club. In 1792, he entered, as a
+      soldier, in a regiment of the army marching against the county of Nice;
+      and, in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted with
+      Bonaparte, whom he, in January, 1794, assisted in despatching the
+      unfortunate Toulonese; and with whom, also, in the autumn of the same
+      year, he, therefore, was arrested as a terrorist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1796, when commander-in-chief, Bonaparte made Junot his aide-de-camp;
+      and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to Egypt. There, as well
+      as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no particular opportunity of
+      distinguishing himself. He was not one of those select few whom Napoleon
+      brought with him to Europe in 1799, but returned first to France in 1801,
+      when he was nominated a general of division and commander of this capital,
+      a place he resigned last year to General Murat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His despotic and cruel behaviour while commander of Paris made him not
+      much regretted. Fouche lost in him, indeed, an able support, but none of
+      us here ever experienced from him justice, much less protection. As with
+      all other of our modern public functionaries, without money nothing was
+      obtained from him. It required as much for not doing any harm as if, in
+      renouncing his usual vexatious oppressions, he had conferred benefits. He
+      was much suspected of being, with Fouche, the patron of a gang of street
+      robbers and housebreakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested this
+      capital, and who, when finally discovered, were screened from justice and
+      suffered to escape punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will tell you what I personally have seen of him. Happening one evening
+      to enter the rooms at Frascati, where the gambling-tables are kept, I
+      observed him, undressed, out of regimentals, in company with at young man,
+      who afterwards avowed himself an aide-de-camp of this general, and who was
+      playing with rouleaux of louis d&rsquo;or, supposed to contain fifty each, at
+      Rouge et Noir. As long as he lost, which he did several times, he took up
+      the rouleau on the table, and gave another from his pocket. At last he
+      won, when he asked the bankers to look at their loss, and count the money
+      in his rouleau before they paid him. On opening it, they found it
+      contained one hundred bank-notes of one thousand livres each&mdash;folded
+      in a manner to resemble the form and size of louis d&rsquo;or. The bankers
+      refused to pay, and applied to the company whether they were not in the
+      right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the person who
+      now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual manner. Before any
+      answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking the bankers whether they
+      knew who he was. Upon their answering in the negative, he said: &ldquo;I am
+      General Junot, the commander of Paris, and this officer who has won the
+      money is my aide-de-camp; and I insist upon your paying him this instant,
+      if you do not wish to have your bank confiscated and your persons
+      arrested.&rdquo; They refused to part with money which they protested was not
+      their own, and most of the individuals present joined them in their
+      resistance. &ldquo;You are altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers,&rdquo;
+       interrupted Junot; &ldquo;your business shall soon be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying, he seized all the money on the table, and a kind of
+      boxing-match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being a tall
+      and strong man, got the better of them. The tumult, however, brought in
+      the guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to prison sixteen
+      persons he pointed out. Fortunately, I was not of the number&mdash;I say
+      fortunately, for I have heard that most of them remained in prison six
+      months before this delicate affair was cleared up and settled. In the
+      meantime, Junot not only pocketed all the money he pretended was due to
+      his aide-de-camp, but the whole sum contained in the bank, which was
+      double that amount. It was believed by every one present that this was an
+      affair arranged between him and his aide-de-camp beforehand to pillage the
+      bank. What a commander, what a general, and what an Ambassador!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fitte, the secretary of our Embassy to Portugal, was formerly an Abbe, and
+      must be well remembered in your country, where he passed some years as an
+      emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand. I am told that, by his
+      intrigues, he even succeeded in swindling your Ministers out of a sum of
+      money by some plausible schemes he proposed to them. He is, as well as all
+      other apostate priests, a very dangerous man, and an immoral and
+      unprincipled wretch. During the time of Robespierre he is said to have
+      caused the murder of his elder brother and younger sister; the former he
+      denounced to appropriate to himself his wealth, and the latter he accused
+      of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him. He daily boasts of
+      the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand. &lsquo;Qualis rex,
+      talis grex&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, September, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;In some of the ancient Republics, all citizens who, in time
+      of danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as traitors or
+      treated as enemies. When, by our Revolution, civilized society and the
+      European Commonwealth were menaced with a total overthrow, had each member
+      of it been considered in the same light, and subjected to the same laws,
+      some individual States might, perhaps, have been less wealthy, but the
+      whole community would have been more happy and more tranquil, which would
+      have been much better. It was a great error in the powerful league of 1793
+      to admit any neutrality at all; every Government that did not combat
+      rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally. The man who
+      continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are wanted to
+      preserve the vessel from sinking, deserves to be thrown overboard, to be
+      swallowed up by the waves and to perish the first. Had all other nations
+      been united and unanimous, during 1793 and 1794, against the monster,
+      Jacobinism, we should not have heard of either Jacobin directors, Jacobin
+      consuls, or a Jacobin Emperor. But then, from a petty regard to a
+      temporary profit, they entered into a truce with a revolutionary volcano,
+      which, sooner or later, will consume them all; for I am afraid it is now
+      too late for all human power, with all human means, to preserve any State,
+      any Government, or any people, from suffering by the threatening
+      conflagration. Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and Tuscany have
+      already gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality. Let but
+      Bonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years longer, and
+      you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and neutral Denmark
+      visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and destruction, and the
+      independence of the nations in the North will be buried in the rubbish of
+      the liberties of the people of the South of Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents
+      pronounce, and their dupes repeat: &ldquo;Oh! the wise Government of Denmark!
+      Oh, what a wise statesman the Danish Minister, Count von Bernstorff!&rdquo; I do
+      not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a great politician; but I
+      assert, also, that his was a greatness more calculated for regular times
+      than for periods of unusual political convulsion. Like your Pitt, the
+      Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to judge
+      soundly and to act rightly, according to the present situation of affairs.
+      He adhered too much to the old routine, and did not perceive the immense
+      difference between the Government of a revolutionary ruler and the
+      Government of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV. I am certain, had he still
+      been alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have
+      repaired them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His son, the present Danish Minister, follows his father&rsquo;s plans, and
+      adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while the
+      alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more affected
+      the real and relative power and weakness of States than all the
+      revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars, and
+      pacifications of the two preceding centuries. He has even gone farther, in
+      some parts of his administration, than his father ever intended. Without
+      remembering the political TRUTH, that a weak State which courts the
+      alliance of a powerful neighbour always becomes a vassal, while desiring
+      to become an ally, he has attempted to exchange the connections of Denmark
+      and Russia for new ones with Prussia; and forgotten the obligations of the
+      Cabinet of Copenhagen to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, and the interested
+      policy of the House of Brandenburgh. That, on the contrary, Russia has
+      always been a generous ally of Denmark, the flourishing state of the
+      Danish dominions since the beginning of the last century evinces. Its
+      distance and geographical position prevent all encroachments from being
+      feared or attempted; while at the same time it affords protection equally
+      against the rivalry of Sweden and ambition of Prussia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Prince Royal of Denmark is patriotic as well as enlightened, and would
+      rule with more true policy and lustre were he to follow seldomer the
+      advice of his counsellors, and oftener the dictates of his own mind. Count
+      von Schimmelmann, Count von Reventlow, and Count von Bernstorff, are all
+      good and moral characters; but I fear that their united capacity taken
+      together will not fill up the vacancy left in the Danish Cabinet by the
+      death of its late Prime Minister. I have been personally acquainted with
+      them all three, but I draw my conclusions from the acts of their
+      administration, not from my own knowledge. Had the late Count von
+      Bernstorff held the ministerial helm in 1803, a paragraph in the Moniteur
+      would never have disbanded a Danish army in Holstein; nor would, in 1805,
+      intriguers have been endured who preached neutrality, after witnessing
+      repeated violation of the law of nations, not on the remote banks of the
+      Rhine, but on the Danish frontiers, on the Danish territory, on the banks
+      of the Elbe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It certainly was no compliment to His Danish Majesty when our Government
+      sent Grouvelle as a representative to Copenhagen, a man who owed his
+      education and information to the Conde branch of the Bourbons, and who
+      afterwards audaciously and sacrilegiously read the sentence of death on
+      the chief of that family, on his good and legitimate King, Louis XVI. It
+      can neither be called dignity nor prudence in the Cabinet of Denmark to
+      suffer this regicide to serve as a point of rally to sedition and
+      innovation; to be the official propagator of revolutionary doctrines, and
+      an official protector of all proselytes and sectaries of this anti-social
+      faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the Revolution a secretary to the Prince of Conde, Grouvelle was
+      trusted and rewarded by His Serene Highness, and in return betrayed his
+      confidence, and repaid benefactions and generosity with calumny and
+      persecution, when his patron was obliged to seek safety in emigration
+      against the assassins of successful rebellion. When the national seals
+      were put on the estates of the Prince, he appropriated to himself not only
+      the whole of His Highness&rsquo;s library, but a part of his plate. Even the
+      wardrobe and the cellar were laid under contributions by this domestic
+      marauder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With natural genius and acquired experience, Grouvelle unites impudence
+      and immorality; and those on whom he fixes for his prey are, therefore,
+      easily duped, and irremediably undone. He has furnished disciples to all
+      factions, and to all sects, assassins to the revolutionary tribunals, as
+      well as victims for the revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to
+      Robespierre, Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies
+      to Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a
+      tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc d&rsquo;
+      Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly condemned
+      and privately executed in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our present Minister at the Court of Copenhagen, D&rsquo; Aguesseau, has no
+      virtues to boast of, but also no crimes to blush for. With inferior
+      capacity, he is only considered by Talleyrand as an inferior intriguer,
+      employed in a country ruled by an inferior policy, neither feared nor
+      esteemed by our Government. His secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our
+      real and confidential firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep burning
+      those materials of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our
+      incendiaries have lighted and illuminated in Holstein, Denmark, Sweden,
+      and Norway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The insatiable avarice of all the members of the Bonaparte
+      family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of our
+      philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude from the
+      mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the passion of covetousness; that he pillages
+      only to get money to pay his military plunderers, and hoards treasures
+      only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the associates and instruments
+      of his authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether their assertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself to
+      decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal palaces,
+      from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal domains; from the
+      immense and valuable quantity of diamonds, jewels, pictures, statues,
+      libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and self-denial are certainly
+      not among Napoleon&rsquo;s virtues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and extensive
+      demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by national.
+      property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial Treasury, or
+      confiscated by Imperial decrees. In Italy, he has, by an official act,
+      declared to be the property of his crown, first, the royal palace at
+      Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls Villa Bonaparte; second, the
+      palace of Monza and its dependencies; third, the palace of Mantua, the
+      palace of The, and the ci-devant ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace
+      situated in the vicinity of Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity of
+      Bologna; fifth, the ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza; sixth,
+      the beautiful forest of Tesin. Ten millions were, besides, ordered to be
+      drawn out of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands for the
+      formation of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former Kings
+      of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of Flanders, of the
+      German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons, etc., who, before the
+      last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of the Rhine. I have seen a
+      list, according to which the number of palaces and chateaux appertaining
+      to Napoleon as Emperor and King, are stated to be seventy-nine; so that he
+      may change his habitations six times in the month, without occupying
+      during the same year the same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at
+      home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of the
+      Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte. Madame Napoleon
+      has purchased, since her husband&rsquo;s consulate, in her own name, or in the
+      name of her children, nine estates with their chateaux, four national
+      forests, and six hotels at Paris. Joseph Bonaparte possesses four estates
+      and chateaux in France, three hotels at Paris and at Brussels, three
+      chateaux and estates in Italy, and one hotel at Milan, and another at
+      Turin. Lucien Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel at Paris, another
+      at Bonne, and a third at Chambery. He has one estate in Burgundy, two in
+      Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital. At Bologna, Ferrara,
+      Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in the Papal States he has
+      obtained, in exchange for property in France, three chateaux with their
+      dependencies. Louis Bonaparte has three hotels at Paris, one at Cologne,
+      one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons. He has two estates in Flanders, three
+      in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte, and another in Alsace. He has also a
+      chateau four leagues from this city. At Genoa he has a beautiful hotel,
+      and upon the Genoese territory a large estate. He has bought three
+      plantations at Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe. To Jerome Bonaparte has
+      hitherto been presented only an estate in Brabant, and a hotel in this
+      capital. Some of the former domains of the House of Orange, in the
+      Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of our Government,
+      and are said to be intended for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and his
+      brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left
+      unprovided for. Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at Paris, one
+      at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome. Her estates in France are four,
+      and in Italy two. Madame Bacciochi, Princess of Piombino and Lucca,
+      possesses two hotels in this capital, and one palace at Piombino and
+      another at Lucca. Of her estates in France, she has only retained two, but
+      she has three in the Kingdom of Italy, and four in her husband&rsquo;s and her
+      own dominions. The Princess Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at Rome and
+      four chateaux in the papal territory. At Milan she has, as well as at
+      Turin and at Paris, hotels given her by her Imperial brother, together
+      with two estates in France, one in Piedmont, and two in Lombardy. The
+      Princesse Murat is mistress of two hotels here, one at Brussels, one at
+      Tours, and one at Bordeaux, together with three estates on this, and five
+      on the other side of the Alps. The Princesse Borghese has purchased three
+      plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with a part of the
+      treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc. With her present husband
+      she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates on the Roman
+      territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her with one hotel at
+      Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at Genoa, together with three
+      estates in France and five in Italy. For his mother, and for each of his
+      sisters, Napoleon has also purchased estates, or lands to form estates, in
+      their native island of Corsica.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have also
+      experienced his bounty. Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris, Milan,
+      Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and Italy. Seventeen,
+      either first, second, or third cousins, by his father&rsquo;s or mother&rsquo;s side,
+      have all obtained estates either in the French Empire, or in the Kingdom
+      of Italy, as well as all brothers, sisters, or cousins of his own wife,
+      and the wives of his brothers, or of the husbands of his sisters. Their
+      exact number cannot well be known, but a gentleman who has long been
+      collecting materials for some future history of the House of Bonaparte,
+      and of the French Empire, has already shown me sixty-six names of
+      individuals of that description, and of both sexes, who all, thanks to the
+      Imperial liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become people of
+      property.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and
+      distributed within the short period of five years, it is not hazardous to
+      say that, in the annals of Europe, another such revolution in property, as
+      well as in power, is not to be found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together does not
+      amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have acquired and possess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at this
+      revolution of property. Richer than any other nation, you have more to
+      apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our frequent enemies
+      and as our national rivals; as a barrier against our plans of universal
+      dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary resources. May we never live
+      to see the day when the mandates of Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured
+      at London, as at Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, and Rome. The misery of ages to
+      come will then be certain, and posterity will regard as comparative
+      happiness, the sufferings of their forefathers. It is not probable that
+      those who have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest
+      contented until you are involved in the same ruin. Union among yourselves
+      only can preserve you from perishing in the universal wreck; by this you
+      will at least gain time, and may hope to profit by probable changes and
+      unexpected accidents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil
+      list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in
+      Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres&mdash;which was divided
+      between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte,
+      Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese. By
+      this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched
+      inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine. This Daru is too good a
+      calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master
+      of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have
+      enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the
+      Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose. On his return
+      here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an
+      annuity of one hundred thousand livres&mdash;not to play; but as this sum
+      would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this Minister
+      sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain of being
+      transported to Cayenne. He obeyed, but the bankers soon experienced that
+      he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other side of the
+      Atlantic he might forward his calculations hither, Fouche recommended him,
+      for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of Bonaparte&rsquo;s civil
+      list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly, injuring our
+      gambling-banks. He has kept his promise with regard to France, but made,
+      last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany, which, he avows,
+      produced him nine millions of livres. He always points, but never keeps a
+      bank. He begins to be so well known in many parts of the Continent, that
+      the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and remain so until his
+      departure. This was the case at Florence last April. He travels always in
+      style, accompanied by two mistresses and four servants. He is a chevalier
+      of the Legion of Honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
+      calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
+      than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
+      been felt and lamented for these ten years past. Augereau, Bernadotte,
+      Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
+      terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal, Bernadotte,
+      of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary brother&mdash;like
+      him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a common soldier
+      before the Revolution. But he has this merit above Bernadotte, that he
+      began his political career as a police spy, and finished his first
+      military engagement by desertion into foreign countries, in most of which,
+      after again enlisting and again deserting, he was also again taken and
+      again flogged. Italy has, indeed, since he has been made a general, been
+      more the scene of his devastations than Germany. Lombardy and Venice will
+      not soon forget the thousands he butchered, and the millions he plundered;
+      that with hands reeking with blood, and stained with human gore, he seized
+      the trinkets which devotion had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers
+      of an assassin, or decorate the bosom of a harlot. The outrages he
+      committed during 1796 and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place
+      in any letter, even were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous
+      and too improbable to be believed. He frequently transformed the temples
+      of the divinity into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had
+      consecrated themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he
+      bayoneted into dens of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these
+      abominations he prided himself. In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to
+      take command of the sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September,
+      hunted away or imprisoned the representatives of the people of the
+      legislative body, he paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night
+      at Pavia, with a draft for fifty louis d&rsquo;or on the municipality of that
+      town, who dared not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799
+      handed it over to Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the
+      very original.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general and grand officer of Bonaparte&rsquo;s Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
+      is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A barber, and son of
+      a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned to
+      be hanged. The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows; but
+      he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
+      doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his
+      fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
+      he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
+      guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family. He
+      was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity and
+      plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank and
+      confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand livres&mdash;properly
+      applied and divided between some of the members of the Bonaparte family,
+      he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a commander-in-chief of
+      the ci-devant Flanders. In landed property, in jewels, in amount in the
+      funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from prudence, six hundred
+      thousand livres&mdash;in gold), his riches amount to eight millions of
+      livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and galley-slave, you must
+      grant this is a very modest sum.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth
+      which, from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you
+      our generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the
+      catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our soldiers,
+      officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and surpassing
+      often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those authorized by
+      our Government itself, or by its civil and military representatives. It
+      comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded and enforced, whether as
+      loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in money as an equivalent for
+      both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and carriages; corvees of all
+      kinds; the emptying of magazines for the service of our armies; in short,
+      whatever was required for the maintenance, a portion of the pay, and
+      divers wants of those armies, from the time they had posted themselves in
+      Brabant, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine. Add
+      to this the pillage of public or private warehouses, granaries, and
+      magazines, whether belonging to individuals, to the State, to societies,
+      to towns, to hospitals, and even to orphan-houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of
+      subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for
+      accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite
+      consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of our
+      civil or military commanders. Most of those articles were delivered in
+      kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready
+      money, and divided among the plunderers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
+      Imperial city of Wetzlar. He there put in requisition all private stores
+      of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon
+      another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.
+      Leather and linen underwent the same operation. Volumes might be filled
+      with similar examples, all of public notoriety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
+      Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790, and
+      is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in
+      1765. Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to
+      escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some
+      Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the men into an
+      insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate. From that
+      period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs,
+      and was, therefore, by his associates, promoted by one step to an
+      adjutant-general. Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement, and
+      greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and enrich
+      himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a short time
+      made a general of division, and acquired a property of several millions.
+      This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously served only
+      under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be
+      attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced
+      into his interest. In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic
+      attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed
+      commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Ambassador from
+      the First Consul to the Helvetic Government. He there conducted himself so
+      much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your
+      country, he was made commander of the camp near Montreuil; and last year
+      his wife was received as a Maid of Honour to the Empress of the French.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept by a
+      man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with Ney. With him
+      she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the municipality of
+      Coblentz made her his wife. Her conduct since has corresponded with that
+      of her husband. When he publicly lived with mistresses, she did not live
+      privately with her gallants, but the instant the Emperor of the French
+      told him to save appearances, if he desired a place for his wife at the
+      Imperial Court, he showed himself the most attentive and faithful of
+      husbands, and she the most tender and dutiful of wives. Her manners are
+      not polished, but they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her
+      person, she is lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her
+      society agreeable. The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of
+      her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires. She has a fault common with
+      most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity presents
+      itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from being fortunate.
+      Report says that more than once she has been reduced to acquit her
+      gambling debts by personal favours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now serving
+      under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat. According to some,
+      he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin, robber, and assassin, long
+      before he obtained his first commission as an officer, which was given him
+      by the recommendation of Marat, whom he in return afterwards wished to
+      immortalize, by the exchange of one letter in his own name, and by calling
+      himself Marat instead of Murat. Others, however, declare that his father
+      was an honest cobbler, very superstitious, residing at Bastide, near
+      Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and that he was in
+      his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange the frock of the
+      monk for the regimentals of a soldier. In what manner, or by what
+      achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796 he was a
+      chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he went to
+      Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married him to his
+      sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of Paris, and in
+      1804 a Prince.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by
+      his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of livres.
+      The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him forty&mdash;two
+      millions&mdash;and it is whispered that the estates bought in the name of
+      his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less. A
+      brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator; and an
+      uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate. A cousin of his, who
+      was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an
+      apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor&rsquo;s
+      chamberlains. He has been very generous to all his relations, and would
+      not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial Court,
+      had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank, lost
+      her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy. The millions
+      are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to gain. His
+      brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of liberty,
+      that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution&mdash;its promoters, its
+      accomplices, and its instruments. Wherever they penetrate, plunder
+      follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but the
+      means. The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
+      nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor&rsquo;s secret deeds
+      of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice. It was under his
+      private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
+      and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way
+      to his place of exile. After the seizure and trial of the Duc d&rsquo; Enghien,
+      some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of his Italian
+      guard would fire at this Prince. &ldquo;If they hesitate,&rdquo; said Murat, who
+      commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, &ldquo;my pistols are loaded,
+      and I will blow out his brains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family. Murat was, at
+      first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law, Lucien,
+      whom he even fought; but Napoleon having assured him, upon his word of
+      honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model of
+      complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as
+      numerous as Madame Murat&rsquo;s favourites. He has a young aide-de-camp of the
+      name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the then
+      Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to have
+      had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was desolating
+      Germany.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Since Bonaparte&rsquo;s departure for Germany, the vigilance of
+      the police has much increased: our patrols are doubled during the night,
+      and our spies more numerous and more insolent during the day. Many
+      suspected persons have also been exiled to some distance from this
+      capital, while others, for a measure of safety, have been shut up in the
+      Temple, or in the Castle of Vincennes. These &lsquo;lettres de cachet&rsquo;, or
+      mandates of arrest, are expedited during the Emperor&rsquo;s absence exclusively
+      by his brother Louis, after a report, or upon a request, of the Minister
+      of Police, Fouche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a drunkard and
+      a libertine. When a young and unprincipled man of such propensities enjoys
+      an unrestrained authority, it cannot be surprising to hear that he has
+      abused it. He had not been his brother&rsquo;s military viceroy for twenty-four
+      hours before one set of our Parisians were amused, while others were
+      shocked and scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised by His
+      Imperial Highness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the boxes, he
+      despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the ground, and to find
+      out who she was. All gentlemen attached to his person or household are
+      also his pimps, and are no novices in forming or executing plans of
+      seduction. Caulincourt (the officer he employed in this affair) returned
+      soon, but had succeeded only in one part of the business. He had not been
+      able to speak to the lady, but was informed that she had only been married
+      a fortnight to a manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her side,
+      jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress. He gave at the same time
+      as his opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police commissary
+      to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some pretext or other,
+      while some of the friends of Prince Louis took advantage of the confusion
+      to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel. An order was directly
+      signed by Louis, according to which the police commissary, Chazot, was to
+      arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of Lyons, and put him into a post-chaise,
+      under the care of two gendarmes, who were to see him safe to Lyons, where
+      he was to sign a promise of not returning to Paris without the permission
+      of Government, being suspected of stockjobbing (agiotage). Everything
+      succeeded according to the proposal of Caulincourt, and Louis found Madame
+      Leboure crying in his saloon. It is said that she promised to surrender
+      her virtue upon condition of only once more seeing her husband, to be
+      certain that he was not murdered, but that Louis refused, and obtained by
+      brutal force, and the assistance of his infamous associates, that conquest
+      over her honour which had not been yielded to his entreaties or threats.
+      His enjoyment, however, was but of short continuance; he had no sooner
+      fallen asleep than his poor injured victim left the bed, and, flying into
+      his anteroom, stabbed herself with his sword. On the next morning she was
+      found a corpse, weltering in her blood. In the hope of burying this infamy
+      in secrecy, her corpse was, on the next evening, when it was dark, put
+      into a sack, and thrown into the river, where, being afterwards
+      discovered, the police agents gave out that she had fallen the victim of
+      assassins. But when Madame Leboure was thus seized at the opera, besides
+      her husband, her parents and a brother were in her company, and the latter
+      did not lose sight of the carriage in which his sister was placed till it
+      had entered the hotel of Louis Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with
+      his father, in vain claimed her. As soon as the husband was informed of
+      the untimely end of his wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot
+      himself immediately afterwards through the head, but his own head was not
+      the place where he should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it the
+      cause of his wretchedness would only have been an act of retaliation, in a
+      country where power forces the law to lie dormant, and where justice is
+      invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our
+      fashionable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe the
+      word &lsquo;amuse&rsquo; is not improperly employed in this instance. At a dozen
+      parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure has always
+      been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of blame, except at
+      Madame Fouche&rsquo;s, where Madame Leboure was very much blamed indeed for
+      having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end
+      tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier. A
+      man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal
+      tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six
+      hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work
+      in the galleys for twenty years. His daughter, a young girl under fifteen,
+      who lived with her grandmother (having lost her mother), went, accompanied
+      by the old lady, and presented a petition to Louis, in favour of her
+      father. Her youth and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the
+      unprincipled libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the
+      colour of clemency to guilt. He ordered her to call on his chamberlain,
+      Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer. There, either
+      seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by
+      delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of
+      release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that
+      he added her to the number of his regular mistresses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter in
+      her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the Imperial
+      Treasury, for twelve thousand livres&mdash;destined to pay the upholsterer
+      who had furnished her apartment. This gave him, no doubt, the idea of
+      making the Prince pay a higher value for his child, and he forged another
+      order for sixty thousand livres&mdash;so closely resembling it that it was
+      without suspicion acquitted by the Imperial Treasurer. Possessing this
+      money, he fabricated a pass, in the name of Louis, as a courier carrying
+      despatches to the Emperor in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived
+      safe on the other side of the Rhine. His forgeries were only discovered
+      after he had written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his
+      daughter of all knowledge of what he had done. In the first moment of
+      anger, her Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since
+      forgiven her, and taken her back to his favour. This trick of Deroux has
+      pleased Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of his
+      dangerous talent and vicious character. He had once before released
+      himself with a forged order from the Minister of Police, whose handwriting
+      he had only seen for a minute upon his own mandate of imprisonment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though loudly complained of by the Cabinet of St. Cloud,
+      the Cabinet of St. Petersburg has conducted itself in these critical times
+      with prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy. In
+      its connections with our Government it has never lost sight of its own
+      dignity, and, therefore, never endured without resentment those
+      impertinent innovations in the etiquette of our Court, and in the manner
+      and language of our Emperor to the representatives of legitimate
+      Sovereigns. Had similar becoming sentiments directed the councils of all
+      other Princes and the behaviour of their Ambassadors here, spirited
+      remonstrances might have moderated the pretensions or passions of upstart
+      vanity, while a forbearance and silence, equally impolitic and shameful,
+      have augmented insolence by flattering the pride of an insupportable and
+      outrageous ambition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Emperor of Russia would not have been so well represented here, had he
+      not been so wisely served and advised in his council chamber at St.
+      Petersburg. Ignorance and folly commonly select fools for their agents,
+      while genius and capacity employ men of their own mould, and of their own
+      cast. It is a remarkable truth that, notwithstanding the frequent
+      revolutions in Russia, since the death of Peter the First the ministerial
+      helm has always been in able hands; the progressive and uninterrupted
+      increase of the real and relative power of the Russian Empire evinces the
+      reality of this assertion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Russian Chancellor, Count Alexander Woronzoff, may be justly called
+      the chief of political veterans, whether his talents or long services are
+      considered. Catherine II., though a voluptuous Princess, was a great
+      Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and it was her unbiased choice
+      that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet young, in her councils. Though the
+      intrigues of favourites have sometimes removed him, he always retired with
+      the esteem of his Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or
+      cringing to return. He is admired by all who have the honour of
+      approaching him, as much for his obliging condescension as for his great
+      information. No petty views, no petty caprices, no petty vengeances find
+      room in his generous bosom. He is known to have conferred benefactions,
+      not only on his enemies, but on those who, at the very time, were
+      meditating his destruction. His opinion is that a patriotic Minister
+      should regard no others as his enemies but those conspiring against their
+      country, and acknowledge no friends or favourites incapable of well
+      serving the State. Prince de Z&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; waited on him
+      one day, and, after hesitating some time, began to compliment him on his
+      liberal sentiments, and concluded by asking the place of a governor for
+      his cousin, with whom he had reason to suppose the Count much offended. &ldquo;I
+      am happy,&rdquo; said His Excellency, &ldquo;to oblige you, and to do my duty at the
+      same time. Here is a libel he wrote against me, and presented to the
+      Empress, who graciously has communicated it to me, in answer to my
+      recommendation of him yesterday to the place you ask for him to-day. Read
+      what I have written on the libel, and you will be convinced that it will
+      not be my fault if he is not to-day a governor.&rdquo; In two hours afterwards
+      the nomination was announced to Prince de Z&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+      who was himself at the head of a cabal against the Minister. In any
+      country such an act would have been laudable, but where despotism rules
+      with unopposed sway, it is both honourable and praiseworthy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prince Adam Czartorinsky, the assistant of Count Woronzoff, and Minister
+      of the foreign department, unites, with the vigour of youth, the
+      experience of age. He has travelled in most countries of Europe, not
+      solely to figure at Courts, to dance at balls, to look at pictures, or to
+      collect curiosities, but to study the character of the people, the laws by
+      which they are governed, and their moral or social influence with regard
+      to their comforts or misery. He therefore brought back with him a stock of
+      knowledge not to be acquired from books, but only found in the world by
+      frequenting different and opposite societies with observation,
+      penetration, and genius. With manners as polished as his mind is well
+      informed, he not only, possesses the favour, but the friendship of his
+      Prince, and, what is still more rare, is worthy of both. All Sovereigns
+      have favourites, few ever had any friends; because it is more easy to
+      flatter vanity, than to display a liberal disinterestedness; to bow meanly
+      than to instruct or to guide with delicacy and dignity; to abuse the
+      confidence of the Prince than to use it to his honour, and to the
+      advantage of his Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That such a Monarch as an Alexander, and such Ministers as Count Woronzoff
+      and Prince Czartorinsky, should appoint a Count Markof to a high and
+      important post, was not unexpected by any one not ignorant of his merit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Count Markof was, early in the reign of Catherine II., employed in the
+      office of the foreign department at St. Petersburg, and was, whilst young,
+      entrusted with several important negotiations at the Courts of Berlin and
+      Vienna., when Prussia had proposed the first partition of Poland. He
+      afterward went on his travels, from which he was recalled to fill the
+      place of an Ambassador to the late King of Sweden, Gustavus III. He was
+      succeeded, in 1784, at Stockholm, by Count Muschin Puschin, after being
+      appointed a Secretary of State in his own country, a post he occupied with
+      distinction, until the death of Catherine II., when Paul the First
+      revenged upon him, as well as on most others of the faithful servants of
+      this Princess, his discontent with his mother. He was then exiled to his
+      estates, where he retired with the esteem of all those who had known him.
+      In 1801, immediately after his accession to the throne, Alexander invited
+      Count Markof to his Court and Council, and the trusty but difficult task
+      of representing a legitimate Sovereign at the Court of our upstart usurper
+      was conferred on him. I imagine that I see the great surprise of this
+      nobleman, when, for the first time, he entered the audience-chamber of our
+      little great man, and saw him fretting, staring, swearing, abusing to
+      right and to left, for one smile conferring twenty frowns, and for one
+      civil word making use of fifty hard expressions, marching in the
+      diplomatic audience as at the head of his troops, and commanding foreign
+      Ambassadors as his French soldiers. I have heard that the report of Count
+      Markof to his Court, describing this new and rare show, is a chef-d&rsquo;oeuvre
+      of wit, equally amusing and instructive. He is said to have requested of
+      his Cabinet new and particular orders how to act&mdash;whether as the
+      representative of an independent Sovereign, or, as most of the other
+      members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, like a valet of the
+      First Consul; and that, in the latter case, he implored as a favour, an
+      immediate recall; preferring, had he no other choice left, sooner to work
+      in the mines at Siberia than to wear, in France the disgraceful fetters of
+      a Bonaparte. His subsequent dignified conduct proves the answer of his
+      Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Talleyrand&rsquo;s craft and dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of
+      Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by
+      the First Consul. All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery was
+      made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador. Sometimes he was
+      reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time protection
+      was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that he was a
+      Sardinian subject. Russian travellers were insulted, and detained on the
+      most frivolous pretences. Two Russian noblemen were even arrested on our
+      side of the Rhine, because Talleyrand had forgotten to sign his name to
+      their passes, which were otherwise in order. The fact was that our
+      Minister suspected them of carrying some papers which he wanted to see,
+      and, therefore, wrote his name with an ink of such a composition that,
+      after a certain number of days, everything written with it disappeared.
+      Their effects and papers were strictly searched by an agent preceding them
+      from this capital, but nothing was found, our Minister being misinformed
+      by his spies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Count Markof left Sweden, he carried with him an actress of the
+      French theatre at Stockholm, Madame Hus, an Alsatian by birth, but who had
+      quitted her country twelve years before the Revolution, and could,
+      therefore, never be included among emigrants. She had continued as a
+      mistress with this nobleman, is the mother of several children by him, and
+      an agreeable companion to him, who has never been married. As I have often
+      said, Talleyrand is much obliged to any foreign diplomatic agent who
+      allows him to be the indirect provider or procurer of his mistresses.
+      After in vain tempting Count Markof with new objects, he introduced to the
+      acquaintance of Madame Hus some of his female emissaries. Their
+      manoeuvres, their insinuations, and even their presents were all thrown
+      away. The lady remained the faithful friend, and therefore refused with
+      indignation to degrade herself into a spy on her lover. Our Minister then
+      first discovered that, not only was Madame Hus an emigrant, but had been a
+      great benefactress and constant companion of emigrants at St. Petersburg,
+      and, of course, deserved to be watched, if not punished. Count Markof is
+      reported to have said to Talleyrand on this grave subject, in the presence
+      of two other foreign Ambassadors:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Apropos! what shall I do to prevent my poor Madame Hus from being shot as
+      an emigrant, and my poor children from becoming prematurely orphans?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; said our diplomatic oracle, &ldquo;she should have petitioned the
+      First Consul for a permission to return, to France before she entered it;
+      but out of regard for you, if she is prudent, she will not, I daresay, be
+      troubled by our Government.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should be sorry if she was not,&rdquo; replied the Count, with a significant
+      look; and here this grand affair ended, to the great entertainment of
+      those foreign agents who dared to smile or to laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The Legion of Honour, though only proclaimed upon
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s assumption of the Imperial rank, dates from the first year of
+      his consulate. To prepare the public mind for a progressive elevation of
+      himself, and for consequential distinctions among all classes of his
+      subjects, he distributed among the military, arms of honour, to which were
+      attached precedence and privileges granted by him, and, therefore, liable
+      to cease with his power or life. The number of these arms increased in
+      proportion to the approach of the period fixed for the change of his title
+      and the erection of his throne. When he judged them numerous enough to
+      support his changes, he made all these wearers of arms of honour knights.
+      Never before were so many chevaliers created en masse; they amounted to no
+      less than twenty-two thousand four hundred, distributed in the different
+      corps of different armies, but principally in the army of England. To
+      these were afterwards joined five thousand nine hundred civil
+      functionaries, men of letters, artists, etc. To remove, however, all ideas
+      of equality, even among the members of the Legion of Honour, they were
+      divided into four classes&mdash;grand officers, commanders, officers, and
+      simple legionaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one who has observed Bonaparte&rsquo;s incessant endeavours to intrude
+      himself among the Sovereigns of Europe, was convinced that he would
+      cajole, or force, as many of them as he could into his revolutionary
+      knighthood; but I heard men, who are not ignorant of the selfishness and
+      corruption of our times, deny the possibility of any independent Prince
+      suffering his name to be registered among criminals of every description,
+      from the thief who picked the pockets of his fellow citizens in the
+      street, down to the regicide who sat in judgment and condemned his King;
+      from the plunderers who have laid waste provinces, republics, and
+      kingdoms, down to the assassins who shot, drowned, or guillotined their
+      countrymen en masse. For my part, I never had but one opinion, and,
+      unfortunately, it has turned out a just one. I always was convinced that
+      those Princes who received other presents from Bonaparte could have no
+      plausible excuse to decline his ribands, crosses, and stars. But who could
+      have presumed to think that, in return for these blood-stained baubles,
+      they would have sacrificed those honourable and dignified ornaments which,
+      for ages past, have been the exclusive distinction of what birth had
+      exalted, virtue made eminent, talents conspicuous, honour illustrious, or
+      valour meritorious? Who would have dared to say that the Prussian Eagle
+      and the Spanish Golden Fleece should thus be prostituted, thus polluted? I
+      do not mean by this remark to throw any blame on the conferring those and
+      other orders on Napoleon Bonaparte, or even on his brothers; I know it is
+      usual, between legitimate Sovereigns in alliance, sometimes to exchange
+      their knighthoods; but to debase royal orders so much as to present them
+      to a Cambaceres, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Bernadotte, a Fesch, and other
+      vile and criminal wretches, I do not deny to have excited my astonishment
+      as well as my indignation. What honest&mdash;I do not say what noble&mdash;subjects
+      of Prussia, or of Spain, will hereafter think themselves rewarded for
+      their loyalty, industry, patriotism, or zeal, when they remember that
+      their Sovereigns have nothing to give but what the rebel has obtained, the
+      robber worn, the murderer vilified, and the regicide debased?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb214" id="pb214"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pb214.jpg (55K)" src="images/pb214.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The number of grand officers of the Legion of Honour does not yet amount
+      to more than eighty, according to a list circulated at Milan last spring,
+      of which I have seen a copy. Of these grand officers, three had been
+      shoemakers, two tailors, four bakers, four barbers, six friars, eight
+      abbes, six officers, three pedlers, three chandlers, seven drummers,
+      sixteen soldiers, and eight regicides; four were lawful Kings, and the six
+      others, Electors or Princes of the most ancient houses in Europe. I have
+      looked over our, own official list, and, as far as I know, the calculation
+      is exact, both with regard to the number and to the quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This new institution of knighthood produced a singular effect on my vain
+      and giddy, countrymen, who, for twelve years before, had scarcely seen a
+      star or a riband, except those of foreign Ambassadors, who were frequently
+      insulted when wearing them. It became now the fashion to be a knight, and
+      those who really were not so, put pinks, or rather blooms, or flowers of a
+      darker red, in their buttonholes, so as to resemble, and to be taken at a
+      distance for, the red ribands of the members of the Legion of Honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man of the name of Villeaume, an engraver by profession, took advantage
+      of this knightly fashion and mania, and sold for four louis d&rsquo;or, not only
+      the stars, but pretended letters of knighthood, said to be procured by his
+      connection with persons of the household of the Emperor. In a month&rsquo;s
+      time, according to a register kept by him, he had made twelve hundred and
+      fifty knights. When his fraud was discovered, he was already out of the
+      way, safe with his money; and, notwithstanding the researches of the
+      police, has not since been taken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A person calling himself Baron von Rinken, a subject and an agent of one
+      of the many Princes of Hohenlohe, according to his own assertion, arrived
+      here with real letters and patents of knighthood, which he offered for
+      sale for three hundred livres. The stars of this Order were as large as
+      the star of the grand officers of the Legion of Honour, and nearly
+      resembled it; but the ribands were of a different colour. He had already
+      disposed of a dozen of these stars, when he was taken up by the police and
+      shut up in the Temple, where he still remains. Four other agents of
+      inferior petty German Princes have also been arrested for offering the
+      Orders of their Sovereigns for sale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Captain Rouvais, who received six wounds in his campaign under Pichegru
+      in 1794, wore the star of the Legion of Honour without being nominated a
+      knight. He has been tried by a military commission, deprived of his
+      pension, and condemned to four years&rsquo; imprisonment in irons. He proved
+      that he had presented fourteen petitions to Bonaparte for obtaining this
+      mark of distinction, but in vain; while hundreds of others, who had hardly
+      seen an enemy, or, at the most, made but one campaign, or been once
+      wounded, had succeeded in their demands. As soon as sentence had been
+      pronounced against him, he took a small pistol from his pocket, and shot
+      himself through the head, saying, &ldquo;Some one else will soon do the same for
+      Bonaparte.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A cobbler, of the name of Matthieu, either in a fit of madness or from
+      hatred to the new order of things, decorated himself with the large riband
+      of the Legion of Honour, and had an old star fastened on his coat. Thus
+      accoutred, he went into the Palais Royal, in the middle of the day, got
+      upon a chair, and began to speak to his audience of the absurdity of true
+      republicans not being on a level, even under an Emperor, and putting on,
+      like him, all his ridiculous ornaments. &ldquo;We are here,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;either
+      all grand officers, or there exist no grand officers at all; we have all
+      fought and paid for liberty, and for the Revolution, as much as Bonaparte,
+      and have, therefore, the same right and claim with him.&rdquo; Here a police
+      agent and some gendarmes interrupted his eloquence by taking him into
+      custody. When Fouche asked him what he meant by such rebellious behaviour,
+      he replied that it was only a trial to see whether destiny had intended
+      him to become an Emperor or to remain a cobbler. On the next day he was
+      shot as a conspirator. I saw the unfortunate man in the Palais Royal; his
+      eyes looked wild, and his words were often incoherent. He was certainly a
+      subject more deserving a place in a madhouse than in a tomb.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing too
+      much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing it in
+      preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour. He was given to understand
+      that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial etiquette did not
+      permit any subjects to display their knighthood of the Prussian Order. In
+      Madame Bonaparte&rsquo;s last drawing-room, before His Imperial Majesty set out
+      for the Rhine, he was ornamented with the Spanish, Neapolitan, Prussian,
+      and Portuguese orders, together with those of the French Legion of Honour
+      and of the Italian Iron Crown. I have seen the Emperor Paul, who was also
+      an amateur of ribands and stars, but never with so many at once. I have
+      just heard that the Grand Master of Malta has presented Napoleon with the
+      Grand Cross of the Maltese Order. This is certainly a negative compliment
+      to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then sectaries, the
+      Turks and Mussulmans, &ldquo;that the Grand Master, Commanders, Knights, and
+      Order of Malta existed no more.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies, that
+      the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of female
+      knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our Court
+      ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc., are to
+      be members. The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are to be
+      hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses,
+      Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into
+      this revolutionary sisterhood. Had the Continent remained tranquil, it
+      would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum. I
+      should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and
+      brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only
+      say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in
+      petto. Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has
+      been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
+      it is truly superb. The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at
+      six hundred thousand livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Since Bonaparte&rsquo;s departure for Germany, fifteen
+      individuals have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the&mdash;Western
+      Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple. Their crime is not exactly
+      known, but private letters from those countries relate that they were
+      recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were entrusted
+      as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis XVIII. to ask
+      for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia, Sweden, and
+      England to support his claims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit. Had the
+      prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they
+      would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed
+      without a trial. I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our Government,
+      as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments during our
+      armies&rsquo; occupation elsewhere. We have, nevertheless, two movable columns
+      of six thousand men each in the country, or in its vicinity, and it would
+      be not only impolitic, but a cruelty, to engage or allure the unfortunate
+      people of these wretched countries into any plots, which, situated as
+      affairs now are, would be productive of great and certain evil to them,
+      without even the probability of any benefit to the cause of royalty and of
+      the Bourbons. I do not mean to say that there are not those who rebel
+      against Bonaparte&rsquo;s tyranny, or that the Bourbons have no friends; on the
+      contrary, the latter are not few, and the former very numerous. But a kind
+      of apathy, the effect of unavailing resistance to usurpation and
+      oppression, has seized on most minds, and annihilated what little remained
+      of our never very great public spirit. We are tired of everything, even of
+      our existence, and care no more whether we are governed by a Maximilian
+      Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a Barras or by Louis XVIII.
+      Except, perhaps, among the military, or among some ambitious schemers,
+      remnants of former factions, I do not believe a Moreau, a Macdonald, a
+      Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the Emperor, and formerly
+      popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in all France; at least,
+      as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present
+      formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse
+      may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from
+      their present torpid state. But until such an event, we shall remain as we
+      are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing our children and treasures for a
+      cause we detest, and for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it
+      certainly does, no honour to my nation when one million desperados of
+      civil and military banditti are suffered to govern, tyrannize, and
+      pillage, at their ease and undisturbed, thirty millions of people, to whom
+      their past crimes are known, and who have every reason to apprehend their
+      future wickedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does not
+      deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
+      poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
+      people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
+      contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
+      submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
+      appearance. I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who formerly
+      were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of twelve or
+      eighteen hundred livres&mdash;per year, with which they are obliged to
+      live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere labour
+      offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows on the
+      necessitous. You know that here all trade and all commerce are at a stand
+      or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling as their
+      manners are vulgar and brutal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a revenue
+      of one hundred and fifty thousand livres&mdash;subsist now on fifteen
+      hundred livres&mdash;per year; and this sum must support six individuals&mdash;the
+      father and mother, with four children! It does so, indeed, by an
+      arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
+      supper three times, in the week. They endure their distress with tolerable
+      cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the garrets of
+      a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once their groom, but
+      who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve years, as a
+      conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and Flanders,
+      twelve millions of livres. He has kindly let my friend understand that his
+      youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid to his wife, being
+      informed that she has a good education. All the four daughters are good
+      musicians, good drawers, and very able with their needles. By their
+      talents they supported their parents and themselves during their
+      emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use or advantage.
+      Those upstarts who want instruction or works of this sort apply to the
+      first, most renowned, and fashionable masters or mistresses; while others,
+      and those the greatest number, cannot afford even to pay the inferior ones
+      and the most cheap. This family is one of the many that regret having
+      returned from their emigration. But, you may ask, why do they not go back
+      again to Germany? First, it would expose them to suspicion, and, perhaps,
+      to ruin, were they to demand passes; and if this danger or difficulty were
+      removed, they have no money for such a long journey.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the families
+      of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen. Paper money, a maximum, and
+      requisitions, have reduced those that did not share in the crimes and
+      pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility. And,
+      contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in commercial
+      speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a general
+      stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital,
+      protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of
+      1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines put
+      together. The expenses of these new merchants are, however, much greater
+      than sixteen years ago, the profit less, and the credit still less than
+      the profit. Hence numerous bankruptcies, frauds, swindling, forgeries, and
+      other evils of immorality, extravagance, and misery. The fair and honest
+      dealers suffer most from the intrusion of these infamous speculators, who
+      expecting, like other vile men wallowing in wealth under their eyes, to
+      make rapid fortunes, and to escape detection as well as punishment&mdash;commit
+      crimes to soothe disappointment. Nothing is done but for ready money, and
+      even bankers&rsquo; bills, or bills accepted by bankers, are not taken in
+      payment before the signatures are avowed by the parties concerned. You can
+      easily conceive what confusion, what expenses, and what; loss of time
+      these precautions must occasion; but the numerous forgeries and
+      fabrications have made them absolutely necessary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The farmers and landholders are better off, but they also complain of the
+      heavy taxes, and low price paid for what they bring to the market, which
+      frequently, for want of ready money, remains long unsold. They take
+      nothing but cash in payment; for, notwithstanding the endeavours of our
+      Government, the notes of the Bank of France have never been in circulation
+      among them. They have also been subject to losses by the fluctuation of
+      paper money, by extortions, requisitions, and by the maximum. In this
+      class of my countrymen remains still some little national spirit and some
+      independence of character; but these are far from being favourable to
+      Bonaparte, or to the Imperial Government, which the yearly increase of
+      taxes, and, above all, the conscription, have rendered extremely odious.
+      You may judge of the great difference in the taxation of lands and landed
+      property now and under our Kings, when I inform you that a friend of mine,
+      who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the Western Departments, twenty-one
+      farms, paid less in contribution for them all than he does now for the
+      three farms he has recovered from the wreck of his fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;In a military empire, ruled by a military despot, it is a
+      necessary policy that the education of youth should also be military. In
+      all our public schools or prytanees, a boy, from the moment of entering,
+      is registered in a company, and regularly drilled, exercised, and
+      reviewed, punished for neglect or fault according to martial law, and
+      advanced if displaying genius or application. All our private schools that
+      wish for the protection of Government are forced to submit to the same
+      military rules, and, therefore, most of our conscripts, so far from being
+      recruits, are fit for any service as soon as put into requisition. The
+      fatal effects to the independence of Europe to be dreaded from this sole
+      innovation, I apprehend, have been too little considered by other nations.
+      A great Power, that can, without obstacle, and with but little expense, in
+      four weeks increase its disposable military force from one hundred and
+      twenty to one hundred and eighty thousand young men, accustomed to
+      military duty from their youth, must finally become the master of all
+      other or rival Powers, and dispose at leisure of empires, kingdoms,
+      principalities, and republics. NOTHING CAN SAVE THEM BUT THE ADOPTION OF
+      SIMILAR MEASURES FOR THEIR PRESERVATION AS HAVE BEEN ADOPTED FOR THEIR
+      SUBJUGATION.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When l&rsquo;Etat Militaire for the year 13 (a work containing the official
+      statement of our military forces) was presented to Bonaparte by Berthier,
+      the latter said: &ldquo;Sire, I lay before Your Majesty the book of the destiny
+      of the world, which your hands direct as the sovereign guide of the armies
+      of your empire.&rdquo; This compliment is a truth, and therefore no flattery. It
+      might as justly have been addressed to a Moreau, a Macdonald, a Le Courbe,
+      or to any other general, as to Bonaparte, because a superior number of
+      well disciplined troops, let them be well or even indifferently commanded,
+      will defeat those inferior in number. Three to one would even overpower an
+      army of giants. Add to it the unity of plans, of dispositions, and of
+      execution, which Bonaparte enjoys exclusively over such a great number of
+      troops, while ten, or perhaps fifty, will direct or contradict every
+      movement of his opponents. I tremble when I meditate on Berthier&rsquo;s
+      assertion; may I never live to see it realized, and to see all hitherto
+      independent nations prostrated, acknowledge that Bonaparte and destiny are
+      the same, and the same distributor of good and evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the bad consequences of this our military education of youth is a
+      total absence of all religious and moral lessons. Arnaud had, last August,
+      the courage to complain of this infamous neglect, in the National
+      Institute. &ldquo;The youth,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;receive no other instruction but lessons
+      to march, to fire, to bow, to dance, to sit, to lie, and to impose with a
+      good grace. I do not ask for Spartans or Romans, but we want Athenians,
+      and our schools are only forming Sybarites.&rdquo; Within twenty-four hours
+      afterwards, Arnaud was visited by a police agent, accompanied by two
+      gendarmes, with an order signed by Fouche, which condemned him to reside
+      at Orleans, and not to return to Paris without the permission of the
+      Government,&mdash;a punishment regarded here as very moderate for such an
+      indiscreet zeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A schoolmaster at Auteuil, near this capital, of the name of Gouron, had a
+      private seminary, organized upon the footing of our former colleges. In
+      some few months he was offered more pupils than he could well attend to,
+      and his house shortly became very fashionable, even for our upstarts, who
+      sent their children there in preference. He was ordered before Fouche last
+      Christmas, and commanded to change the hours hitherto employed in teaching
+      religion and morals, to a military exercise and instruction, as both more
+      necessary and more salubrious for French youth. Having replied that such
+      an alteration was contrary to his plan and agreement with the parents of
+      his scholars, the Minister stopped him short by telling him that he must
+      obey what had been prescribed by Government, or stand the consequences of
+      his refractory spirit. Having consulted with his friends and patrons, he
+      divided the hours, and gave half of the time usually allotted to religion
+      or morality to the study of military exercise. His pupils, however,
+      remained obstinate, broke the drum, and tore and burnt the colours he had
+      bought. As this was not his fault, he did not expect any further
+      disturbance, particularly after having reported to the police both his
+      obedience and the unforeseen result. But last March his house was suddenly
+      surrounded in the night by gendarmes, and some police agents entered it.
+      All the boys were ordered to dress and to pack up their effects, and to
+      follow the gendarmes to several other schools, where the Government had
+      placed them, and of which their parents would be informed. Gouron, his
+      wife, four ushers, and six servants, were all arrested and carried to the
+      police office, where Fouche, after reproaching them for their fanatical
+      behaviour, as he termed it, told them, as they were so fond of teaching
+      religious and moral duties, a suitable situation had been provided for
+      them in Cayenne, where the negroes stood sadly in need of their early
+      arrival, for which reason they would all set out on that very morning for
+      Rochefort. When Gouron asked what was to become of his property,
+      furniture, etc., he was told that his house was intended by Government for
+      a preparatory school, and would, with its contents, be purchased, and the
+      amount paid him in lands in Cayenne. It is not necessary to say that this
+      example of Imperial justice had the desired effect on all other refractory
+      private schoolmasters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The parents of Gouron&rsquo;s pupils were, with a severe reprimand, informed
+      where their sons had been placed, and where they would be educated in a
+      manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them not to remove them,
+      without a previous notice to the police. A hatter, of the name of Maille,
+      however, ordered his son home, because he had been sent to a dearer school
+      than the former. In his turn he was carried before the police, and, after
+      a short examination of a quarter of an hour, was permitted, with his wife
+      and two children, to join their friend Gouron at Rochefort, and to settle
+      with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be given him for his property,
+      in France. These particulars were related to me by a neighbour whose son
+      had, for two years previous to this, been under Gouron&rsquo;s care, but who was
+      now among those placed out by our Government. The boy&rsquo;s present master, he
+      said, was a man of a notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was
+      intimidated, and weak enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt,
+      his personal safety to the future happiness of his child. In your country,
+      you little comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the
+      hands of our rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has been
+      mistaken abroad for affection and content.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of petty
+      tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time, and that,
+      therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful, is also the
+      most occupied of his colleagues. So he certainly is, but, last year, a new
+      organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche was
+      allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors of State, and an augmentation of
+      sixty-four police commissaries. The French Empire was then divided into
+      four arrondissements, with regard to the general police, not including
+      Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of police under the
+      Minister. Of the first of these arrondissements, the Counsellor of State,
+      Real, is a kind of Deputy Minister; the Counsellor of State, Miot, is the
+      same of the second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet de la Lozere, of the
+      third; and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the fourth. The secret
+      police agents, formerly called spies, were also considerably increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXVIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope&rsquo;s Nuncio
+      was for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame Bonaparte&rsquo;s
+      drawing-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness to
+      think himself fortunate in continuing to govern the Ecclesiastical States,
+      without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangements that might be
+      thought necessary or proper by the Government in France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the
+      Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military
+      supporters; Cambacere&rsquo;s brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and Cardinal,
+      and one of Lebrun&rsquo;s, and two of Berthier&rsquo;s cousins are Bishops. As,
+      however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or generals, have,
+      like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous scenes
+      of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes hesitated about sanctioning
+      their promotions. This was the case last summer, when General Dessolles&rsquo;s
+      brother was transferred from the Bishopric of Digne to that of Chambry,
+      and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother of General Miollis,
+      who was a curate of Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix. This curate had not
+      only been one of the first to throw up his letters of priesthood at the
+      Jacobin Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied the divinity of
+      the Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of Parisian atheists,
+      the worship of a Goddess of Reason in a common prostitute with whom he
+      lived. The notoriety of these abominations made even his parishioners at
+      Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to regard him as their pastor,
+      though several of them had been imprisoned, fined, and even transported as
+      fanatics, or as refractory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had been
+      promised, among other things, that, for the future, his conscience should
+      not be wounded by having presented to him for the prelacy any persons but
+      those of the purest morals of the French Empire; and that all his
+      objections should be attended to, in case of promotions; his scruples
+      removed, or his refusal submitted to. When Cardinal Fesch demanded His
+      Holiness&rsquo;s Bull for the curate Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State,
+      Gonsalvi, showed no less than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy, which
+      made him unworthy of such a dignity. To this was replied that, having
+      obtained an indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper subject;
+      above all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the French. The
+      Pope&rsquo;s Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of the
+      Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to
+      Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he,
+      nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of this
+      request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new Imperial
+      etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the representatives of
+      Sovereigns. On the same evening the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome,
+      and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confirmed by the
+      Pope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge of the
+      intention of our Government to adhere to its other engagements; but at
+      Rome, as well as in most other Continental capitals, the Sovereign is the
+      dupe of the perversity of his Counsellors and Ministers, who are the
+      tools, and not seldom the pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if possible,
+      still worse served than in this country. Some of the Bishops there, after
+      having done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and fought
+      against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, from their
+      intrigues, are the terror of all the married part of their flock. The
+      Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a merchant, by whom he has two children;
+      and, that the public may not be mistaken as to their real father, the
+      merchant received a sum of money to establish himself at Brescia, and has
+      not seen his wife for these two years past. General Gourion, who was last
+      spring in Italy, has assured me that he read the advertisement of a curate
+      after his concubine, who had eloped with another curate; and that the
+      Police Minister at Milan openly licensed women to be the housekeepers of
+      priests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but relinquished
+      then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary for the musket.
+      He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured a divorce in a
+      month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another, deserted by him in her
+      turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and eloped from her husband.
+      Last spring he returned to the bosom of the Church, and, by making our
+      Empress a present of a valuable diamond cross, of which he had pillaged
+      the statue of a Madonna, he obtained the dignity of a grand vicar, to the
+      great edification, no doubt, of all those who had seen him before the
+      altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the name of
+      Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys in the same
+      cathedral where he officiates as a priest. Their mother is dead, but her
+      daughter, by another priest, is now their father&rsquo;s mistress. This
+      incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the girl does the honours
+      of the grand vicar&rsquo;s house, and, with naivete enough, tells the guests and
+      visitors of her happiness in having succeeded her mother. I have this
+      anecdote from an officer who heard her make use of that expression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and unprincipled;
+      but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they take care to save the
+      appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt is the same, the scandal is
+      less. Bonaparte pretends to be severe against all those ecclesiastics who
+      are accused of any irregularities after having made their peace with the
+      Church. A curate of Picardy, suspected of gallantry, and another of
+      Normandy, accused of inebriety, were last month, without further trial or
+      ceremony than the report of the Minister Portalis, delivered over to
+      Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne, after they had been stripped of
+      their gowns. At the same time, Cardinal Cambaceres and Cardinal Fesch,
+      equally notorious for their excesses, were taken no notice of, except that
+      they were laughed at in our Court circles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government is
+      totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious establishment when
+      the present race of priests is extinguished; which, in the course of
+      nature, must happen in less than thirty years. Our military system and our
+      military education discourage all young men from entering into orders;
+      while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and more
+      profitable than the Church. Already we want curates, though several have
+      been imported from Germany and Spain, and, in some departments, four, and
+      even six parishes have only one curate to serve them all. The Bishops
+      exhort, and the parents advise their children to study theology; but then
+      the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well as the
+      student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the ranks, and
+      accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they are either
+      unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else. The Pope, with
+      all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was unable to procure an
+      exception from the conscription of young men preparing themselves for
+      priesthood. Bonaparte always answered: &ldquo;Holy Father, were I to consent to
+      your demand, I should soon have an army of priests, instead of an army of
+      soldiers.&rdquo; Our Emperor is not unacquainted with the real character and
+      spirit of his Volunteers. When the Pope represented the danger of religion
+      expiring in France, for want of priests to officiate at the altars, he was
+      answered that Bonaparte, at the beginning of his consulate, found neither
+      altars nor priests in France; that if his reign survived the latter, the
+      former would always be standing, and survive his reign. He trusted that
+      the chief of the Church would prevent them from being deserted. He assured
+      him that when once he had restored the liberties of the seas, and an
+      uninterrupted tranquillity on the Continent, he should attend more, and
+      perhaps entirely, to the affairs of the Church. He consented, however,
+      that the Pope might institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary
+      for two hundred young Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military
+      conscription. This is the stock from which our Church establishment is to
+      be supplied!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXIX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna, and the
+      long stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin, had already
+      caused here many speculations, not quite corresponding with the views and,
+      perhaps, interests of our Court, when our violation of the Prussian
+      territory made our courtiers exclaim: &ldquo;This act proves that the Emperor of
+      the French is in a situation to bid defiance to all the world, and,
+      therefore, no longer courts the neutrality of a Prince whose power is
+      merely artificial; who has indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no
+      regard to claims.&rdquo; Such was the language of those very men who, a month
+      before, declared &ldquo;that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or
+      war in his hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch
+      ever was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of
+      the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to his
+      powerful mediation for the return of peace.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers&rsquo; political jargon has
+      not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered without any
+      official publication. Bonaparte had the adroitness to cajole the Cabinet
+      of Berlin into his interest, in the first month of his consulate,
+      notwithstanding his own critical situation, as well as the critical
+      situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it to
+      his triumphal car and to inculpate it indirectly in his outrages and
+      violations. Convinced, as he thought, of the selfishness which guided all
+      its resolutions, all his attacks and invasions against the law of nations,
+      or independence of States, were either preceded or followed with some
+      offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance. His
+      political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia than his
+      military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in laying the Hanse
+      Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover; or, rather, all these
+      acts of violence and injustice were merely the effects of his ascendency
+      in Prussia. When it is, besides, remembered what provinces Prussia
+      accepted from his bounty, what exchange of presents, of ribands, of
+      private letters passed between Napoleon the First and Frederick William
+      III., between the Empress of the French and the Queen of Prussia, it is
+      not surprising if the Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of the
+      submission of the Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to fear
+      it, or to think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even honour
+      to feel, the numerous Provocations offered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or assert to the contrary, their
+      gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise more that
+      State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense they are
+      liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or meanness into
+      their snares. The more legitimate Sovereigns descend from their true
+      dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they approach the baseness of
+      usurpation and the Machiavellism of rebellion. Like other upstarts, they
+      never suffer an equal. If you do not keep yourself above them, they will
+      crush you beneath them. If they have no reason to fear you, they will
+      create some quarrel to destroy you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said here that Duroc&rsquo;s journey to Berlin was merely to demand a
+      passage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in Franconia,
+      and to prevent the Russian troops from passing through the Prussian
+      territory in Poland. This request is such as might have been expected from
+      our Emperor and his Minister. Whether, however, the tone in which this
+      curious negotiation with a neutral power was begun, or that, at last, the
+      generosity of the Russian Monarch awakened a sense of duty in the Cabinet
+      of Berlin, the arrival of our pacific envoy was immediately followed with
+      warlike preparations. Fortunate, indeed, was it for Prussia to have
+      resorted to her military strength instead of trusting any longer to our
+      friendly assurances. The disasters that have since befallen the Austrian
+      armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our forced marches through neutral
+      Prussia, would otherwise soon have been felt in Westphalia, in
+      Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania. But should His Prussian Majesty not order
+      his troops to act in conjunction with Russia, Austria, England, and
+      Sweden, and that very soon, all efforts against Bonaparte will be vain, as
+      those troops which have dispersed the Austrians and repulsed the Russians
+      will be more than equal to master the Prussians, and one campaign may be
+      sufficient to convince the Prussian Ministers of their folly and errors
+      for years, and to punish them for their ignorance or selfishness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his
+      affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number of
+      spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that
+      Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and inclined to join the
+      confederacy against France. At the last assembly at our Prince
+      Cambaceres&rsquo;s, a rumour circulated that preliminary articles for an
+      offensive alliance with your country had already been signed by the
+      Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg, on one side, and by your Minister
+      to the Court of Berlin on the other; according to which you were to take
+      sixty thousand Prussians and twelve thousand Hessians into your pay, for
+      five years certain. A courier from Duroc was said to have brought this
+      news, which at first made some impression, but it wore away by degrees;
+      and our Government, to judge from the expressions of persons in its
+      confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with Prussia.
+      Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the North of
+      Europe, Bonaparte&rsquo;s numerous and young generals are impatient to enrich
+      themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of Germany are
+      almost exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXX.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The provocations of our Government must have been
+      extraordinary indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of Berlin
+      from its long and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to the friendly
+      intentions of honest Talleyrand, and to the disinterested policy of our
+      generous Bonaparte. To judge its intents from its acts, the favour of the
+      Cabinet of St. Cloud was not only its wish but its want. You must remember
+      that, last year, besides his ordinary Ambassador, Da Lucchesini, His
+      Prussian Majesty was so ill advised as to despatch General Knobelsdorff as
+      his extra representative, to assist at Napoleon&rsquo;s coronation, a
+      degradation of lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples,
+      though surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as
+      last June, the same Knobelsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the
+      honours at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our army in
+      Hanover who chose to attend there. On this occasion the King lodged in a
+      farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of Koestelith, while our
+      sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte &amp; Co., were quartered and treated in
+      style at the castle of Putzbull, fitted up for their accommodation. This
+      was certainly very hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent
+      nor politic. Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are
+      convinced that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not
+      merit to be esteemed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do not confound this Knobelsdorff with the late Field-marshal of that
+      name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then Ambassador at
+      Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him, NON ET SANS PHRASE,
+      the very words this regicide used when he sat in judgment on his King, and
+      voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE. This Knobelsdorff is a very different
+      character. He pretends to be equally conspicuous in the Cabinet as in the
+      field, in the boudoir as in the study. A demi-philosopher, a demi-savant,
+      a demi-gallant and a demi-politician, constitute, all taken together,
+      nothing except an insignificant courtier. I do not know whether he was
+      among those Prussian officers who, in 1798, CRIED when it was inserted in
+      the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte had been killed in an
+      insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain, that were Knobelsdorff to
+      survive Napoleon the First, none of His Imperial Majesty&rsquo;s own dutiful
+      subjects would mourn him more sincerely than this subject of the King of
+      Prussia. He is said to possess a great share of the confidence of his
+      King, who has already employed him in several diplomatic missions. The
+      principal and most requisite qualities in a negotiator are political
+      information, inviolable fidelity, penetrating but unbiased judgment, a
+      dignified firmness, and condescending manners. I have not been often
+      enough in the society of General Knobelsdorff to assert whether nature and
+      education have destined him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian monarchy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von Haugwitz
+      who, in 1792, as Prussian Ambassador at Vienna, arranged the treaty which
+      then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles against the Jacobin Cap of
+      Liberty. It is now said in our diplomatic circle that his second mission
+      to the same capital has for an object the renewal of these ties, which the
+      Treaty of Basle dissolved; and that our Government, to impede his success,
+      or to occasion his recall, before he could have time to conclude, had
+      proposed to Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions of liveres&mdash;which
+      it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality. The present
+      respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that whether the
+      mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His Prussian Majesty
+      confides in his army in preference to our parchments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the foreign
+      department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a friend of the
+      system of neutrality as his predecessor. All the transactions of his
+      administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim that, if he wished his
+      country to take an active part in the present conflict, it would not have
+      been against France, had she not begun the attack with the invasion of
+      Anspach and Bayreuth. Let it be recollected that, since his Ministry,
+      Prussia has acknowledged Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has exchanged
+      orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be present at
+      his coronation,&mdash;not common compliments, even between Princes
+      connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity. Under his
+      administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, and
+      the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been
+      pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against, all
+      these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor a
+      becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on the
+      5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe all our
+      conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not probable
+      that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if
+      self-preservation does not require it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
+      statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice of
+      his Prince. The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister of
+      State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet. On the 26th of January, 1792, as a
+      directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of
+      Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants
+      swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their
+      new Sovereign.&mdash;He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these
+      States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator
+      with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling all
+      differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former post at
+      Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his Government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place
+      he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such
+      information as would enable him to fill it with distinction. I have heard
+      it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid private
+      agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports of what
+      they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations. One of these his
+      agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I to conclude
+      from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very judicious in
+      his selection of private correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed
+      personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post,
+      stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five
+      words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was
+      as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with
+      both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the
+      autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon,
+      assuming an air of diplomatic mystery, even while displaying before me, in
+      a coffee-house, his letters and instructions from his principal. As might
+      be expected, he had the adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple,
+      where, I have been told, the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented
+      him from starving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more
+      knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador, Marquis
+      of Lucchesini. He went with several other philosophers of Italy to admire
+      the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great, who
+      received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed him.
+      I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis&rsquo;s name for the place of
+      a governor of some province that this Monarch said, &ldquo;My subjects of that
+      province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule in my
+      name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend to
+      chastise.&rdquo; This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his
+      sectaries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of Lucchesini
+      was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but he was neither
+      his friend nor his favourite, but his listener. It was first under
+      Frederick William II. that he began his diplomatic career, with an
+      appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late King of Poland. His first
+      act in this post was a treaty signed on the 29th of March, 1790, with the
+      King and Republic of Poland, which changed an elective monarchy into an
+      hereditary one; but, notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had guaranteed
+      this alteration, and the constitution decreed in consequence, in 1791,
+      three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated both, and
+      selfishness banished faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In July, 1790, he assisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the
+      conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch
+      Ambassadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and Turkey.
+      In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers to the
+      Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the Treaty of Peace
+      between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of Germany. In June, 1792, he
+      was a second time sent as a Minister to Warsaw, where he remained until
+      January, 1793, when he was promoted to the post of Ambassador at the Court
+      of Vienna. He continued, however, to reside with His Prussian Majesty
+      during the greatest part of the campaign on the Rhine, and signed, on the
+      24th of June, 1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive and defensive
+      alliance with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy respected not
+      above eighteen months. In October, 1796, he requested his recall, but this
+      his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious expressions; and he could
+      not obtain it until March, 1797. Some disapprobation of the new political
+      plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz in the Cabinet at Berlin is supposed
+      to have occasioned his determination to retire from public employment. As
+      he, however, continued to reside in the capital of Prussia, and, as many
+      believed, secretly intrigued to appear again upon the scene, the
+      nomination, in 1800, to his present important post was as much the
+      consequence of his own desire as of the favour of his King.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful Hotel
+      de l&rsquo;Infantado, where his lady&rsquo;s routs, assemblies, and circles are the
+      resort of our most fashionable gentry. Madame da Lucchesini is more
+      agreeable than handsome, more fit to shine at Berlin than at Paris; for
+      though her manners are elegant, they want that ease, that finish which a
+      German or Italian education cannot teach, nor a German or Italian society
+      confer. To judge from the number of her admirers, she seems to know that
+      she is married to a philosopher. Her husband was born at Lucca, in Italy,
+      and is, therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte&rsquo;s brother-in-law,
+      Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a marker at a
+      billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a shilling, as well
+      as many a box on the ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your
+      countryman, Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of our
+      generals and public functionaries, as unjust as well as disgraceful. At a
+      future General Congress, should ever Bonaparte suffer one to be convoked,
+      except under his auspices and dictature, the distinction and treatment of
+      prisoners of war require to be again regulated, that the valiant warrior
+      may not for the future be confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous
+      spy; nor innocent travellers, provided with regular passes, visiting a
+      country either for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men taken
+      while combating with arms in their hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our ships&mdash;that,
+      during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and Scotland,
+      and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were
+      captured on their return or on their passage; and that your Government
+      never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State
+      criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower. If I am not
+      mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and his
+      suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and men
+      experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow prisoners of
+      war; though the distance is immense between the crime of plotting against
+      the lawful Government of the Princes of the House of Brunswick, and the
+      attempt to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the House of Bonaparte.
+      But, even during the last war, how many of our ships of the line,
+      frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed rebels in
+      Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and yet your
+      generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time when your Sir
+      Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain Wright, were confined in
+      our State prison of the Temple! It is with Governments as with
+      individuals, they ought to be just before they are generous. Had you in
+      1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages so patiently, you would not now
+      have to lament, nor we to blush for, the untimely end of Captain Wright.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the last time that this officer had appeared before the criminal
+      tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was determined on by
+      our Government. His firmness offended, and his patriotism displeased; and
+      as he seemed to possess the confidence of his own Government, it was
+      judged that he was in its secrets; it was, therefore, resolved that, if he
+      refused to become a traitor, he should perish a victim. Desmarets,
+      Fouche&rsquo;s private secretary, who is also the secretary of the secret and
+      haute police, therefore ordered him to another private interrogatory. Here
+      he was offered a considerable sum of money, and the rank of an admiral in
+      our service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of his
+      Government, of its connections with the discontented in this country, and
+      of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them. He replied, as
+      might have been expected, with indignation, to such offers and to such
+      proposals, but as they were frequently repeated with new allurements, he
+      concluded with remaining silent and giving no answers at all. He was then
+      told that the torture would soon restore him his voice, and some select
+      gendarmes seized him and laid him on the rack; there he uttered no
+      complaint, not even a sigh, though instruments the most diabolical were
+      employed, and pains the most acute must have been endured. When threatened
+      that he should expire in torments, he said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder, while my
+      God receives my soul.&rdquo; During the two hours of the first day that he was
+      stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg were broken, and his
+      nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then passed into the hands of a
+      surgeon, and was under his care for five weeks, but, before he was
+      perfectly cured, he was carried to another private interrogatory, at
+      which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real were present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated state of
+      his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he must be
+      convinced that it was not the intention of the French Government ever to
+      restore him to his native country, where he might relate occurrences which
+      the policy of France required to be buried in oblivion; he, therefore, had
+      no choice between serving the Emperor of the French, or perishing within
+      the walls of the prison where he was confined. He replied that he was
+      resigned to his destiny, and would die as he had lived, faithful to his
+      King and to his country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal strength
+      is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate being whose mind
+      is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is weakened by wants. For five
+      months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants, executioners,
+      fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his food had been
+      bread and his drink water. The man who, thus situated and thus perplexed,
+      preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is more worthy of
+      monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator, the victor, or
+      the saint.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This interrogatory was the last undergone by Captain Wright. He was then
+      again stretched on the rack, and what is called by our regenerators the
+      INFERNAL torments, were inflicted on him. After being pinched with red-hot
+      irons all over his body, brandy, mixed with gunpowder, was infused in the
+      numerous wounds and set fire to several times until nearly burned to the
+      bones. In the convulsions, the consequence of these terrible sufferings,
+      he is said to have bitten off a part of his tongue, though, as before, no
+      groans were heard. As life still remained, he was again put under the care
+      of his former surgeon; but, as he was exceedingly exhausted, a spy, in the
+      dress of a Protestant clergyman, presented himself as if to read prayers
+      with him. Of this offer he accepted; but when this man began to ask some
+      insidious questions, he cast on him a look of contempt and never spoke to
+      him more. At last, seeing no means to obtain any information from him, a
+      mameluke last week strangled him in his bed. Thus expired a hero whose
+      fate has excited more compassion, and whose character has received more
+      admiration here, than any of our great men who have fallen fighting for
+      our Emperor. Captain Wright has diffused new rays of renown and glory on
+      the British name, from his tomb as well as from his dungeon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You have certainly a right to call me to an account for all the
+      particulars I have related of this scandalous and abominable transaction,
+      and, though I cannot absolutely guarantee the truth of the narration, I am
+      perfectly satisfied of it myself, and I hope to explain myself to your
+      satisfaction. Your unfortunate countryman was attended by and under the
+      care of a surgeon of the name of Vaugeard, who gained his confidence, and
+      was worthy of it, though employed in that infamous gaol. Either from
+      disgust of life, or from attachment to Captain Wright, he survived him
+      only twelve hours, during which he wrote the shocking details I have given
+      you, and sent them to three of the members of the foreign diplomatic
+      corps, with a prayer to have them forwarded to Sir Sidney Smith or to Mr.
+      Windham, that those his friends might be informed that, to his last
+      moment, Captain Wright was worthy of their protection and kindness. From
+      one of those Ministers I have obtained the original in Vaugeard&rsquo;s own
+      handwriting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I know that Bonaparte and Talleyrand promised the release of Captain
+      Wright to the Spanish Ambassador; but, at that time, he had already
+      suffered once on the rack, and this liberality on their part was merely a
+      trick to impose upon the credulity of the Spaniard or to get rid of his
+      importunities. Had it been otherwise, Captain Wright, like Sir George
+      Rumbold, would himself have been the first to announce in your country the
+      recovery of his liberty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My LORD:&mdash;Should Bonaparte again return here victorious, and a
+      pacificator, great changes in our internal Government and constitution are
+      expected, and will certainly occur. Since the legislative corps has
+      completed the Napoleon code of civil and criminal justice, it is
+      considered by the Emperor not only as useless, but troublesome and
+      superfluous. For the same reasons the tribunate will also be laid aside,
+      and His Majesty will rule the French Empire, with the assistance of his
+      Senate, and with the advice of his Council of State, exclusively. You know
+      that the Senators, as well as the Councillors of State, are nominated by
+      the Emperor; that he changes the latter according to his whim, and that,
+      though the former, according to the present constitution, are to hold
+      their offices for life, the alterations which remove entirely the
+      legislature and the tribunate may also make Senators movable. But as all
+      members of the Senate are favourites or relatives, he will probably not
+      think it necessary to resort to such a measure of policy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a former letter I have already mentioned the heterogeneous composition
+      of the Senate. The tribunate and legislative corps are worthy to figure by
+      its side; their members are also ci-devant mechanics of all descriptions,
+      debased attorneys or apostate priests, national spoilers or rebellious
+      regicides, degraded nobles or dishonoured officers. The nearly unanimous
+      vote of these corps for a consulate for life, and for an hereditary
+      Emperor, cannot, therefore, either be expressive of the national will, or
+      constitute the legality of Bonaparte&rsquo;s sovereignty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the legislature no vote opposed, and no voice declaimed against,
+      Bonaparte&rsquo;s Imperial dignity; but in the tribunate, Carnot&mdash;the
+      infamously notorious Carnot&mdash;&lsquo;pro forma&rsquo;, and with the permission of
+      the Emperor &lsquo;in petto&rsquo;, spoke against the return of a monarchical form of
+      Government. This farce of deception and roguery did not impose even on our
+      good Parisians, otherwise, and so frequently, the dupes of all our
+      political and revolutionary mountebanks. Had Carnot expressed a sentiment
+      or used a word not previously approved by Bonaparte, instead of reposing
+      himself in the tribunate, he would have been wandering in Cayenne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Son of an obscure attorney at Nolay, in Burgundy, he was brought up, like
+      Bonaparte, in one of those military schools established by the munificence
+      of the French Monarchs; and had obtained, from the late King, the
+      commission of a captain of engineers when the Revolution broke out. He was
+      particularly indebted to the Prince of Conde for his support during the
+      earlier part of his life, and yet he joined the enemies of his house, and
+      voted for the death of Louis XVI. A member, with Robespierre and Barrere,
+      of the Committee of Public Safety, he partook of their power, as well as
+      of their crimes, though he has been audacious enough to deny that he had
+      anything to do with other transactions than those of the armies. Were no
+      other proofs to the contrary collected, a letter of his own hand to the
+      ferocious Lebon, at Arras, is a written evidence which he is unable to
+      refute. It is dated November 16th, 1793. &ldquo;You must take,&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;in
+      your energy, all measures of terror commanded or required by present
+      circumstances. Continue your revolutionary attitude; never mind the
+      amnesty pronounced with the acceptance of the absurd constitution of 1791;
+      it is a crime which cannot extenuate other crimes. Anti-republicans can
+      only expiate their folly under the age of the guillotine. The public
+      Treasury will always pay the journeys and expenses of informers, because
+      they have deserved well of their country. Let all suspected traitors
+      expire by the sword or by fire; continue to march upon that revolutionary
+      line so well delineated by you. The committee applauds all your
+      undertakings, all your measures of vigour; they are not only all
+      permitted, but commanded by your mission.&rdquo; Most of the decrees concerning
+      the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, and particularly that for
+      the organization of the atrocious military commission at Orange, were
+      signed by him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without talents; but
+      his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of those plans of
+      campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and 1796, were so
+      triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and Bonaparte, is impertinent,
+      as well as unfounded. At the risk of his own life, Pichegru entirely
+      altered the plan sent him by the Committee of Public Safety; and it was
+      Moreau&rsquo;s masterly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe, that
+      made this general so famous. The surprising successes of Bonaparte in
+      Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and, according
+      to Berthier&rsquo;s assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief, during the first
+      four months, to change five times his plans of proceedings and
+      undertakings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made a
+      fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to
+      live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of the
+      name of Aublin, as his mistresses. He was the friend of the father of
+      these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in 1793,
+      to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both before
+      either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796,
+      reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to
+      a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant. He
+      has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well aware
+      that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the Emperor of
+      the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would, with as
+      great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as he did for
+      that of Louis XVI. He has waded too far in blood and crime to retrograde.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
+      legislator. Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
+      officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of Lot
+      electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National
+      Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a
+      faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre. After the evacuation of
+      Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the
+      Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were
+      arrested and executed. Among these were twenty-two young girls, under
+      twenty years of age, whose crime was the having presented nosegays to the
+      late King of Prussia on his entry after the surrender of Verdun. He was
+      afterwards a national commissary with the armies on the coast near Brest,
+      on the Rhine, and in Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized
+      himself by unheard of ferocities and sanguinary deeds. The following
+      anecdote, printed and published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme,
+      will give you some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and
+      Imperial Solon: &ldquo;Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet,&rdquo; writes Prudhomme,
+      &ldquo;had ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on the
+      evening they expected to arrive in that town. Entering very late, they
+      found two soldiers, who had seen the box empty, placed in its front. These
+      they ordered immediately to be arrested, and condemned them, for having
+      outraged the national representation, to be guillotined on the next day,
+      when they both were accordingly executed!&rdquo; Labarrere, a provost of the
+      Marechaussee at Dax, was in prison as a suspected person. His daughter, a
+      very handsome girl of seventeen, lived with an aunt at Severe. The two
+      pro-consuls passing through that place, she threw herself at their feet,
+      imploring mercy for her parent. This they not only promised, but offered
+      her a place in their carriage to Dax, that she might see him restored to
+      liberty. On the road the monsters insisted on a ransom for the blood of
+      her father. Waiting, afflicted and ashamed, at a friend&rsquo;s house at Dag,
+      the accomplishment of a promise so dearly purchased, she heard the beating
+      of the alarm drum, and looked, from curiosity, through the window, when
+      she saw her unfortunate parent ascending the scaffold! After having
+      remained lifeless for half an hour, she recovered her senses an instant,
+      when she exclaimed:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, the barbarians! they violated me while flattering me with the hope of
+      saving my father!&rdquo; and then expired. In October, 1795, Cavaignac assisted
+      Barras and Bonaparte in the destruction of some thousands of men, women,
+      and children in the streets of this capital, and was, therefore, in 1796,
+      made by the Directory an inspector-general of the customs; and, in 1803,
+      nominated by Bonaparte a legislator. His colleague, Citizen Pinet, is now
+      one of our Emperor&rsquo;s Counsellors of State, and both are commanders of His
+      Majesty&rsquo;s Legion of Honour; rich, respected, and frequented by our most
+      fashionable ladies and gentlemen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXIII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I suppose your Government too vigilant and too patriotic
+      not to be informed of the great and uninterrupted activity which reigns in
+      our arsenals, dockyards, and seaports. I have seen a plan, according to
+      which Bonaparte is enabled, and intends, to build twenty ships of the line
+      and ten frigates, besides cutters, in the year, for ten years to come. I
+      read the calculation of the expenses, the names of the forests where the
+      timber is to be cut, of the foreign countries where a part of the
+      necessary materials are already engaged, and of our own departments which
+      are to furnish the remainder. The whole has been drawn up in a precise and
+      clear manner by Bonaparte&rsquo;s Maritime Prefect at Antwerp, M. Malouet, well
+      known in your country, where he long remained as an emigrant, and, I
+      believe, was even employed by your Ministers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You may, perhaps, smile at this vast naval scheme of Bonaparte; but if you
+      consider that he is the master of all the forests, mines, and productions
+      of France, Italy, and of a great part of Germany, with all the navigable
+      rivers and seaports of these countries and Holland, and remember also the
+      character of the man, you will, perhaps, think it less impracticable. The
+      greatest obstacle he has to encounter, and to remove, is want of
+      experienced naval officers, though even in this he has advanced greatly
+      since the present war, during which he has added to his naval forces
+      twenty&mdash;nine ships of the line, thirty&mdash;four frigates,
+      twenty-one cutters, three thousand prams, gunboats, pinnaces, etc., with
+      four thousand naval officers and thirty-seven thousand sailors, according
+      to the same account, signed by Malouet. It is true that most of our new
+      naval heroes have never ventured far from our coast, and all their naval
+      laurels have been gathered under our land batteries; but the impulse is
+      given to the national spirit, and our conscripts in the maritime
+      departments prefer, to a man, the navy to the army, which was not formerly
+      the case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It cannot have escaped your observation that the incorporation of Genoa
+      procured us, in the South of our Empire, a naval station and arsenal, as a
+      counterpoise to Antwerp, our new naval station in the North, where twelve
+      ships of the line have been built, or are building, since 1803, and where
+      timber and other materials are collected for eight more. At Genoa, two
+      ships of the line and four frigates have lately been launched, and four
+      ships and two frigates are on the stocks; and the Genoese Republic has
+      added sixteen thousand seafaring men to our navy. Should Bonaparte
+      terminate successfully the present war, Naples and Venice will increase
+      the number of our seaports and resources on the borders of the
+      Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. All his courtiers say that he will
+      conquer Italy in Germany, and determine at Vienna&mdash;the fate of
+      London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all our admirals, however, we have not one to compare with your Nelson,
+      your Hood, your St. Vincent, and your Cornwallis. By the appointment of
+      Murat as grand admiral, Bonaparte seems to indicate that he is inclined to
+      imitate the example of Louis. XVI., in the beginning of his reign, and
+      entrust the chief command of his fleets and squadrons to military men of
+      approved capacity and courage, officers of his land troops. Last June,
+      when he expected a probable junction of the fleet under Villeneuve with
+      the squadron under Admiral Winter, and the union of both with Ganteaume at
+      Brest, Murat was to have had the chief command of the united French,
+      Spanish, and Batavian fleets, and to support the landing of our troops in
+      your country; but the arrival of Lord Nelson in the West Indies, and the
+      victory of Admiral Calder, deranged all our plans and postponed all our
+      designs, which the Continental war has interrupted; to be commenced, God
+      knows when.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best amongst our bad admirals is certainly Truguet; but he was
+      disgraced last year, and exiled twenty leagues from the coast, for having
+      declared too publicly &ldquo;that our flotillas would never be serviceable
+      before our fleets were superior to yours, when they would become useless.&rdquo;
+       An intriguer by long habit and by character, having neither property nor
+      principles, he joined the Revolution, and was the second in command under
+      Latouche, in the first republican fleet that left our harbours. He
+      directed the expedition against Sardinia, in January, 1793, during which
+      he acquired neither honour nor glory, being repulsed with great loss by
+      the inhabitants. After being imprisoned under Robespierre, the Directory
+      made him a Minister of the marine, an Ambassador to Spain, and a
+      Vice-Admiral of France. In this capacity he commanded at Brest, during the
+      first eighteen months of the present war. He has an irreconcilable foe in
+      Talleyrand, with whom he quarrelled, when on his embassy in Spain, about
+      some extortions at Madrid, which he declined to share with his principal
+      at Paris. Such was our Minister&rsquo;s inveteracy against him in 1798, that a
+      directorial decree placed him on the list of emigrants, because he
+      remained in Spain after having been recalled to France. In 1799, during
+      Talleyrand&rsquo;s disgrace, Truguet returned here, and, after in vain
+      challenging his enemy to fight, caned him in the Luxembourg gardens, a
+      chastisement which our premier bore with true Christian patience. Truguet
+      is not even a member of the Legion of Honour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Villeneuve is supposed not much inferior in talents, experience, and
+      modesty to Truguet. He was, before the Revolution, a lieutenant of the
+      royal navy; but his principles did not prevent him from deserting to the
+      colours of the enemies of royalty, who promoted him first to a captain and
+      afterwards to an admiral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first command as such was over a division of the Toulon fleet, which,
+      in the winter of 1797, entered Brest. In the battle at Aboukir he was the
+      second in command; and, after the death of Admiral Brueys, he rallied the
+      ships which had escaped, and sailed for Malta, where, two years
+      afterwards, he signed, with General Vaubois, the capitulation of that
+      island. When hostilities again broke out, he commanded in the West Indies,
+      and, leaving his station, escaped your cruisers, and was appointed first
+      to the chief command of the Rochefort, and afterwards the Toulon fleet, on
+      the death of Admiral Latouche. Notwithstanding the gasconade of his report
+      of his negative victory over Admiral Calder, Villeneuve is not a Gascon by
+      birth, but only, by sentiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ganteaume does not possess either the intriguing character of Truguet or
+      the valorous one of Villeneuve.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before the Revolution he was a mate of a merchantman, but when most of the
+      officers of the former royal navy had emigrated or perished, he was, in
+      1793, made a captain of the republican navy, and in 1796 an admiral.
+      During the battle of Aboukir he was the chief of the staff, under Admiral
+      Brueys, and saved himself by swimming, when l&rsquo;Orient took fire and blew
+      up. Bonaparte wrote to him on this occasion: &ldquo;The picture you have sent me
+      of the disaster of l&rsquo;Orient, and of your own dreadful situation, is
+      horrible; but be assured that, having such a miraculous escape, DESTINY
+      intends you to avenge one day our navy and our friends.&rdquo; This note was
+      written in August, 1798, shortly after Bonaparte had professed himself a
+      Mussulman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, in the summer of 1799, our general-in-chief had determined to leave
+      his army of Egypt to its destiny, Ganteaume equipped and commanded the
+      squadron of frigates which brought him to Europe, and was, after his
+      consulate, appointed a Counsellor of State and commander at Brest. In 1800
+      he escaped with a division of the Brest fleet to Toulon, and, in the
+      summer of 1801, when he was ordered to carry succours to Egypt, your ship
+      Skitsure fell in with him, and was captured. As he did not, however,
+      succeed in landing in Egypt the troops on board his ships, a temporary
+      disgrace was incurred, and he was deprived of the command, but made a
+      maritime prefect. Last year favour was restored him, with the command of
+      our naval forces at Brest. All officers who have served under Ganteaume
+      agree that, let his fleet be ever so superior, he will never fight if he
+      can avoid it, and that, in orderly times, his capacity would, at the
+      utmost, make him regarded as a good master of a merchantman, and nothing
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the present commander of our, flotilla at Boulogne, Lacrosse, I will
+      also say some few words. A lieutenant before the Revolution, he became, in
+      1789, one of the most ardent and violent Jacobins, and in 1792 was
+      employed by the friend of the Blacks, and our Minister, Monge, as an
+      emissary in the West Indies, to preach there to the negroes the rights of
+      man and insurrection against the whites, their masters. In 1800, Bonaparte
+      advanced him to a captain-general at Guadeloupe, an island which his
+      plots, eight years before, had involved in all the horrors of anarchy, and
+      where, when he now attempted to restore order, his former instruments rose
+      against him and forced him to escape to one of your islands&mdash;I
+      believe Dominico. Of this island, in return for his hospitable reception,
+      he took plans, according to which our General Lagrange endeavoured to
+      conquer it last spring. Lacrosse is a perfect revolutionary fanatic,
+      unprincipled, cruel, unfeeling, and intolerant. His presumption is great,
+      but his talents are trifling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXIV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The defeat of the Austrians has excited great satisfaction
+      among our courtiers and public functionaries; but the mass of the
+      inhabitants here are too miserable to feel for anything else but their own
+      sufferings. They know very well that every victory rivets their fetters,
+      that no disasters can make them more heavy, and no triumph lighter.
+      Totally indifferent about external occurrences, as well as about internal
+      oppressions, they strive to forget both the past and the present, and to
+      be indifferent as to the future; they would be glad could they cease to
+      feel that they exist. The police officers were now, with their gendarmes,
+      bayoneting them into illuminations for Bonaparte&rsquo;s successes, as they
+      dragooned them last year into rejoicings for his coronation. I never
+      observed before so much apathy; and in more than one place I heard the
+      people say, &ldquo;Oh! how much better we should be with fewer victories and
+      more tranquillity, with less splendour and more security, with an honest
+      peace instead of a brilliant war.&rdquo; But in a country groaning under a
+      military government, the opinions of the people are counted for nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Madame Joseph Bonaparte&rsquo;s circle, however, the countenances were not so
+      gloomy. There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual dullness
+      of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in honour of
+      the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to inspire our
+      warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude towards our
+      Emperor. It is certainly neither philosophical nor philanthropical not to
+      exclude the vilest of all passions, HATRED, on such a happy occasion.
+      Martin, in the dress of a conscript, sang six long couplets against the
+      tyrants of the seas; of which I was only able to retain the following one:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Je deteste le peuple anglais, Je deteste son ministere; J&rsquo;aime l&rsquo;Empereur
+      des Francais, J&rsquo;aime la paix, je hais la guerre; Mais puisqu&rsquo;il faut la
+      soutenir Contre une Nation Sauvage, Mon plus doux, mon plus grand desir
+      Est de montrer tout mon courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But what arrested my attention, more than anything else which occurred in
+      this circle on that evening, was a printed paper mysteriously handed
+      about, and of which, thanks to the civility of a Counsellor of State, I at
+      last got a sight. It was a list of those persons, of different countries,
+      whom the Emperor of the French has fixed upon, to replace all the ancient
+      dynasties of Europe within twenty years to come. From the names of these
+      individuals, some of whom are known to me, I could perceive that Bonaparte
+      had more difficulty to select proper Emperors, Kings, and Electors, than
+      he would have had, some years ago, to choose directors or consuls. Our
+      inconsistency is, however, evident even here; I did not read a name that
+      is not found in the annals of Jacobinism and republicanism. We have, at
+      the same time, taken care not to forget ourselves in this new distribution
+      of supremacy. France is to furnish the stock of the new dynasties for
+      Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. What would you think, were
+      you to awake one morning the subject of King Arthur O&rsquo;Connor the First?
+      You would, I dare say, be even more surprised than I am in being the
+      subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First. You know, I suppose, that
+      O&rsquo;Connor is a general of division, and a commander of the Legion of
+      Honour,&mdash;the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and courting, at this
+      moment, a young lady, a relation of our Empress, whose portion may one day
+      be an Empire. But I am told that, notwithstanding Talleyrand&rsquo;s
+      recommendations, and the approbation of Her Majesty, the lady prefers a
+      colonel, her own countryman, to the Irish general. Should, however, our
+      Emperor announce his determination, she would be obliged to marry as he
+      commands, were he even to give her his groom, or his horse, for a spouse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels are
+      here. O&rsquo;Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to
+      General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on with a
+      sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with
+      poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France. When I
+      was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally
+      considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to
+      profligacy and drunkenness, and, when once drunk, more cruelly ferocious
+      than even our Jacobins. I thought it then, and I still believe it, a
+      national prejudice, because I am convinced that the vices or virtues of
+      all civilized nations are relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we
+      have seen here, and who must be, like our Jacobins, the very dregs of
+      their country, have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only
+      mistrust but abhorrence. It is also an undeniable truth that they were
+      greatly disappointed by our former and present Government. They expected
+      to enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but our
+      police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gendarmes escorted
+      them as criminals to their place of destination, and there they received
+      just enough to prevent them from starving. If they complained they were
+      put in irons, and if they attempted to escape they were sent to the
+      galleys as malefactors or shot as spies. Despair, therefore, no doubt
+      induced many to perpetrate acts of which they were accused, and to rob,
+      swindle, and murder, because they were punished as thieves and assassins.
+      But, some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly, hospitable,
+      and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves ungrateful, as
+      well as infamous. A lady of my acquaintance, of a once large fortune, had
+      nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence depended upon what
+      she got by letting furnished lodgings. Mischance brought three young
+      Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily expectation of
+      remittances from their country, and of a pension from Bonaparte. During
+      six months she not only lodged and supported them, but embarrassed herself
+      to procure them linen and a decent apparel. At last she was informed that
+      each of, them had been allowed sixty livres&mdash;in the month, and that
+      arrears had been paid them for nine months. Their debt to her was above
+      three thousand livres&mdash;but the day after she asked for payment they
+      decamped, and one of them persuaded her daughter, a girl of fourteen, to
+      elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of all her plate.&mdash;He
+      has, indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the galleys for eight
+      years; but this punishment neither restored the daughter her virtue nor
+      the mother her property. The other two denied their debts, and, as she had
+      no other evidence but her own scraps of accounts, they could not be forced
+      to pay; their obdurate effrontery and infamy, however, excited such an
+      indignation in the judges, that they delivered them over as swindlers to
+      the Tribunal Correctional; and the Minister of Police ordered them to be
+      transported as rogues and vagabonds to the colonies. The daughter died
+      shortly after, in consequence of a miscarriage, and the mother did not
+      survive her more than a month, and ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one
+      of our common hospitals. Thus, these depraved young men ruined and
+      murdered their benefactress and her child; and displayed, before they were
+      thirty, such a consummate villainy as few wretches grown hoary in vice
+      have perpetrated. This act of scandalous notoriety injured the Irish
+      reputation very much in this country; for here, as in many other places,
+      inconsiderate people are apt to judge a whole nation according to the
+      behaviour of some few of its outcasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is
+      incomprehensible to all our military men&mdash;not on account of its
+      profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present
+      circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better
+      to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without
+      disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the
+      neutrality of Switzerland, are such political and military errors as
+      require long successes to repair, but which such an enemy as Bonaparte
+      always takes care not to leave unpunished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as much
+      surprised us as the defeat of the army under General von Mack; but from
+      what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would long since have
+      pushed forward had not his movements been unfortunately combined with
+      those of the latter. The House of Lorraine never produced a more valiant
+      warrior, nor Austria a more liberal or better instructed statesman, than
+      this Prince. Heir to the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded, with
+      glory, against France during the revolutionary war; and, although he
+      sometimes experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the
+      chief of his House by his courage, by his activity, by his constancy, and
+      by that salutary firmness which, in calling the generals and superior
+      officers to their duty, has often reanimated the confidence and the ardour
+      of the soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under the Prince
+      of Coburg, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian armies in Brabant, where
+      he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished himself by a valour
+      sometimes bordering on temerity, but which, by degrees, acquired him that
+      esteem and popularity, among the troops often very advantageous to him
+      afterwards. He was, in 1794, appointed governor and captain-general of the
+      Low Countries, and a Field-marshal lieutenant of the army of the German
+      Empire. In April, 1796, he took the command-in-chief of the armies of
+      Austria and of the Empire, and, in the following June, engaged in several
+      combats with General Moreau, in which he was repulsed, but in a manner
+      that did equal honour to the victor and to the vanquished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben, having,
+      about this time, been nearly dispersed by General Jourdan, the Archduke
+      left some divisions of his forces under General Latour, to impede the
+      progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into Franconia, where he
+      defeated Jourdan near Amberg and Wurzburg, routed his army entirely, and
+      forced him to repass the Rhine in the greatest confusion, and with immense
+      loss. The retreat of Moreau was the consequence of the victories of this
+      Prince. After the capture of Kehl, in January, 1797, he assumed the
+      command of the army of Italy, where he in vain employed all his efforts to
+      put a stop to the victorious progress of Bonaparte, with whom, at last, he
+      signed the preliminaries of peace at Leoben. In the spring of 1799, he
+      again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years before in
+      Franconia; but in Switzerland he met with an abler adversary in General
+      Massena; still, I am inclined to think that he displayed there more real
+      talents than anywhere else; and that this part of his campaign of 1799 was
+      the most interesting, in a military point of view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria render
+      justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of Archduke
+      Charles; and, what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who have commanded
+      against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the true manner of
+      combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least, his proclamations are the only
+      ones composed with adroitness, and are what they ought to be, because in
+      them an appeal is made to the public opinion at a time when opinion almost
+      constitutes half the strength of armies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present opposer of this Prince in Italy is one of our best, as well as
+      most fortunate, generals. A Sardinian subject, and a deserter from the
+      Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our commander, General Anselm, in
+      the conquest of the county of Nice, rather as a spy than as a soldier. His
+      knowledge of the Maritime Alps obtained, in 1793, a place on our staff,
+      where, from the services he rendered, the rank of a general of brigade was
+      soon conferred on him. In 1796 he was promoted to serve as a general of
+      division under Bonaparte in Italy, where he distinguished himself so much
+      that when, in 1798, General Berthier was ordered to accompany the army of
+      the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as commander-in-chief of our troops in
+      the temporary Roman Republic. But his merciless pillage, and, perhaps, the
+      idea of his being a foreigner, brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was
+      obliged to recall him. It was his campaign in Switzerland of 1799, and his
+      defence of Genoa in 1800, that principally ranked him high as a military
+      chief. After the battle of Marengo he received the command of the army of
+      Italy; but his extortions produced a revolt among the inhabitants, and he
+      lived for some time in retreat and disgrace, after a violent quarrel with
+      Bonaparte, during which many severe truths were said and heard on both
+      sides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the Peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau, and other
+      discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of views and
+      union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris, where Bonaparte
+      visited him, after the rupture with your country, and made him, we may
+      conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave his retreat. Last year he
+      was nominated one of our Emperor&rsquo;s Field-marshals, and as such he relieved
+      Jourdan of the command in the kingdom of Italy. He has purchased with a
+      part of his spoil, for fifteen millions of livres&mdash;property in France
+      and Italy; and is considered worth double that sum in jewels, money, and
+      other valuables.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Massena is called, in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as
+      Bonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confidence in
+      fortune than in merit, he is, perhaps, more indebted to the former than to
+      the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has made him
+      disliked at our Imperial Court, where he never addresses Napoleon and
+      Madame Bonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress without smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also an
+      officer of great talents and distinctions. He was, in 1791, only a cornet,
+      but in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the army of the Rhine.
+      In his report to the Directory, during the famous retreat of 1796, Moreau
+      speaks highly of this general, and admits that his. achievements, in part,
+      saved the republican army. During 1799 he served in Italy, and in 1800 he
+      commanded the centre of the army of the Rhine, and assisted in gaining the
+      victory of Hohenlinden. After the Peace of Lundville, he was appointed a
+      Counsellor of State of the military section, a place he still occupies,
+      notwithstanding his present employment. Though under forty years of age,
+      he is rather infirm, from the fatigues he has undergone and the wounds he
+      has received. Although he has never combated as a general-in-chief, there
+      is no doubt but that he would fill such a place with honour to himself and
+      advantage to his country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the general officers who command under Archduke Charles, Comte de
+      Bellegarde is already known by his exploits during the last war. He had
+      distinguished himself already in 1793, particularly when Valenciennes and
+      Maubeuge were besieged by the united Austrian and English forces; and, in
+      1794, he commanded the column at the head of which the Emperor marched,
+      when Landrecy was invested. In 1796, he was one of the members of the
+      Council of the Archduke Charles, when this Prince commanded for the first
+      time as a general-in-chief, on which occasion he was promoted to a
+      Field-marshal lieutenant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He displayed again great talents during the campaign of 1799, when he
+      headed a small corps, placed between General Suwarow in Italy, and
+      Archduke Charles in Switzerland; and in this delicate post he contributed
+      equally to the success of both. After the Peace of Luneville he was
+      appointed a commander-in-chief for the Emperor in the ci-devant Venetian
+      States, where the troops composing the army under the Archduke Charles
+      were, last summer, received and inspected by him, before the arrival of
+      the Prince. He is considered by military men as greatly superior to most
+      of the generals now employed by the Emperor of Germany.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXVI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;&ldquo;I would give my brother, the Emperor of Germany, one
+      further piece of advice. Let him hasten to make peace. This is the crisis
+      when, he must recollect, all States must have an end. The idea of the
+      approaching extinction of the, dynasty of Lorraine must impress him with
+      horror.&rdquo; When Bonaparte ordered this paragraph to be inserted in the
+      Moniteur, he discovered an &lsquo;arriere pensee&rsquo;, long suspected by
+      politicians, but never before avowed by himself, or by his Ministers.
+      &ldquo;That he has determined on the universal change of dynasties, because a
+      usurper can never reign with safety or honour as long as any legitimate
+      Prince may disturb his power, or reproach him for his rank.&rdquo; Elevated with
+      prosperity, or infatuated with vanity and pride, he spoke a language which
+      his placemen, courtiers, and even his brother Joseph at first thought
+      premature, if not indiscreet. If all lawful Sovereigns do not read in
+      these words their proscription, and the fate which the most powerful
+      usurper that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it may be
+      ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath, sometimes
+      strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the vicissitudes of human
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Had Talleyrand,&rdquo; said Louis Bonaparte, in his wife&rsquo;s drawing-room, &ldquo;been
+      by my brother&rsquo;s side, he would not have unnecessarily alarmed or awakened
+      those whom it should have been his policy to keep in a soft slumber, until
+      his blows had laid them down to rise no more; but his soldier-like
+      frankness frequently injures his political views.&rdquo; This I myself heard
+      Louis say to Abbe Sieyes, though several foreign Ambassadors were in the
+      saloon, near enough not to miss a word. If it was really meant as a
+      reflection on Napoleon, it was imprudent; if designed as a defiance to
+      other Princes, it was unbecoming and impertinent. I am inclined to believe
+      it, considering the individual to whom it was addressed, a premeditated
+      declaration that our Emperor expected a universal war, was prepared for
+      it, and was certain of its fortunate issue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this Sieyes is often consulted, and publicly flattered, our
+      politicians say, &ldquo;Woe to the happiness of Sovereigns and to the
+      tranquillity of subjects; the fiend of mankind is busy, and at work,&rdquo; and,
+      in fact, ever since 1789, the infamous ex-Abbe has figured, either as a
+      plotter or as an actor, in all our dreadful and sanguinary revolutionary
+      epochas. The accomplice of La Fayette in 1789, of Brissot in 1791, of
+      Marat in 1792, of Robespierre in 1793, of Tallien in 1794, of Barras in
+      1795, of Rewbel in 1797, and of Bonaparte in 1799, he has hitherto
+      planned, served, betrayed, or deserted all factions. He is one of the few
+      of our grand criminals, who, after enticing and sacrificing his
+      associates, has been fortunate enough to survive them. Bonaparte has
+      heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property,
+      senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not
+      supposed one of our Emperor&rsquo;s most dutiful subjects, because many of the
+      late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation, of
+      regeneration, and of overthrow. He has too high an opinion of his own
+      deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a
+      contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his
+      labours and dangers. His modesty has, for these sixteen years past,
+      ascribed to his talents all the glory and prosperity of France, and all
+      her misery and misfortunes to the disregard of his counsels, and to the
+      neglect of his advice. Bonaparte knows it; and that he is one of those
+      crafty, sly, and dark conspirators, more dangerous than the bold assassin,
+      who, by sophistry, art, and perseverance insinuate into the minds of the
+      unwary and daring the ideas of their plots, in such an insidious manner
+      that they take them and foster them as the production of their own genius;
+      he is, therefore, watched by our Imperial spies, and never consulted but
+      when any great blow is intended to be struck, or some enormous atrocities
+      perpetrated. A month before the seizure of the Duc d&rsquo;Enghien, and the
+      murder of Pichegru, he was every day shut up for some hours with Napoleon
+      Bonaparte at St. Cloud, or in the Tuileries; where he has hardly been seen
+      since, except after our Emperor&rsquo;s return from his coronation as a King of
+      Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sieyes never was a republican, and it was cowardice alone that made him
+      vote for the death of his King and benefactor; although he is very fond of
+      his own metaphysical notions, he always has preferred the preservation of
+      his life to the profession or adherence to his systems. He will not think
+      the Revolution complete, or the constitution of his country a good one,
+      until some Napoleon, or some Louis, writes himself an Emperor or King of
+      France, by the grace of Sieyes. He would expose the lives of thousands to
+      obtain such a compliment to his hateful vanity and excessive pride; but he
+      would not take a step that endangered his personal safety, though it might
+      eventually lead him to the possession of a crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the bounty of his King, Sieyes had, before the Revolution, an income
+      of fifteen thousand livres&mdash;per annum; his places, pensions, and
+      landed estates produce now yearly five hundred thousand livres&mdash;not
+      including the interest of his money in the French and foreign funds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two years ago he was exiled, for some time, to an estate of his in
+      Touraine, and Bonaparte even deliberated about transporting him to
+      Cayenne, when Talleyrand observed &ldquo;that such a condemnation would endanger
+      that colony of France, as he would certainly organize there a focus of
+      revolutions, which might also involve Surinam and the Brazils, the
+      colonies of our allies, in one common ruin. In the present circumstances,&rdquo;
+       added the Minister, &ldquo;if Sieyes is to be transported, I wish we could land
+      him in England, Scotland, or Ireland, or even in Russia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I have just heard from a general officer the following anecdote, which he
+      read to me from a letter of another general, dated Ulm, the 25th instant,
+      and, if true, it explains in part Bonaparte&rsquo;s apparent indiscretion in the
+      threat thrown out against all ancient dynasties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among his confidential generals (and hitherto the most irreproachable of
+      all our military commanders), Marmont is particularly distinguished.
+      Before Napoleon left this capital to head his armies in Germany, he is
+      stated to have sent despatches to all those traitors dispersed in
+      different countries whom he has selected to commence the new dynasties,
+      under the protection of the Bonaparte Dynasty. They were, no doubt,
+      advised of this being the crisis when they had to begin their machinations
+      against thrones. A courier from Talleyrand at Strasburg to Bonaparte at
+      Ulm was ordered to pass by the corps under the command of Marmont, to
+      whom, in case the Emperor had advanced too far into Germany, he was to
+      deliver his papers. This courier was surprised and interrupted by some
+      Austrian light troops; and, as it was only some few hours after being
+      informed of this capture that Bonaparte expressed himself frankly, as
+      related above, it was supposed by his army that the Austrian Government
+      had already in its power despatches which made our schemes of improvement
+      at Paris no longer any secrets at Vienna. The writer of this letter added
+      that General Marmont was highly distressed on account of this accident,
+      which might retard the prospect of restoring to Europe its long lost peace
+      and tranquillity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This officer made his first campaign under Pichegru in 1794, and was, in
+      1796, appointed by Bonaparte one of his aides-de-camp. His education had
+      been entirely military, and in the practice the war afforded him he soon
+      evinced how well he remembered the lessons of theory. In the year 1796, at
+      the battle of Saint-Georges, before Mantua, he charged at the head of the
+      eighth battalion of grenadiers, and contributed much to its fortunate
+      issue. In October of the same year, Bonaparte, as a mark of his
+      satisfaction, sent him to present to the Directory the numerous colours
+      which the army of Italy had conquered; from whom he received in return a
+      pair of pistols, with a fraternal hug from Carnot. On his return to Italy
+      he was, for the first time, employed by his chief in a political capacity.
+      A republic, and nothing but a republic, being then the order of the day,
+      some Italian patriots were convoked at Reggio to arrange a plan for a
+      Cisalpine Republic, and for the incorporation with it of Modena, Bologna,
+      and other neutral States; Marmont was nominated a French republican
+      plenipotentiary, and assisted as such in the organization of a
+      Commonwealth, which since has been by turns a province of Austria or a
+      tributary State of France.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marmont, though combating for a bad cause, is an honest man; his hands are
+      neither soiled with plunder, nor stained with blood. Bonaparte, among his
+      other good qualities, wishes to see every one about him rich; and those
+      who have been too delicate to accumulate wealth by pillage, he generally
+      provides for, by putting into requisition some great heiress. After the
+      Peace of Campo Formio, Bonaparte arrived at Paris, where he demanded in
+      marriage for his aide-de-camp Marmont, Mademoiselle Perregeaux, the sole
+      child of the first banker in France, a well-educated and accomplished
+      young lady, who would be much more agreeable did not her continual smiles
+      and laughing indicate a degree of self-satisfaction and complacency which
+      may be felt, but ought never to be published.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The banker, Perregeaux, is one of those fortunate beings who, by drudgery
+      and assiduity, has succeeded in some few years to make an ample fortune. A
+      Swiss by birth, like Necker, he also, like him, after gratifying the
+      passion of avidity, showed an ambition to shine in other places than in
+      the counting-house and upon the exchange. Under La Fayette, in 1790, he
+      was the chief of a battalion of the Parisian National Guards; under
+      Robespierre, a commissioner for purchasing provisions; and under Bonaparte
+      he is become a Senator and a commander of the Legion of Honour. I am told
+      that he has made all his money by his connection with your country; but I
+      know that the favourite of Napoleon can never be the friend of Great
+      Britain. He is a widower; but Mademoiselle Mars, of the Emperor&rsquo;s theatre,
+      consoles him for the loss of his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      General Marmont accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and distinguished himself
+      at the capture of Malta, and when, in the following year, the siege of St.
+      Jean d&rsquo;Acre was undertaken, he was ordered to extend the fortifications of
+      Alexandria; and if, in 1801, they retarded your progress, it was owing to
+      his abilities, being an officer of engineers as well as of the artillery.
+      He returned with Bonaparte to Europe, and was, after his usurpation, made
+      a Counsellor of State. At the battle of Marengo he commanded the
+      artillery, and signed afterwards, with the Austrian general, Count
+      Hohenzollern, the Armistice of Treviso, which preceded shortly the Peace
+      of Luneville. Nothing has abated Bonaparte&rsquo;s attachment to this officer,
+      whom he appointed a commander-in-chief in Holland, when a change of
+      Government was intended there, and whom he will entrust everywhere else,
+      where sovereignty is to be abolished, or thrones and dynasties subverted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER XXXVII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, October, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Many wise people are of the opinion that the revolution of
+      another great Empire is necessary to combat or oppose the great impulse
+      occasioned by the Revolution of France, before Europe can recover its
+      long-lost order and repose. Had the subjects of Austria been as
+      disaffected as they are loyal, the world might have witnessed such a
+      terrible event, and been enabled to judge whether the hypothesis was the
+      production of an ingenious schemer or of a profound statesman. Our armies
+      under Bonaparte have never before penetrated into the heart of a country
+      where subversion was not prepared, and where subversion did not follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How relatively insignificant, in the eyes of Providence, must be the
+      independence of States and the liberties of nations, when such a
+      relatively insignificant personage as General von Mack can shake them?
+      Have, then, the Austrian heroes&mdash;a Prince Eugene, a Laudon, a Lasci,
+      a Beaulieu, a Haddick, a Bender, a Clairfayt, and numerous other valiant
+      and great warriors&mdash;left no posterity behind them; or has the
+      presumption of General von Mack imposed upon the judgment of the
+      Counsellors of his Prince? This latter must have been the case; how
+      otherwise could the welfare of their Sovereign have been entrusted to a
+      military quack, whose want of energy and bad disposition had, in 1799,
+      delivered up the capital of another Sovereign to his enemies. How many
+      reputations are gained by an impudent assurance, and lost when the man of
+      talents is called upon to act and the fool presents himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Baron von Mack served as an aide-de-camp under Field-marshal Laudon,
+      during the last war between Austria and Turkey, and displayed some
+      intrepidity, particularly before Lissa. The Austrian army was encamped
+      eight leagues from that place, and the commander-in-chief hesitated to
+      attack it, believing it to be defended by thirty thousand men. To decide
+      him upon making this attack, Baron von Mack left him at nine o&rsquo;clock at
+      night, crossed the Danube, accompanied only by a single Uhlan, and
+      penetrated into the suburb of Lissa, where he made prisoner a Turkish
+      officer, whom, on the next morning at seven o&rsquo;clock, he presented to his
+      general, and from whom it was learnt that the garrison contained only six
+      thousand, men. This personal temerity, and the applause of Field-marshal
+      Laudon, procured him then a kind of reputation, which he has not since
+      been able to support. Some theoretical knowledge of the art of war, and a
+      great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor
+      Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been
+      proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is
+      immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of
+      Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp or in the field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Preceded by a certain celebrity, Baron von Mack served, in 1793, under the
+      Prince of Coburg, as an adjutant-general, and was called to assist at the
+      Congress at Antwerp, where the operations of the campaign were regulated.
+      Everywhere he displayed activity and bravery; was wounded twice in the
+      month of May; but he left the army without having performed anything that
+      evinced the talents which fame had bestowed on him. In February, 1794, the
+      Emperor sent him to London to arrange, in concert with your Government,
+      the plans of the campaign then on the eve of being opened; and when he
+      returned to the Low Countries he was advanced to a quartermaster-general
+      of the army of Flanders, and terminated also this unfortunate campaign
+      without having done anything to justify the reputation he had before
+      acquired or usurped. His Sovereign continued, nevertheless, to employ him
+      in different armies; and in January, 1797, he was appointed a
+      Field-marshal lieutenant and a quartermaster-general of the army of the
+      Rhine. In February he conducted fifteen thousand of the troops of this
+      army to reinforce the army of Italy; but when Bonaparte in April
+      penetrated into Styria and Carinthia, he was ordered to Vienna as a second
+      in command of the levy &lsquo;en masse&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Real military characters had already formed their opinion of this officer,
+      and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired an able warrior.
+      His own conduct soon convinced them that they neither had been rash nor
+      mistaken. The King of Naples demanding, in 1798, from his son-in-law, the
+      Emperor of Germany, a general to organize and head his troops, Baron von
+      Mack was presented to him. After war had been declared against France he
+      obtained some success in partial engagements, but was defeated in a
+      general battle by an enemy inferior in number. In the Kingdom of Naples,
+      as well as in the Empire of Germany, the fury of negotiation seized him
+      when he should have fought, and when he should have remembered that no
+      compacts can ever be entered into with political and military earthquakes,
+      more than with physical ones. This imprudence, particularly as he was a
+      foreigner, excited suspicion among his troops, whom, instead of leading to
+      battle, he deserted, under the pretence that his life was in danger, and
+      surrendered himself and his staff to our commander, Championnet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A general who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp, much
+      less to command armies; and a military chief who does not consider the
+      happiness and honour of the State as his first passion and his first duty,
+      and prefers existence to glory, deserves to be shot as a traitor, or
+      drummed out of the army as a dastardly coward. Without mentioning the
+      numerous military faults committed by General von Mack during this
+      campaign, it is impossible to deny that, with respect to his own troops,
+      he conducted himself in the most pusillanimous manner. It has often been
+      repeated that martial valour does not always combine with it that courage
+      and that necessary presence of mind which knows how to direct or repress
+      multitudes, how to command obedience and obtain popularity; but when a man
+      is entrusted with the safety of an Empire, and assumes such a brilliant
+      situation, he must be weak-minded and despicable indeed, if he does not
+      show himself worthy of it by endeavouring to succeed, or perish in the
+      attempt. The French emigrant, General Dumas, evinced what might have been
+      done, even with the dispirited Neapolitan troops, whom he neither
+      deserted, nor with whom he offered to capitulate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Baron von Mack is in a very infirm state of health, and is often under the
+      necessity of being carried on a litter; and his bodily complaints have
+      certainly not increased the vigour of his mind. His love of life seems to
+      augment in proportion as its real value diminishes. As to the report here
+      of his having betrayed his trust in exchanging honour for gold, I believe
+      it totally unfounded. Our intriguers may have deluded his understanding,
+      but our traitors would never have been able to seduce or shake his
+      fidelity. His head is weak, but his heart is honest. Unfortunately, it is
+      too true that, in turbulent times, irresolution and weakness in a
+      commander or a Minister operate the same, and are as dangerous as,
+      treason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pauline" id="pauline"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:60%;">
+      <img alt="pauline.jpg (45K)" src="images/pauline.jpg" style="width:100%;"  /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE ETEXT EDITOR&rsquo;S BOOKMARKS:
+    </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Bourrienne
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery&mdash;pays for it like a real Emperor
+Indifference about futurity
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Marble lives longer than man
+May change his habitations six times in the month&mdash;yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+Military diplomacy
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+More vain than ambitious
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats&rsquo; meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Suspicion is evidence
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+&ldquo;This is the age of upstarts,&rdquo; said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon&rsquo;s outrages
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+Want is the parent of industry
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
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+Project Gutenberg's Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete,
+by Lewis Goldsmith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete
+       Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+Author: Lewis Goldsmith
+
+Release Date: September 11, 2006 [EBook #3899]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT OF ST. CLOUD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+By Lewis Goldsmith
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
+
+
+The present work contains particulars of the great Napoleon not to be
+found in any other publication, and forms an interesting addition to the
+information generally known about him.
+
+The writer of the Letters (whose name is said to have been Stewarton, and
+who had been a friend of the Empress Josephine in her happier, if less
+brilliant days) gives full accounts of the lives of nearly all Napoleon's
+Ministers and Generals, in addition to those of a great number of other
+characters, and an insight into the inner life of those who formed
+Napoleon's Court.
+
+All sorts and conditions of men are dealt with--adherents who have come
+over from the Royalist camp, as well as those who have won their way
+upwards as soldiers, as did Napoleon himself.  In fact, the work abounds
+with anecdotes of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Fouche, and a host of others, and
+astounding particulars are given of the mysterious disappearance of those
+persons who were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+At Cardinal Caprara's
+
+Cardinal Fesch
+
+Episode at Mme. Miot's
+
+Napoleon's Guard
+
+A Grand Dinner
+
+Chaptal
+
+Turreaux
+
+Carrier
+
+Barrere
+
+Cambaceres
+
+Pauline Bonaparte
+
+
+
+
+SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+
+THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD.
+
+INTRODUCTORY LETTER.
+
+
+PARIS, November 10th, 1805.
+
+MY LORD,--The Letters I have written to you were intended for the private
+entertainment of a liberal friend, and not for the general perusal of a
+severe public.  Had I imagined that their contents would have penetrated
+beyond your closet or the circle of your intimate acquaintance, several
+of the narratives would have been extended, while others would have been
+compressed; the anecdotes would have been more numerous, and my own
+remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left out, others drawn, and
+all better finished.  I should then have attempted more frequently to
+expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to abhorrence; should have
+lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and oftener held out to ridicule
+puerile vanity and outrageous ambition.  In short, I should then have
+studied more to please than to instruct, by addressing myself seldomer to
+the reason than to the passions.
+
+I subscribe, nevertheless, to your observation, "that the late long war
+and short peace, with the enslaved state of the Press on the Continent,
+would occasion a chasm in the most interesting period of modern history,
+did not independent and judicious travellers or visitors abroad collect
+and forward to Great Britain (the last refuge of freedom) some materials
+which, though scanty and insufficient upon the whole, may, in part, rend
+the veil of destructive politics, and enable future ages to penetrate
+into mysteries which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+to the just reprobation of honour and of virtue."  If, therefore, my
+humble labours can preserve loyal subjects from the seduction of
+traitors, or warn lawful sovereigns and civilized society of the alarming
+conspiracy against them, I shall not think either my time thrown away, or
+fear the dangers to which publicity might expose me were I only suspected
+here of being an Anglican author.  Before the Letters are sent to the
+press I trust, however, to your discretion the removal of everything that
+might produce a discovery, or indicate the source from which you have
+derived your information.
+
+Although it is not usual in private correspondence to quote authorities,
+I have sometimes done so; but satisfied, as I hope you are, with my
+veracity, I should have thought the frequent productions of any better
+pledge than the word of a man of honour an insult to your feelings.  I
+have, besides, not related a fact that is not recent and well known in
+our fashionable and political societies; and of ALL the portraits I have
+delineated, the originals not only exist, but are yet occupied in the
+present busy scene of the Continent, and figuring either at Courts, in
+camps, or in Cabinets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I promised you not to pronounce in haste on persons and events
+passing under my eyes; thirty-one months have quickly passed away since I
+became an attentive spectator of the extraordinary transactions, and of
+the extraordinary characters of the extraordinary Court and Cabinet of
+St. Cloud.  If my talents to delineate equal my zeal to inquire and my
+industry to examine; if I am as able a painter as I have been an
+indefatigable observer, you will be satisfied, and with your approbation
+at once sanction and reward my labours.
+
+With most Princes, the supple courtier and the fawning favourite have
+greater influence than the profound statesman and subtle Minister; and
+the determinations of Cabinets are, therefore, frequently prepared in
+drawing-rooms, and discussed in the closet.  The politician and the
+counsellor are frequently applauded or censured for transactions which
+the intrigues of antechambers conceived, and which cupidity and favour
+gave power to promulgate.
+
+It is very generally imagined, but falsely, that Napoleon Bonaparte
+governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity,
+caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole
+consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited
+authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and
+his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who
+marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that
+disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to
+himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the same
+genius, unbiased and unsupported, crushed factions, erected a throne, and
+reconstructed racks; that the same mind restored and protected
+Christianity, and proscribed and assassinated a D'Enghien.
+
+All these contradictions, all these virtues and vices, may be found in
+the same person; but Bonaparte, individually or isolated, has no claim to
+them.  Except on some sudden occasions that call for immediate decision,
+no Sovereign rules less by himself than Bonaparte; because no Sovereign
+is more surrounded by favourites and counsellors, by needy adventurers
+and crafty intriguers.
+
+What Sovereign has more relatives to enrich, or services to recompense;
+more evils to repair, more jealousies to dread, more dangers to fear,
+more clamours to silence; or stands more in need of information and
+advice?  Let it be remembered that he, who now governs empires and
+nations, ten years ago commanded only a battery; and five years ago was
+only a military chieftain.  The difference is as immense, indeed, between
+the sceptre of a Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise
+legislator who protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and
+the hireling robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder
+at the expense and misery of generations.  The lower classes of all
+countries have produced persons who have distinguished themselves as
+warriors; but what subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence
+and achievements, without infringing on the laws and liberties of his
+country, proved himself worthy to reign?  Besides, the education which
+Bonaparte received was entirely military; and a man (let his innate
+abilities be ever so surprising or excellent) who, during the first
+thirty years of his life, has made either military or political tactics
+or exploits his only study, certainly cannot excel equally in the Cabinet
+and in the camp.  It would be as foolish to believe, as absurd to expect,
+a perfection almost beyond the reach of any man; and of Bonaparte more
+than of any one else.  A man who, like him, is the continual slave of his
+own passions, can neither be a good nor a just, an independent nor
+immaculate master.
+
+Among the courtiers who, ever since Bonaparte was made First Consul, have
+maintained a great ascendency over him, is the present Grand Marshal of
+his Court, the general of division, Duroc.  With some parts, but greater
+presumption, this young man is destined by his master to occupy the most
+confidential places near his person; and to his care are entrusted the
+most difficult and secret missions at foreign Courts.  When he is absent
+from France, the liberty of the Continent is in danger; and when in the
+Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, Bonaparte thinks himself always safe.
+
+Gerard Christophe Michel Duroc was born at Ponta-Mousson, in the
+department of Meurthe, on the 25th of October, 1772, of poor but honest
+parents.  His father kept a petty chandler's shop; but by the interest
+and generosity of Abbe Duroc, a distant relation, he was so well educated
+that, in March, 1792, he became a sub-lieutenant of the artillery.  In
+1796 he served in Italy, as a captain, under General Andreossy, by whom
+he was recommended to General l'Espinasse, then commander of the
+artillery of the army of Italy, who made him an aide-de-camp.  In that
+situation Bonaparte remarked his activity, and was pleased with his
+manners, and therefore attached him as an aide-de-camp to himself.  Duroc
+soon became a favourite with his chief, and, notwithstanding the
+intrigues of his rivals, he has continued to be so to this day.
+
+It has been asserted, by his enemies no doubt, that by implicit obedience
+to his general's orders, by an unresisting complacency, and by executing,
+without hesitation, the most cruel mandates of his superior, he has fixed
+himself so firmly in his good opinion that he is irremovable.  It has
+also been stated that it was Duroc who commanded the drowning and burying
+alive of the wounded French soldiers in Italy, in 1797; and that it was
+he who inspected their poisoning in Syria, in 1799, where he was wounded
+during the siege of St. Jean d' Acre.  He was among the few officers whom
+Bonaparte selected for his companions when he quitted the army of Egypt,
+and landed with him in France in October, 1799.
+
+Hitherto Duroc had only shown himself as a brave soldier and obedient
+officer; but after the revolution which made Bonaparte a First Consul, he
+entered upon another career.  He was then, for the first time, employed
+in a diplomatic mission to Berlin, where he so far insinuated himself
+into the good graces of their Prussian Majesties that the King admitted
+him to the royal table, and on the parade at Potsdam presented him to his
+generals and officers as an aide-de-camp 'du plus grand homme que je
+connais; whilst the Queen gave him a scarf knitted by her own fair hands.
+
+The fortunate result of Duroc's intrigues in Prussia, in 1799, encouraged
+Bonaparte to despatch him, in 1801, to Russia; where Alexander I.
+received him with that noble condescension so natural, to this great and
+good Prince.  He succeeded at St. Petersburg in arranging the political
+and commercial difficulties and disagreements between France and Russia;
+but his proposal for a defensive alliance was declined.
+
+An anecdote is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the
+barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the
+inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little
+displeased the military diplomatist.
+
+Among Talleyrand's female agents sent to cajole Paul I. during the latter
+part of his reign, was a Madame Bonoeil, whose real name is De F-----.
+When this unfortunate Prince was no more, most of the French male and
+female intriguers in Russia thought it necessary to shift their quarters,
+and to expect, on the territory of neutral Prussia, farther instructions
+from Paris, where and how to proceed.  Madame Bonoeil had removed to
+Konigsberg.  In the second week of May, 1801, when Duroc passed through
+that town for St. Petersburg, he visited this lady, according to the
+orders of Bonaparte, and obtained from her a list of the names of the
+principal persons who were inclined to be serviceable to France, and
+might be trusted by him upon the present occasion.  By inattention or
+mistake she had misspelled the name of one of the most trusty and active
+adherents of Bonaparte; and Duroc, therefore, instead of addressing
+himself to the Polish Count de S--------lz, went to the Polish Count de
+S-----tz.  This latter was as much flattered as surprised, upon seeing an
+aide-de-camp and envoy of the First Consul of France enter his
+apartments, seldom visited before but by usurers, gamesters, and
+creditors; and, on hearing the object of this visit, began to think
+either the envoy mad or himself dreaming.  Understanding, however, that
+money would be of little consideration, if the point desired by the First
+Consul could be carried, he determined to take advantage of this
+fortunate hit, and invited Duroc to sup with him the same evening; when
+he promised him he should meet with persons who could do his business,
+provided his pecuniary resources were as ample as he had stated.
+
+This Count de S-----tz was one of the most extravagant and profligate
+subjects that Russia had acquired by the partition of Poland.  After
+squandering away his own patrimony, he had ruined his mother and two
+sisters, and subsisted now entirely by gambling and borrowing.  Among his
+associates, in similar circumstances with himself, was a Chevalier de
+Gausac, a French adventurer, pretending to be an emigrant from the
+vicinity of Toulouse.  To him was communicated what had happened in the
+morning, and his advice was asked how to act in the evening.  It was soon
+settled that De Gausac should be transformed into a Russian Count de
+W-----, a nephew and confidential secretary of the Chancellor of the same
+name; and that one Caumartin, another French adventurer, who taught
+fencing at St. Petersburg, should act the part of Prince de M-----, an
+aide-de-camp of the Emperor; and that all three together should strip
+Duroc, and share the spoil.  At the appointed hour Bonaparte's agent
+arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered
+him of twelve hundred thousand livres.  Though not many days passed
+before he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from
+denouncing the impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret
+between himself, Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses
+of Caumartin excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who
+soon discovered the source from which they had flowed.  De Gausac had the
+imprudence to return to this capital last spring, and is now shut up in
+the Temple, where he probably will be forgotten.
+
+As this loss was more ascribed to the negligence of Madame Bonoeil than
+to the mismanagement of Duroc, or his want of penetration, his reception
+at the Tuileries, though not so gracious as on his return from Berlin,
+nineteen months before, was, however, such as convinced him that if he
+had not increased, he had at the same time not lessened, the confidence
+of his master; and, indeed, shortly afterwards, Bonaparte created him
+first prefect of his palace, and procured him for a wife the only
+daughter of a rich Spanish banker.  Rumour, however, says that Bonaparte
+was not quite disinterested when he commanded and concluded this match,
+and that the fortune of Madame Duroc has paid for the expensive supper of
+her husband with Count de S-----tz at St.  Petersburg.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though the Treaty of Luneville will probably soon be buried in
+the rubbish of the Treaty of Amiens, the influence of their parents in
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud is as great as ever: I say their parents,
+because the crafty ex-Bishop, Talleyrand, foreseeing the short existence
+of these bastard diplomatic acts, took care to compliment the innocent
+Joseph Bonaparte with a share in the parentage, although they were his
+own exclusive offspring.
+
+Joseph Bonaparte, who in 1797, from an attorney's clerk at Ajaccio, in
+Corsica, was at once transformed into an Ambassador to the Court of Rome,
+had hardly read a treaty, or seen a despatch written, before he was
+himself to conclude the one, and to dictate the other.  Had he not been
+supported by able secretaries, Government would soon have been convinced
+that it is as impossible to confer talents as it is easy to give places
+to men to whom Nature has refused parts, and on whom a scanty or
+neglected education has bestowed no improvements.  Deep and reserved,
+like a true Italian, but vain and ambitious, like his brothers, under the
+character of a statesman, he has only been the political puppet of
+Talleyrand.  If he has sometimes been applauded upon the stages where he
+has been placed, he is also exposed to the hooting and hisses of the
+suffering multitude; while the Minister pockets undisturbed all the
+entrance-money, and conceals his wickedness and art under the cloak of
+Joseph; which protects him besides against the anger and fury of
+Napoleon.  No negotiation of any consequence is undertaken, no diplomatic
+arrangements are under consideration, but Joseph is always consulted, and
+Napoleon informed of the consultation.  Hence none of Bonaparte's
+Ministers have suffered less from his violence and resentment than
+Talleyrand, who, in the political department, governs him who governs
+France and Italy.
+
+As early as 1800, Talleyrand determined to throw the odium of his own
+outrages against the law of nations upon the brother of his master.
+Lucien Bonaparte was that year sent Ambassador to Spain, but not sharing
+with the Minister the large profits of his appointment, his diplomatic
+career was but short.  Joseph is as greedy and as ravenous as Lucien, but
+not so frank or indiscreet.  Whether he knew or not of Talleyrand's
+immense gain by the pacification at Luneville in February, 1801, he did
+not neglect his own individual interest.  The day previous to the
+signature of this treaty, he despatched a courier to the rich army
+contractor, Collot, acquainting him in secret of the issue of the
+negotiation, and ordering him at the same time to purchase six millions
+of livres--L 250,000--in the stocks on his account.  On Joseph's arrival
+at Paris, Collot sent him the State bonds for the sum ordered, together
+with a very polite letter; but though he waited on the grand pacificator
+several times afterwards, all admittance was refused, until a douceur of
+one million of livres--nearly L 42,000--of Collot's private profit opened
+the door.  In return, during the discussions between France and England
+in the summer of 1801, and in the spring of 1802, Collot was continued
+Joseph's private agent, and shared with his patron, within twelve months,
+a clear gain of thirty-two millions of livres.
+
+Some of the secret articles of the Treaty of Luneville gave Austria,
+during the insurrection in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1802, an
+opportunity and a right to make representations against the interference
+of France; a circumstance which greatly displeased Bonaparte, who
+reproached Talleyrand for his want of foresight, and of having been
+outwitted by the Cabinet of Vienna.  The Minister, on the very next day,
+laid before his master the correspondence that had passed between him and
+Joseph Bonaparte, during the negotiation concerning these secret
+articles, which were found to have been entirely proposed and settled by
+Joseph; who had been induced by his secretary and factotum (a creature of
+Talleyrand) to adopt sentiments for which that Minister had been paid,
+according to report, six hundred thousand livres--L25,000.  Several other
+tricks have in the same manner been played upon Joseph, who,
+notwithstanding, has the modesty to consider himself (much to the
+advantage and satisfaction of Talleyrand) the first statesman in Europe,
+and the good fortune to be thought so by his brother Napoleon.
+
+When a rupture with England was apprehended, in the spring of 1803,
+Talleyrand never signed a despatch that was not previously communicated
+to, and approved by Joseph, before its contents were sanctioned by
+Napoleon.  This precaution chiefly continued him in place when Lord
+Whitworth left this capital,--a departure that incensed Napoleon to such
+a degree that he entirely forgot the dignity of his rank amidst his
+generals, a becoming deportment to the members of the diplomatic corps,
+and his duty to his mother and brothers, who all more or less experienced
+the effects of his violent passions.  He thus accosted Talleyrand, who
+purposely arrived late at his circle:
+
+"Well! the English Ambassador is gone; and we must again go to war.  Were
+my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers, I should despair
+indeed of the issue of my contest with these insolent islanders.  Many
+believe that had I been more ably supported in my Cabinet, I should not
+have been under the necessity of taking the field, as a rupture might
+have been prevented."
+
+"Such, Citizen First Consul!" answered the trembling and bowing Minister,
+"is not the opinion of the Counsellor of State, Citizen Joseph
+Bonaparte."
+
+"Well, then," said Napoleon, as recollecting himself, "England wishes for
+war, and she shall suffer for it.  This shall be a war of extermination,
+depend upon it."
+
+The name of Joseph alone moderated Napoleon's fury, and changed its
+object.  It is with him what the harp of David was with Saul.  Talleyrand
+knows it, and is no loser by that knowledge.  I must, however, in
+justice, say that, had Bonaparte followed his Minister's advice, and
+suffered himself to be entirely guided by his counsel, all hostilities
+with England at that time might have been avoided; her Government would
+have been lulled into security by the cession of Malta, and some
+commercial regulations, and her future conquest, during a time of peace,
+have been attempted upon plans duly organized, that might have ensured
+success.  He never ceased to repeat, "Citizen First Consul!  some few
+years longer peace with Great Britain, and the 'Te Deums' of modern
+Britons for the conquest and possession of Malta, will be considered by
+their children as the funeral hymns of their liberty and independence."
+
+It was upon this memorable occasion of Lord Whitworth's departure, that
+Bonaparte is known to have betrayed the most outrageous acts of passion;
+he rudely forced his mother from his closet, and forbade his own sisters
+to approach his person; he confined Madame Bonaparte for several hours to
+her chamber; he dismissed favourite generals; treated with ignominy
+members of his Council of State; and towards his physician, secretaries,
+and principal attendants, he committed unbecoming and disgraceful marks
+of personal outrage.  I have heard it affirmed that, though her husband,
+when shutting her up in her dressing-room, put the key in his pocket,
+Madame Napoleon found means to resent the ungallant behaviour of her
+spouse, with the assistance of Madame Remusat.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No act of Bonaparte's government has occasioned so many, so
+opposite, and so violent debates, among the remnants of revolutionary
+factions comprising his Senate and Council of State, as the introduction
+and execution of the religious concordat signed with the Pope.  Joseph
+was here again the ostensible negotiator, though he, on this as well as
+on former occasions, concluded nothing that had not been prepared and
+digested by Talleyrand.
+
+Bonaparte does not in general pay much attention to the opinions of
+others when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or
+coincide with his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public
+career professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the
+worshipper of Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those
+who, after deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their
+youth, continued constant and firm in their apostasy.  Of those who
+deliberated concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and
+the acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz,
+Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real,
+Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis,
+Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte
+for Christianity.  Besides the sentiments of these confidential
+counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
+religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
+counsellors,--all differing as much from one another as the members of
+his own Privy Council.
+
+Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing
+that to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of
+the priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ.  She certainly
+is the most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and
+of her name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced
+Napoleon of the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen
+centuries, had preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations
+of republicans and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very
+probable that her representations would have been as ineffective as her
+piety or her prayers.  So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of
+Napoleon for the Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the
+Pope and the papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were
+laying waste and ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both
+incorporated with his new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his
+first acts of sovereignty, in the name of the then sovereign people, was
+the confiscation of Church lands and the sale of the estates of the
+clergy.
+
+Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
+Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
+intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
+in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
+of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes.  The
+former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
+this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
+its bosom and its doctrine.  With capacity to figure as a country curate,
+he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
+though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
+Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte's promise of
+succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and
+expect to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than
+himself.  It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of
+Pius VII. in France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertake a
+journey that has caused so much scandal among the truly faithful; and
+which, should ever Austria regain its former supremacy in Italy, will
+send the present Pope to end his days in a convent, and make the
+successors of St. Peter what this Apostle was himself, a Bishop of Rome,
+and nothing more.
+
+Bernier was a curate in La Vendee before the Revolution, and one of those
+priests who lighted the torch of civil war in that unfortunate country,
+under pretence of defending the throne of his King and the altars of his
+God.  He not only possessed great popularity among the lower classes, but
+acquired so far the confidence of the Vendean chiefs that he was
+appointed one of the supreme and directing Council of the Royalists and
+Chouans.  Even so late as the summer of 1799 he continued not only
+unsuspected, but trusted by the insurgents in the Western departments. In
+the winter, however, of the same year he had been gained over by
+Bonaparte's emissaries, and was seen at his levies in the Tuileries.  It
+is stated that General Brune made him renounce his former principles,
+desert his former companions, and betray to the then First Consul of the
+French Republic the secrets of the friends of lawful monarchy, of the
+faithful subjects of Louis XVIII.  His perfidy has been rewarded with one
+hundred and fifty thousand livres in ready money, with the see of
+Orleans, and with a promise of a cardinal's hat.  He has also, with the
+Cardinals Gonsalvi, Caprara, Fesch, Cambaceres, and Mauri, Bonaparte's
+promise, and, of course, the expectation of the Roman tiara.  He was one
+of the prelates who officiated at the late coronation, and is now
+confided in as a person who has too far committed himself with his
+legitimate Prince, and whose past treachery, therefore, answers for his
+future fidelity.
+
+This religious concordat of the 10th September, 1801, as well as all
+other constitutional codes emating from revolutionary authorities,
+proscribes even in protecting.  The professors and protectors of the
+religion of universal peace, benevolence, and forgiveness banish in this
+concordat from France forever the Cardinals Rohan and Montmorency, and
+the Bishop of Arras, whose dutiful attachment to their unfortunate Prince
+would, in better times and in a more just and generous nation, have been
+recompensed with distinctions, and honoured even by magnanimous foes.
+
+When Madame Napoleon was informed by her husband of the necessity of
+choosing her almoner and chaplain, and of attending regularly the Mass,
+she first fell a-laughing, taking it merely for a joke; the serious and
+severe looks, and the harsh and threatening expressions of the First
+Consul soon, however, convinced her how much she was mistaken.  To evince
+her repentance, she on the very next day attended her mother-in-law to
+church, who was highly edified by the sudden and religious turn of her
+daughter, and did not fail to ascribe to the efficacious interference of
+one of her favourite saints this conversion of a profane sinner.  But
+Napoleon was not the dupe of this church-going mummery of his wife, whom
+he ordered his spies to watch; these were unfortunate enough to discover
+that she went to the Mass more to fill her appointments with her lovers
+than to pray to her Saviour; and that even by the side of her mother she
+read billets-doux and love-letters when that pious lady supposed that she
+read her prayers, because her eyes were fixed upon her breviary.  Without
+relating to any one this discovery of his Josephine's frailties,
+Napoleon, after a violent connubial fracas and reprimand, and after a
+solitary confinement of her for six days, gave immediate orders to have
+the chapels of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud repaired; and until these
+were ready, Cardinal Cambaceres and Bernier, by turns, said the Mass, in
+her private apartments; where none but selected favourites or favoured
+courtiers were admitted.  Madame Napoleon now never neglects the Mass,
+but if not accompanied by her husband is escorted by a guard of honour,
+among whom she knows that he has several agents watching her motions and
+her very looks.
+
+In the month of June, 1803; I dined with Viscomte de Segur, and Joseph
+and Lucien Bonaparte were among the guests.  The latter jocosely remarked
+with what facility the French Christians had suffered themselves to be
+hunted in and out of their temples, according to the fanaticism or policy
+of their rulers; which he adduced as a proof of the great progress of
+philosophy and toleration in France.  A young officer of the party,
+Jacquemont, a relation of the former husband of the present Madame
+Lucien, observed that he thought it rather an evidence of the
+indifference of the French people to all religion; the consequence of the
+great havoc the tenets of infidelity and of atheism had made among the
+flocks of the faithful.  This was again denied by Bonaparte's
+aide-de-camp, Savary, who observed that, had this been the case, the
+First Consul (who certainly was as well acquainted with the religious
+spirit of Frenchmen as anybody else) would not have taken the trouble to
+conclude a religious concordat, nor have been at the expense of providing
+for the clergy.  To this assertion Joseph nodded an assent.
+
+When the dinner was over, De Segur took me to a window, expressing his
+uneasiness at what he called the imprudence of Jacquemont, who, he
+apprehended, from Joseph's silence and manner, would not escape
+punishment for having indirectly blamed both the restorer of religion and
+his plenipotentiary.  These apprehensions were justified.  On the next
+day Jacquemont received orders to join the colonial depot at Havre; but
+refusing to obey, by giving in his resignation as a captain, he was
+arrested, shut up in the Temple, and afterwards transported to Cayenne or
+Madagascar.  His relatives and friends are still ignorant whether he is
+dead or alive, and what is or has been his place of exile.  To a petition
+presented by Jacquemont's sister, Madame de Veaux, Joseph answered that
+"he never interfered with the acts of the haute police of his brother
+Napoleon's Government, being well convinced both of its justice and
+moderation."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That Bonaparte had, as far back as February, 1803 (when the
+King of Prussia proposed to Louis XVIII. the formal renunciation of his
+hereditary rights in favour of the First Consul), determined to assume
+the rank and title, with the power of a Sovereign, nobody can doubt. Had
+it not been for the war with England, he would, in the spring of that
+year, or twelve months earlier, have proclaimed himself Emperor of the
+French, and probably would have been acknowledged as such by all other
+Princes.  To a man so vain and so impatient, so accustomed to command and
+to intimidate, this suspension of his favourite plan was a considerable
+disappointment, and not a little increased his bitter and irreconcilable
+hatred of Great Britain.
+
+Here, as well as in foreign countries, the multitude pay homage only to
+Napoleon's uninterrupted prosperity; without penetrating or considering
+whether it be the consequence of chance or of well-digested plans;
+whether he owes his successes to his own merit or to a blind fortune. He
+asserted in his speech to the constitutional authorities, immediately
+after hostilities had commenced with England, that the war would be of
+short duration, and he firmly believed what he said.  Had he by his
+gunboats, or by his intrigues or threats, been enabled to extort a second
+edition of the Peace of Amiens, after a warfare of some few months, all
+mouths would have been ready to exclaim, "Oh, the illustrious warrior!
+Oh, the profound politician!"  Now, after three ineffectual campaigns on
+the coast, when the extravagance and ambition of our Government have
+extended the contagion of war over the Continent; when both our direct
+offers of peace, and the negotiations and mediations of our allies, have
+been declined by, or proved unavailing with, the Cabinet of St. James,
+the inconsistency, the ignorance, and the littleness of the fortunate
+great man seem to be not more remembered than the outrages and
+encroachments that have provoked Austria and Russia to take the field.
+Should he continue victorious, and be in a position to dictate another
+Peace of Luneville, which probably would be followed by another pacific
+overture to or from England, mankind will again be ready to call out,
+"Oh, the illustrious warrior!  Oh, the profound politician!  He foresaw,
+in his wisdom, that a Continental war was necessary to terrify or to
+subdue his maritime foe; that a peace with England could be obtained only
+in Germany; and that this war must be excited by extending the power of
+France on the other side of the Alps.  Hence his coronation as a King of
+Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence
+his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!"
+Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray
+as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences
+resulting from preconcerted plans and well-organized designs.
+
+Only rogues can disseminate and fools believe that the disgrace of
+Moreau, and the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, of Pichegru, and Georges,
+were necessary as footsteps to Bonaparte's Imperial throne; and that
+without the treachery of Mehee de la Touche, and the conspiracy he
+pretended to have discovered, France would still have been ruled by a
+First Consul.  It is indeed true, that this plot is to be counted (as the
+imbecility of Melas, which lost the battle of Marengo) among those
+accidents presenting themselves apropos to serve the favourite of fortune
+in his ambitious views; but without it, he would equally have been hailed
+an Emperor of the French in May, 1804.  When he came from the coast, in
+the preceding winter, and was convinced of the impossibility of making
+any impression on the British Islands with his flotilla, he convoked his
+confidential Senators, who then, with Talleyrand, settled the Senatus
+Consultum which appeared five months afterwards.  Mehee's correspondence
+with Mr. Drake was then known to him; but he and the Minister of Police
+were both unacquainted with the residence and arrival of Pichegru and
+Georges in France, and of their connection with Moreau; the particulars
+of which were first disclosed to them in the February following, when
+Bonaparte had been absent from his army of England six weeks.  The
+assumption of the Imperial dignity procured him another decent
+opportunity of offering his olive-branch to those who had caused his
+laurels to wither, and by whom, notwithstanding his abuse, calumnies, and
+menaces, he would have been more proud to be saluted Emperor than by all
+the nations upon the Continent.  His vanity, interest, and policy, all
+required this last degree of supremacy and elevation at that period.
+
+Bonaparte had so well penetrated the weak side of Moreau's character
+that, although he could not avoid doing justice to this general's
+military talents and exploits, he neither esteemed him as a citizen nor
+dreaded him as a rival.  Moreau possessed great popularity; but so did
+Dumourier and Pichegru before him: and yet neither of them had found
+adherents enough to shake those republican governments with which they
+avowed themselves openly discontented, and against which they secretly
+plotted.  I heard Talleyrand say, at Madame de Montlausier's, in the
+presence of fifty persons, "Napoleon Bonaparte had never anything to
+apprehend from General Moreau, and from his popularity, even at the head
+of an army.  Dumourier, too, was at the head of an army when he revolted
+against the National Convention; but had he not saved himself by flight
+his own troops would have delivered him up to be punished as a traitor.
+Moreau, and his popularity, could only be dangerous to the Bonaparte
+dynasty were he to survive Napoleon, had not this Emperor wisely averted
+this danger."  From this official declaration of Napoleon's confidential
+Minister, in a society of known anti-imperialists, I draw the conclusion
+that Moreau will never more, during the present reign, return to France.
+How very feeble, and how badly advised must this general have been, when,
+after his condemnation to two years' imprisonment, he accepted a
+perpetual exile, and renounced all hopes of ever again entering his own
+country.  In the Temple, or in any other prison, if he had submitted to
+the sentence pronounced against him, he would have caused Bonaparte more
+uneasiness than when at liberty, and been more a point of rally to his
+adherents and friends than when at his palace of Grosbois, because
+compassion and pity must have invigorated and sharpened their feelings.
+
+If report be true, however, he did not voluntarily exchange imprisonment
+for exile; racks were shown him; and by the act of banishment was placed
+a poisonous draught.  This report gains considerable credit when it is
+remembered that, immediately after his condemnation, Moreau furnished his
+apartments in the Temple in a handsome manner, so as to be lodged well,
+if not comfortably, with his wife and child, whom, it is said, he was not
+permitted to see before he had accepted Bonaparte's proposal of
+transportation.
+
+It may be objected to this supposition that the man in power, who did not
+care about the barefaced murder of the Duc d'Enghien, and the secret
+destruction of Pichegru, could neither much hesitate, nor be very
+conscientious about adding Moreau to the number of his victims.  True,
+but the assassin in authority is also generally a politician.  The
+untimely end of the Duc d'Enghien and of Pichegru was certainly lamented
+and deplored by the great majority of the French people; but though they
+had many who pitied their fate, but few had any relative interest to
+avenge it; whilst in the assassination of Moreau, every general, every
+officer, and every soldier of his former army, might have read the
+destiny reserved for himself by that chieftain, who did not conceal his
+preference of those who had fought under him in Italy and Egypt, and his
+mistrust and jealousy of those who had vanquished under Moreau in
+Germany; numbers of whom had already perished at St. Domingo, or in the
+other colonies, or were dispersed in separate and distant garrisons of
+the mother country.  It has been calculated that of eighty-four generals
+who made, under Moreau, the campaign of 1800, and who survived the Peace
+of Lundville, sixteen had been killed or died at St. Domingo, four at
+Guadeloupe, ten in Cayenne, nine at Ile de France, and eleven at l'Ile
+Reunion and in Madagascar.  The mortality among the officers and men has
+been in proportion.
+
+An anecdote is related of Pichegru, which does honour to the memory of
+that unfortunate general.  Fouche paid him a visit in prison the day
+before his death, and offered him "Bonaparte's commission as a
+Field-marshal, and a diploma as a grand officer of the Legion of Honour,
+provided he would turn informer against Moreau, of whose treachery
+against himself in 1797 he was reminded.  On the other hand, he was
+informed that, in consequence of his former denials, if he persisted in
+his refractory conduct, he should never more appear before any judge, but
+that the affairs of State and the safety of the country required that he
+should be privately despatched in his gaol."
+
+"So," answered this virtuous and indignant warrior, "you will spare my
+life only upon condition that I prove myself unworthy to live.  As this
+is the case, my choice is made without hesitation; I am prepared to
+become your victim, but I will never be numbered among your accomplices.
+Call in your executioners; I am ready to die as I have lived, a man of
+honour, and an irreproachable citizen."
+
+Within twenty-four hours after this answer, Pichegru was no more.
+
+That the Duc d'Enghien was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804,
+in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even
+by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown.  Some
+assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard;
+others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d'Elite; and others again,
+that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat,
+hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the
+executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by
+riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol.  Certain it is
+that Murat was the first, and Louis Bonaparte the second in command, on
+this dreadful occasion.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Thanks to Talleyrand's political emigration, our Government has
+never been in ignorance of the characters and foibles of the leading
+members among the emigrants in England.  Otto, however, finished their
+picture, but added, some new groups to those delineated by his
+predecessor.  It was according to his plan that the expedition of Mehee
+de la Touche was undertaken, and it was in following his instructions
+that the campaign of this traitor succeeded so well in Great Britain.
+
+Under the Ministry of Vergennes, of Montmorin, and of Delessart, Mehee
+had been employed as a spy in Russia, Sweden, and Poland, and acquitted
+himself perfectly to the satisfaction of his masters.  By some accident
+or other, Delessart discovered, however, in December, 1791, that he had,
+while pocketing the money of the Cabinet of Versailles, sold its secrets
+to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.  He, of course, was no longer trusted
+as a spy, and therefore turned a Jacobin, and announced himself to
+Brissot as a persecuted patriot.  All the calumnies against this Minister
+in Brissot's daily paper, Le Patriote Francois, during January, February,
+and March, 1792, were the productions of Mehee's malicious heart and able
+pen.  Even after they had sent Delessart a State prisoner to Orleans, his
+inveteracy continued, and in September the same year he went to
+Versailles to enjoy the sight of the murder of his former master.  Some
+go so far as to say that the assassins were headed by this monster, who
+aggravated cruelty by insult, and informed the dying Minister of the
+hands that stabbed him, and to whom he was indebted for a premature
+death.
+
+To these and other infamous and barbarous deeds, Talleyrand was not a
+stranger when he made Mehee his secret agent, and entrusted him with the
+mission to England.  He took, therefore, such steps that neither his
+confidence could be betrayed, nor his money squandered.  Mehee had
+instructions how to proceed in Great Britain, but he was ignorant of the
+object Government had in view by his mission; and though large sums were
+promised if successful, and if he gave satisfaction by his zeal and
+discretion, the money advanced him was a mere trifle, and barely
+sufficient to keep him from want.  He was, therefore, really distressed,
+when he fixed upon some necessitous and greedy emigrants for his
+instruments to play on the credulity of the English Ministers in some of
+their unguarded moments.  Their generosity in forbearing to avenge upon
+the deluded French exiles the slur attempted to be thrown upon their
+official capacity, and the ridicule intended to be cast on their private
+characters, has been much approved and admired here by all liberal-minded
+persons; but it has also much disappointed Bonaparte and Talleyrand, who
+expected to see these emigrants driven from the only asylum which
+hospitality has not refused to their misfortunes and misery.
+
+Mehee had been promised by Talleyrand double the amount of the sums which
+he could swindle from your Government; but though he did more mischief to
+your country than was expected in this, and though he proved that he had
+pocketed upwards of ten thousand English guineas, the wages of his
+infamy, when he hinted about the recompense he expected here, Durant,
+Talleyrand's chef du bureau, advised him, as a friend, not to remind the
+Minister of his presence in France, as Bonaparte never pardoned a
+Septembrizer, and the English guineas he possessed might be claimed and
+seized as national property, to compensate some of the sufferers by the
+unprovoked war with England.  In vain did he address himself to his
+fellow labourer in revolutionary plots, the Counsellor of State, Real,
+who had been the intermedium between him and Talleyrand, when he was
+first enlisted among the secret agents; instead of receiving money he
+heard threats; and, therefore, with as good grace as he could, he made
+the best of his disappointment; he sported a carriage, kept a mistress,
+went to gambling-houses, and is now in a fair way to be reduced to the
+status quo before his brilliant exploits in Great Britain.
+
+Real, besides the place of a Counsellor of State, occupies also the
+office of a director of the internal police.  Having some difference with
+my landlord, I was summoned to appear before him at the prefecture of the
+police.  My friend, M. de Sab-----r, formerly a counsellor of the
+Parliament at Rouen, happened to be with me when the summons was
+delivered, and offered to accompany me, being acquainted with Real.
+Though thirty persons were waiting in the antechamber at our arrival, no
+sooner was my friend's name announced than we were admitted, and I
+obtained not only more justice than I expected, or dared to claim, but an
+invitation to Madame Real's tea-party the same evening.  This justice and
+this politeness surprised me, until my friend showed me an act of forgery
+in his possession, committed by Real in 1788, when an advocate of the
+Parliament, and for which the humanity of my friend alone prevented him
+from being struck off the rolls, and otherwise punished.
+
+As I conceived my usual societies and coteries could not approve my
+attendance at the house of such a personage, I was intent upon sending an
+apology to Madame Real.  My friend, however, assured me that I should
+meet in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I
+little expected to see associating together.  I went late, and found the
+assembly very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated
+Princesses Joseph and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame
+Roederer, the cidevant Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont. They
+were conversing with M. Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a
+ci-devant lackey) Collot, the ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the
+legislator Martin, a ci-devant porter: several groups in the several
+apartments were composed of a similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant
+nobles and ci-devant valets, of ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses,
+Countesses and Baronesses, and of ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and
+poissardes.  Round a gambling-table, by the side of the ci-devant Bishop
+of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant
+shoeblack, has, by the purchase of national property, made a fortune of
+nine millions of livres--L375,000.  Opposite them were seated the
+ci-devant Prince de Chalais, and the present Prince Cambaceres with the
+ci-devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame Fauve, the daughter of a
+fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant barber.  In another
+room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with the spy Mehee de la
+Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche's secretary, Desmarets, the
+son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years a known spy.  When I was
+just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot, and her sister, Madame
+de Soubray, joined me.  You have perhaps known them in England, where,
+before their marriage, they resided for five years with their parents,
+the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired by the
+loungers in Bond Street.  The one married for money, Gillot, a ci-devant
+drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has, as a
+general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a
+ci-devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
+who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me. I
+was handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase,
+Madame de Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a
+man whom she detested, and wished to avoid.  We had hardly turned round,
+when Mehee offered her his arm, and she exclaimed with indignation, "How
+dare you, infamous wretch, approach me, when I have forbidden you ever to
+speak to me?  Had you been reduced to become a highwayman, or a
+housebreaker, I might have pitied your infamy; but a spy is a villain who
+aggravates guilt by cowardice and baseness, and can inspire no noble soul
+with any other sentiment but abhorrence, and the most sovereign
+contempt."  Without being disconcerted, Mehee silently returned to the
+company, amidst bursts of laughter from fifty servants, and as many
+masters, waiting for their carriages.  M. de Cetto was among the latter,
+but, though we all fixed our eyes steadfastly upon him, no alteration
+could be seen on his diplomatic countenance: his face must surely be made
+of brass or his heart of marble.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The day on which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an
+Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband's
+Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable
+in her life.  After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the
+drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library,
+where her husband shut her up and confined her.
+
+The discipline of the Court of St. Cloud is as singular as its
+composition is unique.  It is, by the regulation of Napoleon, entirely
+military.  From the Empress to her lowest chambermaid, from the Emperor's
+first aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or
+negligence is punished with confinement, either public or private.  In
+the former case the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in
+the latter they are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in
+the dark galleries at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens,
+where they are guarded day and night by sentries, who answer for their
+persons, and that nobody visits them.
+
+When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
+Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
+with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from
+their principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
+Imperial couple.  She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn,
+consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame
+de Montbrune.  This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
+desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry
+and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices.  She was not
+therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
+vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
+overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
+ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
+level with their circumstances.  These, however, either suspecting her
+intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
+disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
+to encounter.  Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
+following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
+French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour
+to wait on his wife.
+
+On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional
+republican authorities to present their homage as subjects, Napoleon
+asked his Josephine who were the persons, of both sexes, she had engaged,
+according to his carte blanche given her, as necessary and as unavoidable
+decorations of the drawing-room of an Emperor and Empress, as thrones and
+as canopies of State.  She referred him to Madame Remusat, who, though
+but half-dressed, was instantly ordered to appear before him.  This lady
+avowed that his grand master of the ceremonies, De Segur, had been
+entrusted by her with the whole arrangement, but that she feared that he
+had not yet been able to complete the full establishment of the Imperial
+Court.  The aide-de-camp Rapp was then despatched after De Segur, who, as
+usual, presented himself smiling and cringing.
+
+"Give me the list," said Napoleon, "of the ladies and gentlemen you have
+no doubt engaged for our household."
+
+"May it please Your Majesty," answered De Segur, trembling with fear, "I
+humbly supposed that they were not requisite before the day of Your
+Majesty's coronation."
+
+"You supposed!" retorted Napoleon.  "How dare you suppose differently
+from our commands?  Is the Emperor of the Great Nation not to be
+encompassed with a more numerous retinue, or with more lustre, than a
+First Consul?  Do you not see the immense difference between the
+Sovereign Monarch of an Empire, and the citizen chief magistrate of a
+commonwealth?  Are there not starving nobles in my empire enough to
+furnish all the Courts in Europe with attendants, courtiers, and valets?
+Do you not believe that with a nod, with a single nod, I might have them
+all prostrated before my throne?  What can, then, have occasioned this
+impertinent delay?"
+
+"Sire!" answered De Segur, "it is not the want of numbers, but the
+difficulty of the choice among them.  I will never recommend a single
+individual upon whom I cannot depend; or who, on some future day, may
+expose me to the greatest of all evils, the displeasure of my Prince."
+
+"But," continued Napoleon, "what is to be done to-day that I may augment
+the number of my suite, and by it impose upon the gaping multitude and
+the attending deputations?"--"Command," said De Segur, "all the officers
+of Your Majesty's staff, and of the staff of the Governor of Paris,
+General Murat, to surround Your Majesty's sacred person, and order them
+to accoutre themselves in the most shining and splendid manner possible.
+The presence of so many military men will also, in a political point of
+view, be useful.  It will lessen the pretensions of the constituted
+authorities, by telling them indirectly, 'It is not to your Senatus
+Consultum, to your decrees, or to your votes, that I am indebted for my
+present Sovereignty; I owe it exclusively to my own merit and valour, and
+to the valour of my brave officers and men, to whose arms I trust more
+than to your counsels.'"
+
+This advice obtained Napoleon's entire approbation, and was followed.  De
+Segur was permitted to retire, but when Madame Remusat made a curtsey
+also to leave the room, she was stopped with his terrible 'aux arrets'
+and left under the care and responsibility of his aide-de-camp, Lebrun,
+who saw her safe into her room, at the door of which he placed two
+grenadiers.  Napoleon then went out, ordering his wife, at her peril, to
+be in time, ready and brilliantly dressed, for the drawing-room.
+
+Dreading the consequences of her husband's wrath, Madame Napoleon was not
+only punctual, but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and
+ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her
+beauty, honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity.  She thought
+that even in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation.  When
+all the troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when
+Senators, legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a
+model of female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied
+him in silence through six different apartments before he came to her
+library, where he surlily ordered her to enter and to remain until
+further orders.
+
+"What have I done, Sire! to deserve such treatment?" exclaimed Josephine,
+trembling.
+
+"If," answered Napoleon, "Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool
+of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me:
+Had not De Segur fortunately for him--had the ingenuity to extricate us
+from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had
+brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of
+my emperorship.  Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to
+divert you, but you must remain where you are until I am inclined to
+release you."  So saying, Napoleon locked the door and put the key in his
+pocket.
+
+It was near two o'clock in the afternoon when she was thus shut up.
+Remembering the recent flattery of her courtiers, and comparing it with
+the unfeeling treatment of her husband, she found herself so much the
+more unfortunate, as the expressions of the former were regarded by her
+as praise due to her merit, while the unkindness of the latter was
+unavailingly resented as the undeserved oppression of a capricious
+despot.
+
+Business, or perhaps malice, made Napoleon forget to send her any dinner;
+and when, at eight o'clock, his brothers and sisters came, according to
+invitation, to take tea, he said coldly:
+
+"Apropos, I forgot it.  My wife has not dined yet; she is busy, I
+suppose, in her philosophical meditations in her study."
+
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, her daughter, flew directly towards the study,
+and her mother could scarcely, for her tears, inform her that--she was a
+prisoner, and that her husband was her gaoler.
+
+"Oh, Sire!" said Madame Louis, returning, "even this remarkable day is a
+day of mourning for my poor mother!"
+
+"She deserves worse," answered Napoleon, "but, for your sake, she shall
+be released; here is the key, let her out."
+
+Madame Napoleon was, however, not in a situation to wish to appear before
+her envious brothers and sisters-in-law.  Her eyes were so swollen with
+crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those
+Imperial robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a
+certain preservative against sorrow and affliction.  At nine o'clock,
+however, another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave
+her the choice either to accompany him back to the study or to join the
+family party of the Bonapartes.
+
+In deploring her mother's situation, Madame Louis Bonaparte informed her
+former governess, Madame Cam---n, of these particulars, which I heard her
+relate at Madame de M----r's, almost verbatim as I report them to you.
+Such, and other scenes, nearly of the same description, are neither rare
+nor singular, in the most singular Court that ever existed in civilized
+Europe.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though Government suffer a religious, or, rather,
+anti-religious liberty of the Press, the authors who libel or ridicule
+the Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic, religion, are excluded
+from all prospect of advancement, or if in place, are not trusted or
+liked. Cardinal Caprara, the nuncio of the Pope, proposed last year, in a
+long memorial, the same severe restrictions on the discussions or
+publications in religious matters as were already ordered in those
+concerning politics.  But both Bonaparte and his Minister in the affairs
+of the Church, Portalis, refused the introduction of what they called a
+tyranny on the conscience.  Caprara then addressed himself to the
+ex-Bishop Talleyrand, who, on this occasion, was more explicit than he
+generally is.
+
+"Bonaparte," said he, "rules not only over a fickle, but a gossiping
+(bavard) people, whom he has prudently forbidden all conversation and
+writing concerning government of the State.  They would soon (accustomed
+as they are, since the Revolution, to verbal and written debates) be
+tired of talking about fine weather or about the opera.  To occupy them
+and their attention, some ample subject of diversion was necessary, and
+religion was surrendered to them at discretion; because, enlightened as
+the world now is, even athiests or Christian fanatics can do but little
+harm to society.  They may spend rivers of ink, but they will be unable
+to shed a drop of blood."
+
+"True," answered the Cardinal, "but only to a certain degree.  The
+licentiousness of the Press, with regard to religious matters, does it
+not also furnish infidelity with new arms to injure the faith?  And have
+not the horrors from which France has just escaped proved the danger and
+evil consequences of irreligion, and the necessity of encouraging and
+protecting Christianity?  By the recall of the clergy, and by the
+religious concordat, Bonaparte has shown himself convinced of this
+truth."
+
+"So he is," interrupted Talleyrand; "but he abhors intoleration and
+persecution" (not in politics).  "I shall, however, to please Your
+Eminence, lay the particulars of your conversation before him."
+
+Some time afterwards, when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed
+about some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the
+Senators Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of
+the senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and
+remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal
+Caprara for two hours.  What was determined on this occasion has not
+transpired, as even the Cardinal, who is not the most discreet person
+when provoked, and his religious zeal gets the better of his political
+prudence, has remained silent, though seemingly contented.
+
+Two rather insignificant authors, of the name of Varennes and Beaujou,
+who published some scandalous libels on Christianity, have since been
+taken up, and after some months' imprisonment in the Temple been
+condemned to transportation to Cayenne for life,--not as infidels or
+atheists, but as conspirators against the State, in consequence of some
+unguarded expressions which prejudice or ill-will alone would judge
+connected with politics.  Nothing is now permitted to be printed against
+religion but with the author's name; but on affixing his name, he may
+abuse the worship and Gospel as much as he pleases.  Since the example of
+severity alluded to above, however, this practice is on the decline. Even
+Pigault-Lebrun, a popular but immoral novel writer, narrowly escaped
+lately a trip to Cayenne for one of his blasphemous publications, and
+owes to the protection of Madame Murat exclusively that he was not sent
+to keep Varennes and Beaujou company.  Some years ago, when Madame Murat
+was neither so great nor so rich as at present, he presented her with a
+copy of his works, and she had been unfashionable enough not only to
+remember the compliment, but wished to return it by nominating him her
+private secretary; which, however, the veto of Napoleon prevented.
+
+Of Napoleon Bonaparte's religious sentiments, opinions are not divided in
+France.  The influence over him of the petty, superstitious Cardinal
+Caprara is, therefore, inexplicable.  This prelate has forced from him
+assent to transactions which had been refused both to his mother and his
+brother Joseph, who now often employ the Cardinal with success, where
+they either dare not or will not show themselves.  It is true His
+Eminence is not easily rebuked, but returns to the charge unabashed by
+new repulses; and be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a
+man by whom Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no
+insignificant favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites
+cunning with devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to
+corruption as tormented by ambition.
+
+As most ecclesiastical promotions passed through his pure and
+disinterested hands, Madame Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Portalis, who also
+wanted some douceurs for their extraordinary expenses, united together
+last spring to remove him from France.  Napoleon was cajoled to nominate
+him a grand almoner of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Cardinal set out for
+Milan.  He was, however, artful enough to convince his Sovereign of the
+propriety of having his grand almoner by his side; and he is, therefore,
+obliged to this intrigue of his enemies that he now disposes of the
+benefices in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as those of the French Empire.
+
+During the Pope's residence in this capital, His Holiness often made use
+of Cardinal Caprara in his secret negotiations with Bonaparte; and
+whatever advantages were obtained by the Roman Pontiff for the Gallican
+Church His Eminence almost extorted; for he never desisted, where his
+interest or pride were concerned, till he had succeeded.  It is said that
+one day last January, after having been for hours exceedingly teasing and
+troublesome, Bonaparte lost his patience, and was going to treat His
+Eminence as he frequently does his relatives, his Ministers, and
+counsellors,--that is to say, to kick him from his presence; but suddenly
+recollecting himself, he said: "Cardinal, remain here in my closet until
+my return, when I shall have more time to listen to what you have to
+relate."  It was at ten o'clock in the morning, and a day of great
+military audience and grand review.  In going out he put the key in his
+pocket, and told the guards in his antechamber to pay no attention if
+they should hear any noise in his closet.
+
+It was dark before the review was over, and Bonaparte had a large party
+to dinner.  When his guests retired, he went into his wife's
+drawing-room, where one of the Pope's chamberlains waited on him with the
+information that His Holiness was much alarmed about the safety of
+Cardinal Caprara, of whom no account could be obtained, even with the
+assistance of the police, to whom application had been made, since His
+Eminence had so suddenly disappeared.
+
+"Oh!  how absent I am," answered Napoleon, as with surprise; "I entirely
+forgot that I left the Cardinal in my closet this morning.  I will go
+myself and make an apology for my blunder."
+
+His Eminence, quite exhausted, was found fast asleep; but no sooner was
+he a little recovered than he interrupted Bonaparte's affected apology
+with the repetition of the demand he had made in the morning; and so well
+was Napoleon pleased with him, for neglecting his personal inconvenience
+only to occupy himself with the affairs of his Sovereign, that he
+consented to what was asked, and in laying his hand upon the shoulders of
+the prelate, said:
+
+"Faithful Minister!  were every Prince as well served as your Sovereign
+is by you, many evils might be prevented, and much good effected."
+
+The same evening Duroc brought him, as a present, a snuffbox with
+Bonaparte's portrait, set round with diamonds, worth one thousand louis
+d'or.  The adventures of this day certainly did not lessen His Eminence
+in the favour of Napoleon or of Pius VII.
+
+Last November, some not entirely unknown persons intended to amuse
+themselves at the Cardinal's expense.  At seven o'clock one evening, a
+young Abbe presented himself at the Cardinal's house, Hotel de Montmorin,
+Rue Plumet, as by appointment of His Eminence, and was, by his secretary,
+ushered into the study and asked to wait there.  Hardly half an hour
+afterwards, two persons, pretending to be agents of the police, arrived
+just as the Cardinal's carriage had stopped.  They informed him that the
+woman introduced into his house in the dress of an Abby was connected
+with a gang of thieves and housebreakers, and demanded his permission to
+arrest her.  He protested that, except the wife of his porter, no woman
+in any dress whatever could be in his house, and that, to convince
+themselves, they were very welcome to accompany his valet-de-chambre into
+every room they wished to see.  To the great surprise of his servant, a
+very pretty girl was found in the bed of His Eminence's bed-chamber,
+which joined his study, who, though the pretended police agents insisted
+on her getting up, refused, under pretence that she was there waiting for
+her 'bon ami', the Cardinal.
+
+His Eminence was no sooner told of this than he shut the gate of his
+house, after sending his secretary to the commissary of police of the
+section.  In the meantime, both the police agents and the girl entreated
+him to let them out, as the whole was merely a badinage; but he remained
+inflexible, and they were all three carried by the real police commissary
+to prison.
+
+Upon a complaint made by His Eminence to Bonaparte, the Police Minister,
+Fouche, received orders to have those who had dared thus to violate the
+sacred character of the representative of the Holy Pontiff immediately,
+and without further ceremony, transported to Cayenne.  The Cardinal
+demanded, and obtained, a process verbal of what had occurred, and of the
+sentence on the culprits, to be laid before his Sovereign.  As Eugene de
+Beauharnais interested himself so much for the individuals involved in
+this affair as both to implore Bonaparte's pardon and the Cardinal's
+interference for them, many were inclined to believe that he was in the
+secret, if not the contriver of this unfortunate joke.  This supposition
+gained credit when, after all his endeavours to save them proved vain, he
+sent them seventy-two livres L 3,000--to Rochefort, that they might, on
+their arrival at Cayenne, be able to buy a plantation.  He procured them
+also letters to the Governor, Victor Hughes, recommending that they
+should be treated differently from other transported persons.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I was particularly attentive in observing the countenances and
+demeanour of the company at the last levee which Madame Napoleon
+Bonaparte held, previous to her departure with her husband to meet the
+Pope at Fontainebleau.  I had heard from good authority that "to those
+whose propensities were known, Duroc's information that the Empress was
+visible was accompanied with a kind of admonitory or courtly hint, that
+the strictest decency in dress and manners, and a conversation chaste,
+and rather of an unusually modest turn, would be highly agreeable to
+their Sovereigns, in consideration of the solemn occasion of a Sovereign
+Pontiff's arrival in France,--an occurrence that had not happened for
+centuries, and probably would not happen for centuries to come."  I went
+early, and was well rewarded for my punctuality.
+
+There came the Senator Fouche, handing his amiable and chaste spouse,
+walking with as much gravity as formerly, when a friar, he marched in a
+procession.  Then presented themselves the Senators Sieyes and Roederer,
+with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the
+confessor of the latter.  Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before
+I had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of
+fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin.  She was
+followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was
+sighing deeply and loudly.  After her came limping the godly Talleyrand,
+dragging his pure moiety by his side, both with downcast and edifying
+looks.  The Christian patriots, Gravina and Lima, Dreyer and Beust,
+Dalberg and Cetto, Malsburgh and Pappenheim, with the Catholic
+Schimmelpenninck and Mohammed Said Halel Effendi,--all presented
+themselves as penitent sinners imploring absolutions, after undergoing
+mortifications.
+
+But it would become tedious and merely a repetition, were I to depict
+separately the figures and characters of all the personages at this
+politico-comical masquerade.  Their conversation was, however, more
+uniform, more contemptible, and more laughable, than their accoutrements
+and grimaces were ridiculous.  To judge from what they said, they
+belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and
+they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the
+eve of the day of the Last Judgment.  The truly devout Madame Napoleon
+spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the
+vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII.,
+His vicar.  Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic
+commentaries of her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry
+out, as soon as she had finished, "Amen!  Amen!  Amen!"
+
+Napoleon had placed himself between the old Cardinal de Bellois and the
+not young Cardinal Bernier, so as to prevent the approach of any profane
+sinner or unrepentant infidel.  Round him and their clerical chiefs, all
+the curates and grand vicars, almoners and chaplains of the Court, and
+the capitals of the Princess, Princesses, and grand officers of State,
+had formed a kind of cordon.  "Had," said the young General Kellerman to
+me, "Bonaparte always been encompassed by troops of this description, he
+might now have sung hymns as a saint in heaven, but he would never have
+reigned as an Emperor upon earth."  This indiscreet remark was heard by
+Louis Bonaparte, and on the next morning Kellerman received orders to
+join the army in Hanover, where he was put under the command of a general
+younger than himself.  He would have been still more severely punished,
+had not his father, the Senator (General Kellerman), been in so great
+favour at the Court of St. Cloud, and so much protected by Duroc, who had
+made, in 1792, his first campaign under this officer, then
+commander-in-chief of the army of the Ardennes.
+
+When this devout assembly separated, which was by courtesy an hour
+earlier than usual, I expected every moment to hear a chorus of
+horse-laughs, because I clearly perceived that all of them were tired of
+their assumed parts, and, with me, inclined to be gay at the expense of
+their neighbours.  But they all remembered also that they were watched by
+spies, and that an imprudent look or an indiscreet word, gaiety instead
+of gravity, noise when silence was commanded, might be followed by an
+airing in the wilderness of Cayenne.  They, therefore, all called out,
+"Coachman, to our hotel!" as if to say, "We will to-day, in compliment to
+the new-born Christian zeal of our Sovereigns, finish our evening as
+piously as we have begun it."  But no sooner were they out of sight of
+the palace than they hurried to the scenes of dissipation, all
+endeavouring, in the debauchery and excesses so natural to them, to
+forget their unnatural affectation and hypocrisy.
+
+Well you know the standard of the faith even of the members of the
+Bonaparte family.  Two days before this Christian circle at Madame
+Napoleon's, Madame de Chateaureine, with three other ladies, visited the
+Princesse Borghese.  Not seeing a favourite parrot they had often
+previously admired, they inquired what was become of it.
+
+"Oh, the poor creature!"  answered the Princess; "I have disposed of it,
+as well as of two of my monkeys.  The Emperor has obliged me to engage an
+almoner and two chaplains, and it would be too extravagant in me to keep
+six useless animals in my hotel.  I must now submit to hearing the
+disgusting howlings of my almoner instead of the entertaining chat of my
+parrot, and to see the awkward bows and kneelings of my chaplains instead
+of the amusing capering of my monkeys.  Add to this, that I am forced to
+transform into a chapel my elegant and tasty boudoir, on the
+ground-floor, where I have passed so many delicious tete-a-tetes.  Alas!
+what a change!  what a shocking fashion, that we are now all again to be
+Christians!"
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding what was inserted in our public prints to the
+contrary, the reception Bonaparte experienced from his army of England in
+June last year, the first time he presented himself to them as an
+Emperor, was far from such as flattered either his vanity or views.  For
+the first days, some few solitary voices alone accompanied the "Vive
+l'Empereur!" of his generals, and of his aides-de-camp.  This
+indifference, or, as he called it, mutinous spirit, was so much the more
+provoking as it was unexpected.  He did not, as usual, ascribe it to the
+emissaries or gold of England, but to the secret adherents of Pichegru
+and Moreau amongst the brigades or divisions that had served under these
+unfortunate generals.  He ordered, in consequence, his Minister Berthier
+to make out a list of all these corps.  Having obtained this, he
+separated them by ordering some to Italy, others to Holland, and the rest
+to the frontiers of Spain and Germany.  This act of revenge or jealousy
+was regarded, both by the officers and men, as a disgrace and as a doubt
+thrown out against their fidelity, and the murmur was loud and general.
+In consequence of this, some men were shot, and many more arrested.
+
+Observing, however, that severity had not the desired effect, Bonaparte
+suddenly changed his conduct, released the imprisoned, and rewarded with
+the crosses of his Legion of Honour every member of the so lately
+suspected troops who had ever performed any brilliant or valorous
+exploits under the proscribed generals.  He even incorporated among his
+own bodyguards and guides men who had served in the same capacity under
+these rival commanders, and numbers of their children were received in
+the Prytanees and military free schools.  The enthusiastic exclamation
+that soon greeted his ears convinced him that he had struck upon the
+right string of his soldiers' hearts.  Men who, some few days before,
+wanted only the signal of a leader to cut an Emperor they hated to
+pieces, would now have contended who should be foremost to shed their
+last drop of blood for a chief they adored.
+
+This affected liberality towards the troops who had served under his
+rivals roused some slight discontent among those to whom he was chiefly
+indebted for his own laurels.  But if he knew the danger of reducing to
+despair slighted men with arms in their hands, he also was well aware of
+the equal danger of enduring licentiousness or audacity among troops who
+had, on all occasions, experienced his preference and partiality; and he
+gave a sanguinary proof of his opinion on this subject at the grand
+parade of the 12th of July, 1804, preparatory to the grand fete of the
+14th.
+
+A grenadier of the 21st Regiment (which was known in Italy under the name
+of the Terrible), in presetting arms to him, said: "Sire! I have served
+under you four campaigns, fought under you in ten battles or engagements;
+have received in your service seven wounds, and am not a member of your
+Legion of Honour; whilst many who served under Moreau, and are not able
+to show a scratch from an enemy, have that distinction."
+
+Bonaparte instantly ordered this man to be shot by his own comrades in
+the front of the regiment.  The six grenadiers selected to fire, seeming
+to hesitate, he commanded the whole corps to lay down their arms, and
+after being disbanded, to be sent to the different colonial depots.  To
+humiliate them still more, the mutinous grenadier was shot by the
+gendarmes.  When the review was over, "Vive l'Empereur!"  resounded from
+all parts, and his popularity among the troops has since rather increased
+than diminished.  Nobody can deny that Bonaparte possesses a great
+presence of mind, an undaunted firmness, and a perfect knowledge of the
+character of the people over whom he reigns.  Could but justice and
+humanity be added to his other qualities, but, unfortunately for my
+nation, I fear that the answer of General Mortier to a remark of a friend
+of mine on this subject is not problematical: "Had," said this Imperial
+favourite, "Napoleon Bonaparte been just and humane, he would neither
+have vanquished nor reigned."
+
+All these scenes occurred before Bonaparte, seated on a throne, received
+the homage, as a Sovereign, of one hundred and fifty thousand warriors,
+who now bowed as subjects, after having for years fought for liberty and
+equality, and sworn hatred to all monarchical institutions; and who
+hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals.  What
+an inconsistency!  The splendour and show that accompanied him
+everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the
+decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he
+distributed with bombastic speeches among troops--to whom those political
+impositions and social cajoleries were novelties--made such an impression
+upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover,
+brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and
+independence of your country.  The heads and imagination of the soldiers,
+I know from the best authority, were then so exalted that, though they
+might have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or
+routed.  I pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and
+happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled
+people of soldiers,--easy tools in the hands of every impostor or
+mountebank.
+
+The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of
+grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed
+with uneasiness and vexation.  Except at Berlin, in all the other great
+Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your
+country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such lightness
+and such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his boasts and
+defied his threats.  Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of St. James
+more opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the impertinence of
+his menaces, and the folly of his parade for the invasion of your
+country, than by declaring all the ports containing his invincible armada
+in a state of blockade.  I have heard from an officer who witnessed his
+fury when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat from before St. Jean
+d'Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at Boulogne when a despatch
+informed him of this circumstance, that it was nothing compared to the
+violent rage into which he flew upon reading it.  For an hour afterwards
+not even his brother Joseph dared approach him; and his passion got so
+far the better of his policy, that what might still have long been
+concealed from the troops was known within the evening to the whole camp.
+He dictated to his secretary orders for his Ministers at Vienna, Berlin,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and couriers were sent away with them; but half an
+hour afterwards other couriers were despatched after them with other
+orders, which were revoked in their turn, when at last Joseph had
+succeeded in calming him a little.  He passed, however, the whole
+following night full dressed and agitated; lying down only for an
+instant, but having always in his room Joseph and Duroc, and deliberating
+on a thousand methods of destroying the insolent islanders; all equally
+violent, but all equally impracticable.
+
+The next morning, when, as usual, he went to see the manoeuvres of his
+flotilla, and the embarkation and landing of his troops, he looked so
+pale that he almost excited pity.  Your cruisers, however, as if they had
+been informed of the situation of our hero, approached unusually near, to
+evince, as it were, their contempt and, derision.  He ordered instantly
+all the batteries to fire, and went himself to that which carried its
+shot farthest; but that moment six of your vessels, after taking down
+their sails, cast anchors, with the greatest sang-froid, just without the
+reach of our shot.  In an unavailing anger he broke upon the spot six
+officers of artillery, and pushed one, Captain d' Ablincourt, down the
+precipice under the battery, where he narrowly escaped breaking his neck
+as well as his legs; for which injury he was compensated by being made an
+officer of the Legion of Honour.  Bonaparte then convoked upon the spot a
+council of his generals of artillery and of the engineers, and, within an
+hour's time, some guns and mortars of still heavier metal and greater
+calibre were carried up to replace the others; but, fortunately for the
+generals, before a trial could be made of them the tide changed, and your
+cruisers sailed.
+
+In returning to breakfast at General Soult's, he observed the
+countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath;
+and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of
+encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment
+with which your navy had inspired his troops.  The occurrences of these
+two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where
+the cringing of his courtiers consoled him, in part, for the want of
+respect or gallantry in your English tars.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles, it was
+the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who principally
+influenced the determination of Francis II.  to assume the hereditary
+title of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon Emperor of the
+French.
+
+Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
+but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
+number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
+delicate political transactions.  In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
+with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to
+receive him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a proclamation,
+in which Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his predecessor, Joseph
+II., which had been the principal cause of the troubles; and
+reestablished everything upon the same footing as during the reign of
+Maria Theresa.  In 1791 he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St.
+Petersburg, where his conduct obtained the approbation of his own Prince
+and of the Empress of Russia.
+
+In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
+Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte.  His mission was to excite
+the Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence
+to the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides.  He was
+therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near
+the lake of Chiavenne.  A rumour was very prevalent at this time that
+some papers were found in De Semonville's portfolio implicating Count von
+Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals.  The
+continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
+inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
+jealousy.
+
+In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor, a
+treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
+plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom,
+on the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio.  In the
+same capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress broke
+up, he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
+
+After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of experience
+and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister, Talleyrand, the
+Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France, where, with all
+other representatives of Princes, he has experienced more of the frowns
+and rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of our present
+Sovereign.
+
+Count von Cobenzl's foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
+reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
+assist him frequently in his amours.  Some adventures of this sort, which
+occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count's expense.
+Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
+merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
+that "the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable
+to his official notes."
+
+So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at
+Aix-la-Chapelle last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him,
+with the Marquis de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another
+plenipotentiary at Udine), to visit the camps of his army of England on
+the coast.  It is true that this condescension was, perhaps, as much a
+boast, or a threat, as a compliment.
+
+The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
+proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
+of Bonaparte's for your mandate of blockade.  Rumour states that this
+measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
+your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
+Napoleon.  For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
+Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
+objections or representations.  "But what absurdities do I not sign!"
+exclaimed the pliant Minister.
+
+Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
+command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
+waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor.  Charlemagne
+had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
+before,--an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
+Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
+to gratify his impertinent vanity.  Every spot where Charlemagne had
+walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
+great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
+representatives, and by his side his wife.  To a peasant who presented
+him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave
+nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
+crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
+bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
+louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
+but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
+manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute
+for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many
+believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was
+registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor
+to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of
+sixty years' standing.  But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt
+about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe!  A German professor,
+Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise,
+addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his
+intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne
+were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of
+this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured
+within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years.  The night after
+Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary, accompanied by
+four gendarmes, entered the professor's bedroom, forced him to dress, and
+ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under escort to the
+left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under pain of
+death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire.  This
+expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and
+antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such
+numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that
+we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by
+the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine.  A ballad, written in
+monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne
+at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish
+professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of
+Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres--L 500.  This
+ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum
+Charlemagne.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame
+Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health by
+using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor as
+low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied.  Napoleon himself was
+neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her
+extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy
+of the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great
+condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her
+drawing-room and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were
+only fit to be seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as associates
+with her valets or chambermaids.
+
+The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these
+gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they
+were her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued
+debtor to them she could not decently--or rather, she dared not prevent
+them from being visitors to her.  By confiding her situation to her old
+friend, Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those
+troublesome personages.  When the Minister was informed of the occasion
+of the attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to
+Bonaparte not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them
+examples of severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only
+sure means to prevent, for the future, people of the same description
+from being familiar or audacious.
+
+When, thanks to Talleyrand's interference, these family arrangements were
+settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour; and
+her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to think
+of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever.  I am assured
+that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at Aix-la-Chapelle,
+he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her three times, and
+abused her once a day.
+
+It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at last
+completed the composition of their household, and laid before them the
+list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their
+livery.  This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist
+nor a republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a disaffected
+subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth, ridiculing
+both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives; no exact
+definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed professions, of
+his real moral and political character.  One thing only is certain;--he
+was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a submissive slave under
+Napoleon the First.
+
+Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth,
+and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his ancestors
+had been a Field-marshal.  Being early introduced at Court, he acquired,
+with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and
+by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de
+Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the
+Court of St. Petersburg.  With some reading and genius, but with more
+boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French men of letters,
+and was therefore as such received with distinction by Catharine II., on
+whom, and on whose Government, he in return published a libel.  He was a
+valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been under every
+succeeding King of faction.  The partisans of the Revolution pointed him
+out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of Prussia; and
+he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick William II.
+refused him admittance to his person, and, after some ineffectual
+intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he returned to
+Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for another libel
+on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh, which he
+printed in 1796.  Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much admired,
+he was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving under the
+Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to subsist on. In
+1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a Counsellor of
+State,--a place which he resigned last year for that of a grand master of
+the ceremonies at the present Imperial Court.  His ancient inveteracy
+against your country has made him a favourite with Bonaparte.  The
+indelicate and scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797, against Lord
+Malmesbury, in the then official journal, Le Redacteur, were the
+offspring of his malignity and pen; and the philippics and abusive notes
+in our present official Moniteur, against your Government and country,
+are frequently his patriotic progeny, or rather, he often shares with
+Talleyrand and Hauterive their paternity.
+
+The Revolution has not made Comte de Segur more happy with regard to his
+family, than in his circumstances, which, notwithstanding his brilliant
+grand-mastership, are far from being affluent.  His amiable wife died of
+terror, and brokenhearted from the sufferings she had experienced, and
+the atrocities she had witnessed; and when he had enticed his eldest son
+to accept the place of a sub-prefect under Bonaparte, his youngest son,
+who never approved our present regeneration, challenged his brother to
+fight, and, after killing him in a duel, destroyed himself.  Comte de
+Segur is therefore, at present, neither a husband nor a father, but only
+a grand master of ceremonies!  What an indemnification!
+
+Madame Napoleon and her husband are both certainly under much obligation
+to this nobleman for his care to procure them comparatively decent
+persons to decorate their levees and drawing-rooms, who, though they have
+no claim either to morality or virtue, either to honour or chastity, are
+undoubtedly a great acquisition at the Court of St. Cloud, because none
+of them has either been accused of murder, or convicted of plunder; which
+is the case with some of the Ministers, and most of the generals,
+Senators and counsellors.  It is true that they are a mixture of beggared
+nobles and enriched valets, of married courtesans and divorced wives,
+but, for all that, they can with justice demand the places of honour of
+all other Imperial courtiers of both sexes.
+
+When Bonaparte had read over the names of these Court recruits, engaged
+and enlisted by De Segur, he said, "Well, this lumber must do until we
+can exchange it for better furniture."  At that time, young Comte d'
+Arberg (of a German family, on the right bank of the Rhine), but whose
+mother is one of Madame Bonaparte's Maids of Honour, was travelling for
+him in Germany and in Prussia, where, among other negotiations, he was
+charged to procure some persons of both sexes, of the most ancient
+nobility, to augment Napoleon's suite, and to figure in his livery.  More
+individuals presented themselves for this honour than he wanted, but they
+were all without education and without address: ignorant of the world as
+of books; not speaking well their own language, much less understanding
+French or Italian; vain of their birth, but not ashamed of their
+ignorance, and as proud as poor.  This project was therefore relinquished
+for the time; but a number of the children of the principal ci-devant
+German nobles, who, by the Treaty of Luneville and Ratisbon, had become
+subjects of Bonaparte, were, by the advice of Talleyrand, offered places
+in French Prytanees, where the Emperor promised to take care of their
+future advancement.  Madame Bonaparte, at the same time, selected
+twenty-five young girls of the same families, whom she also offered to
+educate at her expense.  Their parents understood too well the meaning of
+these generous offers to dare decline their acceptance.  These children
+are the plants of the Imperial nursery, intended to produce future pages,
+chamberlains, equerries, Maids of Honour and ladies in waiting, who for
+ancestry may bid defiance to all their equals of every Court in
+Christendom.  This act of benevolence, as it was called in some German
+papers, is also an indirect chastisement of the refractory French
+nobility, who either demanded too high prices for their degradation, or
+abruptly refused to disgrace the names of their forefathers.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has been as profuse in his disposal of the Imperial
+diadem of Germany, as in his promises of the papal tiara of Rome.  The
+Houses of Austria and Brandenburgh, the Electors of Bavaria and Baden,
+have by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive support towards
+obtaining it at the first vacancy.  Those, however, who have paid
+attention to his machinations, and studied his actions; who remember his
+pedantic affectation of being considered a modern, or rather a second
+Charlemagne; and who have traced his steps through the labyrinth of folly
+and wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art, corruption, and
+policy, which have seated him on the present throne, can entertain little
+doubt but that he is seriously bent on seizing and adding the sceptre of
+Germany to the crowns of France and Italy.
+
+During his stay last autumn at Mentz, all those German Electors who had
+spirit and dignity enough to refuse to attend on him there in person were
+obliged to send Extraordinary Ambassadors to wait on him, and to
+compliment him on their part.  Though hardly one corner of the veil that
+covered the intrigues going forward there is yet lifted up, enough is
+already seen to warn Europe and alarm the world.  The secret treaties he
+concluded there with most of the petty Princes of Germany, against the
+Chief of the German Empire which not only entirely detached them from
+their country and its legitimate Sovereign, but made their individual
+interests hostile and totally opposite to that of the German
+Commonwealth, transforming them also from independent Princes into
+vassals of France, both directly increased has already gigantic power,
+and indirectly encouraged him to extend it beyond what his most sanguine
+expectation had induced him to hope.  I do not make this assertion from a
+mere supposition in consequence of ulterior occurrences.  At a supper
+with Madame Talleyrand last March, I heard her husband, in a gay,
+unguarded, or perhaps premeditated moment, say, when mentioning his
+proposed journey to Italy:
+
+"I prepared myself to pass the Alps last October at Mentz.  The first
+ground-stone of the throne of Italy was, strange as it may seem, laid on
+the banks of the Rhine: with such an extensive foundation, it must be
+difficult to shake, and impossible to overturn it."
+
+We were, in the whole, twenty-five persons at table when he spoke thus,
+many of whom, he well knew, were intimately acquainted both with the
+Austrian and Prussian Ambassadors, who by the bye, both on the next day
+sent couriers to their respective Courts.
+
+The French Revolution is neither seen in Germany in that dangerous light
+which might naturally be expected from the sufferings in which it has
+involved both Princes and subjects, nor are its future effects dreaded
+from its past enormities.  The cause of this impolitic and anti-patriotic
+apathy is to be looked for in the palaces of Sovereigns, and not in the
+dwellings of their people.  There exists hardly a single German Prince
+whose Ministers, courtiers and counsellors are not numbered, and have
+long been notorious among the anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati:
+most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction
+of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which
+bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their
+sophistry and imposture as inspiration.
+
+Among Princes thus encompassed, the Elector of Bavaria must be allowed
+the first place.  A younger brother of a younger branch, and a colonel in
+the service of Louis XVI., he neither acquired by education, nor
+inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality
+that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a
+lady's drawing-room.  He made himself justly suspected of a moral
+corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his
+approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of
+France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of
+one hundred thousand livres.  Immediately after his unexpected accession
+to the Electorate of Bavaria, he concluded a subsidiary treaty with your
+country, and his troops were ordered to combat rebellion, under the
+standard of Austrian loyalty.  For some months it was believed that the
+Elector wished by his conduct to obliterate the memory of the errors,
+vices, and principles of the Duc de Deux-Ponts (his former title).  But
+placing all his confidence in a political adventurer and revolutionary
+fanatic, Montgelas, without either consistency or firmness, without being
+either bent upon information or anxious about popularity, he threw the
+whole burden of State on the shoulders of this dangerous man, who soon
+showed the world that his master, by his first treaties, intended only to
+pocket your money without serving your cause or interest.
+
+This Montgelas is, on account of his cunning and long standing among
+them, worshipped by the gang of German Illuminati as an idol rather than
+revered as an apostle.  He is their Baal, before whom they hope to oblige
+all nations upon earth to prostrate themselves as soon as infidelity has
+entirely banished Christianity; for the Illuminati do not expect to reign
+till the last Christian is buried under the rubbish of the last altar of
+Christ.  It is not the fault of Montgelas if such an event has not
+already occurred in the Electorate of Bavaria.
+
+Within six months after the Treaty of Lundville, Montgelas began in that
+country his political and religious innovations.  The nobility and the
+clergy were equally attacked; the privileges of the former were invaded,
+and the property of the latter confiscated; and had not his zeal carried
+him too far, so as to alarm our new nobles, our new men of property, and
+new Christians, it is very probable that atheism would have already,
+without opposition, reared its head in the midst of Germany, and
+proclaimed there the rights of man, and the code of liberty and equality.
+
+The inhabitants of Bavaria are, as you know, all Roman Catholics, and the
+most superstitious and ignorant Catholics of Germany.  The step is but
+short from superstition to infidelity; and ignorance has furnished in
+France more sectaries of atheism than perversity.  The Illuminati,
+brothers and friends of Montgelas, have not been idle in that country.
+Their writings have perverted those who had no opportunity to hear their
+speeches, or to witness their example; and I am assured by Count von
+Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the
+lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these
+emissaries have laboured.  To any one looking on the map of the
+Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious
+focus of illumination must be ominous.
+
+Among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, there exists not the
+least doubt but that this Montgelas, as well as Bonaparte's Minister at
+Munich, Otto, was acquainted with the treacherous part Mehde de la Touche
+played against your Minister, Drake; and that it was planned between him
+and Talleyrand as the surest means to break off all political connections
+between your country and Bavaria.  Mr. Drake was personally liked by the
+Elector, and was not inattentive either to the plans and views of
+Montgelas or to the intrigues of Otto.  They were, therefore, both doubly
+interested to remove such a troublesome witness.
+
+M. de Montgelas is now a grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour,
+and he is one of the few foreigners nominated the most worthy of such a
+distinction.  In France he would have been an acquisition either to the
+factions of a Murat, of a Brissot, or of a Robespierre; and the Goddess
+of Reason, as well as the God of the Theophilanthropists, might have been
+sure of counting him among their adorers.  At the clubs of the Jacobins
+or Cordeliers, in the fraternal societies, or in a revolutionary
+tribunal; in the Committee of Public Safety, or in the council chamber of
+the Directory, he would equally have made himself notorious and been
+equally in his place.  A stoic sans-culotte under Du Clots, a stanch
+republican under Robespierre, he would now have been the most pliant and
+brilliant courtier of Bonaparte.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Queen of France ever saw so many foreign Princes and
+Princesses in her drawing-rooms as the first Empress of the French did
+last year at Mentz; and no Sovereign was ever before so well paid, or
+accepted with less difficulty donations and presents for her gracious
+protection.  Madame Napoleon herself, on her return to this capital last
+October, boasted that she was ten millions of livres--richer in diamonds;
+two millions of livres richer in pearls, and three million of livres
+richer in plate and china, than in the June before, when she quitted it.
+She acknowledged that she left behind her some creditors and some money
+at Aix-la-Chapelle; but at Mentz she did not want to borrow, nor had she
+time to gamble.  The gallant ultra Romans provided everything, even to
+the utmost extent of her wishes; and she, on her part, could not but
+honour those with her company as much as possible, particularly as they
+required nothing else for their civilities.  Such was the Empress's
+expression to her lady in waiting, the handsome Madame Seran, with whom
+no confidence, no tale, no story, and no scandal expires; and who was in
+a great hurry to inform, the same evening, the tea-party at Madame de
+Beauvais's of this good news, complaining at the same time of not having
+had the least share in this rich harvest.
+
+Nowhere, indeed, were bribery and corruption carried to a greater extent,
+or practised with more effrontery, than at Mentz.  Madame Napoleon had as
+much her fixed price for every favourable word she spoke, as Talleyrand
+had for every line he wrote.  Even the attendants of the former, and the
+clerks of the latter, demanded, or rather extorted, douceurs from the
+exhausted and almost ruined German petitioners; who in the end were
+rewarded for all their meanness and for all their expenses with promises
+at best; as the new plan of supplementary indemnities was, on the very
+day proposed for its final arrangement, postponed by the desire of the
+Emperor of the French, until further orders.  This provoking delay could
+no more be foreseen by the Empress than by the Minister, who, in return
+for their presents and money almost overpowered the German Princes with
+his protestations of regret at their disappointments.  Nor was Madame
+Bonaparte less sorry or less civil.  She sent her chamberlain, Daubusson
+la Feuillad, with regular compliments of condolence to every Prince who
+had enjoyed her protection.  They returned to their homes, therefore, if
+not wealthier, at least happier; flattered by assurances and
+condescensions, confiding in hope as in certainties.  Within three
+months, however, it is supposed that they would willingly have disposed
+both of promises and expectations at a loss of fifty per cent.
+
+By the cupidity and selfishness of these and other German Princes, and
+their want of patriotism, Talleyrand was become perfectly acquainted with
+the value and production of every principality, bishopric, county, abbey,
+barony, convent, and even village in the German Empire; and though most
+national property in France was disposed of at one or two years'
+purchase, he required five years' purchase-money for all the estates and
+lands on the other side of the Rhine, of which, under the name of
+indemnities, he stripped the lawful owners to gratify the ambition or
+avidity of intruders.  This high price has cooled the claims of the
+bidders, and the plan of the supplementary indemnities is still
+suspended, and probably will continue so until our Minister lowers his
+terms.  A combination is supposed to have been entered into by the chief
+demanders of indemnities, by which they have bound themselves to resist
+all farther extortions.  They do not, however, know the man they have to
+deal with; he will, perhaps, find out some to lay claim to their own
+private and hereditary property whom he will produce and support, and who
+certainly will have the same right to pillage them as they had to the
+spoils of others.
+
+It was reported in our fashionable circles last autumn, and smiled at by
+Talleyrand, that he promised the Comtesse de L------ an abbey, and the
+Baroness de S-----z a convent, for certain personal favours, and that he
+offered a bishopric to the Princesse of Hon----- the same terms, but this
+lady answered that "she would think of his offers after he had put her
+husband in possession of the bishopric."  It is not necessary to observe
+that both the Countess and the Baroness are yet waiting to enjoy his
+liberal donations, and to be indemnified for their prostitution.
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a fit of jealousy at Mentz.  The young
+nephew of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, Comte de L----ge, was very
+assiduous about the Empress, who, herself, at first mistook the motive.
+Her confidential secretary, Deschamps, however, afterwards informed her
+that this nobleman wanted to purchase the place of a coadjutor to his
+uncle, so as to be certain of succeeding him.  He obtained, therefore,
+several private audiences, no doubt to regulate the price, when Napoleon
+put a stop to this secret negotiation by having the Count carried by
+gendarmes, with great politeness, to the other side of the Rhine.  When
+convinced of his error, Bonaparte asked his wife what sum had been
+promised for her protection, and immediately gave her an order on his
+Minister of the Treasury (Marbois) for the amount.  This was an act of
+justice, and a reparation worthy of a good and tender husband; but when,
+the very next day, he recalled this order, threw it into the fire before
+her eyes, and confined her for six hours in her bedroom; because she was
+not dressed in time to take a walk with him on the ramparts, one is apt
+to believe that military despotism has erased from his bosom all
+connubial affection, and that a momentary effusion of kindness and
+generosity can but little alleviate the frequent pangs caused by repeated
+insults and oppression.  Fortunately, Madame Napoleon's disposition is
+proof against rudeness as well as against brutality.  If what her friend
+and consoler, Madame Delucay, reports of her is not exaggerated, her
+tranquillity is not much disturbed nor her happiness affected by these
+explosions of passionate authority, and she prefers admiring, in
+undisturbed solitude, her diamond box to the most beautiful prospects in
+the most agreeable company; and she inspects with more pleasure in
+confinement, her rich wardrobe, her beautiful china, and her heavy plate,
+than she would find satisfaction, surrounded with crowds, in
+comtemplating Nature, even in its utmost perfection.  "The paradise of
+Madame Napoleon," says her friend, "must be of metal, and lighted by the
+lustre of brilliants, else she would decline it for a hell and accept
+Lucifer himself for a spouse, provided gold flowed in his infernal
+domains, though she were even to be scorched by its heat."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe that I have mentioned to you, when in England, that I
+was an old acquaintance of Madame Napoleon, and a visitor at the house of
+her first husband.  When introduced to her after some years' absence,
+during which fortune had treated us very differently, she received me
+with more civility than I was prepared to expect, and would, perhaps,
+have spoken to me more than she did, had not a look of her husband
+silenced her.  Madame Louis Bonaparte was still more condescending, and
+recalled to my memory what I had not forgotten how often she had been
+seated, when a child, on my lap, and played on my knees with her doll.
+Thus they behaved to me when I saw them for the first time in their
+present elevation; I found them afterwards, in their drawing-rooms or at
+their routs and parties, more shy and distant.  This change did not much
+surprise me, as I hardly knew any one that had the slightest pretension
+to their acquaintance who had not troubled them for employment or
+borrowed their money, at the same time that they complained of their
+neglect and their breach of promises.  I continued, however, as much as
+etiquette and decency required, assiduous, but never familiar: if they
+addressed me, I answered with respect, but not with servility; if not, I
+bowed in silence when they passed.  They might easily perceive that I did
+not intend to become an intruder, nor to make the remembrance of what was
+past an apology or a reason for applying for present favours.  A lady, on
+intimate terms with Madame Napoleon, and once our common friend, informed
+me, shortly after the untimely end of the lamented Duc d' Enghien, that
+she had been asked whether she knew anything that could be done for me,
+or whether I would not be flattered by obtaining a place in the
+Legislative Body or in the Tribunate?  I answered as I thought, that were
+I fit for a public life nothing could be more agreeable or suit me
+better; but, having hitherto declined all employments that might restrain
+that independence to which I had accustomed myself from my youth, I was
+now too old to enter upon a new career.  I added that, though the
+Revolution had reduced my circumstances, it had not entirely ruined me. I
+was still independent, because my means were the boundaries of my wants.
+
+A week after this conversation General Murat, the governor of this
+capital, and Bonaparte's favourite-brother-in-law, invited me to a
+conversation in a note delivered to me by an aide-de-camp, who told me
+that he was ordered to wait for my company, or, which was the same, he
+had orders not to lose sight of me, as I was his prisoner.  Having
+nothing with which to reproach myself, and all my written remarks being
+deposited with a friend, whom none of the Imperial functionaries could
+suspect, I entered a hackney coach without any fear or apprehension; and
+we drove to the governor's hotel.
+
+From the manner in which Murat addressed me, I was soon convinced that if
+I had been accused of any error or indiscretion, the accusation could not
+be very grave in his eyes.  He entered with me into his closet and
+inquired whether I had any enemies at the police office.  I told him not
+to my knowledge.
+
+"Is the Police Minister and Senator, Fouche, your friend?"  continued he.
+
+"Fouche," said I, "has bought an estate that formerly belonged to me; may
+he enjoy it with the same peace of mind as I have lost it.  I have never
+spoken to him in my life."
+
+"Have you not complained at Madame de la Force's of the execution of the
+ci-devant Duc d'Enghien, and agreed with the other members of her coterie
+to put on mourning for him?"
+
+"I have never been at the house of that lady since the death of the
+Prince, nor more than once in my life."
+
+"Where did you pass the evening last Saturday?"--"At the hotel, and in
+the assembly of Princesse Louis Bonaparte."
+
+"Did she see you?"
+
+"I believe that she did, because she returned my salute."
+
+"You have known Her Imperial Highness a long time?"
+
+"From her infancy."
+
+"Well, I congratulate you.  You have in her a generous protectress.  But
+for her you would now have been on the way to Cayenne.  Here you see the
+list of persons condemned yesterday, upon the report of Fouche, to
+transportation.  Your name is at the head of them.  You were not only
+accused of being an agent of the Bourbons, but of having intrigued to
+become a member of the Legislature, or the Tribunate, that you might have
+so much the better opportunity to serve them.  Fortunately for you, the
+Emperor remembered that the Princesse Louis had demanded such a favour
+for you, and he informed her of the character of her protege.  This
+brought forward your innocence, because it was discovered that, instead
+of asking for, you had declined the offer she had made you through the
+Empress.  Write the Princess a letter of thanks.  You have, indeed, had a
+narrow escape, but it has been so far useful to you, that Government is
+now aware of your having some secret enemy in power, who is not delicate
+about the means of injuring you."
+
+In quitting General Murat, I could not help deploring the fate of a
+despot, even while I abhorred his unnatural power.  The curses, the
+complaints, and reproaches for all the crimes, all the violence, all the
+oppression perpetrated in his name, are entirely thrown upon him, while
+his situation and occupation do not admit the seeing and hearing
+everything and everybody himself.  He is often forced, therefore, to
+judge according to the report of an impostor; to sanction with his name
+the hatred, malignity, or vengeance of culpable individuals; and to
+sacrifice innocence to gratify the vile passions of his vilest slave. I
+have not so bad an opinion of Bonaparte as to think him capable of
+wilfully condemning any person to death or transportation, of whose
+innocence he was convinced, provided that person stood not in the way of
+his interest and ambition; but suspicion and tyranny are inseparable
+companions, and injustice their common progeny.  The unfortunate beings
+on the long list General Murat showed me were, I dare say, most of them
+as innocent as myself, and all certainly condemned unheard.  But suppose,
+even, that they had been indiscreet enough to put on mourning for a
+Prince of the blood of their former Kings, did their imprudence deserve
+the same punishment as the deed of the robber, the forger, or the
+housebreaker? and, indeed, it was more severe than what our laws inflict
+on such criminals, who are only condemned to transportation for some few
+years, after a public trial and conviction; while the exile of these
+unconvicted, untried, and most probably innocent persons is continued for
+life, on charges as unknown to themselves as their destiny and residence
+remain to their families and friends.  Happy England! where no one is
+condemned unheard, and no one dares attempt to make the laws subservient
+to his passions or caprice.
+
+As to Fouche's enmity, at which General Murat so plainly hinted, I had
+long apprehended it from what others, in similar circumstances with
+myself, had suffered.  He has, since the Revolution, bought no less, than
+sixteen national estates, seven of the former proprietors of which have
+suddenly disappeared since his Ministry, probably in the manner he
+intended to remove me.  This man is one of the most immoral characters
+the Revolution has dragged forward from obscurity.  It is more difficult
+to mention a crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good or
+just action that he ever performed.  He is so notorious a villain that
+even the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and
+since his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased
+country, to extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities.  In a
+nation so greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is more than negative
+evidence.
+
+As a friar before the Revolution he has avowed, in his correspondence
+with the National Convention, that he never believed in a God; and as one
+of the first public functionaries of a Republic he has officially denied
+the existence of virtue.  He is, therefore, as unmoved by tears as by
+reproaches, and as inaccessible to remorse as hardened against
+repentance.  With him interest and bribes are everything, and honour and
+honesty nothing.  The supplicant or the pleader who appears before him
+with no other support than the justice of his cause is fortunate indeed
+if, after being cast, he is not also confined or ruined, and perhaps
+both; while a line from one of the Bonapartes, or a purse of gold,
+changes black to white, guilt to innocence, removes the scaffold waiting
+for the assassin, and extinguishes the faggots lighted for the parricide.
+His authority is so extensive that on the least signal, with one blow,
+from the extremities of France to her centre, it crushes the cot and the
+palace; and his decisions, against which there is no appeal, are so
+destructive that they never leave any traces behind them, and Bonaparte,
+Bonaparte alone, can prevent or arrest their effect.
+
+Though a traitor to his former benefactor, the ex-Director Barras, he
+possesses now the unlimited confidence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as far
+as is known, has not yet done anything to forfeit it,--if private acts of
+cruelty cannot, in the agent of a tyrant, be called breach of trust or
+infidelity.  He shares with Talleyrand the fraternity of the vigilant,
+immoral, and tormenting secret police; and with Real, and Dubois, the
+prefect of police, the reproduction, or rather the invention, of new
+tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are wells or pits dug
+under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works of his own
+infernal genius.  They are covered with trap-doors, and any person whom
+the rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose return to
+society is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is suspected; who has
+been imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be innocent; who is
+disagreeable to the Bonapartes, their favourites, or the mistresses of
+their favourites; who has displeased Fouche, or offended some other
+placeman; any who have refused to part with their property for the
+recovery of their liberty, are all precipitated into these artificial
+abysses there to be forgotten; or worse, to be starved to death, if they
+have not been fortunate enough to break their necks and be killed by the
+fall.
+
+The property Fouche has acquired by his robberies within these last
+twelve years is at the lowest rate valued at fifty million livres--which
+must increase yearly; as a man who disposes of the liberty of fifty
+millions of people is also, in a great part, master of their wealth.
+Except the chiefs of the Governments and their officers of State, there
+exists not an inhabitant of France, Italy, Holland, or Switzerland who
+can consider himself secure for an instant of not being seized,
+imprisoned, plundered, tortured, or exterminated by the orders of Fouche
+and by the hands of his agents.
+
+You will no doubt exclaim, "How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he
+confide, in such a man?"  Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with
+the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents.  There is
+no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he
+will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it.  He is, therefore, a
+most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what
+is said to the contrary in France, and believed abroad, would cease to
+rule the day he became just, and the reign of laws and of humanity
+banished terror and tyranny.
+
+It is reported that some person, pious or revengeful, presented some time
+ago to the devout mother of Napoleon a long memorial containing some
+particulars of the crimes and vices of Fouche and Talleyrand, and
+required of her, if she wished to prevent the curses of Heaven from
+falling on her son, to inform him of them, that he might cease to employ
+men so unworthy of him, and so repugnant to a Divinity.  Napoleon, after
+reading through the memorial, is stated to have answered his mother, who
+was always pressing him to dismiss these Ministers: The memorial, Madame,
+contains nothing of what I was not previously informed.  Louis XVI. did
+not select any but those whom he thought the most virtuous and moral of
+men for his Ministers and counsellors; and where did their virtues and
+morality bring him?  If the writer of the memorial will mention two
+honest and irreproachable characters, with equal talents and zeal to
+serve me, neither Fouche nor Talleyrand shall again be admitted into my
+presence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have with some reason in England complained of the conduct
+of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, when the
+pretended correspondence between Mr. Drake and Mehee de la Touche was
+published in our official gazette.  Had you, however, like myself, been
+in a situation to study the characters and appreciate the worth of most
+of them, this conduct would have excited no surprise, and pity would have
+taken the place both of accusation and reproach.  Hardly one of them,
+except Count Philipp von Cobenzl, the Austrian Ambassador (and even he is
+considerably involved), possesses any property, or has anything else but
+his salary to depend upon for subsistence.  The least offence to
+Bonaparte or Talleyrand would instantly deprive them of their places;
+and, unless they were fortunate enough to obtain some other appointment,
+reduce them to live in obscurity, and perhaps in want, upon a trifling
+pension in their own country.
+
+The day before Mr. Drake's correspondence appeared in the Moniteur, in
+March, 1804, Talleyrand gave a grand diplomatic dinner; in the midst of
+which, as was previously agreed with Bonaparte, Duroc called him out on
+the part of the First Consul.  After an absence of near an hour, which
+excited great curiosity and some alarm among the diplomatists, he
+returned, very thoughtful and seemingly very low-spirited.
+
+"Excuse me, gentlemen," said he, "I have been impolite against my
+inclination.  The First Consul knew that you honoured me with your
+company today, and would therefore not have interrupted me by his orders
+had not a discovery of a most extraordinary nature against the law of
+nations just been made; a discovery which calls for the immediate
+indignation against the Cabinet of St. James, not only of France, but of
+every nation that wishes for the preservation of civilized society. After
+dinner I shall do myself the honour of communicating to you the
+particulars, well convinced that you will all enter with warmth into the
+just resentment of the First Consul."
+
+During the repast the bottle went freely round, and as soon as they had
+drunk their coffee and liqueurs, Talleyrand rang a bell, and Hauterive
+presented himself with a large bundle of papers.  The pretended original
+letters of Mr. Drake were handed about with the commentaries of the
+Minister and his secretary.  Their heads heated with wine, it was not
+difficult to influence their minds, or to mislead their judgment, and
+they exclaimed, as in a chorus, "C'est abominable!  Cela fait fremir!"
+
+Talleyrand took advantage of their situation, as well as of their
+indiscretion.  "I am glad, gentlemen," said he, "and shall not fail to
+inform the First Consul of your unanimous sentiments on this disagreeable
+subject; but verbal expressions are not sufficient in an affair of such
+great consequence.  I have orders to demand your written declarations,
+which, after what you have already expressed, you cannot hesitate about
+sending to me to-night, that they may accompany the denunciation which
+the First Consul despatches, within some few hours, to all the Courts on
+the Continent.  You would much please the First Consul were you to write
+as near as possible according to the formula which my secretary has drawn
+up.  It states nothing either against convenance, or against the customs
+of Sovereigns, or etiquettes of Courts, and I am certain is also
+perfectly congenial with your individual feelings."
+
+A silence of some moments now followed (as all the diplomatists were
+rather taken by surprise with regard to a written declaration), which the
+Swedish Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, interrupted by saying that, "though
+he personally might have no objection to sign such a declaration, he must
+demand some time to consider whether he had a right to, write in the name
+of his Sovereign, without his orders, on a subject still unknown to him."
+
+This remark made the Austrian Ambassador, Count von Cobenzl, propose a
+private consultation among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps at
+one of their hotels, at which the Russian charge d'affaires, D'Oubril,
+who was not at the dinner--party, was invited to assist.  They met
+accordingly, at the Hotel de Montmorency, Rue de Lille, occupied by Count
+von Cobenzl; but they came to no other unanimous determination than that
+of answering a written communication of Talleyrand by a written note,
+according as every one judged most proper and prudent, and corresponding
+with the supposed sentiments of his Sovereign.
+
+As all this official correspondence has been published in England, you
+may, upon reading the notes presented by Baron de Dreyer, and Mr.
+Livingstone,
+
+[In consequence of this conduct, Livingstone was recalled by his
+Government, and lives now in obscurity and disgrace in America.  To
+console him, however, in his misfortune, Bonaparte, on his departure,
+presented him with his portrait, enamelled on the lid of a snuff-box, set
+round with diamonds, and valued at one thousand louis d'or.]
+
+the neutral Ambassadors of Denmark and America, form some tolerably just
+idea of Talleyrand's formula.  Their impolitic servility was blamed even
+by the other members of the diplomatic corps.
+
+Livingstone you know, and perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch
+republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and
+though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of
+the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism
+more, in Europe.  Without talents, and almost without education, he
+thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity
+are synonymous.  He was called here "the courier of Talleyrand," on
+account of his voyages to England, and his journeys to Holland, where
+this Minister sent him to intrigue, with less ceremony than one of his
+secret agents.  He acknowledged that no Government was more liberal, and
+no nation more free, than the British; but he hated the one as much as he
+abused the other; and he did not conceal sentiments that made him always
+so welcome to Bonaparte and Talleyrand.  Never over nice in the choice of
+his companions, Arthur O'Connor, and other Irish traitors and vagabonds,
+used his house as their own; so much so that, when he invited other
+Ambassadors to dine with him, they, before they accepted the invitation,
+made a condition that no outlaws or adventurers should be of the party.
+
+In your youth, Baron de Dreyer was an Ambassador from the Court of
+Copenhagen to that of St. James.  He has since been in the same capacity
+to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Madrid.  Born a Norwegian, of a poor
+and obscure family, he owes his advancement to his own talents; but
+these, though they have procured him rank, have left him without a
+fortune.  When he came here, in June, 1797, from Spain, he brought a
+mistress with him, and several children he had had by her during his
+residence in that country.  He also kept an English mistress some thirty
+years ago in London, by whom he had a son, M. Guillaumeau, who is now his
+secretary.  Thus encumbered, and thus situated at the age of seventy, it
+is no surprise if he strives to die at his post, and that fear to offend
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand sometimes gets the better of his prudence.
+
+In Denmark, as well as in all other Continental States, the pensions of
+diplomatic invalids are more scanty than those of military ones, and
+totally insufficient for a man who, during half a century nearly, has
+accustomed himself to a certain style of life, and to expenses requisite
+to represent his Prince with dignity.  No wonder, therefore, that Baron
+de Dreyer prefers Paris to Copenhagen, and that the cunning Talleyrand
+takes advantage of this preference.
+
+It was reported here among our foreign diplomatists, that the English
+Minister in Denmark complained of the contents of Baron de Dreyer's note
+concerning Mr. Drake's correspondence; and that the Danish Prime
+Minister, Count von Bernstorff, wrote to him in consequence, by the order
+of the Prince Royal, a severe reprimand.  This act of political justice
+is, however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of Copenhagen
+has laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand, but always to
+displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be discontented.
+Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better served by his
+representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one seldomer changes
+or removes them.
+
+While I am speaking of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short
+sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to
+particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously
+complimented by Talleyrand with the title of "The Prince of Neutrality,
+the Sully of Prussia."  Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who,
+until lately, has been the chief director of the political conscience of
+His Prussian Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, was born
+in Silesia, and is the son of a nobleman who was a General in the
+Austrian service when Frederick the Great made the conquest of that
+country.  At the death of this King in 1786, Count von Haugwitz occupied
+an inferior place in the foreign office, where Count von Herzburg
+observed his zeal and assiduity, and recommended him to the notice of the
+late King Frederick William II.  By the interest of the celebrated
+Bishopswerder, he procured, in 1792, the appointment of an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, where he succeeded Baron von Jacobi, the present
+Prussian Minister in your country.  In the autumn of the same year he
+went to Ratisbon, to cooperate with the Austrian Ambassador, and to
+persuade the Princes of the German Empire to join the coalition against
+France.  In the month of March, 1794, he was sent to the Hague, where he
+negotiated with Lord Malmesbury concerning the affairs of France; shortly
+afterwards his nomination as a Minister of State took place, and from
+that time his political sentiments seem to have undergone a revolution,
+for which it is not easy to account; but, whatever were the causes of his
+change of opinions, the Treaty of Basle, concluded between France and
+Prussia in 1795, was certainly negotiated under his auspices; and in
+August, 1796, he signed, with the French Minister at Berlin, Citizen
+Caillard, the first and famous Treaty of Neutrality; and a Prussian
+cordon was accordingly drawn, to cause the neutrality of the North to be
+observed and protected.  Had the Count von Haugwitz of 1795 been the same
+as the Count von Haugwitz of 1792, it is probable we should no longer
+have heard of either a French Republic or a French Empire; but a
+legitimate Monarch of the kingdom of France would have ensured that
+security to all other legitimate Sovereigns, the want of which they
+themselves, or their children, will feel and mourn in vain, as long as
+unlimited usurpations tyrannize over my wretched country.  It is to be
+hoped, however, that the good sense of the Count will point out to him,
+before it is too late, the impolicy of his present connections; and that
+he will use his interest with his Prince to persuade him to adopt a line
+of conduct suited to the grandeur and dignity of the Prussian Monarchy,
+and favourable to the independence of insulted Europe.
+
+When his present Prussian Majesty succeeded to the throne, Count von
+Haugwitz continued in office, with increased influence; but he some time
+since resigned, in consequence, it is said, of a difference of opinion
+with the other Prussian Ministers on the subject of a family alliance,
+which Bonaparte had the modesty to propose, between the illustrious house
+of Napoleon the First and the royal line of Brandenburgh.
+
+On this occasion his King, to evince his satisfaction with his past
+conduct, bestowed on him not only a large pension, but an estate in
+Silesia, where he before possessed some property.  Bonaparte also, to
+express his regret at his retreat, proclaimed His Excellency a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour.
+
+Talleyrand insolently calls the several cordons, or ribands, distributed
+by Bonaparte among the Prussian Ministers and Generals, "his
+leading-strings."  It is to be hoped that Frederick William III.  is
+sufficiently upon his guard to prevent these strings from strangling the
+Prussian Monarchy and the Brandenburgh dynasty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Upwards of two months after my visit to General Murat, I was
+surprised at the appearance of M. Darjuson, the chamberlain of Princesse
+Louis Bonaparte.  He told me that he came on the part of Prince Louis,
+who honoured me with an invitation to dine with him the day after. Upon
+my inquiry whether he knew if the party would be very numerous, he
+answered, between forty and fifty; and that it was a kind of farewell
+dinner, because the Prince intended shortly to set out for Compiegne to
+assume the command of the camp, formed in its vicinity, of the dragoons
+and other light troops of the army of England.
+
+The principal personages present at this dinner were Joseph Bonaparte and
+his wife, General and Madame Murat, the Ministers Berthier, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, Chaptal, and Portalis.  The conversation was entirely military,
+and chiefly related to the probable conquest or subjugation of Great
+Britain, and the probable consequence to mankind in general of such a
+great event.  No difference of opinion was heard with regard to its
+immediate benefit to France and gradual utility to all other nations; but
+Berthier seemed to apprehend that, before France could have time to
+organize this valuable conquest, she would be obliged to support another
+war, with a formidable league, perhaps, of all other European nations.
+The issue, however, he said, would be glorious to France, who, by her
+achievements, would force all people to acknowledge her their mother
+country; and then, first, Europe would constitute but one family.
+
+Chaptal was as certain as everybody else of the destruction of the
+tyrants of the seas; but he thought France would never be secure against
+the treachery of modern Carthage until she followed the example of Rome
+towards ancient Carthage; and therefore, after reducing London to ashes,
+it would be proper to disperse round the universe all the inhabitants of
+the British Islands, and to re-people them with nations less
+evil-disposed and less corrupted.  Portalis observed that it was more
+easy to conceive than to execute such a vast plan.  It would not be an
+undertaking of five, of ten, nor of twenty years, to transplant these
+nations; that misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+and obstinacy, but desperation.
+
+"No people," continued he, "are more attached to their customs and
+countries than islanders in general; and though British subjects are the
+greatest travellers, and found everywhere, they all suppose their country
+the best, and always wish to return to it and finish their days amidst
+their native fogs and smoke.  Neither the Saxons, nor the Danes, nor
+Norman conquerors transplanted them, but, after reducing them,
+incorporated themselves by marriages among the vanquished, and in some
+few generations were but one people.  It is asserted by all persons who
+have lately visited Great Britain, that, though the civilization of the
+lower classes is much behind that of the same description in France, the
+higher orders, the rich and the fashionable, are, with regard to their,
+manners, more French than English, and might easily be cajoled into
+obedience and subjection to the sovereignty of a nation whose customs, by
+free choice, they have adopted in preference to their own, and whose
+language forms a necessary part of their education, and, indeed, of the
+education of almost every class in the British Empire.  The universality
+of the French language is the best ally France has in assisting her to
+conquer a universal dominion.  He wished, therefore, that when we were in
+a situation to dictate in England, instead of proscribing Englishmen we
+should proscribe the English language, and advance and reward, in
+preference, all those parents whose children were sent to be educated in
+France, and all those families who voluntarily adopted in their houses
+and societies exclusively the French language."
+
+Murat was afraid that if France did not transplant the most stubborn
+Britons, and settle among them French colonies, when once their military
+and commercial navy was annihilated, they would turn pirates, and,
+perhaps, within half a century, lay all other nations as much under
+contribution by their piracies as they now do by their industry; and
+that, like the pirates on the coast of Barbary, the instant they had no
+connections with other civilized nations, cut the throats of each other,
+and agree in nothing but in plundering, and considering all other people
+in the, world their natural enemies and purveyors.
+
+To this opinion Talleyrand, by nodding assent, seemed to adhere; but he
+added: "Earthquakes are generally dreaded as destructive; but such a
+convulsion of nature as would swallow up the British Islands, with all
+their inhabitants, would be the greatest blessing Providence ever
+conferred on mankind."
+
+Louis Bonaparte then addressed himself to me and to the Marquis de F----.
+"Gentlemen," said he, "you have been in England; what is your opinion of
+the character of these islanders, and of the probability of their
+subjugation?"
+
+I answered that, during the fifteen months I resided in London I was too
+much occupied to prevent myself from starving, to meditate about anything
+else; that my stomach was my sole meditation as well as anxiety.  That,
+however, I believed that in England, as everywhere else, a mixture of
+good and bad qualities was to be found; but which prevailed, it would be
+presumption in me, from my position, to decide.  But I did not doubt that
+if we cordially hated the English they returned us the compliment with
+interest, and, therefore, the contest with them would be a severe one.
+The Marquis de F---- imprudently attempted to convince the company that
+it was difficult, if not impossible, for our army to land in England,
+much more to conquer it, until we were masters of the seas by a superior
+navy.  He would, perhaps, have been still more indiscreet, had not Madame
+Louis interrupted him, and given another turn to the conversation by
+inquiring about the fair sex in England, and if it was true that handsome
+women were more numerous there than in France?  Here again the Marquis,
+instead of paying her a compliment, as she perhaps expected, roundly
+assured her that for one beauty in France, hundreds might be counted in
+England, where gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and
+that a woman regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a
+first-rate beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of
+them here.
+
+"You must excuse the Marquis, ladies," said I, in my turn; "he has not
+been in love in England.  There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel
+than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her
+insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:
+
+"I apply to M. de Talleyrand," answered the Marquis; "he has been longer
+in England than myself."
+
+"I am not a competent judge," retorted the Minister; "Madame de
+Talleyrand is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I
+dare say the Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the British
+Islands, among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties, or
+admired greater accomplishments or more perfection."
+
+To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks
+the party present, of course, was not included.  All the ladies, who were
+well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very
+good-humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would
+give her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a gallant
+Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt to make
+up their difference.  "She is no more, Madame," said the Marquis; "she
+was, unfortunately, guillotined two days before----" the father of Madame
+Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted him with a
+significant look, and said, "Before the fall of Robespierre, you mean."
+
+From these and other traits of the Marquis's character, you may see that
+he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give
+offence.  He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from
+Fouche, which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris
+without further orders from the Minister of Police.  I know, from high
+authority, that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he
+indebted for not being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported
+to our colonies, for having depreciated the power and means of France to
+invade England.  I am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on
+the subject of the invasion expressed anything but what they really
+thought; and that, of the whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the
+Marquis, and myself, entertained the least doubt of the success of the
+expedition; so firmly did they rely on the former fortune of Bonaparte,
+his boastings, and his assurance.
+
+After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that
+she is not happy.  Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the
+best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached
+to her.  She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked,
+notwithstanding, uncommonly well.  I have heard that Louis is inclined to
+inebriation, and when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and
+very indelicate with other women before her eyes.  He intrigues with her
+own servants and the number of his illegitimate children is said to be as
+many as his years.  She asked General Murat to present me and recommend
+me to Fouche, which he did with great politeness; and the Minister
+assured me that he should be glad to see me at his hotel, which I much
+doubt.  The last words Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a princely
+crown, richly set with diamonds, and given her by her brother-in-law,
+Napoleon, were, "Alas!  grandeur is not always happiness, nor the most
+elevated the most fortunate lot."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a grand
+epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the annals of
+Europe.  The debates in the Sacred College for and against this journey,
+and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to have been
+long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires of
+Cardinal Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres distributed
+apropos among its pious members.  Of this money the Cardinals Mattei,
+Pamphili, Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia, Pacca,
+Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to
+have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent
+anti-Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of
+Napoleon the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real
+worth.
+
+The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
+intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
+brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
+second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
+husband.
+
+Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
+March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
+choeur) in a convent of his native place.  In 1782, whilst he was on a
+visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
+fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
+captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers.  Here
+he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
+professor of, the Alcoran.  In that year he found an opportunity to
+escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
+renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
+constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
+In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
+his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
+gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
+customers.  After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
+the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
+after Napoleon's proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
+of Lyons.  In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
+is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
+tiara.  If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
+name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he
+must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate his
+own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France.
+Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the manner
+already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this pontiff
+would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.
+
+While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
+tinker, by whom he had three children.  This marriage, according to the
+republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
+Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
+left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
+himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor.  But Madame
+Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband's promotion to the
+Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
+children reduced to great misery.  Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
+letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres--informing her that the
+same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
+with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
+instant she left that island.  Either thinking herself not sufficiently
+paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte
+family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she
+remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope.  On the first day His
+Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the
+crowd, and to approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by his side.
+Profiting by a moment's silence, she called out loudly, throwing herself
+at his feet: "Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of Cardinal Fesch, and
+these are our children; he cannot, he dares not, deny this truth.  Had he
+behaved liberally to me, I should not have disturbed him in his present
+grandeur; I supplicate you, Holy Father, not to restore me my husband,
+but to force him to provide for his wife and children, according to his
+present circumstances."--"Matta--ella e matta, santissimo padre!  She is
+mad--she is mad, Holy Father," said the Cardinal; and the good pontiff
+ordered her to be taken care of, to prevent her from doing herself or the
+children any mischief.  She was, indeed, taken care of, because nobody
+ever since heard what has become either of her or her children; and as
+they have not returned to Corsica, probably some snug retreat has been
+allotted them in France.
+
+The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal
+Fesch: his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in
+disagreeable scrapes.  He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons,
+which has since made his stay in that city but short.  Having thrown his
+handkerchief at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she
+accepted it, and gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the
+evening when her husband usually went to the play.  His Eminence arrived
+in disguise, and was received with open arms.  But he was hardly seated
+by her side before the door of a closet was burst open, and his shoulders
+smarted from the lashes inflicted by an offended husband.  In vain did he
+mention his name and rank; they rather increased than decreased the fury
+of Girot, who pretended it was utterly impossible for a Cardinal and
+Archbishop to be thus overtaken with the wife of one of his flock; at
+last Madame Girot proposed a pecuniary accommodation, which, after some
+opposition, was acceded to; and His Eminence signed a bond for one
+hundred thousand livres--upon condition that nothing should transpire of
+this intrigue--a high price enough for a sound drubbing.  On the day when
+the bond was due, Girot and his wife were both arrested by the police
+commissary, Dubois (a brother of the prefect of police at Paris), accused
+of being connected with the coiners, a capital crime at present in this
+country.  In a search made in their house, bad money to the amount of
+three thousand livres was discovered; which they had received the day
+before from a man who called himself a merchant from Paris, but who was a
+police spy sent to entrap them.  After giving up the bond of the
+Cardinal, the Emperor graciously remitted the capital punishment, upon
+condition that they should be transported for life to Cayenne.
+
+This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
+and to constitute a successor of St. Peter.  It would not be the least
+remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
+were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
+boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
+from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle of
+an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a member of
+the Sacred College.
+
+His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
+elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres--and
+his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
+Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
+at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of
+the French.
+
+The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his death
+Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
+expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The amiable and accomplished Amelia Frederique, Princess
+Dowager of the late Electoral Prince, Charles Louis of Baden, born a
+Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, has procured the Electoral House of Baden
+the singular honour of giving consorts to three reigning and Sovereign
+Princes,--to an Emperor of Russia, to a King of Sweden, and to the
+Elector of Bavaria.  Such a distinction, and such alliances, called the
+attention of those at the head of our Revolution; who, after attempting
+in vain to blow up hereditary thrones by the aid of sans-culotte
+incendiaries, seated sans-culottes upon thrones, that they might degrade
+what was not yet ripe for destruction.
+
+Charles Frederick, the reigning Elector of Baden, is now near fourscore
+years of age.  At this period of life if any passions remain, avarice is
+more common than ambition; because treasures may be hoarded without
+bustle, while activity is absolutely necessary to push forward to the
+goal of distinction.  Having bestowed a new King on Tuscany, Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand also resolved to confer new Electors on Germany.  A more
+advantageous fraternity could not be established between the innovators
+here and their opposers in other countries, than by incorporating the
+grandfather-in-law of so many Sovereigns with their own revolutionary
+brotherhood; to humble him by a new rank, and to disgrace him by
+indemnities obtained from their hands.  An intrigue between our Minister,
+Talleyrand, and the Baden Minister, Edelsheim, transformed the oldest
+Margrave of Germany into its youngest Elector, and extended his dominions
+by the spoils obtained at the expense of the rightful owners.  The
+invasion of the Baden territory in time of peace, and the seizure of the
+Duc d'Enghien, though under the protection of the laws of nations and
+hospitality, must have soon convinced Baron Edelsheim what return his
+friend Talleyrand expected, and that Bonaparte thought he had a natural
+right to insult by his attacks those he had dishonoured by his
+connections.
+
+The Minister, Baron Edelsheim, is half an illuminato, half a philosopher,
+half a politician, and half a revolutionist.  He was, long before he was
+admitted into the council chamber of his Prince, half an atheist, half an
+intriguer, and half a spy, in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
+His entry upon the stage at Berlin, and particularly the first parts he
+was destined to act, was curious and extraordinary; whether he acquitted
+himself better in this capacity than he has since in his political one is
+not known.  He was afterwards sent to this capital to execute a
+commission, of which he acquitted himself very ill; exposing himself
+rashly, without profit or service to his employer.  Frederick II.,
+dreading the tediousness of a proposed congress at Augsburg, wished to
+send a private emissary to sound the King of France.  For this purpose he
+chose Edelsheim as a person least liable to suspicion.  The project of
+Frederick was to idemnify the King of Poland for his first losses by
+robbing the ecclesiastical Princes of Germany.  This, Louis XV. totally
+rejected; and Edelsheim returned with his answer to the Prussian Monarch,
+then at Freyburg.  From thence he afterwards departed for London, made
+his communications, and was once again sent back to Paris, on pretence
+that he had left some of his travelling trunks there; and the Bailli de
+Foulay, the Ambassador of the Knights of Malta, being persuaded that the
+Cabinet of Versailles was effectually desirous of peace, was, as he had
+been before, the mediator.  The Bailli was deceived.  The Duc de
+Choiseul, the then Prime Minister, indecently enough threw Edelsheim into
+the Bastille, in order to search or seize his papers, which, however,
+were secured elsewhere.  Edelsheim was released on the morrow, but
+obliged to depart the kingdom by the way of Turin, as related by
+Frederick II. in his "History of the Seven Years' War."  On his return he
+was disgraced, and continued so until 1778; when he again was used as
+emissary to various Courts of Germany.  In 1786 the Elector of Baden sent
+him to Berlin, on the ascension of Frederick William II., as a
+complimentary envoy.  This Monarch, when he saw him, could not forbear
+laughing at the high wisdom of the Court that selected such a personage
+for such an embassy, and of his own sagacity in accepting it.  He quitted
+the capital of Prussia as he came there, with an opinion of himself that
+the royal smiles of contempt had neither altered nor diminished.
+
+You see, by this account, that Edelsheim has long been a partisan of the
+pillage of Germany called indemnities; and long habituated to affronts,
+as well as to plots.  To all his other half qualities, half modesty can
+hardly be added, when he calls himself, or suffers himself to be called,
+"the Talleyrand of Carlsrhue."  He accompanied his Prince last year to
+Mentz; where this old Sovereign was not treated by Bonaparte in the most
+decorous or decent manner, being obliged to wait for hours in his
+antechamber, and afterwards stand during the levees, or in the
+drawing-rooms of Napoleon or of his wife, without the offer of a chair,
+or an invitation to sit down.  It was here where, by a secret treaty,
+Bonaparte became the Sovereign of Baden, if sovereignty consists in the
+disposal of the financial and military resources of a State; and they
+were agreed to be assigned over to him whenever he should deem it proper
+or necessary to invade the German Empire, in return for his protection
+against the Emperor of Germany, who can have no more interest than intent
+to attack a country so distant from his hereditary dominions, and whose
+Sovereign is, besides, the grandfather of the consort of his nearest and
+best ally.
+
+Talleyrand often amused himself at Mentz with playing on the vanity and
+affected consequence of Edelsheim, who was delighted if at any time our
+Minister took him aside, or whispered to him as in confidence.  One
+morning, at the assembly of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, where Edelsheim
+was creeping and cringing about him as usual, he laid hold of his arm and
+walked with him to the upper part of the room.  In a quarter of an hour
+they both joined the company, Edelsheim unusually puffed up with vanity.
+
+"I will lay and bet, gentlemen," said Talleyrand, "that you cannot, with
+all your united wits, guess the grand subject of my conversation with the
+good Baron Edelsheim."  Without waiting for an answer, he continued: "As
+the Baron is a much older and more experienced traveller than myself, I
+asked him which, of all the countries he had visited, could boast the
+prettiest and kindest women.  His reply was really very instructive, and
+it would be a great pity if justice were not done to his merit by its
+publicity."
+
+Here the Baron, red as a turkey-cock and trembling with anger,
+interrupted.  "His Excellency," said he, "is to-night in a humour to
+joke; what we spoke of had nothing to do with women."
+
+"Nor with men, either," retorted Talleyrand, going away.
+
+This anecdote, Baron Dahlberg, the Minister of the Elector of Baden to
+our Court, had the ingenuity to relate at Madame Chapui's as an evidence
+of Edelsheim's intimacy with Talleyrand; only he left out the latter
+part, and forgot to mention the bad grace with which this impertinence of
+Talleyrand was received; but this defect of memory Count von Beust, the
+envoy of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, kindly supplied.
+
+Baron Edelsheim is a great amateur of knighthoods.  On days of great
+festivities his face is, as it were, illuminated with the lustre of his
+stars; and the crosses on his coat conceal almost its original colour.
+Every petty Prince of Germany has dubbed him a chevalier; but Emperors
+and Kings have not been so unanimous in distinguishing his desert, or in
+satisfying his desires.
+
+At Mentz no Prince or Minister fawned more assiduously upon Bonaparte
+than this hero of chivalry.  It could not escape notice, but need not
+have alarmed our great man, as was the case.  The prefect of the palace
+was ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim's moral
+and political character.  He applied to the police commissary, who,
+within twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was
+the most inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that
+ever entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword,
+worn a dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about
+his real character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as
+nowhere they allowed him common sense, much less a character; all blamed
+his presumption, but none defended his capacity.
+
+After the perusal of this report, Bonaparte asked Talleyrand: "What can
+Edelsheim mean by his troublesome assiduities?  Does he want any
+indemnities, or does he wish me to make him a German Prince?  Can he have
+the impudence to hope that I shall appoint him a tribune, a legislator,
+or a Senator in France, or that I shall give him a place in my Council of
+State?"
+
+"No such thing," answered the Minister; "did not Your Majesty condescend
+to notice at the last fete that this eclipsed moon was encompassed in a
+firmanent of stars.  You would, Sire, make him the happiest of mortals
+were you to nominate him a member of your Legion of Honour."
+
+"Does he want nothing else?"  said Napoleon, as if relieved at once of an
+oppressive burden.  "Write to my chancellor of the Legion of Honour,
+Lacepede, to send him a patent, and do you inform him of this favour."
+
+It is reported at Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim
+has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because
+under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into an
+Electorate!!!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The sensation that the arrival of the Pope in this country
+caused among the lower classes of people cannot be expressed, and if
+expressed, would not be believed.  I am sorry, however, to say that,
+instead of improving their morals or increasing their faith, this journey
+has shaken both morality and religion to their foundation.
+
+According to our religious notions, as you must know, the Roman pontiff
+is the vicar of Christ, and infallible; he can never err.  The atheists
+of the National Convention and the Theophilanthropists of the Directory
+not only denied his demi-divinity, but transformed him into a satyr; and
+in pretending to tear the veil of superstition, annihilated all belief in
+a God.  The ignorant part of our nation, which, as everywhere else,
+constitutes the majority, witnessing the impunity and prosperity of
+crime, and bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals, first
+doubted of His omnipotence in not crushing guilt, and afterwards of His
+existence in not exterminating the blasphemous from among the living.
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes here, and
+hope of a reward hereafter for unmerited sufferings upon earth, they all
+hailed as a blessing the restoration of Christianity; and by this
+political act Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories
+he had procured admirers.
+
+Bonaparte's character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and
+his crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description.
+Should he continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave,
+future ages may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his
+contemporaries it will always be doubtful whether mankind has not
+suffered more from his ambition and cruelties than benefited by his
+services.  Had he satisfied himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of
+a Commonwealth; or, if he judged that a monarchical Government alone was
+suitable to the spirit of this country, had he recalled our legitimate
+King, he would have occupied a principal, if not the first, place in the
+history of France,--a place much more exalted than he can ever expect to
+fill as an Emperor of the French.  Let his prosperity be ever so
+uninterrupted, he cannot be mentioned but as an usurper, an appellation
+never exciting esteem, frequently inspiring contempt, and always odious.
+
+The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
+perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve
+an authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme
+Pontiff, whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the
+representative of their God, but who, by this act of scandal and
+sacrilege, descends to a level with the most culpable of men?  I have
+heard, not only in this city but in villages, where sincerity is more
+frequent than corruption, and where hypocrites are as little known as
+infidels, these remarks made by the people:
+
+"Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
+injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of
+bestowing as a sacred donation what belongs to another; and what he has
+no power, no authority, to dispose of?  Can Pius VII. confer on Napoleon
+the First what belongs to Louis XVIII.?  Would Jesus Christ, if upon
+earth, have acted thus?  Would his immediate successors, the Apostles,
+not have preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any
+injury?  If the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his
+Master and predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar of our
+Saviour?"
+
+These and many similar reflections the common people have made, and make
+yet.  The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up
+in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII. to
+be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists and
+freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of God, and that God
+is only the invention of fear.
+
+The fact is, that by the Pope's performance of the coronation of an
+Emperor of the French, a religious as well as a political revolution was
+effected; and the usurper in power, whatever his creed may be, will
+hereafter, without much difficulty, force it on his slaves.  You may,
+perhaps, object that Pius VII., in his official account to the Sacred
+College of his journey to France, speaks with enthusiasm of the
+Catholicism of the French people.  But did not the Goddess of Reason, did
+not Robespierre as a high priest of a Supreme Being, speak as highly of
+their sectaries?  Read the Moniteur of 1793 and 1794, and you will be
+convinced of the truth of this assertion.  They, like the Pope, spoke of
+what they saw, and they, like him, did not see an individual who was not
+instructed how to perform his part, so as to give satisfaction to him
+whom he was to please, and to those who employed him.  As you have
+attended to the history of our Revolution, you have found it in great
+part a cruel masquerade, where none but the unfortunate Louis XVI.
+appeared in his native and natural character and without a mask.
+
+The countenance of Pius VII. is placid and benign, and a kind of calmness
+and tranquillity pervades his address and manners, which are, however,
+far from being easy or elegant.  The crowds that he must have been
+accustomed to see since his present elevation have not lessened a
+timidity the consequence of early seclusion.  Nothing troubled him more
+than the numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body, Tribunate,
+National Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every occasion.
+He never was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative;
+and his best quality is, not to do good, but to prevent evil.  His piety
+is sincere and unaffected, and it is not difficult to perceive that he
+has been more accustomed to address his God than to converse with men. He
+is nowhere so well in his place as before the altar; when imploring the
+blessings of Providence on his audience he speaks with confidence, as to
+a friend to whom his purity is known, and who is accustomed to listen
+favourably to his prayers.  He is zealous but not fanatical, but equally
+superstitious as devout.  His closet was crowded with relics, rosaries,
+etc., but there he passed generally eight hours of the twenty-four upon
+his knees in prayer and meditation.  He often inflicted on himself
+mortifications, observed fast-days, and kept his vows with religious
+strictness.
+
+None of the promises made him by Cardinal Fesch, in the name of Napoleon
+the First, were performed, but all were put off until a general
+pacification.  He was promised indemnity for Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara,
+and Ravenna; the ancient supremacy and pecuniary contributions of the
+Gallican Church, and the restoration of certain religious orders, both in
+France and Italy; but notwithstanding his own representations, and the
+activity of his Cardinal, Caprara, nothing was decided, though nothing
+was refused.
+
+By some means or other he was made perfectly acquainted with the crimes
+and vices of most of our public functionaries.  Talleyrand was surprised
+when Cardinal Caprara explained to him the reason why the Pope refused to
+admit some persons to his presence, and why he wished others even not to
+be of the party when he accepted the invitations of Bonaparte and his
+wife to their private societies.  Many are, however, of opinion that
+Talleyrand, from malignity or revenge, often heightened and confirmed His
+Holiness's aversion.  This was at least once the case with regard to De
+Lalande.  When Duroc inquired the cause of the Pope's displeasure against
+this astronomer, and hinted that it would be very agreeable to the
+Emperor were His Holiness to permit him the honour of prostrating
+himself, he was answered that men of talents and learning would always be
+welcome to approach his person; that he pitied the errors and prayed for
+the conversion of this savant, but was neither displeased nor offended
+with him.  Talleyrand, when informed of the Pope's answer, accused
+Cardinal Caprara of having misinterpreted his master's communications;
+and this prelate, in his turn, censured our Minister's bad memory.
+
+You must have read that this De Lalande is regarded in France as the
+first astronomer of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists; he
+is said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called "The
+Bible of a People who acknowledge no God."  He implored the ferocious
+Robespierre to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet pretended
+to be discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian.  In a letter
+of congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present elevation,
+he also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by styling
+himself Jesus Christ the First, Emperor of the French, instead of
+Napoleon the First.  But it was not his known impiety that made
+Talleyrand wish to exclude him from insulting with his presence a
+Christian pontiff.  In the summer of 1799, when the Minister was in a
+momentary disgrace, De Lalande was at the head of those who imputed to
+his treachery, corruptions, and machinations all the evils France then
+suffered, both from external enemies and internal factions.  If
+Talleyrand has justly been reproached for soon forgetting good offices
+and services done him, nobody ever denied that he has the best
+recollection in the world of offences or attacks, and that he is as
+revengeful as unforgiving.
+
+The only one of our great men whom Pius VII. remained obstinate and
+inflexible in not receiving, was the Senator and Minister of Police,
+Fouche.  As His Holiness was not so particular with regard to other
+persons who, like Fouche, were both apostate priests and regicide
+subjects, the following is reported to be the cause of his aversion and
+obduracy:
+
+In November, 1793, the remains of a wretch of the name of
+Challiers--justly called, for his atrocities, the Murat of Lyons--were
+ordered by Fouche, then a representative of the people in that city, to
+be produced and publicly worshipped; and, under his particular auspices,
+a grand fete was performed to the memory of this republican martyr, who
+had been executed as an assassin.  As part of this impious ceremony, an
+ass, covered with a Bishop's vestments, having on his head a mitre, and
+the volumes of Holy Writ tied to his tail, paraded the streets.  The
+remains of Challiers were then burnt, and the ashes distributed among his
+adorers; while the books were also consumed, and the ashes scattered in
+the wind.  Fouche proposed, after giving the ass some water to drink in a
+sacred chalice, to terminate the festivity of the day by murdering all
+the prisoners, amounting to seven thousand five hundred; but a sudden
+storm prevented the execution of this diabolical proposition, and
+dispersed the sacrilegious congregation.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though all the Bonapartes were great favourites with Pius VII.,
+Madame Letitia, their mother, had a visible preference.  In her
+apartments he seemed most pleased to meet the family parties, as they
+were called, because to them, except the Bonapartes, none but a few
+select favourites were invited,--a distinction as much wished for and
+envied as any other Court honour.  After the Pope had fixed the evening
+he would appear among them, Duroc made out a list, under the dictates of
+Napoleon, of the chosen few destined to partake of the blessing of His
+Holiness's presence; this list was merely pro form, or as a compliment,
+laid before him; and after his tacit approbation, the individuals were
+informed, from the first chamberlain's office, that they would be
+honoured with admittance at such an hour, to such a company, and in such
+an apartment.  The dress in which they were to appear was also
+prescribed.  The parties usually met at six o'clock in the evening.  On
+the Pope's entrance all persons, of both sexes, kneeled to receive his
+blessing.  Tea, ice, liqueurs, and confectionery were then served.  In
+the place of honour were three elevated elbow-chairs, and His Holiness
+was seated between the Emperor and Empress, and seldom spoke to any one
+to whom Napoleon did not previously address the word.  The exploits of
+Bonaparte, particularly his campaigns in Egypt, were the chief subjects
+of conversation.  Before eight o'clock the Pope always retired,
+distributing his blessing to the kneeling audience, as on his entry. When
+he was gone, card-tables were brought in, and play was permitted. Duroc
+received his master's orders how to distribute the places at the
+different tables, what games were to be played, and the amount of the
+sums to be staked.  These were usually trifling and small compared to
+what is daily risked in our fashionable circles.
+
+Often, after the Pope had returned to his own rooms, Madame Letitia
+Bonaparte was admitted to assist at his private prayers.  This lady,
+whose intrigues and gallantry are proverbial in Corsica, has, now that
+she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee, and is surrounded
+by hypocrites and impostors, who, under the mask of sanctity, deceive and
+plunder her.  Her antechambers are always full of priests; and her closet
+and bedroom are crowded with relics, which she collected during her
+journey to Italy last year.  She might, if she chose, establish a
+Catholic museum, and furnish it with a more curious collection, in its
+sort, than any of our other museums contain.  Of all the saints in our
+calendar, there is not one of any notoriety who has not supplied her with
+a finger, a toe, or some other part; or with a piece of a shirt, a
+handkerchief, a sandal, or a winding-sheet.  Even a bit of a pair of
+breeches, said to have belonged to Saint Mathurin, whom many think was a
+sans-cullotte, obtains her adoration on certain occasions.  As none of
+her children have yet arrived at the same height of faith as herself, she
+has, in her will, bequeathed to the Pope all her relics, together with
+eight hundred and seventy-nine Prayer-books, and four hundred and
+forty-six Bibles, either in manuscript or of different editions.  Her
+favourite breviary, used only on great solemnities, was presented to her
+by Cardinal Maury at Rome, and belonged, as it is said, formerly to Saint
+Francois, whose commentary, written with his own hand, fills the margins;
+though many, who with me adore him as a saint, doubt whether he could
+either read or write.
+
+Not long ago she made, as she thought, an exceedingly valuable
+acquisition.  A priest arrived direct from the Holy City of Jerusalem,
+well recommended by the inhabitants of the convents there, with whom he
+pretended to have passed his youth.  After prostrating himself before the
+Pope, he waited on Madame Letitia Bonaparte.  He told her that he had
+brought with him from Syria the famous relic, the shoulder-bone of Saint
+John the Baptist; but that, being in want of money for his voyage, he
+borrowed upon it from a Grecian Bishop in Montenegro two hundred louis
+d'or.  This sum, and one hundred louis d'or besides, was immediately
+given him; and within three months, for a large sum in addition to those
+advanced, this precious relic was in Madame Letitia's possession.
+
+Notwithstanding this lady's care not to engage in her service any person
+of either sex who cannot produce, not a certificate of civism from the
+municipality as was formerly the case, but a certificate of Christianity,
+and a billet of confession signed by the curate of the parish, she had
+often been robbed, and the robbers had made particularly free with those
+relics which were set in gold or in diamonds.  She accused her daughter,
+the Princesse Borghese, who often rallies the devotion of her mamma, and
+who is more an amateur of the living than of the dead, of having played
+her these tricks.  The Princess informed Napoleon of her mother's losses,
+as well as of her own innocence, and asked him to apply to the police to
+find out the thief, who no doubt was one of the pious rogues who almost
+devoured their mother.
+
+On the next day Napoleon invited Madame Letitia to dinner, and Fouche had
+orders to make a strict search, during her absence, among the persons
+composing her household.  Though he, on this occasion, did not find what
+he was looking for, he made a discovery which very much mortified Madame
+Letitia.
+
+Her first chambermaid, Rosina Gaglini, possessed both her esteem and
+confidence, and had been sent for purposely from Ajaccio, in Corsica, on
+account of her general renown for great piety, and a report that she was
+an exclusive favourite with the Virgin Mary, by whose interference she
+had even performed, it was said, some miracles; such as restoring stolen
+goods, runaway cattle, lost children, and procuring prizes in the
+lottery.  Rosina was as relic-mad as her mistress; and as she had no
+means to procure them otherwise, she determined to partake of her lady's
+by cutting off a small part of each relic of Madame Letitia's principal
+saints.  These precious 'morceaux' she placed in a box upon which she
+kneeled to say her prayers during the day; and which, for a
+mortification, served her as a pillow during the night.  Upon each of the
+sacred bits she had affixed a label with the name of the saint it
+belonged to, which occasioned the disclosure.  When Madame Letitia heard
+of this pious theft, she insisted on having the culprit immediately and
+severely punished; and though the Princesse Borghese, as the innocent
+cause of poor Rosina's misfortune, interfered, and Rosina herself
+promised never more to plunder saints, she was without mercy turned away,
+and even denied money sufficient to carry her back to Corsica.  Had she
+made free with Madame Letitia's plate or wardrobe, there is no doubt but
+that she had been forgiven; but to presume to share with her those sacred
+supports on her way to Paradise was a more unpardonable act with a
+devotee than to steal from a lover the portrait of an adored mistress.
+
+In the meantime the police were upon the alert to discover the person
+whom they suspected of having stolen the relics for the diamonds, and not
+the diamonds for the relics.  Among our fashionable and new saints,
+surprising as you may think it, Madame de Genlis holds a distinguished
+place; and she, too, is an amateur and collector of relics in proportion
+to her means; and with her were found those missed by Madame Letitia.
+Being asked to give up the name of him from whom she had purchased them,
+she mentioned Abbe Saladin, the pretended priest from Jerusalem.  He, in
+his turn, was questioned, and by his answers gave rise to suspicion that
+he himself was the thief.  The person of whom he pretended to have bought
+them was not to be found, nor was any one of such a description
+remembered to have been seen anywhere.  On being carried to prison, he
+claimed the protection of Madame Letitia, and produced a letter in which
+this lady had promised him a bishopric either in France or in Italy. When
+she was informed of his situation, she applied to her son Napoleon for
+his liberty, urging that a priest who from Jerusalem had brought with him
+to Europe such an extraordinary relic as the shoulder of Saint John,
+could not be culpable.
+
+Abbe Saladin had been examined by Real, who concluded, from the accent
+and perfection with which he spoke the French language, that he was some
+French adventurer who had imposed on the credulity and superstition of
+Madame Letitia; and, therefore, threatened him with the rack if he did
+not confess the truth.  He continued, however, in his story, and was
+going to be released upon an order from the Emperor, when a gendarme
+recognized him as a person who, eight years before, had, under the name
+of Lanoue, been condemned for theft and forgery to the galleys, whence he
+had made his escape.  Finding himself discovered, he avowed everything.
+He said he had served in Egypt, in the guides of Bonaparte, but deserted
+to the Turks and turned Mussulman, but afterwards returned to the bosom
+of the Church at Jerusalem.  There he persuaded the friars that he had
+been a priest, and obtained the certificates which introduced him to the
+Pope and to the Emperor's mother; from whom he had received twelve
+thousand livres for part of the jaw bone of a whale, which he had sold
+her for the shoulder-bone of a saint.  As the police believe the
+certificates he has produced to be also forged, he is detained in prison
+until an answer arrives from our Consul in Syria.
+
+Madame Letitia did not resign without tears the relic he had sold her;
+and there is reason to believe that many other pieces of her collections,
+worshipped by her as remains of saints, are equally genuine as this
+shoulder-bone of Saint John.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That the population of this capital has, since the Revolution,
+decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be lamented.  This
+focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous, though the
+inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am well
+persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are
+committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of
+time in all other European capitals put together.  From not reading in
+our newspapers, as we do in yours, of the robberies, murders, and frauds
+discovered and punished, you may, perhaps, be inclined to suppose my
+assertion erroneous or exaggerated; but it is the policy of our present
+Government to labour as much as possible in the dark; that is to say, to
+prevent, where it can be done, all publicity of anything directly or
+indirectly tending to inculpate it of oppression, tyranny, or even
+negligence; and to conceal the immorality of the people so nearly
+connected with its own immoral power.  It is true that many vices and
+crimes here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the natural
+consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without
+attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the
+mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit,
+uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be
+mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect
+of police, who very seldom grants it.
+
+Most of the enormities now deplored in this country are the consequence
+of moral and religious licentiousness, that have succeeded to political
+anarchy, or rather were produced by it, and survive it.  Add to this the
+numerous examples of the impunity of guilt, prosperity of infamy, misery
+of honesty, and sufferings of virtue, and you will not think it
+surprising that, notwithstanding half a million of spies, our roads and
+streets are covered with robbers and assassins, and our scaffolds with
+victims.
+
+The undeniable TRUTH that this city alone is watched by one hundred
+thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason
+to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the
+governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter
+good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed,
+wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish
+by its own pestilential breath.
+
+According to the official registers published by Manuel in 1792, the
+number of spies all over France during the reign of Louis XVI. was
+nineteen thousand three hundred (five thousand less than under Louis
+XV.); and of this number six thousand were distributed in Paris, and in a
+circle of four leagues around it, including Versailles.  You will
+undoubtedly ask me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what
+can be the cause of this disproportionate increase of distrust and
+depravity?  I will explain it as far as my abilities admit, according to
+the opinions of others compared with my own remarks.
+
+When factions usurped the supremacy of the Kings, vigilance augmented
+with insecurity; and almost everybody who was not an opposer, who refused
+being an accomplice, or feared to be a victim, was obliged to serve as an
+informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy.  The rapidity with which
+parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals as numerous
+as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I am sorry to
+say few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness and
+constancy were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who, to
+preserve their lives, did not renounce their principles and probity.
+
+Under the reign of Robespierre and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+every member of Government, of the clubs, of the tribunals, and of the
+communes, had his private spies; but no regular register was kept of
+their exact number.  Under the Directory a Police Minister was nominated,
+and a police office established.  According to the declaration of the
+Police Minister, Cochon, in 1797, the spies, who were then regularly
+paid, amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand; and of these, thirty
+thousand did duty in this capital.  How many there were in 1799, when
+Fouche, for the first time, was appointed a chief of the department of
+police, is not known, but suppose them doubled within two years; their
+increase since is nevertheless immense, considering that France has
+enjoyed upwards of four years' uninterrupted Continental peace, and has
+not been exposed to any internal convulsions during the same period.
+
+You may, perhaps, object that France is not rich enough to keep up as
+numerous an army of spies as of soldiers; because the expense of the
+former must be triple the amount of the latter.  Were all these spies,
+now called police agents, or agents of the secret police, paid regular
+salaries, your objection would stand, but most of them have no other
+reward than the protection of the police; being employed in
+gambling--houses, in coffee--houses, in taverns, at the theatres, in the
+public gardens, in the hotels, in lottery offices, at pawnbrokers', in
+brothels, and in bathing-houses, where the proprietors or masters of
+these establishments pay them.  They receive nothing from the police, but
+when they are enabled to make any great discoveries, those who have been
+robbed or defrauded, and to whom they have been serviceable, are, indeed,
+obliged to present them with some douceur, fixed by the police at the
+rate of the value recovered; but such occurrences are merely accidental.
+To these are to be added all individuals of either sex who by the law are
+obliged to obtain from the police licenses to exercise their trade, as
+pedlars, tinkers, masters of puppet-shows, wild beasts, etc.  These, on
+receiving their passes, inscribe themselves, and take the oaths as spies;
+and are forced to send in their regular reports of what they hear or see.
+Prostitutes, who, all over this country, are under the necessity of
+paying for regular licenses, are obliged also to give information, from
+time to time, to the nearest police commissary of what they observe or
+what they know respecting their visitors, neighbours, etc.  The number of
+unfortunate women of this description who had taken out licenses during
+the year 12, or from September, 1803, to September, 1804, is officially
+known to have amounted to two hundred and twenty thousand, of whom forty
+thousand were employed by the armies.
+
+It is no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte has his secret spies upon his
+wife, his brothers, his sisters, his Ministers, Senators, and other
+public functionaries, and also upon his public spies.  These are all
+under his own immediate control and that of Duroc, who does the duty of
+his private Police Minister, and in whom he confides more than even in
+the members of his own family.  In imitation of their master, each of the
+other Bonapartes, and each of the Ministers, have their individual spies,
+and are watched in their turn by the spies of their secretaries, clerks,
+etc.  This infamous custom of espionage goes ad infinitum, and appertains
+almost to the establishment and to the suite of each man in place, who
+does not think himself secure a moment if he remains in ignorance of the
+transactions of his rivals, as well as of those of his equals and
+superiors.
+
+Fouche and Talleyrand are reported to have disagreed before Bonaparte on
+some subject or other, which is frequently the case.  The former,
+offended at some doubts thrown out about his intelligence, said to the
+latter:
+
+"I am so well served that I can tell you the name of every man or woman
+you have conversed with, both yesterday and today; where you saw them,
+and how long you remained with them or they with you."
+
+"If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit," retorted Talleyrand,
+"I am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already
+passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter.  I can
+inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who provided
+these dinners, and who is expected to provide your meats to-morrow and
+the day after.  I can whisper you, in confidence, who slept with Madame
+Fouche last night, and who has an appointment with her to-night."
+
+Here Bonaparte interrupted them, in his usual dignified language: "Hold
+both your tongues; you are both great rogues, but I am at a loss to
+decide which is the greatest."
+
+Without uttering a single syllable, Talleyrand made a profound reverence
+to Fouche.  Bonaparte smiled, and advised them to live upon good terms if
+they were desirous of keeping their places.
+
+A man of the name of Ducroux, who, under Robespierre, had from a barber
+been made a general, and afterwards broken for his ignorance, was engaged
+by Bonaparte as a private spy upon Fouche, who employed him in the same
+capacity upon Bonaparte.  His reports were always written, and delivered
+in person into the hands both of the Emperor and of his Minister.  One
+morning he, by mistake, gave to Bonaparte the report of him instead of
+that intended for him.  Bonaparte began to read: "Yesterday, at nine
+o'clock, the Emperor acted the complete part of a madman; he swore,
+stamped, kicked, foamed, roared--", here poor Ducroux threw himself at
+Bonaparte's feet, and called for mercy for the terrible blunder he had
+committed.
+
+"For whom," asked Bonaparte, "did you intend this treasonable
+correspondence?  I suppose it is composed for some English or Russian
+agent, for Pitt or for Marcoff.  How long have you conspired with my
+enemies, and where are your accomplices?"
+
+"For God's sake, hear me, Sire," prayed Ducroux.  "Your Majesty's enemies
+have always been mine.  The report is for one of your best friends; but
+were I to mention his name, he will ruin me."
+
+"Speak out, or you die!" vociferated Bonaparte.
+
+"Well,'Sire, it is for Fouche--for nobody else but Fouche."
+
+Bonaparte then rang the bell for Duroc, whom he ordered to see Ducroux
+shut up in a dungeon, and afterwards to send for Fouche.  The Minister
+denied all knowledge of Ducroux, who, after undergoing several tortures,
+expiated his blunder upon the rack.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Pope, during his stay here, rose regularly every morning at
+five o'clock, and went to bed every night before ten.  The first hours of
+the day he passed in prayers, breakfasted after the Mass was over,
+transacted business till one, and dined at two.  Between three and four
+he took--his siesta, or nap; afterwards he attended the vespers, and when
+they were over he passed an hour with the Bonapartes, or admitted to his
+presence some members of the clergy.  The day was concluded, as it was
+begun, with some hours of devotion.
+
+Had Pius VII. possessed the character of a Pius VI., he would never have
+crossed the Alps; or had he been gifted with the spirit and talents of
+Sextus V. or Leo X., he would never have entered France to crown
+Bonaparte, without previously stipulating for himself that he should be
+put in possession of the sovereignty of Italy.  You can form no idea what
+great stress was laid on this act of His Holiness by the Bonaparte
+family, and what sacrifices were destined to be made had any serious and
+obstinate resistance been apprehended.  Threats were, indeed, employed
+personally against the Pope, and bribes distributed to the refractory
+members of the Sacred College; but it was no secret, either here or at
+Milan, that Cardinal Fesch had carte blanche with regard to the
+restoration of all provinces seized, since the war, from the Holy See, or
+full territorial indemnities in their place, at the expense of Naples and
+Tuscany; and, indeed, whatever the Roman pontiff has lost in Italy has
+been taken from him by Bonaparte alone, and the apparent generosity which
+policy and ambition required would, therefore, have merely been an act of
+justice.  Confiding foolishly in the honour and rectitude of Napoleon,
+without any other security than the assertion of Fesch, Pius VII., within
+a fortnight's stay in France, found the great difference between the
+promises held out to him when residing as a Sovereign at Rome, and their
+accomplishment when he had so far forgotten himself and his sacred
+dignity as to inhabit as a guest the castle of the Tuileries.
+
+Pius VII. mentioned, the day after his arrival at Fontainebleau, that it
+would be a gratification to his own subjects were he enabled to
+communicate to them the restoration of the former ecclesiastical domains,
+as a free gift of the Emperor of the French, at their first conference,
+as they would then be as well convinced of Napoleon's good faith as he
+was himself.  In answer, His Holiness was informed that the Emperor was
+unprepared to discuss political subjects, being totally occupied with the
+thoughts how to entertain worthily his high visitor, and to acknowledge
+becomingly the great honour done and the great happiness conferred on him
+by such a visit.  As soon as the ceremony of the coronation was over,
+everything, he hoped, would be arranged to the reciprocal satisfaction of
+both parties.
+
+About the middle of last December, Bonaparte was again asked to fix a day
+when the points of negotiation between him and the Pope could be
+discussed and settled.  Cardinal Caprara, who made this demand, was
+referred to Talleyrand, who denied having yet any instructions, though in
+daily expectation of them.  Thus the time went on until February, when
+Bonaparte informed the Pope of his determination to assume the crown of
+Italy, and of some new changes necessary, in consequence on the other
+side of the Alps.
+
+Either seduced by caresses, or blinded by his unaccountable partiality
+for Bonaparte, Pius VII., if left to himself, would not only have
+renounced all his former claims, but probably have made new sacrifices to
+this idol of his infatuation.  Fortunately, his counsellors were wiser
+and less deluded, otherwise the remaining patrimony of Saint Peter might
+now have constituted a part of Napoleon's inheritance, in Italy.  "Am I
+not, Holy Father!" exclaimed the Emperor frequently, "your son, the work
+of your hand?  And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it
+not be shared with you--or rather, do you not share it with me?  Anything
+that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power uncertain
+or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you.  With me you will
+shine or be obscured, rise or fall.  Could you, therefore, hesitate (were
+I to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure) to remove the
+Papal See to Avignon, where it formerly was and continued for centuries,
+and to enlarge the limits of my kingdom of Italy with the Ecclesiastical
+States?  Can you believe my throne at Milan safe as long as it is not the
+sole throne of Italy?  Do you expect to govern at Rome when I cease to
+reign at Milan?  No, Holy Father! the pontiff who placed the crown on my
+head, should it be shaken, will fall to rise no more."  If what Cardinal
+Caprara said can be depended upon, Bonaparte frequently used to
+intimidate or flatter the Pope in this manner.
+
+The representations of Cardinal Caprara changed Napoleon's first
+intention of being again crowned by the Pope as a King of Italy.  His
+crafty Eminence observed that, according to the Emperor's own
+declaration, it was not intended that the crowns of France and Italy
+should continue united.  But were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by
+the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the
+factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion
+of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps
+make even the crown of the French Empire unstable.  He did not deny that
+Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was
+performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the
+Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy.
+Might not circumstances turn out so favourably for Napoleon the First
+that he also might be inaugurated an Emperor of the Germans as well as of
+the French?  This last compliment, or prophecy, as Bonaparte's courtiers
+call it (what a prophet a Caprara!), had the desired effect, as it
+flattered equally Napoleon's ambition and vanity.  For fear, however, of
+Talleyrand and other anti-Catholic counsellors, who wanted him to
+consider the Pope merely as his first almoner, and to treat him as all
+other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as
+possible packing for Rome.  Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet,
+should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental
+Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can,
+without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second
+Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time
+death does not put a period to his encroachments and gigantic plans.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereigns have, since the Revolution, displayed more
+grandeur of soul, and evinced more firmness of character, than the
+present King and Queen of Naples.  Encompassed by a revolutionary volcano
+more dangerous than the physical one, though disturbed at home and
+defeated abroad, they have neither been disgraced nor dishonoured. They
+have, indeed, with all other Italian Princes, suffered territorial and
+pecuniary losses; but these were not yielded through cowardice or
+treachery, but enforced by an absolute necessity, the consequence of the
+desertion or inefficacy of allies.
+
+But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were
+able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian
+philosophers.  Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved
+himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured
+him, and of the hatred with which he has been honoured by all
+revolutionists--the natural and irreconcilable enemies of all legitimate
+sovereignty.
+
+Chevalier Acton is the son of an Irish physician, who first was
+established at Besancon in France, and afterwards at Leghorn in Italy. He
+is indebted for his present elevation to his own merit and to the
+penetration of the Queen of Sardinia, who discovered in him, when young,
+those qualities which have since distinguished him as a faithful
+counsellor and an able Minister.  As loyal as wise, he was, from 1789, an
+enemy to the French Revolution.  He easily foresaw that the specious
+promise of regeneration held out by impostors or fools to delude the
+ignorant, the credulous and the weak, would end in that universal
+corruption and general overthrow which we since have witnessed, and the
+effects of which our grandchildren will mourn.
+
+When our Republic, in April, 1792, declared war against Austria, and
+when, in the September following, the dominions of His Sardinian Majesty
+were invaded by our troops, the neutrality of Naples continued, and was
+acknowledged by our Government.  On the 16th of December following, our
+fleet from Toulon, however, cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, and a
+grenadier of the name of Belleville was landed as an Ambassador of the
+French Republic, and threatened a bombardment in case the demands he
+presented in a note were not acceded to within twenty-four hours.  Being
+attacked in time of peace, and taken by surprise, the Court of Naples was
+unable to make any resistance, and Chevalier Acton informed our grenadier
+Ambassador that this note had been laid before his Sovereign, who had
+ordered him to sign an agreement in consequence.
+
+When in February, 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own
+safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with
+your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our
+Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to
+Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking
+Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of our emissary.
+
+Whenever our Government has, by the success of our arms, been enabled to
+dictate to Naples, the removal of Acton has been insisted upon; but
+though he has ceased to transact business ostensibly as a Minister, his
+influence has always, and deservedly, continued unimpaired, and he still
+enjoys the just confidence and esteem of his Prince.
+
+But is His Sicilian Majesty equally well represented at the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud as served in his own capital?  I have told you before that
+Bonaparte is extremely particular in his acceptance of foreign diplomatic
+agents, and admits none near his person whom he does not believe to be
+well inclined to him.
+
+Marquis de Gallo, the Ambassador of the King of the Two Sicilies to the
+Emperor of the French, is no novice in the diplomatic career.  His
+Sovereign has employed him for these fifteen years in the most delicate
+negotiations, and nominated him in May, 1795, a Minister of the Foreign
+Department, and a successor of Chevalier Acton, an honour which he
+declined.  In the summer and autumn, 1797, Marquis de Gallo assisted at
+the conferences at Udine, and signed, with the Austrian
+plenipotentiaries, the Peace of Campo Formio, on the 17th of October,
+1797.
+
+During 1798, 1799, and 1800 he resided as Neapolitan Ambassador at
+Vienna, and was again entrusted by his Sovereign with several important
+transactions with Austria and Russia.  After a peace had been agreed to
+between France and the Two Sicilies, in March, 1801, and the Court of
+Naples had every reason to fear, and of course to please, the Court of
+St. Cloud, he obtained his present appointment, and is one of the few
+foreign Ambassadors here who has escaped both Bonaparte's private
+admonitions in the diplomatic circle and public lectures in Madame
+Bonaparte's drawing-room.
+
+This escape is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government
+is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls
+it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and
+enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has
+resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity that demand
+our admiration.
+
+It is said that the Marquis de Gallo is not entirely free from some
+taints of modern philosophy, and that he, therefore, does not consider
+the consequences of our innovations so fatal as most loyal men judge
+them; nor thinks a sans-culotte Emperor more dangerous to civilized
+society than a sans-culotte sovereign people.
+
+It is evident from the names and rank of its partisans that the
+Revolution of Naples in 1799 was different in many respects from that of
+every other country in Europe; for, although the political convulsions
+seem to have originated among the middle classes of the community, the
+extremes of society were everywhere else made to act against each other;
+the rabble being the first to triumph, and the nobles to succumb.  But
+here, on the contrary, the lazzaroni, composed of the lowest portion of
+the population of a luxurious capital, appear to have been the most
+strenuous, and, indeed, almost the only supporters of royalty; while the
+great families, instead of being indignant at novelties which levelled
+them, in point of political rights, with the meanest subject, eagerly
+embraced the opportunity of altering that form of Government which alone
+made them great.  It is, however, but justice to say that, though Marquis
+de Gallo gained the good graces of Bonaparte and of France in 1797, he
+was never, directly or indirectly, inculpated in the revolutionary
+transactions of his countrymen in 1799, when he resided at Vienna; and
+indeed, after all, it is not improbable that he disguises his real
+sentiments the better to, serve his country, and by that means has
+imposed on Bonaparte and acquired his favour.
+
+The address and manners of a courtier are allowed Marquis de Gallo by all
+who know him, though few admit that he possesses any talents as a
+statesman.  He is said to have read a great deal, to possess a good
+memory and no bad judgment; but that, notwithstanding this, all his
+knowledge is superficial.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have perhaps heard that Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his
+brothers and sisters, was last Christmas married by the Pope according to
+the Roman Catholic rite, being previously only united according to the
+municipal laws of the French Republic, which consider marriage only as a
+civil contract.  During the last two months of His Holiness's residence
+here, hardly a day passed that he was not petitioned to perform the same
+ceremony for our conscientious grand functionaries and courtiers, which
+he, however, according to the Emperor's desire, declined.  But his
+Cardinals were not under the same restrictions, and to an attentive
+observer who has watched the progress of the Revolution and not lost
+sight of its actors, nothing could appear more ridiculous, nothing could
+inspire more contempt of our versatility and inconsistency, than to
+remark among the foremost to demand the nuptial benediction, a
+Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Real, an Augereau, a Chaptal, a Reubel, a Lasnes,
+a Bessieres, a Thuriot, a Treilhard, a Merlin, with a hundred other
+equally notorious revolutionists, who were, twelve or fifteen years ago,
+not only the first to declaim against religious ceremonies as ridiculous,
+but against religion itself as useless, whose motives produced, and whose
+votes sanctioned, those decrees of the legislature which proscribed the
+worship, together with its priests and sectaries. But then the fashion of
+barefaced infidelity was as much the order of the day as that of external
+sanctity is at present.  I leave to casuists the decision whether to the
+morals of the people, naked atheism, exposed with all its deformities, is
+more or less hurtful than concealed atheism, covered with the garb of
+piety; but for my part I think the noonday murderer less guilty and much
+less detestable than the midnight assassin who stabs in the dark.
+
+A hundred anecdotes are daily related of our new saints and fashionable
+devotees.  They would be laughable were they not scandalous, and
+contemptible did they not add duplicity to our other vices.
+
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass, and on every
+Sunday or holiday they regularly attend at vespers, when, of course, all
+those who wish to be distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their
+flattery never neglect to be present.  In the evening of last Christmas
+Day, the Imperial chapel was, as usual, early crowded in expectation of
+Their Majesties, when the chamberlain, Salmatoris, entered, and said to
+the captain of the guard, loud enough to be heard by the audience, "The
+Emperor and the Empress have just resolved not to come here to-night, His
+Majesty being engaged by some unexpected business, and the Empress not
+wishing to come without her consort."  In ten minutes the chapel was
+emptied of every person but the guards, the priests, and three old women
+who had nowhere else to pass an hour.  At the arrival of our Sovereigns,
+they were astonished at the unusual vacancy, and indignantly regarded
+each other.  After vespers were over, one of Bonaparte's spies informed
+him of the cause, when, instead of punishing the despicable and
+hypocritical courtiers, or showing them any signs of his displeasure, he
+ordered Salmatoris under arrest, who would have experienced a complete
+disgrace had not his friend Duroc interfered and made his peace.
+
+At another time, on a Sunday, Fouche entered the chapel in the midst of
+the service, and whispered to Bonaparte, who immediately beckoned to his
+lord-in-waiting and to Duroc.  These both left the Imperial chapel, and
+returning in a few minutes at the head of five grenadiers, entered the
+grand gallery, generally frequented by the most scrupulous devotees, and
+seized every book.  The cause of this domiciliary visit was an anonymous
+communication received by the Minister of Police, stating that libels
+against the Imperial family, bound in the form of Prayer-books, had been
+placed there.  No such libels were, however, found; but of one hundred
+and sixty pretended breviaries, twenty-eight were volumes of novels,
+sixteen were poems, and eleven were indecent books.  It is not necessary
+to add that the proprietors of these edifying works never reclaimed them.
+The opinions are divided here, whether this curious discovery originated
+in the malice of Fouche, or whether Talleyrand took this method of duping
+his rival, and at the same time of gratifying his own malignity.  Certain
+it is that Fouche was severely reprimanded for the transaction, and that
+Bonaparte was highly offended at the disclosure.
+
+The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously
+devout, nor so basely perverse.  They go to church as to the play, to
+gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to
+admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their
+attendance.  Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of
+religious duties.  Our revolutionary charlatans have as much brutalized
+their understanding as corrupted their hearts.  They heard the Grand Mass
+said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly heard
+Robespierre proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and they
+looked at the Imperial processions with the same insensibility as they
+once saw the daily caravans of victims passing for execution.
+
+Even in Bonaparte's own guard, and among the officers of his household
+troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go to
+any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now,
+after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the Mass
+as to a parade or to a review.  With any other people, Bonaparte would
+not so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and forced
+military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day were
+encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.
+
+On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes
+d'Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the
+sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell
+into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy.  After being a
+little recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would
+injure him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause
+of his accident and terror: "Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d of
+September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from
+which I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the
+sacrament from my hands."  When this occurrence was reported to
+Bonaparte, Ledoux was dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported, and
+the Grand Vicar Clauset sent to the Temple, for the scandal their
+indiscretion had caused.  This act was certainly as unjust towards him
+who was bayoneted at the altar, as towards those who served the altar
+under the protection of the bayonets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your
+country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could
+nowhere justly excite surprise.  We had crossed the Rhine seven months
+before to seize the Duc d'Enghien; and when any prey invited, the passing
+of the Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former outrage, of
+audacity on our part, and of endurance or indifference on the part of
+other Continental States.  Talleyrand's note at Aix-la-Chapelle had also
+informed Europe that we had adopted a new and military diplomacy, and, in
+confounding power with right, would respect no privileges at variance
+with our ambition, interest or, suspicions, nor any independence it was
+thought useful or convenient for us to invade.
+
+It was reported here, at the time, that Bonaparte was much offended with
+General Frere, who commanded this political expedition, for permitting
+Sir George's servant to accompany his master, as Fouche and Real had
+already tortures prepared and racks waiting, and after forcing your agent
+to speak out, would have announced his sudden death, either by his own
+hands or by a coup-de-sang, before any Prussian note could require his
+release.  The known morality of our Government must have removed all
+doubts of the veracity of this assertion; a man might, besides, from the
+fatigues of a long journey, or from other causes, expire suddenly; but
+the exit of two, in the same circumstances, would have been thought at
+least extraordinary, even by our friends, and suspicious by our enemies.
+
+The official declaration of Rheinhard (our Minister to the Circle of
+Lower Saxony) to the Senate at Hamburg, in which he disavowed all
+knowledge on the subject of the capture of Sir George Rumbold, occasioned
+his disgrace.  This man, a subject of the Elector of Wurtemberg by birth,
+is one of the negative accomplices of the criminals of France who, since
+the Revolution, have desolated Europe.  He began in 1792 his diplomatic
+career, under Chauvelin and Talleyrand, in London, and has since been the
+tool of every faction in power.  In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to
+the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of
+rally to all the philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other
+revolutionary amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark,
+and Sweden then abounded.
+
+A citizen of Hamburg--or rather, of the world--of the name of Seveking,
+bestowed on him the hand of a sister; and though he is not accused of
+avarice, some of the contributions extorted by our Government from the
+neutral Hanse Towns are said to have been left behind in his coffers
+instead of being forwarded to this capital.  Either on this account, or
+for some other reason, he was recalled from Hamburg in January, 1797, and
+remained unemployed until the latter part of 1798, when he was sent as
+Minister to Tuscany.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, Talleyrand was forced by the Jacobins to
+resign his place as a Minister of the Foreign Department, he had the
+adroitness to procure Rheinhard to be nominated his successor, so that,
+though no longer nominally the Minister, he still continued to influence
+the decisions of our Government as much as if still in office, because,
+though not without parts, Rheinhard has neither energy of character nor
+consistency of conduct.  He is so much accustomed, and wants so much to
+be governed, that in 1796, at Hamburg, even the then emigrants, Madame de
+Genlis and General Valence, directed him, when he was not ruled or
+dictated to by his wife or brother-in-law.
+
+In 1800 Bonaparte sent him as a representative to the Helvetian Republic,
+and in 1802, again to Hamburg, where he was last winter superseded by
+Bourrienne, and ordered to an inferior station at the: Electoral Court at
+Dresden.  Rheinhard will never become one of those daring diplomatic
+banditti whom revolutionary Governments always employ in preference.  He
+has some moral principles, and, though not religious, is rather
+scrupulous.  He would certainly sooner resign than undertake to remove by
+poison, or by the steel of a bravo, a rival of his own or a person
+obnoxious to his employers.  He would never, indeed, betray the secrets
+of his Government if he understood they intended to rob a despatch or to
+atop a messenger; but no allurements whatever would induce him to head
+the parties perpetrating these acts of our modern diplomacy.
+
+Our present Minister at Hamburg (Bourrienne) is far from being so nice. A
+revolutionist from the beginning of the Revolution, he shared, with the
+partisans of La Fayette, imprisonment under Robespierre, and escaped
+death only by emigration.  Recalled afterwards by his friend, the late
+Director (Barras), he acted as a kind of secretary to him until 1796,
+when Bonaparte demanded him, having known him at the military college.
+During all Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he was his
+sole and confidential secretary--a situation which he lost in 1802, when
+Talleyrand denounced his corruption and cupidity because he had rivalled
+him in speculating in the funds and profiting by the information which
+his place afforded him.  He was then made a Counsellor of State, but in
+1803 he was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of one of our principal
+houses to the amount of a million of livres--and, from his correspondence
+with it, some reasons appeared for the suspicion that he frequently had
+committed a breach of confidence against his master, who, after erasing
+his name from among the Counsellors of State, had him conveyed a prisoner
+to the Temple, where he remained six months.  A small volume, called Le
+Livre Rouge of the Consular Court, made its appearance about that time,
+and contained some articles which gave Bonaparte reason to suppose that
+Bourrienne was its author.  On being questioned by the Grand Judge
+Regnier and the Minister Fouce, before whom he was carried, he avowed
+that he had written it, but denied that he had any intention of making it
+public.  As to its having found its way to the press during his
+confinement, that could only be ascribed to the ill-will or treachery of
+those police agents who inspected his papers and put their seals upon
+them.  "Tell Bonaparte," said he, "that, had I been inclined to injure
+him in the public opinion, I should not have stooped to such trifles as
+Le Livre Rouge, while I have deposited with a friend his original orders,
+letters, and other curious documents as materials for an edifying history
+of our military hospitals during the campaigns of Italy and Syria all
+authentic testimonies of his humanity for the wounded and dying French
+soldiers."
+
+After the answers of this interrogatory had been laid before Bonaparte,
+his brother Joseph was sent to the Temple to negotiate with Bourrienne,
+who was offered his liberty and a prefecture if he would give up all the
+original papers that, as a private secretary, he had had opportunity to
+collect.
+
+"These papers," answered Bourrienne, "are my only security against your
+brother's wrath and his assassins.  Were I weak enough to deliver them up
+to-day, to-morrow, probably, I should no longer be counted among the
+living; but I have now taken my measures so effectually that, were I
+murdered to-day, these originals would be printed to-morrow.  If Napoleon
+does not confide in my word of honour, he may trust to an assurance of
+discretion, with which my own interest is nearly connected.  If he
+suspects me of having wronged him, he is convinced also of the eminent
+services I have rendered him, sufficient surely to outweigh his present
+suspicion.  Let him again employ me in any post worthy of him and of me,
+and he shall soon see how much I will endeavour to regain his
+confidence."
+
+Shortly afterwards Bourrienne was released, and a pension, equal to the
+salary of a Counsellor of State; was granted him until some suitable
+place became vacant.  On Champagny's being appointed a Minister of the
+Home Department, the embassy at Vienna was demanded by Bourrienne, but
+refused, as previously promised to La Rochefoucauld, our late Minister at
+Dresden.  When Rheinhard, in a kind of disgrace, was transferred to that
+relatively insignificant post, Bourrienne was ordered, with extensive
+instructions, to Hamburg.  The Senate soon found the difference between a
+timid and honest Minister, and an unprincipled and crafty intriguer.  New
+loans were immediately required from Hanover; but hardly were these
+acquitted, than fresh extortions were insisted on.  In some secret
+conferences Bourrienne is, however, said to have hinted that some
+douceurs were expected for alleviating the rigour of his instructions.
+This hint has, no doubt, been taken, because he suddenly altered his
+conduct, and instead of hunting the purses of the Germans, pursued the
+persons of his emigrated countrymen; and, in a memorial, demanded the
+expulsion of all Frenchmen who were not registered and protected by him,
+under pretence that every one of them who declined the honour of being a
+subject of Bonaparte, must be a traitor against the French Government and
+his country.
+
+Bourrienne is now stated to have connected himself with several
+stock-jobbers, both in Germany, Holland, and England; and already to have
+pocketed considerable sums by such connections.  It is, however, not to
+be forgotten that several houses have been ruined in this capital by the
+profits allowed him, who always refused to share their losses, but,
+whatever were the consequences, enforced to its full amount the payment
+of that value which he chose to set on his communications.
+
+A place in France would, no doubt, have been preferable to Bourrienne,
+particularly one near the person of Bonaparte.  But if nothing else
+prevented the accomplishment of his wishes, his long familiarity with all
+the Bonapartes, whom he always treated as equals, and even now (with the
+exception of Napoleon) does not think his superiors, will long remain an
+insurmountable barrier.
+
+I cannot comprehend how Bonaparte (who is certainly no bad judge of men)
+could so long confide in Bourrienne, who, with the usual presumption of
+my countrymen, is continually boasting, to a degree that borders on
+indiscretion, and, by an artful questioner, may easily be lead to
+overstep those bounds.  Most of the particulars of his quarrel with
+Napoleon I heard him relate himself, as a proof of his great consequence,
+in a company of forty individuals, many of whom were unknown to him. On
+the first discovery which Bonaparte made of Bourrienne's infidelity,
+Talleyrand complimented him upon not having suffered from it.  "Do you
+not see," answered Bonaparte, "that it is also one of the extraordinary
+gifts of my extraordinary good fortune?
+
+"Even traitors are unable to betray me.  Plots respect me as much as
+bullets."  I need not tell you that Fortune is the sole divinity
+sincerely worshipped by Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Joseph Bonaparte leads a much more retired life, and sees less
+company, than any of his brothers or sisters.  Except the members of his
+own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph those
+regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame Louis
+Bonaparte have.  His hospitality is, however, greater at his countryseat
+Morfontaine than at his hotel here.  Those whom he likes, or does not
+mistrust (who, by the bye, are very few), may visit him without much
+formality in the country, and prolong their stay, according to their own
+inclination or discretion; but they must come without their servants, or
+send them away on their arrival.
+
+As soon as an agreeable visitor presents himself, it is the etiquette of
+the house to consider him as an inmate; but to allow him at the same time
+a perfect liberty to dispose of his hours and his person as suits his
+convenience or caprice.  In this extensive and superb mansion a suite of
+apartments is assigned him, with a valet-de--chambre, a lackey, a
+coachman, a groom, and a jockey, all under his own exclusive command. He
+has allotted him a chariot, a gig, and riding horses, if he prefers such
+an exercise.  A catalogue is given him of the library of the chateau; and
+every morning he is informed what persons compose the company at
+breakfast, dinner, and supper, and of the hours of these different
+repasts.  A bill of fare is at the same time presented to him, and he is
+asked to point out those dishes to which he gives the preference, and to
+declare whether he chooses to join the company or to be served in his own
+rooms.
+
+During the summer season, players from the different theatres of Paris
+are paid to perform three times in the week; and each guest, according to
+the period of his arrival, is asked, in his turn, to command either a
+comedy or a tragedy, a farce or a ballet.  Twice in the week concerts are
+executed by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the
+week invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or
+accepted from them.
+
+Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge
+et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games
+of hazard.  The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who
+advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the loss.
+Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from night
+till morning, without interruption, as no one interferes.  Should Joseph
+hear that any person has been too severely treated by Fortune, or
+suspects that he has not much cash remaining, some rouleaux of napoleons
+d'or are placed on the table of his dressing-room, which he may use or
+leave untouched, as he judges proper.
+
+The hours of Joseph Bonaparte are neither so late as yours in England,
+nor so early as they were formerly in France.  Breakfast is ready served
+at ten o'clock, dinner at four, and supper at nine.  Before midnight he
+retires to bed with his family, but visitors do as they like and follow
+their own usual hours, and their servants are obliged to wait for them.
+
+When any business calls Joseph away, either to preside in the Senate
+here, or to travel in the provinces, he notifies the visitors, telling
+them at the same time not to displace themselves on account of his
+absence, but wait till his return, as they would not observe any
+difference in the economy of his house, of which Madame Joseph always
+does the honours, or, in her absence, some lady appointed by her.
+
+Last year, when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly
+four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant.  On his
+return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of
+Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the
+bottle.  Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors
+and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and burgundy
+so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not heartily
+intoxicated.  But the best of the story is that he employed his mornings
+in composing a poem holding out to abhorrence the disgusting vice of
+drunkenness, and presented it to Joseph, requesting permission to
+dedicate it to him when published.  To those who have read it, or only
+seen extracts from it, the compilation appears far from being
+contemptible, but Joseph still keeps the copy, though he has made the
+author a present of one hundred napoleons d'or, and procured him a place
+of an amanuensis in the chancellory of the Senate, having resolved never
+to accept any dedication, but wishing also not to hurt the feelings of
+the author by a refusal.
+
+In a chateau where so many visitors of licentious and depraved morals
+meet, of both sexes, and where such an unlimited liberty reigns,
+intrigues must occur, and have of course not seldom furnished materials
+for the scandalous chronicle.  Even Madame Joseph herself has either been
+gallant or calumniated.  Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of
+Eugene de Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively
+indebted to the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even
+fought a duel concerning the right of paternity.  Eugene de Beauharnais
+never was a great favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved manners
+and prudence form too great a contrast to his noisy and blundering way to
+accord with each other.  Before he set out for Italy, it was well known
+in our fashionable circles that he had been interdicted the house of his
+uncle, and that no reconciliation took place, notwithstanding the
+endeavours of Madame Napoleon.  To humble him still more, Joseph even
+nominated la Fond-Blaniac an equerry to his wife, who, therefore, easily
+consoled herself for the departure of her dear nephew.
+
+The husband of Madame Miot (one of Madame Joseph's ladies-in-waiting) was
+not so patient, nor such a philosopher as Joseph Bonaparte.  Some
+charitable person having reported in the company of a 'bonne amie' of
+Miot, that his wife did not pass her nights in solitude, but that she
+sought consolation among the many gallants and disengaged visitors at
+Morfontaine, he determined to surprise her.  It was past eleven o'clock
+at night when his arrival was announced to Joseph, who had just retired
+to his closet.  Madame Miot had been in bed ever since nine, ill of a
+migraine, and her husband was too affectionate not to be the first to
+inform her of his presence, without permitting anybody previously to
+disturb her.  With great reluctance, Madame Miot's maid delivered the key
+of her rooms, while she accompanied him with a light.  In the antechamber
+he found a hat and a greatcoat, and in the closet adjoining the bedroom,
+a coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and
+slippers.  Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and
+her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband
+began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the
+closet.  A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so
+vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!"  with all his
+might.  The chateau was instantly in an uproar, and the apartments
+crowded with half-dressed and half-naked lovers.  Joseph Bonaparte alone
+was able to separate the combatants; and inquiring the cause of the riot,
+assured them that he would suffer no scandal and no intrigues in his
+house, without seriously resenting it.  An explanation being made, Madame
+Miot was looked for but in vain; and the maid declared that, being warned
+by a letter from Paris of her husband's jealousy and determination to
+surprise her, her mistress had reposed herself in her room; while, to
+punish the ungenerous suspicions of her husband, she had persuaded
+Captain d' Horteuil to occupy her place in her own bed.  The maid had no
+sooner finished her deposition, than her mistress made her appearance and
+upbraided her husband severely, in which she was cordially joined by the
+spectators.  She inquired if, on seeing the dress of a gentleman, he had
+also discovered the attire of a female; and she appealed to Captain d'
+Horteuil whether he had not the two preceding nights also slept in her
+bed.  To this he, of course, assented; adding that, had M. Miot attacked
+him the first night, he would not then perhaps have been so roughly
+handled as now; for then he was prepared for a visit, which this night
+was rather unexpected.  This connubial farce ended by Miot begging pardon
+of his wife and her gallant; the former of whom, after much entreaty by
+Joseph, at last consented to share with him her bed.  But being
+disfigured with two black eyes and suffering from several bruises, and
+also ashamed of his unfashionable behaviour, he continued invisible for
+ten days afterwards, and returned to this city as he had left it, by
+stealth.
+
+This Niot was a spy under Robespierre, and is a Counsellor of State under
+Bonaparte.  Without bread, as well as without a home, he was, from the
+beginning of the Revolution, one of the most ardent patriots, and the
+first republican Minister in Tuscany.  After the Sovereign of that
+country had, in 1793, joined the League, Miot returned to France, and
+was, for his want of address to negotiate as a Minister, shut up to
+perform the part of a spy in the Luxembourg,  then transformed into a
+prison for suspected persons.  Thanks to his patriotism, upwards of two
+hundred individuals of both sexes were denounced, transferred to the
+Conciergerie prison, and afterwards guillotined.  After that, until 1799,
+he continued so despised that no faction would accept him for an
+accomplice; but in the November of that year, after Bonaparte had
+declared himself a First Consul, Miot was appointed a tribune, an office
+from which he was advanced, in 1802, to be a Counsellor of State. As Miot
+squanders away his salary with harlots and in gambling-houses, and is
+pursued by creditors he neither will nor can pay, it was merely from
+charity that his wife was received among the other ladies of Madame
+Joseph Bonaparte's household.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding the ties of consanguinity, honour, duty,
+interest, and gratitude, which bound the Spanish Bourbons to the cause of
+the Bourbons of France, no monarch has rendered more service to the cause
+of rebellion, and done more harm to the cause of royalty, than the King
+of Spain.
+
+But here, again, you must understand me.  When I speak of Princes whose
+talents are known not to be brilliant, whose intellects are known to be
+feeble, and whose good intentions are rendered null by a want of firmness
+of character or consistency of conduct; while I deplore their weakness
+and the consequent misfortunes of their contemporaries, I lay all the
+blame on their wicked or ignorant counsellors; because, if no Ministers
+were fools or traitors, no Sovereigns would tremble on their thrones, and
+no subjects dare to shake their foundation.  Had Providence blessed
+Charles IV. of Spain with the judgment in selecting his Ministers, and
+the constancy of persevering in his choice, possessed by your George
+III.; had the helm of Spain been in the firm and able hands of a
+Grenville, a Windham, and a Pitt, the Cabinet of Madrid would never have
+been oppressed by the yoke of the Cabinet of St. Cloud, nor paid a heavy
+tribute for its bondage, degrading as well as ruinous.
+
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand to his cousin, Prince de
+Chalais, who reproached him for an unbecoming servility to low and vile
+personages; "and I prefer bowing to them to being trampled upon and
+crushed by them."  Indeed, as far as I remember, nowhere in history are
+hitherto recorded so many low persons who, from obscurity and meanness,
+have suddenly and at once attained rank and notoriety.  Where do we read
+of such a numerous crew of upstart Emperors, Kings, grand pensionaries,
+directors, Imperial Highnesses, Princes, Field-marshals, generals,
+Senators, Ministers, governors, Cardinals, etc., as we now witness
+figuring upon the theatre of Europe, and who chiefly decide on the
+destiny of nations?  Among these, several are certainly to be found whose
+superior parts have made them worthy to pierce the crowd and to shake off
+their native mud; but others again, and by far the greatest number of
+these 'novi homines', owe their present elevation to shameless intrigues
+or atrocious crimes.
+
+The Prime Minister--or rather, the viceroy of Spain, the Prince of
+Peace--belongs to the latter class.  From a man in the ranks of the
+guards he was promoted to a general-in-chief, and from a harp player in
+antechambers to a president of the councils of a Prince; and that within
+the short period of six years.  Such a fortune is not common; but to be
+absolutely without capacity as well as virtue, genius as well as good
+breeding, and, nevertheless, to continue in an elevation so little
+merited, and in a place formerly so subject to changes and so unstable,
+is a fortune that no upstart ever before experienced in Spain.
+
+An intrigue of his elder brother with the present Queen, then Princess of
+Asturia, which was discovered by the King, introduced him first at Court
+as a harp player, and, when his brother was exiled, he was entrusted with
+the correspondence of the Princess with her gallant.  After she had
+ascended the throne, he thought it more profitable to be the lover than
+the messenger, and contrived, therefore, to supplant his brother in the
+royal favour.  Promotions and riches were consequently heaped upon him,
+and, what is surprising, the more undisguised the partiality of the Queen
+was, the greater the attachment of the King displayed itself; and it has
+ever since been an emulation between the royal couple who should the most
+forget and vilify birth and supremacy by associating this man not only in
+the courtly pleasures, but in the functions of Sovereignty.  Had he been
+gifted with sound understanding, or possessed any share of delicacy,
+generosity, or discretion, he would, while he profited by their imprudent
+condescension, have prevented them from exposing their weaknesses and
+frailties to a discussion and ridicule among courtiers, and from becoming
+objects of humiliation and scandal among the people.  He would have
+warned them of the danger which at all times attends the publicity of
+foibles and vices of Princes, but particularly in the present times of
+trouble and innovations.  He would have told them: "Make me great and
+wealthy, but not at the expense of your own grandeur or of the loyalty of
+your people.  Do not treat an humble subject as an equal, nor suffer Your
+Majesties, whom Providence destined to govern a high-spirited nation, to
+be openly ruled by one born to obey.  I am too dutiful not to lay aside
+my private vanity when the happiness of my King and the tranquillity of
+my fellow subjects are at stake.  I am already too high.  In descending a
+little, I shall not only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in
+the opinion of posterity.  Every step I am advancing undermines your
+throne.  In retreating a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never
+injure it."  But I beg your pardon for this digression, and for putting
+the language of dignified reason into the mouth of a man as corrupt as he
+is imbecile.
+
+Do not suppose, because the Prince of Peace is no friend of my nation,
+that I am his enemy.  No!  Had he shown himself a true patriot, a friend
+of his own country, and of his too liberal Prince, or even of monarchy in
+general, or of anybody else but himself--although I might have
+disapproved of his policy, if he has any--I would never have lashed the
+individual for the acts of the Minister.  But you must have observed,
+with me, that never before his administration was the Cabinet of Madrid
+worse conducted at home or more despised abroad; the Spanish Monarch more
+humbled or Spanish subjects more wretched; the Spanish power more
+dishonoured or the Spanish resources worse employed.  Never, before the
+treaty with France of 1796, concluded by this wiseacre (which made him a
+Prince of Peace, and our Government the Sovereign of Spain), was the
+Spanish monarchy reduced to such a lamentable dilemma as to be forced
+into an expensive war without a cause, and into a disgraceful peace, not
+only unprofitable, but absolutely disadvantageous.  Never before were its
+treasures distributed among its oppressors to support their tyranny, nor
+its military and naval forces employed to fight the battles of rebellion.
+The loyal subjects of Spain have only one hope left.  The delicate state
+of his present Majesty's health does not promise a much longer
+continuance of his reign, and the Prince of Asturia is too well informed
+to endure the guidance of the most ignorant Minister that ever was
+admitted into the Cabinet and confidence of a Sovereign.  It is more than
+probable that under a new reign the misfortunes of the Prince of Peace
+will inspire as much compassion as his rapid advancement has excited
+astonishment and indignation.
+
+A Cabinet thus badly directed cannot be expected to have representatives
+abroad either of abilities or patriotism.  The Admiral and General
+Gravina, who but lately left this capital as an Ambassador from the Court
+of Spain to assume the command of a Spanish fleet, is more valiant than
+wise, and more an enemy of your country than a friend of his own.  He is
+a profound admirer of Bonaparte's virtues and successes, and was, during
+his residence, one of the most ostentatiously awkward courtiers of
+Napoleon the First.  It is said that he has the modesty and loyalty to
+wish to become a Spanish Bonaparte, and that he promises to restore by
+his genius and exploits the lost lustre of the Spanish monarchy.  When
+this was reported to Talleyrand, he smiled with contempt; but when it was
+told to Bonaparte, he stamped with rage at the impudence of the Spaniard
+in daring to associate his name of acquired and established greatness
+with his own impertinent schemes of absurdities and impossibilities.
+
+In the summer of 1793, Gravina commanded a division of the Spanish
+fleet in the Mediterranean, of which Admiral Langara was the
+commander-in-chief.  At the capitulation of Toulon, after the combined
+English and Spanish forces had taken possession of it, when Rear-Admiral
+Goodall was declared governor, Gravina was made the commandant of the
+troops.  At the head of these he often fought bravely in different
+sorties, and on the 1st of October was wounded at the re-capture of Fort
+Pharon.  He complains still of having suffered insults or neglect from
+the English, and even of having been exposed unnecessarily to the fire
+and sword of the enemy merely because he was a patriot as well as an
+envied or suspected ally.  His inveteracy against your country takes its
+date, no doubt, from the siege of Toulon, or perhaps, from its
+evacuation.
+
+When, in May, 1794, our troops were advancing towards Collioure, he was
+sent with a squadron to bring it succours, but he arrived too late, and
+could not save that important place.  He was not more successful at the
+beginning of the campaign of 1795 at Rosa, where he had only time to
+carry away the artillery before the enemy entered.  In August, that year,
+during the absence of Admiral Massaredo, he assumed ad interim the
+command of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean; but in the December
+following he was disgraced, arrested, and shut up as a State prisoner.
+
+During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the
+autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and
+after the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St.
+Cloud, Chevalier d' Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was
+nominated both his successor and a representative of the King of Etruria.
+Among the members of our diplomatic corps, he was considered somewhat of
+a Spanish gasconader and a bully.  He more frequently boasted of his
+wounds and battles than of his negotiations or conferences, though he
+pretended, indeed, to shine as much in the Cabinet as in the field.
+
+In his suite were two Spanish women, one about forty, and the other about
+twenty years of age.  Nobody knew what to make of them, as they were
+treated neither as wives, mistresses, nor servants; and they avowed
+themselves to be no relations.  After a residence here of some weeks, he
+was, by superior orders, waylaid one night at the opera, by a young and
+beautiful dancing girl of the name of Barrois, who engaged him to take
+her into keeping.  He hesitated, indeed, for some time; at last, however,
+love got the better of his scruples, and he furnished for her an elegant
+apartment on the new Boulevard.  On the day he carried her there, he was
+accompanied by the chaplain of the Spanish Legation; and told her that,
+previous to any further intimacy, she must be married to him, as his
+religious principles did not permit him to cohabit with a woman who was
+not his wife.  At the same time he laid before her an agreement to sign,
+by which she bound herself never to claim him as a husband before her
+turn--that is to say, until sixteen other women, to whom he had been
+previously married, were dead.  She made no opposition, either to the
+marriage or to the conditions annexed to it.  This girl had a sweetheart
+of the name of Valere, an actor at one of the little theatres on the
+Boulevards, to whom she communicated her adventure.  He advised her to be
+scrupulous in her turn, and to ask a copy of the agreement.  After some
+difficulty this was obtained.  In it no mention was made of her
+maintenance, nor in what manner her children were to be regarded, should
+she have any.  Valere had, therefore, another agreement drawn up, in
+which all these points were arranged, according to his own interested
+views.  Gravina refused to subscribe to what he plainly perceived were
+only extortions; and the girl, in her turn, not only declined any further
+connection with him, but threatened to publish the act of polygamy.
+Before they had done discussing this subject, the door was suddenly
+opened and the two Spanish ladies presented themselves.  After severely
+upbraiding Gravina, who was struck mute by surprise, they announced to
+the girl that whatever promise or contract of marriage she had obtained
+from him was of no value, as, before they came with him to France, he had
+bound himself, before a public notary at Madrid, not to form any more
+connections, nor to marry any other woman, without their written consent.
+One of these ladies declared that she had been married to Gravina
+twenty-two years, and was his oldest wife but one; the other said that
+she had been married to him six years.  They insisted upon his following
+them, which he did, after putting a purse of gold into Barrois's hand.
+
+When Valere heard from his mistress this occurrence, he advised her to
+make the most money she could of the Spaniard's curious scruples.  A
+letter was, therefore, written to him, demanding one hundred thousand
+livres--as the price of secrecy and withholding the particulars of this
+business from the knowledge of the tribunals and the police; and an
+answer was required within twenty-four hours.  The same night Gravina
+offered one thousand Louis, which were accepted, and the papers returned;
+but the next day Valere went to his hotel, Rue de Provence, where he
+presented himself as a brother of Barrois.  He stated that he still
+possessed authenticated copies of the papers returned, and that he must
+have either the full sum first asked by his sister, or an annuity of
+twelve thousand livres settled upon her.  Instead of an answer, Gravina
+ordered him to be turned out of the house.  An attorney then waited on
+His Excellency, on the part of the brother and the sister, and repeated
+their threats and their demands, adding that he would write a memorial
+both to the Emperor of the French and to the King of Spain, were justice
+refused to his principals any longer.
+
+Gravina was well aware that this affair, though more laughable than
+criminal, would hurt both his character and credit if it were known in
+France; he therefore consented to pay seventy-six thousand livres more,
+upon a formal renunciation by the party of all future claims.  Not having
+money sufficient by him, he went to borrow it from a banker, whose clerk
+was one of Talleyrand's secret agents.  Our Minister, therefore, ordered
+every step of Gravina to be watched; but he soon discovered that, instead
+of wanting this money for a political intrigue, it was necessary to
+extricate him out of an amorous scrape.  Hearing, however, in what a
+scandalous manner the Ambassador had been duped and imposed upon, he
+reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche orders to have Valere, Barrois,
+and the attorney immediately transported to Cayenne, and to restore
+Gravina his money.  The former part of this order the Minister of Police
+executed the more willingly, as it was according to his plan that Barrois
+had pitched upon Gravina for a lover.  She had been intended by him as a
+spy on His Excellency, but had deceived him by her reports--a crime for
+which transportation was a usual punishment.
+
+Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this
+affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our
+fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists.  But these
+artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to
+chastise genius than to silence tongues.  The declaration of war by Spain
+against your country was a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit with
+honour a Court where he was an object of ridicule, to assume the command
+of a fleet which might one day make him an object of terror.  When he
+took leave of Bonaparte, he was told to return to France victorious, or
+never to return any more; and Talleyrand warned him as a friend,
+"whenever he returned to his post in France to leave his marriage mania
+behind him in Spain.  Here," said he, "you may, without ridicule,
+intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a great risk by marrying even
+one."
+
+I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say, so
+far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious.  But
+infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--It cannot have escaped the observation of the most superficial
+traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of morals is not
+atoned for by good breeding or good manners.  The hideousness of vice,
+the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of favour, and
+the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil, that gloss of
+virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity of corruption and
+the scandal of depravity.  Duplicity and hypocrisy are here very common
+indeed, more so than dissimulation anywhere else; but barefaced knaves
+and impostors must always make indifferent courtiers.  Here the Minister
+tells you, I must have such a sum for a place; and the chamberlain tells
+you, Count down so much for my protection.  The Princess requires a
+necklace of such a value for interesting herself for your advancement;
+and the lady-in-waiting demands a diamond of such worth on the day of
+your promotion.  This tariff of favours and of infamy descends 'ad
+infinitum'.  The secretary for signing, and the clerk for writing your
+commission; the cashier for delivering it, and the messenger for
+informing you of it, have all their fixed prices.  Have you a lawsuit,
+the judge announces to you that so much has been offered by your
+opponent, and so much is expected from you, if you desire to win your
+cause.  When you are the defendant against the Crown, the attorney or
+solicitor-general lets you know that such a douceur is requisite to
+procure such an issue.  Even in criminal proceedings, not only honour,
+but life, may be saved by pecuniary sacrifices.
+
+A man of the name of Martin, by profession a stock-jobber, killed, in
+1803, his own wife; and for twelve thousand livres--he was acquitted, and
+recovered his liberty.  In November last year, in a quarrel with his own
+brother, he stabbed him through the heart, and for another sum of twelve
+thousand livres he was acquitted, and released before last Christmas.
+This wretch is now in prison again, on suspicion of having poisoned his
+own daughter, with whom he had an incestuous intercourse, and he boasts
+publicly of soon being liberated.  Another person, Louis de Saurac, the
+younger son of Baron de Saurac, who together with his eldest son had
+emigrated, forged a will in the name of his parent, whom he pretended to
+be dead, which left him the sole heir of all the disposable property, to
+the exclusion of two sisters.  After the nation had shared its part as
+heir of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder.  In 1802,
+both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and returned to
+France.  To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis had, by his
+ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them even the
+common necessaries of life.  After upbraiding him for his want of duty,
+the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of the unsold
+part of his estates.  On the day fixed for settling the accounts and
+entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a conspirator
+and imprisoned in the Temple.  He had been denounced as having served in
+the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII.  To
+disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from
+America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon
+the rack he denied the latter.  During his arrest, the eldest son
+discovered that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means
+of the will he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he
+who had been unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days.  With
+the wreck of their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father's
+release; who, being acquainted with the perversity of his younger son,
+addressed himself to the department to be reinstated in his property.
+This was opposed by Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the
+revolutionary maxim which had passed into a law, enacting that all
+emigrants should be considered as politically dead.  Hitherto Baron de
+Saurac had, from affection, declined to mention the forged will; but
+shocked by his son's obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his
+counsellor produced this document, which not only went to deprive Louis
+of his property, but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.
+
+This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
+revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
+the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen.  He addressed
+himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial
+attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe
+of fifty thousand livres--obtained for him, after he had been defeated in
+every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of
+cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being,
+according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of
+any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the
+family.
+
+This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the
+Abbey of the same name.  One of the monks, observing in him some
+application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
+bestowed on him some previous education.  Not satisfied with this
+generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of
+Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the
+Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him.  By his
+dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors;
+who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as
+representative of the people to our First National Assembly.  They soon,
+however, had reason to repent of their generosity.  He joined the Orleans
+faction and became one of the most persevering, violent, and cruel
+persecutors of the privileged classes, particularly of the clergy, to
+whom he was indebted for everything.  In 1792 he was elected a member of
+the National Convention, where he voted for the death of his King. It was
+he who proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme, the production of the
+deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected persons; which was decreed
+on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused the imprisonment or
+proscription of two hundred thousand families.  This decree procured him
+the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of Merlin Potence.  In 1795 he was
+appointed a Minister of Police, and soon afterwards a Minister of
+Justice.  After the revolution in favour of the Jacobins of the 4th of
+September, 1797, he was made a director, a place which he was obliged by
+the same Jacobins to resign, in June, 1799.  Bonaparte expressed, at
+first, the most sovereign contempt for this Merlin, but on account of one
+of his sons, who was his aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when
+First Consul, his attorney-general.
+
+As nothing paints better the true features of a Government than the
+morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man's portrait
+with the following characteristic touches.
+
+Merlin de Douai has been successively the counsel of the late Duc d'
+Orleans, the friend of Danton, of Chabot, and of Hebert, the admirer of
+Murat, and the servant of Robespierre.  An accomplice of Rewbell, Barras,
+and la Reveilliere, an author of the law of suspected persons, an
+advocate of the Septembrizers, and an ardent apostle of the St.
+Guillotine.  Cunning as a fog and ferocious as a tiger, he has outlived
+all the factions with which he has been connected.  It has been his
+policy to keep in continual fermentation rivalships, jealousies,
+inquietudes, revenge and all other odious passions; establishing, by such
+means, his influence on the terror of some, the ambition of others, and
+the credulity of them all.  Had I, when Merlin proposed his law
+concerning suspected persons, in the name of liberty and equality, been
+free and his equal, I should have said to him, "Monster, this, your
+atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it has brought thousands of
+innocent persons to an untimely end; you shall die by my hands as a
+victim, if the tribunals do not condemn you to the scaffold as an
+executioner or as a criminal."
+
+Merlin has bought national property to the amount of fifteen million of
+livress--and he is supposed to possess money nearly to the same amount,
+in your or our funds.  For a man born a beggar, and educated by charity,
+this fortune, together with the liberal salaries he enjoys, might seem
+sufficient without selling justice, protecting guilt, and oppressing or
+persecuting innocence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The household troops of Napoleon the First are by thousands
+more numerous than those even of Louis XIV. were.  Grenadiers on foot and
+on horseback, riflemen on foot and on horseback, heavy and light
+artillery, dragoons and hussars, mamelukes and sailors, artificers and
+pontoneers, gendarmes, gendarmes d'Alite, Velites and veterans, with
+Italian grenadiers, riflemen, dragoons, etc., etc., compose all together
+a not inconsiderable army.
+
+Though it frequently happens that the pay of the other troops is in
+arrears, those appertaining to Bonaparte's household are as regularly
+paid as his Senators, Counsellors of State, and other public
+functionaries.  All the men are picked, and all the officers as much as
+possible of birth, or at least of education.  In the midst of this
+voluptuous and seductive capital, they are kept very strict, and the
+least negligence or infraction of military discipline is more severely
+punished than if committed in garrison or in an encampment.  They are
+both better clothed, accoutred, and paid, than the troops of the line,
+and have everywhere the precedency of them.  All the officers, and many
+of the soldiers, are members of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and carry
+arms of honour distributed to them by Imperial favour, or for military
+exploits.  None of them are quartered upon the citizens; each corps has
+its own spacious barracks, hospitals, drilling-ground, riding or
+fencing-houses, gardens, bathing-houses, billiard-table, and even
+libraries. A chapel has lately been constructed near each barrack, and
+almoners are already appointed.  In the meantime, they attend regularly
+at Mass, either in the Imperial Chapel or in the parish churches.
+Bonaparte discourages much all marriages among the military in general,
+but particularly among those of his household troops.  That they may not,
+however, be entirely deprived of the society of women, he allows five to
+each company, with the same salaries as the men, under the name of
+washerwomen.
+
+With a vain and fickle people, fond of shows and innovations, nothing in
+a military despotism has a greater political utility, gives greater
+satisfaction, and leaves behind a more useful terror and awe, than
+Bonaparte's grand military reviews.  In the beginning of his consulate,
+they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of
+Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has been
+proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month.  This ostentatious
+exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review of
+the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those occasions
+their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully has seized,
+and continues to usurp, the authority of his own Sovereign.  What an
+example for ambition! what a lesson to treachery!
+
+Besides the household troops, this capital and its vicinity have, for
+these three years past, never contained less than from fifteen to twenty
+thousand men of the regiments of the line, belonging to what is called
+the first military division of the Army of the Interior.  These troops
+are selected from among the brigades that served under Bonaparte in Italy
+and Egypt with the greatest eclat, and constitute a kind of depot for
+recruiting his household troops with tried and trusty men.  They are also
+regularly paid, and generally better accoutred than their comrades
+encamped on the coast, or quartered in Italy or Holland.
+
+But a standing army, upon which all revolutionary rulers can depend, and
+that always will continue their faithful support, unique in its sort and
+composition, exists in the bosom as well as in the extremities of this
+country.  I mean, one hundred and twenty thousand invalids, mostly young
+men under thirty, forced by conscription against their will into the
+field, quartered and taken care of by our Government, and all possessed
+with the absurd prejudice that, as they have been maimed in fighting the
+battles of rebellion, the restoration of legitimate sovereignty would to
+them be an epoch of destruction, or at least of misery and want; and this
+prejudice is kept alive by emissaries employed on purpose to mislead
+them.  Of these, eight thousand are lodged and provided for in this city;
+ten thousand at Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and
+in the conquered departments on the left bank of the Abine; countries
+where the inhabitants are discontented and disaffected, and require,
+therefore, to be watched, and to have a better spirit infused.
+
+Those whose wounds permit it are also employed to do garrison duty in
+fortified places not exposed to an attack by enemies, and to assist in
+the different arsenals and laboratories, foundries, and depots of
+military or naval stores.  Others are attached to the police offices, and
+some as gendarmes, to arrest suspected or guilty individuals; or as
+garnissaires, to enforce the payment of contributions from the unwilling
+or distressed.  When the period for the payment of taxes is expired, two
+of these janissaires present themselves at the house of the persons in
+arrears, with a billet signed by the director of the contributions and
+countersigned by the police commissary.  If the money is not immediately
+paid, with half a crown to each of them besides, they remain quartered in
+the house, where they are to be boarded and to receive half a crown a day
+each until an order from those who sent them informs them that what was
+due to the state has been acquitted.  After their entrance into a house,
+and during their stay, no furniture or effects whatever can be removed or
+disposed of, nor can the master or mistress go out-of-doors without being
+accompanied by one of them.
+
+In the houses appropriated to our invalids, the inmates are very well
+treated, and Government takes great care to make them satisfied with
+their lot.  The officers have large halls, billiards, and reading-room to
+meet in; and the common men are admitted into apartments adjoining
+libraries, from-which they can borrow what books they contain, and read
+them at leisure.  This is certainly a very good and even a humane
+institution, though these libraries chiefly contain military histories or
+novels.
+
+As to the morals of these young invalids, they may be well conceived when
+you remember the morality of our Revolution; and that they, without any
+religious notions or restraints, were not only permitted, but encouraged
+to partake of the debauchery and licentiousness which were carried to
+such an extreme in our armies and encampments.  In an age when the
+passions are strongest, and often blind reason and silence conscience,
+they have not the means nor the permission to marry; in their vicinity it
+is, therefore, more difficult to discover one honest woman or a dutiful
+wife, than hundreds of harlots and of adulteresses.  Notwithstanding that
+many of them have been accused before the tribunals of seductions, rape,
+and violence against the sex, not one has been punished for what the
+morality of our Government consider merely as bagatelles.  Even in cases
+where husbands, brothers, and lovers have been killed by them while
+defending or avenging the honour of their wives, sisters, and mistresses,
+our tribunals have been ordered by our grand judge, according to the
+commands of the Emperor, not to proceed.  As most of them have no
+occupation, the vice of idleness augments the mass of their corruption;
+for men of their principles, when they have nothing to do, never do
+anything good.
+
+I do not know if my countrywomen feel themselves honoured by or obliged
+to Bonaparte, for leaving their virtue and honour unprotected, except by
+their own prudence and strength; but of this I am certain, that all our
+other troops, as well as the invalids, may live on free quarters with the
+sex without fearing the consequences; provided they keep at a distance
+from the females of our Imperial Family, and of those of our grand
+officers of State and principal functionaries.  The wives and the
+daughters of the latter have, however, sometimes declined the advantage
+of these exclusive privileges.
+
+A horse grenadier of Bonaparte's Imperial Guard, of the name of Rabais,
+notorious for his amours and debauchery, was accused before the Imperial
+Judge Thuriot, at one and the same time by several husbands and fathers,
+of having seduced the affections of their wives and of their daughters.
+As usual, Thuriot refused to listen to their complaints; at the same time
+insultingly advising them to retake their wives and children, and for the
+future to be more careful of them.  Triumphing, as it were, in his
+injustice, he inconsiderately mentioned the circumstance to his own wife,
+observing that he never knew so many charges of the same sort exhibited
+against one man.
+
+Madame Thuriot, who had been a servant-maid to her husband before he made
+her his wife, instead of being disgusted at the recital, secretly
+determined to see this Rabais.  An intrigue was then begun, and carried
+on for four months, if not with discretion, at least without discovery;
+but the lady's own imprudence at last betrayed her, or I should say,
+rather, her jealousy.  But for this she might still have been admired
+among our modest women, and Thuriot among fortunate husbands and happy
+fathers; for the lady, for the first time since her marriage, proved, to
+the great joy and pride of her husband, in the family way.  Suspecting,
+however, the fidelity of her paramour, she watched his motions so closely
+that she discovered an intrigue between him and the chaste spouse of a
+rich banker; but the consequence of this discovery was the detection of
+her own crime.
+
+On the discovery of this disgrace, Thuriot obtained an audience of
+Bonaparte, in which he exposed his misfortune, and demanded punishment on
+his wife's gallant.  As, however, he also acknowledged that his own
+indiscretion was an indirect cause of their connection, he received the
+same advice which he had given to other unfortunate husbands: to retake,
+and for the future guard better, his dear moiety.
+
+Thuriot had, however, an early opportunity of wreaking his vengeance on
+this gallant Rabais.  It seems his prowess had reached the ears of Madame
+Baciocchi, the eldest sister of Bonaparte.  This lady has a children
+mania, which is very troublesome to her husband, disagreeable to her
+relations, and injurious to herself.  She never beholds any lady,
+particularly any of her family, in the way which women wish to be who
+love their lords, but she is absolutely frantic.  Now, Thuriot's worthy
+friend Fouche had discovered, by his spies, that Rabais paid frequent and
+secret visits to the hotel Baciocchi, and that Madame Baciocchi was the
+object of these visits.  Thuriot, on this discovery, instantly denounced
+him to Bonaparte.
+
+Had Rabais ruined all the women of this capital, he would not only have
+been forgiven, but applauded by Napoleon, and his counsellors and
+courtiers; but to dare to approach, or only to cast his eyes on one of
+our Imperial Highnesses, was a crime nothing could extenuate or avenge,
+but the most exemplary punishment.  He was therefore arrested, sent to
+the Temple, and has never since been heard of; so that his female friends
+are still in the cruel uncertainty whether he has died on the rack, been
+buried alive in the oubliettes, or is wandering an exile in the wilds of
+Cayenne.
+
+In examining his trunk, among the curious effects discovered by the
+police were eighteen portraits and one hundred billets-doux, with
+medallions, rings, bracelets, tresses of hair, etc., as numerous.  Two of
+the portraits occasioned much scandal, and more gossiping.  They were
+those of two of our most devout and most respectable Court ladies, Maids
+of Honour to our Empress, Madame Ney and Madame Lasnes; who never miss an
+opportunity of going to church, who have received the private blessing of
+the Pope, and who regularly confess to some Bishop or other once in a
+fortnight.  Madame Napoleon cleared them, however, of all suspicion, by
+declaring publicly in her drawing-room that these portraits had come into
+the possession of Rabais by the infidelity of their maids; who had
+confessed their faults, and, therefore, had been charitably pardoned.
+Whether the opinions of Generals Ney and Lasnes coincide with Madame
+Napoleon's assertion is uncertain; but Lasnes has been often heard to say
+that, from the instant his wife began to confess, he was convinced she
+was inclined to dishonour him; so that nothing surprised him.
+
+One of the medallions in Rabais's collection contained on one side the
+portrait of Thuriot, and on the other that of his wife; both set with
+diamonds, and presented to her by him on their last wedding day.  For the
+supposed theft of this medallion, two of Thuriot's servants were in
+prison, when the arrest of Rabais explained the manner in which it had
+been lost.  This so enraged him that he beat and kicked his wife so
+heartily that for some time even her life was in danger, and Thuriot lost
+all hopes of being a father.
+
+Before the Revolution, Thuriot had been, for fraud and forgery, struck
+off the roll as an advocate, and therefore joined it as a patriot.  In
+1791, he was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly, and in 1792 to the
+National Convention.  He always showed himself one of the most ungenerous
+enemies of the clergy, of monarchy, and of his King, for whose death he
+voted.  On the 25th of May, 1792, in declaiming against Christianity and
+priesthood, he wished them both, for the welfare of mankind, at the
+bottom of the sea; and on the 18th of December the same year, he declared
+in the Jacobin Club that, if the National Convention evinced any signs of
+clemency towards Louis XVI., he would go himself to the Temple and blow
+out the brains of this unfortunate King.  He defended in the tribune the
+massacres of the prisoners, affirming that the tree of liberty could
+never flourish without being inundated with the blood of aristocrats and
+other enemies of the Revolution.  He has been convicted by rival factions
+of the most shameful robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so
+notorious that neither Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory
+would or could employ him.  After the Revolution of the 9th of November,
+1799, Bonaparte gave him the office of judge of the criminal tribunal,
+and in 1804 made him a Commander of his Legion of Honour.  He is now one
+of our Emperor's most faithful subjects and most sincere Christians. Such
+is now his tender conscientiousness, that he was among those who were the
+first to be married again by some Cardinal to their present wives, to
+whom they had formerly been united only by the municipality. This new
+marriage, however, took place before Madame Thuriot had introduced
+herself to the acquaintance of the Imperial Grenadier Rabais.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Regarding me as a connoisseur, though I have no pretensions but
+that of being an amateur, Lucien Bonaparte, shortly before his disgrace,
+invited me to pass some days with him in the country, and to assist him
+in arranging his very valuable collection of pictures--next our public
+ones, the most curious and most valuable in Europe, and, of course, in
+the world.  I found here, as at Joseph Bonaparte's, the same splendour,
+the same etiquette, and the same liberty, which latter was much enhanced
+by the really engaging and unassuming manners and conversation of the
+host.  At Joseph's, even in the midst of abundance and of liberty, in
+seeing the person or meditating on the character of the host, you feel
+both your inferiority of fortune and the humiliation of dependence, and
+that you visit a master instead of a friend, who indirectly tells you,
+"Eat, drink, and rejoice as long and as much as you like; but remember
+that if you are happy, it is to my generosity you are indebted, and if
+unhappy, that I do not care a pin about you."  With Lucien it is the very
+reverse.  His conduct seems to indicate that by your company you confer
+an obligation on him, and he is studious to remove, on all occasions,
+that distance which fortune has placed between him and his guests; and as
+he cannot compliment them upon being wealthier than himself, he seizes
+with delicacy every opportunity to chew that he acknowledges their
+superiority in talents and in genius as more than an equivalent for the
+absence of riches.
+
+He is, nevertheless, himself a young man of uncommon parts, and, as far
+as I could judge from my short intercourse with the reserved Joseph and
+with the haughty Napoleon, he is abler and better informed than either,
+and much more open and sincere.  His manners are also more elegant, and
+his language more polished, which is the more creditable to him when it
+is remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the
+Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were,
+like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble.  It is
+not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart
+soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the
+most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant
+sans-culotte.  He has, besides, other qualities (and those more
+estimable) which will place him much above his elder brothers in the
+opinion of posterity.  He is extremely compassionate and liberal to the
+truly distressed, serviceable to those whom he knows are not his friends,
+and forgiving and obliging even to those who have proved and avowed
+themselves his enemies.  These are virtues commonly very scarce, and
+hitherto never displayed by any other member of the Bonaparte family.
+
+An acquaintance of yours, and--a friend of mine, Count de T-----, at his
+return here from emigration, found, of his whole former fortune,
+producing once eighty thousand livres--in the year, only four farms
+unsold, and these were advertised for sale.  A man who had once been his
+servant, but was then a groom to Lucien, offered to present a memorial
+for him to his master, to prevent the disposal of the only support which
+remained to subsist himself, with a wife and four children.  Lucien asked
+Napoleon to prohibit the sale, and to restore the Count the farms, and
+obtained his consent; but Fouche, whose cousin wanted them, having
+purchased other national property in the neighbourhood, prevailed upon
+Napoleon to forget his promise, and the farms were sold.  As soon as
+Lucien heard of it he sent for the Count, delivered into his hands an
+annuity of six thousand livres--for the life of himself, his wife, and
+his children, as an indemnity for the inefficacy of his endeavours to
+serve him, as he expressed himself.  Had the Count recovered the farms,
+they would not have given him a clear profit of half the amount, all
+taxes paid.
+
+A young author of the name of Gauvan, irritated by the loss of parents
+and fortune by the Revolution, attacked, during 1799, in the public
+prints, as well as in pamphlets, every Revolutionist who had obtained
+notoriety or popularity.  He was particularly vehement against Lucien,
+and laid before the public all his crimes and all his errors, and
+asserted, as facts, atrocities which were either calumnies or merely
+rumours.  When, after Napoleon's assumption of the Consulate, Lucien was
+appointed a Minister of the Interior, he sent for Gauvan, and said to
+him, "Great misfortunes have early made you wretched and unjust, and you
+have frequently revenged yourself on those who could not prevent them,
+among whom I am one.  You do not want capacity, nor, I believe, probity.
+Here is a commission which makes you a Director of Contributions in the
+Departments of the Rhine and Moselle, an office with a salary of twelve
+thousand livres but producing double that sum.  If you meet with any
+difficulties, write to me; I am your friend.  Take those one hundred
+louis d'or for the expenses of your journey.  Adieu!"  This anecdote I
+have read in Gauvan's own handwriting, in a letter to his sister.  He
+died in 1802; but Mademoiselle Gauvan, who is not yet fifteen, has a
+pension of three thousand livres a year--from Lucien, who, has never seen
+her.
+
+Lucien Bonaparte has another good quality: he is consistent in his
+political principles.  Either from conviction or delusion he is still a
+Republican, and does not conceal that, had he suspected Napoleon of any
+intent to reestablish monarchy, much less tyranny, he would have joined
+those deputies who, on the 9th of November, 1799, in the sitting at St.
+Cloud, demanded a decree of outlawry against him.  If the present quarrel
+between these two brothers were sifted to the bottom, perhaps it would be
+found to originate more from Lucien's Republicanism than from his
+marriage.
+
+I know, with all France and Europe, that Lucien's youth has been very
+culpable; that he has committed many indiscretions, much injustice, many
+imprudences, many errors, and, I fear, even some crimes.  I know that he
+has been the most profligate among the profligate, the most debauched
+among libertines, the most merciless among the plunderers, and the most
+perverse among rebels.  I know that he is accused of being a
+Septembrizer; of having murdered one wife and poisoned another; of having
+been a spy, a denouncer, a persecutor of innocent persons in the Reign of
+Terror.  I know that he is accused of having fought his brothers-in-law;
+of having ill-used his mother, and of an incestuous commerce with his own
+sisters.
+
+I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far be
+it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them.  But suppose all this
+infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it never has
+been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be--what are
+the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to the
+enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted?  Is the
+poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of
+wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons,
+suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold
+blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners?  Is incest with a sister more
+shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not
+continue the disgusting comparison.  As long as Napoleon is unable to
+acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right
+to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have
+Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the
+Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise the
+latter for crimes which lose their enormity when compared to the horrid
+perpetrations of his Imperial brother.
+
+An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien's wife, and a person in whose
+veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he
+always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has repeated
+to me many of their conversations.  She assures me that Lucien deplores
+frequently the want of a good and religious education, and the tempting
+examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance upon the
+revolutionary scene.  He says that he determined to get rich 'per fas aut
+nefas', because he observed that money was everything, and that most
+persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be enabled to gather
+treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much above their desert
+and expectation, instead of being satiated or even satisfied, they
+bustled and intrigued for more, until success made them unguarded and
+prosperity indiscreet, and they became with their wealth the easy prey of
+rival factions.  Such was the case of Danton, of Fabre d'Eglantine, of
+Chabot, of Chaumette, of Stebert, and other contemptible wretches,
+butchered by Robespierre and his partisans--victims in their turn to men
+as unjust and sanguinary as themselves.  He had, therefore, laid out a
+different plan of conduct for himself.  He had fixed upon fifty millions
+of livres--as the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in
+his possession, he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and
+employment, and to enjoy 'otium cum dignitate'.  He had kept to his
+determination, and so regulated his income that; with the expenses, pomp,
+and retinue of a Prince, he is enabled to make more persons happy and
+comfortable than his extortions have ruined or even embarrassed.  He now
+lives like a philosopher, and endeavours to forget the past, to delight
+in the present, and to be indifferent about futurity.  He chose,
+therefore, for a wife, a lady whom he loved and esteemed, in preference
+to one whose birth would have been a continual reproach to the meanness
+of his own origin.
+
+You must, with me, admire the modesty of a citizen sans-culotte, who,
+without a shilling in the world, fixes upon fifty millions as a reward
+for his revolutionary achievements, and with which he would be satisfied
+to sit down and begin his singular course of singular philosophy.  But
+his success is more extraordinary that his pretensions were extravagant.
+This immense sum was amassed by him in the short period of four years,
+chiefly by bribes from foreign Courts, and by selling his protections in
+France.
+
+But most of the other Bonapartes have made as great and as rapid fortunes
+as Lucien, and yet, instead of being generous, contented, or even
+philosophers, they are still profiting by every occasion to increase
+their ill-gotten treasures, and no distress was ever relieved, no talents
+encouraged, or virtues recompensed by them.  The mind of their garrets
+lodges with them in their palaces, while Lucien seems to ascend as near
+as possible to a level with his circumstances.  I have myself found him
+beneficent without ostentation.
+
+Among his numerous pictures, I observed four that had formerly belonged
+to my father's, and afterwards to my own cabinet.  I inquired how much he
+had paid for them, without giving the least hint that they had been my
+property, and were plundered from me by the nation.  He had, indeed, paid
+their full value.  In a fortnight after I had quitted him, these, with
+six other pictures, were deposited in my room, with a very polite note,
+begging my acceptance of them, and assuring me that he had but the day
+before heard from his picture dealer that they had belonged to me.  He
+added that he would never retake them, unless he received an assurance
+from me that I parted with them without reluctance, and at the same time
+affixed their price.  I returned them, as I knew they were desired by him
+for his collection, but he continued obstinate.  I told him, therefore,
+that, as I was acquainted with his inclination to perform a generous
+action, I would, instead of payment for the pictures, indicate a person
+deserving his assistance.  I mentioned the old Duchesse de ------, who is
+seventy-four years of age and blind; and, after possessing in her youth
+an income of eight hundred thousand livres--is now, in her old age,
+almost destitute.  He did for this worthy lady more than I expected; but
+happening, in his visits to relieve my friend, to cast his eye on the
+daughter of the landlady where she lodged, he found means to prevail on
+the simplicity of the poor girl, and seduced her.  So much do I know
+personally of Lucien Bonaparte, who certainly is a composition of good
+and bad qualities, but which of them predominate I will not take upon me
+to decide.  This I can affirm--Lucien is not the worst member of the
+Bonaparte family.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--As long as Austria ranks among independent nations, Bonaparte
+will take care not to offend or alarm the ambition and interest of
+Prussia by incorporating the Batavian Republic with the other provinces
+of his Empire.  Until that period, the Dutch must continue (as they have
+been these last ten years) under the appellation of allies, oppressed
+like subjects and plundered like foes.  Their mock sovereignty will
+continue to weigh heavier on them than real servitude does on their
+Belgic and Flemish neighbours, because Frederick the Great pointed out to
+his successors the Elbe and the Tegel as the natural borders of the
+Prussian monarchy, whenever the right bank of the Rhine should form the
+natural frontiers of the kingdom of France.
+
+That during the present summer a project for a partition treaty of
+Holland has by the Cabinet of St. Cloud been laid before the Cabinet of
+Berlin is a fact, though disseminated only as a rumour by the secret
+agents of Talleyrand.  Their object was on this, as on all previous
+occasions when any names, rights, or liberties of people were intended to
+be erased from among the annals of independence, to sound the ground, and
+to prepare by such rumours the mind of the public for another outrage and
+another overthrow.  But Prussia, as well as France, knows the value of a
+military and commercial navy, and that to obtain it good harbours and
+navigable rivers are necessary, and therefore, as well as from principles
+of justice, perhaps, declined the acceptance of a plunder, which, though
+tempting, was contrary to the policy of the House of Brandenburgh.
+
+According to a copy circulated among the members of our diplomatic corps,
+this partition treaty excluded Prussia from all the Batavian seaports
+except Delfzig, and those of the river Ems, but gave her extensive
+territories on the side of Guelderland, and a rich country in Friesland.
+Had it been acceded to by the Court of Berlin, with the annexed condition
+of a defensive and offensive alliance with the Court of St. Cloud, the
+Prussian monarchy would, within half a century, have been swallowed up in
+the same gulf with the Batavian Commonwealth and the Republic of Poland;
+and by some future scheme of some future Bonaparte or Talleyrand, be
+divided in its turn, and serve as a pledge of reconciliation or
+inducement of connection between some future rulers of the French and
+Russian Empires.
+
+Talleyrand must, indeed, have a very mean opinion of the capacity of the
+Prussian Ministers, or a high notion of his own influence over them, if
+he was serious in this overture.  For my part, I am rather inclined to
+think that it was merely thrown out to discover whether Frederick William
+III.  had entered into any engagement contrary to the interest of
+Napoleon the First; or to allure His Prussian Majesty into a negotiation
+which would suspend, or at least interfere with, those supposed to be
+then on the carpet with Austria, Russia, or perhaps even with England.
+
+The late Batavian Government had, ever since the beginning of the present
+war with England, incurred the displeasure of Bonaparte.  When it
+apprehended a rupture from the turn which the discussion respecting the
+occupation of Malta assumed, the Dutch Ambassadors at St. Petersburg and
+Berlin were ordered to demand the interference of these two Cabinets for
+the preservation of the neutrality of Holland, which your country had
+promised to acknowledge, if respected by France.  No sooner was Bonaparte
+informed of this step, than he marched troops into the heart of the
+Batavian Republic, and occupied its principal forts, ports, and arsenals.
+When, some time afterwards, Count Markof received instructions from his
+Court, according to the desire of the Batavian Directory, and demanded,
+in consequence, an audience from Bonaparte, a map was laid before him,
+indicating the position of the French troops in Holland, and plans of the
+intended encampment of our army of England on the coast of Flanders and
+France; and he was asked whether he thought it probable that our
+Government would assent to a neutrality so injurious to its offensive
+operations against Great Britain.
+
+"But," said the Russian Ambassador, "the independence of Holland has been
+admitted by you in formal treaties."
+
+"So has the cession of Malta by England," interrupted Bonaparte, with
+impatience.
+
+"True," replied Markof, "but you are now at war with England for this
+point; while Holland, against which you have no complaint, has not only
+been invaded by your troops, but, contrary both to its inclination and
+interest, involved in a war with you, by which it has much to lose and
+nothing to gain."
+
+"I have no account to render to anybody for my transactions, and I desire
+to hear nothing more on this subject," said Bonaparte, retiring furious,
+and leaving Markof to meditate on our Sovereign's singular principles of
+political justice and of 'jus pentium'.
+
+From that period Bonaparte resolved on another change of the executive
+power of the Batavian Republic.  But it was more easy to displace one set
+of men for another than to find proper ones to occupy a situation in
+which, if they do their duty as patriots, they must offend France; and if
+they are our tools, instead of the independent governors of their
+country, they must excite a discontent among their fellow citizens,
+disgracing themselves as individuals, and exposing themselves as chief
+magistrates to the fate of the De Witts, should ever fortune forsake our
+arms or desert Bonaparte.
+
+No country has of late been less productive of great men than Holland.
+The Van Tromps, the Russel, and the William III.  all died without
+leaving any posterity behind them; and the race of Batavian heroes seems
+to have expired with them, as that of patriots with the De, Witts and
+Barneveldt.  Since the beginning of the last century we read, indeed, of
+some able statesmen, as most, if not all, the former grand pensionaries
+have been; but the name of no warrior of any great eminence is recorded.
+This scarcity, of native genius and valour has not a little contributed
+to the present humbled, disgraced, and oppressed state of wretched
+Batavia.
+
+Admiral de Winter certainly neither wants courage nor genius, but his
+private character has a great resemblance to that of General Moreau.
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern.  He may direct as
+ably and as valiantly the manoeuvres of a fleet as Moreau does those of
+an army, but neither the one nor the other at the head of his nation
+would render himself respected, his country flourishing, or his
+countrymen happy and tranquil.
+
+Destined from his youth for the navy, Admiral de Winter entered into the
+naval service of his country before he was fourteen, and was a second
+lieutenant when the Batavian patriots, in rebellion against the
+Stadtholder, were, in 1787, reduced to submission by the Duke of
+Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army that invaded Holland.  His
+parents and family being of the anti-Orange party, he emigrated to
+France, where he was made an officer in the legion of Batavian refugees.
+During the campaign of 1793 and 1794, he so much distinguished himself
+under that competent judge of merit, Pichegru, that this commander
+obtained for him the commission of a general of brigade in the service of
+the French; which, after the conquest of Holland in January, 1795, was
+exchanged for the rank of a vice-admiral of the Batavian Republic.  His
+exploits as commander of the Dutch fleet, during the battle of the 11th
+of October, 1797, with your fleet, under Lord Duncan, I have heard
+applauded even in your presence, when in your country.  Too honest to be
+seduced, and too brave to be intimidated, he is said to have incurred
+Bonaparte's hatred by resisting both his offers and his threats, and
+declining to sell his own liberty as well as to betray the liberty of his
+fellow subjects.  When, in 1800, Bonaparte proposed to him the presidency
+and consulate of the United States, for life, on condition that he should
+sign a treaty, which made him a vassal of France, he refused, with
+dignity and with firmness, and preferred retirement to a supremacy so
+dishonestly acquired, and so dishonourably occupied.
+
+General Daendels, another Batavian revolutionist of some notoriety, from
+an attorney became a lieutenant-colonel, and served as a spy under
+Dumouriez in the winter of 1792 and in the spring of 1793.  Under
+Pichegru he was made a general, and exhibited those talents in the field
+which are said to have before been displayed in the forum.  In June,
+1795, he was made a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic, and he
+was the commander-in-chief of the Dutch troops combating in 1799 your
+army under the Duke of York.  In this place he did not much distinguish
+himself, and the issue of the contest was entirely owing to our troops
+and to our generals.
+
+After the Peace of Amiens, observing that Bonaparte intended to
+annihilate instead of establishing universal liberty, Daendels gave in
+his resignation and retired to obscurity, not wishing to be an instrument
+of tyranny, after having so long fought for freedom.  Had he possessed
+the patriotism of a Brutus or a Cato, he would have bled or died for his
+cause and country sooner than have deserted them both; or had the
+ambition and love of glory of a Caesar held a place in his bosom, he
+would have attempted to be the chief of his country, and by generosity
+and clemency atone, if possible, for the loss of liberty.  Upon the line
+of baseness,--the deserter is placed next to the traitor.
+
+Dumonceau, another Batavian general of some publicity, is not by birth a
+citizen of the United States, but was born at Brussels in 1758, and was
+by profession a stonemason when, in 1789, he joined, as a volunteer, the
+Belgian insurgents.  After their dispersion in 1790 he took refuge and
+served in France, and was made an officer in the corps of Belgians,
+formed after the declaration of war against Austria in 1792.  Here he
+frequently distinguished himself, and was, therefore, advanced to the
+rank of a general; but the Dutch general officers being better paid than
+those of the French Republic, he was, with the permission of our
+Directory, received, in 1795, as a lieutenant-general of the Batavian
+Republic.  He has often evinced bravery, but seldom great capacity.  His
+natural talents are considered as but indifferent, and his education is
+worse.
+
+These are the only three military characters who might, with any prospect
+of success, have tried to play the part of a Napoleon Bonaparte in
+Holland.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Not to give umbrage to the Cabinet of Berlin, Bonaparte
+communicated to it the necessity he was under of altering the form of
+Government in Holland, and, if report be true, even condescended to ask
+advice concerning a chief magistrate for that country.  The young Prince
+of Orange, brother-in-law of His Prussian Majesty, naturally presented
+himself; but, after some time, Talleyrand's agents discovered that great
+pecuniary sacrifices could not be expected from that quarter, and perhaps
+less submission to France experienced than from the former governors. An
+eye was then cast on the Elector of Bavaria, whose past patriotism, as
+well as that of his Ministers, was a full guarantee for future obedience.
+Had he consented to such an arrangement, Austria might have aggrandized
+herself on the Inn, Prussia in Franconia, and France in Italy; and the
+present bone of contest would have been chiefly removed.
+
+This intrigue, for it was nothing else, was carried on by the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud in March, 1804, about the time that Germany was invaded and the
+Duc d'Enghien seized.  This explains to you the reason why the Russian
+note, delivered to the Diet of Ratisbon on the 8th of the following May,
+was left without any support, except the ineffectual one from the King of
+Sweden.  How any Cabinet could be dupe enough to think Bonaparte serious,
+or the Elector of Bavaria so weak as to enter into his schemes, is
+difficult to be conceived, had not Europe witnessed still greater
+credulity on one side, and still greater effrontery on the other.
+
+In the meantime Bonaparte grew every day more discontented with the
+Batavian Directory, and more irritated against the members who composed
+it.  Against his regulations for excluding the commerce and productions
+of your country, they resented with spirit instead of obeying them
+without murmur as was required.  He is said to have discovered, after his
+own soldiers had forced the custom-house officers to obey his orders,
+that, while in their proclamations the directors publicly prohibited the
+introduction of British goods, some of them were secret insurers of this
+forbidden merchandise, introduced by fraud and by smuggling; and that
+while they officially wished for the success of the French arms and
+destruction of England, they withdrew by stealth what property they had
+in the French funds, to place it in the English.  This refractory and, as
+Bonaparte called it, mercantile spirit, so enraged him, that he had
+already signed an order for arresting and transferring en masse his high
+allies, the Batavian directors, to his Temple, when the representations
+of Talleyrand moderated his fury, and caused the order to be recalled,
+which Fouche was ready to execute.
+
+Had Jerome Bonaparte not offended his brother by his transatlantic
+marriage, he would long ago have been the Prince Stadtholder of Holland;
+but his disobedience was so far useful to the Cabinet of St. Cloud as it
+gave it an opportunity of intriguing with, or deluding, other Cabinets
+that might have any pretensions to interfere in the regulation of the
+Batavian Government.  By the choice finally made, you may judge how
+difficult it was to find a suitable subject to represent it, and that
+this representation is intended only to be temporary.
+
+Schimmelpenninck, the present grand pensionary of the Batavian Republic,
+was destined by his education for the bar, but by his natural parts to
+await in quiet obscurity the end of a dull existence.  With some
+property, little information, and a tolerably good share of common sense,
+he might have lived and died respected, and even regretted, without any
+pretension, or perhaps even ambition, to shine.  The anti-Orange faction,
+to which his parents and family appertained, pushed him forward, and
+elected him, in 1795, a member of the First Batavian National Convention,
+where, according to the spirit of the times, his speeches were rather
+those of a demagogue than those of a Republican.  Liberty, Equality, and
+Fraternity were the constant themes of his political declamations,
+infidelity his religious profession, and the examples of immorality, his
+social lessons; so rapid and dangerous are the strides with which
+seduction frequently advances on weak minds.
+
+In 1800 he was appointed an Ambassador to Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles
+Maurice Talleyrand.  The latter used him as a stockbroker, and the former
+for anything he thought proper; and he was the humble and submissive
+valet of both.  More ignorant than malicious, and a greater fool than a
+rogue, he was more laughed at and despised than trusted or abused.
+
+His patience being equal to his phlegm, nothing either moved or
+confounded him; and he was, as Talleyrand remarked, "a model of an
+Ambassador, according to which he and Bonaparte wished that all other
+independent Princes and States would choose their representatives to the
+French Government."
+
+When our Minister and his Sovereign were discussing the difficulty of
+properly filling up the vacancy, of the Dutch Government, judged
+necessary by both, the former mentioned Schimmelpenninck with a smile;
+and serious as Bonaparte commonly is, he could not help laughing. "I
+should have been less astonished," said he, "had you proposed my
+Mameluke, Rostan."
+
+This rebuke did not deter Talleyrand (who had settled his terms with
+Schimmelpenninck) from continuing to point out the advantage which France
+would derive from this nomination.  "Because no man could easier be
+directed when in office, and no man easier turned out of office when
+disagreeable or unnecessary.  Both as a Batavian plenipotentiary at
+Amiens, and as Batavian Ambassador in England, he had proved himself as
+obedient and submissive to France as when in the same capacity at Paris."
+
+By returning often to the charge, with these and other remarks,
+Talleyrand at last accustomed Bonaparte to the idea, which had once
+appeared so humiliating, of writing to a man so much inferior in
+everything, "Great and dear Friend!"  and therefore said to the Minister:
+
+"Well!  let us then make him a grand pensionary and a locum tenens for
+five years; or until Jerome, when he repents, returns to his duty, and is
+pardoned."
+
+"Is he, then, not to be a grand pensionary for life?"  asked Talleyrand;
+"whether for one month or for life, he would be equally obedient to
+resign when, commanded; but the latter would be more popular in Holland,
+where they were tired of so many changes."
+
+"Let them complain, if they dare," replied Bonaparte.  "Schimmelpenninck
+is their chief magistrate only for five years, if so long; but you may
+add that they may reelect him."
+
+It was not before Talleyrand had compared the pecuniary proposal made to
+his agents by foreign Princes with those of Schimmelpenninck to himself,
+that the latter obtained the preference.  The exact amount of the
+purchase-money for the supreme magistracy in Holland is not well known to
+any but the contracting parties.  Some pretended that the whole was paid
+down beforehand, being advanced by a society of merchants at Amsterdam,
+the friends or relatives of the grand pensionary; others, that it is to
+be paid by annual instalments of two millions of livres--for a certain
+number of years.  Certain it is, that this high office was sold and
+bought; and that, had it been given for life, its value would have been
+proportionately enhanced; which was the reason that Talleyrand
+endeavoured to have it thus established.
+
+Talleyrand well knew the precarious state of Schimmelpenninck's grandeur;
+that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had long been
+intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome.  Another Dutchman asked
+him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he was well aware
+could never be called a sinecure place, and was so precarious in its
+tenure.  "Foolish vanity," answered the Minister, "can never pay enough
+for the gratification of its desires.  All the Schimmelpennincks in the
+world do not possess property enough to recompense me for the sovereign
+honours which I have procured for one of their name and family, were he
+deposed within twenty-four hours.  What treasures can indemnify me for
+connecting such a name and such a personage with the great name of the
+First Emperor of the French?"
+
+I have only twice in my life been in Schimmelpenninck's company, and I
+thought him both timid and reserved; but from what little he said, I
+could not possibly judge of his character and capacity.  His portrait and
+its accompaniments have been presented to me; such as delivered to you by
+one of his countrymen, a Mr. M---- (formerly an Ambassador also), who was
+both his schoolfellow and his comrade at the university.  I shall add the
+following traits, in his own words as near as possible:
+
+"More vain than ambitious, Schimmelpenninck from his youth, and,
+particularly, from his entrance into public life, tried every means to
+make a noise, but found none to make a reputation.  He caressed in
+succession all the systems of the French Revolution, without adopting one
+for himself.  All the Kings of faction received in their turns his homage
+and felicitations.  It was impossible to mention to him a man of any
+notoriety, of whom he did not become immediately a partisan.  The virtues
+or the vices, the merit or defects, of the individual were of no
+consideration; according to his judgment it was sufficient to be famous.
+Yet with all the extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes, and of a
+heart spoiled by modern philosophy, added to a habit of licentiousness,
+he had no idea of becoming an instrument for the destruction of liberty
+in his own country, much less of becoming its tyrant, in submitting to be
+the slave of France.  It was but lately that he took the fancy, after so
+long admiring all other great men of our age, to be at any rate one of
+their number, and of being admired as a great man in his turn.  On this
+account many accuse him of hypocrisy, but no one deserves that
+appellation less, his vanity and exaltation never permitting him to
+dissimulate; and no presumption, therefore, was less disguised than his,
+to those who studied the man.  Without acquired ability, without natural
+genius, or political capacity, destitute of discretion and address, as
+confident and obstinate as ignorant, he is only elevated to fall and to
+rise no more."
+
+Madame Schimmelpenninck, I was informed, is as amiable and accomplished
+as her husband is awkward and deficient; though well acquainted with his
+infidelities and profligacy, she is too virtuous to listen to revenge,
+and too generous not to forgive.  She is, besides, said to be a lady of
+uncommon abilities, and of greater information than she chooses to
+display.  She has never been the worshipper of Bonaparte, or the friend
+of Talleyrand; she loved her country, and detested its tyrants.  Had she
+been created a grand pensionary, she would certainly have swayed with
+more glory than her husband; and been hailed by contemporaries, as well
+as posterity, if not a heroine, at least a patriot,--a title which in our
+times, though often prostituted, so few have any claim to, and which,
+therefore, is so much the more valuable.
+
+When it was known at Paris that Schimmelpenninck had set out for his new
+sovereignty, no less than sixteen girls of the Palais Royal demanded
+passes for Holland.  Being questioned by Fouche as to their business in
+that country, they answered that they intended to visit their friend, the
+grand pensionary, in his new dominions.  Fouche communicated to
+Talleyrand both their demands and their business, and asked his advice.
+He replied:
+
+"Send two, and those of whose vigilance and intelligence you are sure.
+Refuse, by all means, the other fourteen.  Schimmelpenninck's time is
+precious, and were they at the Hague, he would neglect everything for
+them.  If they are fond of travelling, and are handsome and adroit,
+advise them to set out for London or for St. Petersburg; and if they
+consent, order them to my office, and they shall be supplied, if approved
+of, both with instructions, and with their travelling expenses."
+
+Fouche answered his colleague that "they were in every respect the very
+reverse of his description; they seemed to have passed their lives in the
+lowest stage of infamy, and they could neither read nor write."  You have
+therefore, no reason to fear that these belles will be sent to
+disseminate corruption in your happy island.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Italian subjects of Napoleon the First were far from
+displaying the same zeal and the same gratitude for his paternal care and
+kindness in taking upon himself the trouble of governing them, as we good
+Parisians have done.  Notwithstanding that a brigade of our police agents
+and spies, drilled for years to applaud and to excite enthusiasm,
+proceeded as his advanced guard to raise the public spirit, the reception
+at Milan was cold and everything else but cordial and pleasing. The
+absence of duty did not escape his observation and resentment. Convinced,
+in his own mind, of the great blessing, prosperity, and liberty his
+victories and sovereignty have conferred on the inhabitants of the other
+side of the Alps, he ascribed their present passive or mutinous behaviour
+to the effect of foreign emissaries from Courts envious of his glory and
+jealous of his authority.
+
+He suspected particularly England and Russia of having selected this
+occasion of a solemnity that would complete his grandeur to humble his
+just pride.  He also had some idea within himself that even Austria might
+indirectly have dared to influence the sentiments and conduct of her
+ci-devant subjects of Lombardy; but his own high opinion of the awe which
+his very name inspired at Vienna dispersed these thoughts, and his wrath
+fell entirely on the audacity of Pitt and Markof.  Strict orders were
+therefore issued to the prefects and commissaries of police to watch
+vigilantly all foreigners and strangers, who might have arrived, or who
+should arrive, to witness the ceremony of the coronation, and to arrest
+instantly any one who should give the least reason to suppose that he was
+an enemy instead of an admirer of His Imperial and Royal Majesty.  He
+also commanded the prefects of his palace not to permit any persons to
+approach his sacred person, of whose morality and politics they had not
+previously obtained a good account.
+
+These great measures of security were not entirely unnecessary.
+Individual vengeance and individual patriotism sharpened their daggers,
+and, to use Senator Roederer's language, "were near transforming the most
+glorious day of rejoicing into a day of universal mourning."
+
+All our writers on the Revolution agree that in France, within the first
+twelve years after we had reconquered our lost liberty, more conspiracies
+have been denounced than during the six centuries of the most brilliant
+epoch of ancient and free Rome.  These facts and avowals are speaking
+evidences of the eternal tranquillity of our unfortunate country, of our
+affection to our rulers, and of the unanimity with which all the changes
+of Government have been, notwithstanding our printed votes, received and
+approved.
+
+The frequency of conspiracies not only shows the discontent of the
+governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors.  This
+truth has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an
+expeditious and secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators,
+and to bury the conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup d'etat
+is to be struck; or, to excite the passions of hatred, any proofs can be
+found, or must be fabricated, involving an inimical or rival foreign
+Government in an odious plot.  Since the farce which Mehee de la Touche
+exhibited, you have, therefore, not read in the Moniteur either of the
+danger our Emperor has incurred several times since from the machinations
+of implacable or fanatical foes, or of the alarm these have caused his
+partisans.  They have, indeed, been hinted at in some speeches of our
+public functionaries, and in some paragraphs of our public prints, but
+their particulars will remain concealed from historians, unless some one
+of those composing our Court, our fashionable, or our political circles,
+has taken the trouble of noting them down; but even to these they are but
+imperfectly or incorrectly known.
+
+Could the veracity of a Fouche, a Real, a Talleyrand, or a Duroc (the
+only members of this new secret and invisible tribunal for expediting
+conspirators) be depended upon, they would be the most authentic
+annalists of these and other interesting secret occurrences.
+
+What I intend relating to you on this subject are circumstances such as
+they have been reported in our best informed societies by our most
+inquisitive companions.  Truth is certainly the foundation of these
+anecdotes; but their parts may be extenuated, diminished, altered, or
+exaggerated.  Defective or incomplete as they are, I hope you will not
+judge them unworthy of a page in a letter, considering the grand
+personage they concern, and the mystery with which he and his Government
+encompass themselves, or in which they wrap up everything not agreeable
+concerning them.
+
+A woman is said to have been at the head of the first plot against
+Napoleon since his proclamation as an Emperor of the French.  She called
+herself Charlotte Encore; but her real name is not known.  In 1803 she
+lived and had furnished a house at Abbeville, where she passed for a
+young widow of property, subsisting on her rents.  About the same time
+several other strangers settled there; but though she visited the
+principal inhabitants, she never publicly had any connection with the
+newcomers.
+
+In the summer of 1803, a girl at Amiens--some say a real enthusiast of
+Bonaparte's, but, according to others, engaged by Madame Bonaparte to
+perform the part she did demanded, upon her knees, in a kind of paroxysm
+of joy, the happiness of embracing him, in doing which she fainted, or
+pretended to faint away, and a pension of three thousand livres--was
+settled on her for her affection.
+
+Madame Encore, at Abbeville, to judge of her discourse and conversation,
+was also an ardent friend and well-wisher of the Emperor; and when, in
+July, 1804, he passed through Abbeville, on his journey to the coast,
+she, also, threw herself at his feet, and declared that she would die
+content if allowed the honour of embracing him.  To this he was going to
+assent, when Duroc stepped between them, seized her by the arm, and
+dragged her to an adjoining room, whither Bonaparte, near fainting from
+the sudden alarm his friend's interference had occasioned, followed him,
+trembling.  In the right sleeve of Madame Encore's gown was found a
+stiletto, the point of which was poisoned.  She was the same day
+transported to this capital, under the inspection of Duroc, and
+imprisoned in the Temple.  In her examination she denied having
+accomplices, and she expired on the rack without telling even her name.
+The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once famous Andre Dumont, was ordered
+to disseminate a report that she was shut up as insane in a madhouse.
+
+In the strict search made by the police in the house occupied by her, no
+papers or any, other indications were discovered that involved other
+persons, or disclosed who she was, or what induced her to attempt such a
+rash action.  Before the secret tribunal she is reported to have said,
+"that being convinced of Bonaparte's being one of the greatest criminals
+that ever breathed upon the earth, she took upon herself the office of a
+volunteer executioner; having, with every other good or loyal person, a
+right to punish him whom the law could not, or dared not, reach." When,
+however, some repairs were made in the house at Abbeville by a new
+tenant, a bundle of papers was found, which proved that a M.
+Franquonville, and about thirty, other individuals (many, of whom were
+the late newcomers there), had for six months been watching an
+opportunity to seize Bonaparte in his journeys between Abbeville and
+Montreuil, and to carry him to some part of the coast, where a vessel was
+ready to sail for England with him.  Had he, however, made resistance, he
+would have been shot in France, and his assassins have saved themselves
+in the vessel.
+
+The numerous escort that always, since he was an Emperor, accompanied
+him, and particularly his concealment of the days of his journeys,
+prevented the execution of this plot; and Madame Encore, therefore, took
+upon her to sacrifice herself for what she thought the welfare of her
+country.  How Duroc suspected or discovered her intent is not known; some
+say that an anonymous letter informed him of it, while others assert
+that, in throwing herself at Bonaparte's feet, this prefect observed the
+steel through the sleeve of her muslin gown.  Most of her associates were
+secretly executed; some, however, were carried to Boulogne and shot at
+the head of the army of England as English spies.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--After the discovery of Charlotte Encore's attempt, Bonaparte,
+who hitherto had flattered himself that he possessed the good wishes, if
+not the affection, of his female subjects, made a regulation according to
+which no women who had not previously given in their names to the
+prefects of his palaces, and obtained previous permission, can approach
+his person or throw themselves at his feet, without incurring his
+displeasure, and even arrest.  Of this Imperial decree, ladies, both of
+the capital and of the provinces, when he travels, are officially
+informed.  Notwithstanding this precaution, he was a second time last
+spring, at Lyons, near falling the victim of the vengeance or malice of a
+woman.
+
+In his journey to be crowned King of Italy, he occupied his uncle's
+episcopal palace at Lyons during the forty-eight hours he remained there.
+Most of the persons of both sexes composing the household of Cardinal
+Fesch were from his own country, Corsica; among these was one of the name
+of Pauline Riotti, who inspected the economy of the kitchens.  It is
+Bonaparte's custom to take a dish of chocolate in the forenoon, which
+she, on the morning of his departure, against her custom, but under
+pretence of knowing the taste of the family, desired to prepare.  One of
+the cooks observed that she mixed it with something from her pocket, but,
+without saying a word to her that indicated suspicion, he warned
+Bonaparte, in a note, delivered to a page, to be upon his guard.  When
+the chamberlain carried in the chocolate, Napoleon ordered the person who
+had prepared it to be brought before him.  This being told Pauline, she
+fainted away, after having first drunk the remaining contents of the
+chocolate pot.  Her convulsions soon indicated that she was poisoned,
+and, notwithstanding the endeavours of Bonaparte's physician, Corvisart,
+she expired within an hour; protesting that her crime was an act of
+revenge against Napoleon, who had seduced her, when young, under a
+promise of marriage; but who, since his elevation, had not only neglected
+her, but reduced her to despair by refusing an honest support for herself
+and her child, sufficient to preserve her from the degradation of
+servitude.  Cardinal Fesch received a severe reprimand for admitting
+among his domestics individuals with whose former lives he was not better
+acquainted, and the same day he dismissed every Corsican in his service.
+The cook was, with the reward of a pension, made a member of the Legion
+of Honour, and it was given out by Corvisart that Pauline died insane.
+
+Within three weeks after this occurrence, Bonaparte was, at Milan, again
+exposed to an imminent danger.  According to his commands, the vigilance
+of the police had been very strict, and even severe.  All strangers who
+could not give the most satisfactory account of themselves, had either
+been sent out of the country, or were imprisoned.  He never went out
+unless strongly attended, and during his audiences the most trusty
+officers always surrounded him; these precautions increased in proportion
+as the day of his coronation approached.  On the morning of that day,
+about nine o'clock, when full dressed in his Imperial and royal robes,
+and all the grand officers of State by his side, a paper was delivered to
+him by his chamberlain, Talleyrand, a nephew of the Minister.  The
+instant he had read it, he flew into the arms of Berthier, exclaiming:
+"My friend, I am betrayed; are you among the number of conspirators?
+Jourdan, Lasnes, Mortier, Bessieres, St. Cyr, are you also forsaking your
+friend and benefactor?"  They all instantly encompassed him, begging that
+he would calm himself; that they all were what they always had been,
+dutiful and faithful subjects.  "But read this paper from my prefect,
+Salmatoris; he says that if I move a step I may cease to live, as the
+assassins are near me, as well as before me."
+
+The commander of his guard then entered with fifty grenadiers, their
+bayonets fixed, carrying with them a prisoner, who pointed out four
+individuals not far from Bonaparte's person, two of whom were Italian
+officers of the Royal Italian Guard, and two were dressed in Swiss
+uniforms.  They were all immediately seized, and at their feet were found
+three daggers.  One of those in Swiss regimentals exclaimed, before he
+was taken: "Tremble, tyrant of my country!  Thousands of the descendants
+of William Tell have, with me, sworn your destruction.  You, escape this
+day, but the just vengeance of outraged humanity follows you like your
+shade.  Depend upon it an untimely end is irremediably reserved you."  So
+saying, he pierced his heart and fell a corpse into the arms of the
+grenadiers who came to arrest him.
+
+This incident suspended the procession to the cathedral for an hour, when
+Berthier announced that the conspirators were punished.  Bonaparte
+evinced on this occasion the same absence of mind and of courage as on
+the 9th of November, 1799, when Arena and other deputies drew their
+daggers against him at St. Cloud.  As this scene did not redound much to
+the honour of the Emperor and King, all mention of the conspiracy was
+severely prohibited, and the deputations ready to congratulate him on his
+escape were dispersed to attend their other duties.
+
+The conspirators are stated to have been four young men, who had lost
+their parents and fortunes by the Revolutions effected by Bonaparte in
+Italy and Switzerland, and who had sworn fidelity to each other, and to
+avenge their individual wrongs with the injuries of their countries at
+the same time.  They were all prepared and resigned to die, expecting to
+be cut to pieces the moment Bonaparte fell by their hands; but one of the
+Italians, rather superstitious, had, before he went to the drawing-room,
+confessed and received absolution from a priest, whom he knew to be an
+enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in hope of reward, disclosed the
+conspiracy to the master of ceremonies, Salmatoris.  The three surviving
+conspirators are said to have been literally torn to pieces by the
+engines of torture, and the priest was shot for having given absolution
+to an assassin, and for having concealed his knowledge of the plot an
+hour after he was acquainted with it.  Even Salmatoris had some
+difficulty to avoid being disgraced for having written a terrifying note,
+which had exposed the Emperor's weakness, and shown that his life was
+dearer to him at the head of Empires than when only at the head of
+armies.
+
+My narrative of this event I have from an officer present, whose veracity
+I can guarantee.  He also informed me that, in consequence of it, all the
+officers of the Swiss brigades in the French service that were quartered
+or encamped in Italy were, to the number of near fifty, dismissed at
+once.  Of the Italian guards, every officer who was known to have
+suffered any losses by the new order of things in his country, was
+ordered to resign, if he would not enter into the regiments of the line.
+
+Whatever the police agents did to prevent it, and in spite of some unjust
+and cruel chastisement, Bonaparte continued, during his stay in Italy, an
+object of ridicule in conversation, as well as in pamphlets and
+caricatures.  One of these represented him in the ragged garb of a
+sans-culotte, pale and trembling on his knees, with bewildered looks and
+his hair standing upright on his head like pointed horns, tearing the map
+of the world to pieces, and, to save his life, offering each of his
+generals a slice, who in return regarded him with looks of contempt mixed
+with pity.
+
+I have just heard of a new plot, or rather a league against Bonaparte's
+ambition.  At its head the Generals Jourdan, Macdonald, Le Courbe, and
+Dessolles are placed, though many less victorious generals and officers,
+civil as well as military, are reported to be its members.  Their object
+is not to remove or displace Bonaparte as an Emperor of the French; on
+the contrary, they offer their lives to strengthen his authority and to
+resist his enemies; but they ask and advise him to renounce, for himself,
+for his relations, and for France, all possessions on the Italian side of
+the Alps, as the only means to establish a permanent peace, and to avoid
+a war with other States, whose safety is endangered by our great
+encroachments.  A mutinous kind of address to this effect has been sent
+to the camp of Boulogne and to all other encampments of our troops, that
+those generals and other military persons there, who chose, might both
+see the object and the intent of the associates.  It is reported that
+Bonaparte ordered it to be burnt by the hands of the common executioner
+at Boulogne; that sixteen officers there who had subscribed their names
+in appropriation of the address were broken, and dismissed with disgrace;
+that Jourdan is deprived of his command in Italy, and ordered to render
+an account of his conduct to the Emperor.  Dessolles is also said to be
+dismissed, and with Macdonald, Le Courbe, and eighty-four others of His
+Majesty's subjects, whose names appeared under the remonstrance (or
+petition, as some call it), exiled to different departments of this
+country, where they are to expect their Sovereign's further
+determination, and, in the meantime, remain under the inspection and
+responsibility of his constituted authorities and commissaries of police.
+As it is as dangerous to inquire as to converse on this and other
+subjects, which the mysterious policy of our Government condemns to
+silence or oblivion, I have not yet been able to gather any more or
+better information concerning this league, or unconstitutional opposition
+to the executive power; but as I am intimate with one of the actors,
+should he have an opportunity, he will certainly write to me at full
+length, and be very explicit.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe I have before remarked that, under the Government of
+Bonaparte, causes relatively the most insignificant have frequently
+produced effects of the greatest consequence.  A capricious or whimsical
+character, swaying with unlimited power, is certainly the most dangerous
+guardian of the prerogatives of sovereignty, as well as of the rights and
+liberties of the people.  That Bonaparte is as vain and fickle as a
+coquette, as obstinate as a mule, and equally audacious and unrelenting,
+every one who has witnessed his actions or meditated on his transactions
+must be convinced.  The least opposition irritates his pride, and he
+determines and commands, in a moment of impatience or vivacity, what may
+cause the misery of millions for ages, and, perhaps, his own repentance
+for years.
+
+When Bonaparte was officially informed by his Ambassador at Vienna, the
+young La Rochefoucauld, that the Emperor of Germany had declined being
+one of his grand officers of the Legion of Honour, he flew into a rage,
+and used against this Prince the most gross, vulgar, and unbecoming
+language.  I have heard it said that he went so far as to say, "Well,
+Francis II. is tired of reigning.  I hope to have strength enough to
+carry a third crown.  He who dares refuse to be and continue my equal,
+shall soon, as a vassal, think himself honoured with the regard which, as
+a master, I may condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him."  Though
+forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with
+the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so
+furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of
+the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and
+for the honour of our nation thus represented.
+
+When the diplomatic audience was over, he said to Talleyrand, in a
+commanding and harsh tone of voice, in the presence of all his
+aides-de-camp and generals:
+
+"Write this afternoon, by an extraordinary courier, to my Minister at
+Genoa, Salicetti, to prepare the Doge and the people for the immediate
+incorporation of the Ligurian Republic with my Empire.  Should Austria
+dare to murmur, I shall, within three months, also incorporate the
+ci-devant Republic of Venice with my Kingdom of Italy!"
+
+"But--but--Sire!" uttered the Minister, trembling.
+
+"There exists no 'but,' and I will listen to no 'but,'" interrupted His
+Majesty.  "Obey my orders without further discussions.  Should Austria
+dare to arm, I shall, before next Christmas, make Vienna the headquarters
+of a fiftieth military division.  In an hour I expect you with the
+despatches ready for Salicetti."
+
+This Salicetti is a Corsican of a respectable family, born at Bastia, in
+1758, and it was he who, during the siege of Toulon in 1793, introduced
+his countryman, Napoleon Bonaparte, his present Sovereign, to the
+acquaintance of Barras, an occurrence which has since produced
+consequences so terribly notorious.
+
+Before the Revolution an advocate of the superior council of Corsica, he
+was elected a member to the First National Assembly, where, on the 30th
+of November, 1789, he pressed the decree which declared the Island of
+Corsica an integral part of the French monarchy.  In 1792, he was sent by
+his fellow citizens as a deputy to the National Convention, where he
+joined the terrorist faction, and voted for the death of his King.  In
+May, 1793, he was in Corsica, and violently opposed the partisans of
+General Paoli.  Obliged to make his escape in August from that island, to
+save himself, he joined the army of General Carteaux, then marching
+against the Marseilles insurgents, whence he was sent by the National
+Convention with Barras, Gasparin, Robespierre the younger, and Ricrod, as
+a representative of the people, to the army before Toulon, where, as well
+as at Marseilles, he shared in all the atrocities committed by his
+colleagues and by Bonaparte; for which, after the death of the
+Robespierres, he was arrested with him as a terrorist.
+
+He had not known Bonaparte much in Corsica, but, finding him and his
+family in great distress, with all other Corsican refugees, and observing
+his adroitness as a captain of artillery, he recommended him to Barras,
+and upon their representation to the Committee of Public Safety, he was
+promoted to a chef de brigade, or colonel.  In 1796, when Barras gave
+Bonaparte the command of the army of Italy, Salicetti was appointed a
+Commissary of Government to the same army, and in that capacity behaved
+with the greatest insolence towards all the Princes of Italy, and most so
+towards the Duke of Modena, with whom he and Bonaparte signed a treaty of
+neutrality, for which they received a large sum in ready money; but
+shortly afterwards the duchy was again invaded, and an attempt made to
+surprise and seize the Duke.  In 1797 he was chosen a member of the
+Council of Five Hundred, where he always continued a supporter of violent
+measures.
+
+When, in 1799, his former protege, Bonaparte, was proclaimed a First
+Consul, Salicetti desired to be placed in the Conservative Senate; but
+his familiarity displeased Napoleon, who made him first a commercial
+agent, and afterwards a Minister to the Ligurian Republic, so as to keep
+him at a distance.  During his several missions, he has amassed a
+fortune, calculated, at the lowest, of six millions of livres.
+
+The order Salicetti received to prepare the incorporation of Genoa with
+France, would not, without the presence of our troops, have been very
+easy to execute, particularly as he, six months before, had prevailed on
+the Doge and the Senate to resign all sovereignty to Lucien Bonaparte,
+under the title of a Grand Duke of Genoa.
+
+The cause of Napoleon's change of opinion with regard to his brother
+Lucien, was that the latter would not separate from a wife he loved, but
+preferred domestic happiness to external splendour frequently accompanied
+with internal misery.  So that this act of incorporation of the Ligurian
+Republic, in fact, originated, notwithstanding the great and deep
+calculations of our profound politicians and political schemers, in
+nothing else but in the keeping of a wife, and in the refusal of a
+riband.
+
+That corruption, seduction, and menaces seconded the intrigues and
+bayonets which convinced the Ligurian Government of the honour and
+advantage of becoming subjects of Bonaparte, I have not the least doubt;
+but that the Doge, Girolamo Durazzo, and the senators Morchio, Maglione,
+Travega, Maghella, Roggieri, Taddei, Balby, and Langlade sold the
+independence of their country for ten millions of livres--though it has
+been positively asserted, I can hardly believe; and, indeed, money was as
+little necessary as resistance would have been unavailing, all the forts
+and strong positions being in the occupation of our troops.  A general
+officer present when the Doge of Genoa, at the head of the Ligurian
+deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at Milan, and exchanged
+liberty for bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief magistrate
+spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and that
+indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the deputation
+thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to vilify their
+sentiments as patriots.
+
+When Salicetti, with his secretary, Milhaud, had arranged this honourable
+affair, they set out from Genoa to announce to Bonaparte, at Milan, their
+success.  Not above a league from the former city their carriage was
+stopped, their persons stripped, and their papers and effects seized by a
+gang, called in the country the gang of PATRIOTIC ROBBERS, commanded by
+Mulieno.  This chief is a descendant of a good Genoese family, proscribed
+by France, and the men under him are all above the common class of
+people.  They never commit any murders, nor do they rob any but
+Frenchmen, or Italians known to be adherents of the French party.  Their
+spoils they distribute among those of their countrymen who, like
+themselves, have suffered from the revolutions in Italy within these last
+nine years.  They usually send the amount destined to relieve these
+persons to the curates of the several parishes, signifying in what manner
+it is to be employed.  Their conduct has procured them many friends among
+the low and the poor, and, though frequently pursued by our gendarmes,
+they have hitherto always escaped.  The papers captured by them on this
+occasion from Salicetti are said to be of a most curious nature, and
+throw great light on Bonaparte's future views of Italy.  The original act
+of consent of the Ligurian Government to the incorporation with France
+was also in this number.  It is reported that they were deposited with
+the Austrian Minister at Genoa, who found means to forward them to his
+Court; and it is supposed that their contents did not a little to hasten
+the present movements of the Emperor of Germany.
+
+Another gang, known under the appellation of the PATRIOTIC AVENGERS, also
+desolates the Ligurian Republic.  They never rob, but always murder those
+whom they consider as enemies of their country.  Many of our officers,
+and even our sentries on duty, have been wounded or killed by them; and,
+after dark, therefore, no Frenchman dares walk out unattended.  Their
+chief is supposed to be a ci-devant Abbe, Sagati, considered a political
+as well as a religious fanatic.  In consequence of the deeds of these
+patriotic avengers, Bonaparte's first act, as a Sovereign of Liguria, was
+the establishment of special military commissions, and a law prohibiting,
+under pain of death, every person from carrying arms who could not show a
+written permission of our commissary of police.  Robbers and assassins
+are, unfortunately, common to all nations, and all people of all ages;
+but those of the above description are only the production and progeny of
+revolutionary and troublesome times.  They pride themselves, instead of
+violating the laws, on supplying their inefficacy and counteracting their
+partiality.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte is now the knight of more Royal Orders than any other
+Sovereign in Europe, and were he to put them on all at once, their
+ribands would form stuff enough for a light summer coat of as many
+different colours as the rainbow.  The Kings of Spain, of Naples, of
+Prussia, of Portugal, and of Etruria have admitted him a
+knight-companion, as well as the Electors of Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden,
+and the Pope of Rome.  In return he has appointed these Princes his grand
+officers of HIS Legion of Honour, the highest rank of his newly
+instituted Imperial Order.  It is even said that some of these Sovereigns
+have been honoured by him with the grand star and broad riband of the
+Order of His Iron Crown of the Kingdom of Italy.
+
+Before Napoleon's departure for Milan last spring, Talleyrand intimated
+to the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here, that their presence
+would be agreeable to the Emperor of the French at his coronation at
+Milan as a King of Italy.  In the preceding summer a similar hint, or
+order, had been given by him for a diplomatic trip to Aix-la-Chapelle,
+and all Their Excellencies set a-packing instantly; but some legitimate
+Sovereigns, having since discovered that it was indecent for their
+representatives to be crowding the suite of an insolently and proudly
+travelling usurper, under different pretences declined the honour of an
+invitation and journey to Italy.  It would, besides, have been pleasant
+enough to have witnessed the Ambassadors of Austria and Prussia, whose
+Sovereigns had not acknowledged Bonaparte's right to his assumed title of
+King of Italy, indirectly approving it by figuring at the solemnity which
+inaugurated him as such.  Of this inconsistency and impropriety
+Talleyrand was well aware; but audacity on one side, and endurance and
+submission on the other, had so often disregarded these considerations
+before, that he saw no indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal.  His
+master had, however, the gratification to see at his levee, and in his
+wife's drawing-room, the Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and
+Bavaria, who laid at the Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of
+their own Princes, to the nor little entertainment of His Imperial and
+Royal Majesty, and to the great edification of his dutiful subjects on
+the other side of the Alps.
+
+The expenses of Bonaparte's journey to Milan, and his coronation there
+(including also those of his attendants from France), amounted to no less
+a sum than fifteen millions of livres--of which one hundred and fifty
+thousand livres--was laid out in fireworks, double that sum in
+decorations of the Royal Palace and the cathedral, and three millions of
+livres--in presents to different generals, grand officers, deputations,
+etc.  The poor also shared his bounty; medals to the value of fifty
+thousand livres--were thrown out among them on the day of the ceremony,
+besides an equal sum given by Madame Napoleon to the hospitals and
+orphan-houses.  These last have a kind of hereditary or family claim on
+the purse of our Sovereign; their parents were the victims of the
+Emperor's first step towards glory and grandeur.
+
+Another three millions of livres was expended for the march of troops
+from France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more was
+requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during two
+months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men composing
+them two million livres' worth of rings, watches, snuff-boxes, portraits
+set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets, as evidences of His
+Majesty's satisfaction with their behaviour, presence, and performances.
+
+These troops were under the command of Bonaparte's Field-marshal,
+Jourdan, a general often mentioned in the military annals of our
+revolutionary war.  During the latter part of the American war, he served
+under General Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in 1783, after
+the peace, his discharge.  He then turned a pedlar, in which situation
+the Revolution found him.  He had also married, for her fortune, a lame
+daughter of a tailor, who brought him a fortune of two thousand
+livres--from whom he has since been divorced, leaving her to shift for
+herself as she can, in a small milliner's shop at Limoges, where her
+husband was born in 1763.
+
+Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
+organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in the
+National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel.  His known
+love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public Safety, in
+1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of Ardennes and
+of the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard.  On the 17th of October
+the same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies, which obliged the
+united forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to raise the siege of
+Maubeuge.  The jealous Republican Government, in reward, deposed him and
+appointed Pichegru his successor, which was the origin of that enmity and
+malignity with which Jourdan pursued this unfortunate general, even to
+his grave.  He never forgave Pichegru the acceptance of a command which
+he could not decline without risking his life; and when he should have
+avenged his disgrace on the real causes of it, he chose to resent it on
+him who, like himself, was merely an instrument, or a slave, in the hands
+and under the whip of a tyrannical power.
+
+After the imprisonment of General Hoche, in March, 1794, Jourdan
+succeeded him as chief of the army of the Moselle.  In June he joined,
+with thirty thousand men, the right wing of the army of the North,
+forming a new one, under the name of the army of the Sambre and Meuse. On
+the 16th of the same month he gained a complete victory over the Prince
+of Coburg, who tried to raise the siege of Charleroy.  This battle, which
+was fought near Trasegnies, is, nevertheless, commonly called the battle
+of Fleurus.  After Charleroy had surrendered on the 25th, Jourdan and his
+army were ordered to act under the direction of General Pichegru, who had
+drawn the plan of that brilliant campaign. Always envious of this
+general, Jourdan did everything to retard his progress, and at last
+intrigued so well that the army of the Sambre and the Meuse was separated
+from that of the North.
+
+With the former of these armies Jourdan pursued the retreating
+confederates, and, after driving them from different stands and
+positions, he repulsed them to the banks of the Rhine, which river they
+were obliged to pass.  Here ended his successes this year, successes that
+were not obtained without great loss on our side.
+
+Jourdan began the campaigns of 1795 and 1796 with equal brilliancy, and
+ended them with equal disgrace.  After penetrating into Germany with
+troops as numerous as well-disciplined, he was defeated at the end of
+them by Archduke Charles, and retreated always with such precipitation,
+and in such confusion, that it looked more like the flight of a
+disorderly rabble than the retreat of regular troops; and had not Moreau,
+in 1796, kept the enemy in awe, few of Jourdan's officers or men would
+again have seen France; for the inhabitants of Franconia rose on these
+marauders, and cut them to pieces, wherever they could surprise or waylay
+them.
+
+In 1797, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the
+Jacobin faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a
+chief; and he had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride himself
+upon having procured the transportation of that patriotic general to
+Cayenne.  In 1799, he again assumed the command of the army of Alsace and
+of Switzerland; but he crossed the Rhine and penetrated into Suabia only
+to be again routed by the Archduke Charles, and to repass this river in
+disorder.  Under the necessity of resigning as a general-in-chief, he
+returned to the Council of Five Hundred, more violent than ever, and
+provoked there the most oppressive measures against his fellow citizens.
+Previous to the revolution effected by Bonaparte in November of that
+year, he had entered with Garreau and Santerre into a conspiracy, the
+object of which was to restore the Reign of Terror, and to prevent which
+Bonaparte said he made those changes which placed him at the head of
+Government.  The words were even printed in the papers of that period,
+which Bonaparte on the 10th of November addressed to the then deputy of
+Mayenne, Prevost: "If the plot entered into by Jourdan and others, and of
+which they have not blushed to propose to me the execution, had not been
+defeated, they would have surrounded the place of your sitting, and to
+crush all future opposition, ordered a number of deputies to be
+massacred.  That done, they were to establish the sanguinary despotism of
+the Reign of Terror."  But whether such was Jourdan's project, or whether
+it was merely given out to be such by the consular faction, to extenuate
+their own usurpation, he certainly had connected himself with the most
+guilty and contemptible of the former terrorists, and drew upon himself
+by such conduct the hatred and blame even of those whose opinion had long
+been suspended on his account.
+
+General Jourdan was among those terrorists whom the Consular Government
+condemned to transportation; but after several interviews with Bonaparte
+he was not only pardoned, but made a Counsellor of State of the military
+section; and afterwards, in 1801, an administrator-general of Piedmont,
+where he was replaced by General Menou in 1803, being himself entrusted
+with the command in Italy.  This place he has preserved until last month,
+when he was ordered to resign it to Massena, with whom he had a quarrel,
+and would have fought him in a duel, had not the Viceroy, Eugene de
+Beauharnais, put him under arrest and ordered him back hither, where he
+is daily expected.  If Massena's report to Bonaparte be true, the army of
+Italy was very far from being as orderly and numerous as Jourdan's
+assertions would have induced us to believe.  But this accusation of a
+rival must be listened to with caution; because, should Massena meet with
+repulse, he will no doubt make use of it as an apology; and should he be
+victorious, hold it out as a claim for more honour and praise.
+
+The same doubts which still continue of Jourdan's political opinions
+remain also with regard to his military capacity.  But the unanimous
+declaration of those who have served under his orders as a general must
+silence both his blind admirers and unjust slanderers.  They all allow
+him some military ability; he combines and prepares in the Cabinet a plan
+of defence and attack, with method and intelligence, but he does not
+possess the quick coup d'oeil, and that promptitude which perceives, and
+rectifies accordingly, an error on the field of battle.  If, on the day
+of action, some accident, or some manoeuvre, occurs, which has not been
+foreseen by him, his dull and heavy genius does not enable him to alter
+instantly his dispositions, or to remedy errors, misfortunes, or
+improvidences.  This kind of talent, and this kind of absence of talent,
+explain equally the causes of his advantages, as well as the origin of
+his frequent disasters.  Nobody denies him courage, but, with most of our
+other republican generals, he has never been careful of the lives of the
+troops under him.  I have heard an officer of superior talents and rank
+assert, in the presence of Carnot, that the number of wounded and killed
+under Jourdan, when victorious, frequently surpassed the number of
+enemies he had defeated.  I fear it is too true that we are as much, if
+not more, indebted for our successes to the superior number as to the
+superior valour of our troops.
+
+Jourdan is, with regard to fortune, one of our poorest republican
+generals who have headed armies.  He has not, during all his campaigns,
+collected more than a capital of eight millions of livres--a mere trifle
+compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions of Le
+Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of
+Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte.  It is also
+true that Jourdan is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and
+women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to
+business, he passed the remainder of his time either at the
+gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio--I say seraglio,
+because he kept, in the extensive house joining his palace as governor
+and commander, ten women-three French, three Italians, two Germans, two
+Irish or English girls.  He supported them all in style; but they were
+his slaves, and he was their sultan, whose official mutes (his
+aides-de-camp) both watched them, and, if necessary, chastised them.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I can truly defy the world to produce a corps of such a
+heterogeneous composition as our Conservative Senate, when I except the
+members composing Bonaparte's Legion of Honour.  Some of our Senators
+have been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks, physicians,
+barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers, mountebanks,
+Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors, counsellors, or presidents
+of Parliament, admirals, barristers, Bishops, sailors, attorneys,
+authors, Barons, spies, painters, professors, Ministers, sans-culottes,
+atheists, stonemasons, robbers, mathematicians, philosophers, regicides,
+and a long et cetera.  Any person reading through the official list of
+the members of the Senate, and who is acquainted with their former
+situations in life, may be convinced of this truth.  Should he even be
+ignorant of them, let him but inquire, with the list in his hand, in any
+of our fashionable or political circles; he will meet with but few
+persons who are not able or willing to remove his doubts, or to gratify
+his curiosity.  There are not many of them whom it is possible to
+elevate, but those are still more numerous whom it is impossible to
+degrade.  Their past lives, vices, errors, or crimes, have settled their
+characters and reputation; and they must live and die in 'statu quo',
+either as fools or as knaves, and perhaps as both.
+
+I do not mean to say that they are all criminals or all equally criminal,
+if insurrection against lawful authority and obedience to usurped tyranny
+are not to be considered as crimes; but there are few indeed who can lay
+their hands on their bosoms and say, 'vitam expendere vero'.  Some of
+them, as a Lagrange, Berthollet, Chaptal, Laplace, Francois de
+Neuf-Chateau, Tronchet, Monge, Lacepede, and Bougainville, are certainly
+men of talents; but others, as a Porcher, Resnier, Vimar, Auber, Perk,
+Sera, Vernier, Vien, Villetard, Tascher, Rigal, Baciocchi, Beviere,
+Beauharnais, De Luynea (a ci-devant duke, known under the name of Le Gros
+Cochon), nature never destined but to figure among those half-idiots and
+half-imbeciles who are, as it were, intermedial between the brute and
+human creation.
+
+Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche,
+Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer
+form another class,--some of them regicides, others assassins and
+plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning
+of the Revolution.  They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge,
+and of great presumption.  As to their morality, it is on a level with
+their religion and loyalty.  They betrayed their King, and had denied
+their God already in 1789.
+
+After these come some others, who again have neither talents to boast of
+nor crimes of which they have to be ashamed.  They have but little
+pretension to genius, none to consistency, and their honesty equals their
+capacity.  They joined our political revolution as they might have done a
+religious procession.  It was at that time a fashion; and they applauded
+our revolutionary innovations as they would have done the introduction of
+a new opera, of a new tragedy, of a new comedy, or of a new farce.  To
+this fraternity appertain a ci-devant Comte de Stult-Tracy,
+Dubois--Dubay, Kellerman, Lambrechts, Lemercier, Pleville--Le Pelley,
+Clement de Ris, Peregeaux, Berthelemy, Vaubois, Nrignon, D'Agier, Abrial,
+De Belloy, Delannoy, Aboville, and St. Martin La Motte.
+
+Such are the characteristics of men whose 'senatus consultum' bestows an
+Emperor on France, a King on Italy, makes of principalities departments
+of a Republic, and transforms Republics into provinces or principalities.
+To show the absurdly fickle and ridiculously absurd appellations of our
+shamefully perverted institutions, this Senate was called the
+Conservative Senate; that is to say, it was to preserve the republican
+consular constitution in its integrity, both against the; encroachments
+of the executive and legislative power, both against the manoeuvres of
+the factions, the plots of the royalists or monarchists, and the clamours
+of a populace of levellers.  But during the five years that these honest
+wiseacres have been preserving, everything has perished--the Republic,
+the Consuls, free discussions, free election, the political liberty, and
+the liberty of the Press; all--all are found nowhere but in old, useless,
+and rejected codes.  They have, however, in a truly patriotic manner
+taken care of their own dear selves.  Their salaries are more than
+doubled since 1799.
+
+Besides mock Senators, mock praetors, mock quaestors, other 'nomina
+libertatis' are revived, so as to make the loss of the reality so much
+the more galling.  We have also two curious commissions; one called "the
+Senatorial Commission of Personal Liberty," and the other "the Senatorial
+Commission of the Liberty of the Press."  The imprisonment without cause,
+and transportation without trial, of thousands of persons of both sexes
+weekly, show the grand advantages which arise from the former of these
+commissions; and the contents of our new books and daily prints evince
+the utility and liberality of the latter.
+
+But from the past conduct of these our Senators, members of these
+commissions, one may easily conclude what is to be expected in future
+from their justice and patriotism.  Lenoin Laroche, at the head of the
+one, was formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to
+politics than to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at the
+end of the session of the first assembly (of which he was a member),
+forced, for subsistence, to become the editor of an insignificant
+journal.  Here he preached licentiousness, under the name of Liberty, and
+the agrarian law in recommending Equality.  A prudent courtier of all
+systems in fashion, and of all factions in power, he escaped
+proscription, though not accusation of having shared in the national
+robberies.  A short time in the summer of 1797, after the dismissal of
+Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins
+elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he, with other
+deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return, rewarded with a
+place in the Senate.  Under monarchy he was a republican, and under a
+Republic he extolled monarchical institutions.  He wished to be singular,
+and to be rich.  Among so many shocking originals, however, he was not
+distinguished; and among so many philosophical marauders, he had no
+opportunity to pillage above two millions of livres.  This friend of
+liberty is now one of the most despotic Senators, and this lover of
+equality never answers when spoken to, if not addressed as "His
+Excellency," or "Monseigneur."
+
+Boissy d' Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the
+Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was
+chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions, and
+in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that dishonoured
+the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution.  A member afterwards
+of the National Convention, he was sent in mission to Lyons, where,
+instead of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he inflicted new ones.
+When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he
+pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in
+his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take
+it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First!  He pronounced
+the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat.  "The soul,"
+said he, "was moved and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the
+Supreme Being with philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;" and he
+signed the removal of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to
+humanity!  In September, 1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to
+transportation by the Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made
+him first a tribune and afterwards a Senator.
+
+Boissy d' Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
+neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself,
+he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and
+friends.
+
+Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
+bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the
+same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
+attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a
+motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France.  He
+seconded another motion of Bonaparte's prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a
+corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
+Princes.  At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on
+having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and
+boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary
+justice, those who had escaped the laws.  After meeting with well-merited
+contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a
+handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of
+Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of
+his Senate.  Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense
+when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
+him by Nature.  Without education, as well as without parts, he for a
+long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
+eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent.  His ideas of liberty
+are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
+arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
+because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.
+
+Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
+commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
+four are slaves.
+
+Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
+liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal.  The former
+is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
+sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist. A
+mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
+enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
+caused to be massacred or guillotined.  When, as a Minister of Justice,
+he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
+affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices,
+whose nature had not much of tenderness.  As a member of the first
+assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the
+Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press. "The
+laws, you say" (exclaimed he, in the Council), "punish libellers; so they
+do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors
+unbolted?  Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a
+citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press,
+you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think.
+The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain.  Were you,
+therefore, determined to decree the motion for this dangerous and
+impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that conviction of having
+written a libel carries with it capital punishment, and that a label be
+fastened on the breast of the libeller, when carried to execution, with
+this inscription: 'A social murderer,' or 'A murderer of characters!'"
+
+Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all
+political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after
+approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them,
+or betrayed them.  Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at
+Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the
+Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court.  Immoral and
+unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only
+equalled by his perversity and cruelty.  It was he who, on the 10th of
+August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of
+their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act. After
+he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties
+and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a
+Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and
+afterwards as a Senator.  His own and only daughter died in a
+miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural
+parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his
+father's baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to
+marry.
+
+With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one
+period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the
+preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as
+well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a
+constitutional Government.  At another time he wrote that, as it was
+impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness
+of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the
+liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one
+wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to
+preserve.  To show his indifference about his own character, as well as
+about the opinion of the public, these opposite declarations were
+inserted in one of our daily papers, and both were signed "Roederer."
+
+In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand
+livres--and he now possesses national property purchased for seven
+millions of livres--and he avows himself to be worth three millions more
+in money placed in our public funds.  He often says, laughingly, that he
+is under great obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted in
+one day all his debts.  All his creditors, after being denounced for
+their aristocracy, were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.
+
+Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have
+had the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most
+affected, silly, and disgusting.  His wrinkled face, and effeminate and
+childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his
+confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear
+such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and
+enervated person, that I have frequently been ready to laugh at him in
+his face, had not indignation silenced all other feeling.  A
+light-coloured wig covers a bald head; his cheeks and eyelids are
+painted, and his teeth false; and I have seen a woman faint away from the
+effect of his breath, notwithstanding that he infects with his musk and
+perfumes a whole house only with his presence.  When on the ground floor
+you may smell him in the attic.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The reciprocal jealousy and even interest of Austria, France,
+and Russia have hitherto prevented the tottering Turkish Empire from
+being partitioned, like Poland, or seized, like Italy; to serve as
+indemnities, like the German empire; or to be shared, as reward to the
+allies, like the Empire of Mysore.
+
+When we consider the anarchy that prevails, both in the Government and
+among the subjects, as well in the capital as in the provinces of the
+Ottoman Porte; when we reflect on the mutiny and cowardice of its armies
+and navy, the ignorance and incapacity of its officers and military and
+naval commanders, it is surprising, indeed, as I have heard Talleyrand
+often declare, that more foreign political intrigues should be carried on
+at Constantinople alone than in all other capitals of Europe taken
+together.  These intrigues, however, instead of doing honour to the,
+sagacity and patriotism of the members of the Divan, expose only their
+corruption and imbecility; and, instead of indicating a dread of the
+strength of the Sublime Sultan, show a knowledge of his weakness, of
+which the gold of the most wealthy, and the craft of the most subtle, by
+turns are striving to profit.
+
+Beyond a doubt the enmity of the Ottoman Porte can do more mischief than
+its friendship can do service.  Its neutrality is always useful, while
+its alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no
+advantage.  It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than
+from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe.
+The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or
+nugatory in this assertion.
+
+As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in
+1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to
+invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion
+in favour of this country.  Our Ambassador in Turkey at that time, Comte
+de Choiseul-Gouffier, though an admirer of the Revolution, was not a
+republican, and, therefore, secretly counteracted what he officially
+seemed to wish to effect.  The Imperial Court succeeded, therefore, in
+establishing a neutrality of the Ottoman Porte, but Comte de Choiseul was
+proscribed by the Convention.  As academician, he was, however, at St.
+Petersburg, liberally recompensed by Catherine II. for the services the
+Ambassador had performed at Constantinople.
+
+In May, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety determined to expedite
+another embassy to the Grand. Seignior, at the head of which was the
+famous intriguer, De Semonville, whose revolutionary diplomacy had,
+within three years, alarmed the Courts of Madrid, Naples, and Turin, as
+well as the republican Government of Genoa.  His career towards Turkey
+was stopped in the Grisons Republic, on the 25th of July following, where
+he, with sixteen other persons of his suite, was arrested, and sent a
+prisoner, first to Milan, and afterwards to Mantua.  He carried with him
+presents of immense value, which were all seized by the Austrians.  Among
+them were four superb coaches, highly finished, varnished, and gilt; what
+is iron or brass in common carriages was here gold or silver-gilt.  Two
+large chests were filled with stuff of gold brocade, India gold muslins,
+and shawls and laces of very great value.  Eighty thousand louis d'or in
+ready money; a service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly
+belonged to the Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and
+brilliants, the intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight
+millions of livres--and a great number of jewels; among others, the crown
+diamond, called here the Regents', and in your country the Pitt Diamond,
+fell, with other riches, into the hands of the captors. Notwithstanding
+this loss and this disappointment, we contrived in vain to purchase the
+hostility of the Turks against our enemies, though with the sacrifice of
+no less a sum (according to the report of Saint Just, in June, 1794,)
+than seventy millions of livres:  These official statements prove the
+means which our so often extolled economical and moral republican
+Governments have employed in their negotiations.
+
+After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the Sultan
+became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
+friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war. The
+preliminaries of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were,
+however, soon followed with a renewal of our former friendly intercourse
+with the Ottoman Porte. The voyage of Sebastiani into Egypt and Syria, in
+the autumn of 1802, showed that our tenderness for the inhabitants of
+these countries had not diminished, and that we soon intended to bestow
+on them new hugs of fraternity.  Your pretensions to Malta impeded our
+prospects in the East, and your obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so
+well planned schemes of encroachments.  It was then that Bonaparte first
+selected for his representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune,
+commonly called by Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of
+military merit, an intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time
+of peace when seated in the Council chamber.
+
+This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married
+to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from
+starving, for he was as vicious as idle.  The money he gained when he
+chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among
+prostitutes.  To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest
+means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of
+types and of paper.
+
+In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an
+acceptable associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the
+Orleans faction, bought him a printing-office, and he printed the so
+dreadfully well-known journal, called 'L'Amie du Peuple'.  From the
+principles of this atrocious paper, and from those of his sanguinary
+patron, he formed his own political creed.  He distinguished himself
+frequently at the clubs of the Cordeliers, and of the Jacobins, by his
+extravagant motions, and by provoking laws of proscription against a
+wealth he did not possess, and against a rank he would have dishonoured,
+but did not see without envy.  On the 30th of June, 1791, he said, in the
+former of these clubs:
+
+"We hear everywhere complaints of poverty; were not our eyes so often
+disgusted with the sight of unnatural riches, our hearts would not so
+often be shocked at the unnatural sufferings of humanity.  The blessings
+of our Revolution will never be felt by the world, until we in France are
+on a level, with regard to rank as well as to fortune.  I, for my part,
+know too well the dignity of human nature ever to bow to a superior; but,
+brothers and friends, it is not enough that we are all politically equal,
+we must also be all equally rich or equally poor--we must either all
+strive to become men of property, or reduce men of property to become
+sans-culottes.  Believe me, the aristocracy of property is more dangerous
+than the aristocracy of prerogative or fanaticism, because it is more
+common.  Here is a list sent to 'L' Amie du People', but of which
+prudence yet prohibits the publication.  It contains the names of all the
+men of property of Paris, and of the Department of the Seine, the amount
+of their fortunes, and a proposal how to reduce and divide it among our
+patriots.  Of its great utility in the moment when we have been striking
+our grand blows, nobody dares doubt; I, therefore, move that a brotherly
+letter be sent to every society of our brothers and friends in the
+provinces, inviting each of them to compose one of similar contents and
+of similar tendency, in their own districts, with what remarks they think
+proper to affix, and to forward them to us, to be deposited, in the
+mother club, after taking copies of them for the archives of their own
+society."
+
+His motion was decreed.
+
+Two days afterwards, he again ascended the tribune.  "You approved," said
+he, "of the measures I lately proposed against the aristocracy of
+property; I will now tell you of another aristocracy which we must also
+crush--I mean that of religion, and of the clergy.  Their supports are
+folly, cowardice, and ignorance.  All priests are to be proscribed as
+criminals, and despised as impostors or idiots; and all altars must be
+reduced to dust as unnecessary.  To prepare the public mind for such
+events, we must enlighten it; which can only be done by disseminating
+extracts from 'L' Amie du People', and other philosophical publications.
+I have here some ballads of my own composition, which have been sung in
+my quarter; where all superstitious persons have already trembled, and
+all fanatics are raving.  If you think proper, I will, for a mere trifle,
+print twenty thousand copies of them, to be distributed and disseminated
+gratis all over France."
+
+After some discussion, the treasurer of the club was ordered to advance
+Citizen Brune the sum required, and the secretary to transmit the ballads
+to the fraternal societies in the provinces.
+
+Brune put on his first regimentals as an aide-decamp to General Santerre
+in December, 1792, after having given proofs of his military prowess the
+preceding September, in the massacre of the prisoners in the Abbey.  In
+1793 he was appointed a colonel in the revolutionary army, which, during
+the Reign of Terror, laid waste the departments of the Gironde, where he
+was often seen commanding his corps, with a human head fixed on his
+sword.  On the day when he entered Bordeaux with his troops, a new-born
+child occupied the same place, to the great horror of the inhabitants.
+During this brilliant expedition he laid the first foundation of his
+present fortune, having pillaged in a most unmerciful manner, and
+arrested or shot every suspected person who could not, or would not,
+exchange property for life.  On his return to Paris, his patriotism was
+recompensed with a commission of a general of brigade.  On the death of
+Robespierre, he was arrested as a terrorist, but, after some months'
+imprisonment, again released.
+
+In October, 1795, he assisted Napoleon Bonaparte in the massacre of the
+Parisians, and obtained for it, from the director Barras, the rank of a
+general of division.  Though occupying, in time of war, such a high
+military rank, he had hitherto never seen an enemy, or witnessed an
+engagement.
+
+After Bonaparte had planned the invasion and pillage of Switzerland,
+Brune was charged to execute this unjust outrage against the law of
+nations.  His capacity to intrigue procured him this distinction, and he
+did honour to the choice of his employers.  You have no doubt read that,
+after lulling the Government of Berne into security by repeated proposals
+of accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops during a
+truce, and obtained by treachery successes which his valour did not
+promise him.  The pillage, robberies, and devastations in Helvetia added
+several more millions to his previously great riches.
+
+It was after his campaign in Holland, during the autumn of 1799, that he
+first began to claim some military glory.  He owed, however, his
+successes to the superior number of his troops, and to the talents of the
+generals and officers serving under him.  Being made a Counsellor of
+State by Bonaparte, he was entrusted with the command of the army against
+the Chouans.  Here he again seduced by his promises, and duped by his
+intrigues, acted infamously--but was successful.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Three months before Brune set out on his embassy to
+Constantinople, Talleyrand and Fouche were collecting together all the
+desperadoes of our Revolution, and all the Italian, Corsican, Greek, and
+Arabian renegadoes and vagabonds in our country, to form him a set of
+attendants agreeable to the real object of his mission.
+
+You know too much of our national character and of my own veracity to
+think it improbable, when I assure you that most of our great men in
+place are as vain as presumptuous, and that sometimes vanity and
+presumption get the better of their discretion and prudence.  What I am
+going to tell you I did not hear myself, but it was reported to me by a
+female friend, as estimable for her virtues as admired for her
+accomplishments.  She is often honoured with invitations to Talleyrand's
+familiar parties, composed chiefly of persons whose fortunes are as
+independent as their principles, who, though not approving the
+Revolution, neither joined its opposers nor opposed its adherents,
+preferring tranquillity and obscurity to agitation and celebrity.  Their
+number is not much above half a dozen, and the Minister calls them the
+only honest people in France with whom he thinks himself safe.
+
+When it was reported here that two hundred persons of Brune's suite had
+embarked at Marseilles and eighty-four at Genoa, and when it was besides
+known that nearly fifty individuals accompanied him in his outset, this
+unusual occurrence caused much conversation and many speculations in all
+our coteries and fashionable circles.  About that time my friend dined
+with Talleyrand, and, by chance, also mentioned this grand embassy,
+observing, at the same time, that it was too much honour done to the
+Ottoman Porte, and too much money thrown away upon splendour, to honour
+such an imbecile and tottering Government.
+
+"How people talk," interrupted Talleyrand, "about what they do not
+comprehend.  Generous as Bonaparte is, he does not throw away his
+expenses; perhaps within twelve months all these renegadoes or
+adventurers, whom you all consider as valets of Brune, will be
+three-tailed Pachas or Beys, leading friends of liberty, who shall have
+gloriously broken their fetters as slaves of a Selim to become the
+subjects of a Napoleon.  The Eastern Empire has, indeed, long expired,
+but it may suddenly be revived."
+
+"Austria and Russia," replied my friend, "would never suffer it, and
+England would sooner ruin her navy and exhaust her Treasury than permit
+such a revolution."
+
+"So they have tried to do," retorted Talleyrand, "to bring about a
+counter revolution in France.  But though only a moment is requisite to
+erect the standard of revolt, ages often are necessary to conquer and
+seize it.  Turkey has long been ripe for a revolution. It wanted only
+chiefs and directors.  In time of war, ten thousand Frenchmen landed in
+the Dardanelles would be masters of Constantinople, and perhaps of the
+Empire.  In time of peace, four hundred bold and well-informed men may
+produce the same effect.  Besides, with some temporary cession of a
+couple of provinces to each of the Imperial Courts, and with the
+temporary present of an island to Great Britain, everything may be
+settled 'pro tempore', and a Joseph Bonaparte be permitted to reign at
+Constantinople, as a Napoleon does at Paris."
+
+That the Minister made use of this language I can take upon me to affirm;
+but whether purposely or unintentionally, whether to give a high opinion
+of his plans or to impose upon his company, I will not and cannot assert.
+
+On the subject of this numerous suite of Brune, Markof is said to have
+obtained several conferences with Talleyrand and several audiences of
+Bonaparte, in which representations, as just as energetic, were made,
+which, however, did not alter the intent of our Government or increase
+the favour of the Russian Ambassador at the Court of St. Cloud.  But it
+proved that our schemes of subversion are suspected, and that our agents
+of overthrow would be watched and their manoeuvres inspected.
+
+Count Italinski, the Russian Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, is one of
+those noblemen who unite rank and fortune, talents and modesty, honour
+and patriotism, wealth and liberality.  His personal character and his
+individual virtues made him, therefore, more esteemed and revered by the
+members of the Divan, than the high station he occupied, and the powerful
+Prince he represented, made him feared or respected.  His warnings had
+created prejudices against Brune which he found difficult to remove. To
+revenge himself in his old way, our Ambassador inserted several
+paragraphs in the Moniteur and in our other papers, in which Count
+Italinski was libelled, and his transactions or views calumniated.
+
+After his first audience with the Grand Seignior, Brune complained
+bitterly, of not having learned the Turkish language, and of being under
+the necessity, therefore, of using interpreters, to whom he ascribed the
+renewed obstacles he encountered in every step he took, while his hotel
+was continually surrounded with spies, and the persons of his suite
+followed everywhere like criminals when they went out.  Even the valuable
+presents he carried with him, amounting in value to twenty-four millions
+of livres--were but indifferently received, the acceptors, seeming to
+suspect the object and the honesty of the donor.
+
+In proportion as our politics became embroiled with those of Russia, the
+post of Brune became of more importance; but the obstacles thrown in his
+way augmented daily, and he was forced to avow that Russia and England
+had greater influence and more credit than the French Republic and its
+chief.  When Bonaparte was proclaimed an Emperor of the French, Brune
+expected that his acknowledgment as such at Constantinople would be a
+mere matter of course and announced officially on the day he presented a
+copy of his new credentials.  Here again he was disappointed, and
+therefore demanded his recall from a place where there was no
+probability, under the present circumstances, of either exciting the
+subjects to revolt, of deluding the Prince into submission, or seducing
+Ministers who, in pocketing his bribes, forgot for what they were given.
+
+It was then that Bonaparte sent Joubert with a letter in his own
+handwriting, to be delivered into the hands of the Grand Seignior
+himself.  This Joubert is a foundling, and, was from his youth destined
+and educated to be one of the secret agents of our secret diplomacy. You
+already, perhaps, have heard that our Government selects yearly a number
+of young foundlings or orphans, whom it causes to be brought up in
+foreign countries at its expense, so as to learn the language as natives
+of the nation, where, when grown up, they are chiefly to be employed.
+Joubert had been educated under the inspection of our consuls at Smyrna,
+and, when he assumes the dress of a Turk, from his accent and manners
+even the Mussulmans mistake him for one of their own creed and of their
+country.  He was introduced to Bonaparte in 1797, and accompanied him to
+Egypt, where his services were of the greatest utility to the army.  He
+is now a kind of undersecretary in the office of our secret diplomacy,
+and a member of the Legion of Honour.  Should ever Joseph Bonaparte be an
+Emperor or Sultan of the East, Joubert will certainly be his Grand
+Vizier.  There is another Joubert (with whom you must not confound him),
+who was; also a kind of Dragoman at Constantinople some years ago, and
+who is still somewhere on a secret mission in the East Indies.
+
+Joubert's arrival at Constantinople excited both curiosity among the
+people and suspicion among the Ministry.  There is no example in the
+Ottoman history of a chief of a Christian nation having written to the
+Sultan by a private messenger, or of His Highness having condescended to
+receive the letter from the bearer, or to converse with him.  The Grand
+Vizier demanded a copy of Bonaparte's letter, before an audience could be
+granted.  This was refused by Joubert; and as Brune threatened to quit
+the capital of Turkey if any longer delay were experienced, the letter
+was delivered in a garden near Constantinople, where the Sultan met
+Bonaparte's agent, as if by chance, who, it seems, lost all courage and
+presence of mind, and did not utter four words, to which no answer was
+given.
+
+This impertinent intrigue, and this novel diplomacy, therefore, totally
+miscarried, to the great shame and greater disappointment of the schemers
+and contrivers.  I must, however, do Talleyrand the justice to say that
+he never approved of it, and even foretold the issue to his intimate
+friends.  It was entirely the whim and invention of Bonaparte himself,
+upon a suggestion of Brune, who was far from being so well acquainted
+with the spirit and policy of the Divan as he had been with the genius
+and plots of Jacobinism.  Not rebuked, however, Joubert was ordered away
+a second time with a second letter, and, after an absence of four months,
+returned again as he went, less satisfied with the second than with his
+first journey.
+
+In these trips to Turkey, he had always for travelling companions some of
+our emissaries to Austria, Hungary, and in particular to Servia, where
+the insurgents were assisted by our councils, and even guided by some of
+our officers.  The principal aide-de-camp of Czerni George, the Servian
+chieftain, is one Saint Martin, formerly a captain in our artillery,
+afterwards an officer of engineers in the Russian service, and finally a
+volunteer in the army of Conde.  He and three other officers of artillery
+were, under fictitious names, sent by our Government, during the spring
+of last year, to the camp of the insurgents.  They pretended to be of the
+Grecian religion, and formerly Russian officers, and were immediately
+employed.  Saint Martin has gained great influence over Czerni George,
+and directs both his political councils and military operations.  Besides
+the individuals left behind by Joubert; it is said that upwards of one
+hundred persons of Brune's suite have been ordered for the same
+destination.  You see how great the activity of our Government is, and
+that nothing is thought unworthy of its vigilance or its machinations. In
+the staff of Paswan Oglou, six of my countrymen have been serving ever
+since 1796, always in the pay of our Government.
+
+It was much against the inclination and interest of our Emperor that his
+Ambassador at Constantinople should leave the field of battle there to
+the representatives of Russia, Austria, and England.  But his dignity was
+at stake.  After many threats to deprive the Sultan of the honour of his
+presence, and even after setting out once for some leagues on his return,
+Brune, observing that these marches and countermarches excited more mirth
+than terror, at last fixed a day, when, finally, either Bonaparte must be
+acknowledged by the Divan as an Emperor of the French, or his departure
+would take place.  On that day he, indeed, began his retreat, but, under
+different pretexts, be again stopped, sent couriers to his secretaries,
+waited for their return, and sent new couriers again,--but all in vain,
+the Divan continued refractory.
+
+At his first audience after his return, the reception Bonaparte gave him
+was not very cordial.  He demanded active employment, in case of a
+continental war, either in Italy or in Germany, but received neither.
+When our army of England was already on its march towards the Rhine, and
+Bonaparte returned here, Brune was ordered to take command on the coast,
+and to organize there an army of observation, destined to succour Holland
+in case of an invasion, or to invade England should a favourable occasion
+present itself.  The fact is, he was charged to intrigue rather than to
+fight; and were Napoleon able to force upon Austria another Peace of
+Luneville, Brune would probably be the plenipotentiary that would ask
+your acceptance of another Peace of Amiens.  It is here a general belief
+that his present command signifies another pacific overture from
+Bonaparte before your Parliament meets, or, at least, before the New
+Year.  Remember that our hero is more to be dreaded as a Philip than as
+an Alexander.
+
+General Brune has bought landed property for nine millions of livres--and
+has, in different funds, placed ready money to the same amount.  His own
+and his wife's diamonds are valued by him at three millions; and when he
+has any parties to dinner, he exhibits them with great complaisance as
+presents forced upon him during his campaign in Switzerland and Holland,
+for the protection he gave the inhabitants.  He is now so vain of his
+wealth and proud of his rank, that he not only disregards all former
+acquaintances, but denies his own brothers and sisters,--telling them
+frankly that the Fieldmarshal Brune can have no shoemaker for a brother,
+nor a sister married to a chandler; that he knows of no parents, and of
+no relatives, being the maker of his own fortune, and of what he is; that
+his children will look no further back for ancestry than their father.
+One of his first cousins, a postilion, who insisted, rather obstinately,
+on his family alliance, was recommended by Brune to his friend Fouche,
+who sent him on a voyage of discovery to Cayenne, from which he probably
+will not return very soon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XL.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Madame de C------n is now one of our most fashionable ladies.
+Once in the week she has a grand tea-party; once in a fortnight a grand
+dinner; and once in the month a grand ball.  Foreign gentlemen are
+particularly well received at her house, which, of course, is much
+frequented by them.  As you intend to visit this country after a peace,
+it may be of some service to you not to be unacquainted with the portrait
+of a lady whose invitation to see the original you may depend upon the
+day after your arrival.
+
+Madame de C----n is the widow of the great and useless traveller, Comte
+de C----n, to whom his relatives pretend that she was never married. Upon
+his death-bed he acknowledged her, however, for his wife, and left her
+mistress of a fortune of three hundred thousand livres a year. The first
+four years of her widowhood she passed in lawsuits before the tribunals,
+where the plaintiffs could not prove that she was unmarried, nor she
+herself that she was married.  But Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, for a small
+douceur, speaking in her favour, the consciences of the juries, and the
+understanding of the judges, were all convinced at once that she had been
+the lawful wife, and was the lawful heiress, of Comte de C----n, who had
+no children, or nearer relatives than third cousins.
+
+Comte de C----n was travelling in the East Indies when the Revolution
+broke out.  His occupation there was a very innocent one; he drew
+countenances, being one of the most enthusiastic sectaries of Lavater,
+and modestly called himself the first physiognomist in the world. Indeed,
+he had been at least the most laborious one; for he left behind him a
+collection of six thousand two hundred portraits, drawn by himself in the
+four quarters of the world, during a period of thirty years.
+
+He never engaged a servant, nor dealt with a tradesman, whose physiognomy
+had not been examined by him.  In his travels he preferred the worst
+accommodation in a house where he approved of the countenance of the
+host, to the best where the traits or lines of the landlord's face were
+irregular, or did not coincide with his ideas of physiognomical
+propriety.  The cut of a face, its expression, the length of the nose,
+the width or smallness of the mouth, the form of the eyelids or of the
+ears, the colour or thickness of the hair, with the shape and tout
+ensemble of the head, were always minutely considered and discussed
+before he entered into any agreement, on any subject, with any individual
+whatever.  Whatever recommendations, or whatever attestations were
+produced, if they did not correspond with his own physiognomical remarks
+and calculations, they were disregarded; while a person whose physiognomy
+pleased him required no other introduction to obtain his confidence.
+Whether he thought himself wiser than his forefathers, he certainly did
+not grow richer than they were.  Charlatans who imposed upon his
+credulity and impostors who flattered his mania, servants who robbed him
+and mistresses who deceived him, proved that if his knowledge of
+physiognomy was great, it was by no means infallible.  At his death, of
+the fortune left him by his parents only the half remained.
+
+His friends often amused themselves at the expense of his foibles. When
+he prepared for a journey to the East, one of them recommended him a
+servant, upon whose fidelity he could depend.  After examining with
+minute scrupulosity the head of the person, he wrote: "My friend, I
+accept your valuable present.  From calculations, which never deceive me,
+Manville (the servant's name) possesses, with the fidelity of a dog, the
+intrepidity of the lion.  Chastity itself is painted on his front,
+modesty in his looks, temperance on his cheek, and his mouth and nose
+bespeak honesty itself."  Shortly after the Count had landed at
+Pondicherry, Mauville, who was a girl, died, in a condition which showed
+that chastity had not been the divinity to whom she had chiefly
+sacrificed.  In her trunk were found several trinkets belonging to her
+master, which she honestly had appropriated to herself.  His
+miscalculation on this subject the Count could not but avow; he added,
+however, that it was the entire fault of his friend, who had duped him
+with regard to the sex.
+
+Madame de C----n was, on account of her physiognomy, purchased by her
+late husband, then travelling in Turkey, from a merchant of Circassian
+slaves, when she was under seven years of age, and sent for her education
+to a relative of the Count, an Abbess of a convent in Languedoc.  On his
+return from Turkey, some years afterwards, he took her under his own
+care, and she accompanied him all over Asia, and returned first to France
+in 1796, where her husband's name was upon the list of emigrants, though
+he had not been in Europe for ten years before the Revolution.
+
+However, by some pecuniary arrangements with Barras, he recovered his
+property, which he did not long enjoy, for he died in 1798.  The suitors
+of Madame de C----n, mistress of a large fortune, with some remnants of
+beauty and elegance of manners, have been numerous, and among them
+several Senators and generals, and even the Minister Chaptal.  But she
+has politely declined all their offers, preferring her liberty and the
+undisturbed right of following her own inclination to the inconvenient
+ties of Hymen.  A gentleman, whom she calls, and who passes for, her
+brother, Chevalier de M de T----, a Knight of Malta, assists her in doing
+the honours of her house, and is considered as her favourite lover;
+though report and the scandalous chronicle say that she bestows her
+favours on every person who wishes to bestow on her his name, and that,
+therefore, her gallants are at least as numerous as her suitors.
+
+Such is the true statement of the past, as well as the present, with
+regard to Madame de C----n.  She relates, however, a different story. She
+says that she is the daughter of the Marquis de M de T-----, of a
+Languedoc family; that she sailed, when a child, with her mother in a
+felucca from Nice to Malta, there to visit her brother; was captured by
+an Algerine pilot, separated from her mother, and carried to
+Constantinople by a merchant of slaves; there she was purchased by Comte
+de C----n, who restored her to her family, and whom, therefore,
+notwithstanding the difference of their ages, she married from gratitude.
+This pretty, romantic story is ordered in our Court circles to be
+officially believed; and, of course, is believed by nobody, not even by
+the Emperor and Empress themselves, who would not give her the place of a
+lady-in-waiting, though her request was accompanied with a valuable
+diamond to the latter.  The present was kept, but the offer declined.
+
+All the members of the Bonaparte family, female as well as male, honour
+her house with their visits and with the acceptance of her invitations;
+and it is, therefore, among our fashionables, the 'haut ton' to be of the
+society and circle of Madame de C----n.
+
+Last February, Madame de P----t (the wife of Comte de P----t, a relative,
+by her husband's side, of Madame de C----n, and who by the Revolution
+lost all their property, and now live with her as companions) was brought
+to bed of a son; the child was baptized by the Cardinal de Belloy, and
+Madame Joseph and Prince Louis Bonaparte stood sponsors. This occurrence
+was celebrated with great pomp, and a fete was given to nearly one
+hundred and fifty per sons of both sexes,--as usual, a mixture of
+ci-devant nobles and of ci-devant sans-culottes; of rank and meanness; of
+upstart wealth and beggared dignity.
+
+What that day struck me most was the audacity of the Senator Villetard in
+teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with his impertinent
+conversation and affected piety.  This Villetard was, before the
+Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789 by the mob from
+the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined for theft.  In 1791 his
+patriotism was so well known in the Department of Yonne, that he was
+deputed by the Jacobins there to the Jacobins of the capital with an
+address, encouraging and advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in
+1792 he was chosen a member of the National Convention, where the most
+sanguinary and most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon
+him in the number of their adherents.
+
+In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph Bonaparte at
+Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and
+liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the
+Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna. In
+the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the
+littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind.  The wooden
+image of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her,
+together with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic
+faithful have for ages believed to have been used by her, were presented
+by him to the Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a
+horribly blasphemous letter.  He passed the next night, after he had
+perpetrated this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of the
+Holy Virgin; and, on the next morning, placed one of them, naked, on the
+pedestal where the statue of the Virgin had formerly stood, and ordered
+all the devotees at Loretto, and two leagues round, to prostrate
+themselves before her.  This shocking command occasioned the premature
+death of fifteen ladies, two of whom, who were nuns, died on the spot on
+beholding the horrid outrage; and many more were deprived of their
+reason.  How barbarously unfeeling must that wretch be who, in bereaving
+the religious, the pious, and the conscientious of their consolation and
+hope, adds the tormenting reproach of apostasy, by forcing virtue upon
+its knees to bow before what it knows to be guilt and infamy.
+
+A traitor to his associates as to his God, it was he who, in November,
+1799, presented at St. Cloud the decree which excluded all those who
+opposed Bonaparte's authority from the Council of Five Hundred, and
+appointed the two committees which made him a First Consul.  In reward
+for this act of treachery, he was nominated to a place in the
+Conservative Senate.  He has now ranked himself among our modern saints,
+goes regularly to Mass and confesses; has made a brother of his, who was
+a drummer, an Abbe; and his assiduity about the Cardinal was probably
+with a view to obtain advancement for this edifying priest.
+
+The Cardinal de Belloy is now ninety-six years of age, being born in
+1709, and has been a Bishop for fifty-three years, but, during the
+Revolution, was proscribed, with all other prelates.  He remained,
+however, in France, where his age saved him from the guillotine, but not
+from being reduced to the greatest want.  A descendant of a noble family,
+and possessing an unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one
+of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him
+an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from
+Rome.  But he is now in his second childhood, entirely directed by his
+grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and
+absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte.  An innocent instrument in their hands,
+of those impious compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the
+Empress, he did not, perhaps, even understand the meaning.  From such a
+man the vile and artful Villetard might extort any promise.  I observed,
+however, with pleasure, that he was watched by the grand vicar, Malaret,
+who seldom loses sight of His Eminence.
+
+These two so opposite characters--I mean De Belloy and Villetard--are
+already speaking evidences of the composition of the society at Madame de
+C----n's.  But I will tell you something still more striking.  This lady
+is famous for her elegant services of plate, as much as for her delicate
+taste in entertaining her parties.  After the supper on this night,
+eleven silver and four gold plates, besides numerous silver and gold
+spoons, forks, etc., were missed.  She informed Fouche of her loss, who
+had her house surrounded by spies, with orders not to let any servant
+pass without undergoing a strict search.  The first gentleman who called
+for his carriage was His Excellency the Counsellor of State and grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, Treilhard.  His servants were stopped
+and the cause explained.  They willingly, and against the protest of
+their master, suffered themselves to be searched.  Nothing was found upon
+them; but the police agents, observing the full-dress hat of their master
+rather bulky under his arm, took the liberty to look into it, where they
+found one of Madame de C----n's gold plates and two of her spoons.  His
+Excellency immediately ordered his servants to be arrested, for having
+concealed their theft there.  Fouche, however, when called out, advised
+his friend to forgive them for misplacing them, as the less said on the
+subject the better.  When Madame de C----n heard of this discovery, she
+asked Fouche to recall his order or to alter it.  "A repetition of such
+misplacings in the hats or in the pockets of the masters," said she,
+"would injure the reputation of my house and company."  She never
+recovered the remainder of her loss, and that she might not be exposed in
+future to the same occurrences, she bought two services of china the
+following day, to be used when she had mixed society.
+
+Treilhard had, before the Revolution, the reputation of being an honest
+man and an able advocate; but has since joined the criminals of all
+factions, being an accomplice in their guilt and a sharer of their
+spoils.  In the convention, he voted for the death of Louis XVI. and
+pursued without mercy the unfortunate Marie Antoinette to the scaffold.
+During his missions in the departments, wherever he went the guillotine
+was erected and blood flowed in streams.  He was, nevertheless, accused
+by Robespierre of moderatism.  At Lille, in 1797, and at Rastadt, in
+1798, he negotiated as a plenipotentiary with the representatives of
+Princes, and in 1799 corresponded as a director with Emperors and Kings,
+to whom he wrote as his great and dear friends.  He is now a Counsellor
+of State, in the section of legislation, and enjoys a fortune of several
+millions of livres, arising from estates in the country, and from leases
+in the capital.  As this accident at Madame de C----n's soon became
+public, his friends gave out that he had of late been exceedingly absent,
+and, from absence of mind, puts everything he can lay hold of into his
+pocket.  He is not a favourite with Madame Bonaparte, and she asked her
+husband to dismiss and disgrace him for an act so disgraceful to a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, but was answered, "Were I to turn away
+all the thieves and rogues that encompass me I should soon cease to
+reign.  I despise them, but I must employ them."
+
+It is whispered that the police have discovered another of Madame de C
+n's lost gold plates at a pawnbroker's, where it had been pledged by the
+wife of another Counsellor of State, Francois de Nantes.
+
+This I give you merely as a report!  though the fact is, that Madame
+Francois is very fond of gambling, but very unfortunate; and she, with
+other of our fashionable ladies, has more than once resorted to her
+charms for the payment of her gambling debts.
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since my return here, I have never neglected to present myself
+before our Sovereign, on his days of grand reviews and grand diplomatic
+audiences.  I never saw him more condescending, more agreeable, or, at
+least, less offensive, than on the day of his last levee, before he set
+out to be inaugurated a King of Italy; nor worse tempered, more petulant,
+agitated, abrupt, and rude than at his first grand audience after his
+arrival from Milan, when this ceremony had been performed.  I am not the
+only one who has made this remark; he did not disguise either his good or
+ill-humour; and it was only requisite to have eyes and ears to see and be
+disgusted at the difference of behaviour.
+
+I have heard a female friend of Madame Bonaparte explain, in part, the
+cause of this alteration.  Just before he set out for Italy, the
+agreeable news of the success of the first Rochefort squadron in the West
+Indies, and the escape of our Toulon fleet from the vigilance of your
+Lord Nelson, highly elevated his spirits, as it was the first naval
+enterprise of any consequence since his reign.  I am certain that one
+grand naval victory would flatter his vanity and ambition more than all
+the glory of one of his most brilliant Continental campaigns.  He had
+also, at that time, great expectations that another negotiation with
+Russia would keep the Continent submissive under his dictature, until he
+should find an opportunity of crushing your power.  You may be sure that
+he had no small hopes of striking a blow in your country, after the
+junction of our fleet with the Spanish, not by any engagement between our
+Brest fleet and your Channel fleet, but under a supposition that you
+would detach squadrons to the East and West Indies in search of the
+combined fleet, which, by an unexpected return, according to orders,
+would have then left us masters of the Channel, and, if joined with the
+Batavian fleet, perhaps even of the North Sea.  By the incomprehensible
+activity of Lord Nelson, and by the defeat (or as we call it here, the
+negative victory) of Villeneuve and Gravina, all this first prospect had
+vanished.  Our vengeance against a nation of shopkeepers we were not only
+under the necessity of postponing, but, from the unpolite threats and
+treaties of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg with those of Vienna and St.
+James, we were on the eve of a Continental war, and our gunboats, instead
+of being useful in carrying an army to the destruction of the tyrants of
+the seas, were burdensome, as an army was necessary to guard them, and to
+prevent these tyrants from capturing or destroying them.  Such changes,
+in so short a period of time as three months, might irritate a temper
+less patient than that of Napoleon the First.
+
+At his grand audience here, even after the army, of England had moved
+towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should, therefore,
+have been made up, he was almost insupportable.  The low bows, and the
+still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador, the Marquis da
+Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon Ambassador, Count von
+Buneau, was addressed in a language that no well-bred master ever uses in
+speaking to a menial servant.  He did not cast a look, or utter a word,
+that was not an insult to the audience and a disgrace to his rank. I
+never before saw him vent his rage and disappointment so
+indiscriminately.  We were, indeed (if I may use the term), humbled and
+trampled upon en masse.  Some he put out of countenance by staring
+angrily at them; others he shocked by his hoarse voice and harsh words;
+and all--all of us--were afraid, in our turn, of experiencing something
+worse than our neighbours.  I observed more than one Minister, and more
+than one general, change colour, and even perspire, at His Majesty's
+approach.
+
+I believe the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here will all agree
+with me that, at a future congress, the restoration of the ancient and
+becoming etiquette of the Kings of France would be as desirable a point
+to demand from the Emperor of the French as the restoration of the
+balance of power.
+
+Before his army of England quitted its old quarters on the coast, the
+officers and men often felt the effects of his ungovernable temper. When
+several regiments of grenadiers, of the division of Oudinot, were
+defiling before him on the 25th of last month, he frequently and
+severely, though without cause, reprobated their manner of marching, and
+once rode up to Captain Fournois, pushed him forwards with the point of a
+small cane, calling out, "Sacre Dieu!  Advance; you walk like a turkey."
+In the first moment of indignation, the captain, striking at the cane
+with his sword, made a push, or a gesture, as if threatening the person
+of Bonaparte, who called out to his aide-de-camp, Savary:
+
+"Disarm the villain, and arrest him!"
+
+"It is unnecessary," the captain replied, "I have served a tyrant, and
+merit my fate!"  So saying, he passed his sword through his heart.
+
+His whole company stopped instantly, as at a word of command, and a
+general murmur was heard.
+
+"Lay down your arms, and march out of the file instantly," commanded
+Bonaparte, "or you shall be cut down for your mutiny by my guides."
+
+They hesitated for a moment, but the guides advancing to surround them,
+they obeyed, and were disarmed.  On the following afternoon, by a special
+military commission, each tenth man was condemned to be shot; but
+Bonaparte pardoned them upon condition of serving for life in the
+colonies; and the whole company was ordered to the colonial depots. The
+widow and five children of Captain Fournois the next morning threw
+themselves at the Emperor's feet, presenting a petition, in which they
+stated that the pay of the captain had been their only support.
+
+"Well," replied Bonaparte to the kneeling petitioners, "Fournois was both
+a fool and a traitor; but, nevertheless, I will take care of you."
+Indeed, they have been so well taken care of that nobody knows what has
+become of them.
+
+I am almost certain that I am not telling you what you did not know
+beforehand in informing you that the spirit of our troops is greatly
+different from that of the Germans, and even from that of your own
+country.  Every, one of our soldiers would prefer being shot to being
+beaten or caned.  Flogging, with us, is out of the question.  It may,
+perhaps, be national vanity, but I am doubtful whether any other army is,
+or can be, governed, with regard to discipline, in a less violent and
+more delicate manner, and, nevertheless, be kept in subordination, and
+perform the most brilliant exploits.  Remember, I speak of our spirit of
+subordination and discipline, and not of our character as citizens, as
+patriots, or as subjects.  I have often hinted it, but I believe I have
+not explained myself so fully before; but my firm opinion and persuasion
+is that, with regard to our loyalty, our duty, and our moral and
+political principles, another equally inconsistent and despicable people
+does not exist in the universe.
+
+The condition of the slave is certainly in itself that of vileness; but
+is that slave a vile being who, for a blow, pierces his bosom because he
+is unable to avenge it?  And what epithet can be given him who braves
+voluntarily a death seemingly certain, not from the love of his country,
+but from a principle of honour, almost incompatible with the dishonour of
+bondage?
+
+During the siege of Yorktown, in America, we had, during one night,
+erected a battery, with intent to blow up a place which, according to the
+report of our spies, was your magazine of ammunition, etc.  We had not
+time to finish it before daylight; but one loaded twenty-four pounder was
+mounted, and our cannoneer, the moment he was about to fire it, was
+killed.  Six more of our men, in the same attempt, experienced the same
+fate.  My regiment constituted the advanced guard nearest to the spot,
+and La Fayette brought me the order from the commander-in-chief to engage
+some of my men upon that desperate undertaking.  I spoke to them, and two
+advanced, but were both instantly shot by your sharpshooters.  I then
+looked at my grenadiers, without uttering anything, when, to my sorrow,
+one of my best and most orderly men advanced, saying, "My colonel, permit
+me to try my fortune!"  I assented, and he went coldly amidst hundreds of
+bullets whistling around his ears, set fire to the cannon, which blew up
+a depot of powder, as was expected, and in the confusion returned unhurt.
+La Fayette then presented him with his purse.  "No, monsieur," replied
+he, "money did not make me venture upon such a perilous undertaking."  I
+understood my man, promoted him to a sergeant, and recommended him to
+Rochambeau, who, in some months, procured him the commission of a
+sub-lieutenant.  He is now one of Bonaparte's Field-marshals, and the
+only one of that rank who has no crimes to reproach himself with.  This
+man was the soldier of a despot; but was not his action that of a man of
+honour, which a stanch republican of ancient Rome would have been proud
+of?  Who can explain this contradiction?
+
+This anecdote about Fournois I heard General Savary relate at Madame
+Duchatel's, as a proof of Bonaparte's generosity and clemency, which, he
+affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at Boulogne.  I do not
+suppose this officer to be above thirty years of age, of which he has
+passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses or in watch-houses; but no
+tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or a more abject courtier.  His
+affectation to extol everything that Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is
+at last become so habitual that it is naturalized, and you may mistake
+for sincerity that which is nothing but imposture or flattery. This son
+of a Swiss porter is now one of Bonaparte's adjutants-general, a colonel
+of the Gendarmes d'Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to
+valour or merit, but to abjectness, immorality, and servility.  When an
+aide-de-camp with Bonaparte in Egypt, he served him as a spy on his
+comrades and on the officers of the staff, and was so much detested that,
+near Aboukir, several shots were fired at him in his tent by his own
+countrymen.  He is supposed still to continue the same espionage; and as
+a colonel of the Gendarmes d'Elite, he is charged with the secret
+execution of all proscribed persons or State prisoners, who have been
+secretly condemned,--a commission that a despot gives to a man he trusts,
+but dares not offer to a man he esteems.  He is so well known that the
+instant he enters a society silence follows, and he has the whole
+conversation to himself.  This he is stupid enough to take for a
+compliment, or for a mark of respect, or an acknowledgment of his
+superior parts and intelligence, when, in fact, it is a direct reproach
+with which prudence arms itself against suspected or known dishonesty.
+Besides his wife, he has to support six other women whom he has seduced
+and ruined; and, notwithstanding the numerous opportunities his master
+has procured him of pillaging and enriching himself, he is still much in
+debt; but woe to his creditors were they indiscreet enough to ask for
+their payments!  The Secret Tribunal would soon seize them and transport
+them, or deliver them over to the hands of their debtor, to be shot as
+traitors or conspirators.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I am told that it was the want of pecuniary resources that made
+Bonaparte so ill-tempered on his last levee day.  He would not have come
+here at all, but preceded his army to Strasburg, had his Minister of
+Finances, Gaudin, and his Minister of the Public Treasury, Marbois, been
+able to procure forty-four millions of livres--to pay a part of the
+arrears of the troops; and for the speedy conveyance of ammunition and
+artillery towards the Rhine.
+
+Immediately after his arrival here, Bonaparte sent for the directors of
+the Bank of France, informing them that within twenty-four hours they
+must advance him thirty-six millions of livres--upon the revenue of the
+last quarter of 1808.  The president of the bank, Senator Garrat,
+demanded two hours to lay before the Emperor the situation of the bank,
+that His Majesty might judge what sum it was possible to spare without
+ruining the credit of an establishment hitherto so useful to the commerce
+of the Empire.  To this Bonaparte replied that he was not ignorant of the
+resources, or of the credit of the bank, any more than of its public
+utility; but that the affairs of State suffered from every hour's delay,
+and that, therefore, he insisted upon having the sum demanded even within
+two hours, partly in paper and partly in cash; and were they to show any
+more opposition, he would order the bank and all its effects to be seized
+that moment.  The directors bowed and returned to the bank; whither they
+were followed by four waggons escorted by hussars, and belonging to the
+financial department of the army of England.  In these were placed eight
+millions of livres in cash; and twenty-eight millions in bank-notes were
+delivered to M. Lefevre, the Secretary-General of Marbois, who presented,
+in exchange, Bonaparte's bond and security for the amount, bearing an
+interest of five per cent. yearly.
+
+When this money transaction was known to the public, the alarm became
+general, and long before the hour the bank usually opens the adjoining
+streets were crowded with persons desiring to exchange their notes for
+cash.  During the night the directors had taken care to pay themselves
+for the banknotes in their own possession with silver or gold, and, as
+they expected a run, they ordered all persons to be paid in copper coin,
+as long as any money of this metal remained.  It required a long time to
+count those halfpennies and centimes (five of which make a sou, or
+halfpenny), but the people were not tired with waiting until towards
+three o'clock in the afternoon, when the bank is shut up.  They then
+became so clamorous that a company of gendarmes was placed for protection
+at the entrance of the bank; but, as the tumult increased, the street was
+surrounded by the police guards, and above six hundred individuals, many
+of them women, were carried, under an escort, to different police
+commissaries, and to the prefecture of the police.  There most of them,
+after being examined, were reprimanded and released.  The same night, the
+police spies reported in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, and on
+the Boulevards, that this run on the bank was encouraged, and paid for,
+by English emissaries, some of whom were already taken, and would be
+executed on the next day.  In the morning, however, the streets adjoining
+the bank were still more crowded, and the crowd still more tumultuous,
+because payment was refused for all notes but those of five hundred
+livres.  The activity of the police agents, supported by the gendarmes
+and police soldiers, again restored order, after several hundred persons
+had been again taken up for their mutinous conduct.  Of these many were,
+on the same evening, loaded with chains, and, placed in carts under
+military escort, paraded about near the bank and the Palais Royal; the
+police having, as a measure of safety, under suspicion that they were
+influenced by British gold, condemned them to be transported to Cayenne;
+and the carts set out on the same night for Rochefort, the place of their
+embarkation.
+
+On the following day, not an individual approached the bank, but all
+trade and all payments were at a stand; nobody would sell but for ready
+money, and nobody who had bank-notes would part with cash.  Some Jews and
+money-brokers in the Palais Royal offered cash for these bills, at a
+discount of from ten to twenty per cent.  But these usurers were, in
+their turn, taken up and transported, as agents of Pitt.  An interview
+was then demanded by the directors and principal bankers with the
+Ministers of Finance and of the Public Treasury.  In this conference it
+was settled that, as soon as the two millions of dollars on their way
+from Spain had arrived at Paris, the bank should reassume its payments.
+These dollars Government would lend the bank for three months, and take
+in return its notes, but the bank was, nevertheless, to pay an interest
+of six per cent. during that period.  All the bankers agreed not to press
+unnecessarily for any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the
+credit of the bank even by the individual credit of their own houses.
+
+You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but two
+sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres--and those of five hundred
+livres.  At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of livres--of the
+former, and fifteen millions of livres--of the latter, were in
+circulation; and I have heard a banker assert that the bank had not then
+six millions of livres--in money and bullion, to satisfy the claims of
+its creditors, or to honour its bills.
+
+The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition of
+Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty ever be
+repaired under his despotic government.  Even now, when the bank pays in
+cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten per cent. between
+purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and this mistrust will not
+be lessened hereafter.  You may, perhaps, object that, as long as the
+bank pays, it is absurd for any one possessing its bills to pay dearer
+than with cash, which might so easily be obtained.  This objection would
+stand with regard to your, or any other free country, but here, where no
+payments are made in gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a
+cart to carry away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of
+these metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
+these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our
+Government.  With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction,
+and chastisement follows it as its shadow.
+
+A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St. Martin,
+where he had for years carried on business in the woollen line, went to
+the bank two days after it had begun to pay.  He demanded, and obtained,
+exchange for twenty-four thousand livres--in notes, necessary for him to
+pay what was due by him to his workmen.  The same afternoon six of our
+custom-house officers, accompanied by police agents and gendarmes, paid
+him a domiciliary visit under pretence of searching for English goods.
+Several bales were seized as being of that description, and Debrais was
+carried a prisoner to La Force.  On being examined by Fouche, he offered
+to prove, by the very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that
+they were not English.  The Minister silenced him by saying that
+Government had not only evidence of the contrary, but was convinced that
+he was employed as an English agent to hurt the credit of the bank, and
+therefore, if he did not give up his accomplices or employers, had
+condemned him to transportation.  In vain did his wife and daughters
+petition to Madame Bonaparte; Debrais is now at Rochefort, if not already
+embarked for our colonies.
+
+When he was arrested, a seal, as usual, was put on his house, from which
+his wife and family were turned out, until the police should have time to
+take an inventory of his effects, and had decided on his fate.  When
+Madame Debrais, after much trouble and many pecuniary sacrifices, at last
+obtained permission to have the seals removed, and reenter her house, she
+found that all her plate and more than half her goods and furniture had
+been stolen and carried away.  Upon her complaint of this theft she was
+thrown into prison for not being able to support her complaint with
+proofs, and for attempting to vilify the characters of the agents of our
+Government.  She is still in prison, but her daughters are by her orders
+disposing of the remainder of their parents' property, and intend to join
+their father as soon as their mother has recovered her liberty.
+
+The same tyranny that supports the credit of our bank also keeps up the
+price of our stocks.  Any of our great stockholders who sell out to any
+large amount, if they are unable to account for, or unwilling to declare
+the manner in which they intend to employ, their money, are immediately
+arrested, sometimes transported to the colonies, but more frequently
+exiled into the country, to remain under the inspection of some police
+agent, and are not allowed to return here without the previous permission
+of our Government.  Those of them who are upstarts, and have made their
+fortune since the Revolution by plunder or as contractors, are still more
+severely treated, and are often obliged to renounce part of their
+ill-gotten wealth to save the remainder, or to preserve their liberty or
+lives.  A revisal of their former accounts, or an inspection of their
+past transactions, is a certain and efficacious threat to keep them in
+silent submission, as they all well understand the meaning of them.
+
+Even foreigners, whom our numerous national bankruptcies have not yet
+disheartened, are subject to these measures of rigour or vigour requisite
+to preserve our public credit.  In the autumn of last year a Dutchman of
+the name of Van der Winkle sold out by his agent for three millions of
+livres--in our stock on one day, for which he bought up bills upon
+Hamburg and London.  He lodged in the Hotel des Quatre Nations, Rue
+Grenelle, where the landlord, who is a patriot, introduced some police
+agents into his apartments during his absence.  These broke open all his
+trunks, drawers, and even his writing-desk, and when he entered, seized
+his person, and carried him to the Temple.  By his correspondence it was
+discovered that all this money was to be brought over to England; a
+reason more than sufficient to incur the suspicion of our Government. Van
+der Winkle spoke very little French, and he continued, therefore, in
+confinement three weeks before he was examined, as our secret police had
+not at Paris any of its agents who spoke Dutch.  Carried before Fouche,
+he avowed that the money was destined for England, there to pay for some
+plantations which he desired to purchase in Surinam and Barbice.  His
+interpreter advised him, by the orders of Fouche, to alter his mind, and,
+as he was fond of colonial property, lay out his money in plantations at
+Cayenne, which was in the vicinity of Surinam, and where Government would
+recommend him advantageous purchases.  It was hinted to him, also, that
+this was a particular favour, and a proof of the generosity of our
+Government, as his papers contained many matters that might easily be
+construed to be of a treasonable nature.  After consulting with
+Schimmelpenninck, the Ambassador of his country, he wrote for his wife
+and children, and was seen safe with them to Bordeaux by our police
+agents, who had hired an American vessel to carry them all to Cayenne.
+This certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its
+generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites.  According to the
+boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it
+within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the
+Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century
+of peace can restore to that unfortunate country.  It is reported here
+that each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the
+Continental States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover
+in courtesy to Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to
+make certain douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has
+received from Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte
+two hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our
+military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.
+
+General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who
+have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau,
+without ever serving under him.  Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son
+of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768.  He was a shopman with
+his father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a
+lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first
+battalion of volunteers of the Department of the North.  His first sight
+of an enemy was on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had
+a horse killed under him.  He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of
+Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg.  At the battle of Houdscoote he
+distinguished himself so much as to be promoted to an adjutant general.
+He was wounded at the battle of Fleures, and again at the passage of the
+Rhine, in 1795, under General Moreau.  During 1796 and 1797 he continued
+to serve in Germany, but in 1798 and 1799 he headed a division in
+Switzerland from which Bonaparte recalled him in 1800, to command the
+troops in the capital and its environs.  His address to Bonaparte,
+announcing the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for
+life and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and
+abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more
+self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the fire of
+a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as their
+contents are, procured him the Field-marshal's staff.  Mortier well knew
+his man, and that his cringing in antechambers would be better rewarded
+than his services in the field.  I was not present when Mortier spoke so
+shamefully, but I have heard from persons who witnessed this farce, that
+he had his eyes fixed on the ground the whole time, as if to say, "I
+grant that I speak as a despicable being, and I grant that I am so; but
+what shall I do, tormented as I am by ambition to figure among the great,
+and to riot among the wealthy?  Have compassion on my weakness, or, if
+you have not, I will console myself with the idea that my meanness is
+only of the duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will
+be permanent."
+
+Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle
+Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest
+of her father.  She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage
+of her husband's complaisance to console herself both for his absence and
+infidelities.  When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier
+positively declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and
+the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de
+chambre.  The child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and
+the Empress were the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch.
+Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond
+necklace valued at one hundred and fifty thousand livres.
+
+During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious
+campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven
+millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands.  He is considered by
+other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among
+our fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as a model of connubial
+fidelity--satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only.
+
+There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in
+consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of
+Bonaparte's confidence and attachment.  He was recalled to take the
+command of the artillery of Bonaparte's, household troops the moment
+Pichegru, George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial tide
+had been resolved on.  More resistance against this innovation was at
+that time expected than experienced.
+
+Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in Hanover,
+is a man of a different stamp.  His father was a chair-man, and he was
+born at Paris in 1763.  In 1779 he enlisted in the regiment called La
+Vieille Harine, where the Revolution found him a sergeant.  This regiment
+was then quartered at Toulon, and the emissaries of anarchy and
+licentiousness engaged him as one of their agents.  His activity soon
+destroyed all discipline, and the troops, instead of attending to their
+military duty, followed him to the debates and discussions of the Jacobin
+clubs.  Being arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous,
+scandalous behaviour, an insurrection liberated him, and forced his
+accusers to save their lives by flight.  In April, 1790, he headed the
+banditti who murdered the Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles,
+and who afterwards occasioned the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he
+served under Jourdan, known by the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who
+made him a colonel and his aide-de-camp.  In 1794, he was employed, as a
+general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the
+campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the general,
+without much distinction,--except that he was accused by him of being the
+cause of all the disasters of the last campaign, by the complete rout he
+suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August, 1796.  His division was
+ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the laws of nations, he arrested
+M. d' Antraigues, who was attached to the Russian legation.  When the
+Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice,
+and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied:
+"There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right
+and justice of power, and I am here the strongest.  M. d'Antraigues is
+our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot.  I
+repeat, I am here the strongest, 'et nous verrons'."
+
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of Jacobin
+propagators.  Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose
+lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet of Vienna had
+spared, he thought that he might attempt anything; and, therefore, on the
+anniversary day of the fete for the levy en masse of the inhabitants of
+the capital, he insulted the feelings of the loyal, and excited the
+discontented to rebellion, by placing over the door and in the windows of
+his house the tri-coloured flag.  This outrage the Emperor was unable to
+prevent his subjects from resenting.  Bernadotte's house was invaded, his
+furniture broken to pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the
+house of the Spanish Ambassador.  As a satisfaction for this attack,
+provoked by his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the
+Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to
+leave Vienna, which he did on the next day.  So disgraceful was his
+conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little
+impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse
+with the Austrian Government.
+
+In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from
+which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed.  When Bonaparte intended
+to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an
+implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand
+livres--calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not
+infallible or their government the best of all possible governments. In
+1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department, where
+he exercised the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom he
+accused of being still chouans and royalists.
+
+With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer.  In the
+summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of
+Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within
+twenty-four hours, two millions of livres.  With much difficulty this sum
+was collected.  The day after he had received it, he insisted upon
+another sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing
+in case of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his
+troops. Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them
+from the execution of his threats.  The troops under him were, both in
+Italy and in Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated
+were, from their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts.  Bernadotte
+has by these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten
+millions of livres.
+
+Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in
+the wrong.  Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the
+first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him.  The many massacres under
+Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no
+doubt display a most sanguinary character.  A lady, however, in whose
+house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to
+judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his
+imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he
+knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs
+others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from
+stabbing him.  Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity
+as well as justice.  Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the
+Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black
+Eagle.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his
+"Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the
+well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign
+countries.  According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of
+the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
+country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners.  Though the names
+of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I
+have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two
+or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and
+scurrilous party pamphlets.  I made this observation to Fontanes, who
+replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been
+very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and
+that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men
+of greater talents.  He granted also that men of true genius and literary
+eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character
+than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He
+added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a
+literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from
+that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
+
+To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted
+to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal.  Some he has made tribunes,
+prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in
+foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given
+places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of
+this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a
+De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our
+literature and honours to our nation.  This liberality is often carried
+too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery
+displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To
+a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the
+First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that
+ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a
+place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve
+thousand livres in the year--besides a present, in ready money, of one
+hundred napoleons d'or.  Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and
+sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty
+lines on Bonaparte's birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand
+livres in the year--and one hundred napoleons d'or for his travelling
+expenses.
+
+The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte's agents for
+dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than
+those fixed for regular literary pensions.  Instead of discouraging these
+foolish and impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity,
+necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them.
+His name is, therefore, found in more dedications published within these
+last five years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken
+together for the last century.  In a man whose name, unfortunately for
+humanity, must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable
+weakness to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality
+which some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
+
+During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu's, in
+company with Duroc.  The question turned upon literary productions and
+the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign
+authors.  "As to the merits or the quality," said Duroc, "I will not take
+upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to
+their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will
+not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion.  I am
+convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than
+those of my own country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what
+I have witnessed and experienced for some years past, that of every book
+or publication printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is
+dedicated to the Emperor.  Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German
+and seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His
+Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only
+sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their Sovereign."
+For my part I think Duroc's conclusion tolerably just.
+
+Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed,
+or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more
+than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein.  The former
+presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte
+family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred
+years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that
+of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the
+Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore,
+relatives of the Bourbons; and the sceptre of the French Empire is still
+in the same family, though in a more worthy branch.  Spanicetti received
+one thousand louis--in gold, a pension of six thousand livres--for life,
+and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home department
+of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres yearly.
+
+Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the
+Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the
+friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he
+exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet
+family, the last branch of which has since been extinguished by its
+intermarriage and incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that,
+therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign
+Princes of Europe, but has more right to the throne of Great Britain than
+George the Third, being descended from the male branch of the Stuarts;
+while this Prince is only descended from the female branch of the same
+royal house.  Ritterstein was presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte's
+portrait set with diamonds, valued at twelve thousand livres, and
+received twenty-four thousand livres ready money, together with a pension
+of nine thousand livres--in the year, until he could be better provided
+for.  He was, besides, nominated a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It
+cannot be denied but that Bonaparte rewards like a real Emperor.
+
+But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same encouragement,
+and experience the same liberality.  In our different museums we,
+therefore, already, see and admire upwards of two hundred pictures,
+representing the different actions, scenes, and achievements of
+Bonaparte's public life.  It is true they are not all highly finished or
+well composed or delineated, but they all strike the spectators more or
+less with surprise or admiration; and it is with us, as, I suppose, with
+you, and everywhere else, the multitude decide: for one competent judge
+or real connoisseur, hundreds pass, who stare, gape, are charmed, and
+inspire thousands of their acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with
+their own satisfaction.  Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the
+age, his contemporaries, and, I fear, even posterity.
+
+That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous patron, the
+numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy, and Germany,
+having him for their object, seem to evince.  Ten sculptors have already
+represented his passage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his passage
+over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that over Pont d' Arcole.  At Rome,
+Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are statues of him representing his
+natural size; and our ten thousand municipalities have each one of his
+busts; without mentioning the thousands of busts all over Europe, not
+excepting even your own country.  When Bonaparte sees under the windows
+of the Tuileries the statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that
+palace, he cannot help saying to himself: "Marble lives longer than man."
+Have you any doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
+
+The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for
+his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte,
+was a German of the name of Schumacher.  It is, indeed, allowed that he
+was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or
+considerate.  He did not consider that it would be no compliment to give
+the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man.  Schumacher had employed
+near three years in planning and executing in marble the prettiest model
+of a sepulchral monument I have ever seen, read or heard of.  He had
+inscribed it: "The Future Tomb of Bonaparte the Great."  Under the
+patronage of Count von Beast, he arrived here; and I saw the model in the
+house of this Minister of the German Elector Arch--Chancellor, where also
+many French artists went to inspect it.  Count von Beast asked De Segur,
+the grand master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant
+Schumacher the honour of showing him his performance.  De Segur advised
+him to address himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon, who, after
+looking at it, could not help paying a just tribute to the execution and
+to the talents of the artist, though he disapproved of the subject, and
+declined mentioning it to the Emperor.  After three months' attendance in
+this capital, and all petitions and memorials to our great folks
+remaining unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which
+he asked permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte's tomb to the
+public for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
+
+"Where is it now?"  asked Fouche.
+
+"At the Minister's of the Elector Arch-Chancellor," answered the artist.
+
+"But where do you intend to show it for money?"  continued Fouche.
+
+"In the Palais Royal."
+
+"Well, bring it there," replied Fouche.
+
+The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a
+police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the
+care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the
+Rhine.  Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his
+home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model
+of a grand tomb for a little man.  I have just heard that one of your
+countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d'or.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of
+the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
+the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
+believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
+in Europe.  But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our
+hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans
+and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful
+necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere,
+comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery.  And it is
+not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty
+are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and,
+I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged
+classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but
+who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
+to both.
+
+When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
+exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or
+want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper
+to you: "Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise--on
+the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;" and you
+sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre
+that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness,
+you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to
+relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious
+warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that
+eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some
+few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
+capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
+ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
+tyranny.
+
+Some author has written that "want is the parent of industry, and
+wretchedness the mother of ingenuity."  I know that you have often
+approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
+countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
+disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
+the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no
+other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide.  How many
+have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no
+expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their
+necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final
+prospect of all their sufferings.
+
+Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
+ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
+his uncle's porter.  Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
+by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
+their business.  Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
+less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses.  I have
+seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
+and the other a Counsellor of Parliament.  Every, day you may bestow your
+penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
+one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
+Marquis, a general under Louis XVI.  They, are usually placed, the one on
+the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
+woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand.  I am told one of
+the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies.  What a
+recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
+
+On the day of Bonaparte's coronation, and a little before he set out with
+his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
+Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
+hat with this inscription: "I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
+years of age, and I request alms."  Many individuals, even some of
+Bonaparte's soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
+he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am
+told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose
+property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time
+he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since
+for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
+supported himself lately entirely by begging.  The value of the dress of
+one of Bonaparte's running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve
+him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and
+agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to
+renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the
+remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived
+me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and
+illuminating Bonaparte's palace of the Tuileries.
+
+Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
+whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
+officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for
+years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army
+of Conde.  Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte's household troops,
+where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in
+combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now
+made a knight of Napoleon's Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for
+bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.  As he is a man of
+real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced
+that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it,
+but prove that he has never been misplaced.  Another emigrant who, after
+being a page to the Duc d'Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of
+the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded
+with the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion
+of Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French.
+Four more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common
+Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of
+Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde.  It were to be wished that the whole
+of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants.  I am sure
+they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
+never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
+
+While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
+are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
+domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
+governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or
+ladies-in-waiting.  Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de
+R------, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat,
+which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a
+companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet
+of Comte de Brienne.  Her father and brother suffered for this choice and
+preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be
+transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a
+coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the
+wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant
+assassin and Septembrizer.  It was only by a valuable present to Madame
+Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not
+included in the act of proscription against her father and brother.
+
+I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
+frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes.  But they are
+proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
+without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
+Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
+the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
+of what they were.  The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
+an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last
+three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
+vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
+vices, opinions are various, and even opposite.  Most persons, who have
+long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
+have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities.  On the other
+hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
+rumours, which certainly are exaggerated.  It is true, indeed, that it
+was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her
+hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome,
+and had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms.  Her
+husband's conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into
+a proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence
+of his affection towards her.  As he knew who she was when he received
+her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her
+subsequent intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt--policy may
+influence a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem.  He may
+choose to live with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
+
+A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me
+that, had it not been for Napoleon's singular inclination for his
+youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of
+his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already
+been made her by Talleyrand.  It was then reported that Bonaparte had his
+eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which
+the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were
+expected to be encountered at St. Petersburg.  The untimely end of this
+Prince, and the supplications of his wife and daughter, have since
+altered his intent, and Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I
+may use the expression, incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte
+family.
+
+But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that
+Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex.  You read last
+summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the Interior
+(Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded by our
+Ambassador at Vienna Champagny.  This promotion was the consequence of a
+disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress,
+Mademoiselle George, one of the handsomest women of this capital.  He was
+informed by his spies that this lady frequently, in the dusk of the
+evening, or when she thought him employed in his office, went to the
+house of a famous milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in
+an adjoining passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face,
+always entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as
+she continued there.  The house was then by his orders beset with spies,
+who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner.  To be
+near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the
+very next day her visit to the milliner's was announced to him.  While
+his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner's house
+through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door
+of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant
+was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his
+companions.  He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected
+appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of
+this enraged lover.  The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte
+himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial
+portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate,
+had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair
+which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
+
+Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
+according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour
+of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant.  The quantity of jewels
+with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much
+ostentation in the new tragedy, 'The Templars', indicate, however, a
+Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover.  And, indeed, she already
+treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public,
+more as a real than a theatrical Princess.  Without any cause whatever,
+but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out,
+without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very
+day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off
+for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
+
+When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors
+of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no
+notice should be taken of this 'etourderie', which should not occur
+again.
+
+Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier,
+having ruined himself in search after the philosopher's stone.  To
+persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but
+no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion,
+and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first
+speech at the Jacobin Club.  Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking
+of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and
+the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which
+the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without
+resistance.  He was denounced by the municipality to the National
+Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and
+other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment.  During
+1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the
+armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and
+other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of
+livres--but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres--himself.
+He was, under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage,
+but bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes.  In 1799, he
+advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres--to bribe adherents for the
+new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of interest,
+appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in
+September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him
+in the Ministry of the Interior.  You may see by this short account that
+the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical
+stone.  He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive
+(from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a
+separate establishment.  This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
+character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither
+committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I have read a copy of a letter from Madrid, circulated among
+the members of our foreign diplomatic corps, which draws a most
+deplorable picture of the Court and Kingdom of Spain.  Forced into an
+unprofitable and expensive war, famine ravaging some, and disease other
+provinces, experiencing from allies the treatment of tyrannical foes,
+disunion in his family and among his Ministers, His Spanish Majesty
+totters on a throne exposed to the combined attacks of internal
+disaffection and external plots, with no other support than the advice of
+a favourite, who is either a fool or a traitor, and perhaps both.
+
+As the Spanish monarchy has been more humbled and reduced during the
+twelve years' administration of the Prince of Peace than during the whole
+period that it has been governed by Princes of the House of Bourbon, the
+heir of the throne, the young Prince of Asturias, has, with all the
+moderation consistent with duty, rank, and consanguinity, tried to remove
+an upstart, universally despised for his immorality as, well as for his
+incapacity; and who, should he continue some years longer to rule in the
+name of Charles IV., will certainly involve his King and his country in
+one common ruin.  Ignorant and presumptuous, even beyond upstarts in
+general, the Prince of Peace treats with insolence all persons raised
+above him by birth or talents, who refuse to be his accomplices or
+valets.  Proud and certain of the protection of the Queen, and of the
+weakness of the King, the Spanish nobility is not only humbled, provoked,
+and wronged by him, but openly defied and insulted.
+
+You know the nice principles of honour and loyalty that have always
+formerly distinguished the ancient families of Spain.  Believe me that,
+notwithstanding what appearances indicate to the contrary, the Spanish
+grandee who ordered his house to be pulled down because the rebel
+constable had slept in it, has still many descendants, but loyal men
+always decline to use that violence to which rebels always resort.  Soon
+after the marriage of the Prince of Asturias, in October, 1801, to his
+cousin, the amiable Maria Theresa, Princess Royal of Naples, the ancient
+Spanish families sent some deputies to Their Royal Highnesses, not for
+the purpose of intriguing, but to lay before them the situation of the
+kingdom, and to inform them of the real cause of all disasters.  They
+were received as faithful subjects and true patriots, and Their Royal
+Highnesses promised every support in their power towards remedying the
+evil complained of, and preventing, if possible, the growth of others.
+
+The Princess of Asturias is a worthy granddaughter of Maria Theresa of
+Austria, and seems to inherit her character as well as her virtues.  She
+agreed with her royal consort that, after having gained the affection of
+the Queen by degrees, it would be advisable for her to insinuate some
+hints of the danger that threatened their country and the discontent that
+agitated the people.  The Prince of Asturias was to act the same part
+with his father as the Princess did with his mother.  As there is no one
+about the person of Their Spanish Majesties, from the highest lord to the
+lowest servant, who is not placed there by the favourite, and act as his
+spies, he was soon aware that he had no friend in the heir to the throne.
+His conversation with Their Majesties confirmed him in this supposition,
+and that some secret measures were going on to deprive him of the place
+he occupied, if not of the royal favour.  All visitors to the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias were, therefore, watched by his emissaries; and all
+the letters or memorials sent to them by the post were opened, read, and;
+if contrary to his interest, destroyed, and their writers imprisoned in
+Spain or banished to the colonies.  These measures of injustice created
+suspicion, disunion, and, perhaps, fear, among the members of the
+Asturian cabal, as it was called; all farther pursuit, therefore, was
+deferred until more propitious times, and the Prince of Peace remained
+undisturbed and in perfect security until the rupture with your country
+last autumn.
+
+It is to be lamented that, with all their valuable qualities and feelings
+of patriotism, the Prince and Princess of Asturias do not possess a
+little dissimulation and more knowledge of the world.  The favourite
+tried by all means to gain their good opinion, but his advances met with
+that repulse they morally deserved, but which, from policy, should have
+been suspended or softened, with the hope of future accommodation.
+
+Beurnonville, the Ambassador of our Court to the Court of Madrid, was
+here upon leave of absence when war was declared by Spain against your
+country, and his first secretary, Herman, acted as charge d'affaires.
+This Herman has been brought up in Talleyrand's office, and is both abler
+and more artful than Beurnonville; he possesses also the full confidence
+of our Minister, who, in several secret and pecuniary transactions, has
+obtained many proofs of this secretary's fidelity as well as capacity.
+The views of the Cabinet of St. Cloud were, therefore, not lost sight of,
+nor its interest neglected at Madrid.
+
+I suppose you have heard that the Prince of Peace, like all other
+ignorant and illiberal people, believes no one can be a good or clever
+man who is not also his countryman, and that all the ability and probity
+of the world is confined within the limits of Spain.  On this principle
+he equally detests France and England, Germany and Russia, and is,
+therefore, not much liked by our Government, except for his imbecility,
+which makes him its tool and dupe.  His disgrace would not be much
+regretted here, where we have it in our power to place or displace
+Ministers in certain States, whenever and as often as we like.  On this
+occasion, however, we supported him, and helped to dissolve the cabal
+formed against him; and that for the following reasons:
+
+By the assurances of Beurnonville, Bonaparte and Talleyrand had been led
+to believe that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were well affected to
+France, and to them personally; and conceiving themselves much more
+certain of this than of the good disposition of the favourite, though
+they did not take a direct part against him, at the same time they did
+not disclose what they knew was determined on to remove him from the helm
+of affairs.  During Beurnonville's absence, however, Herman had formed an
+intrigue with a Neapolitan girl, in the suite of Asturias, who,
+influenced by love or bribes, introduced him into the Cabinet where her
+mistress kept her correspondence with her royal parents.  With a
+pick-lock key he opened all the drawers, and even the writing-desk, in
+which he is said to have discovered written evidence that, though the
+Princess was not prejudiced against France, she had but an indifferent
+opinion of the morality and honesty of our present Government and of our
+present governors.  One of these original papers Herman appropriated to
+himself, and despatched to this capital by an extraordinary courier,
+whose despatches, more than the rupture with your country, forced
+Beurnonville away in a hurry from the agreeable society of gamesters and
+prostitutes, chiefly frequented by him in this capital.
+
+It is not and cannot be known yet what was the exact plan of the Prince
+and Princess of Asturias and their adherents; but a diplomatic gentleman,
+who has just arrived from Madrid, and who can have no reason to impose
+upon me, has informed me of the following particulars:
+
+Their Royal Highnesses succeeded perfectly in their endeavours to gain
+the well-merited tenderness and approbation of their Sovereigns in
+everything else but when the favourite was mentioned with any slight, or
+when any insinuations were thrown out concerning the mischief arising
+from his tenacity of power, and incapacity of exercising it with
+advantage to the State.  The Queen was especially irritated when such was
+the subject of conversation or of remark; and she finally prohibited it
+under pain of her displeasure.  A report even reached Their Royal
+Highnesses, that the Prince of Peace had demanded their separation and
+separate confinement.  Nothing could, therefore, be effected to impede
+the progress of wickedness and calamity, but by some temporary measure of
+severity.  In this disagreeable dilemma, it was resolved by the cabal to
+send the Queen to a convent, until her favourite had been arrested and
+imprisoned; to declare the Prince of Asturias Regent during the King's
+illness (His Majesty then still suffered from several paralytic strokes),
+and to place men of talents and patriotism in the place of the creatures
+of the Prince of Peace.  As soon as this revolution was organized, the
+Queen would have been restored to full liberty and to that respect due to
+her rank.
+
+This plan had been communicated to our Ambassador, and approved of by our
+Government; but when Herman in such an honest manner had inspected the
+confidential correspondence of the Princess of Asturias, Beurnonville was
+instructed by Talleyrand to, warn the favourite of the impending danger,
+and to advise him to be beforehand with his enemies.  Instead of telling
+the truth, the Prince of Peace alarmed the King and Queen with the most
+absurd fabrications; and assured Their Majesties that their son and their
+daughter-in-law had determined not only to dethrone them, but to keep
+them prisoners for life, after they had been forced to witness his
+execution.
+
+Indolence and weakness are often more fearful than guilt.  Everything he
+said was at once believed; the Prince and Princess were ordered under
+arrest in their own apartments, without permission to see or correspond
+with anybody; and so certain was the Prince of Peace of a complete and
+satisfactory revenge for the attempt against his tyranny, that a frigate
+at Cadiz was ready waiting to carry the Princess of Asturias back to
+Naples.  All Spaniards who had the honour of their Sovereigns and of
+their country at heart lamented these rash proceedings; but no one dared
+to take any measures to counteract them.  At last, however, the Duke of
+Montemar, grand officer to the Prince of Asturias, demanded an audience
+of Their Majesties, in the presence of the favourite.  He began by
+begging his Sovereign to recollect that for the place he occupied he was
+indebted to the Prince of Peace; and he called upon him to declare
+whether he had ever had reason to suspect him either of ingratitude or
+disloyalty.  Being answered in the negative, he said that, though his
+present situation and office near the heir to the throne was the pride
+and desire of his life, he would have thrown it up the instant that he
+had the least ground to suppose that this Prince ceased to be a dutiful
+son and subject; but so far from this being the case, he had observed him
+in his most unguarded moments--in moments of conviviality had heard him
+speak of his royal parents with as much submission and respect as if he
+had been in their presence.  "If," continued he, "the Prince of Peace has
+said otherwise, he has misled his King and his Queen, being, no doubt,
+deceived himself.  To overthrow a throne and to seize it cannot be done
+without accomplices, without arms, without money.  Who are the
+conspirators hailing the Prince as their chief?  I have heard no name but
+that of the lovely Princess, his consort, the partaker of his sentiments
+as well as of his heart.  And his arms?  They are in the hands of those
+guards his royal parent has given to augment the necessary splendour of
+his rank.  And as to his money?  He has none but what is received from
+royal and paternal munificence and bounty.  You, my Prince," said he to
+the favourite (who seemed much offended at the impression the speech made
+on Their Majesties), "will one day thank me, if I am happy enough to
+dissuade dishonourable, impolitic, or unjust sentiments.  Of the
+approbation of posterity I am certain--"
+
+"If," interrupted the favourite, "the Prince of Asturias and his consort
+will give up their bad counsellors, I hope Their Majesties will forget
+and forgive everything with myself."
+
+"Whether Their Royal Highnesses," replied the Duke of Montemar, "have
+done anything that deserves forgiveness, or whether they have any
+counsellors, I do not know, and am incompetent to judge; but I am much
+mistaken in the character of Their Royal Highnesses if they wish to
+purchase favour at the expense of confidence and honour.  An order from
+His Majesty may immediately clear up this doubt."
+
+The Prince of Peace was then ordered to write, in the name of the King,
+to his children in the manner he proposed, and to command an answer by
+the messenger.  In half an hour the messenger returned with a letter
+addressed to the favourite, containing only these lines:
+
+"A King of Spain is well aware that a Prince and Princess of Asturias can
+have no answer to give to such proposals or to such questions."
+
+After six days' arrest, and after the Prince of Peace had in vain
+endeavoured to discover something to inculpate Their Royal Highnesses,
+they were invited to Court, and reconciled both to him and their royal
+parents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I will add in this letter, to the communication of the
+gentlemen mentioned in my last, what I remember myself of the letter
+which was circulated among our diplomatists, concerning the intrigues at
+Madrid.
+
+The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of
+Montemar, had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence, and as
+much as possible all noise.  This accounts for the favourite's pretended
+moderation on this occasion.  But though he was externally reconciled,
+and, as was reported at Madrid, had sworn his reconciliation even by
+taking the sacrament, all the undertakings of the Prince and Princess of
+Asturias were strictly observed and reported by the spies whom he had
+placed round Their Royal Highnesses.  Vain of his success and victory, he
+even lost that respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred
+subject always shows to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related
+to his Sovereign.  He sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity,
+and with an insolence provoking or defying resentment.  It was on the
+days of great festivities, when the Court was most brilliant, and the
+courtiers most numerous, that he took occasion to be most arrogant to
+those whom he traitorously and audaciously dared to call his rivals.  On
+the 9th of last December, at the celebration of the Queen's birthday, his
+conduct towards Their Royal Highnesses excited such general indignation
+that the remembrance of the occasion of the fete, and the presence of
+their Sovereigns, could not repress a murmur, which made the favourite
+tremble.  A signal from the Prince of Asturias would then have been
+sufficient to have caused the insolent upstart to be seized and thrown
+out of the window.  I am told that some of the Spanish grandees even laid
+their hands on their swords, fixing their eyes on the heir to the throne,
+as if to say: "Command, and your unworthy enemy shall exist no more."
+
+To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which
+contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate, the
+Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way and
+manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and unnatural
+Philip II.; but the Queen's confessor, though, like all her other
+domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire with reproof,
+saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the grand and powerful
+Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin; adding that no laws,
+human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy whatever, could authorize
+a parent to stain his hands in the blood of his children.  These
+anecdotes are sufficient both to elucidate the inveteracy of the
+favourite, the abject state of the heir to the throne, and the
+incomprehensible infatuation of the King and Queen.
+
+Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he disapproved
+of those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he neither offered to
+put an end to them nor to be a mediator for a perfect reconciliation with
+their Sovereigns.  He was guided by no other motive but to keep the
+favourite in subjection and alarm by preserving a correspondence with his
+rivals.  That this was the case and the motive cannot be doubted from the
+financial intrigue he carried on in the beginning of last month.
+
+Foreigners have but an imperfect or erroneous idea of the amount of the
+immense sums Spain has paid to our Government in loans, in contributions,
+in donations, and in subsidies.  Since the reign of Bonaparte, or for
+these last five years, upwards of half the revenue of the Spanish
+monarchy has either been brought into our National Treasury or into the
+privy purse of the Bonaparte family.  Without the aid of Spanish money,
+neither would our gunboats have been built, our fleets equipped, nor our
+armies paid.  The dreadful situation of the Spanish finances is,
+therefore, not surprising--it is, indeed, still more surprising that a
+general bankruptcy has not already involved the Spanish nation in a
+general ruin.
+
+When, on his return from Italy, the recall of the Russian negotiator and
+the preparations of Austria convinced Bonaparte of the probability of a
+Continental war, our troops on the coast had not been paid for two
+months, and his Imperial Ministers of Finances had no funds either to
+discharge the arrears or to provide for future payments until the
+beginning of the year 14, or the 22d instant.  Beurnonville was,
+therefore, ordered to demand peremptorily from the Cabinet of Madrid
+forty millions of livres--in advance upon future subsidies.  Half of that
+sum had, indeed, shortly before arrived at Cadiz from America, but much
+more was due by the Spanish Government to its own creditors, and promised
+them in payment of old debts.  The Prince of Peace, in consequence,
+declared that, however much he wished to oblige the French Government, it
+was utterly impossible to procure, much less to advance such sums.
+Beurnonville then became more assiduous than ever about the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and he had the impudence to assert that they had
+promised, if their friends were at the head of affairs, to satisfy the
+wishes and expectation of the Emperor of the French, by seizing the
+treasury at Cadiz, and paying the State creditors in vales deinero; notes
+hitherto payable in cash, and never at a discount.  The stupid favourite
+swallowed the palpable bait; four millions in dollars were sent under an
+escort to this country, while the Spanish notes instantly fell to a
+discount at first of four and afterwards of six per cent., and probably
+will fall lower still, as no treasures are expected from America this
+autumn.  It was with two millions of these dollars that the credit of the
+Bank of France was restored, or at least for some time enabled to resume
+its payments in specie.  Thus wretched Spain pays abroad for the forging
+of those disgraceful fetters which oppress her at home; and supports a
+foreign tyranny, which finally must produce domestic misery as well as
+slavery.
+
+When the Prince and Princess of Asturias were informed of the scandalous
+and false assertion of Beurnonville, they and their adherents not only
+publicly, and in all societies, contradicted it, but affirmed that,
+rather than obtain authority or influence on such ruinous terms, they
+would have consented to remain discarded and neglected during their
+lives.  They took the more care to have their sentiments known on this
+subject, as our Ambassador's calumny had hurt their popularity.  It was
+then first that, to revenge the shame with which his duplicity had
+covered him, Beurnonville permitted and persuaded the Prince of Peace to
+begin the chastisement of Their Royal Highnesses in the persons of their
+favourites.  Duke of Montemar, the grand officer to the Prince of
+Asturias; Marquis of Villa Franca, the grand equerry to the Princess of
+Asturias; Count of Miranda, chamberlain to the King; and the Countess
+Dowager del Monte, with six other Court ladies and four other noblemen,
+were, therefore, exiled from Madrid into different provinces, and
+forbidden to reside in any place within twenty leagues of the residence
+of the royal family.  According to the last letters and communications
+from Spain, the Prince and Princess of Asturias had not appeared at Court
+since the insult offered them in the disgrace of their friends, and were
+resolved not to appear in any place where they might be likely to meet
+with the favourite.
+
+Among our best informed politicians here, it is expected that a
+revolution and a change of dynasty will be the issue of this our
+political embryo in Spain.  Napoleon has more than once indirectly hinted
+that the Bonaparte dynasty will never be firm and fixed in France as long
+as any Bourbons reign in Spain or Italy.  Should he prove victorious in
+the present Continental contest, another peace, and not the most
+advantageous, will again be signed with your country--a peace which, I
+fear, will leave him absolute master of all Continental States.  His
+family arrangements are publicly avowed to be as follow: His third
+brother, Louis, and his sons, are to be the heirs of the French Empire.
+Joseph Bonaparte is, at the death or resignation of Napoleon, to succeed
+to the Kingdom of Italy, including Naples.  Lucien, though at present in
+disgrace, is considered as the person destined to supplant the Bourbons
+in Spain, where, during his embassy in 1800, and in 1801, he formed
+certain connections which Napoleon still keeps up and preserves.  Holland
+will be the inheritance of Jerome should Napoleon not live long enough to
+extend his power in Great Britain.  Such are the modest pretensions our
+Imperial courtiers bestow upon the family of our Sovereign.
+
+As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the hands
+of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as long as they
+find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be the case, they break
+and throw away.  This idiot is made to believe that both his political
+and physical existence depends entirely upon our support, and he has
+infused the same ridiculous notion into his accomplices and adherents.
+Guilt, ignorance, and cowardice thus misled may, directed by art,
+interest, and craft, perform wonders to entangle themselves in the
+destruction of their country.
+
+Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a porter,
+and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a soldier in one
+of our regiments serving in the East Indies.  Having there collected some
+pillage, he purchased the place of a major in the militia of the Island
+of Bourbon, but was, for his immorality, broken by the governor.
+Returning to France, he bitterly complained of this injustice, and, after
+much cringing in the antechambers of Ministers, he obtained at last the
+Cross of St. Louis as a kind of indemnity.  About the same time he also
+bought with his Indian wealth the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard
+of Monsieur, the present Louis XVIII.  Being refused admittance into any
+genteel societies, he resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to
+gambling-houses, and he even kept to himself when the Revolution took
+place.  He had at the same time, and for a certain interest, advanced
+Madame d'Estainville money to establish her famous, or rather infamous,
+house in the Rue de Bonnes Enfants, near the Palais Royal,--a house that
+soon became the fashionable resort of our friends of Liberty and
+Equality.
+
+In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our then
+hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who declined the
+honour.  The Jacobins were not so nice.  In 1792, they appointed him a
+general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax.  This modern Ajax,
+having obtained a separate command, attacked Treves in a most ignorant
+manner, and was worsted with great loss.  The official reports of our
+revolutionary generals have long been admired for their modesty as well
+as veracity; but Beurnonville has almost outdone them all, not excepting
+our great Bonaparte.  In a report to the National Convention concerning a
+terrible engagement of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville
+declares that, though the number of the enemy killed was immense, his
+troops got out of the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of
+one of his riflemen.  On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the
+execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War
+Department--a place which he refused, under a pretence that he was better
+able to serve his country with his sword than with his pen, having
+already been in one hundred and twenty battles (where, he did not
+enumerate or state). On the 14th of the following March, however, he
+accepted the ministerial portfolio, which he did not keep long, being
+delivered up by his Hector, Dumouriez, to the Austrians.  He remained a
+prisoner at Olmutz until the 22d of November, 1795, when he was included
+among the persons exchanged for the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present
+Royal Highness, the Duchess of Angouleme.
+
+In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed
+remnants of Jourdan's army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French commander
+to Holland.  In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to the Court
+of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the Court of
+Madrid.  In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be dreaded, nor his
+personal qualities make him esteemed.  In France, he is laughed at as a
+boaster, but not trusted as a warrior.  In Spain, he is neither dreaded
+nor esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there universally
+despised.  He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter
+breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness.
+Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency
+of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy
+dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation,
+teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even
+the most inattentive observer.
+
+The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of
+age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother
+who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another
+to a merchant who cries dogs' and cats' meat in our streets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him
+when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her
+tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his
+resolution.  Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be
+in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis
+Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.
+
+During the Emperor's absence, the former is the President of the Senate,
+and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops
+in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case
+of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil
+determinations with his military forces.  Even with the army in Germany,
+Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte
+dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an
+Imperial diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as
+a viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena.  It must be
+granted that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is
+almost certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his
+death; and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition,
+carried into execution.  These very precautions evince, however, how
+uncertain and precarious he considers his existence to be, and that,
+notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte
+dynasty will not survive him.
+
+Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own creation,
+or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which they might
+consider unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte.  The superior
+officers, not included in the above description, are such insignificant
+characters that, though he makes use of their experience and courage, he
+does not fear their views or ambition.  Among the inferior officers, and
+even among the men, all those who have displayed, either at reviews or in
+battles, capacity, activity, or valour, are all members of his Legion of
+Honour; and are bound to him by the double tie of gratitude and
+self-interest.  They look to him alone for future advancements, and for
+the preservation of the distinction they have obtained from him.  His
+emissaries artfully disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow
+everything a Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil
+officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be
+discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII.  Any
+person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the
+impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and
+retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an
+emissary of the Bourbons.
+
+I have often amused myself in conversing with our new generals and new
+officers; there is such a curious mixture of ignorance and information,
+of credulity and disbelief, of real boasting and affected modesty, in
+everything they say or do in company; their manners are far from being
+elegant, but also very distant from vulgarity; they do not resemble those
+of what we formerly called 'gens comme il faut', and 'la bonne societe'!
+nor those of the bourgeoisie, or the lower classes.  They form a new
+species of fashionables, and a 'haut ton militaire', which strikes a
+person accustomed to Courts at first with surprise, and perhaps with
+indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become
+reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of military
+frankness interwoven with the military roughness.  Our ladies, however (I
+mean those who have seen other Courts, or remember our other coteries),
+complain loudly of this alteration of address, and of this fashionable
+innovation; and pretend that our military, under the notion of being
+frank, are rude, and by the negligence of their manners and language, are
+not only offensive, but inattentive and indelicate.  This is so much the
+more provoking to them, as our Imperial courtiers and Imperial placemen
+do not think themselves fashionable without imitating our military
+gentry, who take Napoleon for their exclusive model and chief in
+everything, even in manners.
+
+What I have said above applies only to those officers whose parents are
+not of the lowest class, or who entered so early or so young into the
+army that they may be said to have been educated there, and as they
+advanced, have assumed the 'ton' of their comrades of the same rank. I
+was invited, some time ago, to a wedding, by a jeweller whose sister had
+been my nurse, and whose daughter was to be married to a captain of
+hussars quartered here.  The bridegroom had engaged several other
+officers to assist at the ceremony, and to partake of the fete and ball
+that followed.  A general of the name of Liebeau was also of the party,
+and obtained the place of honour by the side of the bride's mother.  At
+his entrance into the apartment I formed an opinion of him which his
+subsequent conduct during the ball confirmed.
+
+During the dinner he seemed to forget that he had a knife and a fork, and
+he did not eat of a dish (and he ate of them all, numerous as they were)
+without bespattering or besmearing himself or his neighbours.  He broke
+two glasses and one plate, and, for equality's sake, I suppose, when he
+threw the wine on the lady to his right, the lady to his left was
+inundated with sauces.  In getting up from dinner to take coffee and
+liqueurs, according to our custom, as he took the hand of the mistress of
+the house, he seized at the same time a corner of the napkin, and was not
+aware of his blunder till the destruction of bottles, glasses, and plate,
+and the screams of the ladies, informed him of the havoc and terror his
+awkward gallantry had occasioned.  When the ball began, he was too vain
+of his rank and precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride down
+the first dance; but she was not, I believe, much obliged to him for his
+politeness; it cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and a broken nail,
+and she continued lame during the remainder of the night.  In making an
+apology to her for his want of dexterity, and assuring her that he was
+not so awkward in handling the enemies of his country in battle as in
+handling friends he esteemed in a dance, he gave no quarter to an old
+maid aunt, whom, in the violence of his gesticulation, he knocked down
+with his elbow and laid sprawling on the ground.  He was sober when these
+accidents literally occurred.
+
+Of this original I collected the following particulars: Before the
+Revolution he was a soldier in the regiment of Flanders, from which he
+deserted and became a corporal in another regiment; in 1793 he was a
+drum-major in one of the battalions in garrison in Paris.  You remember
+the struggles of factions in the latter part of May and in the beginning
+of June, the same year, when Brissot and his accomplices were contending
+with Marat, Robespierre, and their adherents for the reins of power.  On
+the 1st of June the latter party could not get a drummer to beat the
+alarm, though they offered money and advancement.  At last Robespierre
+stepped forward to Liebeau and said, "Citizen, beat the alarm march, and
+to-day you shall be nominated a general."  Liebeau obeyed, Robespierre
+became victorious and kept his promise, and thus my present associate
+gained his rank.  He has since been employed under Jourdan in Germany,
+and under Le Courbe in Switzerland.  When, under the former, he was
+ordered to retreat towards the Rhine, he pointed out the march route to
+his division according to his geographical knowledge, but mistook upon
+the map the River Main for a turnpike road, and commanded the retreat
+accordingly.  Ever since, our troops have called that river 'La chausee
+de Liebeau'.  He was not more fortunate in Helvetia.  Being ordered to
+cross one of the mountains, he marched his men into a glacier, where
+twelve perished before he was aware of his mistake.
+
+Being afterwards appointed a governor of Blois, he there became a petty,
+insupportable tyrant, and laid all the inhabitants indiscriminately under
+arbitrary contribution.  Those who refused to pay were imprisoned as
+aristocrats, and their property confiscated in the name and on the part
+of the nation; that is to say, he appropriated to himself in the name of
+the nation everything that struck his fancy; and if any complaints were
+made, the owners were seized and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal at
+Paris to be condemned as the correspondents or adherents of the royalists
+of La Vendee.  After the death of Robespierre he was deprived of this
+profitable place, in which, during the short space of eleven months, he
+amassed five millions of livres.  The Directory, then gave him a
+division, first under Jourdan, and afterwards under Le Courbe.
+
+Bonaparte, after witnessing his incapacity in Italy, in 1800, put him on
+the full half-pay, and has lately made him a commander of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+His dear spouse, Madame Liebeau, is his counterpart.  When he married
+her, she was crying mackerel and herrings in our streets; but she told me
+in confidence, during the dinner, being seated by my side, that her
+father was an officer of fortune, and a Chevalier of the Order of St.
+Louis.  She assured me that her husband had done greater services to his
+country than Bonaparte; and that, had it not been for his patriotism in
+1793, the Austrians would have taken Paris.  She was very angry with
+Madame Napoleon, to whom she had been presented, but who had not shown
+her so much attention and civility, as was due to her husband's rank,
+having never invited her to more than one supper and two tea-parties; and
+when invited by her, had sent Duroc with an apology that she was unable
+to come, though the same evening she went to the opera.
+
+Another guest, in the regimentals of a colonel, seemed rather bashful
+when I spoke to him.  I could not comprehend the reason, and therefore
+inquired of our host who he was.  (You know that with us it is not the
+custom to introduce persons by name, etc., as in your country, when
+meeting in mixed companies.) He answered:
+
+"Do you not remember your brother's jockey, Prial?"
+
+"Yes," said I, "but he was established by my brother as a hairdresser."
+
+"He is the very same person," replied the jeweller.  "He has fought very
+bravely, and is now a colonel of dragoons, a great favourite with
+Bonaparte, and will be a general at the first promotion."
+
+As the colonel did not seem to desire a renewal of acquaintance with me,
+I did not intrude myself upon him.
+
+During the supper the military gentlemen were encouraged by the
+bridegroom, and the bottle went round very freely; and the more they
+drank, the greater and more violent became their political discussions.
+Liebeau vociferated in favour of republican and revolutionary measures,
+and avowed his approbation of requisitions, confiscations, and the
+guillotine; while Frial inclined to the regular and organized despotism
+of one, to secret trial, and still more secret executions; defending
+arbitrary imprisonments, exiles, and transportations.  This displeased
+Madame Liebeau, who exclaimed:
+
+"Since the colonel is so fond of an Imperial Government, he can have no
+objection to remain a faithful subject whenever my husband, Liebeau,
+becomes, an Antoine the First, Emperor of the French."
+
+Frial smiled with contempt.
+
+"You seem to think it improbable," said Liebeau.  "I, Antoine Liebeau, I
+have more prospect of being an Emperor than Napoleon Bonaparte had ten
+years ago, when he was only a colonel, and was arrested as a terrorist.
+And am I not a Frenchman?  And is he not a foreigner?  Come, shake hands
+with me; as soon as I am Emperor, depend upon it you shall be a general,
+and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour."
+
+"Ah!  my jewel," interrupted Madame Liebeau, "how happy will France then
+be.  You are such a friend of peace.  We will then have no wars, no
+contributions; all the English milords may then come here and spend their
+money, nobody cares about where or how.  Will you not, then, my sweet
+love, make all the gentlemen here your chamberlains, and permit me to
+accept all the ladies of the company for my Maids of Honour or
+ladies-in-waiting?"
+
+"Softly, softly," cried Frial, who now began to be as intoxicated and as
+ambitious as the general;  "whenever Napoleon dies, I have more hope,
+more: claim, and more right than you to the throne.  I am in actual
+service; and had not Bonaparte been the same, he might have still
+remained upon the half-pay, obscure and despised.  Were not most of the
+Field-marshals and generals under him now, above him ten years ago?  May
+I not, ten years hence, if I am satisfied with you, General Liebeau, make
+you also a Field-marshal, or my Minister of War; and you, Madame Liebeau,
+a lady of my wife's wardrobe, as soon as I am married?  I, too, have my
+plans and my views, and perhaps one day you will recollect this
+conversation, and not be sorry for my acquaintance."
+
+"What!  you a colonel, an Emperor, before me, who have so long been a
+general?"  howled Liebeau, who was no longer able to speak.  "I would
+sooner knock your brains out with this bottle than suffer such a
+precedence; and my wife a lady of your wardrobe! she who has possessed
+from her birth the soul of an Empress!  No, sir! never will I take the
+oath to you, nor suffer anybody else to take it."
+
+"Then I will punish you as a rebel," retorted Frial; "and as sure as you
+stand here you shall be shot."
+
+Liebeau then rose up to fetch his sword, but the company interfered, and
+the dispute about the priority of claim to the throne of France between
+the ci-devant drummer and ci-devant jockey was left undecided.  From the
+words and looks of several of the captains present, I think that they
+seemed, in their own opinions, to have as much prospect and expectation
+to reign over the French Empire as either General Liebeau or Colonel
+Frial.
+
+As soon as I returned home I wrote down this curious conversation and
+this debate about supremacy.  To what a degradation is the highest rank
+in my unfortunate country reduced when two such personages seriously
+contend about it!  I collected more subjects for meditation and
+melancholy in this low company (where, by the bye, I witnessed more
+vulgarity and more indecencies than I had before seen during my life)
+than from all former scenes of humiliation and disgust since my return
+here.  When I the next day mentioned it to General de M------, whom you
+have known as an emigrant officer in your service, but whom policy has
+since ranged under the colours of Bonaparte, he assured me that these
+discussions about the Imperial throne are very frequent among the
+superior officers, and have caused many bloody scenes; and that hardly
+any of our generals of any talent exist who have not the same 'arriere
+pensee of some day or other.  Napoleon cannot, therefore, well be
+ignorant of the many other dynasties here now rivalling that of the
+Bonapartes, and who wait only for his exit to tear his Senatus Consultum,
+his will, and his family, as well as each other, to pieces.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our rich
+upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by Bonaparte,
+transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and
+possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of livres.  In this
+house I saw for the first time the famous Madame Chevalier, the mistress,
+and the indirect cause of the untimely end, of the unfortunate Paul the
+First.  She is very short, fat, and coarse.  I do not know whether
+prejudice, from what I have heard of her vile, greedy, and immoral
+character, influenced my feelings, but she appeared to me a most artful,
+vain, and disagreeable woman.  She looked to be about thirty-six years of
+age; and though she might when younger have been well made, it is
+impossible that she could ever have been handsome.  The features of her
+face are far from being regular.  Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow,
+and her nose short.  Her language is that of brothels, and her manners
+correspond with her expressions.  She is the daughter of a workman at a
+silk manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had
+attained the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city,
+kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with
+her.  She then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating, and
+he introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior
+dancers.  Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged
+as a supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however,
+never above twelve hundred livres in the year--which was four hundred
+livres more than her husband received.
+
+He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers,
+quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and
+instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his
+nation.  His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at
+Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other
+wicked offsprings of rebellion.  With all other terrorists, he was
+imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as
+restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some
+amateurs had constructed a French theatre.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in
+the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical
+war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and
+the English and emigrant loyalists on the other.  Having no money to
+continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the
+French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play
+on that night.  She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear
+to the most advantage, and was deservedly applauded.  The very next
+evening the Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted
+that Madame Chevalier should be given a regular engagement.  He replied
+that no place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be
+ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public
+had hitherto declared their satisfaction.  The Jacobins continued
+inflexible, and here, as well as everywhere else, supported injustice by
+violence.  As the patriotism of the husband, more than the charms of the
+wife, was known to have produced this indecent fracas, which for upwards
+of a week interrupted the plays, all anti-Jacobins united to restore
+order.  In this they would, perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the
+bayonets of the Hamburg soldiers interfered, and forced this precious
+piece of revolutionary furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.
+
+After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of the
+Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping by a then
+rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present of a richly and
+elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten thousand louis d'or
+on her, before he had a mortifying conviction that some other had
+partaken of those favours for which he had so dearly paid.  A countryman
+of yours then showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene,
+and made his debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his
+theatrical goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with
+large and valuable diamonds.  Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards
+hearing that her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy,
+and that his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his
+portrait changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving,
+however, the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the
+stage, by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her
+bosom.  The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which
+he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had put the
+whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which all her
+numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had won it.
+
+The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his
+turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.
+She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry,
+during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to
+France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand
+livres.  Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the
+decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect
+money, and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances.  She had
+always lists of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play
+in her lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her,
+by the assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.
+
+I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of
+Talleyrand's secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of
+the other sex.  I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our
+Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who
+instructed her how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg.  I need not
+repeat what is so well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined
+the domestic happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his
+political transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely
+end, in procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and
+jewels, the recall of one of the principal conspirators against the
+unfortunate Paul.
+
+The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short period
+of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of roubles.  For
+money she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon innocence the
+punishment merited by guilt.  The scaffolds of Russia were bleeding, and
+the roads to Siberia crowded with the victims of the avarice of this
+female demon, who often promised what she was unable to perform, and, to
+silence complaint, added cruelty to fraud, and, after pocketing the
+bribe, resorted to the executioner to remove those whom she had duped.
+The shocking anecdote of the Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out
+of nearly a hundred thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards
+persuaded her Imperial lover to inflict capital punishment, is too recent
+and too public to be unknown or forgotten.  A Russian nobleman has
+assured me that the number of unfortunate individuals whom her and her
+husband's intrigues have caused to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801
+was forty-six; and that nearly three hundred persons besides, who could
+not or would not pay their extortionate demands, were exiled to Siberia
+during the same period of time.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such great and
+terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as well as of
+acquired accomplishments.  As I have already stated, she can have no
+pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating, sings tolerably
+well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an unusually good share
+of cunning, presumption, and duplicity.  Her husband, also, everywhere
+took care to make her fashionable; and the vanity of the first of their
+dupes increased the number of her admirers and engaged the vanity of
+others in their turn to sacrifice themselves at her shrine.
+
+The immorality of our age, also, often procured her popularity for what
+deserved, and in better times would have encountered, the severest
+reprobation.  In 1797, an emigrant lodged at an inn at Hamburg where
+another traveller was robbed of a large sum in ready money and jewels.
+The unfortunate is always suspected; and in the visit made to his room by
+the magistrates was found a key that opened the door of the apartment
+where the theft had been committed.  In vain did he represent that had he
+been the thief he should not have kept an instrument which was, or might
+be, construed into an argument of guilt; he was carried to prison, and,
+though none of the property was discovered in his possession, would have
+been condemned, had he not produced Madame Chevalier, who avowed that the
+key opened the door of her bedroom, which the smith who had made it
+confirmed, and swore that he had fabricated eight keys for the same
+actress and for the same purpose.
+
+At that time this woman lived in the same house with her husband, but
+cohabited there with the husband of another woman.  She had also places
+of assignation with other gallants at private apartments, both in Hamburg
+and at Altona.  All these, her scandalous intrigues, were known even to
+the common porters of these cities.  The first time, after the affair of
+the key had become public, she acted in a play where a key was mentioned,
+and the audience immediately repeated, "The key! the key!"  Far from
+being ashamed, she appeared every night in pieces selected by her, where
+there was mention of keys, and thus tired the jokes of the public.  This
+impudence might have been expected from her, but it was little to be
+supposed that her barefaced vices should, as really was the case, augment
+the crowd of suitors, and occasion even some duels, which latter she both
+encouraged and rewarded.
+
+Two brothers, of the name of De S-----, were both in love with her, and
+the eldest, as the richest, became her choice.  Offended at his refusal
+of too large a sum of money, she wrote to the younger De S-----, and
+offered to accede to his proposals if, like a gentleman, he would avenge
+the affront she had experienced from his brother.  He consulted a friend,
+who, to expose her infamy, advised him to send some confidential person
+to inform her that he had killed his elder brother, and expected the
+recompense on the same night.  He went and was received with open arms,
+and had just retired with her, when the elder brother, accompanied by his
+friend, entered the room.  Madame Chevalier, instead of upbraiding,
+laughed, and the next day the public laughed with her, and applauded her
+more than ever.  She knew very well what she was doing.  The stories of
+the key and the duel produced for her more than four thousand louis d'or
+by the number of new gallants they enticed.  It was a kind of emulation
+among all young men in the North who should be foremost to dishonour and
+ruin himself with this infamous woman.
+
+Madame Chevalier and her husband now live here in grand style, and have
+their grand parties, grand teas, grand assemblies, and grand balls. Their
+hotel, I am assured, is even visited by the Bonapartes and by the members
+of the foreign diplomatic corps.  In the house where I saw her, I
+observed that Louis Bonaparte and two foreign Ambassadors spoke to her as
+old acquaintances.  Though rich, to the amount of ten millions of
+livres--she, or rather her husband, keeps a gambling-house, and her
+superannuated charms are still to be bought for money, at the disposal of
+those amateurs who are fond of antiques.  Both her husband and herself
+are still members of our secret diplomacy, though she complains loudly
+that, of the two millions of livres--promised her in 1799 by Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand if she could succeed in persuading Paul I. to withdraw
+from his alliance with England and Austria, only six hundred thousand
+livres--has been paid her.
+
+I cannot finish this letter without telling you that before our military
+forces had reached the Rhine, our political incendiaries had already
+taken the field, and were in full march towards the Austrian, Russian,
+and Prussian capitals.  The advanced guard of this dangerous corps
+consists entirely of females, all gifted with beauty and parts as much
+superior to those of Madame Chevalier as their instructions are better
+digested.  Bonaparte and Talleyrand have more than once regretted that
+Madame Chevalier was not ordered to enter into the conspiracy against
+Paul (whose inconsistency and violence they foresaw would make his reign
+short), that she might have influenced the conspirators to fix upon a
+successor more pliable and less scrupulous, and who would have suffered
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud to dictate to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.
+
+I dined in company several times this last spring with two ladies who,
+rumour said, have been destined for your P----- of W---- and D--- of
+Y---ever since the Peace of Amiens.  Talleyrand is well informed what
+figures and what talents are requisite to make an impression on these
+Princes, and has made his choice accordingly.  These ladies have lately
+disappeared, and when inquired after are stated to be in the country,
+though I do not consider it improbable that they have already arrived at
+headquarters.  They are both rather fair and lusty, above the middle
+size, and about twenty-five years of age.  They speak, besides French,
+the English and Italian languages.  They are good drawers, good
+musicians, good singers, and, if necessary, even good drinkers.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Had the citizens of the United States been as submissive to the
+taxation of your Government as to the vexations of our ruler, America
+would, perhaps, have been less free and Europe more tranquil. After the
+treaty of Amiens had Produced a general pacification, our Government was
+seriously determined to reconquer from America a part of those treasures
+its citizens had gained during the Revolutionary War, by a neutrality
+which our policy and interest required, and which the liberality of your
+Government endured.  Hence the acquisition we made of New Orleans from
+Spain, and hence the intrigues of our emissaries in that colony, and the
+peremptory requisitions of provision for St. Domingo by our Minister and
+generals.  Had we been victorious in St. Domingo, most of our troops
+there were destined for the American Continent, to invade, according to
+circumstances, either the Spanish colonies on the terra firma or the
+States of the American Commonwealth.  The unforeseen rupture with your
+country postponed a plan that is far from being laid aside.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that since we sold Louisiana we have no footing
+in America that can threaten the peace or independence of the United
+States; but may not the same dictates that procured us at Madrid the
+acquisition of New Orleans, also make us masters of Spanish Florida?  And
+do you believe it improbable that the present disagreement between
+America and Spain is kept up by our intrigues and by our future views?
+Would not a word from us settle in an instant at Madrid the differences
+as well as the frontiers of the contending parties in America?  And does
+it not seem to be the regular and systematic plan of our Government to
+provoke the retaliation of the Americans, and to show our disregard of
+their privilege of neutrality and rights of independence; and that we
+insult them only because we despise them, and despise them only because
+we do not apprehend their resentment.
+
+I have heard the late American Minister here assert that the American
+vessels captured by our cruisers and condemned by our tribunals, only
+during the last war, amounted to about five hundred; and their cargoes
+(all American property) to one hundred and fifty millions of
+livres--L6,000,000.  Some few days ago I saw a printed list, presented by
+the American consul to our Minister of the Marine Department, claiming
+one hundred and twelve American ships captured in the West Indies and on
+the coast of America within these last two years, the cargoes of which
+have all been confiscated, and most of the crews still continue prisoners
+at Martinico, Gaudeloupe, or Cayenne.  Besides these, sixty-six American
+ships, after being plundered in part of their cargoes at sea by our
+privateers, had been released; and their claims for property thus lost,
+or damage thus done, amounting to one million three hundred thousand
+livres.
+
+You must have read the proclamations of our governors in the West Indies,
+and therefore remember that one dated at Guadeloupe, and another dated at
+the City of San Domingo, both declare, without farther ceremony, all
+American and other neutral ships and cargoes good and lawful prizes, when
+coming from or destined to any port in the Island of St. Domingo, because
+Bonaparte's subjects there were in a state of rebellion.  What would
+these philosophers who, twelve years ago, wrote so many libels against
+your Ministers for their pretended system of famine, have said, had they,
+instead of prohibiting the carrying of ammunition and provisions to the
+ports of France, thus extended their orders without discrimination or
+distinction?  How would the neutral Americans, and the neutral Danes, and
+their then allies, philosophers, and Jacobins of all colours and classes,
+have complained and declaimed against the tyrants of the seas; against
+the enemies of humanity, liberty, and equality.  Have not the negroes
+now, as much as our Jacobins had in 1793, a right to call upon all those
+tender-hearted schemers, dupes, or impostors, to interest humanity in
+their favour?  But, as far as I know, no friends of liberty have yet
+written a line in favour of these oppressed and injured men, whose former
+slavery was never doubtful, and who, therefore, had more reason to rise
+against their tyrants, and to attempt to shake off their yoke, than our
+French insurgents, who, free before, have never since they revolted
+against lawful authority enjoyed an hour's freedom.  But the Emperor
+Jacques the First has no propagators, no emissaries, no learned savans
+and no secret agents to preach insurrection in other States, while
+defending his own usurpation; besides, his treasury is not in the most
+brilliant and flourishing situation, and the crew of our white
+revolutionists are less attached to liberty than to cash.
+
+Our Ambassador to the United States, General Turreaux, is far from being
+contented with our friend, the President Jefferson, whose patriotic
+notions have not yet soared to the level of our patriotic transactions.
+He refused both to prevent the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte with a female
+American citizen, and to detain her after her marriage when her husband
+returned to Europe.  To our continual representation against the
+liberties which the American newspapers take with our Government, with
+our Emperor, with our Imperial Family, and with our Imperial Ministers,
+the answer has always been, "Prosecute the libeller, and as soon as he is
+convicted he will be punished."  This tardy and negative justice is so
+opposite to our expeditious and summary mode of proceeding, of punishing
+first and trying afterwards, that it must be both humiliating and
+offensive.  In return, when the Americans have complained to Turreaux
+against the piracy of our privateers, he has sent them here to seek
+redress, where they also will, to their cost, discover that in civil
+cases our justice has not the same rapid march as when it is a question
+of arresting or transporting suspected persons, or of tormenting,
+shooting, or guillotining a pretended spy, or supposed conspirator.
+
+Had the peace of Europe continued, Bernadotte was the person selected by
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we
+then intended to strike, and not to negotiate.  But during the present
+embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than
+either a warrior or a politician.  A man who has passed through all the
+mire of our own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an
+accomplice of all our factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument
+where factions are to be created and directed, where wealth is designed
+for pillage, and a State for overthrow.  General Turreaux is, therefore,
+in his place, and at his proper post, as our Ambassador in America.
+
+The son of a valet of the late Duc de Bouillon, Turreaux called himself
+before the Revolution Chevalier de Grambonville, and was, in fact, a
+'chevalier d'industrie' (a swindler), who supported himself by gambling
+and cheating.  An associate of Beurnonville, Barras, and other vile
+characters, he with them joined the colours of rebellion, and served
+under the former in 1792, in the army of the Moselle, first as a
+volunteer, and afterwards as an aide-de-camp.  In a speech at the Jacobin
+Club at Quesnoy, on the 20th of November, 1792, he made a motion--"That,
+throughout the whole republican army, all hats should be prohibited, and
+red caps substituted in their place; and that, not only portable
+guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs, should accompany the soldiers of
+Liberty and Equality."
+
+A cousin of his was a member of the National Convention, and one of those
+called Mountaineers, or sturdy partisans of Marat and Robespierre.  It
+was to the influence of this cousin, that he was indebted, first for a
+commission as an adjutant-general, and afterwards for his promotion to a
+general of brigade.  In 1793, he was ordered to march, under the command
+of Santerre, to La Vendee, where he shared in the defeat of the
+republicans at Vihiers.  At the engagement near Roches d'Erigne he
+commanded, for the first time, a separate column, and the capacity and
+abilities which he displayed on that occasion were such as might have
+been expected from a man who had passed the first thirty years of his
+life in brothels and gambling-houses.  So pleasant were his dispositions,
+that almost the whole army narrowly escaped having been thrown and pushed
+into the River Loire.  The battle of Doux was the only one in which he
+had a share where the republicans were not routed; but some few days
+afterwards, near Coron, all the troops under him were cut to pieces, and
+he was himself wounded.
+
+The confidence of his friends, the Jacobins, increased, however, in
+proportion to his disasters, and he was, in 1794, after the superior
+number of the republican soldiers had forced the remnants of the
+Royalists to evacuate what was properly called La Vendee, appointed a
+commander-in-chief.  He had now an opportunity to display his infamy and
+barbarity.  Having established his headquarters at Mantes, where he was
+safe, amidst the massacres of women and children ordered by his friend
+Carriere, he commanded the republican army to enter La Vendee in twelve
+columns, preceded by fire and sword; and within four weeks, one of the
+most populous departments of France, to the extent and circumference of
+sixty leagues, was laid waste-not a house, not a cottage, not a tree was
+spared, all was reduced to ashes; and the unfortunate inhabitants, who
+had not perished amid the ruin of their dwellings, were shot or stabbed;
+while attempting to save themselves from the common conflagration.  On
+the 22d of January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of
+the National Convention: "Citizen Representatives!--A country of sixty
+leagues extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a perfect
+desert; not a dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes; and of one
+hundred and eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a soul breathes
+any longer.  Men and women, old men and children, have all experienced
+the national vengeance, and are no more.  It was a pleasure to a true
+republican to see upon the bayonets of each of our brave republicans the
+children of traitors, or their, heads.  According to the lowest
+calculation, I have despatched, within three months, two hundred thousand
+individuals of both sexes, and of all ages.  Vive la Republique!!!" In
+the works of Prudhomme and our republican writers, are inserted hundreds
+of letters, still more cruelly extravagant, from this ci-devant friend of
+Liberty and Equality, and at present faithful subject, and grand officer
+of the Legion of Honour, of His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First.
+
+After the death of Robespierre, Turreaux, then a governor at Belleisle,
+was arrested as a terrorist, and shut up at Du Plessis until the general
+amnesty released him in 1795.  During his imprisonment he amused himself
+with writing memoirs of the war of La Vendee, in which he tried to prove
+that all his barbarities had been perpetrated for the sake of humanity,
+and to save the lives of republicans.  He had also the modesty to
+announce that, as a military work, his production would be equally
+interesting as those of a Folard and Guibert.  These memoirs, however,
+proved nothing but that he was equally ignorant and wicked, presumptuous
+and ferocious.
+
+During the reign of the Directory he was rather discarded, or only
+employed as a kind of recruiting officer to hunt young conscripts, but in
+1800 Bonaparte gave him a command in the army of reserve; and in 1802,
+another in the army of the interior.  He then became one of the most
+assiduous and cringing courtiers at the Emperor's levies; while in the
+Empress's drawing-room he assumed his former air and ton of a chevalier,
+in hopes of imposing upon those who did not remember the nickname which
+his soldiers gave him ten years before, of Chevalier of the Guillotine.
+
+At a ball of the Bonaparte family to which he was invited, the Emperor
+took the fancy to dance with his stepdaughter, Madame Louis.  He,
+therefore, unhooked his sword, which he handed to a young colonel, D'
+Avry, standing by his side.  This colonel, who had been a page at the
+Court of Louis XVI., knew that it would have been against etiquette, and
+even unbecoming of him, to act as a valet to Napoleon while there were
+valets in the room; he therefore retreated, looking round for a servant.
+"Oh!" said the Emperor, "I see that I am mistaken; here, generals,"
+continued he (addressing himself to half a dozen, with whose independent
+principles and good breeding he was acquainted), "take this sword during
+my dance."  They all pushed forward, but Turreaux and La Grange, another
+general and intriguer, were foremost; the latter, however, received the
+preference.  On the next day, D' Avry was ordered upon service to
+Cayenne.
+
+Turreaux has acquired, by his patriotic deeds in La Vendee, a fortune of
+seven millions of livres.  He has the highest opinion of his own
+capacity, while a moment's conversation will inform a man of sense that
+he is only a conceited fool.  As to his political transactions, he has by
+his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a
+diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on
+him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business.  During a European
+war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should
+Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States
+will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same
+outrages their commercial navy now experiences on the main.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy, has assured
+me that, so far from Bonaparte's subjects on the other side of the Alps
+being contented and attached to his person and Government, were a
+victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of Lombardy a general
+insurrection would be the consequence.  During these last nine years the
+inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment's tranquillity or safety.  Every
+relation or favourite whom Napoleon wished to provide for, or to enrich,
+he has saddled upon them as in free quarters; and since 1796, when they
+first had the honour of our Emperor's acquaintance, they have paid more
+in taxes, in forced loans, requisitions, and extortions of every
+description, than their ancestors or themselves had paid during the one
+hundred and ninety-six preceding years.
+
+Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the
+people in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse off.
+Having more national character and more fidelity towards their Sovereign
+than their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated. Their
+governor, General De Menou, has caused most of the departments to be
+declared under martial law, and without right to claim the protection of
+our happy constitution.  In every city or town are organized special
+tribunals, the progeny of our revolutionary tribunals, against the
+sentences of which no appeal can be made, though these sentences are
+always capital ones.  Before these, suspicion is evidence, and an
+imprudent word is subject to the same punishment as a murderous deed.
+Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he who complains is shot as a
+conspirator.
+
+There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape these
+legal assassinations.  They must either desert their country or sacrifice
+a part of their property.  In the former case, if retaken, they are
+condemned as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the risk that those
+to whom they have already given a part of their possessions will also
+require the remainder, and having obtained it, to enjoy in security the
+spoil, will send them to the tribunals and to death.  De Menou has a
+fixed tariff for his protection, regulated according to the riches of
+each person; and the tax-gatherers collect these arbitrary contributions
+with the regular ones, so little pains are taken to conceal or to
+disguise these robberies.
+
+De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
+Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment
+or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately.  He
+calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous
+action he proposes to commit, and determines accordingly.  He owed some
+riches and the rank of the major-general to the bounty of Louis XVI., but
+when he considered the immense value of the revolutionary plunder, called
+national property, and that those who confiscated could also promote, he
+did not hesitate what party to take.  A traitor is generally a coward; he
+has everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his Royalist
+countrymen in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by your
+countrymen in 1801.
+
+Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one
+Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are
+obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection,
+and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours.  He has also in his
+hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
+themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
+if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business
+done.  He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money,
+and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have
+the same privilege.  Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of
+the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of
+those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit.  All
+the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
+by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
+weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying.  He is a
+grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
+that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
+a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
+France, and to create in their place only a national one.  Always an
+incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
+Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
+Alcoran.
+
+The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
+complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First.  If persons of
+rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
+birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
+dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
+might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
+death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
+of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
+of lowest birth and basest morals.  If their revolutionary mania were not
+incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
+duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
+being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
+preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.
+
+The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
+Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections.  Wealthy as well as
+elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
+enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
+esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
+his own conscience.  Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
+made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
+works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
+reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
+charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
+attempted to be put into practice.  Returned to his own country, his
+acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
+with his religion, and with himself.  In our Revolution he thought that
+he saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species,
+and that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society
+as was promised in books.  With our own regenerators he extenuated the
+crimes which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them
+even necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete.  When,
+therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was
+among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer.
+The numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
+commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.
+"The faults and sufferings of individuals," he said, "are nothing to the
+goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole."  To
+him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of
+thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with
+the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and
+instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers.  In recompense for so
+much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in
+1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at
+Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic. As Melzi
+was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much
+approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that
+annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people.  In a conference,
+however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced
+that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
+intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the
+point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it
+should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he
+advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and
+equality.  Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi
+to sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he
+occupied.
+
+The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his
+philosophy and his schemes of regeneration.  He trusted so much to the
+promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined
+to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was
+ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais
+as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy.  He was not
+philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad
+grace to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred
+seeing in that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general. To
+soften his disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and
+with that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons,
+where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of
+Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.
+
+Immediately after Bonaparte's return to France, Melzi left Milan, and
+retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to Talleyrand a
+letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave to pass the
+remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives.  An answer was
+presented him by an officer of Bonaparte's Gendarmes d'Elite, in which he
+was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to return with the officer to
+Milan, and there occupy his office of Arch-Chancellor to which he had
+been nominated.  Enraged at such treatment, he endeavoured to kill
+himself with a dose of poison, but his attempt did not succeed.  His
+health was, however, so much injured by it that it is not supposed he can
+live long.  What, a lesson for reformers and innovators!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A ridiculous affair lately occasioned a great deal of bustle
+among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps.  When Bonaparte
+demanded for himself and for his wife the title of Imperial Majesty, and
+for his brothers and sisters that of Imperial Highness, he also insisted
+on the salutation of a Serene Highness being given to his
+Arch-Chancellor, Cambaceres, and his Arch-Treasurer, Lebrun.  The
+political consciences of the independent representatives of independent
+Continental Princes immediately took the alarm at the latter innovation,
+as the appellation of Serene Highness has never hitherto been bestowed on
+persons who had not princely rank.  They complained to Talleyrand, they
+petitioned Bonaparte, and they even despatched couriers to their
+respective Courts.  The Minister smiled, the Emperor cursed, and their
+own Cabinets deliberated.  All routs, all assemblies, all circles, and
+all balls were at a stop.  Cambaceres applied to his Sovereign to support
+his pretensions, as connected with his own dignity; and the diplomatic
+corps held forward their dignity as opposing the pretensions of
+Cambaceres.  In this dilemma Bonaparte ordered all the Ambassadors,
+Ministers, envoys, and agents 'en masse' to the castle of the Tuileries.
+After hearing, with apparent patience, their arguments in favour of
+established etiquette and customs, he remained inflexible, upon the
+ground that he, as master, had a right to confer what titles he chose
+within his own dominions on his own subjects; and that those foreigners
+who refused to submit to his regulations might return to their own
+country.  This plain explanation neither effecting a conversion nor
+making any, impression, he grew warm, and left the refractory
+diplomatists with these remarkable words: "Were I to create my Mameluke
+Rostan a King, both you and your masters should acknowledge him in that
+rank."
+
+After this conference most of Their Excellencies were seized with terror
+and fear, and would, perhaps, have subscribed to the commands of our
+Emperor had not some of the wisest among them proposed, and obtained the
+consent of the rest, to apply, once more to Talleyrand, and purchase by
+some douceur his assistance in this great business.  The heart of our
+Minister is easily softened; and he assented, upon certain conditions, to
+lay the whole before his Sovereign in such a manner that Cambaceres
+should be made a Prince as well as a Serene Highness.
+
+It is said that Bonaparte was not easily persuaded to this measure, and
+did not consent to it before the Minister remarked that his condescension
+in this insignificant opposition to his will would proclaim his
+moderation and generosity, and empower him to insist on obedience when
+matters of the greatest consequence should be in question or disputed.
+Thus our regicide, Cambaceres, owes his princely title to the shallow
+intrigues of the agents of legitimate Sovereigns.  Their nicety in
+talking of innovations with regard to him, after they had without
+difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an Emperor, and other sans-culottes
+Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd as improper.  Report, however, states,
+what is very probable, that they were merely the duped tools of
+Cambaceres's ambition and vanity, and of Talleyrand's corruption and
+cupidity.
+
+Cambaceres expected to have been elevated to a Prince on the same day
+that he was made a Serene Highness; but Joseph Bonaparte represented to
+his brother that too many other princedoms would diminish the respect and
+value of the princedoms of the Bonaparte family.  Cambaceres knew that
+Talleyrand had some reason at that period to be discontented with Joseph,
+and, therefore, asked his advice how to get made a Prince against the
+wishes of this Grand Elector.  After some consideration, the Minister
+replied that he was acquainted with one way, which would, with his
+support, certainly succeed; but it required a million of livres to set
+the wheels in motion, and keep them going afterwards.  The hint was
+taken, and an agreement signed for one million, payable on the day when
+the princely patent should be delivered to the Arch-Chancellor.
+
+Among the mistresses provided by our Minister for the members of the
+foreign diplomatic corps, Madame B----s is one of the ablest in the way
+of intrigue.  She was instructed to alarm her 'bon ami', the Bavarian
+Minister, Cetto, who is always bustling and pushing himself forward in
+the grand questions of etiquette.  A fool rather than a rogue, and an
+intriguer while he thinks himself a negotiator, he was happy to have this
+occasion to prove his penetrating genius and astonishing information. A
+convocation of the diplomatic corps was therefore called, and the
+suggestions of Cetto were regarded as an inspiration, and approved, with
+a resolution to persevere unanimously.  At their first audience with
+Talleyrand on this subject, he seemed to incline in their favour; but, as
+soon as he observed how much they showed themselves interested about this
+trifling punctilio, it occurred to him that they, as well as Cambaceres,
+might in some way or other reward the service he intended to perform.
+Madame B----s was again sent for; and she once more advised her lover,
+who again advised his colleagues.  Their scanty purses were opened, and a
+subscription entered into for a very valuable diamond, which, with the
+millions of the Arch-Chancellor, gave satisfaction to all parties; and
+even Joseph Bonaparte was reconciled, upon the consideration that
+Cambaceres has no children, and that, therefore, the Prince will expire
+with the Grand Officer of State.
+
+Cambaceres, though before the Revolution a nobleman of a Parliamentary
+family, was so degraded and despised for his unnatural and beastly
+propensities, that to see him in the ranks of rebellion was not
+unexpected.  Born in Languedoc, his countrymen were the first to suffer
+from his revolutionary proceedings, and reproached him as one of the most
+active instruments of persecution against the clergy of Toulouse, and as
+one of the causes of all the blood that flowed in consequence.  A coward
+as well as a traitor, after the death of Louis XVI. he never dared ascend
+the tribune of the National Convention, but always gave a silent vote to
+all the atrocious laws proposed and carried by Marat, Robespierre, and
+their accomplices.  It was in 1795, when the Reign of Terror had ceased,
+that he first displayed his zeal for anarchy, and his hatred to royalty;
+his contemptible and disgusting vices were, however, so publicly
+reprobated, that even the Directory dared not nominate him a Minister of
+Justice, a place for which he intrigued in vain, from 1796 to 1799; when
+Bonaparte, either not so scrupulous, or setting himself above the public
+opinion, caused him to be called to the Consulate; which, in 1802, was
+ensured him for life, but exchanged, in 1804, for the office of an
+Arch-Chancellor.
+
+He is now worth thirty millions of livres--all honestly obtained by his
+revolutionary industry.  Besides a Prince, a Serene Highness, an
+Arch-Chancellor, a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, he is also a
+Knight of the Prussian Black Eagle!  For his brother, who was for a long
+time an emigrant clergyman, and whom he then renounced as a fanatic, he
+has now procured the Archbishopric of Rouen and a Cardinal's hat.  His
+Eminence is also a grand officer of the Legion of Honour in France, and a
+Pope in petto at Rome.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereign Prince has more incurred the hatred of Bonaparte
+than the present King of Sweden; and I have heard from good authority
+that our Government spares neither bribes nor intrigues to move the tails
+of those factions which were dissolved, but not crushed, after the murder
+of Gustavus III.  The Swedes are generally brave and loyal, but their
+history bears witness that they are easily misled; all their grand
+achievements are their own, and the consequence of their national spirit
+and national valour, while all their disasters have been effected by the
+influence of foreign gold and of foreign machinations.  Had they not been
+the dupes of the plots and views of the Cabinets of Versailles and St.
+Petersburg, their country might have been as powerful in the nineteenth
+century as it was in the seventeenth.
+
+That Gustavus IV. both knew the danger of Europe, and indicated the
+remedy, His Majesty's notes, as soon as he came of age, presented by the
+able and loyal Minister Bildt to the Diet of Ratisbon, evince.  Had they
+been more attended to during 1798 and 1799, Bonaparte would not, perhaps,
+have now been so great, but the Continent would have remained more free
+and more independent.  They were the first causes of our Emperor's
+official anger against the Cabinet of Stockholm.
+
+When, however, His Swedish Majesty entered into the Northern league, his
+Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, was for some time treated with no insults
+distinct or different from those to which all foreign diplomatic agents
+have been accustomed during the present reign; but when he demanded
+reparation for the piracies committed during the last war by our
+privateers on the commerce of his nation, the tone was changed; and when
+his Sovereign, in 1803, was on a visit to his father-in-law, the Elector
+of Baden, and there preferred the agreeable company of the unfortunate
+Duc d'Enghien to the society of our Minister, Baron Ehrensward never
+entered Napoleon's diplomatic circle or Madame Napoleon's drawing-room
+without hearing rebukes and experiencing disgusts.  One day, when more
+than usually attacked, he said, on leaving the apartment, to another
+Ambassador, and in the hearing of Duroc, "that it required more real
+courage to encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming
+provocations, which the person who gave them knew could not be resented,
+than to brave a death which the mouths of cannon vomit or the points of
+bayonets inflict."  Duroc reported to his master what he heard, and but
+for Talleyrand's interference, the Swedish Ambassador would, on the same
+night, have been lodged in the Temple.  Orders were already given to that
+purpose, but were revoked.
+
+This Baron Ehrensward, who is also a general in the service of his
+country, has almost from his youth passed his time at Courts; first in
+his own country, and afterwards in Spain, where he resided twelve years
+as our Ambassador.  Frank as a soldier, but also polite as a courtier, he
+was not a little surprised at the new etiquette of our new court, and at
+the endurance of all the members of the diplomatic corps, of whom hardly
+one had spirit enough to remember that he was the representative of one,
+at least nominally, independent Prince or State.  It must be added that
+he was the only foreign diplomatist, with Count Markof, who was not the
+choice of our Cabinet, and, therefore, was not in our secrets.
+
+As soon as His Swedish Majesty heard of the unexpected and unlawful
+seizure of the Duc d'Enghien, he wrote a letter with his own hand to
+Bonaparte, which he sent by his adjutant-general, Tawast; but this
+officer arrived too late, and only in time to hear of the execution of
+the Prince he intended to save, and the indecent expressions of Napoleon
+when acquainted with the object of his mission.  Baron Ehrensward was
+then recalled, and a Court mourning was proclaimed by Gustavus IV., as
+well as by Alexander the First, for the lamented victim of the violated
+laws of nations and humanity.  This so, enraged our ruler that General
+Caulincourt (the same who commanded the expedition which crossed the
+Rhine and captured the Duc d' Enghien) was engaged to head and lead fifty
+other banditti, who were destined to pass in disguise into Baden, and to
+bring the King of Sweden a prisoner to this capital.  Fortunately, His
+Majesty had some suspicion of the attempt, and removed to a greater
+distance from our frontiers than Carlsruhe.  So certain was our
+Government of the success of this shameful enterprise, that our charge
+d'affaires in Sweden was preparing to engage the discontented and
+disaffected there for the convocation of a diet and the establishment of
+a regency.
+
+According to the report in our diplomatic circle.  Bonaparte and
+Talleyrand intended nevermore to, release their royal captive when once
+in their power; but, after forcing him to resign the throne to his son,
+keep him a prisoner for the remainder of his days, which they would have
+taken care should not have been long.  The Duke of Sudermania was to have
+been nominated a regent until the majority of the young King, not yet six
+years of age.  The Swedish diets were to recover that influence, or,
+rather, that licentiousness, to which Gustavus III., by the revolution of
+the 19th of August, 1772, put an end.  All exiled regicides, or traitors,
+were to be recalled, and a revolutionary focus organized in the North,
+equally threatening Russia and Denmark.  The dreadful consequences of
+such an event are incalculable.  Thanks to the prudence of His Swedish
+Majesty, all these schemes evaporated in air.
+
+Not being able to dethrone a Swedish Monarch, our Cabinet resolved to
+partition the Swedish territory, to which effect I am assured that
+proposals were last summer made to the Cabinets of St. Petersburg,
+Berlin, and Copenhagen.  Swedish Finland was stated to have been offered
+to Russia, Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, and Scania and Blekinge to
+Denmark; but the overture was rejected.
+
+The King of Sweden possesses both talents and information superior to
+most of his contemporaries, and he has surrounded himself with
+counsellors who, with their experience, make wisdom more firm, more
+useful, and more valuable.  His chancellor, D'Ehrenheim, unites modesty
+with sagacity; he is a most able statesman, an accomplished gentleman,
+and the most agreeable of men.  He knows the languages, as well as the
+constitutions, of every country in Europe, with equal perfection as his
+native tongue and national code.  Had his Sovereign the same ascendency
+over the European politics as Christina had during the negotiation of the
+Treaty of Munster, other States would admire, and Sweden be proud of,
+another Axel Oxenstiern.
+
+Count Fersen, who also has, and is worthy of, the confidence of his
+Prince, is a nobleman, the honour and pride of his rank.  A colonel
+before the Revolution of the regiment Royal Suedois, in the service of my
+country, his principles were so well appreciated that he was entrusted by
+Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when so many were so justly suspected,
+and served royalty in distress, at the risk of his own existence.  This
+was so much the more generous in him as he was a foreigner, of one of the
+most ancient families, and one of the richest noblemen in his own
+country.  To him Louis XVIII. is indebted for his life; and he brought
+consolation to the deserted Marie Antoinette even in the dungeon of the
+Conciergerie, when a discovery would have been a sentence of death. In
+1797, he was appointed by his King plenipotentiary to the Congress of
+Rastadt, and arrived there just at the time when Bonaparte, after the
+destruction of happiness in Italy, had resolved on the ruin of liberty in
+Switzerland, and came there proud of past exploits and big with future
+schemes of mischief.  His reception from the conquerer of Italy was such
+as might have been expected by distinguished loyalty from successful
+rebellion.  He was told that the Congress of Rastadt was not his place!
+and this was true; for what can be common between honour and infamy,
+between virtue and vice?  On his return to Sweden, Count Fersen was
+rewarded with the dignity of a Grand Officer of State.
+
+Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of His Swedish Majesty, Baron
+d'Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced in saying that he was the
+friend of Gustavus III.  From a page to that chevalier of royalty he was
+advanced to the rank of general; and during the war with Russia, in 1789
+and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his Prince and benefactor. It
+was to him that his King said, when wounded mortally, by the hand of a
+regicide, at a masquerade in March, 1792, "Don't be alarmed, my friend.
+You know as well as myself that all wounds are not dangerous."
+Unfortunately, his were not of that description.
+
+In the will of this great Monarch, Baron d'Armfeldt was nominated one of
+the guardians of his present Sovereign, and a governor of the capital;
+but the Duke Regent, who was a weak Prince, guided by philosophical
+adventurers, by Illuminati and Freemasons, most of whom had imbibed the
+French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a kind of honourable exile, as
+an Ambassador to Italy.  Shortly afterwards, under pretence of having
+discovered a conspiracy, in which the Baron was implicated, he was
+outlawed.  He then took refuge in Russia, where he was made a general,
+and as such distinguished him self under Suwarow during the campaign of
+1799.  He was then recalled to his country, and restored to all his
+former places and dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and
+obtain the favour, friendship, and approbation of his King.  He is said
+to be one of the Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with
+the Russian troops expected in Pomerania.  Wherever he is employed, I am
+convinced that he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero.  Last
+spring he was offered the place of a lieutenant-general in the Austrian
+service, which, with regard to salary and emoluments, is greatly superior
+to what he enjoys in Sweden; he declined it, however, because, with a
+warrior of his stamp, interest is the last consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Believe me, Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than
+all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes for
+his destruction.  He is aware of the fatal consequences all former
+factions suffered from the public exposure of their past crimes and
+future views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their
+boasts and promises.  He does not doubt but that a faithful account of
+all the actions and intrigues of his Government, its imposition, fraud,
+duplicity, and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public
+opinion; and that even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being
+tired of our revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity, have
+been his adherents, might alter their sentiments when they read of
+enormities which must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one that he
+who waded through rivers of blood to seize power will never hesitate
+about the means of preserving it.
+
+There is not a printing-office, from the banks of the Elbe to the Gulf of
+Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection of our
+police agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France, Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work which, if contrary to
+our policy or our fears, is not either confiscated, or purchased on the
+day it, makes its appearance.  Besides our regular emissaries, we have
+persons travelling from the beginning to the end of the year, to pick up
+information of what literary productions are printing; of what authors
+are popular; of their political opinions and private circumstances.  This
+branch of our haute police extends even to your country.
+
+Before the Revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers, but
+from 1789 to 1799 never less than thirty, and frequently sixty journals
+were daily printed.  After Bonaparte had assumed the consular authority,
+they were reduced to ten.  But though these were under a very strict
+inspection of our Minister of Police, they were regarded still as too
+numerous, and have lately been diminished to eight, by the incorporation
+of 'Le Clef du Cabinet' and 'Le Bulletin de l'Europe' with the 'Gazette
+de France', a paper of which the infamously famous Barrere is the editor.
+According to a proposal of Bonaparte, it was lately debated in the
+Council of State whether it would not be politic to suppress all daily
+prints, with the sole exception of the Moniteur.  Fouche and Talleyrand
+spoke much in favour of this measure of security.  Real, however, is said
+to have suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our Government,
+instead of prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has resolved
+by degrees to purchase them all, and to entrust them entirely to the
+direction of Barrere, who now is consulted in everything concerning books
+or newspapers.
+
+All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have
+previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary
+censor, Barrere.  Any person offending against this law is most severely
+punished.  An American gentlemen, of the name of Campbell, was last
+spring sent to the Temple for lending one of your old daily papers to a
+person who lodged in the same hotel with him.  After an imprisonment of
+ten weeks he made some pecuniary sacrifices to obtain his liberty, but
+was carried to Havre, under an escort of gendarmes, put on board a
+neutral vessel, and forbidden, under pain of death, ever to set his foot
+on French ground again.  An American vessel was, about the same time,
+confiscated at Bordeaux, and the captain and crew imprisoned, because
+some English books were found on board, in which Bonaparte, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, and some of our great men were rather ill-treated.  The crew have
+since been liberated, but the captain has been brought here, and is still
+in the Temple.  The vessel and the cargo have been sold as lawful
+captures, though the captain has proved from the names written in the
+books that they belonged to a passenger.  A young German student in
+surgery, who came here to improve himself, has been nine months in the
+same state prison, for having with him a book, printed in Germany during
+Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, wherein the chief and the undertaking
+are ridiculed.  His mother, the widow of a clergyman, hearing of the
+misfortune of her son, came here, and has presented to the Emperor and
+Empress half a dozen petitions, without any effect whatever, and has
+almost ruined herself and her other children by the expenses of the
+journey.  During a stay of four months she has not yet been able to gain
+admittance into the Temple, to visit or see her son, who perhaps expired
+in tortures, or died brokenhearted before she came here.
+
+A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the Duc d'Enghien had found their
+way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at last the
+police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of having read
+them was arrested.  The number of these unfortunate persons, according to
+some, amounted to one hundred and thirty, while others say that they were
+only eighty-four, of whom twelve died suddenly in the Temple, and the
+remainder were transported to Cayenne; upwards of half of them were
+women, some of the ci-devant highest rank among subjects.
+
+A Prussian, of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of
+Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives of
+Bonaparte and of some of his generals.  Every day such and other examples
+of the severity of our Government are related; and foreigners who visit
+us continue, nevertheless, to be off their guard.  They would be less
+punished had they with them forged bills than, printed books or
+newspapers, in which our Imperial Family and public functionaries are not
+treated with due respect.  Bonaparte is convinced that in every book
+where he is not spoken of with praise, the intent is to blame him; and
+such intents or negative guilt never escape with impunity.
+
+As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more fond of
+foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own,
+official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and
+at Mentz, where the 'Gazette de Leyden', 'Hamburg Correspondenten', and
+'Journal de Frankfort' are reprinted; some articles left out, and others
+inserted in their room.  It was intended to reprint also the 'Courier de
+Londres', but our types, and particularly, our paper, would detect the
+fraud.  I have read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were
+extracts from this French paper, printed in your country, which I
+strongly suspect are of our own manufacture.  I am told that several new
+books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant
+Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will
+soon be laid before the public as foreign productions.
+
+A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention, during
+his dinner at the restaurateur's of 'Cadran Vert', on the Boulevards,
+some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the 'Moniteur'. As
+he left the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of
+being an English agent, and before supper-time he was on the road to
+Rochefort on his way to Cayenne.  As soon as the banker Tournon was
+informed of this expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on
+Fouche, who threatened even to transport him if he dared to interfere
+with the transactions of the police.  This banker was himself seized in
+the spring of last year by a police agent and some gendarmes, and carried
+into exile forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six.
+months, until a pecuniary douceur procured him a recall.  His crime was
+having inquired after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having
+left his card there.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of the
+Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleon the First, and is
+now in Germany, making his first campaign.  A descendant of a wealthy and
+ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was easily
+deluded into the ranks of the revolutionists of his own country, by a
+Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse
+Borghese, his mother.  He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin
+club established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the
+same year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States,
+he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa
+Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat.  To show his love
+of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company of
+which the captain was a fellow that sold cats' meat and tripe in the
+streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother's kitchen.
+Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as
+insupportable for his pride and vanity as he, some years ago, was
+contemptible for his meanness.  He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who,
+between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband--a space
+of twelve months--had twice been in a fair way to become a mother.  Her
+portion was estimated at eighteen millions of livres--a sum sufficient to
+palliate many 'faux pas' in the eyes of a husband more sensible and more
+delicate than her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince
+Borghese.
+
+The lady is the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also the
+most wicked of the female Bonapartes.  She had, almost from her infancy,
+passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery, and profligacy
+before she attained her present elevation; rank, however, has not altered
+her morals, but only procured her the means of indulging in new excesses.
+Ever since the wedding night the Prince Borghese has been excluded from
+her bed; for she declared frankly to him, as well as to her brother, that
+she would never endure the approach of a man with a bad breath; though
+many who, from the opportunities they have had of judging, certainly
+ought to know, pretend that her own breath is not the sweetest in the
+world.  When her husband had marched towards the Rhine, she asked her
+brother, as a favour, to procure the Prince Borghese, after a useless
+life, a glorious death.  This curious demand of a wife was, made in
+Madame Bonaparte's drawing-room, in the presence of fifty persons.  "You
+are always 'etourdie'," replied Napoleon, smiling.
+
+If Bonaparte, however, overlooks the intrigues of his sisters, he is not
+so easily pacified when any reports reach him inculpating the virtues of
+his sisters-in-law.  Some gallants of Madame Joseph Bonaparte have
+already disappeared to return no more, or are wandering in the wilds of
+Cayenne; but the Emperor is particularly attentive to everything
+concerning the morality of Madame Louis, whose descendants are destined
+to continue the Bonaparte dynasty.  Two officers, after being cashiered,
+were, with two of Madame Louis's maids, shut up last month in the Temple,
+and have not since been heard of, upon suspicion that the Princess
+preferred their society to that of her husband.
+
+Louis Bonaparte, whose constitution has been much impaired by his
+debaucheries, was, last July, advised by his physicians to use the baths
+at St. Amand.  After his wife had accompanied him as far as Lille, she
+went to visit one of her friends, Madame Ney, the wife of General Ney,
+who commanded the camp near Montreuil.  This lady resided in a castle
+called Leek, in the vicinity, where dinners, concerts, balls, and other
+festivities celebrated the arrival of the Princess; and to these the
+principal officers of the camp were invited.  One morning, about an hour
+after the company had retired to bed, the whole castle was disturbed and
+alarmed by an uproar in the anteroom of Princesse Louis's bedchamber. On
+coming to the scene of riot, two officers were found there fighting, and
+the Princesse Louis, more than half undressed, came out and called the
+sentries on duty to separate the combatants, who were both wounded. This
+affair occasioned great scandal; and General Ney, after having put the
+officers under arrest, sent a courier to Napoleon at Boulogne, relating
+the particulars and demanding His Majesty's orders.  It was related and
+believed as a fact that the quarrel originated about two of the maids of
+the Princess (whose virtue was never suspected), with whom the officers
+were intriguing.  The Emperor ordered the culprits to be broken and
+delivered up to his Minister of Police, who knew how to proceed.  The
+Princesse Louis also received an invitation to join her sister-in-law,
+Madame Murat, then in the camp at Boulogne, and to remain under her care
+until her husband's return from St. Amand.
+
+General Murat was then at Paris, and his lady was merely on a visit to
+her Imperial brother, who made her responsible for Madame Louis, whom he
+severely reprimanded for the misconduct of her maids.  The bedrooms of
+the two sisters were on the same floor.  One night, Princesse Louis
+thought she heard the footsteps of a person on the staircase, not like
+those of a female, and afterwards the door of Madame Murat's room opened
+softly.  This occurrence deprived her of all desire to sleep; and
+curiosity, or perhaps revenge, excited her to remove her doubts
+concerning the virtue of her guardian.  In about an hour afterwards, she
+stole into Madame Murat's bedroom, by the way of their sitting-room, the
+door in the passage being bolted.  Passing her hand over the pillow, she
+almost pricked herself with the strong beard of a man, and, screaming
+out, awoke her sister, who inquired what she could want at such an
+unusual hour.
+
+"I believe," replied the Princess, "my room is haunted.  I have not shut
+my eyes, and intended to ask for a place by your side, but I find it is
+already engaged:
+
+"My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent," said Madame
+Murat.
+
+"It is very rude of your maid to go to bed with her mistress without
+first shaving herself," said the Princess, and left the room.
+
+The next morning an explanation took place; the ladies understood each
+other, and each, during the remaining part of her husband's absence, had
+for consolation a maid for a bedfellow.  Madame Murat also convinced the
+Emperor that his suspicions with regard to the Princesse Louis were
+totally unfounded; and he with some precious presents, indemnified her
+for his harsh treatment.
+
+It is reported that the two maids of the Princesse Louis, when before
+Fouche, first denied all acquaintance with the officers; but, being
+threatened with tortures, they signed a 'proces verbal', acknowledging
+their guilt.  This valuable and authentic document the Minister sent by
+an extra courier to the Emperor, who showed it to his stepdaughter.  Her
+generosity is proverbial here, and therefore nobody is surprised that she
+has given a handsome sum of money to the parents of her maids, who had in
+vain applied to see their children; Fouche having told them that affairs
+of State still required their confinement.  One of them, Mariothe, has
+been in the service of the Princess ever since her marriage, and is known
+to possess all her confidence; though during that period of four years
+she has twice been in a state of pregnancy, through the condescending
+attention of her princely master.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--When preparations were made for the departure of our army of
+England for Germany, it excited both laughter and murmuring among the
+troops.  Those who had always regarded the conquest of England as
+impracticable in present circumstances, laughed, and those who had in
+their imagination shared the wealth of your country, showed themselves
+vexed at their disappointment.  To keep them in good spirits, the company
+of the theatre of the Vaudevilles was ordered from hence to Boulogne, and
+several plays, composed for the occasion, were performed, in which the
+Germans were represented as defeated, and the English begging for peace
+on their knees, which the Emperor of the French grants upon condition
+that one hundred guineas ready money should be paid to each of his
+soldiers and sailors.  Every corps in its turn was admitted gratis to
+witness this exhibition of the end of all their labours; and you can form
+no idea what effect it produced, though you are not a stranger to our
+fickle and inconsiderate character.  Ballads, with the same predictions
+and the same promises, were written and distributed among the soldiers,
+and sung by women sent by Fouche to the coast.  As all productions of
+this sort were, as usual, liberally rewarded by the Emperor, they poured
+in from all parts of his Empire.
+
+Three poets and authors of the theatre of the Vaudevilles, Barrel, Radet,
+and Desfontaines, each received two hundred napoleons d'or for their
+common production of a ballad, called "Des Adieux d'un Grenadier au Camp
+de Boulogne."  From this I have extracted the following sample, by which
+you may judge of the remainder:
+
+THE GRENADIER'S ADIEU
+
+TO THE CAMP AT BOULOGNE
+
+The drum is beating, we must march, We're summon'd to another field, A
+field that to our conq'ring swords Shall soon a laurel harvest yield. If
+English folly light the torch Of war in Germany again The loss is
+theirs--the gain is ours March! march! commence the bright campaign.
+
+There, only by their glorious deeds Our chiefs and gallant bands are
+known; There, often have they met their foes, And victory was all their
+own: There, hostile ranks, at our approach, Prostrate beneath our feet
+shall bow; There, smiling conquest waits to twine A laurel wreath round
+every brow.
+
+Adieu, my pretty turf-built hut * Adieu, my little garden, too! I made, I
+deck'd you all myself, And I am loth to part with you: But since my arms
+I must resume, And leave your comforts all behind, Upon the hostile
+frontier soon My tent shall flutter in the wind.
+
+My pretty fowls and doves, adieu! Adieu, my playful cat, to thee! Who
+every morning round me came, And were my little family. But thee, my dog,
+I shall not leave No, thou shalt ever follow me, Shalt share my toils,
+shaft share my fame For thou art called VICTORY.
+
+But no farewell I bid to you, Ye prams and boats, which, o'er the wave,
+Were doom'd to waft to England's shore Our hero chiefs, our soldiers
+brave. To you, good gentlemen of Thames, Soon, soon our visit shall be
+paid, Soon, soon your merriment be o'er 'T is but a few short hours
+delay'd.
+
+     * During the long continuance of the French encampment at
+     Boulogne the troops had formed, as it were, a romantic town
+     of huts.  Every hut had a garden surrounding it, kept in
+     neat order and stocked with vegetables and flowers.  They
+     had, besides, fowls, pigeons, and rabbits; and these, with a
+     cat and a dog, generally formed the little household of
+     every soldier.
+
+As I am writing on the subject of poetical agents, I will also say some
+words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons frequently
+occupy both the one office and the other.  A man of the name of Richaud,
+who has sung previously the glory of Marat and Robespierre, offered to
+Bonaparte, on the evening preceding his departure for Strasburg, the
+following lines; and was in return presented with a purse full of gold,
+and an order to the Minister of the Interior, Champagny, to be employed
+in his offices, until better provided for.
+
+STANZAS
+
+ON THE RUMOUR OF A WAR WITH AUSTRIA
+
+Kings who, so often vanquish'd, vainly dare
+Menace the victor that has laid you low--
+Look now at France--and view your own despair
+In the majestic splendour of your foe.
+
+What miserable pride, ye foolish kings,
+Still your deluded reason thus misleads?
+Provoke the storm--the bolt with lightning wings
+Shall fall--but fall on your devoted heads.
+
+And thou, Napoleon, if thy mighty sword
+Shall for thy people conquer new renown;
+Go--Europe shall attest, thy heart preferr'd
+The modest olive to the laurel crown.
+
+But thee, lov'd chief, to new achievements bold
+
+The aroused spirit of the soldier calls;
+Speak!--and Vienna cowering shall behold
+Our banners waving o'er her prostrate walls.
+
+I received, four days afterwards, at the circle of Madame Joseph
+Bonaparte, with all other visitors, a copy of these stanzas.  Most of the
+foreign Ambassadors were of the party, and had also a share of this
+patriotic donation.  Count von Cobenzl had prudently absented himself;
+otherwise, this delenda of the Austrian Carthage would have been
+officially announced to him.
+
+Another poetaster, of the name of Brouet, in a long, dull, disgusting
+poem, after comparing Bonaparte with all great men of antiquity, and
+proving that he surpasses them all, tells his countrymen that their
+Emperor is the deputy Divinity upon earth--the mirror of wisdom, a
+demi-god to whom future ages will erect statues, build temples, burn
+incense, fall down and adore.  A proportionate share of abuse is, of
+course, bestowed on your nation.  He says:
+
+A Londres on vit briller d'un eclat ephemere Le front tout radieux d'un
+ministre influent; Mais pour faire palir l'etoile d'Angleterre, Un SOLEIL
+tout nouveau parut au firmament, Et ce soleil du peuple franc Admire de
+l'Europe entiere Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE LE GRAND.
+
+For this delicate compliment Brouet was made deputy postmaster-general in
+Italy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It must be granted that, if
+Bonaparte is fond of flattery, he does not receive it gratis, but pays
+for it like a real Emperor.
+
+It has lately become the etiquette, not only in our Court circle and
+official assemblies, but even in fashionable societies of persons who
+are, or wish to become, Bonaparte's public functionaries, to distribute
+and have read and applauded these disinterested effusions of our poetical
+geniuses.  This fashion occasioned lately a curious blunder at a
+tea-party in the hotel of Madame de Talleyrand.  The same printer who had
+been engaged by this lady had also been employed by Chenier, or some
+other poet, to print a short satire against several of our literary
+ladies, in which Madame de Genlis and Madame de Stael (who has just
+arrived here from her exile) were, with others, very severely handled. By
+mistake, a bundle of this production was given to the porter of Madame de
+Talleyrand, and a copy was handed to each visitor, even to Madame de
+Genlis and Madame de Stael, who took them without noticing their
+contents.  Picard, after reading an act of a new play, was asked by the
+lady of the house to read this poetic worship of the Emperor of the
+French.  After the first two lines he stopped short, looking round him
+confused, suspecting a trick had been played upon him.  This induced the
+audience to read what had been given them, and Madame de Talleyrand with
+the rest; who, instead of permitting Picard to continue with another.
+scene of his play, as he had adroitly begun, made the most awkward
+apology in the world, and by it exposed the ladies still more who were
+the objects of the satire; which, an hour afterwards, was exchanged for
+the verses intended for the homage of the Emperor, and the cause of the
+error was cleared up.
+
+I have read somewhere of a tyrant of antiquity who forced all his
+subjects to furnish one room of their houses in the best possible manner,
+according to their circumstances, and to have it consecrated for the
+reception of his bust, before which, under pain of death, they were
+commanded to prostrate themselves, morning, noon, and night.  They were
+to enter this room, bareheaded and barefooted, to remain there only on
+their knees, and to leave it without turning their back towards the
+sacred representative of their Prince.  All laughing, sneezing, coughing,
+speaking, or even whispering, were capitally prohibited; but crying was
+not only permitted, but commanded, when His Majesty was offended, angry,
+or unwell.  Should our system of cringing continue progressively to
+increase as it has done these last three years, we, too, shall very soon
+have rooms consecrated, and an idol to adore.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Portugal has suffered more from the degraded state of Spain,
+under the administration of the Prince of Peace, than we have yet gained
+by it in France.  Engaged by her, in 1793, in a war against its
+inclination and interest, it was not only deserted afterwards, but
+sacrificed.  But for the dictates of the Court of Madrid, supported,
+perhaps, by some secret influence of the Court of St. James, the Court of
+Lisbon would have preserved its neutrality, and, though not a well-wisher
+of the French Republic, never have been counted among her avowed enemies.
+
+In the peace of 1795, and in the subsequent treaty of 1796, which
+transformed the family compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons into a
+national alliance between France and Spain, there was no question about
+Portugal.  In 1797, indeed, our Government condescended to receive a
+Portuguese plenipotentiary, but merely for the purpose of plundering his
+country of some millions of money, and to insult it by shutting up its
+representative as a State prisoner in the Temple.  Of this violation of
+the laws of civilized nations, Spain never complained, nor had Portugal
+any means to avenge it.  After four years of negotiation, and an
+expenditure of thirty millions, the imbecile Spanish premier supported
+demands made by our Government, which, if assented to, would have left
+Her Most Faithful Majesty without any territory in Europe, and without
+any place of refuge in America.  Circumstances not permitting your
+country to send any but pecuniary succours, Portugal would have become an
+easy prey to the united Spanish and French forces, had the marauders
+agreed about the partition of the spoil.  Their disunion, the consequence
+of their avidity, saved it from ruin, but not from pillage.  A province
+was ceded to Spain, the banks and the navigation of a river to France,
+and fifty millions to the private purse of the Bonaparte family.
+
+It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such offerings,
+would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but, though the
+Cabinet of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+pretensions and encroachments of the latter left the former no rest.
+While pocketing tributes it required commercial monopolies, and when its
+commerce was favoured, it demanded seaports to ensure the security of its
+trade.  Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions of the
+State it, oppressed.  With the money and the value of the diamonds which
+Portugal has paid in loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in
+donations, in tributes, and in presents, it might have supported, during
+ten years, an army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have
+been worse situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?
+
+But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort, were
+more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the extortions
+themselves were injurious to its resources.  The first revolutionary
+Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his
+contempt.
+
+Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more
+vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes.  The son of a publican
+and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a
+postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin, and a terrorist;
+and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of these different
+trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and
+disgusts.  He seems to say, "I am a villain.  I know that I am so, and I
+am proud of being so.  To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no
+human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance.  I might be
+murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me.  On a gibbet or
+in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with
+Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same.  Infamy
+cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me."
+General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will
+always be the same polluted, but daring individual; a stranger to remorse
+and repentance, as well as to honour and virtue.  Where Bonaparte sends a
+banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction.
+
+A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes's first
+mission to Portugal.  When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he
+had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest,
+and, as a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador, as he said himself.
+His resentment against Bonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent
+of Portugal.  Without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the
+Court of Lisbon, he brought the sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of
+the Tuileries with him, and determined to fraternize with a foreign and
+legitimate Sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and
+First Consul; and, what is the more surprising, he carried his point. The
+Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor
+to his child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before he was
+divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince's consort, a
+Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to associate.
+
+Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an Ambassador, his
+former business of a smuggler, and, instead of being ashamed of a
+discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not reprimanded
+in France, but was, without apology, received back again in Portugal. His
+conduct afterwards could not be surprising.  He only insisted that some
+faithful and able Ministers should be removed, and others appointed in
+their place, more complaisant and less honest.
+
+New plans of Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but
+what did it obtain in return?--another grenadier Ambassador, less brutal
+but more cunning, as abandoned but more dissimulating.
+
+Gendral Junot is the son of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of this
+capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789.  Having committed some
+pilfering, he was turned out of the parental dwelling, and therefore
+lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club.  In 1792, he entered, as
+a soldier, in a regiment of the army marching against the county of Nice;
+and, in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted with
+Bonaparte, whom he, in January, 1794, assisted in despatching the
+unfortunate Toulonese; and with whom, also, in the autumn of the same
+year, he, therefore, was arrested as a terrorist.
+
+In 1796, when commander-in-chief, Bonaparte made Junot his aide-de-camp;
+and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to Egypt.  There, as
+well as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no particular opportunity of
+distinguishing himself.  He was not one of those select few whom Napoleon
+brought with him to Europe in 1799, but returned first to France in 1801,
+when he was nominated a general of division and commander of this
+capital, a place he resigned last year to General Murat.
+
+His despotic and cruel behaviour while commander of Paris made him not
+much regretted.  Fouche lost in him, indeed, an able support, but none of
+us here ever experienced from him justice, much less protection.  As with
+all other of our modern public functionaries, without money nothing was
+obtained from him.  It required as much for not doing any harm as if, in
+renouncing his usual vexatious oppressions, he had conferred benefits. He
+was much suspected of being, with Fouche, the patron of a gang of street
+robbers and housebreakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested this
+capital, and who, when finally discovered, were screened from justice and
+suffered to escape punishment.
+
+I will tell you what I personally have seen of him.  Happening one
+evening to enter the rooms at Frascati, where the gambling-tables are
+kept, I observed him, undressed, out of regimentals, in company with at
+young man, who afterwards avowed himself an aide-de-camp of this general,
+and who was playing with rouleaux of louis d'or, supposed to contain
+fifty each, at Rouge et Noir.  As long as he lost, which he did several
+times, he took up the rouleau on the table, and gave another from his
+pocket.  At last he won, when he asked the bankers to look at their loss,
+and count the money in his rouleau before they paid him.  On opening it,
+they found it contained one hundred bank-notes of one thousand livres
+each--folded in a manner to resemble the form and size of louis d'or. The
+bankers refused to pay, and applied to the company whether they were not
+in the right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the
+person who now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual manner.
+Before any answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking the bankers
+whether they knew who he was.  Upon their answering in the negative, he
+said: "I am General Junot, the commander of Paris, and this officer who
+has won the money is my aide-de-camp; and I insist upon your paying him
+this instant, if you do not wish to have your bank confiscated and your
+persons arrested."  They refused to part with money which they protested
+was not their own, and most of the individuals present joined them in
+their resistance.  "You are altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers,"
+interrupted Junot; "your business shall soon be done."
+
+So saying, he seized all the money on the table, and a kind of
+boxing-match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being a
+tall and strong man, got the better of them.  The tumult, however,
+brought in the guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to prison
+sixteen persons he pointed out.  Fortunately, I was not of the number--I
+say fortunately, for I have heard that most of them remained in prison
+six months before this delicate affair was cleared up and settled.  In
+the meantime, Junot not only pocketed all the money he pretended was due
+to his aide-de-camp, but the whole sum contained in the bank, which was
+double that amount.  It was believed by every one present that this was
+an affair arranged between him and his aide-de-camp beforehand to pillage
+the bank.  What a commander, what a general, and what an Ambassador!
+
+Fitte, the secretary of our Embassy to Portugal, was formerly an Abbe,
+and must be well remembered in your country, where he passed some years
+as an emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand.  I am told that,
+by his intrigues, he even succeeded in swindling your Ministers out of a
+sum of money by some plausible schemes he proposed to them.  He is, as
+well as all other apostate priests, a very dangerous man, and an immoral
+and unprincipled wretch.  During the time of Robespierre he is said to
+have caused the murder of his elder brother and younger sister; the
+former he denounced to appropriate to himself his wealth, and the latter
+he accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him.  He
+daily boasts of the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand.
+'Qualis rex, talis grex'.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In some of the ancient Republics, all citizens who, in time of
+danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as traitors or
+treated as enemies.  When, by our Revolution, civilized society and the
+European Commonwealth were menaced with a total overthrow, had each
+member of it been considered in the same light, and subjected to the same
+laws, some individual States might, perhaps, have been less wealthy, but
+the whole community would have been more happy and more tranquil, which
+would have been much better.  It was a great error in the powerful league
+of 1793 to admit any neutrality at all; every Government that did not
+combat rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally. The
+man who continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are wanted
+to preserve the vessel from sinking, deserves to be thrown overboard, to
+be swallowed up by the waves and to perish the first. Had all other
+nations been united and unanimous, during 1793 and 1794, against the
+monster, Jacobinism, we should not have heard of either Jacobin
+directors, Jacobin consuls, or a Jacobin Emperor.  But then, from a petty
+regard to a temporary profit, they entered into a truce with a
+revolutionary volcano, which, sooner or later, will consume them all; for
+I am afraid it is now too late for all human power, with all human means,
+to preserve any State, any Government, or any people, from suffering by
+the threatening conflagration.  Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and
+Tuscany have already gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality.
+Let but Bonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years
+longer, and you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and
+neutral Denmark visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and
+destruction, and the independence of the nations in the North will be
+buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the South of
+Europe.
+
+These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents
+pronounce, and their dupes repeat: "Oh!  the wise Government of Denmark!
+Oh, what a wise statesman the Danish Minister, Count von Bernstorff!" I
+do not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a great politician;
+but I assert, also, that his was a greatness more calculated for regular
+times than for periods of unusual political convulsion.  Like your Pitt,
+the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to
+judge soundly and to act rightly, according to the present situation of
+affairs.  He adhered too much to the old routine, and did not perceive
+the immense difference between the Government of a revolutionary ruler
+and the Government of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV.  I am certain, had he
+still been alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have
+repaired them.
+
+His son, the present Danish Minister, follows his father's plans, and
+adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while the
+alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more affected
+the real and relative power and weakness of States than all the
+revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars, and
+pacifications of the two preceding centuries.  He has even gone farther,
+in some parts of his administration, than his father ever intended.
+Without remembering the political TRUTH, that a weak State which courts
+the alliance of a powerful neighbour always becomes a vassal, while
+desiring to become an ally, he has attempted to exchange the connections
+of Denmark and Russia for new ones with Prussia; and forgotten the
+obligations of the Cabinet of Copenhagen to the Cabinet of St.
+Petersburg, and the interested policy of the House of Brandenburgh. That,
+on the contrary, Russia has always been a generous ally of Denmark, the
+flourishing state of the Danish dominions since the beginning of the last
+century evinces.  Its distance and geographical position prevent all
+encroachments from being feared or attempted; while at the same time it
+affords protection equally against the rivalry of Sweden and ambition of
+Prussia.
+
+The Prince Royal of Denmark is patriotic as well as enlightened, and
+would rule with more true policy and lustre were he to follow seldomer
+the advice of his counsellors, and oftener the dictates of his own mind.
+Count von Schimmelmann, Count von Reventlow, and Count von Bernstorff,
+are all good and moral characters; but I fear that their united capacity
+taken together will not fill up the vacancy left in the Danish Cabinet by
+the death of its late Prime Minister.  I have been personally acquainted
+with them all three, but I draw my conclusions from the acts of their
+administration, not from my own knowledge.  Had the late Count von
+Bernstorff held the ministerial helm in 1803, a paragraph in the Moniteur
+would never have disbanded a Danish army in Holstein; nor would, in 1805,
+intriguers have been endured who preached neutrality, after witnessing
+repeated violation of the law of nations, not on the remote banks of the
+Rhine, but on the Danish frontiers, on the Danish territory, on the banks
+of the Elbe.
+
+It certainly was no compliment to His Danish Majesty when our Government
+sent Grouvelle as a representative to Copenhagen, a man who owed his
+education and information to the Conde branch of the Bourbons, and who
+afterwards audaciously and sacrilegiously read the sentence of death on
+the chief of that family, on his good and legitimate King, Louis XVI. It
+can neither be called dignity nor prudence in the Cabinet of Denmark to
+suffer this regicide to serve as a point of rally to sedition and
+innovation; to be the official propagator of revolutionary doctrines, and
+an official protector of all proselytes and sectaries of this anti-social
+faith.
+
+Before the Revolution a secretary to the Prince of Conde, Grouvelle was
+trusted and rewarded by His Serene Highness, and in return betrayed his
+confidence, and repaid benefactions and generosity with calumny and
+persecution, when his patron was obliged to seek safety in emigration
+against the assassins of successful rebellion.  When the national seals
+were put on the estates of the Prince, he appropriated to himself not
+only the whole of His Highness's library, but a part of his plate.  Even
+the wardrobe and the cellar were laid under contributions by this
+domestic marauder.
+
+With natural genius and acquired experience, Grouvelle unites impudence
+and immorality; and those on whom he fixes for his prey are, therefore,
+easily duped, and irremediably undone.  He has furnished disciples to all
+factions, and to all sects, assassins to the revolutionary tribunals, as
+well as victims for the revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to
+Robespierre, Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies
+to Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a
+tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc d'
+Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly
+condemned and privately executed in France.
+
+Our present Minister at the Court of Copenhagen, D' Aguesseau, has no
+virtues to boast of, but also no crimes to blush for.  With inferior
+capacity, he is only considered by Talleyrand as an inferior intriguer,
+employed in a country ruled by an inferior policy, neither feared nor
+esteemed by our Government.  His secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our
+real and confidential firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep
+burning those materials of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our
+incendiaries have lighted and illuminated in Holstein, Denmark, Sweden,
+and Norway.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The insatiable avarice of all the members of the Bonaparte
+family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of our
+philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude from the
+mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the passion of covetousness; that he pillages
+only to get money to pay his military plunderers, and hoards treasures
+only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the associates and instruments
+of his authority.
+
+Whether their assertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself to
+decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal palaces,
+from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal domains; from the
+immense and valuable quantity of diamonds, jewels, pictures, statues,
+libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and self-denial are certainly
+not among Napoleon's virtues.
+
+In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and extensive
+demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by national.
+property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial Treasury, or
+confiscated by Imperial decrees.  In Italy, he has, by an official act,
+declared to be the property of his crown, first, the royal palace at
+Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls Villa Bonaparte; second, the
+palace of Monza and its dependencies; third, the palace of Mantua, the
+palace of The, and the ci-devant ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace
+situated in the vicinity of Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity
+of Bologna; fifth, the ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza;
+sixth, the beautiful forest of Tesin.  Ten millions were, besides,
+ordered to be drawn out of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands
+for the formation of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.
+
+To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former Kings
+of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of Flanders, of the
+German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons, etc., who, before the
+last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of the Rhine.  I have seen a
+list, according to which the number of palaces and chateaux appertaining
+to Napoleon as Emperor and King, are stated to be seventy-nine; so that
+he may change his habitations six times in the month, without occupying
+during the same year the same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at
+home.
+
+In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of the
+Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte.  Madame
+Napoleon has purchased, since her husband's consulate, in her own name,
+or in the name of her children, nine estates with their chateaux, four
+national forests, and six hotels at Paris.  Joseph Bonaparte possesses
+four estates and chateaux in France, three hotels at Paris and at
+Brussels, three chateaux and estates in Italy, and one hotel at Milan,
+and another at Turin.  Lucien Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel
+at Paris, another at Bonne, and a third at Chambery.  He has one estate
+in Burgundy, two in Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital.
+At Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in
+the Papal States he has obtained, in exchange for property in France,
+three chateaux with their dependencies.  Louis Bonaparte has three hotels
+at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons.  He has two
+estates in Flanders, three in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte, and another
+in Alsace.  He has also a chateau four leagues from this city.  At Genoa
+he has a beautiful hotel, and upon the Genoese territory a large estate.
+He has bought three plantations at Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe.  To
+Jerome Bonaparte has hitherto been presented only an estate in Brabant,
+and a hotel in this capital.  Some of the former domains of the House of
+Orange, in the Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of
+our Government, and are said to be intended for him.
+
+But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and his
+brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left
+unprovided for.  Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at Paris,
+one at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome.  Her estates in France are
+four, and in Italy two.  Madame Bacciochi, Princess of Piombino and
+Lucca, possesses two hotels in this capital, and one palace at Piombino
+and another at Lucca.  Of her estates in France, she has only retained
+two, but she has three in the Kingdom of Italy, and four in her husband's
+and her own dominions.  The Princess Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at
+Rome and four chateaux in the papal territory.  At Milan she has, as well
+as at Turin and at Paris, hotels given her by her Imperial brother,
+together with two estates in France, one in Piedmont, and two in
+Lombardy.  The Princesse Murat is mistress of two hotels here, one at
+Brussels, one at Tours, and one at Bordeaux, together with three estates
+on this, and five on the other side of the Alps.  The Princesse Borghese
+has purchased three plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with
+a part of the treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc.  With her
+present husband she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates on
+the Roman territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her with one
+hotel at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at Genoa, together
+with three estates in France and five in Italy.  For his mother, and for
+each of his sisters, Napoleon has also purchased estates, or lands to
+form estates, in their native island of Corsica.
+
+The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have also
+experienced his bounty.  Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris, Milan,
+Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and Italy. Seventeen,
+either first, second, or third cousins, by his father's or mother's side,
+have all obtained estates either in the French Empire, or in the Kingdom
+of Italy, as well as all brothers, sisters, or cousins of his own wife,
+and the wives of his brothers, or of the husbands of his sisters.  Their
+exact number cannot well be known, but a gentleman who has long been
+collecting materials for some future history of the House of Bonaparte,
+and of the French Empire, has already shown me sixty-six names of
+individuals of that description, and of both sexes, who all, thanks to
+the Imperial liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become people of
+property.
+
+When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and
+distributed within the short period of five years, it is not hazardous to
+say that, in the annals of Europe, another such revolution in property,
+as well as in power, is not to be found.
+
+The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together does
+not amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have acquired and
+possess.
+
+Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at this
+revolution of property.  Richer than any other nation, you have more to
+apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our frequent enemies
+and as our national rivals; as a barrier against our plans of universal
+dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary resources.  May we never live
+to see the day when the mandates of Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured
+at London, as at Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, and Rome.  The misery of ages
+to come will then be certain, and posterity will regard as comparative
+happiness, the sufferings of their forefathers.  It is not probable that
+those who have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest
+contented until you are involved in the same ruin.  Union among
+yourselves only can preserve you from perishing in the universal wreck;
+by this you will at least gain time, and may hope to profit by probable
+changes and unexpected accidents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil
+list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in
+Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres--which was divided
+between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte,
+Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese. By
+this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched
+inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine.  This Daru is too good a
+calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master
+of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have
+enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the
+Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose.  On his return
+here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an
+annuity of one hundred thousand livres--not to play; but as this sum
+would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this
+Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain
+of being transported to Cayenne.  He obeyed, but the bankers soon
+experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other
+side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations hither, Fouche
+recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of
+Bonaparte's civil list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly,
+injuring our gambling-banks.  He has kept his promise with regard to
+France, but made, last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany,
+which, he avows, produced him nine millions of livres.  He always points,
+but never keeps a bank.  He begins to be so well known in many parts of
+the Continent, that the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and
+remain so until his departure.  This was the case at Florence last April.
+He travels always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four
+servants.  He is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
+
+He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
+calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
+than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
+been felt and lamented for these ten years past.  Augereau, Bernadotte,
+Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
+terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.
+
+In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
+Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary
+brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a
+common soldier before the Revolution.  But he has this merit above
+Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and
+finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign
+countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting,
+he was also again taken and again flogged.  Italy has, indeed, since he
+has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than
+Germany.  Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he
+butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with
+blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion
+had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers of an assassin, or
+decorate the bosom of a harlot.  The outrages he committed during 1796
+and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even
+were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable
+to be believed.  He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity
+into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
+themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into dens
+of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided
+himself.  In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the
+sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or
+imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he
+paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night at Pavia, with a
+draft for fifty louis d'or on the municipality of that town, who dared
+not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to
+Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.
+
+The general and grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
+is another of our military heroes of the same stamp.  A barber, and son
+of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
+to be hanged.  The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
+but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
+doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life.  The Revolution broke his
+fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
+he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
+guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family.  He
+was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
+and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
+and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand
+livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the
+Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a
+commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders.  In landed property, in
+jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from
+prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to
+eight millions of livres.  For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and
+galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth which,
+from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you our
+generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the
+catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our
+soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and
+surpassing often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those
+authorized by our Government itself, or by its civil and military
+representatives.  It comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded
+and enforced, whether as loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in
+money as an equivalent for both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and
+carriages; corvees of all kinds; the emptying of magazines for the
+service of our armies; in short, whatever was required for the
+maintenance, a portion of the pay, and divers wants of those armies, from
+the time they had posted themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy,
+Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine.  Add to this the pillage of
+public or private warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging
+to individuals, to the State, to societies, to towns, to hospitals, and
+even to orphan-houses.
+
+But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of
+subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for
+accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite
+consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of our
+civil or military commanders.  Most of those articles were delivered in
+kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready
+money, and divided among the plunderers.
+
+In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
+Imperial city of Wetzlar.  He there put in requisition all private stores
+of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon
+another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.
+Leather and linen underwent the same operation.  Volumes might be filled
+with similar examples, all of public notoriety.
+
+This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
+Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790,
+and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in
+1765.  Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to
+escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some
+Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the men into an
+insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate.  From that
+period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs,
+and was, therefore, by his associates, promoted by one step to an
+adjutant-general.  Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement, and
+greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and
+enrich himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a
+short time made a general of division, and acquired a property of several
+millions.  This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously
+served only under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.
+
+He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be
+attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced
+into his interest.  In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic
+attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed
+commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Ambassador from
+the First Consul to the Helvetic Government.  He there conducted himself
+so much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your
+country, he was made commander of the camp near Montreuil; and last year
+his wife was received as a Maid of Honour to the Empress of the French.
+
+This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept by a
+man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with Ney.  With
+him she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the municipality of
+Coblentz made her his wife.  Her conduct since has corresponded with that
+of her husband.  When he publicly lived with mistresses, she did not live
+privately with her gallants, but the instant the Emperor of the French
+told him to save appearances, if he desired a place for his wife at the
+Imperial Court, he showed himself the most attentive and faithful of
+husbands, and she the most tender and dutiful of wives.  Her manners are
+not polished, but they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her
+person, she is lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her
+society agreeable.  The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of
+her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires.  She has a fault common
+with most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity
+presents itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from being
+fortunate.  Report says that more than once she has been reduced to
+acquit her gambling debts by personal favours.
+
+Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now serving
+under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat.  According to some,
+he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin, robber, and assassin,
+long before he obtained his first commission as an officer, which was
+given him by the recommendation of Marat, whom he in return afterwards
+wished to immortalize, by the exchange of one letter in his own name, and
+by calling himself Marat instead of Murat.  Others, however, declare that
+his father was an honest cobbler, very superstitious, residing at
+Bastide, near Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and
+that he was in his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange
+the frock of the monk for the regimentals of a soldier.  In what manner,
+or by what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796
+he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he
+went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married
+him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of
+Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.
+
+The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by
+his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of
+livres.  The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him
+forty--two millions--and it is whispered that the estates bought in the
+name of his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less. A
+brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator; and an
+uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate.  A cousin of his,
+who was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an
+apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor's
+chamberlains.  He has been very generous to all his relations, and would
+not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial
+Court, had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank,
+lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy.  The
+millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to
+gain.  His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of
+livres.
+
+It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:
+
+"It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of
+liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution--its promoters,
+its accomplices, and its instruments.  Wherever they penetrate, plunder
+follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but
+the means.  The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
+nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence."
+
+General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret deeds
+of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice.  It was under his
+private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
+and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way
+to his place of exile.  After the seizure and trial of the Duc d'
+Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of
+his Italian guard would fire at this Prince.  "If they hesitate," said
+Murat, who commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, "my pistols
+are loaded, and I will blow out his brains."
+
+His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family.  Murat was, at
+first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law, Lucien,
+whom he even fought; but Napoleon having assured him, upon his word of
+honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model of
+complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as
+numerous as Madame Murat's favourites.  He has a young aide-de-camp of
+the name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the
+then Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to
+have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was
+desolating Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, the vigilance of the
+police has much increased: our patrols are doubled during the night, and
+our spies more numerous and more insolent during the day.  Many suspected
+persons have also been exiled to some distance from this capital, while
+others, for a measure of safety, have been shut up in the Temple, or in
+the Castle of Vincennes.  These 'lettres de cachet', or mandates of
+arrest, are expedited during the Emperor's absence exclusively by his
+brother Louis, after a report, or upon a request, of the Minister of
+Police, Fouche.
+
+I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a drunkard
+and a libertine.  When a young and unprincipled man of such propensities
+enjoys an unrestrained authority, it cannot be surprising to hear that he
+has abused it.  He had not been his brother's military viceroy for
+twenty-four hours before one set of our Parisians were amused, while
+others were shocked and scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised
+by His Imperial Highness.
+
+Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the boxes,
+he despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the ground, and to
+find out who she was.  All gentlemen attached to his person or household
+are also his pimps, and are no novices in forming or executing plans of
+seduction.  Caulincourt (the officer he employed in this affair) returned
+soon, but had succeeded only in one part of the business.  He had not
+been able to speak to the lady, but was informed that she had only been
+married a fortnight to a manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her
+side, jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress.  He gave at the
+same time as his opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police
+commissary to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some
+pretext or other, while some of the friends of Prince Louis took
+advantage of the confusion to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel.
+An order was directly signed by Louis, according to which the police
+commissary, Chazot, was to arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of Lyons, and
+put him into a post-chaise, under the care of two gendarmes, who were to
+see him safe to Lyons, where he was to sign a promise of not returning to
+Paris without the permission of Government, being suspected of
+stockjobbing (agiotage).  Everything succeeded according to the proposal
+of Caulincourt, and Louis found Madame Leboure crying in his saloon.  It
+is said that she promised to surrender her virtue upon condition of only
+once more seeing her husband, to be certain that he was not murdered, but
+that Louis refused, and obtained by brutal force, and the assistance of
+his infamous associates, that conquest over her honour which had not been
+yielded to his entreaties or threats.  His enjoyment, however, was but of
+short continuance; he had no sooner fallen asleep than his poor injured
+victim left the bed, and, flying into his anteroom, stabbed herself with
+his sword.  On the next morning she was found a corpse, weltering in her
+blood.  In the hope of burying this infamy in secrecy, her corpse was, on
+the next evening, when it was dark, put into a sack, and thrown into the
+river, where, being afterwards discovered, the police agents gave out
+that she had fallen the victim of assassins.  But when Madame Leboure was
+thus seized at the opera, besides her husband, her parents and a brother
+were in her company, and the latter did not lose sight of the carriage in
+which his sister was placed till it had entered the hotel of Louis
+Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with his father, in vain claimed
+her.  As soon as the husband was informed of the untimely end of his
+wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot himself immediately
+afterwards through the head, but his own head was not the place where he
+should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it the cause of his
+wretchedness would only have been an act of retaliation, in a country
+where power forces the law to lie dormant, and where justice is invoked
+in vain when the criminal is powerful.
+
+I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our
+fashionable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe the
+word 'amuse' is not improperly employed in this instance.  At a dozen
+parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure has always
+been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of blame, except
+at Madame Fouche's, where Madame Leboure was very much blamed indeed for
+having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.
+
+Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end
+tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier.
+A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal
+tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six
+hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work
+in the galleys for twenty years.  His daughter, a young girl under
+fifteen, who lived with her grandmother (having lost her mother), went,
+accompanied by the old lady, and presented a petition to Louis, in favour
+of her father.  Her youth and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the
+unprincipled libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the
+colour of clemency to guilt.  He ordered her to call on his chamberlain,
+Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer.  There, either
+seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by
+delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of
+release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that
+he added her to the number of his regular mistresses.
+
+As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter in
+her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the Imperial
+Treasury, for twelve thousand livres--destined to pay the upholsterer who
+had furnished her apartment.  This gave him, no doubt, the idea of making
+the Prince pay a higher value for his child, and he forged another order
+for sixty thousand livres--so closely resembling it that it was without
+suspicion acquitted by the Imperial Treasurer.  Possessing this money, he
+fabricated a pass, in the name of Louis, as a courier carrying despatches
+to the Emperor in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived safe on the
+other side of the Rhine.  His forgeries were only discovered after he had
+written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his daughter of all
+knowledge of what he had done.  In the first moment of anger, her
+Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since forgiven her,
+and taken her back to his favour.  This trick of Deroux has pleased
+Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of his dangerous
+talent and vicious character.  He had once before released himself with a
+forged order from the Minister of Police, whose handwriting he had only
+seen for a minute upon his own mandate of imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though loudly complained of by the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+Cabinet of St. Petersburg has conducted itself in these critical times
+with prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy. In
+its connections with our Government it has never lost sight of its own
+dignity, and, therefore, never endured without resentment those
+impertinent innovations in the etiquette of our Court, and in the manner
+and language of our Emperor to the representatives of legitimate
+Sovereigns.  Had similar becoming sentiments directed the councils of all
+other Princes and the behaviour of their Ambassadors here, spirited
+remonstrances might have moderated the pretensions or passions of upstart
+vanity, while a forbearance and silence, equally impolitic and shameful,
+have augmented insolence by flattering the pride of an insupportable and
+outrageous ambition.
+
+The Emperor of Russia would not have been so well represented here, had
+he not been so wisely served and advised in his council chamber at St.
+Petersburg.  Ignorance and folly commonly select fools for their agents,
+while genius and capacity employ men of their own mould, and of their own
+cast.  It is a remarkable truth that, notwithstanding the frequent
+revolutions in Russia, since the death of Peter the First the ministerial
+helm has always been in able hands; the progressive and uninterrupted
+increase of the real and relative power of the Russian Empire evinces the
+reality of this assertion.
+
+The Russian Chancellor, Count Alexander Woronzoff, may be justly called
+the chief of political veterans, whether his talents or long services are
+considered.  Catherine II., though a voluptuous Princess, was a great
+Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and it was her unbiased choice
+that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet young, in her councils.  Though
+the intrigues of favourites have sometimes removed him, he always retired
+with the esteem of his Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or
+cringing to return.  He is admired by all who have the honour of
+approaching him, as much for his obliging condescension as for his great
+information.  No petty views, no petty caprices, no petty vengeances find
+room in his generous bosom.  He is known to have conferred benefactions,
+not only on his enemies, but on those who, at the very time, were
+meditating his destruction.  His opinion is that a patriotic Minister
+should regard no others as his enemies but those conspiring against their
+country, and acknowledge no friends or favourites incapable of well
+serving the State.  Prince de Z-------- waited on him one day, and, after
+hesitating some time, began to compliment him on his liberal sentiments,
+and concluded by asking the place of a governor for his cousin, with whom
+he had reason to suppose the Count much offended.  "I am happy," said His
+Excellency, "to oblige you, and to do my duty at the same time.  Here is
+a libel he wrote against me, and presented to the Empress, who graciously
+has communicated it to me, in answer to my recommendation of him
+yesterday to the place you ask for him to-day.  Read what I have written
+on the libel, and you will be convinced that it will not be my fault if
+he is not to-day a governor."  In two hours afterwards the nomination was
+announced to Prince de Z--------, who was himself at the head of a cabal
+against the Minister.  In any country such an act would have been
+laudable, but where despotism rules with unopposed sway, it is both
+honourable and praiseworthy.
+
+Prince Adam Czartorinsky, the assistant of Count Woronzoff, and Minister
+of the foreign department, unites, with the vigour of youth, the
+experience of age.  He has travelled in most countries of Europe, not
+solely to figure at Courts, to dance at balls, to look at pictures, or to
+collect curiosities, but to study the character of the people, the laws
+by which they are governed, and their moral or social influence with
+regard to their comforts or misery.  He therefore brought back with him a
+stock of knowledge not to be acquired from books, but only found in the
+world by frequenting different and opposite societies with observation,
+penetration, and genius.  With manners as polished as his mind is well
+informed, he not only, possesses the favour, but the friendship of his
+Prince, and, what is still more rare, is worthy of both.  All Sovereigns
+have favourites, few ever had any friends; because it is more easy to
+flatter vanity, than to display a liberal disinterestedness; to bow
+meanly than to instruct or to guide with delicacy and dignity; to abuse
+the confidence of the Prince than to use it to his honour, and to the
+advantage of his Government.
+
+That such a Monarch as an Alexander, and such Ministers as Count
+Woronzoff and Prince Czartorinsky, should appoint a Count Markof to a
+high and important post, was not unexpected by any one not ignorant of
+his merit.
+
+Count Markof was, early in the reign of Catherine II., employed in the
+office of the foreign department at St. Petersburg, and was, whilst
+young, entrusted with several important negotiations at the Courts of
+Berlin and Vienna., when Prussia had proposed the first partition of
+Poland.  He afterward went on his travels, from which he was recalled to
+fill the place of an Ambassador to the late King of Sweden, Gustavus III.
+He was succeeded, in 1784, at Stockholm, by Count Muschin Puschin, after
+being appointed a Secretary of State in his own country, a post he
+occupied with distinction, until the death of Catherine II., when Paul
+the First revenged upon him, as well as on most others of the faithful
+servants of this Princess, his discontent with his mother.  He was then
+exiled to his estates, where he retired with the esteem of all those who
+had known him.  In 1801, immediately after his accession to the throne,
+Alexander invited Count Markof to his Court and Council, and the trusty
+but difficult task of representing a legitimate Sovereign at the Court of
+our upstart usurper was conferred on him.  I imagine that I see the great
+surprise of this nobleman, when, for the first time, he entered the
+audience-chamber of our little great man, and saw him fretting, staring,
+swearing, abusing to right and to left, for one smile conferring twenty
+frowns, and for one civil word making use of fifty hard expressions,
+marching in the diplomatic audience as at the head of his troops, and
+commanding foreign Ambassadors as his French soldiers.  I have heard that
+the report of Count Markof to his Court, describing this new and rare
+show, is a chef-d'oeuvre of wit, equally amusing and instructive.  He is
+said to have requested of his Cabinet new and particular orders how to
+act--whether as the representative of an independent Sovereign, or, as
+most of the other members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, like
+a valet of the First Consul; and that, in the latter case, he implored as
+a favour, an immediate recall; preferring, had he no other choice left,
+sooner to work in the mines at Siberia than to wear, in France the
+disgraceful fetters of a Bonaparte.  His subsequent dignified conduct
+proves the answer of his Court.
+
+Talleyrand's craft and dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of
+Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by
+the First Consul.  All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery
+was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador.  Sometimes
+he was reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time
+protection was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that he
+was a Sardinian subject.  Russian travellers were insulted, and detained
+on the most frivolous pretences.  Two Russian noblemen were even arrested
+on our side of the Rhine, because Talleyrand had forgotten to sign his
+name to their passes, which were otherwise in order.  The fact was that
+our Minister suspected them of carrying some papers which he wanted to
+see, and, therefore, wrote his name with an ink of such a composition
+that, after a certain number of days, everything written with it
+disappeared.  Their effects and papers were strictly searched by an agent
+preceding them from this capital, but nothing was found, our Minister
+being misinformed by his spies.
+
+When Count Markof left Sweden, he carried with him an actress of the
+French theatre at Stockholm, Madame Hus, an Alsatian by birth, but who
+had quitted her country twelve years before the Revolution, and could,
+therefore, never be included among emigrants.  She had continued as a
+mistress with this nobleman, is the mother of several children by him,
+and an agreeable companion to him, who has never been married.  As I have
+often said, Talleyrand is much obliged to any foreign diplomatic agent
+who allows him to be the indirect provider or procurer of his mistresses.
+After in vain tempting Count Markof with new objects, he introduced to
+the acquaintance of Madame Hus some of his female emissaries.  Their
+manoeuvres, their insinuations, and even their presents were all thrown
+away.  The lady remained the faithful friend, and therefore refused with
+indignation to degrade herself into a spy on her lover.  Our Minister
+then first discovered that, not only was Madame Hus an emigrant, but had
+been a great benefactress and constant companion of emigrants at St.
+Petersburg, and, of course, deserved to be watched, if not punished.
+Count Markof is reported to have said to Talleyrand on this grave
+subject, in the presence of two other foreign Ambassadors:
+
+"Apropos!  what shall I do to prevent my poor Madame Hus from being shot
+as an emigrant, and my poor children from becoming prematurely orphans?"
+
+"Monsieur," said our diplomatic oracle, "she should have petitioned the
+First Consul for a permission to return, to France before she entered it;
+but out of regard for you, if she is prudent, she will not, I daresay, be
+troubled by our Government."
+
+"I should be sorry if she was not," replied the Count, with a significant
+look; and here this grand affair ended, to the great entertainment of
+those foreign agents who dared to smile or to laugh.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Legion of Honour, though only proclaimed upon Bonaparte's
+assumption of the Imperial rank, dates from the first year of his
+consulate.  To prepare the public mind for a progressive elevation of
+himself, and for consequential distinctions among all classes of his
+subjects, he distributed among the military, arms of honour, to which
+were attached precedence and privileges granted by him, and, therefore,
+liable to cease with his power or life.  The number of these arms
+increased in proportion to the approach of the period fixed for the
+change of his title and the erection of his throne.  When he judged them
+numerous enough to support his changes, he made all these wearers of arms
+of honour knights.  Never before were so many chevaliers created en
+masse; they amounted to no less than twenty-two thousand four hundred,
+distributed in the different corps of different armies, but principally
+in the army of England.  To these were afterwards joined five thousand
+nine hundred civil functionaries, men of letters, artists, etc.  To
+remove, however, all ideas of equality, even among the members of the
+Legion of Honour, they were divided into four classes--grand officers,
+commanders, officers, and simple legionaries.
+
+Every one who has observed Bonaparte's incessant endeavours to intrude
+himself among the Sovereigns of Europe, was convinced that he would
+cajole, or force, as many of them as he could into his revolutionary
+knighthood; but I heard men, who are not ignorant of the selfishness and
+corruption of our times, deny the possibility of any independent Prince
+suffering his name to be registered among criminals of every description,
+from the thief who picked the pockets of his fellow citizens in the
+street, down to the regicide who sat in judgment and condemned his King;
+from the plunderers who have laid waste provinces, republics, and
+kingdoms, down to the assassins who shot, drowned, or guillotined their
+countrymen en masse.  For my part, I never had but one opinion, and,
+unfortunately, it has turned out a just one.  I always was convinced that
+those Princes who received other presents from Bonaparte could have no
+plausible excuse to decline his ribands, crosses, and stars.  But who
+could have presumed to think that, in return for these blood-stained
+baubles, they would have sacrificed those honourable and dignified
+ornaments which, for ages past, have been the exclusive distinction of
+what birth had exalted, virtue made eminent, talents conspicuous, honour
+illustrious, or valour meritorious?  Who would have dared to say that the
+Prussian Eagle and the Spanish Golden Fleece should thus be prostituted,
+thus polluted?  I do not mean by this remark to throw any blame on the
+conferring those and other orders on Napoleon Bonaparte, or even on his
+brothers; I know it is usual, between legitimate Sovereigns in alliance,
+sometimes to exchange their knighthoods; but to debase royal orders so
+much as to present them to a Cambaceres, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a
+Bernadotte, a Fesch, and other vile and criminal wretches, I do not deny
+to have excited my astonishment as well as my indignation.  What
+honest--I do not say what noble--subjects of Prussia, or of Spain, will
+hereafter think themselves rewarded for their loyalty, industry,
+patriotism, or zeal, when they remember that their Sovereigns have
+nothing to give but what the rebel has obtained, the robber worn, the
+murderer vilified, and the regicide debased?
+
+The number of grand officers of the Legion of Honour does not yet amount
+to more than eighty, according to a list circulated at Milan last spring,
+of which I have seen a copy.  Of these grand officers, three had been
+shoemakers, two tailors, four bakers, four barbers, six friars, eight
+abbes, six officers, three pedlers, three chandlers, seven drummers,
+sixteen soldiers, and eight regicides; four were lawful Kings, and the
+six others, Electors or Princes of the most ancient houses in Europe. I
+have looked over our, own official list, and, as far as I know, the
+calculation is exact, both with regard to the number and to the quality.
+
+This new institution of knighthood produced a singular effect on my vain
+and giddy, countrymen, who, for twelve years before, had scarcely seen a
+star or a riband, except those of foreign Ambassadors, who were
+frequently insulted when wearing them.  It became now the fashion to be a
+knight, and those who really were not so, put pinks, or rather blooms, or
+flowers of a darker red, in their buttonholes, so as to resemble, and to
+be taken at a distance for, the red ribands of the members of the Legion
+of Honour.
+
+A man of the name of Villeaume, an engraver by profession, took advantage
+of this knightly fashion and mania, and sold for four louis d'or, not
+only the stars, but pretended letters of knighthood, said to be procured
+by his connection with persons of the household of the Emperor.  In a
+month's time, according to a register kept by him, he had made twelve
+hundred and fifty knights.  When his fraud was discovered, he was already
+out of the way, safe with his money; and, notwithstanding the researches
+of the police, has not since been taken.
+
+A person calling himself Baron von Rinken, a subject and an agent of one
+of the many Princes of Hohenlohe, according to his own assertion, arrived
+here with real letters and patents of knighthood, which he offered for
+sale for three hundred livres.  The stars of this Order were as large as
+the star of the grand officers of the Legion of Honour, and nearly
+resembled it; but the ribands were of a different colour.  He had already
+disposed of a dozen of these stars, when he was taken up by the police
+and shut up in the Temple, where he still remains.  Four other agents of
+inferior petty German Princes have also been arrested for offering the
+Orders of their Sovereigns for sale.
+
+A Captain Rouvais, who received six wounds in his campaign under Pichegru
+in 1794, wore the star of the Legion of Honour without being nominated a
+knight.  He has been tried by a military commission, deprived of his
+pension, and condemned to four years' imprisonment in irons.  He proved
+that he had presented fourteen petitions to Bonaparte for obtaining this
+mark of distinction, but in vain; while hundreds of others, who had
+hardly seen an enemy, or, at the most, made but one campaign, or been
+once wounded, had succeeded in their demands.  As soon as sentence had
+been pronounced against him, he took a small pistol from his pocket, and
+shot himself through the head, saying, "Some one else will soon do the
+same for Bonaparte."
+
+A cobbler, of the name of Matthieu, either in a fit of madness or from
+hatred to the new order of things, decorated himself with the large
+riband of the Legion of Honour, and had an old star fastened on his coat.
+Thus accoutred, he went into the Palais Royal, in the middle of the day,
+got upon a chair, and began to speak to his audience of the absurdity of
+true republicans not being on a level, even under an Emperor, and putting
+on, like him, all his ridiculous ornaments.  "We are here," said he,
+"either all grand officers, or there exist no grand officers at all; we
+have all fought and paid for liberty, and for the Revolution, as much as
+Bonaparte, and have, therefore, the same right and claim with him."  Here
+a police agent and some gendarmes interrupted his eloquence by taking him
+into custody.  When Fouche asked him what he meant by such rebellious
+behaviour, he replied that it was only a trial to see whether destiny had
+intended him to become an Emperor or to remain a cobbler.  On the next
+day he was shot as a conspirator.  I saw the unfortunate man in the
+Palais Royal; his eyes looked wild, and his words were often incoherent.
+He was certainly a subject more deserving a place in a madhouse than in a
+tomb.
+
+Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing too
+much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing it in
+preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour.  He was given to understand
+that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial etiquette did not
+permit any subjects to display their knighthood of the Prussian Order. In
+Madame Bonaparte's last drawing-room, before His Imperial Majesty set out
+for the Rhine, he was ornamented with the Spanish, Neapolitan, Prussian,
+and Portuguese orders, together with those of the French Legion of Honour
+and of the Italian Iron Crown.  I have seen the Emperor Paul, who was
+also an amateur of ribands and stars, but never with so many at once.  I
+have just heard that the Grand Master of Malta has presented Napoleon
+with the Grand Cross of the Maltese Order.  This is certainly a negative
+compliment to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then
+sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, "that the Grand Master, Commanders,
+Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more."
+
+I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies,
+that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of
+female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our
+Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc.,
+are to be members.  The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are
+to be hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses,
+Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into
+this revolutionary sisterhood.  Had the Continent remained tranquil, it
+would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum.  I
+should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and
+brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only
+say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in
+petto.  Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has
+been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
+it is truly superb.  The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at
+six hundred thousand livres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, fifteen individuals
+have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the--Western
+Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple.  Their crime is not
+exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that they
+were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were
+entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis
+XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia,
+Sweden, and England to support his claims.
+
+These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit.  Had the
+prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they
+would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed
+without a trial.  I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our
+Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments
+during our armies' occupation elsewhere.  We have, nevertheless, two
+movable columns of six thousand men each in the country, or in its
+vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but a cruelty, to engage or
+allure the unfortunate people of these wretched countries into any plots,
+which, situated as affairs now are, would be productive of great and
+certain evil to them, without even the probability of any benefit to the
+cause of royalty and of the Bourbons.  I do not mean to say that there
+are not those who rebel against Bonaparte's tyranny, or that the Bourbons
+have no friends; on the contrary, the latter are not few, and the former
+very numerous.  But a kind of apathy, the effect of unavailing resistance
+to usurpation and oppression, has seized on most minds, and annihilated
+what little remained of our never very great public spirit.  We are tired
+of everything, even of our existence, and care no more whether we are
+governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a
+Barras or by Louis XVIII.  Except, perhaps, among the military, or among
+some ambitious schemers, remnants of former factions, I do not believe a
+Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the
+Emperor, and formerly popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in
+all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized
+in their present formidable manner.  Should anything happen to our
+present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and
+raise our characters from their present torpid state.  But until such an
+event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing
+our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor.
+I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when
+one million desperados of civil and military banditti are suffered to
+govern, tyrannize, and pillage, at their ease and undisturbed, thirty
+millions of people, to whom their past crimes are known, and who have
+every reason to apprehend their future wickedness.
+
+This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does not
+deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
+poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
+people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
+contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
+submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
+appearance.  I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who
+formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of
+twelve or eighteen hundred livres--per year, with which they are obliged
+to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere
+labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows
+on the necessitous.  You know that here all trade and all commerce are at
+a stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling
+as their manners are vulgar and brutal.
+
+A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
+revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres--subsist now on fifteen
+hundred livres--per year; and this sum must support six individuals--the
+father and mother, with four children!  It does so, indeed, by an
+arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
+supper three times, in the week.  They endure their distress with
+tolerable cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the
+garrets of a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once
+their groom, but who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve
+years, as a conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and
+Flanders, twelve millions of livres.  He has kindly let my friend
+understand that his youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid
+to his wife, being informed that she has a good education.  All the four
+daughters are good musicians, good drawers, and very able with their
+needles.  By their talents they supported their parents and themselves
+during their emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use
+or advantage.  Those upstarts who want instruction or works of this sort
+apply to the first, most renowned, and fashionable masters or mistresses;
+while others, and those the greatest number, cannot afford even to pay
+the inferior ones and the most cheap.  This family is one of the many
+that regret having returned from their emigration.  But, you may ask, why
+do they not go back again to Germany?  First, it would expose them to
+suspicion, and, perhaps, to ruin, were they to demand passes; and if this
+danger or difficulty were removed, they have no money for such a long
+journey.
+
+But this sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the families
+of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen.  Paper money, a maximum,
+and requisitions, have reduced those that did not share in the crimes and
+pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility.  And,
+contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in
+commercial speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a
+general stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital,
+protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of
+1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines
+put together.  The expenses of these new merchants are, however, much
+greater than sixteen years ago, the profit less, and the credit still
+less than the profit.  Hence numerous bankruptcies, frauds, swindling,
+forgeries, and other evils of immorality, extravagance, and misery.  The
+fair and honest dealers suffer most from the intrusion of these infamous
+speculators, who expecting, like other vile men wallowing in wealth under
+their eyes, to make rapid fortunes, and to escape detection as well as
+punishment--commit crimes to soothe disappointment.  Nothing is done but
+for ready money, and even bankers' bills, or bills accepted by bankers,
+are not taken in payment before the signatures are avowed by the parties
+concerned.  You can easily conceive what confusion, what expenses, and
+what; loss of time these precautions must occasion; but the numerous
+forgeries and fabrications have made them absolutely necessary.
+
+The farmers and landholders are better off, but they also complain of the
+heavy taxes, and low price paid for what they bring to the market, which
+frequently, for want of ready money, remains long unsold.  They take
+nothing but cash in payment; for, notwithstanding the endeavours of our
+Government, the notes of the Bank of France have never been in
+circulation among them.  They have also been subject to losses by the
+fluctuation of paper money, by extortions, requisitions, and by the
+maximum.  In this class of my countrymen remains still some little
+national spirit and some independence of character; but these are far
+from being favourable to Bonaparte, or to the Imperial Government, which
+the yearly increase of taxes, and, above all, the conscription, have
+rendered extremely odious.  You may judge of the great difference in the
+taxation of lands and landed property now and under our Kings, when I
+inform you that a friend of mine, who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the
+Western Departments, twenty-one farms, paid less in contribution for them
+all than he does now for the three farms he has recovered from the wreck
+of his fortune.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In a military empire, ruled by a military despot, it is a
+necessary policy that the education of youth should also be military. In
+all our public schools or prytanees, a boy, from the moment of entering,
+is registered in a company, and regularly drilled, exercised, and
+reviewed, punished for neglect or fault according to martial law, and
+advanced if displaying genius or application.  All our private schools
+that wish for the protection of Government are forced to submit to the
+same military rules, and, therefore, most of our conscripts, so far from
+being recruits, are fit for any service as soon as put into requisition.
+The fatal effects to the independence of Europe to be dreaded from this
+sole innovation, I apprehend, have been too little considered by other
+nations.  A great Power, that can, without obstacle, and with but little
+expense, in four weeks increase its disposable military force from one
+hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty thousand young men,
+accustomed to military duty from their youth, must finally become the
+master of all other or rival Powers, and dispose at leisure of empires,
+kingdoms, principalities, and republics.  NOTHING CAN SAVE THEM BUT THE
+ADOPTION OF SIMILAR MEASURES FOR THEIR PRESERVATION AS HAVE BEEN ADOPTED
+FOR THEIR SUBJUGATION.
+
+When l'Etat Militaire for the year 13 (a work containing the official
+statement of our military forces) was presented to Bonaparte by Berthier,
+the latter said: "Sire, I lay before Your Majesty the book of the destiny
+of the world, which your hands direct as the sovereign guide of the
+armies of your empire."  This compliment is a truth, and therefore no
+flattery.  It might as justly have been addressed to a Moreau, a
+Macdonald, a Le Courbe, or to any other general, as to Bonaparte, because
+a superior number of well disciplined troops, let them be well or even
+indifferently commanded, will defeat those inferior in number. Three to
+one would even overpower an army of giants.  Add to it the unity of
+plans, of dispositions, and of execution, which Bonaparte enjoys
+exclusively over such a great number of troops, while ten, or perhaps
+fifty, will direct or contradict every movement of his opponents.  I
+tremble when I meditate on Berthier's assertion; may I never live to see
+it realized, and to see all hitherto independent nations prostrated,
+acknowledge that Bonaparte and destiny are the same, and the same
+distributor of good and evil.
+
+One of the bad consequences of this our military education of youth is a
+total absence of all religious and moral lessons.  Arnaud had, last
+August, the courage to complain of this infamous neglect, in the National
+Institute.  "The youth," said he, "receive no other instruction but
+lessons to march, to fire, to bow, to dance, to sit, to lie, and to
+impose with a good grace.  I do not ask for Spartans or Romans, but we
+want Athenians, and our schools are only forming Sybarites."  Within
+twenty-four hours afterwards, Arnaud was visited by a police agent,
+accompanied by two gendarmes, with an order signed by Fouche, which
+condemned him to reside at Orleans, and not to return to Paris without
+the permission of the Government,--a punishment regarded here as very
+moderate for such an indiscreet zeal.
+
+A schoolmaster at Auteuil, near this capital, of the name of Gouron, had
+a private seminary, organized upon the footing of our former colleges. In
+some few months he was offered more pupils than he could well attend to,
+and his house shortly became very fashionable, even for our upstarts, who
+sent their children there in preference.  He was ordered before Fouche
+last Christmas, and commanded to change the hours hitherto employed in
+teaching religion and morals, to a military exercise and instruction, as
+both more necessary and more salubrious for French youth. Having replied
+that such an alteration was contrary to his plan and agreement with the
+parents of his scholars, the Minister stopped him short by telling him
+that he must obey what had been prescribed by Government, or stand the
+consequences of his refractory spirit.  Having consulted with his friends
+and patrons, he divided the hours, and gave half of the time usually
+allotted to religion or morality to the study of military exercise.  His
+pupils, however, remained obstinate, broke the drum, and tore and burnt
+the colours he had bought.  As this was not his fault, he did not expect
+any further disturbance, particularly after having reported to the police
+both his obedience and the unforeseen result.  But last March his house
+was suddenly surrounded in the night by gendarmes, and some police agents
+entered it.  All the boys were ordered to dress and to pack up their
+effects, and to follow the gendarmes to several other schools, where the
+Government had placed them, and of which their parents would be informed.
+Gouron, his wife, four ushers, and six servants, were all arrested and
+carried to the police office, where Fouche, after reproaching them for
+their fanatical behaviour, as he termed it, told them, as they were so
+fond of teaching religious and moral duties, a suitable situation had
+been provided for them in Cayenne, where the negroes stood sadly in need
+of their early arrival, for which reason they would all set out on that
+very morning for Rochefort.  When Gouron asked what was to become of his
+property, furniture, etc., he was told that his house was intended by
+Government for a preparatory school, and would, with its contents, be
+purchased, and the amount paid him in lands in Cayenne.  It is not
+necessary to say that this example of Imperial justice had the desired
+effect on all other refractory private schoolmasters.
+
+The parents of Gouron's pupils were, with a severe reprimand, informed
+where their sons had been placed, and where they would be educated in a
+manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them not to remove them,
+without a previous notice to the police.  A hatter, of the name of
+Maille, however, ordered his son home, because he had been sent to a
+dearer school than the former.  In his turn he was carried before the
+police, and, after a short examination of a quarter of an hour, was
+permitted, with his wife and two children, to join their friend Gouron at
+Rochefort, and to settle with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be
+given him for his property, in France.  These particulars were related to
+me by a neighbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been
+under Gouron's care, but who was now among those placed out by our
+Government.  The boy's present master, he said, was a man of a
+notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was intimidated, and weak
+enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt, his personal safety to
+the future happiness of his child.  In your country, you little
+comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the hands of our
+rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has been mistaken abroad
+for affection and content.
+
+All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of petty
+tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time, and that,
+therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful, is also the
+most occupied of his colleagues.  So he certainly is, but, last year, a
+new organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche
+was allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors of State, and an
+augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries.  The French Empire was
+then divided into four arrondissements, with regard to the general
+police, not including Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of
+police under the Minister.  Of the first of these arrondissements, the
+Counsellor of State, Real, is a kind of Deputy Minister; the Counsellor
+of State, Miot, is the same of the second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet
+de la Lozere, of the third; and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the
+fourth.  The secret police agents, formerly called spies, were also
+considerably increased.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope's Nuncio was
+for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame Bonaparte's
+drawing-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness
+to think himself fortunate in continuing to govern the Ecclesiastical
+States, without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangements that
+might be thought necessary or proper by the Government in France.
+
+Bonaparte's policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the
+Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military
+supporters; Cambacere's brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and
+Cardinal, and one of Lebrun's, and two of Berthier's cousins are Bishops.
+As, however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or generals,
+have, like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous
+scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes hesitated about
+sanctioning their promotions.  This was the case last summer, when
+General Dessolles's brother was transferred from the Bishopric of Digne
+to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother
+of General Miollis, who was a curate of Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix.
+This curate had not only been one of the first to throw up his letters of
+priesthood at the Jacobin Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied
+the divinity of the Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of
+Parisian atheists, the worship of a Goddess of Reason in a common
+prostitute with whom he lived.  The notoriety of these abominations made
+even his parishioners at Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to
+regard him as their pastor, though several of them had been imprisoned,
+fined, and even transported as fanatics, or as refractory.
+
+During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had been
+promised, among other things, that, for the future, his conscience should
+not be wounded by having presented to him for the prelacy any persons but
+those of the purest morals of the French Empire; and that all his
+objections should be attended to, in case of promotions; his scruples
+removed, or his refusal submitted to.  When Cardinal Fesch demanded His
+Holiness's Bull for the curate Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State,
+Gonsalvi, showed no less than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy,
+which made him unworthy of such a dignity.  To this was replied that,
+having obtained an indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper
+subject; above all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the
+French.  The Pope's Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of
+the Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to
+Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he,
+nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of this
+request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new Imperial
+etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the representatives of
+Sovereigns.  On the same evening the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome,
+and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confirmed by
+the Pope.
+
+From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge of the
+intention of our Government to adhere to its other engagements; but at
+Rome, as well as in most other Continental capitals, the Sovereign is the
+dupe of the perversity of his Counsellors and Ministers, who are the
+tools, and not seldom the pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.
+
+But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if possible,
+still worse served than in this country.  Some of the Bishops there,
+after having done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and
+fought against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, from
+their intrigues, are the terror of all the married part of their flock.
+The Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a merchant, by whom he has two
+children; and, that the public may not be mistaken as to their real
+father, the merchant received a sum of money to establish himself at
+Brescia, and has not seen his wife for these two years past.  General
+Gourion, who was last spring in Italy, has assured me that he read the
+advertisement of a curate after his concubine, who had eloped with
+another curate; and that the Police Minister at Milan openly licensed
+women to be the housekeepers of priests.
+
+A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but
+relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary
+for the musket.  He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured
+a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another,
+deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and
+eloped from her husband.  Last spring he returned to the bosom of the
+Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a valuable diamond cross,
+of which he had pillaged the statue of a Madonna, he obtained the dignity
+of a grand vicar, to the great edification, no doubt, of all those who
+had seen him before the altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the
+hospital.
+
+Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the name of
+Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys in the same
+cathedral where he officiates as a priest.  Their mother is dead, but her
+daughter, by another priest, is now their father's mistress.  This
+incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the girl does the honours
+of the grand vicar's house, and, with naivete enough, tells the guests
+and visitors of her happiness in having succeeded her mother.  I have
+this anecdote from an officer who heard her make use of that expression.
+
+In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and
+unprincipled; but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they take
+care to save the appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt is the
+same, the scandal is less.  Bonaparte pretends to be severe against all
+those ecclesiastics who are accused of any irregularities after having
+made their peace with the Church.  A curate of Picardy, suspected of
+gallantry, and another of Normandy, accused of inebriety, were last
+month, without further trial or ceremony than the report of the Minister
+Portalis, delivered over to Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne,
+after they had been stripped of their gowns.  At the same time, Cardinal
+Cambaceres and Cardinal Fesch, equally notorious for their excesses, were
+taken no notice of, except that they were laughed at in our Court
+circles.
+
+I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government is
+totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious establishment
+when the present race of priests is extinguished; which, in the course of
+nature, must happen in less than thirty years.  Our military system and
+our military education discourage all young men from entering into
+orders; while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and
+more profitable than the Church.  Already we want curates, though several
+have been imported from Germany and Spain, and, in some departments,
+four, and even six parishes have only one curate to serve them all.  The
+Bishops exhort, and the parents advise their children to study theology;
+but then the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well
+as the student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the
+ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they are
+either unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else.  The
+Pope, with all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was unable to
+procure an exception from the conscription of young men preparing
+themselves for priesthood.  Bonaparte always answered: "Holy Father, were
+I to consent to your demand, I should soon have an army of priests,
+instead of an army of soldiers."  Our Emperor is not unacquainted with
+the real character and spirit of his Volunteers.  When the Pope
+represented the danger of religion expiring in France, for want of
+priests to officiate at the altars, he was answered that Bonaparte, at
+the beginning of his consulate, found neither altars nor priests in
+France; that if his reign survived the latter, the former would always be
+standing, and survive his reign.  He trusted that the chief of the Church
+would prevent them from being deserted.  He assured him that when once he
+had restored the liberties of the seas, and an uninterrupted tranquillity
+on the Continent, he should attend more, and perhaps entirely, to the
+affairs of the Church.  He consented, however, that the Pope might
+institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary for two hundred young
+Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military conscription.  This is the
+stock from which our Church establishment is to be supplied!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna, and the long
+stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin, had already caused
+here many speculations, not quite corresponding with the views and,
+perhaps, interests of our Court, when our violation of the Prussian
+territory made our courtiers exclaim: "This act proves that the Emperor
+of the French is in a situation to bid defiance to all the world, and,
+therefore, no longer courts the neutrality of a Prince whose power is
+merely artificial; who has indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no
+regard to claims."  Such was the language of those very men who, a month
+before, declared "that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or
+war in his hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch
+ever was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of
+the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to his
+powerful mediation for the return of peace."
+
+The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers' political jargon has
+not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered without any
+official publication.  Bonaparte had the adroitness to cajole the Cabinet
+of Berlin into his interest, in the first month of his consulate,
+notwithstanding his own critical situation, as well as the critical
+situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it
+to his triumphal car and to inculpate it indirectly in his outrages and
+violations.  Convinced, as he thought, of the selfishness which guided
+all its resolutions, all his attacks and invasions against the law of
+nations, or independence of States, were either preceded or followed with
+some offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance.
+His political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia than
+his military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in laying the
+Hanse Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover; or, rather, all
+these acts of violence and injustice were merely the effects of his
+ascendency in Prussia.  When it is, besides, remembered what provinces
+Prussia accepted from his bounty, what exchange of presents, of ribands,
+of private letters passed between Napoleon the First and Frederick
+William III., between the Empress of the French and the Queen of Prussia,
+it is not surprising if the Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of
+the submission of the Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to
+fear it, or to think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even
+honour to feel, the numerous Provocations offered.
+
+Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or assert to the contrary, their
+gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise more that
+State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense they are
+liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or meanness into
+their snares.  The more legitimate Sovereigns descend from their true
+dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they approach the baseness of
+usurpation and the Machiavellism of rebellion.  Like other upstarts, they
+never suffer an equal.  If you do not keep yourself above them, they will
+crush you beneath them.  If they have no reason to fear you, they will
+create some quarrel to destroy you.
+
+It is said here that Duroc's journey to Berlin was merely to demand a
+passage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in
+Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops from passing through the
+Prussian territory in Poland.  This request is such as might have been
+expected from our Emperor and his Minister.  Whether, however, the tone
+in which this curious negotiation with a neutral power was begun, or
+that, at last, the generosity of the Russian Monarch awakened a sense of
+duty in the Cabinet of Berlin, the arrival of our pacific envoy was
+immediately followed with warlike preparations.  Fortunate, indeed, was
+it for Prussia to have resorted to her military strength instead of
+trusting any longer to our friendly assurances.  The disasters that have
+since befallen the Austrian armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our
+forced marches through neutral Prussia, would otherwise soon have been
+felt in Westphalia, in Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania.  But should His
+Prussian Majesty not order his troops to act in conjunction with Russia,
+Austria, England, and Sweden, and that very soon, all efforts against
+Bonaparte will be vain, as those troops which have dispersed the
+Austrians and repulsed the Russians will be more than equal to master the
+Prussians, and one campaign may be sufficient to convince the Prussian
+Ministers of their folly and errors for years, and to punish them for
+their ignorance or selfishness.
+
+Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his
+affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number of
+spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that
+Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and inclined to join the
+confederacy against France.  At the last assembly at our Prince
+Cambaceres's, a rumour circulated that preliminary articles for an
+offensive alliance with your country had already been signed by the
+Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg, on one side, and by your
+Minister to the Court of Berlin on the other; according to which you were
+to take sixty thousand Prussians and twelve thousand Hessians into your
+pay, for five years certain.  A courier from Duroc was said to have
+brought this news, which at first made some impression, but it wore away
+by degrees; and our Government, to judge from the expressions of persons
+in its confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with
+Prussia.  Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the
+North of Europe, Bonaparte's numerous and young generals are impatient to
+enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of
+Germany are almost exhausted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The provocations of our Government must have been extraordinary
+indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of Berlin from its long
+and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to the friendly intentions
+of honest Talleyrand, and to the disinterested policy of our generous
+Bonaparte.  To judge its intents from its acts, the favour of the Cabinet
+of St. Cloud was not only its wish but its want.  You must remember that,
+last year, besides his ordinary Ambassador, Da Lucchesini, His Prussian
+Majesty was so ill advised as to despatch General Knobelsdorff as his
+extra representative, to assist at Napoleon's coronation, a degradation
+of lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples, though
+surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as last
+June, the same Knobelsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the honours
+at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our army in Hanover
+who chose to attend there.  On this occasion the King lodged in a
+farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of Koestelith, while our
+sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte & Co., were quartered and treated in
+style at the castle of Putzbull, fitted up for their accommodation.  This
+was certainly very hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent
+nor politic.  Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are
+convinced that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not
+merit to be esteemed.
+
+Do not confound this Knobelsdorff with the late Field-marshal of that
+name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then Ambassador at
+Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him, NON ET SANS
+PHRASE, the very words this regicide used when he sat in judgment on his
+King, and voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE.  This Knobelsdorff is a very
+different character.  He pretends to be equally conspicuous in the
+Cabinet as in the field, in the boudoir as in the study.  A
+demi-philosopher, a demi-savant, a demi-gallant and a demi-politician,
+constitute, all taken together, nothing except an insignificant courtier.
+I do not know whether he was among those Prussian officers who, in 1798,
+CRIED when it was inserted in the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte
+had been killed in an insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain,
+that were Knobelsdorff to survive Napoleon the First, none of His
+Imperial Majesty's own dutiful subjects would mourn him more sincerely
+than this subject of the King of Prussia.  He is said to possess a great
+share of the confidence of his King, who has already employed him in
+several diplomatic missions.  The principal and most requisite qualities
+in a negotiator are political information, inviolable fidelity,
+penetrating but unbiased judgment, a dignified firmness, and
+condescending manners.  I have not been often enough in the society of
+General Knobelsdorff to assert whether nature and education have destined
+him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian monarchy.
+
+I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von
+Haugwitz who, in 1792, as Prussian Ambassador at Vienna, arranged the
+treaty which then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles against the
+Jacobin Cap of Liberty.  It is now said in our diplomatic circle that his
+second mission to the same capital has for an object the renewal of these
+ties, which the Treaty of Basle dissolved; and that our Government, to
+impede his success, or to occasion his recall, before he could have time
+to conclude, had proposed to Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions
+of liveres--which it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality.
+The present respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that
+whether the mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His
+Prussian Majesty confides in his army in preference to our parchments.
+
+Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the foreign
+department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a friend of the
+system of neutrality as his predecessor.  All the transactions of his
+administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim that, if he wished his
+country to take an active part in the present conflict, it would not have
+been against France, had she not begun the attack with the invasion of
+Anspach and Bayreuth.  Let it be recollected that, since his Ministry,
+Prussia has acknowledged Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has
+exchanged orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be
+present at his coronation,--not common compliments, even between Princes
+connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity.  Under his
+administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc d'Enghien, and
+the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been
+pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against, all
+these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor a
+becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on
+the 5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe
+all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters?  It is not
+probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if
+self-preservation does not require it.
+
+Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
+statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice
+of his Prince.  The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister
+of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet.  On the 26th of January, 1792,
+as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of
+Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants
+swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their
+new Sovereign.--He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these
+States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator
+with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling
+all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former
+post at Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his
+Government.
+
+The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place
+he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such
+information as would enable him to fill it with distinction.  I have
+heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid
+private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports
+of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations.  One of
+these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I
+to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very
+judicious in his selection of private correspondents.  Figure to yourself
+a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high,
+deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a
+sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made
+unintelligible.  His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular,
+and his manners corresponded with both.  He called himself Baron von
+Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with
+the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic
+mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters
+and instructions from his principal.  As might be expected, he had the
+adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told,
+the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented him from starving.
+
+No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more
+knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador, Marquis
+of Lucchesini.  He went with several other philosophers of Italy to
+admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great,
+who received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed
+him.  I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis's name for the
+place of a governor of some province that this Monarch said, "My subjects
+of that province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule
+in my name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend
+to chastise."  This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his
+sectaries.
+
+During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of
+Lucchesini was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but he
+was neither his friend nor his favourite, but his listener.  It was first
+under Frederick William II.  that he began his diplomatic career, with an
+appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late King of Poland.  His
+first act in this post was a treaty signed on the 29th of March, 1790,
+with the King and Republic of Poland, which changed an elective monarchy
+into an hereditary one; but, notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had
+guaranteed this alteration, and the constitution decreed in consequence,
+in 1791, three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated
+both, and selfishness banished faith.
+
+In July, 1790, he assisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the
+conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch
+Ambassadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and Turkey.
+In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers to the
+Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the Treaty of Peace
+between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of Germany.  In June, 1792, he
+was a second time sent as a Minister to Warsaw, where he remained until
+January, 1793, when he was promoted to the post of Ambassador at the
+Court of Vienna.  He continued, however, to reside with His Prussian
+Majesty during the greatest part of the campaign on the Rhine, and
+signed, on the 24th of June, 1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive
+and defensive alliance with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy
+respected not above eighteen months.  In October, 1796, he requested his
+recall, but this his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious
+expressions; and he could not obtain it until March, 1797.  Some
+disapprobation of the new political plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz
+in the Cabinet at Berlin is supposed to have occasioned his determination
+to retire from public employment.  As he, however, continued to reside in
+the capital of Prussia, and, as many believed, secretly intrigued to
+appear again upon the scene, the nomination, in 1800, to his present
+important post was as much the consequence of his own desire as of the
+favour of his King.
+
+The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful
+Hotel de l'Infantado, where his lady's routs, assemblies, and circles are
+the resort of our most fashionable gentry.  Madame da Lucchesini is more
+agreeable than handsome, more fit to shine at Berlin than at Paris; for
+though her manners are elegant, they want that ease, that finish which a
+German or Italian education cannot teach, nor a German or Italian society
+confer.  To judge from the number of her admirers, she seems to know that
+she is married to a philosopher.  Her husband was born at Lucca, in
+Italy, and is, therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte's
+brother-in-law, Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a
+marker at a billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a
+shilling, as well as many a box on the ear.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your countryman,
+Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of our generals and
+public functionaries, as unjust as well as disgraceful.  At a future
+General Congress, should ever Bonaparte suffer one to be convoked, except
+under his auspices and dictature, the distinction and treatment of
+prisoners of war require to be again regulated, that the valiant warrior
+may not for the future be confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous
+spy; nor innocent travellers, provided with regular passes, visiting a
+country either for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men
+taken while combating with arms in their hands.
+
+You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our ships--that,
+during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and Scotland,
+and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were
+captured on their return or on their passage; and that your Government
+never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State
+criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower.  If I am not
+mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and
+his suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and
+men experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow
+prisoners of war; though the distance is immense between the crime of
+plotting against the lawful Government of the Princes of the House of
+Brunswick, and the attempt to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the
+House of Bonaparte.  But, even during the last war, how many of our ships
+of the line, frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed
+rebels in Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and
+yet your generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time when
+your Sir Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain Wright, were
+confined in our State prison of the Temple!  It is with Governments as
+with individuals, they ought to be just before they are generous.  Had
+you in 1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages so patiently, you would
+not now have to lament, nor we to blush for, the untimely end of Captain
+Wright.
+
+From the last time that this officer had appeared before the criminal
+tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was determined on
+by our Government.  His firmness offended, and his patriotism displeased;
+and as he seemed to possess the confidence of his own Government, it was
+judged that he was in its secrets; it was, therefore, resolved that, if
+he refused to become a traitor, he should perish a victim.  Desmarets,
+Fouche's private secretary, who is also the secretary of the secret and
+haute police, therefore ordered him to another private interrogatory.
+Here he was offered a considerable sum of money, and the rank of an
+admiral in our service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of
+his Government, of its connections with the discontented in this country,
+and of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them.  He replied,
+as might have been expected, with indignation, to such offers and to such
+proposals, but as they were frequently repeated with new allurements, he
+concluded with remaining silent and giving no answers at all.  He was
+then told that the torture would soon restore him his voice, and some
+select gendarmes seized him and laid him on the rack; there he uttered no
+complaint, not even a sigh, though instruments the most diabolical were
+employed, and pains the most acute must have been endured.  When
+threatened that he should expire in torments, he said:
+
+"I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder, while my
+God receives my soul."  During the two hours of the first day that he was
+stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg were broken, and his
+nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then passed into the hands of a
+surgeon, and was under his care for five weeks, but, before he was
+perfectly cured, he was carried to another private interrogatory, at
+which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real were present.
+
+The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated state of
+his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he must be
+convinced that it was not the intention of the French Government ever to
+restore him to his native country, where he might relate occurrences
+which the policy of France required to be buried in oblivion; he,
+therefore, had no choice between serving the Emperor of the French, or
+perishing within the walls of the prison where he was confined.  He
+replied that he was resigned to his destiny, and would die as he had
+lived, faithful to his King and to his country.
+
+The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal strength
+is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate being whose mind
+is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is weakened by wants.  For
+five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants,
+executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his
+food had been bread and his drink water.  The man who, thus situated and
+thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is
+more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator,
+the victor, or the saint.
+
+This interrogatory was the last undergone by Captain Wright.  He was then
+again stretched on the rack, and what is called by our regenerators the
+INFERNAL torments, were inflicted on him.  After being pinched with
+red-hot irons all over his body, brandy, mixed with gunpowder, was
+infused in the numerous wounds and set fire to several times until nearly
+burned to the bones.  In the convulsions, the consequence of these
+terrible sufferings, he is said to have bitten off a part of his tongue,
+though, as before, no groans were heard.  As life still remained, he was
+again put under the care of his former surgeon; but, as he was
+exceedingly exhausted, a spy, in the dress of a Protestant clergyman,
+presented himself as if to read prayers with him.  Of this offer he
+accepted; but when this man began to ask some insidious questions, he
+cast on him a look of contempt and never spoke to him more.  At last,
+seeing no means to obtain any information from him, a mameluke last week
+strangled him in his bed.  Thus expired a hero whose fate has excited
+more compassion, and whose character has received more admiration here,
+than any of our great men who have fallen fighting for our Emperor.
+Captain Wright has diffused new rays of renown and glory on the British
+name, from his tomb as well as from his dungeon.
+
+You have certainly a right to call me to an account for all the
+particulars I have related of this scandalous and abominable transaction,
+and, though I cannot absolutely guarantee the truth of the narration, I
+am perfectly satisfied of it myself, and I hope to explain myself to your
+satisfaction.  Your unfortunate countryman was attended by and under the
+care of a surgeon of the name of Vaugeard, who gained his confidence, and
+was worthy of it, though employed in that infamous gaol.  Either from
+disgust of life, or from attachment to Captain Wright, he survived him
+only twelve hours, during which he wrote the shocking details I have
+given you, and sent them to three of the members of the foreign
+diplomatic corps, with a prayer to have them forwarded to Sir Sidney
+Smith or to Mr. Windham, that those his friends might be informed that,
+to his last moment, Captain Wright was worthy of their protection and
+kindness.  From one of those Ministers I have obtained the original in
+Vaugeard's own handwriting.
+
+I know that Bonaparte and Talleyrand promised the release of Captain
+Wright to the Spanish Ambassador; but, at that time, he had already
+suffered once on the rack, and this liberality on their part was merely a
+trick to impose upon the credulity of the Spaniard or to get rid of his
+importunities.  Had it been otherwise, Captain Wright, like Sir George
+Rumbold, would himself have been the first to announce in your country
+the recovery of his liberty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Should Bonaparte again return here victorious, and a
+pacificator, great changes in our internal Government and constitution
+are expected, and will certainly occur.  Since the legislative corps has
+completed the Napoleon code of civil and criminal justice, it is
+considered by the Emperor not only as useless, but troublesome and
+superfluous.  For the same reasons the tribunate will also be laid aside,
+and His Majesty will rule the French Empire, with the assistance of his
+Senate, and with the advice of his Council of State, exclusively.  You
+know that the Senators, as well as the Councillors of State, are
+nominated by the Emperor; that he changes the latter according to his
+whim, and that, though the former, according to the present constitution,
+are to hold their offices for life, the alterations which remove entirely
+the legislature and the tribunate may also make Senators movable.  But as
+all members of the Senate are favourites or relatives, he will probably
+not think it necessary to resort to such a measure of policy.
+
+In a former letter I have already mentioned the heterogeneous composition
+of the Senate.  The tribunate and legislative corps are worthy to figure
+by its side; their members are also ci-devant mechanics of all
+descriptions, debased attorneys or apostate priests, national spoilers or
+rebellious regicides, degraded nobles or dishonoured officers. The nearly
+unanimous vote of these corps for a consulate for life, and for an
+hereditary Emperor, cannot, therefore, either be expressive of the
+national will, or constitute the legality of Bonaparte's sovereignty.
+
+In the legislature no vote opposed, and no voice declaimed against,
+Bonaparte's Imperial dignity; but in the tribunate, Carnot--the
+infamously notorious Carnot--'pro forma', and with the permission of the
+Emperor 'in petto', spoke against the return of a monarchical form of
+Government.  This farce of deception and roguery did not impose even on
+our good Parisians, otherwise, and so frequently, the dupes of all our
+political and revolutionary mountebanks.  Had Carnot expressed a
+sentiment or used a word not previously approved by Bonaparte, instead of
+reposing himself in the tribunate, he would have been wandering in
+Cayenne.
+
+Son of an obscure attorney at Nolay, in Burgundy, he was brought up, like
+Bonaparte, in one of those military schools established by the
+munificence of the French Monarchs; and had obtained, from the late King,
+the commission of a captain of engineers when the Revolution broke out.
+He was particularly indebted to the Prince of Conde for his support
+during the earlier part of his life, and yet he joined the enemies of his
+house, and voted for the death of Louis XVI.  A member, with Robespierre
+and Barrere, of the Committee of Public Safety, he partook of their
+power, as well as of their crimes, though he has been audacious enough to
+deny that he had anything to do with other transactions than those of the
+armies.  Were no other proofs to the contrary collected, a letter of his
+own hand to the ferocious Lebon, at Arras, is a written evidence which he
+is unable to refute.  It is dated November 16th, 1793.  "You must take,"
+says he, "in your energy, all measures of terror commanded or required by
+present circumstances.  Continue your revolutionary attitude; never mind
+the amnesty pronounced with the acceptance of the absurd constitution of
+1791; it is a crime which cannot extenuate other crimes. Anti-republicans
+can only expiate their folly under the age of the guillotine. The public
+Treasury will always pay the journeys and expenses of informers, because
+they have deserved well of their country.  Let all suspected traitors
+expire by the sword or by fire; continue to march upon that revolutionary
+line so well delineated by you.  The committee applauds all your
+undertakings, all your measures of vigour; they are not only all
+permitted, but commanded by your mission."  Most of the decrees
+concerning the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, and particularly
+that for the organization of the atrocious military commission at Orange,
+were signed by him.
+
+Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without talents; but
+his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of those plans of
+campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and 1796, were so
+triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and Bonaparte, is impertinent,
+as well as unfounded.  At the risk of his own life, Pichegru entirely
+altered the plan sent him by the Committee of Public Safety; and it was
+Moreau's masterly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe,
+that made this general so famous.  The surprising successes of Bonaparte
+in Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and,
+according to Berthier's assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief,
+during the first four months, to change five times his plans of
+proceedings and undertakings.
+
+During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made
+a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to
+live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of
+the name of Aublin, as his mistresses.  He was the friend of the father
+of these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in
+1793, to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both
+before either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796,
+reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to
+a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant. He
+has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
+
+Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well
+aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the
+Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would,
+with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as
+he did for that of Louis XVI.  He has waded too far in blood and crime to
+retrograde.
+
+To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
+legislator.  Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
+officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of
+Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National
+Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a
+faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre.  After the evacuation of
+Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the
+Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were
+arrested and executed.  Among these were twenty-two young girls, under
+twenty years of age, whose crime was the having presented nosegays to the
+late King of Prussia on his entry after the surrender of Verdun.  He was
+afterwards a national commissary with the armies on the coast near Brest,
+on the Rhine, and in Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized
+himself by unheard of ferocities and sanguinary deeds.  The following
+anecdote, printed and published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme,
+will give you some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and
+Imperial Solon: "Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet," writes Prudhomme,
+"had ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on
+the evening they expected to arrive in that town.  Entering very late,
+they found two soldiers, who had seen the box empty, placed in its front.
+These they ordered immediately to be arrested, and condemned them, for
+having outraged the national representation, to be guillotined on the
+next day, when they both were accordingly executed!"  Labarrere, a
+provost of the Marechaussee at Dax, was in prison as a suspected person.
+His daughter, a very handsome girl of seventeen, lived with an aunt at
+Severe.  The two pro-consuls passing through that place, she threw
+herself at their feet, imploring mercy for her parent.  This they not
+only promised, but offered her a place in their carriage to Dax, that she
+might see him restored to liberty.  On the road the monsters insisted on
+a ransom for the blood of her father.  Waiting, afflicted and ashamed, at
+a friend's house at Dag, the accomplishment of a promise so dearly
+purchased, she heard the beating of the alarm drum, and looked, from
+curiosity, through the window, when she saw her unfortunate parent
+ascending the scaffold!  After having remained lifeless for half an hour,
+she recovered her senses an instant, when she exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, the barbarians! they violated me while flattering me with the hope
+of saving my father!" and then expired.  In October, 1795, Cavaignac
+assisted Barras and Bonaparte in the destruction of some thousands of
+men, women, and children in the streets of this capital, and was,
+therefore, in 1796, made by the Directory an inspector-general of the
+customs; and, in 1803, nominated by Bonaparte a legislator.  His
+colleague, Citizen Pinet, is now one of our Emperor's Counsellors of
+State, and both are commanders of His Majesty's Legion of Honour; rich,
+respected, and frequented by our most fashionable ladies and gentlemen.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I suppose your Government too vigilant and too patriotic not to
+be informed of the great and uninterrupted activity which reigns in our
+arsenals, dockyards, and seaports.  I have seen a plan, according to
+which Bonaparte is enabled, and intends, to build twenty ships of the
+line and ten frigates, besides cutters, in the year, for ten years to
+come.  I read the calculation of the expenses, the names of the forests
+where the timber is to be cut, of the foreign countries where a part of
+the necessary materials are already engaged, and of our own departments
+which are to furnish the remainder.  The whole has been drawn up in a
+precise and clear manner by Bonaparte's Maritime Prefect at Antwerp, M.
+Malouet, well known in your country, where he long remained as an
+emigrant, and, I believe, was even employed by your Ministers.
+
+You may, perhaps, smile at this vast naval scheme of Bonaparte; but if
+you consider that he is the master of all the forests, mines, and
+productions of France, Italy, and of a great part of Germany, with all
+the navigable rivers and seaports of these countries and Holland, and
+remember also the character of the man, you will, perhaps, think it less
+impracticable.  The greatest obstacle he has to encounter, and to remove,
+is want of experienced naval officers, though even in this he has
+advanced greatly since the present war, during which he has added to his
+naval forces twenty--nine ships of the line, thirty--four frigates,
+twenty-one cutters, three thousand prams, gunboats, pinnaces, etc., with
+four thousand naval officers and thirty-seven thousand sailors, according
+to the same account, signed by Malouet.  It is true that most of our new
+naval heroes have never ventured far from our coast, and all their naval
+laurels have been gathered under our land batteries; but the impulse is
+given to the national spirit, and our conscripts in the maritime
+departments prefer, to a man, the navy to the army, which was not
+formerly the case.
+
+It cannot have escaped your observation that the incorporation of Genoa
+procured us, in the South of our Empire, a naval station and arsenal, as
+a counterpoise to Antwerp, our new naval station in the North, where
+twelve ships of the line have been built, or are building, since 1803,
+and where timber and other materials are collected for eight more.  At
+Genoa, two ships of the line and four frigates have lately been launched,
+and four ships and two frigates are on the stocks; and the Genoese
+Republic has added sixteen thousand seafaring men to our navy.  Should
+Bonaparte terminate successfully the present war, Naples and Venice will
+increase the number of our seaports and resources on the borders of the
+Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.  All his courtiers say that he will
+conquer Italy in Germany, and determine at Vienna--the fate of London.
+
+Of all our admirals, however, we have not one to compare with your
+Nelson, your Hood, your St. Vincent, and your Cornwallis.  By the
+appointment of Murat as grand admiral, Bonaparte seems to indicate that
+he is inclined to imitate the example of Louis. XVI., in the beginning of
+his reign, and entrust the chief command of his fleets and squadrons to
+military men of approved capacity and courage, officers of his land
+troops.  Last June, when he expected a probable junction of the fleet
+under Villeneuve with the squadron under Admiral Winter, and the union of
+both with Ganteaume at Brest, Murat was to have had the chief command of
+the united French, Spanish, and Batavian fleets, and to support the
+landing of our troops in your country; but the arrival of Lord Nelson in
+the West Indies, and the victory of Admiral Calder, deranged all our
+plans and postponed all our designs, which the Continental war has
+interrupted; to be commenced, God knows when.
+
+The best amongst our bad admirals is certainly Truguet; but he was
+disgraced last year, and exiled twenty leagues from the coast, for having
+declared too publicly "that our flotillas would never be serviceable
+before our fleets were superior to yours, when they would become
+useless."  An intriguer by long habit and by character, having neither
+property nor principles, he joined the Revolution, and was the second in
+command under Latouche, in the first republican fleet that left our
+harbours.  He directed the expedition against Sardinia, in January, 1793,
+during which he acquired neither honour nor glory, being repulsed with
+great loss by the inhabitants.  After being imprisoned under Robespierre,
+the Directory made him a Minister of the marine, an Ambassador to Spain,
+and a Vice-Admiral of France.  In this capacity he commanded at Brest,
+during the first eighteen months of the present war.  He has an
+irreconcilable foe in Talleyrand, with whom he quarrelled, when on his
+embassy in Spain, about some extortions at Madrid, which he declined to
+share with his principal at Paris.  Such was our Minister's inveteracy
+against him in 1798, that a directorial decree placed him on the list of
+emigrants, because he remained in Spain after having been recalled to
+France.  In 1799, during Talleyrand's disgrace, Truguet returned here,
+and, after in vain challenging his enemy to fight, caned him in the
+Luxembourg gardens, a chastisement which our premier bore with true
+Christian patience.  Truguet is not even a member of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+Villeneuve is supposed not much inferior in talents, experience, and
+modesty to Truguet.  He was, before the Revolution, a lieutenant of the
+royal navy; but his principles did not prevent him from deserting to the
+colours of the enemies of royalty, who promoted him first to a captain
+and afterwards to an admiral.
+
+His first command as such was over a division of the Toulon fleet, which,
+in the winter of 1797, entered Brest.  In the battle at Aboukir he was
+the second in command; and, after the death of Admiral Brueys, he rallied
+the ships which had escaped, and sailed for Malta, where, two years
+afterwards, he signed, with General Vaubois, the capitulation of that
+island.  When hostilities again broke out, he commanded in the West
+Indies, and, leaving his station, escaped your cruisers, and was
+appointed first to the chief command of the Rochefort, and afterwards the
+Toulon fleet, on the death of Admiral Latouche.  Notwithstanding the
+gasconade of his report of his negative victory over Admiral Calder,
+Villeneuve is not a Gascon by birth, but only, by sentiment.
+
+Ganteaume does not possess either the intriguing character of Truguet or
+the valorous one of Villeneuve.
+
+Before the Revolution he was a mate of a merchantman, but when most of
+the officers of the former royal navy had emigrated or perished, he was,
+in 1793, made a captain of the republican navy, and in 1796 an admiral.
+During the battle of Aboukir he was the chief of the staff, under Admiral
+Brueys, and saved himself by swimming, when l'Orient took fire and blew
+up.  Bonaparte wrote to him on this occasion: "The picture you have sent
+me of the disaster of l'Orient, and of your own dreadful situation, is
+horrible; but be assured that, having such a miraculous escape, DESTINY
+intends you to avenge one day our navy and our friends."  This note was
+written in August, 1798, shortly after Bonaparte had professed himself a
+Mussulman.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, our general-in-chief had determined to leave
+his army of Egypt to its destiny, Ganteaume equipped and commanded the
+squadron of frigates which brought him to Europe, and was, after his
+consulate, appointed a Counsellor of State and commander at Brest.  In
+1800 he escaped with a division of the Brest fleet to Toulon, and, in the
+summer of 1801, when he was ordered to carry succours to Egypt, your ship
+Skitsure fell in with him, and was captured.  As he did not, however,
+succeed in landing in Egypt the troops on board his ships, a temporary
+disgrace was incurred, and he was deprived of the command, but made a
+maritime prefect.  Last year favour was restored him, with the command of
+our naval forces at Brest.  All officers who have served under Ganteaume
+agree that, let his fleet be ever so superior, he will never fight if he
+can avoid it, and that, in orderly times, his capacity would, at the
+utmost, make him regarded as a good master of a merchantman, and nothing
+else.
+
+Of the present commander of our, flotilla at Boulogne, Lacrosse, I will
+also say some few words.  A lieutenant before the Revolution, he became,
+in 1789, one of the most ardent and violent Jacobins, and in 1792 was
+employed by the friend of the Blacks, and our Minister, Monge, as an
+emissary in the West Indies, to preach there to the negroes the rights of
+man and insurrection against the whites, their masters.  In 1800,
+Bonaparte advanced him to a captain-general at Guadeloupe, an island
+which his plots, eight years before, had involved in all the horrors of
+anarchy, and where, when he now attempted to restore order, his former
+instruments rose against him and forced him to escape to one of your
+islands--I believe Dominico.  Of this island, in return for his
+hospitable reception, he took plans, according to which our General
+Lagrange endeavoured to conquer it last spring.  Lacrosse is a perfect
+revolutionary fanatic, unprincipled, cruel, unfeeling, and intolerant.
+His presumption is great, but his talents are trifling.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The defeat of the Austrians has excited great satisfaction
+among our courtiers and public functionaries; but the mass of the
+inhabitants here are too miserable to feel for anything else but their
+own sufferings.  They know very well that every victory rivets their
+fetters, that no disasters can make them more heavy, and no triumph
+lighter.  Totally indifferent about external occurrences, as well as
+about internal oppressions, they strive to forget both the past and the
+present, and to be indifferent as to the future; they would be glad could
+they cease to feel that they exist.  The police officers were now, with
+their gendarmes, bayoneting them into illuminations for Bonaparte's
+successes, as they dragooned them last year into rejoicings for his
+coronation. I never observed before so much apathy; and in more than one
+place I heard the people say, "Oh!  how much better we should be with
+fewer victories and more tranquillity, with less splendour and more
+security, with an honest peace instead of a brilliant war."  But in a
+country groaning under a military government, the opinions of the people
+are counted for nothing.
+
+At Madame Joseph Bonaparte's circle, however, the countenances were not
+so gloomy.  There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual
+dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in
+honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles, to
+inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as gratitude
+towards our Emperor.  It is certainly neither philosophical nor
+philanthropical not to exclude the vilest of all passions, HATRED, on
+such a happy occasion.  Martin, in the dress of a conscript, sang six
+long couplets against the tyrants of the seas; of which I was only able
+to retain the following one:
+
+Je deteste le peuple anglais, Je deteste son ministere; J'aime l'Empereur
+des Francais, J'aime la paix, je hais la guerre; Mais puisqu'il faut la
+soutenir Contre une Nation Sauvage, Mon plus doux, mon plus grand desir
+Est de montrer tout mon courage.
+
+But what arrested my attention, more than anything else which occurred in
+this circle on that evening, was a printed paper mysteriously handed
+about, and of which, thanks to the civility of a Counsellor of State, I
+at last got a sight.  It was a list of those persons, of different
+countries, whom the Emperor of the French has fixed upon, to replace all
+the ancient dynasties of Europe within twenty years to come.  From the
+names of these individuals, some of whom are known to me, I could
+perceive that Bonaparte had more difficulty to select proper Emperors,
+Kings, and Electors, than he would have had, some years ago, to choose
+directors or consuls.  Our inconsistency is, however, evident even here;
+I did not read a name that is not found in the annals of Jacobinism and
+republicanism.  We have, at the same time, taken care not to forget
+ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy.  France is to furnish
+the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and
+Sweden.  What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject
+of King Arthur O'Connor the First?  You would, I dare say, be even more
+surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First.
+You know, I suppose, that O'Connor is a general of division, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour,--the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and
+courting, at this moment, a young lady, a relation of our Empress, whose
+portion may one day be an Empire.  But I am told that, notwithstanding
+Talleyrand's recommendations, and the approbation of Her Majesty, the
+lady prefers a colonel, her own countryman, to the Irish general. Should,
+however, our Emperor announce his determination, she would be obliged to
+marry as he commands, were he even to give her his groom, or his horse,
+for a spouse.
+
+You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels are
+here.  O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to
+General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on with a
+sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with
+poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France.  When
+I was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally
+considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to
+profligacy and drunkenness, and, when once drunk, more cruelly ferocious
+than even our Jacobins.  I thought it then, and I still believe it, a
+national prejudice, because I am convinced that the vices or virtues of
+all civilized nations are relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we
+have seen here, and who must be, like our Jacobins, the very dregs of
+their country, have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only
+mistrust but abhorrence.  It is also an undeniable truth that they were
+greatly disappointed by our former and present Government.  They expected
+to enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but our
+police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gendarmes escorted
+them as criminals to their place of destination, and there they received
+just enough to prevent them from starving.  If they complained they were
+put in irons, and if they attempted to escape they were sent to the
+galleys as malefactors or shot as spies.  Despair, therefore, no doubt
+induced many to perpetrate acts of which they were accused, and to rob,
+swindle, and murder, because they were punished as thieves and assassins.
+But, some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly,
+hospitable, and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves
+ungrateful, as well as infamous.  A lady of my acquaintance, of a once
+large fortune, had nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence
+depended upon what she got by letting furnished lodgings.  Mischance
+brought three young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily
+expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from
+Bonaparte.  During six months she not only lodged and supported them, but
+embarrassed herself to procure them linen and a decent apparel.  At last
+she was informed that each of, them had been allowed sixty livres--in the
+month, and that arrears had been paid them for nine months.  Their debt
+to her was above three thousand livres--but the day after she asked for
+payment they decamped, and one of them persuaded her daughter, a girl of
+fourteen, to elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of
+all her plate.--He has, indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the
+galleys for eight years; but this punishment neither restored the
+daughter her virtue nor the mother her property.  The other two denied
+their debts, and, as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of
+accounts, they could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and
+infamy, however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they
+delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and the
+Minister of Police ordered them to be transported as rogues and vagabonds
+to the colonies.  The daughter died shortly after, in consequence of a
+miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her more than a month, and
+ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our common hospitals.  Thus,
+these depraved young men ruined and murdered their benefactress and her
+child; and displayed, before they were thirty, such a consummate villainy
+as few wretches grown hoary in vice have perpetrated.  This act of
+scandalous notoriety injured the Irish reputation very much in this
+country; for here, as in many other places, inconsiderate people are apt
+to judge a whole nation according to the behaviour of some few of its
+outcasts.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible
+to all our military men--not on account of its profundity, but on account
+of its absurdity or incoherency.  In the present circumstances,
+half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike
+strongly and firmly than justly.  To invade Bavaria without disarming the
+Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality of
+Switzerland, are such political and military errors as require long
+successes to repair, but which such an enemy as Bonaparte always takes
+care not to leave unpunished.
+
+The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as much
+surprised us as the defeat of the army under General von Mack; but from
+what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would long since have
+pushed forward had not his movements been unfortunately combined with
+those of the latter.  The House of Lorraine never produced a more valiant
+warrior, nor Austria a more liberal or better instructed statesman, than
+this Prince.  Heir to the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded,
+with glory, against France during the revolutionary war; and, although he
+sometimes experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the
+chief of his House by his courage, by his activity, by his constancy, and
+by that salutary firmness which, in calling the generals and superior
+officers to their duty, has often reanimated the confidence and the
+ardour of the soldier.
+
+The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under the Prince
+of Coburg, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian armies in Brabant,
+where he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished himself by a
+valour sometimes bordering on temerity, but which, by degrees, acquired
+him that esteem and popularity, among the troops often very advantageous
+to him afterwards.  He was, in 1794, appointed governor and
+captain-general of the Low Countries, and a Field-marshal lieutenant of
+the army of the German Empire.  In April, 1796, he took the
+command-in-chief of the armies of Austria and of the Empire, and, in the
+following June, engaged in several combats with General Moreau, in which
+he was repulsed, but in a manner that did equal honour to the victor and
+to the vanquished.
+
+The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben, having,
+about this time, been nearly dispersed by General Jourdan, the Archduke
+left some divisions of his forces under General Latour, to impede the
+progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into Franconia, where he
+defeated Jourdan near Amberg and Wurzburg, routed his army entirely, and
+forced him to repass the Rhine in the greatest confusion, and with
+immense loss.  The retreat of Moreau was the consequence of the victories
+of this Prince.  After the capture of Kehl, in January, 1797, he assumed
+the command of the army of Italy, where he in vain employed all his
+efforts to put a stop to the victorious progress of Bonaparte, with whom,
+at last, he signed the preliminaries of peace at Leoben.  In the spring
+of 1799, he again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years
+before in Franconia; but in Switzerland he met with an abler adversary in
+General Massena; still, I am inclined to think that he displayed there
+more real talents than anywhere else; and that this part of his campaign
+of 1799 was the most interesting, in a military point of view.
+
+The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria
+render justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of
+Archduke Charles; and, what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who have
+commanded against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the true
+manner of combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least, his proclamations
+are the only ones composed with adroitness, and are what they ought to
+be, because in them an appeal is made to the public opinion at a time
+when opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies.
+
+The present opposer of this Prince in Italy is one of our best, as well
+as most fortunate, generals.  A Sardinian subject, and a deserter from
+the Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our commander, General
+Anselm, in the conquest of the county of Nice, rather as a spy than as a
+soldier.  His knowledge of the Maritime Alps obtained, in 1793, a place
+on our staff, where, from the services he rendered, the rank of a general
+of brigade was soon conferred on him.  In 1796 he was promoted to serve
+as a general of division under Bonaparte in Italy, where he distinguished
+himself so much that when, in 1798, General Berthier was ordered to
+accompany the army of the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as
+commander-in-chief of our troops in the temporary Roman Republic.  But
+his merciless pillage, and, perhaps, the idea of his being a foreigner,
+brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was obliged to recall him.  It was
+his campaign in Switzerland of 1799, and his defence of Genoa in 1800,
+that principally ranked him high as a military chief.  After the battle
+of Marengo he received the command of the army of Italy; but his
+extortions produced a revolt among the inhabitants, and he lived for some
+time in retreat and disgrace, after a violent quarrel with Bonaparte,
+during which many severe truths were said and heard on both sides.
+
+After the Peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau, and
+other discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of views
+and union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris, where
+Bonaparte visited him, after the rupture with your country, and made him,
+we may conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave his retreat.  Last
+year he was nominated one of our Emperor's Field-marshals, and as such he
+relieved Jourdan of the command in the kingdom of Italy.  He has
+purchased with a part of his spoil, for fifteen millions of
+livres--property in France and Italy; and is considered worth double that
+sum in jewels, money, and other valuables.
+
+Massena is called, in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as
+Bonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confidence in
+fortune than in merit, he is, perhaps, more indebted to the former than
+to the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has made him
+disliked at our Imperial Court, where he never addresses Napoleon and
+Madame Bonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress without smiling.
+
+General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also an
+officer of great talents and distinctions.  He was, in 1791, only a
+cornet, but in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the army of
+the Rhine.  In his report to the Directory, during the famous retreat of
+1796, Moreau speaks highly of this general, and admits that his.
+achievements, in part, saved the republican army.  During 1799 he served
+in Italy, and in 1800 he commanded the centre of the army of the Rhine,
+and assisted in gaining the victory of Hohenlinden.  After the Peace of
+Lundville, he was appointed a Counsellor of State of the military
+section, a place he still occupies, notwithstanding his present
+employment.  Though under forty years of age, he is rather infirm, from
+the fatigues he has undergone and the wounds he has received.  Although
+he has never combated as a general-in-chief, there is no doubt but that
+he would fill such a place with honour to himself and advantage to his
+country.
+
+Of the general officers who command under Archduke Charles, Comte de
+Bellegarde is already known by his exploits during the last war.  He had
+distinguished himself already in 1793, particularly when Valenciennes and
+Maubeuge were besieged by the united Austrian and English forces; and, in
+1794, he commanded the column at the head of which the Emperor marched,
+when Landrecy was invested.  In 1796, he was one of the members of the
+Council of the Archduke Charles, when this Prince commanded for the first
+time as a general-in-chief, on which occasion he was promoted to a
+Field-marshal lieutenant.
+
+He displayed again great talents during the campaign of 1799, when he
+headed a small corps, placed between General Suwarow in Italy, and
+Archduke Charles in Switzerland; and in this delicate post he contributed
+equally to the success of both.  After the Peace of Luneville he was
+appointed a commander-in-chief for the Emperor in the ci-devant Venetian
+States, where the troops composing the army under the Archduke Charles
+were, last summer, received and inspected by him, before the arrival of
+the Prince.  He is considered by military men as greatly superior to most
+of the generals now employed by the Emperor of Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--"I would give my brother, the Emperor of Germany, one further
+piece of advice.  Let him hasten to make peace.  This is the crisis when,
+he must recollect, all States must have an end.  The idea of the
+approaching extinction of the, dynasty of Lorraine must impress him with
+horror."  When Bonaparte ordered this paragraph to be inserted in the
+Moniteur, he discovered an 'arriere pensee', long suspected by
+politicians, but never before avowed by himself, or by his Ministers.
+"That he has determined on the universal change of dynasties, because a
+usurper can never reign with safety or honour as long as any legitimate
+Prince may disturb his power, or reproach him for his rank."  Elevated
+with prosperity, or infatuated with vanity and pride, he spoke a language
+which his placemen, courtiers, and even his brother Joseph at first
+thought premature, if not indiscreet.  If all lawful Sovereigns do not
+read in these words their proscription, and the fate which the most
+powerful usurper that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it
+may be ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath,
+sometimes strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the vicissitudes
+of human life.
+
+"Had Talleyrand," said Louis Bonaparte, in his wife's drawing-room, "been
+by my brother's side, he would not have unnecessarily alarmed or awakened
+those whom it should have been his policy to keep in a soft slumber,
+until his blows had laid them down to rise no more; but his soldier-like
+frankness frequently injures his political views."  This I myself heard
+Louis say to Abbe Sieyes, though several foreign Ambassadors were in the
+saloon, near enough not to miss a word.  If it was really meant as a
+reflection on Napoleon, it was imprudent; if designed as a defiance to
+other Princes, it was unbecoming and impertinent.  I am inclined to
+believe it, considering the individual to whom it was addressed, a
+premeditated declaration that our Emperor expected a universal war, was
+prepared for it, and was certain of its fortunate issue.
+
+When this Sieyes is often consulted, and publicly flattered, our
+politicians say, "Woe to the happiness of Sovereigns and to the
+tranquillity of subjects; the fiend of mankind is busy, and at work,"
+and, in fact, ever since 1789, the infamous ex-Abbe has figured, either
+as a plotter or as an actor, in all our dreadful and sanguinary
+revolutionary epochas.  The accomplice of La Fayette in 1789, of Brissot
+in 1791, of Marat in 1792, of Robespierre in 1793, of Tallien in 1794, of
+Barras in 1795, of Rewbel in 1797, and of Bonaparte in 1799, he has
+hitherto planned, served, betrayed, or deserted all factions.  He is one
+of the few of our grand criminals, who, after enticing and sacrificing
+his associates, has been fortunate enough to survive them.  Bonaparte has
+heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property,
+senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not
+supposed one of our Emperor's most dutiful subjects, because many of the
+late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation,
+of regeneration, and of overthrow.  He has too high an opinion of his own
+deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a
+contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his
+labours and dangers.  His modesty has, for these sixteen years past,
+ascribed to his talents all the glory and prosperity of France, and all
+her misery and misfortunes to the disregard of his counsels, and to the
+neglect of his advice.  Bonaparte knows it; and that he is one of those
+crafty, sly, and dark conspirators, more dangerous than the bold
+assassin, who, by sophistry, art, and perseverance insinuate into the
+minds of the unwary and daring the ideas of their plots, in such an
+insidious manner that they take them and foster them as the production of
+their own genius; he is, therefore, watched by our Imperial spies, and
+never consulted but when any great blow is intended to be struck, or some
+enormous atrocities perpetrated.  A month before the seizure of the Duc
+d'Enghien, and the murder of Pichegru, he was every day shut up for some
+hours with Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Cloud, or in the Tuileries; where he
+has hardly been seen since, except after our Emperor's return from his
+coronation as a King of Italy.
+
+Sieyes never was a republican, and it was cowardice alone that made him
+vote for the death of his King and benefactor; although he is very fond
+of his own metaphysical notions, he always has preferred the preservation
+of his life to the profession or adherence to his systems.  He will not
+think the Revolution complete, or the constitution of his country a good
+one, until some Napoleon, or some Louis, writes himself an Emperor or
+King of France, by the grace of Sieyes.  He would expose the lives of
+thousands to obtain such a compliment to his hateful vanity and excessive
+pride; but he would not take a step that endangered his personal safety,
+though it might eventually lead him to the possession of a crown.
+
+From the bounty of his King, Sieyes had, before the Revolution, an income
+of fifteen thousand livres--per annum; his places, pensions, and landed
+estates produce now yearly five hundred thousand livres--not including
+the interest of his money in the French and foreign funds.
+
+Two years ago he was exiled, for some time, to an estate of his in
+Touraine, and Bonaparte even deliberated about transporting him to
+Cayenne, when Talleyrand observed "that such a condemnation would
+endanger that colony of France, as he would certainly organize there a
+focus of revolutions, which might also involve Surinam and the Brazils,
+the colonies of our allies, in one common ruin.  In the present
+circumstances," added the Minister, "if Sieyes is to be transported, I
+wish we could land him in England, Scotland, or Ireland, or even in
+Russia."
+
+I have just heard from a general officer the following anecdote, which he
+read to me from a letter of another general, dated Ulm, the 25th instant,
+and, if true, it explains in part Bonaparte's apparent indiscretion in
+the threat thrown out against all ancient dynasties.
+
+Among his confidential generals (and hitherto the most irreproachable of
+all our military commanders), Marmont is particularly distinguished.
+Before Napoleon left this capital to head his armies in Germany, he is
+stated to have sent despatches to all those traitors dispersed in
+different countries whom he has selected to commence the new dynasties,
+under the protection of the Bonaparte Dynasty.  They were, no doubt,
+advised of this being the crisis when they had to begin their
+machinations against thrones.  A courier from Talleyrand at Strasburg to
+Bonaparte at Ulm was ordered to pass by the corps under the command of
+Marmont, to whom, in case the Emperor had advanced too far into Germany,
+he was to deliver his papers.  This courier was surprised and interrupted
+by some Austrian light troops; and, as it was only some few hours after
+being informed of this capture that Bonaparte expressed himself frankly,
+as related above, it was supposed by his army that the Austrian
+Government had already in its power despatches which made our schemes of
+improvement at Paris no longer any secrets at Vienna.  The writer of this
+letter added that General Marmont was highly distressed on account of
+this accident, which might retard the prospect of restoring to Europe its
+long lost peace and tranquillity.
+
+This officer made his first campaign under Pichegru in 1794, and was, in
+1796, appointed by Bonaparte one of his aides-de-camp.  His education had
+been entirely military, and in the practice the war afforded him he soon
+evinced how well he remembered the lessons of theory.  In the year 1796,
+at the battle of Saint-Georges, before Mantua, he charged at the head of
+the eighth battalion of grenadiers, and contributed much to its fortunate
+issue.  In October of the same year, Bonaparte, as a mark of his
+satisfaction, sent him to present to the Directory the numerous colours
+which the army of Italy had conquered; from whom he received in return a
+pair of pistols, with a fraternal hug from Carnot.  On his return to
+Italy he was, for the first time, employed by his chief in a political
+capacity.  A republic, and nothing but a republic, being then the order
+of the day, some Italian patriots were convoked at Reggio to arrange a
+plan for a Cisalpine Republic, and for the incorporation with it of
+Modena, Bologna, and other neutral States; Marmont was nominated a French
+republican plenipotentiary, and assisted as such in the organization of a
+Commonwealth, which since has been by turns a province of Austria or a
+tributary State of France.
+
+Marmont, though combating for a bad cause, is an honest man; his hands
+are neither soiled with plunder, nor stained with blood.  Bonaparte,
+among his other good qualities, wishes to see every one about him rich;
+and those who have been too delicate to accumulate wealth by pillage, he
+generally provides for, by putting into requisition some great heiress.
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bonaparte arrived at Paris, where he
+demanded in marriage for his aide-de-camp Marmont, Mademoiselle
+Perregeaux, the sole child of the first banker in France, a well-educated
+and accomplished young lady, who would be much more agreeable did not her
+continual smiles and laughing indicate a degree of self-satisfaction and
+complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published.
+
+The banker, Perregeaux, is one of those fortunate beings who, by drudgery
+and assiduity, has succeeded in some few years to make an ample fortune.
+A Swiss by birth, like Necker, he also, like him, after gratifying the
+passion of avidity, showed an ambition to shine in other places than in
+the counting-house and upon the exchange.  Under La Fayette, in 1790, he
+was the chief of a battalion of the Parisian National Guards; under
+Robespierre, a commissioner for purchasing provisions; and under
+Bonaparte he is become a Senator and a commander of the Legion of Honour.
+I am told that he has made all his money by his connection with your
+country; but I know that the favourite of Napoleon can never be the
+friend of Great Britain.  He is a widower; but Mademoiselle Mars, of the
+Emperor's theatre, consoles him for the loss of his wife.
+
+General Marmont accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and distinguished himself
+at the capture of Malta, and when, in the following year, the siege of
+St. Jean d'Acre was undertaken, he was ordered to extend the
+fortifications of Alexandria; and if, in 1801, they retarded your
+progress, it was owing to his abilities, being an officer of engineers as
+well as of the artillery.  He returned with Bonaparte to Europe, and was,
+after his usurpation, made a Counsellor of State.  At the battle of
+Marengo he commanded the artillery, and signed afterwards, with the
+Austrian general, Count Hohenzollern, the Armistice of Treviso, which
+preceded shortly the Peace of Luneville.  Nothing has abated Bonaparte's
+attachment to this officer, whom he appointed a commander-in-chief in
+Holland, when a change of Government was intended there, and whom he will
+entrust everywhere else, where sovereignty is to be abolished, or thrones
+and dynasties subverted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Many wise people are of the opinion that the revolution of
+another great Empire is necessary to combat or oppose the great impulse
+occasioned by the Revolution of France, before Europe can recover its
+long-lost order and repose.  Had the subjects of Austria been as
+disaffected as they are loyal, the world might have witnessed such a
+terrible event, and been enabled to judge whether the hypothesis was the
+production of an ingenious schemer or of a profound statesman.  Our
+armies under Bonaparte have never before penetrated into the heart of a
+country where subversion was not prepared, and where subversion did not
+follow.
+
+How relatively insignificant, in the eyes of Providence, must be the
+independence of States and the liberties of nations, when such a
+relatively insignificant personage as General von Mack can shake them?
+Have, then, the Austrian heroes--a Prince Eugene, a Laudon, a Lasci, a
+Beaulieu, a Haddick, a Bender, a Clairfayt, and numerous other valiant
+and great warriors--left no posterity behind them; or has the presumption
+of General von Mack imposed upon the judgment of the Counsellors of his
+Prince?  This latter must have been the case; how otherwise could the
+welfare of their Sovereign have been entrusted to a military quack, whose
+want of energy and bad disposition had, in 1799, delivered up the capital
+of another Sovereign to his enemies.  How many reputations are gained by
+an impudent assurance, and lost when the man of talents is called upon to
+act and the fool presents himself.
+
+Baron von Mack served as an aide-de-camp under Field-marshal Laudon,
+during the last war between Austria and Turkey, and displayed some
+intrepidity, particularly before Lissa.  The Austrian army was encamped
+eight leagues from that place, and the commander-in-chief hesitated to
+attack it, believing it to be defended by thirty thousand men.  To decide
+him upon making this attack, Baron von Mack left him at nine o'clock at
+night, crossed the Danube, accompanied only by a single Uhlan, and
+penetrated into the suburb of Lissa, where he made prisoner a Turkish
+officer, whom, on the next morning at seven o'clock, he presented to his
+general, and from whom it was learnt that the garrison contained only six
+thousand, men.  This personal temerity, and the applause of Field-marshal
+Laudon, procured him then a kind of reputation, which he has not since
+been able to support.  Some theoretical knowledge of the art of war, and
+a great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the Emperor
+Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long been
+proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is
+immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of
+Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp or in the field.
+
+Preceded by a certain celebrity, Baron von Mack served, in 1793, under
+the Prince of Coburg, as an adjutant-general, and was called to assist at
+the Congress at Antwerp, where the operations of the campaign were
+regulated.  Everywhere he displayed activity and bravery; was wounded
+twice in the month of May; but he left the army without having performed
+anything that evinced the talents which fame had bestowed on him.  In
+February, 1794, the Emperor sent him to London to arrange, in concert
+with your Government, the plans of the campaign then on the eve of being
+opened; and when he returned to the Low Countries he was advanced to a
+quartermaster-general of the army of Flanders, and terminated also this
+unfortunate campaign without having done anything to justify the
+reputation he had before acquired or usurped.  His Sovereign continued,
+nevertheless, to employ him in different armies; and in January, 1797, he
+was appointed a Field-marshal lieutenant and a quartermaster-general of
+the army of the Rhine.  In February he conducted fifteen thousand of the
+troops of this army to reinforce the army of Italy; but when Bonaparte in
+April penetrated into Styria and Carinthia, he was ordered to Vienna as a
+second in command of the levy 'en masse'.
+
+Real military characters had already formed their opinion of this
+officer, and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired an
+able warrior.  His own conduct soon convinced them that they neither had
+been rash nor mistaken.  The King of Naples demanding, in 1798, from his
+son-in-law, the Emperor of Germany, a general to organize and head his
+troops, Baron von Mack was presented to him.  After war had been declared
+against France he obtained some success in partial engagements, but was
+defeated in a general battle by an enemy inferior in number.  In the
+Kingdom of Naples, as well as in the Empire of Germany, the fury of
+negotiation seized him when he should have fought, and when he should
+have remembered that no compacts can ever be entered into with political
+and military earthquakes, more than with physical ones.  This imprudence,
+particularly as he was a foreigner, excited suspicion among his troops,
+whom, instead of leading to battle, he deserted, under the pretence that
+his life was in danger, and surrendered himself and his staff to our
+commander, Championnet.
+
+A general who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp, much
+less to command armies; and a military chief who does not consider the
+happiness and honour of the State as his first passion and his first
+duty, and prefers existence to glory, deserves to be shot as a traitor,
+or drummed out of the army as a dastardly coward.  Without mentioning the
+numerous military faults committed by General von Mack during this
+campaign, it is impossible to deny that, with respect to his own troops,
+he conducted himself in the most pusillanimous manner.  It has often been
+repeated that martial valour does not always combine with it that courage
+and that necessary presence of mind which knows how to direct or repress
+multitudes, how to command obedience and obtain popularity; but when a
+man is entrusted with the safety of an Empire, and assumes such a
+brilliant situation, he must be weak-minded and despicable indeed, if he
+does not show himself worthy of it by endeavouring to succeed, or perish
+in the attempt.  The French emigrant, General Dumas, evinced what might
+have been done, even with the dispirited Neapolitan troops, whom he
+neither deserted, nor with whom he offered to capitulate.
+
+Baron von Mack is in a very infirm state of health, and is often under
+the necessity of being carried on a litter; and his bodily complaints
+have certainly not increased the vigour of his mind.  His love of life
+seems to augment in proportion as its real value diminishes.  As to the
+report here of his having betrayed his trust in exchanging honour for
+gold, I believe it totally unfounded.  Our intriguers may have deluded
+his understanding, but our traitors would never have been able to seduce
+or shake his fidelity.  His head is weak, but his heart is honest.
+Unfortunately, it is too true that, in turbulent times, irresolution and
+weakness in a commander or a Minister operate the same, and are as
+dangerous as, treason.
+
+
+
+
+THE ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Bourrienne
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery--pays for it like a real Emperor
+Indifference about futurity
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Marble lives longer than man
+May change his habitations six times in the month--yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+Military diplomacy
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+More vain than ambitious
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Suspicion is evidence
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon's outrages
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+Want is the parent of industry
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud,
+Complete, by Lewis Goldsmith
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, entire
+#8 in our series by Stewarton, Gentleman at Paris, to Nobleman in London
+#62 in our series Historic Court Memoirs
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+Title: Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, entire
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+Author: Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+Release Date: March, 2003  [Etext #3899]
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+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD, complete
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 1.
+
+
+PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
+
+The present work contains particulars of the great Napoleon not to be
+found in any other publication, and forms an interesting addition to the
+information generally known about him.
+
+The writer of the Letters (whose name is said to have been Stewarton, and
+who had been a friend of the Empress Josephine in her happier, if less
+brilliant days) gives full accounts of the lives of nearly all Napoleon's
+Ministers and Generals, in addition to those of a great number of other
+characters, and an insight into the inner life of those who formed
+Napoleon's Court.
+
+All sorts and conditions of men are dealt with--adherents who have come
+over from the Royalist camp, as well as those who have won their way
+upwards as soldiers, as did Napoleon himself.  In fact, the work abounds
+with anecdotes of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Fouche, and a host of others, and
+astounding particulars are given of the mysterious disappearance of those
+persons who were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+
+SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+
+THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD.
+INTRODUCTORY LETTER.
+
+PARIS, November 10th, 1805.
+
+MY LORD,--The Letters I have written to you were intended for the
+private entertainment of a liberal friend, and not for the general
+perusal of a severe public.  Had I imagined that their contents would
+have penetrated beyond your closet or the circle of your intimate
+acquaintance, several of the narratives would have been extended, while
+others would have been compressed; the anecdotes would have been more
+numerous, and my own remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left
+out, others drawn, and all better finished.  I should then have attempted
+more frequently to expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to
+abhorrence; should have lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and
+oftener held out to ridicule puerile vanity and outrageous ambition.  In
+short, I should then have studied more to please than to instruct, by
+addressing myself seldomer to the reason than to the passions.
+
+I subscribe, nevertheless, to your observation, "that the late long war
+and short peace, with the enslaved state of the Press on the Continent,
+would occasion a chasm in the most interesting period of modern history,
+did not independent and judicious travellers or visitors abroad collect
+and forward to Great Britain (the last refuge of freedom) some materials
+which, though scanty and insufficient upon the whole, may, in part, rend
+the veil of destructive politics, and enable future ages to penetrate
+into mysteries which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+to the just reprobation of honour and of virtue."  If, therefore, my
+humble labours can preserve loyal subjects from the seduction of
+traitors, or warn lawful sovereigns and civilized society of the alarming
+conspiracy against them, I shall not think either my time thrown away, or
+fear the dangers to which publicity might expose me were I only suspected
+here of being an Anglican author.  Before the Letters are sent to the
+press I trust, however, to your discretion the removal of everything that
+might produce a discovery, or indicate the source from which you have
+derived your information.
+
+Although it is not usual in private correspondence to quote authorities,
+I have sometimes done so; but satisfied, as I hope you are, with my
+veracity, I should have thought the frequent productions of any better
+pledge than the word of a man of honour an insult to your feelings.  I
+have, besides, not related a fact that is not recent and well known in
+our fashionable and political societies; and of ALL the portraits I have
+delineated, the originals not only exist, but are yet occupied in the
+present busy scene of the Continent, and figuring either at Courts, in
+camps, or in Cabinets.
+
+
+
+SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+
+THE COURT OF ST.  CLOUD.
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I promised you not to pronounce in haste on persons and events
+passing under my eyes; thirty-one months have quickly passed away since I
+became an attentive spectator of the extraordinary transactions, and of
+the extraordinary characters of the extraordinary Court and Cabinet of
+St. Cloud.  If my talents to delineate equal my zeal to inquire and my
+industry to examine; if I am as able a painter as I have been an
+indefatigable observer, you will be satisfied, and with your approbation
+at once sanction and reward my labours.
+
+With most Princes, the supple courtier and the fawning favourite have
+greater influence than the profound statesman and subtle Minister; and
+the determinations of Cabinets are, therefore, frequently prepared in
+drawing-rooms, and discussed in the closet.  The politician and the
+counsellor are frequently applauded or censured for transactions which
+the intrigues of antechambers conceived, and which cupidity and favour
+gave power to promulgate.
+
+It is very generally imagined, but falsely, that Napoleon Bonaparte
+governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity,
+caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole
+consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited
+authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and
+his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who
+marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that
+disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to
+himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the same
+genius, unbiased and unsupported, crushed factions, erected a throne, and
+reconstructed racks; that the same mind restored and protected
+Christianity, and proscribed and assassinated a D'Enghien.
+
+All these contradictions, all these virtues and vices, may be found in
+the same person; but Bonaparte, individually or isolated, has no claim to
+them.  Except on some sudden occasions that call for immediate decision,
+no Sovereign rules less by himself than Bonaparte; because no Sovereign
+is more surrounded by favourites and counsellors, by needy adventurers
+and crafty intriguers.
+
+What Sovereign has more relatives to enrich, or services to recompense;
+more evils to repair, more jealousies to dread, more dangers to fear,
+more clamours to silence; or stands more in need of information and
+advice?  Let it be remembered that he, who now governs empires and
+nations, ten years ago commanded only a battery; and five years ago was
+only a military chieftain.  The difference is as immense, indeed, between
+the sceptre of a Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise
+legislator who protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and
+the hireling robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder
+at the expense and misery of generations.  The lower classes of all
+countries have produced persons who have distinguished themselves as
+warriors; but what subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence
+and achievements, without infringing on the laws and liberties of his
+country, proved himself worthy to reign?  Besides, the education which
+Bonaparte received was entirely military; and a man (let his innate
+abilities be ever so surprising or excellent) who, during the first
+thirty years of his life, has made either military or political tactics
+or exploits his only study, certainly cannot excel equally in the Cabinet
+and in the camp.  It would be as foolish to believe, as absurd to expect,
+a perfection almost beyond the reach of any man; and of Bonaparte more
+than of any one else.  A man who, like him, is the continual slave of his
+own passions, can neither be a good nor a just, an independent nor
+immaculate master.
+
+Among the courtiers who, ever since Bonaparte was made First Consul, have
+maintained a great ascendency over him, is the present Grand Marshal of
+his Court, the general of division, Duroc.  With some parts, but greater
+presumption, this young man is destined by his master to occupy the most
+confidential places near his person; and to his care are entrusted the
+most difficult and secret missions at foreign Courts.  When he is absent
+from France, the liberty of the Continent is in danger; and when in the
+Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, Bonaparte thinks himself always safe.
+
+Gerard Christophe Michel Duroc was born at Ponta-Mousson, in the
+department of Meurthe, on the 25th of October, 1772, of poor but honest
+parents.  His father kept a petty chandler's shop; but by the interest
+and generosity of Abbe Duroc, a distant relation, he was so well educated
+that, in March, 1792, he became a sub-lieutenant of the artillery.  In
+1796 he served in Italy, as a captain, under General Andreossy, by whom
+he was recommended to General l'Espinasse, then commander of the
+artillery of the army of Italy, who made him an aide-de-camp.  In that
+situation Bonaparte remarked his activity, and was pleased with his
+manners, and therefore attached him as an aide-de-camp to himself.  Duroc
+soon became a favourite with his chief, and, notwithstanding the
+intrigues of his rivals, he has continued to be so to this day.
+
+It has been asserted, by his enemies no doubt, that by implicit obedience
+to his general's orders, by an unresisting complacency, and by executing,
+without hesitation, the most cruel mandates of his superior, he has fixed
+himself so firmly in his good opinion that he is irremovable.  It has
+also been stated that it was Duroc who commanded the drowning and burying
+alive of the wounded French soldiers in Italy, in 1797; and that it was
+he who inspected their poisoning in Syria, in 1799, where he was wounded
+during the siege of St. Jean d' Acre.  He was among the few officers whom
+Bonaparte selected for his companions when he quitted the army of Egypt,
+and landed with him in France in October, 1799.
+
+Hitherto Duroc had only shown himself as a brave soldier and obedient
+officer; but after the revolution which made Bonaparte a First Consul, he
+entered upon another career.  He was then, for the first time, employed
+in a diplomatic mission to Berlin, where he so far insinuated himself
+into the good graces of their Prussian Majesties that the King admitted
+him to the royal table, and on the parade at Potsdam presented him to his
+generals and officers as an aide-de-camp 'du plus grand homme que je
+connais; whilst the Queen gave him a scarf knitted by her own fair hands.
+
+The fortunate result of Duroc's intrigues in Prussia, in 1799, encouraged
+Bonaparte to despatch him, in 1801, to Russia; where Alexander I.
+received him with that noble condescension so natural, to this great and
+good Prince.  He succeeded at St. Petersburg in arranging the political
+and commercial difficulties and disagreements between France and Russia;
+but his proposal for a defensive alliance was declined.
+
+An anecdote is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the
+barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the
+inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little
+displeased the military diplomatist.
+
+Among Talleyrand's female agents sent to cajole Paul I. during the latter
+part of his reign, was a Madame Bonoeil, whose real name is De F-----.
+When this unfortunate Prince was no more, most of the French male and
+female intriguers in Russia thought it necessary to shift their quarters,
+and to expect, on the territory of neutral Prussia, farther instructions
+from Paris, where and how to proceed.  Madame Bonoeil had removed to
+Konigsberg.  In the second week of May, 1801, when Duroc passed through
+that town for St. Petersburg, he visited this lady, according to the
+orders of Bonaparte, and obtained from her a list of the names of the
+principal persons who were inclined to be serviceable to France, and
+might be trusted by him upon the present occasion.  By inattention or
+mistake she had misspelled the name of one of the most trusty and active
+adherents of Bonaparte; and Duroc, therefore, instead of addressing
+himself to the Polish Count de S--------lz, went to the Polish Count de
+S-----tz.  This latter was as much flattered as surprised, upon seeing an
+aide-de-camp and envoy of the First Consul of France enter his
+apartments, seldom visited before but by usurers, gamesters, and
+creditors; and, on hearing the object of this visit, began to think
+either the envoy mad or himself dreaming.  Understanding, however, that
+money would be of little consideration, if the point desired by the First
+Consul could be carried, he determined to take advantage of this
+fortunate hit, and invited Duroc to sup with him the same evening; when
+he promised him he should meet with persons who could do his business,
+provided his pecuniary resources were as ample as he had stated.
+
+This Count de S-----tz was one of the most extravagant and profligate
+subjects that Russia had acquired by the partition of Poland.  After
+squandering away his own patrimony, he had ruined his mother and two
+sisters, and subsisted now entirely by gambling and borrowing.  Among his
+associates, in similar circumstances with himself, was a Chevalier de
+Gausac, a French adventurer, pretending to be an emigrant from the
+vicinity of Toulouse.  To him was communicated what had happened in the
+morning, and his advice was asked how to act in the evening.  It was soon
+settled that De Gausac should be transformed into a Russian Count de
+W-----, a nephew and confidential secretary of the Chancellor of the same
+name; and that one Caumartin, another French adventurer, who taught
+fencing at St. Petersburg, should act the part of Prince de M-----, an
+aide-de-camp of the Emperor; and that all three together should strip
+Duroc, and share the spoil.  At the appointed hour Bonaparte's agent
+arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered
+him of twelve hundred thousand livres.  Though not many days passed
+before he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from
+denouncing the impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret
+between himself, Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses
+of Caumartin excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who
+soon discovered the source from which they had flowed.  De Gausac had the
+imprudence to return to this capital last spring, and is now shut up in
+the Temple, where he probably will be forgotten.
+
+As this loss was more ascribed to the negligence of Madame Bonoeil than
+to the mismanagement of Duroc, or his want of penetration, his reception
+at the Tuileries, though not so gracious as on his return from Berlin,
+nineteen months before, was, however, such as convinced him that if he
+had not increased, he had at the same time not lessened, the confidence
+of his master; and, indeed, shortly afterwards, Bonaparte created him
+first prefect of his palace, and procured him for a wife the only
+daughter of a rich Spanish banker.  Rumour, however, says that Bonaparte
+was not quite disinterested when he commanded and concluded this match,
+and that the fortune of Madame Duroc has paid for the expensive supper of
+her husband with Count de S-----tz at St.  Petersburg.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER II.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though the Treaty of Luneville will probably soon be buried in
+the rubbish of the Treaty of Amiens, the influence of their parents in
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud is as great as ever: I say their parents,
+because the crafty ex-Bishop, Talleyrand, foreseeing the short existence
+of these bastard diplomatic acts, took care to compliment the innocent
+Joseph Bonaparte with a share in the parentage, although they were his
+own exclusive offspring.
+
+Joseph Bonaparte, who in 1797, from an attorney's clerk at Ajaccio, in
+Corsica, was at once transformed into an Ambassador to the Court of Rome,
+had hardly read a treaty, or seen a despatch written, before he was
+himself to conclude the one, and to dictate the other.  Had he not been
+supported by able secretaries, Government would soon have been convinced
+that it is as impossible to confer talents as it is easy to give places
+to men to whom Nature has refused parts, and on whom a scanty or
+neglected education has bestowed no improvements.  Deep and reserved,
+like a true Italian, but vain and ambitious, like his brothers, under the
+character of a statesman, he has only been the political puppet of
+Talleyrand.  If he has sometimes been applauded upon the stages where he
+has been placed, he is also exposed to the hooting and hisses of the
+suffering multitude; while the Minister pockets undisturbed all the
+entrance-money, and conceals his wickedness and art under the cloak of
+Joseph; which protects him besides against the anger and fury of
+Napoleon.  No negotiation of any consequence is undertaken, no diplomatic
+arrangements are under consideration, but Joseph is always consulted,
+and Napoleon informed of the consultation.  Hence none of Bonaparte's
+Ministers have suffered less from his violence and resentment than
+Talleyrand, who, in the political department, governs him who governs
+France and Italy.
+
+As early as 1800, Talleyrand determined to throw the odium of his own
+outrages against the law of nations upon the brother of his master.
+Lucien Bonaparte was that year sent Ambassador to Spain, but not sharing
+with the Minister the large profits of his appointment, his diplomatic
+career was but short.  Joseph is as greedy and as ravenous as Lucien, but
+not so frank or indiscreet.  Whether he knew or not of Talleyrand's
+immense gain by the pacification at Luneville in February, 1801, he did
+not neglect his own individual interest.  The day previous to the
+signature of this treaty, he despatched a courier to the rich army
+contractor, Collot, acquainting him in secret of the issue of the
+negotiation, and ordering him at the same time to purchase six millions
+of livres--L 250,000--in the stocks on his account.  On Joseph's arrival
+at Paris, Collot sent him the State bonds for the sum ordered, together
+with a very polite letter; but though he waited on the grand pacificator
+several times afterwards, all admittance was refused, until a douceur of
+one million of livres--nearly L 42,000--of Collot's private profit opened
+the door.  In return, during the discussions between France and England
+in the summer of 1801, and in the spring of 1802, Collot was continued
+Joseph's private agent, and shared with his patron, within twelve months,
+a clear gain of thirty-two millions of livres.
+
+Some of the secret articles of the Treaty of Luneville gave Austria,
+during the insurrection in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1802, an
+opportunity and a right to make representations against the interference
+of France; a circumstance which greatly displeased Bonaparte, who
+reproached Talleyrand for his want of foresight, and of having been
+outwitted by the Cabinet of Vienna.  The Minister, on the very next day,
+laid before his master the correspondence that had passed between him and
+Joseph Bonaparte, during the negotiation concerning these secret
+articles, which were found to have been entirely proposed and settled by
+Joseph; who had been induced by his secretary and factotum (a creature of
+Talleyrand) to adopt sentiments for which that Minister had been paid,
+according to report, six hundred thousand livres--L25,000.  Several
+other tricks have in the same manner been played upon Joseph, who,
+notwithstanding, has the modesty to consider himself (much to the
+advantage and satisfaction of Talleyrand) the first statesman in Europe,
+and the good fortune to be thought so by his brother Napoleon.
+
+When a rupture with England was apprehended, in the spring of 1803,
+Talleyrand never signed a despatch that was not previously communicated
+to, and approved by Joseph, before its contents were sanctioned by
+Napoleon.  This precaution chiefly continued him in place when Lord
+Whitworth left this capital,--a departure that incensed Napoleon to such
+a degree that he entirely forgot the dignity of his rank amidst his
+generals, a becoming deportment to the members of the diplomatic corps,
+and his duty to his mother and brothers, who all more or less experienced
+the effects of his violent passions.  He thus accosted Talleyrand, who
+purposely arrived late at his circle:
+
+"Well! the English Ambassador is gone; and we must again go to war.  Were
+my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers, I should despair
+indeed of the issue of my contest with these insolent islanders.  Many
+believe that had I been more ably supported in my Cabinet, I should not
+have been under the necessity of taking the field, as a rupture might
+have been prevented."
+
+"Such, Citizen First Consul!" answered the trembling and bowing Minister,
+"is not the opinion of the Counsellor of State, Citizen Joseph
+Bonaparte."
+
+"Well, then," said Napoleon, as recollecting himself, "England wishes for
+war, and she shall suffer for it.  This shall be a war of extermination,
+depend upon it."
+
+The name of Joseph alone moderated Napoleon's fury, and changed its
+object.  It is with him what the harp of David was with Saul.  Talleyrand
+knows it, and is no loser by that knowledge.  I must, however, in
+justice, say that, had Bonaparte followed his Minister's advice, and
+suffered himself to be entirely guided by his counsel, all hostilities
+with England at that time might have been avoided; her Government would
+have been lulled into security by the cession of Malta, and some
+commercial regulations, and her future conquest, during a time of peace,
+have been attempted upon plans duly organized, that might have ensured
+success.  He never ceased to repeat, "Citizen First Consul!  some few
+years longer peace with Great Britain, and the 'Te Deums' of modern
+Britons for the conquest and possession of Malta, will be considered
+by their children as the funeral hymns of their liberty and
+independence."
+
+It was upon this memorable occasion of Lord Whitworth's departure, that
+Bonaparte is known to have betrayed the most outrageous acts of passion;
+he rudely forced his mother from his closet, and forbade his own sisters
+to approach his person; he confined Madame Bonaparte for several hours to
+her chamber; he dismissed favourite generals; treated with ignominy
+members of his Council of State; and towards his physician, secretaries,
+and principal attendants, he committed unbecoming and disgraceful marks
+of personal outrage.  I have heard it affirmed that, though her husband,
+when shutting her up in her dressing-room, put the key in his pocket,
+Madame Napoleon found means to resent the ungallant behaviour of her
+spouse, with the assistance of Madame Remusat.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No act of Bonaparte's government has occasioned so many, so
+opposite, and so violent debates, among the remnants of revolutionary
+factions comprising his Senate and Council of State, as the introduction
+and execution of the religious concordat signed with the Pope.  Joseph
+was here again the ostensible negotiator, though he, on this as well as
+on former occasions, concluded nothing that had not been prepared and
+digested by Talleyrand.
+
+Bonaparte does not in general pay much attention to the opinions of
+others when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or
+coincide with his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public
+career professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the
+worshipper of Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those
+who, after deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their
+youth, continued constant and firm in their apostasy.  Of those who
+deliberated concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and
+the acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz,
+Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real,
+Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis,
+Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte
+for Christianity.  Besides the sentiments of these confidential
+counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
+religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
+counsellors,--all differing as much from one another as the members of
+his own Privy Council.
+
+Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing
+that to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of
+the priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ.  She certainly
+is the most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and
+of her name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced
+Napoleon of the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen
+centuries, had preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations
+of republicans and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very
+probable that her representations would have been as ineffective as her
+piety or her prayers.  So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of
+Napoleon for the Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the
+Pope and the papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were
+laying waste and ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both
+incorporated with his new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his
+first acts of sovereignty, in the name of the then sovereign people, was
+the confiscation of Church lands and the sale of the estates of the
+clergy.
+
+Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
+Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
+intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
+in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
+of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes.  The
+former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
+this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
+its bosom and its doctrine.  With capacity to figure as a country curate,
+he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
+though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
+Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte's promise of
+succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and
+expect to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than
+himself.  It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of
+Pius VII. in France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertake a
+journey that has caused so much scandal among the truly faithful; and
+which, should ever Austria regain its former supremacy in Italy, will
+send the present Pope to end his days in a convent, and make the
+successors of St. Peter what this Apostle was himself, a Bishop of Rome,
+and nothing more.
+
+Bernier was a curate in La Vendee before the Revolution, and one of those
+priests who lighted the torch of civil war in that unfortunate country,
+under pretence of defending the throne of his King and the altars of his
+God.  He not only possessed great popularity among the lower classes,
+but acquired so far the confidence of the Vendean chiefs that he was
+appointed one of the supreme and directing Council of the Royalists and
+Chouans.  Even so late as the summer of 1799 he continued not only
+unsuspected, but trusted by the insurgents in the Western departments.
+In the winter, however, of the same year he had been gained over by
+Bonaparte's emissaries, and was seen at his levies in the Tuileries.  It
+is stated that General Brune made him renounce his former principles,
+desert his former companions, and betray to the then First Consul of the
+French Republic the secrets of the friends of lawful monarchy, of the
+faithful subjects of Louis XVIII.  His perfidy has been rewarded with one
+hundred and fifty thousand livres in ready money, with the see of
+Orleans, and with a promise of a cardinal's hat.  He has also, with the
+Cardinals Gonsalvi, Caprara, Fesch, Cambaceres, and Mauri, Bonaparte's
+promise, and, of course, the expectation of the Roman tiara.  He was one
+of the prelates who officiated at the late coronation, and is now
+confided in as a person who has too far committed himself with his
+legitimate Prince, and whose past treachery, therefore, answers for his
+future fidelity.
+
+This religious concordat of the 10th September, 1801, as well as all
+other constitutional codes emating from revolutionary authorities,
+proscribes even in protecting.  The professors and protectors of the
+religion of universal peace, benevolence, and forgiveness banish in this
+concordat from France forever the Cardinals Rohan and Montmorency, and
+the Bishop of Arras, whose dutiful attachment to their unfortunate Prince
+would, in better times and in a more just and generous nation, have been
+recompensed with distinctions, and honoured even by magnanimous foes.
+
+When Madame Napoleon was informed by her husband of the necessity of
+choosing her almoner and chaplain, and of attending regularly the Mass,
+she first fell a-laughing, taking it merely for a joke; the serious and
+severe looks, and the harsh and threatening expressions of the First
+Consul soon, however, convinced her how much she was mistaken.  To evince
+her repentance, she on the very next day attended her mother-in-law to
+church, who was highly edified by the sudden and religious turn of her
+daughter, and did not fail to ascribe to the efficacious interference of
+one of her favourite saints this conversion of a profane sinner.  But
+Napoleon was not the dupe of this church-going mummery of his wife, whom
+he ordered his spies to watch; these were unfortunate enough to discover
+that she went to the Mass more to fill her appointments with her lovers
+than to pray to her Saviour; and that even by the side of her mother she
+read billets-doux and love-letters when that pious lady supposed that she
+read her prayers, because her eyes were fixed upon her breviary.  Without
+relating to any one this discovery of his Josephine's frailties,
+Napoleon, after a violent connubial fracas and reprimand, and after a
+solitary confinement of her for six days, gave immediate orders to have
+the chapels of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud repaired; and until these
+were ready, Cardinal Cambaceres and Bernier, by turns, said the Mass, in
+her private apartments; where none but selected favourites or favoured
+courtiers were admitted.  Madame Napoleon now never neglects the Mass,
+but if not accompanied by her husband is escorted by a guard of honour,
+among whom she knows that he has several agents watching her motions and
+her very looks.
+
+In the month of June, 1803; I dined with Viscomte de Segur, and Joseph
+and Lucien Bonaparte were among the guests.  The latter jocosely remarked
+with what facility the French Christians had suffered themselves to be
+hunted in and out of their temples, according to the fanaticism or policy
+of their rulers; which he adduced as a proof of the great progress of
+philosophy and toleration in France.  A young officer of the party,
+Jacquemont, a relation of the former husband of the present Madame
+Lucien, observed that he thought it rather an evidence of the
+indifference of the French people to all religion; the consequence of the
+great havoc the tenets of infidelity and of atheism had made among the
+flocks of the faithful.  This was again denied by Bonaparte's aide-de-
+camp, Savary, who observed that, had this been the case, the First Consul
+(who certainly was as well acquainted with the religious spirit of
+Frenchmen as anybody else) would not have taken the trouble to conclude a
+religious concordat, nor have been at the expense of providing for the
+clergy.  To this assertion Joseph nodded an assent.
+
+When the dinner was over, De Segur took me to a window, expressing his
+uneasiness at what he called the imprudence of Jacquemont, who, he
+apprehended, from Joseph's silence and manner, would not escape
+punishment for having indirectly blamed both the restorer of religion and
+his plenipotentiary.  These apprehensions were justified.  On the next
+day Jacquemont received orders to join the colonial depot at Havre; but
+refusing to obey, by giving in his resignation as a captain, he was
+arrested, shut up in the Temple, and afterwards transported to Cayenne or
+Madagascar.  His relatives and friends are still ignorant whether he is
+dead or alive, and what is or has been his place of exile.  To a petition
+presented by Jacquemont's sister, Madame de Veaux, Joseph answered that
+"he never interfered with the acts of the haute police of his brother
+Napoleon's Government, being well convinced both of its justice and
+moderation."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That Bonaparte had, as far back as February, 1803 (when the
+King of Prussia proposed to Louis XVIII. the formal renunciation of his
+hereditary rights in favour of the First Consul), determined to assume
+the rank and title, with the power of a Sovereign, nobody can doubt.
+Had it not been for the war with England, he would, in the spring of that
+year, or twelve months earlier, have proclaimed himself Emperor of the
+French, and probably would have been acknowledged as such by all other
+Princes.  To a man so vain and so impatient, so accustomed to command and
+to intimidate, this suspension of his favourite plan was a considerable
+disappointment, and not a little increased his bitter and irreconcilable
+hatred of Great Britain.
+
+Here, as well as in foreign countries, the multitude pay homage only to
+Napoleon's uninterrupted prosperity; without penetrating or considering
+whether it be the consequence of chance or of well-digested plans;
+whether he owes his successes to his own merit or to a blind fortune.
+He asserted in his speech to the constitutional authorities, immediately
+after hostilities had commenced with England, that the war would be of
+short duration, and he firmly believed what he said.  Had he by his
+gunboats, or by his intrigues or threats, been enabled to extort a second
+edition of the Peace of Amiens, after a warfare of some few months, all
+mouths would have been ready to exclaim, "Oh, the illustrious warrior!
+Oh, the profound politician!"  Now, after three ineffectual campaigns on
+the coast, when the extravagance and ambition of our Government have
+extended the contagion of war over the Continent; when both our direct
+offers of peace, and the negotiations and mediations of our allies, have
+been declined by, or proved unavailing with, the Cabinet of St. James,
+the inconsistency, the ignorance, and the littleness of the fortunate
+great man seem to be not more remembered than the outrages and
+encroachments that have provoked Austria and Russia to take the field.
+Should he continue victorious, and be in a position to dictate another
+Peace of Luneville, which probably would be followed by another pacific
+overture to or from England, mankind will again be ready to call out,
+"Oh, the illustrious warrior!  Oh, the profound politician!  He foresaw,
+in his wisdom, that a Continental war was necessary to terrify or to
+subdue his maritime foe; that a peace with England could be obtained only
+in Germany; and that this war must be excited by extending the power of
+France on the other side of the Alps.  Hence his coronation as a King of
+Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence
+his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!"
+Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray
+as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences
+resulting from preconcerted plans and well-organized designs.
+
+Only rogues can disseminate and fools believe that the disgrace of
+Moreau, and the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, of Pichegru, and Georges,
+were necessary as footsteps to Bonaparte's Imperial throne; and that
+without the treachery of Mehee de la Touche, and the conspiracy he
+pretended to have discovered, France would still have been ruled by a
+First Consul.  It is indeed true, that this plot is to be counted (as the
+imbecility of Melas, which lost the battle of Marengo) among those
+accidents presenting themselves apropos to serve the favourite of fortune
+in his ambitious views; but without it, he would equally have been hailed
+an Emperor of the French in May, 1804.  When he came from the coast, in
+the preceding winter, and was convinced of the impossibility of making
+any impression on the British Islands with his flotilla, he convoked his
+confidential Senators, who then, with Talleyrand, settled the Senatus
+Consultum which appeared five months afterwards.  Mehee's correspondence
+with Mr. Drake was then known to him; but he and the Minister of Police
+were both unacquainted with the residence and arrival of Pichegru and
+Georges in France, and of their connection with Moreau; the particulars
+of which were first disclosed to them in the February following, when
+Bonaparte had been absent from his army of England six weeks.  The
+assumption of the Imperial dignity procured him another decent
+opportunity of offering his olive-branch to those who had caused his
+laurels to wither, and by whom, notwithstanding his abuse, calumnies, and
+menaces, he would have been more proud to be saluted Emperor than by all
+the nations upon the Continent.  His vanity, interest, and policy, all
+required this last degree of supremacy and elevation at that period.
+
+Bonaparte had so well penetrated the weak side of Moreau's character
+that, although he could not avoid doing justice to this general's
+military talents and exploits, he neither esteemed him as a citizen nor
+dreaded him as a rival.  Moreau possessed great popularity; but so did
+Dumourier and Pichegru before him: and yet neither of them had found
+adherents enough to shake those republican governments with which they
+avowed themselves openly discontented, and against which they secretly
+plotted.  I heard Talleyrand say, at Madame de Montlausier's, in the
+presence of fifty persons, "Napoleon Bonaparte had never anything to
+apprehend from General Moreau, and from his popularity, even at the head
+of an army.  Dumourier, too, was at the head of an army when he revolted
+against the National Convention; but had he not saved himself by flight
+his own troops would have delivered him up to be punished as a traitor.
+Moreau, and his popularity, could only be dangerous to the Bonaparte
+dynasty were he to survive Napoleon, had not this Emperor wisely averted
+this danger."  From this official declaration of Napoleon's confidential
+Minister, in a society of known anti-imperialists, I draw the conclusion
+that Moreau will never more, during the present reign, return to France.
+How very feeble, and how badly advised must this general have been, when,
+after his condemnation to two years' imprisonment, he accepted a
+perpetual exile, and renounced all hopes of ever again entering his own
+country.  In the Temple, or in any other prison, if he had submitted to
+the sentence pronounced against him, he would have caused Bonaparte more
+uneasiness than when at liberty, and been more a point of rally to his
+adherents and friends than when at his palace of Grosbois, because
+compassion and pity must have invigorated and sharpened their feelings.
+
+If report be true, however, he did not voluntarily exchange imprisonment
+for exile; racks were shown him; and by the act of banishment was placed
+a poisonous draught.  This report gains considerable credit when it is
+remembered that, immediately after his condemnation, Moreau furnished his
+apartments in the Temple in a handsome manner, so as to be lodged well,
+if not comfortably, with his wife and child, whom, it is said, he was not
+permitted to see before he had accepted Bonaparte's proposal of
+transportation.
+
+It may be objected to this supposition that the man in power, who did not
+care about the barefaced murder of the Duc d'Enghien, and the secret
+destruction of Pichegru, could neither much hesitate, nor be very
+conscientious about adding Moreau to the number of his victims.  True,
+but the assassin in authority is also generally a politician.  The
+untimely end of the Duc d'Enghien and of Pichegru was certainly lamented
+and deplored by the great majority of the French people; but though they
+had many who pitied their fate, but few had any relative interest to
+avenge it; whilst in the assassination of Moreau, every general, every
+officer, and every soldier of his former army, might have read the
+destiny reserved for himself by that chieftain, who did not conceal his
+preference of those who had fought under him in Italy and Egypt, and his
+mistrust and jealousy of those who had vanquished under Moreau in
+Germany; numbers of whom had already perished at St. Domingo, or in the
+other colonies, or were dispersed in separate and distant garrisons of
+the mother country.  It has been calculated that of eighty-four generals
+who made, under Moreau, the campaign of 1800, and who survived the Peace
+of Lundville, sixteen had been killed or died at St. Domingo, four at
+Guadeloupe, ten in Cayenne, nine at Ile de France, and eleven at l'Ile
+Reunion and in Madagascar.  The mortality among the officers and men has
+been in proportion.
+
+An anecdote is related of Pichegru, which does honour to the memory of
+that unfortunate general.  Fouche paid him a visit in prison the day
+before his death, and offered him "Bonaparte's commission as a Field-
+marshal, and a diploma as a grand officer of the Legion of Honour,
+provided he would turn informer against Moreau, of whose treachery
+against himself in 1797 he was reminded.  On the other hand, he was
+informed that, in consequence of his former denials, if he persisted in
+his refractory conduct, he should never more appear before any judge, but
+that the affairs of State and the safety of the country required that he
+should be privately despatched in his gaol."
+
+"So," answered this virtuous and indignant warrior, "you will spare my
+life only upon condition that I prove myself unworthy to live.  As this
+is the case, my choice is made without hesitation; I am prepared to
+become your victim, but I will never be numbered among your accomplices.
+Call in your executioners; I am ready to die as I have lived, a man of
+honour, and an irreproachable citizen."
+
+Within twenty-four hours after this answer, Pichegru was no more.
+
+That the Duc d'Enghien was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804,
+in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even
+by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown.  Some
+assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard;
+others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d'Elite; and others again,
+that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat,
+hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the
+executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by
+riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol.  Certain it is
+that Murat was the first, and Louis Bonaparte the second in command, on
+this dreadful occasion.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Thanks to Talleyrand's political emigration, our Government has
+never been in ignorance of the characters and foibles of the leading
+members among the emigrants in England.  Otto, however, finished their
+picture, but added, some new groups to those delineated by his
+predecessor.  It was according to his plan that the expedition of Mehee
+de la Touche was undertaken, and it was in following his instructions
+that the campaign of this traitor succeeded so well in Great Britain.
+
+Under the Ministry of Vergennes, of Montmorin, and of Delessart, Mehee
+had been employed as a spy in Russia, Sweden, and Poland, and acquitted
+himself perfectly to the satisfaction of his masters.  By some accident
+or other, Delessart discovered, however, in December, 1791, that he had,
+while pocketing the money of the Cabinet of Versailles, sold its secrets
+to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.  He, of course, was no longer trusted
+as a spy, and therefore turned a Jacobin, and announced himself to
+Brissot as a persecuted patriot.  All the calumnies against this Minister
+in Brissot's daily paper, Le Patriote Francois, during January, February,
+and March, 1792, were the productions of Mehee's malicious heart and able
+pen.  Even after they had sent Delessart a State prisoner to Orleans, his
+inveteracy continued, and in September the same year he went to
+Versailles to enjoy the sight of the murder of his former master.  Some
+go so far as to say that the assassins were headed by this monster, who
+aggravated cruelty by insult, and informed the dying Minister of the
+hands that stabbed him, and to whom he was indebted for a premature
+death.
+
+To these and other infamous and barbarous deeds, Talleyrand was not a
+stranger when he made Mehee his secret agent, and entrusted him with the
+mission to England.  He took, therefore, such steps that neither his
+confidence could be betrayed, nor his money squandered.  Mehee had
+instructions how to proceed in Great Britain, but he was ignorant of the
+object Government had in view by his mission; and though large sums were
+promised if successful, and if he gave satisfaction by his zeal and
+discretion, the money advanced him was a mere trifle, and barely
+sufficient to keep him from want.  He was, therefore, really distressed,
+when he fixed upon some necessitous and greedy emigrants for his
+instruments to play on the credulity of the English Ministers in some of
+their unguarded moments.  Their generosity in forbearing to avenge upon
+the deluded French exiles the slur attempted to be thrown upon their
+official capacity, and the ridicule intended to be cast on their private
+characters, has been much approved and admired here by all liberal-minded
+persons; but it has also much disappointed Bonaparte and Talleyrand, who
+expected to see these emigrants driven from the only asylum which
+hospitality has not refused to their misfortunes and misery.
+
+Mehee had been promised by Talleyrand double the amount of the sums which
+he could swindle from your Government; but though he did more mischief to
+your country than was expected in this, and though he proved that he had
+pocketed upwards of ten thousand English guineas, the wages of his
+infamy, when he hinted about the recompense he expected here, Durant,
+Talleyrand's chef du bureau, advised him, as a friend, not to remind the
+Minister of his presence in France, as Bonaparte never pardoned a
+Septembrizer, and the English guineas he possessed might be claimed and
+seized as national property, to compensate some of the sufferers by the
+unprovoked war with England.  In vain did he address himself to his
+fellow labourer in revolutionary plots, the Counsellor of State, Real,
+who had been the intermedium between him and Talleyrand, when he was
+first enlisted among the secret agents; instead of receiving money he
+heard threats; and, therefore, with as good grace as he could, he made
+the best of his disappointment; he sported a carriage, kept a mistress,
+went to gambling-houses, and is now in a fair way to be reduced to the
+status quo before his brilliant exploits in Great Britain.
+
+Real, besides the place of a Counsellor of State, occupies also the
+office of a director of the internal police.  Having some difference with
+my landlord, I was summoned to appear before him at the prefecture of the
+police.  My friend, M. de Sab-----r, formerly a counsellor of the
+Parliament at Rouen, happened to be with me when the summons was
+delivered, and offered to accompany me, being acquainted with Real.
+Though thirty persons were waiting in the antechamber at our arrival, no
+sooner was my friend's name announced than we were admitted, and I
+obtained not only more justice than I expected, or dared to claim, but an
+invitation to Madame Real's tea-party the same evening.  This justice and
+this politeness surprised me, until my friend showed me an act of forgery
+in his possession, committed by Real in 1788, when an advocate of the
+Parliament, and for which the humanity of my friend alone prevented him
+from being struck off the rolls, and otherwise punished.
+
+As I conceived my usual societies and coteries could not approve my
+attendance at the house of such a personage, I was intent upon sending an
+apology to Madame Real.  My friend, however, assured me that I should
+meet in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I
+little expected to see associating together.  I went late, and found the
+assembly very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated
+Princesses Joseph and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame
+Roederer, the cidevant Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont.
+They were conversing with M. Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a ci-
+devant lackey) Collot, the ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the
+legislator Martin, a ci-devant porter: several groups in the several
+apartments were composed of a similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant
+nobles and ci-devant valets, of ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses,
+Countesses and Baronesses, and of ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and
+poissardes.  Round a gambling-table, by the side of the ci-devant Bishop
+of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant
+shoeblack, has, by the purchase of national property, made a fortune of
+nine millions of livres--L375,000.  Opposite them were seated the ci-
+devant Prince de Chalais, and the present Prince Cambaceres with the ci-
+devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame Fauve, the daughter of a
+fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant barber.  In another
+room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with the spy Mehee de la
+Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche's secretary, Desmarets, the
+son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years a known spy.  When I was
+just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot, and her sister, Madame
+de Soubray, joined me.  You have perhaps known them in England, where,
+before their marriage, they resided for five years with their parents,
+the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired by the
+loungers in Bond Street.  The one married for money, Gillot, a ci-devant
+drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has, as a
+general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a ci-
+devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
+who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me.
+I was handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase,
+Madame de Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a
+man whom she detested, and wished to avoid.  We had hardly turned round,
+when Mehee offered her his arm, and she exclaimed with indignation, "How
+dare you, infamous wretch, approach me, when I have forbidden you ever to
+speak to me?  Had you been reduced to become a highwayman, or a
+housebreaker, I might have pitied your infamy; but a spy is a villain who
+aggravates guilt by cowardice and baseness, and can inspire no noble soul
+with any other sentiment but abhorrence, and the most sovereign
+contempt."  Without being disconcerted, Mehee silently returned to the
+company, amidst bursts of laughter from fifty servants, and as many
+masters, waiting for their carriages.  M. de Cetto was among the latter,
+but, though we all fixed our eyes steadfastly upon him, no alteration
+could be seen on his diplomatic countenance: his face must surely be made
+of brass or his heart of marble.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The day on which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an
+Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband's
+Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable
+in her life.  After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the
+drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library,
+where her husband shut her up and confined her.
+
+The discipline of the Court of St. Cloud is as singular as its
+composition is unique.  It is, by the regulation of Napoleon, entirely
+military.  From the Empress to her lowest chambermaid, from the Emperor's
+first aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or
+negligence is punished with confinement, either public or private.  In
+the former case the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in
+the latter they are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in
+the dark galleries at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens,
+where they are guarded day and night by sentries, who answer for their
+persons, and that nobody visits them.
+
+When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
+Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
+with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from
+their principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
+Imperial couple.  She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn,
+consulted her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame
+de Montbrune.  This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
+desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry
+and honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices.  She was not
+therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
+vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
+overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
+ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
+level with their circumstances.  These, however, either suspecting her
+intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
+disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
+to encounter.  Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
+following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
+French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour
+to wait on his wife.
+
+On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional
+republican authorities to present their homage as subjects, Napoleon
+asked his Josephine who were the persons, of both sexes, she had engaged,
+according to his carte blanche given her, as necessary and as unavoidable
+decorations of the drawing-room of an Emperor and Empress, as thrones and
+as canopies of State.  She referred him to Madame Remusat, who, though
+but half-dressed, was instantly ordered to appear before him.  This lady
+avowed that his grand master of the ceremonies, De Segur, had been
+entrusted by her with the whole arrangement, but that she feared that he
+had not yet been able to complete the full establishment of the Imperial
+Court.  The aide-de-camp Rapp was then despatched after De Segur, who, as
+usual, presented himself smiling and cringing.
+
+"Give me the list," said Napoleon, "of the ladies and gentlemen you have
+no doubt engaged for our household."
+
+"May it please Your Majesty," answered De Segur, trembling with fear,
+"I humbly supposed that they were not requisite before the day of Your
+Majesty's coronation."
+
+"You supposed!" retorted Napoleon.  "How dare you suppose differently
+from our commands?  Is the Emperor of the Great Nation not to be
+encompassed with a more numerous retinue, or with more lustre, than a
+First Consul?  Do you not see the immense difference between the
+Sovereign Monarch of an Empire, and the citizen chief magistrate of a
+commonwealth?  Are there not starving nobles in my empire enough to
+furnish all the Courts in Europe with attendants, courtiers, and valets?
+Do you not believe that with a nod, with a single nod, I might have them
+all prostrated before my throne?  What can, then, have occasioned this
+impertinent delay?"
+
+"Sire!" answered De Segur, "it is not the want of numbers, but the
+difficulty of the choice among them.  I will never recommend a single
+individual upon whom I cannot depend; or who, on some future day, may
+expose me to the greatest of all evils, the displeasure of my Prince."
+
+"But," continued Napoleon, "what is to be done to-day that I may augment
+the number of my suite, and by it impose upon the gaping multitude and
+the attending deputations?"--"Command," said De Segur, "all the officers
+of Your Majesty's staff, and of the staff of the Governor of Paris,
+General Murat, to surround Your Majesty's sacred person, and order them
+to accoutre themselves in the most shining and splendid manner possible.
+The presence of so many military men will also, in a political point of
+view, be useful.  It will lessen the pretensions of the constituted
+authorities, by telling them indirectly, 'It is not to your Senatus
+Consultum, to your decrees, or to your votes, that I am indebted for my
+present Sovereignty; I owe it exclusively to my own merit and valour, and
+to the valour of my brave officers and men, to whose arms I trust more
+than to your counsels.'"
+
+This advice obtained Napoleon's entire approbation, and was followed.  De
+Segur was permitted to retire, but when Madame Remusat made a curtsey
+also to leave the room, she was stopped with his terrible 'aux arrets'
+and left under the care and responsibility of his aide-de-camp, Lebrun,
+who saw her safe into her room, at the door of which he placed two
+grenadiers.  Napoleon then went out, ordering his wife, at her peril, to
+be in time, ready and brilliantly dressed, for the drawing-room.
+
+Dreading the consequences of her husband's wrath, Madame Napoleon was not
+only punctual, but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and
+ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her
+beauty, honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity.  She thought
+that even in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation.  When
+all the troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when
+Senators, legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a
+model of female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied
+him in silence through six different apartments before he came to her
+library, where he surlily ordered her to enter and to remain until
+further orders.
+
+"What have I done, Sire! to deserve such treatment?" exclaimed Josephine,
+trembling.
+
+"If," answered Napoleon, "Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool
+of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me:
+Had not De Segur fortunately for him--had the ingenuity to extricate us
+from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had
+brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of
+my emperorship.  Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to
+divert you, but you must remain where you are until I am inclined to
+release you."  So saying, Napoleon locked the door and put the key in his
+pocket.
+
+It was near two o'clock in the afternoon when she was thus shut up.
+Remembering the recent flattery of her courtiers, and comparing it with
+the unfeeling treatment of her husband, she found herself so much the
+more unfortunate, as the expressions of the former were regarded by her
+as praise due to her merit, while the unkindness of the latter was
+unavailingly resented as the undeserved oppression of a capricious
+despot.
+
+Business, or perhaps malice, made Napoleon forget to send her any dinner;
+and when, at eight o'clock, his brothers and sisters came, according to
+invitation, to take tea, he said coldly:
+
+"Apropos, I forgot it.  My wife has not dined yet; she is busy, I
+suppose, in her philosophical meditations in her study."
+
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, her daughter, flew directly towards the study,
+and her mother could scarcely, for her tears, inform her that--she was a
+prisoner, and that her husband was her gaoler.
+
+"Oh, Sire!" said Madame Louis, returning, "even this remarkable day is a
+day of mourning for my poor mother!"
+
+"She deserves worse," answered Napoleon, "but, for your sake, she shall
+be released; here is the key, let her out."
+
+Madame Napoleon was, however, not in a situation to wish to appear before
+her envious brothers and sisters-in-law.  Her eyes were so swollen with
+crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those
+Imperial robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a
+certain preservative against sorrow and affliction.  At nine o'clock,
+however, another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave
+her the choice either to accompany him back to the study or to join the
+family party of the Bonapartes.
+
+In deploring her mother's situation, Madame Louis Bonaparte informed her
+former governess, Madame Cam---n, of these particulars, which I heard her
+relate at Madame de M----r's, almost verbatim as I report them to you.
+Such, and other scenes, nearly of the same description, are neither rare
+nor singular, in the most singular Court that ever existed in civilized
+Europe.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though Government suffer a religious, or, rather, anti-
+religious liberty of the Press, the authors who libel or ridicule the
+Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic, religion, are excluded from
+all prospect of advancement, or if in place, are not trusted or liked.
+Cardinal Caprara, the nuncio of the Pope, proposed last year, in a long
+memorial, the same severe restrictions on the discussions or publications
+in religious matters as were already ordered in those concerning
+politics.  But both Bonaparte and his Minister in the affairs of the
+Church, Portalis, refused the introduction of what they called a tyranny
+on the conscience.  Caprara then addressed himself to the ex-Bishop
+Talleyrand, who, on this occasion, was more explicit than he generally
+is.
+
+"Bonaparte," said he, "rules not only over a fickle, but a gossiping
+(bavard) people, whom he has prudently forbidden all conversation and
+writing concerning government of the State.  They would soon (accustomed
+as they are, since the Revolution, to verbal and written debates) be
+tired of talking about fine weather or about the opera.  To occupy them
+and their attention, some ample subject of diversion was necessary, and
+religion was surrendered to them at discretion; because, enlightened as
+the world now is, even athiests or Christian fanatics can do but little
+harm to society.  They may spend rivers of ink, but they will be unable
+to shed a drop of blood."
+
+"True," answered the Cardinal, "but only to a certain degree.  The
+licentiousness of the Press, with regard to religious matters, does it
+not also furnish infidelity with new arms to injure the faith?  And have
+not the horrors from which France has just escaped proved the danger and
+evil consequences of irreligion, and the necessity of encouraging and
+protecting Christianity?  By the recall of the clergy, and by the
+religious concordat, Bonaparte has shown himself convinced of this
+truth."
+
+"So he is," interrupted Talleyrand; "but he abhors intoleration and
+persecution" (not in politics).  "I shall, however, to please Your
+Eminence, lay the particulars of your conversation before him."
+
+Some time afterwards, when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed
+about some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the
+Senators Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of
+the senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and
+remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal
+Caprara for two hours.  What was determined on this occasion has not
+transpired, as even the Cardinal, who is not the most discreet person
+when provoked, and his religious zeal gets the better of his political
+prudence, has remained silent, though seemingly contented.
+
+Two rather insignificant authors, of the name of Varennes and Beaujou,
+who published some scandalous libels on Christianity, have since been
+taken up, and after some months' imprisonment in the Temple been
+condemned to transportation to Cayenne for life,--not as infidels or
+atheists, but as conspirators against the State, in consequence of some
+unguarded expressions which prejudice or ill-will alone would judge
+connected with politics.  Nothing is now permitted to be printed against
+religion but with the author's name; but on affixing his name, he may
+abuse the worship and Gospel as much as he pleases.  Since the example of
+severity alluded to above, however, this practice is on the decline.
+Even Pigault-Lebrun, a popular but immoral novel writer, narrowly escaped
+lately a trip to Cayenne for one of his blasphemous publications, and
+owes to the protection of Madame Murat exclusively that he was not sent
+to keep Varennes and Beaujou company.  Some years ago, when Madame Murat
+was neither so great nor so rich as at present, he presented her with a
+copy of his works, and she had been unfashionable enough not only to
+remember the compliment, but wished to return it by nominating him her
+private secretary; which, however, the veto of Napoleon prevented.
+
+Of Napoleon Bonaparte's religious sentiments, opinions are not divided in
+France.  The influence over him of the petty, superstitious Cardinal
+Caprara is, therefore, inexplicable.  This prelate has forced from him
+assent to transactions which had been refused both to his mother and his
+brother Joseph, who now often employ the Cardinal with success, where
+they either dare not or will not show themselves.  It is true His
+Eminence is not easily rebuked, but returns to the charge unabashed by
+new repulses; and be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a
+man by whom Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no
+insignificant favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites
+cunning with devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to
+corruption as tormented by ambition.
+
+As most ecclesiastical promotions passed through his pure and
+disinterested hands, Madame Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Portalis, who also
+wanted some douceurs for their extraordinary expenses, united together
+last spring to remove him from France.  Napoleon was cajoled to nominate
+him a grand almoner of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Cardinal set out for
+Milan.  He was, however, artful enough to convince his Sovereign of the
+propriety of having his grand almoner by his side; and he is, therefore,
+obliged to this intrigue of his enemies that he now disposes of the
+benefices in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as those of the French Empire.
+
+During the Pope's residence in this capital, His Holiness often made use
+of Cardinal Caprara in his secret negotiations with Bonaparte; and
+whatever advantages were obtained by the Roman Pontiff for the Gallican
+Church His Eminence almost extorted; for he never desisted, where his
+interest or pride were concerned, till he had succeeded.  It is said that
+one day last January, after having been for hours exceedingly teasing and
+troublesome, Bonaparte lost his patience, and was going to treat His
+Eminence as he frequently does his relatives, his Ministers, and
+counsellors,--that is to say, to kick him from his presence; but suddenly
+recollecting himself, he said: "Cardinal, remain here in my closet until
+my return, when I shall have more time to listen to what you have to
+relate."  It was at ten o'clock in the morning, and a day of great
+military audience and grand review.  In going out he put the key in his
+pocket, and told the guards in his antechamber to pay no attention if
+they should hear any noise in his closet.
+
+It was dark before the review was over, and Bonaparte had a large party
+to dinner.  When his guests retired, he went into his wife's drawing-
+room, where one of the Pope's chamberlains waited on him with the
+information that His Holiness was much alarmed about the safety of
+Cardinal Caprara, of whom no account could be obtained, even with the
+assistance of the police, to whom application had been made, since His
+Eminence had so suddenly disappeared.
+
+"Oh!  how absent I am," answered Napoleon, as with surprise; "I entirely
+forgot that I left the Cardinal in my closet this morning.  I will go
+myself and make an apology for my blunder."
+
+His Eminence, quite exhausted, was found fast asleep; but no sooner was
+he a little recovered than he interrupted Bonaparte's affected apology
+with the repetition of the demand he had made in the morning; and so well
+was Napoleon pleased with him, for neglecting his personal inconvenience
+only to occupy himself with the affairs of his Sovereign, that he
+consented to what was asked, and in laying his hand upon the shoulders of
+the prelate, said:
+
+"Faithful Minister!  were every Prince as well served as your Sovereign
+is by you, many evils might be prevented, and much good effected."
+
+The same evening Duroc brought him, as a present, a snuffbox with
+Bonaparte's portrait, set round with diamonds, worth one thousand louis
+d'or.  The adventures of this day certainly did not lessen His Eminence
+in the favour of Napoleon or of Pius VII.
+
+Last November, some not entirely unknown persons intended to amuse
+themselves at the Cardinal's expense.  At seven o'clock one evening, a
+young Abbe presented himself at the Cardinal's house, Hotel de Montmorin,
+Rue Plumet, as by appointment of His Eminence, and was, by his secretary,
+ushered into the study and asked to wait there.  Hardly half an hour
+afterwards, two persons, pretending to be agents of the police, arrived
+just as the Cardinal's carriage had stopped.  They informed him that the
+woman introduced into his house in the dress of an Abby was connected
+with a gang of thieves and housebreakers, and demanded his permission to
+arrest her.  He protested that, except the wife of his porter, no woman
+in any dress whatever could be in his house, and that, to convince
+themselves, they were very welcome to accompany his valet-de-chambre into
+every room they wished to see.  To the great surprise of his servant, a
+very pretty girl was found in the bed of His Eminence's bed-chamber,
+which joined his study, who, though the pretended police agents insisted
+on her getting up, refused, under pretence that she was there waiting for
+her 'bon ami', the Cardinal.
+
+His Eminence was no sooner told of this than he shut the gate of his
+house, after sending his secretary to the commissary of police of the
+section.  In the meantime, both the police agents and the girl entreated
+him to let them out, as the whole was merely a badinage; but he remained
+inflexible, and they were all three carried by the real police commissary
+to prison.
+
+Upon a complaint made by His Eminence to Bonaparte, the Police Minister,
+Fouche, received orders to have those who had dared thus to violate the
+sacred character of the representative of the Holy Pontiff immediately,
+and without further ceremony, transported to Cayenne.  The Cardinal
+demanded, and obtained, a process verbal of what had occurred, and of the
+sentence on the culprits, to be laid before his Sovereign.  As Eugene de
+Beauharnais interested himself so much for the individuals involved in
+this affair as both to implore Bonaparte's pardon and the Cardinal's
+interference for them, many were inclined to believe that he was in the
+secret, if not the contriver of this unfortunate joke.  This supposition
+gained credit when, after all his endeavours to save them proved vain, he
+sent them seventy-two livres L 3,000--to Rochefort, that they might, on
+their arrival at Cayenne, be able to buy a plantation.  He procured them
+also letters to the Governor, Victor Hughes, recommending that they
+should be treated differently from other transported persons.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I was particularly attentive in observing the countenances and
+demeanour of the company at the last levee which Madame Napoleon
+Bonaparte held, previous to her departure with her husband to meet the
+Pope at Fontainebleau.  I had heard from good authority that "to those
+whose propensities were known, Duroc's information that the Empress was
+visible was accompanied with a kind of admonitory or courtly hint, that
+the strictest decency in dress and manners, and a conversation chaste,
+and rather of an unusually modest turn, would be highly agreeable to
+their Sovereigns, in consideration of the solemn occasion of a Sovereign
+Pontiff's arrival in France,--an occurrence that had not happened for
+centuries, and probably would not happen for centuries to come."  I went
+early, and was well rewarded for my punctuality.
+
+There came the Senator Fouche, handing his amiable and chaste spouse,
+walking with as much gravity as formerly, when a friar, he marched in a
+procession.  Then presented themselves the Senators Sieyes and Roederer,
+with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the
+confessor of the latter.  Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before
+I had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of
+fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin.  She was
+followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was
+sighing deeply and loudly.  After her came limping the godly Talleyrand,
+dragging his pure moiety by his side, both with downcast and edifying
+looks.  The Christian patriots, Gravina and Lima, Dreyer and Beust,
+Dalberg and Cetto, Malsburgh and Pappenheim, with the Catholic
+Schimmelpenninck and Mohammed Said Halel Effendi,--all presented
+themselves as penitent sinners imploring absolutions, after undergoing
+mortifications.
+
+But it would become tedious and merely a repetition, were I to depict
+separately the figures and characters of all the personages at this
+politico-comical masquerade.  Their conversation was, however, more
+uniform, more contemptible, and more laughable, than their accoutrements
+and grimaces were ridiculous.  To judge from what they said, they
+belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and
+they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the
+eve of the day of the Last Judgment.  The truly devout Madame Napoleon
+spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the
+vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII.,
+His vicar.  Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic
+commentaries of her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry
+out, as soon as she had finished, "Amen!  Amen!  Amen!"
+
+Napoleon had placed himself between the old Cardinal de Bellois and the
+not young Cardinal Bernier, so as to prevent the approach of any profane
+sinner or unrepentant infidel.  Round him and their clerical chiefs, all
+the curates and grand vicars, almoners and chaplains of the Court, and
+the capitals of the Princess, Princesses, and grand officers of State,
+had formed a kind of cordon.  "Had," said the young General Kellerman to
+me, "Bonaparte always been encompassed by troops of this description, he
+might now have sung hymns as a saint in heaven, but he would never have
+reigned as an Emperor upon earth."  This indiscreet remark was heard by
+Louis Bonaparte, and on the next morning Kellerman received orders to
+join the army in Hanover, where he was put under the command of a general
+younger than himself.  He would have been still more severely punished,
+had not his father, the Senator (General Kellerman), been in so great
+favour at the Court of St. Cloud, and so much protected by Duroc, who had
+made, in 1792, his first campaign under this officer, then commander-in-
+chief of the army of the Ardennes.
+
+When this devout assembly separated, which was by courtesy an hour
+earlier than usual, I expected every moment to hear a chorus of horse-
+laughs, because I clearly perceived that all of them were tired of their
+assumed parts, and, with me, inclined to be gay at the expense of their
+neighbours.  But they all remembered also that they were watched by
+spies, and that an imprudent look or an indiscreet word, gaiety instead
+of gravity, noise when silence was commanded, might be followed by an
+airing in the wilderness of Cayenne.  They, therefore, all called out,
+"Coachman, to our hotel!" as if to say, "We will to-day, in compliment to
+the new-born Christian zeal of our Sovereigns, finish our evening as
+piously as we have begun it."  But no sooner were they out of sight of
+the palace than they hurried to the scenes of dissipation, all
+endeavouring, in the debauchery and excesses so natural to them, to
+forget their unnatural affectation and hypocrisy.
+
+Well you know the standard of the faith even of the members of the
+Bonaparte family.  Two days before this Christian circle at Madame
+Napoleon's, Madame de Chateaureine, with three other ladies, visited the
+Princesse Borghese.  Not seeing a favourite parrot they had often
+previously admired, they inquired what was become of it.
+
+"Oh, the poor creature!"  answered the Princess; "I have disposed of it,
+as well as of two of my monkeys.  The Emperor has obliged me to engage an
+almoner and two chaplains, and it would be too extravagant in me to keep
+six useless animals in my hotel.  I must now submit to hearing the
+disgusting howlings of my almoner instead of the entertaining chat of my
+parrot, and to see the awkward bows and kneelings of my chaplains instead
+of the amusing capering of my monkeys.  Add to this, that I am forced to-
+transform into a chapel my elegant and tasty boudoir, on the ground-
+floor, where I have passed so many delicious tete-a-tetes.  Alas!  what a
+change!  what a shocking fashion, that we are now all again to be
+Christians!"
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding what was inserted in our public prints to the
+contrary, the reception Bonaparte experienced from his army of England in
+June last year, the first time he presented himself to them as an
+Emperor, was far from such as flattered either his vanity or views.  For
+the first days, some few solitary voices alone accompanied the "Vive
+l'Empereur!" of his generals, and of his aides-de-camp.  This
+indifference, or, as he called it, mutinous spirit, was so much the more
+provoking as it was unexpected.  He did not, as usual, ascribe it to the
+emissaries or gold of England, but to the secret adherents of Pichegru
+and Moreau amongst the brigades or divisions that had served under these
+unfortunate generals.  He ordered, in consequence, his Minister Berthier
+to make out a list of all these corps.  Having obtained this, he
+separated them by ordering some to Italy, others to Holland, and the rest
+to the frontiers of Spain and Germany.  This act of revenge or jealousy
+was regarded, both by the officers and men, as a disgrace and as a doubt
+thrown out against their fidelity, and the murmur was loud and general.
+In consequence of this, some men were shot, and many more arrested.
+
+Observing, however, that severity had not the desired effect, Bonaparte
+suddenly changed his conduct, released the imprisoned, and rewarded with
+the crosses of his Legion of Honour every member of the so lately
+suspected troops who had ever performed any brilliant or valorous
+exploits under the proscribed generals.  He even incorporated among his
+own bodyguards and guides men who had served in the same capacity under
+these rival commanders, and numbers of their children were received in
+the Prytanees and military free schools.  The enthusiastic exclamation
+that soon greeted his ears convinced him that he had struck upon the
+right string of his soldiers' hearts.  Men who, some few days before,
+wanted only the signal of a leader to cut an Emperor they hated to
+pieces, would now have contended who should be foremost to shed their
+last drop of blood for a chief they adored.
+
+This affected liberality towards the troops who had served under his
+rivals roused some slight discontent among those to whom he was chiefly
+indebted for his own laurels.  But if he knew the danger of reducing to
+despair slighted men with arms in their hands, he also was well aware of
+the equal danger of enduring licentiousness or audacity among troops who
+had, on all occasions, experienced his preference and partiality; and he
+gave a sanguinary proof of his opinion on this subject at the grand
+parade of the 12th of July, 1804, preparatory to the grand fete of the
+14th.
+
+A grenadier of the 21st Regiment (which was known in Italy under the name
+of the Terrible), in presetting arms to him, said: "Sire! I have served
+under you four campaigns, fought under you in ten battles or engagements;
+have received in your service seven wounds, and am not a member of your
+Legion of Honour; whilst many who served under Moreau, and are not able
+to show a scratch from an enemy, have that distinction."
+
+Bonaparte instantly ordered this man to be shot by his own comrades in
+the front of the regiment.  The six grenadiers selected to fire, seeming
+to hesitate, he commanded the whole corps to lay down their arms, and
+after being disbanded, to be sent to the different colonial depots.  To
+humiliate them still more, the mutinous grenadier was shot by the
+gendarmes.  When the review was over, "Vive l'Empereur!"  resounded from
+all parts, and his popularity among the troops has since rather increased
+than diminished.  Nobody can deny that Bonaparte possesses a great
+presence of mind, an undaunted firmness, and a perfect knowledge of the
+character of the people over whom he reigns.  Could but justice and
+humanity be added to his other qualities, but, unfortunately for my
+nation, I fear that the answer of General Mortier to a remark of a friend
+of mine on this subject is not problematical: "Had," said this Imperial
+favourite, "Napoleon Bonaparte been just and humane, he would neither
+have vanquished nor reigned."
+
+All these scenes occurred before Bonaparte, seated on a throne, received
+the homage, as a Sovereign, of one hundred and fifty thousand warriors,
+who now bowed as subjects, after having for years fought for liberty and
+equality, and sworn hatred to all monarchical institutions; and who
+hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals.  What
+an inconsistency!  The splendour and show that accompanied him
+everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the
+decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he
+distributed with bombastic speeches among troops--to whom those political
+impositions and social cajoleries were novelties--made such an impression
+upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between Calais and Dover,
+brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled for the liberty and
+independence of your country.  The heads and imagination of the soldiers,
+I know from the best authority, were then so exalted that, though they
+might have been cut to pieces, they could never have been defeated or
+routed.  I pity our children when I reflect that their tranquillity and
+happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a corrupt and unprincipled
+people of soldiers,--easy tools in the hands of every impostor or
+mountebank.
+
+The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of
+grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed
+with uneasiness and vexation.  Except at Berlin, in all the other great
+Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your
+country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such lightness
+and such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his boasts and
+defied his threats.  Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of St. James
+more opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the impertinence of
+his menaces, and the folly of his parade for the invasion of your
+country, than by declaring all the ports containing his invincible armada
+in a state of blockade.  I have heard from an officer who witnessed his
+fury when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat from before St. Jean
+d'Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at Boulogne when a despatch
+informed him of this circumstance, that it was nothing compared to the
+violent rage into which he flew upon reading it.  For an hour afterwards
+not even his brother Joseph dared approach him; and his passion got so
+far the better of his policy, that what might still have long been
+concealed from the troops was known within the evening to the whole camp.
+He dictated to his secretary orders for his Ministers at Vienna, Berlin,
+Lisbon, and Madrid, and couriers were sent away with them; but half an
+hour afterwards other couriers were despatched after them with other
+orders, which were revoked in their turn, when at last Joseph had
+succeeded in calming him a little.  He passed, however, the whole
+following night full dressed and agitated; lying down only for an
+instant, but having always in his room Joseph and Duroc, and deliberating
+on a thousand methods of destroying the insolent islanders; all equally
+violent, but all equally impracticable.
+
+The next morning, when, as usual, he went to see the manoeuvres of his
+flotilla, and the embarkation and landing of his troops, he looked so
+pale that he almost excited pity.  Your cruisers, however, as if they had
+been informed of the situation of our hero, approached unusually near, to
+evince, as it were, their contempt and, derision.  He ordered instantly
+all the batteries to fire, and went himself to that which carried its
+shot farthest; but that moment six of your vessels, after taking down
+their sails, cast anchors, with the greatest sang-froid, just without the
+reach of our shot.  In an unavailing anger he broke upon the spot six
+officers of artillery, and pushed one, Captain d' Ablincourt, down the
+precipice under the battery, where he narrowly escaped breaking his neck
+as well as his legs; for which injury he was compensated by being made an
+officer of the Legion of Honour.  Bonaparte then convoked upon the spot a
+council of his generals of artillery and of the engineers, and, within an
+hour's time, some guns and mortars of still heavier metal and greater
+calibre were carried up to replace the others; but, fortunately for the
+generals, before a trial could be made of them the tide changed, and your
+cruisers sailed.
+
+In returning to breakfast at General Soult's, he observed the
+countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath;
+and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of
+encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment
+with which your navy had inspired his troops.  The occurrences of these
+two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle, where
+the cringing of his courtiers consoled him, in part, for the want of
+respect or gallantry in your English tars.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles, it was
+the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who principally
+influenced the determination of Francis II.  to assume the hereditary
+title of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon Emperor of the
+French.
+
+Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
+but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
+number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
+delicate political transactions.  In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
+with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to
+receive him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a proclamation,
+in which Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his predecessor, Joseph
+II., which had been the principal cause of the troubles; and
+reestablished everything upon the same footing as during the reign of
+Maria Theresa.  In 1791 he was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St.
+Petersburg, where his conduct obtained the approbation of his own Prince
+and of the Empress of Russia.
+
+In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
+Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte.  His mission was to excite
+the Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence
+to the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides.  He was
+therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near
+the lake of Chiavenne.  A rumour was very prevalent at this time that
+some papers were found in De Semonville's portfolio implicating Count von
+Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals.  The
+continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
+inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
+jealousy.
+
+In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor, a
+treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
+plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom,
+on the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio.  In the
+same capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress broke
+up, he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
+
+After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of experience
+and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister, Talleyrand, the
+Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France, where, with all
+other representatives of Princes, he has experienced more of the frowns
+and rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of our present
+Sovereign.
+
+Count von Cobenzl's foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
+reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
+assist him frequently in his amours.  Some adventures of this sort, which
+occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count's expense.
+Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
+merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
+that "the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable
+to his official notes."
+
+So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at Aix-la-
+Chapelle last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him, with
+the Marquis de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another plenipotentiary
+at Udine), to visit the camps of his army of England on the coast.  It is
+true that this condescension was, perhaps, as much a boast, or a threat,
+as a compliment.
+
+The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
+proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge
+of Bonaparte's for your mandate of blockade.  Rumour states that this
+measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of
+your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our
+Napoleon.  For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination,
+Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any
+objections or representations.  "But what absurdities do I not sign!"
+exclaimed the pliant Minister.
+
+Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
+command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
+waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor.  Charlemagne
+had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
+before,--an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
+Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
+to gratify his impertinent vanity.  Every spot where Charlemagne had
+walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
+great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
+representatives, and by his side his wife.  To a peasant who presented
+him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave
+nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
+crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
+bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
+louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
+but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
+manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute
+for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many
+believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was
+registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor
+to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of
+sixty years' standing.  But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt
+about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe!  A German professor,
+Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise,
+addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his
+intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne
+were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of
+this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured
+within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years.  The night after
+Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary, accompanied by
+four gendarmes, entered the professor's bedroom, forced him to dress, and
+ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under escort to the
+left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under pain of
+death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire.  This
+expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and
+antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such
+numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that
+we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by
+the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine.  A ballad, written in
+monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne
+at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish
+professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of
+Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres--L 500.  This
+ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum
+Charlemagne.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame
+Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health by
+using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor as
+low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied.  Napoleon himself was
+neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her
+extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy
+of the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great
+condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her drawing-
+room and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were only fit
+to be seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as associates with her
+valets or chambermaids.
+
+The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these
+gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they
+were her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued
+debtor to them she could not decently--or rather, she dared not prevent
+them from being visitors to her.  By confiding her situation to her old
+friend, Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those
+troublesome personages.  When the Minister was informed of the occasion
+of the attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to
+Bonaparte not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them
+examples of severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only
+sure means to prevent, for the future, people of the same description
+from being familiar or audacious.
+
+When, thanks to Talleyrand's interference, these family arrangements were
+settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour; and
+her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to think
+of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever.  I am assured
+that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at Aix-la-Chapelle,
+he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her three times, and
+abused her once a day.
+
+It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at last
+completed the composition of their household, and laid before them the
+list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their
+livery.  This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist
+nor a republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a disaffected
+subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth, ridiculing
+both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives; no exact
+definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed professions,
+of his real moral and political character.  One thing only is certain;--
+he was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a submissive slave
+under Napoleon the First.
+
+Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth,
+and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his ancestors
+had been a Field-marshal.  Being early introduced at Court, he acquired,
+with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and
+by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de
+Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the
+Court of St. Petersburg.  With some reading and genius, but with more
+boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French men of letters,
+and was therefore as such received with distinction by Catharine II., on
+whom, and on whose Government, he in return published a libel.  He was a
+valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been under every
+succeeding King of faction.  The partisans of the Revolution pointed him
+out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of Prussia; and
+he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick William II.
+refused him admittance to his person, and, after some ineffectual
+intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he returned to
+Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for another libel
+on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh, which he
+printed in 1796.  Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much admired,
+he was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving under the
+Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to subsist on.
+In 1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a Counsellor of
+State,--a place which he resigned last year for that of a grand master of
+the ceremonies at the present Imperial Court.  His ancient inveteracy
+against your country has made him a favourite with Bonaparte.  The
+indelicate and scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797, against Lord
+Malmesbury, in the then official journal, Le Redacteur, were the
+offspring of his malignity and pen; and the philippics and abusive notes
+in our present official Moniteur, against your Government and country,
+are frequently his patriotic progeny, or rather, he often shares with
+Talleyrand and Hauterive their paternity.
+
+The Revolution has not made Comte de Segur more happy with regard to his
+family, than in his circumstances, which, notwithstanding his brilliant
+grand-mastership, are far from being affluent.  His amiable wife died of
+terror, and brokenhearted from the sufferings she had experienced, and
+the atrocities she had witnessed; and when he had enticed his eldest son
+to accept the place of a sub-prefect under Bonaparte, his youngest son,
+who never approved our present regeneration, challenged his brother to
+fight, and, after killing him in a duel, destroyed himself.  Comte de
+Segur is therefore, at present, neither a husband nor a father, but only
+a grand master of ceremonies!  What an indemnification!
+
+Madame Napoleon and her husband are both certainly under much obligation
+to this nobleman for his care to procure them comparatively decent
+persons to decorate their levees and drawing-rooms, who, though they have
+no claim either to morality or virtue, either to honour or chastity, are
+undoubtedly a great acquisition at the Court of St. Cloud, because none
+of them has either been accused of murder, or convicted of plunder; which
+is the case with some of the Ministers, and most of the generals,
+Senators and counsellors.  It is true that they are a mixture of beggared
+nobles and enriched valets, of married courtesans and divorced wives,
+but, for all that, they can with justice demand the places of honour of
+all other Imperial courtiers of both sexes.
+
+When Bonaparte had read over the names of these Court recruits, engaged
+and enlisted by De Segur, he said, "Well, this lumber must do until we
+can exchange it for better furniture."  At that time, young Comte d'
+Arberg (of a German family, on the right bank of the Rhine), but whose
+mother is one of Madame Bonaparte's Maids of Honour, was travelling for
+him in Germany and in Prussia, where, among other negotiations, he was
+charged to procure some persons of both sexes, of the most ancient
+nobility, to augment Napoleon's suite, and to figure in his livery.  More
+individuals presented themselves for this honour than he wanted, but they
+were all without education and without address: ignorant of the world as
+of books; not speaking well their own language, much less understanding
+French or Italian; vain of their birth, but not ashamed of their
+ignorance, and as proud as poor.  This project was therefore relinquished
+for the time; but a number of the children of the principal ci-devant
+German nobles, who, by the Treaty of Luneville and Ratisbon, had become
+subjects of Bonaparte, were, by the advice of Talleyrand, offered places
+in French Prytanees, where the Emperor promised to take care of their
+future advancement.  Madame Bonaparte, at the same time, selected twenty-
+five young girls of the same families, whom she also offered to educate
+at her expense.  Their parents understood too well the meaning of these
+generous offers to dare decline their acceptance.  These children are the
+plants of the Imperial nursery, intended to produce future pages,
+chamberlains, equerries, Maids of Honour and ladies in waiting, who for
+ancestry may bid defiance to all their equals of every Court in
+Christendom.  This act of benevolence, as it was called in some German
+papers, is also an indirect chastisement of the refractory French
+nobility, who either demanded too high prices for their degradation, or
+abruptly refused to disgrace the names of their forefathers.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v1
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 2.
+
+
+LETTER XII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has been as profuse in his disposal of the Imperial
+diadem of Germany, as in his promises of the papal tiara of Rome.  The
+Houses of Austria and Brandenburgh, the Electors of Bavaria and Baden,
+have by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive support towards
+obtaining it at the first vacancy.  Those, however, who have paid
+attention to his machinations, and studied his actions; who remember his
+pedantic affectation of being considered a modern, or rather a second
+Charlemagne; and who have traced his steps through the labyrinth of folly
+and wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art, corruption, and
+policy, which have seated him on the present throne, can entertain little
+doubt but that he is seriously bent on seizing and adding the sceptre of
+Germany to the crowns of France and Italy.
+
+During his stay last autumn at Mentz, all those German Electors who had
+spirit and dignity enough to refuse to attend on him there in person were
+obliged to send Extraordinary Ambassadors to wait on him, and to
+compliment him on their part.  Though hardly one corner of the veil that
+covered the intrigues going forward there is yet lifted up, enough is
+already seen to warn Europe and alarm the world.  The secret treaties he
+concluded there with most of the petty Princes of Germany, against the
+Chief of the German Empire which not only entirely detached them from
+their country and its legitimate Sovereign, but made their individual
+interests hostile and totally opposite to that of the German
+Commonwealth, transforming them also from independent Princes into
+vassals of France, both directly increased has already gigantic power,
+and indirectly encouraged him to extend it beyond what his most sanguine
+expectation had induced him to hope.  I do not make this assertion from a
+mere supposition in consequence of ulterior occurrences.  At a supper
+with Madame Talleyrand last March, I heard her husband, in a gay,
+unguarded, or perhaps premeditated moment, say, when mentioning his
+proposed journey to Italy:
+
+"I prepared myself to pass the Alps last October at Mentz.  The first
+ground-stone of the throne of Italy was, strange as it may seem, laid on
+the banks of the Rhine: with such an extensive foundation, it must be
+difficult to shake, and impossible to overturn it."
+
+We were, in the whole, twenty-five persons at table when he spoke thus,
+many of whom, he well knew, were intimately acquainted both with the
+Austrian and Prussian Ambassadors, who by the bye, both on the next day
+sent couriers to their respective Courts.
+
+The French Revolution is neither seen in Germany in that dangerous light
+which might naturally be expected from the sufferings in which it has
+involved both Princes and subjects, nor are its future effects dreaded
+from its past enormities.  The cause of this impolitic and anti-patriotic
+apathy is to be looked for in the palaces of Sovereigns, and not in the
+dwellings of their people.  There exists hardly a single German Prince
+whose Ministers, courtiers and counsellors are not numbered, and have
+long been notorious among the anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati:
+most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy direction
+of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or folly, which
+bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail their
+sophistry and imposture as inspiration.
+
+Among Princes thus encompassed, the Elector of Bavaria must be allowed
+the first place.  A younger brother of a younger branch, and a colonel in
+the service of Louis XVI., he neither acquired by education, nor
+inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one quality
+that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a regiment or a
+lady's drawing-room.  He made himself justly suspected of a moral
+corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced his
+approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King of
+France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension of
+one hundred thousand livres.  Immediately after his unexpected accession
+to the Electorate of Bavaria, he concluded a subsidiary treaty with your
+country, and his troops were ordered to combat rebellion, under the
+standard of Austrian loyalty.  For some months it was believed that the
+Elector wished by his conduct to obliterate the memory of the errors,
+vices, and principles of the Duc de Deux-Ponts (his former title).  But
+placing all his confidence in a political adventurer and revolutionary
+fanatic, Montgelas, without either consistency or firmness, without being
+either bent upon information or anxious about popularity, he threw the
+whole burden of State on the shoulders of this dangerous man, who soon
+showed the world that his master, by his first treaties, intended only to
+pocket your money without serving your cause or interest.
+
+This Montgelas is, on account of his cunning and long standing among
+them, worshipped by the gang of German Illuminati as an idol rather than
+revered as an apostle.  He is their Baal, before whom they hope to oblige
+all nations upon earth to prostrate themselves as soon as infidelity has
+entirely banished Christianity; for the Illuminati do not expect to reign
+till the last Christian is buried under the rubbish of the last altar of
+Christ.  It is not the fault of Montgelas if such an event has not
+already occurred in the Electorate of Bavaria.
+
+Within six months after the Treaty of Lundville, Montgelas began in that
+country his political and religious innovations.  The nobility and the
+clergy were equally attacked; the privileges of the former were invaded,
+and the property of the latter confiscated; and had not his zeal carried
+him too far, so as to alarm our new nobles, our new men of property, and
+new Christians, it is very probable that atheism would have already,
+without opposition, reared its head in the midst of Germany, and
+proclaimed there the rights of man, and the code of liberty and equality.
+
+The inhabitants of Bavaria are, as you know, all Roman Catholics, and the
+most superstitious and ignorant Catholics of Germany.  The step is but
+short from superstition to infidelity; and ignorance has furnished in
+France more sectaries of atheism than perversity.  The Illuminati,
+brothers and friends of Montgelas, have not been idle in that country.
+Their writings have perverted those who had no opportunity to hear their
+speeches, or to witness their example; and I am assured by Count von
+Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the
+lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these
+emissaries have laboured.  To any one looking on the map of the
+Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious
+focus of illumination must be ominous.
+
+Among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, there exists not the
+least doubt but that this Montgelas, as well as Bonaparte's Minister at
+Munich, Otto, was acquainted with the treacherous part Mehde de la Touche
+played against your Minister, Drake; and that it was planned between him
+and Talleyrand as the surest means to break off all political connections
+between your country and Bavaria.  Mr. Drake was personally liked by the
+Elector, and was not inattentive either to the plans and views of
+Montgelas or to the intrigues of Otto.  They were, therefore, both doubly
+interested to remove such a troublesome witness.
+
+M. de Montgelas is now a grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour,
+and he is one of the few foreigners nominated the most worthy of such a
+distinction.  In France he would have been an acquisition either to the
+factions of a Murat, of a Brissot, or of a Robespierre; and the Goddess
+of Reason, as well as the God of the Theophilanthropists, might have been
+sure of counting him among their adorers.  At the clubs of the Jacobins
+or Cordeliers, in the fraternal societies, or in a revolutionary
+tribunal; in the Committee of Public Safety, or in the council chamber of
+the Directory, he would equally have made himself notorious and been
+equally in his place.  A stoic sans-culotte under Du Clots, a stanch
+republican under Robespierre, he would now have been the most pliant and
+brilliant courtier of Bonaparte.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Queen of France ever saw so many foreign Princes and
+Princesses in her drawing-rooms as the first Empress of the French did
+last year at Mentz; and no Sovereign was ever before so well paid, or
+accepted with less difficulty donations and presents for her gracious
+protection.  Madame Napoleon herself, on her return to this capital last
+October, boasted that she was ten millions of livres--richer in diamonds;
+two millions of livres richer in pearls, and three million of livres
+richer in plate and china, than in the June before, when she quitted it.
+She acknowledged that she left behind her some creditors and some money
+at Aix-la-Chapelle; but at Mentz she did not want to borrow, nor had she
+time to gamble.  The gallant ultra Romans provided everything, even to
+the utmost extent of her wishes; and she, on her part, could not but
+honour those with her company as much as possible, particularly as they
+required nothing else for their civilities.  Such was the Empress's
+expression to her lady in waiting, the handsome Madame Seran, with whom
+no confidence, no tale, no story, and no scandal expires; and who was in
+a great hurry to inform, the same evening, the tea-party at Madame de
+Beauvais's of this good news, complaining at the same time of not having
+had the least share in this rich harvest.
+
+Nowhere, indeed, were bribery and corruption carried to a greater extent,
+or practised with more effrontery, than at Mentz.  Madame Napoleon had as
+much her fixed price for every favourable word she spoke, as Talleyrand
+had for every line he wrote.  Even the attendants of the former, and the
+clerks of the latter, demanded, or rather extorted, douceurs from the
+exhausted and almost ruined German petitioners; who in the end were
+rewarded for all their meanness and for all their expenses with promises
+at best; as the new plan of supplementary indemnities was, on the very
+day proposed for its final arrangement, postponed by the desire of the
+Emperor of the French, until further orders.  This provoking delay could
+no more be foreseen by the Empress than by the Minister, who, in return
+for their presents and money almost overpowered the German Princes with
+his protestations of regret at their disappointments.  Nor was Madame
+Bonaparte less sorry or less civil.  She sent her chamberlain, Daubusson
+la Feuillad, with regular compliments of condolence to every Prince who
+had enjoyed her protection.  They returned to their homes, therefore, if
+not wealthier, at least happier; flattered by assurances and
+condescensions, confiding in hope as in certainties.  Within three
+months, however, it is supposed that they would willingly have disposed
+both of promises and expectations at a loss of fifty per cent.
+
+By the cupidity and selfishness of these and other German Princes, and
+their want of patriotism, Talleyrand was become perfectly acquainted with
+the value and production of every principality, bishopric, county, abbey,
+barony, convent, and even village in the German Empire; and though most
+national property in France was disposed of at one or two years'
+purchase, he required five years' purchase-money for all the estates and
+lands on the other side of the Rhine, of which, under the name of
+indemnities, he stripped the lawful owners to gratify the ambition or
+avidity of intruders.  This high price has cooled the claims of the
+bidders, and the plan of the supplementary indemnities is still
+suspended, and probably will continue so until our Minister lowers his
+terms.  A combination is supposed to have been entered into by the chief
+demanders of indemnities, by which they have bound themselves to resist
+all farther extortions.  They do not, however, know the man they have to
+deal with; he will, perhaps, find out some to lay claim to their own
+private and hereditary property whom he will produce and support, and who
+certainly will have the same right to pillage them as they had to the
+spoils of others.
+
+It was reported in our fashionable circles last autumn, and smiled at by
+Talleyrand, that he promised the Comtesse de L------ an abbey, and the
+Baroness de S-----z a convent, for certain personal favours, and that he
+offered a bishopric to the Princesse of Hon----- the same terms, but this
+lady answered that "she would think of his offers after he had put her
+husband in possession of the bishopric."  It is not necessary to observe
+that both the Countess and the Baroness are yet waiting to enjoy his
+liberal donations, and to be indemnified for their prostitution.
+
+Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a fit of jealousy at Mentz.  The young
+nephew of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, Comte de L----ge, was very
+assiduous about the Empress, who, herself, at first mistook the motive.
+Her confidential secretary, Deschamps, however, afterwards informed her
+that this nobleman wanted to purchase the place of a coadjutor to his
+uncle, so as to be certain of succeeding him.  He obtained, therefore,
+several private audiences, no doubt to regulate the price, when Napoleon
+put a stop to this secret negotiation by having the Count carried by
+gendarmes, with great politeness, to the other side of the Rhine.  When
+convinced of his error, Bonaparte asked his wife what sum had been
+promised for her protection, and immediately gave her an order on his
+Minister of the Treasury (Marbois) for the amount.  This was an act of
+justice, and a reparation worthy of a good and tender husband; but when,
+the very next day, he recalled this order, threw it into the fire before
+her eyes, and confined her for six hours in her bedroom; because she was
+not dressed in time to take a walk with him on the ramparts, one is apt
+to believe that military despotism has erased from his bosom all
+connubial affection, and that a momentary effusion of kindness and
+generosity can but little alleviate the frequent pangs caused by repeated
+insults and oppression.  Fortunately, Madame Napoleon's disposition is
+proof against rudeness as well as against brutality.  If what her friend
+and consoler, Madame Delucay, reports of her is not exaggerated, her
+tranquillity is not much disturbed nor her happiness affected by these
+explosions of passionate authority, and she prefers admiring, in
+undisturbed solitude, her diamond box to the most beautiful prospects in
+the most agreeable company; and she inspects with more pleasure in
+confinement, her rich wardrobe, her beautiful china, and her heavy plate,
+than she would find satisfaction, surrounded with crowds, in
+comtemplating Nature, even in its utmost perfection.  "The paradise of
+Madame Napoleon," says her friend, "must be of metal, and lighted by the
+lustre of brilliants, else she would decline it for a hell and accept
+Lucifer himself for a spouse, provided gold flowed in his infernal
+domains, though she were even to be scorched by its heat."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe that I have mentioned to you, when in England, that I
+was an old acquaintance of Madame Napoleon, and a visitor at the house of
+her first husband.  When introduced to her after some years' absence,
+during which fortune had treated us very differently, she received me
+with more civility than I was prepared to expect, and would, perhaps,
+have spoken to me more than she did, had not a look of her husband
+silenced her.  Madame Louis Bonaparte was still more condescending, and
+recalled to my memory what I had not forgotten how often she had been
+seated, when a child, on my lap, and played on my knees with her doll.
+Thus they behaved to me when I saw them for the first time in their
+present elevation; I found them afterwards, in their drawing-rooms or at
+their routs and parties, more shy and distant.  This change did not much
+surprise me, as I hardly knew any one that had the slightest pretension
+to their acquaintance who had not troubled them for employment or
+borrowed their money, at the same time that they complained of their
+neglect and their breach of promises.  I continued, however, as much as
+etiquette and decency required, assiduous, but never familiar: if they
+addressed me, I answered with respect, but not with servility; if not,
+I bowed in silence when they passed.  They might easily perceive that I
+did not intend to become an intruder, nor to make the remembrance of what
+was past an apology or a reason for applying for present favours.  A
+lady, on intimate terms with Madame Napoleon, and once our common friend,
+informed me, shortly after the untimely end of the lamented Duc d'
+Enghien, that she had been asked whether she knew anything that could be
+done for me, or whether I would not be flattered by obtaining a place in
+the Legislative Body or in the Tribunate?  I answered as I thought, that
+were I fit for a public life nothing could be more agreeable or suit me
+better; but, having hitherto declined all employments that might restrain
+that independence to which I had accustomed myself from my youth, I was
+now too old to enter upon a new career.  I added that, though the
+Revolution had reduced my circumstances, it had not entirely ruined me.
+I was still independent, because my means were the boundaries of my
+wants.
+
+A week after this conversation General Murat, the governor of this
+capital, and Bonaparte's favourite-brother-in-law, invited me to a
+conversation in a note delivered to me by an aide-de-camp, who told me
+that he was ordered to wait for my company, or, which was the same, he
+had orders not to lose sight of me, as I was his prisoner.  Having
+nothing with which to reproach myself, and all my written remarks being
+deposited with a friend, whom none of the Imperial functionaries could
+suspect, I entered a hackney coach without any fear or apprehension; and
+we drove to the governor's hotel.
+
+From the manner in which Murat addressed me, I was soon convinced that if
+I had been accused of any error or indiscretion, the accusation could not
+be very grave in his eyes.  He entered with me into his closet and
+inquired whether I had any enemies at the police office.  I told him not
+to my knowledge.
+
+"Is the Police Minister and Senator, Fouche, your friend?"  continued he.
+
+"Fouche," said I, "has bought an estate that formerly belonged to me; may
+he enjoy it with the same peace of mind as I have lost it.  I have never
+spoken to him in my life."
+
+"Have you not complained at Madame de la Force's of the execution of the
+ci-devant Duc d'Enghien, and agreed with the other members of her coterie
+to put on mourning for him?"
+
+"I have never been at the house of that lady since the death of the
+Prince, nor more than once in my life."
+
+"Where did you pass the evening last Saturday?"--"At the hotel, and in
+the assembly of Princesse Louis Bonaparte."
+
+"Did she see you?"
+
+"I believe that she did, because she returned my salute."
+
+"You have known Her Imperial Highness a long time?"
+
+"From her infancy."
+
+"Well, I congratulate you.  You have in her a generous protectress.  But
+for her you would now have been on the way to Cayenne.  Here you see the
+list of persons condemned yesterday, upon the report of Fouche, to
+transportation.  Your name is at the head of them.  You were not only
+accused of being an agent of the Bourbons, but of having intrigued to
+become a member of the Legislature, or the Tribunate, that you might have
+so much the better opportunity to serve them.  Fortunately for you, the
+Emperor remembered that the Princesse Louis had demanded such a favour
+for you, and he informed her of the character of her protege.  This
+brought forward your innocence, because it was discovered that, instead
+of asking for, you had declined the offer she had made you through the
+Empress.  Write the Princess a letter of thanks.  You have, indeed, had a
+narrow escape, but it has been so far useful to you, that Government is
+now aware of your having some secret enemy in power, who is not delicate
+about the means of injuring you."
+
+In quitting General Murat, I could not help deploring the fate of a
+despot, even while I abhorred his unnatural power.  The curses, the
+complaints, and reproaches for all the crimes, all the violence, all the
+oppression perpetrated in his name, are entirely thrown upon him, while
+his situation and occupation do not admit the seeing and hearing
+everything and everybody himself.  He is often forced, therefore, to
+judge according to the report of an impostor; to sanction with his name
+the hatred, malignity, or vengeance of culpable individuals; and to
+sacrifice innocence to gratify the vile passions of his vilest slave.
+I have not so bad an opinion of Bonaparte as to think him capable of
+wilfully condemning any person to death or transportation, of whose
+innocence he was convinced, provided that person stood not in the way of
+his interest and ambition; but suspicion and tyranny are inseparable
+companions, and injustice their common progeny.  The unfortunate beings
+on the long list General Murat showed me were, I dare say, most of them
+as innocent as myself, and all certainly condemned unheard.  But suppose,
+even, that they had been indiscreet enough to put on mourning for a
+Prince of the blood of their former Kings, did their imprudence deserve
+the same punishment as the deed of the robber, the forger, or the
+housebreaker? and, indeed, it was more severe than what our laws inflict
+on such criminals, who are only condemned to transportation for some few
+years, after a public trial and conviction; while the exile of these
+unconvicted, untried, and most probably innocent persons is continued for
+life, on charges as unknown to themselves as their destiny and residence
+remain to their families and friends.  Happy England! where no one is
+condemned unheard, and no one dares attempt to make the laws subservient
+to his passions or caprice.
+
+As to Fouche's enmity, at which General Murat so plainly hinted, I had
+long apprehended it from what others, in similar circumstances with
+myself, had suffered.  He has, since the Revolution, bought no less, than
+sixteen national estates, seven of the former proprietors of which have
+suddenly disappeared since his Ministry, probably in the manner he
+intended to remove me.  This man is one of the most immoral characters
+the Revolution has dragged forward from obscurity.  It is more difficult
+to mention a crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good or
+just action that he ever performed.  He is so notorious a villain that
+even the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and
+since his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased
+country, to extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities.  In a
+nation so greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is more than negative
+evidence.
+
+As a friar before the Revolution he has avowed, in his correspondence
+with the National Convention, that he never believed in a God; and as one
+of the first public functionaries of a Republic he has officially denied
+the existence of virtue.  He is, therefore, as unmoved by tears as by
+reproaches, and as inaccessible to remorse as hardened against
+repentance.  With him interest and bribes are everything, and honour and
+honesty nothing.  The supplicant or the pleader who appears before him
+with no other support than the justice of his cause is fortunate indeed
+if, after being cast, he is not also confined or ruined, and perhaps
+both; while a line from one of the Bonapartes, or a purse of gold,
+changes black to white, guilt to innocence, removes the scaffold waiting
+for the assassin, and extinguishes the faggots lighted for the parricide.
+His authority is so extensive that on the least signal, with one blow,
+from the extremities of France to her centre, it crushes the cot and the
+palace; and his decisions, against which there is no appeal, are so
+destructive that they never leave any traces behind them, and Bonaparte,
+Bonaparte alone, can prevent or arrest their effect.
+
+Though a traitor to his former benefactor, the ex-Director Barras, he
+possesses now the unlimited confidence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as far
+as is known, has not yet done anything to forfeit it,--if private acts of
+cruelty cannot, in the agent of a tyrant, be called breach of trust or
+infidelity.  He shares with Talleyrand the fraternity of the vigilant,
+immoral, and tormenting secret police; and with Real, and Dubois, the
+prefect of police, the reproduction, or rather the invention, of new
+tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are wells or pits dug
+under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works of his own
+infernal genius.  They are covered with trap-doors, and any person whom
+the rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose return to
+society is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is suspected; who has
+been imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be innocent; who is
+disagreeable to the Bonapartes, their favourites, or the mistresses of
+their favourites; who has displeased Fouche, or offended some other
+placeman; any who have refused to part with their property for the
+recovery of their liberty, are all precipitated into these artificial
+abysses there to be forgotten; or worse, to be starved to death, if they
+have not been fortunate enough to break their necks and be killed by the
+fall.
+
+The property Fouche has acquired by his robberies within these last
+twelve years is at the lowest rate valued at fifty million livres--which
+must increase yearly; as a man who disposes of the liberty of fifty
+millions of people is also, in a great part, master of their wealth.
+Except the chiefs of the Governments and their officers of State, there
+exists not an inhabitant of France, Italy, Holland, or Switzerland who
+can consider himself secure for an instant of not being seized,
+imprisoned, plundered, tortured, or exterminated by the orders of Fouche
+and by the hands of his agents.
+
+You will no doubt exclaim, "How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he
+confide, in such a man?"  Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with
+the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents.  There is
+no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he
+will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it.  He is, therefore, a
+most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what
+is said to the contrary in France, and believed abroad, would cease to
+rule the day he became just, and the reign of laws and of humanity
+banished terror and tyranny.
+
+It is reported that some person, pious or revengeful, presented some time
+ago to the devout mother of Napoleon a long memorial containing some
+particulars of the crimes and vices of Fouche and Talleyrand, and
+required of her, if she wished to prevent the curses of Heaven from
+falling on her son, to inform him of them, that he might cease to employ
+men so unworthy of him, and so repugnant to a Divinity.  Napoleon, after
+reading through the memorial, is stated to have answered his mother, who
+was always pressing him to dismiss these Ministers: The memorial, Madame,
+contains nothing of what I was not previously informed.  Louis XVI. did
+not select any but those whom he thought the most virtuous and moral of
+men for his Ministers and counsellors; and where did their virtues and
+morality bring him?  If the writer of the memorial will mention two
+honest and irreproachable characters, with equal talents and zeal to
+serve me, neither Fouche nor Talleyrand shall again be admitted into my
+presence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have with some reason in England complained of the conduct
+of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, when the
+pretended correspondence between Mr. Drake and Mehee de la Touche was
+published in our official gazette.  Had you, however, like myself, been
+in a situation to study the characters and appreciate the worth of most
+of them, this conduct would have excited no surprise, and pity would have
+taken the place both of accusation and reproach.  Hardly one of them,
+except Count Philipp von Cobenzl, the Austrian Ambassador (and even he is
+considerably involved), possesses any property, or has anything else but
+his salary to depend upon for subsistence.  The least offence to
+Bonaparte or Talleyrand would instantly deprive them of their places;
+and, unless they were fortunate enough to obtain some other appointment,
+reduce them to live in obscurity, and perhaps in want, upon a trifling
+pension in their own country.
+
+The day before Mr. Drake's correspondence appeared in the Moniteur, in
+March, 1804, Talleyrand gave a grand diplomatic dinner; in the midst of
+which, as was previously agreed with Bonaparte, Duroc called him out on
+the part of the First Consul.  After an absence of near an hour, which
+excited great curiosity and some alarm among the diplomatists, he
+returned, very thoughtful and seemingly very low-spirited.
+
+"Excuse me, gentlemen," said he, "I have been impolite against my
+inclination.  The First Consul knew that you honoured me with your
+company today, and would therefore not have interrupted me by his orders
+had not a discovery of a most extraordinary nature against the law of
+nations just been made; a discovery which calls for the immediate
+indignation against the Cabinet of St. James, not only of France, but of
+every nation that wishes for the preservation of civilized society.
+After dinner I shall do myself the honour of communicating to you the
+particulars, well convinced that you will all enter with warmth into the
+just resentment of the First Consul."
+
+During the repast the bottle went freely round, and as soon as they had
+drunk their coffee and liqueurs, Talleyrand rang a bell, and Hauterive
+presented himself with a large bundle of papers.  The pretended original
+letters of Mr. Drake were handed about with the commentaries of the
+Minister and his secretary.  Their heads heated with wine, it was not
+difficult to influence their minds, or to mislead their judgment, and
+they exclaimed, as in a chorus, "C'est abominable!  Cela fait fremir!"
+
+Talleyrand took advantage of their situation, as well as of their
+indiscretion.  "I am glad, gentlemen," said he, "and shall not fail to
+inform the First Consul of your unanimous sentiments on this disagreeable
+subject; but verbal expressions are not sufficient in an affair of such
+great consequence.  I have orders to demand your written declarations,
+which, after what you have already expressed, you cannot hesitate about
+sending to me to-night, that they may accompany the denunciation which
+the First Consul despatches, within some few hours, to all the Courts on
+the Continent.  You would much please the First Consul were you to write
+as near as possible according to the formula which my secretary has drawn
+up.  It states nothing either against convenance, or against the customs
+of Sovereigns, or etiquettes of Courts, and I am certain is also
+perfectly congenial with your individual feelings."
+
+A silence of some moments now followed (as all the diplomatists were
+rather taken by surprise with regard to a written declaration), which the
+Swedish Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, interrupted by saying that, "though
+he personally might have no objection to sign such a declaration, he must
+demand some time to consider whether he had a right to, write in the name
+of his Sovereign, without his orders, on a subject still unknown to him."
+
+This remark made the Austrian Ambassador, Count von Cobenzl, propose a
+private consultation among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps at
+one of their hotels, at which the Russian charge d'affaires, D'Oubril,
+who was not at the dinner--party, was invited to assist.  They met
+accordingly, at the Hotel de Montmorency, Rue de Lille, occupied by Count
+von Cobenzl; but they came to no other unanimous determination than that
+of answering a written communication of Talleyrand by a written note,
+according as every one judged most proper and prudent, and corresponding
+with the supposed sentiments of his Sovereign.
+
+As all this official correspondence has been published in England, you
+may, upon reading the notes presented by Baron de Dreyer, and Mr.
+Livingstone,
+
+     [In consequence of this conduct, Livingstone was recalled by his
+     Government, and lives now in obscurity and disgrace in America.  To
+     console him, however, in his misfortune, Bonaparte, on his
+     departure, presented him with his portrait, enamelled on the lid of
+     a snuff-box, set round with diamonds, and valued at one thousand
+     louis d'or.]
+
+the neutral Ambassadors of Denmark and America, form some tolerably just
+idea of Talleyrand's formula.  Their impolitic servility was blamed even
+by the other members of the diplomatic corps.
+
+Livingstone you know, and perhaps have not to learn that, though a stanch
+republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France; and
+though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side of
+the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism
+more, in Europe.  Without talents, and almost without education, he
+thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity
+are synonymous.  He was called here "the courier of Talleyrand," on
+account of his voyages to England, and his journeys to Holland, where
+this Minister sent him to intrigue, with less ceremony than one of his
+secret agents.  He acknowledged that no Government was more liberal, and
+no nation more free, than the British; but he hated the one as much as he
+abused the other; and he did not conceal sentiments that made him always
+so welcome to Bonaparte and Talleyrand.  Never over nice in the choice of
+his companions, Arthur O'Connor, and other Irish traitors and vagabonds,
+used his house as their own; so much so that, when he invited other
+Ambassadors to dine with him, they, before they accepted the invitation,
+made a condition that no outlaws or adventurers should be of the party.
+
+In your youth, Baron de Dreyer was an Ambassador from the Court of
+Copenhagen to that of St. James.  He has since been in the same capacity
+to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Madrid.  Born a Norwegian, of a poor
+and obscure family, he owes his advancement to his own talents; but
+these, though they have procured him rank, have left him without a
+fortune.  When he came here, in June, 1797, from Spain, he brought a
+mistress with him, and several children he had had by her during his
+residence in that country.  He also kept an English mistress some thirty
+years ago in London, by whom he had a son, M. Guillaumeau, who is now his
+secretary.  Thus encumbered, and thus situated at the age of seventy, it
+is no surprise if he strives to die at his post, and that fear to offend
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand sometimes gets the better of his prudence.
+
+In Denmark, as well as in all other Continental States, the pensions of
+diplomatic invalids are more scanty than those of military ones, and
+totally insufficient for a man who, during half a century nearly, has
+accustomed himself to a certain style of life, and to expenses requisite
+to represent his Prince with dignity.  No wonder, therefore, that Baron
+de Dreyer prefers Paris to Copenhagen, and that the cunning Talleyrand
+takes advantage of this preference.
+
+It was reported here among our foreign diplomatists, that the English
+Minister in Denmark complained of the contents of Baron de Dreyer's note
+concerning Mr. Drake's correspondence; and that the Danish Prime
+Minister, Count von Bernstorff, wrote to him in consequence, by the order
+of the Prince Royal, a severe reprimand.  This act of political justice
+is, however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of Copenhagen
+has laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand, but always to
+displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be discontented.
+Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better served by his
+representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one seldomer changes
+or removes them.
+
+While I am speaking of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short
+sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to
+particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously
+complimented by Talleyrand with the title of "The Prince of Neutrality,
+the Sully of Prussia."  Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who,
+until lately, has been the chief director of the political conscience of
+His Prussian Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, was born
+in Silesia, and is the son of a nobleman who was a General in the
+Austrian service when Frederick the Great made the conquest of that
+country.  At the death of this King in 1786, Count von Haugwitz occupied
+an inferior place in the foreign office, where Count von Herzburg
+observed his zeal and assiduity, and recommended him to the notice of the
+late King Frederick William II.  By the interest of the celebrated
+Bishopswerder, he procured, in 1792, the appointment of an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, where he succeeded Baron von Jacobi, the present
+Prussian Minister in your country.  In the autumn of the same year he
+went to Ratisbon, to cooperate with the Austrian Ambassador, and to
+persuade the Princes of the German Empire to join the coalition against
+France.  In the month of March, 1794, he was sent to the Hague, where he
+negotiated with Lord Malmesbury concerning the affairs of France; shortly
+afterwards his nomination as a Minister of State took place, and from
+that time his political sentiments seem to have undergone a revolution,
+for which it is not easy to account; but, whatever were the causes of his
+change of opinions, the Treaty of Basle, concluded between France and
+Prussia in 1795, was certainly negotiated under his auspices; and in
+August, 1796, he signed, with the French Minister at Berlin, Citizen
+Caillard, the first and famous Treaty of Neutrality; and a Prussian
+cordon was accordingly drawn, to cause the neutrality of the North to be
+observed and protected.  Had the Count von Haugwitz of 1795 been the same
+as the Count von Haugwitz of 1792, it is probable we should no longer
+have heard of either a French Republic or a French Empire; but a
+legitimate Monarch of the kingdom of France would have ensured that
+security to all other legitimate Sovereigns, the want of which they
+themselves, or their children, will feel and mourn in vain, as long as
+unlimited usurpations tyrannize over my wretched country.  It is to be
+hoped, however, that the good sense of the Count will point out to him,
+before it is too late, the impolicy of his present connections; and that
+he will use his interest with his Prince to persuade him to adopt a line
+of conduct suited to the grandeur and dignity of the Prussian Monarchy,
+and favourable to the independence of insulted Europe.
+
+When his present Prussian Majesty succeeded to the throne, Count von
+Haugwitz continued in office, with increased influence; but he some time
+since resigned, in consequence, it is said, of a difference of opinion
+with the other Prussian Ministers on the subject of a family alliance,
+which Bonaparte had the modesty to propose, between the illustrious house
+of Napoleon the First and the royal line of Brandenburgh.
+
+On this occasion his King, to evince his satisfaction with his past
+conduct, bestowed on him not only a large pension, but an estate in
+Silesia, where he before possessed some property.  Bonaparte also, to
+express his regret at his retreat, proclaimed His Excellency a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour.
+
+Talleyrand insolently calls the several cordons, or ribands, distributed
+by Bonaparte among the Prussian Ministers and Generals, "his leading-
+strings."  It is to be hoped that Frederick William III.  is sufficiently
+upon his guard to prevent these strings from strangling the Prussian
+Monarchy and the Brandenburgh dynasty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Upwards of two months after my visit to General Murat, I was
+surprised at the appearance of M. Darjuson, the chamberlain of Princesse
+Louis Bonaparte.  He told me that he came on the part of Prince Louis,
+who honoured me with an invitation to dine with him the day after.
+Upon my inquiry whether he knew if the party would be very numerous,
+he answered, between forty and fifty; and that it was a kind of farewell
+dinner, because the Prince intended shortly to set out for Compiegne to
+assume the command of the camp, formed in its vicinity, of the dragoons
+and other light troops of the army of England.
+
+The principal personages present at this dinner were Joseph Bonaparte and
+his wife, General and Madame Murat, the Ministers Berthier, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, Chaptal, and Portalis.  The conversation was entirely military,
+and chiefly related to the probable conquest or subjugation of Great
+Britain, and the probable consequence to mankind in general of such a
+great event.  No difference of opinion was heard with regard to its
+immediate benefit to France and gradual utility to all other nations; but
+Berthier seemed to apprehend that, before France could have time to
+organize this valuable conquest, she would be obliged to support another
+war, with a formidable league, perhaps, of all other European nations.
+The issue, however, he said, would be glorious to France, who, by her
+achievements, would force all people to acknowledge her their mother
+country; and then, first, Europe would constitute but one family.
+
+Chaptal was as certain as everybody else of the destruction of the
+tyrants of the seas; but he thought France would never be secure against
+the treachery of modern Carthage until she followed the example of Rome
+towards ancient Carthage; and therefore, after reducing London to ashes,
+it would be proper to disperse round the universe all the inhabitants of
+the British Islands, and to re-people them with nations less evil-
+disposed and less corrupted.  Portalis observed that it was more easy to
+conceive than to execute such a vast plan.  It would not be an
+undertaking of five, of ten, nor of twenty years, to transplant these
+nations; that misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+and obstinacy, but desperation.
+
+"No people," continued he, "are more attached to their customs and
+countries than islanders in general; and though British subjects are the
+greatest travellers, and found everywhere, they all suppose their country
+the best, and always wish to return to it and finish their days amidst
+their native fogs and smoke.  Neither the Saxons, nor the Danes, nor
+Norman conquerors transplanted them, but, after reducing them,
+incorporated themselves by marriages among the vanquished, and in some
+few generations were but one people.  It is asserted by all persons who
+have lately visited Great Britain, that, though the civilization of the
+lower classes is much behind that of the same description in France, the
+higher orders, the rich and the fashionable, are, with regard to their,
+manners, more French than English, and might easily be cajoled into
+obedience and subjection to the sovereignty of a nation whose customs, by
+free choice, they have adopted in preference to their own, and whose
+language forms a necessary part of their education, and, indeed, of the
+education of almost every class in the British Empire.  The universality
+of the French language is the best ally France has in assisting her to
+conquer a universal dominion.  He wished, therefore, that when we were in
+a situation to dictate in England, instead of proscribing Englishmen we
+should proscribe the English language, and advance and reward, in
+preference, all those parents whose children were sent to be educated in
+France, and all those families who voluntarily adopted in their houses
+and societies exclusively the French language."
+
+Murat was afraid that if France did not transplant the most stubborn
+Britons, and settle among them French colonies, when once their military
+and commercial navy was annihilated, they would turn pirates, and,
+perhaps, within half a century, lay all other nations as much under
+contribution by their piracies as they now do by their industry; and
+that, like the pirates on the coast of Barbary, the instant they had no
+connections with other civilized nations, cut the throats of each other,
+and agree in nothing but in plundering, and considering all other people
+in the, world their natural enemies and purveyors.
+
+To this opinion Talleyrand, by nodding assent, seemed to adhere; but he
+added: "Earthquakes are generally dreaded as destructive; but such a
+convulsion of nature as would swallow up the British Islands, with all
+their inhabitants, would be the greatest blessing Providence ever
+conferred on mankind."
+
+Louis Bonaparte then addressed himself to me and to the Marquis de F----.
+"Gentlemen," said he, "you have been in England; what is your opinion of
+the character of these islanders, and of the probability of their
+subjugation?"
+
+I answered that, during the fifteen months I resided in London I was too
+much occupied to prevent myself from starving, to meditate about anything
+else; that my stomach was my sole meditation as well as anxiety.  That,
+however, I believed that in England, as everywhere else, a mixture of
+good and bad qualities was to be found; but which prevailed, it would be
+presumption in me, from my position, to decide.  But I did not doubt that
+if we cordially hated the English they returned us the compliment with
+interest, and, therefore, the contest with them would be a severe one.
+The Marquis de F---- imprudently attempted to convince the company that
+it was difficult, if not impossible, for our army to land in England,
+much more to conquer it, until we were masters of the seas by a superior
+navy.  He would, perhaps, have been still more indiscreet, had not Madame
+Louis interrupted him, and given another turn to the conversation by
+inquiring about the fair sex in England, and if it was true that handsome
+women were more numerous there than in France?  Here again the Marquis,
+instead of paying her a compliment, as she perhaps expected, roundly
+assured her that for one beauty in France, hundreds might be counted in
+England, where gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and
+that a woman regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a
+first-rate beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of
+them here.
+
+"You must excuse the Marquis, ladies," said I, in my turn; "he has not
+been in love in England.  There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel
+than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her
+insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:
+
+"I apply to M. de Talleyrand," answered the Marquis; "he has been longer
+in England than myself."
+
+"I am not a competent judge," retorted the Minister; "Madame de
+Talleyrand is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I
+dare say the Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the British
+Islands, among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties, or
+admired greater accomplishments or more perfection."
+
+To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks
+the party present, of course, was not included.  All the ladies, who were
+well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very good-
+humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would give
+her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a gallant
+Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt to make
+up their difference.  "She is no more, Madame," said the Marquis; "she
+was, unfortunately, guillotined two days before----" the father of Madame
+Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted him with a
+significant look, and said, "Before the fall of Robespierre, you mean."
+
+From these and other traits of the Marquis's character, you may see that
+he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give
+offence.  He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from
+Fouche, which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris
+without further orders from the Minister of Police.  I know, from high
+authority, that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he
+indebted for not being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported
+to our colonies, for having depreciated the power and means of France to
+invade England.  I am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on
+the subject of the invasion expressed anything but what they really
+thought; and that, of the whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the
+Marquis, and myself, entertained the least doubt of the success of the
+expedition; so firmly did they rely on the former fortune of Bonaparte,
+his boastings, and his assurance.
+
+After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with
+Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that
+she is not happy.  Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the
+best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached
+to her.  She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked,
+notwithstanding, uncommonly well.  I have heard that Louis is inclined to
+inebriation, and when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and
+very indelicate with other women before her eyes.  He intrigues with her
+own servants and the number of his illegitimate children is said to be as
+many as his years.  She asked General Murat to present me and recommend
+me to Fouche, which he did with great politeness; and the Minister
+assured me that he should be glad to see me at his hotel, which I much
+doubt.  The last words Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a princely
+crown, richly set with diamonds, and given her by her brother-in-law,
+Napoleon, were, "Alas!  grandeur is not always happiness, nor the most
+elevated the most fortunate lot."
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a grand
+epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the annals of
+Europe.  The debates in the Sacred College for and against this journey,
+and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to have been
+long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires of
+Cardinal Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres distributed
+apropos among its pious members.  Of this money the Cardinals Mattei,
+Pamphili, Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia, Pacca,
+Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to
+have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent anti-
+Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of Napoleon
+the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real worth.
+
+The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
+intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
+brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
+second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
+husband.
+
+Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
+March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
+choeur) in a convent of his native place.  In 1782, whilst he was on a
+visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
+fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
+captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers.  Here
+he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
+professor of, the Alcoran.  In that year he found an opportunity to
+escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
+renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
+constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
+In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
+his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
+gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
+customers.  After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
+the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
+after Napoleon's proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
+of Lyons.  In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
+is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
+tiara.  If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
+name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he
+must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate his
+own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France.
+Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the manner
+already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this pontiff
+would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.
+
+While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
+tinker, by whom he had three children.  This marriage, according to the
+republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
+Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
+left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
+himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor.  But Madame
+Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband's promotion to the
+Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
+children reduced to great misery.  Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
+letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres--informing her that the
+same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
+with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
+instant she left that island.  Either thinking herself not sufficiently
+paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte
+family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she
+remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope.  On the first day His
+Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the
+crowd, and to approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by his side.
+Profiting by a moment's silence, she called out loudly, throwing herself
+at his feet: "Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of Cardinal Fesch, and
+these are our children; he cannot, he dares not, deny this truth.  Had he
+behaved liberally to me, I should not have disturbed him in his present
+grandeur; I supplicate you, Holy Father, not to restore me my husband,
+but to force him to provide for his wife and children, according to his
+present circumstances."--"Matta--ella e matta, santissimo padre!  She is
+mad--she is mad, Holy Father," said the Cardinal; and the good pontiff
+ordered her to be taken care of, to prevent her from doing herself or the
+children any mischief.  She was, indeed, taken care of, because nobody
+ever since heard what has become either of her or her children; and as
+they have not returned to Corsica, probably some snug retreat has been
+allotted them in France.
+
+The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal
+Fesch: his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in
+disagreeable scrapes.  He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons,
+which has since made his stay in that city but short.  Having thrown his
+handkerchief at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she
+accepted it, and gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the
+evening when her husband usually went to the play.  His Eminence arrived
+in disguise, and was received with open arms.  But he was hardly seated
+by her side before the door of a closet was burst open, and his shoulders
+smarted from the lashes inflicted by an offended husband.  In vain did he
+mention his name and rank; they rather increased than decreased the fury
+of Girot, who pretended it was utterly impossible for a Cardinal and
+Archbishop to be thus overtaken with the wife of one of his flock; at
+last Madame Girot proposed a pecuniary accommodation, which, after some
+opposition, was acceded to; and His Eminence signed a bond for one
+hundred thousand livres--upon condition that nothing should transpire of
+this intrigue--a high price enough for a sound drubbing.  On the day when
+the bond was due, Girot and his wife were both arrested by the police
+commissary, Dubois (a brother of the prefect of police at Paris), accused
+of being connected with the coiners, a capital crime at present in this
+country.  In a search made in their house, bad money to the amount of
+three thousand livres was discovered; which they had received the day
+before from a man who called himself a merchant from Paris, but who was a
+police spy sent to entrap them.  After giving up the bond of the
+Cardinal, the Emperor graciously remitted the capital punishment, upon
+condition that they should be transported for life to Cayenne.
+
+This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
+and to constitute a successor of St. Peter.  It would not be the least
+remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
+were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
+boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
+from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle of
+an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a member of
+the Sacred College.
+
+His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
+elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres--and
+his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
+Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
+at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of
+the French.
+
+The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his death
+Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
+expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The amiable and accomplished Amelia Frederique, Princess
+Dowager of the late Electoral Prince, Charles Louis of Baden, born a
+Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, has procured the Electoral House of Baden
+the singular honour of giving consorts to three reigning and Sovereign
+Princes,--to an Emperor of Russia, to a King of Sweden, and to the
+Elector of Bavaria.  Such a distinction, and such alliances, called the
+attention of those at the head of our Revolution; who, after attempting
+in vain to blow up hereditary thrones by the aid of sans-culotte
+incendiaries, seated sans-culottes upon thrones, that they might degrade
+what was not yet ripe for destruction.
+
+Charles Frederick, the reigning Elector of Baden, is now near fourscore
+years of age.  At this period of life if any passions remain, avarice is
+more common than ambition; because treasures may be hoarded without
+bustle, while activity is absolutely necessary to push forward to the
+goal of distinction.  Having bestowed a new King on Tuscany, Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand also resolved to confer new Electors on Germany.  A more
+advantageous fraternity could not be established between the innovators
+here and their opposers in other countries, than by incorporating the
+grandfather-in-law of so many Sovereigns with their own revolutionary
+brotherhood; to humble him by a new rank, and to disgrace him by
+indemnities obtained from their hands.  An intrigue between our Minister,
+Talleyrand, and the Baden Minister, Edelsheim, transformed the oldest
+Margrave of Germany into its youngest Elector, and extended his dominions
+by the spoils obtained at the expense of the rightful owners.  The
+invasion of the Baden territory in time of peace, and the seizure of the
+Duc d'Enghien, though under the protection of the laws of nations and
+hospitality, must have soon convinced Baron Edelsheim what return his
+friend Talleyrand expected, and that Bonaparte thought he had a natural
+right to insult by his attacks those he had dishonoured by his
+connections.
+
+The Minister, Baron Edelsheim, is half an illuminato, half a philosopher,
+half a politician, and half a revolutionist.  He was, long before he was
+admitted into the council chamber of his Prince, half an atheist, half an
+intriguer, and half a spy, in the pay of Frederick the Great of Prussia.
+His entry upon the stage at Berlin, and particularly the first parts he
+was destined to act, was curious and extraordinary; whether he acquitted
+himself better in this capacity than he has since in his political one is
+not known.  He was afterwards sent to this capital to execute a
+commission, of which he acquitted himself very ill; exposing himself
+rashly, without profit or service to his employer.  Frederick II.,
+dreading the tediousness of a proposed congress at Augsburg, wished to
+send a private emissary to sound the King of France.  For this purpose he
+chose Edelsheim as a person least liable to suspicion.  The project of
+Frederick was to idemnify the King of Poland for his first losses by
+robbing the ecclesiastical Princes of Germany.  This, Louis XV. totally
+rejected; and Edelsheim returned with his answer to the Prussian Monarch,
+then at Freyburg.  From thence he afterwards departed for London, made
+his communications, and was once again sent back to Paris, on pretence
+that he had left some of his travelling trunks there; and the Bailli de
+Foulay, the Ambassador of the Knights of Malta, being persuaded that the
+Cabinet of Versailles was effectually desirous of peace, was, as he had
+been before, the mediator.  The Bailli was deceived.  The Duc de
+Choiseul, the then Prime Minister, indecently enough threw Edelsheim into
+the Bastille, in order to search or seize his papers, which, however,
+were secured elsewhere.  Edelsheim was released on the morrow, but
+obliged to depart the kingdom by the way of Turin, as related by
+Frederick II. in his "History of the Seven Years' War."  On his return he
+was disgraced, and continued so until 1778; when he again was used as
+emissary to various Courts of Germany.  In 1786 the Elector of Baden sent
+him to Berlin, on the ascension of Frederick William II., as a
+complimentary envoy.  This Monarch, when he saw him, could not forbear
+laughing at the high wisdom of the Court that selected such a personage
+for such an embassy, and of his own sagacity in accepting it.  He quitted
+the capital of Prussia as he came there, with an opinion of himself that
+the royal smiles of contempt had neither altered nor diminished.
+
+You see, by this account, that Edelsheim has long been a partisan of the
+pillage of Germany called indemnities; and long habituated to affronts,
+as well as to plots.  To all his other half qualities, half modesty can
+hardly be added, when he calls himself, or suffers himself to be called,
+"the Talleyrand of Carlsrhue."  He accompanied his Prince last year to
+Mentz; where this old Sovereign was not treated by Bonaparte in the most
+decorous or decent manner, being obliged to wait for hours in his
+antechamber, and afterwards stand during the levees, or in the drawing-
+rooms of Napoleon or of his wife, without the offer of a chair, or an
+invitation to sit down.  It was here where, by a secret treaty, Bonaparte
+became the Sovereign of Baden, if sovereignty consists in the disposal of
+the financial and military resources of a State; and they were agreed to
+be assigned over to him whenever he should deem it proper or necessary to
+invade the German Empire, in return for his protection against the
+Emperor of Germany, who can have no more interest than intent to attack a
+country so distant from his hereditary dominions, and whose Sovereign is,
+besides, the grandfather of the consort of his nearest and best ally.
+
+Talleyrand often amused himself at Mentz with playing on the vanity and
+affected consequence of Edelsheim, who was delighted if at any time our
+Minister took him aside, or whispered to him as in confidence.  One
+morning, at the assembly of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, where Edelsheim
+was creeping and cringing about him as usual, he laid hold of his arm and
+walked with him to the upper part of the room.  In a quarter of an hour
+they both joined the company, Edelsheim unusually puffed up with vanity.
+
+"I will lay and bet, gentlemen," said Talleyrand, "that you cannot, with
+all your united wits, guess the grand subject of my conversation with the
+good Baron Edelsheim."  Without waiting for an answer, he continued: "As
+the Baron is a much older and more experienced traveller than myself, I
+asked him which, of all the countries he had visited, could boast the
+prettiest and kindest women.  His reply was really very instructive, and
+it would be a great pity if justice were not done to his merit by its
+publicity."
+
+Here the Baron, red as a turkey-cock and trembling with anger,
+interrupted.  "His Excellency," said he, "is to-night in a humour to
+joke; what we spoke of had nothing to do with women."
+
+"Nor with men, either," retorted Talleyrand, going away.
+
+This anecdote, Baron Dahlberg, the Minister of the Elector of Baden to
+our Court, had the ingenuity to relate at Madame Chapui's as an evidence
+of Edelsheim's intimacy with Talleyrand; only he left out the latter
+part, and forgot to mention the bad grace with which this impertinence of
+Talleyrand was received; but this defect of memory Count von Beust, the
+envoy of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, kindly supplied.
+
+Baron Edelsheim is a great amateur of knighthoods.  On days of great
+festivities his face is, as it were, illuminated with the lustre of his
+stars; and the crosses on his coat conceal almost its original colour.
+Every petty Prince of Germany has dubbed him a chevalier; but Emperors
+and Kings have not been so unanimous in distinguishing his desert, or in
+satisfying his desires.
+
+At Mentz no Prince or Minister fawned more assiduously upon Bonaparte
+than this hero of chivalry.  It could not escape notice, but need not
+have alarmed our great man, as was the case.  The prefect of the palace
+was ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim's moral
+and political character.  He applied to the police commissary, who,
+within twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was
+the most inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that
+ever entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword,
+worn a dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about
+his real character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as
+nowhere they allowed him common sense, much less a character; all blamed
+his presumption, but none defended his capacity.
+
+After the perusal of this report, Bonaparte asked Talleyrand: "What can
+Edelsheim mean by his troublesome assiduities?  Does he want any
+indemnities, or does he wish me to make him a German Prince?  Can he have
+the impudence to hope that I shall appoint him a tribune, a legislator,
+or a Senator in France, or that I shall give him a place in my Council of
+State?"
+
+"No such thing," answered the Minister; "did not Your Majesty condescend
+to notice at the last fete that this eclipsed moon was encompassed in a
+firmanent of stars.  You would, Sire, make him the happiest of mortals
+were you to nominate him a member of your Legion of Honour."
+
+"Does he want nothing else?"  said Napoleon, as if relieved at once of an
+oppressive burden.  "Write to my chancellor of the Legion of Honour,
+Lacepede, to send him a patent, and do you inform him of this favour."
+
+It is reported at Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim
+has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because
+under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into an
+Electorate!!!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The sensation that the arrival of the Pope in this country
+caused among the lower classes of people cannot be expressed, and if
+expressed, would not be believed.  I am sorry, however, to say that,
+instead of improving their morals or increasing their faith, this journey
+has shaken both morality and religion to their foundation.
+
+According to our religious notions, as you must know, the Roman pontiff
+is the vicar of Christ, and infallible; he can never err.  The atheists
+of the National Convention and the Theophilanthropists of the Directory
+not only denied his demi-divinity, but transformed him into a satyr; and
+in pretending to tear the veil of superstition, annihilated all belief in
+a God.  The ignorant part of our nation, which, as everywhere else,
+constitutes the majority, witnessing the impunity and prosperity of
+crime, and bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals, first
+doubted of His omnipotence in not crushing guilt, and afterwards of His
+existence in not exterminating the blasphemous from among the living.
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes here, and
+hope of a reward hereafter for unmerited sufferings upon earth, they all
+hailed as a blessing the restoration of Christianity; and by this
+political act Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories
+he had procured admirers.
+
+Bonaparte's character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and
+his crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description.
+Should he continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave,
+future ages may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his
+contemporaries it will always be doubtful whether mankind has not
+suffered more from his ambition and cruelties than benefited by his
+services.  Had he satisfied himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of
+a Commonwealth; or, if he judged that a monarchical Government alone was
+suitable to the spirit of this country, had he recalled our legitimate
+King, he would have occupied a principal, if not the first, place in the
+history of France,--a place much more exalted than he can ever expect to
+fill as an Emperor of the French.  Let his prosperity be ever so
+uninterrupted, he cannot be mentioned but as an usurper, an appellation
+never exciting esteem, frequently inspiring contempt, and always odious.
+
+The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
+perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve
+an authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme
+Pontiff, whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the
+representative of their God, but who, by this act of scandal and
+sacrilege, descends to a level with the most culpable of men?  I have
+heard, not only in this city but in villages, where sincerity is more
+frequent than corruption, and where hypocrites are as little known as
+infidels, these remarks made by the people:
+
+"Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
+injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of
+bestowing as a sacred donation what belongs to another; and what he has
+no power, no authority, to dispose of?  Can Pius VII. confer on Napoleon
+the First what belongs to Louis XVIII.?  Would Jesus Christ, if upon
+earth, have acted thus?  Would his immediate successors, the Apostles,
+not have preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any
+injury?  If the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his
+Master and predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar of our
+Saviour?"
+
+These and many similar reflections the common people have made, and make
+yet.  The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up
+in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII.
+to be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists
+and freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of God, and that
+God is only the invention of fear.
+
+The fact is, that by the Pope's performance of the coronation of an
+Emperor of the French, a religious as well as a political revolution was
+effected; and the usurper in power, whatever his creed may be, will
+hereafter, without much difficulty, force it on his slaves.  You may,
+perhaps, object that Pius VII., in his official account to the Sacred
+College of his journey to France, speaks with enthusiasm of the
+Catholicism of the French people.  But did not the Goddess of Reason, did
+not Robespierre as a high priest of a Supreme Being, speak as highly of
+their sectaries?  Read the Moniteur of 1793 and 1794, and you will be
+convinced of the truth of this assertion.  They, like the Pope, spoke of
+what they saw, and they, like him, did not see an individual who was not
+instructed how to perform his part, so as to give satisfaction to him
+whom he was to please, and to those who employed him.  As you have
+attended to the history of our Revolution, you have found it in great
+part a cruel masquerade, where none but the unfortunate Louis XVI.
+appeared in his native and natural character and without a mask.
+
+The countenance of Pius VII. is placid and benign, and a kind of calmness
+and tranquillity pervades his address and manners, which are, however,
+far from being easy or elegant.  The crowds that he must have been
+accustomed to see since his present elevation have not lessened a
+timidity the consequence of early seclusion.  Nothing troubled him more
+than the numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body, Tribunate,
+National Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every occasion.
+He never was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative;
+and his best quality is, not to do good, but to prevent evil.  His piety
+is sincere and unaffected, and it is not difficult to perceive that he
+has been more accustomed to address his God than to converse with men.
+He is nowhere so well in his place as before the altar; when imploring
+the blessings of Providence on his audience he speaks with confidence, as
+to a friend to whom his purity is known, and who is accustomed to listen
+favourably to his prayers.  He is zealous but not fanatical, but equally
+superstitious as devout.  His closet was crowded with relics, rosaries,
+etc., but there he passed generally eight hours of the twenty-four upon
+his knees in prayer and meditation.  He often inflicted on himself
+mortifications, observed fast-days, and kept his vows with religious
+strictness.
+
+None of the promises made him by Cardinal Fesch, in the name of Napoleon
+the First, were performed, but all were put off until a general
+pacification.  He was promised indemnity for Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara,
+and Ravenna; the ancient supremacy and pecuniary contributions of the
+Gallican Church, and the restoration of certain religious orders, both in
+France and Italy; but notwithstanding his own representations, and the
+activity of his Cardinal, Caprara, nothing was decided, though nothing
+was refused.
+
+By some means or other he was made perfectly acquainted with the crimes
+and vices of most of our public functionaries.  Talleyrand was surprised
+when Cardinal Caprara explained to him the reason why the Pope refused to
+admit some persons to his presence, and why he wished others even not to
+be of the party when he accepted the invitations of Bonaparte and his
+wife to their private societies.  Many are, however, of opinion that
+Talleyrand, from malignity or revenge, often heightened and confirmed His
+Holiness's aversion.  This was at least once the case with regard to De
+Lalande.  When Duroc inquired the cause of the Pope's displeasure against
+this astronomer, and hinted that it would be very agreeable to the
+Emperor were His Holiness to permit him the honour of prostrating
+himself, he was answered that men of talents and learning would always be
+welcome to approach his person; that he pitied the errors and prayed for
+the conversion of this savant, but was neither displeased nor offended
+with him.  Talleyrand, when informed of the Pope's answer, accused
+Cardinal Caprara of having misinterpreted his master's communications;
+and this prelate, in his turn, censured our Minister's bad memory.
+
+You must have read that this De Lalande is regarded in France as the
+first astronomer of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists;
+he is said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called "The
+Bible of a People who acknowledge no God."  He implored the ferocious
+Robespierre to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet pretended
+to be discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian.  In a letter
+of congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present elevation,
+he also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by styling
+himself Jesus Christ the First, Emperor of the French, instead of
+Napoleon the First.  But it was not his known impiety that made
+Talleyrand wish to exclude him from insulting with his presence a
+Christian pontiff.  In the summer of 1799, when the Minister was in a
+momentary disgrace, De Lalande was at the head of those who imputed to
+his treachery, corruptions, and machinations all the evils France then
+suffered, both from external enemies and internal factions.  If
+Talleyrand has justly been reproached for soon forgetting good offices
+and services done him, nobody ever denied that he has the best
+recollection in the world of offences or attacks, and that he is as
+revengeful as unforgiving.
+
+The only one of our great men whom Pius VII. remained obstinate and
+inflexible in not receiving, was the Senator and Minister of Police,
+Fouche.  As His Holiness was not so particular with regard to other
+persons who, like Fouche, were both apostate priests and regicide
+subjects, the following is reported to be the cause of his aversion and
+obduracy:
+
+In November, 1793, the remains of a wretch of the name of Challiers--
+justly called, for his atrocities, the Murat of Lyons--were ordered by
+Fouche, then a representative of the people in that city, to be produced
+and publicly worshipped; and, under his particular auspices, a grand fete
+was performed to the memory of this republican martyr, who had been
+executed as an assassin.  As part of this impious ceremony, an ass,
+covered with a Bishop's vestments, having on his head a mitre, and the
+volumes of Holy Writ tied to his tail, paraded the streets.  The remains
+of Challiers were then burnt, and the ashes distributed among his
+adorers; while the books were also consumed, and the ashes scattered in
+the wind.  Fouche proposed, after giving the ass some water to drink in a
+sacred chalice, to terminate the festivity of the day by murdering all
+the prisoners, amounting to seven thousand five hundred; but a sudden
+storm prevented the execution of this diabolical proposition, and
+dispersed the sacrilegious congregation.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though all the Bonapartes were great favourites with Pius VII.,
+Madame Letitia, their mother, had a visible preference.  In her
+apartments he seemed most pleased to meet the family parties, as they
+were called, because to them, except the Bonapartes, none but a few
+select favourites were invited,--a distinction as much wished for and
+envied as any other Court honour.  After the Pope had fixed the evening
+he would appear among them, Duroc made out a list, under the dictates of
+Napoleon, of the chosen few destined to partake of the blessing of His
+Holiness's presence; this list was merely pro form, or as a compliment,
+laid before him; and after his tacit approbation, the individuals were
+informed, from the first chamberlain's office, that they would be
+honoured with admittance at such an hour, to such a company, and in such
+an apartment.  The dress in which they were to appear was also
+prescribed.  The parties usually met at six o'clock in the evening.  On
+the Pope's entrance all persons, of both sexes, kneeled to receive his
+blessing.  Tea, ice, liqueurs, and confectionery were then served.  In
+the place of honour were three elevated elbow-chairs, and His Holiness
+was seated between the Emperor and Empress, and seldom spoke to any one
+to whom Napoleon did not previously address the word.  The exploits of
+Bonaparte, particularly his campaigns in Egypt, were the chief subjects
+of conversation.  Before eight o'clock the Pope always retired,
+distributing his blessing to the kneeling audience, as on his entry.
+When he was gone, card-tables were brought in, and play was permitted.
+Duroc received his master's orders how to distribute the places at the
+different tables, what games were to be played, and the amount of the
+sums to be staked.  These were usually trifling and small compared to
+what is daily risked in our fashionable circles.
+
+Often, after the Pope had returned to his own rooms, Madame Letitia
+Bonaparte was admitted to assist at his private prayers.  This lady,
+whose intrigues and gallantry are proverbial in Corsica, has, now that
+she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee, and is surrounded
+by hypocrites and impostors, who, under the mask of sanctity, deceive and
+plunder her.  Her antechambers are always full of priests; and her closet
+and bedroom are crowded with relics, which she collected during her
+journey to Italy last year.  She might, if she chose, establish a
+Catholic museum, and furnish it with a more curious collection, in its
+sort, than any of our other museums contain.  Of all the saints in our
+calendar, there is not one of any notoriety who has not supplied her with
+a finger, a toe, or some other part; or with a piece of a shirt, a
+handkerchief, a sandal, or a winding-sheet.  Even a bit of a pair of
+breeches, said to have belonged to Saint Mathurin, whom many think was a
+sans-cullotte, obtains her adoration on certain occasions.  As none of
+her children have yet arrived at the same height of faith as herself,
+she has, in her will, bequeathed to the Pope all her relics, together
+with eight hundred and seventy-nine Prayer-books, and four hundred and
+forty-six Bibles, either in manuscript or of different editions.  Her
+favourite breviary, used only on great solemnities, was presented to her
+by Cardinal Maury at Rome, and belonged, as it is said, formerly to Saint
+Francois, whose commentary, written with his own hand, fills the margins;
+though many, who with me adore him as a saint, doubt whether he could
+either read or write.
+
+Not long ago she made, as she thought, an exceedingly valuable
+acquisition.  A priest arrived direct from the Holy City of Jerusalem,
+well recommended by the inhabitants of the convents there, with whom he
+pretended to have passed his youth.  After prostrating himself before the
+Pope, he waited on Madame Letitia Bonaparte.  He told her that he had
+brought with him from Syria the famous relic, the shoulder-bone of Saint
+John the Baptist; but that, being in want of money for his voyage, he
+borrowed upon it from a Grecian Bishop in Montenegro two hundred louis
+d'or.  This sum, and one hundred louis d'or besides, was immediately
+given him; and within three months, for a large sum in addition to those
+advanced, this precious relic was in Madame Letitia's possession.
+
+Notwithstanding this lady's care not to engage in her service any person
+of either sex who cannot produce, not a certificate of civism from the
+municipality as was formerly the case, but a certificate of Christianity,
+and a billet of confession signed by the curate of the parish, she had
+often been robbed, and the robbers had made particularly free with those
+relics which were set in gold or in diamonds.  She accused her daughter,
+the Princesse Borghese, who often rallies the devotion of her mamma, and
+who is more an amateur of the living than of the dead, of having played
+her these tricks.  The Princess informed Napoleon of her mother's losses,
+as well as of her own innocence, and asked him to apply to the police to
+find out the thief, who no doubt was one of the pious rogues who almost
+devoured their mother.
+
+On the next day Napoleon invited Madame Letitia to dinner, and Fouche had
+orders to make a strict search, during her absence, among the persons
+composing her household.  Though he, on this occasion, did not find what
+he was looking for, he made a discovery which very much mortified Madame
+Letitia.
+
+Her first chambermaid, Rosina Gaglini, possessed both her esteem and
+confidence, and had been sent for purposely from Ajaccio, in Corsica, on
+account of her general renown for great piety, and a report that she was
+an exclusive favourite with the Virgin Mary, by whose interference she
+had even performed, it was said, some miracles; such as restoring stolen
+goods, runaway cattle, lost children, and procuring prizes in the
+lottery.  Rosina was as relic-mad as her mistress; and as she had no
+means to procure them otherwise, she determined to partake of her lady's
+by cutting off a small part of each relic of Madame Letitia's principal
+saints.  These precious 'morceaux' she placed in a box upon which she
+kneeled to say her prayers during the day; and which, for a
+mortification, served her as a pillow during the night.  Upon each of the
+sacred bits she had affixed a label with the name of the saint it
+belonged to, which occasioned the disclosure.  When Madame Letitia heard
+of this pious theft, she insisted on having the culprit immediately and
+severely punished; and though the Princesse Borghese, as the innocent
+cause of poor Rosina's misfortune, interfered, and Rosina herself
+promised never more to plunder saints, she was without mercy turned away,
+and even denied money sufficient to carry her back to Corsica.  Had she
+made free with Madame Letitia's plate or wardrobe, there is no doubt but
+that she had been forgiven; but to presume to share with her those sacred
+supports on her way to Paradise was a more unpardonable act with a
+devotee than to steal from a lover the portrait of an adored mistress.
+
+In the meantime the police were upon the alert to discover the person
+whom they suspected of having stolen the relics for the diamonds, and not
+the diamonds for the relics.  Among our fashionable and new saints,
+surprising as you may think it, Madame de Genlis holds a distinguished
+place; and she, too, is an amateur and collector of relics in proportion
+to her means; and with her were found those missed by Madame Letitia.
+Being asked to give up the name of him from whom she had purchased them,
+she mentioned Abbe Saladin, the pretended priest from Jerusalem.  He, in
+his turn, was questioned, and by his answers gave rise to suspicion that
+he himself was the thief.  The person of whom he pretended to have bought
+them was not to be found, nor was any one of such a description
+remembered to have been seen anywhere.  On being carried to prison, he
+claimed the protection of Madame Letitia, and produced a letter in which
+this lady had promised him a bishopric either in France or in Italy.
+When she was informed of his situation, she applied to her son Napoleon
+for his liberty, urging that a priest who from Jerusalem had brought with
+him to Europe such an extraordinary relic as the shoulder of Saint John,
+could not be culpable.
+
+Abbe Saladin had been examined by Real, who concluded, from the accent
+and perfection with which he spoke the French language, that he was some
+French adventurer who had imposed on the credulity and superstition of
+Madame Letitia; and, therefore, threatened him with the rack if he did
+not confess the truth.  He continued, however, in his story, and was
+going to be released upon an order from the Emperor, when a gendarme
+recognized him as a person who, eight years before, had, under the name
+of Lanoue, been condemned for theft and forgery to the galleys, whence he
+had made his escape.  Finding himself discovered, he avowed everything.
+He said he had served in Egypt, in the guides of Bonaparte, but deserted
+to the Turks and turned Mussulman, but afterwards returned to the bosom
+of the Church at Jerusalem.  There he persuaded the friars that he had
+been a priest, and obtained the certificates which introduced him to the
+Pope and to the Emperor's mother; from whom he had received twelve
+thousand livres for part of the jaw bone of a whale, which he had sold
+her for the shoulder-bone of a saint.  As the police believe the
+certificates he has produced to be also forged, he is detained in prison
+until an answer arrives from our Consul in Syria.
+
+Madame Letitia did not resign without tears the relic he had sold her;
+and there is reason to believe that many other pieces of her collections,
+worshipped by her as remains of saints, are equally genuine as this
+shoulder-bone of Saint John.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--That the population of this capital has, since the Revolution,
+decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be lamented.  This
+focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous, though the
+inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am well
+persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are
+committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of
+time in all other European capitals put together.  From not reading in
+our newspapers, as we do in yours, of the robberies, murders, and frauds
+discovered and punished, you may, perhaps, be inclined to suppose my
+assertion erroneous or exaggerated; but it is the policy of our present
+Government to labour as much as possible in the dark; that is to say, to
+prevent, where it can be done, all publicity of anything directly or
+indirectly tending to inculpate it of oppression, tyranny, or even
+negligence; and to conceal the immorality of the people so nearly
+connected with its own immoral power.  It is true that many vices and
+crimes here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the natural
+consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore, without
+attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed to the
+mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant lawsuit,
+uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never allowed to be
+mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission from the prefect
+of police, who very seldom grants it.
+
+Most of the enormities now deplored in this country are the consequence
+of moral and religious licentiousness, that have succeeded to political
+anarchy, or rather were produced by it, and survive it.  Add to this the
+numerous examples of the impunity of guilt, prosperity of infamy, misery
+of honesty, and sufferings of virtue, and you will not think it
+surprising that, notwithstanding half a million of spies, our roads and
+streets are covered with robbers and assassins, and our scaffolds with
+victims.
+
+The undeniable TRUTH that this city alone is watched by one hundred
+thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has reason
+to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality of the
+governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the latter
+good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if employed,
+wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of tyranny perish
+by its own pestilential breath.
+
+According to the official registers published by Manuel in 1792, the
+number of spies all over France during the reign of Louis XVI. was
+nineteen thousand three hundred (five thousand less than under Louis
+XV.); and of this number six thousand were distributed in Paris, and in a
+circle of four leagues around it, including Versailles.  You will
+undoubtedly ask me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what
+can be the cause of this disproportionate increase of distrust and
+depravity?  I will explain it as far as my abilities admit, according to
+the opinions of others compared with my own remarks.
+
+When factions usurped the supremacy of the Kings, vigilance augmented
+with insecurity; and almost everybody who was not an opposer, who refused
+being an accomplice, or feared to be a victim, was obliged to serve as an
+informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy.  The rapidity with which
+parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals as numerous
+as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I am sorry to
+say few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness and
+constancy were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who, to
+preserve their lives, did not renounce their principles and probity.
+
+Under the reign of Robespierre and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+every member of Government, of the clubs, of the tribunals, and of the
+communes, had his private spies; but no regular register was kept of
+their exact number.  Under the Directory a Police Minister was nominated,
+and a police office established.  According to the declaration of the
+Police Minister, Cochon, in 1797, the spies, who were then regularly
+paid, amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand; and of these, thirty
+thousand did duty in this capital.  How many there were in 1799, when
+Fouche, for the first time, was appointed a chief of the department of
+police, is not known, but suppose them doubled within two years; their
+increase since is nevertheless immense, considering that France has
+enjoyed upwards of four years' uninterrupted Continental peace, and has
+not been exposed to any internal convulsions during the same period.
+
+You may, perhaps, object that France is not rich enough to keep up as
+numerous an army of spies as of soldiers; because the expense of the
+former must be triple the amount of the latter.  Were all these spies,
+now called police agents, or agents of the secret police, paid regular
+salaries, your objection would stand, but most of them have no other
+reward than the protection of the police; being employed in gambling--
+houses, in coffee--houses, in taverns, at the theatres, in the public
+gardens, in the hotels, in lottery offices, at pawnbrokers', in brothels,
+and in bathing-houses, where the proprietors or masters of these
+establishments pay them.  They receive nothing from the police, but when
+they are enabled to make any great discoveries, those who have been
+robbed or defrauded, and to whom they have been serviceable, are, indeed,
+obliged to present them with some douceur, fixed by the police at the
+rate of the value recovered; but such occurrences are merely accidental.
+To these are to be added all individuals of either sex who by the law are
+obliged to obtain from the police licenses to exercise their trade, as
+pedlars, tinkers, masters of puppet-shows, wild beasts, etc.  These, on
+receiving their passes, inscribe themselves, and take the oaths as spies;
+and are forced to send in their regular reports of what they hear or see.
+Prostitutes, who, all over this country, are under the necessity of
+paying for regular licenses, are obliged also to give information, from
+time to time, to the nearest police commissary of what they observe or
+what they know respecting their visitors, neighbours, etc.  The number of
+unfortunate women of this description who had taken out licenses during
+the year 12, or from September, 1803, to September, 1804, is officially
+known to have amounted to two hundred and twenty thousand, of whom forty
+thousand were employed by the armies.
+
+It is no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte has his secret spies upon his
+wife, his brothers, his sisters, his Ministers, Senators, and other
+public functionaries, and also upon his public spies.  These are all
+under his own immediate control and that of Duroc, who does the duty of
+his private Police Minister, and in whom he confides more than even in
+the members of his own family.  In imitation of their master, each of the
+other Bonapartes, and each of the Ministers, have their individual spies,
+and are watched in their turn by the spies of their secretaries, clerks,
+etc.  This infamous custom of espionage goes ad infinitum, and appertains
+almost to the establishment and to the suite of each man in place, who
+does not think himself secure a moment if he remains in ignorance of the
+transactions of his rivals, as well as of those of his equals and
+superiors.
+
+Fouche and Talleyrand are reported to have disagreed before Bonaparte on
+some subject or other, which is frequently the case.  The former,
+offended at some doubts thrown out about his intelligence, said to the
+latter:
+
+"I am so well served that I can tell you the name of every man or woman
+you have conversed with, both yesterday and today; where you saw them,
+and how long you remained with them or they with you."
+
+"If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit," retorted Talleyrand,
+"I am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already
+passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter.  I can
+inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who provided
+these dinners, and who is expected to provide your meats to-morrow and
+the day after.  I can whisper you, in confidence, who slept with Madame
+Fouche last night, and who has an appointment with her to-night."
+
+Here Bonaparte interrupted them, in his usual dignified language: "Hold
+both your tongues; you are both great rogues, but I am at a loss to
+decide which is the greatest."
+
+Without uttering a single syllable, Talleyrand made a profound reverence
+to Fouche.  Bonaparte smiled, and advised them to live upon good terms if
+they were desirous of keeping their places.
+
+A man of the name of Ducroux, who, under Robespierre, had from a barber
+been made a general, and afterwards broken for his ignorance, was engaged
+by Bonaparte as a private spy upon Fouche, who employed him in the same
+capacity upon Bonaparte.  His reports were always written, and delivered
+in person into the hands both of the Emperor and of his Minister.  One
+morning he, by mistake, gave to Bonaparte the report of him instead of
+that intended for him.  Bonaparte began to read: "Yesterday, at nine
+o'clock, the Emperor acted the complete part of a madman; he swore,
+stamped, kicked, foamed, roared--", here poor Ducroux threw himself at
+Bonaparte's feet, and called for mercy for the terrible blunder he had
+committed.
+
+"For whom," asked Bonaparte, "did you intend this treasonable
+correspondence?  I suppose it is composed for some English or Russian
+agent, for Pitt or for Marcoff.  How long have you conspired with my
+enemies, and where are your accomplices?"
+
+"For God's sake, hear me, Sire," prayed Ducroux.  "Your Majesty's enemies
+have always been mine.  The report is for one of your best friends; but
+were I to mention his name, he will ruin me."
+
+"Speak out, or you die!" vociferated Bonaparte.
+
+"Well,'Sire, it is for Fouche--for nobody else but Fouche."
+
+Bonaparte then rang the bell for Duroc, whom he ordered to see Ducroux
+shut up in a dungeon, and afterwards to send for Fouche.  The Minister
+denied all knowledge of Ducroux, who, after undergoing several tortures,
+expiated his blunder upon the rack.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Pope, during his stay here, rose regularly every morning at
+five o'clock, and went to bed every night before ten.  The first hours of
+the day he passed in prayers, breakfasted after the Mass was over,
+transacted business till one, and dined at two.  Between three and four
+he took--his siesta, or nap; afterwards he attended the vespers, and when
+they were over he passed an hour with the Bonapartes, or admitted to his
+presence some members of the clergy.  The day was concluded, as it was
+begun, with some hours of devotion.
+
+Had Pius VII. possessed the character of a Pius VI., he would never have
+crossed the Alps; or had he been gifted with the spirit and talents of
+Sextus V. or Leo X., he would never have entered France to crown
+Bonaparte, without previously stipulating for himself that he should be
+put in possession of the sovereignty of Italy.  You can form no idea what
+great stress was laid on this act of His Holiness by the Bonaparte
+family, and what sacrifices were destined to be made had any serious and
+obstinate resistance been apprehended.  Threats were, indeed, employed
+personally against the Pope, and bribes distributed to the refractory
+members of the Sacred College; but it was no secret, either here or at
+Milan, that Cardinal Fesch had carte blanche with regard to the
+restoration of all provinces seized, since the war, from the Holy See, or
+full territorial indemnities in their place, at the expense of Naples and
+Tuscany; and, indeed, whatever the Roman pontiff has lost in Italy has
+been taken from him by Bonaparte alone, and the apparent generosity which
+policy and ambition required would, therefore, have merely been an act of
+justice.  Confiding foolishly in the honour and rectitude of Napoleon,
+without any other security than the assertion of Fesch, Pius VII., within
+a fortnight's stay in France, found the great difference between the
+promises held out to him when residing as a Sovereign at Rome, and their
+accomplishment when he had so far forgotten himself and his sacred
+dignity as to inhabit as a guest the castle of the Tuileries.
+
+Pius VII. mentioned, the day after his arrival at Fontainebleau,
+that it would be a gratification to his own subjects were he enabled to
+communicate to them the restoration of the former ecclesiastical domains,
+as a free gift of the Emperor of the French, at their first conference,
+as they would then be as well convinced of Napoleon's good faith as he
+was himself.  In answer, His Holiness was informed that the Emperor was
+unprepared to discuss political subjects, being totally occupied with the
+thoughts how to entertain worthily his high visitor, and to acknowledge
+becomingly the great honour done and the great happiness conferred on him
+by such a visit.  As soon as the ceremony of the coronation was over,
+everything, he hoped, would be arranged to the reciprocal satisfaction of
+both parties.
+
+About the middle of last December, Bonaparte was again asked to fix a
+day when the points of negotiation between him and the Pope could be
+discussed and settled.  Cardinal Caprara, who made this demand, was
+referred to Talleyrand, who denied having yet any instructions, though in
+daily expectation of them.  Thus the time went on until February, when
+Bonaparte informed the Pope of his determination to assume the crown of
+Italy, and of some new changes necessary, in consequence on the other
+side of the Alps.
+
+Either seduced by caresses, or blinded by his unaccountable partiality
+for Bonaparte, Pius VII., if left to himself, would not only have
+renounced all his former claims, but probably have made new sacrifices to
+this idol of his infatuation.  Fortunately, his counsellors were wiser
+and less deluded, otherwise the remaining patrimony of Saint Peter might
+now have constituted a part of Napoleon's inheritance, in Italy.  "Am I
+not, Holy Father!" exclaimed the Emperor frequently, "your son, the work
+of your hand?  And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it
+not be shared with you--or rather, do you not share it with me?  Anything
+that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power uncertain
+or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you.  With me you will
+shine or be obscured, rise or fall.  Could you, therefore, hesitate (were
+I to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure) to remove the
+Papal See to Avignon, where it formerly was and continued for centuries,
+and to enlarge the limits of my kingdom of Italy with the Ecclesiastical
+States?  Can you believe my throne at Milan safe as long as it is not the
+sole throne of Italy?  Do you expect to govern at Rome when I cease to
+reign at Milan?  No, Holy Father! the pontiff who placed the crown on my
+head, should it be shaken, will fall to rise no more."  If what Cardinal
+Caprara said can be depended upon, Bonaparte frequently used to
+intimidate or flatter the Pope in this manner.
+
+The representations of Cardinal Caprara changed Napoleon's first
+intention of being again crowned by the Pope as a King of Italy.  His
+crafty Eminence observed that, according to the Emperor's own
+declaration, it was not intended that the crowns of France and Italy
+should continue united.  But were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by
+the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the
+factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion
+of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps
+make even the crown of the French Empire unstable.  He did not deny that
+Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was
+performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the
+Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy.
+Might not circumstances turn out so favourably for Napoleon the First
+that he also might be inaugurated an Emperor of the Germans as well as of
+the French?  This last compliment, or prophecy, as Bonaparte's courtiers
+call it (what a prophet a Caprara!), had the desired effect, as it
+flattered equally Napoleon's ambition and vanity.  For fear, however, of
+Talleyrand and other anti-Catholic counsellors, who wanted him to
+consider the Pope merely as his first almoner, and to treat him as all
+other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as
+possible packing for Rome.  Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet,
+should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental
+Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can,
+without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second
+Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time
+death does not put a period to his encroachments and gigantic plans.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v2
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 3.
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereigns have, since the Revolution, displayed more
+grandeur of soul, and evinced more firmness of character, than the
+present King and Queen of Naples.  Encompassed by a revolutionary volcano
+more dangerous than the physical one, though disturbed at home and
+defeated abroad, they have neither been disgraced nor dishonoured.
+They have, indeed, with all other Italian Princes, suffered territorial
+and pecuniary losses; but these were not yielded through cowardice or
+treachery, but enforced by an absolute necessity, the consequence of the
+desertion or inefficacy of allies.
+
+But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were
+able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian
+philosophers.  Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved
+himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured
+him, and of the hatred with which he has been honoured by all
+revolutionists--the natural and irreconcilable enemies of all legitimate
+sovereignty.
+
+Chevalier Acton is the son of an Irish physician, who first was
+established at Besancon in France, and afterwards at Leghorn in Italy.
+He is indebted for his present elevation to his own merit and to the
+penetration of the Queen of Sardinia, who discovered in him, when young,
+those qualities which have since distinguished him as a faithful
+counsellor and an able Minister.  As loyal as wise, he was, from 1789, an
+enemy to the French Revolution.  He easily foresaw that the specious
+promise of regeneration held out by impostors or fools to delude the
+ignorant, the credulous and the weak, would end in that universal
+corruption and general overthrow which we since have witnessed, and the
+effects of which our grandchildren will mourn.
+
+When our Republic, in April, 1792, declared war against Austria, and
+when, in the September following, the dominions of His Sardinian Majesty
+were invaded by our troops, the neutrality of Naples continued, and was
+acknowledged by our Government.  On the 16th of December following, our
+fleet from Toulon, however, cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, and a
+grenadier of the name of Belleville was landed as an Ambassador of the
+French Republic, and threatened a bombardment in case the demands he
+presented in a note were not acceded to within twenty-four hours.  Being
+attacked in time of peace, and taken by surprise, the Court of Naples was
+unable to make any resistance, and Chevalier Acton informed our grenadier
+Ambassador that this note had been laid before his Sovereign, who had
+ordered him to sign an agreement in consequence.
+
+When in February, 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own
+safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with
+your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our
+Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to
+Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking
+Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of our emissary.
+
+Whenever our Government has, by the success of our arms, been enabled to
+dictate to Naples, the removal of Acton has been insisted upon; but
+though he has ceased to transact business ostensibly as a Minister, his
+influence has always, and deservedly, continued unimpaired, and he still
+enjoys the just confidence and esteem of his Prince.
+
+But is His Sicilian Majesty equally well represented at the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud as served in his own capital?  I have told you before that
+Bonaparte is extremely particular in his acceptance of foreign diplomatic
+agents, and admits none near his person whom he does not believe to be
+well inclined to him.
+
+Marquis de Gallo, the Ambassador of the King of the Two Sicilies to the
+Emperor of the French, is no novice in the diplomatic career.  His
+Sovereign has employed him for these fifteen years in the most delicate
+negotiations, and nominated him in May, 1795, a Minister of the Foreign
+Department, and a successor of Chevalier Acton, an honour which he
+declined.  In the summer and autumn, 1797, Marquis de Gallo assisted at
+the conferences at Udine, and signed, with the Austrian
+plenipotentiaries, the Peace of Campo Formio, on the 17th of October,
+1797.
+
+During 1798, 1799, and 1800 he resided as Neapolitan Ambassador at
+Vienna, and was again entrusted by his Sovereign with several important
+transactions with Austria and Russia.  After a peace had been agreed to
+between France and the Two Sicilies, in March, 1801, and the Court of
+Naples had every reason to fear, and of course to please, the Court of
+St. Cloud, he obtained his present appointment, and is one of the few
+foreign Ambassadors here who has escaped both Bonaparte's private
+admonitions in the diplomatic circle and public lectures in Madame
+Bonaparte's drawing-room.
+
+This escape is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government
+is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls
+it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and
+enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has
+resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity that demand
+our admiration.
+
+It is said that the Marquis de Gallo is not entirely free from some
+taints of modern philosophy, and that he, therefore, does not consider
+the consequences of our innovations so fatal as most loyal men judge
+them; nor thinks a sans-culotte Emperor more dangerous to civilized
+society than a sans-culotte sovereign people.
+
+It is evident from the names and rank of its partisans that the
+Revolution of Naples in 1799 was different in many respects from that of
+every other country in Europe; for, although the political convulsions
+seem to have originated among the middle classes of the community, the
+extremes of society were everywhere else made to act against each other;
+the rabble being the first to triumph, and the nobles to succumb.  But
+here, on the contrary, the lazzaroni, composed of the lowest portion of
+the population of a luxurious capital, appear to have been the most
+strenuous, and, indeed, almost the only supporters of royalty; while the
+great families, instead of being indignant at novelties which levelled
+them, in point of political rights, with the meanest subject, eagerly
+embraced the opportunity of altering that form of Government which alone
+made them great.  It is, however, but justice to say that, though Marquis
+de Gallo gained the good graces of Bonaparte and of France in 1797,
+he was never, directly or indirectly, inculpated in the revolutionary
+transactions of his countrymen in 1799, when he resided at Vienna;
+and indeed, after all, it is not improbable that he disguises his real
+sentiments the better to, serve his country, and by that means has
+imposed on Bonaparte and acquired his favour.
+
+The address and manners of a courtier are allowed Marquis de Gallo by
+all who know him, though few admit that he possesses any talents as a
+statesman.  He is said to have read a great deal, to possess a good
+memory and no bad judgment; but that, notwithstanding this, all his
+knowledge is superficial.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You have perhaps heard that Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his
+brothers and sisters, was last Christmas married by the Pope according to
+the Roman Catholic rite, being previously only united according to the
+municipal laws of the French Republic, which consider marriage only as a
+civil contract.  During the last two months of His Holiness's residence
+here, hardly a day passed that he was not petitioned to perform the same
+ceremony for our conscientious grand functionaries and courtiers, which
+he, however, according to the Emperor's desire, declined.  But his
+Cardinals were not under the same restrictions, and to an attentive
+observer who has watched the progress of the Revolution and not lost
+sight of its actors, nothing could appear more ridiculous, nothing could
+inspire more contempt of our versatility and inconsistency, than to
+remark among the foremost to demand the nuptial benediction,
+a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Real, an Augereau, a Chaptal, a Reubel, a
+Lasnes, a Bessieres, a Thuriot, a Treilhard, a Merlin, with a hundred
+other equally notorious revolutionists, who were, twelve or fifteen years
+ago, not only the first to declaim against religious ceremonies as
+ridiculous, but against religion itself as useless, whose motives
+produced, and whose votes sanctioned, those decrees of the legislature
+which proscribed the worship, together with its priests and sectaries.
+But then the fashion of barefaced infidelity was as much the order of the
+day as that of external sanctity is at present.  I leave to casuists the
+decision whether to the morals of the people, naked atheism, exposed with
+all its deformities, is more or less hurtful than concealed atheism,
+covered with the garb of piety; but for my part I think the noonday
+murderer less guilty and much less detestable than the midnight assassin
+who stabs in the dark.
+
+A hundred anecdotes are daily related of our new saints and fashionable
+devotees.  They would be laughable were they not scandalous, and
+contemptible did they not add duplicity to our other vices.
+
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass, and on every
+Sunday or holiday they regularly attend at vespers, when, of course, all
+those who wish to be distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their
+flattery never neglect to be present.  In the evening of last Christmas
+Day, the Imperial chapel was, as usual, early crowded in expectation of
+Their Majesties, when the chamberlain, Salmatoris, entered, and said to
+the captain of the guard, loud enough to be heard by the audience, "The
+Emperor and the Empress have just resolved not to come here to-night, His
+Majesty being engaged by some unexpected business, and the Empress not
+wishing to come without her consort."  In ten minutes the chapel was
+emptied of every person but the guards, the priests, and three old women
+who had nowhere else to pass an hour.  At the arrival of our Sovereigns,
+they were astonished at the unusual vacancy, and indignantly regarded
+each other.  After vespers were over, one of Bonaparte's spies informed
+him of the cause, when, instead of punishing the despicable and
+hypocritical courtiers, or showing them any signs of his displeasure,
+he ordered Salmatoris under arrest, who would have experienced a complete
+disgrace had not his friend Duroc interfered and made his peace.
+
+At another time, on a Sunday, Fouche entered the chapel in the midst of
+the service, and whispered to Bonaparte, who immediately beckoned to his
+lord-in-waiting and to Duroc.  These both left the Imperial chapel, and
+returning in a few minutes at the head of five grenadiers, entered the
+grand gallery, generally frequented by the most scrupulous devotees, and
+seized every book.  The cause of this domiciliary visit was an anonymous
+communication received by the Minister of Police, stating that libels
+against the Imperial family, bound in the form of Prayer-books, had been
+placed there.  No such libels were, however, found; but of one hundred
+and sixty pretended breviaries, twenty-eight were volumes of novels,
+sixteen were poems, and eleven were indecent books.  It is not necessary
+to add that the proprietors of these edifying works never reclaimed them.
+The opinions are divided here, whether this curious discovery originated
+in the malice of Fouche, or whether Talleyrand took this method of duping
+his rival, and at the same time of gratifying his own malignity.  Certain
+it is that Fouche was severely reprimanded for the transaction, and that
+Bonaparte was highly offended at the disclosure.
+
+The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously
+devout, nor so basely perverse.  They go to church as to the play, to
+gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to
+admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their
+attendance.  Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of
+religious duties.  Our revolutionary charlatans have as much brutalized
+their understanding as corrupted their hearts.  They heard the Grand Mass
+said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly heard
+Robespierre proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and they
+looked at the Imperial processions with the same insensibility as they
+once saw the daily caravans of victims passing for execution.
+
+Even in Bonaparte's own guard, and among the officers of his household
+troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go to
+any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now,
+after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the Mass
+as to a parade or to a review.  With any other people, Bonaparte would
+not so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and forced
+military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day were
+encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.
+
+On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes
+d'Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the
+sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell
+into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy.  After being a
+little recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would
+injure him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause
+of his accident and terror: "Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d
+of September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from
+which I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the
+sacrament from my hands."  When this occurrence was reported to
+Bonaparte, Ledoux was dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported,
+and the Grand Vicar Clauset sent to the Temple, for the scandal their
+indiscretion had caused.  This act was certainly as unjust towards him
+who was bayoneted at the altar, as towards those who served the altar
+under the protection of the bayonets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your
+country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could
+nowhere justly excite surprise.  We had crossed the Rhine seven months
+before to seize the Duc d'Enghien; and when any prey invited, the passing
+of the Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former outrage, of
+audacity on our part, and of endurance or indifference on the part of
+other Continental States.  Talleyrand's note at Aix-la-Chapelle had also
+informed Europe that we had adopted a new and military diplomacy, and,
+in confounding power with right, would respect no privileges at variance
+with our ambition, interest or, suspicions, nor any independence it was
+thought useful or convenient for us to invade.
+
+It was reported here, at the time, that Bonaparte was much offended with
+General Frere, who commanded this political expedition, for permitting
+Sir George's servant to accompany his master, as Fouche and Real had
+already tortures prepared and racks waiting, and after forcing your agent
+to speak out, would have announced his sudden death, either by his own
+hands or by a coup-de-sang, before any Prussian note could require his
+release.  The known morality of our Government must have removed all
+doubts of the veracity of this assertion; a man might, besides, from the
+fatigues of a long journey, or from other causes, expire suddenly; but
+the exit of two, in the same circumstances, would have been thought at
+least extraordinary, even by our friends, and suspicious by our enemies.
+
+The official declaration of Rheinhard (our Minister to the Circle of
+Lower Saxony) to the Senate at Hamburg, in which he disavowed all
+knowledge on the subject of the capture of Sir George Rumbold, occasioned
+his disgrace.  This man, a subject of the Elector of Wurtemberg by birth,
+is one of the negative accomplices of the criminals of France who, since
+the Revolution, have desolated Europe.  He began in 1792 his diplomatic
+career, under Chauvelin and Talleyrand, in London, and has since been the
+tool of every faction in power.  In 1796 he was appointed a Minister to
+the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he was hailed as the point of
+rally to all the philosophers, philanthropists, Illuminati and other
+revolutionary amateurs, with which the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark,
+and Sweden then abounded.
+
+A citizen of Hamburg--or rather, of the world--of the name of Seveking,
+bestowed on him the hand of a sister; and though he is not accused of
+avarice, some of the contributions extorted by our Government from the
+neutral Hanse Towns are said to have been left behind in his coffers
+instead of being forwarded to this capital.  Either on this account, or
+for some other reason, he was recalled from Hamburg in January, 1797, and
+remained unemployed until the latter part of 1798, when he was sent as
+Minister to Tuscany.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, Talleyrand was forced by the Jacobins to
+resign his place as a Minister of the Foreign Department, he had the
+adroitness to procure Rheinhard to be nominated his successor, so that,
+though no longer nominally the Minister, he still continued to influence
+the decisions of our Government as much as if still in office, because,
+though not without parts, Rheinhard has neither energy of character nor
+consistency of conduct.  He is so much accustomed, and wants so much to
+be governed, that in 1796, at Hamburg, even the then emigrants, Madame de
+Genlis and General Valence, directed him, when he was not ruled or
+dictated to by his wife or brother-in-law.
+
+In 1800 Bonaparte sent him as a representative to the Helvetian Republic,
+and in 1802, again to Hamburg, where he was last winter superseded by
+Bourrienne, and ordered to an inferior station at the: Electoral Court at
+Dresden.  Rheinhard will never become one of those daring diplomatic
+banditti whom revolutionary Governments always employ in preference.  He
+has some moral principles, and, though not religious, is rather
+scrupulous.  He would certainly sooner resign than undertake to remove by
+poison, or by the steel of a bravo, a rival of his own or a person
+obnoxious to his employers.  He would never, indeed, betray the secrets
+of his Government if he understood they intended to rob a despatch or to
+atop a messenger; but no allurements whatever would induce him to head
+the parties perpetrating these acts of our modern diplomacy.
+
+Our present Minister at Hamburg (Bourrienne) is far from being so nice.
+A revolutionist from the beginning of the Revolution, he shared, with the
+partisans of La Fayette, imprisonment under Robespierre, and escaped
+death only by emigration.  Recalled afterwards by his friend, the late
+Director (Barras), he acted as a kind of secretary to him until 1796,
+when Bonaparte demanded him, having known him at the military college.
+During all Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he was his
+sole and confidential secretary--a situation which he lost in 1802, when
+Talleyrand denounced his corruption and cupidity because he had rivalled
+him in speculating in the funds and profiting by the information which
+his place afforded him.  He was then made a Counsellor of State, but in
+1803 he was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of one of our principal
+houses to the amount of a million of livres--and, from his correspondence
+with it, some reasons appeared for the suspicion that he frequently had
+committed a breach of confidence against his master, who, after erasing
+his name from among the Counsellors of State, had him conveyed a prisoner
+to the Temple, where he remained six months.  A small volume, called Le
+Livre Rouge of the Consular Court, made its appearance about that time,
+and contained some articles which gave Bonaparte reason to suppose that
+Bourrienne was its author.  On being questioned by the Grand Judge
+Regnier and the Minister Fouce, before whom he was carried, he avowed
+that he had written it, but denied that he had any intention of making it
+public.  As to its having found its way to the press during his
+confinement, that could only be ascribed to the ill-will or treachery of
+those police agents who inspected his papers and put their seals upon
+them.  "Tell Bonaparte," said he, "that, had I been inclined to injure
+him in the public opinion, I should not have stooped to such trifles as
+Le Livre Rouge, while I have deposited with a friend his original orders,
+letters, and other curious documents as materials for an edifying history
+of our military hospitals during the campaigns of Italy and Syria all
+authentic testimonies of his humanity for the wounded and dying French
+soldiers."
+
+After the answers of this interrogatory had been laid before Bonaparte,
+his brother Joseph was sent to the Temple to negotiate with Bourrienne,
+who was offered his liberty and a prefecture if he would give up all the
+original papers that, as a private secretary, he had had opportunity to
+collect.
+
+"These papers," answered Bourrienne, "are my only security against your
+brother's wrath and his assassins.  Were I weak enough to deliver them up
+to-day, to-morrow, probably, I should no longer be counted among the
+living; but I have now taken my measures so effectually that, were I
+murdered to-day, these originals would be printed to-morrow.  If Napoleon
+does not confide in my word of honour, he may trust to an assurance of
+discretion, with which my own interest is nearly connected.  If he
+suspects me of having wronged him, he is convinced also of the eminent
+services I have rendered him, sufficient surely to outweigh his present
+suspicion.  Let him again employ me in any post worthy of him and of me,
+and he shall soon see how much I will endeavour to regain his
+confidence."
+
+Shortly afterwards Bourrienne was released, and a pension, equal to the
+salary of a Counsellor of State; was granted him until some suitable
+place became vacant.  On Champagny's being appointed a Minister of the
+Home Department, the embassy at Vienna was demanded by Bourrienne, but
+refused, as previously promised to La Rochefoucauld, our late Minister at
+Dresden.  When Rheinhard, in a kind of disgrace, was transferred to that
+relatively insignificant post, Bourrienne was ordered, with extensive
+instructions, to Hamburg.  The Senate soon found the difference between a
+timid and honest Minister, and an unprincipled and crafty intriguer.  New
+loans were immediately required from Hanover; but hardly were these
+acquitted, than fresh extortions were insisted on.  In some secret
+conferences Bourrienne is, however, said to have hinted that some
+douceurs were expected for alleviating the rigour of his instructions.
+This hint has, no doubt, been taken, because he suddenly altered his
+conduct, and instead of hunting the purses of the Germans, pursued the
+persons of his emigrated countrymen; and, in a memorial, demanded the
+expulsion of all Frenchmen who were not registered and protected by him,
+under pretence that every one of them who declined the honour of being a
+subject of Bonaparte, must be a traitor against the French Government and
+his country.
+
+Bourrienne is now stated to have connected himself with several stock-
+jobbers, both in Germany, Holland, and England; and already to have
+pocketed considerable sums by such connections.  It is, however, not to
+be forgotten that several houses have been ruined in this capital by the
+profits allowed him, who always refused to share their losses, but,
+whatever were the consequences, enforced to its full amount the payment
+of that value which he chose to set on his communications.
+
+A place in France would, no doubt, have been preferable to Bourrienne,
+particularly one near the person of Bonaparte.  But if nothing else
+prevented the accomplishment of his wishes, his long familiarity with all
+the Bonapartes, whom he always treated as equals, and even now (with the
+exception of Napoleon) does not think his superiors, will long remain an
+insurmountable barrier.
+
+I cannot comprehend how Bonaparte (who is certainly no bad judge of men)
+could so long confide in Bourrienne, who, with the usual presumption of
+my countrymen, is continually boasting, to a degree that borders on
+indiscretion, and, by an artful questioner, may easily be lead to
+overstep those bounds.  Most of the particulars of his quarrel with
+Napoleon I heard him relate himself, as a proof of his great consequence,
+in a company of forty individuals, many of whom were unknown to him.
+On the first discovery which Bonaparte made of Bourrienne's infidelity,
+Talleyrand complimented him upon not having suffered from it.  "Do you
+not see," answered Bonaparte, "that it is also one of the extraordinary
+gifts of my extraordinary good fortune?
+
+"Even traitors are unable to betray me.  Plots respect me as much as
+bullets."  I need not tell you that Fortune is the sole divinity
+sincerely worshipped by Napoleon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Joseph Bonaparte leads a much more retired life, and sees less
+company, than any of his brothers or sisters.  Except the members of his
+own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph those
+regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame Louis
+Bonaparte have.  His hospitality is, however, greater at his countryseat
+Morfontaine than at his hotel here.  Those whom he likes, or does not
+mistrust (who, by the bye, are very few), may visit him without much
+formality in the country, and prolong their stay, according to their own
+inclination or discretion; but they must come without their servants, or
+send them away on their arrival.
+
+As soon as an agreeable visitor presents himself, it is the etiquette of
+the house to consider him as an inmate; but to allow him at the same time
+a perfect liberty to dispose of his hours and his person as suits his
+convenience or caprice.  In this extensive and superb mansion a suite of
+apartments is assigned him, with a valet-de--chambre, a lackey,
+a coachman, a groom, and a jockey, all under his own exclusive command.
+He has allotted him a chariot, a gig, and riding horses, if he prefers
+such an exercise.  A catalogue is given him of the library of the
+chateau; and every morning he is informed what persons compose the
+company at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and of the hours of these
+different repasts.  A bill of fare is at the same time presented to him,
+and he is asked to point out those dishes to which he gives the
+preference, and to declare whether he chooses to join the company or to
+be served in his own rooms.
+
+During the summer season, players from the different theatres of Paris
+are paid to perform three times in the week; and each guest, according to
+the period of his arrival, is asked, in his turn, to command either a
+comedy or a tragedy, a farce or a ballet.  Twice in the week concerts are
+executed by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the
+week invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or
+accepted from them.
+
+Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge
+et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games
+of hazard.  The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who
+advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the loss.
+Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from night
+till morning, without interruption, as no one interferes.  Should Joseph
+hear that any person has been too severely treated by Fortune, or
+suspects that he has not much cash remaining, some rouleaux of napoleons
+d'or are placed on the table of his dressing-room, which he may use or
+leave untouched, as he judges proper.
+
+The hours of Joseph Bonaparte are neither so late as yours in England,
+nor so early as they were formerly in France.  Breakfast is ready served
+at ten o'clock, dinner at four, and supper at nine.  Before midnight he
+retires to bed with his family, but visitors do as they like and follow
+their own usual hours, and their servants are obliged to wait for them.
+
+When any business calls Joseph away, either to preside in the Senate
+here, or to travel in the provinces, he notifies the visitors, telling
+them at the same time not to displace themselves on account of his
+absence, but wait till his return, as they would not observe any
+difference in the economy of his house, of which Madame Joseph always
+does the honours, or, in her absence, some lady appointed by her.
+
+Last year, when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly
+four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant.  On his
+return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of
+Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the
+bottle.  Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors
+and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and burgundy
+so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not heartily
+intoxicated.  But the best of the story is that he employed his mornings
+in composing a poem holding out to abhorrence the disgusting vice of
+drunkenness, and presented it to Joseph, requesting permission to
+dedicate it to him when published.  To those who have read it,
+or only seen extracts from it, the compilation appears far from being
+contemptible, but Joseph still keeps the copy, though he has made the
+author a present of one hundred napoleons d'or, and procured him a place
+of an amanuensis in the chancellory of the Senate, having resolved never
+to accept any dedication, but wishing also not to hurt the feelings of
+the author by a refusal.
+
+In a chateau where so many visitors of licentious and depraved morals
+meet, of both sexes, and where such an unlimited liberty reigns,
+intrigues must occur, and have of course not seldom furnished materials
+for the scandalous chronicle.  Even Madame Joseph herself has either been
+gallant or calumniated.  Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of
+Eugene de Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively
+indebted to the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even
+fought a duel concerning the right of paternity.  Eugene de Beauharnais
+never was a great favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved manners
+and prudence form too great a contrast to his noisy and blundering way to
+accord with each other.  Before he set out for Italy, it was well known
+in our fashionable circles that he had been interdicted the house of his
+uncle, and that no reconciliation took place, notwithstanding the
+endeavours of Madame Napoleon.  To humble him still more, Joseph even
+nominated la Fond-Blaniac an equerry to his wife, who, therefore, easily
+consoled herself for the departure of her dear nephew.
+
+The husband of Madame Miot (one of Madame Joseph's ladies-in-waiting) was
+not so patient, nor such a philosopher as Joseph Bonaparte.  Some
+charitable person having reported in the company of a 'bonne amie' of
+Miot, that his wife did not pass her nights in solitude, but that she
+sought consolation among the many gallants and disengaged visitors at
+Morfontaine, he determined to surprise her.  It was past eleven o'clock
+at night when his arrival was announced to Joseph, who had just retired
+to his closet.  Madame Miot had been in bed ever since nine, ill of a
+migraine, and her husband was too affectionate not to be the first to
+inform her of his presence, without permitting anybody previously to
+disturb her.  With great reluctance, Madame Miot's maid delivered the key
+of her rooms, while she accompanied him with a light.  In the antechamber
+he found a hat and a greatcoat, and in the closet adjoining the bedroom,
+a coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of breeches, with drawers, stockings, and
+slippers.  Though the maid kept coughing all the time, Madame Miot and
+her gallant did not awake from their slumber, till the enraged husband
+began to use the bludgeon of the lover, which had also been left in the
+closet.  A battle then ensued, in which the lover retaliated so
+vigorously, that the husband called out "Murder! murder!"  with all his
+might.  The chateau was instantly in an uproar, and the apartments
+crowded with half-dressed and half-naked lovers.  Joseph Bonaparte alone
+was able to separate the combatants; and inquiring the cause of the riot,
+assured them that he would suffer no scandal and no intrigues in his
+house, without seriously resenting it.  An explanation being made, Madame
+Miot was looked for but in vain; and the maid declared that, being warned
+by a letter from Paris of her husband's jealousy and determination to
+surprise her, her mistress had reposed herself in her room; while, to
+punish the ungenerous suspicions of her husband, she had persuaded
+Captain d' Horteuil to occupy her place in her own bed.  The maid had no
+sooner finished her deposition, than her mistress made her appearance and
+upbraided her husband severely, in which she was cordially joined by the
+spectators.  She inquired if, on seeing the dress of a gentleman, he had
+also discovered the attire of a female; and she appealed to Captain d'
+Horteuil whether he had not the two preceding nights also slept in her
+bed.  To this he, of course, assented; adding that, had M. Miot attacked
+him the first night, he would not then perhaps have been so roughly
+handled as now; for then he was prepared for a visit, which this night
+was rather unexpected.  This connubial farce ended by Miot begging pardon
+of his wife and her gallant; the former of whom, after much entreaty by
+Joseph, at last consented to share with him her bed.  But being
+disfigured with two black eyes and suffering from several bruises, and
+also ashamed of his unfashionable behaviour, he continued invisible for
+ten days afterwards, and returned to this city as he had left it, by
+stealth.
+
+This Niot was a spy under Robespierre, and is a Counsellor of State under
+Bonaparte.  Without bread, as well as without a home, he was, from the
+beginning of the Revolution, one of the most ardent patriots, and the
+first republican Minister in Tuscany.  After the Sovereign of that
+country had, in 1793, joined the League, Miot returned to France, and
+was, for his want of address to negotiate as a Minister, shut up to
+perform the part of a spy in the Luxembourg,  then transformed into a
+prison for suspected persons.  Thanks to his patriotism, upwards of two
+hundred individuals of both sexes were denounced, transferred to the
+Conciergerie prison, and afterwards guillotined.  After that, until 1799,
+he continued so despised that no faction would accept him for an
+accomplice; but in the November of that year, after Bonaparte had
+declared himself a First Consul, Miot was appointed a tribune, an office
+from which he was advanced, in 1802, to be a Counsellor of State.
+As Miot squanders away his salary with harlots and in gambling-houses,
+and is pursued by creditors he neither will nor can pay, it was merely
+from charity that his wife was received among the other ladies of Madame
+Joseph Bonaparte's household.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Notwithstanding the ties of consanguinity, honour, duty,
+interest, and gratitude, which bound the Spanish Bourbons to the cause of
+the Bourbons of France, no monarch has rendered more service to the cause
+of rebellion, and done more harm to the cause of royalty, than the King
+of Spain.
+
+But here, again, you must understand me.  When I speak of Princes whose
+talents are known not to be brilliant, whose intellects are known to be
+feeble, and whose good intentions are rendered null by a want of firmness
+of character or consistency of conduct; while I deplore their weakness
+and the consequent misfortunes of their contemporaries, I lay all the
+blame on their wicked or ignorant counsellors; because, if no Ministers
+were fools or traitors, no Sovereigns would tremble on their thrones, and
+no subjects dare to shake their foundation.  Had Providence blessed
+Charles IV. of Spain with the judgment in selecting his Ministers, and
+the constancy of persevering in his choice, possessed by your George
+III.; had the helm of Spain been in the firm and able hands of a
+Grenville, a Windham, and a Pitt, the Cabinet of Madrid would never have
+been oppressed by the yoke of the Cabinet of St. Cloud, nor paid a heavy
+tribute for its bondage, degrading as well as ruinous.
+
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand to his cousin, Prince de
+Chalais, who reproached him for an unbecoming servility to low and vile
+personages.; "and I prefer bowing to them to being trampled upon and
+crushed by them."  Indeed, as far as I remember, nowhere in history are
+hitherto recorded so many low persons who, from obscurity and meanness,
+have suddenly and at once attained rank and notoriety.  Where do we read
+of such a numerous crew of upstart Emperors, Kings, grand pensionaries,
+directors, Imperial Highnesses, Princes, Field-marshals, generals,
+Senators, Ministers, governors, Cardinals, etc., as we now witness
+figuring upon the theatre of Europe, and who chiefly decide on the
+destiny of nations?  Among these, several are certainly to be found whose
+superior parts have made them worthy to pierce the crowd and to shake off
+their native mud; but others again, and by far the greatest number of
+these 'novi homines', owe their present elevation to shameless intrigues
+or atrocious crimes.
+
+The Prime Minister--or rather, the viceroy of Spain, the Prince of Peace
+--belongs to the latter class.  From a man in the ranks of the guards he
+was promoted to a general-in-chief, and from a harp player in
+antechambers to a president of the councils of a Prince; and that within
+the short period of six years.  Such a fortune is not common; but to be
+absolutely without capacity as well as virtue, genius as well as good
+breeding, and, nevertheless, to continue in an elevation so little
+merited, and in a place formerly so subject to changes and so unstable,
+is a fortune that no upstart ever before experienced in Spain.
+
+An intrigue of his elder brother with the present Queen, then Princess of
+Asturia, which was discovered by the King, introduced him first at Court
+as a harp player, and, when his brother was exiled, he was entrusted with
+the correspondence of the Princess with her gallant.  After she had
+ascended the throne, he thought it more profitable to be the lover than
+the messenger, and contrived, therefore, to supplant his brother in the
+royal favour.  Promotions and riches were consequently heaped upon him,
+and, what is surprising, the more undisguised the partiality of the Queen
+was, the greater the attachment of the King displayed itself; and it has
+ever since been an emulation between the royal couple who should the most
+forget and vilify birth and supremacy by associating this man not only in
+the courtly pleasures, but in the functions of Sovereignty.  Had he been
+gifted with sound understanding, or possessed any share of delicacy,
+generosity, or discretion, he would, while he profited by their imprudent
+condescension, have prevented them from exposing their weaknesses and
+frailties to a discussion and ridicule among courtiers, and from becoming
+objects of humiliation and scandal among the people.  He would have
+warned them of the danger which at all times attends the publicity of
+foibles and vices of Princes, but particularly in the present times of
+trouble and innovations.  He would have told them: "Make me great and
+wealthy, but not at the expense of your own grandeur or of the loyalty of
+your people.  Do not treat an humble subject as an equal, nor suffer Your
+Majesties, whom Providence destined to govern a high-spirited nation, to
+be openly ruled by one born to obey.  I am too dutiful not to lay aside
+my private vanity when the happiness of my King and the tranquillity of
+my fellow subjects are at stake.  I am already too high.  In descending a
+little, I shall not only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in
+the opinion of posterity.  Every step I am advancing undermines your
+throne.  In retreating a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never
+injure it."  But I beg your pardon for this digression, and for putting
+the language of dignified reason into the mouth of a man as corrupt as he
+is imbecile.
+
+Do not suppose, because the Prince of Peace is no friend of my nation,
+that I am his enemy.  No!  Had he shown himself a true patriot, a friend
+of his own country, and of his too liberal Prince, or even of monarchy in
+general, or of anybody else but himself--although I might have
+disapproved of his policy, if he has any--I would never have lashed the
+individual for the acts of the Minister.  But you must have observed,
+with me, that never before his administration was the Cabinet of Madrid
+worse conducted at home or more despised abroad; the Spanish Monarch more
+humbled or Spanish subjects more wretched; the Spanish power more
+dishonoured or the Spanish resources worse employed.  Never, before the
+treaty with France of 1796, concluded by this wiseacre (which made him a
+Prince of Peace, and our Government the Sovereign of Spain), was the
+Spanish monarchy reduced to such a lamentable dilemma as to be forced
+into an expensive war without a cause, and into a disgraceful peace, not
+only unprofitable, but absolutely disadvantageous.  Never before were its
+treasures distributed among its oppressors to support their tyranny, nor
+its military and naval forces employed to fight the battles of rebellion.
+The loyal subjects of Spain have only one hope left.  The delicate state
+of his present Majesty's health does not promise a much longer
+continuance of his reign, and the Prince of Asturia is too well informed
+to endure the guidance of the most ignorant Minister that ever was
+admitted into the Cabinet and confidence of a Sovereign.  It is more than
+probable that under a new reign the misfortunes of the Prince of Peace
+will inspire as much compassion as his rapid advancement has excited
+astonishment and indignation.
+
+A Cabinet thus badly directed cannot be expected to have representatives
+abroad either of abilities or patriotism.  The Admiral and General
+Gravina, who but lately left this capital as an Ambassador from the Court
+of Spain to assume the command of a Spanish fleet, is more valiant than
+wise, and more an enemy of your country than a friend of his own.  He is
+a profound admirer of Bonaparte's virtues and successes, and was, during
+his residence, one of the most ostentatiously awkward courtiers of
+Napoleon the First.  It is said that he has the modesty and loyalty to
+wish to become a Spanish Bonaparte, and that he promises to restore by
+his genius and exploits the lost lustre of the Spanish monarchy.  When
+this was reported to Talleyrand, he smiled with contempt; but when it was
+told to Bonaparte, he stamped with rage at the impudence of the Spaniard
+in daring to associate his name of acquired and established greatness
+with his own impertinent schemes of absurdities and impossibilities.
+
+In the summer of 1793, Gravina commanded a division of the Spanish fleet
+in the Mediterranean, of which Admiral Langara was the commander-in-
+chief.  At the capitulation of Toulon, after the combined English and
+Spanish forces had taken possession of it, when Rear-Admiral Goodall was
+declared governor, Gravina was made the commandant of the troops.  At the
+head of these he often fought bravely in different sorties, and on the
+1st of October was wounded at the re-capture of Fort Pharon.  He
+complains still of having suffered insults or neglect from the English,
+and even of having been exposed unnecessarily to the fire and sword of
+the enemy merely because he was a patriot as well as an envied or
+suspected ally.  His inveteracy against your country takes its date, no
+doubt, from the siege of Toulon, or perhaps, from its evacuation.
+
+When, in May, 1794, our troops were advancing towards Collioure, he was
+sent with a squadron to bring it succours, but he arrived too late, and
+could not save that important place.  He was not more successful at the
+beginning of the campaign of 1795 at Rosa, where he had only time to
+carry away the artillery before the enemy entered.  In August, that year,
+during the absence of Admiral Massaredo, he assumed ad interim the
+command of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean; but in the December
+following he was disgraced, arrested, and shut up as a State prisoner.
+
+During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the
+autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and
+after the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St.
+Cloud, Chevalier d' Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was
+nominated both his successor and a representative of the King of Etruria.
+Among the members of our diplomatic corps, he was considered somewhat of
+a Spanish gasconader and a bully.  He more frequently boasted of his
+wounds and battles than of his negotiations or conferences, though he
+pretended, indeed, to shine as much in the Cabinet as in the field.
+
+In his suite were two Spanish women, one about forty, and the other about
+twenty years of age.  Nobody knew what to make of them, as they were
+treated neither as wives, mistresses, nor servants; and they avowed
+themselves to be no relations.  After a residence here of some weeks, he
+was, by superior orders, waylaid one night at the opera, by a young and
+beautiful dancing girl of the name of Barrois, who engaged him to take
+her into keeping.  He hesitated, indeed, for some time; at last, however,
+love got the better of his scruples, and he furnished for her an elegant
+apartment on the new Boulevard.  On the day he carried her there, he was
+accompanied by the chaplain of the Spanish Legation; and told her that,
+previous to any further intimacy, she must be married to him, as his
+religious principles did not permit him to cohabit with a woman who was
+not his wife.  At the same time he laid before her an agreement to sign,
+by which she bound herself never to claim him as a husband before her
+turn--that is to say, until sixteen other women, to whom he had been
+previously married, were dead.  She made no opposition, either to the
+marriage or to the conditions annexed to it.  This girl had a sweetheart
+of the name of Valere, an actor at one of the little theatres on the
+Boulevards, to whom she communicated her adventure.  He advised her to be
+scrupulous in her turn, and to ask a copy of the agreement.  After some
+difficulty this was obtained.  In it no mention was made of her
+maintenance, nor in what manner her children were to be regarded, should
+she have any.  Valere had, therefore, another agreement drawn up, in
+which all these points were arranged, according to his own interested
+views.  Gravina refused to subscribe to what he plainly perceived were
+only extortions; and the girl, in her turn, not only declined any further
+connection with him, but threatened to publish the act of polygamy.
+Before they had done discussing this subject, the door was suddenly
+opened and the two Spanish ladies presented themselves.  After severely
+upbraiding Gravina, who was struck mute by surprise, they announced to
+the girl that whatever promise or contract of marriage she had obtained
+from him was of no value, as, before they came with him to France, he had
+bound himself, before a public notary at Madrid, not to form any more
+connections, nor to marry any other woman, without their written consent.
+One of these ladies declared that she had been married to Gravina twenty-
+two years, and was his oldest wife but one; the other said that she had
+been married to him six years.  They insisted upon his following them,
+which he did, after putting a purse of gold into Barrois's hand.
+
+When Valere heard from his mistress this occurrence, he advised her to
+make the most money she could of the Spaniard's curious scruples.  A
+letter was, therefore, written to him, demanding one hundred thousand
+livres--as the price of secrecy and withholding the particulars of this
+business from the knowledge of the tribunals and the police; and an
+answer was required within twenty-four hours.  The same night Gravina
+offered one thousand Louis, which were accepted, and the papers returned;
+but the next day Valere went to his hotel, Rue de Provence, where he
+presented himself as a brother of Barrois.  He stated that he still
+possessed authenticated copies of the papers returned, and that he must
+have either the full sum first asked by his sister, or an annuity of
+twelve thousand livres settled upon her.  Instead of an answer, Gravina
+ordered him to be turned out of the house.  An attorney then waited on
+His Excellency, on the part of the brother and the sister, and repeated
+their threats and their demands, adding that he would write a memorial
+both to the Emperor of the French and to the King of Spain, were justice
+refused to his principals any longer.
+
+Gravina was well aware that this affair, though more laughable than
+criminal, would hurt both his character and credit if it were known in
+France; he therefore consented to pay seventy-six thousand livres more,
+upon a formal renunciation by the party of all future claims.  Not having
+money sufficient by him, he went to borrow it from a banker, whose clerk
+was one of Talleyrand's secret agents.  Our Minister, therefore, ordered
+every step of Gravina to be watched; but he soon discovered that, instead
+of wanting this money for a political intrigue, it was necessary to
+extricate him out of an amorous scrape.  Hearing, however, in what a
+scandalous manner the Ambassador had been duped and imposed upon,
+he reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche orders to have Valere,
+Barrois, and the attorney immediately transported to Cayenne, and to
+restore Gravina his money.  The former part of this order the Minister of
+Police executed the more willingly, as it was according to his plan that
+Barrois had pitched upon Gravina for a lover.  She had been intended by
+him as a spy on His Excellency, but had deceived him by her reports--a
+crime for which transportation was a usual punishment.
+
+Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this
+affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our
+fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists.  But these
+artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to
+chastise genius than to silence tongues.  The declaration of war by Spain
+against your country was a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit with
+honour a Court where he was an object of ridicule, to assume the command
+of a fleet which might one day make him an object of terror.  When he
+took leave of Bonaparte, he was told to return to France victorious,
+or never to return any more; and Talleyrand warned him as a friend,
+"whenever he returned to his post in France to leave his marriage mania
+behind him in Spain.  Here," said he, "you may, without ridicule,
+intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a great risk by marrying even
+one."
+
+I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say, so
+far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious.  But
+infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--It cannot have escaped the observation of the most superficial
+traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of morals is not
+atoned for by good breeding or good manners.  The hideousness of vice,
+the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of favour, and
+the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil, that gloss of
+virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity of corruption and
+the scandal of depravity.  Duplicity and hypocrisy are here very common
+indeed, more so than dissimulation anywhere else; but barefaced knaves
+and impostors must always make indifferent courtiers.  Here the Minister
+tells you, I must have such a sum for a place; and the chamberlain tells
+you, Count down so much for my protection.  The Princess requires a
+necklace of such a value for interesting herself for your advancement;
+and the lady-in-waiting demands a diamond of such worth on the day of
+your promotion.  This tariff of favours and of infamy descends
+'ad infinitum'.  The secretary for signing, and the clerk for writing
+your commission; the cashier for delivering it, and the messenger for
+informing you of it, have all their fixed prices.  Have you a lawsuit,
+the judge announces to you that so much has been offered by your
+opponent, and so much is expected from you, if you desire to win your
+cause.  When you are the defendant against the Crown, the attorney or
+solicitor-general lets you know that such a douceur is requisite to
+procure such an issue.  Even in criminal proceedings, not only honour,
+but life, may be saved by pecuniary sacrifices.
+
+A man of the name of Martin, by profession a stock-jobber, killed, in
+1803, his own wife; and for twelve thousand livres--he was acquitted, and
+recovered his liberty.  In November last year, in a quarrel with his own
+brother, he stabbed him through the heart, and for another sum of twelve
+thousand livres he was acquitted, and released before last Christmas.
+This wretch is now in prison again, on suspicion of having poisoned his
+own daughter, with whom he had an incestuous intercourse, and he boasts
+publicly of soon being liberated.  Another person, Louis de Saurac, the
+younger son of Baron de Saurac, who together with his eldest son had
+emigrated, forged a will in the name of his parent, whom he pretended to
+be dead, which left him the sole heir of all the disposable property, to
+the exclusion of two sisters.  After the nation had shared its part as
+heir of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder.  In 1802,
+both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and returned to
+France.  To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis had, by his
+ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them even the
+common necessaries of life.  After upbraiding him for his want of duty,
+the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of the unsold
+part of his estates.  On the day fixed for settling the accounts and
+entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as a conspirator
+and imprisoned in the Temple.  He had been denounced as having served in
+the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of Louis XVIII.  To
+disprove the first part of the charge, he produced certificates from
+America, where he had passed the time of his emigration, and even upon
+the rack he denied the latter.  During his arrest, the eldest son
+discovered that Louis had become the owner of their possessions, by means
+of the will he had forged in the name of his father; and that it was he
+who had been unnatural enough to denounce the author of his days.  With
+the wreck of their fortune in St. Domingo, he procured his father's
+release; who, being acquainted with the perversity of his younger son,
+addressed himself to the department to be reinstated in his property.
+This was opposed by Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the
+revolutionary maxim which had passed into a law, enacting that all
+emigrants should be considered as politically dead.  Hitherto Baron de
+Saurac had, from affection, declined to mention the forged will; but
+shocked by his son's obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his
+counsellor produced this document, which not only went to deprive Louis
+of his property, but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.
+
+This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
+revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
+the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen.  He addressed
+himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial attorney-
+general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe of fifty
+thousand livres--obtained for him, after he had been defeated in every
+other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of cassation,
+under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being, according to
+law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of any one of
+them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the family.
+
+This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the
+Abbey of the same name.  One of the monks, observing in him some
+application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
+bestowed on him some previous education.  Not satisfied with this
+generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of
+Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the
+Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him.  By his
+dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors;
+who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as
+representative of the people to our First National Assembly.  They soon,
+however, had reason to repent of their generosity.  He joined the Orleans
+faction and became one of the most persevering, violent, and cruel
+persecutors of the privileged classes, particularly of the clergy,
+to whom he was indebted for everything.  In 1792 he was elected a member
+of the National Convention, where he voted for the death of his King.
+It was he who proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme, the production
+of the deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected persons; which was
+decreed on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused the imprisonment or
+proscription of two hundred thousand families.  This decree procured him
+the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of Merlin Potence.  In 1795 he was
+appointed a Minister of Police, and soon afterwards a Minister of
+Justice.  After the revolution in favour of the Jacobins of the 4th of
+September, 1797, he was made a director, a place which he was obliged by
+the same Jacobins to resign, in June, 1799.  Bonaparte expressed, at
+first, the most sovereign contempt for this Merlin, but on account of one
+of his sons, who was his aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when
+First Consul, his attorney-general.
+
+As nothing paints better the true features of a Government than the
+morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man's portrait
+with the following characteristic touches.
+
+Merlin de Douai has been successively the counsel of the late Duc d'
+Orleans, the friend of Danton, of Chabot, and of Hebert, the admirer of
+Murat, and the servant of Robespierre.  An accomplice of Rewbell, Barras,
+and la Reveilliere, an author of the law of suspected persons, an
+advocate of the Septembrizers, and an ardent apostle of the St.
+Guillotine.  Cunning as a fog and ferocious as a tiger, he has outlived
+all the factions with which he has been connected.  It has been his
+policy to keep in continual fermentation rivalships, jealousies,
+inquietudes, revenge and all other odious passions; establishing, by such
+means, his influence on the terror of some, the ambition of others, and
+the credulity of them all.  Had I, when Merlin proposed his law
+concerning suspected persons, in the name of liberty and equality,
+been free and his equal, I should have said to him, "Monster, this,
+your atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it has brought thousands
+of innocent persons to an untimely end; you shall die by my hands as a
+victim, if the tribunals do not condemn you to the scaffold as an
+executioner or as a criminal."
+
+Merlin has bought national property to the amount of fifteen million of
+livress--and he is supposed to possess money nearly to the same amount,
+in your or our funds.  For a man born a beggar, and educated by charity,
+this fortune, together with the liberal salaries he enjoys, might seem
+sufficient without selling justice, protecting guilt, and oppressing or
+persecuting innocence.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+Paris, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The household troops of Napoleon the First are by thousands
+more numerous than those even of Louis XIV. were.  Grenadiers on foot
+and on horseback, riflemen on foot and on horseback, heavy and light
+artillery, dragoons and hussars, mamelukes and sailors, artificers and
+pontoneers, gendarmes, gendarmes d'Alite, Velites and veterans, with
+Italian grenadiers, riflemen, dragoons, etc., etc., compose all together
+a not inconsiderable army.
+
+Though it frequently happens that the pay of the other troops is in
+arrears, those appertaining to Bonaparte's household are as regularly
+paid as his Senators, Counsellors of State, and other public
+functionaries.  All the men are picked, and all the officers as much as
+possible of birth, or at least of education.  In the midst of this
+voluptuous and seductive capital, they are kept very strict, and the
+least negligence or infraction of military discipline is more severely
+punished than if committed in garrison or in an encampment.  They are
+both better clothed, accoutred, and paid, than the troops of the line,
+and have everywhere the precedency of them.  All the officers, and many
+of the soldiers, are members of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and carry
+arms of honour distributed to them by Imperial favour, or for military
+exploits.  None of them are quartered upon the citizens; each corps has
+its own spacious barracks, hospitals, drilling-ground, riding or fencing-
+houses, gardens, bathing-houses, billiard-table, and even libraries.
+A chapel has lately been constructed near each barrack, and almoners
+are already appointed.  In the meantime, they attend regularly at Mass,
+either in the Imperial Chapel or in the parish churches.  Bonaparte
+discourages much all marriages among the military in general, but
+particularly among those of his household troops.  That they may not,
+however, be entirely deprived of the society of women, he allows five to
+each company, with the same salaries as the men, under the name of
+washerwomen.
+
+With a vain and fickle people, fond of shows and innovations, nothing in
+a military despotism has a greater political utility, gives greater
+satisfaction, and leaves behind a more useful terror and awe, than
+Bonaparte's grand military reviews.  In the beginning of his consulate,
+they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of
+Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has been
+proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month.  This ostentatious
+exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review of
+the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those occasions
+their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully has seized,
+and continues to usurp, the authority of his own Sovereign.  What an
+example for ambition! what a lesson to treachery!
+
+Besides the household troops, this capital and its vicinity have, for
+these three years past, never contained less than from fifteen to twenty
+thousand men of the regiments of the line, belonging to what is called
+the first military division of the Army of the Interior.  These troops
+are selected from among the brigades that served under Bonaparte in Italy
+and Egypt with the greatest eclat, and constitute a kind of depot for
+recruiting his household troops with tried and trusty men.  They are also
+regularly paid, and generally better accoutred than their comrades
+encamped on the coast, or quartered in Italy or Holland.
+
+But a standing army, upon which all revolutionary rulers can depend, and
+that always will continue their faithful support, unique in its sort and
+composition, exists in the bosom as well as in the extremities of this
+country.  I mean, one hundred and twenty thousand invalids, mostly young
+men under thirty, forced by conscription against their will into the
+field, quartered and taken care of by our Government, and all possessed
+with the absurd prejudice that, as they have been maimed in fighting the
+battles of rebellion, the restoration of legitimate sovereignty would to
+them be an epoch of destruction, or at least of misery and want; and this
+prejudice is kept alive by emissaries employed on purpose to mislead
+them.  Of these, eight thousand are lodged and provided for in this city;
+ten thousand at Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and
+in the conquered departments on the left bank of the Abine; countries
+where the inhabitants are discontented and disaffected, and require,
+therefore, to be watched, and to have a better spirit infused.
+
+Those whose wounds permit it are also employed to do garrison duty in
+fortified places not exposed to an attack by enemies, and to assist in
+the different arsenals and laboratories, foundries, and depots of
+military or naval stores.  Others are attached to the police offices, and
+some as gendarmes, to arrest suspected or guilty individuals; or as
+garnissaires, to enforce the payment of contributions from the unwilling
+or distressed.  When the period for the payment of taxes is expired, two
+of these janissaires present themselves at the house of the persons in
+arrears, with a billet signed by the director of the contributions and
+countersigned by the police commissary.  If the money is not immediately
+paid, with half a crown to each of them besides, they remain quartered in
+the house, where they are to be boarded and to receive half a crown a day
+each until an order from those who sent them informs them that what was
+due to the state has been acquitted.  After their entrance into a house,
+and during their stay, no furniture or effects whatever can be removed or
+disposed of, nor can the master or mistress go out-of-doors without being
+accompanied by one of them.
+
+In the houses appropriated to our invalids, the inmates are very well
+treated, and Government takes great care to make them satisfied with
+their lot.  The officers have large halls, billiards, and reading-room
+to meet in; and the common men are admitted into apartments adjoining
+libraries, from-which they can borrow what books they contain, and read
+them at leisure.  This is certainly a very good and even a humane
+institution, though these libraries chiefly contain military histories or
+novels.
+
+As to the morals of these young invalids, they may be well conceived when
+you remember the morality of our Revolution; and that they, without any
+religious notions or restraints, were not only permitted, but encouraged
+to partake of the debauchery and licentiousness which were carried to
+such an extreme in our armies and encampments.  In an age when the
+passions are strongest, and often blind reason and silence conscience,
+they have not the means nor the permission to marry; in their vicinity it
+is, therefore, more difficult to discover one honest woman or a dutiful
+wife, than hundreds of harlots and of adulteresses.  Notwithstanding that
+many of them have been accused before the tribunals of seductions, rape,
+and violence against the sex, not one has been punished for what the
+morality of our Government consider merely as bagatelles.  Even in cases
+where husbands, brothers, and lovers have been killed by them while
+defending or avenging the honour of their wives, sisters, and mistresses,
+our tribunals have been ordered by our grand judge, according to the
+commands of the Emperor, not to proceed.  As most of them have no
+occupation, the vice of idleness augments the mass of their corruption;
+for men of their principles, when they have nothing to do, never do
+anything good.
+
+I do not know if my countrywomen feel themselves honoured by or obliged
+to Bonaparte, for leaving their virtue and honour unprotected, except by
+their own prudence and strength; but of this I am certain, that all our
+other troops, as well as the invalids, may live on free quarters with the
+sex without fearing the consequences; provided they keep at a distance
+from the females of our Imperial Family, and of those of our grand
+officers of State and principal functionaries.  The wives and the
+daughters of the latter have, however, sometimes declined the advantage
+of these exclusive privileges.
+
+A horse grenadier of Bonaparte's Imperial Guard, of the name of Rabais,
+notorious for his amours and debauchery, was accused before the Imperial
+Judge Thuriot, at one and the same time by several husbands and fathers,
+of having seduced the affections of their wives and of their daughters.
+As usual, Thuriot refused to listen to their complaints; at the same time
+insultingly advising them to retake their wives and children, and for the
+future to be more careful of them.  Triumphing, as it were, in his
+injustice, he inconsiderately mentioned the circumstance to his own wife,
+observing that he never knew so many charges of the same sort exhibited
+against one man.
+
+Madame Thuriot, who had been a servant-maid to her husband before he made
+her his wife, instead of being disgusted at the recital, secretly
+determined to see this Rabais.  An intrigue was then begun, and carried
+on for four months, if not with discretion, at least without discovery;
+but the lady's own imprudence at last betrayed her, or I should say,
+rather, her jealousy.  But for this she might still have been admired
+among our modest women, and Thuriot among fortunate husbands and happy
+fathers; for the lady, for the first time since her marriage, proved, to
+the great joy and pride of her husband, in the family way.  Suspecting,
+however, the fidelity of her paramour, she watched his motions so closely
+that she discovered an intrigue between him and the chaste spouse of a
+rich banker; but the consequence of this discovery was the detection of
+her own crime.
+
+On the discovery of this disgrace, Thuriot obtained an audience of
+Bonaparte, in which he exposed his misfortune, and demanded punishment on
+his wife's gallant.  As, however, he also acknowledged that his own
+indiscretion was an indirect cause of their connection, he received the
+same advice which he had given to other unfortunate husbands: to retake,
+and for the future guard better, his dear moiety.
+
+Thuriot had, however, an early opportunity of wreaking his vengeance on
+this gallant Rabais.  It seems his prowess had reached the ears of Madame
+Baciocchi, the eldest sister of Bonaparte.  This lady has a children
+mania, which is very troublesome to her husband, disagreeable to her
+relations, and injurious to herself.  She never beholds any lady,
+particularly any of her family, in the way which women wish to be who
+love their lords, but she is absolutely frantic.  Now, Thuriot's worthy
+friend Fouche had discovered, by his spies, that Rabais paid frequent and
+secret visits to the hotel Baciocchi, and that Madame Baciocchi was the
+object of these visits.  Thuriot, on this discovery, instantly denounced
+him to Bonaparte.
+
+Had Rabais ruined all the women of this capital, he would not only have
+been forgiven, but applauded by Napoleon, and his counsellors and
+courtiers; but to dare to approach, or only to cast his eyes on one of
+our Imperial Highnesses, was a crime nothing could extenuate or avenge,
+but the most exemplary punishment.  He was therefore arrested, sent to
+the Temple, and has never since been heard of; so that his female friends
+are still in the cruel uncertainty whether he has died on the rack, been
+buried alive in the oubliettes, or is wandering an exile in the wilds of
+Cayenne.
+
+In examining his trunk, among the curious effects discovered by the
+police were eighteen portraits and one hundred billets-doux, with
+medallions, rings, bracelets, tresses of hair, etc., as numerous.  Two of
+the portraits occasioned much scandal, and more gossiping.  They were
+those of two of our most devout and most respectable Court ladies, Maids
+of Honour to our Empress, Madame Ney and Madame Lasnes; who never miss an
+opportunity of going to church, who have received the private blessing of
+the Pope, and who regularly confess to some Bishop or other once in a
+fortnight.  Madame Napoleon cleared them, however, of all suspicion, by
+declaring publicly in her drawing-room that these portraits had come into
+the possession of Rabais by the infidelity of their maids; who had
+confessed their faults, and, therefore, had been charitably pardoned.
+Whether the opinions of Generals Ney and Lasnes coincide with Madame
+Napoleon's assertion is uncertain; but Lasnes has been often heard to say
+that, from the instant his wife began to confess, he was convinced she
+was inclined to dishonour him; so that nothing surprised him.
+
+One of the medallions in Rabais's collection contained on one side the
+portrait of Thuriot, and on the other that of his wife; both set with
+diamonds, and presented to her by him on their last wedding day.  For the
+supposed theft of this medallion, two of Thuriot's servants were in
+prison, when the arrest of Rabais explained the manner in which it had
+been lost.  This so enraged him that he beat and kicked his wife so
+heartily that for some time even her life was in danger, and Thuriot lost
+all hopes of being a father.
+
+Before the Revolution, Thuriot had been, for fraud and forgery, struck
+off the roll as an advocate, and therefore joined it as a patriot.  In
+1791, he was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly, and in 1792 to the
+National Convention.  He always showed himself one of the most ungenerous
+enemies of the clergy, of monarchy, and of his King, for whose death he
+voted.  On the 25th of May, 1792, in declaiming against Christianity and
+priesthood, he wished them both, for the welfare of mankind, at the
+bottom of the sea; and on the 18th of December the same year, he declared
+in the Jacobin Club that, if the National Convention evinced any signs of
+clemency towards Louis XVI., he would go himself to the Temple and blow
+out the brains of this unfortunate King.  He defended in the tribune the
+massacres of the prisoners, affirming that the tree of liberty could
+never flourish without being inundated with the blood of aristocrats and
+other enemies of the Revolution.  He has been convicted by rival factions
+of the most shameful robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so
+notorious that neither Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory
+would or could employ him.  After the Revolution of the 9th of November,
+1799, Bonaparte gave him the office of judge of the criminal tribunal,
+and in 1804 made him a Commander of his Legion of Honour.  He is now one
+of our Emperor's most faithful subjects and most sincere Christians.
+Such is now his tender conscientiousness, that he was among those who
+were the first to be married again by some Cardinal to their present
+wives, to whom they had formerly been united only by the municipality.
+This new marriage, however, took place before Madame Thuriot had
+introduced herself to the acquaintance of the Imperial Grenadier Rabais.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Regarding me as a connoisseur, though I have no pretensions but
+that of being an amateur, Lucien Bonaparte, shortly before his disgrace,
+invited me to pass some days with him in the country, and to assist him
+in arranging his very valuable collection of pictures--next our public
+ones, the most curious and most valuable in Europe, and, of course, in
+the world.  I found here, as at Joseph Bonaparte's, the same splendour,
+the same etiquette, and the same liberty, which latter was much enhanced
+by the really engaging and unassuming manners and conversation of the
+host.  At Joseph's, even in the midst of abundance and of liberty, in
+seeing the person or meditating on the character of the host, you feel
+both your inferiority of fortune and the humiliation of dependence, and
+that you visit a master instead of a friend, who indirectly tells you,
+"Eat, drink, and rejoice as long and as much as you like; but remember
+that if you are happy, it is to my generosity you are indebted, and if
+unhappy, that I do not care a pin about you."  With Lucien it is the very
+reverse.  His conduct seems to indicate that by your company you confer
+an obligation on him, and he is studious to remove, on all occasions,
+that distance which fortune has placed between him and his guests;
+and as he cannot compliment them upon being wealthier than himself,
+he seizes with delicacy every opportunity to chew that he acknowledges
+their superiority in talents and in genius as more than an equivalent for
+the absence of riches.
+
+He is, nevertheless, himself a young man of uncommon parts, and, as far
+as I could judge from my short intercourse with the reserved Joseph and
+with the haughty Napoleon, he is abler and better informed than either,
+and much more open and sincere.  His manners are also more elegant, and
+his language more polished, which is the more creditable to him when it
+is remembered how much his education has been neglected, how vitiated the
+Revolution made him, and that but lately his principal associates were,
+like himself, from among the vilest and most vulgar of the rabble.  It is
+not necessary to be a keen observer to remark in Napoleon the upstart
+soldier, and in Joseph the former low member of the law; but I defy the
+most refined courtier to see in Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant
+sans-culotte.  He has, besides, other qualities (and those more
+estimable) which will place him much above his elder brothers in the
+opinion of posterity.  He is extremely compassionate and liberal to the
+truly distressed, serviceable to those whom he knows are not his friends,
+and forgiving and obliging even to those who have proved and avowed
+themselves his enemies.  These are virtues commonly very scarce, and
+hitherto never displayed by any other member of the Bonaparte family.
+
+An acquaintance of yours, and--a friend of mine, Count de T-----, at his
+return here from emigration, found, of his whole former fortune,
+producing once eighty thousand livres--in the year, only four farms
+unsold, and these were advertised for sale.  A man who had once been his
+servant, but was then a groom to Lucien, offered to present a memorial
+for him to his master, to prevent the disposal of the only support which
+remained to subsist himself, with a wife and four children.  Lucien asked
+Napoleon to prohibit the sale, and to restore the Count the farms, and
+obtained his consent; but Fouche, whose cousin wanted them, having
+purchased other national property in the neighbourhood, prevailed upon
+Napoleon to forget his promise, and the farms were sold.  As soon as
+Lucien heard of it he sent for the Count, delivered into his hands an
+annuity of six thousand livres--for the life of himself, his wife, and
+his children, as an indemnity for the inefficacy of his endeavours to
+serve him, as he expressed himself.  Had the Count recovered the farms,
+they would not have given him a clear profit of half the amount, all
+taxes paid.
+
+A young author of the name of Gauvan, irritated by the loss of parents
+and fortune by the Revolution, attacked, during 1799, in the public
+prints, as well as in pamphlets, every Revolutionist who had obtained
+notoriety or popularity.  He was particularly vehement against Lucien,
+and laid before the public all his crimes and all his errors, and
+asserted, as facts, atrocities which were either calumnies or merely
+rumours.  When, after Napoleon's assumption of the Consulate, Lucien was
+appointed a Minister of the Interior, he sent for Gauvan, and said to
+him, "Great misfortunes have early made you wretched and unjust, and you
+have frequently revenged yourself on those who could not prevent them,
+among whom I am one.  You do not want capacity, nor, I believe, probity.
+Here is a commission which makes you a Director of Contributions in the
+Departments of the Rhine and Moselle, an office with a salary of twelve
+thousand livres but producing double that sum.  If you meet with any
+difficulties, write to me; I am your friend.  Take those one hundred
+louis d'or for the expenses of your journey.  Adieu!  "This anecdote I
+have read in Gauvan's own handwriting, in a letter to his sister.  He
+died in 1802; but Mademoiselle Gauvan, who is not yet fifteen, has a
+pension of three thousand livres a year--from Lucien, who, has never seen
+her.
+
+Lucien Bonaparte has another good quality: he is consistent in his
+political principles.  Either from conviction or delusion he is still a
+Republican, and does not conceal that, had he suspected Napoleon of any
+intent to reestablish monarchy, much less tyranny, he would have joined
+those deputies who, on the 9th of November, 1799, in the sitting at St.
+Cloud, demanded a decree of outlawry against him.  If the present quarrel
+between these two brothers were sifted to the bottom, perhaps it would be
+found to originate more from Lucien's Republicanism than from his
+marriage.
+
+I know, with all France and Europe, that Lucien's youth has been very
+culpable; that he has committed many indiscretions, much injustice, many
+imprudences, many errors, and, I fear, even some crimes.  I know that he
+has been the most profligate among the profligate, the most debauched
+among libertines, the most merciless among the plunderers, and the most
+perverse among rebels.  I know that he is accused of being a
+Septembrizer; of having murdered one wife and poisoned another; of having
+been a spy, a denouncer, a persecutor of innocent persons in the Reign of
+Terror.  I know that he is accused of having fought his brothers-in-law;
+of having ill-used his mother, and of an incestuous commerce with his own
+sisters.
+
+I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far be
+it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them.  But suppose all this
+infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it never has
+been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be--what are
+the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to the
+enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted?  Is the
+poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of
+wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons,
+suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold
+blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners?  Is incest with a sister more
+shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not
+continue the disgusting comparison.  As long as Napoleon is unable to
+acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right
+to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have
+Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the
+Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise the
+latter for crimes which lose their enormity when compared to the horrid
+perpetrations of his Imperial brother.
+
+An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien's wife, and a person in whose
+veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he
+always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has repeated
+to me many of their conversations.  She assures me that Lucien deplores
+frequently the want of a good and religious education, and the tempting
+examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance upon the
+revolutionary scene.  He says that he determined to get rich 'per fas aut
+nefas', because he observed that money was everything, and that most
+persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be enabled to gather
+treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much above their desert
+and expectation, instead of being satiated or even satisfied, they
+bustled and intrigued for more, until success made them unguarded and
+prosperity indiscreet, and they became with their wealth the easy prey of
+rival factions.  Such was the case of Danton, of Fabre d'Eglantine, of
+Chabot, of Chaumette, of Stebert, and other contemptible wretches,
+butchered by Robespierre and his partisans--victims in their turn to men
+as unjust and sanguinary as themselves.  He had, therefore, laid out a
+different plan of conduct for himself.  He had fixed upon fifty millions
+of livres--as the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in
+his possession, he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and
+employment, and to enjoy 'otium cum dignitate'.  He had kept to his
+determination, and so regulated his income that; with the expenses, pomp,
+and retinue of a Prince, he is enabled to make more persons happy and
+comfortable than his extortions have ruined or even embarrassed.  He now
+lives like a philosopher, and endeavours to forget the past, to delight
+in the present, and to be indifferent about futurity.  He chose,
+therefore, for a wife, a lady whom he loved and esteemed, in preference
+to one whose birth would have been a continual reproach to the meanness
+of his own origin.
+
+You must, with me, admire the modesty of a citizen sans-culotte, who,
+without a shilling in the world, fixes upon fifty millions as a reward
+for his revolutionary achievements, and with which he would be satisfied
+to sit down and begin his singular course of singular philosophy.  But
+his success is more extraordinary that his pretensions were extravagant.
+This immense sum was amassed by him in the short period of four years,
+chiefly by bribes from foreign Courts, and by selling his protections in
+France.
+
+But most of the other Bonapartes have made as great and as rapid fortunes
+as Lucien, and yet, instead of being generous, contented, or even
+philosophers, they are still profiting by every occasion to increase
+their ill-gotten treasures, and no distress was ever relieved, no talents
+encouraged, or virtues recompensed by them.  The mind of their garrets
+lodges with them in their palaces, while Lucien seems to ascend as near
+as possible to a level with his circumstances.  I have myself found him
+beneficent without ostentation.
+
+Among his numerous pictures, I observed four that had formerly belonged
+to my father's, and afterwards to my own cabinet.  I inquired how much he
+had paid for them, without giving the least hint that they had been my
+property, and were plundered from me by the nation.  He had, indeed, paid
+their full value.  In a fortnight after I had quitted him, these, with
+six other pictures, were deposited in my room, with a very polite note,
+begging my acceptance of them, and assuring me that he had but the day
+before heard from his picture dealer that they had belonged to me.  He
+added that he would never retake them, unless he received an assurance
+from me that I parted with them without reluctance, and at the same time
+affixed their price.  I returned them, as I knew they were desired by him
+for his collection, but he continued obstinate.  I told him, therefore,
+that, as I was acquainted with his inclination to perform a generous
+action, I would, instead of payment for the pictures, indicate a person
+deserving his assistance.  I mentioned the old Duchesse de ------, who is
+seventy-four years of age and blind; and, after possessing in her youth
+an income of eight hundred thousand livres--is now, in her old age,
+almost destitute.  He did for this worthy lady more than I expected; but
+happening, in his visits to relieve my friend, to cast his eye on the
+daughter of the landlady where she lodged, he found means to prevail on
+the simplicity of the poor girl, and seduced her.  So much do I know
+personally of Lucien Bonaparte, who certainly is a composition of good
+and bad qualities, but which of them predominate I will not take upon me
+to decide.  This I can affirm--Lucien is not the worst member of the
+Bonaparte family.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--As long as Austria ranks among independent nations, Bonaparte
+will take care not to offend or alarm the ambition and interest of
+Prussia by incorporating the Batavian Republic with the other provinces
+of his Empire.  Until that period, the Dutch must continue (as they have
+been these last ten years) under the appellation of allies, oppressed
+like subjects and plundered like foes.  Their mock sovereignty will
+continue to weigh heavier on them than real servitude does on their
+Belgic and Flemish neighbours, because Frederick the Great pointed out
+to his successors the Elbe and the Tegel as the natural borders of the
+Prussian monarchy, whenever the right bank of the Rhine should form the
+natural frontiers of the kingdom of France.
+
+That during the present summer a project for a partition treaty of
+Holland has by the Cabinet of St. Cloud been laid before the Cabinet of
+Berlin is a fact, though disseminated only as a rumour by the secret
+agents of Talleyrand.  Their object was on this, as on all previous
+occasions when any names, rights, or liberties of people were intended to
+be erased from among the annals of independence, to sound the ground, and
+to prepare by such rumours the mind of the public for another outrage and
+another overthrow.  But Prussia, as well as France, knows the value of a
+military and commercial navy, and that to obtain it good harbours and
+navigable rivers are necessary, and therefore, as well as from principles
+of justice, perhaps, declined the acceptance of a plunder, which, though
+tempting, was contrary to the policy of the House of Brandenburgh.
+
+According to a copy circulated among the members of our diplomatic corps,
+this partition treaty excluded Prussia from all the Batavian seaports
+except Delfzig, and those of the river Ems, but gave her extensive
+territories on the side of Guelderland, and a rich country in Friesland.
+Had it been acceded to by the Court of Berlin, with the annexed condition
+of a defensive and offensive alliance with the Court of St. Cloud, the
+Prussian monarchy would, within half a century, have been swallowed up in
+the same gulf with the Batavian Commonwealth and the Republic of Poland;
+and by some future scheme of some future Bonaparte or Talleyrand, be
+divided in its turn, and serve as a pledge of reconciliation or
+inducement of connection between some future rulers of the French and
+Russian Empires.
+
+Talleyrand must, indeed, have a very mean opinion of the capacity of the
+Prussian Ministers, or a high notion of his own influence over them, if
+he was serious in this overture.  For my part, I am rather inclined to
+think that it was merely thrown out to discover whether Frederick William
+III.  had entered into any engagement contrary to the interest of
+Napoleon the First; or to allure His Prussian Majesty into a negotiation
+which would suspend, or at least interfere with, those supposed to be
+then on the carpet with Austria, Russia, or perhaps even with England.
+
+The late Batavian Government had, ever since the beginning of the present
+war with England, incurred the displeasure of Bonaparte.  When it
+apprehended a rupture from the turn which the discussion respecting the
+occupation of Malta assumed, the Dutch Ambassadors at St. Petersburg and
+Berlin were ordered to demand the interference of these two Cabinets for
+the preservation of the neutrality of Holland, which your country had
+promised to acknowledge, if respected by France.  No sooner was Bonaparte
+informed of this step, than he marched troops into the heart of the
+Batavian Republic, and occupied its principal forts, ports, and arsenals.
+When, some time afterwards, Count Markof received instructions from his
+Court, according to the desire of the Batavian Directory, and demanded,
+in consequence, an audience from Bonaparte, a map was laid before him,
+indicating the position of the French troops in Holland, and plans of the
+intended encampment of our army of England on the coast of Flanders and
+France; and he was asked whether he thought it probable that our
+Government would assent to a neutrality so injurious to its offensive
+operations against Great Britain.
+
+"But," said the Russian Ambassador, "the independence of Holland has been
+admitted by you in formal treaties."
+
+"So has the cession of Malta by England," interrupted Bonaparte, with
+impatience.
+
+"True," replied Markof, "but you are now at war with England for this
+point; while Holland, against which you have no complaint, has not only
+been invaded by your troops, but, contrary both to its inclination and
+interest, involved in a war with you, by which it has much to lose and
+nothing to gain."
+
+"I have no account to render to anybody for my transactions, and I desire
+to hear nothing more on this subject," said Bonaparte, retiring furious,
+and leaving Markof to meditate on our Sovereign's singular principles of
+political justice and of 'jus pentium'.
+
+From that period Bonaparte resolved on another change of the executive
+power of the Batavian Republic.  But it was more easy to displace one set
+of men for another than to find proper ones to occupy a situation in
+which, if they do their duty as patriots, they must offend France; and if
+they are our tools, instead of the independent governors of their
+country, they must excite a discontent among their fellow citizens,
+disgracing themselves as individuals, and exposing themselves as chief
+magistrates to the fate of the De Witts, should ever fortune forsake our
+arms or desert Bonaparte.
+
+No country has of late been less productive of great men than Holland.
+The Van Tromps, the Russel, and the William III.  all died without
+leaving any posterity behind them; and the race of Batavian heroes seems
+to have expired with them, as that of patriots with the De, Witts and
+Barneveldt.  Since the beginning of the last century we read, indeed, of
+some able statesmen, as most, if not all, the former grand pensionaries
+have been; but the name of no warrior of any great eminence is recorded.
+This scarcity, of native genius and valour has not a little contributed
+to the present humbled, disgraced, and oppressed state of wretched
+Batavia.
+
+Admiral de Winter certainly neither wants courage nor genius, but his
+private character has a great resemblance to that of General Moreau.
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern.  He may direct as
+ably and as valiantly the manoeuvres of a fleet as Moreau does those of
+an army, but neither the one nor the other at the head of his nation
+would render himself respected, his country flourishing, or his
+countrymen happy and tranquil.
+
+Destined from his youth for the navy, Admiral de Winter entered into the
+naval service of his country before he was fourteen, and was a second
+lieutenant when the Batavian patriots, in rebellion against the
+Stadtholder, were, in 1787, reduced to submission by the Duke of
+Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army that invaded Holland.  His
+parents and family being of the anti-Orange party, he emigrated to
+France, where he was made an officer in the legion of Batavian refugees.
+During the campaign of 1793 and 1794, he so much distinguished himself
+under that competent judge of merit, Pichegru, that this commander
+obtained for him the commission of a general of brigade in the service of
+the French; which, after the conquest of Holland in January, 1795, was
+exchanged for the rank of a vice-admiral of the Batavian Republic.  His
+exploits as commander of the Dutch fleet, during the battle of the 11th
+of October, 1797, with your fleet, under Lord Duncan, I have heard
+applauded even in your presence, when in your country.  Too honest to be
+seduced, and too brave to be intimidated, he is said to have incurred
+Bonaparte's hatred by resisting both his offers and his threats, and
+declining to sell his own liberty as well as to betray the liberty of his
+fellow subjects.  When, in 1800, Bonaparte proposed to him the presidency
+and consulate of the United States, for life, on condition that he should
+sign a treaty, which made him a vassal of France, he refused, with
+dignity and with firmness, and preferred retirement to a supremacy so
+dishonestly acquired, and so dishonourably occupied.
+
+General Daendels, another Batavian revolutionist of some notoriety, from
+an attorney became a lieutenant-colonel, and served as a spy under
+Dumouriez in the winter of 1792 and in the spring of 1793.  Under
+Pichegru he was made a general, and exhibited those talents in the field
+which are said to have before been displayed in the forum.  In June,
+1795, he was made a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic, and he
+was the commander-in-chief of the Dutch troops combating in 1799 your
+army under the Duke of York.  In this place he did not much distinguish
+himself, and the issue of the contest was entirely owing to our troops
+and to our generals.
+
+After the Peace of Amiens, observing that Bonaparte intended to
+annihilate instead of establishing universal liberty, Daendels gave in
+his resignation and retired to obscurity, not wishing to be an instrument
+of tyranny, after having so long fought for freedom.  Had he possessed
+the patriotism of a Brutus or a Cato, he would have bled or died for his
+cause and country sooner than have deserted them both; or had the
+ambition and love of glory of a Caesar held a place in his bosom, he
+would have attempted to be the chief of his country, and by generosity
+and clemency atone, if possible, for the loss of liberty.  Upon the line
+of baseness,--the deserter is placed next to the traitor.
+
+Dumonceau, another Batavian general of some publicity, is not by birth a
+citizen of the United States, but was born at Brussels in 1758, and was
+by profession a stonemason when, in 1789, he joined, as a volunteer, the
+Belgian insurgents.  After their dispersion in 1790 he took refuge and
+served in France, and was made an officer in the corps of Belgians,
+formed after the declaration of war against Austria in 1792.  Here he
+frequently distinguished himself, and was, therefore, advanced to the
+rank of a general; but the Dutch general officers being better paid than
+those of the French Republic, he was, with the permission of our
+Directory, received, in 1795, as a lieutenant-general of the Batavian
+Republic.  He has often evinced bravery, but seldom great capacity.  His
+natural talents are considered as but indifferent, and his education is
+worse.
+
+These are the only three military characters who might, with any prospect
+of success, have tried to play the part of a Napoleon Bonaparte in
+Holland.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Not to give umbrage to the Cabinet of Berlin, Bonaparte
+communicated to it the necessity he was under of altering the form of
+Government in Holland, and, if report be true, even condescended to ask
+advice concerning a chief magistrate for that country.  The young Prince
+of Orange, brother-in-law of His Prussian Majesty, naturally presented
+himself; but, after some time, Talleyrand's agents discovered that great
+pecuniary sacrifices could not be expected from that quarter, and perhaps
+less submission to France experienced than from the former governors.
+An eye was then cast on the Elector of Bavaria, whose past patriotism,
+as well as that of his Ministers, was a full guarantee for future
+obedience.  Had he consented to such an arrangement, Austria might have
+aggrandized herself on the Inn, Prussia in Franconia, and France in
+Italy; and the present bone of contest would have been chiefly removed.
+
+This intrigue, for it was nothing else, was carried on by the Cabinet of
+St. Cloud in March, 1804, about the time that Germany was invaded and the
+Duc d'Enghien seized.  This explains to you the reason why the Russian
+note, delivered to the Diet of Ratisbon on the 8th of the following May,
+was left without any support, except the ineffectual one from the King of
+Sweden.  How any Cabinet could be dupe enough to think Bonaparte serious,
+or the Elector of Bavaria so weak as to enter into his schemes,
+is difficult to be conceived, had not Europe witnessed still greater
+credulity on one side, and still greater effrontery on the other.
+
+In the meantime Bonaparte grew every day more discontented with the
+Batavian Directory, and more irritated against the members who composed
+it.  Against his regulations for excluding the commerce and productions
+of your country, they resented with spirit instead of obeying them
+without murmur as was required.  He is said to have discovered, after his
+own soldiers had forced the custom-house officers to obey his orders,
+that, while in their proclamations the directors publicly prohibited the
+introduction of British goods, some of them were secret insurers of this
+forbidden merchandise, introduced by fraud and by smuggling; and that
+while they officially wished for the success of the French arms and
+destruction of England, they withdrew by stealth what property they had
+in the French funds, to place it in the English.  This refractory and,
+as Bonaparte called it, mercantile spirit, so enraged him, that he had
+already signed an order for arresting and transferring en masse his high
+allies, the Batavian directors, to his Temple, when the representations
+of Talleyrand moderated his fury, and caused the order to be recalled,
+which Fouche was ready to execute.
+
+Had Jerome Bonaparte not offended his brother by his transatlantic
+marriage, he would long ago have been the Prince Stadtholder of Holland;
+but his disobedience was so far useful to the Cabinet of St. Cloud as it
+gave it an opportunity of intriguing with, or deluding, other Cabinets
+that might have any pretensions to interfere in the regulation of the
+Batavian Government.  By the choice finally made, you may judge how
+difficult it was to find a suitable subject to represent it, and that
+this representation is intended only to be temporary.
+
+Schimmelpenninck, the present grand pensionary of the Batavian Republic,
+was destined by his education for the bar, but by his natural parts to
+await in quiet obscurity the end of a dull existence.  With some
+property, little information, and a tolerably good share of common sense,
+he might have lived and died respected, and even regretted, without any
+pretension, or perhaps even ambition, to shine.  The anti-Orange faction,
+to which his parents and family appertained, pushed him forward, and
+elected him, in 1795, a member of the First Batavian National Convention,
+where, according to the spirit of the times, his speeches were rather
+those of a demagogue than those of a Republican.  Liberty, Equality, and
+Fraternity were the constant themes of his political declamations,
+infidelity his religious profession, and the examples of immorality, his
+social lessons; so rapid and dangerous are the strides with which
+seduction frequently advances on weak minds.
+
+In 1800 he was appointed an Ambassador to Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles
+Maurice Talleyrand.  The latter used him as a stockbroker, and the former
+for anything he thought proper; and he was the humble and submissive
+valet of both.  More ignorant than malicious, and a greater fool than a
+rogue, he was more laughed at and despised than trusted or abused.
+
+His patience being equal to his phlegm, nothing either moved or
+confounded him; and he was, as Talleyrand remarked, "a model of an
+Ambassador, according to which he and Bonaparte wished that all other
+independent Princes and States would choose their representatives to the
+French Government."
+
+When our Minister and his Sovereign were discussing the difficulty of
+properly filling up the vacancy, of the Dutch Government, judged
+necessary by both, the former mentioned Schimmelpenninck with a smile;
+and serious as Bonaparte commonly is, he could not help laughing.
+"I should have been less astonished," said he, "had you proposed my
+Mameluke, Rostan."
+
+This rebuke did not deter Talleyrand (who had settled his terms with
+Schimmelpenninck) from continuing to point out the advantage which France
+would derive from this nomination.  "Because no man could easier be
+directed when in office, and no man easier turned out of office when
+disagreeable or unnecessary.  Both as a Batavian plenipotentiary at
+Amiens, and as Batavian Ambassador in England, he had proved himself as
+obedient and submissive to France as when in the same capacity at Paris."
+
+By returning often to the charge, with these and other remarks,
+Talleyrand at last accustomed Bonaparte to the idea, which had once
+appeared so humiliating, of writing to a man so much inferior in
+everything, "Great and dear Friend!"  and therefore said to the Minister:
+
+"Well!  let us then make him a grand pensionary and a locum tenens for
+five years; or until Jerome, when he repents, returns to his duty, and is
+pardoned."
+
+"Is he, then, not to be a grand pensionary for life?"  asked Talleyrand;
+"whether for one month or for life, he would be equally obedient to
+resign when, commanded; but the latter would be more popular in Holland,
+where they were tired of so many changes."
+
+"Let them complain, if they dare," replied Bonaparte.  "Schimmelpenninck
+is their chief magistrate only for five years, if so long; but you may
+add that they may reelect him."
+
+It was not before Talleyrand had compared the pecuniary proposal made to
+his agents by foreign Princes with those of Schimmelpenninck to himself,
+that the latter obtained the preference.  The exact amount of the
+purchase-money for the supreme magistracy in Holland is not well known to
+any but the contracting parties.  Some pretended that the whole was paid
+down beforehand, being advanced by a society of merchants at Amsterdam,
+the friends or relatives of the grand pensionary; others, that it is to
+be paid by annual instalments of two millions of livres--for a certain
+number of years.  Certain it is, that this high office was sold and
+bought; and that, had it been given for life, its value would have been
+proportionately enhanced; which was the reason that Talleyrand
+endeavoured to have it thus established.
+
+Talleyrand well knew the precarious state of Schimmelpenninck's grandeur;
+that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had long been
+intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome.  Another Dutchman asked
+him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he was well aware
+could never be called a sinecure place, and was so precarious in its
+tenure.  "Foolish vanity," answered the Minister, "can never pay enough
+for the gratification of its desires.  All the Schimmelpennincks in the
+world do not possess property enough to recompense me for the sovereign
+honours which I have procured for one of their name and family, were he
+deposed within twenty-four hours.  What treasures can indemnify me for
+connecting such a name and such a personage with the great name of the
+First Emperor of the French?"
+
+I have only twice in my life been in Schimmelpenninck's company, and I
+thought him both timid and reserved; but from what little he said,
+I could not possibly judge of his character and capacity.  His portrait
+and its accompaniments have been presented to me; such as delivered to
+you by one of his countrymen, a Mr. M---- (formerly an Ambassador also),
+who was both his schoolfellow and his comrade at the university.  I shall
+add the following traits, in his own words as near as possible:
+
+"More vain than ambitious, Schimmelpenninck from his youth, and,
+particularly, from his entrance into public life, tried every means to
+make a noise, but found none to make a reputation.  He caressed in
+succession all the systems of the French Revolution, without adopting one
+for himself.  All the Kings of faction received in their turns his homage
+and felicitations.  It was impossible to mention to him a man of any
+notoriety, of whom he did not become immediately a partisan.  The virtues
+or the vices, the merit or defects, of the individual were of no
+consideration; according to his judgment it was sufficient to be famous.
+Yet with all the extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes, and of a
+heart spoiled by modern philosophy, added to a habit of licentiousness,
+he had no idea of becoming an instrument for the destruction of liberty
+in his own country, much less of becoming its tyrant, in submitting to be
+the slave of France.  It was but lately that he took the fancy, after so
+long admiring all other great men of our age, to be at any rate one of
+their number, and of being admired as a great man in his turn.  On this
+account many accuse him of hypocrisy, but no one deserves that
+appellation less, his vanity and exaltation never permitting him to
+dissimulate; and no presumption, therefore, was less disguised than his,
+to those who studied the man.  Without acquired ability, without natural
+genius, or political capacity, destitute of discretion and address, as
+confident and obstinate as ignorant, he is only elevated to fall and to
+rise no more."
+
+Madame Schimmelpenninck, I was informed, is as amiable and accomplished
+as her husband is awkward and deficient; though well acquainted with his
+infidelities and profligacy, she is too virtuous to listen to revenge,
+and too generous not to forgive.  She is, besides, said to be a lady of
+uncommon abilities, and of greater information than she chooses to
+display.  She has never been the worshipper of Bonaparte, or the friend
+of Talleyrand; she loved her country, and detested its tyrants.  Had she
+been created a grand pensionary, she would certainly have swayed with
+more glory than her husband; and been hailed by contemporaries, as well
+as posterity, if not a heroine, at least a patriot,--a title which in our
+times, though often prostituted, so few have any claim to, and which,
+therefore, is so much the more valuable.
+
+When it was known at Paris that Schimmelpenninck had set out for his new
+sovereignty, no less than sixteen girls of the Palais Royal demanded
+passes for Holland.  Being questioned by Fouche as to their business in
+that country, they answered that they intended to visit their friend, the
+grand pensionary, in his new dominions.  Fouche communicated to
+Talleyrand both their demands and their business, and asked his advice.
+He replied:
+
+"Send two, and those of whose vigilance and intelligence you are sure.
+Refuse, by all means, the other fourteen.  Schimmelpenninck's time is
+precious, and were they at the Hague, he would neglect everything for
+them.  If they are fond of travelling, and are handsome and adroit,
+advise them to set out for London or for St. Petersburg; and if they
+consent, order them to my office, and they shall be supplied, if approved
+of, both with instructions, and with their travelling expenses."
+
+Fouche answered his colleague that "they were in every respect the very
+reverse of his description; they seemed to have passed their lives in the
+lowest stage of infamy, and they could neither read nor write."  You have
+therefore, no reason to fear that these belles will be sent to
+disseminate corruption in your happy island.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bourrienne
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+Indifference about futurity
+Military diplomacy
+More vain than ambitious
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v3
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 4.
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Italian subjects of Napoleon the First were far from
+displaying the same zeal and the same gratitude for his paternal care and
+kindness in taking upon himself the trouble of governing them, as we good
+Parisians have done.  Notwithstanding that a brigade of our police agents
+and spies, drilled for years to applaud and to excite enthusiasm,
+proceeded as his advanced guard to raise the public spirit, the
+reception at Milan was cold and everything else but cordial and pleasing.
+The absence of duty did not escape his observation and resentment.
+Convinced, in his own mind, of the great blessing, prosperity, and
+liberty his victories and sovereignty have conferred on the inhabitants
+of the other side of the Alps, he ascribed their present passive or
+mutinous behaviour to the effect of foreign emissaries from Courts
+envious of his glory and jealous of his authority.
+
+He suspected particularly England and Russia of having selected this
+occasion of a solemnity that would complete his grandeur to humble his
+just pride.  He also had some idea within himself that even Austria might
+indirectly have dared to influence the sentiments and conduct of her
+ci-devant subjects of Lombardy; but his own high opinion of the awe which
+his very name inspired at Vienna dispersed these thoughts, and his wrath
+fell entirely on the audacity of Pitt and Markof.  Strict orders were
+therefore issued to the prefects and commissaries of police to watch
+vigilantly all foreigners and strangers, who might have arrived, or who
+should arrive, to witness the ceremony of the coronation, and to arrest
+instantly any one who should give the least reason to suppose that he was
+an enemy instead of an admirer of His Imperial and Royal Majesty.  He
+also commanded the prefects of his palace not to permit any persons to
+approach his sacred person, of whose morality and politics they had not
+previously obtained a good account.
+
+These great measures of security were not entirely unnecessary.
+Individual vengeance and individual patriotism sharpened their daggers,
+and, to use Senator Roederer's language, "were near transforming the most
+glorious day of rejoicing into a day of universal mourning."
+
+All our writers on the Revolution agree that in France, within the first
+twelve years after we had reconquered our lost liberty, more conspiracies
+have been denounced than during the six centuries of the most brilliant
+epoch of ancient and free Rome.  These facts and avowals are speaking
+evidences of the eternal tranquillity of our unfortunate country, of our
+affection to our rulers, and of the unanimity with which all the changes
+of Government have been, notwithstanding our printed votes, received and
+approved.
+
+The frequency of conspiracies not only shows the discontent of the
+governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors.  This
+truth has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an
+expeditious and secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators,
+and to bury the conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup d'etat
+is to be struck; or, to excite the passions of hatred, any proofs can be
+found, or must be fabricated, involving an inimical or rival foreign
+Government in an odious plot.  Since the farce which Mehee de la Touche
+exhibited, you have, therefore, not read in the Moniteur either of the
+danger our Emperor has incurred several times since from the machinations
+of implacable or fanatical foes, or of the alarm these have caused his
+partisans.  They have, indeed, been hinted at in some speeches of our
+public functionaries, and in some paragraphs of our public prints, but
+their particulars will remain concealed from historians, unless some one
+of those composing our Court, our fashionable, or our political circles,
+has taken the trouble of noting them down; but even to these they are but
+imperfectly or incorrectly known.
+
+Could the veracity of a Fouche, a Real, a Talleyrand, or a Duroc (the
+only members of this new secret and invisible tribunal for expediting
+conspirators) be depended upon, they would be the most authentic
+annalists of these and other interesting secret occurrences.
+
+What I intend relating to you on this subject are circumstances such as
+they have been reported in our best informed societies by our most
+inquisitive companions.  Truth is certainly the foundation of these
+anecdotes; but their parts may be extenuated, diminished, altered, or
+exaggerated.  Defective or incomplete as they are, I hope you will not
+judge them unworthy of a page in a letter, considering the grand
+personage they concern, and the mystery with which he and his Government
+encompass themselves, or in which they wrap up everything not agreeable
+concerning them.
+
+A woman is said to have been at the head of the first plot against
+Napoleon since his proclamation as an Emperor of the French.  She called
+herself Charlotte Encore; but her real name is not known.  In 1803 she
+lived and had furnished a house at Abbeville, where she passed for a
+young widow of property, subsisting on her rents.  About the same time
+several other strangers settled there; but though she visited the
+principal inhabitants, she never publicly had any connection with the
+newcomers.
+
+In the summer of 1803, a girl at Amiens--some say a real enthusiast of
+Bonaparte's, but, according to others, engaged by Madame Bonaparte to
+perform the part she did demanded, upon her knees, in a kind of paroxysm
+of joy, the happiness of embracing him, in doing which she fainted, or
+pretended to faint away, and a pension of three thousand livres--was
+settled on her for her affection.
+
+Madame Encore, at Abbeville, to judge of her discourse and conversation,
+was also an ardent friend and well-wisher of the Emperor; and when, in
+July, 1804, he passed through Abbeville, on his journey to the coast,
+she, also, threw herself at his feet, and declared that she would die
+content if allowed the honour of embracing him.  To this he was going to
+assent, when Duroc stepped between them, seized her by the arm, and
+dragged her to an adjoining room, whither Bonaparte, near fainting from
+the sudden alarm his friend's interference had occasioned, followed him,
+trembling.  In the right sleeve of Madame Encore's gown was found a
+stiletto, the point of which was poisoned.  She was the same day
+transported to this capital, under the inspection of Duroc, and
+imprisoned in the Temple.  In her examination she denied having
+accomplices, and she expired on the rack without telling even her name.
+The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once famous Andre Dumont, was ordered
+to disseminate a report that she was shut up as insane in a madhouse.
+
+In the strict search made by the police in the house occupied by her, no
+papers or any, other indications were discovered that involved other
+persons, or disclosed who she was, or what induced her to attempt such a
+rash action.  Before the secret tribunal she is reported to have said,
+"that being convinced of Bonaparte's being one of the greatest criminals
+that ever breathed upon the earth, she took upon herself the office of a
+volunteer executioner; having, with every other good or loyal person,
+a right to punish him whom the law could not, or dared not, reach."
+When, however, some repairs were made in the house at Abbeville by a new
+tenant, a bundle of papers was found, which proved that a M.
+Franquonville, and about thirty, other individuals (many, of whom were
+the late newcomers there), had for six months been watching an
+opportunity to seize Bonaparte in his journeys between Abbeville and
+Montreuil, and to carry him to some part of the coast, where a vessel was
+ready to sail for England with him.  Had he, however, made resistance,
+he would have been shot in France, and his assassins have saved
+themselves in the vessel.
+
+The numerous escort that always, since he was an Emperor, accompanied
+him, and particularly his concealment of the days of his journeys,
+prevented the execution of this plot; and Madame Encore, therefore, took
+upon her to sacrifice herself for what she thought the welfare of her
+country.  How Duroc suspected or discovered her intent is not known; some
+say that an anonymous letter informed him of it, while others assert
+that, in throwing herself at Bonaparte's feet, this prefect observed the
+steel through the sleeve of her muslin gown.  Most of her associates were
+secretly executed; some, however, were carried to Boulogne and shot at
+the head of the army of England as English spies.
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--After the discovery of Charlotte Encore's attempt, Bonaparte,
+who hitherto had flattered himself that he possessed the good wishes, if
+not the affection, of his female subjects, made a regulation according to
+which no women who had not previously given in their names to the
+prefects of his palaces, and obtained previous permission, can approach
+his person or throw themselves at his feet, without incurring his
+displeasure, and even arrest.  Of this Imperial decree, ladies, both of
+the capital and of the provinces, when he travels, are officially
+informed.  Notwithstanding this precaution, he was a second time last
+spring, at Lyons, near falling the victim of the vengeance or malice of a
+woman.
+
+In his journey to be crowned King of Italy, he occupied his uncle's
+episcopal palace at Lyons during the forty-eight hours he remained there.
+Most of the persons of both sexes composing the household of Cardinal
+Fesch were from his own country, Corsica; among these was one of the name
+of Pauline Riotti, who inspected the economy of the kitchens.  It is
+Bonaparte's custom to take a dish of chocolate in the forenoon, which
+she, on the morning of his departure, against her custom, but under
+pretence of knowing the taste of the family, desired to prepare.  One of
+the cooks observed that she mixed it with something from her pocket, but,
+without saying a word to her that indicated suspicion, he warned
+Bonaparte, in a note, delivered to a page, to be upon his guard.  When
+the chamberlain carried in the chocolate,.  Napoleon ordered the person
+who had prepared it to be brought before him.  This being told Pauline,
+she fainted away, after having first drunk the remaining contents of the
+chocolate pot.  Her convulsions soon indicated that she was poisoned,
+and, notwithstanding the endeavours of Bonaparte's physician, Corvisart,
+she expired within an hour; protesting that her crime was an act of
+revenge against Napoleon, who had seduced her, when young, under a
+promise of marriage; but who, since his elevation, had not only neglected
+her, but reduced her to despair by refusing an honest support for herself
+and her child, sufficient to preserve her from the degradation of
+servitude.  Cardinal Fesch received a severe reprimand for admitting
+among his domestics individuals with whose former lives he was not better
+acquainted, and the same day he dismissed every Corsican in his service.
+The cook was, with the reward of a pension, made a member of the Legion
+of Honour, and it was given out by Corvisart that Pauline died insane.
+
+Within three weeks after this occurrence, Bonaparte was, at Milan, again
+exposed to an imminent danger.  According to his commands, the vigilance
+of the police had been very strict, and even severe.  All strangers who
+could not give the most satisfactory account of themselves, had either
+been sent out of the country, or were imprisoned.  He never went out
+unless strongly attended, and during his audiences the most trusty
+officers always surrounded him; these precautions increased in proportion
+as the day of his coronation approached.  On the morning of that day,
+about nine o'clock, when full dressed in his Imperial and royal robes,
+and all the grand officers of State by his side, a paper was delivered to
+him by his chamberlain, Talleyrand, a nephew of the Minister.  The
+instant he had read it, he flew into the arms of Berthier, exclaiming:
+"My friend, I am betrayed; are you among the number of conspirators?
+Jourdan, Lasnes, Mortier, Bessieres, St. Cyr, are you also forsaking your
+friend and benefactor?"  They all instantly encompassed him, begging that
+be would calm himself; that they all were what they always had been,
+dutiful and faithful subjects.  "But read this paper from my prefect,
+Salmatoris; he says that if I move a step I may cease to live, as the
+assassins are near me, as well as before me."
+
+The commander of his guard then entered with fifty grenadiers, their
+bayonets fixed, carrying with them a prisoner, who pointed out four
+individuals not far from Bonaparte's person, two of whom were Italian
+officers of the Royal Italian Guard, and two were dressed in Swiss
+uniforms.  They were all immediately seized, and at their feet were found
+three daggers.  One of those in Swiss regimentals exclaimed, before he
+was taken: "Tremble, tyrant of my country!  Thousands of the descendants
+of William Tell have, with me, sworn your destruction.  You, escape this
+day, but the just vengeance of outraged humanity follows you like your
+shade.  Depend upon it an untimely end is irremediably reserved you."  So
+saying, he pierced his heart and fell a corpse into the arms of the
+grenadiers who came to arrest him.
+
+This incident suspended the procession to the cathedral for an hour,
+when Berthier announced that the conspirators were punished.  Bonaparte
+evinced on this occasion the same absence of mind and of courage as on
+the 9th of November, 1799, when Arena and other deputies drew their
+daggers against him at St. Cloud.  As this scene did not redound much to
+the honour of the Emperor and King, all mention of the conspiracy was
+severely prohibited, and the deputations ready to congratulate him on his
+escape were dispersed to attend their other duties.
+
+The conspirators are stated to have been four young men, who had lost
+their parents and fortunes by the Revolutions effected by Bonaparte in
+Italy and Switzerland, and who had sworn fidelity to each other, and to
+avenge their individual wrongs with the injuries of their countries at
+the same time.  They were all prepared and resigned to die, expecting to
+be cut to pieces the moment Bonaparte fell by their hands; but one of the
+Italians, rather superstitious, had, before he went to the drawing-room,
+confessed and received absolution from a priest, whom he knew to be an
+enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in hope of reward, disclosed the
+conspiracy to the master of ceremonies, Salmatoris.  The three surviving
+conspirators are said to have been literally torn to pieces by the
+engines of torture, and the priest was shot for having given absolution
+to an assassin, and for having concealed his knowledge of the plot an
+hour after he was acquainted with it.  Even Salmatoris had some
+difficulty to avoid being disgraced for having written a terrifying note,
+which had exposed the Emperor's weakness, and shown that his life was
+dearer to him at the head of Empires than when only at the head of
+armies.
+
+My narrative of this event I have from an officer present, whose veracity
+I can guarantee.  He also informed me that, in consequence of it, all the
+officers of the Swiss brigades in the French service that were quartered
+or encamped in Italy were, to the number of near fifty, dismissed at
+once.  Of the Italian guards, every officer who was known to have
+suffered any losses by the new order of things in his country, was
+ordered to resign, if he would not enter into the regiments of the line.
+
+Whatever the police agents did to prevent it, and in spite of some unjust
+and cruel chastisement, Bonaparte continued, during his stay in Italy,
+an object of ridicule in conversation, as well as in pamphlets and
+caricatures.  One of these represented him in the ragged garb of a sans-
+culotte, pale and trembling on his knees, with bewildered looks and his
+hair standing upright on his head like pointed horns, tearing the map of
+the world to pieces, and, to save his life, offering each of his generals
+a slice, who in return regarded him with looks of contempt mixed with
+pity.
+
+I have just heard of a new plot, or rather a league against Bonaparte's
+ambition.  At its head the Generals Jourdan, Macdonald, Le Courbe, and
+Dessolles are placed, though many less victorious generals and officers,
+civil as well as military, are reported to be its members.  Their object
+is not to remove or displace Bonaparte as an Emperor of the French; on
+the contrary, they offer their lives to strengthen his authority and to
+resist his enemies; but they ask and advise him to renounce, for himself,
+for his relations, and for France, all possessions on the Italian side of
+the Alps, as the only means to establish a permanent peace, and to avoid
+a war with other States, whose safety is endangered by our great
+encroachments.  A mutinous kind of address to this effect has been sent
+to the camp of Boulogne and to all other encampments of our troops, that
+those generals and other military persons there, who chose, might both
+see the object and the intent of the associates.  It is reported that
+Bonaparte ordered it to be burnt by the hands of the common executioner
+at Boulogne; that sixteen officers there who had subscribed their names
+in appropriation of the address were broken, and dismissed with disgrace;
+that Jourdan is deprived of his command in Italy, and ordered to render
+an account of his conduct to the Emperor.  Dessolles is also said to be
+dismissed, and with Macdonald, Le Courbe, and eighty-four others of His
+Majesty's subjects, whose names appeared under the remonstrance (or
+petition, as some call it), exiled to different departments of this
+country, where they are to expect their Sovereign's further
+determination, and, in the meantime, remain under the inspection and
+responsibility of his constituted authorities and commissaries of police.
+As it is as dangerous to inquire as to converse on this and other
+subjects, which the mysterious policy of our Government condemns to
+silence or oblivion, I have not yet been able to gather any more or
+better information concerning this league, or unconstitutional opposition
+to the executive power; but as I am intimate with one of the actors,
+should he have an opportunity, he will certainly write to me at full
+length, and be very explicit.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, August, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I believe I have before remarked that, under the Government of
+Bonaparte, causes relatively the most insignificant have frequently
+produced effects of the greatest consequence.  A capricious or whimsical
+character, swaying with unlimited power, is certainly the most dangerous
+guardian of the prerogatives of sovereignty, as well as of the rights and
+liberties of the people.  That Bonaparte is as vain and fickle as a
+coquette, as obstinate as a mule, and equally audacious and unrelenting,
+every one who has witnessed his actions or meditated on his transactions
+must be convinced.  The least opposition irritates his pride, and he
+determines and commands, in a moment of impatience or vivacity, what may
+cause the misery of millions for ages, and, perhaps, his own repentance
+for years.
+
+When Bonaparte was officially informed by his Ambassador at Vienna, the
+young La Rochefoucauld, that the Emperor of Germany had declined being
+one of his grand officers of the Legion of Honour, he flew into a rage,
+and used against this Prince the most gross, vulgar, and unbecoming
+language.  I have heard it said that he went so far as to say, "Well,
+Francis II. is tired of reigning.  I hope to have strength enough to
+carry a third crown.  He who dares refuse to be and continue my equal,
+shall soon, as a vassal, think himself honoured with the regard which, as
+a master, I may condescend, from compassion, to bestow on him."  Though
+forty-eight hours had elapsed after this furious sally before he met with
+the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von Cobenzl, his passion was still so
+furious, that, observing his grossness and violence, all the members of
+the diplomatic corps trembled, both for this their respected member, and
+for the honour of our nation thus represented.
+
+When the diplomatic audience was over, he said to Talleyrand, in a
+commanding and harsh tone of voice, in the presence of all his aides-de-
+camp and generals:
+
+"Write this afternoon, by an extraordinary courier, to my Minister at
+Genoa, Salicetti, to prepare the Doge and the people for the immediate
+incorporation of the Ligurian Republic with my Empire.  Should Austria
+dare to murmur, I shall, within three months, also incorporate the
+ci-devant Republic of Venice with my Kingdom of Italy!"
+
+"But--but--Sire!" uttered the Minister, trembling.
+
+"There exists no 'but,' and I will listen to no 'but,'" interrupted His
+Majesty.  "Obey my orders without further discussions.  Should Austria
+dare to arm, I shall, before next Christmas, make Vienna the headquarters
+of a fiftieth military division.  In an hour I expect you with the
+despatches ready for Salicetti."
+
+This Salicetti is a Corsican of a respectable family, born at Bastia, in
+1758, and it was he who, during the siege of Toulon in 1793, introduced
+his countryman, Napoleon Bonaparte, his present Sovereign, to the
+acquaintance of Barras, an occurrence which has since produced
+consequences so terribly notorious.
+
+Before the Revolution an advocate of the superior council of Corsica, he
+was elected a member to the First National Assembly, where, on the 30th
+of November, 1789, he pressed the decree which declared the Island of
+Corsica an integral part of the French monarchy.  In 1792, he was sent by
+his fellow citizens as a deputy to the National Convention, where he
+joined the terrorist faction, and voted for the death of his King.  In
+May, 1793, he was in Corsica, and violently opposed the partisans of
+General Paoli.  Obliged to make his escape in August from that island, to
+save himself, he joined the army of General Carteaux, then marching
+against the Marseilles insurgents, whence he was sent by the National
+Convention with Barras, Gasparin, Robespierre the younger, and Ricrod, as
+a representative of the people, to the army before Toulon, where, as well
+as at Marseilles, he shared in all the atrocities committed by his
+colleagues and by Bonaparte; for which, after the death of the
+Robespierres, he was arrested with him as a terrorist.
+
+He had not known Bonaparte much in Corsica, but, finding him and his
+family in great distress, with all other Corsican refugees, and observing
+his adroitness as a captain of artillery, he recommended him to Barras,
+and upon their representation to the Committee of Public Safety, he was
+promoted to a chef de brigade, or colonel.  In 1796, when Barras gave
+Bonaparte the command of the army of Italy, Salicetti was appointed a
+Commissary of Government to the same army, and in that capacity behaved
+with the greatest insolence towards all the Princes of Italy, and most so
+towards the Duke of Modena, with whom he and Bonaparte signed a treaty of
+neutrality, for which they received a large sum in ready money; but
+shortly afterwards the duchy was again invaded, and an attempt made to
+surprise and seize the Duke.  In 1797 he was chosen a member of the
+Council of Five Hundred, where he always continued a supporter of violent
+measures.
+
+When, in 1799, his former protege, Bonaparte, was proclaimed a First
+Consul, Salicetti desired to be placed in the Conservative Senate; but
+his familiarity displeased Napoleon, who made him first a commercial
+agent, and afterwards a Minister to the Ligurian Republic, so as to keep
+him at a distance.  During his several missions, he has amassed a
+fortune, calculated, at the lowest, of six millions of livres.
+
+The order Salicetti received to prepare the incorporation of Genoa with
+France, would not, without the presence of our troops, have been very
+easy to execute, particularly as he, six months before, had prevailed on
+the Doge and the Senate to resign all sovereignty to Lucien Bonaparte,
+under the title of a Grand Duke of Genoa.
+
+The cause of Napoleon's change of opinion with regard to his brother
+Lucien, was that the latter would not separate from a wife he loved, but
+preferred domestic happiness to external splendour frequently accompanied
+with internal misery.  So that this act of incorporation of the Ligurian
+Republic, in fact, originated, notwithstanding the great and deep
+calculations of our profound politicians and political schemers, in
+nothing else but in the keeping of a wife, and in the refusal of a
+riband.
+
+That corruption, seduction, and menaces seconded the intrigues and
+bayonets which convinced the Ligurian Government of the honour and
+advantage of becoming subjects of Bonaparte, I have not the least doubt;
+but that the Doge, Girolamo Durazzo, and the senators Morchio, Maglione,
+Travega, Maghella, Roggieri, Taddei, Balby, and Langlade sold the
+independence of their country for ten millions of livres--though it has
+been positively asserted, I can hardly believe; and, indeed, money was as
+little necessary as resistance would have been unavailing, all the forts
+and strong positions being in the occupation of our troops.  A general
+officer present when the Doge of Genoa, at the head of the Ligurian
+deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at Milan, and exchanged
+liberty for bondage, assured me that this ci-devant chief magistrate
+spoke with a faltering voice and with tears in his eyes, and that
+indignation was read on the countenance of every member of the deputation
+thus forced to prostitute their rights as citizens, and to vilify their
+sentiments as patriots.
+
+When Salicetti, with his secretary, Milhaud, had arranged this honourable
+affair, they set out from Genoa to announce to Bonaparte, at Milan, their
+success.  Not above a league from the former city their carriage was
+stopped, their persons stripped, and their papers and effects seized by a
+gang, called in the country the gang of PATRIOTIC ROBBERS, commanded by
+Mulieno.  This chief is a descendant of a good Genoese family, proscribed
+by France, and the men under him are all above the common class of
+people.  They never commit any murders, nor do they rob any but
+Frenchmen, or Italians known to be adherents of the French party.  Their
+spoils they distribute among those of their countrymen who, like
+themselves, have suffered from the revolutions in Italy within these last
+nine years.  They usually send the amount destined to relieve these
+persons to the curates of the several parishes, signifying in what manner
+it is to be employed.  Their conduct has procured them many friends among
+the low and the poor, and, though frequently pursued by our gendarmes,
+they have hitherto always escaped.  The papers captured by them on this
+occasion from Salicetti are said to be of a most curious nature, and
+throw great light on Bonaparte's future views of Italy.  The original act
+of consent of the Ligurian Government to the incorporation with France
+was also in this number.  It is reported that they were deposited with
+the Austrian Minister at Genoa, who found means to forward them to his
+Court; and it is supposed that their contents did not a little to hasten
+the present movements of the Emperor of Germany.
+
+Another gang, known under the appellation of the PATRIOTIC AVENGERS, also
+desolates the Ligurian Republic.  They never rob, but always murder those
+whom they consider as enemies of their country.  Many of our officers,
+and even our sentries on duty, have been wounded or killed by them; and,
+after dark, therefore, no Frenchman dares walk out unattended.  Their
+chief is supposed to be a ci-devant Abbe, Sagati, considered a political
+as well as a religious fanatic.  In consequence of the deeds of these
+patriotic avengers, Bonaparte's first act, as a Sovereign of Liguria, was
+the establishment of special military commissions, and a law prohibiting,
+under pain of death, every person from carrying arms who could not show a
+written permission of our commissary of police.  Robbers and assassins
+are, unfortunately, common to all nations, and all people of all ages;
+but those of the above description are only the production and progeny of
+revolutionary and troublesome times.  They pride themselves, instead of
+violating the laws, on supplying their inefficacy and counteracting their
+partiality.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte is now the knight of more Royal Orders than any other
+Sovereign in Europe, and were he to put them on all at once, their
+ribands would form stuff enough for a light summer coat of as many
+different colours as the rainbow.  The Kings of Spain, of Naples, of
+Prussia, of Portugal, and of Etruria have admitted him a knight-
+companion, as well as the Electors of Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden, and the
+Pope of Rome.  In return he has appointed these Princes his grand
+officers of HIS Legion of Honour, the highest rank of his newly
+instituted Imperial Order.  It is even said that some of these Sovereigns
+have been honoured by him with the grand star and broad riband of the
+Order of His Iron Crown of the Kingdom of Italy.
+
+Before Napoleon's departure for Milan last spring, Talleyrand intimated
+to the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here, that their presence
+would be agreeable to the Emperor of the French at his coronation at
+Milan as a King of Italy.  In the preceding summer a similar hint, or
+order, had been given by him for a diplomatic trip to Aix-la-Chapelle,
+and all Their Excellencies set a-packing instantly; but some legitimate
+Sovereigns, having since discovered that it was indecent for their
+representatives to be crowding the suite of an insolently and proudly
+travelling usurper, under different pretences declined the honour of an
+invitation and journey to Italy.  It would, besides, have been pleasant
+enough to have witnessed the Ambassadors of Austria and Prussia, whose
+Sovereigns had not acknowledged Bonaparte's right to his assumed title of
+King of Italy, indirectly approving it by figuring at the solemnity which
+inaugurated him as such.  Of this inconsistency and impropriety
+Talleyrand was well aware; but audacity on one side, and endurance and
+submission on the other, had so often disregarded these considerations
+before, that he saw no indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal.  His
+master had, however, the gratification to see at his levee, and in his
+wife's drawing-room, the Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and
+Bavaria, who laid at the Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of
+their own Princes, to the nor little entertainment of His Imperial and
+Royal Majesty, and to the great edification of his dutiful subjects on
+the other side of the Alps.
+
+The expenses of Bonaparte's journey to Milan, and his coronation there
+(including also those of his attendants from France), amounted to no less
+a sum than fifteen millions of livres--of which one hundred and fifty
+thousand livres--was laid out in fireworks, double that sum in
+decorations of the Royal Palace and the cathedral, and three millions of
+livres--in presents to different generals, grand officers, deputations,
+etc.  The poor also shared his bounty; medals to the value of fifty
+thousand livres--were thrown out among them on the day of the ceremony,
+besides an equal sum given by Madame Napoleon to the hospitals and
+orphan-houses.  These last have a kind of hereditary or family claim on
+the purse of our Sovereign; their parents were the victims of the
+Emperor's first step towards glory and grandeur.
+
+Another three millions of livres was expended for the march of troops
+from France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more was
+requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during two
+months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men composing
+them two million livres' worth of rings, watches, snuff-boxes, portraits
+set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets, as evidences of His
+Majesty's satisfaction with their behaviour, presence, and performances.
+
+These troops were under the command of Bonaparte's Field-marshal,
+Jourdan, a general often mentioned in the military annals of our
+revolutionary war.  During the latter part of the American war, he served
+under General Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in 1783, after
+the peace, his discharge.  He then turned a pedlar, in which situation
+the Revolution found him.  He had also married, for her fortune, a lame
+daughter of a tailor, who brought him a fortune of two thousand livres--
+from whom he has since been divorced, leaving her to shift for herself as
+she can, in a small milliner's shop at Limoges, where her husband was
+born in 1763.
+
+Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
+organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in the
+National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel.  His known
+love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public Safety, in
+1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of Ardennes and
+of the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard.  On the 17th of October
+the same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies, which obliged the
+united forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to raise the siege of
+Maubeuge.  The jealous Republican Government, in reward, deposed him and
+appointed Pichegru his successor, which was the origin of that enmity and
+malignity with which Jourdan pursued this unfortunate general, even to
+his grave.  He never forgave Pichegru the acceptance of a command which
+he could not decline without risking his life; and when he should have
+avenged his disgrace on the real causes of it, he chose to resent it on
+him who, like himself, was merely an instrument, or a slave, in the hands
+and under the whip of a tyrannical power.
+
+After the imprisonment of General Hoche, in March, 1794, Jourdan
+succeeded him as chief of the army of the Moselle.  In June he joined,
+with thirty thousand men, the right wing of the army of the North,
+forming a new one, under the name of the army of the Sambre and Meuse.
+On the 16th of the same month he gained a complete victory over the
+Prince of Coburg, who tried to raise the siege of Charleroy.  This
+battle, which was fought near Trasegnies, is, nevertheless, commonly
+called the battle of Fleurus.  After Charleroy had surrendered on the
+25th, Jourdan and his army were ordered to act under the direction of
+General Pichegru, who had drawn the plan of that brilliant campaign.
+Always envious of this general, Jourdan did everything to retard his
+progress, and at last intrigued so well that the army of the Sambre and
+the Meuse was separated from that of the North.
+
+With the former of these armies Jourdan pursued the retreating
+confederates, and, after driving them from different stands and
+positions, he repulsed them to the banks of the Rhine, which river they
+were obliged to pass.  Here ended his successes this year, successes that
+were not obtained without great loss on our side.
+
+Jourdan began the campaigns of 1795 and 1796 with equal brilliancy,
+and ended them with equal disgrace.  After penetrating into Germany with
+troops as numerous as well-disciplined, he was defeated at the end of
+them by Archduke Charles, and retreated always with such precipitation,
+and in such confusion, that it looked more like the flight of a
+disorderly rabble than the retreat of regular troops; and had not Moreau,
+in 1796, kept the enemy in awe, few of Jourdan's officers or men would
+again have seen France; for the inhabitants of Franconia rose on these
+marauders, and cut them to pieces, wherever they could surprise or waylay
+them.
+
+In 1797, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the
+Jacobin faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a
+chief; and he had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride himself
+upon having procured the transportation of that patriotic general to
+Cayenne.  In 1799, he again assumed the command of the army of Alsace and
+of Switzerland; but he crossed the Rhine and penetrated into Suabia only
+to be again routed by the Archduke Charles, and to repass this river in
+disorder.  Under the necessity of resigning as a general-in-chief, he
+returned to the Council of Five Hundred, more violent than ever, and
+provoked there the most oppressive measures against his fellow citizens.
+Previous to the revolution effected by Bonaparte in November of that
+year, he had entered with Garreau and Santerre into a conspiracy, the
+object of which was to restore the Reign of Terror, and to prevent which
+Bonaparte said he made those changes which placed him at the head of
+Government.  The words were even printed in the papers of that period,
+which Bonaparte on the 10th of November addressed to the then deputy of
+Mayenne, Prevost: "If the plot entered into by Jourdan and others, and of
+which they have not blushed to propose to me the execution, had not been
+defeated, they would have surrounded the place of your sitting, and to
+crush all future opposition, ordered a number of deputies to be
+massacred.  That done, they were to establish the sanguinary despotism of
+the Reign of Terror."  But whether such was Jourdan's project, or whether
+it was merely given out to be such by the consular faction, to extenuate
+their own usurpation, he certainly had connected himself with the most
+guilty and contemptible of the former terrorists, and drew upon himself
+by such conduct the hatred and blame even of those whose opinion had long
+been suspended on his account.
+
+General Jourdan was among those terrorists whom the Consular Government
+condemned to transportation; but after several interviews with Bonaparte
+he was not only pardoned, but made a Counsellor of State of the military
+section; and afterwards, in 1801, an administrator-general of Piedmont,
+where he was replaced by General Menou in 1803, being himself entrusted
+with the command in Italy.  This place he has preserved until last month,
+when he was ordered to resign it to Massena, with whom he had a quarrel,
+and would have fought him in a duel, had not the Viceroy, Eugene de
+Beauharnais, put him under arrest and ordered him back hither, where he
+is daily expected.  If Massena's report to Bonaparte be true, the army of
+Italy was very far from being as orderly and numerous as Jourdan's
+assertions would have induced us to believe.  But this accusation of a
+rival must be listened to with caution; because, should Massena meet with
+repulse, he will no doubt make use of it as an apology; and should he be
+victorious, hold it out as a claim for more honour and praise.
+
+The same doubts which still continue of Jourdan's political opinions
+remain also with regard to his military capacity.  But the unanimous
+declaration of those who have served under his orders as a general must
+silence both his blind admirers and unjust slanderers.  They all allow
+him some military ability; he combines and prepares in the Cabinet a plan
+of defence and attack, with method and intelligence, but he does not
+possess the quick coup d'oeil, and that promptitude which perceives, and
+rectifies accordingly, an error on the field of battle.  If, on the day
+of action, some accident, or some manoeuvre, occurs, which has not been
+foreseen by him, his dull and heavy genius does not enable him to alter
+instantly his dispositions, or to remedy errors, misfortunes, or
+improvidences.  This kind of talent, and this kind of absence of talent,
+explain equally the causes of his advantages, as well as the origin of
+his frequent disasters.  Nobody denies him courage, but, with most of our
+other republican generals, he has never been careful of the lives of the
+troops under him.  I have heard an officer of superior talents and rank
+assert, in the presence of Carnot, that the number of wounded and killed
+under Jourdan, when victorious, frequently surpassed the number of
+enemies he had defeated.  I fear it is too true that we are as much, if
+not more, indebted for our successes to the superior number as to the
+superior valour of our troops.
+
+Jourdan is, with regard to fortune, one of our poorest republican
+generals who have headed armies.  He has not, during all his campaigns,
+collected more than a capital of eight millions of livres--a mere trifle
+compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions of Le
+Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of
+Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte.  It is also
+true that Jourdan is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards, dice, and
+women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four allotted to
+business, he passed the remainder of his time either at the gaming-
+tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio--I say seraglio, because he
+kept, in the extensive house joining his palace as governor and
+commander, ten women-three French, three Italians, two Germans, two Irish
+or English girls.  He supported them all in style; but they were his
+slaves, and he was their sultan, whose official mutes (his aides-de-camp)
+both watched them, and, if necessary, chastised them.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I can truly defy the world to produce a corps of such a
+heterogeneous composition as our Conservative Senate, when I except the
+members composing Bonaparte's Legion of Honour.  Some of our Senators
+have been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks, physicians,
+barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers, mountebanks,
+Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors, counsellors, or presidents
+of Parliament, admirals, barristers, Bishops, sailors, attorneys,
+authors, Barons, spies, painters, professors, Ministers, sans-culottes,
+atheists, stonemasons, robbers, mathematicians, philosophers, regicides,
+and a long et cetera.  Any person reading through the official list of
+the members of the Senate, and who is acquainted with their former
+situations in life, may be convinced of this truth.  Should he even be
+ignorant of them, let him but inquire, with the list in his hand, in any
+of our fashionable or political circles; he will meet with but few
+persons who are not able or willing to remove his doubts, or to gratify
+his curiosity.  There are not many of them whom it is possible to
+elevate, but those are still more numerous whom it is impossible to
+degrade.  Their past lives, vices, errors, or crimes, have settled their
+characters and reputation; and they must live and die in 'statu quo',
+either as fools or as knaves, and perhaps as both.
+
+I do not mean to say that they are all criminals or all equally criminal,
+if insurrection against lawful authority and obedience to usurped tyranny
+are not to be considered as crimes; but there are few indeed who can lay
+their hands on their bosoms and say, 'vitam expendere vero'.  Some of
+them, as a Lagrange, Berthollet, Chaptal, Laplace, Francois de Neuf-
+Chateau, Tronchet, Monge, Lacepede, and Bougainville, are certainly men
+of talents; but others, as a Porcher, Resnier, Vimar, Auber, Perk, Sera,
+Vernier, Vien, Villetard, Tascher, Rigal, Baciocchi, Beviere,
+Beauharnais, De Luynea (a ci-devant duke, known under the name of Le Gros
+Cochon), nature never destined but to figure among those half-idiots and
+half-imbeciles who are, as it were, intermedial between the brute and
+human creation.
+
+Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche,
+Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and Roederer
+form another class,--some of them regicides, others assassins and
+plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date from the beginning
+of the Revolution.  They are all men of parts, of more or less knowledge,
+and of great presumption.  As to their morality, it is on a level with
+their religion and loyalty.  They betrayed their King, and had denied
+their God already in 1789.
+
+After these come some others, who again have neither talents to boast of
+nor crimes of which they have to be ashamed.  They have but little
+pretension to genius, none to consistency, and their honesty equals their
+capacity.  They joined our political revolution as they might have done a
+religious procession.  It was at that time a fashion; and they applauded
+our revolutionary innovations as they would have done the introduction of
+a new opera, of a new tragedy, of a new comedy, or of a new farce.  To
+this fraternity appertain a ci-devant Comte de Stult-Tracy, Dubois--
+Dubay, Kellerman, Lambrechts, Lemercier, Pleville--Le Pelley, Clement de
+Ris, Peregeaux, Berthelemy, Vaubois, Nrignon, D'Agier, Abrial, De Belloy,
+Delannoy, Aboville, and St. Martin La Motte.
+
+Such are the characteristics of men whose 'senatus consultum' bestows an
+Emperor on France, a King on Italy, makes of principalities departments
+of a Republic, and transforms Republics into provinces or principalities.
+To show the absurdly fickle and ridiculously absurd appellations of our
+shamefully perverted institutions, this Senate was called the
+Conservative Senate; that is to say, it was to preserve the republican
+consular constitution in its integrity, both against the; encroachments
+of the executive and legislative power, both against the manoeuvres of
+the factions, the plots of the royalists or monarchists, and the clamours
+of a populace of levellers.  But during the five years that these honest
+wiseacres have been preserving, everything has perished--the Republic,
+the Consuls, free discussions, free election, the political liberty, and
+the liberty of the Press; all--all are found nowhere but in old, useless,
+and rejected codes.  They have, however, in a truly patriotic manner
+taken care of their own dear selves.  Their salaries are more than
+doubled since 1799.
+
+Besides mock Senators, mock praetors, mock quaestors, other 'nomina
+libertatis' are revived, so as to make the loss of the reality so much
+the more galling.  We have also two curious commissions; one called "the
+Senatorial Commission of Personal Liberty," and the other "the Senatorial
+Commission of the Liberty of the Press."  The imprisonment without cause,
+and transportation without trial, of thousands of persons of both sexes
+weekly, show the grand advantages which arise from the former of these
+commissions; and the contents of our new books and daily prints evince
+the utility and liberality of the latter.
+
+But from the past conduct of these our Senators, members of these
+commissions, one may easily conclude what is to be expected in future
+from their justice and patriotism.  Lenoin Laroche, at the head of the
+one, was formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to
+politics than to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at the
+end of the session of the first assembly (of which he was a member),
+forced, for subsistence, to become the editor of an insignificant
+journal.  Here he preached licentiousness, under the name of Liberty, and
+the agrarian law in recommending Equality.  A prudent courtier of all
+systems in fashion, and of all factions in power, he escaped
+proscription, though not accusation of having shared in the national
+robberies.  A short time in the summer of 1797, after the dismissal of
+Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins
+elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he, with other
+deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return, rewarded with a
+place in the Senate.  Under monarchy he was a republican, and under a
+Republic he extolled monarchical institutions.  He wished to be singular,
+and to be rich.  Among so many shocking originals, however, he was not
+distinguished; and among so many philosophical marauders, he had no
+opportunity to pillage above two millions of livres.  This friend of
+liberty is now one of the most despotic Senators, and this lover of
+equality never answers when spoken to, if not addressed as "His
+Excellency," or "Monseigneur."
+
+Boissy d' Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the
+Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was
+chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions, and
+in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that dishonoured
+the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution.  A member afterwards
+of the National Convention, he was sent in mission to Lyons, where,
+instead of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he inflicted new ones.
+When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he
+pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in
+his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take
+it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First!  He pronounced
+the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat.  "The soul,"
+said he, "was moved and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the
+Supreme Being with philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;" and he
+signed the removal of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to
+humanity!  In September, 1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to
+transportation by the Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made
+him first a tribune and afterwards a Senator.
+
+Boissy d' Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
+neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself,
+he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and
+friends.
+
+Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
+bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the
+same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
+attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a
+motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France.  He
+seconded another motion of Bonaparte's prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a
+corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
+Princes.  At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on
+having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and
+boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary
+justice, those who had escaped the laws.  After meeting with well-merited
+contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a
+handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of
+Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of
+his Senate.  Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense
+when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted
+him by Nature.  Without education, as well as without parts, he for a
+long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself
+eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent.  His ideas of liberty
+are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of
+arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball,
+because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.
+
+Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that
+commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all
+four are slaves.
+
+Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
+liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal.  The former
+is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
+sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist.
+A mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
+enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
+caused to be massacred or guillotined.  When, as a Minister of Justice,
+he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
+affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices,
+whose nature had not much of tenderness.  As a member of the first
+assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the
+Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press.
+"The laws, you say" (exclaimed he, in the Council), "punish libellers;
+so they do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave
+your doors unbolted?  Is not the character, the honour, and the
+tranquillity of a citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the
+liberty of the Press, you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who
+can write or think.  The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will
+always remain.  Were you, therefore, determined to decree the motion for
+this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that
+conviction of having written a libel carries with it capital punishment,
+and that a label be fastened on the breast of the libeller, when carried
+to execution, with this inscription: 'A social murderer,' or 'A murderer
+of characters!'"
+
+Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all
+political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after
+approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them,
+or betrayed them.  Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at
+Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the
+Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court.  Immoral and
+unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only
+equalled by his perversity and cruelty.  It was he who, on the 10th of
+August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of
+their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act.
+After he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our
+parties and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien,
+and a Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and
+afterwards as a Senator.  His own and only daughter died in a
+miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural
+parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his
+father's baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to
+marry.
+
+With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one
+period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the
+preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as
+well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a
+constitutional Government.  At another time he wrote that, as it was
+impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness
+of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the
+liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one
+wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to
+preserve.  To show his indifference about his own character, as well as
+about the opinion of the public, these opposite declarations were
+inserted in one of our daily papers, and both were signed "Roederer."
+
+In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand livres--
+and he now possesses national property purchased for seven millions of
+livres--and he avows himself to be worth three millions more in money
+placed in our public funds.  He often says, laughingly, that he is under
+great obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted in one day
+all his debts.  All his creditors, after being denounced for their
+aristocracy, were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.
+
+Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have
+had the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most
+affected, silly, and disgusting.  His wrinkled face, and effeminate and
+childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his
+confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear
+such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and
+enervated person, that I have frequently been ready to laugh at him in
+his face, had not indignation silenced all other feeling.  A light-
+coloured wig covers a bald head; his cheeks and eyelids are painted, and
+his teeth false; and I have seen a woman faint away from the effect of
+his breath, notwithstanding that he infects with his musk and perfumes a
+whole house only with his presence.  When on the ground floor you may
+smell him in the attic.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The reciprocal jealousy and even interest of Austria, France,
+and Russia have hitherto prevented the tottering Turkish Empire from
+being partitioned, like Poland, or seized, like Italy; to serve as
+indemnities, like the German empire; or to be shared, as reward to the
+allies, like the Empire of Mysore.
+
+When we consider the anarchy that prevails, both in the Government and
+among the subjects, as well in the capital as in the provinces of the
+Ottoman Porte; when we reflect on the mutiny and cowardice of its armies
+and navy, the ignorance and incapacity of its officers and military and
+naval commanders, it is surprising, indeed, as I have heard Talleyrand
+often declare, that more foreign political intrigues should be carried on
+at Constantinople alone than in all other capitals of Europe taken
+together.  These intrigues, however, instead of doing honour to the,
+sagacity and patriotism of the members of the Divan, expose only their
+corruption and imbecility; and, instead of indicating a dread of the
+strength of the Sublime Sultan, show a knowledge of his weakness, of
+which the gold of the most wealthy, and the craft of the most subtle, by
+turns are striving to profit.
+
+Beyond a doubt the enmity of the Ottoman Porte can do more mischief than
+its friendship can do service.  Its neutrality is always useful, while
+its alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no
+advantage.  It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than
+from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and bribe.
+The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or
+nugatory in this assertion.
+
+As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in
+1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to
+invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion
+in favour of this country.  Our Ambassador in Turkey at that time, Comte
+de Choiseul-Gouffier, though an admirer of the Revolution, was not a
+republican, and, therefore, secretly counteracted what he officially
+seemed to wish to effect.  The Imperial Court succeeded, therefore, in
+establishing a neutrality of the Ottoman Porte, but Comte de Choiseul was
+proscribed by the Convention.  As academician, he was, however, at St.
+Petersburg, liberally recompensed by Catherine II. for the services the
+Ambassador had performed at Constantinople.
+
+In May, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety determined to expedite
+another embassy to the Grand. Seignior, at the head of which was the
+famous intriguer, De Semonville, whose revolutionary diplomacy had,
+within three years, alarmed the Courts of Madrid, Naples, and Turin, as
+well as the republican Government of Genoa.  His career towards Turkey
+was stopped in the Grisons Republic, on the 25th of July following, where
+he, with sixteen other persons of his suite, was arrested, and sent a
+prisoner, first to Milan, and afterwards to Mantua.  He carried with him
+presents of immense value, which were all seized by the Austrians.  Among
+them were four superb coaches, highly finished, varnished, and gilt; what
+is iron or brass in common carriages was here gold or silver-gilt.  Two
+large chests were filled with stuff of gold brocade, India gold muslins,
+and shawls and laces of very great value.  Eighty thousand louis d'or in
+ready money; a service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly
+belonged to the Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and
+brilliants, the intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight
+millions of livres--and a great number of jewels; among others, the
+crown diamond, called here the Regents', and in your country the Pitt
+Diamond, fell, with other riches, into the hands of the captors.
+Notwithstanding this loss and this disappointment, we contrived in vain
+to purchase the hostility of the Turks against our enemies, though with
+the sacrifice of no less a sum (according to the report of Saint Just, in
+June, 1794,) than seventy millions of livres:  These official statements
+prove the means which our so often extolled economical and moral
+republican Governments have employed in their negotiations.
+
+After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the Sultan
+became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
+friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war.
+The preliminaries of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were,
+however, soon followed with a renewal of our former friendly intercourse
+with the Ottoman Porte. The voyage of Sebastiani into Egypt and Syria, in
+the autumn of 1802, showed that our tenderness for the inhabitants of
+these countries had not diminished, and that we soon intended to bestow
+on them new hugs of fraternity.  Your pretensions to Malta impeded our
+prospects in the East, and your obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so
+well planned schemes of encroachments.  It was then that Bonaparte first
+selected for his representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune,
+commonly called by Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of
+military merit, an intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time
+of peace when seated in the Council chamber.
+
+This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married
+to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from
+starving, for he was as vicious as idle.  The money he gained when he
+chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among
+prostitutes.  To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest
+means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of
+types and of paper.
+
+In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an
+acceptable associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the
+Orleans faction, bought him a printing-office, and he printed the so
+dreadfully well-known journal, called 'L'Amie du Peuple'.  From the
+principles of this atrocious paper, and from those of his sanguinary
+patron, he formed his own political creed.  He distinguished himself
+frequently at the clubs of the Cordeliers, and of the Jacobins, by his
+extravagant motions, and by provoking laws of proscription against a
+wealth he did not possess, and against a rank he would have dishonoured,
+but did not see without envy.  On the 30th of June, 1791, he said, in the
+former of these clubs:
+
+"We hear everywhere complaints of poverty; were not our eyes so often
+disgusted with the sight of unnatural riches, our hearts would not so
+often be shocked at the unnatural sufferings of humanity.  The blessings
+of our Revolution will never be felt by the world, until we in France are
+on a level, with regard to rank as well as to fortune.  I, for my part,
+know too well the dignity of human nature ever to bow to a superior; but,
+brothers and friends, it is not enough that we are all politically equal,
+we must also be all equally rich or equally poor--we must either all
+strive to become men of property, or reduce men of property to become
+sans-culottes.  Believe me, the aristocracy of property is more dangerous
+than the aristocracy of prerogative or fanaticism, because it is more
+common.  Here is a list sent to 'L' Amie du People', but of which
+prudence yet prohibits the publication.  It contains the names of all the
+men of property of Paris, and of the Department of the Seine, the amount
+of their fortunes, and a proposal how to reduce and divide it among our
+patriots.  Of its great utility in the moment when we have been striking
+our grand blows, nobody dares doubt; I, therefore, move that a brotherly
+letter be sent to every society of our brothers and friends in the
+provinces, inviting each of them to compose one of similar contents and
+of similar tendency, in their own districts, with what remarks they think
+proper to affix, and to forward them to us, to be deposited, in the
+mother club, after taking copies of them for the archives of their own
+society."
+
+His motion was decreed.
+
+Two days afterwards, he again ascended the tribune.  "You approved," said
+he, "of the measures I lately proposed against the aristocracy of
+property; I will now tell you of another aristocracy which we must also
+crush--I mean that of religion, and of the clergy.  Their supports are
+folly, cowardice, and ignorance.  All priests are to be proscribed as
+criminals, and despised as impostors or idiots; and all altars must be
+reduced to dust as unnecessary.  To prepare the public mind for such
+events, we must enlighten it; which can only be done by disseminating
+extracts from 'L' Amie du People', and other philosophical publications.
+I have here some ballads of my own composition, which have been sung in
+my quarter; where all superstitious persons have already trembled, and
+all fanatics are raving.  If you think proper, I will, for a mere trifle,
+print twenty thousand copies of them, to be distributed and disseminated
+gratis all over France."
+
+After some discussion, the treasurer of the club was ordered to advance
+Citizen Brune the sum required, and the secretary to transmit the ballads
+to the fraternal societies in the provinces.
+
+Brune put on his first regimentals as an aide-decamp to General Santerre
+in December, 1792, after having given proofs of his military prowess the
+preceding September, in the massacre of the prisoners in the Abbey.  In
+1793 he was appointed a colonel in the revolutionary army, which, during
+the Reign of Terror, laid waste the departments of the Gironde, where he
+was often seen commanding his corps, with a human head fixed on his
+sword.  On the day when he entered Bordeaux with his troops, a new-born
+child occupied the same place, to the great horror of the inhabitants.
+During this brilliant expedition he laid the first foundation of his
+present fortune, having pillaged in a most unmerciful manner, and
+arrested or shot every suspected person who could not, or would not,
+exchange property for life.  On his return to Paris, his patriotism was
+recompensed with a commission of a general of brigade.  On the death of
+Robespierre, he was arrested as a terrorist, but, after some months'
+imprisonment, again released.
+
+In October, 1795, he assisted Napoleon Bonaparte in the massacre of the
+Parisians, and obtained for it, from the director Barras, the rank of a
+general of division.  Though occupying, in time of war, such a high
+military rank, he had hitherto never seen an enemy, or witnessed an
+engagement.
+
+After Bonaparte had planned the invasion and pillage of Switzerland,
+Brune was charged to execute this unjust outrage against the law of
+nations.  His capacity to intrigue procured him this distinction, and he
+did honour to the choice of his employers.  You have no doubt read that,
+after lulling the Government of Berne into security by repeated proposals
+of accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops during a
+truce, and obtained by treachery successes which his valour did not
+promise him.  The pillage, robberies, and devastations in Helvetia added
+several more millions to his previously great riches.
+
+It was after his campaign in Holland, during the autumn of 1799, that he
+first began to claim some military glory.  He owed, however, his
+successes to the superior number of his troops, and to the talents of the
+generals and officers serving under him.  Being made a Counsellor of
+State by Bonaparte, he was entrusted with the command of the army against
+the Chouans.  Here he again seduced by his promises, and duped by his
+intrigues, acted infamously--but was successful.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Three months before Brune set out on his embassy to
+Constantinople, Talleyrand and Fouche were collecting together all the
+desperadoes of our Revolution, and all the Italian, Corsican, Greek, and
+Arabian renegadoes and vagabonds in our country, to form him a set of
+attendants agreeable to the real object of his mission.
+
+You know too much of our national character and of my own veracity to
+think it improbable, when I assure you that most of our great men in
+place are as vain as presumptuous, and that sometimes vanity and
+presumption get the better of their discretion and prudence.  What I am
+going to tell you I did not hear myself, but it was reported to me by a
+female friend, as estimable for her virtues as admired for her
+accomplishments.  She is often honoured with invitations to Talleyrand's
+familiar parties, composed chiefly of persons whose fortunes are as
+independent as their principles, who, though not approving the
+Revolution, neither joined its opposers nor opposed its adherents,
+preferring tranquillity and obscurity to agitation and celebrity.  Their
+number is not much above half a dozen, and the Minister calls them the
+only honest people in France with whom he thinks himself safe.
+
+When it was reported here that two hundred persons of Brune's suite had
+embarked at Marseilles and eighty-four at Genoa, and when it was besides
+known that nearly fifty individuals accompanied him in his outset, this
+unusual occurrence caused much conversation and many speculations in all
+our coteries and fashionable circles.  About that time my friend dined
+with Talleyrand, and, by chance, also mentioned this grand embassy,
+observing, at the same time, that it was too much honour done to the
+Ottoman Porte, and too much money thrown away upon splendour, to honour
+such an imbecile and tottering Government.
+
+"How people talk," interrupted Talleyrand, "about what they do not
+comprehend.  Generous as Bonaparte is, he does not throw away his
+expenses; perhaps within twelve months all these renegadoes or
+adventurers, whom you all consider as valets of Brune, will be three-
+tailed Pachas or Beys, leading friends of liberty, who shall have
+gloriously broken their fetters as slaves of a Selim to become the
+subjects of a Napoleon.  The Eastern Empire has, indeed, long expired,
+but it may suddenly be revived."
+
+"Austria and Russia," replied my friend, "would never suffer it, and
+England would sooner ruin her navy and exhaust her Treasury than permit
+such a revolution."
+
+"So they have tried to do," retorted Talleyrand, "to bring about a
+counter revolution in France.  But though only a moment is requisite to
+erect the standard of revolt, ages often are necessary to conquer and
+seize it.  Turkey has long been ripe for a revolution. It wanted only
+chiefs and directors.  In time of war, ten thousand Frenchmen landed in
+the Dardanelles would be masters of Constantinople, and perhaps of the
+Empire.  In time of peace, four hundred bold and well-informed men may
+produce the same effect.  Besides, with some temporary cession of a
+couple of provinces to each of the Imperial Courts, and with the
+temporary present of an island to Great Britain, everything may be
+settled 'pro tempore', and a Joseph Bonaparte be permitted to reign at
+Constantinople, as a Napoleon does at Paris."
+
+That the Minister made use of this language I can take upon me to affirm;
+but whether purposely or unintentionally, whether to give a high opinion
+of his plans or to impose upon his company, I will not and cannot assert.
+
+On the subject of this numerous suite of Brune, Markof is said to have
+obtained several conferences with Talleyrand and several audiences of
+Bonaparte, in which representations, as just as energetic, were made,
+which, however, did not alter the intent of our Government or increase
+the favour of the Russian Ambassador at the Court of St. Cloud.  But it
+proved that our schemes of subversion are suspected, and that our agents
+of overthrow would be watched and their manoeuvres inspected.
+
+Count Italinski, the Russian Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, is one of
+those noblemen who unite rank and fortune, talents and modesty, honour
+and patriotism, wealth and liberality.  His personal character and his
+individual virtues made him, therefore, more esteemed and revered by the
+members of the Divan, than the high station he occupied, and the powerful
+Prince he represented, made him feared or respected.  His warnings had
+created prejudices against Brune which he found difficult to remove.
+To revenge himself in his old way, our Ambassador inserted several
+paragraphs in the Moniteur and in our other papers, in which Count
+Italinski was libelled, and his transactions or views calumniated.
+
+After his first audience with the Grand Seignior, Brune complained
+bitterly, of not having learned the Turkish language, and of being under
+the necessity, therefore, of using interpreters, to whom he ascribed the
+renewed obstacles he encountered in every step he took, while his hotel
+was continually surrounded with spies, and the persons of his suite
+followed everywhere like criminals when they went out.  Even the valuable
+presents he carried with him, amounting in value to twenty-four millions
+of livres--were but indifferently received, the acceptors, seeming to
+suspect the object and the honesty of the donor.
+
+In proportion as our politics became embroiled with those of Russia, the
+post of Brune became of more importance; but the obstacles thrown in his
+way augmented daily, and he was forced to avow that Russia and England
+had greater influence and more credit than the French Republic and its
+chief.  When Bonaparte was proclaimed an Emperor of the French, Brune
+expected that his acknowledgment as such at Constantinople would be a
+mere matter of course and announced officially on the day he presented a
+copy of his new credentials.  Here again he was disappointed, and
+therefore demanded his recall from a place where there was no
+probability, under the present circumstances, of either exciting the
+subjects to revolt, of deluding the Prince into submission, or seducing
+Ministers who, in pocketing his bribes, forgot for what they were given.
+
+It was then that Bonaparte sent Joubert with a letter in his own
+handwriting, to be delivered into the hands of the Grand Seignior
+himself.  This Joubert is a foundling, and, was from his youth destined
+and educated to be one of the secret agents of our secret diplomacy.
+You already, perhaps, have heard that our Government selects yearly a
+number of young foundlings or orphans, whom it causes to be brought up in
+foreign countries at its expense, so as to learn the language as natives
+of the nation, where, when grown up, they are chiefly to be employed.
+Joubert had been educated under the inspection of our consuls at Smyrna,
+and, when he assumes the dress of a Turk, from his accent and manners
+even the Mussulmans mistake him for one of their own creed and of their
+country.  He was introduced to Bonaparte in 1797, and accompanied him to
+Egypt, where his services were of the greatest utility to the army.  He
+is now a kind of undersecretary in the office of our secret diplomacy,
+and a member of the Legion of Honour.  Should ever Joseph Bonaparte be an
+Emperor or Sultan of the East, Joubert will certainly be his Grand
+Vizier.  There is another Joubert (with whom you must not confound him),
+who was; also a kind of Dragoman at Constantinople some years ago, and
+who is still somewhere on a secret mission in the East Indies.
+
+Joubert's arrival at Constantinople excited both curiosity among the
+people and suspicion among the Ministry.  There is no example in the
+Ottoman history of a chief of a Christian nation having written to the
+Sultan by a private messenger, or of His Highness having condescended to
+receive the letter from the bearer, or to converse with him.  The Grand
+Vizier demanded a copy of Bonaparte's letter, before an audience could be
+granted.  This was refused by Joubert; and as Brune threatened to quit
+the capital of Turkey if any longer delay were experienced, the letter
+was delivered in a garden near Constantinople, where the Sultan met
+Bonaparte's agent, as if by chance, who, it seems, lost all courage and
+presence of mind, and did not utter four words, to which no answer was
+given.
+
+This impertinent intrigue, and this novel diplomacy, therefore, totally
+miscarried, to the great shame and greater disappointment of the schemers
+and contrivers.  I must, however, do Talleyrand the justice to say that
+he never approved of it, and even foretold the issue to his intimate
+friends.  It was entirely the whim and invention of Bonaparte himself,
+upon a suggestion of Brune, who was far from being so well acquainted
+with the spirit and policy of the Divan as he had been with the genius
+and plots of Jacobinism.  Not rebuked, however, Joubert was ordered away
+a second time with a second letter, and, after an absence of four months,
+returned again as he went, less satisfied with the second than with his
+first journey.
+
+In these trips to Turkey, he had always for travelling companions some of
+our emissaries to Austria, Hungary, and in particular to Servia, where
+the insurgents were assisted by our councils, and even guided by some of
+our officers.  The principal aide-de-camp of Czerni George, the Servian
+chieftain, is one Saint Martin, formerly a captain in our artillery,
+afterwards an officer of engineers in the Russian service, and finally a
+volunteer in the army of Conde.  He and three other officers of artillery
+were, under fictitious names, sent by our Government, during the spring
+of last year, to the camp of the insurgents.  They pretended to be of the
+Grecian religion, and formerly Russian officers, and were immediately
+employed.  Saint Martin has gained great influence over Czerni George,
+and directs both his political councils and military operations.  Besides
+the individuals left behind by Joubert; it is said that upwards of one
+hundred persons of Brune's suite have been ordered for the same
+destination.  You see how great the activity of our Government is, and
+that nothing is thought unworthy of its vigilance or its machinations.
+In the staff of Paswan Oglou, six of my countrymen have been serving ever
+since 1796, always in the pay of our Government.
+
+It was much against the inclination and interest of our Emperor that his
+Ambassador at Constantinople should leave the field of battle there to
+the representatives of Russia, Austria, and England.  But his dignity was
+at stake.  After many threats to deprive the Sultan of the honour of his
+presence, and even after setting out once for some leagues on his return,
+Brune, observing that these marches and countermarches excited more mirth
+than terror, at last fixed a day, when, finally, either Bonaparte must be
+acknowledged by the Divan as an Emperor of the French, or his departure
+would take place.  On that day he, indeed, began his retreat, but, under
+different pretexts, be again stopped, sent couriers to his secretaries,
+waited for their return, and sent new couriers again,--but all in vain,
+the Divan continued refractory.
+
+At his first audience after his return, the reception Bonaparte gave him
+was not very cordial.  He demanded active employment, in case of a
+continental war, either in Italy or in Germany, but received neither.
+When our army of England was already on its march towards the Rhine, and
+Bonaparte returned here, Brune was ordered to take command on the coast,
+and to organize there an army of observation, destined to succour Holland
+in case of an invasion, or to invade England should a favourable occasion
+present itself.  The fact is, he was charged to intrigue rather than to
+fight; and were Napoleon able to force upon Austria another Peace of
+Luneville, Brune would probably be the plenipotentiary that would ask
+your acceptance of another Peace of Amiens.  It is here a general belief
+that his present command signifies another pacific overture from
+Bonaparte before your Parliament meets, or, at least, before the New
+Year.  Remember that our hero is more to be dreaded as a Philip than as
+an Alexander.
+
+General Brune has bought landed property for nine millions of livres--and
+has, in different funds, placed ready money to the same amount.  His own
+and his wife's diamonds are valued by him at three millions; and when he
+has any parties to dinner, he exhibits them with great complaisance as
+presents forced upon him during his campaign in Switzerland and Holland,
+for the protection he gave the inhabitants.  He is now so vain of his
+wealth and proud of his rank, that he not only disregards all former
+acquaintances, but denies his own brothers and sisters,--telling them
+frankly that the Fieldmarshal Brune can have no shoemaker for a brother,
+nor a sister married to a chandler; that he knows of no parents, and of
+no relatives, being the maker of his own fortune, and of what he is; that
+his children will look no further back for ancestry than their father.
+One of his first cousins, a postilion, who insisted, rather obstinately,
+on his family alliance, was recommended by Brune to his friend Fouche,
+who sent him on a voyage of discovery to Cayenne, from which he probably
+will not return very soon.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XL.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Madame de C------n is now one of our most fashionable ladies.
+Once in the week she has a grand tea-party; once in a fortnight a grand
+dinner; and once in the month a grand ball.  Foreign gentlemen are
+particularly well received at her house, which, of course, is much
+frequented by them.  As you intend to visit this country after a peace,
+it may be of some service to you not to be unacquainted with the portrait
+of a lady whose invitation to see the original you may depend upon the
+day after your arrival.
+
+Madame de C----n is the widow of the great and useless traveller, Comte
+de C----n, to whom his relatives pretend that she was never married.
+Upon his death-bed he acknowledged her, however, for his wife, and left
+her mistress of a fortune of three hundred thousand livres a year.
+The first four years of her widowhood she passed in lawsuits before the
+tribunals, where the plaintiffs could not prove that she was unmarried,
+nor she herself that she was married.  But Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, for
+a small douceur, speaking in her favour, the consciences of the juries,
+and the understanding of the judges, were all convinced at once that she
+had been the lawful wife, and was the lawful heiress, of Comte de C----n,
+who had no children, or nearer relatives than third cousins.
+
+Comte de C----n was travelling in the East Indies when the Revolution
+broke out.  His occupation there was a very innocent one; he drew
+countenances, being one of the most enthusiastic sectaries of Lavater,
+and modestly called himself the first physiognomist in the world.
+Indeed, he had been at least the most laborious one; for he left behind
+him a collection of six thousand two hundred portraits, drawn by himself
+in the four quarters of the world, during a period of thirty years.
+
+He never engaged a servant, nor dealt with a tradesman, whose physiognomy
+had not been examined by him.  In his travels he preferred the worst
+accommodation in a house where he approved of the countenance of the
+host, to the best where the traits or lines of the landlord's face were
+irregular, or did not coincide with his ideas of physiognomical
+propriety.  The cut of a face, its expression, the length of the nose,
+the width or smallness of the mouth, the form of the eyelids or of the
+ears, the colour or thickness of the hair, with the shape and tout
+ensemble of the head, were always minutely considered and discussed
+before he entered into any agreement, on any subject, with any individual
+whatever.  Whatever recommendations, or whatever attestations were
+produced, if they did not correspond with his own physiognomical remarks
+and calculations, they were disregarded; while a person whose physiognomy
+pleased him required no other introduction to obtain his confidence.
+Whether he thought himself wiser than his forefathers, he certainly did
+not grow richer than they were.  Charlatans who imposed upon his
+credulity and impostors who flattered his mania, servants who robbed him
+and mistresses who deceived him, proved that if his knowledge of
+physiognomy was great, it was by no means infallible.  At his death,
+of the fortune left him by his parents only the half remained.
+
+His friends often amused themselves at the expense of his foibles.
+When he prepared for a journey to the East, one of them recommended him
+a servant, upon whose fidelity he could depend.  After examining with
+minute scrupulosity the head of the person, he wrote: "My friend, I
+accept your valuable present.  From calculations, which never deceive me,
+Manville (the servant's name) possesses, with the fidelity of a dog, the
+intrepidity of the lion.  Chastity itself is painted on his front,
+modesty in his looks, temperance on his cheek, and his mouth and nose
+bespeak honesty itself."  Shortly after the Count had landed at
+Pondicherry, Mauville, who was a girl, died, in a condition which showed
+that chastity had not been the divinity to whom she had chiefly
+sacrificed.  In her trunk were found several trinkets belonging to her
+master, which she honestly had appropriated to herself.  His
+miscalculation on this subject the Count could not but avow; he added,
+however, that it was the entire fault of his friend, who had duped him
+with regard to the sex.
+
+Madame de C----n was, on account of her physiognomy, purchased by her
+late husband, then travelling in Turkey, from a merchant of Circassian
+slaves, when she was under seven years of age, and sent for her education
+to a relative of the Count, an Abbess of a convent in Languedoc.  On his
+return from Turkey, some years afterwards, he took her under his own
+care, and she accompanied him all over Asia, and returned first to France
+in 1796, where her husband's name was upon the list of emigrants, though
+he had not been in Europe for ten years before the Revolution.
+
+However, by some pecuniary arrangements with Barras, he recovered his
+property, which he did not long enjoy, for he died in 1798.  The suitors
+of Madame de C----n, mistress of a large fortune, with some remnants of
+beauty and elegance of manners, have been numerous, and among them
+several Senators and generals, and even the Minister Chaptal.  But she
+has politely declined all their offers, preferring her liberty and the
+undisturbed right of following her own inclination to the inconvenient
+ties of Hymen.  A gentleman, whom she calls, and who passes for, her
+brother, Chevalier de M de T----, a Knight of Malta, assists her in doing
+the honours of her house, and is considered as her favourite lover;
+though report and the scandalous chronicle say that she bestows her
+favours on every person who wishes to bestow on her his name, and that,
+therefore, her gallants are at least as numerous as her suitors.
+
+Such is the true statement of the past, as well as the present, with
+regard to Madame de C----n.  She relates, however, a different story.
+She says that she is the daughter of the Marquis de M de T-----, of a
+Languedoc family; that she sailed, when a child, with her mother in a
+felucca from Nice to Malta, there to visit her brother; was captured by
+an Algerine pilot, separated from her mother, and carried to
+Constantinople by a merchant of slaves; there she was purchased by Comte
+de C----n, who restored her to her family, and whom, therefore,
+notwithstanding the difference of their ages, she married from gratitude.
+This pretty, romantic story is ordered in our Court circles to be
+officially believed; and, of course, is believed by nobody, not even by
+the Emperor and Empress themselves, who would not give her the place of a
+lady-in-waiting, though her request was accompanied with a valuable
+diamond to the latter.  The present was kept, but the offer declined.
+
+All the members of the Bonaparte family, female as well as male, honour
+her house with their visits and with the acceptance of her invitations;
+and it is, therefore, among our fashionables, the 'haut ton' to be of the
+society and circle of Madame de C----n.
+
+Last February, Madame de P----t (the wife of Comte de P----t, a relative,
+by her husband's side, of Madame de C----n, and who by the Revolution
+lost all their property, and now live with her as companions) was brought
+to bed of a son; the child was baptized by the Cardinal de Belloy, and
+Madame Joseph and Prince Louis Bonaparte stood sponsors. This occurrence
+was celebrated with great pomp, and a fete was given to nearly one
+hundred and fifty per sons of both sexes,--as usual, a mixture of
+ci-devant nobles and of ci-devant sans-culottes; of rank and meanness;
+of upstart wealth and beggared dignity.
+
+What that day struck me most was the audacity of the Senator Villetard in
+teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with his impertinent
+conversation and affected piety.  This Villetard was, before the
+Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789 by the mob from
+the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined for theft.  In 1791 his
+patriotism was so well known in the Department of Yonne, that he was
+deputed by the Jacobins there to the Jacobins of the capital with an
+address, encouraging and advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in
+1792 he was chosen a member of the National Convention, where the most
+sanguinary and most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon
+him in the number of their adherents.
+
+In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph Bonaparte at
+Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and
+liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the
+Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna.
+In the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the
+littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind.  The wooden
+image of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her,
+together with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic
+faithful have for ages believed to have been used by her, were presented
+by him to the Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a
+horribly blasphemous letter.  He passed the next night, after he had
+perpetrated this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of the
+Holy Virgin; and, on the next morning, placed one of them, naked, on the
+pedestal where the statue of the Virgin had formerly stood, and ordered
+all the devotees at Loretto, and two leagues round, to prostrate
+themselves before her.  This shocking command occasioned the premature
+death of fifteen ladies, two of whom, who were nuns, died on the spot on
+beholding the horrid outrage; and many more were deprived of their
+reason.  How barbarously unfeeling must that wretch be who, in bereaving
+the religious, the pious, and the conscientious of their consolation and
+hope, adds the tormenting reproach of apostasy, by forcing virtue upon
+its knees to bow before what it knows to be guilt and infamy.
+
+A traitor to his associates as to his God, it was he who, in November,
+1799, presented at St. Cloud the decree which excluded all those who
+opposed Bonaparte's authority from the Council of Five Hundred, and
+appointed the two committees which made him a First Consul.  In reward
+for this act of treachery, he was nominated to a place in the
+Conservative Senate.  He has now ranked himself among our modern saints,
+goes regularly to Mass and confesses; has made a brother of his, who was
+a drummer, an Abbe; and his assiduity about the Cardinal was probably
+with a view to obtain advancement for this edifying priest.
+
+The Cardinal de Belloy is now ninety-six years of age, being born in
+1709, and has been a Bishop for fifty-three years, but, during the
+Revolution, was proscribed, with all other prelates.  He remained,
+however, in France, where his age saved him from the guillotine, but not
+from being reduced to the greatest want.  A descendant of a noble family,
+and possessing an unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon him as one
+of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic worship, made him
+an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank of a Cardinal from
+Rome.  But he is now in his second childhood, entirely directed by his
+grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and Legeas, who are in the pay of, and
+absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte.  An innocent instrument in their hands,
+of those impious compliments pronounced by him to the Emperor and the
+Empress, he did not, perhaps, even understand the meaning.  From such a
+man the vile and artful Villetard might extort any promise.  I observed,
+however, with pleasure, that he was watched by the grand vicar, Malaret,
+who seldom loses sight of His Eminence.
+
+These two so opposite characters--I mean De Belloy and Villetard--are
+already speaking evidences of the composition of the society at Madame de
+C----n's.  But I will tell you something still more striking.  This lady
+is famous for her elegant services of plate, as much as for her delicate
+taste in entertaining her parties.  After the supper on this night,
+eleven silver and four gold plates, besides numerous silver and gold
+spoons, forks, etc., were missed.  She informed Fouche of her loss, who
+had her house surrounded by spies, with orders not to let any servant
+pass without undergoing a strict search.  The first gentleman who called
+for his carriage was His Excellency the Counsellor of State and grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, Treilhard.  His servants were stopped
+and the cause explained.  They willingly, and against the protest of
+their master, suffered themselves to be searched.  Nothing was found upon
+them; but the police agents, observing the full-dress hat of their master
+rather bulky under his arm, took the liberty to look into it, where they
+found one of Madame de C----n's gold plates and two of her spoons.  His
+Excellency immediately ordered his servants to be arrested, for having
+concealed their theft there.  Fouche, however, when called out, advised
+his friend to forgive them for misplacing them, as the less said on the
+subject the better.  When Madame de C----n heard of this discovery, she
+asked Fouche to recall his order or to alter it.  "A repetition of such
+misplacings in the hats or in the pockets of the masters," said she,
+"would injure the reputation of my house and company."  She never
+recovered the remainder of her loss, and that she might not be exposed in
+future to the same occurrences, she bought two services of china the
+following day, to be used when she had mixed society.
+
+Treilhard had, before the Revolution, the reputation of being an honest
+man and an able advocate; but has since joined the criminals of all
+factions, being an accomplice in their guilt and a sharer of their
+spoils.  In the convention, he voted for the death of Louis XVI. and
+pursued without mercy the unfortunate Marie Antoinette to the scaffold.
+During his missions in the departments, wherever he went the guillotine
+was erected and blood flowed in streams.  He was, nevertheless, accused
+by Robespierre of moderatism.  At Lille, in 1797, and at Rastadt, in
+1798, he negotiated as a plenipotentiary with the representatives of
+Princes, and in 1799 corresponded as a director with Emperors and Kings,
+to whom he wrote as his great and dear friends.  He is now a Counsellor
+of State, in the section of legislation, and enjoys a fortune of several
+millions of livres, arising from estates in the country, and from leases
+in the capital.  As this accident at Madame de C----n's soon became
+public, his friends gave out that he had of late been exceedingly absent,
+and, from absence of mind, puts everything he can lay hold of into his
+pocket.  He is not a favourite with Madame Bonaparte, and she asked her
+husband to dismiss and disgrace him for an act so disgraceful to a grand
+officer of the Legion of Honour, but was answered, "Were I to turn away
+all the thieves and rogues that encompass me I should soon cease to
+reign.  I despise them, but I must employ them."
+
+It is whispered that the police have discovered another of Madame de C
+n's lost gold plates at a pawnbroker's, where it had been pledged by the
+wife of another Counsellor of State, Francois de Nantes.
+
+This I give you merely as a report!  though the fact is, that Madame
+Francois is very fond of gambling, but very unfortunate; and she, with
+other of our fashionable ladies, has more than once resorted to her
+charms for the payment of her gambling debts.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v4
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 5.
+
+
+LETTER I.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since my return here, I have never neglected to present myself
+before our Sovereign, on his days of grand reviews and grand diplomatic
+audiences.  I never saw him more condescending, more agreeable, or, at
+least, less offensive, than on the day of his last levee, before he set
+out to be inaugurated a King of Italy; nor worse tempered, more petulant,
+agitated, abrupt, and rude than at his first grand audience after his
+arrival from Milan, when this ceremony had been performed.  I am not the
+only one who has made this remark; he did not disguise either his good or
+ill-humour; and it was only requisite to have eyes and ears to see and be
+disgusted at the difference of behaviour.
+
+I have heard a female friend of Madame Bonaparte explain, in part, the
+cause of this alteration.  Just before he set out for Italy, the
+agreeable news of the success of the first Rochefort squadron in the West
+Indies, and the escape of our Toulon fleet from the vigilance of your
+Lord Nelson, highly elevated his spirits, as it was the first naval
+enterprise of any consequence since his reign.  I am certain that one
+grand naval victory would flatter his vanity and ambition more than all
+the glory of one of his most brilliant Continental campaigns.  He had
+also, at that time, great expectations that another negotiation with
+Russia would keep the Continent submissive under his dictature, until he
+should find an opportunity of crushing your power.  You may be sure that
+he had no small hopes of striking a blow in your country, after the
+junction of our fleet with the Spanish, not by any engagement between our
+Brest fleet and your Channel fleet, but under a supposition that you
+would detach squadrons to the East and West Indies in search of the
+combined fleet, which, by an unexpected return, according to orders,
+would have then left us masters of the Channel, and, if joined with the
+Batavian fleet, perhaps even of the North Sea.  By the incomprehensible
+activity of Lord Nelson, and by the defeat (or as we call it here, the
+negative victory) of Villeneuve and Gravina, all this first prospect had
+vanished.  Our vengeance against a nation of shopkeepers we were not only
+under the necessity of postponing, but, from the unpolite threats and
+treaties of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg with those of Vienna and St.
+James, we were on the eve of a Continental war, and our gunboats, instead
+of being useful in carrying an army to the destruction of the tyrants of
+the seas, were burdensome, as an army was necessary to guard them, and to
+prevent these tyrants from capturing or destroying them.  Such changes,
+in so short a period of time as three months, might irritate a temper
+less patient than that of Napoleon the First.
+
+At his grand audience here, even after the army, of England had moved
+towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should, therefore,
+have been made up, he was almost insupportable.  The low bows, and the
+still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador, the Marquis da
+Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon Ambassador, Count von
+Buneau, was addressed in a language that no well-bred master ever uses in
+speaking to a menial servant.  He did not cast a look, or utter a word,
+that was not an insult to the audience and a disgrace to his rank.
+I never before saw him vent his rage and disappointment so
+indiscriminately.  We were, indeed (if I may use the term), humbled and
+trampled upon en masse.  Some he put out of countenance by staring
+angrily at them; others he shocked by his hoarse voice and harsh words;
+and all--all of us--were afraid, in our turn, of experiencing something
+worse than our neighbours.  I observed more than one Minister, and more
+than one general, change colour, and even perspire, at His Majesty's
+approach.
+
+I believe the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here will all agree
+with me that, at a future congress, the restoration of the ancient and
+becoming etiquette of the Kings of France would be as desirable a point
+to demand from the Emperor of the French as the restoration of the
+balance of power.
+
+Before his army of England quitted its old quarters on the coast, the
+officers and men often felt the effects of his ungovernable temper.
+When several regiments of grenadiers, of the division of Oudinot,
+were defiling before him on the 25th of last month, he frequently and
+severely, though without cause, reprobated their manner of marching,
+and once rode up to Captain Fournois, pushed him forwards with the point
+of a small cane, calling out, "Sacre Dieu!  Advance; you walk like a
+turkey."  In the first moment of indignation, the captain, striking at
+the cane with his sword, made a push, or a gesture, as if threatening the
+person of Bonaparte, who called out to his aide-de-camp, Savary:
+
+"Disarm the villain, and arrest him!"
+
+"It is unnecessary," the captain replied, "I have served a tyrant, and
+merit my fate!"  So saying, he passed his sword through his heart.
+
+His whole company stopped instantly, as at a word of command, and a
+general murmur was heard.
+
+"Lay down your arms, and march out of the file instantly," commanded
+Bonaparte, "or you shall be cut down for your mutiny by my guides."
+
+They hesitated for a moment, but the guides advancing to surround them,
+they obeyed, and were disarmed.  On the following afternoon, by a special
+military commission, each tenth man was condemned to be shot; but
+Bonaparte pardoned them upon condition of serving for life in the
+colonies; and the whole company was ordered to the colonial depots.
+The widow and five children of Captain Fournois the next morning threw
+themselves at the Emperor's feet, presenting a petition, in which they
+stated that the pay of the captain had been their only support.
+
+"Well," replied Bonaparte to the kneeling petitioners, "Fournois was both
+a fool and a traitor; but, nevertheless, I will take care of you."
+Indeed, they have been so well taken care of that nobody knows what has
+become of them.
+
+I am almost certain that I am not telling you what you did not know
+beforehand in informing you that the spirit of our troops is greatly
+different from that of the Germans, and even from that of your own
+country.  Every, one of our soldiers would prefer being shot to being
+beaten or caned.  Flogging, with us, is out of the question.  It may,
+perhaps, be national vanity, but I am doubtful whether any other army is,
+or can be, governed, with regard to discipline, in a less violent and
+more delicate manner, and, nevertheless, be kept in subordination, and
+perform the most brilliant exploits.  Remember, I speak of our spirit of
+subordination and discipline, and not of our character as citizens, as
+patriots, or as subjects.  I have often hinted it, but I believe I have
+not explained myself so fully before; but my firm opinion and persuasion
+is that, with regard to our loyalty, our duty, and our moral and
+political principles, another equally inconsistent and despicable people
+does not exist in the universe.
+
+The condition of the slave is certainly in itself that of vileness; but
+is that slave a vile being who, for a blow, pierces his bosom because he
+is unable to avenge it?  And what epithet can be given him who braves
+voluntarily a death seemingly certain, not from the love of his country,
+but from a principle of honour, almost incompatible with the dishonour of
+bondage?
+
+During the siege of Yorktown, in America, we had, during one night,
+erected a battery, with intent to blow up a place which, according to the
+report of our spies, was your magazine of ammunition, etc.  We had not
+time to finish it before daylight; but one loaded twenty-four pounder was
+mounted, and our cannoneer, the moment he was about to fire it, was
+killed.  Six more of our men, in the same attempt, experienced the same
+fate.  My regiment constituted the advanced guard nearest to the spot,
+and La Fayette brought me the order from the commander-in-chief to engage
+some of my men upon that desperate undertaking.  I spoke to them, and two
+advanced, but were both instantly shot by your sharpshooters.  I then
+looked at my grenadiers, without uttering anything, when, to my sorrow,
+one of my best and most orderly men advanced, saying, "My colonel, permit
+me to try my fortune!"  I assented, and he went coldly amidst hundreds of
+bullets whistling around his ears, set fire to the cannon, which blew up
+a depot of powder, as was expected, and in the confusion returned unhurt.
+La Fayette then presented him with his purse.  "No, monsieur," replied
+he, "money did not make me venture upon such a perilous undertaking."  I
+understood my man, promoted him to a sergeant, and recommended him to
+Rochambeau, who, in some months, procured him the commission of a sub-
+lieutenant.  He is now one of Bonaparte's Field-marshals, and the only
+one of that rank who has no crimes to reproach himself with.  This man
+was the soldier of a despot; but was not his action that of a man of
+honour, which a stanch republican of ancient Rome would have been proud
+of?  Who can explain this contradiction?
+
+This anecdote about Fournois I heard General Savary relate at Madame
+Duchatel's, as a proof of Bonaparte's generosity and clemency, which, he
+affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at Boulogne.  I do not
+suppose this officer to be above thirty years of age, of which he has
+passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses or in watch-houses; but no
+tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or a more abject courtier.  His
+affectation to extol everything that Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is
+at last become so habitual that it is naturalized, and you may mistake
+for sincerity that which is nothing but imposture or flattery.
+This son of a Swiss porter is now one of Bonaparte's adjutants-general, a
+colonel of the Gendarmes d'Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to
+valour or merit, but to abjectness, immorality, and servility.  When an
+aide-de-camp with Bonaparte in Egypt, he served him as a spy on his
+comrades and on the officers of the staff, and was so much detested that,
+near Aboukir, several shots were fired at him in his tent by his own
+countrymen.  He is supposed still to continue the same espionage; and as
+a colonel of the Gendarmes d'Elite, he is charged with the secret
+execution of all proscribed persons or State prisoners, who have been
+secretly condemned,--a commission that a despot gives to a man he trusts,
+but dares not offer to a man he esteems.  He is so well known that the
+instant he enters a society silence follows, and he has the whole
+conversation to himself.  This he is stupid enough to take for a
+compliment, or for a mark of respect, or an acknowledgment of his
+superior parts and intelligence, when, in fact, it is a direct reproach
+with which prudence arms itself against suspected or known dishonesty.
+Besides his wife, he has to support six other women whom he has seduced
+and ruined; and, notwithstanding the numerous opportunities his master
+has procured him of pillaging and enriching himself, he is still much in
+debt; but woe to his creditors were they indiscreet enough to ask for
+their payments!  The Secret Tribunal would soon seize them and transport
+them, or deliver them over to the hands of their debtor, to be shot as
+traitors or conspirators.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IL
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I am told that it was the want of pecuniary resources that made
+Bonaparte so ill-tempered on his last levee day.  He would not have come
+here at all, but preceded his army to Strasburg, had his Minister of
+Finances, Gaudin, and his Minister of the Public Treasury, Marbois, been
+able to procure forty-four millions of livres--to pay a part of the
+arrears of the troops; and for the speedy conveyance of ammunition and
+artillery towards the Rhine.
+
+Immediately after his arrival here, Bonaparte sent for the directors of
+the Bank of France, informing them that within twenty-four hours they
+must advance him thirty-six millions of livres--upon the revenue of the
+last quarter of 1808.  The president of the bank, Senator Garrat,
+demanded two hours to lay before the Emperor the situation of the bank,
+that His Majesty might judge what sum it was possible to spare without
+ruining the credit of an establishment hitherto so useful to the commerce
+of the Empire.  To this Bonaparte replied that he was not ignorant of the
+resources, or of the credit of the bank, any more than of its public
+utility; but that the affairs of State suffered from every hour's delay,
+and that, therefore, he insisted upon having the sum demanded even within
+two hours, partly in paper and partly in cash; and were they to show any
+more opposition, he would order the bank and all its effects to be seized
+that moment.  The directors bowed and returned to the bank; whither they
+were followed by four waggons escorted by hussars, and belonging to the
+financial department of the army of England.  In these were placed eight
+millions of livres in cash; and twenty-eight millions in bank-notes were
+delivered to M. Lefevre, the Secretary-General of Marbois, who presented,
+in exchange, Bonaparte's bond and security for the amount, bearing an
+interest of five per cent. yearly.
+
+When this money transaction was known to the public, the alarm became
+general, and long before the hour the bank usually opens the adjoining
+streets were crowded with persons desiring to exchange their notes for
+cash.  During the night the directors had taken care to pay themselves
+for the banknotes in their own possession with silver or gold, and, as
+they expected a run, they ordered all persons to be paid in copper coin,
+as long as any money of this metal remained.  It required a long time to
+count those halfpennies and centimes (five of which make a sou, or
+halfpenny), but the people were not tired with waiting until towards
+three o'clock in the afternoon, when the bank is shut up.  They then
+became so clamorous that a company of gendarmes was placed for protection
+at the entrance of the bank; but, as the tumult increased, the street was
+surrounded by the police guards, and above six hundred individuals, many
+of them women, were carried, under an escort, to different police
+commissaries, and to the prefecture of the police.  There most of them,
+after being examined, were reprimanded and released.  The same night, the
+police spies reported in the coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, and on
+the Boulevards, that this run on the bank was encouraged, and paid for,
+by English emissaries, some of whom were already taken, and would be
+executed on the next day.  In the morning, however, the streets adjoining
+the bank were still more crowded, and the crowd still more tumultuous,
+because payment was refused for all notes but those of five hundred
+livres.  The activity of the police agents, supported by the gendarmes
+and police soldiers, again restored order, after several hundred persons
+had been again taken up for their mutinous conduct.  Of these many were,
+on the same evening, loaded with chains, and, placed in carts under
+military escort, paraded about near the bank and the Palais Royal; the
+police having, as a measure of safety, under suspicion that they were
+influenced by British gold, condemned them to be transported to Cayenne;
+and the carts set out on the same night for Rochefort, the place of their
+embarkation.
+
+On the following day, not an individual approached the bank, but all
+trade and all payments were at a stand; nobody would sell but for ready
+money, and nobody who had bank-notes would part with cash.  Some Jews and
+money-brokers in the Palais Royal offered cash for these bills, at a
+discount of from ten to twenty per cent.  But these usurers were, in
+their turn, taken up and transported, as agents of Pitt.  An interview
+was then demanded by the directors and principal bankers with the
+Ministers of Finance and of the Public Treasury.  In this conference it
+was settled that, as soon as the two millions of dollars on their way
+from Spain had arrived at Paris, the bank should reassume its payments.
+These dollars Government would lend the bank for three months, and take
+in return its notes, but the bank was, nevertheless, to pay an interest
+of six per cent. during that period.  All the bankers agreed not to press
+unnecessarily for any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the
+credit of the bank even by the individual credit of their own houses.
+
+You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but two
+sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres--and those of five hundred
+livres.  At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of livres--of the
+former, and fifteen millions of livres--of the latter, were in
+circulation; and I have heard a banker assert that the bank had not then
+six millions of livres--in money and bullion, to satisfy the claims of
+its creditors, or to honour its bills.
+
+The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition of
+Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty ever be
+repaired under his despotic government.  Even now, when the bank pays in
+cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten per cent. between
+purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and this mistrust will not
+be lessened hereafter.  You may, perhaps, object that, as long as the
+bank pays, it is absurd for any one possessing its bills to pay dearer
+than with cash, which might so easily be obtained.  This objection would
+stand with regard to your, or any other free country, but here, where no
+payments are made in gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a
+cart to carry away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of
+these metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
+these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our
+Government.  With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction,
+and chastisement follows it as its shadow.
+
+A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St. Martin,
+where he had for years carried on business in the woollen line, went to
+the bank two days after it had begun to pay.  He demanded, and obtained,
+exchange for twenty-four thousand livres--in notes, necessary for him to
+pay what was due by him to his workmen.  The same afternoon six of our
+custom-house officers, accompanied by police agents and gendarmes, paid
+him a domiciliary visit under pretence of searching for English goods.
+Several bales were seized as being of that description, and Debrais was
+carried a prisoner to La Force.  On being examined by Fouche, he offered
+to prove, by the very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that
+they were not English.  The Minister silenced him by saying that
+Government had not only evidence of the contrary, but was convinced that
+he was employed as an English agent to hurt the credit of the bank, and
+therefore, if he did not give up his accomplices or employers, had
+condemned him to transportation.  In vain did his wife and daughters
+petition to Madame Bonaparte; Debrais is now at Rochefort, if not already
+embarked for our colonies.
+
+When he was arrested, a seal, as usual, was put on his house, from which
+his wife and family were turned out, until the police should have time to
+take an inventory of his effects, and had decided on his fate.  When
+Madame Debrais, after much trouble and many pecuniary sacrifices, at last
+obtained permission to have the seals removed, and reenter her house, she
+found that all her plate and more than half her goods and furniture had
+been stolen and carried away.  Upon her complaint of this theft she was
+thrown into prison for not being able to support her complaint with
+proofs, and for attempting to vilify the characters of the agents of our
+Government.  She is still in prison, but her daughters are by her orders
+disposing of the remainder of their parents' property, and intend to join
+their father as soon as their mother has recovered her liberty.
+
+The same tyranny that supports the credit of our bank also keeps up the
+price of our stocks.  Any of our great stockholders who sell out to any
+large amount, if they are unable to account for, or unwilling to declare
+the manner in which they intend to employ, their money, are immediately
+arrested, sometimes transported to the colonies, but more frequently
+exiled into the country, to remain under the inspection of some police
+agent, and are not allowed to return here without the previous permission
+of our Government.  Those of them who are upstarts, and have made their
+fortune since the Revolution by plunder or as contractors, are still more
+severely treated, and are often obliged to renounce part of their ill-
+gotten wealth to save the remainder, or to preserve their liberty or
+lives.  A revisal of their former accounts, or an inspection of their
+past transactions, is a certain and efficacious threat to keep them in
+silent submission, as they all well understand the meaning of them.
+
+Even foreigners, whom our numerous national bankruptcies have not yet
+disheartened, are subject to these measures of rigour or vigour requisite
+to preserve our public credit.  In the autumn of last year a Dutchman of
+the name of Van der Winkle sold out by his agent for three millions of
+livres--in our stock on one day, for which he bought up bills upon
+Hamburg and London.  He lodged in the Hotel des Quatre Nations, Rue
+Grenelle, where the landlord, who is a patriot, introduced some police
+agents into his apartments during his absence.  These broke open all his
+trunks, drawers, and even his writing-desk, and when he entered, seized
+his person, and carried him to the Temple.  By his correspondence it was
+discovered that all this money was to be brought over to England; a
+reason more than sufficient to incur the suspicion of our Government.
+Van der Winkle spoke very little French, and he continued, therefore, in
+confinement three weeks before he was examined, as our secret police had
+not at Paris any of its agents who spoke Dutch.  Carried before Fouche,
+he avowed that the money was destined for England, there to pay for some
+plantations which he desired to purchase in Surinam and Barbice.  His
+interpreter advised him, by the orders of Fouchd, to alter his mind, and,
+as he was fond of colonial property, lay out his money in plantations at
+Cayenne, which was in the vicinity of Surinam, and where Government would
+recommend him advantageous purchases.  It was hinted to him, also, that
+this was a particular favour, and a proof of the generosity of our
+Government, as his papers contained many matters that might easily be
+construed to be of a treasonable nature.  After consulting with
+Schimmelpenninck, the Ambassador of his country, he wrote for his wife
+and children, and was seen safe with them to Bordeaux by our police
+agents, who had hired an American vessel to carry them all to Cayenne.
+This certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER III.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its
+generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites.  According to the
+boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it
+within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the
+Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century
+of peace can restore to that unfortunate country.  It is reported here
+that each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the
+Continental States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover
+in courtesy to Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to
+make certain douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has
+received from Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte
+two hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our
+military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.
+
+General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who
+have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau,
+without ever serving under him.  Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son
+of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768.  He was a shopman with
+his father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a
+lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first
+battalion of volunteers of the Department of the North.  His first sight
+of an enemy was on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had
+a horse killed under him.  He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of
+Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg.  At the battle of Houdscoote he
+distinguished himself so much as to be promoted to an adjutant general.
+He was wounded at the battle of Fleures, and again at the passage of the
+Rhine, in 1795, under General Moreau.  During 1796 and 1797 he continued
+to serve in Germany, but in 1798 and 1799 he headed a division in
+Switzerland from which Bonaparte recalled him in 1800, to command the
+troops in the capital and its environs.  His address to Bonaparte,
+announcing the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for
+life and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and
+abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more
+self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the fire of
+a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as their
+contents are, procured him the Field-marshal's staff.  Mortier well knew
+his man, and that his cringing in antechambers would be better rewarded
+than his services in the field.  I was not present when Mortier spoke so
+shamefully, but I have heard from persons who witnessed this farce, that
+he had his eyes fixed on the ground the whole time, as if to say, "I
+grant that I speak as a despicable being, and I grant that I am so; but
+what shall I do, tormented as I am by ambition to figure among the great,
+and to riot among the wealthy?  Have compassion on my weakness, or, if
+you have not, I will console myself with the idea that my meanness is
+only of the duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will
+be permanent."
+
+Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle
+Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest
+of her father.  She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage
+of her husband's complaisance to console herself both for his absence and
+infidelities.  When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier
+positively declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and
+the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de
+chambre.  The child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and
+the Empress were the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch.
+Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond
+necklace valued at one hundred and fifty thousand livres.
+
+During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious
+campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven
+millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands.  He is considered by
+other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among
+our fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as a model of connubial
+fidelity--satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only.
+
+There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in
+consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of
+Bonaparte's confidence and attachment.  He was recalled to take the
+command of the artillery of Bonaparte's, household troops the moment
+Pichegru, George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial tide
+had been resolved on.  More resistance against this innovation was at
+that time expected than experienced.
+
+Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in Hanover,
+is a man of a different stamp.  His father was a chair-man, and he was
+born at Paris in 1763.  In 1779 he enlisted in the regiment called La
+Vieille Harine, where the Revolution found him a sergeant.  This regiment
+was then quartered at Toulon, and the emissaries of anarchy and
+licentiousness engaged him as one of their agents.  His activity soon
+destroyed all discipline, and the troops, instead of attending to their
+military duty, followed him to the debates and discussions of the Jacobin
+clubs.  Being arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous,
+scandalous behaviour, an insurrection liberated him, and forced his
+accusers to save their lives by flight.  In April, 1790, he headed the
+banditti who murdered the Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles,
+and who afterwards occasioned the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he
+served under Jourdan, known by the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who
+made him a colonel and his aide-de-camp.  In 1794, he was employed, as a
+general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the
+campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the general,
+without much distinction,--except that he was accused by him of being the
+cause of all the disasters of the last campaign, by the complete rout he
+suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August, 1796.  His division was
+ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the laws of nations, he arrested
+M. d' Antraigues, who was attached to the Russian legation.  When the
+Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice,
+and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied:
+"There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right
+and justice of power, and I am here the strongest.  M. d'Antraigues is
+our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot.  I
+repeat, I am here the strongest, 'et nous verrons'."
+
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Ambassador to
+the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of Jacobin
+propagators.  Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose
+lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet of Vienna had
+spared, he thought that he might attempt anything; and, therefore, on the
+anniversary day of the fete for the levy en masse of the inhabitants of
+the capital, he insulted the feelings of the loyal, and excited the
+discontented to rebellion, by placing over the door and in the windows of
+his house the tri-coloured flag.  This outrage the Emperor was unable to
+prevent his subjects from resenting.  Bernadotte's house was invaded, his
+furniture broken to pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the
+house of the Spanish Ambassador.  As a satisfaction for this attack,
+provoked by his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the
+Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to
+leave Vienna, which he did on the next day.  So disgraceful was his
+conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little
+impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse
+with the Austrian Government.
+
+In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from
+which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed.  When Bonaparte intended
+to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an
+implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres--
+calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not
+infallible or their government the best of all possible governments.
+In 1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department,
+where he exercised the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom
+he accused of being still chouans and royalists.
+
+With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer.  In the
+summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of
+Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within twenty-
+four hours, two millions of livres.  With much difficulty this sum was
+collected.  The day after he had received it, he insisted upon another
+sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing in case
+of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his troops.
+Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them from the
+execution of his threats.  The troops under him were, both in Italy and
+in Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated were, from
+their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts.  Bernadotte has by
+these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten millions
+of livres.
+
+Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in
+the wrong.  Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the
+first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him.  The many massacres under
+Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no
+doubt display a most sanguinary character.  A lady, however, in whose
+house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to
+judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his
+imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he
+knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs
+others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from
+stabbing him.  Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity
+as well as justice.  Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the
+Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black
+Eagle.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his
+"Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the
+well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign
+countries.  According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of
+the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
+country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners.  Though the names
+of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I
+have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two
+or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and
+scurrilous party pamphlets.  I made this observation to Fontanes, who
+replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been
+very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and
+that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men
+of greater talents.  He granted also that men of true genius and literary
+eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character
+than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over.
+He added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on
+a literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from
+that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
+
+To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted
+to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal.  Some he has made tribunes,
+prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in
+foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given
+places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of
+this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a
+De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our
+literature and honours to our nation.  This liberality is often carried
+too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery
+displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame.
+To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the
+First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that
+ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a
+place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve
+thousand livres in the year--besides a present, in ready money, of one
+hundred napoleons d'or.  Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and
+sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty
+lines on Bonaparte's birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand
+livres in the year--and one hundred napoleons d'or for his travelling
+expenses.
+
+The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte's agents for
+dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than
+those fixed for regular literary pensions.  Instead of discouraging these
+foolish and impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity,
+necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them.
+His name is, therefore, found in more dedications published within these
+last five years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken
+together for the last century.  In a man whose name, unfortunately for
+humanity, must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable
+weakness to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality
+which some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
+
+During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu's, in
+company with Duroc.  The question turned upon literary productions and
+the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign
+authors.  "As to the merits or the quality," said Duroc, "I will not take
+upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to
+their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will
+not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion.  I am
+convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than
+those of my own country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what
+I have witnessed and experienced for some years past, that of every book
+or publication printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is
+dedicated to the Emperor.  Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German
+and seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His
+Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only
+sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their Sovereign."
+For my part I think Duroc's conclusion tolerably just.
+
+Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed,
+or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more
+than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein.  The former
+presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte
+family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred
+years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that
+of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the
+Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore,
+relatives of the Bourbons; and the sceptre of the French Empire is still
+in the same family, though in a more worthy branch.  Spanicetti received
+one thousand louis--in gold, a pension of six thousand livres--for life,
+and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home department
+of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres yearly.
+
+Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the
+Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the
+friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he
+exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet
+family, the last branch of which has since been extinguished by its
+intermarriage and incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that,
+therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign
+Princes of Europe, but has more right to the throne of Great Britain than
+George the Third, being descended from the male branch of the Stuarts;
+while this Prince is only descended from the female branch of the same
+royal house.  Ritterstein was presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte's
+portrait set with diamonds, valued at twelve thousand livres, and
+received twenty-four thousand livres ready money, together with a pension
+of nine thousand livres--in the year, until he could be better provided
+for.  He was, besides, nominated a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It
+cannot be denied but that Bonaparte rewards like a real Emperor.
+
+But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same encouragement,
+and experience the same liberality.  In our different museums we,
+therefore, already, see and admire upwards of two hundred pictures,
+representing the different actions, scenes, and achievements of
+Bonaparte's public life.  It is true they are not all highly finished or
+well composed or delineated, but they all strike the spectators more or
+less with surprise or admiration; and it is with us, as, I suppose, with
+you, and everywhere else, the multitude decide: for one competent judge
+or real connoisseur, hundreds pass, who stare, gape, are charmed, and
+inspire thousands of their acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with
+their own satisfaction.  Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the
+age, his contemporaries, and, I fear, even posterity.
+
+That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous patron, the
+numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy, and Germany,
+having him for their object, seem to evince.  Ten sculptors have already
+represented his passage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his passage
+over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that over Pont d' Arcole.  At Rome,
+Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are statues of him representing his
+natural size; and our ten thousand municipalities have each one of his
+busts; without mentioning the thousands of busts all over Europe, not
+excepting even your own country.  When Bonaparte sees under the windows
+of the Tuileries the statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that
+palace, he cannot help saying to himself: "Marble lives longer than man."
+Have you any doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
+
+The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for
+his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte,
+was a German of the name of Schumacher.  It is, indeed, allowed that he
+was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or
+considerate.  He did not consider that it would be no compliment to give
+the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man.  Schumacher had employed
+near three years in planning and executing in marble the prettiest model
+of a sepulchral monument I have ever seen, read or heard of.  He had
+inscribed it: "The Future Tomb of Bonaparte the Great."  Under the
+patronage of Count von Beast, he arrived here; and I saw the model in the
+house of this Minister of the German Elector Arch--Chancellor, where also
+many French artists went to inspect it.  Count von Beast asked De Segur,
+the grand master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant
+Schumacher the honour of showing him his performance.  De Segur advised
+him to address himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon, who, after
+looking at it, could not help paying a just tribute to the execution and
+to the talents of the artist, though he disapproved of the subject, and
+declined mentioning it to the Emperor.  After three months' attendance in
+this capital, and all petitions and memorials to our great folks
+remaining unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which
+he asked permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte's tomb to the
+public for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
+
+"Where is it now?"  asked Fouche.
+
+"At the Minister's of the Elector Arch-Chancellor," answered the artist.
+
+"But where do you intend to show it for money?"  continued Fouche.
+
+"In the Palais Royal."
+
+"Well, bring it there," replied Fouche.
+
+The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a
+police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the
+care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the
+Rhine.  Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his
+home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model
+of a grand tomb for a little man.  I have just heard that one of your
+countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d'or.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER V.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of
+the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
+the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
+believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
+in Europe.  But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our
+hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans
+and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful
+necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere,
+comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery.  And it is
+not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty
+are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and,
+I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged
+classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but
+who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
+to both.
+
+When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
+exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or
+want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper
+to you: "Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise--
+on the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;" and you
+sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre
+that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness,
+you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to
+relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious
+warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that
+eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires.
+Some few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
+capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
+ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
+tyranny.
+
+Some author has written that "want is the parent of industry, and
+wretchedness the mother of ingenuity."  I know that you have often
+approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
+countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
+disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
+the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no
+other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide.  How many
+have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no
+expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their
+necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final
+prospect of all their sufferings.
+
+Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
+ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
+his uncle's porter.  Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
+by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
+their business.  Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
+less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses.  I have
+seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
+and the other a Counsellor of Parliament.  Every, day you may bestow your
+penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
+one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
+Marquis, a general under Louis XVI.  They, are usually placed, the one on
+the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
+woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand.  I am told one of
+the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies.  What a
+recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
+
+On the day of Bonaparte's coronation, and a little before he set out with
+his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
+Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
+hat with this inscription: "I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
+years of age, and I request alms."  Many individuals, even some of
+Bonaparte's soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
+he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of.
+I am told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis,
+whose property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at
+the time he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy.
+He has since for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength
+failing, he supported himself lately entirely by begging.  The value of
+the dress of one of Bonaparte's running footmen might have been
+sufficient to relieve him for the probably short remainder of his days.
+But it is more easy and agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want
+in dungeons than to renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it.
+In the evening the remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor
+Chevalier deprived me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand
+lamps decorating and illuminating Bonaparte's palace of the Tuileries.
+
+Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
+whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
+officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for
+years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army
+of Conde.  Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte's household troops,
+where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in
+combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now
+made a knight of Napoleon's Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for
+bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress.  As he is a man of
+real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced
+that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it,
+but prove that he has never been misplaced.  Another emigrant who, after
+being a page to the Duc d'Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of
+the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded
+with the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion
+of Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French.
+Four more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common
+Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of
+Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde.  It were to be wished that the whole
+of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants.  I am sure
+they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
+never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
+
+While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
+are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
+domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
+governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or ladies-in-
+waiting.  Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de R------,
+was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat, which she
+declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a companion of
+the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet of Comte de
+Brienne.  Her father and brother suffered for this choice and preference,
+which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be transported
+to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a coffee-house
+that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the wife of a
+ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant assassin and
+Septembrizer.  It was only by a valuable present to Madame Bonaparte from
+Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not included in the act of
+proscription against her father and brother.
+
+I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
+frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes.  But they are
+proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
+without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
+Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
+the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
+of what they were.  The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
+an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last
+three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
+vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
+vices, opinions are various, and even opposite.  Most persons, who have
+long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
+have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities.  On the other
+hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
+rumours, which certainly are exaggerated.  It is true, indeed, that it
+was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her
+hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome,
+and had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms.  Her
+husband's conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into
+a proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence
+of his affection towards her.  As he knew who she was when he received
+her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her
+subsequent intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt--policy may
+influence a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem.  He may
+choose to live with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
+
+A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me
+that, had it not been for Napoleon's singular inclination for his
+youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of
+his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already
+been made her by Talleyrand.  It was then reported that Bonaparte had his
+eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which
+the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were
+expected to be encountered at St. Petersburg.  The untimely end of this
+Prince, and the supplications of his wife and daughter, have since
+altered his intent, and Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I
+may use the expression, incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte
+family.
+
+But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that
+Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex.  You read last
+summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the Interior
+(Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded by our
+Ambassador at Vienna Champagny.  This promotion was the consequence of a
+disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress,
+Mademoiselle George, one of the handsomest women of this capital.  He was
+informed by his spies that this lady frequently, in the dusk of the
+evening, or when she thought him employed in his office, went to the
+house of a famous milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in
+an adjoining passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face,
+always entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as
+she continued there.  The house was then by his orders beset with spies,
+who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner.  To be
+near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the
+very next day her visit to the milliner's was announced to him.  While
+his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner's house
+through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door
+of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant
+was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his
+companions.  He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected
+appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of
+this enraged lover.  The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte
+himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial
+portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate,
+had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair
+which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
+
+Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
+according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour
+of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant.  The quantity of jewels
+with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much
+ostentation in the new tragedy, 'The Templars', indicate, however, a
+Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover.  And, indeed, she already
+treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public,
+more as a real than a theatrical Princess.  Without any cause whatever,
+but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out,
+without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very
+day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off
+for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
+
+When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors
+of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no
+notice should be taken of this 'etourderie', which should not occur
+again.
+
+Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier,
+having ruined himself in search after the philosopher's stone.  To
+persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but
+no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion,
+and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first
+speech at the Jacobin Club.  Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking
+of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and
+the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which
+the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without
+resistance.  He was denounced by the municipality to the National
+Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and
+other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment.  During
+1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the
+armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and
+other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of livres--
+but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres--himself.  He was,
+under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage, but
+bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes.  In 1799, he
+advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres--to bribe adherents for the
+new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of interest,
+appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in
+September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him
+in the Ministry of the Interior.  You may see by this short account that
+the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical
+stone.  He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive
+(from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a
+separate establishment.  This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
+character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither
+committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I have read a copy of a letter from Madrid, circulated among
+the members of our foreign diplomatic corps, which draws a most
+deplorable picture of the Court and Kingdom of Spain.  Forced into an
+unprofitable and expensive war, famine ravaging some, and disease other
+provinces, experiencing from allies the treatment of tyrannical foes,
+disunion in his family and among his Ministers, His Spanish Majesty
+totters on a throne exposed to the combined attacks of internal
+disaffection and external plots, with no other support than the advice of
+a favourite, who is either a fool or a traitor, and perhaps both.
+
+As the Spanish monarchy has been more humbled and reduced during the
+twelve years' administration of the Prince of Peace than during the whole
+period that it has been governed by Princes of the House of Bourbon, the
+heir of the throne, the young Prince of Asturias, has, with all the
+moderation consistent with duty, rank, and consanguinity, tried to remove
+an upstart, universally despised for his immorality as, well as for his
+incapacity; and who, should he continue some years longer to rule in the
+name of Charles IV., will certainly involve his King and his country in
+one common ruin.  Ignorant and presumptuous, even beyond upstarts in
+general, the Prince of Peace treats with insolence all persons raised
+above him by birth or talents, who refuse to be his accomplices or
+valets.  Proud and certain of the protection of the Queen, and of the
+weakness of the King, the Spanish nobility is not only humbled, provoked,
+and wronged by him, but openly defied and insulted.
+
+You know the nice principles of honour and loyalty that have always
+formerly distinguished the ancient families of Spain.  Believe me that,
+notwithstanding what appearances indicate to the contrary, the Spanish
+grandee who ordered his house to be pulled down because the rebel
+constable had slept in it, has still many descendants, but loyal men
+always decline to use that violence to which rebels always resort.  Soon
+after the marriage of the Prince of Asturias, in October, 1801, to his
+cousin, the amiable Maria Theresa, Princess Royal of Naples, the ancient
+Spanish families sent some deputies to Their Royal Highnesses, not for
+the purpose of intriguing, but to lay before them the situation of the
+kingdom, and to inform them of the real cause of all disasters.  They
+were received as faithful subjects and true patriots, and Their Royal
+Highnesses promised every support in their power towards remedying the
+evil complained of, and preventing, if possible, the growth of others.
+
+The Princess of Asturias is a worthy granddaughter of Maria Theresa of
+Austria, and seems to inherit her character as well as her virtues.  She
+agreed with her royal consort that, after having gained the affection of
+the Queen by degrees, it would be advisable for her to insinuate some
+hints of the danger that threatened their country and the discontent that
+agitated the people.  The Prince of Asturias was to act the same part
+with his father as the Princess did with his mother.  As there is no one
+about the person of Their Spanish Majesties, from the highest lord to the
+lowest servant, who is not placed there by the favourite, and act as his
+spies, he was soon aware that he had no friend in the heir to the throne.
+His conversation with Their Majesties confirmed him in this supposition,
+and that some secret measures were going on to deprive him of the place
+he occupied, if not of the royal favour.  All visitors to the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias were, therefore, watched by his emissaries; and all
+the letters or memorials sent to them by the post were opened, read, and;
+if contrary to his interest, destroyed, and their writers imprisoned in
+Spain or banished to the colonies.  These measures of injustice created
+suspicion, disunion, and, perhaps, fear, among the members of the
+Asturian cabal, as it was called; all farther pursuit, therefore, was
+deferred until more propitious times, and the Prince of Peace remained
+undisturbed and in perfect security until the rupture with your country
+last autumn.
+
+It is to be lamented that, with all their valuable qualities and feelings
+of patriotism, the Prince and Princess of Asturias do not possess a
+little dissimulation and more knowledge of the world.  The favourite
+tried by all means to gain their good opinion, but his advances met with
+that repulse they morally deserved, but which, from policy, should have
+been suspended or softened, with the hope of future accommodation.
+
+Beurnonville, the Ambassador of our Court to the Court of Madrid, was
+here upon leave of absence when war was declared by Spain against your
+country, and his first secretary, Herman, acted as charge d'affaires.
+This Herman has been brought up in Talleyrand's office, and is both abler
+and more artful than Beurnonville; he possesses also the full confidence
+of our Minister, who, in several secret and pecuniary transactions, has
+obtained many proofs of this secretary's fidelity as well as capacity.
+The views of the Cabinet of St. Cloud were, therefore, not lost sight of,
+nor its interest neglected at Madrid.
+
+I suppose you have heard that the Prince of Peace, like all other
+ignorant and illiberal people, believes no one can be a good or clever
+man who is not also his countryman, and that all the ability and probity
+of the world is confined within the limits of Spain.  On this principle
+he equally detests France and England, Germany and Russia, and is,
+therefore, not much liked by our Government, except for his imbecility,
+which makes him its tool and dupe.  His disgrace would not be much
+regretted here, where we have it in our power to place or displace
+Ministers in certain States, whenever and as often as we like.  On this
+occasion, however, we supported him, and helped to dissolve the cabal
+formed against him; and that for the following reasons:
+
+By the assurances of Beurnonville, Bonaparte and Talleyrand had been led
+to believe that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were well affected to
+France, and to them personally; and conceiving themselves much more
+certain of this than of the good disposition of the favourite, though
+they did not take a direct part against him, at the same time they did
+not disclose what they knew was determined on to remove him from the helm
+of affairs.  During Beurnonville's absence, however, Herman had formed an
+intrigue with a Neapolitan girl, in the suite of Asturias, who,
+influenced by love or bribes, introduced him into the Cabinet where her
+mistress kept her correspondence with her royal parents.  With a pick-
+lock key he opened all the drawers, and even the writing-desk, in which
+he is said to have discovered written evidence that, though the Princess
+was not prejudiced against France, she had but an indifferent opinion of
+the morality and honesty of our present Government and of our present
+governors.  One of these original papers Herman appropriated to himself,
+and despatched to this capital by an extraordinary courier, whose
+despatches, more than the rupture with your country, forced Beurnonville
+away in a hurry from the agreeable society of gamesters and prostitutes,
+chiefly frequented by him in this capital.
+
+It is not and cannot be known yet what was the exact plan of the Prince
+and Princess of Asturias and their adherents; but a diplomatic gentleman,
+who has just arrived from Madrid, and who can have no reason to impose
+upon me, has informed me of the following particulars:
+
+Their Royal Highnesses succeeded perfectly in their endeavours to gain
+the well-merited tenderness and approbation of their Sovereigns in
+everything else but when the favourite was mentioned with any slight,
+or when any insinuations were thrown out concerning the mischief arising
+from his tenacity of power, and incapacity of exercising it with
+advantage to the State.  The Queen was especially irritated when such was
+the subject of conversation or of remark; and she finally prohibited it
+under pain of her displeasure.  A report even reached Their Royal
+Highnesses, that the Prince of Peace had demanded their separation and
+separate confinement.  Nothing could, therefore, be effected to impede
+the progress of wickedness and calamity, but by some temporary measure of
+severity.  In this disagreeable dilemma, it was resolved by the cabal to
+send the Queen to a convent, until her favourite had been arrested and
+imprisoned; to declare the Prince of Asturias Regent during the King's
+illness (His Majesty then still suffered from several paralytic strokes),
+and to place men of talents and patriotism in the place of the creatures
+of the Prince of Peace.  As soon as this revolution was organized, the
+Queen would have been restored to full liberty and to that respect due to
+her rank.
+
+This plan had been communicated to our Ambassador, and approved of by our
+Government; but when Herman in such an honest manner had inspected the
+confidential correspondence of the Princess of Asturias, Beurnonville was
+instructed by Talleyrand to, warn the favourite of the impending danger,
+and to advise him to be beforehand with his enemies.  Instead of telling
+the truth, the Prince of Peace alarmed the King and Queen with the most
+absurd fabrications; and assured Their Majesties that their son and their
+daughter-in-law had determined not only to dethrone them, but to keep
+them prisoners for life, after they had been forced to witness his
+execution.
+
+Indolence and weakness are often more fearful than guilt.  Everything he
+said was at once believed; the Prince and Princess were ordered under
+arrest in their own apartments, without permission to see or correspond
+with anybody; and so certain was the Prince of Peace of a complete and
+satisfactory revenge for the attempt against his tyranny, that a frigate
+at Cadiz was ready waiting to carry the Princess of Asturias back to
+Naples.  All Spaniards who had the honour of their Sovereigns and of
+their country at heart lamented these rash proceedings; but no one dared
+to take any measures to counteract them.  At last, however, the Duke of
+Montemar, grand officer to the Prince of Asturias, demanded an audience
+of Their Majesties, in the presence of the favourite.  He began by
+begging his Sovereign to recollect that for the place he occupied he was
+indebted to the Prince of Peace; and he called upon him to declare
+whether he had ever had reason to suspect him either of ingratitude or
+disloyalty.  Being answered in the negative, he said that, though his
+present situation and office near the heir to the throne was the pride
+and desire of his life, he would have thrown it up the instant that he
+had the least ground to suppose that this Prince ceased to be a dutiful
+son and subject; but so far from this being the case, he had observed him
+in his most unguarded moments--in moments of conviviality had heard him
+speak of his royal parents with as much submission and respect as if he
+had been in their presence.  "If," continued he, "the Prince of Peace has
+said otherwise, he has misled his King and his Queen, being, no doubt,
+deceived himself.  To overthrow a throne and to seize it cannot be done
+without accomplices, without arms, without money.  Who are the
+conspirators hailing the Prince as their chief?  I have heard no name but
+that of the lovely Princess, his consort, the partaker of his sentiments
+as well as of his heart.  And his arms?  They are in the hands of those
+guards his royal parent has given to augment the necessary splendour of
+his rank.  And as to his money?  He has none but what is received from
+royal and paternal munificence and bounty.  You, my Prince," said he to
+the favourite (who seemed much offended at the impression the speech made
+on Their Majesties), "will one day thank me, if I am happy enough to
+dissuade dishonourable, impolitic, or unjust sentiments.  Of the
+approbation of posterity I am certain--"
+
+"If," interrupted the favourite, "the Prince of Asturias and his consort
+will give up their bad counsellors, I hope Their Majesties will forget
+and forgive everything with myself."
+
+"Whether Their Royal Highnesses," replied the Duke of Montemar, "have
+done anything that deserves forgiveness, or whether they have any
+counsellors, I do not know, and am incompetent to judge; but I am much
+mistaken in the character of Their Royal Highnesses if they wish to
+purchase favour at the expense of confidence and honour.  An order from
+His Majesty may immediately clear up this doubt."
+
+The Prince of Peace was then ordered to write, in the name of the King,
+to his children in the manner he proposed, and to command an answer by
+the messenger.  In half an hour the messenger returned with a letter
+addressed to the favourite, containing only these lines:
+
+"A King of Spain is well aware that a Prince and Princess of Asturias can
+have no answer to give to such proposals or to such questions."
+
+After six days' arrest, and after the Prince of Peace had in vain
+endeavoured to discover something to inculpate Their Royal Highnesses,
+they were invited to Court, and reconciled both to him and their royal
+parents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER VIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I will add in this letter, to the communication of the
+gentlemen mentioned in my last, what I remember myself of the letter
+which was circulated among our diplomatists, concerning the intrigues at
+Madrid.
+
+The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of
+Montemar, had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence, and as
+much as possible all noise.  This accounts for the favourite's pretended
+moderation on this occasion.  But though he was externally reconciled,
+and, as was reported at Madrid, had sworn his reconciliation even by
+taking the sacrament, all the undertakings of the Prince and Princess of
+Asturias were strictly observed and reported by the spies whom he had
+placed round Their Royal Highnesses.  Vain of his success and victory, he
+even lost that respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred
+subject always shows to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related
+to his Sovereign.  He sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity,
+and with an insolence provoking or defying resentment.  It was on the
+days of great festivities, when the Court was most brilliant, and the
+courtiers most numerous, that he took occasion to be most arrogant to
+those whom he traitorously and audaciously dared to call his rivals.  On
+the 9th of last December, at the celebration of the Queen's birthday, his
+conduct towards Their Royal Highnesses excited such general indignation
+that the remembrance of the occasion of the fete, and the presence of
+their Sovereigns, could not repress a murmur, which made the favourite
+tremble.  A signal from the Prince of Asturias would then have been
+sufficient to have caused the insolent upstart to be seized and thrown
+out of the window.  I am told that some of the Spanish grandees even laid
+their hands on their swords, fixing their eyes on the heir to the throne,
+as if to say: "Command, and your unworthy enemy shall exist no more."
+
+To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which
+contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate, the
+Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way and
+manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and unnatural
+Philip II.; but the Queen's confessor, though, like all her other
+domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire with reproof,
+saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the grand and powerful
+Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin; adding that no laws,
+human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy whatever, could authorize
+a parent to stain his hands in the blood of his children.  These
+anecdotes are sufficient both to elucidate the inveteracy of the
+favourite, the abject state of the heir to the throne, and the
+incomprehensible infatuation of the King and Queen.
+
+Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he disapproved
+of those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he neither offered to
+put an end to them nor to be a mediator for a perfect reconciliation with
+their Sovereigns.  He was guided by no other motive but to keep the
+favourite in subjection and alarm by preserving a correspondence with his
+rivals.  That this was the case and the motive cannot be doubted from the
+financial intrigue he carried on in the beginning of last month.
+
+Foreigners have but an imperfect or erroneous idea of the amount of the
+immense sums Spain has paid to our Government in loans, in contributions,
+in donations, and in subsidies.  Since the reign of Bonaparte, or for
+these last five years, upwards of half the revenue of the Spanish
+monarchy has either been brought into our National Treasury or into the
+privy purse of the Bonaparte family.  Without the aid of Spanish money,
+neither would our gunboats have been built, our fleets equipped, nor our
+armies paid.  The dreadful situation of the Spanish finances is,
+therefore, not surprising--it is, indeed, still more surprising that a
+general bankruptcy has not already involved the Spanish nation in a
+general ruin.
+
+When, on his return from Italy, the recall of the Russian negotiator and
+the preparations of Austria convinced Bonaparte of the probability of a
+Continental war, our troops on the coast had not been paid for two
+months, and his Imperial Ministers of Finances had no funds either to
+discharge the arrears or to provide for future payments until the
+beginning of the year 14, or the 22d instant.  Beurnonville was,
+therefore, ordered to demand peremptorily from the Cabinet of Madrid
+forty millions of livres--in advance upon future subsidies.  Half of that
+sum had, indeed, shortly before arrived at Cadiz from America, but much
+more was due by the Spanish Government to its own creditors, and promised
+them in payment of old debts.  The Prince of Peace, in consequence,
+declared that, however much he wished to oblige the French Government,
+it was utterly impossible to procure, much less to advance such sums.
+Beurnonville then became more assiduous than ever about the Prince and
+Princess of Asturias; and he had the impudence to assert that they had
+promised, if their friends were at the head of affairs, to satisfy the
+wishes and expectation of the Emperor of the French, by seizing the
+treasury at Cadiz, and paying the State creditors in vales deinero; notes
+hitherto payable in cash, and never at a discount.  The stupid favourite
+swallowed the palpable bait; four millions in dollars were sent under an
+escort to this country, while the Spanish notes instantly fell to a
+discount at first of four and afterwards of six per cent., and probably
+will fall lower still, as no treasures are expected from America this
+autumn.  It was with two millions of these dollars that the credit of the
+Bank of France was restored, or at least for some time enabled to resume
+its payments in specie.  Thus wretched Spain pays abroad for the forging
+of those disgraceful fetters which oppress her at home; and supports a
+foreign tyranny, which finally must produce domestic misery as well as
+slavery.
+
+When the Prince and Princess of Asturias were informed of the scandalous
+and false assertion of Beurnonville, they and their adherents not only
+publicly, and in all societies, contradicted it, but affirmed that,
+rather than obtain authority or influence on such ruinous terms, they
+would have consented to remain discarded and neglected during their
+lives.  They took the more care to have their sentiments known on this
+subject, as our Ambassador's calumny had hurt their popularity.  It was
+then first that, to revenge the shame with which his duplicity had
+covered him, Beurnonville permitted and persuaded the Prince of Peace to
+begin the chastisement of Their Royal Highnesses in the persons of their
+favourites.  Duke of Montemar, the grand officer to the Prince of
+Asturias; Marquis of Villa Franca, the grand equerry to the Princess of
+Asturias; Count of Miranda, chamberlain to the King; and the Countess
+Dowager del Monte, with six other Court ladies and four other noblemen,
+were, therefore, exiled from Madrid into different provinces, and
+forbidden to reside in any place within twenty leagues of the residence
+of the royal family.  According to the last letters and communications
+from Spain, the Prince and Princess of Asturias had not appeared at Court
+since the insult offered them in the disgrace of their friends, and were
+resolved not to appear in any place where they might be likely to meet
+with the favourite.
+
+Among our best informed politicians here, it is expected that a
+revolution and a change of dynasty will be the issue of this our
+political embryo in Spain.  Napoleon has more than once indirectly hinted
+that the Bonaparte dynasty will never be firm and fixed in France as long
+as any Bourbons reign in Spain or Italy.  Should he prove victorious in
+the present Continental contest, another peace, and not the most
+advantageous, will again be signed with your country--a peace which, I
+fear, will leave him absolute master of all Continental States.  His
+family arrangements are publicly avowed to be as follow: His third
+brother, Louis, and his sons, are to be the heirs of the French Empire.
+Joseph Bonaparte is, at the death or resignation of Napoleon, to succeed
+to the Kingdom of Italy, including Naples.  Lucien, though at present in
+disgrace, is considered as the person destined to supplant the Bourbons
+in Spain, where, during his embassy in 1800, and in 1801, he formed
+certain connections which Napoleon still keeps up and preserves.  Holland
+will be the inheritance of Jerome should Napoleon not live long enough to
+extend his power in Great Britain.  Such are the modest pretensions our
+Imperial courtiers bestow upon the family of our Sovereign.
+
+As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the hands
+of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as long as they
+find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be the case, they break
+and throw away.  This idiot is made to believe that both his political
+and physical existence depends entirely upon our support, and he has
+infused the same ridiculous notion into his accomplices and adherents.
+Guilt, ignorance, and cowardice thus misled may, directed by art,
+interest, and craft, perform wonders to entangle themselves in the
+destruction of their country.
+
+Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a porter,
+and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a soldier in one
+of our regiments serving in the East Indies.  Having there collected some
+pillage, he purchased the place of a major in the militia of the Island
+of Bourbon, but was, for his immorality, broken by the governor.
+Returning to France, he bitterly complained of this injustice, and, after
+much cringing in the antechambers of Ministers, he obtained at last the
+Cross of St. Louis as a kind of indemnity.  About the same time he also
+bought with his Indian wealth the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard
+of Monsieur, the present Louis XVIII.  Being refused admittance into any
+genteel societies, he resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to
+gambling-houses, and he even kept to himself when the Revolution took
+place.  He had at the same time, and for a certain interest, advanced
+Madame d'Estainville money to establish her famous, or rather infamous,
+house in the Rue de Bonnes Enfants, near the Palais Royal,--a house that
+soon became the fashionable resort of our friends of Liberty and
+Equality.
+
+In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our then
+hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who declined the
+honour.  The Jacobins were not so nice.  In 1792, they appointed him a
+general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax.  This modern Ajax,
+having obtained a separate command, attacked Treves in a most ignorant
+manner, and was worsted with great loss.  The official reports of our
+revolutionary generals have long been admired for their modesty as well
+as veracity; but Beurnonville has almost outdone them all, not excepting
+our great Bonaparte.  In a report to the National Convention concerning a
+terrible engagement of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville
+declares that, though the number of the enemy killed was immense, his
+troops got out of the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of
+one of his riflemen.  On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the
+execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War Department-
+a place which he refused, under a pretence that he was better able to
+serve his country with his sword than with his pen, having already been
+in one hundred and twenty battles (where, he did not enumerate or state).
+On the 14th of the following March, however, he accepted the ministerial
+portfolio, which he did not keep long, being delivered up by his Hector,
+Dumouriez, to the Austrians.  He remained a prisoner at Olmutz until the
+22d of November, 1795, when he was included among the persons exchanged
+for the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present Royal Highness, the Duchess
+of Angouleme.
+
+In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed
+remnants of Jourdan's army,, and in 1797 he was sent as a French
+commander to Holland.  In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to
+the Court of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the
+Court of Madrid.  In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be
+dreaded, nor his personal qualities make him esteemed.  In France, he is
+laughed at as a boaster, but not trusted as a warrior.  In Spain, he is
+neither dreaded nor esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there
+universally despised.  He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the
+native porter breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and
+outre politeness.  Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face,
+the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and
+dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his
+presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and
+obscenity, he cannot escape even the most inattentive observer.
+
+The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of
+age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother
+who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another
+to a merchant who cries dogs' and cats' meat in our streets.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER IX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him
+when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her
+tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his
+resolution.  Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be
+in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis
+Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.
+
+During the Emperor's absence, the former is the President of the Senate,
+and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops
+in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case
+of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil
+determinations with his military forces.  Even with the army in Germany,
+Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte
+dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an
+Imperial diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as
+a viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena.  It must be
+granted that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is
+almost certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his
+death; and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition,
+carried into execution.  These very precautions evince, however, how
+uncertain and precarious he considers his existence to be, and that,
+notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte
+dynasty will not survive him.
+
+Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own creation,
+or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which they might
+consider unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte.  The superior
+officers, not included in the above description, are such insignificant
+characters that, though he makes use of their experience and courage, he
+does not fear their views or ambition.  Among the inferior officers, and
+even among the men, all those who have displayed, either at reviews or in
+battles, capacity, activity, or valour, are all members of his Legion of
+Honour; and are bound to him by the double tie of gratitude and self-
+interest.  They look to him alone for future advancements, and for the
+preservation of the distinction they have obtained from him.  His
+emissaries artfully disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow
+everything a Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil
+officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be
+discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII.  Any
+person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the
+impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and
+retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an
+emissary of the Bourbons.
+
+I have often amused myself in conversing with our new generals and new
+officers; there is such a curious mixture of ignorance and information,
+of credulity and disbelief, of real boasting and affected modesty, in
+everything they say or do in company; their manners are far from being
+elegant, but also very distant from vulgarity; they do not resemble those
+of what we formerly called 'gens comme il faut', and 'la bonne societe'!
+nor those of the bourgeoisie, or the lower classes.  They form a new
+species of fashionables, and a 'haut ton militaire', which strikes a
+person accustomed to Courts at first with surprise, and perhaps with
+indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become
+reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of military
+frankness interwoven with the military roughness.  Our ladies, however
+(I mean those who have seen other Courts, or remember our other
+coteries), complain loudly of this alteration of address, and of this
+fashionable innovation; and pretend that our military, under the notion
+of being frank, are rude, and by the negligence of their manners and
+language, are not only offensive, but inattentive and indelicate.  This
+is so much the more provoking to them, as our Imperial courtiers and
+Imperial placemen do not think themselves fashionable without imitating
+our military gentry, who take Napoleon for their exclusive model and
+chief in everything, even in manners.
+
+What I have said above applies only to those officers whose parents are
+not of the lowest class, or who entered so early or so young into the
+army that they may be said to have been educated there, and as they
+advanced, have assumed the 'ton' of their comrades of the same rank.
+I was invited, some time ago, to a wedding, by a jeweller whose sister
+had been my nurse, and whose daughter was to be married to a captain of
+hussars quartered here.  The bridegroom had engaged several other
+officers to assist at the ceremony, and to partake of the fete and ball
+that followed.  A general of the name of Liebeau was also of the party,
+and obtained the place of honour by the side of the bride's mother.  At
+his entrance into the apartment I formed an opinion of him which his
+subsequent conduct during the ball confirmed.
+
+During the dinner he seemed to forget that he had a knife and a fork,
+and he did not eat of a dish (and he ate of them all, numerous as they
+were) without bespattering or besmearing himself or his neighbours.  He
+broke two glasses and one plate, and, for equality's sake, I suppose,
+when he threw the wine on the lady to his right, the lady to his left was
+inundated with sauces.  In getting up from dinner to take coffee and
+liqueurs, according to our custom, as he took the hand of the mistress of
+the house, he seized at the same time a corner of the napkin, and was not
+aware of his blunder till the destruction of bottles, glasses, and plate,
+and the screams of the ladies, informed him of the havoc and terror his
+awkward gallantry had occasioned.  When the ball began, he was too vain
+of his rank and precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride down
+the first dance; but she was not, I believe, much obliged to him for his
+politeness; it cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and a broken nail,
+and she continued lame during the remainder of the night.  In making an
+apology to her for his want of dexterity, and assuring her that he was
+not so awkward in handling the enemies of his country in battle as in
+handling friends he esteemed in a dance, he gave no quarter to an old
+maid aunt, whom, in the violence of his gesticulation, he knocked down
+with his elbow and laid sprawling on the ground.  He was sober when these
+accidents literally occurred.
+
+Of this original I collected the following particulars: Before the
+Revolution he was a soldier in the regiment of Flanders, from which he
+deserted and became a corporal in another regiment; in 1793 he was a
+drum-major in one of the battalions in garrison in Paris.  You remember
+the struggles of factions in the latter part of May and in the beginning
+of June, the same year, when Brissot and his accomplices were contending
+with Marat, Robespierre, and their adherents for the reins of power.  On
+the 1st of June the latter party could not get a drummer to beat the
+alarm, though they offered money and advancement.  At last Robespierre
+stepped forward to Liebeau and said, "Citizen, beat the alarm march, and
+to-day you shall be nominated a general."  Liebeau obeyed, Robespierre
+became victorious and kept his promise, and thus my present associate
+gained his rank.  He has since been employed under Jourdan in Germany,
+and under Le Courbe in Switzerland.  When, under the former, he was
+ordered to retreat towards the Rhine, he pointed out the march route to
+his division according to his geographical knowledge, but mistook upon
+the map the River Main for a turnpike road, and commanded the retreat
+accordingly.  Ever since, our troops have called that river 'La chausee
+de Liebeau'.  He was not more fortunate in Helvetia.  Being ordered to
+cross one of the mountains, he marched his men into a glacier, where
+twelve perished before he was aware of his mistake.
+
+Being afterwards appointed a governor of Blois, he there became a petty,
+insupportable tyrant, and laid all the inhabitants indiscriminately under
+arbitrary contribution.  Those who refused to pay were imprisoned as
+aristocrats, and their property confiscated in the name and on the part
+of the nation; that is to say, he appropriated to himself in the name of
+the nation everything that struck his fancy; and if any complaints were
+made, the owners were seized and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal at
+Paris to be condemned as the correspondents or adherents of the royalists
+of La Vendee.  After the death of Robespierre he was deprived of this
+profitable place, in which, during the short space of eleven months, he
+amassed five millions of livres.  The Directory, then gave him a
+division, first under Jourdan, and afterwards under Le Courbe.
+
+Bonaparte, after witnessing his incapacity in Italy, in 1800, put him on
+the full half-pay, and has lately made him a commander of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+His dear spouse, Madame Liebeau, is his counterpart.  When he married
+her, she was crying mackerel and herrings in our streets; but she told me
+in confidence, during the dinner, being seated by my side, that her
+father was an officer of fortune, and a Chevalier of the Order of St.
+Louis.  She assured me that her husband had done greater services to his
+country than Bonaparte; and that, had it not been for his patriotism in
+1793, the Austrians would have taken Paris.  She was very angry with
+Madame Napoleon, to whom she had been presented, but who had not shown
+her so much attention and civility, as was due to her husband's rank,
+having never invited her to more than one supper and two tea-parties; and
+when invited by her, had sent Duroc with an apology that she was unable
+to come, though the same evening she went to the opera.
+
+Another guest, in the regimentals of a colonel, seemed rather bashful
+when I spoke to him.  I could not comprehend the reason, and therefore
+inquired of our host who he was.  (You know that with us it is not the
+custom to introduce persons by name, etc., as in your country, when
+meeting in mixed companies.) He answered:
+
+"Do you not remember your brother's jockey, Prial?"
+
+"Yes," said I, "but he was established by my brother as a hairdresser."
+
+"He is the very same person," replied the jeweller.  "He has fought very
+bravely, and is now a colonel of dragoons, a great favourite with
+Bonaparte, and will be a general at the first promotion."
+
+As the colonel did not seem to desire a renewal of acquaintance with me,
+I did not intrude myself upon him.
+
+During the supper the military gentlemen were encouraged by the
+bridegroom, and the bottle went round very freely; and the more they
+drank, the greater and more violent became their political discussions.
+Liebeau vociferated in favour of republican and revolutionary measures,
+and avowed his approbation of requisitions, confiscations, and the
+guillotine; while Frial inclined to the regular and organized despotism
+of one, to secret trial, and still more secret executions; defending
+arbitrary imprisonments, exiles, and transportations.  This displeased
+Madame Liebeau, who exclaimed:
+
+"Since the colonel is so fond of an Imperial Government, he can have no
+objection to remain a faithful subject whenever my husband, Liebeau,
+becomes, an Antoine the First, Emperor of the French."
+
+Frial smiled with contempt.
+
+"You seem to think it improbable," said Liebeau.  "I, Antoine Liebeau,
+I have more prospect of being an Emperor than Napoleon Bonaparte had ten
+years ago, when he was only a colonel, and was arrested as a terrorist.
+And am I not a Frenchman?  And is he not a foreigner?  Come, shake hands
+with me; as soon as I am Emperor, depend upon it you shall be a general,
+and a grand officer of the Legion of Honour."
+
+"Ah!  my jewel," interrupted Madame Liebeau, "how happy will France then
+be.  You are such a friend of peace.  We will then have no wars, no
+contributions; all the English milords may then come here and spend their
+money, nobody cares about where or how.  Will you not, then, my sweet
+love, make all the gentlemen here your chamberlains, and permit me to
+accept all the ladies of the company for my Maids of Honour or ladies-in-
+waiting?"
+
+"Softly, softly," cried Frial, who now began to be as intoxicated and as
+ambitious as the general;  "whenever Napoleon dies, I have more hope,
+more: claim, and more right than you to the throne.  I am in actual
+service; and had not Bonaparte been the same, he might have still
+remained upon the half-pay, obscure and despised.  Were not most of the
+Field-marshals and generals under him now, above him ten years ago?  May
+I not, ten years hence, if I am satisfied with you, General Liebeau, make
+you also a Field-marshal, or my Minister of War; and you, Madame Liebeau,
+a lady of my wife's wardrobe, as soon as I am married?  I, too, have my
+plans and my views, and perhaps one day you will recollect this
+conversation, and not be sorry for my acquaintance."
+
+"What!  you a colonel, an Emperor, before me, who have so long been a
+general?"  howled Liebeau, who was no longer able to speak.  "I would
+sooner knock your brains out with this bottle than suffer such a
+precedence; and my wife a lady of your wardrobe! she who has possessed
+from her birth the soul of an Empress!  No, sir! never will I take the
+oath to you, nor suffer anybody else to take it."
+
+"Then I will punish you as a rebel," retorted Frial; "and as sure as you
+stand here you shall be shot."
+
+Liebeau then rose up to fetch his sword, but the company interfered, and
+the dispute about the priority of claim to the throne of France between
+the ci-devant drummer and ci-devant jockey was left undecided.  From the
+words and looks of several of the captains present, I think that they
+seemed, in their own opinions, to have as much prospect and expectation
+to reign over the French Empire as either General Liebeau or Colonel
+Frial.
+
+As soon as I returned home I wrote down this curious conversation and
+this debate about supremacy.  To what a degradation is the highest rank
+in my unfortunate country reduced when two such personages seriously
+contend about it!  I collected more subjects for meditation and
+melancholy in this low company (where, by the bye, I witnessed more
+vulgarity and more indecencies than I had before seen during my life)
+than from all former scenes of humiliation and disgust since my return
+here.  When I the next day mentioned it to General de M------, whom you
+have known as an emigrant officer in your service, but whom policy has
+since ranged under the colours of Bonaparte, he assured me that these
+discussions about the Imperial throne are very frequent among the
+superior officers, and have caused many bloody scenes; and that hardly
+any of our generals of any talent exist who have not the same 'arriere
+pensee of some day or other.  Napoleon cannot, therefore, well be
+ignorant of the many other dynasties here now rivalling that of the
+Bonapartes, and who wait only for his exit to tear his Senatus Consultum,
+his will, and his family, as well as each other, to pieces.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+Marble lives longer than man
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+Want is the parent of industry
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v5
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 6.
+
+
+LETTER X.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our rich
+upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by Bonaparte,
+transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of Honour, and
+possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of livres.  In this
+house I saw for the first time the famous Madame Chevalier, the mistress,
+and the indirect cause of the untimely end, of the unfortunate Paul the
+First.  She is very short, fat, and coarse.  I do not know whether
+prejudice, from what I have heard of her vile, greedy, and immoral
+character, influenced my feelings, but she appeared to me a most artful,
+vain, and disagreeable woman.  She looked to be about thirty-six years of
+age; and though she might when younger have been well made, it is
+impossible that she could ever have been handsome.  The features of her
+face are far from being regular.  Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow,
+and her nose short.  Her language is that of brothels, and her manners
+correspond with her expressions.  She is the daughter of a workman at a
+silk manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had
+attained the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native city,
+kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became acquainted with
+her.  She then had a tolerably good voice, was young and insinuating,
+and he introduced her on the same stage where he was one of the inferior
+dancers.  Here in a short time she improved so much, that she was engaged
+as a supernumerary; her salary in France as an actress was, however,
+never above twelve hundred livres in the year--which was four hundred
+livres more than her husband received.
+
+He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers,
+quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs; and
+instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and regenerate his
+nation.  His name is found in the annals of the crimes perpetrated at
+Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot d'Herbois, and other
+wicked offsprings of rebellion.  With all other terrorists, he was
+imprisoned for some time after the death of Robespierre; as soon as
+restored to liberty, he set out with his wife for Hamburg, where some
+amateurs had constructed a French theatre.
+
+It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard of in
+the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of theatrical
+war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on one side, and
+the English and emigrant loyalists on the other.  Having no money to
+continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she asked the manager of the
+French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a benefit, and permission to play
+on that night.  She selected, of course, a part in which she could appear
+to the most advantage, and was deservedly applauded.  The very next
+evening the Jacobin cabal called the manager upon the stage, and insisted
+that Madame Chevalier should be given a regular engagement.  He replied
+that no place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be
+ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the public
+had hitherto declared their satisfaction.  The Jacobins continued
+inflexible, and here, as well as everywhere else, supported injustice by
+violence.  As the patriotism of the husband, more than the charms of the
+wife, was known to have produced this indecent fracas, which for upwards
+of a week interrupted the plays, all anti-Jacobins united to restore
+order.  In this they would, perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the
+bayonets of the Hamburg soldiers interfered, and forced this precious
+piece of revolutionary furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.
+
+After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of the
+Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping by a then
+rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present of a richly and
+elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten thousand louis d'or
+on her, before he had a mortifying conviction that some other had
+partaken of those favours for which he had so dearly paid.  A countryman
+of yours then showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene,
+and made his debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his
+theatrical goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with
+large and valuable diamonds.  Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards
+hearing that her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy,
+and that his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his
+portrait changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving,
+however, the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the
+stage, by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her
+bosom.  The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which
+he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had put the
+whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which all her
+numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had won it.
+
+The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his
+turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.
+She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry,
+during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to
+France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand
+livres.  Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the
+decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect
+money, and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances.  She had
+always lists of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play
+in her lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her,
+by the assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.
+
+I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of
+Talleyrand's secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of
+the other sex.  I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our
+Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who
+instructed her how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg.  I need not
+repeat what is so well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined
+the domestic happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his
+political transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely
+end, in procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and
+jewels, the recall of one of the principal conspirators against the
+unfortunate Paul.
+
+The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short period
+of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of roubles.  For
+money she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon innocence the
+punishment merited by guilt.  The scaffolds of Russia were bleeding, and
+the roads to Siberia crowded with the victims of the avarice of this
+female demon, who often promised what she was unable to perform, and,
+to silence complaint, added cruelty to fraud, and, after pocketing the
+bribe, resorted to the executioner to remove those whom she had duped.
+The shocking anecdote of the Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out
+of nearly a hundred thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards
+persuaded her Imperial lover to inflict capital punishment, is too recent
+and too public to be unknown or forgotten.  A Russian nobleman has
+assured me that the number of unfortunate individuals whom her and her
+husband's intrigues have caused to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801
+was forty-six; and that nearly three hundred persons besides, who could
+not or would not pay their extortionate demands, were exiled to Siberia
+during the same period of time.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such great and
+terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as well as of
+acquired accomplishments.  As I have already stated, she can have no
+pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating, sings tolerably
+well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an unusually good share
+of cunning, presumption, and duplicity.  Her husband, also, everywhere
+took care to make her fashionable; and the vanity of the first of their
+dupes increased the number of her admirers and engaged the vanity of
+others in their turn to sacrifice themselves at her shrine.
+
+The immorality of our age, also, often procured her popularity for what
+deserved, and in better times would have encountered, the severest
+reprobation.  In 1797, an emigrant lodged at an inn at Hamburg where
+another traveller was robbed of a large sum in ready money and jewels.
+The unfortunate is always suspected; and in the visit made to his room by
+the magistrates was found a key that opened the door of the apartment
+where the theft had been committed.  In vain did he represent that had he
+been the thief he should not have kept an instrument which was, or might
+be, construed into an argument of guilt; he was carried to prison, and,
+though none of the property was discovered in his possession, would have
+been condemned, had he not produced Madame Chevalier, who avowed that the
+key opened the door of her bedroom, which the smith who had made it
+confirmed, and swore that he had fabricated eight keys for the same
+actress and for the same purpose.
+
+At that time this woman lived in the same house with her husband, but
+cohabited there with the husband of another woman.  She had also places
+of assignation with other gallants at private apartments, both in Hamburg
+and at Altona.  All these, her scandalous intrigues, were known even to
+the common porters of these cities.  The first time, after the affair of
+the key had become public, she acted in a play where a key was mentioned,
+and the audience immediately repeated, "The key! the key!"  Far from
+being ashamed, she appeared every night in pieces selected by her, where
+there was mention of keys, and thus tired the jokes of the public.  This
+impudence might have been expected from her, but it was little to be
+supposed that her barefaced vices should, as really was the case, augment
+the crowd of suitors, and occasion even some duels, which latter she both
+encouraged and rewarded.
+
+Two brothers, of the name of De S-----, were both in love with her, and
+the eldest, as the richest, became her choice.  Offended at his refusal
+of too large a sum of money, she wrote to the younger De S-----, and
+offered to accede to his proposals if, like a gentleman, he would avenge
+the affront she had experienced from his brother.  He consulted a friend,
+who, to expose her infamy, advised him to send some confidential person
+to inform her that he had killed his elder brother, and expected the
+recompense on the same night.  He went and was received with open arms,
+and had just retired with her, when the elder brother, accompanied by his
+friend, entered the room.  Madame Chevalier, instead of upbraiding,
+laughed, and the next day the public laughed with her, and applauded her
+more than ever.  She knew very well what she was doing.  The stories of
+the key and the duel produced for her more than four thousand louis d'or
+by the number of new gallants they enticed.  It was a kind of emulation
+among all young men in the North who should be foremost to dishonour and
+ruin himself with this infamous woman.
+
+Madame Chevalier and her husband now live here in grand style, and have
+their grand parties, grand teas, grand assemblies, and grand balls.
+Their hotel, I am assured, is even visited by the Bonapartes and by the
+members of the foreign diplomatic corps.  In the house where I saw her,
+I observed that Louis Bonaparte and two foreign Ambassadors spoke to her
+as old acquaintances.  Though rich, to the amount of ten millions of
+livres--she, or rather her husband, keeps a gambling-house, and her
+superannuated charms are still to be bought for money, at the disposal of
+those amateurs who are fond of antiques.  Both her husband and herself
+are still members of our secret diplomacy, though she complains loudly
+that, of the two millions of livres--promised her in 1799 by Bonaparte
+and Talleyrand if she could succeed in persuading Paul I. to withdraw
+from his alliance with England and Austria, only six hundred thousand
+livres--has been paid her.
+
+I cannot finish this letter without telling you that before our military
+forces had reached the Rhine, our political incendiaries had already
+taken the field, and were in full march towards the Austrian, Russian,
+and Prussian capitals.  The advanced guard of this dangerous corps
+consists entirely of females, all gifted with beauty and parts as much
+superior to those of Madame Chevalier as their instructions are better
+digested.  Bonaparte and Talleyrand have more than once regretted that
+Madame Chevalier was not ordered to enter into the conspiracy against
+Paul (whose inconsistency and violence they foresaw would make his reign
+short), that she might have influenced the conspirators to fix upon a
+successor more pliable and less scrupulous, and who would have suffered
+the Cabinet of St. Cloud to dictate to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.
+
+I dined in company several times this last spring with two ladies who,
+rumour said, have been destined for your P----- of W---- and D--- of Y---
+ever since the Peace of Amiens.  Talleyrand is well informed what figures
+and what talents are requisite to make an impression on these Princes,
+and has made his choice accordingly.  These ladies have lately
+disappeared, and when inquired after are stated to be in the country,
+though I do not consider it improbable that they have already arrived at
+headquarters.  They are both rather fair and lusty, above the middle
+size, and about twenty-five years of age.  They speak, besides French,
+the English and Italian languages.  They are good drawers, good
+musicians, good singers, and, if necessary, even good drinkers.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Had the citizens of the United States been as submissive to the
+taxation of your Government as to the vexations of our ruler, America
+would, perhaps, have been less free and Europe more tranquil.
+After the treaty of Amiens had Produced a general pacification, our
+Government was seriously determined to reconquer from America a part of
+those treasures its citizens had gained during the Revolutionary War, by
+a neutrality which our policy and interest required, and which the
+liberality of your Government endured.  Hence the acquisition we made of
+New Orleans from Spain, and hence the intrigues of our emissaries in that
+colony, and the peremptory requisitions of provision for St. Domingo by
+our Minister and generals.  Had we been victorious in St. Domingo, most
+of our troops there were destined for the American Continent, to invade,
+according to circumstances, either the Spanish colonies on the terra
+firma or the States of the American Commonwealth.  The unforeseen rupture
+with your country postponed a plan that is far from being laid aside.
+
+You may, perhaps, think that since we sold Louisiana we have no footing
+in America that can threaten the peace or independence of the United
+States; but may not the same dictates that procured us at Madrid the
+acquisition of New Orleans, also make us masters of Spanish Florida?  And
+do you believe it improbable that the present disagreement between
+America and Spain is kept up by our intrigues and by our future views?
+Would not a word from us settle in an instant at Madrid the differences
+as well as the frontiers of the contending parties in America?  And does
+it not seem to be the regular and systematic plan of our Government to
+provoke the retaliation of the Americans, and to show our disregard of
+their privilege of neutrality and rights of independence; and that we
+insult them only because we despise them, and despise them only because
+we do not apprehend their resentment.
+
+I have heard the late American Minister here assert that the American
+vessels captured by our cruisers and condemned by our tribunals, only
+during the last war, amounted to about five hundred; and their cargoes
+(all American property) to one hundred and fifty millions of livres--
+L6,000,000.  Some few days ago I saw a printed list, presented by the
+American consul to our Minister of the Marine Department, claiming one
+hundred and twelve American ships captured in the West Indies and on the
+coast of America within these last two years, the cargoes of which have
+all been confiscated, and most of the crews still continue prisoners at
+Martinico, Gaudeloupe, or Cayenne.  Besides these, sixty-six American
+ships, after being plundered in part of their cargoes at sea by our
+privateers, had been released; and their claims for property thus lost,
+or damage thus done, amounting to one million three hundred thousand
+livres.
+
+You must have read the proclamations of our governors in the West Indies,
+and therefore remember that one dated at Guadeloupe, and another dated at
+the City of San Domingo, both declare, without farther ceremony, all
+American and other neutral ships and cargoes good and lawful prizes, when
+coming from or destined to any port in the Island of St. Domingo, because
+Bonaparte's subjects there were in a state of rebellion.  What would
+these philosophers who, twelve years ago, wrote so many libels against
+your Ministers for their pretended system of famine, have said, had they,
+instead of prohibiting the carrying of ammunition and provisions to the
+ports of France, thus extended their orders without discrimination or
+distinction?  How would the neutral Americans, and the neutral Danes, and
+their then allies, philosophers, and Jacobins of all colours and classes,
+have complained and declaimed against the tyrants of the seas; against
+the enemies of humanity, liberty, and equality.  Have not the negroes
+now, as much as our Jacobins had in 1793, a right to call upon all those
+tender-hearted schemers, dupes, or impostors, to interest humanity in
+their favour?  But, as far as I know, no friends of liberty have yet
+written a line in favour of these oppressed and injured men, whose former
+slavery was never doubtful, and who, therefore, had more reason to rise
+against their tyrants, and to attempt to shake off their yoke, than our
+French insurgents, who, free before, have never since they revolted
+against lawful authority enjoyed an hour's freedom.  But the Emperor
+Jacques the First has no propagators, no emissaries, no learned savans
+and no secret agents to preach insurrection in other States, while
+defending his own usurpation; besides, his treasury is not in the most
+brilliant and flourishing situation, and the crew of our white
+revolutionists are less attached to liberty than to cash.
+
+Our Ambassador to the United States, General Turreaux, is far from being
+contented with our friend, the President Jefferson, whose patriotic
+notions have not yet soared to the level of our patriotic transactions.
+He refused both to prevent the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte with a female
+American citizen, and to detain her after her marriage when her husband
+returned to Europe.  To our continual representation against the
+liberties which the American newspapers take with our Government, with
+our Emperor, with our Imperial Family, and with our Imperial Ministers,
+the answer has always been, "Prosecute the libeller, and as soon as he is
+convicted he will be punished."  This tardy and negative justice is so
+opposite to our expeditious and summary mode of proceeding, of punishing
+first and trying afterwards, that it must be both humiliating and
+offensive.  In return, when the Americans have complained to Turreaux
+against the piracy of our privateers, he has sent them here to seek
+redress, where they also will, to their cost, discover that in civil
+cases our justice has not the same rapid march as when it is a question
+of arresting or transporting suspected persons, or of tormenting,
+shooting, or guillotining a pretended spy, or supposed conspirator.
+
+Had the peace of Europe continued, Bernadotte was the person selected by
+Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in America; because we
+then intended to strike, and not to negotiate.  But during the present
+embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was more necessary there than
+either a warrior or a politician.  A man who has passed through all the
+mire of our own Revolution, who has been in the secrets, and an
+accomplice of all our factions, is, undoubtedly, a useful instrument
+where factions are to be created and directed, where wealth is designed
+for pillage, and a State for overthrow.  General Turreaux is, therefore,
+in his place, and at his proper post, as our Ambassador in America.
+
+The son of a valet of the late Duc de Bouillon, Turreaux called himself
+before the Revolution Chevalier de Grambonville, and was, in fact, a
+'chevalier d'industrie' (a swindler), who supported himself by gambling
+and cheating.  An associate of Beurnonville, Barras, and other vile
+characters, he with them joined the colours of rebellion, and served
+under the former in 1792, in the army of the Moselle, first as a
+volunteer, and afterwards as an aide-de-camp.  In a speech at the Jacobin
+Club at Quesnoy, on the 20th of November, 1792, he made a motion--"That,
+throughout the whole republican army, all hats should be prohibited, and
+red caps substituted in their place; and that, not only portable
+guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs, should accompany the soldiers of
+Liberty and Equality."
+
+A cousin of his was a member of the National Convention, and one of those
+called Mountaineers, or sturdy partisans of Marat and Robespierre.  It
+was to the influence of this cousin, that he was indebted, first for a
+commission as an adjutant-general, and afterwards for his promotion to a
+general of brigade.  In 1793, he was ordered to march, under the command
+of Santerre, to La Vendee, where he shared in the defeat of the
+republicans at Vihiers.  At the engagement near Roches d'Erigne he
+commanded, for the first time, a separate column, and the capacity and
+abilities which he displayed on that occasion were such as might have
+been expected from a man who had passed the first thirty years of his
+life in brothels and gambling-houses.  So pleasant were his dispositions,
+that almost the whole army narrowly escaped having been thrown and pushed
+into the River Loire.  The battle of Doux was the only one in which he
+had a share where the republicans were not routed; but some few days
+afterwards, near Coron, all the troops under him were cut to pieces, and
+he was himself wounded.
+
+The confidence of his friends, the Jacobins, increased, however, in
+proportion to his disasters, and he was, in 1794, after the superior
+number of the republican soldiers had forced the remnants of the
+Royalists to evacuate what was properly called La Vendee, appointed a
+commander-in-chief.  He had now an opportunity to display his infamy and
+barbarity.  Having established his headquarters at Mantes, where he was
+safe, amidst the massacres of women and children ordered by his friend
+Carriere, he commanded the republican army to enter La Vendee in twelve
+columns, preceded by fire and sword; and within four weeks, one of the
+most populous departments of France, to the extent and circumference of
+sixty leagues, was laid waste-not a house, not a cottage, not a tree was
+spared, all was reduced to ashes; and the unfortunate inhabitants, who
+had not perished amid the ruin of their dwellings, were shot or stabbed;
+while attempting to save themselves from the common conflagration.  On
+the 22d of January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of
+the National Convention: "Citizen Representatives!--A country of sixty
+leagues extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a perfect
+desert; not a dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes; and of one
+hundred and eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a soul breathes
+any longer.  Men and women, old men and children, have all experienced
+the national vengeance, and are no more.  It was a pleasure to a true
+republican to see upon the bayonets of each of our brave republicans the
+children of traitors, or their, heads.  According to the lowest
+calculation, I have despatched, within three months, two hundred thousand
+individuals of both sexes, and of all ages.  Vive la Republique!!!"
+In the works of Prudhomme and our republican writers, are inserted
+hundreds of letters, still more cruelly extravagant, from this ci-devant
+friend of Liberty and Equality, and at present faithful subject, and
+grand officer of the Legion of Honour, of His Imperial Majesty Napoleon
+the First.
+
+After the death of Robespierre, Turreaux, then a governor at Belleisle,
+was arrested as a terrorist, and shut up at Du Plessis until the general
+amnesty released him in 1795.  During his imprisonment he amused himself
+with writing memoirs of the war of La Vendee, in which he tried to prove
+that all his barbarities had been perpetrated for the sake of humanity,,
+and to save the lives of republicans.  He had also the modesty to
+announce that, as a military work, his production would be equally
+interesting as those of a Folard and Guibert.  These memoirs, however,
+proved nothing but that he was equally ignorant and wicked, presumptuous
+and ferocious.
+
+During the reign of the Directory he was rather discarded, or only
+employed as a kind of recruiting officer to hunt young conscripts, but in
+1800 Bonaparte gave him a command in the army of reserve; and in 1802,
+another in the army of the interior.  He then became one of the most
+assiduous and cringing courtiers at the Emperor's levies; while in the
+Empress's drawing-room he assumed his former air and ton of a chevalier,
+in hopes of imposing upon those who did not remember the nickname which
+his soldiers gave him ten years before, of Chevalier of the Guillotine.
+
+At a ball of the Bonaparte family to which he was invited, the Emperor
+took the fancy to dance with his stepdaughter, Madame Louis.  He,
+therefore, unhooked his sword, which he handed to a young colonel, D'
+Avry, standing by his side.  This colonel, who had been a page at the
+Court of Louis XVI,, knew that it would have been against etiquette, and
+even unbecoming of him, to act as a valet to Napoleon while there were
+valets in the room; he therefore retreated, looking round for a servant.
+"Oh!" said the Emperor, "I see that I am mistaken; here, generals,"
+continued he (addressing himself to half a dozen, with whose independent
+principles and good breeding he was acquainted), "take this sword during
+my dance."  They all pushed forward, but Turreaux and La Grange, another
+general and intriguer, were foremost; the latter, however, received the
+preference.  On the next day, D' Avry was ordered upon service to
+Cayenne.
+
+Turreaux has acquired, by his patriotic deeds in La Vendee, a fortune of
+seven millions of livres.  He has the highest opinion of his own
+capacity, while a moment's conversation will inform a man of sense that
+he is only a conceited fool.  As to his political transactions, he has by
+his side, as a secretary, a man of the name of Petry, who has received a
+diplomatic education, and does not want either subtlety or parts; and on
+him, no doubt, is thrown the drudgery of business.  During a European
+war, Turreaux's post is of little relative consequence; but should
+Napoleon live to dictate another general pacification, the United States
+will be exposed, on their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same
+outrages their commercial navy now experiences on the main.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XII
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy, has assured
+me that, so far from Bonaparte's subjects on the other side of the Alps
+being contented and attached to his person and Government, were a
+victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of Lombardy a general
+insurrection would be the consequence.  During these last nine years the
+inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment's tranquillity or safety.  Every
+relation or favourite whom Napoleon wished to provide for, or to enrich,
+he has saddled upon them as in free quarters; and since 1796, when they
+first had the honour of our Emperor's acquaintance, they have paid more
+in taxes, in forced loans, requisitions, and extortions of every
+description, than their ancestors or themselves had paid during the one
+hundred and ninety-six preceding years.
+
+Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the
+people in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse off.
+Having more national character and more fidelity towards their
+Sovereign than their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated.
+Their governor, General De Menou, has caused most of the departments to
+be declared under martial law, and without right to claim the protection
+of our happy constitution.  In every city or town are organized special
+tribunals, the progeny of our revolutionary tribunals, against the
+sentences of which no appeal can be made, though these sentences are
+always capital ones.  Before these, suspicion is evidence, and an
+imprudent word is subject to the same punishment as a murderous deed.
+Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he who complains is shot as a
+conspirator.
+
+There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape these
+legal assassinations.  They must either desert their country or sacrifice
+a part of their property.  In the former case, if retaken, they are
+condemned as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the risk that those
+to whom they have already given a part of their possessions will also
+require the remainder, and having obtained it, to enjoy in security the
+spoil, will send them to the tribunals and to death.  De Menou has a
+fixed tariff for his protection, regulated according to the riches of
+each person; and the tax-gatherers collect these arbitrary contributions
+with the regular ones, so little pains are taken to conceal or to
+disguise these robberies.
+
+De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
+Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment
+or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately.  He
+calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous
+action he proposes to commit, and determines accordingly.  He owed some
+riches and the rank of the major-general to the bounty of Louis XVI.,
+but when he considered the immense value of the revolutionary plunder,
+called national property, and that those who confiscated could also
+promote, he did not hesitate what party to take.  A traitor is generally
+a coward; he has everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his
+Royalist countrymen in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by
+your countrymen in 1801.
+
+Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one
+Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are
+obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection,
+and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours.  He has also in his
+hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
+themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
+if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business
+done.  He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money,
+and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have
+the same privilege.  Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of
+the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of
+those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit.  All
+the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
+by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
+weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying.  He is a
+grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
+that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
+a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
+France, and to create in their place only a national one.  Always an
+incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
+Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
+Alcoran.
+
+The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
+complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First.  If persons of
+rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
+birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
+dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
+might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
+death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
+of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
+of lowest birth and basest morals.  If their revolutionary mania were not
+incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
+duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
+being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
+preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.
+
+The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee, Melzi-
+Eril, has induced me to make these reflections.  Wealthy as well as
+elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
+enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
+esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
+his own conscience.  Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
+made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
+works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
+reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
+charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
+attempted to be put into practice.  Returned to his own country, his
+acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
+with his religion, and with himself.  In our Revolution he thought that
+he saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species,
+and that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society
+as was promised in books.  With our own regenerators he extenuated the
+crimes which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them
+even necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete.  When,
+therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was
+among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer.
+The numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
+commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.
+"The faults and sufferings of individuals," he said, "are nothing to the
+goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole."  To
+him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of
+thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with
+the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and
+instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers.  In recompense for so
+much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in
+1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at
+Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic.
+As Melzi was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not
+much approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that
+annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people.  In a conference,
+however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced
+that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
+intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the
+point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it
+should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he
+advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and
+equality.  Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi
+to sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he
+occupied.
+
+The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his
+philosophy and his schemes of regeneration.  He trusted so much to the
+promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined
+to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was
+ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais
+as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy.  He was not
+philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad
+grace to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred
+seeing in that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general.
+To soften his disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and
+with that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons,
+where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of
+Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.
+
+Immediately after Bonaparte's return to France, Melzi left Milan, and
+retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to Talleyrand
+a letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave to pass the
+remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives.  An answer was
+presented him by an officer of Bonaparte's Gendarmes d'Elite, in which
+he was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to return with the officer
+to Milan, and there occupy his office of Arch-Chancellor to which he had
+been nominated.  Enraged at such treatment, he endeavoured to kill
+himself with a dose of poison, but his attempt did not succeed.  His
+health was, however, so much injured by it that it is not supposed he can
+live long.  What, a lesson for reformers and innovators!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--A ridiculous affair lately occasioned a great deal of bustle
+among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps.  When Bonaparte
+demanded for himself and for his wife the title of Imperial Majesty, and
+for his brothers and sisters that of Imperial Highness, he also insisted
+on the salutation of a Serene Highness being given to his Arch-
+Chancellor, Cambaceres, and his Arch-Treasurer, Lebrun.  The political
+consciences of the independent representatives of independent Continental
+Princes immediately took the alarm at the latter innovation, as the
+appellation of Serene Highness has never hitherto been bestowed on
+persons who had not princely rank.  They complained to Talleyrand, they
+petitioned Bonaparte, and they even despatched couriers to their
+respective Courts.  The Minister smiled, the Emperor cursed, and their
+own Cabinets deliberated.  All routs, all assemblies, all circles, and
+all balls were at a stop.  Cambaceres applied to his Sovereign to support
+his pretensions, as connected with his own dignity; and the diplomatic
+corps held forward their dignity as opposing the pretensions of
+Cambaceres.  In this dilemma Bonaparte ordered all the Ambassadors,
+Ministers, envoys, and agents 'en masse' to the castle of the Tuileries.
+After hearing, with apparent patience, their arguments in favour of
+established etiquette and customs, he remained inflexible, upon the
+ground that he, as master, had a right to confer what titles he chose
+within his own dominions on his own subjects; and that those foreigners
+who refused to submit to his regulations might return to their own
+country.  This plain explanation neither effecting a conversion nor
+making any, impression, he grew warm, and left the refractory
+diplomatists with these remarkable words: "Were I to create my Mameluke
+Rostan a King, both you and your masters should acknowledge him in that
+rank."
+
+After this conference most of Their Excellencies were seized with terror
+and fear, and would, perhaps, have subscribed to the commands of our
+Emperor had not some of the wisest among them proposed, and obtained the
+consent of the rest, to apply, once more to Talleyrand, and purchase by
+some douceur his assistance in this great business.  The heart of our
+Minister is easily softened; and he assented, upon certain conditions, to
+lay the whole before his Sovereign in such a manner that Cambaceres
+should be made a Prince as well as a Serene Highness.
+
+It is said that Bonaparte was not easily persuaded to this measure, and
+did not consent to it before the Minister remarked that his condescension
+in this insignificant opposition to his will would proclaim his
+moderation and generosity, and empower him to insist on obedience when
+matters of the greatest consequence should be in question or disputed.
+Thus our regicide, Cambaceres, owes his princely title to the shallow
+intrigues of the agents of legitimate Sovereigns.  Their nicety in
+talking of innovations with regard to him, after they had without
+difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an Emperor, and other sans-culottes
+Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd as improper.  Report, however, states,
+what is very probable, that they were merely the duped tools of
+Cambaceres's ambition and vanity, and of Talleyrand's corruption and
+cupidity.
+
+Cambaceres expected to have been elevated to a Prince on the same day
+that he was made a Serene Highness; but Joseph Bonaparte represented to
+his brother that too many other princedoms would diminish the respect and
+value of the princedoms of the Bonaparte family.  Cambaceres knew that
+Talleyrand had some reason at that period to be discontented with Joseph,
+and, therefore, asked his advice how to get made a Prince against the
+wishes of this Grand Elector.  After some consideration, the Minister
+replied that he was acquainted with one way, which would, with his
+support, certainly succeed; but it required a million of livres to set
+the wheels in motion, and keep them going afterwards.  The hint was
+taken, and an agreement signed for one million, payable on the day when
+the princely patent should be delivered to the Arch-Chancellor.
+
+Among the mistresses provided by our Minister for the members of the
+foreign diplomatic corps, Madame B----s is one of the ablest in the way
+of intrigue.  She was instructed to alarm her 'bon ami', the Bavarian
+Minister, Cetto, who is always bustling and pushing himself forward in
+the grand questions of etiquette.  A fool rather than a rogue, and an
+intriguer while he thinks himself a negotiator, he was happy to have this
+occasion to prove his penetrating genius and astonishing information.
+A convocation of the diplomatic corps was therefore called, and the
+suggestions of Cetto were regarded as an inspiration, and approved, with
+a resolution to persevere unanimously.  At their first audience with
+Talleyrand on this subject, he seemed to incline in their favour; but,
+as soon as he observed how much they showed themselves interested about
+this trifling punctilio, it occurred to him that they, as well as
+Cambaceres, might in some way or other reward the service he intended to
+perform.  Madame B----s was again sent for; and she once more advised her
+lover, who again advised his colleagues.  Their scanty purses were
+opened, and a subscription entered into for a very valuable diamond,
+which, with the millions of the Arch-Chancellor, gave satisfaction to all
+parties; and even Joseph Bonaparte was reconciled, upon the consideration
+that Cambaceres has no children, and that, therefore, the Prince will
+expire with the Grand Officer of State.
+
+Cambaceres, though before the Revolution a nobleman of a Parliamentary
+family, was so degraded and despised for his unnatural and beastly
+propensities, that to see him in the ranks of rebellion was not
+unexpected.  Born in Languedoc, his countrymen were the first to suffer
+from his revolutionary proceedings, and reproached him as one of the most
+active instruments of persecution against the clergy of Toulouse, and as
+one of the causes of all the blood that flowed in consequence.  A coward
+as well as a traitor, after the death of Louis XVI. he never dared ascend
+the tribune of the National Convention, but always gave a silent vote to
+all the atrocious laws proposed and carried by Marat, Robespierre, and
+their accomplices.  It was in 1795, when the Reign of Terror had ceased,
+that he first displayed his zeal for anarchy, and his hatred to royalty;
+his contemptible and disgusting vices were, however, so publicly
+reprobated, that even the Directory dared not nominate him a Minister of
+Justice, a place for which he intrigued in vain, from 1796 to 1799; when
+Bonaparte, either not so scrupulous, or setting himself above the public
+opinion, caused him to be called to the Consulate; which, in 1802, was
+ensured him for life, but exchanged, in 1804, for the office of an Arch-
+Chancellor.
+
+He is now worth thirty millions of livres--all honestly obtained by his
+revolutionary industry.  Besides a Prince, a Serene Highness, an Arch-
+Chancellor, a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, he is also a Knight
+of the Prussian Black Eagle!  For his brother, who was for a long time an
+emigrant clergyman, and whom he then renounced as a fanatic, he has now
+procured the Archbishopric of Rouen and a Cardinal's hat.  His Eminence
+is also a grand officer of the Legion of Honour in France, and a Pope in
+petto at Rome.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--No Sovereign Prince has more incurred the hatred of Bonaparte
+than the present King of Sweden; and I have heard from good authority
+that our Government spares neither bribes nor intrigues to move the tails
+of those factions which were dissolved, but not crushed, after the murder
+of Gustavus III.  The Swedes are generally brave and loyal, but their
+history bears witness that they are easily misled; all their grand
+achievements are their own, and the consequence of their national spirit
+and national valour, while all their disasters have been effected by the
+influence of foreign gold and of foreign machinations.  Had they not been
+the dupes of the plots and views of the Cabinets of Versailles and St.
+Petersburg, their country might have been as powerful in the nineteenth
+century as it was in the seventeenth.
+
+That Gustavus IV. both knew the danger of Europe, and indicated the
+remedy, His Majesty's notes, as soon as he came of age, presented by the
+able and loyal Minister Bildt to the Diet of Ratisbon, evince.  Had they
+been more attended to during 1798 and 1799, Bonaparte would not, perhaps,
+have now been so great, but the Continent would have remained more free
+and more independent.  They were the first causes of our Emperor's
+official anger against the Cabinet of Stockholm.
+
+When, however, His Swedish Majesty entered into the Northern league, his
+Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, was for some time treated with no insults
+distinct or different from those to which all foreign diplomatic agents
+have been accustomed during the present reign; but when he demanded
+reparation for the piracies committed during the last war by our
+privateers on the commerce of his nation, the tone was changed; and when
+his Sovereign, in 1803, was on a visit to his father-in-law, the Elector
+of Baden, and there preferred the agreeable company of the unfortunate
+Duc d'Enghien to the society of our Minister, Baron Ehrensward never
+entered Napoleon's diplomatic circle or Madame Napoleon's drawing-room
+without hearing rebukes and experiencing disgusts.  One day, when more
+than usually attacked, he said, on leaving the apartment, to another
+Ambassador, and in the hearing of Duroc, "that it required more real
+courage to encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming
+provocations, which the person who gave them knew could not be resented,
+than to brave a death which the mouths of cannon vomit or the points of
+bayonets inflict."  Duroc reported to his master what he heard, and but
+for Talleyrand's interference, the Swedish Ambassador would, on the same
+night, have been lodged in the Temple.  Orders were already given to that
+purpose, but were revoked.
+
+This Baron Ehrensward, who is also a general in the service of his
+country, has almost from his youth passed his time at Courts; first in
+his own country, and afterwards in Spain, where he resided twelve years
+as our Ambassador.  Frank as a soldier, but also polite as a courtier,
+he was not a little surprised at the new etiquette of our new court,
+and at the endurance of all the members of the diplomatic corps, of whom
+hardly one had spirit enough to remember that he was the representative
+of one, at least nominally, independent Prince or State.  It must be
+added that he was the only foreign diplomatist, with Count Markof, who
+was not the choice of our Cabinet, and, therefore, was not in our
+secrets.
+
+As soon as His Swedish Majesty heard of the unexpected and unlawful
+seizure of the Duc d'Enghien, he wrote a letter with his own hand to
+Bonaparte, which he sent by his adjutant-general, Tawast; but this
+officer arrived too late, and only in time to hear of the execution of
+the Prince he intended to save, and the indecent expressions of Napoleon
+when acquainted with the object of his mission.  Baron Ehrensward was
+then recalled, and a Court mourning was proclaimed by Gustavus IV., as
+well as by Alexander the First, for the lamented victim of the violated
+laws of nations and humanity.  This so, enraged our ruler that General
+Caulincourt (the same who commanded the expedition which crossed the
+Rhine and captured the Duc d' Enghien) was engaged to head and lead fifty
+other banditti, who were destined to pass in disguise into Baden, and to
+bring the King of Sweden a prisoner to this capital.  Fortunately, His
+Majesty had some suspicion of the attempt, and removed to a greater
+distance from our frontiers than Carlsruhe.  So certain was our
+Government of the success of this shameful enterprise, that our charge
+d'affaires in Sweden was preparing to engage the discontented and
+disaffected there for the convocation of a diet and the establishment of
+a regency.
+
+According to the report in our diplomatic circle.  Bonaparte and
+Talleyrand intended nevermore to, release their royal captive when once
+in their power; but, after forcing him to resign the throne to his son,
+keep him a prisoner for the remainder of his days, which they would have
+taken care should not have been long.  The Duke of Sudermania was to have
+been nominated a regent until the majority of the young King, not yet six
+years of age.  The Swedish diets were to recover that influence, or,
+rather, that licentiousness, to which Gustavus III., by the revolution of
+the 19th of August, 1772, put an end.  All exiled regicides, or traitors,
+were to be recalled, and a revolutionary focus organized in the North,
+equally threatening Russia and Denmark.  The dreadful consequences of
+such an event are incalculable.  Thanks to the prudence of His Swedish
+Majesty, all these schemes evaporated in air.
+
+Not being able to dethrone a Swedish Monarch, our Cabinet resolved to
+partition the Swedish territory, to which effect I am assured that
+proposals were last summer made to the Cabinets of St. Petersburg,
+Berlin, and Copenhagen.  Swedish Finland was stated to have been offered
+to Russia, Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, and Scania and Blekinge to
+Denmark; but the overture was rejected.
+
+The King of Sweden possesses both talents and information superior to
+most of his contemporaries, and he has surrounded himself with
+counsellors who, with their experience, make wisdom more firm, more
+useful, and more valuable.  His chancellor, D'Ehrenheim, unites modesty
+with sagacity; he is a most able statesman, an accomplished gentleman,
+and the most agreeable of men.  He knows the languages, as well as the
+constitutions, of every country in Europe, with equal perfection as his
+native tongue and national code.  Had his Sovereign the same ascendency
+over the European politics as Christina had during the negotiation of the
+Treaty of Munster, other States would admire, and Sweden be proud of,
+another Axel Oxenstiern.
+
+Count Fersen, who also has, and is worthy of, the confidence of his
+Prince, is a nobleman, the honour and pride of his rank.  A colonel
+before the Revolution of the regiment Royal Suedois, in the service of my
+country, his principles were so well appreciated that he was entrusted by
+Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when so many were so justly suspected,
+and served royalty in distress, at the risk of his own existence.  This
+was so much the more generous in him as he was a foreigner, of one of the
+most ancient families, and one of the richest noblemen in his own
+country.  To him Louis XVIII. is indebted for his life; and he brought
+consolation to the deserted Marie Antoinette even in the dungeon of the
+Conciergerie, when a discovery would have been a sentence of death.
+In 1797, he was appointed by his King plenipotentiary to the Congress of
+Rastadt, and arrived there just at the time when Bonaparte, after the
+destruction of happiness in Italy, had resolved on the ruin of liberty in
+Switzerland, and came there proud of past exploits and big with future
+schemes of mischief.  His reception from the conquerer of Italy was such
+as might have been expected by distinguished loyalty from successful
+rebellion.  He was told that the Congress of Rastadt was not his place!
+and this was true; for what can be common between honour and infamy,
+between virtue and vice?  On his return to Sweden, Count Fersen was
+rewarded with the dignity of a Grand Officer of State.
+
+Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of His Swedish Majesty, Baron
+d'Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced in saying that he was the
+friend of Gustavus III.  From a page to that chevalier of royalty he was
+advanced to the rank of general; and during the war with Russia, in 1789
+and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his Prince and benefactor.
+It was to him that his King said, when wounded mortally, by the hand of a
+regicide, at a masquerade in March, 1792, "Don't be alarmed, my friend.
+You know as well as myself that all wounds are not dangerous."
+Unfortunately, his were not of that description.
+
+In the will of this great Monarch, Baron d'Armfeldt was nominated one of
+the guardians of his present Sovereign, and a governor of the capital;
+but the Duke Regent, who was a weak Prince, guided by philosophical
+adventurers, by Illuminati and Freemasons, most of whom had imbibed the
+French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a kind of honourable exile,
+as an Ambassador to Italy.  Shortly afterwards, under pretence of having
+discovered a conspiracy, in which the Baron was implicated, he was
+outlawed.  He then took refuge in Russia, where he was made a general,
+and as such distinguished him self under Suwarow during the campaign of
+1799.  He was then recalled to his country, and restored to all his
+former places and dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and
+obtain the favour, friendship, and approbation of his King.  He is said
+to be one of the Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with
+the Russian troops expected in Pomerania.  Wherever he is employed, I am
+convinced that he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero.  Last
+spring he was offered the place of a lieutenant-general in the Austrian
+service, which, with regard to salary and emoluments, is greatly superior
+to what he enjoys in Sweden; he declined it, however, because, with a
+warrior of his stamp, interest is the last consideration.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XV.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Believe me, Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than
+all other engines, military or political, used by his rivals or foes for
+his destruction.  He is aware of the fatal consequences all former
+factions suffered from the public exposure of their past crimes and
+future views; of the reality of their guilt, and of the fallacy of their
+boasts and promises.  He does not doubt but that a faithful account of
+all the actions and intrigues of his Government, its imposition, fraud,
+duplicity, and tyranny, would make a sensible alteration in the public
+opinion; and that even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being
+tired of our revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity,
+have been his adherents, might alter their sentiments when they read of
+enormities which must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one that he
+who waded through rivers of blood to seize power will never hesitate
+about the means of preserving it.
+
+There is not a printing-office, from the banks of the Elbe to the Gulf
+of Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection of our
+police agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France, Italy, Spain,
+Portugal, Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work which, if contrary to
+our policy or our fears, is not either confiscated, or purchased on the
+day it, makes its appearance.  Besides our regular emissaries, we have
+persons travelling from the beginning to the end of the year, to pick up
+information of what literary productions are printing; of what authors
+are popular; of their political opinions and private circumstances.  This
+branch of our haute police extends even to your country.
+
+Before the Revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers, but
+from 1789 to 1799 never less than thirty, and frequently sixty journals
+were daily printed.  After Bonaparte had assumed the consular authority,
+they were reduced to ten.  But though these were under a very strict
+inspection of our Minister of Police, they were regarded still as too
+numerous, and have lately been diminished to eight, by the incorporation
+of 'Le Clef du Cabinet' and 'Le Bulletin de l'Europe' with the 'Gazette
+de France', a paper of which the infamously famous Barrere is the editor.
+According to a proposal of Bonaparte, it was lately debated in the
+Council of State whether it would not be politic to suppress all daily
+prints, with the sole exception of the Moniteur.  Fouche and Talleyrand
+spoke much in favour of this measure of security.  Real, however, is said
+to have suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our Government,
+instead of prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has resolved
+by degrees to purchase them all, and to entrust them entirely to the
+direction of Barrere, who now is consulted in everything concerning books
+or newspapers.
+
+All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have
+previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary
+censor, Barrere.  Any person offending against this law is most severely
+punished.  An American gentlemen, of the name of Campbell, was last
+spring sent to the Temple for lending one of your old daily papers to a
+person who lodged in the same hotel with him.  After an imprisonment of
+ten weeks he made some pecuniary sacrifices to obtain his liberty,
+but was carried to Havre, under an escort of gendarmes, put on board a
+neutral vessel, and forbidden, under pain of death, ever to set his foot
+on French ground again.  An American vessel was, about the same time,
+confiscated at Bordeaux, and the captain and crew imprisoned, because
+some English books were found on board, in which Bonaparte, Talleyrand,
+Fouche, and some of our great men were rather ill-treated.  The crew have
+since been liberated, but the captain has been brought here, and is still
+in the Temple.  The vessel and the cargo have been sold as lawful
+captures, though the captain has proved from the names written in the
+books that they belonged to a passenger.  A young German student in
+surgery, who came here to improve himself, has been nine months in the
+same state prison, for having with him a book, printed in Germany during
+Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, wherein the chief and the undertaking
+are ridiculed.  His mother, the widow of a clergyman, hearing of the
+misfortune of her son, came here, and has presented to the Emperor and
+Empress half a dozen petitions, without any effect whatever, and has
+almost ruined herself and her other children by the expenses of the
+journey.  During a stay of four months she has not yet been able to gain
+admittance into the Temple, to visit or see her son, who perhaps expired
+in tortures, or died brokenhearted before she came here.
+
+A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the Duc d'Enghien had found their
+way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at last the
+police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of having read
+them was arrested.  The number of these unfortunate persons, according to
+some, amounted to one hundred and thirty, while others say that they were
+only eighty-four, of whom twelve died suddenly in the Temple, and the
+remainder were transported to Cayenne; upwards of half of them were
+women, some of the ci-devant highest rank among subjects.
+
+A Prussian, of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of
+Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives of
+Bonaparte and of some of his generals.  Every day such and other examples
+of the severity of our Government are related; and foreigners who visit
+us continue, nevertheless, to be off their guard.  They would be less
+punished had they with them forged bills than, printed books or
+newspapers, in which our Imperial Family and public functionaries are not
+treated with due respect.  Bonaparte is convinced that in every book
+where he is not spoken of with praise, the intent is to blame him; and
+such intents or negative guilt never escape with impunity.
+
+As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more fond of
+foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own,
+official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and
+at Mentz, where the 'Gazette de Leyden', 'Hamburg Correspondenten', and
+'Journal de Frankfort' are reprinted; some articles left out, and others
+inserted in their room.  It was intended to reprint also the 'Courier de
+Londres', but our types, and particularly, our paper, would detect the
+fraud.  I have read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were
+extracts from this French paper, printed in your country, which I
+strongly suspect are of our own manufacture.  I am told that several new
+books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant
+Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will
+soon be laid before the public as foreign productions.
+
+A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention, during
+his dinner at the restaurateur's of 'Cadran Vert', on the Boulevards,
+some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the 'Moniteur'.
+As he left the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of
+being an English agent, and before supper-time he was on the road to
+Rochefort on his way to Cayenne.  As soon as the banker Tournon was
+informed of this expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on
+Fouche, who threatened even to transport him if he dared to interfere
+with the transactions of the police.  This banker was himself seized in
+the spring of last year by a police agent and some gendarmes, and carried
+into exile forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six.
+months, until a pecuniary douceur procured him a recall.  His crime was
+having inquired after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having
+left his card there.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVI.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of the
+Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleon the First, and is
+now in Germany, making his first campaign.  A descendant of a wealthy and
+ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was easily
+deluded into the ranks of the revolutionists of his own country, by a
+Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse
+Borghese, his mother.  He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin
+club established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the
+same year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States,
+he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa
+Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat.  To show his love
+of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company of
+which the captain was a fellow that sold cats' meat and tripe in the
+streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother's kitchen.
+Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as
+insupportable for his pride and vanity as he, some years ago, was
+contemptible for his meanness.  He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who,
+between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband--a space
+of twelve months--had twice been in a fair way to become a mother.  Her
+portion was estimated at eighteen millions of livres--a sum sufficient to
+palliate many 'faux pas' in the eyes of a husband more sensible and more
+delicate than her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince
+Borghese.
+
+The lady is the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also the
+most wicked of the female Bonapartes.  She had, almost from her infancy,
+passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery, and profligacy
+before she attained her present elevation; rank, however, has not altered
+her morals, but only procured her the means of indulging in new excesses.
+Ever since the wedding night the Prince Borghese has been excluded from
+her bed; for she declared frankly to him, as well as to her brother, that
+she would never endure the approach of a man with a bad breath; though
+many who, from the opportunities they have had of judging, certainly
+ought to know, pretend that her own breath is not the sweetest in the
+world.  When her husband had marched towards the Rhine, she asked her
+brother, as a favour, to procure the Prince Borghese, after a useless
+life, a glorious death.  This curious demand of a wife was, made in
+Madame Bonaparte's drawing-room, in the presence of fifty persons.  "You
+are always 'etourdie'," replied Napoleon, smiling.
+
+If Bonaparte, however, overlooks the intrigues of his sisters, he is not
+so easily pacified when any reports reach him inculpating the virtues of
+his sisters-in-law.  Some gallants of Madame Joseph Bonaparte have
+already disappeared to return no more, or are wandering in the wilds of
+Cayenne; but the Emperor is particularly attentive to everything
+concerning the morality of Madame Louis, whose descendants are destined
+to continue the Bonaparte dynasty.  Two officers, after being cashiered,
+were, with two of Madame Louis's maids, shut up last month in the Temple,
+and have not since been heard of, upon suspicion that the Princess
+preferred their society to that of her husband.
+
+Louis Bonaparte, whose constitution has been much impaired by his
+debaucheries, was, last July, advised by his physicians to use the baths
+at St. Amand.  After his wife had accompanied him as far as Lille, she
+went to visit one of her friends, Madame Ney, the wife of General Ney,
+who commanded the camp near Montreuil.  This lady resided in a castle
+called Leek, in the vicinity, where dinners, concerts, balls, and other
+festivities celebrated the arrival of the Princess; and to these the
+principal officers of the camp were invited.  One morning, about an hour
+after the company had retired to bed, the whole castle was disturbed and
+alarmed by an uproar in the anteroom of Princesse Louis's bedchamber.
+On coming to the scene of riot, two officers were found there fighting,
+and the Princesse Louis, more than half undressed, came out and called
+the sentries on duty to separate the combatants, who were both wounded.
+This affair occasioned great scandal; and General Ney, after having put
+the officers under arrest, sent a courier to Napoleon at Boulogne,
+relating the particulars and demanding His Majesty's orders.  It was
+related and believed as a fact that the quarrel originated about two of
+the maids of the Princess (whose virtue was never suspected), with whom
+the officers were intriguing.  The Emperor ordered the culprits to be
+broken and delivered up to his Minister of Police, who knew how to
+proceed.  The Princesse Louis also received an invitation to join her
+sister-in-law, Madame Murat, then in the camp at Boulogne, and to remain
+under her care until her husband's return from St. Amand.
+
+General Murat was then at Paris, and his lady was merely on a visit to
+her Imperial brother, who made her responsible for Madame Louis, whom he
+severely reprimanded for the misconduct of her maids.  The bedrooms of
+the two sisters were on the same floor.  One night, Princesse Louis
+thought she heard the footsteps of a person on the staircase, not like
+those of a female, and afterwards the door of Madame Murat's room opened
+softly.  This occurrence deprived her of all desire to sleep; and
+curiosity, or perhaps revenge, excited her to remove her doubts
+concerning the virtue of her guardian.  In about an hour afterwards,
+she stole into Madame Murat's bedroom, by the way of their sitting-room,
+the door in the passage being bolted.  Passing her hand over the pillow,
+she almost pricked herself with the strong beard of a man, and, screaming
+out, awoke her sister, who inquired what she could want at such an
+unusual hour.
+
+"I believe," replied the Princess, "my room is haunted.  I have not shut
+my eyes, and intended to ask for a place by your side, but I find it is
+already engaged:
+
+"My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent," said Madame
+Murat.
+
+"It is very rude of your maid to go to bed with her mistress without
+first shaving herself," said the Princess, and left the room.
+
+The next morning an explanation took place; the ladies understood each
+other, and each, during the remaining part of her husband's absence, had
+for consolation a maid for a bedfellow.  Madame Murat also convinced the
+Emperor that his suspicions with regard to the Princesse Louis were
+totally unfounded; and he with some precious presents, indemnified her
+for his harsh treatment.
+
+It is reported that the two maids of the Princesse Louis, when before
+Fouche, first denied all acquaintance with the officers; but, being
+threatened with tortures, they signed a 'proces verbal', acknowledging
+their guilt.  This valuable and authentic document the Minister sent by
+an extra courier to the Emperor, who showed it to his stepdaughter.  Her
+generosity is proverbial here, and therefore nobody is surprised that she
+has given a handsome sum of money to the parents of her maids, who had in
+vain applied to see their children; Fouche having told them that affairs
+of State still required their confinement.  One of them, Mariothe, has
+been in the service of the Princess ever since her marriage, and is known
+to possess all her confidence; though during that period of four years
+she has twice been in a state of pregnancy, through the condescending
+attention of her princely master.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--When preparations were made for the departure of our army of
+England for Germany, it excited both laughter and murmuring among the
+troops.  Those who had always regarded the conquest of England as
+impracticable in present circumstances, laughed, and those who had in
+their imagination shared the wealth of your country, showed themselves
+vexed at their disappointment.  To keep them in good spirits, the company
+of the theatre of the Vaudevilles was ordered from hence to Boulogne,
+and several plays, composed for the occasion, were performed, in which
+the Germans were represented as defeated, and the English begging for
+peace on their knees, which the Emperor of the French grants upon
+condition that one hundred guineas ready money should be paid to each of
+his soldiers and sailors.  Every corps in its turn was admitted gratis to
+witness this exhibition of the end of all their labours; and you can form
+no idea what effect it produced, though you are not a stranger to our
+fickle and inconsiderate character.  Ballads, with the same predictions
+and the same promises, were written and distributed among the soldiers,
+and sung by women sent by Fouche to the coast.  As all productions of
+this sort were, as usual, liberally rewarded by the Emperor, they poured
+in from all parts of his Empire.
+
+Three poets and authors of the theatre of the Vaudevilles, Barrel, Radet,
+and Desfontaines, each received two hundred napoleons d'or for their
+common production of a ballad, called "Des Adieux d'un Grenadier au Camp
+de Boulogne."  From this I have extracted the following sample, by which
+you may judge of the remainder:
+
+                    THE GRENADIER'S ADIEU
+
+                   TO THE CAMP AT BOULOGNE
+
+               The drum is beating, we must march,
+               We're summon'd to another field,
+               A field that to our conq'ring swords
+               Shall soon a laurel harvest yield.
+               If English folly light the torch
+               Of war in Germany again
+               The loss is theirs--the gain is ours
+               March! march! commence the bright campaign.
+
+               There, only by their glorious deeds
+               Our chiefs and gallant bands are known;
+               There, often have they met their foes,
+               And victory was all their own:
+               There, hostile ranks, at our approach,
+               Prostrate beneath our feet shall bow;
+               There, smiling conquest waits to twine
+               A laurel wreath round every brow.
+
+               Adieu, my pretty turf-built hut *
+               Adieu, my little garden, too!
+               I made, I deck'd you all myself,
+               And I am loth to part with you:
+               But since my arms I must resume,
+               And leave your comforts all behind,
+               Upon the hostile frontier soon
+               My tent shall flutter in the wind.
+
+               My pretty fowls and doves, adieu!
+               Adieu, my playful cat, to thee!
+               Who every morning round me came,
+               And were my little family.
+               But thee, my dog, I shall not leave
+               No, thou shalt ever follow me,
+               Shalt share my toils, shaft share my fame
+               For thou art called VICTORY.
+
+               But no farewell I bid to you,
+               Ye prams and boats, which, o'er the wave,
+               Were doom'd to waft to England's shore
+               Our hero chiefs, our soldiers brave.
+               To you, good gentlemen of Thames,
+               Soon, soon our visit shall be paid,
+               Soon, soon your merriment be o'er
+               'T is but a few short hours delay'd.
+
+     * During the long continuance of the French encampment at Boulogne
+     the troops had formed, as it were, a romantic town of huts.  Every
+     but had a garden surrounding it, kept in neat order and stocked with
+     vegetables and flowers.  They had, besides, fowls, pigeons, and
+     rabbits; and these, with a cat and a dog, generally formed the
+     little household of every soldier.
+
+As I am writing on the subject of poetical agents, I will also say some
+words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons frequently
+occupy both the one office and the other.  A man of the name of Richaud,
+who has sung previously the glory of Marat and Robespierre, offered to
+Bonaparte, on the evening preceding his departure for Strasburg, the
+following lines; and was in return presented with a purse full of gold,
+and an order to the Minister of the Interior, Champagny, to be employed
+in his offices, until better provided for.
+
+                              STANZAS
+
+                  ON THE RUMOUR OF A WAR WITH AUSTRIA
+
+               Kings who, so often vanquish'd, vainly dare
+               Menace the victor that has laid you low--
+               Look now at France--and view your own despair
+               In the majestic splendour of your foe.
+
+               What miserable pride, ye foolish kings,
+               Still your deluded reason thus misleads?
+               Provoke the storm--the bolt with lightning wings
+               Shall fall--but fall on your devoted heads.
+
+               And thou, Napoleon, if thy mighty sword
+               Shall for thy people conquer new renown;
+               Go--Europe shall attest, thy heart preferr'd
+               The modest olive to the laurel crown.
+
+               But thee, lov'd chief, to new achievements bold
+
+               The aroused spirit of the soldier calls;
+               Speak!--and Vienna cowering shall behold
+               Our banners waving o'er her prostrate walls.
+
+
+I received, four days afterwards, at the circle of Madame Joseph
+Bonaparte, with all other visitors, a copy of these stanzas.  Most of
+the foreign Ambassadors were of the party, and had also a share of this
+patriotic donation.  Count von Cobenzl had prudently absented himself;
+otherwise, this delenda of the Austrian Carthage would have been
+officially announced to him.
+
+Another poetaster, of the name of Brouet, in a long, dull, disgusting
+poem, after comparing Bonaparte with all great men of antiquity, and
+proving that he surpasses them all, tells his countrymen that their
+Emperor is the deputy Divinity upon earth--the mirror of wisdom, a demi-
+god to whom future ages will erect statues, build temples, burn incense,
+fall down and adore.  A proportionate share of abuse is, of course,
+bestowed on your nation.  He says:
+
+               A Londres on vit briller d'un eclat ephemere
+               Le front tout radieux d'un ministre influent;
+               Mais pour faire palir l'etoile d'Angleterre,
+               Un SOLEIL tout nouveau parut au firmament,
+               Et ce soleil du peuple franc
+               Admire de l'Europe entiere
+               Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE LE GRAND.
+
+For this delicate compliment Brouet was made deputy postmaster-general in
+Italy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour.  It must be granted that,
+if Bonaparte is fond of flattery, he does not receive it gratis, but pays
+for it like a real Emperor.
+
+It has lately become the etiquette, not only in our Court circle and
+official assemblies, but even in fashionable societies of persons who
+are, or wish to become, Bonaparte's public functionaries, to distribute
+and have read and applauded these disinterested effusions of our poetical
+geniuses.  This fashion occasioned lately a curious blunder at a tea-
+party in the hotel of Madame de Talleyrand.  The same printer who had
+been engaged by this lady had also been employed by Chenier, or some
+other poet, to print a short satire against several of our literary
+ladies, in which Madame de Genlis and Madame de Stael (who has just
+arrived here from her exile) were, with others, very severely handled.
+By mistake, a bundle of this production was given to the porter of Madame
+de Talleyrand, and a copy was handed to each visitor, even to Madame de
+Genlis and Madame de Stael, who took them without noticing their
+contents.  Picard, after reading an act of a new play, was asked by the
+lady of the house to read this poetic worship of the Emperor of the
+French.  After the first two lines he stopped short, looking round him
+confused, suspecting a trick had been played upon him.  This induced the
+audience to read what had been given them, and Madame de Talleyrand with
+the rest; who, instead of permitting Picard to continue with another.
+scene of his play, as he had adroitly begun, made the most awkward
+apology in the world, and by it exposed the ladies still more who were
+the objects of the satire; which, an hour afterwards, was exchanged for
+the verses intended for the homage of the Emperor, and the cause of the
+error was cleared up.
+
+I have read somewhere of a tyrant of antiquity who forced all his
+subjects to furnish one room of their houses in the best possible manner,
+according to their circumstances, and to have it consecrated for the
+reception of his bust, before which, under pain of death, they were
+commanded to prostrate themselves, morning, noon, and night.  They were
+to enter this room, bareheaded and barefooted, to remain there only on
+their knees, and to leave it without turning their back towards the
+sacred representative of their Prince.  All laughing, sneezing, coughing,
+speaking, or even whispering, were capitally prohibited; but crying was
+not only permitted, but commanded, when His Majesty was offended, angry,
+or unwell.  Should our system of cringing continue progressively to
+increase as it has done these last three years, we, too, shall very soon
+have rooms consecrated, and an idol to adore.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XVIII.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Portugal has suffered more from the degraded state of Spain,
+under the administration of the Prince of Peace, than we have yet gained
+by it in France.  Engaged by her, in 1793, in a war against its
+inclination and interest, it was not only deserted afterwards, but
+sacrificed.  But for the dictates of the Court of Madrid, supported,
+perhaps, by some secret influence of the Court of St. James, the Court of
+Lisbon would have preserved its neutrality, and, though not a well-wisher
+of the French Republic, never have been counted among her avowed enemies.
+
+In the peace of 1795, and in the subsequent treaty of 1796, which
+transformed the family compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons into a
+national alliance between France and Spain, there was no question about
+Portugal.  In 1797, indeed, our Government condescended to receive a
+Portuguese plenipotentiary, but merely for the purpose of plundering his
+country of some millions of money, and to insult it by shutting up its
+representative as a State prisoner in the Temple.  Of this violation of
+the laws of civilized nations, Spain never complained, nor had Portugal
+any means to avenge it.  After four years of negotiation, and an
+expenditure of thirty millions, the imbecile Spanish premier supported
+demands made by our Government, which, if assented to, would have left
+Her Most Faithful Majesty without any territory in Europe, and without
+any place of refuge in America.  Circumstances not permitting your
+country to send any but pecuniary succours, Portugal would have become an
+easy prey to the united Spanish and French forces, had the marauders
+agreed about the partition of the spoil.  Their disunion, the consequence
+of their avidity, saved it from ruin, but not from pillage.  A province
+was ceded to Spain, the banks and the navigation of a river to France,
+and fifty millions to the private purse of the Bonaparte family.
+
+It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such offerings,
+would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but, though the
+Cabinet of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+pretensions and encroachments of the latter left the former no rest.
+While pocketing tributes it required commercial monopolies, and when its
+commerce was favoured, it demanded seaports to ensure the security of its
+trade.  Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions of the
+State it, oppressed.  With the money and the value of the diamonds which
+Portugal has paid in loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in
+donations, in tributes, and in presents, it might have supported, during
+ten years, an army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have
+been worse situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?
+
+But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort,
+were more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the extortions
+themselves were injurious to its resources.  The first revolutionary
+Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his
+contempt.
+
+Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more
+vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes.  The son of a publican
+and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a
+postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin, and a terrorist;
+and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of these different
+trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and
+disgusts.  He seems to say, "I am a villain.  I know that I am so, and I
+am proud of being so.  To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no
+human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance.  I might be
+murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me.  On a gibbet or
+in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with
+Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same.  Infamy
+cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me."
+General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will
+always be the same polluted, but daring individual; a stranger to remorse
+and repentance, as well as to honour and virtue.  Where Bonaparte sends a
+banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction.
+
+A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes's first
+mission to Portugal.  When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he
+had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest,
+and, as a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador, as he said himself.
+His resentment against Bonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent
+of Portugal.  Without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the
+Court of Lisbon, he brought the sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of
+the Tuileries with him, and determined to fraternize with a foreign and
+legitimate Sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and
+First Consul; and, what is the more surprising, he carried his point.
+The Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood
+sponsor to his child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before
+he was divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince's
+consort, a Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to
+associate.
+
+Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an Ambassador, his
+former business of a smuggler, and, instead of being ashamed of a
+discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not reprimanded
+in France, but was, without apology, received back again in Portugal.
+His conduct afterwards could not be surprising.  He only insisted that
+some faithful and able Ministers should be removed, and others appointed
+in their place, more complaisant and less honest.
+
+New plans of Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this plague; but
+what did it obtain in return?--another grenadier Ambassador, less brutal
+but more cunning, as abandoned but more dissimulating.
+
+Gendral Junot is the son of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of this
+capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789.  Having committed some
+pilfering, he was turned out of the parental dwelling, and therefore
+lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin Club.  In 1792, he entered,
+as a soldier, in a regiment of the army marching against the county of
+Nice; and, in 1793, he served before Toulon, where he became acquainted
+with Bonaparte, whom he, in January, 1794, assisted in despatching the
+unfortunate Toulonese; and with whom, also, in the autumn of the same
+year, he, therefore, was arrested as a terrorist.
+
+In 1796, when commander-in-chief, Bonaparte made Junot his aide-de-camp;
+and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to Egypt.  There, as
+well as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no particular opportunity of
+distinguishing himself.  He was not one of those select few whom Napoleon
+brought with him to Europe in 1799, but returned first to France in 1801,
+when he was nominated a general of division and commander of this
+capital, a place he resigned last year to General Murat.
+
+His despotic and cruel behaviour while commander of Paris made him not
+much regretted.  Fouche lost in him, indeed, an able support, but none of
+us here ever experienced from him justice, much less protection.  As with
+all other of our modern public functionaries, without money nothing was
+obtained from him.  It required as much for not doing any harm as if, in
+renouncing his usual vexatious oppressions, he had conferred benefits.
+He was much suspected of being, with Fouche, the patron of a gang of
+street robbers and housebreakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested
+this capital, and who, when finally discovered, were screened from
+justice and suffered to escape punishment.
+
+I will tell you what I personally have seen of him.  Happening one
+evening to enter the rooms at Frascati, where the gambling-tables are
+kept, I observed him, undressed, out of regimentals, in company with at
+young man, who afterwards avowed himself an aide-de-camp of this general,
+and who was playing with rouleaux of louis d'or, supposed to contain
+fifty each, at Rouge et Noir.  As long as he lost, which he did several
+times, he took up the rouleau on the table, and gave another from his
+pocket.  At last he won, when he asked the bankers to look at their loss,
+and count the money in his rouleau before they paid him.  On opening it,
+they found it contained one hundred bank-notes of one thousand livres
+each--folded in a manner to resemble the form and size of louis d'or.
+The bankers refused to pay, and applied to the company whether they were
+not in the right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the
+person who now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual manner.
+Before any answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking the bankers
+whether they knew who he was.  Upon their answering in the negative, he
+said: "I am General Junot, the commander of Paris, and this officer who
+has won the money is my aide-de-camp; and I insist upon your paying him
+this instant, if you do not wish to have your bank confiscated and your
+persons arrested."  They refused to part with money which they protested
+was not their own, and most of the individuals present joined them in
+their resistance.  "You are altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers,"
+interrupted Junot; "your business shall soon be done."
+
+So saying, he seized all the money on the table, and a kind of boxing-
+match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being a tall and
+strong man, got the better of them.  The tumult, however, brought in the
+guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to prison sixteen
+persons he pointed out.  Fortunately, I was not of the number--I say
+fortunately, for I have heard that most of them remained in prison six
+months before this delicate affair was cleared up and settled.  In the
+meantime, Junot not only pocketed all the money he pretended was due to
+his aide-de-camp, but the whole sum contained in the bank, which was
+double that amount.  It was believed by every one present that this was
+an affair arranged between him and his aide-de-camp beforehand to pillage
+the bank.  What a commander, what a general, and what an Ambassador!
+
+Fitte, the secretary of our Embassy to Portugal, was formerly an Abbe,
+and must be well remembered in your country, where he passed some years
+as an emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand.  I am told that,
+by his intrigues, he even succeeded in swindling your Ministers out of a
+sum of money by some plausible schemes he proposed to them.  He is, as
+well as all other apostate priests, a very dangerous man, and an immoral
+and unprincipled wretch.  During the time of Robespierre he is said to
+have caused the murder of his elder brother and younger sister; the
+former he denounced to appropriate to himself his wealth, and the latter
+he accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him.  He
+daily boasts of the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand.
+'Qualis rex, talis grex'.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XIX.
+
+PARIS, September, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In some of the ancient Republics, all citizens who, in time of
+danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as traitors or
+treated as enemies.  When, by our Revolution, civilized society and the
+European Commonwealth were menaced with a total overthrow, had each
+member of it been considered in the same light, and subjected to the same
+laws, some individual States might, perhaps, have been less wealthy, but
+the whole community would have been more happy and more tranquil, which
+would have been much better.  It was a great error in the powerful league
+of 1793 to admit any neutrality at all; every Government that did not
+combat rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally.
+The man who continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are
+wanted to preserve the vessel from sinking, deserves to be thrown
+overboard, to be swallowed up by the waves and to perish the first.
+Had all other nations been united and unanimous, during 1793 and 1794,
+against the monster, Jacobinism, we should not have heard of either
+Jacobin directors, Jacobin consuls, or a Jacobin Emperor.  But then,
+from a petty regard to a temporary profit, they entered into a truce with
+a revolutionary volcano, which, sooner or later, will consume them all;
+for I am afraid it is now too late for all human power, with all human
+means, to preserve any State, any Government, or any people, from
+suffering by the threatening conflagration.  Switzerland, Venice, Geneva,
+Genoa, and Tuscany have already gathered the poisoned fruits of their
+neutrality.  Let but Bonaparte establish himself undisturbed in Hanover
+some years longer, and you will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral
+Prussia, and neutral Denmark visited with all the evils of invasion,
+pillage, and destruction, and the independence of the nations in the
+North will be buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the
+South of Europe.
+
+These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents
+pronounce, and their dupes repeat: "Oh!  the wise Government of Denmark!
+Oh, what a wise statesman the Danish Minister, Count von Bernstorff!"
+I do not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a great politician;
+but I assert, also, that his was a greatness more calculated for regular
+times than for periods of unusual political convulsion.  Like your Pitt,
+the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to
+judge soundly and to act rightly, according to the present situation of
+affairs.  He adhered too much to the old routine, and did not perceive
+the immense difference between the Government of a revolutionary ruler
+and the Government of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV.  I am certain, had he
+still been alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have
+repaired them.
+
+His son, the present Danish Minister, follows his father's plans, and
+adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while the
+alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more affected
+the real and relative power and weakness of States than all the
+revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars, and
+pacifications of the two preceding centuries.  He has even gone farther,
+in some parts of his administration, than his father ever intended.
+Without remembering the political TRUTH, that a weak State which courts
+the alliance of a powerful neighbour always becomes a vassal, while
+desiring to become an ally, he has attempted to exchange the connections
+of Denmark and Russia for new ones with Prussia; and forgotten the
+obligations of the Cabinet of Copenhagen to the Cabinet of St.
+Petersburg, and the interested policy of the House of Brandenburgh.
+That, on the contrary, Russia has always been a generous ally of Denmark,
+the flourishing state of the Danish dominions since the beginning of the
+last century evinces.  Its distance and geographical position prevent all
+encroachments from being feared or attempted; while at the same time it
+affords protection equally against the rivalry of Sweden and ambition of
+Prussia.
+
+The Prince Royal of Denmark is patriotic as well as enlightened, and
+would rule with more true policy and lustre were he to follow seldomer
+the advice of his counsellors, and oftener the dictates of his own mind.
+Count von Schimmelmann, Count von Reventlow, and Count von Bernstorff,
+are all good and moral characters; but I fear that their united capacity
+taken together will not fill up the vacancy left in the Danish Cabinet by
+the death of its late Prime Minister.  I have been personally acquainted
+with them all three, but I draw my conclusions from the acts of their
+administration, not from my own knowledge.  Had the late Count von
+Bernstorff held the ministerial helm in 1803, a paragraph in the Moniteur
+would never have disbanded a Danish army in Holstein; nor would, in 1805,
+intriguers have been endured who preached neutrality, after witnessing
+repeated violation of the law of nations, not on the remote banks of the
+Rhine, but on the Danish frontiers, on the Danish territory, on the banks
+of the Elbe.
+
+It certainly was no compliment to His Danish Majesty when our Government
+sent Grouvelle as a representative to Copenhagen, a man who owed his
+education and information to the Conde branch of the Bourbons, and who
+afterwards audaciously and sacrilegiously read the sentence of death on
+the chief of that family, on his good and legitimate King, Louis XVI.
+It can neither be called dignity nor prudence in the Cabinet of Denmark
+to suffer this regicide to serve as a point of rally to sedition and
+innovation; to be the official propagator of revolutionary doctrines,
+and an official protector of all proselytes and sectaries of this anti-
+social faith.
+
+Before the Revolution a secretary to the Prince of Conde, Grouvelle was
+trusted and rewarded by His Serene Highness, and in return betrayed his
+confidence, and repaid benefactions and generosity with calumny and
+persecution, when his patron was obliged to seek safety in emigration
+against the assassins of successful rebellion.  When the national seals
+were put on the estates of the Prince, he appropriated to himself not
+only the whole of His Highness's library, but a part of his plate.  Even
+the wardrobe and the cellar were laid under contributions by this
+domestic marauder.
+
+With natural genius and acquired experience, Grouvelle unites impudence
+and immorality; and those on whom he fixes for his prey are, therefore,
+easily duped, and irremediably undone.  He has furnished disciples to all
+factions, and to all sects, assassins to the revolutionary tribunals, as
+well as victims for the revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to
+Robespierre, Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies
+to Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a
+tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc d'
+Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly
+condemned and privately executed in France.
+
+Our present Minister at the Court of Copenhagen, D' Aguesseau, has no
+virtues to boast of, but also no crimes to blush for.  With inferior
+capacity, he is only considered by Talleyrand as an inferior intriguer,
+employed in a country ruled by an inferior policy, neither feared nor
+esteemed by our Government.  His secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our
+real and confidential firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep
+burning those materials of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our
+incendiaries have lighted and illuminated in Holstein, Denmark, Sweden,
+and Norway.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The insatiable avarice of all the members of the Bonaparte
+family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of our
+philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude from the
+mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the passion of covetousness; that he pillages
+only to get money to pay his military plunderers, and hoards treasures
+only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the associates and instruments
+of his authority.
+
+Whether their assertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself to
+decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal palaces,
+from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal domains; from the
+immense and valuable quantity of diamonds, jewels, pictures, statues,
+libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and self-denial are certainly
+not among Napoleon's virtues.
+
+In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and extensive
+demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by national.
+property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial Treasury, or
+confiscated by Imperial decrees.  In Italy, he has, by an official act,
+declared to be the property of his crown, first, the royal palace at
+Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls Villa Bonaparte; second, the
+palace of Monza and its dependencies; third, the palace of Mantua, the
+palace of The, and the ci-devant ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace
+situated in the vicinity of Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity
+of Bologna; fifth, the ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza;
+sixth, the beautiful forest of Tesin.  Ten millions were, besides,
+ordered to be drawn out of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands
+for the formation of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.
+
+To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former Kings
+of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of Flanders, of the
+German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons, etc., who, before the
+last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of the Rhine.  I have seen a
+list, according to which the number of palaces and chateaux appertaining
+to Napoleon as Emperor and King, are stated to be seventy-nine; so that
+he may change his habitations six times in the month, without occupying
+during the same year the same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at
+home.
+
+In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of the
+Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte.  Madame
+Napoleon has purchased, since her husband's consulate, in her own name,
+or in the name of her children, nine estates with their chateaux, four
+national forests, and six hotels at Paris.  Joseph Bonaparte possesses
+four estates and chateaux in France, three hotels at Paris and at
+Brussels, three chateaux and estates in Italy,, and one hotel at Milan,
+and another at Turin.  Lucien Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel
+at Paris, another at Bonne, and a third at Chambery.  He has one estate
+in Burgundy, two in Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital.
+At Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in
+the Papal States he has obtained, in exchange for property in France,
+three chateaux with their dependencies.  Louis Bonaparte has three hotels
+at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons.  He has two
+estates in Flanders, three in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte, and another
+in Alsace.  He has also a chateau four leagues from this city.  At Genoa
+he has a beautiful hotel, and upon the Genoese territory a large estate.
+He has bought three plantations at Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe.  To
+Jerome Bonaparte has hitherto been presented only an estate in Brabant,
+and a hotel in this capital.  Some of the former domains of the House of
+Orange, in the Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of
+our Government, and are said to be intended for him.
+
+But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and his
+brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left
+unprovided for.  Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at Paris,
+one at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome.  Her estates in France are
+four, and in Italy two.  Madame Bacciochi, Princess of Piombino and
+Lucca, possesses two hotels in this capital, and one palace at Piombino
+and another at Lucca.  Of her estates in France, she has only retained
+two, but she has three in the Kingdom of Italy, and four in her husband's
+and her own dominions.  The Princess Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at
+Rome and four chateaux in the papal territory.  At Milan she has, as well
+as at Turin and at Paris, hotels given her by her Imperial brother,
+together with two estates in France, one in Piedmont, and two in
+Lombardy.  The Princesse Murat is mistress of two hotels here, one at
+Brussels, one at Tours, and one at Bordeaux, together with three estates
+on this, and five on the other side of the Alps.  The Princesse Borghese
+has purchased three plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with
+a part of the treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc.  With her
+present husband she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates on
+the Roman territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her with one
+hotel at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at Genoa, together
+with three estates in France and five in Italy.  For his mother, and for
+each of his sisters, Napoleon has also purchased estates, or lands to
+form estates, in their native island of Corsica.
+
+The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have also
+experienced his bounty.  Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris, Milan,
+Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and Italy.
+Seventeen, either first, second, or third cousins, by his father's or
+mother's side, have all obtained estates either in the French Empire, or
+in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as all brothers, sisters, or cousins of
+his own wife, and the wives of his brothers, or of the husbands of his
+sisters.  Their exact number cannot well be known, but a gentleman who
+has long been collecting materials for some future history of the House
+of Bonaparte, and of the French Empire, has already shown me sixty-six
+names of individuals of that description, and of both sexes, who all,
+thanks to the Imperial liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become
+people of property.
+
+When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and
+distributed within the short period of five years, it is not hazardous to
+say that, in the annals of Europe, another such revolution in property,
+as well as in power, is not to be found.
+
+The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together does
+not amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have acquired and
+possess.
+
+Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at this
+revolution of property.  Richer than any other nation, you have more to
+apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our frequent enemies
+and as our national rivals; as a barrier against our plans of universal
+dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary resources.  May we never live
+to see the day when the mandates of Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured
+at London, as at Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, and Rome.  The misery of ages
+to come will then be certain, and posterity will regard as comparative
+happiness, the sufferings of their forefathers.  It is not probable that
+those who have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest
+contented until you are involved in the same ruin.  Union among
+yourselves only can preserve you from perishing in the universal wreck;
+by this you will at least gain time, and may hope to profit by probable
+changes and unexpected accidents.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil
+list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in
+Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres--which was divided
+between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte,
+Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese.
+By this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched
+inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine.  This Daru is too good a
+calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master
+of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have
+enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the
+Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose.  On his return
+here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an
+annuity of one hundred thousand livres--not to play; but as this sum
+would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this
+Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain
+of being transported to Cayenne.  He obeyed, but the bankers soon
+experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other
+side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations hither, Fouche
+recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of
+Bonaparte's civil list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly,
+injuring our gambling-banks.  He has kept his promise with regard to
+France, but made, last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany,
+which, he avows, produced him nine millions of livres.  He always points,
+but never keeps a bank.  He begins to be so well known in many parts of
+the Continent, that the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and
+remain so until his departure.  This was the case at Florence last April.
+He travels always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four
+servants.  He is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
+
+He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
+calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
+than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
+been felt and lamented for these ten years past.  Augereau, Bernadotte,
+Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
+terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.
+
+In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
+Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary
+brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a
+common soldier before the Revolution.  But he has this merit above
+Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and
+finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign
+countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting,
+he was also again taken and again flogged.  Italy has, indeed, since he
+has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than
+Germany.  Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he
+butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with
+blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion
+had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers of an assassin, or
+decorate the bosom of a harlot.  The outrages he committed during 1796
+and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even
+were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable
+to be believed.  He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity
+into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
+themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into dens
+of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided
+himself.  In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the
+sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or
+imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he
+paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night at Pavia, with a
+draft for fifty louis d'or on the municipality of that town, who dared
+not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to
+Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.
+
+The general and grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
+is another of our military heroes of the same stamp.  A barber, and son
+of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
+to be hanged.  The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
+but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
+doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life.  The Revolution broke his
+fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
+he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
+guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family.  He
+was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
+and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
+and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand livres--
+properly applied and divided between some of the members of the Bonaparte
+family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a commander-in-
+chief of the ci-devant Flanders.  In landed property, in jewels, in
+amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from prudence,
+six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to eight
+millions of livres.  For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and galley-
+slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth which,
+from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you our
+generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the
+catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our
+soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and
+surpassing often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those
+authorized by our Government itself, or by its civil and military
+representatives.  It comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded
+and enforced, whether as loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in
+money as an equivalent for both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and
+carriages; corvees of all kinds; the emptying of magazines for the
+service of our armies; in short, whatever was required for the
+maintenance, a portion of the pay, and divers wants of those armies,
+from the time they had posted themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy,
+Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine.  Add to this the pillage of
+public or private warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging
+to individuals, to the State, to societies, to towns, to hospitals, and
+even to orphan-houses.
+
+But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of
+subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for
+accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite
+consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of our
+civil or military commanders.  Most of those articles were delivered in
+kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready
+money, and divided among the plunderers.
+
+In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
+Imperial city of Wetzlar.  He there put in requisition all private stores
+of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon
+another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.
+Leather and linen underwent the same operation.  Volumes might be filled
+with similar examples, all of public notoriety.
+
+This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
+Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790,
+and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in
+1765.  Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to
+escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some
+Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the men into an
+insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate.  From that
+period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs,
+and was, therefore, by his associates, promoted by one step to an
+adjutant-general.  Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement,
+and greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and
+enrich himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a
+short time made a general of division, and acquired a property of several
+millions.  This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously
+served only under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.
+
+He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be
+attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced
+into his interest.  In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic
+attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed commander-
+in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Ambassador from the First
+Consul to the Helvetic Government.  He there conducted himself so much to
+the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your country, he
+was made commander of the camp near Montreuil; and last year his wife was
+received as a Maid of Honour to the Empress of the French.
+
+This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept by a
+man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with Ney.  With
+him she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the municipality of
+Coblentz made her his wife.  Her conduct since has corresponded with that
+of her husband.  When he publicly lived with mistresses, she did not live
+privately with her gallants, but the instant the Emperor of the French
+told him to save appearances, if he desired a place for his wife at the
+Imperial Court, he showed himself the most attentive and faithful of
+husbands, and she the most tender and dutiful of wives.  Her manners are
+not polished, but they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her
+person, she is lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her
+society agreeable.  The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of
+her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires.  She has a fault common
+with most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity
+presents itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from being
+fortunate.  Report says that more than once she has been reduced to
+acquit her gambling debts by personal favours.
+
+Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now serving
+under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat.  According to some,
+he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin, robber, and assassin,
+long before he obtained his first commission as an officer, which was
+given him by the recommendation of Marat, whom he in return afterwards
+wished to immortalize, by the exchange of one letter in his own name, and
+by calling himself Marat instead of Murat.  Others, however, declare that
+his father was an honest cobbler, very superstitious, residing at
+Bastide, near Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and
+that he was in his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange
+the frock of the monk for the regimentals of a soldier.  In what manner,
+or by what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796
+he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he
+went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married
+him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of
+Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.
+
+The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by
+his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of
+livres.  The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him
+forty--two millions--and it is whispered that the estates bought in the
+name of his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less.
+A brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator;
+and an uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate.  A cousin of
+his, who was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was
+an apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor's
+chamberlains.  He has been very generous to all his relations, and would
+not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial
+Court, had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank,
+lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy.  The
+millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to
+gain.  His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of
+livres.
+
+It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:
+
+"It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of
+liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution--its promoters,
+its accomplices, and its instruments.  Wherever they penetrate, plunder
+follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but
+the means.  The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
+nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence."
+
+General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret deeds
+of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice.  It was under his
+private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
+and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way
+to his place of exile.  After the seizure and trial of the Duc d'
+Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of
+his Italian guard would fire at this Prince.  "If they hesitate," said
+Murat, who commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, "my pistols
+are loaded, and I will blow out his brains."
+
+His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family.  Murat was,
+at first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law,
+Lucien, whom he even fought; but Napoleon having assured him, upon his
+word of honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model
+of complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as
+numerous as Madame Murat's favourites.  He has a young aide-de-camp of
+the name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the
+then Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to
+have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was
+desolating Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, the vigilance of the
+police has much increased: our patrols are doubled during the night, and
+our spies more numerous and more insolent during the day.  Many suspected
+persons have also been exiled to some distance from this capital, while
+others, for a measure of safety, have been shut up in the Temple, or in
+the Castle of Vincennes.  These 'lettres de cachet', or mandates of
+arrest, are expedited during the Emperor's absence exclusively by his
+brother Louis, after a report, or upon a request, of the Minister of
+Police, Fouche.
+
+I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a drunkard
+and a libertine.  When a young and unprincipled man of such propensities
+enjoys an unrestrained authority, it cannot be surprising to hear that he
+has abused it.  He had not been his brother's military viceroy for
+twenty-four hours before one set of our Parisians were amused, while
+others were shocked and scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised
+by His Imperial Highness.
+
+Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the boxes,
+he despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the ground, and to
+find out who she was.  All gentlemen attached to his person or household
+are also his pimps, and are no novices in forming or executing plans of
+seduction.  Caulincourt (the officer he employed in this affair) returned
+soon, but had succeeded only in one part of the business.  He had not
+been able to speak to the lady, but was informed that she had only been
+married a fortnight to a manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her
+side, jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress.  He gave at the
+same time as his opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police
+commissary to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some
+pretext or other, while some of the friends of Prince Louis took
+advantage of the confusion to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel.
+An order was directly signed by Louis, according to which the police
+commissary, Chazot, was to arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of Lyons, and
+put him into a post-chaise, under the care of two gendarmes, who were to
+see him safe to Lyons, where he was to sign a promise of not returning to
+Paris without the permission of Government, being suspected of
+stockjobbing (agiotage).  Everything succeeded according to the proposal
+of Caulincourt, and Louis found Madame Leboure crying in his saloon.  It
+is said that she promised to surrender her virtue upon condition of only
+once more seeing her husband, to be certain that he was not murdered, but
+that Louis refused, and obtained by brutal force, and the assistance of
+his infamous associates, that conquest over her honour which had not been
+yielded to his entreaties or threats.  His enjoyment, however, was but of
+short continuance; he had no sooner fallen asleep than his poor injured
+victim left the bed, and, flying into his anteroom, stabbed herself with
+his sword.  On the next morning she was found a corpse, weltering in her
+blood.  In the hope of burying this infamy in secrecy, her corpse was, on
+the next evening, when it was dark, put into a sack, and thrown into the
+river, where, being afterwards discovered, the police agents gave out
+that she had fallen the victim of assassins.  But when Madame Leboure was
+thus seized at the opera, besides her husband, her parents and a brother
+were in her company, and the latter did not lose sight of the carriage in
+which his sister was placed till it had entered the hotel of Louis
+Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with his father, in vain claimed
+her.  As soon as the husband was informed of the untimely end of his
+wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot himself immediately
+afterwards through the head, but his own head was not the place where he
+should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it the cause of his
+wretchedness would only have been an act of retaliation, in a country
+where power forces the law to lie dormant, and where justice is invoked
+in vain when the criminal is powerful.
+
+I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our
+fashionable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe the
+word 'amuse' is not improperly employed in this instance.  At a dozen
+parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure has always
+been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of blame, except
+at Madame Fouche's, where Madame Leboure was very much blamed indeed for
+having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.
+
+Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end
+tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier.
+A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal
+tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six
+hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work
+in the galleys for twenty years.  His daughter, a young girl under
+fifteen, who lived with her grandmother (having lost her mother), went,
+accompanied by the old lady, and presented a petition to Louis, in favour
+of her father.  Her youth and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the
+unprincipled libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the
+colour of clemency to guilt.  He ordered her to call on his chamberlain,
+Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer.  There, either
+seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by
+delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of
+release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that
+he added her to the number of his regular mistresses.
+
+As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter in
+her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the Imperial
+Treasury, for twelve thousand livres--destined to pay the upholsterer who
+had furnished her apartment.  This gave him, no doubt, the idea of making
+the Prince pay a higher value for his child, and he forged another order
+for sixty thousand livres--so closely resembling it that it was without
+suspicion acquitted by the Imperial Treasurer.  Possessing this money,
+he fabricated a pass, in the name of Louis, as a courier carrying
+despatches to the Emperor in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived
+safe on the other side of the Rhine.  His forgeries were only discovered
+after he had written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his
+daughter of all knowledge of what he had done.  In the first moment of
+anger, her Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since
+forgiven her, and taken her back to his favour.  This trick of Deroux has
+pleased Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of his
+dangerous talent and vicious character.  He had once before released
+himself with a forged order from the Minister of Police, whose
+handwriting he had only seen for a minute upon his own mandate of
+imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery--pays for it like a real Emperor
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+May change his habitations six times in the month--yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion is evidence
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon's outrages
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v6
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+
+Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+BOOK 7
+
+
+LETTER XXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Though loudly complained of by the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the
+Cabinet of St. Petersburg has conducted itself in these critical times
+with prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy.
+In its connections with our Government it has never lost sight of its
+own dignity, and, therefore, never endured without resentment those
+impertinent innovations in the etiquette of our Court, and in the manner
+and language of our Emperor to the representatives of legitimate
+Sovereigns.  Had similar becoming sentiments directed the councils of all
+other Princes and the behaviour of their Ambassadors here, spirited
+remonstrances might have moderated the pretensions or passions of upstart
+vanity, while a forbearance and silence, equally impolitic and shameful,
+have augmented insolence by flattering the pride of an insupportable and
+outrageous ambition.
+
+The Emperor of Russia would not have been so well represented here, had
+he not been so wisely served and advised in his council chamber at St.
+Petersburg.  Ignorance and folly commonly select fools for their agents,
+while genius and capacity employ men of their own mould, and of their own
+cast.  It is a remarkable truth that, notwithstanding the frequent
+revolutions in Russia, since the death of Peter the First the ministerial
+helm has always been in able hands; the progressive and uninterrupted
+increase of the real and relative power of the Russian Empire evinces the
+reality of this assertion.
+
+The Russian Chancellor, Count Alexander Woronzoff, may be justly called
+the chief of political veterans, whether his talents or long services are
+considered.  Catherine II., though a voluptuous Princess, was a great
+Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and it was her unbiased choice
+that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet young, in her councils.  Though
+the intrigues of favourites have sometimes removed him, he always retired
+with the esteem of his Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or
+cringing to return.  He is admired by all who have the honour of
+approaching him, as much for his obliging condescension as for his great
+information.  No petty views, no petty caprices, no petty vengeances find
+room in his generous bosom.  He is known to have conferred benefactions,
+not only on his enemies, but on those who, at the very time, were
+meditating his destruction.  His opinion is that a patriotic Minister
+should regard no others as his enemies but those conspiring against their
+country, and acknowledge no friends or favourites incapable of well
+serving the State.  Prince de Z-------- waited on him one day, and, after
+hesitating some time, began to compliment him on his liberal sentiments,
+and concluded by asking the place of a governor for his cousin, with whom
+he had reason to suppose the Count much offended.  "I am happy," said His
+Excellency, "to oblige you, and to do my duty at the same time.  Here is
+a libel he wrote against me, and presented to the Empress, who graciously
+has communicated it to me, in answer to my recommendation of him
+yesterday to the place you ask for him to-day.  Read what I have written
+on the libel, and you will be convinced that it will not be my fault if
+he is not to-day a governor."  In two hours afterwards the nomination was
+announced to Prince de Z--------, who was himself at the head of a cabal
+against the Minister.  In any country such an act would have been
+laudable, but where despotism rules with unopposed sway, it is both
+honourable and praiseworthy.
+
+Prince Adam Czartorinsky, the assistant of Count Woronzoff, and Minister
+of the foreign department, unites, with the vigour of youth, the
+experience of age.  He has travelled in most countries of Europe, not
+solely to figure at Courts, to dance at balls, to look at pictures, or to
+collect curiosities, but to study the character of the people, the laws
+by which they are governed, and their moral or social influence with
+regard to their comforts or misery.  He therefore brought back with him a
+stock of knowledge not to be acquired from books, but only found in the
+world by frequenting different and opposite societies with observation,
+penetration, and genius.  With manners as polished as his mind is well
+informed, he not only, possesses the favour, but the friendship of his
+Prince, and, what is still more rare, is worthy of both.  All Sovereigns
+have favourites, few ever had any friends; because it is more easy to
+flatter vanity, than to display a liberal disinterestedness; to bow
+meanly than to instruct or to guide with delicacy and dignity; to abuse
+the confidence of the Prince than to use it to his honour, and to the
+advantage of his Government.
+
+That such a Monarch as an Alexander, and such Ministers as Count
+Woronzoff and Prince Czartorinsky, should appoint a Count Markof to a
+high and important post, was not unexpected by any one not ignorant of
+his merit.
+
+Count Markof was, early in the reign of Catherine II., employed in the
+office of the foreign department at St. Petersburg, and was, whilst
+young, entrusted with several important negotiations at the Courts of
+Berlin and Vienna., when Prussia had proposed the first partition of
+Poland.  He afterward went on his travels, from which he was recalled to
+fill the place of an Ambassador to the late King of Sweden, Gustavus III.
+He was succeeded, in 1784, at Stockholm, by Count Muschin Puschin, after
+being appointed a Secretary of State in his own country, a post he
+occupied with distinction, until the death of Catherine II., when Paul
+the First revenged upon him, as well as on most others of the faithful
+servants of this Princess, his discontent with his mother.  He was then
+exiled to his estates, where he retired with the esteem of all those who
+had known him.  In 1801, immediately after his accession to the throne,
+Alexander invited Count Markof to his Court and Council, and the trusty
+but difficult task of representing a legitimate Sovereign at the Court of
+our upstart usurper was conferred on him.  I imagine that I see the great
+surprise of this nobleman, when, for the first time, he entered the
+audience-chamber of our little great man, and saw him fretting, staring,
+swearing, abusing to right and to left, for one smile conferring twenty
+frowns, and for one civil word making use of fifty hard expressions,
+marching in the diplomatic audience as at the head of his troops, and
+commanding foreign Ambassadors as his French soldiers.  I have heard that
+the report of Count Markof to his Court, describing this new and rare
+show, is a chef-d'oeuvre of wit, equally amusing and instructive.  He is
+said to have requested of his Cabinet new and particular orders how to
+act--whether as the representative of an independent Sovereign, or, as
+most of the other members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, like
+a valet of the First Consul; and that, in the latter case, he implored as
+a favour, an immediate recall; preferring, had he no other choice left,
+sooner to work in the mines at Siberia than to wear, in France the
+disgraceful fetters of a Bonaparte.  His subsequent dignified conduct
+proves the answer of his Court.
+
+Talleyrand's craft and dissimulation could not delude the sagacity of
+Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister than by
+the First Consul.  All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary chicanery
+was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian Ambassador.  Sometimes
+he was reproached with having emigrants in his service; another time
+protection was refused to one of his secretaries, under pretence that he
+was a Sardinian subject.  Russian travellers were insulted, and detained
+on the most frivolous pretences.  Two Russian noblemen were even arrested
+on our side of the Rhine, because Talleyrand had forgotten to sign his
+name to their passes, which were otherwise in order.  The fact was that
+our Minister suspected them of carrying some papers which he wanted to
+see, and, therefore, wrote his name with an ink of such a composition
+that, after a certain number of days, everything written with it
+disappeared.  Their effects and papers were strictly searched by an agent
+preceding them from this capital, but nothing was found, our Minister
+being misinformed by his spies.
+
+When Count Markof left Sweden, he carried with him an actress of the
+French theatre at Stockholm, Madame Hus, an Alsatian by birth, but who
+had quitted her country twelve years before the Revolution, and could,
+therefore, never be included among emigrants.  She had continued as a
+mistress with this nobleman, is the mother of several children by him,
+and an agreeable companion to him, who has never been married.  As I have
+often said, Talleyrand is much obliged to any foreign diplomatic agent
+who allows him to be the indirect provider or procurer of his mistresses.
+After in vain tempting Count Markof with new objects, he introduced to
+the acquaintance of Madame Hus some of his female emissaries.  Their
+manoeuvres, their insinuations, and even their presents were all thrown
+away.  The lady remained the faithful friend, and therefore refused with
+indignation to degrade herself into a spy on her lover.  Our Minister
+then first discovered that, not only was Madame Hus an emigrant, but had
+been a great benefactress and constant companion of emigrants at St.
+Petersburg, and, of course, deserved to be watched, if not punished.
+Count Markof is reported to have said to Talleyrand on this grave
+subject, in the presence of two other foreign Ambassadors:
+
+"Apropos!  what shall I do to prevent my poor Madame Hus from being shot
+as an emigrant, and my poor children from becoming prematurely orphans?"
+
+"Monsieur," said our diplomatic oracle, "she should have petitioned the
+First Consul for a permission to return, to France before she entered it;
+but out of regard for you, if she is prudent, she will not, I daresay, be
+troubled by our Government."
+
+"I should be sorry if she was not," replied the Count, with a significant
+look; and here this grand affair ended, to the great entertainment of
+those foreign agents who dared to smile or to laugh.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The Legion of Honour, though only proclaimed upon Bonaparte's
+assumption of the Imperial rank, dates from the first year of his
+consulate.  To prepare the public mind for a progressive elevation of
+himself, and for consequential distinctions among all classes of his
+subjects, he distributed among the military, arms of honour, to which
+were attached precedence and privileges granted by him, and, therefore,
+liable to cease with his power or life.  The number of these arms
+increased in proportion to the approach of the period fixed for the
+change of his title and the erection of his throne.  When he judged them
+numerous enough to support his changes, he made all these wearers of arms
+of honour knights.  Never before were so many chevaliers created en
+masse; they amounted to no less than twenty-two thousand four hundred,
+distributed in the different corps of different armies, but principally
+in the army of England.  To these were afterwards joined five thousand
+nine hundred civil functionaries, men of letters, artists, etc.  To
+remove, however, all ideas of equality, even among the members of the
+Legion of Honour, they were divided into four classes--grand officers,
+commanders, officers, and simple legionaries.
+
+Every one who has observed Bonaparte's incessant endeavours to intrude
+himself among the Sovereigns of Europe, was convinced that he would
+cajole, or force, as many of them as he could into his revolutionary
+knighthood; but I heard men, who are not ignorant of the selfishness and
+corruption of our times, deny the possibility of any independent Prince
+suffering his name to be registered among criminals of every description,
+from the thief who picked the pockets of his fellow citizens in the
+street, down to the regicide who sat in judgment and condemned his King;
+from the plunderers who have laid waste provinces, republics, and
+kingdoms, down to the assassins who shot, drowned, or guillotined their
+countrymen en masse.  For my part, I never had but one opinion, and,
+unfortunately, it has turned out a just one.  I always was convinced that
+those Princes who received other presents from Bonaparte could have no
+plausible excuse to decline his ribands, crosses, and stars.  But who
+could have presumed to think that, in return for these blood-stained
+baubles, they would have sacrificed those honourable and dignified
+ornaments which, for ages past, have been the exclusive distinction of
+what birth had exalted, virtue made eminent, talents conspicuous, honour
+illustrious, or valour meritorious?  Who would have dared to say that the
+Prussian Eagle and the Spanish Golden Fleece should thus be prostituted,
+thus polluted?  I do not mean by this remark to throw any blame on the
+conferring those and other orders on Napoleon Bonaparte, or even on his
+brothers; I know it is usual, between legitimate Sovereigns in alliance,
+sometimes to exchange their knighthoods; but to debase royal orders so
+much as to present them to a Cambaceres, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a
+Bernadotte, a Fesch, and other vile and criminal wretches, I do not deny
+to have excited my astonishment as well as my indignation.  What honest--
+I do not say what noble--subjects of Prussia, or of Spain, will hereafter
+think themselves rewarded for their loyalty, industry, patriotism, or
+zeal, when they remember that their Sovereigns have nothing to give but
+what the rebel has obtained, the robber worn, the murderer vilified, and
+the regicide debased?
+
+The number of grand officers of the Legion of Honour does not yet amount
+to more than eighty, according to a list circulated at Milan last spring,
+of which I have seen a copy.  Of these grand officers, three had been
+shoemakers, two tailors, four bakers, four barbers, six friars, eight
+abbes, six officers, three pedlers, three chandlers, seven drummers,
+sixteen soldiers, and eight regicides; four were lawful Kings, and the
+six others, Electors or Princes of the most ancient houses in Europe.
+I have looked over our, own official list, and, as far as I know, the
+calculation is exact, both with regard to the number and to the quality.
+
+This new institution of knighthood produced a singular effect on my vain
+and giddy, countrymen, who, for twelve years before, had scarcely seen a
+star or a riband, except those of foreign Ambassadors, who were
+frequently insulted when wearing them.  It became now the fashion to be a
+knight, and those who really were not so, put pinks, or rather blooms, or
+flowers of a darker red, in their buttonholes, so as to resemble, and to
+be taken at a distance for, the red ribands of the members of the Legion
+of Honour.
+
+A man of the name of Villeaume, an engraver by profession, took advantage
+of this knightly fashion and mania, and sold for four louis d'or, not
+only the stars, but pretended letters of knighthood, said to be procured
+by his connection with persons of the household of the Emperor.  In a
+month's time, according to a register kept by him, he had made twelve
+hundred and fifty knights.  When his fraud was discovered, he was already
+out of the way, safe with his money; and, notwithstanding the researches
+of the police, has not since been taken.
+
+A person calling himself Baron von Rinken, a subject and an agent of one
+of the many Princes of Hohenlohe, according to his own assertion, arrived
+here with real letters and patents of knighthood, which he offered for
+sale for three hundred livres.  The stars of this Order were as large as
+the star of the grand officers of the Legion of Honour, and nearly
+resembled it; but the ribands were of a different colour.  He had already
+disposed of a dozen of these stars, when he was taken up by the police
+and shut up in the Temple, where he still remains.  Four other agents of
+inferior petty German Princes have also been arrested for offering the
+Orders of their Sovereigns for sale.
+
+A Captain Rouvais, who received six wounds in his campaign under Pichegru
+in 1794, wore the star of the Legion of Honour without being nominated a
+knight.  He has been tried by a military commission, deprived of his
+pension, and condemned to four years' imprisonment in irons.  He proved
+that he had presented fourteen petitions to Bonaparte for obtaining this
+mark of distinction, but in vain; while hundreds of others, who had
+hardly seen an enemy, or, at the most, made but one campaign, or been
+once wounded, had succeeded in their demands.  As soon as sentence had
+been pronounced against him, he took a small pistol from his pocket, and
+shot himself through the head, saying, "Some one else will soon do the
+same for Bonaparte."
+
+A cobbler, of the name of Matthieu, either in a fit of madness or from
+hatred to the new order of things, decorated himself with the large
+riband of the Legion of Honour, and had an old star fastened on his coat.
+Thus accoutred, he went into the Palais Royal, in the middle of the day,
+got upon a chair, and began to speak to his audience of the absurdity of
+true republicans not being on a level, even under an Emperor, and putting
+on, like him, all his ridiculous ornaments.  "We are here," said he,
+"either all grand officers, or there exist no grand officers at all; we
+have all fought and paid for liberty, and for the Revolution, as much as
+Bonaparte, and have, therefore, the same right and claim with him."  Here
+a police agent and some gendarmes interrupted his eloquence by taking him
+into custody.  When Fouche asked him what he meant by such rebellious
+behaviour, he replied that it was only a trial to see whether destiny had
+intended him to become an Emperor or to remain a cobbler.  On the next
+day he was shot as a conspirator.  I saw the unfortunate man in the
+Palais Royal; his eyes looked wild, and his words were often incoherent.
+He was certainly a subject more deserving a place in a madhouse than in a
+tomb.
+
+Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing too
+much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing it in
+preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour.  He was given to understand
+that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial etiquette did not
+permit any subjects to display their knighthood of the Prussian Order.
+In Madame Bonaparte's last drawing-room, before His Imperial Majesty set
+out for the Rhine, he was ornamented with the Spanish, Neapolitan,
+Prussian, and Portuguese orders, together with those of the French Legion
+of Honour and of the Italian Iron Crown.  I have seen the Emperor Paul,
+who was also an amateur of ribands and stars, but never with so many at
+once.  I have just heard that the Grand Master of Malta has presented
+Napoleon with the Grand Cross of the Maltese Order.  This is certainly a
+negative compliment to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to
+his then sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, "that the Grand Master,
+Commanders, Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more."
+
+I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies,
+that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of
+female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our
+Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc.,
+are to be members.  The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are
+to be hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses,
+Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into
+this revolutionary sisterhood.  Had the Continent remained tranquil, it
+would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum.  I
+should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and
+brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only
+say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in
+petto.  Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has
+been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
+it is truly superb.  The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at
+six hundred thousand livres.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, fifteen individuals
+have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the--Western
+Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple.  Their crime is not
+exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that they
+were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were
+entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis
+XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia,
+Sweden, and England to support his claims.
+
+These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit.  Had the
+prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they
+would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed
+without a trial.  I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our
+Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments
+during our armies' occupation elsewhere.  We have, nevertheless, two
+movable columns of six thousand men each in the country, or in its
+vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but a cruelty, to engage or
+allure the unfortunate people of these wretched countries into any plots,
+which, situated as affairs now are, would be productive of great and
+certain evil to them, without even the probability of any benefit to the
+cause of royalty and of the Bourbons.  I do not mean to say that there
+are not those who rebel against Bonaparte's tyranny, or that the Bourbons
+have no friends; on the contrary, the latter are not few, and the former
+very numerous.  But a kind of apathy, the effect of unavailing resistance
+to usurpation and oppression, has seized on most minds, and annihilated
+what little remained of our never very great public spirit.  We are tired
+of everything, even of our existence, and care no more whether we are
+governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a
+Barras or by Louis XVIII.  Except, perhaps, among the military, or among
+some ambitious schemers, remnants of former factions, I do not believe a
+Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the
+Emperor, and formerly popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in
+all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized
+in their present formidable manner.  Should anything happen to our
+present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and
+raise our characters from their present torpid state.  But until such an
+event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive, sacrificing
+our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and for a man we abhor.
+I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no honour to my nation when
+one million desperados of civil and military banditti are suffered to
+govern, tyrannize, and pillage, at their ease and undisturbed, thirty
+millions of people, to whom their past crimes are known, and who have
+every reason to apprehend their future wickedness.
+
+This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does not
+deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
+poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
+people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
+contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
+submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
+appearance.  I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who
+formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of
+twelve or eighteen hundred livres--per year, with which they are obliged
+to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere
+labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows
+on the necessitous.  You know that here all trade and all commerce are at
+a stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling
+as their manners are vulgar and brutal.
+
+A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
+revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres--subsist now on fifteen
+hundred livres--per year; and this sum must support six individuals--the
+father and mother, with four children!  It does so, indeed, by an
+arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
+supper three times, in the week.  They endure their distress with
+tolerable cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the
+garrets of a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once
+their groom, but who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve
+years, as a conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and
+Flanders, twelve millions of livres.  He has kindly let my friend
+understand that his youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid
+to his wife, being informed that she has a good education.  All the four
+daughters are good musicians, good drawers, and very able with their
+needles.  By their talents they supported their parents and themselves
+during their emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use
+or advantage.  Those upstarts who want instruction or works of this sort
+apply to the first, most renowned, and fashionable masters or mistresses;
+while others, and those the greatest number, cannot afford even to pay
+the inferior ones and the most cheap.  This family is one of the many
+that regret having returned from their emigration.  But, you may ask, why
+do they not go back again to Germany?  First, it would expose them to
+suspicion, and, perhaps, to ruin, were they to demand passes; and if this
+danger or difficulty were removed, they have no money for such a long
+journey.
+
+But this sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the families
+of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen.  Paper money, a maximum,
+and requisitions, have reduced those that did not share in the crimes and
+pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility.  And,
+contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in
+commercial speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a
+general stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital,
+protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of
+1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines
+put together.  The expenses of these new merchants are, however, much
+greater than sixteen years ago, the profit less, and the credit still
+less than the profit.  Hence numerous bankruptcies, frauds, swindling,
+forgeries, and other evils of immorality, extravagance, and misery.  The
+fair and honest dealers suffer most from the intrusion of these infamous
+speculators, who expecting, like other vile men wallowing in wealth under
+their eyes, to make rapid fortunes, and to escape detection as well as
+punishment--commit crimes to soothe disappointment.  Nothing is done but
+for ready money, and even bankers' bills, or bills accepted by bankers,
+are not taken in payment before the signatures are avowed by the parties
+concerned.  You can easily conceive what confusion, what expenses, and
+what; loss of time these precautions must occasion; but the numerous
+forgeries and fabrications have made them absolutely necessary.
+
+The farmers and landholders are better off, but they also complain of the
+heavy taxes, and low price paid for what they bring to the market, which
+frequently, for want of ready money, remains long unsold.  They take
+nothing but cash in payment; for, notwithstanding the endeavours of our
+Government, the notes of the Bank of France have never been in
+circulation among them.  They have also been subject to losses by the
+fluctuation of paper money, by extortions, requisitions, and by the
+maximum.  In this class of my countrymen remains still some little
+national spirit and some independence of character; but these are far
+from being favourable to Bonaparte, or to the Imperial Government, which
+the yearly increase of taxes, and, above all, the conscription, have
+rendered extremely odious.  You may judge of the great difference in the
+taxation of lands and landed property now and under our Kings, when I
+inform you that a friend of mine, who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the
+Western Departments, twenty-one farms, paid less in contribution for them
+all than he does now for the three farms he has recovered from the wreck
+of his fortune.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--In a military empire, ruled by a military despot, it is a
+necessary policy that the education of youth should also be military.
+In all our public schools or prytanees, a boy, from the moment of
+entering, is registered in a company, and regularly drilled, exercised,
+and reviewed, punished for neglect or fault according to martial law,
+and advanced if displaying genius or application.  All our private
+schools that wish for the protection of Government are forced to submit
+to the same military rules, and, therefore, most of our conscripts, so
+far from being recruits, are fit for any service as soon as put into
+requisition.  The fatal effects to the independence of Europe to be
+dreaded from this sole innovation, I apprehend, have been too little
+considered by other nations.  A great Power, that can, without obstacle,
+and with but little expense, in four weeks increase its disposable
+military force from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty
+thousand young men, accustomed to military duty from their youth, must
+finally become the master of all other or rival Powers, and dispose at
+leisure of empires, kingdoms, principalities, and republics.  NOTHING CAN
+SAVE THEM BUT THE ADOPTION OF SIMILAR MEASURES FOR THEIR PRESERVATION AS
+HAVE BEEN ADOPTED FOR THEIR SUBJUGATION.
+
+When l'Etat Militaire for the year 13 (a work containing the official
+statement of our military forces) was presented to Bonaparte by Berthier,
+the latter said: "Sire, I lay before Your Majesty the book of the destiny
+of the world, which your hands direct as the sovereign guide of the
+armies of your empire."  This compliment is a truth, and therefore no
+flattery.  It might as justly have been addressed to a Moreau,
+a Macdonald, a Le Courbe, or to any other general, as to Bonaparte,
+because a superior number of well disciplined troops, let them be well
+or even indifferently commanded, will defeat those inferior in number.
+Three to one would even overpower an army of giants.  Add to it the unity
+of plans, of dispositions, and of execution, which Bonaparte enjoys
+exclusively over such a great number of troops, while ten, or perhaps
+fifty, will direct or contradict every movement of his opponents.  I
+tremble when I meditate on Berthier's assertion; may I never live to see
+it realized, and to see all hitherto independent nations prostrated,
+acknowledge that Bonaparte and destiny are the same, and the same
+distributor of good and evil.
+
+One of the bad consequences of this our military education of youth is a
+total absence of all religious and moral lessons.  Arnaud had, last
+August, the courage to complain of this infamous neglect, in the National
+Institute.  "The youth," said he, "receive no other instruction but
+lessons to march, to fire, to bow, to dance, to sit, to lie, and to
+impose with a good grace.  I do not ask for Spartans or Romans, but we
+want Athenians, and our schools are only forming Sybarites."  Within
+twenty-four hours afterwards, Arnaud was visited by a police agent,
+accompanied by two gendarmes, with an order signed by Fouche, which
+condemned him to reside at Orleans, and not to return to Paris without
+the permission of the Government,--a punishment regarded here as very
+moderate for such an indiscreet zeal.
+
+A schoolmaster at Auteuil, near this capital, of the name of Gouron, had
+a private seminary, organized upon the footing of our former colleges.
+In some few months he was offered more pupils than he could well attend
+to, and his house shortly became very fashionable, even for our upstarts,
+who sent their children there in preference.  He was ordered before
+Fouche last Christmas, and commanded to change the hours hitherto
+employed in teaching religion and morals, to a military exercise and
+instruction, as both more necessary and more salubrious for French youth.
+Having replied that such an alteration was contrary to his plan and
+agreement with the parents of his scholars, the Minister stopped him
+short by telling him that he must obey what had been prescribed by
+Government, or stand the consequences of his refractory spirit.  Having
+consulted with his friends and patrons, he divided the hours, and gave
+half of the time usually allotted to religion or morality to the study of
+military exercise.  His pupils, however, remained obstinate, broke the
+drum, and tore and burnt the colours he had bought.  As this was not his
+fault, he did not expect any further disturbance, particularly after
+having reported to the police both his obedience and the unforeseen
+result.  But last March his house was suddenly surrounded in the night by
+gendarmes, and some police agents entered it.  All the boys were ordered
+to dress and to pack up their effects, and to follow the gendarmes to
+several other schools, where the Government had placed them, and of which
+their parents would be informed.  Gouron, his wife, four ushers, and six
+servants, were all arrested and carried to the police office, where
+Fouche, after reproaching them for their fanatical behaviour, as he
+termed it, told them, as they were so fond of teaching religious and
+moral duties, a suitable situation had been provided for them in Cayenne,
+where the negroes stood sadly in need of their early arrival, for which
+reason they would all set out on that very morning for Rochefort.  When
+Gouron asked what was to become of his property, furniture, etc., he was
+told that his house was intended by Government for a preparatory school,
+and would, with its contents, be purchased, and the amount paid him in
+lands in Cayenne.  It is not necessary to say that this example of
+Imperial justice had the desired effect on all other refractory private
+schoolmasters.
+
+The parents of Gouron's pupils were, with a severe reprimand, informed
+where their sons had been placed, and where they would be educated in a
+manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them not to remove them,
+without a previous notice to the police.  A hatter, of the name of
+Maille, however, ordered his son home, because he had been sent to a
+dearer school than the former.  In his turn he was carried before the
+police, and, after a short examination of a quarter of an hour, was
+permitted, with his wife and two children, to join their friend Gouron at
+Rochefort, and to settle with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be
+given him for his property, in France.  These particulars were related to
+me by a neighbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been
+under Gouron's care, but who was now among those placed out by our
+Government.  The boy's present master, he said, was a man of a
+notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was intimidated, and weak
+enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt, his personal safety to
+the future happiness of his child.  In your country, you little
+comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the hands of our
+rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has been mistaken abroad
+for affection and content.
+
+All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of petty
+tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time, and that,
+therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful, is also the
+most occupied of his colleagues.  So he certainly is, but, last year, a
+new organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche
+was allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors of State, and an
+augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries.  The French Empire was
+then divided into four arrondissements, with regard to the general
+police, not including Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of
+police under the Minister.  Of the first of these arrondissements, the
+Counsellor of State, Real, is a kind of Deputy Minister; the Counsellor
+of State, Miot, is the same of the second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet
+de la Lozere, of the third; and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the
+fourth.  The secret police agents, formerly called spies, were also
+considerably increased.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXVIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope's Nuncio was
+for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame Bonaparte's drawing-
+room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness to think
+himself fortunate in continuing to govern the Ecclesiastical States,
+without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangements that might be
+thought necessary or proper by the Government in France.
+
+Bonaparte's policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the
+Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military
+supporters; Cambacere's brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and
+Cardinal, and one of Lebrun's, and two of Berthier's cousins are Bishops.
+As, however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or generals,
+have, like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous
+scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes hesitated about
+sanctioning their promotions.  This was the case last summer, when
+General Dessolles's brother was transferred from the Bishopric of Digne
+to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother
+of General Miollis, who was a curate of Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix.
+This curate had not only been one of the first to throw up his letters of
+priesthood at the Jacobin Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied
+the divinity of the Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of
+Parisian atheists, the worship of a Goddess of Reason in a common
+prostitute with whom he lived.  The notoriety of these abominations made
+even his parishioners at Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to
+regard him as their pastor, though several of them had been imprisoned,
+fined, and even transported as fanatics, or as refractory.
+
+During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had been
+promised, among other things, that, for the future, his conscience should
+not be wounded by having presented to him for the prelacy any persons but
+those of the purest morals of the French Empire; and that all his
+objections should be attended to, in case of promotions; his scruples
+removed, or his refusal submitted to.  When Cardinal Fesch demanded His
+Holiness's Bull for the curate Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State,
+Gonsalvi, showed no less than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy,
+which made him unworthy of such a dignity.  To this was replied that,
+having obtained an indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper
+subject; above all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the
+French.  The Pope's Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of
+the Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to
+Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he,
+nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of this
+request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new Imperial
+etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the representatives of
+Sovereigns.  On the same evening the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome,
+and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confirmed by
+the Pope.
+
+From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge of the
+intention of our Government to adhere to its other engagements; but at
+Rome, as well as in most other Continental capitals, the Sovereign is the
+dupe of the perversity of his Counsellors and Ministers, who are the
+tools, and not seldom the pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.
+
+But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if possible,
+still worse served than in this country.  Some of the Bishops there,
+after having done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and
+fought against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, from
+their intrigues, are the terror of all the married part of their flock.
+The Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a merchant, by whom he has two
+children; and, that the public may not be mistaken as to their real
+father, the merchant received a sum of money to establish himself at
+Brescia, and has not seen his wife for these two years past.  General
+Gourion, who was last spring in Italy, has assured me that he read the
+advertisement of a curate after his concubine, who had eloped with
+another curate; and that the Police Minister at Milan openly licensed
+women to be the housekeepers of priests.
+
+A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but
+relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary
+for the musket.  He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured
+a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another,
+deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and
+eloped from her husband.  Last spring he returned to the bosom of the
+Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a valuable diamond cross,
+of which he had pillaged the statue of a Madonna, he obtained the dignity
+of a grand vicar, to the great edification, no doubt, of all those who
+had seen him before the altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the
+hospital.
+
+Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the name of
+Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys in the same
+cathedral where he officiates as a priest.  Their mother is dead, but her
+daughter, by another priest, is now their father's mistress.  This
+incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the girl does the honours
+of the grand vicar's house, and, with naivete enough, tells the guests
+and visitors of her happiness in having succeeded her mother.  I have
+this anecdote from an officer who heard her make use of that expression.
+
+In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and
+unprincipled; but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they take
+care to save the appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt is the
+same, the scandal is less.  Bonaparte pretends to be severe against all
+those ecclesiastics who are accused of any irregularities after having
+made their peace with the Church.  A curate of Picardy, suspected of
+gallantry, and another of Normandy, accused of inebriety, were last
+month, without further trial or ceremony than the report of the Minister
+Portalis, delivered over to Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne,
+after they had been stripped of their gowns.  At the same time, Cardinal
+Cambaceres and Cardinal Fesch, equally notorious for their excesses, were
+taken no notice of, except that they were laughed at in our Court
+circles.
+
+I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government is
+totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious establishment
+when the present race of priests is extinguished; which, in the course of
+nature, must happen in less than thirty years.  Our military system and
+our military education discourage all young men from entering into
+orders; while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and
+more profitable than the Church.  Already we want curates, though several
+have been imported from Germany and Spain, and, in some departments,
+four, and even six parishes have only one curate to serve them all.  The
+Bishops exhort, and the parents advise their children to study theology;
+but then the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well
+as the student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the
+ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they are
+either unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else.  The
+Pope, with all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was unable to
+procure an exception from the conscription of young men preparing
+themselves for priesthood.  Bonaparte always answered: "Holy Father, were
+I to consent to your demand, I should soon have an army of priests,
+instead of an army of soldiers."  Our Emperor is not unacquainted with
+the real character and spirit of his Volunteers.  When the Pope
+represented the danger of religion expiring in France, for want of
+priests to officiate at the altars, he was answered that Bonaparte, at
+the beginning of his consulate, found neither altars nor priests in
+France; that if his reign survived the latter, the former would always be
+standing, and survive his reign.  He trusted that the chief of the Church
+would prevent them from being deserted.  He assured him that when once he
+had restored the liberties of the seas, and an uninterrupted tranquillity
+on the Continent, he should attend more, and perhaps entirely, to the
+affairs of the Church.  He consented, however, that the Pope might
+institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary for two hundred young
+Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military conscription.  This is the
+stock from which our Church establishment is to be supplied!
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXIX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna, and the long
+stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin, had already caused
+here many speculations, not quite corresponding with the views and,
+perhaps, interests of our Court, when our violation of the Prussian
+territory made our courtiers exclaim: "This act proves that the Emperor
+of the French is in a situation to bid defiance to all the world, and,
+therefore, no longer courts the neutrality of a Prince whose power is
+merely artificial; who has indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no
+regard to claims."  Such was the language of those very men who, a month
+before, declared "that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or
+war in his hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch
+ever was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of
+the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to his
+powerful mediation for the return of peace."
+
+The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers' political jargon has
+not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered without any
+official publication.  Bonaparte had the adroitness to cajole the Cabinet
+of Berlin into his interest, in the first month of his consulate,
+notwithstanding his own critical situation, as well as the critical
+situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it
+to his triumphal car and to inculpate it indirectly in his outrages and
+violations.  Convinced, as he thought, of the selfishness which guided
+all its resolutions, all his attacks and invasions against the law of
+nations, or independence of States, were either preceded or followed with
+some offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance.
+His political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia than
+his military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in laying the
+Hanse Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover; or, rather, all
+these acts of violence and injustice were merely the effects of his
+ascendency in Prussia.  When it is, besides, remembered what provinces
+Prussia accepted from his bounty, what exchange of presents, of ribands,
+of private letters passed between Napoleon the First and Frederick
+William III., between the Empress of the French and the Queen of Prussia,
+it is not surprising if the Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of
+the submission of the Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to
+fear it, or to think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even
+honour to feel, the numerous Provocations offered.
+
+Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or assert to the contrary, their
+gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise more that
+State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense they are
+liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or meanness into
+their snares.  The more legitimate Sovereigns descend from their true
+dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they approach the baseness of
+usurpation and the Machiavellism of rebellion.  Like other upstarts, they
+never suffer an equal.  If you do not keep yourself above them, they will
+crush you beneath them.  If they have no reason to fear you, they will
+create some quarrel to destroy you.
+
+It is said here that Duroc's journey to Berlin was merely to demand a
+passage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in
+Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops from passing through the
+Prussian territory in Poland.  This request is such as might have been
+expected from our Emperor and his Minister.  Whether, however, the tone
+in which this curious negotiation with a neutral power was begun, or
+that, at last, the generosity of the Russian Monarch awakened a sense of
+duty in the Cabinet of Berlin, the arrival of our pacific envoy was
+immediately followed with warlike preparations.  Fortunate, indeed, was
+it for Prussia to have resorted to her military strength instead of
+trusting any longer to our friendly assurances.  The disasters that have
+since befallen the Austrian armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our
+forced marches through neutral Prussia, would otherwise soon have been
+felt in Westphalia, in Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania.  But should His
+Prussian Majesty not order his troops to act in conjunction with Russia,
+Austria, England, and Sweden, and that very soon, all efforts against
+Bonaparte will be vain, as those troops which have dispersed the
+Austrians and repulsed the Russians will be more than equal to master the
+Prussians, and one campaign may be sufficient to convince the Prussian
+Ministers of their folly and errors for years, and to punish them for
+their ignorance or selfishness.
+
+Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his
+affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number of
+spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that
+Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and inclined to join the
+confederacy against France.  At the last assembly at our Prince
+Cambaceres's, a rumour circulated that preliminary articles for an
+offensive alliance with your country had already been signed by the
+Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg, on one side, and by your
+Minister to the Court of Berlin on the other; according to which you were
+to take sixty thousand Prussians and twelve thousand Hessians into your
+pay, for five years certain.  A courier from Duroc was said to have
+brought this news, which at first made some impression, but it wore away
+by degrees; and our Government, to judge from the expressions of persons
+in its confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with
+Prussia.  Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the
+North of Europe, Bonaparte's numerous and young generals are impatient to
+enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of
+Germany are almost exhausted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXX.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The provocations of our Government must have been extraordinary
+indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of Berlin from its long
+and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to the friendly intentions
+of honest Talleyrand, and to the disinterested policy of our generous
+Bonaparte.  To judge its intents from its acts, the favour of the Cabinet
+of St. Cloud was not only its wish but its want.  You must remember that,
+last year, besides his ordinary Ambassador, Da Lucchesini, His Prussian
+Majesty was so ill advised as to despatch General Knobelsdorff as his
+extra representative, to assist at Napoleon's coronation, a degradation
+of lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples, though
+surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as last
+June, the same Knobelsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the honours
+at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our army in Hanover
+who chose to attend there.  On this occasion the King lodged in a
+farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of Koestelith, while our
+sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte & Co., were quartered and treated in
+style at the castle of Putzbull, fitted up for their accommodation.  This
+was certainly very hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent
+nor politic.  Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are
+convinced that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not
+merit to be esteemed.
+
+Do not confound this Knobelsdorff with the late Field-marshal of that
+name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then Ambassador at
+Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him, NON ET SANS
+PHRASE, the very words this regicide used when he sat in judgment on his
+King, and voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE.  This Knobelsdorff is a very
+different character.  He pretends to be equally conspicuous in the
+Cabinet as in the field, in the boudoir as in the study.  A demi-
+philosopher, a demi-savant, a demi-gallant and a demi-politician,
+constitute, all taken together, nothing except an insignificant courtier.
+I do not know whether he was among those Prussian officers who, in 1798,
+CRIED when it was inserted in the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte
+had been killed in an insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain,
+that were Knobelsdorff to survive Napoleon the First, none of His
+Imperial Majesty's own dutiful subjects would mourn him more sincerely
+than this subject of the King of Prussia.  He is said to possess a great
+share of the confidence of his King, who has already employed him in
+several diplomatic missions.  The principal and most requisite qualities
+in a negotiator are political information, inviolable fidelity,
+penetrating but unbiased judgment, a dignified firmness, and
+condescending manners.  I have not been often enough in the society of
+General Knobelsdorff to assert whether nature and education have destined
+him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian monarchy.
+
+I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von
+Haugwitz who, in 1792, as Prussian Ambassador at Vienna, arranged the
+treaty which then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles against the
+Jacobin Cap of Liberty.  It is now said in our diplomatic circle that his
+second mission to the same capital has for an object the renewal of these
+ties, which the Treaty of Basle dissolved; and that our Government, to
+impede his success, or to occasion his recall, before he could have time
+to conclude, had proposed to Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions
+of liveres--which it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality.
+The present respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that
+whether the mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His
+Prussian Majesty confides in his army in preference to our parchments.
+
+Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the foreign
+department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a friend of the
+system of neutrality as his predecessor.  All the transactions of his
+administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim that, if he wished his
+country to take an active part in the present conflict, it would not have
+been against France, had she not begun the attack with the invasion of
+Anspach and Bayreuth.  Let it be recollected that, since his Ministry,
+Prussia has acknowledged Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has
+exchanged orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be
+present at his coronation,--not common compliments, even between Princes
+connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity.  Under his
+administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc d'Enghien,
+and the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been
+pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against,
+all these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor
+a becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who,
+on the 5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe
+all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters?  It is not
+probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny,
+if self-preservation does not require it.
+
+Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
+statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice
+of his Prince.  The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister
+of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet.  On the 26th of January, 1792,
+as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of
+Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants
+swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their
+new Sovereign.--He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these
+States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator
+with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling
+all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former
+post at Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his
+Government.
+
+The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place
+he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such
+information as would enable him to fill it with distinction.  I have
+heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid
+private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports
+of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations.  One of
+these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I
+to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very
+judicious in his selection of private correspondents.  Figure to yourself
+a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high,
+deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a
+sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made
+unintelligible.  His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular,
+and his manners corresponded with both.  He called himself Baron von
+Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with
+the same accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic
+mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters
+and instructions from his principal.  As might be expected, he had the
+adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told,
+the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented him from starving.
+
+No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more
+knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador, Marquis
+of Lucchesini.  He went with several other philosophers of Italy to
+admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great,
+who received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed
+him.  I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis's name for the
+place of a governor of some province that this Monarch said, "My subjects
+of that province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule
+in my name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend
+to chastise."  This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his
+sectaries.
+
+During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of
+Lucchesini was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but he
+was neither his friend nor his favourite, but his listener.  It was first
+under Frederick William II.  that he began his diplomatic career, with an
+appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late King of Poland.  His
+first act in this post.  was a treaty signed on the 29th of March, 1790,
+with the King and Republic of Poland, which changed an elective monarchy
+into an hereditary one; but, notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had
+guaranteed this alteration, and the constitution decreed in consequence,
+in 1791, three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated
+both, and selfishness banished faith.
+
+In July, 1790, he assisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the
+conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch
+Ambassadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and Turkey.
+In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers to the
+Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the Treaty of Peace
+between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of Germany.  In June, 1792, he
+was a second time sent as a Minister to Warsaw, where he remained until
+January, 1793, when he was promoted to the post of Ambassador at the
+Court of Vienna.  He continued, however, to reside with His Prussian
+Majesty during the greatest part of the campaign on the Rhine, and
+signed, on the 24th of June, 1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive
+and defensive alliance with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy
+respected not above eighteen months.  In October, 1796, he requested his
+recall, but this his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious
+expressions; and he could not obtain it until March, 1797.  Some
+disapprobation of the new political plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz
+in the Cabinet at Berlin is supposed to have occasioned his determination
+to retire from public employment.  As he, however, continued to reside in
+the capital of Prussia, and, as many believed, secretly intrigued to
+appear again upon the scene, the nomination, in 1800, to his present
+important post was as much the consequence of his own desire as of the
+favour of his King.
+
+The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful
+Hotel de l'Infantado, where his lady's routs, assemblies, and circles are
+the resort of our most fashionable gentry.  Madame da Lucchesini is more
+agreeable than handsome, more fit to shine at Berlin than at Paris; for
+though her manners are elegant, they want that ease, that finish which a
+German or Italian education cannot teach, nor a German or Italian society
+confer.  To judge from the number of her admirers, she seems to know that
+she is married to a philosopher.  Her husband was born at Lucca, in
+Italy, and is, therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte's brother-in-
+law, Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a marker at
+a billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a shilling, as
+well as many a box on the ear.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your countryman,
+Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of our generals and
+public functionaries, as unjust as well as disgraceful.  At a future
+General Congress, should ever Bonaparte suffer one to be convoked, except
+under his auspices and dictature, the distinction and treatment of
+prisoners of war require to be again regulated, that the valiant warrior
+may not for the future be confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous
+spy; nor innocent travellers, provided with regular passes, visiting a
+country either for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men
+taken while combating with arms in their hands.
+
+You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our ships--that,
+during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and Scotland,
+and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were
+captured on their return or on their passage; and that your Government
+never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State
+criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower.  If I am not
+mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and
+his suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and
+men experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow
+prisoners of war; though the distance is immense between the crime of
+plotting against the lawful Government of the Princes of the House of
+Brunswick, and the attempt to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the
+House of Bonaparte.  But, even during the last war, how many of our ships
+of the line, frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed
+rebels in Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and
+yet your generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time when
+your Sir Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain Wright, were
+confined in our State prison of the Temple!  It is with Governments as
+with individuals, they ought to be just before they are generous.  Had
+you in 1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages so patiently, you would
+not now have to lament, nor we to blush for, the untimely end of Captain
+Wright.
+
+From the last time that this officer had appeared before the criminal
+tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was determined on
+by our Government.  His firmness offended, and his patriotism displeased;
+and as he seemed to possess the confidence of his own Government, it was
+judged that he was in its secrets; it was, therefore, resolved that, if
+he refused to become a traitor, he should perish a victim.  Desmarets,
+Fouche's private secretary, who is also the secretary of the secret and
+haute police, therefore ordered him to another private interrogatory.
+Here he was offered a considerable sum of money, and the rank of an
+admiral in our service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of
+his Government, of its connections with the discontented in this country,
+and of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them.  He replied,
+as might have been expected, with indignation, to such offers and to such
+proposals, but as they were frequently repeated with new allurements, he
+concluded with remaining silent and giving no answers at all.  He was
+then told that the torture would soon restore him his voice, and some
+select gendarmes seized him and laid him on the rack; there he uttered no
+complaint, not even a sigh, though instruments the most diabolical were
+employed, and pains the most acute must have been endured.  When
+threatened that he should expire in torments, he said:
+
+"I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder, while my
+God receives my soul."  During the two hours of the first day that he was
+stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg were broken, and his
+nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then passed into the hands of a
+surgeon, and was under his care for five weeks, but, before he was
+perfectly cured, he was carried to another private interrogatory, at
+which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real were present.
+
+The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated state of
+his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he must be
+convinced that it was not the intention of the French Government ever to
+restore him to his native country, where he might relate occurrences
+which the policy of France required to be buried in oblivion; he,
+therefore, had no choice between serving the Emperor of the French, or
+perishing within the walls of the prison where he was confined.  He
+replied that he was resigned to his destiny, and would die as he had
+lived, faithful to his King and to his country.
+
+The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal strength
+is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate being whose mind
+is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is weakened by wants.  For
+five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants,
+executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his
+food had been bread and his drink water.  The man who, thus situated and
+thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is
+more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator,
+the victor, or the saint.
+
+This interrogatory was the last undergone by Captain Wright.  He was then
+again stretched on the rack, and what is called by our regenerators the
+INFERNAL torments, were inflicted on him.  After being pinched with red-
+hot irons all over his body, brandy, mixed with gunpowder, was infused in
+the numerous wounds and set fire to several times until nearly burned to
+the bones.  In the convulsions, the consequence of these terrible
+sufferings, he is said to have bitten off a part of his tongue, though,
+as before, no groans were heard.  As life still remained, he was again
+put under the care of his former surgeon; but, as he was exceedingly
+exhausted, a spy, in the dress of a Protestant clergyman, presented
+himself as if to read prayers with him.  Of this offer he accepted; but
+when this man began to ask some insidious questions, he cast on him a
+look of contempt and never spoke to him more.  At last, seeing no means
+to obtain any information from him, a mameluke last week strangled him in
+his bed.  Thus expired a hero whose fate has excited more compassion,
+and whose character has received more admiration here, than any of our
+great men who have fallen fighting for our Emperor.  Captain Wright has
+diffused new rays of renown and glory on the British name, from his tomb
+as well as from his dungeon.
+
+You have certainly a right to call me to an account for all the
+particulars I have related of this scandalous and abominable transaction,
+and, though I cannot absolutely guarantee the truth of the narration,
+I am perfectly satisfied of it myself, and I hope to explain myself to
+your satisfaction.  Your unfortunate countryman was attended by and under
+the care of a surgeon of the name of Vaugeard, who gained his confidence,
+and was worthy of it, though employed in that infamous gaol.  Either from
+disgust of life, or from attachment to Captain Wright, he survived him
+only twelve hours, during which he wrote the shocking details I have
+given you, and sent them to three of the members of the foreign
+diplomatic corps, with a prayer to have them forwarded to Sir Sidney
+Smith or to Mr. Windham, that those his friends might be informed that,
+to his last moment, Captain Wright was worthy of their protection and
+kindness.  From one of those Ministers I have obtained the original in
+Vaugeard's own handwriting.
+
+I know that Bonaparte and Talleyrand promised the release of Captain
+Wright to the Spanish Ambassador; but, at that time, he had already
+suffered once on the rack, and this liberality on their part was merely a
+trick to impose upon the credulity of the Spaniard or to get rid of his
+importunities.  Had it been otherwise, Captain Wright, like Sir George
+Rumbold, would himself have been the first to announce in your country
+the recovery of his liberty.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+My LORD:--Should Bonaparte again return here victorious, and a
+pacificator, great changes in our internal Government and constitution
+are expected, and will certainly occur.  Since the legislative corps has
+completed the Napoleon code of civil and criminal justice, it is
+considered by the Emperor not only as useless, but troublesome and
+superfluous.  For the same reasons the tribunate will also be laid aside,
+and His Majesty will rule the French Empire, with the assistance of his
+Senate, and with the advice of his Council of State, exclusively.  You
+know that the Senators, as well as the Councillors of State, are
+nominated by the Emperor; that he changes the latter according to his
+whim, and that, though the former, according to the present constitution,
+are to hold their offices for life, the alterations which remove entirely
+the legislature and the tribunate may also make Senators movable.  But as
+all members of the Senate are favourites or relatives, he will probably
+not think it necessary to resort to such a measure of policy.
+
+In a former letter I have already mentioned the heterogeneous composition
+of the Senate.  The tribunate and legislative corps are worthy to figure
+by its side; their members are also ci-devant mechanics of all
+descriptions, debased attorneys or apostate priests, national spoilers
+or rebellious regicides, degraded nobles or dishonoured officers.
+The nearly unanimous vote of these corps for a consulate for life,
+and for an hereditary Emperor, cannot, therefore, either be expressive of
+the national will, or constitute the legality of Bonaparte's sovereignty.
+
+In the legislature no vote opposed, and no voice declaimed against,
+Bonaparte's Imperial dignity; but in the tribunate, Carnot--the
+infamously notorious Carnot--'pro forma', and with the permission of the
+Emperor 'in petto', spoke against the return of a monarchical form of
+Government.  This farce of deception and roguery did not impose even on
+our good Parisians, otherwise, and so frequently, the dupes of all our
+political and revolutionary mountebanks.  Had Carnot expressed a
+sentiment or used a word not previously approved by Bonaparte, instead of
+reposing himself in the tribunate, he would have been wandering in
+Cayenne.
+
+Son of an obscure attorney at Nolay, in Burgundy, he was brought up, like
+Bonaparte, in one of those military schools established by the
+munificence of the French Monarchs; and had obtained, from the late
+King, the commission of a captain of engineers when the Revolution broke
+out.  He was particularly indebted to the Prince of Conde for his support
+during the earlier part of his life, and yet he joined the enemies of his
+house, and voted for the death of Louis XVI.  A member, with Robespierre
+and Barrere, of the Committee of Public Safety, he partook of their
+power, as well as of their crimes, though he has been audacious enough to
+deny that he had anything to do with other transactions than those of the
+armies.  Were no other proofs to the contrary collected, a letter of his
+own hand to the ferocious Lebon, at Arras, is a written evidence which he
+is unable to refute.  It is dated November 16th, 1793.  "You must take,"
+says he, "in your energy, all measures of terror commanded or required by
+present circumstances.  Continue your revolutionary attitude; never mind
+the amnesty pronounced with the acceptance of the absurd constitution of
+1791; it is a crime which cannot extenuate other crimes.  Anti-
+republicans can only expiate their folly under the age of the guillotine.
+The public Treasury will always pay the journeys and expenses of
+informers, because they have deserved well of their country.  Let all
+suspected traitors expire by the sword or by fire; continue to march upon
+that revolutionary line so well delineated by you.  The committee
+applauds all your undertakings, all your measures of vigour; they are not
+only all permitted, but commanded by your mission."  Most of the decrees
+concerning the establishment of revolutionary tribunals, and particularly
+that for the organization of the atrocious military commission at Orange,
+were signed by him.
+
+Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without talents;
+but his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of those plans
+of campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and 1796, were so
+triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and Bonaparte, is impertinent,
+as well as unfounded.  At the risk of his own life, Pichegru entirely
+altered the plan sent him by the Committee of Public Safety; and it was
+Moreau's masterly retreat, which no plan of campaign could prescribe,
+that made this general so famous.  The surprising successes of Bonaparte
+in Italy were both unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and,
+according to Berthier's assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief,
+during the first four months, to change five times his plans of
+proceedings and undertakings.
+
+During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has made
+a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him not only to
+live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style two sisters, of
+the name of Aublin, as his mistresses.  He was the friend of the father
+of these girls, and promised him, when condemned to the guillotine in
+1793, to be their second father; but he debauched and ruined them both
+before either was fourteen years of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796,
+reproached him with the infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to
+a military commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant.
+He has two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
+
+Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well
+aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the
+Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he would,
+with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon the First as
+he did for that of Louis XVI.  He has waded too far in blood and crime to
+retrograde.
+
+To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
+legislator.  Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
+officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department of
+Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the National
+Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and remained a
+faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre.  After the evacuation of
+Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a report to the
+Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of that town were
+arrested and executed.  Among these were twenty-two young girls, under
+twenty years of age, whose crime was the having presented nosegays to the
+late King of Prussia on his entry after the surrender of Verdun.  He was
+afterwards a national commissary with the armies on the coast near Brest,
+on the Rhine, and in Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized
+himself by unheard of ferocities and sanguinary deeds.  The following
+anecdote, printed and published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme,
+will give you some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and
+Imperial Solon: "Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet," writes Prudhomme,
+"had ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on
+the evening they expected to arrive in that town.  Entering very late,
+they found two soldiers, who had seen the box empty, placed in its front.
+These they ordered immediately to be arrested, and condemned them, for
+having outraged the national representation, to be guillotined on the
+next day, when they both were accordingly executed!"  Labarrere, a
+provost of the Marechaussee at Dax, was in prison as a suspected person.
+His daughter, a very handsome girl of seventeen, lived with an aunt at
+Severe.  The two pro-consuls passing through that place, she threw
+herself at their feet, imploring mercy for her parent.  This they not
+only promised, but offered her a place in their carriage to Dax, that she
+might see him restored to liberty.  On the road the monsters insisted on
+a ransom for the blood of her father.  Waiting, afflicted and ashamed,
+at a friend's house at Dag, the accomplishment of a promise so dearly
+purchased, she heard the beating of the alarm drum, and looked, from
+curiosity, through the window, when she saw her unfortunate parent
+ascending the scaffold!  After having remained lifeless for half an hour,
+she recovered her senses an instant, when she exclaimed:
+
+"Oh, the barbarians! they violated me while flattering me with the hope
+of saving my father!" and then expired.  In October, 1795, Cavaignac
+assisted Barras and Bonaparte in the destruction of some thousands of
+men, women, and children in the streets of this capital, and was,
+therefore, in 1796, made by the Directory an inspector-general of the
+customs; and, in 1803, nominated by Bonaparte a legislator.  His
+colleague, Citizen Pinet, is now one of our Emperor's Counsellors of
+State, and both are commanders of His Majesty's Legion of Honour; rich,
+respected, and frequented by our most fashionable ladies and gentlemen.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--I suppose your Government too vigilant and too patriotic not to
+be informed of the great and uninterrupted activity which reigns in our
+arsenals, dockyards, and seaports.  I have seen a plan, according to
+which Bonaparte is enabled, and intends, to build twenty ships of the
+line and ten frigates, besides cutters, in the year, for ten years to
+come.  I read the calculation of the expenses, the names of the forests
+where the timber is to be cut, of the foreign countries where a part of
+the necessary materials are already engaged, and of our own departments
+which are to furnish the remainder.  The whole has been drawn up in a
+precise and clear manner by Bonaparte's Maritime Prefect at Antwerp,
+M. Malouet, well known in your country, where he long remained as an
+emigrant, and, I believe, was even employed by your Ministers.
+
+You may, perhaps, smile at this vast naval scheme of Bonaparte; but if
+you consider that he is the master of all the forests, mines, and
+productions of France, Italy, and of a great part of Germany, with all
+the navigable rivers and seaports of these countries and Holland, and
+remember also the character of the man, you will, perhaps, think it less
+impracticable.  The greatest obstacle he has to encounter, and to remove,
+is want of experienced naval officers, though even in this he has
+advanced greatly since the present war, during which he has added to his
+naval forces twenty--nine ships of the line, thirty--four frigates,
+twenty-one cutters, three thousand prams, gunboats, pinnaces, etc., with
+four thousand naval officers and thirty-seven thousand sailors, according
+to the same account, signed by Malouet.  It is true that most of our new
+naval heroes have never ventured far from our coast, and all their naval
+laurels have been gathered under our land batteries; but the impulse is
+given to the national spirit, and our conscripts in the maritime
+departments prefer, to a man, the navy to the army, which was not
+formerly the case.
+
+It cannot have escaped your observation that the incorporation of Genoa
+procured us, in the South of our Empire, a naval station and arsenal, as
+a counterpoise to Antwerp, our new naval station in the North, where
+twelve ships of the line have been built, or are building, since 1803,
+and where timber and other materials are collected for eight more.  At
+Genoa, two ships of the line and four frigates have lately been launched,
+and four ships and two frigates are on the stocks; and the Genoese
+Republic has added sixteen thousand seafaring men to our navy.  Should
+Bonaparte terminate successfully the present war, Naples and Venice will
+increase the number of our seaports and resources on the borders of the
+Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.  All his courtiers say that he will
+conquer Italy in Germany, and determine at Vienna--the fate of London.
+
+Of all our admirals, however, we have not one to compare with your
+Nelson, your Hood, your St. Vincent, and your Cornwallis.  By the
+appointment of Murat as grand admiral, Bonaparte seems to indicate that
+he is inclined to imitate the example of Louis. XVI., in the beginning of
+his reign, and entrust the chief command of his fleets and squadrons to
+military men of approved capacity and courage, officers of his land
+troops.  Last June, when he expected a probable junction of the fleet
+under Villeneuve with the squadron under Admiral Winter, and the union of
+both with Ganteaume at Brest, Murat was to have had the chief command of
+the united French, Spanish, and Batavian fleets, and to support the
+landing of our troops in your country; but the arrival of Lord Nelson in
+the West Indies, and the victory of Admiral Calder, deranged all our
+plans and postponed all our designs, which the Continental war has
+interrupted; to be commenced, God knows when.
+
+The best amongst our bad admirals is certainly Truguet; but he was
+disgraced last year, and exiled twenty leagues from the coast, for having
+declared too publicly "that our flotillas would never be serviceable
+before our fleets were superior to yours, when they would become
+useless."  An intriguer by long habit and by character, having neither
+property nor principles, he joined the Revolution, and was the second in
+command under Latouche, in the first republican fleet that left our
+harbours.  He directed the expedition against Sardinia, in January, 1793,
+during which he acquired neither honour nor glory, being repulsed with
+great loss by the inhabitants.  After being imprisoned under Robespierre,
+the Directory made him a Minister of the marine, an Ambassador to Spain,
+and a Vice-Admiral of France.  In this capacity he commanded at Brest,
+during the first eighteen months of the present war.  He has an
+irreconcilable foe in Talleyrand, with whom he quarrelled, when on his
+embassy in Spain, about some extortions at Madrid, which he declined to
+share with his principal at Paris.  Such was our Minister's inveteracy
+against him in 1798, that a directorial decree placed him on the list of
+emigrants, because he remained in Spain after having been recalled to
+France.  In 1799, during Talleyrand's disgrace, Truguet returned here,
+and, after in vain challenging his enemy to fight, caned him in the
+Luxembourg gardens, a chastisement which our premier bore with true
+Christian patience.  Truguet is not even a member of the Legion of
+Honour.
+
+Villeneuve is supposed not much inferior in talents, experience, and
+modesty to Truguet.  He was, before the Revolution, a lieutenant of the
+royal navy; but his principles did not prevent him from deserting to the
+colours of the enemies of royalty, who promoted him first to a captain
+and afterwards to an admiral.
+
+His first command as such was over a division of the Toulon fleet, which,
+in the winter of 1797, entered Brest.  In the battle at Aboukir he was
+the second in command; and, after the death of Admiral Brueys, he rallied
+the ships which had escaped, and sailed for Malta, where, two years
+afterwards, he signed, with General Vaubois, the capitulation of that
+island.  When hostilities again broke out, he commanded in the West
+Indies, and, leaving his station, escaped your cruisers, and was
+appointed first to the chief command of the Rochefort, and afterwards the
+Toulon fleet, on the death of Admiral Latouche.  Notwithstanding the
+gasconade of his report of his negative victory over Admiral Calder,
+Villeneuve is not a Gascon by birth, but only, by sentiment.
+
+Ganteaume does not possess either the intriguing character of Truguet or
+the valorous one of Villeneuve.
+
+Before the Revolution he was a mate of a merchantman, but when most of
+the officers of the former royal navy had emigrated or perished, he was,
+in 1793, made a captain of the republican navy, and in 1796 an admiral.
+During the battle of Aboukir he was the chief of the staff, under Admiral
+Brueys, and saved himself by swimming, when l'Orient took fire and blew
+up.  Bonaparte wrote to him on this occasion: "The picture you have sent
+me of the disaster of l'Orient, and of your own dreadful situation, is
+horrible; but be assured that, having such a miraculous escape, DESTINY
+intends you to avenge one day our navy and our friends."  This note was
+written in August, 1798, shortly after Bonaparte had professed himself a
+Mussulman.
+
+When, in the summer of 1799, our general-in-chief had determined to leave
+his army of Egypt to its destiny, Ganteaume equipped and commanded the
+squadron of frigates which brought him to Europe, and was, after his
+consulate, appointed a Counsellor of State and commander at Brest.  In
+1800 he escaped with a division of the Brest fleet to Toulon, and, in the
+summer of 1801, when he was ordered to carry succours to Egypt, your ship
+Skitsure fell in with him, and was captured.  As he did not, however,
+succeed in landing in Egypt the troops on board his ships, a temporary
+disgrace was incurred, and he was deprived of the command, but made a
+maritime prefect.  Last year favour was restored him, with the command of
+our naval forces at Brest.  All officers who have served under Ganteaume
+agree that, let his fleet be ever so superior, he will never fight if he
+can avoid it, and that, in orderly times, his capacity would, at the
+utmost, make him regarded as a good master of a merchantman, and nothing
+else.
+
+Of the present commander of our, flotilla at Boulogne, Lacrosse, I will
+also say some few words.  A lieutenant before the Revolution, he became,
+in 1789, one of the most ardent and violent Jacobins, and in 1792 was
+employed by the friend of the Blacks, and our Minister, Monge, as an
+emissary in the West Indies, to preach there to the negroes the rights of
+man and insurrection against the whites, their masters.  In 1800,
+Bonaparte advanced him to a captain-general at Guadeloupe, an island
+which his plots, eight years before, had involved in all the horrors of
+anarchy, and where, when he now attempted to restore order, his former
+instruments rose against him and forced him to escape to one of your
+islands--I believe Dominico.  Of this island, in return for his
+hospitable reception, he took plans, according to which our General
+Lagrange endeavoured to conquer it last spring.  Lacrosse is a perfect
+revolutionary fanatic, unprincipled, cruel, unfeeling, and intolerant.
+His presumption is great, but his talents are trifling.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXIV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The defeat of the Austrians has excited great satisfaction
+among our courtiers and public functionaries; but the mass of the
+inhabitants here are too miserable to feel for anything else but their
+own sufferings.  They know very well that every victory rivets their
+fetters, that no disasters can make them more heavy, and no triumph
+lighter.  Totally indifferent about external occurrences, as well as
+about internal oppressions, they strive to forget both the past and the
+present, and to be indifferent as to the future; they would be glad could
+they cease to feel that they exist.  The police officers were now, with
+their gendarmes, bayoneting them into illuminations for Bonaparte's
+successes, as they dragooned them last year into rejoicings for his
+coronation. I never observed before so much apathy; and in more than one
+place I heard the people say, "Oh!  how much better we should be with
+fewer victories and more tranquillity, with less splendour and more
+security, with an honest peace instead of a brilliant war."  But in a
+country groaning under a military government, the opinions of the people
+are counted for nothing.
+
+At Madame Joseph Bonaparte's circle, however, the countenances were not
+so gloomy.  There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the usual
+dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating patriotic verses in
+honour of the victor; while others were singing airs or vaudevilles,
+to inspire our warriors with as much hatred towards your nation as
+gratitude towards our Emperor.  It is certainly neither philosophical
+nor philanthropical not to exclude the vilest of all passions, HATRED,
+on such a happy occasion.  Martin, in the dress of a conscript, sang six
+long couplets against the tyrants of the seas; of which I was only able
+to retain the following one:
+
+                    Je deteste le peuple anglais,
+                    Je deteste son ministere;
+                    J'aime l'Empereur des Francais,
+                    J'aime la paix, je hais la guerre;
+                    Mais puisqu'il faut la soutenir
+                    Contre une Nation Sauvage,
+                    Mon plus doux, mon plus grand desir
+                    Est de montrer tout mon courage.
+
+But what arrested my attention, more than anything else which occurred in
+this circle on that evening, was a printed paper mysteriously handed
+about, and of which, thanks to the civility of a Counsellor of State,
+I at last got a sight.  It was a list of those persons, of different
+countries, whom the Emperor of the French has fixed upon, to replace all
+the ancient dynasties of Europe within twenty years to come.  From the
+names of these individuals, some of whom are known to me, I could
+perceive that Bonaparte had more difficulty to select proper Emperors,
+Kings, and Electors, than he would have had, some years ago, to choose
+directors or consuls.  Our inconsistency is, however, evident even here;
+I did not read a name that is not found in the annals of Jacobinism and
+republicanism.  We have, at the same time, taken care not to forget
+ourselves in this new distribution of supremacy.  France is to furnish
+the stock of the new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and
+Sweden.  What would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject
+of King Arthur O'Connor the First?  You would, I dare say, be even more
+surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the First.
+You know, I suppose, that O'Connor is a general of division, and a
+commander of the Legion of Honour,--the bosom friend of Talleyrand, and
+courting, at this moment, a young lady, a relation of our Empress, whose
+portion may one day be an Empire.  But I am told that, notwithstanding
+Talleyrand's recommendations, and the approbation of Her Majesty, the
+lady prefers a colonel, her own countryman, to the Irish general.
+Should, however, our Emperor announce his determination, she would be
+obliged to marry as he commands, were he even to give her his groom, or
+his horse, for a spouse.
+
+You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels are
+here.  O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand,
+to General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on
+with a sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with
+poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France.  When
+I was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally
+considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to
+profligacy and drunkenness, and, when once drunk, more cruelly ferocious
+than even our Jacobins.  I thought it then, and I still believe it,
+a national prejudice, because I am convinced that the vices or virtues of
+all civilized nations are relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we
+have seen here, and who must be, like our Jacobins, the very dregs of
+their country, have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only
+mistrust but abhorrence.  It is also an undeniable truth that they were
+greatly disappointed by our former and present Government.  They expected
+to enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but our
+police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gendarmes escorted
+them as criminals to their place of destination, and there they received
+just enough to prevent them from starving.  If they complained they were
+put in irons, and if they attempted to escape they were sent to the
+galleys as malefactors or shot as spies.  Despair, therefore, no doubt
+induced many to perpetrate acts of which they were accused, and to rob,
+swindle, and murder, because they were punished as thieves and assassins.
+But, some of them, who have been treated in the most friendly,
+hospitable, and generous manner in this capital, have proved themselves
+ungrateful, as well as infamous.  A lady of my acquaintance, of a once
+large fortune, had nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence
+depended upon what she got by letting furnished lodgings.  Mischance
+brought three young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily
+expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from
+Bonaparte.  During six months she not only lodged and supported them, but
+embarrassed herself to procure them linen and a decent apparel.  At last
+she was informed that each of, them had been allowed sixty livres--in the
+month, and that arrears had been paid them for nine months.  Their debt
+to her was above three thousand livres--but the day after she asked for
+payment they decamped, and one of them persuaded her daughter, a girl of
+fourteen, to elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of
+all her plate.--He has, indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the
+galleys for eight years; but this punishment neither restored the
+daughter her virtue nor the mother her property.  The other two denied
+their debts, and, as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of
+accounts, they could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and
+infamy, however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they
+delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and the
+Minister of Police ordered them to be transported as rogues and vagabonds
+to the colonies.  The daughter died shortly after, in consequence of a
+miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her more than a month, and
+ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our common hospitals.  Thus,
+these depraved young men ruined and murdered their benefactress and her
+child; and displayed, before they were thirty, such a consummate villainy
+as few wretches grown hoary in vice have perpetrated.  This act of
+scandalous notoriety injured the Irish reputation very much in this
+country; for here, as in many other places, inconsiderate people are apt
+to judge a whole nation according to the behaviour of some few of its
+outcasts.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXV.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible
+to all our military men--not on account of its profundity, but on account
+of its absurdity or incoherency.  In the present circumstances, half-
+measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly
+and firmly than justly.  To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian
+army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality of
+Switzerland, are such political and military errors as require long
+successes to repair, but which such an enemy as Bonaparte always takes
+care not to leave unpunished.
+
+The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as much
+surprised us as the defeat of the army under General von Mack; but from
+what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would long since have
+pushed forward had not his movements been unfortunately combined with
+those of the latter.  The House of Lorraine never produced a more valiant
+warrior, nor Austria a more liberal or better instructed statesman, than
+this Prince.  Heir to the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded,
+with glory, against France during the revolutionary war; and, although he
+sometimes experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the
+chief of his House by his courage, by his activity, by his constancy, and
+by that salutary firmness which, in calling the generals and superior
+officers to their duty, has often reanimated the confidence and the
+ardour of the soldier.
+
+The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under the Prince
+of Coburg, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian armies in Brabant,
+where he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished himself by a
+valour sometimes bordering on temerity, but which, by degrees, acquired
+him that esteem and popularity, among the troops often very advantageous
+to him afterwards.  He was, in 1794, appointed governor and captain-
+general of the Low Countries, and a Field-marshal lieutenant of the army
+of the German Empire.  In April, 1796, he took the command-in-chief of
+the armies of Austria and of the Empire, and, in the following June,
+engaged in several combats with General Moreau, in which he was repulsed,
+but in a manner that did equal honour to the victor and to the
+vanquished.
+
+The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben, having,
+about this time, been nearly dispersed by General Jourdan, the Archduke
+left some divisions of his forces under General Latour, to impede the
+progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into Franconia, where he
+defeated Jourdan near Amberg and Wurzburg, routed his army entirely, and
+forced him to repass the Rhine in the greatest confusion, and with
+immense loss.  The retreat of Moreau was the consequence of the victories
+of this Prince.  After the capture of Kehl, in January, 1797, he assumed
+the command of the army of Italy, where he in vain employed all his
+efforts to put a stop to the victorious progress of Bonaparte, with whom,
+at last, he signed the preliminaries of peace at Leoben.  In the spring
+of 1799, he again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years
+before in Franconia; but in Switzerland he met with an abler adversary in
+General Massena; still, I am inclined to think that he displayed there
+more real talents than anywhere else; and that this part of his campaign
+of 1799 was the most interesting, in a military point of view.
+
+The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria
+render justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of
+Archduke Charles; and, what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who have
+commanded against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the true
+manner of combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least, his proclamations
+are the only ones composed with adroitness, and are what they ought to
+be, because in them an appeal is made to the public opinion at a time
+when opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies.
+
+The present opposer of this Prince in Italy is one of our best, as well
+as most fortunate, generals.  A Sardinian subject, and a deserter from
+the Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our commander, General
+Anselm, in the conquest of the county of Nice, rather as a spy than as a
+soldier.  His knowledge of the Maritime Alps obtained, in 1793, a place
+on our staff, where, from the services he rendered, the rank of a general
+of brigade was soon conferred on him.  In 1796 he was promoted to serve
+as a general of division under Bonaparte in Italy, where he distinguished
+himself so much that when, in 1798, General Berthier was ordered to
+accompany the army of the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as commander-
+in-chief of our troops in the temporary Roman Republic.  But his
+merciless pillage, and, perhaps, the idea of his being a foreigner,
+brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was obliged to recall him.  It was
+his campaign in Switzerland of 1799, and his defence of Genoa in 1800,
+that principally ranked him high as a military chief.  After the battle
+of Marengo he received the command of the army of Italy; but his
+extortions produced a revolt among the inhabitants, and he lived for some
+time in retreat and disgrace, after a violent quarrel with Bonaparte,
+during which many severe truths were said and heard on both sides.
+
+After the Peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau, and
+other discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of views
+and union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris, where
+Bonaparte visited him, after the rupture with your country, and made him,
+we may conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave his retreat.  Last
+year he was nominated one of our Emperor's Field-marshals, and as such
+he relieved Jourdan of the command in the kingdom of Italy.  He has
+purchased with a part of his spoil, for fifteen millions of livres--
+property in France and Italy; and is considered worth double that sum in
+jewels, money, and other valuables.
+
+Massena is called, in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as
+Bonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confidence in
+fortune than in merit, he is, perhaps, more indebted to the former than
+to the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has made him
+disliked at our Imperial Court, where he never addresses Napoleon and
+Madame Bonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress without smiling.
+
+General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also an
+officer of great talents and distinctions.  He was, in 1791, only a
+cornet, but in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the army of
+the Rhine.  In his report to the Directory, during the famous retreat of
+1796, Moreau speaks highly of this general, and admits that his.
+achievements, in part, saved the republican army.  During 1799 he served
+in Italy, and in 1800 he commanded the centre of the army of the Rhine,
+and assisted in gaining the victory of Hohenlinden.  After the Peace of
+Lundville, he was appointed a Counsellor of State of the military
+section, a place he still occupies, notwithstanding his present
+employment.  Though under forty years of age, he is rather infirm, from
+the fatigues he has undergone and the wounds he has received.  Although
+he has never combated as a general-in-chief, there is no doubt but that
+he would fill such a place with honour to himself and advantage to his
+country.
+
+Of the general officers who command under Archduke Charles, Comte de
+Bellegarde is already known by his exploits during the last war.  He had
+distinguished himself already in 1793, particularly when Valenciennes and
+Maubeuge were besieged by the united Austrian and English forces; and, in
+1794, he commanded the column at the head of which the Emperor marched,
+when Landrecy was invested.  In 1796, he was one of the members of the
+Council of the Archduke Charles, when this Prince commanded for the first
+time as a general-in-chief, on which occasion he was promoted to a Field-
+marshal lieutenant.
+
+He displayed again great talents during the campaign of 1799, when he
+headed a small corps, placed between General Suwarow in Italy, and
+Archduke Charles in Switzerland; and in this delicate post he contributed
+equally to the success of both.  After the Peace of Luneville he was
+appointed a commander-in-chief for the Emperor in the ci-devant Venetian
+States, where the troops composing the army under the Archduke Charles
+were, last summer, received and inspected by him, before the arrival of
+the Prince.  He is considered by military men as greatly superior to most
+of the generals now employed by the Emperor of Germany.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVI.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--"I would give my brother, the Emperor of Germany, one further
+piece of advice.  Let him hasten to make peace.  This is the crisis when,
+he must recollect, all States must have an end.  The idea of the
+approaching extinction of the, dynasty of Lorraine must impress him with
+horror."  When Bonaparte ordered this paragraph to be inserted in the
+Moniteur, he discovered an 'arriere pensee', long suspected by
+politicians, but never before avowed by himself, or by his Ministers.
+"That he has determined on the universal change of dynasties, because a
+usurper can never reign with safety or honour as long as any legitimate
+Prince may disturb his power, or reproach him for his rank."  Elevated
+with prosperity, or infatuated with vanity and pride, he spoke a language
+which his placemen, courtiers, and even his brother Joseph at first
+thought premature, if not indiscreet.  If all lawful Sovereigns do not
+read in these words their proscription, and the fate which the most
+powerful usurper that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it
+may be ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath,
+sometimes strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the vicissitudes
+of human life.
+
+"Had Talleyrand," said Louis Bonaparte, in his wife's drawing-room, "been
+by my brother's side, he would not have unnecessarily alarmed or awakened
+those whom it should have been his policy to keep in a soft slumber,
+until his blows had laid them down to rise no more; but his soldier-like
+frankness frequently injures his political views."  This I myself heard
+Louis say to Abbe Sieyes, though several foreign Ambassadors were in the
+saloon, near enough not to miss a word.  If it was really meant as a
+reflection on Napoleon, it was imprudent; if designed as a defiance to
+other Princes, it was unbecoming and impertinent.  I am inclined to
+believe it, considering the individual to whom it was addressed, a
+premeditated declaration that our Emperor expected a universal war,
+was prepared for it, and was certain of its fortunate issue.
+
+When this Sieyes is often consulted, and publicly flattered, our
+politicians say, "Woe to the happiness of Sovereigns and to the
+tranquillity of subjects; the fiend of mankind is busy, and at work,"
+and, in fact, ever since 1789, the infamous ex-Abbe has figured, either
+as a plotter or as an actor, in all our dreadful and sanguinary
+revolutionary epochas.  The accomplice of La Fayette in 1789, of Brissot
+in 1791, of Marat in 1792, of Robespierre in 1793, of Tallien in 1794, of
+Barras in 1795, of Rewbel in 1797, and of Bonaparte in 1799, he has
+hitherto planned, served,, betrayed, or deserted all factions.  He is one
+of the few of our grand criminals, who, after enticing and sacrificing
+his associates, has been fortunate enough to survive them.  Bonaparte has
+heaped upon him presents, places, and pensions; national property,
+senatories, knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not
+supposed one of our Emperor's most dutiful subjects, because many of the
+late changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation,
+of regeneration, and of overthrow.  He has too high an opinion of his own
+deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to be a
+contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy by his
+labours and dangers.  His modesty has, for these sixteen years past,
+ascribed to his talents all the glory and prosperity of France, and all
+her misery and misfortunes to the disregard of his counsels, and to the
+neglect of his advice.  Bonaparte knows it; and that he is one of those
+crafty, sly, and dark conspirators, more dangerous than the bold
+assassin, who, by sophistry, art, and perseverance insinuate into the
+minds of the unwary and daring the ideas of their plots, in such an
+insidious manner that they take them and foster them as the production of
+their own genius; he is, therefore, watched by our Imperial spies, and
+never consulted but when any great blow is intended to be struck, or some
+enormous atrocities perpetrated.  A month before the seizure of the Duc
+d'Enghien, and the murder of Pichegru, he was every day shut up for some
+hours with Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Cloud, or in the Tuileries; where he
+has hardly been seen since, except after our Emperor's return from his
+coronation as a King of Italy.
+
+Sieyes never was a republican, and it was cowardice alone that made him
+vote for the death of his King and benefactor; although he is very fond
+of his own metaphysical notions, he always has preferred the preservation
+of his life to the profession or adherence to his systems.  He will not
+think the Revolution complete, or the constitution of his country a good
+one, until some Napoleon, or some Louis, writes himself an Emperor or
+King of France, by the grace of Sieyes.  He would expose the lives of
+thousands to obtain such a compliment to his hateful vanity and excessive
+pride; but he would not take a step that endangered his personal safety,
+though it might eventually lead him to the possession of a crown.
+
+From the bounty of his King, Sieyes had, before the Revolution, an income
+of fifteen thousand livres--per annum; his places, pensions, and landed
+estates produce now yearly five hundred thousand livres--not including
+the interest of his money in the French and foreign funds.
+
+Two years ago he was exiled, for some time, to an estate of his in
+Touraine, and Bonaparte even deliberated about transporting him to
+Cayenne, when Talleyrand observed "that such a condemnation would
+endanger that colony of France, as he would certainly organize there a
+focus of revolutions, which might also involve Surinam and the Brazils,
+the colonies of our allies, in one common ruin.  In the present
+circumstances," added the Minister, "if Sieyes is to be transported, I
+wish we could land him in England, Scotland, or Ireland, or even in
+Russia."
+
+I have just heard from a general officer the following anecdote, which he
+read to me from a letter of another general, dated Ulm, the 25th instant,
+and, if true, it explains in part Bonaparte's apparent indiscretion in
+the threat thrown out against all ancient dynasties.
+
+Among his confidential generals (and hitherto the most irreproachable of
+all our military commanders), Marmont is particularly distinguished.
+Before Napoleon left this capital to head his armies in Germany, he is
+stated to have sent despatches to all those traitors dispersed in
+different countries whom he has selected to commence the new dynasties,
+under the protection of the Bonaparte Dynasty.  They were, no doubt,
+advised of this being the crisis when they had to begin their
+machinations against thrones.  A courier from Talleyrand at Strasburg to
+Bonaparte at Ulm was ordered to pass by the corps under the command of
+Marmont, to whom, in case the Emperor had advanced too far into Germany,
+he was to deliver his papers.  This courier was surprised and interrupted
+by some Austrian light troops; and, as it was only some few hours after
+being informed of this capture that Bonaparte expressed himself frankly,
+as related above, it was supposed by his army that the Austrian
+Government had already in its power despatches which made our schemes of
+improvement at Paris no longer any secrets at Vienna.  The writer of this
+letter added that General Marmont was highly distressed on account of
+this accident, which might retard the prospect of restoring to Europe its
+long lost peace and tranquillity.
+
+This officer made his first campaign under Pichegru in 1794, and was, in
+1796, appointed by Bonaparte one of his aides-de-camp.  His education had
+been entirely military, and in the practice the war afforded him he soon
+evinced how well he remembered the lessons of theory.  In the year 1796,
+at the battle of Saint-Georges, before Mantua, he charged at the head of
+the eighth battalion of grenadiers, and contributed much to its fortunate
+issue.  In October of the same year, Bonaparte, as a mark of his
+satisfaction, sent him to present to the Directory the numerous colours
+which the army of Italy had conquered; from whom he received in return a
+pair of pistols, with a fraternal hug from Carnot.  On his return to
+Italy he was, for the first time, employed by his chief in a political
+capacity.  A republic, and nothing but a republic, being then the order
+of the day, some Italian patriots were convoked at Reggio to arrange a
+plan for a Cisalpine Republic, and for the incorporation with it of
+Modena, Bologna, and other neutral States; Marmont was nominated a French
+republican plenipotentiary, and assisted as such in the organization of a
+Commonwealth, which since has been by turns a province of Austria or a
+tributary State of France.
+
+Marmont, though combating for a bad cause, is an honest man; his hands
+are neither soiled with plunder, nor stained with blood.  Bonaparte,
+among his other good qualities, wishes to see every one about him rich;
+and those who have been too delicate to accumulate wealth by pillage, he
+generally provides for, by putting into requisition some great heiress.
+After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bonaparte arrived at Paris, where he
+demanded in marriage for his aide-de-camp Marmont, Mademoiselle
+Perregeaux, the sole child of the first banker in France, a well-educated
+and accomplished young lady, who would be much more agreeable did not her
+continual smiles and laughing indicate a degree of self-satisfaction and
+complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published.
+
+The banker, Perregeaux, is one of those fortunate beings who, by drudgery
+and assiduity, has succeeded in some few years to make an ample fortune.
+A Swiss by birth, like Necker, he also, like him, after gratifying the
+passion of avidity, showed an ambition to shine in other places than in
+the counting-house and upon the exchange.  Under La Fayette, in 1790, he
+was the chief of a battalion of the Parisian National Guards; under
+Robespierre, a commissioner for purchasing provisions; and under
+Bonaparte he is become a Senator and a commander of the Legion of Honour.
+I am told that he has made all his money by his connection with your
+country; but I know that the favourite of Napoleon can never be the
+friend of Great Britain.  He is a widower; but Mademoiselle Mars, of the
+Emperor's theatre, consoles him for the loss of his wife.
+
+General Marmont accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and distinguished himself
+at the capture of Malta, and when, in the following year, the siege of
+St. Jean d'Acre was undertaken, he was ordered to extend the
+fortifications of Alexandria; and if, in 1801, they retarded your
+progress, it was owing to his abilities, being an officer of engineers as
+well as of the artillery.  He returned with Bonaparte to Europe, and was,
+after his usurpation, made a Counsellor of State.  At the battle of
+Marengo he commanded the artillery, and signed afterwards, with the
+Austrian general, Count Hohenzollern, the Armistice of Treviso, which
+preceded shortly the Peace of Luneville.  Nothing has abated Bonaparte's
+attachment to this officer, whom he appointed a commander-in-chief in
+Holland, when a change of Government was intended there, and whom he will
+entrust everywhere else, where sovereignty is to be abolished, or thrones
+and dynasties subverted.
+
+
+
+
+LETTER XXXVII.
+
+PARIS, October, 1805.
+
+MY LORD:--Many wise people are of the opinion that the revolution of
+another great Empire is necessary to combat or oppose the great impulse
+occasioned by the Revolution of France, before Europe can recover its
+long-lost order and repose.  Had the subjects of Austria been as
+disaffected as they are loyal, the world might have witnessed such a
+terrible event, and been enabled to judge whether the hypothesis was the
+production of an ingenious schemer or of a profound statesman.  Our
+armies under Bonaparte have never before penetrated into the heart of a
+country where subversion was not prepared, and where subversion did not
+follow.
+
+How relatively insignificant, in the eyes of Providence, must be the
+independence of States and the liberties of nations, when such a
+relatively insignificant personage as General von Mack can shake them?
+Have, then, the Austrian heroes--a Prince Eugene, a Laudon, a Lasci, a
+Beaulieu, a Haddick, a Bender, a Clairfayt, and numerous other valiant
+and great warriors--left no posterity behind them; or has the presumption
+of General von Mack imposed upon the judgment of the Counsellors of his
+Prince?  This latter must have been the case; how otherwise could the
+welfare of their Sovereign have been entrusted to a military quack, whose
+want of energy and bad disposition had, in 1799, delivered up the capital
+of another Sovereign to his enemies.  How many reputations are gained by
+an impudent assurance, and lost when the man of talents is called upon to
+act and the fool presents himself.
+
+Baron von Mack served as an aide-de-camp under Field-marshal Laudon,
+during the last war between Austria and Turkey, and displayed some
+intrepidity, particularly before Lissa.  The Austrian army was encamped
+eight leagues from that place, and the commander-in-chief hesitated to
+attack it, believing it to be defended by thirty thousand men.  To decide
+him upon making this attack, Baron von Mack left him at nine o'clock at
+night, crossed the Danube, accompanied only by a single Uhlan, and
+penetrated into the suburb of Lissa, where he made prisoner a Turkish
+officer, whom, on the next morning at seven o'clock, he presented to his
+general, and from whom it was learnt that the garrison contained only six
+thousand, men.  This personal temerity, and the applause of Field-marshal
+Laudon, procured him then a kind of reputation, which he has not since
+been able to support.  Some theoretical knowledge of the art of war,
+and a great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the
+Emperor Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has long
+been proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the difference is
+immense between the speculator and the operator, and that the generals of
+Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in the camp or in the field.
+
+Preceded by a certain celebrity, Baron von Mack served, in 1793, under
+the Prince of Coburg, as an adjutant-general, and was called to assist at
+the Congress at Antwerp, where the operations of the campaign were
+regulated.  Everywhere he displayed activity and bravery; was wounded
+twice in the month of May; but he left the army without having performed
+anything that evinced the talents which fame had bestowed on him.  In
+February, 1794, the Emperor sent him to London to arrange, in concert
+with your Government, the plans of the campaign then on the eve of being
+opened; and when he returned to the Low Countries he was advanced to a
+quartermaster-general of the army of Flanders, and terminated also this
+unfortunate campaign without having done anything to justify the
+reputation he had before acquired or usurped.  His Sovereign continued,
+nevertheless, to employ him in different armies; and in January, 1797, he
+was appointed a Field-marshal lieutenant and a quartermaster-general of
+the army of the Rhine.  In February he conducted fifteen thousand of the
+troops of this army to reinforce the army of Italy; but when Bonaparte in
+April penetrated into Styria and Carinthia, he was ordered to Vienna as a
+second in command of the levy 'en masse'.
+
+Real military characters had already formed their opinion of this
+officer, and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired an
+able warrior.  His own conduct soon convinced them that they neither had
+been rash nor mistaken.  The King of Naples demanding, in 1798, from his
+son-in-law, the Emperor of Germany, a general to organize and head his
+troops, Baron von Mack was presented to him.  After war had been declared
+against France he obtained some success in partial engagements, but was
+defeated in a general battle by an enemy inferior in number.  In the
+Kingdom of Naples, as well as in the Empire of Germany, the fury of
+negotiation seized him when he should have fought, and when he should
+have remembered that no compacts can ever be entered into with political
+and military earthquakes, more than with physical ones.  This imprudence,
+particularly as he was a foreigner, excited suspicion among his troops,
+whom, instead of leading to battle, he deserted, under the pretence that
+his life was in danger, and surrendered himself and his staff to our
+commander, Championnet.
+
+A general who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp, much
+less to command armies; and a military chief who does not consider the
+happiness and honour of the State as his first passion and his first
+duty, and prefers existence to glory, deserves to be shot as a traitor,
+or drummed out of the army as a dastardly coward.  Without mentioning the
+numerous military faults committed by General von Mack during this
+campaign, it is impossible to deny that, with respect to his own troops,
+he conducted himself in the most pusillanimous manner.  It has often been
+repeated that martial valour does not always combine with it that courage
+and that necessary presence of mind which knows how to direct or repress
+multitudes, how to command obedience and obtain popularity; but when a
+man is entrusted with the safety of an Empire, and assumes such a
+brilliant situation, he must be weak-minded and despicable indeed, if he
+does not show himself worthy of it by endeavouring to succeed, or perish
+in the attempt.  The French emigrant, General Dumas, evinced what might
+have been done, even with the dispirited Neapolitan troops, whom he
+neither deserted, nor with whom he offered to capitulate.
+
+Baron von Mack is in a very infirm state of health, and is often under
+the necessity of being carried on a litter; and his bodily complaints
+have certainly not increased the vigour of his mind.  His love of life
+seems to augment in proportion as its real value diminishes.  As to the
+report here of his having betrayed his trust in exchanging honour for
+gold, I believe it totally unfounded.  Our intriguers may have deluded
+his understanding, but our traitors would never have been able to seduce
+or shake his fidelity.  His head is weak, but his heart is honest.
+Unfortunately, it is too true that, in turbulent times, irresolution and
+weakness in a commander or a Minister operate the same, and are as
+dangerous as, treason.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs of Court of St. Cloud, v7
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD:
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Bourrienne
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery--pays for it like a real Emperor
+Indifference about futurity
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Marble lives longer than man
+May change his habitations six times in the month--yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+Military diplomacy
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+More vain than ambitious
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Suspicion is evidence
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon's outrages
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+Want is the parent of industry
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext Memoirs The Court of St. Cloud, entire
+by Stewarton, a Gentleman at Paris, to a Nobleman in London
+
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      MEMOIRS COURT OF ST. CLOUD, By Lewis Goldsmith
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+    <!--
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+    <h2>
+      MEMOIRS COURT OF ST. CLOUD, By Lewis Goldsmith
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+Project Gutenberg's Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete,
+by Lewis Goldsmith
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete
+       Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+
+Author: Lewis Goldsmith
+
+
+Release Date: September 11, 2006 [EBook #3899]
+Last Updated: April 3, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COURT OF ST. CLOUD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="bookcover.jpg (144K)" src="images/bookcover.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="titlepage.jpg (52K)" src="images/titlepage.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      PUBLISHERS' NOTE.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The present work contains particulars of the great Napoleon not to be
+      found in any other publication, and forms an interesting addition to the
+      information generally known about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The writer of the Letters (whose name is said to have been Stewarton, and
+      who had been a friend of the Empress Josephine in her happier, if less
+      brilliant days) gives full accounts of the lives of nearly all Napoleon's
+      Ministers and Generals, in addition to those of a great number of other
+      characters, and an insight into the inner life of those who formed
+      Napoleon's Court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All sorts and conditions of men are dealt with&mdash;adherents who have
+      come over from the Royalist camp, as well as those who have won their way
+      upwards as soldiers, as did Napoleon himself. In fact, the work abounds
+      with anecdotes of Napoleon, Talleyrand, Fouche, and a host of others, and
+      astounding particulars are given of the mysterious disappearance of those
+      persons who were unfortunate enough to incur the displeasure of Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="napoleon.jpg (54K)" src="images/napoleon.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>ILLUSTRATIONS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#p078">At Cardinal Caprara's</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p146">Cardinal
+        Fesch</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p214">Episode at Mme. Miot's</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#p236">Napoleon's Guard</a><br /><br /> <a href="#p338">A Grand
+        Dinner</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb064">Chaptal</a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#pb114">Turreaux</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb118">Carrier</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#pb146">Barrere</a><br /><br /> <a href="#pb214">Cambaceres</a><br /><br />
+        <a href="#pauline">Pauline Bonaparte</a><br /><br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      SECRET COURT MEMOIRS.
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD. <br /><br />INTRODUCTORY LETTER.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, November 10th, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD,&mdash;The Letters I have written to you were intended for the
+      private entertainment of a liberal friend, and not for the general perusal
+      of a severe public. Had I imagined that their contents would have
+      penetrated beyond your closet or the circle of your intimate acquaintance,
+      several of the narratives would have been extended, while others would
+      have been compressed; the anecdotes would have been more numerous, and my
+      own remarks fewer; some portraits would have been left out, others drawn,
+      and all better finished. I should then have attempted more frequently to
+      expose meanness to contempt, and treachery to abhorrence; should have
+      lashed more severely incorrigible vice, and oftener held out to ridicule
+      puerile vanity and outrageous ambition. In short, I should then have
+      studied more to please than to instruct, by addressing myself seldomer to
+      the reason than to the passions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I subscribe, nevertheless, to your observation, "that the late long war
+      and short peace, with the enslaved state of the Press on the Continent,
+      would occasion a chasm in the most interesting period of modern history,
+      did not independent and judicious travellers or visitors abroad collect
+      and forward to Great Britain (the last refuge of freedom) some materials
+      which, though scanty and insufficient upon the whole, may, in part, rend
+      the veil of destructive politics, and enable future ages to penetrate into
+      mysteries which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable to the
+      just reprobation of honour and of virtue." If, therefore, my humble
+      labours can preserve loyal subjects from the seduction of traitors, or
+      warn lawful sovereigns and civilized society of the alarming conspiracy
+      against them, I shall not think either my time thrown away, or fear the
+      dangers to which publicity might expose me were I only suspected here of
+      being an Anglican author. Before the Letters are sent to the press I
+      trust, however, to your discretion the removal of everything that might
+      produce a discovery, or indicate the source from which you have derived
+      your information.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Although it is not usual in private correspondence to quote authorities, I
+      have sometimes done so; but satisfied, as I hope you are, with my
+      veracity, I should have thought the frequent productions of any better
+      pledge than the word of a man of honour an insult to your feelings. I
+      have, besides, not related a fact that is not recent and well known in our
+      fashionable and political societies; and of ALL the portraits I have
+      delineated, the originals not only exist, but are yet occupied in the
+      present busy scene of the Continent, and figuring either at Courts, in
+      camps, or in Cabinets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;I promised you not to pronounce in haste on persons and
+      events passing under my eyes; thirty-one months have quickly passed away
+      since I became an attentive spectator of the extraordinary transactions,
+      and of the extraordinary characters of the extraordinary Court and Cabinet
+      of St. Cloud. If my talents to delineate equal my zeal to inquire and my
+      industry to examine; if I am as able a painter as I have been an
+      indefatigable observer, you will be satisfied, and with your approbation
+      at once sanction and reward my labours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With most Princes, the supple courtier and the fawning favourite have
+      greater influence than the profound statesman and subtle Minister; and the
+      determinations of Cabinets are, therefore, frequently prepared in
+      drawing-rooms, and discussed in the closet. The politician and the
+      counsellor are frequently applauded or censured for transactions which the
+      intrigues of antechambers conceived, and which cupidity and favour gave
+      power to promulgate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very generally imagined, but falsely, that Napoleon Bonaparte
+      governs, or rather tyrannizes, by himself, according to his own capacity,
+      caprices, or interest; that all his acts, all his changes, are the sole
+      consequence of his own exclusive, unprejudiced will, as well as unlimited
+      authority; that both his greatness and his littleness, his successes and
+      his crimes, originate entirely with himself; that the fortunate hero who
+      marched triumphant over the Alps, and the dastardly murderer that
+      disgraced human nature at Jaffa, because the same person, owed victory to
+      himself alone, and by himself alone commanded massacre; that the same
+      genius, unbiased and unsupported, crushed factions, erected a throne, and
+      reconstructed racks; that the same mind restored and protected
+      Christianity, and proscribed and assassinated a D'Enghien.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these contradictions, all these virtues and vices, may be found in the
+      same person; but Bonaparte, individually or isolated, has no claim to
+      them. Except on some sudden occasions that call for immediate decision, no
+      Sovereign rules less by himself than Bonaparte; because no Sovereign is
+      more surrounded by favourites and counsellors, by needy adventurers and
+      crafty intriguers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Sovereign has more relatives to enrich, or services to recompense;
+      more evils to repair, more jealousies to dread, more dangers to fear, more
+      clamours to silence; or stands more in need of information and advice? Let
+      it be remembered that he, who now governs empires and nations, ten years
+      ago commanded only a battery; and five years ago was only a military
+      chieftain. The difference is as immense, indeed, between the sceptre of a
+      Monarch and the sword of a general, as between the wise legislator who
+      protects the lives and property of his contemporaries, and the hireling
+      robber who wades through rivers of blood to obtain plunder at the expense
+      and misery of generations. The lower classes of all countries have
+      produced persons who have distinguished themselves as warriors; but what
+      subject has yet usurped a throne, and by his eminence and achievements,
+      without infringing on the laws and liberties of his country, proved
+      himself worthy to reign? Besides, the education which Bonaparte received
+      was entirely military; and a man (let his innate abilities be ever so
+      surprising or excellent) who, during the first thirty years of his life,
+      has made either military or political tactics or exploits his only study,
+      certainly cannot excel equally in the Cabinet and in the camp. It would be
+      as foolish to believe, as absurd to expect, a perfection almost beyond the
+      reach of any man; and of Bonaparte more than of any one else. A man who,
+      like him, is the continual slave of his own passions, can neither be a
+      good nor a just, an independent nor immaculate master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the courtiers who, ever since Bonaparte was made First Consul, have
+      maintained a great ascendency over him, is the present Grand Marshal of
+      his Court, the general of division, Duroc. With some parts, but greater
+      presumption, this young man is destined by his master to occupy the most
+      confidential places near his person; and to his care are entrusted the
+      most difficult and secret missions at foreign Courts. When he is absent
+      from France, the liberty of the Continent is in danger; and when in the
+      Tuileries, or at St. Cloud, Bonaparte thinks himself always safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gerard Christophe Michel Duroc was born at Ponta-Mousson, in the
+      department of Meurthe, on the 25th of October, 1772, of poor but honest
+      parents. His father kept a petty chandler's shop; but by the interest and
+      generosity of Abbe Duroc, a distant relation, he was so well educated
+      that, in March, 1792, he became a sub-lieutenant of the artillery. In 1796
+      he served in Italy, as a captain, under General Andreossy, by whom he was
+      recommended to General l'Espinasse, then commander of the artillery of the
+      army of Italy, who made him an aide-de-camp. In that situation Bonaparte
+      remarked his activity, and was pleased with his manners, and therefore
+      attached him as an aide-de-camp to himself. Duroc soon became a favourite
+      with his chief, and, notwithstanding the intrigues of his rivals, he has
+      continued to be so to this day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It has been asserted, by his enemies no doubt, that by implicit obedience
+      to his general's orders, by an unresisting complacency, and by executing,
+      without hesitation, the most cruel mandates of his superior, he has fixed
+      himself so firmly in his good opinion that he is irremovable. It has also
+      been stated that it was Duroc who commanded the drowning and burying alive
+      of the wounded French soldiers in Italy, in 1797; and that it was he who
+      inspected their poisoning in Syria, in 1799, where he was wounded during
+      the siege of St. Jean d' Acre. He was among the few officers whom
+      Bonaparte selected for his companions when he quitted the army of Egypt,
+      and landed with him in France in October, 1799.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hitherto Duroc had only shown himself as a brave soldier and obedient
+      officer; but after the revolution which made Bonaparte a First Consul, he
+      entered upon another career. He was then, for the first time, employed in
+      a diplomatic mission to Berlin, where he so far insinuated himself into
+      the good graces of their Prussian Majesties that the King admitted him to
+      the royal table, and on the parade at Potsdam presented him to his
+      generals and officers as an aide-de-camp 'du plus grand homme que je
+      connais; whilst the Queen gave him a scarf knitted by her own fair hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fortunate result of Duroc's intrigues in Prussia, in 1799, encouraged
+      Bonaparte to despatch him, in 1801, to Russia; where Alexander I. received
+      him with that noble condescension so natural, to this great and good
+      Prince. He succeeded at St. Petersburg in arranging the political and
+      commercial difficulties and disagreements between France and Russia; but
+      his proposal for a defensive alliance was declined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An anecdote is related of his political campaign in the North, upon the
+      barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the
+      inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little displeased
+      the military diplomatist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among Talleyrand's female agents sent to cajole Paul I. during the latter
+      part of his reign, was a Madame Bonoeil, whose real name is De F&mdash;&mdash;-.
+      When this unfortunate Prince was no more, most of the French male and
+      female intriguers in Russia thought it necessary to shift their quarters,
+      and to expect, on the territory of neutral Prussia, farther instructions
+      from Paris, where and how to proceed. Madame Bonoeil had removed to
+      Konigsberg. In the second week of May, 1801, when Duroc passed through
+      that town for St. Petersburg, he visited this lady, according to the
+      orders of Bonaparte, and obtained from her a list of the names of the
+      principal persons who were inclined to be serviceable to France, and might
+      be trusted by him upon the present occasion. By inattention or mistake she
+      had misspelled the name of one of the most trusty and active adherents of
+      Bonaparte; and Duroc, therefore, instead of addressing himself to the
+      Polish Count de S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;lz, went to the Polish Count
+      de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz. This latter was as much flattered as surprised,
+      upon seeing an aide-de-camp and envoy of the First Consul of France enter
+      his apartments, seldom visited before but by usurers, gamesters, and
+      creditors; and, on hearing the object of this visit, began to think either
+      the envoy mad or himself dreaming. Understanding, however, that money
+      would be of little consideration, if the point desired by the First Consul
+      could be carried, he determined to take advantage of this fortunate hit,
+      and invited Duroc to sup with him the same evening; when he promised him
+      he should meet with persons who could do his business, provided his
+      pecuniary resources were as ample as he had stated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Count de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz was one of the most extravagant and
+      profligate subjects that Russia had acquired by the partition of Poland.
+      After squandering away his own patrimony, he had ruined his mother and two
+      sisters, and subsisted now entirely by gambling and borrowing. Among his
+      associates, in similar circumstances with himself, was a Chevalier de
+      Gausac, a French adventurer, pretending to be an emigrant from the
+      vicinity of Toulouse. To him was communicated what had happened in the
+      morning, and his advice was asked how to act in the evening. It was soon
+      settled that De Gausac should be transformed into a Russian Count de W&mdash;&mdash;-,
+      a nephew and confidential secretary of the Chancellor of the same name;
+      and that one Caumartin, another French adventurer, who taught fencing at
+      St. Petersburg, should act the part of Prince de M&mdash;&mdash;-, an
+      aide-de-camp of the Emperor; and that all three together should strip
+      Duroc, and share the spoil. At the appointed hour Bonaparte's agent
+      arrived, and was completely the dupe of these adventurers, who plundered
+      him of twelve hundred thousand livres. Though not many days passed before
+      he discovered the imposition, prudence prevented him from denouncing the
+      impostors; and this blunder would have remained a secret between himself,
+      Bonaparte, and Talleyrand, had not the unusual expenses of Caumartin
+      excited the suspicion of the Russian Police Minister, who soon discovered
+      the source from which they had flowed. De Gausac had the imprudence to
+      return to this capital last spring, and is now shut up in the Temple,
+      where he probably will be forgotten.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As this loss was more ascribed to the negligence of Madame Bonoeil than to
+      the mismanagement of Duroc, or his want of penetration, his reception at
+      the Tuileries, though not so gracious as on his return from Berlin,
+      nineteen months before, was, however, such as convinced him that if he had
+      not increased, he had at the same time not lessened, the confidence of his
+      master; and, indeed, shortly afterwards, Bonaparte created him first
+      prefect of his palace, and procured him for a wife the only daughter of a
+      rich Spanish banker. Rumour, however, says that Bonaparte was not quite
+      disinterested when he commanded and concluded this match, and that the
+      fortune of Madame Duroc has paid for the expensive supper of her husband
+      with Count de S&mdash;&mdash;-tz at St. Petersburg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though the Treaty of Luneville will probably soon be buried
+      in the rubbish of the Treaty of Amiens, the influence of their parents in
+      the Cabinet of St. Cloud is as great as ever: I say their parents, because
+      the crafty ex-Bishop, Talleyrand, foreseeing the short existence of these
+      bastard diplomatic acts, took care to compliment the innocent Joseph
+      Bonaparte with a share in the parentage, although they were his own
+      exclusive offspring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Bonaparte, who in 1797, from an attorney's clerk at Ajaccio, in
+      Corsica, was at once transformed into an Ambassador to the Court of Rome,
+      had hardly read a treaty, or seen a despatch written, before he was
+      himself to conclude the one, and to dictate the other. Had he not been
+      supported by able secretaries, Government would soon have been convinced
+      that it is as impossible to confer talents as it is easy to give places to
+      men to whom Nature has refused parts, and on whom a scanty or neglected
+      education has bestowed no improvements. Deep and reserved, like a true
+      Italian, but vain and ambitious, like his brothers, under the character of
+      a statesman, he has only been the political puppet of Talleyrand. If he
+      has sometimes been applauded upon the stages where he has been placed, he
+      is also exposed to the hooting and hisses of the suffering multitude;
+      while the Minister pockets undisturbed all the entrance-money, and
+      conceals his wickedness and art under the cloak of Joseph; which protects
+      him besides against the anger and fury of Napoleon. No negotiation of any
+      consequence is undertaken, no diplomatic arrangements are under
+      consideration, but Joseph is always consulted, and Napoleon informed of
+      the consultation. Hence none of Bonaparte's Ministers have suffered less
+      from his violence and resentment than Talleyrand, who, in the political
+      department, governs him who governs France and Italy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As early as 1800, Talleyrand determined to throw the odium of his own
+      outrages against the law of nations upon the brother of his master. Lucien
+      Bonaparte was that year sent Ambassador to Spain, but not sharing with the
+      Minister the large profits of his appointment, his diplomatic career was
+      but short. Joseph is as greedy and as ravenous as Lucien, but not so frank
+      or indiscreet. Whether he knew or not of Talleyrand's immense gain by the
+      pacification at Luneville in February, 1801, he did not neglect his own
+      individual interest. The day previous to the signature of this treaty, he
+      despatched a courier to the rich army contractor, Collot, acquainting him
+      in secret of the issue of the negotiation, and ordering him at the same
+      time to purchase six millions of livres&mdash;L 250,000&mdash;in the
+      stocks on his account. On Joseph's arrival at Paris, Collot sent him the
+      State bonds for the sum ordered, together with a very polite letter; but
+      though he waited on the grand pacificator several times afterwards, all
+      admittance was refused, until a douceur of one million of livres&mdash;nearly
+      L 42,000&mdash;of Collot's private profit opened the door. In return,
+      during the discussions between France and England in the summer of 1801,
+      and in the spring of 1802, Collot was continued Joseph's private agent,
+      and shared with his patron, within twelve months, a clear gain of
+      thirty-two millions of livres.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of the secret articles of the Treaty of Luneville gave Austria,
+      during the insurrection in Switzerland, in the autumn of 1802, an
+      opportunity and a right to make representations against the interference
+      of France; a circumstance which greatly displeased Bonaparte, who
+      reproached Talleyrand for his want of foresight, and of having been
+      outwitted by the Cabinet of Vienna. The Minister, on the very next day,
+      laid before his master the correspondence that had passed between him and
+      Joseph Bonaparte, during the negotiation concerning these secret articles,
+      which were found to have been entirely proposed and settled by Joseph; who
+      had been induced by his secretary and factotum (a creature of Talleyrand)
+      to adopt sentiments for which that Minister had been paid, according to
+      report, six hundred thousand livres&mdash;L25,000. Several other tricks
+      have in the same manner been played upon Joseph, who, notwithstanding, has
+      the modesty to consider himself (much to the advantage and satisfaction of
+      Talleyrand) the first statesman in Europe, and the good fortune to be
+      thought so by his brother Napoleon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When a rupture with England was apprehended, in the spring of 1803,
+      Talleyrand never signed a despatch that was not previously communicated
+      to, and approved by Joseph, before its contents were sanctioned by
+      Napoleon. This precaution chiefly continued him in place when Lord
+      Whitworth left this capital,&mdash;a departure that incensed Napoleon to
+      such a degree that he entirely forgot the dignity of his rank amidst his
+      generals, a becoming deportment to the members of the diplomatic corps,
+      and his duty to his mother and brothers, who all more or less experienced
+      the effects of his violent passions. He thus accosted Talleyrand, who
+      purposely arrived late at his circle:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well! the English Ambassador is gone; and we must again go to war. Were
+      my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers, I should despair
+      indeed of the issue of my contest with these insolent islanders. Many
+      believe that had I been more ably supported in my Cabinet, I should not
+      have been under the necessity of taking the field, as a rupture might have
+      been prevented."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Such, Citizen First Consul!" answered the trembling and bowing Minister,
+      "is not the opinion of the Counsellor of State, Citizen Joseph Bonaparte."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, then," said Napoleon, as recollecting himself, "England wishes for
+      war, and she shall suffer for it. This shall be a war of extermination,
+      depend upon it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The name of Joseph alone moderated Napoleon's fury, and changed its
+      object. It is with him what the harp of David was with Saul. Talleyrand
+      knows it, and is no loser by that knowledge. I must, however, in justice,
+      say that, had Bonaparte followed his Minister's advice, and suffered
+      himself to be entirely guided by his counsel, all hostilities with England
+      at that time might have been avoided; her Government would have been
+      lulled into security by the cession of Malta, and some commercial
+      regulations, and her future conquest, during a time of peace, have been
+      attempted upon plans duly organized, that might have ensured success. He
+      never ceased to repeat, "Citizen First Consul! some few years longer peace
+      with Great Britain, and the 'Te Deums' of modern Britons for the conquest
+      and possession of Malta, will be considered by their children as the
+      funeral hymns of their liberty and independence."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was upon this memorable occasion of Lord Whitworth's departure, that
+      Bonaparte is known to have betrayed the most outrageous acts of passion;
+      he rudely forced his mother from his closet, and forbade his own sisters
+      to approach his person; he confined Madame Bonaparte for several hours to
+      her chamber; he dismissed favourite generals; treated with ignominy
+      members of his Council of State; and towards his physician, secretaries,
+      and principal attendants, he committed unbecoming and disgraceful marks of
+      personal outrage. I have heard it affirmed that, though her husband, when
+      shutting her up in her dressing-room, put the key in his pocket, Madame
+      Napoleon found means to resent the ungallant behaviour of her spouse, with
+      the assistance of Madame Remusat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;No act of Bonaparte's government has occasioned so many, so
+      opposite, and so violent debates, among the remnants of revolutionary
+      factions comprising his Senate and Council of State, as the introduction
+      and execution of the religious concordat signed with the Pope. Joseph was
+      here again the ostensible negotiator, though he, on this as well as on
+      former occasions, concluded nothing that had not been prepared and
+      digested by Talleyrand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte does not in general pay much attention to the opinions of others
+      when they do not agree with his own views and interests, or coincide with
+      his plans of reform or innovation; but having in his public career
+      professed himself by turns an atheist and an infidel, the worshipper of
+      Christ and of Mahomet, he could not decently silence those who, after
+      deserting or denying the God of their forefathers and of their youth,
+      continued constant and firm in their apostasy. Of those who deliberated
+      concerning the restoration or exclusion of Christianity, and the
+      acceptance or rejection of the concordat, Fouche, Francois de Nantz,
+      Roederer, and Sieges were for the religion of Nature; Volney, Real,
+      Chaptal, Bourrienne, and Lucien Bonaparte for atheism; and Portalis,
+      Gregoire, Cambaceres, Lebrun, Talleyrand, Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte
+      for Christianity. Besides the sentiments of these confidential
+      counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
+      religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
+      counsellors,&mdash;all differing as much from one another as the members
+      of his own Privy Council.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing that
+      to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of the
+      priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ. She certainly is the
+      most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and of her
+      name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced Napoleon of
+      the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen centuries, had
+      preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations of republicans
+      and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very probable that her
+      representations would have been as ineffective as her piety or her
+      prayers. So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of Napoleon for the
+      Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the Pope and the
+      papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were laying waste and
+      ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both incorporated with his
+      new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his first acts of sovereignty,
+      in the name of the then sovereign people, was the confiscation of Church
+      lands and the sale of the estates of the clergy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
+      Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
+      intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
+      in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
+      of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes. The
+      former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
+      this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
+      its bosom and its doctrine. With capacity to figure as a country curate,
+      he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
+      though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
+      Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte's promise of
+      succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and expect
+      to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than himself.
+      It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of Pius VII. in
+      France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertake a journey that
+      has caused so much scandal among the truly faithful; and which, should
+      ever Austria regain its former supremacy in Italy, will send the present
+      Pope to end his days in a convent, and make the successors of St. Peter
+      what this Apostle was himself, a Bishop of Rome, and nothing more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bernier was a curate in La Vendee before the Revolution, and one of those
+      priests who lighted the torch of civil war in that unfortunate country,
+      under pretence of defending the throne of his King and the altars of his
+      God. He not only possessed great popularity among the lower classes, but
+      acquired so far the confidence of the Vendean chiefs that he was appointed
+      one of the supreme and directing Council of the Royalists and Chouans.
+      Even so late as the summer of 1799 he continued not only unsuspected, but
+      trusted by the insurgents in the Western departments. In the winter,
+      however, of the same year he had been gained over by Bonaparte's
+      emissaries, and was seen at his levies in the Tuileries. It is stated that
+      General Brune made him renounce his former principles, desert his former
+      companions, and betray to the then First Consul of the French Republic the
+      secrets of the friends of lawful monarchy, of the faithful subjects of
+      Louis XVIII. His perfidy has been rewarded with one hundred and fifty
+      thousand livres in ready money, with the see of Orleans, and with a
+      promise of a cardinal's hat. He has also, with the Cardinals Gonsalvi,
+      Caprara, Fesch, Cambaceres, and Mauri, Bonaparte's promise, and, of
+      course, the expectation of the Roman tiara. He was one of the prelates who
+      officiated at the late coronation, and is now confided in as a person who
+      has too far committed himself with his legitimate Prince, and whose past
+      treachery, therefore, answers for his future fidelity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This religious concordat of the 10th September, 1801, as well as all other
+      constitutional codes emating from revolutionary authorities, proscribes
+      even in protecting. The professors and protectors of the religion of
+      universal peace, benevolence, and forgiveness banish in this concordat
+      from France forever the Cardinals Rohan and Montmorency, and the Bishop of
+      Arras, whose dutiful attachment to their unfortunate Prince would, in
+      better times and in a more just and generous nation, have been recompensed
+      with distinctions, and honoured even by magnanimous foes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Madame Napoleon was informed by her husband of the necessity of
+      choosing her almoner and chaplain, and of attending regularly the Mass,
+      she first fell a-laughing, taking it merely for a joke; the serious and
+      severe looks, and the harsh and threatening expressions of the First
+      Consul soon, however, convinced her how much she was mistaken. To evince
+      her repentance, she on the very next day attended her mother-in-law to
+      church, who was highly edified by the sudden and religious turn of her
+      daughter, and did not fail to ascribe to the efficacious interference of
+      one of her favourite saints this conversion of a profane sinner. But
+      Napoleon was not the dupe of this church-going mummery of his wife, whom
+      he ordered his spies to watch; these were unfortunate enough to discover
+      that she went to the Mass more to fill her appointments with her lovers
+      than to pray to her Saviour; and that even by the side of her mother she
+      read billets-doux and love-letters when that pious lady supposed that she
+      read her prayers, because her eyes were fixed upon her breviary. Without
+      relating to any one this discovery of his Josephine's frailties, Napoleon,
+      after a violent connubial fracas and reprimand, and after a solitary
+      confinement of her for six days, gave immediate orders to have the chapels
+      of the Tuileries and of St. Cloud repaired; and until these were ready,
+      Cardinal Cambaceres and Bernier, by turns, said the Mass, in her private
+      apartments; where none but selected favourites or favoured courtiers were
+      admitted. Madame Napoleon now never neglects the Mass, but if not
+      accompanied by her husband is escorted by a guard of honour, among whom
+      she knows that he has several agents watching her motions and her very
+      looks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the month of June, 1803; I dined with Viscomte de Segur, and Joseph and
+      Lucien Bonaparte were among the guests. The latter jocosely remarked with
+      what facility the French Christians had suffered themselves to be hunted
+      in and out of their temples, according to the fanaticism or policy of
+      their rulers; which he adduced as a proof of the great progress of
+      philosophy and toleration in France. A young officer of the party,
+      Jacquemont, a relation of the former husband of the present Madame Lucien,
+      observed that he thought it rather an evidence of the indifference of the
+      French people to all religion; the consequence of the great havoc the
+      tenets of infidelity and of atheism had made among the flocks of the
+      faithful. This was again denied by Bonaparte's aide-de-camp, Savary, who
+      observed that, had this been the case, the First Consul (who certainly was
+      as well acquainted with the religious spirit of Frenchmen as anybody else)
+      would not have taken the trouble to conclude a religious concordat, nor
+      have been at the expense of providing for the clergy. To this assertion
+      Joseph nodded an assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the dinner was over, De Segur took me to a window, expressing his
+      uneasiness at what he called the imprudence of Jacquemont, who, he
+      apprehended, from Joseph's silence and manner, would not escape punishment
+      for having indirectly blamed both the restorer of religion and his
+      plenipotentiary. These apprehensions were justified. On the next day
+      Jacquemont received orders to join the colonial depot at Havre; but
+      refusing to obey, by giving in his resignation as a captain, he was
+      arrested, shut up in the Temple, and afterwards transported to Cayenne or
+      Madagascar. His relatives and friends are still ignorant whether he is
+      dead or alive, and what is or has been his place of exile. To a petition
+      presented by Jacquemont's sister, Madame de Veaux, Joseph answered that
+      "he never interfered with the acts of the haute police of his brother
+      Napoleon's Government, being well convinced both of its justice and
+      moderation."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER IV.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;That Bonaparte had, as far back as February, 1803 (when the
+      King of Prussia proposed to Louis XVIII. the formal renunciation of his
+      hereditary rights in favour of the First Consul), determined to assume the
+      rank and title, with the power of a Sovereign, nobody can doubt. Had it
+      not been for the war with England, he would, in the spring of that year,
+      or twelve months earlier, have proclaimed himself Emperor of the French,
+      and probably would have been acknowledged as such by all other Princes. To
+      a man so vain and so impatient, so accustomed to command and to
+      intimidate, this suspension of his favourite plan was a considerable
+      disappointment, and not a little increased his bitter and irreconcilable
+      hatred of Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, as well as in foreign countries, the multitude pay homage only to
+      Napoleon's uninterrupted prosperity; without penetrating or considering
+      whether it be the consequence of chance or of well-digested plans; whether
+      he owes his successes to his own merit or to a blind fortune. He asserted
+      in his speech to the constitutional authorities, immediately after
+      hostilities had commenced with England, that the war would be of short
+      duration, and he firmly believed what he said. Had he by his gunboats, or
+      by his intrigues or threats, been enabled to extort a second edition of
+      the Peace of Amiens, after a warfare of some few months, all mouths would
+      have been ready to exclaim, "Oh, the illustrious warrior! Oh, the profound
+      politician!" Now, after three ineffectual campaigns on the coast, when the
+      extravagance and ambition of our Government have extended the contagion of
+      war over the Continent; when both our direct offers of peace, and the
+      negotiations and mediations of our allies, have been declined by, or
+      proved unavailing with, the Cabinet of St. James, the inconsistency, the
+      ignorance, and the littleness of the fortunate great man seem to be not
+      more remembered than the outrages and encroachments that have provoked
+      Austria and Russia to take the field. Should he continue victorious, and
+      be in a position to dictate another Peace of Luneville, which probably
+      would be followed by another pacific overture to or from England, mankind
+      will again be ready to call out, "Oh, the illustrious warrior! Oh, the
+      profound politician! He foresaw, in his wisdom, that a Continental war was
+      necessary to terrify or to subdue his maritime foe; that a peace with
+      England could be obtained only in Germany; and that this war must be
+      excited by extending the power of France on the other side of the Alps.
+      Hence his coronation as a King of Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma
+      and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his
+      brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of
+      sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding
+      fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans and
+      well-organized designs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only rogues can disseminate and fools believe that the disgrace of Moreau,
+      and the execution of the Duc d'Enghien, of Pichegru, and Georges, were
+      necessary as footsteps to Bonaparte's Imperial throne; and that without
+      the treachery of Mehee de la Touche, and the conspiracy he pretended to
+      have discovered, France would still have been ruled by a First Consul. It
+      is indeed true, that this plot is to be counted (as the imbecility of
+      Melas, which lost the battle of Marengo) among those accidents presenting
+      themselves apropos to serve the favourite of fortune in his ambitious
+      views; but without it, he would equally have been hailed an Emperor of the
+      French in May, 1804. When he came from the coast, in the preceding winter,
+      and was convinced of the impossibility of making any impression on the
+      British Islands with his flotilla, he convoked his confidential Senators,
+      who then, with Talleyrand, settled the Senatus Consultum which appeared
+      five months afterwards. Mehee's correspondence with Mr. Drake was then
+      known to him; but he and the Minister of Police were both unacquainted
+      with the residence and arrival of Pichegru and Georges in France, and of
+      their connection with Moreau; the particulars of which were first
+      disclosed to them in the February following, when Bonaparte had been
+      absent from his army of England six weeks. The assumption of the Imperial
+      dignity procured him another decent opportunity of offering his
+      olive-branch to those who had caused his laurels to wither, and by whom,
+      notwithstanding his abuse, calumnies, and menaces, he would have been more
+      proud to be saluted Emperor than by all the nations upon the Continent.
+      His vanity, interest, and policy, all required this last degree of
+      supremacy and elevation at that period.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bonaparte had so well penetrated the weak side of Moreau's character that,
+      although he could not avoid doing justice to this general's military
+      talents and exploits, he neither esteemed him as a citizen nor dreaded him
+      as a rival. Moreau possessed great popularity; but so did Dumourier and
+      Pichegru before him: and yet neither of them had found adherents enough to
+      shake those republican governments with which they avowed themselves
+      openly discontented, and against which they secretly plotted. I heard
+      Talleyrand say, at Madame de Montlausier's, in the presence of fifty
+      persons, "Napoleon Bonaparte had never anything to apprehend from General
+      Moreau, and from his popularity, even at the head of an army. Dumourier,
+      too, was at the head of an army when he revolted against the National
+      Convention; but had he not saved himself by flight his own troops would
+      have delivered him up to be punished as a traitor. Moreau, and his
+      popularity, could only be dangerous to the Bonaparte dynasty were he to
+      survive Napoleon, had not this Emperor wisely averted this danger." From
+      this official declaration of Napoleon's confidential Minister, in a
+      society of known anti-imperialists, I draw the conclusion that Moreau will
+      never more, during the present reign, return to France. How very feeble,
+      and how badly advised must this general have been, when, after his
+      condemnation to two years' imprisonment, he accepted a perpetual exile,
+      and renounced all hopes of ever again entering his own country. In the
+      Temple, or in any other prison, if he had submitted to the sentence
+      pronounced against him, he would have caused Bonaparte more uneasiness
+      than when at liberty, and been more a point of rally to his adherents and
+      friends than when at his palace of Grosbois, because compassion and pity
+      must have invigorated and sharpened their feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If report be true, however, he did not voluntarily exchange imprisonment
+      for exile; racks were shown him; and by the act of banishment was placed a
+      poisonous draught. This report gains considerable credit when it is
+      remembered that, immediately after his condemnation, Moreau furnished his
+      apartments in the Temple in a handsome manner, so as to be lodged well, if
+      not comfortably, with his wife and child, whom, it is said, he was not
+      permitted to see before he had accepted Bonaparte's proposal of
+      transportation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be objected to this supposition that the man in power, who did not
+      care about the barefaced murder of the Duc d'Enghien, and the secret
+      destruction of Pichegru, could neither much hesitate, nor be very
+      conscientious about adding Moreau to the number of his victims. True, but
+      the assassin in authority is also generally a politician. The untimely end
+      of the Duc d'Enghien and of Pichegru was certainly lamented and deplored
+      by the great majority of the French people; but though they had many who
+      pitied their fate, but few had any relative interest to avenge it; whilst
+      in the assassination of Moreau, every general, every officer, and every
+      soldier of his former army, might have read the destiny reserved for
+      himself by that chieftain, who did not conceal his preference of those who
+      had fought under him in Italy and Egypt, and his mistrust and jealousy of
+      those who had vanquished under Moreau in Germany; numbers of whom had
+      already perished at St. Domingo, or in the other colonies, or were
+      dispersed in separate and distant garrisons of the mother country. It has
+      been calculated that of eighty-four generals who made, under Moreau, the
+      campaign of 1800, and who survived the Peace of Lundville, sixteen had
+      been killed or died at St. Domingo, four at Guadeloupe, ten in Cayenne,
+      nine at Ile de France, and eleven at l'Ile Reunion and in Madagascar. The
+      mortality among the officers and men has been in proportion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An anecdote is related of Pichegru, which does honour to the memory of
+      that unfortunate general. Fouche paid him a visit in prison the day before
+      his death, and offered him "Bonaparte's commission as a Field-marshal, and
+      a diploma as a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, provided he would
+      turn informer against Moreau, of whose treachery against himself in 1797
+      he was reminded. On the other hand, he was informed that, in consequence
+      of his former denials, if he persisted in his refractory conduct, he
+      should never more appear before any judge, but that the affairs of State
+      and the safety of the country required that he should be privately
+      despatched in his gaol."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So," answered this virtuous and indignant warrior, "you will spare my
+      life only upon condition that I prove myself unworthy to live. As this is
+      the case, my choice is made without hesitation; I am prepared to become
+      your victim, but I will never be numbered among your accomplices. Call in
+      your executioners; I am ready to die as I have lived, a man of honour, and
+      an irreproachable citizen."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within twenty-four hours after this answer, Pichegru was no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the Duc d'Enghien was shot on the night of the 21st of March, 1804,
+      in the wood or in the ditch of the castle at Vincennes, is admitted even
+      by Government; but who really were his assassins is still unknown. Some
+      assert that he was shot by the grenadiers of Bonaparte's Italian guard;
+      others say, by a detachment of the Gendarmes d'Elite; and others again,
+      that the men of both these corps refused to fire, and that General Murat,
+      hearing the troops murmur, and fearing their mutiny, was himself the
+      executioner of this young and innocent Prince of the House of Bourbon, by
+      riding up to him and blowing out his brains with a pistol. Certain it is
+      that Murat was the first, and Louis Bonaparte the second in command, on
+      this dreadful occasion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER V.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Thanks to Talleyrand's political emigration, our Government
+      has never been in ignorance of the characters and foibles of the leading
+      members among the emigrants in England. Otto, however, finished their
+      picture, but added, some new groups to those delineated by his
+      predecessor. It was according to his plan that the expedition of Mehee de
+      la Touche was undertaken, and it was in following his instructions that
+      the campaign of this traitor succeeded so well in Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the Ministry of Vergennes, of Montmorin, and of Delessart, Mehee had
+      been employed as a spy in Russia, Sweden, and Poland, and acquitted
+      himself perfectly to the satisfaction of his masters. By some accident or
+      other, Delessart discovered, however, in December, 1791, that he had,
+      while pocketing the money of the Cabinet of Versailles, sold its secrets
+      to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg. He, of course, was no longer trusted as
+      a spy, and therefore turned a Jacobin, and announced himself to Brissot as
+      a persecuted patriot. All the calumnies against this Minister in Brissot's
+      daily paper, Le Patriote Francois, during January, February, and March,
+      1792, were the productions of Mehee's malicious heart and able pen. Even
+      after they had sent Delessart a State prisoner to Orleans, his inveteracy
+      continued, and in September the same year he went to Versailles to enjoy
+      the sight of the murder of his former master. Some go so far as to say
+      that the assassins were headed by this monster, who aggravated cruelty by
+      insult, and informed the dying Minister of the hands that stabbed him, and
+      to whom he was indebted for a premature death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To these and other infamous and barbarous deeds, Talleyrand was not a
+      stranger when he made Mehee his secret agent, and entrusted him with the
+      mission to England. He took, therefore, such steps that neither his
+      confidence could be betrayed, nor his money squandered. Mehee had
+      instructions how to proceed in Great Britain, but he was ignorant of the
+      object Government had in view by his mission; and though large sums were
+      promised if successful, and if he gave satisfaction by his zeal and
+      discretion, the money advanced him was a mere trifle, and barely
+      sufficient to keep him from want. He was, therefore, really distressed,
+      when he fixed upon some necessitous and greedy emigrants for his
+      instruments to play on the credulity of the English Ministers in some of
+      their unguarded moments. Their generosity in forbearing to avenge upon the
+      deluded French exiles the slur attempted to be thrown upon their official
+      capacity, and the ridicule intended to be cast on their private
+      characters, has been much approved and admired here by all liberal-minded
+      persons; but it has also much disappointed Bonaparte and Talleyrand, who
+      expected to see these emigrants driven from the only asylum which
+      hospitality has not refused to their misfortunes and misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mehee had been promised by Talleyrand double the amount of the sums which
+      he could swindle from your Government; but though he did more mischief to
+      your country than was expected in this, and though he proved that he had
+      pocketed upwards of ten thousand English guineas, the wages of his infamy,
+      when he hinted about the recompense he expected here, Durant, Talleyrand's
+      chef du bureau, advised him, as a friend, not to remind the Minister of
+      his presence in France, as Bonaparte never pardoned a Septembrizer, and
+      the English guineas he possessed might be claimed and seized as national
+      property, to compensate some of the sufferers by the unprovoked war with
+      England. In vain did he address himself to his fellow labourer in
+      revolutionary plots, the Counsellor of State, Real, who had been the
+      intermedium between him and Talleyrand, when he was first enlisted among
+      the secret agents; instead of receiving money he heard threats; and,
+      therefore, with as good grace as he could, he made the best of his
+      disappointment; he sported a carriage, kept a mistress, went to
+      gambling-houses, and is now in a fair way to be reduced to the status quo
+      before his brilliant exploits in Great Britain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Real, besides the place of a Counsellor of State, occupies also the office
+      of a director of the internal police. Having some difference with my
+      landlord, I was summoned to appear before him at the prefecture of the
+      police. My friend, M. de Sab&mdash;&mdash;-r, formerly a counsellor of the
+      Parliament at Rouen, happened to be with me when the summons was
+      delivered, and offered to accompany me, being acquainted with Real. Though
+      thirty persons were waiting in the antechamber at our arrival, no sooner
+      was my friend's name announced than we were admitted, and I obtained not
+      only more justice than I expected, or dared to claim, but an invitation to
+      Madame Real's tea-party the same evening. This justice and this politeness
+      surprised me, until my friend showed me an act of forgery in his
+      possession, committed by Real in 1788, when an advocate of the Parliament,
+      and for which the humanity of my friend alone prevented him from being
+      struck off the rolls, and otherwise punished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I conceived my usual societies and coteries could not approve my
+      attendance at the house of such a personage, I was intent upon sending an
+      apology to Madame Real. My friend, however, assured me that I should meet
+      in her salon persons of all classes and of all ranks, and many I little
+      expected to see associating together. I went late, and found the assembly
+      very numerous; at the upper part of the hall were seated Princesses Joseph
+      and Louis Bonaparte, with Madame Fouche, Madame Roederer, the cidevant
+      Duchesse de Fleury, and Marquise de Clermont. They were conversing with M.
+      Mathew de Montmorency, the contractor (a ci-devant lackey) Collot, the
+      ci-devant Duc de Fitz-James, and the legislator Martin, a ci-devant
+      porter: several groups in the several apartments were composed of a
+      similar heterogeneous mixture of ci-devant nobles and ci-devant valets, of
+      ci-devant Princesses, Marchionesses, Countesses and Baronesses, and of
+      ci-devant chambermaids, mistresses and poissardes. Round a gambling-table,
+      by the side of the ci-devant Bishop of Autun, Talleyrand, sat Madame
+      Hounguenin, whose husband, a ci-devant shoeblack, has, by the purchase of
+      national property, made a fortune of nine millions of livres&mdash;L375,000.
+      Opposite them were seated the ci-devant Prince de Chalais, and the present
+      Prince Cambaceres with the ci-devant Comtesse de Beauvais, and Madame
+      Fauve, the daughter of a fishwoman, and the wife of a tribune, a ci-devant
+      barber. In another room, the Bavarian Minister Cetto was conferring with
+      the spy Mehee de la Touche; but observed at a distance by Fouche's
+      secretary, Desmarets, the son of a tailor at Fontainebleau, and for years
+      a known spy. When I was just going to retire, the handsome Madame Gillot,
+      and her sister, Madame de Soubray, joined me. You have perhaps known them
+      in England, where, before their marriage, they resided for five years with
+      their parents, the Marquis and Marquise de Courtin; and were often admired
+      by the loungers in Bond Street. The one married for money, Gillot, a
+      ci-devant drummer in the French Guard, but who, since the Revolution, has,
+      as a general; made a large fortune; and the other united herself to a
+      ci-devant Abbe, from love; but both are now divorced from their husbands,
+      who passed them without any notice while they were chatting with me. I was
+      handing Madame Gillot to her carriage, when, from the staircase, Madame de
+      Soubray called to us not to quit her, as she was pursued by a man whom she
+      detested, and wished to avoid. We had hardly turned round, when Mehee
+      offered her his arm, and she exclaimed with indignation, "How dare you,
+      infamous wretch, approach me, when I have forbidden you ever to speak to
+      me? Had you been reduced to become a highwayman, or a housebreaker, I
+      might have pitied your infamy; but a spy is a villain who aggravates guilt
+      by cowardice and baseness, and can inspire no noble soul with any other
+      sentiment but abhorrence, and the most sovereign contempt." Without being
+      disconcerted, Mehee silently returned to the company, amidst bursts of
+      laughter from fifty servants, and as many masters, waiting for their
+      carriages. M. de Cetto was among the latter, but, though we all fixed our
+      eyes steadfastly upon him, no alteration could be seen on his diplomatic
+      countenance: his face must surely be made of brass or his heart of marble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VI.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;The day on which Madame Napoleon Bonaparte was elected an
+      Empress of the French, by the constitutional authorities of her husband's
+      Empire, was, contradictory as it may seem, one of the most uncomfortable
+      in her life. After the show and ceremony of the audience and of the
+      drawing-room were over, she passed it entirely in tears, in her library,
+      where her husband shut her up and confined her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The discipline of the Court of St. Cloud is as singular as its composition
+      is unique. It is, by the regulation of Napoleon, entirely military. From
+      the Empress to her lowest chambermaid, from the Emperor's first
+      aide-de-camp down to his youngest page, any slight offence or negligence
+      is punished with confinement, either public or private. In the former case
+      the culprits are shut up in their own apartments, but in the latter they
+      are ordered into one of the small rooms, constructed in the dark galleries
+      at the Tuileries and St. Cloud, near the kitchens, where they are guarded
+      day and night by sentries, who answer for their persons, and that nobody
+      visits them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, on the 28th of March, 1804, the Senate had determined on offering
+      Bonaparte the Imperial dignity, he immediately gave his wife full powers,
+      with order to form her household of persons who, from birth and from their
+      principles, might be worthy, and could be trusted to encompass the
+      Imperial couple. She consulted Madame Remusat, who, in her turn, consulted
+      her friend De Segur, who also consulted his bonne amie, Madame de
+      Montbrune. This lady determined that if Bonaparte and his wife were
+      desirous to be served, or waited on, by persons above them by ancestry and
+      honour, they should pay liberally for such sacrifices. She was not
+      therefore idle, but wishing to profit herself by the pride of upstart
+      vanity, she had at first merely reconnoitred the ground, or made distant
+      overtures to those families of the ancient French nobility who had been
+      ruined by the Revolution, and whose minds she expected to have found on a
+      level with their circumstances. These, however, either suspecting her
+      intent and her views, or preferring honest poverty to degrading and
+      disgraceful splendour, had started objections which she was not prepared
+      to encounter. Thus the time passed away; and when, on the 18th of the
+      following May, the Senate proclaimed Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the
+      French, not a Chamberlain was ready to attend him, nor a Maid of Honour to
+      wait on his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the morning of the 20th May, the day fixed for the constitutional
+      republican authorities to present their homage as subjects, Napoleon asked
+      his Josephine who were the persons, of both sexes, she had engaged,
+      according to his carte blanche given her, as necessary and as unavoidable
+      decorations of the drawing-room of an Emperor and Empress, as thrones and
+      as canopies of State. She referred him to Madame Remusat, who, though but
+      half-dressed, was instantly ordered to appear before him. This lady avowed
+      that his grand master of the ceremonies, De Segur, had been entrusted by
+      her with the whole arrangement, but that she feared that he had not yet
+      been able to complete the full establishment of the Imperial Court. The
+      aide-de-camp Rapp was then despatched after De Segur, who, as usual,
+      presented himself smiling and cringing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Give me the list," said Napoleon, "of the ladies and gentlemen you have
+      no doubt engaged for our household."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "May it please Your Majesty," answered De Segur, trembling with fear, "I
+      humbly supposed that they were not requisite before the day of Your
+      Majesty's coronation."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You supposed!" retorted Napoleon. "How dare you suppose differently from
+      our commands? Is the Emperor of the Great Nation not to be encompassed
+      with a more numerous retinue, or with more lustre, than a First Consul? Do
+      you not see the immense difference between the Sovereign Monarch of an
+      Empire, and the citizen chief magistrate of a commonwealth? Are there not
+      starving nobles in my empire enough to furnish all the Courts in Europe
+      with attendants, courtiers, and valets? Do you not believe that with a
+      nod, with a single nod, I might have them all prostrated before my throne?
+      What can, then, have occasioned this impertinent delay?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Sire!" answered De Segur, "it is not the want of numbers, but the
+      difficulty of the choice among them. I will never recommend a single
+      individual upon whom I cannot depend; or who, on some future day, may
+      expose me to the greatest of all evils, the displeasure of my Prince."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But," continued Napoleon, "what is to be done to-day that I may augment
+      the number of my suite, and by it impose upon the gaping multitude and the
+      attending deputations?"&mdash;"Command," said De Segur, "all the officers
+      of Your Majesty's staff, and of the staff of the Governor of Paris,
+      General Murat, to surround Your Majesty's sacred person, and order them to
+      accoutre themselves in the most shining and splendid manner possible. The
+      presence of so many military men will also, in a political point of view,
+      be useful. It will lessen the pretensions of the constituted authorities,
+      by telling them indirectly, 'It is not to your Senatus Consultum, to your
+      decrees, or to your votes, that I am indebted for my present Sovereignty;
+      I owe it exclusively to my own merit and valour, and to the valour of my
+      brave officers and men, to whose arms I trust more than to your
+      counsels.'"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This advice obtained Napoleon's entire approbation, and was followed. De
+      Segur was permitted to retire, but when Madame Remusat made a curtsey also
+      to leave the room, she was stopped with his terrible 'aux arrets' and left
+      under the care and responsibility of his aide-de-camp, Lebrun, who saw her
+      safe into her room, at the door of which he placed two grenadiers.
+      Napoleon then went out, ordering his wife, at her peril, to be in time,
+      ready and brilliantly dressed, for the drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dreading the consequences of her husband's wrath, Madame Napoleon was not
+      only punctual, but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and
+      ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her beauty,
+      honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity. She thought that even
+      in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation. When all the
+      troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when Senators,
+      legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a model of
+      female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied him in
+      silence through six different apartments before he came to her library,
+      where he surlily ordered her to enter and to remain until further orders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What have I done, Sire! to deserve such treatment?" exclaimed Josephine,
+      trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "If," answered Napoleon, "Madame Remusat, your favourite, has made a fool
+      of you, this is only to teach you that you shall not make a fool of me:
+      Had not De Segur fortunately for him&mdash;had the ingenuity to extricate
+      us from the dilemma into which my confidence and dependence on you had
+      brought me, I should have made a fine figure indeed on the first day of my
+      emperorship. Have patience, Madame; you have plenty of books to divert
+      you, but you must remain where you are until I am inclined to release
+      you." So saying, Napoleon locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was near two o'clock in the afternoon when she was thus shut up.
+      Remembering the recent flattery of her courtiers, and comparing it with
+      the unfeeling treatment of her husband, she found herself so much the more
+      unfortunate, as the expressions of the former were regarded by her as
+      praise due to her merit, while the unkindness of the latter was
+      unavailingly resented as the undeserved oppression of a capricious despot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Business, or perhaps malice, made Napoleon forget to send her any dinner;
+      and when, at eight o'clock, his brothers and sisters came, according to
+      invitation, to take tea, he said coldly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Apropos, I forgot it. My wife has not dined yet; she is busy, I suppose,
+      in her philosophical meditations in her study."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Louis Bonaparte, her daughter, flew directly towards the study, and
+      her mother could scarcely, for her tears, inform her that&mdash;she was a
+      prisoner, and that her husband was her gaoler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, Sire!" said Madame Louis, returning, "even this remarkable day is a
+      day of mourning for my poor mother!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "She deserves worse," answered Napoleon, "but, for your sake, she shall be
+      released; here is the key, let her out."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Madame Napoleon was, however, not in a situation to wish to appear before
+      her envious brothers and sisters-in-law. Her eyes were so swollen with
+      crying that she could hardly see; and her tears had stained those Imperial
+      robes which the unthinking and inconsiderate no doubt believed a certain
+      preservative against sorrow and affliction. At nine o'clock, however,
+      another aide-de-camp of her husband presented himself, and gave her the
+      choice either to accompany him back to the study or to join the family
+      party of the Bonapartes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In deploring her mother's situation, Madame Louis Bonaparte informed her
+      former governess, Madame Cam&mdash;-n, of these particulars, which I heard
+      her relate at Madame de M&mdash;&mdash;r's, almost verbatim as I report
+      them to you. Such, and other scenes, nearly of the same description, are
+      neither rare nor singular, in the most singular Court that ever existed in
+      civilized Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      LETTER VII.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      PARIS, August, 1805.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      MY LORD:&mdash;Though Government suffer a religious, or, rather,
+      anti-religious liberty of the Press, the authors who libel or ridicule the
+      Christian, particularly the Roman Catholic, religion, are excluded from
+      all prospect of advancement, or if in place, are not trusted or liked.
+      Cardinal Caprara, the nuncio of the Pope, proposed last year, in a long
+      memorial, the same severe restrictions on the discussions or publications
+      in religious matters as were already ordered in those concerning politics.
+      But both Bonaparte and his Minister in the affairs of the Church,
+      Portalis, refused the introduction of what they called a tyranny on the
+      conscience. Caprara then addressed himself to the ex-Bishop Talleyrand,
+      who, on this occasion, was more explicit than he generally is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bonaparte," said he, "rules not only over a fickle, but a gossiping
+      (bavard) people, whom he has prudently forbidden all conversation and
+      writing concerning government of the State. They would soon (accustomed as
+      they are, since the Revolution, to verbal and written debates) be tired of
+      talking about fine weather or about the opera. To occupy them and their
+      attention, some ample subject of diversion was necessary, and religion was
+      surrendered to them at discretion; because, enlightened as the world now
+      is, even athiests or Christian fanatics can do but little harm to society.
+      They may spend rivers of ink, but they will be unable to shed a drop of
+      blood."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "True," answered the Cardinal, "but only to a certain degree. The
+      licentiousness of the Press, with regard to religious matters, does it not
+      also furnish infidelity with new arms to injure the faith? And have not
+      the horrors from which France has just escaped proved the danger and evil
+      consequences of irreligion, and the necessity of encouraging and
+      protecting Christianity? By the recall of the clergy, and by the religious
+      concordat, Bonaparte has shown himself convinced of this truth."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So he is," interrupted Talleyrand; "but he abhors intoleration and
+      persecution" (not in politics). "I shall, however, to please Your
+      Eminence, lay the particulars of your conversation before him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some time afterwards, when Talleyrand and Bonaparte must have agreed about
+      some new measure to indirectly chastise impious writers, the Senators
+      Garat, Jaucourt, Roederer, and Demeunier, four of the members of the
+      senatorial commission of the liberty of the Press, were sent for, and
+      remained closeted with Napoleon, his Minister Portalis, and Cardinal
+      Caprara for two hours. What was determined on this occasion has not
+      transpired, as even the Cardinal, who is not the most discreet person when
+      provoked, and his religious zeal gets the better of his political
+      prudence, has remained silent, though seemingly contented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two rather insignificant authors, of the name of Varennes and Beaujou, who
+      published some scandalous libels on Christianity, have since been taken
+      up, and after some months' imprisonment in the Temple been condemned to
+      transportation to Cayenne for life,&mdash;not as infidels or atheists, but
+      as conspirators against the State, in consequence of some unguarded
+      expressions which prejudice or ill-will alone would judge connected with
+      politics. Nothing is now permitted to be printed against religion but with
+      the author's name; but on affixing his name, he may abuse the worship and
+      Gospel as much as he pleases. Since the example of severity alluded to
+      above, however, this practice is on the decline. Even Pigault-Lebrun, a
+      popular but immoral novel writer, narrowly escaped lately a trip to
+      Cayenne for one of his blasphemous publications, and owes to the
+      protection of Madame Murat exclusively that he was not sent to keep
+      Varennes and Beaujou company. Some years ago, when Madame Murat was
+      neither so great nor so rich as at present, he presented her with a copy
+      of his works, and she had been unfashionable enough not only to remember
+      the compliment, but wished to return it by nominating him her private
+      secretary; which, however, the veto of Napoleon prevented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Napoleon Bonaparte's religious sentiments, opinions are not divided in
+      France. The influence over him of the petty, superstitious Cardinal
+      Caprara is, therefore, inexplicable. This prelate has forced from him
+      assent to transactions which had been refused both to his mother and his
+      brother Joseph, who now often employ the Cardinal with success, where they
+      either dare not or will not show themselves. It is true His Eminence is
+      not easily rebuked, but returns to the charge unabashed by new repulses;
+      and be obtains by teasing more than by persuasion; but a man by whom
+      Bonaparte suffers, himself to be teased with impunity is no insignificant
+      favourite, particularly when, like this Cardinal, he unites cunning with
+      devotion, craft with superstition; and is as accessible to corruption as
+      tormented by ambition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As most ecclesiastical promotions passed through his pure and
+      disinterested hands, Madame Napoleon, Talleyrand, and Portalis, who also
+      wanted some douceurs for their extraordinary expenses, united together
+      last spring to remove him from France. Napoleon was cajoled to nominate
+      him a grand almoner of the Kingdom of Italy, and the Cardinal set out for
+      Milan. He was, however, artful enough to convince his Sovereign of the
+      propriety of having his grand almoner by his side; and he is, therefore,
+      obliged to this intrigue of his enemies that he now disposes of the
+      benefices in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as those of the French Empire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the Pope's residence in this capital, His Holiness often made use
+      of Cardinal Caprara in his secret negotiations with Bonaparte; and
+      whatever advantages were obtained by the Roman Pontiff for the Gallican
+      Church His Eminence almost extorted; for he never desisted, where his
+      interest or pride were concerned, till he had succeeded. It is said that
+      one day last January, after having been for hours exceedingly teasing and
+      troublesome, Bonaparte lost his patience, and was going to treat His
+      Eminence as he frequently does his relatives, his Ministers, and
+      counsellors,&mdash;that is to say, to kick him from his presence; but
+      suddenly recollecting himself, he said: "Cardinal, remain here in my
+      closet until my return, when I shall have more time to listen to what you
+      have to relate." It was at ten o'clock in the morning, and a day of great
+      military audience and grand review. In going out he put the key in his
+      pocket, and told the guards in his antechamber to pay no attention if they
+      should hear any noise in his closet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dark before the review was over, and Bonaparte had a large party to
+      dinner. When his guests retired, he went into his wife's drawing-room,
+      where one of the Pope's chamberlains waited on him with the information
+      that His Holiness was much alarmed about the safety of Cardinal Caprara,
+      of whom no account could be obtained, even with the assistance of the
+      police, to whom application had been made, since His Eminence had so
+      suddenly disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh! how absent I am," answered Napoleon, as with surprise; "I entirely
+      forgot that I left the Cardinal in my closet this morning. I will go
+      myself and make an apology for my blunder."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Eminence, quite exhausted, was found fast asleep; but no sooner was he
+      a little recovered than he interrupted Bonaparte's affected apology with
+      the repetition of the demand he had made in the morning; and so well was
+      Napoleon pleased with him, for neglecting his personal inconvenience only
+      to occupy himself with the affairs of his Sovereign, that he consented to
+      what was asked, and in laying his hand upon the shoulders of the prelate,
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Faithful Minister! were every Prince as well served as your Sovereign is
+      by you, many evils might be prevented, and much good effected."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same evening Duroc brought him, as a present, a snuffbox with
+      Bonaparte's portrait, set round with diamonds, worth one thousand louis
+      d'or. The adventures of this day certainly did not lessen His Eminence in
+      the favour of Napoleon or of Pius VII.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Last November, some not entirely unknown persons intended to amuse
+      themselves at the Cardinal's expense. At seven o'clock one evening, a
+      young Abbe presented himself at the Cardinal's house, Hotel de Montmorin,
+      Rue Plumet, as by appointment of His Eminence, and was, by his secretary,
+      ushered into the study and asked to wait there. Hardly half an hour
+      afterwards, two persons, pretending to be agents of the police, arrived
+      just as the Cardinal's carriage had stopped. They informed him that the
+      woman introduced into his house in the dress of an Abby was connected with
+      a gang of thieves and housebreakers, and demanded his permission to arrest
+      her. He protested that, except the wife of his porter, no woman in any
+      dress whatever could be in his house, and that, to convince themselves,
+      they were very welcome to accompany his valet-de-chambre into every room
+      they wished to see. To the great surprise of his servant, a very pretty
+      girl was found in the bed of His Eminence's bed-chamber, which joined his
+      study, who, though the pretended police agents insisted on her getting up,
+      refused, under pretence that she was there waiting for her 'bon ami', the
+      Cardinal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p078" id="p078"></a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+      <img alt="p078.jpg (84K)" src="images/p078.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+      <p>
+        His Eminence was no sooner told of this than he shut the gate of his
+        house, after sending his secretary to the commissary of police of the
+        section. In the meantime, both the police agents and the girl entreated
+        him to let them out, as the whole was merely a badinage; but he remained
+        inflexible, and they were all three carried by the real police
+        commissary to prison.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Upon a complaint made by His Eminence to Bonaparte, the Police Minister,
+        Fouche, received orders to have those who had dared thus to violate the
+        sacred character of the representative of the Holy Pontiff immediately,
+        and without further ceremony, transported to Cayenne. The Cardinal
+        demanded, and obtained, a process verbal of what had occurred, and of
+        the sentence on the culprits, to be laid before his Sovereign. As Eugene
+        de Beauharnais interested himself so much for the individuals involved
+        in this affair as both to implore Bonaparte's pardon and the Cardinal's
+        interference for them, many were inclined to believe that he was in the
+        secret, if not the contriver of this unfortunate joke. This supposition
+        gained credit when, after all his endeavours to save them proved vain,
+        he sent them seventy-two livres L 3,000&mdash;to Rochefort, that they
+        might, on their arrival at Cayenne, be able to buy a plantation. He
+        procured them also letters to the Governor, Victor Hughes, recommending
+        that they should be treated differently from other transported persons.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER VIII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;I was particularly attentive in observing the
+        countenances and demeanour of the company at the last levee which Madame
+        Napoleon Bonaparte held, previous to her departure with her husband to
+        meet the Pope at Fontainebleau. I had heard from good authority that "to
+        those whose propensities were known, Duroc's information that the
+        Empress was visible was accompanied with a kind of admonitory or courtly
+        hint, that the strictest decency in dress and manners, and a
+        conversation chaste, and rather of an unusually modest turn, would be
+        highly agreeable to their Sovereigns, in consideration of the solemn
+        occasion of a Sovereign Pontiff's arrival in France,&mdash;an occurrence
+        that had not happened for centuries, and probably would not happen for
+        centuries to come." I went early, and was well rewarded for my
+        punctuality.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        There came the Senator Fouche, handing his amiable and chaste spouse,
+        walking with as much gravity as formerly, when a friar, he marched in a
+        procession. Then presented themselves the Senators Sieyes and Roederer,
+        with an air as composed as if the former had still been an Abbe and the
+        confessor of the latter. Next came Madame Murat, whom three hours before
+        I had seen in the Bois de Boulogne in all the disgusting display of
+        fashionable nakedness, now clothed and covered to her chin. She was
+        followed by the pious Madame Le Clerc, now Princesse Borghese, who was
+        sighing deeply and loudly. After her came limping the godly Talleyrand,
+        dragging his pure moiety by his side, both with downcast and edifying
+        looks. The Christian patriots, Gravina and Lima, Dreyer and Beust,
+        Dalberg and Cetto, Malsburgh and Pappenheim, with the Catholic
+        Schimmelpenninck and Mohammed Said Halel Effendi,&mdash;all presented
+        themselves as penitent sinners imploring absolutions, after undergoing
+        mortifications.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But it would become tedious and merely a repetition, were I to depict
+        separately the figures and characters of all the personages at this
+        politico-comical masquerade. Their conversation was, however, more
+        uniform, more contemptible, and more laughable, than their accoutrements
+        and grimaces were ridiculous. To judge from what they said, they
+        belonged no longer to this world; all their thoughts were in heaven, and
+        they considered themselves either on the borders of eternity or on the
+        eve of the day of the Last Judgment. The truly devout Madame Napoleon
+        spoke with rapture of martyrs and miracles, of the Mass and of the
+        vespers, of Agnuses and relics of Christ her Saviour, and of Pius VII.,
+        His vicar. Had not her enthusiasm been interrupted by the enthusiastic
+        commentaries of her mother-in-law, I saw every mouth open ready to cry
+        out, as soon as she had finished, "Amen! Amen! Amen!"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Napoleon had placed himself between the old Cardinal de Bellois and the
+        not young Cardinal Bernier, so as to prevent the approach of any profane
+        sinner or unrepentant infidel. Round him and their clerical chiefs, all
+        the curates and grand vicars, almoners and chaplains of the Court, and
+        the capitals of the Princess, Princesses, and grand officers of State,
+        had formed a kind of cordon. "Had," said the young General Kellerman to
+        me, "Bonaparte always been encompassed by troops of this description, he
+        might now have sung hymns as a saint in heaven, but he would never have
+        reigned as an Emperor upon earth." This indiscreet remark was heard by
+        Louis Bonaparte, and on the next morning Kellerman received orders to
+        join the army in Hanover, where he was put under the command of a
+        general younger than himself. He would have been still more severely
+        punished, had not his father, the Senator (General Kellerman), been in
+        so great favour at the Court of St. Cloud, and so much protected by
+        Duroc, who had made, in 1792, his first campaign under this officer,
+        then commander-in-chief of the army of the Ardennes.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When this devout assembly separated, which was by courtesy an hour
+        earlier than usual, I expected every moment to hear a chorus of
+        horse-laughs, because I clearly perceived that all of them were tired of
+        their assumed parts, and, with me, inclined to be gay at the expense of
+        their neighbours. But they all remembered also that they were watched by
+        spies, and that an imprudent look or an indiscreet word, gaiety instead
+        of gravity, noise when silence was commanded, might be followed by an
+        airing in the wilderness of Cayenne. They, therefore, all called out,
+        "Coachman, to our hotel!" as if to say, "We will to-day, in compliment
+        to the new-born Christian zeal of our Sovereigns, finish our evening as
+        piously as we have begun it." But no sooner were they out of sight of
+        the palace than they hurried to the scenes of dissipation, all
+        endeavouring, in the debauchery and excesses so natural to them, to
+        forget their unnatural affectation and hypocrisy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Well you know the standard of the faith even of the members of the
+        Bonaparte family. Two days before this Christian circle at Madame
+        Napoleon's, Madame de Chateaureine, with three other ladies, visited the
+        Princesse Borghese. Not seeing a favourite parrot they had often
+        previously admired, they inquired what was become of it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Oh, the poor creature!" answered the Princess; "I have disposed of it,
+        as well as of two of my monkeys. The Emperor has obliged me to engage an
+        almoner and two chaplains, and it would be too extravagant in me to keep
+        six useless animals in my hotel. I must now submit to hearing the
+        disgusting howlings of my almoner instead of the entertaining chat of my
+        parrot, and to see the awkward bows and kneelings of my chaplains
+        instead of the amusing capering of my monkeys. Add to this, that I am
+        forced to transform into a chapel my elegant and tasty boudoir, on the
+        ground-floor, where I have passed so many delicious tete-a-tetes. Alas!
+        what a change! what a shocking fashion, that we are now all again to be
+        Christians!"
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER IX.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Notwithstanding what was inserted in our public prints to
+        the contrary, the reception Bonaparte experienced from his army of
+        England in June last year, the first time he presented himself to them
+        as an Emperor, was far from such as flattered either his vanity or
+        views. For the first days, some few solitary voices alone accompanied
+        the "Vive l'Empereur!" of his generals, and of his aides-de-camp. This
+        indifference, or, as he called it, mutinous spirit, was so much the more
+        provoking as it was unexpected. He did not, as usual, ascribe it to the
+        emissaries or gold of England, but to the secret adherents of Pichegru
+        and Moreau amongst the brigades or divisions that had served under these
+        unfortunate generals. He ordered, in consequence, his Minister Berthier
+        to make out a list of all these corps. Having obtained this, he
+        separated them by ordering some to Italy, others to Holland, and the
+        rest to the frontiers of Spain and Germany. This act of revenge or
+        jealousy was regarded, both by the officers and men, as a disgrace and
+        as a doubt thrown out against their fidelity, and the murmur was loud
+        and general. In consequence of this, some men were shot, and many more
+        arrested.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Observing, however, that severity had not the desired effect, Bonaparte
+        suddenly changed his conduct, released the imprisoned, and rewarded with
+        the crosses of his Legion of Honour every member of the so lately
+        suspected troops who had ever performed any brilliant or valorous
+        exploits under the proscribed generals. He even incorporated among his
+        own bodyguards and guides men who had served in the same capacity under
+        these rival commanders, and numbers of their children were received in
+        the Prytanees and military free schools. The enthusiastic exclamation
+        that soon greeted his ears convinced him that he had struck upon the
+        right string of his soldiers' hearts. Men who, some few days before,
+        wanted only the signal of a leader to cut an Emperor they hated to
+        pieces, would now have contended who should be foremost to shed their
+        last drop of blood for a chief they adored.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This affected liberality towards the troops who had served under his
+        rivals roused some slight discontent among those to whom he was chiefly
+        indebted for his own laurels. But if he knew the danger of reducing to
+        despair slighted men with arms in their hands, he also was well aware of
+        the equal danger of enduring licentiousness or audacity among troops who
+        had, on all occasions, experienced his preference and partiality; and he
+        gave a sanguinary proof of his opinion on this subject at the grand
+        parade of the 12th of July, 1804, preparatory to the grand fete of the
+        14th.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A grenadier of the 21st Regiment (which was known in Italy under the
+        name of the Terrible), in presetting arms to him, said: "Sire! I have
+        served under you four campaigns, fought under you in ten battles or
+        engagements; have received in your service seven wounds, and am not a
+        member of your Legion of Honour; whilst many who served under Moreau,
+        and are not able to show a scratch from an enemy, have that
+        distinction."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bonaparte instantly ordered this man to be shot by his own comrades in
+        the front of the regiment. The six grenadiers selected to fire, seeming
+        to hesitate, he commanded the whole corps to lay down their arms, and
+        after being disbanded, to be sent to the different colonial depots. To
+        humiliate them still more, the mutinous grenadier was shot by the
+        gendarmes. When the review was over, "Vive l'Empereur!" resounded from
+        all parts, and his popularity among the troops has since rather
+        increased than diminished. Nobody can deny that Bonaparte possesses a
+        great presence of mind, an undaunted firmness, and a perfect knowledge
+        of the character of the people over whom he reigns. Could but justice
+        and humanity be added to his other qualities, but, unfortunately for my
+        nation, I fear that the answer of General Mortier to a remark of a
+        friend of mine on this subject is not problematical: "Had," said this
+        Imperial favourite, "Napoleon Bonaparte been just and humane, he would
+        neither have vanquished nor reigned."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        All these scenes occurred before Bonaparte, seated on a throne, received
+        the homage, as a Sovereign, of one hundred and fifty thousand warriors,
+        who now bowed as subjects, after having for years fought for liberty and
+        equality, and sworn hatred to all monarchical institutions; and who
+        hitherto had saluted and obeyed him only as the first among equals. What
+        an inconsistency! The splendour and show that accompanied him
+        everywhere, the pageantry and courtly pomp that surrounded him, and the
+        decorations of the stars and ribands of the Legion of Honour, which he
+        distributed with bombastic speeches among troops&mdash;to whom those
+        political impositions and social cajoleries were novelties&mdash;made
+        such an impression upon them, that had a bridge been then fixed between
+        Calais and Dover, brave as your countrymen are, I should have trembled
+        for the liberty and independence of your country. The heads and
+        imagination of the soldiers, I know from the best authority, were then
+        so exalted that, though they might have been cut to pieces, they could
+        never have been defeated or routed. I pity our children when I reflect
+        that their tranquillity and happiness will, perhaps, depend upon such a
+        corrupt and unprincipled people of soldiers,&mdash;easy tools in the
+        hands of every impostor or mountebank.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The lively satisfaction which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle
+        of grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely
+        unmixed with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other
+        great Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and
+        your country, of the subjugation of which he had spoken with such
+        lightness and such inconsideration, instead of dreading, despised his
+        boasts and defied his threats. Indeed, never before did the Cabinet of
+        St. James more opportunely expose the reality of his impotency, the
+        impertinence of his menaces, and the folly of his parade for the
+        invasion of your country, than by declaring all the ports containing his
+        invincible armada in a state of blockade. I have heard from an officer
+        who witnessed his fury when in May, 1799, he was compelled to retreat
+        from before St. Jean d'Acre, and who was by his side in the camp at
+        Boulogne when a despatch informed him of this circumstance, that it was
+        nothing compared to the violent rage into which he flew upon reading it.
+        For an hour afterwards not even his brother Joseph dared approach him;
+        and his passion got so far the better of his policy, that what might
+        still have long been concealed from the troops was known within the
+        evening to the whole camp. He dictated to his secretary orders for his
+        Ministers at Vienna, Berlin, Lisbon, and Madrid, and couriers were sent
+        away with them; but half an hour afterwards other couriers were
+        despatched after them with other orders, which were revoked in their
+        turn, when at last Joseph had succeeded in calming him a little. He
+        passed, however, the whole following night full dressed and agitated;
+        lying down only for an instant, but having always in his room Joseph and
+        Duroc, and deliberating on a thousand methods of destroying the insolent
+        islanders; all equally violent, but all equally impracticable.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The next morning, when, as usual, he went to see the manoeuvres of his
+        flotilla, and the embarkation and landing of his troops, he looked so
+        pale that he almost excited pity. Your cruisers, however, as if they had
+        been informed of the situation of our hero, approached unusually near,
+        to evince, as it were, their contempt and, derision. He ordered
+        instantly all the batteries to fire, and went himself to that which
+        carried its shot farthest; but that moment six of your vessels, after
+        taking down their sails, cast anchors, with the greatest sang-froid,
+        just without the reach of our shot. In an unavailing anger he broke upon
+        the spot six officers of artillery, and pushed one, Captain d'
+        Ablincourt, down the precipice under the battery, where he narrowly
+        escaped breaking his neck as well as his legs; for which injury he was
+        compensated by being made an officer of the Legion of Honour. Bonaparte
+        then convoked upon the spot a council of his generals of artillery and
+        of the engineers, and, within an hour's time, some guns and mortars of
+        still heavier metal and greater calibre were carried up to replace the
+        others; but, fortunately for the generals, before a trial could be made
+        of them the tide changed, and your cruisers sailed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In returning to breakfast at General Soult's, he observed the
+        countenances of his soldiers rather inclined to laughter than to wrath;
+        and he heard some jests, significant enough in the vocabulary of
+        encampments, and which informed him that contempt was not the sentiment
+        with which your navy had inspired his troops. The occurrences of these
+        two days hastened his departure from the coast for Aix-la-Chapelle,
+        where the cringing of his courtiers consoled him, in part, for the want
+        of respect or gallantry in your English tars.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER X.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;According to a general belief in our diplomatic circles,
+        it was the Austrian Ambassador in France, Count von Cobenzl, who
+        principally influenced the determination of Francis II. to assume the
+        hereditary title of Emperor of Austria, and to acknowledge Napoleon
+        Emperor of the French.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Johann Philipp, Count von Cobenzl, enjoys, not only in his own country,
+        but through all Europe, a great reputation as a statesman, and has for a
+        number of years been employed by his Court in the most intricate and
+        delicate political transactions. In 1790 he was sent to Brabant to treat
+        with the Belgian insurgents; but the States of Brabant refusing to
+        receive him, he retired to Luxembourg, where he published a
+        proclamation, in which Leopold II. revoked all those edicts of his
+        predecessor, Joseph II., which had been the principal cause of the
+        troubles; and reestablished everything upon the same footing as during
+        the reign of Maria Theresa. In 1791 he was appointed Ambassador to the
+        Court of St. Petersburg, where his conduct obtained the approbation of
+        his own Prince and of the Empress of Russia.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In 1793 the Committee of Public Safety nominated the intriguer, De
+        Semonville, Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. His mission was to excite
+        the Turks against Austria and Russia, and it became of great consequence
+        to the two Imperial Courts to seize this incendiary of regicides. He was
+        therefore stopped, on the 25th of July, in the village of Novate, near
+        the lake of Chiavenne. A rumour was very prevalent at this time that
+        some papers were found in De Semonville's portfolio implicating Count
+        von Cobenzl as a correspondent with the revolutionary French generals.
+        The continued confidence of his Sovereign contradicts, however, this
+        inculpation, which seems to have been merely the invention of rivalry or
+        jealousy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In October, 1795, Count von Cobenzl signed, in the name of the Emperor,
+        a treaty with England and Russia; and in 1797 he was one of the Imperial
+        plenipotentiaries sent to Udine to negotiate with Bonaparte, with whom,
+        on the 17th of October, he signed the Treaty of Campo Formio. In the
+        same capacity he went afterwards to Rastadt, and when this congress
+        broke up, he returned again as an Ambassador to St. Petersburg.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After the Peace of Lunwille, when it required to have a man of
+        experience and talents to oppose to our so deeply able Minister,
+        Talleyrand, the Cabinet of Vienna removed him from Russia to France,
+        where, with all other representatives of Princes, he has experienced
+        more of the frowns and rebukes, than of the dignity and good grace, of
+        our present Sovereign.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Count von Cobenzl's foible is said to be a passion for women; and it is
+        reported that our worthy Minister, Talleyrand, has been kind enough to
+        assist him frequently in his amours. Some adventures of this sort, which
+        occurred at Rastadt, afforded much amusement at the Count's expense.
+        Talleyrand, from envy, no doubt, does not allow him the same political
+        merit as his other political contemporaries, having frequently repeated
+        that "the official dinners of Count von Cobenzl were greatly preferable
+        to his official notes."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        So well pleased was Bonaparte with this Ambassador when at
+        Aix-la-Chapelle last year, that, as a singular favour, he permitted him,
+        with the Marquis de Gallo (the Neapolitan Minister and another
+        plenipotentiary at Udine), to visit the camps of his army of England on
+        the coast. It is true that this condescension was, perhaps, as much a
+        boast, or a threat, as a compliment.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle
+        proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight
+        revenge of Bonaparte's for your mandate of blockade. Rumour states that
+        this measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude
+        any of your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip
+        of our Napoleon. For fear, however, of some more extravagant
+        determination, Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his
+        brother any objections or representations. "But what absurdities do I
+        not sign!" exclaimed the pliant Minister.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to
+        command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France,
+        waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor. Charlemagne
+        had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years
+        before,&mdash;an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these
+        Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but
+        to gratify his impertinent vanity. Every spot where Charlemagne had
+        walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with
+        great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign
+        representatives, and by his side his wife. To a peasant who presented
+        him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he
+        gave nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small
+        crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he
+        bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand
+        louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter,
+        but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the
+        manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National
+        Institute for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by
+        Charlemagne, who many believed was not able to write; and a German
+        Baron, Krigge, was registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring
+        presented by this Emperor to one of his ancestors, though his nobility
+        is well known not to be of sixty years' standing. But woe to him who
+        dared to suggest any doubt about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to
+        believe! A German professor, Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and
+        more sincere than wise, addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in
+        which he proved, from his intimacy with antiquity, that most of the
+        pretended relics of Charlemagne were impositions on the credulous; that
+        the portrait was a drawing of this century, the diploma written in the
+        last; the crucifix manufactured within fifty, and the ring, perhaps,
+        within ten years. The night after Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a
+        police commissary, accompanied by four gendarmes, entered the
+        professor's bedroom, forced him to dress, and ushered him into a covered
+        cart, which carried him under escort to the left bank of the Rhine;
+        where he was left with orders, under pain of death, never more to enter
+        the territory of the French Empire. This expeditious and summary justice
+        silenced all other connoisseurs and antiquarians; and relics of
+        Charlemagne have since poured in in such numbers from all parts of
+        France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that we are here in hope to
+        see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by the side of the museums
+        Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in monkish Latin, said to be
+        sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne at his Court on great
+        festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish professor, Cranener,
+        who in return was presented, on the part of Bonaparte, with a diamond
+        ring worth twelve thousand livres&mdash;L 500. This ballad may, perhaps,
+        be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum Charlemagne.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XI.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame
+        Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health
+        by using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor
+        as low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied. Napoleon himself
+        was neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her
+        extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy
+        of the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great
+        condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her
+        drawing-room and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were
+        only fit to be seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as
+        associates with her valets or chambermaids.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these
+        gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they
+        were her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued
+        debtor to them she could not decently&mdash;or rather, she dared not
+        prevent them from being visitors to her. By confiding her situation to
+        her old friend, Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those
+        troublesome personages. When the Minister was informed of the occasion
+        of the attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to
+        Bonaparte not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them
+        examples of severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only
+        sure means to prevent, for the future, people of the same description
+        from being familiar or audacious.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When, thanks to Talleyrand's interference, these family arrangements
+        were settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour;
+        and her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to
+        think of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever. I am
+        assured that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at
+        Aix-la-Chapelle, he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her
+        three times, and abused her once a day.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at
+        last completed the composition of their household, and laid before them
+        the list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their
+        livery. This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist
+        nor a republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a
+        disaffected subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth,
+        ridiculing both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives;
+        no exact definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed
+        professions, of his real moral and political character. One thing only
+        is certain;&mdash;he was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a
+        submissive slave under Napoleon the First.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth,
+        and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his
+        ancestors had been a Field-marshal. Being early introduced at Court, he
+        acquired, with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a
+        courtier; and by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas
+        and Comte de Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an
+        Ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg. With some reading and genius,
+        but with more boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French
+        men of letters, and was therefore as such received with distinction by
+        Catharine II., on whom, and on whose Government, he in return published
+        a libel. He was a valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been
+        under every succeeding King of faction. The partisans of the Revolution
+        pointed him out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of
+        Prussia; and he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick
+        William II. refused him admittance to his person, and, after some
+        ineffectual intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he
+        returned to Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for
+        another libel on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh,
+        which he printed in 1796. Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much
+        admired, he was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving
+        under the Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to
+        subsist on. In 1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a
+        Counsellor of State,&mdash;a place which he resigned last year for that
+        of a grand master of the ceremonies at the present Imperial Court. His
+        ancient inveteracy against your country has made him a favourite with
+        Bonaparte. The indelicate and scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797,
+        against Lord Malmesbury, in the then official journal, Le Redacteur,
+        were the offspring of his malignity and pen; and the philippics and
+        abusive notes in our present official Moniteur, against your Government
+        and country, are frequently his patriotic progeny, or rather, he often
+        shares with Talleyrand and Hauterive their paternity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The Revolution has not made Comte de Segur more happy with regard to his
+        family, than in his circumstances, which, notwithstanding his brilliant
+        grand-mastership, are far from being affluent. His amiable wife died of
+        terror, and brokenhearted from the sufferings she had experienced, and
+        the atrocities she had witnessed; and when he had enticed his eldest son
+        to accept the place of a sub-prefect under Bonaparte, his youngest son,
+        who never approved our present regeneration, challenged his brother to
+        fight, and, after killing him in a duel, destroyed himself. Comte de
+        Segur is therefore, at present, neither a husband nor a father, but only
+        a grand master of ceremonies! What an indemnification!
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Madame Napoleon and her husband are both certainly under much obligation
+        to this nobleman for his care to procure them comparatively decent
+        persons to decorate their levees and drawing-rooms, who, though they
+        have no claim either to morality or virtue, either to honour or
+        chastity, are undoubtedly a great acquisition at the Court of St. Cloud,
+        because none of them has either been accused of murder, or convicted of
+        plunder; which is the case with some of the Ministers, and most of the
+        generals, Senators and counsellors. It is true that they are a mixture
+        of beggared nobles and enriched valets, of married courtesans and
+        divorced wives, but, for all that, they can with justice demand the
+        places of honour of all other Imperial courtiers of both sexes.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When Bonaparte had read over the names of these Court recruits, engaged
+        and enlisted by De Segur, he said, "Well, this lumber must do until we
+        can exchange it for better furniture." At that time, young Comte d'
+        Arberg (of a German family, on the right bank of the Rhine), but whose
+        mother is one of Madame Bonaparte's Maids of Honour, was travelling for
+        him in Germany and in Prussia, where, among other negotiations, he was
+        charged to procure some persons of both sexes, of the most ancient
+        nobility, to augment Napoleon's suite, and to figure in his livery. More
+        individuals presented themselves for this honour than he wanted, but
+        they were all without education and without address: ignorant of the
+        world as of books; not speaking well their own language, much less
+        understanding French or Italian; vain of their birth, but not ashamed of
+        their ignorance, and as proud as poor. This project was therefore
+        relinquished for the time; but a number of the children of the principal
+        ci-devant German nobles, who, by the Treaty of Luneville and Ratisbon,
+        had become subjects of Bonaparte, were, by the advice of Talleyrand,
+        offered places in French Prytanees, where the Emperor promised to take
+        care of their future advancement. Madame Bonaparte, at the same time,
+        selected twenty-five young girls of the same families, whom she also
+        offered to educate at her expense. Their parents understood too well the
+        meaning of these generous offers to dare decline their acceptance. These
+        children are the plants of the Imperial nursery, intended to produce
+        future pages, chamberlains, equerries, Maids of Honour and ladies in
+        waiting, who for ancestry may bid defiance to all their equals of every
+        Court in Christendom. This act of benevolence, as it was called in some
+        German papers, is also an indirect chastisement of the refractory French
+        nobility, who either demanded too high prices for their degradation, or
+        abruptly refused to disgrace the names of their forefathers.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte has been as profuse in his disposal of the
+        Imperial diadem of Germany, as in his promises of the papal tiara of
+        Rome. The Houses of Austria and Brandenburgh, the Electors of Bavaria
+        and Baden, have by turns been cajoled into a belief of his exclusive
+        support towards obtaining it at the first vacancy. Those, however, who
+        have paid attention to his machinations, and studied his actions; who
+        remember his pedantic affectation of being considered a modern, or
+        rather a second Charlemagne; and who have traced his steps through the
+        labyrinth of folly and wickedness, of meanness and greatness, of art,
+        corruption, and policy, which have seated him on the present throne, can
+        entertain little doubt but that he is seriously bent on seizing and
+        adding the sceptre of Germany to the crowns of France and Italy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        During his stay last autumn at Mentz, all those German Electors who had
+        spirit and dignity enough to refuse to attend on him there in person
+        were obliged to send Extraordinary Ambassadors to wait on him, and to
+        compliment him on their part. Though hardly one corner of the veil that
+        covered the intrigues going forward there is yet lifted up, enough is
+        already seen to warn Europe and alarm the world. The secret treaties he
+        concluded there with most of the petty Princes of Germany, against the
+        Chief of the German Empire which not only entirely detached them from
+        their country and its legitimate Sovereign, but made their individual
+        interests hostile and totally opposite to that of the German
+        Commonwealth, transforming them also from independent Princes into
+        vassals of France, both directly increased has already gigantic power,
+        and indirectly encouraged him to extend it beyond what his most sanguine
+        expectation had induced him to hope. I do not make this assertion from a
+        mere supposition in consequence of ulterior occurrences. At a supper
+        with Madame Talleyrand last March, I heard her husband, in a gay,
+        unguarded, or perhaps premeditated moment, say, when mentioning his
+        proposed journey to Italy:
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I prepared myself to pass the Alps last October at Mentz. The first
+        ground-stone of the throne of Italy was, strange as it may seem, laid on
+        the banks of the Rhine: with such an extensive foundation, it must be
+        difficult to shake, and impossible to overturn it."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        We were, in the whole, twenty-five persons at table when he spoke thus,
+        many of whom, he well knew, were intimately acquainted both with the
+        Austrian and Prussian Ambassadors, who by the bye, both on the next day
+        sent couriers to their respective Courts.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The French Revolution is neither seen in Germany in that dangerous light
+        which might naturally be expected from the sufferings in which it has
+        involved both Princes and subjects, nor are its future effects dreaded
+        from its past enormities. The cause of this impolitic and anti-patriotic
+        apathy is to be looked for in the palaces of Sovereigns, and not in the
+        dwellings of their people. There exists hardly a single German Prince
+        whose Ministers, courtiers and counsellors are not numbered, and have
+        long been notorious among the anti-social conspirators, the Illuminati:
+        most of them are knaves of abilities, who have usurped the easy
+        direction of ignorance, or forced themselves as guides on weakness or
+        folly, which bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity, and hail
+        their sophistry and imposture as inspiration.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Among Princes thus encompassed, the Elector of Bavaria must be allowed
+        the first place. A younger brother of a younger branch, and a colonel in
+        the service of Louis XVI., he neither acquired by education, nor
+        inherited from nature, any talent to reign, nor possessed any one
+        quality that fitted him for a higher situation than the head of a
+        regiment or a lady's drawing-room. He made himself justly suspected of a
+        moral corruption, as well as of a natural incapacity, when he announced
+        his approbation of the Revolution against his benefactor, the late King
+        of France, who, besides a regiment, had also given him a yearly pension
+        of one hundred thousand livres. Immediately after his unexpected
+        accession to the Electorate of Bavaria, he concluded a subsidiary treaty
+        with your country, and his troops were ordered to combat rebellion,
+        under the standard of Austrian loyalty. For some months it was believed
+        that the Elector wished by his conduct to obliterate the memory of the
+        errors, vices, and principles of the Duc de Deux-Ponts (his former
+        title). But placing all his confidence in a political adventurer and
+        revolutionary fanatic, Montgelas, without either consistency or
+        firmness, without being either bent upon information or anxious about
+        popularity, he threw the whole burden of State on the shoulders of this
+        dangerous man, who soon showed the world that his master, by his first
+        treaties, intended only to pocket your money without serving your cause
+        or interest.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This Montgelas is, on account of his cunning and long standing among
+        them, worshipped by the gang of German Illuminati as an idol rather than
+        revered as an apostle. He is their Baal, before whom they hope to oblige
+        all nations upon earth to prostrate themselves as soon as infidelity has
+        entirely banished Christianity; for the Illuminati do not expect to
+        reign till the last Christian is buried under the rubbish of the last
+        altar of Christ. It is not the fault of Montgelas if such an event has
+        not already occurred in the Electorate of Bavaria.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Within six months after the Treaty of Lundville, Montgelas began in that
+        country his political and religious innovations. The nobility and the
+        clergy were equally attacked; the privileges of the former were invaded,
+        and the property of the latter confiscated; and had not his zeal carried
+        him too far, so as to alarm our new nobles, our new men of property, and
+        new Christians, it is very probable that atheism would have already,
+        without opposition, reared its head in the midst of Germany, and
+        proclaimed there the rights of man, and the code of liberty and
+        equality.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The inhabitants of Bavaria are, as you know, all Roman Catholics, and
+        the most superstitious and ignorant Catholics of Germany. The step is
+        but short from superstition to infidelity; and ignorance has furnished
+        in France more sectaries of atheism than perversity. The Illuminati,
+        brothers and friends of Montgelas, have not been idle in that country.
+        Their writings have perverted those who had no opportunity to hear their
+        speeches, or to witness their example; and I am assured by Count von
+        Beust, who travelled in Bavaria last year, that their progress among the
+        lower classes is astonishing, considering the short period these
+        emissaries have laboured. To any one looking on the map of the
+        Continent, and acquainted with the spirit of our times, this impious
+        focus of illumination must be ominous.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, there exists not the
+        least doubt but that this Montgelas, as well as Bonaparte's Minister at
+        Munich, Otto, was acquainted with the treacherous part Mehde de la
+        Touche played against your Minister, Drake; and that it was planned
+        between him and Talleyrand as the surest means to break off all
+        political connections between your country and Bavaria. Mr. Drake was
+        personally liked by the Elector, and was not inattentive either to the
+        plans and views of Montgelas or to the intrigues of Otto. They were,
+        therefore, both doubly interested to remove such a troublesome witness.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        M. de Montgelas is now a grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour,
+        and he is one of the few foreigners nominated the most worthy of such a
+        distinction. In France he would have been an acquisition either to the
+        factions of a Murat, of a Brissot, or of a Robespierre; and the Goddess
+        of Reason, as well as the God of the Theophilanthropists, might have
+        been sure of counting him among their adorers. At the clubs of the
+        Jacobins or Cordeliers, in the fraternal societies, or in a
+        revolutionary tribunal; in the Committee of Public Safety, or in the
+        council chamber of the Directory, he would equally have made himself
+        notorious and been equally in his place. A stoic sans-culotte under Du
+        Clots, a stanch republican under Robespierre, he would now have been the
+        most pliant and brilliant courtier of Bonaparte.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XIII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;No Queen of France ever saw so many foreign Princes and
+        Princesses in her drawing-rooms as the first Empress of the French did
+        last year at Mentz; and no Sovereign was ever before so well paid, or
+        accepted with less difficulty donations and presents for her gracious
+        protection. Madame Napoleon herself, on her return to this capital last
+        October, boasted that she was ten millions of livres&mdash;richer in
+        diamonds; two millions of livres richer in pearls, and three million of
+        livres richer in plate and china, than in the June before, when she
+        quitted it. She acknowledged that she left behind her some creditors and
+        some money at Aix-la-Chapelle; but at Mentz she did not want to borrow,
+        nor had she time to gamble. The gallant ultra Romans provided
+        everything, even to the utmost extent of her wishes; and she, on her
+        part, could not but honour those with her company as much as possible,
+        particularly as they required nothing else for their civilities. Such
+        was the Empress's expression to her lady in waiting, the handsome Madame
+        Seran, with whom no confidence, no tale, no story, and no scandal
+        expires; and who was in a great hurry to inform, the same evening, the
+        tea-party at Madame de Beauvais's of this good news, complaining at the
+        same time of not having had the least share in this rich harvest.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Nowhere, indeed, were bribery and corruption carried to a greater
+        extent, or practised with more effrontery, than at Mentz. Madame
+        Napoleon had as much her fixed price for every favourable word she
+        spoke, as Talleyrand had for every line he wrote. Even the attendants of
+        the former, and the clerks of the latter, demanded, or rather extorted,
+        douceurs from the exhausted and almost ruined German petitioners; who in
+        the end were rewarded for all their meanness and for all their expenses
+        with promises at best; as the new plan of supplementary indemnities was,
+        on the very day proposed for its final arrangement, postponed by the
+        desire of the Emperor of the French, until further orders. This
+        provoking delay could no more be foreseen by the Empress than by the
+        Minister, who, in return for their presents and money almost overpowered
+        the German Princes with his protestations of regret at their
+        disappointments. Nor was Madame Bonaparte less sorry or less civil. She
+        sent her chamberlain, Daubusson la Feuillad, with regular compliments of
+        condolence to every Prince who had enjoyed her protection. They returned
+        to their homes, therefore, if not wealthier, at least happier; flattered
+        by assurances and condescensions, confiding in hope as in certainties.
+        Within three months, however, it is supposed that they would willingly
+        have disposed both of promises and expectations at a loss of fifty per
+        cent.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        By the cupidity and selfishness of these and other German Princes, and
+        their want of patriotism, Talleyrand was become perfectly acquainted
+        with the value and production of every principality, bishopric, county,
+        abbey, barony, convent, and even village in the German Empire; and
+        though most national property in France was disposed of at one or two
+        years' purchase, he required five years' purchase-money for all the
+        estates and lands on the other side of the Rhine, of which, under the
+        name of indemnities, he stripped the lawful owners to gratify the
+        ambition or avidity of intruders. This high price has cooled the claims
+        of the bidders, and the plan of the supplementary indemnities is still
+        suspended, and probably will continue so until our Minister lowers his
+        terms. A combination is supposed to have been entered into by the chief
+        demanders of indemnities, by which they have bound themselves to resist
+        all farther extortions. They do not, however, know the man they have to
+        deal with; he will, perhaps, find out some to lay claim to their own
+        private and hereditary property whom he will produce and support, and
+        who certainly will have the same right to pillage them as they had to
+        the spoils of others.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It was reported in our fashionable circles last autumn, and smiled at by
+        Talleyrand, that he promised the Comtesse de L&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; an
+        abbey, and the Baroness de S&mdash;&mdash;-z a convent, for certain
+        personal favours, and that he offered a bishopric to the Princesse of
+        Hon&mdash;&mdash;- the same terms, but this lady answered that "she
+        would think of his offers after he had put her husband in possession of
+        the bishopric." It is not necessary to observe that both the Countess
+        and the Baroness are yet waiting to enjoy his liberal donations, and to
+        be indemnified for their prostitution.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Napoleon Bonaparte was attacked by a fit of jealousy at Mentz. The young
+        nephew of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, Comte de L&mdash;&mdash;ge, was
+        very assiduous about the Empress, who, herself, at first mistook the
+        motive. Her confidential secretary, Deschamps, however, afterwards
+        informed her that this nobleman wanted to purchase the place of a
+        coadjutor to his uncle, so as to be certain of succeeding him. He
+        obtained, therefore, several private audiences, no doubt to regulate the
+        price, when Napoleon put a stop to this secret negotiation by having the
+        Count carried by gendarmes, with great politeness, to the other side of
+        the Rhine. When convinced of his error, Bonaparte asked his wife what
+        sum had been promised for her protection, and immediately gave her an
+        order on his Minister of the Treasury (Marbois) for the amount. This was
+        an act of justice, and a reparation worthy of a good and tender husband;
+        but when, the very next day, he recalled this order, threw it into the
+        fire before her eyes, and confined her for six hours in her bedroom;
+        because she was not dressed in time to take a walk with him on the
+        ramparts, one is apt to believe that military despotism has erased from
+        his bosom all connubial affection, and that a momentary effusion of
+        kindness and generosity can but little alleviate the frequent pangs
+        caused by repeated insults and oppression. Fortunately, Madame
+        Napoleon's disposition is proof against rudeness as well as against
+        brutality. If what her friend and consoler, Madame Delucay, reports of
+        her is not exaggerated, her tranquillity is not much disturbed nor her
+        happiness affected by these explosions of passionate authority, and she
+        prefers admiring, in undisturbed solitude, her diamond box to the most
+        beautiful prospects in the most agreeable company; and she inspects with
+        more pleasure in confinement, her rich wardrobe, her beautiful china,
+        and her heavy plate, than she would find satisfaction, surrounded with
+        crowds, in comtemplating Nature, even in its utmost perfection. "The
+        paradise of Madame Napoleon," says her friend, "must be of metal, and
+        lighted by the lustre of brilliants, else she would decline it for a
+        hell and accept Lucifer himself for a spouse, provided gold flowed in
+        his infernal domains, though she were even to be scorched by its heat."
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XIV.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        LETTER XIV.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;I believe that I have mentioned to you, when in England,
+        that I was an old acquaintance of Madame Napoleon, and a visitor at the
+        house of her first husband. When introduced to her after some years'
+        absence, during which fortune had treated us very differently, she
+        received me with more civility than I was prepared to expect, and would,
+        perhaps, have spoken to me more than she did, had not a look of her
+        husband silenced her. Madame Louis Bonaparte was still more
+        condescending, and recalled to my memory what I had not forgotten how
+        often she had been seated, when a child, on my lap, and played on my
+        knees with her doll. Thus they behaved to me when I saw them for the
+        first time in their present elevation; I found them afterwards, in their
+        drawing-rooms or at their routs and parties, more shy and distant. This
+        change did not much surprise me, as I hardly knew any one that had the
+        slightest pretension to their acquaintance who had not troubled them for
+        employment or borrowed their money, at the same time that they
+        complained of their neglect and their breach of promises. I continued,
+        however, as much as etiquette and decency required, assiduous, but never
+        familiar: if they addressed me, I answered with respect, but not with
+        servility; if not, I bowed in silence when they passed. They might
+        easily perceive that I did not intend to become an intruder, nor to make
+        the remembrance of what was past an apology or a reason for applying for
+        present favours. A lady, on intimate terms with Madame Napoleon, and
+        once our common friend, informed me, shortly after the untimely end of
+        the lamented Duc d' Enghien, that she had been asked whether she knew
+        anything that could be done for me, or whether I would not be flattered
+        by obtaining a place in the Legislative Body or in the Tribunate? I
+        answered as I thought, that were I fit for a public life nothing could
+        be more agreeable or suit me better; but, having hitherto declined all
+        employments that might restrain that independence to which I had
+        accustomed myself from my youth, I was now too old to enter upon a new
+        career. I added that, though the Revolution had reduced my
+        circumstances, it had not entirely ruined me. I was still independent,
+        because my means were the boundaries of my wants.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A week after this conversation General Murat, the governor of this
+        capital, and Bonaparte's favourite-brother-in-law, invited me to a
+        conversation in a note delivered to me by an aide-de-camp, who told me
+        that he was ordered to wait for my company, or, which was the same, he
+        had orders not to lose sight of me, as I was his prisoner. Having
+        nothing with which to reproach myself, and all my written remarks being
+        deposited with a friend, whom none of the Imperial functionaries could
+        suspect, I entered a hackney coach without any fear or apprehension; and
+        we drove to the governor's hotel.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        From the manner in which Murat addressed me, I was soon convinced that
+        if I had been accused of any error or indiscretion, the accusation could
+        not be very grave in his eyes. He entered with me into his closet and
+        inquired whether I had any enemies at the police office. I told him not
+        to my knowledge.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Is the Police Minister and Senator, Fouche, your friend?" continued he.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Fouche," said I, "has bought an estate that formerly belonged to me;
+        may he enjoy it with the same peace of mind as I have lost it. I have
+        never spoken to him in my life."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Have you not complained at Madame de la Force's of the execution of the
+        ci-devant Duc d'Enghien, and agreed with the other members of her
+        coterie to put on mourning for him?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I have never been at the house of that lady since the death of the
+        Prince, nor more than once in my life."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Where did you pass the evening last Saturday?"&mdash;"At the hotel, and
+        in the assembly of Princesse Louis Bonaparte."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Did she see you?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I believe that she did, because she returned my salute."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "You have known Her Imperial Highness a long time?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "From her infancy."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Well, I congratulate you. You have in her a generous protectress. But
+        for her you would now have been on the way to Cayenne. Here you see the
+        list of persons condemned yesterday, upon the report of Fouche, to
+        transportation. Your name is at the head of them. You were not only
+        accused of being an agent of the Bourbons, but of having intrigued to
+        become a member of the Legislature, or the Tribunate, that you might
+        have so much the better opportunity to serve them. Fortunately for you,
+        the Emperor remembered that the Princesse Louis had demanded such a
+        favour for you, and he informed her of the character of her protege.
+        This brought forward your innocence, because it was discovered that,
+        instead of asking for, you had declined the offer she had made you
+        through the Empress. Write the Princess a letter of thanks. You have,
+        indeed, had a narrow escape, but it has been so far useful to you, that
+        Government is now aware of your having some secret enemy in power, who
+        is not delicate about the means of injuring you."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In quitting General Murat, I could not help deploring the fate of a
+        despot, even while I abhorred his unnatural power. The curses, the
+        complaints, and reproaches for all the crimes, all the violence, all the
+        oppression perpetrated in his name, are entirely thrown upon him, while
+        his situation and occupation do not admit the seeing and hearing
+        everything and everybody himself. He is often forced, therefore, to
+        judge according to the report of an impostor; to sanction with his name
+        the hatred, malignity, or vengeance of culpable individuals; and to
+        sacrifice innocence to gratify the vile passions of his vilest slave. I
+        have not so bad an opinion of Bonaparte as to think him capable of
+        wilfully condemning any person to death or transportation, of whose
+        innocence he was convinced, provided that person stood not in the way of
+        his interest and ambition; but suspicion and tyranny are inseparable
+        companions, and injustice their common progeny. The unfortunate beings
+        on the long list General Murat showed me were, I dare say, most of them
+        as innocent as myself, and all certainly condemned unheard. But suppose,
+        even, that they had been indiscreet enough to put on mourning for a
+        Prince of the blood of their former Kings, did their imprudence deserve
+        the same punishment as the deed of the robber, the forger, or the
+        housebreaker? and, indeed, it was more severe than what our laws inflict
+        on such criminals, who are only condemned to transportation for some few
+        years, after a public trial and conviction; while the exile of these
+        unconvicted, untried, and most probably innocent persons is continued
+        for life, on charges as unknown to themselves as their destiny and
+        residence remain to their families and friends. Happy England! where no
+        one is condemned unheard, and no one dares attempt to make the laws
+        subservient to his passions or caprice.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As to Fouche's enmity, at which General Murat so plainly hinted, I had
+        long apprehended it from what others, in similar circumstances with
+        myself, had suffered. He has, since the Revolution, bought no less, than
+        sixteen national estates, seven of the former proprietors of which have
+        suddenly disappeared since his Ministry, probably in the manner he
+        intended to remove me. This man is one of the most immoral characters
+        the Revolution has dragged forward from obscurity. It is more difficult
+        to mention a crime that he has not perpetrated than to discover a good
+        or just action that he ever performed. He is so notorious a villain that
+        even the infamous National Convention expelled him from its bosom, and
+        since his Ministry no man has been found base enough, in my debased
+        country, to extenuate, much less to defend, his past enormities. In a
+        nation so greatly corrupted and immoral, this alone is more than
+        negative evidence.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As a friar before the Revolution he has avowed, in his correspondence
+        with the National Convention, that he never believed in a God; and as
+        one of the first public functionaries of a Republic he has officially
+        denied the existence of virtue. He is, therefore, as unmoved by tears as
+        by reproaches, and as inaccessible to remorse as hardened against
+        repentance. With him interest and bribes are everything, and honour and
+        honesty nothing. The supplicant or the pleader who appears before him
+        with no other support than the justice of his cause is fortunate indeed
+        if, after being cast, he is not also confined or ruined, and perhaps
+        both; while a line from one of the Bonapartes, or a purse of gold,
+        changes black to white, guilt to innocence, removes the scaffold waiting
+        for the assassin, and extinguishes the faggots lighted for the
+        parricide. His authority is so extensive that on the least signal, with
+        one blow, from the extremities of France to her centre, it crushes the
+        cot and the palace; and his decisions, against which there is no appeal,
+        are so destructive that they never leave any traces behind them, and
+        Bonaparte, Bonaparte alone, can prevent or arrest their effect.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Though a traitor to his former benefactor, the ex-Director Barras, he
+        possesses now the unlimited confidence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and, as
+        far as is known, has not yet done anything to forfeit it,&mdash;if
+        private acts of cruelty cannot, in the agent of a tyrant, be called
+        breach of trust or infidelity. He shares with Talleyrand the fraternity
+        of the vigilant, immoral, and tormenting secret police; and with Real,
+        and Dubois, the prefect of police, the reproduction, or rather the
+        invention, of new tortures and improved racks; the oubliettes, which are
+        wells or pits dug under the Temple and most other prisons, are the works
+        of his own infernal genius. They are covered with trap-doors, and any
+        person whom the rack has mutilated, or not obliged to speak out; whose
+        return to society is thought dangerous, or whose discretion is
+        suspected; who has been imprisoned by mistake, or discovered to be
+        innocent; who is disagreeable to the Bonapartes, their favourites, or
+        the mistresses of their favourites; who has displeased Fouche, or
+        offended some other placeman; any who have refused to part with their
+        property for the recovery of their liberty, are all precipitated into
+        these artificial abysses there to be forgotten; or worse, to be starved
+        to death, if they have not been fortunate enough to break their necks
+        and be killed by the fall.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The property Fouche has acquired by his robberies within these last
+        twelve years is at the lowest rate valued at fifty million livres&mdash;which
+        must increase yearly; as a man who disposes of the liberty of fifty
+        millions of people is also, in a great part, master of their wealth.
+        Except the chiefs of the Governments and their officers of State, there
+        exists not an inhabitant of France, Italy, Holland, or Switzerland who
+        can consider himself secure for an instant of not being seized,
+        imprisoned, plundered, tortured, or exterminated by the orders of Fouche
+        and by the hands of his agents.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        You will no doubt exclaim, "How can Bonaparte employ, how dares he
+        confide, in such a man?" Fouche is as able as unprincipled, and, with
+        the most unfeeling and perverse heart, possesses great talents. There is
+        no infamy he will not stoop to, and no crime, however execrable, that he
+        will hesitate to commit, if his Sovereign orders it. He is, therefore, a
+        most useful instrument in the hand of a despot who, notwithstanding what
+        is said to the contrary in France, and believed abroad, would cease to
+        rule the day he became just, and the reign of laws and of humanity
+        banished terror and tyranny.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It is reported that some person, pious or revengeful, presented some
+        time ago to the devout mother of Napoleon a long memorial containing
+        some particulars of the crimes and vices of Fouche and Talleyrand, and
+        required of her, if she wished to prevent the curses of Heaven from
+        falling on her son, to inform him of them, that he might cease to employ
+        men so unworthy of him, and so repugnant to a Divinity. Napoleon, after
+        reading through the memorial, is stated to have answered his mother, who
+        was always pressing him to dismiss these Ministers: The memorial,
+        Madame, contains nothing of what I was not previously informed. Louis
+        XVI. did not select any but those whom he thought the most virtuous and
+        moral of men for his Ministers and counsellors; and where did their
+        virtues and morality bring him? If the writer of the memorial will
+        mention two honest and irreproachable characters, with equal talents and
+        zeal to serve me, neither Fouche nor Talleyrand shall again be admitted
+        into my presence.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XV.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;You have with some reason in England complained of the
+        conduct of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, when
+        the pretended correspondence between Mr. Drake and Mehee de la Touche
+        was published in our official gazette. Had you, however, like myself,
+        been in a situation to study the characters and appreciate the worth of
+        most of them, this conduct would have excited no surprise, and pity
+        would have taken the place both of accusation and reproach. Hardly one
+        of them, except Count Philipp von Cobenzl, the Austrian Ambassador (and
+        even he is considerably involved), possesses any property, or has
+        anything else but his salary to depend upon for subsistence. The least
+        offence to Bonaparte or Talleyrand would instantly deprive them of their
+        places; and, unless they were fortunate enough to obtain some other
+        appointment, reduce them to live in obscurity, and perhaps in want, upon
+        a trifling pension in their own country.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The day before Mr. Drake's correspondence appeared in the Moniteur, in
+        March, 1804, Talleyrand gave a grand diplomatic dinner; in the midst of
+        which, as was previously agreed with Bonaparte, Duroc called him out on
+        the part of the First Consul. After an absence of near an hour, which
+        excited great curiosity and some alarm among the diplomatists, he
+        returned, very thoughtful and seemingly very low-spirited.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Excuse me, gentlemen," said he, "I have been impolite against my
+        inclination. The First Consul knew that you honoured me with your
+        company today, and would therefore not have interrupted me by his orders
+        had not a discovery of a most extraordinary nature against the law of
+        nations just been made; a discovery which calls for the immediate
+        indignation against the Cabinet of St. James, not only of France, but of
+        every nation that wishes for the preservation of civilized society.
+        After dinner I shall do myself the honour of communicating to you the
+        particulars, well convinced that you will all enter with warmth into the
+        just resentment of the First Consul."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        During the repast the bottle went freely round, and as soon as they had
+        drunk their coffee and liqueurs, Talleyrand rang a bell, and Hauterive
+        presented himself with a large bundle of papers. The pretended original
+        letters of Mr. Drake were handed about with the commentaries of the
+        Minister and his secretary. Their heads heated with wine, it was not
+        difficult to influence their minds, or to mislead their judgment, and
+        they exclaimed, as in a chorus, "C'est abominable! Cela fait fremir!"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Talleyrand took advantage of their situation, as well as of their
+        indiscretion. "I am glad, gentlemen," said he, "and shall not fail to
+        inform the First Consul of your unanimous sentiments on this
+        disagreeable subject; but verbal expressions are not sufficient in an
+        affair of such great consequence. I have orders to demand your written
+        declarations, which, after what you have already expressed, you cannot
+        hesitate about sending to me to-night, that they may accompany the
+        denunciation which the First Consul despatches, within some few hours,
+        to all the Courts on the Continent. You would much please the First
+        Consul were you to write as near as possible according to the formula
+        which my secretary has drawn up. It states nothing either against
+        convenance, or against the customs of Sovereigns, or etiquettes of
+        Courts, and I am certain is also perfectly congenial with your
+        individual feelings."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A silence of some moments now followed (as all the diplomatists were
+        rather taken by surprise with regard to a written declaration), which
+        the Swedish Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, interrupted by saying that,
+        "though he personally might have no objection to sign such a
+        declaration, he must demand some time to consider whether he had a right
+        to, write in the name of his Sovereign, without his orders, on a subject
+        still unknown to him."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This remark made the Austrian Ambassador, Count von Cobenzl, propose a
+        private consultation among the members of the foreign diplomatic corps
+        at one of their hotels, at which the Russian charge d'affaires,
+        D'Oubril, who was not at the dinner&mdash;party, was invited to assist.
+        They met accordingly, at the Hotel de Montmorency, Rue de Lille,
+        occupied by Count von Cobenzl; but they came to no other unanimous
+        determination than that of answering a written communication of
+        Talleyrand by a written note, according as every one judged most proper
+        and prudent, and corresponding with the supposed sentiments of his
+        Sovereign.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As all this official correspondence has been published in England, you
+        may, upon reading the notes presented by Baron de Dreyer, and Mr.
+        Livingstone,
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        [In consequence of this conduct, Livingstone was recalled by his
+        Government, and lives now in obscurity and disgrace in America. To
+        console him, however, in his misfortune, Bonaparte, on his departure,
+        presented him with his portrait, enamelled on the lid of a snuff-box,
+        set round with diamonds, and valued at one thousand louis d'or.]
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        the neutral Ambassadors of Denmark and America, form some tolerably just
+        idea of Talleyrand's formula. Their impolitic servility was blamed even
+        by the other members of the diplomatic corps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Livingstone you know, and perhaps have not to learn that, though a
+        stanch republican in America, he was the most abject courtier in France;
+        and though a violent defender of liberty and equality on the other side
+        of the Atlantic, no man bowed lower to usurpation, or revered despotism
+        more, in Europe. Without talents, and almost without education, he
+        thinks intrigues negotiations, and conceives that policy and duplicity
+        are synonymous. He was called here "the courier of Talleyrand," on
+        account of his voyages to England, and his journeys to Holland, where
+        this Minister sent him to intrigue, with less ceremony than one of his
+        secret agents. He acknowledged that no Government was more liberal, and
+        no nation more free, than the British; but he hated the one as much as
+        he abused the other; and he did not conceal sentiments that made him
+        always so welcome to Bonaparte and Talleyrand. Never over nice in the
+        choice of his companions, Arthur O'Connor, and other Irish traitors and
+        vagabonds, used his house as their own; so much so that, when he invited
+        other Ambassadors to dine with him, they, before they accepted the
+        invitation, made a condition that no outlaws or adventurers should be of
+        the party.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In your youth, Baron de Dreyer was an Ambassador from the Court of
+        Copenhagen to that of St. James. He has since been in the same capacity
+        to the Courts of St. Petersburg and Madrid. Born a Norwegian, of a poor
+        and obscure family, he owes his advancement to his own talents; but
+        these, though they have procured him rank, have left him without a
+        fortune. When he came here, in June, 1797, from Spain, he brought a
+        mistress with him, and several children he had had by her during his
+        residence in that country. He also kept an English mistress some thirty
+        years ago in London, by whom he had a son, M. Guillaumeau, who is now
+        his secretary. Thus encumbered, and thus situated at the age of seventy,
+        it is no surprise if he strives to die at his post, and that fear to
+        offend Bonaparte and Talleyrand sometimes gets the better of his
+        prudence.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In Denmark, as well as in all other Continental States, the pensions of
+        diplomatic invalids are more scanty than those of military ones, and
+        totally insufficient for a man who, during half a century nearly, has
+        accustomed himself to a certain style of life, and to expenses requisite
+        to represent his Prince with dignity. No wonder, therefore, that Baron
+        de Dreyer prefers Paris to Copenhagen, and that the cunning Talleyrand
+        takes advantage of this preference.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It was reported here among our foreign diplomatists, that the English
+        Minister in Denmark complained of the contents of Baron de Dreyer's note
+        concerning Mr. Drake's correspondence; and that the Danish Prime
+        Minister, Count von Bernstorff, wrote to him in consequence, by the
+        order of the Prince Royal, a severe reprimand. This act of political
+        justice is, however, denied by him, under pretence that the Cabinet of
+        Copenhagen has laid it down as an invariable rule, never to reprimand,
+        but always to displace those of its agents with whom it has reason to be
+        discontented. Should this be the case, no Sovereign in Europe is better
+        served by his representatives than his Danish Majesty, because no one
+        seldomer changes or removes them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        While I am speaking of diplomatists, I cannot forbear giving you a short
+        sketch of one whose weight in the scale of politics entitles him to
+        particular notice: I mean the Count von Haugwitz, insidiously
+        complimented by Talleyrand with the title of "The Prince of Neutrality,
+        the Sully of Prussia." Christian Henry Curce, Count von Haugwitz, who,
+        until lately, has been the chief director of the political conscience of
+        His Prussian Majesty, as his Minister of the Foreign Department, was
+        born in Silesia, and is the son of a nobleman who was a General in the
+        Austrian service when Frederick the Great made the conquest of that
+        country. At the death of this King in 1786, Count von Haugwitz occupied
+        an inferior place in the foreign office, where Count von Herzburg
+        observed his zeal and assiduity, and recommended him to the notice of
+        the late King Frederick William II. By the interest of the celebrated
+        Bishopswerder, he procured, in 1792, the appointment of an Ambassador to
+        the Court of Vienna, where he succeeded Baron von Jacobi, the present
+        Prussian Minister in your country. In the autumn of the same year he
+        went to Ratisbon, to cooperate with the Austrian Ambassador, and to
+        persuade the Princes of the German Empire to join the coalition against
+        France. In the month of March, 1794, he was sent to the Hague, where he
+        negotiated with Lord Malmesbury concerning the affairs of France;
+        shortly afterwards his nomination as a Minister of State took place, and
+        from that time his political sentiments seem to have undergone a
+        revolution, for which it is not easy to account; but, whatever were the
+        causes of his change of opinions, the Treaty of Basle, concluded between
+        France and Prussia in 1795, was certainly negotiated under his auspices;
+        and in August, 1796, he signed, with the French Minister at Berlin,
+        Citizen Caillard, the first and famous Treaty of Neutrality; and a
+        Prussian cordon was accordingly drawn, to cause the neutrality of the
+        North to be observed and protected. Had the Count von Haugwitz of 1795
+        been the same as the Count von Haugwitz of 1792, it is probable we
+        should no longer have heard of either a French Republic or a French
+        Empire; but a legitimate Monarch of the kingdom of France would have
+        ensured that security to all other legitimate Sovereigns, the want of
+        which they themselves, or their children, will feel and mourn in vain,
+        as long as unlimited usurpations tyrannize over my wretched country. It
+        is to be hoped, however, that the good sense of the Count will point out
+        to him, before it is too late, the impolicy of his present connections;
+        and that he will use his interest with his Prince to persuade him to
+        adopt a line of conduct suited to the grandeur and dignity of the
+        Prussian Monarchy, and favourable to the independence of insulted
+        Europe.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When his present Prussian Majesty succeeded to the throne, Count von
+        Haugwitz continued in office, with increased influence; but he some time
+        since resigned, in consequence, it is said, of a difference of opinion
+        with the other Prussian Ministers on the subject of a family alliance,
+        which Bonaparte had the modesty to propose, between the illustrious
+        house of Napoleon the First and the royal line of Brandenburgh.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        On this occasion his King, to evince his satisfaction with his past
+        conduct, bestowed on him not only a large pension, but an estate in
+        Silesia, where he before possessed some property. Bonaparte also, to
+        express his regret at his retreat, proclaimed His Excellency a grand
+        officer of the Legion of Honour.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Talleyrand insolently calls the several cordons, or ribands, distributed
+        by Bonaparte among the Prussian Ministers and Generals, "his
+        leading-strings." It is to be hoped that Frederick William III. is
+        sufficiently upon his guard to prevent these strings from strangling the
+        Prussian Monarchy and the Brandenburgh dynasty.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XVI.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Upwards of two months after my visit to General Murat, I
+        was surprised at the appearance of M. Darjuson, the chamberlain of
+        Princesse Louis Bonaparte. He told me that he came on the part of Prince
+        Louis, who honoured me with an invitation to dine with him the day
+        after. Upon my inquiry whether he knew if the party would be very
+        numerous, he answered, between forty and fifty; and that it was a kind
+        of farewell dinner, because the Prince intended shortly to set out for
+        Compiegne to assume the command of the camp, formed in its vicinity, of
+        the dragoons and other light troops of the army of England.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The principal personages present at this dinner were Joseph Bonaparte
+        and his wife, General and Madame Murat, the Ministers Berthier,
+        Talleyrand, Fouche, Chaptal, and Portalis. The conversation was entirely
+        military, and chiefly related to the probable conquest or subjugation of
+        Great Britain, and the probable consequence to mankind in general of
+        such a great event. No difference of opinion was heard with regard to
+        its immediate benefit to France and gradual utility to all other
+        nations; but Berthier seemed to apprehend that, before France could have
+        time to organize this valuable conquest, she would be obliged to support
+        another war, with a formidable league, perhaps, of all other European
+        nations. The issue, however, he said, would be glorious to France, who,
+        by her achievements, would force all people to acknowledge her their
+        mother country; and then, first, Europe would constitute but one family.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Chaptal was as certain as everybody else of the destruction of the
+        tyrants of the seas; but he thought France would never be secure against
+        the treachery of modern Carthage until she followed the example of Rome
+        towards ancient Carthage; and therefore, after reducing London to ashes,
+        it would be proper to disperse round the universe all the inhabitants of
+        the British Islands, and to re-people them with nations less
+        evil-disposed and less corrupted. Portalis observed that it was more
+        easy to conceive than to execute such a vast plan. It would not be an
+        undertaking of five, of ten, nor of twenty years, to transplant these
+        nations; that misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire
+        courage and obstinacy, but desperation.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "No people," continued he, "are more attached to their customs and
+        countries than islanders in general; and though British subjects are the
+        greatest travellers, and found everywhere, they all suppose their
+        country the best, and always wish to return to it and finish their days
+        amidst their native fogs and smoke. Neither the Saxons, nor the Danes,
+        nor Norman conquerors transplanted them, but, after reducing them,
+        incorporated themselves by marriages among the vanquished, and in some
+        few generations were but one people. It is asserted by all persons who
+        have lately visited Great Britain, that, though the civilization of the
+        lower classes is much behind that of the same description in France, the
+        higher orders, the rich and the fashionable, are, with regard to their,
+        manners, more French than English, and might easily be cajoled into
+        obedience and subjection to the sovereignty of a nation whose customs,
+        by free choice, they have adopted in preference to their own, and whose
+        language forms a necessary part of their education, and, indeed, of the
+        education of almost every class in the British Empire. The universality
+        of the French language is the best ally France has in assisting her to
+        conquer a universal dominion. He wished, therefore, that when we were in
+        a situation to dictate in England, instead of proscribing Englishmen we
+        should proscribe the English language, and advance and reward, in
+        preference, all those parents whose children were sent to be educated in
+        France, and all those families who voluntarily adopted in their houses
+        and societies exclusively the French language."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Murat was afraid that if France did not transplant the most stubborn
+        Britons, and settle among them French colonies, when once their military
+        and commercial navy was annihilated, they would turn pirates, and,
+        perhaps, within half a century, lay all other nations as much under
+        contribution by their piracies as they now do by their industry; and
+        that, like the pirates on the coast of Barbary, the instant they had no
+        connections with other civilized nations, cut the throats of each other,
+        and agree in nothing but in plundering, and considering all other people
+        in the, world their natural enemies and purveyors.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        To this opinion Talleyrand, by nodding assent, seemed to adhere; but he
+        added: "Earthquakes are generally dreaded as destructive; but such a
+        convulsion of nature as would swallow up the British Islands, with all
+        their inhabitants, would be the greatest blessing Providence ever
+        conferred on mankind."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Louis Bonaparte then addressed himself to me and to the Marquis de F&mdash;&mdash;.
+        "Gentlemen," said he, "you have been in England; what is your opinion of
+        the character of these islanders, and of the probability of their
+        subjugation?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        I answered that, during the fifteen months I resided in London I was too
+        much occupied to prevent myself from starving, to meditate about
+        anything else; that my stomach was my sole meditation as well as
+        anxiety. That, however, I believed that in England, as everywhere else,
+        a mixture of good and bad qualities was to be found; but which
+        prevailed, it would be presumption in me, from my position, to decide.
+        But I did not doubt that if we cordially hated the English they returned
+        us the compliment with interest, and, therefore, the contest with them
+        would be a severe one. The Marquis de F&mdash;&mdash; imprudently
+        attempted to convince the company that it was difficult, if not
+        impossible, for our army to land in England, much more to conquer it,
+        until we were masters of the seas by a superior navy. He would, perhaps,
+        have been still more indiscreet, had not Madame Louis interrupted him,
+        and given another turn to the conversation by inquiring about the fair
+        sex in England, and if it was true that handsome women were more
+        numerous there than in France? Here again the Marquis, instead of paying
+        her a compliment, as she perhaps expected, roundly assured her that for
+        one beauty in France, hundreds might be counted in England, where
+        gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and that a woman
+        regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a first-rate
+        beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of them
+        here.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "You must excuse the Marquis, ladies," said I, in my turn; "he has not
+        been in love in England. There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel
+        than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her
+        insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I apply to M. de Talleyrand," answered the Marquis; "he has been longer
+        in England than myself."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I am not a competent judge," retorted the Minister; "Madame de
+        Talleyrand is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I
+        dare say the Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the
+        British Islands, among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties,
+        or admired greater accomplishments or more perfection."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks
+        the party present, of course, was not included. All the ladies, who were
+        well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very
+        good-humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would
+        give her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a
+        gallant Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt
+        to make up their difference. "She is no more, Madame," said the Marquis;
+        "she was, unfortunately, guillotined two days before&mdash;&mdash;" the
+        father of Madame Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted
+        him with a significant look, and said, "Before the fall of Robespierre,
+        you mean."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        From these and other traits of the Marquis's character, you may see that
+        he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give
+        offence. He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from
+        Fouche, which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris
+        without further orders from the Minister of Police. I know, from high
+        authority, that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he
+        indebted for not being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported
+        to our colonies, for having depreciated the power and means of France to
+        invade England. I am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on
+        the subject of the invasion expressed anything but what they really
+        thought; and that, of the whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the
+        Marquis, and myself, entertained the least doubt of the success of the
+        expedition; so firmly did they rely on the former fortune of Bonaparte,
+        his boastings, and his assurance.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with
+        Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that
+        she is not happy. Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the
+        best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached
+        to her. She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked,
+        notwithstanding, uncommonly well. I have heard that Louis is inclined to
+        inebriation, and when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and
+        very indelicate with other women before her eyes. He intrigues with her
+        own servants and the number of his illegitimate children is said to be
+        as many as his years. She asked General Murat to present me and
+        recommend me to Fouche, which he did with great politeness; and the
+        Minister assured me that he should be glad to see me at his hotel, which
+        I much doubt. The last words Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a
+        princely crown, richly set with diamonds, and given her by her
+        brother-in-law, Napoleon, were, "Alas! grandeur is not always happiness,
+        nor the most elevated the most fortunate lot."
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XVII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        My LORD:&mdash;The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a
+        grand epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the
+        annals of Europe. The debates in the Sacred College for and against this
+        journey, and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to
+        have been long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires
+        of Cardinal Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres
+        distributed apropos among its pious members. Of this money the Cardinals
+        Mattei, Pamphili, Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia,
+        Pacca, Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are
+        said to have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent
+        anti-Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of
+        Napoleon the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real
+        worth.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
+        intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
+        brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
+        second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
+        husband.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
+        March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
+        choeur) in a convent of his native place. In 1782, whilst he was on a
+        visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
+        fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
+        captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers. Here
+        he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
+        professor of, the Alcoran. In that year he found an opportunity to
+        escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
+        renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
+        constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
+        In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
+        his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
+        gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
+        customers. After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
+        the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
+        after Napoleon's proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
+        of Lyons. In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
+        is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
+        tiara. If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
+        name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that
+        he must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate
+        his own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of
+        France. Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the
+        manner already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this
+        pontiff would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p146" id="p146"></a>
+      <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+        <img alt="p146.jpg (48K)" src="images/p146.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+      </div>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+      <p>
+        While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
+        tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the
+        republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
+        Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
+        left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves,
+        considering himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor.
+        But Madame Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband's promotion
+        to the Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being
+        with her children reduced to great misery. Madame Letitia Bonaparte
+        answered her letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres&mdash;informing
+        her that the same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she
+        continued with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would
+        cease the instant she left that island. Either thinking herself not
+        sufficiently paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the
+        Bonaparte family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year,
+        where she remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope. On the first
+        day His Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to
+        pierce the crowd, and to approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by
+        his side. Profiting by a moment's silence, she called out loudly,
+        throwing herself at his feet: "Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of
+        Cardinal Fesch, and these are our children; he cannot, he dares not,
+        deny this truth. Had he behaved liberally to me, I should not have
+        disturbed him in his present grandeur; I supplicate you, Holy Father,
+        not to restore me my husband, but to force him to provide for his wife
+        and children, according to his present circumstances."&mdash;"Matta&mdash;ella
+        e matta, santissimo padre! She is mad&mdash;she is mad, Holy Father,"
+        said the Cardinal; and the good pontiff ordered her to be taken care of,
+        to prevent her from doing herself or the children any mischief. She was,
+        indeed, taken care of, because nobody ever since heard what has become
+        either of her or her children; and as they have not returned to Corsica,
+        probably some snug retreat has been allotted them in France.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal
+        Fesch: his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in
+        disagreeable scrapes. He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons,
+        which has since made his stay in that city but short. Having thrown his
+        handkerchief at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she
+        accepted it, and gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the
+        evening when her husband usually went to the play. His Eminence arrived
+        in disguise, and was received with open arms. But he was hardly seated
+        by her side before the door of a closet was burst open, and his
+        shoulders smarted from the lashes inflicted by an offended husband. In
+        vain did he mention his name and rank; they rather increased than
+        decreased the fury of Girot, who pretended it was utterly impossible for
+        a Cardinal and Archbishop to be thus overtaken with the wife of one of
+        his flock; at last Madame Girot proposed a pecuniary accommodation,
+        which, after some opposition, was acceded to; and His Eminence signed a
+        bond for one hundred thousand livres&mdash;upon condition that nothing
+        should transpire of this intrigue&mdash;a high price enough for a sound
+        drubbing. On the day when the bond was due, Girot and his wife were both
+        arrested by the police commissary, Dubois (a brother of the prefect of
+        police at Paris), accused of being connected with the coiners, a capital
+        crime at present in this country. In a search made in their house, bad
+        money to the amount of three thousand livres was discovered; which they
+        had received the day before from a man who called himself a merchant
+        from Paris, but who was a police spy sent to entrap them. After giving
+        up the bond of the Cardinal, the Emperor graciously remitted the capital
+        punishment, upon condition that they should be transported for life to
+        Cayenne.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
+        and to constitute a successor of St. Peter. It would not be the least
+        remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
+        were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
+        boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
+        from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle
+        of an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a
+        member of the Sacred College.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
+        elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres&mdash;and
+        his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
+        Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
+        at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
+        officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of
+        the French.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his
+        death Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
+        expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XVIII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        Paris, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;The amiable and accomplished Amelia Frederique, Princess
+        Dowager of the late Electoral Prince, Charles Louis of Baden, born a
+        Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, has procured the Electoral House of Baden
+        the singular honour of giving consorts to three reigning and Sovereign
+        Princes,&mdash;to an Emperor of Russia, to a King of Sweden, and to the
+        Elector of Bavaria. Such a distinction, and such alliances, called the
+        attention of those at the head of our Revolution; who, after attempting
+        in vain to blow up hereditary thrones by the aid of sans-culotte
+        incendiaries, seated sans-culottes upon thrones, that they might degrade
+        what was not yet ripe for destruction.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Charles Frederick, the reigning Elector of Baden, is now near fourscore
+        years of age. At this period of life if any passions remain, avarice is
+        more common than ambition; because treasures may be hoarded without
+        bustle, while activity is absolutely necessary to push forward to the
+        goal of distinction. Having bestowed a new King on Tuscany, Bonaparte
+        and Talleyrand also resolved to confer new Electors on Germany. A more
+        advantageous fraternity could not be established between the innovators
+        here and their opposers in other countries, than by incorporating the
+        grandfather-in-law of so many Sovereigns with their own revolutionary
+        brotherhood; to humble him by a new rank, and to disgrace him by
+        indemnities obtained from their hands. An intrigue between our Minister,
+        Talleyrand, and the Baden Minister, Edelsheim, transformed the oldest
+        Margrave of Germany into its youngest Elector, and extended his
+        dominions by the spoils obtained at the expense of the rightful owners.
+        The invasion of the Baden territory in time of peace, and the seizure of
+        the Duc d'Enghien, though under the protection of the laws of nations
+        and hospitality, must have soon convinced Baron Edelsheim what return
+        his friend Talleyrand expected, and that Bonaparte thought he had a
+        natural right to insult by his attacks those he had dishonoured by his
+        connections.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The Minister, Baron Edelsheim, is half an illuminato, half a
+        philosopher, half a politician, and half a revolutionist. He was, long
+        before he was admitted into the council chamber of his Prince, half an
+        atheist, half an intriguer, and half a spy, in the pay of Frederick the
+        Great of Prussia. His entry upon the stage at Berlin, and particularly
+        the first parts he was destined to act, was curious and extraordinary;
+        whether he acquitted himself better in this capacity than he has since
+        in his political one is not known. He was afterwards sent to this
+        capital to execute a commission, of which he acquitted himself very ill;
+        exposing himself rashly, without profit or service to his employer.
+        Frederick II., dreading the tediousness of a proposed congress at
+        Augsburg, wished to send a private emissary to sound the King of France.
+        For this purpose he chose Edelsheim as a person least liable to
+        suspicion. The project of Frederick was to idemnify the King of Poland
+        for his first losses by robbing the ecclesiastical Princes of Germany.
+        This, Louis XV. totally rejected; and Edelsheim returned with his answer
+        to the Prussian Monarch, then at Freyburg. From thence he afterwards
+        departed for London, made his communications, and was once again sent
+        back to Paris, on pretence that he had left some of his travelling
+        trunks there; and the Bailli de Foulay, the Ambassador of the Knights of
+        Malta, being persuaded that the Cabinet of Versailles was effectually
+        desirous of peace, was, as he had been before, the mediator. The Bailli
+        was deceived. The Duc de Choiseul, the then Prime Minister, indecently
+        enough threw Edelsheim into the Bastille, in order to search or seize
+        his papers, which, however, were secured elsewhere. Edelsheim was
+        released on the morrow, but obliged to depart the kingdom by the way of
+        Turin, as related by Frederick II. in his "History of the Seven Years'
+        War." On his return he was disgraced, and continued so until 1778; when
+        he again was used as emissary to various Courts of Germany. In 1786 the
+        Elector of Baden sent him to Berlin, on the ascension of Frederick
+        William II., as a complimentary envoy. This Monarch, when he saw him,
+        could not forbear laughing at the high wisdom of the Court that selected
+        such a personage for such an embassy, and of his own sagacity in
+        accepting it. He quitted the capital of Prussia as he came there, with
+        an opinion of himself that the royal smiles of contempt had neither
+        altered nor diminished.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        You see, by this account, that Edelsheim has long been a partisan of the
+        pillage of Germany called indemnities; and long habituated to affronts,
+        as well as to plots. To all his other half qualities, half modesty can
+        hardly be added, when he calls himself, or suffers himself to be called,
+        "the Talleyrand of Carlsrhue." He accompanied his Prince last year to
+        Mentz; where this old Sovereign was not treated by Bonaparte in the most
+        decorous or decent manner, being obliged to wait for hours in his
+        antechamber, and afterwards stand during the levees, or in the
+        drawing-rooms of Napoleon or of his wife, without the offer of a chair,
+        or an invitation to sit down. It was here where, by a secret treaty,
+        Bonaparte became the Sovereign of Baden, if sovereignty consists in the
+        disposal of the financial and military resources of a State; and they
+        were agreed to be assigned over to him whenever he should deem it proper
+        or necessary to invade the German Empire, in return for his protection
+        against the Emperor of Germany, who can have no more interest than
+        intent to attack a country so distant from his hereditary dominions, and
+        whose Sovereign is, besides, the grandfather of the consort of his
+        nearest and best ally.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Talleyrand often amused himself at Mentz with playing on the vanity and
+        affected consequence of Edelsheim, who was delighted if at any time our
+        Minister took him aside, or whispered to him as in confidence. One
+        morning, at the assembly of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, where Edelsheim
+        was creeping and cringing about him as usual, he laid hold of his arm
+        and walked with him to the upper part of the room. In a quarter of an
+        hour they both joined the company, Edelsheim unusually puffed up with
+        vanity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I will lay and bet, gentlemen," said Talleyrand, "that you cannot, with
+        all your united wits, guess the grand subject of my conversation with
+        the good Baron Edelsheim." Without waiting for an answer, he continued:
+        "As the Baron is a much older and more experienced traveller than
+        myself, I asked him which, of all the countries he had visited, could
+        boast the prettiest and kindest women. His reply was really very
+        instructive, and it would be a great pity if justice were not done to
+        his merit by its publicity."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Here the Baron, red as a turkey-cock and trembling with anger,
+        interrupted. "His Excellency," said he, "is to-night in a humour to
+        joke; what we spoke of had nothing to do with women."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Nor with men, either," retorted Talleyrand, going away.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This anecdote, Baron Dahlberg, the Minister of the Elector of Baden to
+        our Court, had the ingenuity to relate at Madame Chapui's as an evidence
+        of Edelsheim's intimacy with Talleyrand; only he left out the latter
+        part, and forgot to mention the bad grace with which this impertinence
+        of Talleyrand was received; but this defect of memory Count von Beust,
+        the envoy of the Elector Arch-Chancellor, kindly supplied.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Baron Edelsheim is a great amateur of knighthoods. On days of great
+        festivities his face is, as it were, illuminated with the lustre of his
+        stars; and the crosses on his coat conceal almost its original colour.
+        Every petty Prince of Germany has dubbed him a chevalier; but Emperors
+        and Kings have not been so unanimous in distinguishing his desert, or in
+        satisfying his desires.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        At Mentz no Prince or Minister fawned more assiduously upon Bonaparte
+        than this hero of chivalry. It could not escape notice, but need not
+        have alarmed our great man, as was the case. The prefect of the palace
+        was ordered to give authentic information concerning Edelsheim's moral
+        and political character. He applied to the police commissary, who,
+        within twenty hours, signed a declaration affirming that Edelsheim was
+        the most inoffensive and least dangerous of all imbecile creatures that
+        ever entered the Cabinet of a Prince; that he had never drawn a sword,
+        worn a dagger, or fired a pistol in his life; that the inquiries about
+        his real character were sneered at in every part of the Electorate, as
+        nowhere they allowed him common sense, much less a character; all blamed
+        his presumption, but none defended his capacity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After the perusal of this report, Bonaparte asked Talleyrand: "What can
+        Edelsheim mean by his troublesome assiduities? Does he want any
+        indemnities, or does he wish me to make him a German Prince? Can he have
+        the impudence to hope that I shall appoint him a tribune, a legislator,
+        or a Senator in France, or that I shall give him a place in my Council
+        of State?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "No such thing," answered the Minister; "did not Your Majesty condescend
+        to notice at the last fete that this eclipsed moon was encompassed in a
+        firmanent of stars. You would, Sire, make him the happiest of mortals
+        were you to nominate him a member of your Legion of Honour."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Does he want nothing else?" said Napoleon, as if relieved at once of an
+        oppressive burden. "Write to my chancellor of the Legion of Honour,
+        Lacepede, to send him a patent, and do you inform him of this favour."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It is reported at Carlsruhe, the capital of Baden, that Baron Edelsheim
+        has composed his own epitaph, in which he claims immortality, because
+        under his Ministry the Margravate of Baden was elevated into an
+        Electorate!!!
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XIX.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;The sensation that the arrival of the Pope in this
+        country caused among the lower classes of people cannot be expressed,
+        and if expressed, would not be believed. I am sorry, however, to say
+        that, instead of improving their morals or increasing their faith, this
+        journey has shaken both morality and religion to their foundation.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        According to our religious notions, as you must know, the Roman pontiff
+        is the vicar of Christ, and infallible; he can never err. The atheists
+        of the National Convention and the Theophilanthropists of the Directory
+        not only denied his demi-divinity, but transformed him into a satyr; and
+        in pretending to tear the veil of superstition, annihilated all belief
+        in a God. The ignorant part of our nation, which, as everywhere else,
+        constitutes the majority, witnessing the impunity and prosperity of
+        crime, and bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals, first
+        doubted of His omnipotence in not crushing guilt, and afterwards of His
+        existence in not exterminating the blasphemous from among the living.
+        Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes here, and
+        hope of a reward hereafter for unmerited sufferings upon earth, they all
+        hailed as a blessing the restoration of Christianity; and by this
+        political act Bonaparte gained more adherents than by all his victories
+        he had procured admirers.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bonaparte's character, his good and his bad qualities, his talents and
+        his crimes, are too recent and too notorious to require description.
+        Should he continue successful, and be attended by fortune to his grave,
+        future ages may perhaps hail him a hero and a great man; but by his
+        contemporaries it will always be doubtful whether mankind has not
+        suffered more from his ambition and cruelties than benefited by his
+        services. Had he satisfied himself by continuing the Chief Magistrate of
+        a Commonwealth; or, if he judged that a monarchical Government alone was
+        suitable to the spirit of this country, had he recalled our legitimate
+        King, he would have occupied a principal, if not the first, place in the
+        history of France,&mdash;a place much more exalted than he can ever
+        expect to fill as an Emperor of the French. Let his prosperity be ever
+        so uninterrupted, he cannot be mentioned but as an usurper, an
+        appellation never exciting esteem, frequently inspiring contempt, and
+        always odious.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The crime of usurpation is the greatest and most enormous a subject can
+        perpetrate; but what epithet can there be given to him who, to preserve
+        an authority unlawfully acquired, asssociates in his guilt a Supreme
+        Pontiff, whom the multitude is accustomed to reverence as the
+        representative of their God, but who, by this act of scandal and
+        sacrilege, descends to a level with the most culpable of men? I have
+        heard, not only in this city but in villages, where sincerity is more
+        frequent than corruption, and where hypocrites are as little known as
+        infidels, these remarks made by the people:
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Can the real vicar of Christ, by his inauguration, commit the double
+        injustice of depriving the legitimate owner of his rights, and of
+        bestowing as a sacred donation what belongs to another; and what he has
+        no power, no authority, to dispose of? Can Pius VII. confer on Napoleon
+        the First what belongs to Louis XVIII.? Would Jesus Christ, if upon
+        earth, have acted thus? Would his immediate successors, the Apostles,
+        not have preferred the suffering of martyrdom to the commission of any
+        injury? If the present Roman pontiff acts differently from what his
+        Master and predecessors would have done, can he be the vicar of our
+        Saviour?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        These and many similar reflections the common people have made, and make
+        yet. The step from doubt to disbelief is but short, and those brought up
+        in the Roman Catholic religion, who hesitate about believing Pius VII.
+        to be the vicar of Christ, will soon remember the precepts of atheists
+        and freethinkers, and believe that Christ is not the Son of God, and
+        that God is only the invention of fear.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The fact is, that by the Pope's performance of the coronation of an
+        Emperor of the French, a religious as well as a political revolution was
+        effected; and the usurper in power, whatever his creed may be, will
+        hereafter, without much difficulty, force it on his slaves. You may,
+        perhaps, object that Pius VII., in his official account to the Sacred
+        College of his journey to France, speaks with enthusiasm of the
+        Catholicism of the French people. But did not the Goddess of Reason, did
+        not Robespierre as a high priest of a Supreme Being, speak as highly of
+        their sectaries? Read the Moniteur of 1793 and 1794, and you will be
+        convinced of the truth of this assertion. They, like the Pope, spoke of
+        what they saw, and they, like him, did not see an individual who was not
+        instructed how to perform his part, so as to give satisfaction to him
+        whom he was to please, and to those who employed him. As you have
+        attended to the history of our Revolution, you have found it in great
+        part a cruel masquerade, where none but the unfortunate Louis XVI.
+        appeared in his native and natural character and without a mask.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The countenance of Pius VII. is placid and benign, and a kind of
+        calmness and tranquillity pervades his address and manners, which are,
+        however, far from being easy or elegant. The crowds that he must have
+        been accustomed to see since his present elevation have not lessened a
+        timidity the consequence of early seclusion. Nothing troubled him more
+        than the numerous deputations of our Senate, Legislative Body,
+        Tribunate, National Institute, Tribunals, etc., that teased him on every
+        occasion. He never was suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are
+        negative; and his best quality is, not to do good, but to prevent evil.
+        His piety is sincere and unaffected, and it is not difficult to perceive
+        that he has been more accustomed to address his God than to converse
+        with men. He is nowhere so well in his place as before the altar; when
+        imploring the blessings of Providence on his audience he speaks with
+        confidence, as to a friend to whom his purity is known, and who is
+        accustomed to listen favourably to his prayers. He is zealous but not
+        fanatical, but equally superstitious as devout. His closet was crowded
+        with relics, rosaries, etc., but there he passed generally eight hours
+        of the twenty-four upon his knees in prayer and meditation. He often
+        inflicted on himself mortifications, observed fast-days, and kept his
+        vows with religious strictness.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        None of the promises made him by Cardinal Fesch, in the name of Napoleon
+        the First, were performed, but all were put off until a general
+        pacification. He was promised indemnity for Avignon, Bologna, Ferrara,
+        and Ravenna; the ancient supremacy and pecuniary contributions of the
+        Gallican Church, and the restoration of certain religious orders, both
+        in France and Italy; but notwithstanding his own representations, and
+        the activity of his Cardinal, Caprara, nothing was decided, though
+        nothing was refused.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        By some means or other he was made perfectly acquainted with the crimes
+        and vices of most of our public functionaries. Talleyrand was surprised
+        when Cardinal Caprara explained to him the reason why the Pope refused
+        to admit some persons to his presence, and why he wished others even not
+        to be of the party when he accepted the invitations of Bonaparte and his
+        wife to their private societies. Many are, however, of opinion that
+        Talleyrand, from malignity or revenge, often heightened and confirmed
+        His Holiness's aversion. This was at least once the case with regard to
+        De Lalande. When Duroc inquired the cause of the Pope's displeasure
+        against this astronomer, and hinted that it would be very agreeable to
+        the Emperor were His Holiness to permit him the honour of prostrating
+        himself, he was answered that men of talents and learning would always
+        be welcome to approach his person; that he pitied the errors and prayed
+        for the conversion of this savant, but was neither displeased nor
+        offended with him. Talleyrand, when informed of the Pope's answer,
+        accused Cardinal Caprara of having misinterpreted his master's
+        communications; and this prelate, in his turn, censured our Minister's
+        bad memory.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        You must have read that this De Lalande is regarded in France as the
+        first astronomer of Europe, and hailed as the high priest of atheists;
+        he is said to be the author of a shockingly blasphemous work called "The
+        Bible of a People who acknowledge no God." He implored the ferocious
+        Robespierre to honour the heavens by bestowing, on a new planet
+        pretended to be discovered, his ci-devant Christian-name, Maximilian. In
+        a letter of congratulation to Bonaparte, on the occasion of his present
+        elevation, he also implored him to honour the God of the Christians by
+        styling himself Jesus Christ the First, Emperor of the French, instead
+        of Napoleon the First. But it was not his known impiety that made
+        Talleyrand wish to exclude him from insulting with his presence a
+        Christian pontiff. In the summer of 1799, when the Minister was in a
+        momentary disgrace, De Lalande was at the head of those who imputed to
+        his treachery, corruptions, and machinations all the evils France then
+        suffered, both from external enemies and internal factions. If
+        Talleyrand has justly been reproached for soon forgetting good offices
+        and services done him, nobody ever denied that he has the best
+        recollection in the world of offences or attacks, and that he is as
+        revengeful as unforgiving.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The only one of our great men whom Pius VII. remained obstinate and
+        inflexible in not receiving, was the Senator and Minister of Police,
+        Fouche. As His Holiness was not so particular with regard to other
+        persons who, like Fouche, were both apostate priests and regicide
+        subjects, the following is reported to be the cause of his aversion and
+        obduracy:
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In November, 1793, the remains of a wretch of the name of Challiers&mdash;justly
+        called, for his atrocities, the Murat of Lyons&mdash;were ordered by
+        Fouche, then a representative of the people in that city, to be produced
+        and publicly worshipped; and, under his particular auspices, a grand
+        fete was performed to the memory of this republican martyr, who had been
+        executed as an assassin. As part of this impious ceremony, an ass,
+        covered with a Bishop's vestments, having on his head a mitre, and the
+        volumes of Holy Writ tied to his tail, paraded the streets. The remains
+        of Challiers were then burnt, and the ashes distributed among his
+        adorers; while the books were also consumed, and the ashes scattered in
+        the wind. Fouche proposed, after giving the ass some water to drink in a
+        sacred chalice, to terminate the festivity of the day by murdering all
+        the prisoners, amounting to seven thousand five hundred; but a sudden
+        storm prevented the execution of this diabolical proposition, and
+        dispersed the sacrilegious congregation.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XX.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Though all the Bonapartes were great favourites with Pius
+        VII., Madame Letitia, their mother, had a visible preference. In her
+        apartments he seemed most pleased to meet the family parties, as they
+        were called, because to them, except the Bonapartes, none but a few
+        select favourites were invited,&mdash;a distinction as much wished for
+        and envied as any other Court honour. After the Pope had fixed the
+        evening he would appear among them, Duroc made out a list, under the
+        dictates of Napoleon, of the chosen few destined to partake of the
+        blessing of His Holiness's presence; this list was merely pro form, or
+        as a compliment, laid before him; and after his tacit approbation, the
+        individuals were informed, from the first chamberlain's office, that
+        they would be honoured with admittance at such an hour, to such a
+        company, and in such an apartment. The dress in which they were to
+        appear was also prescribed. The parties usually met at six o'clock in
+        the evening. On the Pope's entrance all persons, of both sexes, kneeled
+        to receive his blessing. Tea, ice, liqueurs, and confectionery were then
+        served. In the place of honour were three elevated elbow-chairs, and His
+        Holiness was seated between the Emperor and Empress, and seldom spoke to
+        any one to whom Napoleon did not previously address the word. The
+        exploits of Bonaparte, particularly his campaigns in Egypt, were the
+        chief subjects of conversation. Before eight o'clock the Pope always
+        retired, distributing his blessing to the kneeling audience, as on his
+        entry. When he was gone, card-tables were brought in, and play was
+        permitted. Duroc received his master's orders how to distribute the
+        places at the different tables, what games were to be played, and the
+        amount of the sums to be staked. These were usually trifling and small
+        compared to what is daily risked in our fashionable circles.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Often, after the Pope had returned to his own rooms, Madame Letitia
+        Bonaparte was admitted to assist at his private prayers. This lady,
+        whose intrigues and gallantry are proverbial in Corsica, has, now that
+        she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee, and is surrounded
+        by hypocrites and impostors, who, under the mask of sanctity, deceive
+        and plunder her. Her antechambers are always full of priests; and her
+        closet and bedroom are crowded with relics, which she collected during
+        her journey to Italy last year. She might, if she chose, establish a
+        Catholic museum, and furnish it with a more curious collection, in its
+        sort, than any of our other museums contain. Of all the saints in our
+        calendar, there is not one of any notoriety who has not supplied her
+        with a finger, a toe, or some other part; or with a piece of a shirt, a
+        handkerchief, a sandal, or a winding-sheet. Even a bit of a pair of
+        breeches, said to have belonged to Saint Mathurin, whom many think was a
+        sans-cullotte, obtains her adoration on certain occasions. As none of
+        her children have yet arrived at the same height of faith as herself,
+        she has, in her will, bequeathed to the Pope all her relics, together
+        with eight hundred and seventy-nine Prayer-books, and four hundred and
+        forty-six Bibles, either in manuscript or of different editions. Her
+        favourite breviary, used only on great solemnities, was presented to her
+        by Cardinal Maury at Rome, and belonged, as it is said, formerly to
+        Saint Francois, whose commentary, written with his own hand, fills the
+        margins; though many, who with me adore him as a saint, doubt whether he
+        could either read or write.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Not long ago she made, as she thought, an exceedingly valuable
+        acquisition. A priest arrived direct from the Holy City of Jerusalem,
+        well recommended by the inhabitants of the convents there, with whom he
+        pretended to have passed his youth. After prostrating himself before the
+        Pope, he waited on Madame Letitia Bonaparte. He told her that he had
+        brought with him from Syria the famous relic, the shoulder-bone of Saint
+        John the Baptist; but that, being in want of money for his voyage, he
+        borrowed upon it from a Grecian Bishop in Montenegro two hundred louis
+        d'or. This sum, and one hundred louis d'or besides, was immediately
+        given him; and within three months, for a large sum in addition to those
+        advanced, this precious relic was in Madame Letitia's possession.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Notwithstanding this lady's care not to engage in her service any person
+        of either sex who cannot produce, not a certificate of civism from the
+        municipality as was formerly the case, but a certificate of
+        Christianity, and a billet of confession signed by the curate of the
+        parish, she had often been robbed, and the robbers had made particularly
+        free with those relics which were set in gold or in diamonds. She
+        accused her daughter, the Princesse Borghese, who often rallies the
+        devotion of her mamma, and who is more an amateur of the living than of
+        the dead, of having played her these tricks. The Princess informed
+        Napoleon of her mother's losses, as well as of her own innocence, and
+        asked him to apply to the police to find out the thief, who no doubt was
+        one of the pious rogues who almost devoured their mother.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        On the next day Napoleon invited Madame Letitia to dinner, and Fouche
+        had orders to make a strict search, during her absence, among the
+        persons composing her household. Though he, on this occasion, did not
+        find what he was looking for, he made a discovery which very much
+        mortified Madame Letitia.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Her first chambermaid, Rosina Gaglini, possessed both her esteem and
+        confidence, and had been sent for purposely from Ajaccio, in Corsica, on
+        account of her general renown for great piety, and a report that she was
+        an exclusive favourite with the Virgin Mary, by whose interference she
+        had even performed, it was said, some miracles; such as restoring stolen
+        goods, runaway cattle, lost children, and procuring prizes in the
+        lottery. Rosina was as relic-mad as her mistress; and as she had no
+        means to procure them otherwise, she determined to partake of her lady's
+        by cutting off a small part of each relic of Madame Letitia's principal
+        saints. These precious 'morceaux' she placed in a box upon which she
+        kneeled to say her prayers during the day; and which, for a
+        mortification, served her as a pillow during the night. Upon each of the
+        sacred bits she had affixed a label with the name of the saint it
+        belonged to, which occasioned the disclosure. When Madame Letitia heard
+        of this pious theft, she insisted on having the culprit immediately and
+        severely punished; and though the Princesse Borghese, as the innocent
+        cause of poor Rosina's misfortune, interfered, and Rosina herself
+        promised never more to plunder saints, she was without mercy turned
+        away, and even denied money sufficient to carry her back to Corsica. Had
+        she made free with Madame Letitia's plate or wardrobe, there is no doubt
+        but that she had been forgiven; but to presume to share with her those
+        sacred supports on her way to Paradise was a more unpardonable act with
+        a devotee than to steal from a lover the portrait of an adored mistress.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In the meantime the police were upon the alert to discover the person
+        whom they suspected of having stolen the relics for the diamonds, and
+        not the diamonds for the relics. Among our fashionable and new saints,
+        surprising as you may think it, Madame de Genlis holds a distinguished
+        place; and she, too, is an amateur and collector of relics in proportion
+        to her means; and with her were found those missed by Madame Letitia.
+        Being asked to give up the name of him from whom she had purchased them,
+        she mentioned Abbe Saladin, the pretended priest from Jerusalem. He, in
+        his turn, was questioned, and by his answers gave rise to suspicion that
+        he himself was the thief. The person of whom he pretended to have bought
+        them was not to be found, nor was any one of such a description
+        remembered to have been seen anywhere. On being carried to prison, he
+        claimed the protection of Madame Letitia, and produced a letter in which
+        this lady had promised him a bishopric either in France or in Italy.
+        When she was informed of his situation, she applied to her son Napoleon
+        for his liberty, urging that a priest who from Jerusalem had brought
+        with him to Europe such an extraordinary relic as the shoulder of Saint
+        John, could not be culpable.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Abbe Saladin had been examined by Real, who concluded, from the accent
+        and perfection with which he spoke the French language, that he was some
+        French adventurer who had imposed on the credulity and superstition of
+        Madame Letitia; and, therefore, threatened him with the rack if he did
+        not confess the truth. He continued, however, in his story, and was
+        going to be released upon an order from the Emperor, when a gendarme
+        recognized him as a person who, eight years before, had, under the name
+        of Lanoue, been condemned for theft and forgery to the galleys, whence
+        he had made his escape. Finding himself discovered, he avowed
+        everything. He said he had served in Egypt, in the guides of Bonaparte,
+        but deserted to the Turks and turned Mussulman, but afterwards returned
+        to the bosom of the Church at Jerusalem. There he persuaded the friars
+        that he had been a priest, and obtained the certificates which
+        introduced him to the Pope and to the Emperor's mother; from whom he had
+        received twelve thousand livres for part of the jaw bone of a whale,
+        which he had sold her for the shoulder-bone of a saint. As the police
+        believe the certificates he has produced to be also forged, he is
+        detained in prison until an answer arrives from our Consul in Syria.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Madame Letitia did not resign without tears the relic he had sold her;
+        and there is reason to believe that many other pieces of her
+        collections, worshipped by her as remains of saints, are equally genuine
+        as this shoulder-bone of Saint John.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXI.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;That the population of this capital has, since the
+        Revolution, decreased near two hundred thousand souls, is not to be
+        lamented. This focus of corruption and profligacy is still too populous,
+        though the inhabitants do not amount to six hundred thousand; for I am
+        well persuaded that more crimes and excesses of every description are
+        committed here in one year than are perpetrated in the same period of
+        time in all other European capitals put together. From not reading in
+        our newspapers, as we do in yours, of the robberies, murders, and frauds
+        discovered and punished, you may, perhaps, be inclined to suppose my
+        assertion erroneous or exaggerated; but it is the policy of our present
+        Government to labour as much as possible in the dark; that is to say, to
+        prevent, where it can be done, all publicity of anything directly or
+        indirectly tending to inculpate it of oppression, tyranny, or even
+        negligence; and to conceal the immorality of the people so nearly
+        connected with its own immoral power. It is true that many vices and
+        crimes here, as well as everywhere else, are unavoidable, and the
+        natural consequences of corruption, and might be promulgated, therefore,
+        without attaching any reproach to our rulers; but they are so accustomed
+        to the mystery adherent to tyranny, that even the most unimportant
+        lawsuit, uninteresting intrigue, elopement, or divorce, are never
+        allowed to be mentioned in our journals, without a previous permission
+        from the prefect of police, who very seldom grants it.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Most of the enormities now deplored in this country are the consequence
+        of moral and religious licentiousness, that have succeeded to political
+        anarchy, or rather were produced by it, and survive it. Add to this the
+        numerous examples of the impunity of guilt, prosperity of infamy, misery
+        of honesty, and sufferings of virtue, and you will not think it
+        surprising that, notwithstanding half a million of spies, our roads and
+        streets are covered with robbers and assassins, and our scaffolds with
+        victims.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The undeniable TRUTH that this city alone is watched by one hundred
+        thousand spies (so that, when in company with six persons, one has
+        reason to dread the presence of one spy), proclaims at once the morality
+        of the governors and that of the governed: were the former just, and the
+        latter good, this mass of vileness would never be employed; or, if
+        employed, wickedness would expire for want of fuel, and the hydra of
+        tyranny perish by its own pestilential breath.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        According to the official registers published by Manuel in 1792, the
+        number of spies all over France during the reign of Louis XVI. was
+        nineteen thousand three hundred (five thousand less than under Louis
+        XV.); and of this number six thousand were distributed in Paris, and in
+        a circle of four leagues around it, including Versailles. You will
+        undoubtedly ask me, even allowing for our extension of territory, what
+        can be the cause of this disproportionate increase of distrust and
+        depravity? I will explain it as far as my abilities admit, according to
+        the opinions of others compared with my own remarks.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When factions usurped the supremacy of the Kings, vigilance augmented
+        with insecurity; and almost everybody who was not an opposer, who
+        refused being an accomplice, or feared to be a victim, was obliged to
+        serve as an informer and vilify himself by becoming a spy. The rapidity
+        with which parties followed and destroyed each other made the criminals
+        as numerous as the sufferings of honour and loyalty innumerable; and I
+        am sorry to say few persons exist in my degraded country, whose firmness
+        and constancy were proof against repeated torments and trials, and who,
+        to preserve their lives, did not renounce their principles and probity.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Under the reign of Robespierre and of the Committee of Public Safety,
+        every member of Government, of the clubs, of the tribunals, and of the
+        communes, had his private spies; but no regular register was kept of
+        their exact number. Under the Directory a Police Minister was nominated,
+        and a police office established. According to the declaration of the
+        Police Minister, Cochon, in 1797, the spies, who were then regularly
+        paid, amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand; and of these, thirty
+        thousand did duty in this capital. How many there were in 1799, when
+        Fouche, for the first time, was appointed a chief of the department of
+        police, is not known, but suppose them doubled within two years; their
+        increase since is nevertheless immense, considering that France has
+        enjoyed upwards of four years' uninterrupted Continental peace, and has
+        not been exposed to any internal convulsions during the same period.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        You may, perhaps, object that France is not rich enough to keep up as
+        numerous an army of spies as of soldiers; because the expense of the
+        former must be triple the amount of the latter. Were all these spies,
+        now called police agents, or agents of the secret police, paid regular
+        salaries, your objection would stand, but most of them have no other
+        reward than the protection of the police; being employed in gambling&mdash;houses,
+        in coffee&mdash;houses, in taverns, at the theatres, in the public
+        gardens, in the hotels, in lottery offices, at pawnbrokers', in
+        brothels, and in bathing-houses, where the proprietors or masters of
+        these establishments pay them. They receive nothing from the police, but
+        when they are enabled to make any great discoveries, those who have been
+        robbed or defrauded, and to whom they have been serviceable, are,
+        indeed, obliged to present them with some douceur, fixed by the police
+        at the rate of the value recovered; but such occurrences are merely
+        accidental. To these are to be added all individuals of either sex who
+        by the law are obliged to obtain from the police licenses to exercise
+        their trade, as pedlars, tinkers, masters of puppet-shows, wild beasts,
+        etc. These, on receiving their passes, inscribe themselves, and take the
+        oaths as spies; and are forced to send in their regular reports of what
+        they hear or see. Prostitutes, who, all over this country, are under the
+        necessity of paying for regular licenses, are obliged also to give
+        information, from time to time, to the nearest police commissary of what
+        they observe or what they know respecting their visitors, neighbours,
+        etc. The number of unfortunate women of this description who had taken
+        out licenses during the year 12, or from September, 1803, to September,
+        1804, is officially known to have amounted to two hundred and twenty
+        thousand, of whom forty thousand were employed by the armies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It is no secret that Napoleon Bonaparte has his secret spies upon his
+        wife, his brothers, his sisters, his Ministers, Senators, and other
+        public functionaries, and also upon his public spies. These are all
+        under his own immediate control and that of Duroc, who does the duty of
+        his private Police Minister, and in whom he confides more than even in
+        the members of his own family. In imitation of their master, each of the
+        other Bonapartes, and each of the Ministers, have their individual
+        spies, and are watched in their turn by the spies of their secretaries,
+        clerks, etc. This infamous custom of espionage goes ad infinitum, and
+        appertains almost to the establishment and to the suite of each man in
+        place, who does not think himself secure a moment if he remains in
+        ignorance of the transactions of his rivals, as well as of those of his
+        equals and superiors.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Fouche and Talleyrand are reported to have disagreed before Bonaparte on
+        some subject or other, which is frequently the case. The former,
+        offended at some doubts thrown out about his intelligence, said to the
+        latter:
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "I am so well served that I can tell you the name of every man or woman
+        you have conversed with, both yesterday and today; where you saw them,
+        and how long you remained with them or they with you."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "If such commonplace espionage evinces any merit," retorted Talleyrand,
+        "I am even here your superior; because I know not only what has already
+        passed with you and in your house, but what is to pass hereafter. I can
+        inform you of every dish you had for your dinners this week, who
+        provided these dinners, and who is expected to provide your meats
+        to-morrow and the day after. I can whisper you, in confidence, who slept
+        with Madame Fouche last night, and who has an appointment with her
+        to-night."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Here Bonaparte interrupted them, in his usual dignified language: "Hold
+        both your tongues; you are both great rogues, but I am at a loss to
+        decide which is the greatest."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Without uttering a single syllable, Talleyrand made a profound reverence
+        to Fouche. Bonaparte smiled, and advised them to live upon good terms if
+        they were desirous of keeping their places.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A man of the name of Ducroux, who, under Robespierre, had from a barber
+        been made a general, and afterwards broken for his ignorance, was
+        engaged by Bonaparte as a private spy upon Fouche, who employed him in
+        the same capacity upon Bonaparte. His reports were always written, and
+        delivered in person into the hands both of the Emperor and of his
+        Minister. One morning he, by mistake, gave to Bonaparte the report of
+        him instead of that intended for him. Bonaparte began to read:
+        "Yesterday, at nine o'clock, the Emperor acted the complete part of a
+        madman; he swore, stamped, kicked, foamed, roared&mdash;", here poor
+        Ducroux threw himself at Bonaparte's feet, and called for mercy for the
+        terrible blunder he had committed.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "For whom," asked Bonaparte, "did you intend this treasonable
+        correspondence? I suppose it is composed for some English or Russian
+        agent, for Pitt or for Marcoff. How long have you conspired with my
+        enemies, and where are your accomplices?"
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "For God's sake, hear me, Sire," prayed Ducroux. "Your Majesty's enemies
+        have always been mine. The report is for one of your best friends; but
+        were I to mention his name, he will ruin me."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Speak out, or you die!" vociferated Bonaparte.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Well,'Sire, it is for Fouche&mdash;for nobody else but Fouche."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bonaparte then rang the bell for Duroc, whom he ordered to see Ducroux
+        shut up in a dungeon, and afterwards to send for Fouche. The Minister
+        denied all knowledge of Ducroux, who, after undergoing several tortures,
+        expiated his blunder upon the rack.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;The Pope, during his stay here, rose regularly every
+        morning at five o'clock, and went to bed every night before ten. The
+        first hours of the day he passed in prayers, breakfasted after the Mass
+        was over, transacted business till one, and dined at two. Between three
+        and four he took&mdash;his siesta, or nap; afterwards he attended the
+        vespers, and when they were over he passed an hour with the Bonapartes,
+        or admitted to his presence some members of the clergy. The day was
+        concluded, as it was begun, with some hours of devotion.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Had Pius VII. possessed the character of a Pius VI., he would never have
+        crossed the Alps; or had he been gifted with the spirit and talents of
+        Sextus V. or Leo X., he would never have entered France to crown
+        Bonaparte, without previously stipulating for himself that he should be
+        put in possession of the sovereignty of Italy. You can form no idea what
+        great stress was laid on this act of His Holiness by the Bonaparte
+        family, and what sacrifices were destined to be made had any serious and
+        obstinate resistance been apprehended. Threats were, indeed, employed
+        personally against the Pope, and bribes distributed to the refractory
+        members of the Sacred College; but it was no secret, either here or at
+        Milan, that Cardinal Fesch had carte blanche with regard to the
+        restoration of all provinces seized, since the war, from the Holy See,
+        or full territorial indemnities in their place, at the expense of Naples
+        and Tuscany; and, indeed, whatever the Roman pontiff has lost in Italy
+        has been taken from him by Bonaparte alone, and the apparent generosity
+        which policy and ambition required would, therefore, have merely been an
+        act of justice. Confiding foolishly in the honour and rectitude of
+        Napoleon, without any other security than the assertion of Fesch, Pius
+        VII., within a fortnight's stay in France, found the great difference
+        between the promises held out to him when residing as a Sovereign at
+        Rome, and their accomplishment when he had so far forgotten himself and
+        his sacred dignity as to inhabit as a guest the castle of the Tuileries.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Pius VII. mentioned, the day after his arrival at Fontainebleau, that it
+        would be a gratification to his own subjects were he enabled to
+        communicate to them the restoration of the former ecclesiastical
+        domains, as a free gift of the Emperor of the French, at their first
+        conference, as they would then be as well convinced of Napoleon's good
+        faith as he was himself. In answer, His Holiness was informed that the
+        Emperor was unprepared to discuss political subjects, being totally
+        occupied with the thoughts how to entertain worthily his high visitor,
+        and to acknowledge becomingly the great honour done and the great
+        happiness conferred on him by such a visit. As soon as the ceremony of
+        the coronation was over, everything, he hoped, would be arranged to the
+        reciprocal satisfaction of both parties.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        About the middle of last December, Bonaparte was again asked to fix a
+        day when the points of negotiation between him and the Pope could be
+        discussed and settled. Cardinal Caprara, who made this demand, was
+        referred to Talleyrand, who denied having yet any instructions, though
+        in daily expectation of them. Thus the time went on until February, when
+        Bonaparte informed the Pope of his determination to assume the crown of
+        Italy, and of some new changes necessary, in consequence on the other
+        side of the Alps.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Either seduced by caresses, or blinded by his unaccountable partiality
+        for Bonaparte, Pius VII., if left to himself, would not only have
+        renounced all his former claims, but probably have made new sacrifices
+        to this idol of his infatuation. Fortunately, his counsellors were wiser
+        and less deluded, otherwise the remaining patrimony of Saint Peter might
+        now have constituted a part of Napoleon's inheritance, in Italy. "Am I
+        not, Holy Father!" exclaimed the Emperor frequently, "your son, the work
+        of your hand? And if the pages of history assign me any glory, must it
+        not be shared with you&mdash;or rather, do you not share it with me?
+        Anything that impedes my successes, or makes the continuance of my power
+        uncertain or hazardous, reflects on you and is dangerous to you. With me
+        you will shine or be obscured, rise or fall. Could you, therefore,
+        hesitate (were I to demonstrate to you the necessity of such a measure)
+        to remove the Papal See to Avignon, where it formerly was and continued
+        for centuries, and to enlarge the limits of my kingdom of Italy with the
+        Ecclesiastical States? Can you believe my throne at Milan safe as long
+        as it is not the sole throne of Italy? Do you expect to govern at Rome
+        when I cease to reign at Milan? No, Holy Father! the pontiff who placed
+        the crown on my head, should it be shaken, will fall to rise no more."
+        If what Cardinal Caprara said can be depended upon, Bonaparte frequently
+        used to intimidate or flatter the Pope in this manner.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The representations of Cardinal Caprara changed Napoleon's first
+        intention of being again crowned by the Pope as a King of Italy. His
+        crafty Eminence observed that, according to the Emperor's own
+        declaration, it was not intended that the crowns of France and Italy
+        should continue united. But were he to cede one supremacy confirmed by
+        the sacred hands of a pontiff, the partisans of the Bourbons, or the
+        factions in France, would then take advantage to diminish in the opinion
+        of the people his right and the sacredness of His Holiness, and perhaps
+        make even the crown of the French Empire unstable. He did not deny that
+        Charlemagne was crowned by a pontiff in Italy, but this ceremony was
+        performed at Rome, where that Prince was proclaimed an Emperor of the
+        Holy Roman and German Empires, as well as a King of Lombardy and Italy.
+        Might not circumstances turn out so favourably for Napoleon the First
+        that he also might be inaugurated an Emperor of the Germans as well as
+        of the French? This last compliment, or prophecy, as Bonaparte's
+        courtiers call it (what a prophet a Caprara!), had the desired effect,
+        as it flattered equally Napoleon's ambition and vanity. For fear,
+        however, of Talleyrand and other anti-Catholic counsellors, who wanted
+        him to consider the Pope merely as his first almoner, and to treat him
+        as all other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as
+        soon as possible packing for Rome. Though I am neither a cardinal nor a
+        prophet, should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other
+        Continental Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct,
+        I can, without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the
+        second Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that
+        time death does not put a period to his encroachments and gigantic
+        plans.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXIII.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;No Sovereigns have, since the Revolution, displayed more
+        grandeur of soul, and evinced more firmness of character, than the
+        present King and Queen of Naples. Encompassed by a revolutionary volcano
+        more dangerous than the physical one, though disturbed at home and
+        defeated abroad, they have neither been disgraced nor dishonoured. They
+        have, indeed, with all other Italian Princes, suffered territorial and
+        pecuniary losses; but these were not yielded through cowardice or
+        treachery, but enforced by an absolute necessity, the consequence of the
+        desertion or inefficacy of allies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But Their Sicilian Majesties have been careful, as much as they were
+        able, to exclude from their councils both German Illuminati and Italian
+        philosophers. Their principal Minister, Chevalier Acton, has proved
+        himself worthy of the confidence with which his Sovereigns have honoured
+        him, and of the hatred with which he has been honoured by all
+        revolutionists&mdash;the natural and irreconcilable enemies of all
+        legitimate sovereignty.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Chevalier Acton is the son of an Irish physician, who first was
+        established at Besancon in France, and afterwards at Leghorn in Italy.
+        He is indebted for his present elevation to his own merit and to the
+        penetration of the Queen of Sardinia, who discovered in him, when young,
+        those qualities which have since distinguished him as a faithful
+        counsellor and an able Minister. As loyal as wise, he was, from 1789, an
+        enemy to the French Revolution. He easily foresaw that the specious
+        promise of regeneration held out by impostors or fools to delude the
+        ignorant, the credulous and the weak, would end in that universal
+        corruption and general overthrow which we since have witnessed, and the
+        effects of which our grandchildren will mourn.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When our Republic, in April, 1792, declared war against Austria, and
+        when, in the September following, the dominions of His Sardinian Majesty
+        were invaded by our troops, the neutrality of Naples continued, and was
+        acknowledged by our Government. On the 16th of December following, our
+        fleet from Toulon, however, cast anchor in the Bay of Naples, and a
+        grenadier of the name of Belleville was landed as an Ambassador of the
+        French Republic, and threatened a bombardment in case the demands he
+        presented in a note were not acceded to within twenty-four hours. Being
+        attacked in time of peace, and taken by surprise, the Court of Naples
+        was unable to make any resistance, and Chevalier Acton informed our
+        grenadier Ambassador that this note had been laid before his Sovereign,
+        who had ordered him to sign an agreement in consequence.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When in February, 1793, the King of Naples was obliged, for his own
+        safety, to join the league against France, Acton concluded a treaty with
+        your country, and informed the Sublime Porte of the machinations of our
+        Committee of Public Safety in sending De Semonville as an Ambassador to
+        Constantinople, which, perhaps, prevented the Divan from attacking
+        Austria, and occasioned the capture and imprisonment of our emissary.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Whenever our Government has, by the success of our arms, been enabled to
+        dictate to Naples, the removal of Acton has been insisted upon; but
+        though he has ceased to transact business ostensibly as a Minister, his
+        influence has always, and deservedly, continued unimpaired, and he still
+        enjoys the just confidence and esteem of his Prince.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        But is His Sicilian Majesty equally well represented at the Cabinet of
+        St. Cloud as served in his own capital? I have told you before that
+        Bonaparte is extremely particular in his acceptance of foreign
+        diplomatic agents, and admits none near his person whom he does not
+        believe to be well inclined to him.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Marquis de Gallo, the Ambassador of the King of the Two Sicilies to the
+        Emperor of the French, is no novice in the diplomatic career. His
+        Sovereign has employed him for these fifteen years in the most delicate
+        negotiations, and nominated him in May, 1795, a Minister of the Foreign
+        Department, and a successor of Chevalier Acton, an honour which he
+        declined. In the summer and autumn, 1797, Marquis de Gallo assisted at
+        the conferences at Udine, and signed, with the Austrian
+        plenipotentiaries, the Peace of Campo Formio, on the 17th of October,
+        1797.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        During 1798, 1799, and 1800 he resided as Neapolitan Ambassador at
+        Vienna, and was again entrusted by his Sovereign with several important
+        transactions with Austria and Russia. After a peace had been agreed to
+        between France and the Two Sicilies, in March, 1801, and the Court of
+        Naples had every reason to fear, and of course to please, the Court of
+        St. Cloud, he obtained his present appointment, and is one of the few
+        foreign Ambassadors here who has escaped both Bonaparte's private
+        admonitions in the diplomatic circle and public lectures in Madame
+        Bonaparte's drawing-room.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        This escape is so much the more fortunate and singular as our Government
+        is far from being content with the mutinous spirit (as Bonaparte calls
+        it) of the Government of Naples, which, considering its precarious and
+        enfeebled state, with a French army in the heart of the kingdom, has
+        resisted our attempts and insults with a courage and dignity that demand
+        our admiration.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It is said that the Marquis de Gallo is not entirely free from some
+        taints of modern philosophy, and that he, therefore, does not consider
+        the consequences of our innovations so fatal as most loyal men judge
+        them; nor thinks a sans-culotte Emperor more dangerous to civilized
+        society than a sans-culotte sovereign people.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It is evident from the names and rank of its partisans that the
+        Revolution of Naples in 1799 was different in many respects from that of
+        every other country in Europe; for, although the political convulsions
+        seem to have originated among the middle classes of the community, the
+        extremes of society were everywhere else made to act against each other;
+        the rabble being the first to triumph, and the nobles to succumb. But
+        here, on the contrary, the lazzaroni, composed of the lowest portion of
+        the population of a luxurious capital, appear to have been the most
+        strenuous, and, indeed, almost the only supporters of royalty; while the
+        great families, instead of being indignant at novelties which levelled
+        them, in point of political rights, with the meanest subject, eagerly
+        embraced the opportunity of altering that form of Government which alone
+        made them great. It is, however, but justice to say that, though Marquis
+        de Gallo gained the good graces of Bonaparte and of France in 1797, he
+        was never, directly or indirectly, inculpated in the revolutionary
+        transactions of his countrymen in 1799, when he resided at Vienna; and
+        indeed, after all, it is not improbable that he disguises his real
+        sentiments the better to, serve his country, and by that means has
+        imposed on Bonaparte and acquired his favour.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The address and manners of a courtier are allowed Marquis de Gallo by
+        all who know him, though few admit that he possesses any talents as a
+        statesman. He is said to have read a great deal, to possess a good
+        memory and no bad judgment; but that, notwithstanding this, all his
+        knowledge is superficial.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXIV.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;You have perhaps heard that Napoleon Bonaparte, with all
+        his brothers and sisters, was last Christmas married by the Pope
+        according to the Roman Catholic rite, being previously only united
+        according to the municipal laws of the French Republic, which consider
+        marriage only as a civil contract. During the last two months of His
+        Holiness's residence here, hardly a day passed that he was not
+        petitioned to perform the same ceremony for our conscientious grand
+        functionaries and courtiers, which he, however, according to the
+        Emperor's desire, declined. But his Cardinals were not under the same
+        restrictions, and to an attentive observer who has watched the progress
+        of the Revolution and not lost sight of its actors, nothing could appear
+        more ridiculous, nothing could inspire more contempt of our versatility
+        and inconsistency, than to remark among the foremost to demand the
+        nuptial benediction, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Real, an Augereau, a
+        Chaptal, a Reubel, a Lasnes, a Bessieres, a Thuriot, a Treilhard, a
+        Merlin, with a hundred other equally notorious revolutionists, who were,
+        twelve or fifteen years ago, not only the first to declaim against
+        religious ceremonies as ridiculous, but against religion itself as
+        useless, whose motives produced, and whose votes sanctioned, those
+        decrees of the legislature which proscribed the worship, together with
+        its priests and sectaries. But then the fashion of barefaced infidelity
+        was as much the order of the day as that of external sanctity is at
+        present. I leave to casuists the decision whether to the morals of the
+        people, naked atheism, exposed with all its deformities, is more or less
+        hurtful than concealed atheism, covered with the garb of piety; but for
+        my part I think the noonday murderer less guilty and much less
+        detestable than the midnight assassin who stabs in the dark.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A hundred anecdotes are daily related of our new saints and fashionable
+        devotees. They would be laughable were they not scandalous, and
+        contemptible did they not add duplicity to our other vices.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass, and on every
+        Sunday or holiday they regularly attend at vespers, when, of course, all
+        those who wish to be distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their
+        flattery never neglect to be present. In the evening of last Christmas
+        Day, the Imperial chapel was, as usual, early crowded in expectation of
+        Their Majesties, when the chamberlain, Salmatoris, entered, and said to
+        the captain of the guard, loud enough to be heard by the audience, "The
+        Emperor and the Empress have just resolved not to come here to-night,
+        His Majesty being engaged by some unexpected business, and the Empress
+        not wishing to come without her consort." In ten minutes the chapel was
+        emptied of every person but the guards, the priests, and three old women
+        who had nowhere else to pass an hour. At the arrival of our Sovereigns,
+        they were astonished at the unusual vacancy, and indignantly regarded
+        each other. After vespers were over, one of Bonaparte's spies informed
+        him of the cause, when, instead of punishing the despicable and
+        hypocritical courtiers, or showing them any signs of his displeasure, he
+        ordered Salmatoris under arrest, who would have experienced a complete
+        disgrace had not his friend Duroc interfered and made his peace.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        At another time, on a Sunday, Fouche entered the chapel in the midst of
+        the service, and whispered to Bonaparte, who immediately beckoned to his
+        lord-in-waiting and to Duroc. These both left the Imperial chapel, and
+        returning in a few minutes at the head of five grenadiers, entered the
+        grand gallery, generally frequented by the most scrupulous devotees, and
+        seized every book. The cause of this domiciliary visit was an anonymous
+        communication received by the Minister of Police, stating that libels
+        against the Imperial family, bound in the form of Prayer-books, had been
+        placed there. No such libels were, however, found; but of one hundred
+        and sixty pretended breviaries, twenty-eight were volumes of novels,
+        sixteen were poems, and eleven were indecent books. It is not necessary
+        to add that the proprietors of these edifying works never reclaimed
+        them. The opinions are divided here, whether this curious discovery
+        originated in the malice of Fouche, or whether Talleyrand took this
+        method of duping his rival, and at the same time of gratifying his own
+        malignity. Certain it is that Fouche was severely reprimanded for the
+        transaction, and that Bonaparte was highly offended at the disclosure.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously
+        devout, nor so basely perverse. They go to church as to the play, to
+        gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to
+        admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of
+        their attendance. Their indifference about futurity equals their
+        ignorance of religious duties. Our revolutionary charlatans have as much
+        brutalized their understanding as corrupted their hearts. They heard the
+        Grand Mass said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly
+        heard Robespierre proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and
+        they looked at the Imperial processions with the same insensibility as
+        they once saw the daily caravans of victims passing for execution.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Even in Bonaparte's own guard, and among the officers of his household
+        troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go
+        to any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now,
+        after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the
+        Mass as to a parade or to a review. With any other people, Bonaparte
+        would not so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and
+        forced military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day
+        were encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes
+        d'Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the
+        sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell
+        into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy. After being a
+        little recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would
+        injure him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause
+        of his accident and terror: "Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d
+        of September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from
+        which I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the
+        sacrament from my hands." When this occurrence was reported to
+        Bonaparte, Ledoux was dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported, and
+        the Grand Vicar Clauset sent to the Temple, for the scandal their
+        indiscretion had caused. This act was certainly as unjust towards him
+        who was bayoneted at the altar, as towards those who served the altar
+        under the protection of the bayonets.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXV.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your
+        country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could
+        nowhere justly excite surprise. We had crossed the Rhine seven months
+        before to seize the Duc d'Enghien; and when any prey invited, the
+        passing of the Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former
+        outrage, of audacity on our part, and of endurance or indifference on
+        the part of other Continental States. Talleyrand's note at
+        Aix-la-Chapelle had also informed Europe that we had adopted a new and
+        military diplomacy, and, in confounding power with right, would respect
+        no privileges at variance with our ambition, interest or, suspicions,
+        nor any independence it was thought useful or convenient for us to
+        invade.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        It was reported here, at the time, that Bonaparte was much offended with
+        General Frere, who commanded this political expedition, for permitting
+        Sir George's servant to accompany his master, as Fouche and Real had
+        already tortures prepared and racks waiting, and after forcing your
+        agent to speak out, would have announced his sudden death, either by his
+        own hands or by a coup-de-sang, before any Prussian note could require
+        his release. The known morality of our Government must have removed all
+        doubts of the veracity of this assertion; a man might, besides, from the
+        fatigues of a long journey, or from other causes, expire suddenly; but
+        the exit of two, in the same circumstances, would have been thought at
+        least extraordinary, even by our friends, and suspicious by our enemies.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The official declaration of Rheinhard (our Minister to the Circle of
+        Lower Saxony) to the Senate at Hamburg, in which he disavowed all
+        knowledge on the subject of the capture of Sir George Rumbold,
+        occasioned his disgrace. This man, a subject of the Elector of
+        Wurtemberg by birth, is one of the negative accomplices of the criminals
+        of France who, since the Revolution, have desolated Europe. He began in
+        1792 his diplomatic career, under Chauvelin and Talleyrand, in London,
+        and has since been the tool of every faction in power. In 1796 he was
+        appointed a Minister to the Hanse Towns, and, without knowing why, he
+        was hailed as the point of rally to all the philosophers,
+        philanthropists, Illuminati and other revolutionary amateurs, with which
+        the North of Germany, Poland, Denmark, and Sweden then abounded.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A citizen of Hamburg&mdash;or rather, of the world&mdash;of the name of
+        Seveking, bestowed on him the hand of a sister; and though he is not
+        accused of avarice, some of the contributions extorted by our Government
+        from the neutral Hanse Towns are said to have been left behind in his
+        coffers instead of being forwarded to this capital. Either on this
+        account, or for some other reason, he was recalled from Hamburg in
+        January, 1797, and remained unemployed until the latter part of 1798,
+        when he was sent as Minister to Tuscany.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When, in the summer of 1799, Talleyrand was forced by the Jacobins to
+        resign his place as a Minister of the Foreign Department, he had the
+        adroitness to procure Rheinhard to be nominated his successor, so that,
+        though no longer nominally the Minister, he still continued to influence
+        the decisions of our Government as much as if still in office, because,
+        though not without parts, Rheinhard has neither energy of character nor
+        consistency of conduct. He is so much accustomed, and wants so much to
+        be governed, that in 1796, at Hamburg, even the then emigrants, Madame
+        de Genlis and General Valence, directed him, when he was not ruled or
+        dictated to by his wife or brother-in-law.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In 1800 Bonaparte sent him as a representative to the Helvetian
+        Republic, and in 1802, again to Hamburg, where he was last winter
+        superseded by Bourrienne, and ordered to an inferior station at the:
+        Electoral Court at Dresden. Rheinhard will never become one of those
+        daring diplomatic banditti whom revolutionary Governments always employ
+        in preference. He has some moral principles, and, though not religious,
+        is rather scrupulous. He would certainly sooner resign than undertake to
+        remove by poison, or by the steel of a bravo, a rival of his own or a
+        person obnoxious to his employers. He would never, indeed, betray the
+        secrets of his Government if he understood they intended to rob a
+        despatch or to atop a messenger; but no allurements whatever would
+        induce him to head the parties perpetrating these acts of our modern
+        diplomacy.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Our present Minister at Hamburg (Bourrienne) is far from being so nice.
+        A revolutionist from the beginning of the Revolution, he shared, with
+        the partisans of La Fayette, imprisonment under Robespierre, and escaped
+        death only by emigration. Recalled afterwards by his friend, the late
+        Director (Barras), he acted as a kind of secretary to him until 1796,
+        when Bonaparte demanded him, having known him at the military college.
+        During all Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy, Egypt, and Syria, he was his
+        sole and confidential secretary&mdash;a situation which he lost in 1802,
+        when Talleyrand denounced his corruption and cupidity because he had
+        rivalled him in speculating in the funds and profiting by the
+        information which his place afforded him. He was then made a Counsellor
+        of State, but in 1803 he was involved in the fraudulent bankruptcy of
+        one of our principal houses to the amount of a million of livres&mdash;and,
+        from his correspondence with it, some reasons appeared for the suspicion
+        that he frequently had committed a breach of confidence against his
+        master, who, after erasing his name from among the Counsellors of State,
+        had him conveyed a prisoner to the Temple, where he remained six months.
+        A small volume, called Le Livre Rouge of the Consular Court, made its
+        appearance about that time, and contained some articles which gave
+        Bonaparte reason to suppose that Bourrienne was its author. On being
+        questioned by the Grand Judge Regnier and the Minister Fouce, before
+        whom he was carried, he avowed that he had written it, but denied that
+        he had any intention of making it public. As to its having found its way
+        to the press during his confinement, that could only be ascribed to the
+        ill-will or treachery of those police agents who inspected his papers
+        and put their seals upon them. "Tell Bonaparte," said he, "that, had I
+        been inclined to injure him in the public opinion, I should not have
+        stooped to such trifles as Le Livre Rouge, while I have deposited with a
+        friend his original orders, letters, and other curious documents as
+        materials for an edifying history of our military hospitals during the
+        campaigns of Italy and Syria all authentic testimonies of his humanity
+        for the wounded and dying French soldiers."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        After the answers of this interrogatory had been laid before Bonaparte,
+        his brother Joseph was sent to the Temple to negotiate with Bourrienne,
+        who was offered his liberty and a prefecture if he would give up all the
+        original papers that, as a private secretary, he had had opportunity to
+        collect.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "These papers," answered Bourrienne, "are my only security against your
+        brother's wrath and his assassins. Were I weak enough to deliver them up
+        to-day, to-morrow, probably, I should no longer be counted among the
+        living; but I have now taken my measures so effectually that, were I
+        murdered to-day, these originals would be printed to-morrow. If Napoleon
+        does not confide in my word of honour, he may trust to an assurance of
+        discretion, with which my own interest is nearly connected. If he
+        suspects me of having wronged him, he is convinced also of the eminent
+        services I have rendered him, sufficient surely to outweigh his present
+        suspicion. Let him again employ me in any post worthy of him and of me,
+        and he shall soon see how much I will endeavour to regain his
+        confidence."
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Shortly afterwards Bourrienne was released, and a pension, equal to the
+        salary of a Counsellor of State; was granted him until some suitable
+        place became vacant. On Champagny's being appointed a Minister of the
+        Home Department, the embassy at Vienna was demanded by Bourrienne, but
+        refused, as previously promised to La Rochefoucauld, our late Minister
+        at Dresden. When Rheinhard, in a kind of disgrace, was transferred to
+        that relatively insignificant post, Bourrienne was ordered, with
+        extensive instructions, to Hamburg. The Senate soon found the difference
+        between a timid and honest Minister, and an unprincipled and crafty
+        intriguer. New loans were immediately required from Hanover; but hardly
+        were these acquitted, than fresh extortions were insisted on. In some
+        secret conferences Bourrienne is, however, said to have hinted that some
+        douceurs were expected for alleviating the rigour of his instructions.
+        This hint has, no doubt, been taken, because he suddenly altered his
+        conduct, and instead of hunting the purses of the Germans, pursued the
+        persons of his emigrated countrymen; and, in a memorial, demanded the
+        expulsion of all Frenchmen who were not registered and protected by him,
+        under pretence that every one of them who declined the honour of being a
+        subject of Bonaparte, must be a traitor against the French Government
+        and his country.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Bourrienne is now stated to have connected himself with several
+        stock-jobbers, both in Germany, Holland, and England; and already to
+        have pocketed considerable sums by such connections. It is, however, not
+        to be forgotten that several houses have been ruined in this capital by
+        the profits allowed him, who always refused to share their losses, but,
+        whatever were the consequences, enforced to its full amount the payment
+        of that value which he chose to set on his communications.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        A place in France would, no doubt, have been preferable to Bourrienne,
+        particularly one near the person of Bonaparte. But if nothing else
+        prevented the accomplishment of his wishes, his long familiarity with
+        all the Bonapartes, whom he always treated as equals, and even now (with
+        the exception of Napoleon) does not think his superiors, will long
+        remain an insurmountable barrier.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        I cannot comprehend how Bonaparte (who is certainly no bad judge of men)
+        could so long confide in Bourrienne, who, with the usual presumption of
+        my countrymen, is continually boasting, to a degree that borders on
+        indiscretion, and, by an artful questioner, may easily be lead to
+        overstep those bounds. Most of the particulars of his quarrel with
+        Napoleon I heard him relate himself, as a proof of his great
+        consequence, in a company of forty individuals, many of whom were
+        unknown to him. On the first discovery which Bonaparte made of
+        Bourrienne's infidelity, Talleyrand complimented him upon not having
+        suffered from it. "Do you not see," answered Bonaparte, "that it is also
+        one of the extraordinary gifts of my extraordinary good fortune?
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        "Even traitors are unable to betray me. Plots respect me as much as
+        bullets." I need not tell you that Fortune is the sole divinity
+        sincerely worshipped by Napoleon.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+      <h2>
+        LETTER XXVI.
+      </h2>
+      <br />
+      <p>
+        PARIS, August, 1805.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        MY LORD:&mdash;Joseph Bonaparte leads a much more retired life, and sees
+        less company, than any of his brothers or sisters. Except the members of
+        his own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph
+        those regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame
+        Louis Bonaparte have. His hospitality is, however, greater at his
+        countryseat Morfontaine than at his hotel here. Those whom he likes, or
+        does not mistrust (who, by the bye, are very few), may visit him without
+        much formality in the country, and prolong their stay, according to
+        their own inclination or discretion; but they must come without their
+        servants, or send them away on their arrival.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        As soon as an agreeable visitor presents himself, it is the etiquette of
+        the house to consider him as an inmate; but to allow him at the same
+        time a perfect liberty to dispose of his hours and his person as suits
+        his convenience or caprice. In this extensive and superb mansion a suite
+        of apartments is assigned him, with a valet-de&mdash;chambre, a lackey,
+        a coachman, a groom, and a jockey, all under his own exclusive command.
+        He has allotted him a chariot, a gig, and riding horses, if he prefers
+        such an exercise. A catalogue is given him of the library of the
+        chateau; and every morning he is informed what persons compose the
+        company at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and of the hours of these
+        different repasts. A bill of fare is at the same time presented to him,
+        and he is asked to point out those dishes to which he gives the
+        preference, and to declare whether he chooses to join the company or to
+        be served in his own rooms.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        During the summer season, players from the different theatres of Paris
+        are paid to perform three times in the week; and each guest, according
+        to the period of his arrival, is asked, in his turn, to command either a
+        comedy or a tragedy, a farce or a ballet. Twice in the week concerts are
+        executed by the first performers of the opera-bouffe; and twice in the
+        week invitations to tea-parties are sent to some of the neighbours, or
+        accepted from them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Besides four billiard-tables, there are other gambling-tables for Rouge
+        et Noir, Trente et Quarante, Faro, La Roulette, Birribi, and other games
+        of hazard. The bankers are young men from Corsica, to whom Joseph, who
+        advances the money, allows all the gain, while he alone suffers the
+        loss. Those who are inclined may play from morning till night, and from
+        night till morning, without interruption, as no one interferes. Should
+        Joseph hear that any person has been too severely treated by Fortune, or
+        suspects that he has not much cash remaining, some rouleaux of napoleons
+        d'or are placed on the table of his dressing-room, which he may use or
+        leave untouched, as he judges proper.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        The hours of Joseph Bonaparte are neither so late as yours in England,
+        nor so early as they were formerly in France. Breakfast is ready served
+        at ten o'clock, dinner at four, and supper at nine. Before midnight he
+        retires to bed with his family, but visitors do as they like and follow
+        their own usual hours, and their servants are obliged to wait for them.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        When any business calls Joseph away, either to preside in the Senate
+        here, or to travel in the provinces, he notifies the visitors, telling
+        them at the same time not to displace themselves on account of his
+        absence, but wait till his return, as they would not observe any
+        difference in the economy of his house, of which Madame Joseph always
+        does the honours, or, in her absence, some lady appointed by her.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        Last year, when Joseph first assumed a military rank, he passed nearly
+        four months with the army of England on the coast or in Brabant. On his
+        return, all his visitors were gone, except a young poet of the name of
+        Montaigne, who does not want genius, but who is rather too fond of the
+        bottle. Joseph is considered the best gourmet or connoisseur in liquors
+        and wines of this capital, and Montaigne found his Champagne and
+        burgundy so excellent that he never once went to bed that he was not
+        heartily intoxicated. But the best of the story is that he employed his
+        mornings in composing a poem holding out to abhorrence the disgusting
+        vice of drunkenness, and presented it to Joseph, requesting permission
+        to dedicate it to him when published. To those who have read it, or only
+        seen extracts from it, the compilation appears far from being
+        contemptible, but Joseph still keeps the copy, though he has made the
+        author a present of one hundred napoleons d'or, and procured him a place
+        of an amanuensis in the chancellory of the Senate, having resolved never
+        to accept any dedication, but wishing also not to hurt the feelings of
+        the author by a refusal.
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        In a chateau where so many visitors of licentious and depraved morals
+        meet, of both sexes, and where such an unlimited liberty reigns,
+        intrigues must occur, and have of course not seldom furnished materials
+        for the scandalous chronicle. Even Madame Joseph herself has either been
+        gallant or calumniated. Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of
+        Eugene de Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively
+        indebted to the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even
+        fought a duel concerning the right of paternity. Eugene de Beauharnais
+        never was a great favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved
+        manners and prudence form too great a contrast to his noisy and
+        blundering way to accord with each other. Before he set out for Italy,
+        it was well known in our fashionable circles that he had been
+        interdicted the house of his uncle, and that no reconciliation took
+        place, notwithstanding the endeavours of Madame Napoleon. To humble him
+        still more, Joseph even nominated la Fond-Blaniac an equerry to his
+        wife, who, therefore, easily consoled herself for the departure of her
+        dear nephew.
+      </p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p214" id="p214"></a>
+      <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+        <img alt="p214.jpg (77K)" src="images/p214.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+      </div>
+        <p>
+          The husband of Madame Miot (one of Madame Joseph's ladies-in-waiting)
+          was not so patient, nor such a philosopher as Joseph Bonaparte. Some
+          charitable person having reported in the company of a 'bonne amie' of
+          Miot, that his wife did not pass her nights in solitude, but that she
+          sought consolation among the many gallants and disengaged visitors at
+          Morfontaine, he determined to surprise her. It was past eleven o'clock
+          at night when his arrival was announced to Joseph, who had just
+          retired to his closet. Madame Miot had been in bed ever since nine,
+          ill of a migraine, and her husband was too affectionate not to be the
+          first to inform her of his presence, without permitting anybody
+          previously to disturb her. With great reluctance, Madame Miot's maid
+          delivered the key of her rooms, while she accompanied him with a
+          light. In the antechamber he found a hat and a greatcoat, and in the
+          closet adjoining the bedroom, a coat, a waistcoat, and a pair of
+          breeches, with drawers, stockings, and slippers. Though the maid kept
+          coughing all the time, Madame Miot and her gallant did not awake from
+          their slumber, till the enraged husband began to use the bludgeon of
+          the lover, which had also been left in the closet. A battle then
+          ensued, in which the lover retaliated so vigorously, that the husband
+          called out "Murder! murder!" with all his might. The chateau was
+          instantly in an uproar, and the apartments crowded with half-dressed
+          and half-naked lovers. Joseph Bonaparte alone was able to separate the
+          combatants; and inquiring the cause of the riot, assured them that he
+          would suffer no scandal and no intrigues in his house, without
+          seriously resenting it. An explanation being made, Madame Miot was
+          looked for but in vain; and the maid declared that, being warned by a
+          letter from Paris of her husband's jealousy and determination to
+          surprise her, her mistress had reposed herself in her room; while, to
+          punish the ungenerous suspicions of her husband, she had persuaded
+          Captain d' Horteuil to occupy her place in her own bed. The maid had
+          no sooner finished her deposition, than her mistress made her
+          appearance and upbraided her husband severely, in which she was
+          cordially joined by the spectators. She inquired if, on seeing the
+          dress of a gentleman, he had also discovered the attire of a female;
+          and she appealed to Captain d' Horteuil whether he had not the two
+          preceding nights also slept in her bed. To this he, of course,
+          assented; adding that, had M. Miot attacked him the first night, he
+          would not then perhaps have been so roughly handled as now; for then
+          he was prepared for a visit, which this night was rather unexpected.
+          This connubial farce ended by Miot begging pardon of his wife and her
+          gallant; the former of whom, after much entreaty by Joseph, at last
+          consented to share with him her bed. But being disfigured with two
+          black eyes and suffering from several bruises, and also ashamed of his
+          unfashionable behaviour, he continued invisible for ten days
+          afterwards, and returned to this city as he had left it, by stealth.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This Niot was a spy under Robespierre, and is a Counsellor of State
+          under Bonaparte. Without bread, as well as without a home, he was,
+          from the beginning of the Revolution, one of the most ardent patriots,
+          and the first republican Minister in Tuscany. After the Sovereign of
+          that country had, in 1793, joined the League, Miot returned to France,
+          and was, for his want of address to negotiate as a Minister, shut up
+          to perform the part of a spy in the Luxembourg, then transformed into
+          a prison for suspected persons. Thanks to his patriotism, upwards of
+          two hundred individuals of both sexes were denounced, transferred to
+          the Conciergerie prison, and afterwards guillotined. After that, until
+          1799, he continued so despised that no faction would accept him for an
+          accomplice; but in the November of that year, after Bonaparte had
+          declared himself a First Consul, Miot was appointed a tribune, an
+          office from which he was advanced, in 1802, to be a Counsellor of
+          State. As Miot squanders away his salary with harlots and in
+          gambling-houses, and is pursued by creditors he neither will nor can
+          pay, it was merely from charity that his wife was received among the
+          other ladies of Madame Joseph Bonaparte's household.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXVII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;Notwithstanding the ties of consanguinity, honour,
+          duty, interest, and gratitude, which bound the Spanish Bourbons to the
+          cause of the Bourbons of France, no monarch has rendered more service
+          to the cause of rebellion, and done more harm to the cause of royalty,
+          than the King of Spain.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          But here, again, you must understand me. When I speak of Princes whose
+          talents are known not to be brilliant, whose intellects are known to
+          be feeble, and whose good intentions are rendered null by a want of
+          firmness of character or consistency of conduct; while I deplore their
+          weakness and the consequent misfortunes of their contemporaries, I lay
+          all the blame on their wicked or ignorant counsellors; because, if no
+          Ministers were fools or traitors, no Sovereigns would tremble on their
+          thrones, and no subjects dare to shake their foundation. Had
+          Providence blessed Charles IV. of Spain with the judgment in selecting
+          his Ministers, and the constancy of persevering in his choice,
+          possessed by your George III.; had the helm of Spain been in the firm
+          and able hands of a Grenville, a Windham, and a Pitt, the Cabinet of
+          Madrid would never have been oppressed by the yoke of the Cabinet of
+          St. Cloud, nor paid a heavy tribute for its bondage, degrading as well
+          as ruinous.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand to his cousin, Prince
+          de Chalais, who reproached him for an unbecoming servility to low and
+          vile personages; "and I prefer bowing to them to being trampled upon
+          and crushed by them." Indeed, as far as I remember, nowhere in history
+          are hitherto recorded so many low persons who, from obscurity and
+          meanness, have suddenly and at once attained rank and notoriety. Where
+          do we read of such a numerous crew of upstart Emperors, Kings, grand
+          pensionaries, directors, Imperial Highnesses, Princes, Field-marshals,
+          generals, Senators, Ministers, governors, Cardinals, etc., as we now
+          witness figuring upon the theatre of Europe, and who chiefly decide on
+          the destiny of nations? Among these, several are certainly to be found
+          whose superior parts have made them worthy to pierce the crowd and to
+          shake off their native mud; but others again, and by far the greatest
+          number of these 'novi homines', owe their present elevation to
+          shameless intrigues or atrocious crimes.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The Prime Minister&mdash;or rather, the viceroy of Spain, the Prince
+          of Peace&mdash;belongs to the latter class. From a man in the ranks of
+          the guards he was promoted to a general-in-chief, and from a harp
+          player in antechambers to a president of the councils of a Prince; and
+          that within the short period of six years. Such a fortune is not
+          common; but to be absolutely without capacity as well as virtue,
+          genius as well as good breeding, and, nevertheless, to continue in an
+          elevation so little merited, and in a place formerly so subject to
+          changes and so unstable, is a fortune that no upstart ever before
+          experienced in Spain.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          An intrigue of his elder brother with the present Queen, then Princess
+          of Asturia, which was discovered by the King, introduced him first at
+          Court as a harp player, and, when his brother was exiled, he was
+          entrusted with the correspondence of the Princess with her gallant.
+          After she had ascended the throne, he thought it more profitable to be
+          the lover than the messenger, and contrived, therefore, to supplant
+          his brother in the royal favour. Promotions and riches were
+          consequently heaped upon him, and, what is surprising, the more
+          undisguised the partiality of the Queen was, the greater the
+          attachment of the King displayed itself; and it has ever since been an
+          emulation between the royal couple who should the most forget and
+          vilify birth and supremacy by associating this man not only in the
+          courtly pleasures, but in the functions of Sovereignty. Had he been
+          gifted with sound understanding, or possessed any share of delicacy,
+          generosity, or discretion, he would, while he profited by their
+          imprudent condescension, have prevented them from exposing their
+          weaknesses and frailties to a discussion and ridicule among courtiers,
+          and from becoming objects of humiliation and scandal among the people.
+          He would have warned them of the danger which at all times attends the
+          publicity of foibles and vices of Princes, but particularly in the
+          present times of trouble and innovations. He would have told them:
+          "Make me great and wealthy, but not at the expense of your own
+          grandeur or of the loyalty of your people. Do not treat an humble
+          subject as an equal, nor suffer Your Majesties, whom Providence
+          destined to govern a high-spirited nation, to be openly ruled by one
+          born to obey. I am too dutiful not to lay aside my private vanity when
+          the happiness of my King and the tranquillity of my fellow subjects
+          are at stake. I am already too high. In descending a little, I shall
+          not only rise in the eyes of my contemporaries, but in the opinion of
+          posterity. Every step I am advancing undermines your throne. In
+          retreating a little, if I do not strengthen, I can never injure it."
+          But I beg your pardon for this digression, and for putting the
+          language of dignified reason into the mouth of a man as corrupt as he
+          is imbecile.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Do not suppose, because the Prince of Peace is no friend of my nation,
+          that I am his enemy. No! Had he shown himself a true patriot, a friend
+          of his own country, and of his too liberal Prince, or even of monarchy
+          in general, or of anybody else but himself&mdash;although I might have
+          disapproved of his policy, if he has any&mdash;I would never have
+          lashed the individual for the acts of the Minister. But you must have
+          observed, with me, that never before his administration was the
+          Cabinet of Madrid worse conducted at home or more despised abroad; the
+          Spanish Monarch more humbled or Spanish subjects more wretched; the
+          Spanish power more dishonoured or the Spanish resources worse
+          employed. Never, before the treaty with France of 1796, concluded by
+          this wiseacre (which made him a Prince of Peace, and our Government
+          the Sovereign of Spain), was the Spanish monarchy reduced to such a
+          lamentable dilemma as to be forced into an expensive war without a
+          cause, and into a disgraceful peace, not only unprofitable, but
+          absolutely disadvantageous. Never before were its treasures
+          distributed among its oppressors to support their tyranny, nor its
+          military and naval forces employed to fight the battles of rebellion.
+          The loyal subjects of Spain have only one hope left. The delicate
+          state of his present Majesty's health does not promise a much longer
+          continuance of his reign, and the Prince of Asturia is too well
+          informed to endure the guidance of the most ignorant Minister that
+          ever was admitted into the Cabinet and confidence of a Sovereign. It
+          is more than probable that under a new reign the misfortunes of the
+          Prince of Peace will inspire as much compassion as his rapid
+          advancement has excited astonishment and indignation.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A Cabinet thus badly directed cannot be expected to have
+          representatives abroad either of abilities or patriotism. The Admiral
+          and General Gravina, who but lately left this capital as an Ambassador
+          from the Court of Spain to assume the command of a Spanish fleet, is
+          more valiant than wise, and more an enemy of your country than a
+          friend of his own. He is a profound admirer of Bonaparte's virtues and
+          successes, and was, during his residence, one of the most
+          ostentatiously awkward courtiers of Napoleon the First. It is said
+          that he has the modesty and loyalty to wish to become a Spanish
+          Bonaparte, and that he promises to restore by his genius and exploits
+          the lost lustre of the Spanish monarchy. When this was reported to
+          Talleyrand, he smiled with contempt; but when it was told to
+          Bonaparte, he stamped with rage at the impudence of the Spaniard in
+          daring to associate his name of acquired and established greatness
+          with his own impertinent schemes of absurdities and impossibilities.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the summer of 1793, Gravina commanded a division of the Spanish
+          fleet in the Mediterranean, of which Admiral Langara was the
+          commander-in-chief. At the capitulation of Toulon, after the combined
+          English and Spanish forces had taken possession of it, when
+          Rear-Admiral Goodall was declared governor, Gravina was made the
+          commandant of the troops. At the head of these he often fought bravely
+          in different sorties, and on the 1st of October was wounded at the
+          re-capture of Fort Pharon. He complains still of having suffered
+          insults or neglect from the English, and even of having been exposed
+          unnecessarily to the fire and sword of the enemy merely because he was
+          a patriot as well as an envied or suspected ally. His inveteracy
+          against your country takes its date, no doubt, from the siege of
+          Toulon, or perhaps, from its evacuation.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When, in May, 1794, our troops were advancing towards Collioure, he
+          was sent with a squadron to bring it succours, but he arrived too
+          late, and could not save that important place. He was not more
+          successful at the beginning of the campaign of 1795 at Rosa, where he
+          had only time to carry away the artillery before the enemy entered. In
+          August, that year, during the absence of Admiral Massaredo, he assumed
+          ad interim the command of the Spanish fleet in the Mediterranean; but
+          in the December following he was disgraced, arrested, and shut up as a
+          State prisoner.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          During the embassy of Lucien Bonaparte to the Court of Madrid, in the
+          autumn of 1800, Gravina was by his influence restored to favour; and
+          after the death of the late Spanish Ambassador to the Cabinet of St.
+          Cloud, Chevalier d' Azara, by the special desire of Napoleon, was
+          nominated both his successor and a representative of the King of
+          Etruria. Among the members of our diplomatic corps, he was considered
+          somewhat of a Spanish gasconader and a bully. He more frequently
+          boasted of his wounds and battles than of his negotiations or
+          conferences, though he pretended, indeed, to shine as much in the
+          Cabinet as in the field.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In his suite were two Spanish women, one about forty, and the other
+          about twenty years of age. Nobody knew what to make of them, as they
+          were treated neither as wives, mistresses, nor servants; and they
+          avowed themselves to be no relations. After a residence here of some
+          weeks, he was, by superior orders, waylaid one night at the opera, by
+          a young and beautiful dancing girl of the name of Barrois, who engaged
+          him to take her into keeping. He hesitated, indeed, for some time; at
+          last, however, love got the better of his scruples, and he furnished
+          for her an elegant apartment on the new Boulevard. On the day he
+          carried her there, he was accompanied by the chaplain of the Spanish
+          Legation; and told her that, previous to any further intimacy, she
+          must be married to him, as his religious principles did not permit him
+          to cohabit with a woman who was not his wife. At the same time he laid
+          before her an agreement to sign, by which she bound herself never to
+          claim him as a husband before her turn&mdash;that is to say, until
+          sixteen other women, to whom he had been previously married, were
+          dead. She made no opposition, either to the marriage or to the
+          conditions annexed to it. This girl had a sweetheart of the name of
+          Valere, an actor at one of the little theatres on the Boulevards, to
+          whom she communicated her adventure. He advised her to be scrupulous
+          in her turn, and to ask a copy of the agreement. After some difficulty
+          this was obtained. In it no mention was made of her maintenance, nor
+          in what manner her children were to be regarded, should she have any.
+          Valere had, therefore, another agreement drawn up, in which all these
+          points were arranged, according to his own interested views. Gravina
+          refused to subscribe to what he plainly perceived were only
+          extortions; and the girl, in her turn, not only declined any further
+          connection with him, but threatened to publish the act of polygamy.
+          Before they had done discussing this subject, the door was suddenly
+          opened and the two Spanish ladies presented themselves. After severely
+          upbraiding Gravina, who was struck mute by surprise, they announced to
+          the girl that whatever promise or contract of marriage she had
+          obtained from him was of no value, as, before they came with him to
+          France, he had bound himself, before a public notary at Madrid, not to
+          form any more connections, nor to marry any other woman, without their
+          written consent. One of these ladies declared that she had been
+          married to Gravina twenty-two years, and was his oldest wife but one;
+          the other said that she had been married to him six years. They
+          insisted upon his following them, which he did, after putting a purse
+          of gold into Barrois's hand.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When Valere heard from his mistress this occurrence, he advised her to
+          make the most money she could of the Spaniard's curious scruples. A
+          letter was, therefore, written to him, demanding one hundred thousand
+          livres&mdash;as the price of secrecy and withholding the particulars
+          of this business from the knowledge of the tribunals and the police;
+          and an answer was required within twenty-four hours. The same night
+          Gravina offered one thousand Louis, which were accepted, and the
+          papers returned; but the next day Valere went to his hotel, Rue de
+          Provence, where he presented himself as a brother of Barrois. He
+          stated that he still possessed authenticated copies of the papers
+          returned, and that he must have either the full sum first asked by his
+          sister, or an annuity of twelve thousand livres settled upon her.
+          Instead of an answer, Gravina ordered him to be turned out of the
+          house. An attorney then waited on His Excellency, on the part of the
+          brother and the sister, and repeated their threats and their demands,
+          adding that he would write a memorial both to the Emperor of the
+          French and to the King of Spain, were justice refused to his
+          principals any longer.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Gravina was well aware that this affair, though more laughable than
+          criminal, would hurt both his character and credit if it were known in
+          France; he therefore consented to pay seventy-six thousand livres
+          more, upon a formal renunciation by the party of all future claims.
+          Not having money sufficient by him, he went to borrow it from a
+          banker, whose clerk was one of Talleyrand's secret agents. Our
+          Minister, therefore, ordered every step of Gravina to be watched; but
+          he soon discovered that, instead of wanting this money for a political
+          intrigue, it was necessary to extricate him out of an amorous scrape.
+          Hearing, however, in what a scandalous manner the Ambassador had been
+          duped and imposed upon, he reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche
+          orders to have Valere, Barrois, and the attorney immediately
+          transported to Cayenne, and to restore Gravina his money. The former
+          part of this order the Minister of Police executed the more willingly,
+          as it was according to his plan that Barrois had pitched upon Gravina
+          for a lover. She had been intended by him as a spy on His Excellency,
+          but had deceived him by her reports&mdash;a crime for which
+          transportation was a usual punishment.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this
+          affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our
+          fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists. But these
+          artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to
+          chastise genius than to silence tongues. The declaration of war by
+          Spain against your country was a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit
+          with honour a Court where he was an object of ridicule, to assume the
+          command of a fleet which might one day make him an object of terror.
+          When he took leave of Bonaparte, he was told to return to France
+          victorious, or never to return any more; and Talleyrand warned him as
+          a friend, "whenever he returned to his post in France to leave his
+          marriage mania behind him in Spain. Here," said he, "you may, without
+          ridicule, intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a great risk by
+          marrying even one."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say,
+          so far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious.
+          But infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXVIII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;It cannot have escaped the observation of the most
+          superficial traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want
+          of morals is not atoned for by good breeding or good manners. The
+          hideousness of vice, the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank,
+          the pride of favour, and the shame of venality do not wear here that
+          delicate veil, that gloss of virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens
+          the deformity of corruption and the scandal of depravity. Duplicity
+          and hypocrisy are here very common indeed, more so than dissimulation
+          anywhere else; but barefaced knaves and impostors must always make
+          indifferent courtiers. Here the Minister tells you, I must have such a
+          sum for a place; and the chamberlain tells you, Count down so much for
+          my protection. The Princess requires a necklace of such a value for
+          interesting herself for your advancement; and the lady-in-waiting
+          demands a diamond of such worth on the day of your promotion. This
+          tariff of favours and of infamy descends 'ad infinitum'. The secretary
+          for signing, and the clerk for writing your commission; the cashier
+          for delivering it, and the messenger for informing you of it, have all
+          their fixed prices. Have you a lawsuit, the judge announces to you
+          that so much has been offered by your opponent, and so much is
+          expected from you, if you desire to win your cause. When you are the
+          defendant against the Crown, the attorney or solicitor-general lets
+          you know that such a douceur is requisite to procure such an issue.
+          Even in criminal proceedings, not only honour, but life, may be saved
+          by pecuniary sacrifices.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A man of the name of Martin, by profession a stock-jobber, killed, in
+          1803, his own wife; and for twelve thousand livres&mdash;he was
+          acquitted, and recovered his liberty. In November last year, in a
+          quarrel with his own brother, he stabbed him through the heart, and
+          for another sum of twelve thousand livres he was acquitted, and
+          released before last Christmas. This wretch is now in prison again, on
+          suspicion of having poisoned his own daughter, with whom he had an
+          incestuous intercourse, and he boasts publicly of soon being
+          liberated. Another person, Louis de Saurac, the younger son of Baron
+          de Saurac, who together with his eldest son had emigrated, forged a
+          will in the name of his parent, whom he pretended to be dead, which
+          left him the sole heir of all the disposable property, to the
+          exclusion of two sisters. After the nation had shared its part as heir
+          of all emigrants, Louis took possession of the remainder. In 1802,
+          both his father and brother accepted the general amnesty, and returned
+          to France. To their great surprise, they heard that this Louis had, by
+          his ill-treatment, forced his sisters into servitude, refusing them
+          even the common necessaries of life. After upbraiding him for his want
+          of duty, the father desired, according to the law, the restitution of
+          the unsold part of his estates. On the day fixed for settling the
+          accounts and entering into his rights, Baron de Saurac was arrested as
+          a conspirator and imprisoned in the Temple. He had been denounced as
+          having served in the army of Conde, and as being a secret agent of
+          Louis XVIII. To disprove the first part of the charge, he produced
+          certificates from America, where he had passed the time of his
+          emigration, and even upon the rack he denied the latter. During his
+          arrest, the eldest son discovered that Louis had become the owner of
+          their possessions, by means of the will he had forged in the name of
+          his father; and that it was he who had been unnatural enough to
+          denounce the author of his days. With the wreck of their fortune in
+          St. Domingo, he procured his father's release; who, being acquainted
+          with the perversity of his younger son, addressed himself to the
+          department to be reinstated in his property. This was opposed by
+          Louis, who defended his title to the estate by the revolutionary maxim
+          which had passed into a law, enacting that all emigrants should be
+          considered as politically dead. Hitherto Baron de Saurac had, from
+          affection, declined to mention the forged will; but shocked by his
+          son's obduracy, and being reduced to distress, his counsellor produced
+          this document, which not only went to deprive Louis of his property,
+          but exposed him to a criminal prosecution.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This unnatural son, who was not yet twenty-five, had imbibed all the
+          revolutionary morals of his contemporaries, and was well acquainted
+          with the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen. He
+          addressed himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial
+          attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a
+          bribe of fifty thousand livres&mdash;obtained for him, after he had
+          been defeated in every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the
+          tribunal of cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all
+          emigrants, being, according to law, considered as politically dead, a
+          will in the name of any one of them was merely a pious fraud to
+          preserve the property in the family.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of
+          the Abbey of the same name. One of the monks, observing in him some
+          application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
+          bestowed on him some previous education. Not satisfied with this
+          generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of
+          Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by
+          the Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him.
+          By his dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his
+          benefactors; who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination
+          as representative of the people to our First National Assembly. They
+          soon, however, had reason to repent of their generosity. He joined the
+          Orleans faction and became one of the most persevering, violent, and
+          cruel persecutors of the privileged classes, particularly of the
+          clergy, to whom he was indebted for everything. In 1792 he was elected
+          a member of the National Convention, where he voted for the death of
+          his King. It was he who proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme,
+          the production of the deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected
+          persons; which was decreed on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused
+          the imprisonment or proscription of two hundred thousand families.
+          This decree procured him the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of
+          Merlin Potence. In 1795 he was appointed a Minister of Police, and
+          soon afterwards a Minister of Justice. After the revolution in favour
+          of the Jacobins of the 4th of September, 1797, he was made a director,
+          a place which he was obliged by the same Jacobins to resign, in June,
+          1799. Bonaparte expressed, at first, the most sovereign contempt for
+          this Merlin, but on account of one of his sons, who was his
+          aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when First Consul, his
+          attorney-general.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          As nothing paints better the true features of a Government than the
+          morality or vices of its functionaries, I will finish this man's
+          portrait with the following characteristic touches.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Merlin de Douai has been successively the counsel of the late Duc d'
+          Orleans, the friend of Danton, of Chabot, and of Hebert, the admirer
+          of Murat, and the servant of Robespierre. An accomplice of Rewbell,
+          Barras, and la Reveilliere, an author of the law of suspected persons,
+          an advocate of the Septembrizers, and an ardent apostle of the St.
+          Guillotine. Cunning as a fog and ferocious as a tiger, he has outlived
+          all the factions with which he has been connected. It has been his
+          policy to keep in continual fermentation rivalships, jealousies,
+          inquietudes, revenge and all other odious passions; establishing, by
+          such means, his influence on the terror of some, the ambition of
+          others, and the credulity of them all. Had I, when Merlin proposed his
+          law concerning suspected persons, in the name of liberty and equality,
+          been free and his equal, I should have said to him, "Monster, this,
+          your atrocious law, is your sentence of death; it has brought
+          thousands of innocent persons to an untimely end; you shall die by my
+          hands as a victim, if the tribunals do not condemn you to the scaffold
+          as an executioner or as a criminal."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Merlin has bought national property to the amount of fifteen million
+          of livress&mdash;and he is supposed to possess money nearly to the
+          same amount, in your or our funds. For a man born a beggar, and
+          educated by charity, this fortune, together with the liberal salaries
+          he enjoys, might seem sufficient without selling justice, protecting
+          guilt, and oppressing or persecuting innocence.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXIX.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          Paris, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;The household troops of Napoleon the First are by
+          thousands more numerous than those even of Louis XIV. were. Grenadiers
+          on foot and on horseback, riflemen on foot and on horseback, heavy and
+          light artillery, dragoons and hussars, mamelukes and sailors,
+          artificers and pontoneers, gendarmes, gendarmes d'Alite, Velites and
+          veterans, with Italian grenadiers, riflemen, dragoons, etc., etc.,
+          compose all together a not inconsiderable army.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Though it frequently happens that the pay of the other troops is in
+          arrears, those appertaining to Bonaparte's household are as regularly
+          paid as his Senators, Counsellors of State, and other public
+          functionaries. All the men are picked, and all the officers as much as
+          possible of birth, or at least of education. In the midst of this
+          voluptuous and seductive capital, they are kept very strict, and the
+          least negligence or infraction of military discipline is more severely
+          punished than if committed in garrison or in an encampment. They are
+          both better clothed, accoutred, and paid, than the troops of the line,
+          and have everywhere the precedency of them. All the officers, and many
+          of the soldiers, are members of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and
+          carry arms of honour distributed to them by Imperial favour, or for
+          military exploits. None of them are quartered upon the citizens; each
+          corps has its own spacious barracks, hospitals, drilling-ground,
+          riding or fencing-houses, gardens, bathing-houses, billiard-table, and
+          even libraries. A chapel has lately been constructed near each
+          barrack, and almoners are already appointed. In the meantime, they
+          attend regularly at Mass, either in the Imperial Chapel or in the
+          parish churches. Bonaparte discourages much all marriages among the
+          military in general, but particularly among those of his household
+          troops. That they may not, however, be entirely deprived of the
+          society of women, he allows five to each company, with the same
+          salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          With a vain and fickle people, fond of shows and innovations, nothing
+          in a military despotism has a greater political utility, gives greater
+          satisfaction, and leaves behind a more useful terror and awe, than
+          Bonaparte's grand military reviews. In the beginning of his consulate,
+          they regularly occurred three times in the month; after his victory of
+          Marengo, they were reduced to once in a fortnight, and since he has
+          been proclaimed Emperor, to once only in the month. This ostentatious
+          exhibition of usurped power is always closed with a diplomatic review
+          of the representatives of lawful Princes, who introduce on those
+          occasions their fellow-subjects to another subject, who successfully
+          has seized, and continues to usurp, the authority of his own
+          Sovereign. What an example for ambition! what a lesson to treachery!
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Besides the household troops, this capital and its vicinity have, for
+          these three years past, never contained less than from fifteen to
+          twenty thousand men of the regiments of the line, belonging to what is
+          called the first military division of the Army of the Interior. These
+          troops are selected from among the brigades that served under
+          Bonaparte in Italy and Egypt with the greatest eclat, and constitute a
+          kind of depot for recruiting his household troops with tried and
+          trusty men. They are also regularly paid, and generally better
+          accoutred than their comrades encamped on the coast, or quartered in
+          Italy or Holland.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          But a standing army, upon which all revolutionary rulers can depend,
+          and that always will continue their faithful support, unique in its
+          sort and composition, exists in the bosom as well as in the
+          extremities of this country. I mean, one hundred and twenty thousand
+          invalids, mostly young men under thirty, forced by conscription
+          against their will into the field, quartered and taken care of by our
+          Government, and all possessed with the absurd prejudice that, as they
+          have been maimed in fighting the battles of rebellion, the restoration
+          of legitimate sovereignty would to them be an epoch of destruction, or
+          at least of misery and want; and this prejudice is kept alive by
+          emissaries employed on purpose to mislead them. Of these, eight
+          thousand are lodged and provided for in this city; ten thousand at
+          Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and in the
+          conquered departments on the left bank of the Abine; countries where
+          the inhabitants are discontented and disaffected, and require,
+          therefore, to be watched, and to have a better spirit infused.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Those whose wounds permit it are also employed to do garrison duty in
+          fortified places not exposed to an attack by enemies, and to assist in
+          the different arsenals and laboratories, foundries, and depots of
+          military or naval stores. Others are attached to the police offices,
+          and some as gendarmes, to arrest suspected or guilty individuals; or
+          as garnissaires, to enforce the payment of contributions from the
+          unwilling or distressed. When the period for the payment of taxes is
+          expired, two of these janissaires present themselves at the house of
+          the persons in arrears, with a billet signed by the director of the
+          contributions and countersigned by the police commissary. If the money
+          is not immediately paid, with half a crown to each of them besides,
+          they remain quartered in the house, where they are to be boarded and
+          to receive half a crown a day each until an order from those who sent
+          them informs them that what was due to the state has been acquitted.
+          After their entrance into a house, and during their stay, no furniture
+          or effects whatever can be removed or disposed of, nor can the master
+          or mistress go out-of-doors without being accompanied by one of them.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the houses appropriated to our invalids, the inmates are very well
+          treated, and Government takes great care to make them satisfied with
+          their lot. The officers have large halls, billiards, and reading-room
+          to meet in; and the common men are admitted into apartments adjoining
+          libraries, from-which they can borrow what books they contain, and
+          read them at leisure. This is certainly a very good and even a humane
+          institution, though these libraries chiefly contain military histories
+          or novels.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          As to the morals of these young invalids, they may be well conceived
+          when you remember the morality of our Revolution; and that they,
+          without any religious notions or restraints, were not only permitted,
+          but encouraged to partake of the debauchery and licentiousness which
+          were carried to such an extreme in our armies and encampments. In an
+          age when the passions are strongest, and often blind reason and
+          silence conscience, they have not the means nor the permission to
+          marry; in their vicinity it is, therefore, more difficult to discover
+          one honest woman or a dutiful wife, than hundreds of harlots and of
+          adulteresses. Notwithstanding that many of them have been accused
+          before the tribunals of seductions, rape, and violence against the
+          sex, not one has been punished for what the morality of our Government
+          consider merely as bagatelles. Even in cases where husbands, brothers,
+          and lovers have been killed by them while defending or avenging the
+          honour of their wives, sisters, and mistresses, our tribunals have
+          been ordered by our grand judge, according to the commands of the
+          Emperor, not to proceed. As most of them have no occupation, the vice
+          of idleness augments the mass of their corruption; for men of their
+          principles, when they have nothing to do, never do anything good.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I do not know if my countrywomen feel themselves honoured by or
+          obliged to Bonaparte, for leaving their virtue and honour unprotected,
+          except by their own prudence and strength; but of this I am certain,
+          that all our other troops, as well as the invalids, may live on free
+          quarters with the sex without fearing the consequences; provided they
+          keep at a distance from the females of our Imperial Family, and of
+          those of our grand officers of State and principal functionaries. The
+          wives and the daughters of the latter have, however, sometimes
+          declined the advantage of these exclusive privileges.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A horse grenadier of Bonaparte's Imperial Guard, of the name of
+          Rabais, notorious for his amours and debauchery, was accused before
+          the Imperial Judge Thuriot, at one and the same time by several
+          husbands and fathers, of having seduced the affections of their wives
+          and of their daughters. As usual, Thuriot refused to listen to their
+          complaints; at the same time insultingly advising them to retake their
+          wives and children, and for the future to be more careful of them.
+          Triumphing, as it were, in his injustice, he inconsiderately mentioned
+          the circumstance to his own wife, observing that he never knew so many
+          charges of the same sort exhibited against one man.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Madame Thuriot, who had been a servant-maid to her husband before he
+          made her his wife, instead of being disgusted at the recital, secretly
+          determined to see this Rabais. An intrigue was then begun, and carried
+          on for four months, if not with discretion, at least without
+          discovery; but the lady's own imprudence at last betrayed her, or I
+          should say, rather, her jealousy. But for this she might still have
+          been admired among our modest women, and Thuriot among fortunate
+          husbands and happy fathers; for the lady, for the first time since her
+          marriage, proved, to the great joy and pride of her husband, in the
+          family way. Suspecting, however, the fidelity of her paramour, she
+          watched his motions so closely that she discovered an intrigue between
+          him and the chaste spouse of a rich banker; but the consequence of
+          this discovery was the detection of her own crime.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          On the discovery of this disgrace, Thuriot obtained an audience of
+          Bonaparte, in which he exposed his misfortune, and demanded punishment
+          on his wife's gallant. As, however, he also acknowledged that his own
+          indiscretion was an indirect cause of their connection, he received
+          the same advice which he had given to other unfortunate husbands: to
+          retake, and for the future guard better, his dear moiety.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Thuriot had, however, an early opportunity of wreaking his vengeance
+          on this gallant Rabais. It seems his prowess had reached the ears of
+          Madame Baciocchi, the eldest sister of Bonaparte. This lady has a
+          children mania, which is very troublesome to her husband, disagreeable
+          to her relations, and injurious to herself. She never beholds any
+          lady, particularly any of her family, in the way which women wish to
+          be who love their lords, but she is absolutely frantic. Now, Thuriot's
+          worthy friend Fouche had discovered, by his spies, that Rabais paid
+          frequent and secret visits to the hotel Baciocchi, and that Madame
+          Baciocchi was the object of these visits. Thuriot, on this discovery,
+          instantly denounced him to Bonaparte.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Had Rabais ruined all the women of this capital, he would not only
+          have been forgiven, but applauded by Napoleon, and his counsellors and
+          courtiers; but to dare to approach, or only to cast his eyes on one of
+          our Imperial Highnesses, was a crime nothing could extenuate or
+          avenge, but the most exemplary punishment. He was therefore arrested,
+          sent to the Temple, and has never since been heard of; so that his
+          female friends are still in the cruel uncertainty whether he has died
+          on the rack, been buried alive in the oubliettes, or is wandering an
+          exile in the wilds of Cayenne.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In examining his trunk, among the curious effects discovered by the
+          police were eighteen portraits and one hundred billets-doux, with
+          medallions, rings, bracelets, tresses of hair, etc., as numerous. Two
+          of the portraits occasioned much scandal, and more gossiping. They
+          were those of two of our most devout and most respectable Court
+          ladies, Maids of Honour to our Empress, Madame Ney and Madame Lasnes;
+          who never miss an opportunity of going to church, who have received
+          the private blessing of the Pope, and who regularly confess to some
+          Bishop or other once in a fortnight. Madame Napoleon cleared them,
+          however, of all suspicion, by declaring publicly in her drawing-room
+          that these portraits had come into the possession of Rabais by the
+          infidelity of their maids; who had confessed their faults, and,
+          therefore, had been charitably pardoned. Whether the opinions of
+          Generals Ney and Lasnes coincide with Madame Napoleon's assertion is
+          uncertain; but Lasnes has been often heard to say that, from the
+          instant his wife began to confess, he was convinced she was inclined
+          to dishonour him; so that nothing surprised him.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          One of the medallions in Rabais's collection contained on one side the
+          portrait of Thuriot, and on the other that of his wife; both set with
+          diamonds, and presented to her by him on their last wedding day. For
+          the supposed theft of this medallion, two of Thuriot's servants were
+          in prison, when the arrest of Rabais explained the manner in which it
+          had been lost. This so enraged him that he beat and kicked his wife so
+          heartily that for some time even her life was in danger, and Thuriot
+          lost all hopes of being a father.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Before the Revolution, Thuriot had been, for fraud and forgery, struck
+          off the roll as an advocate, and therefore joined it as a patriot. In
+          1791, he was chosen a deputy to the National Assembly, and in 1792 to
+          the National Convention. He always showed himself one of the most
+          ungenerous enemies of the clergy, of monarchy, and of his King, for
+          whose death he voted. On the 25th of May, 1792, in declaiming against
+          Christianity and priesthood, he wished them both, for the welfare of
+          mankind, at the bottom of the sea; and on the 18th of December the
+          same year, he declared in the Jacobin Club that, if the National
+          Convention evinced any signs of clemency towards Louis XVI., he would
+          go himself to the Temple and blow out the brains of this unfortunate
+          King. He defended in the tribune the massacres of the prisoners,
+          affirming that the tree of liberty could never flourish without being
+          inundated with the blood of aristocrats and other enemies of the
+          Revolution. He has been convicted by rival factions of the most
+          shameful robberies, and his infamy and depravity were so notorious
+          that neither Murat, Brissot, Robespierre, nor the Directory would or
+          could employ him. After the Revolution of the 9th of November, 1799,
+          Bonaparte gave him the office of judge of the criminal tribunal, and
+          in 1804 made him a Commander of his Legion of Honour. He is now one of
+          our Emperor's most faithful subjects and most sincere Christians. Such
+          is now his tender conscientiousness, that he was among those who were
+          the first to be married again by some Cardinal to their present wives,
+          to whom they had formerly been united only by the municipality. This
+          new marriage, however, took place before Madame Thuriot had introduced
+          herself to the acquaintance of the Imperial Grenadier Rabais.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXX.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;Regarding me as a connoisseur, though I have no
+          pretensions but that of being an amateur, Lucien Bonaparte, shortly
+          before his disgrace, invited me to pass some days with him in the
+          country, and to assist him in arranging his very valuable collection
+          of pictures&mdash;next our public ones, the most curious and most
+          valuable in Europe, and, of course, in the world. I found here, as at
+          Joseph Bonaparte's, the same splendour, the same etiquette, and the
+          same liberty, which latter was much enhanced by the really engaging
+          and unassuming manners and conversation of the host. At Joseph's, even
+          in the midst of abundance and of liberty, in seeing the person or
+          meditating on the character of the host, you feel both your
+          inferiority of fortune and the humiliation of dependence, and that you
+          visit a master instead of a friend, who indirectly tells you, "Eat,
+          drink, and rejoice as long and as much as you like; but remember that
+          if you are happy, it is to my generosity you are indebted, and if
+          unhappy, that I do not care a pin about you." With Lucien it is the
+          very reverse. His conduct seems to indicate that by your company you
+          confer an obligation on him, and he is studious to remove, on all
+          occasions, that distance which fortune has placed between him and his
+          guests; and as he cannot compliment them upon being wealthier than
+          himself, he seizes with delicacy every opportunity to chew that he
+          acknowledges their superiority in talents and in genius as more than
+          an equivalent for the absence of riches.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          He is, nevertheless, himself a young man of uncommon parts, and, as
+          far as I could judge from my short intercourse with the reserved
+          Joseph and with the haughty Napoleon, he is abler and better informed
+          than either, and much more open and sincere. His manners are also more
+          elegant, and his language more polished, which is the more creditable
+          to him when it is remembered how much his education has been
+          neglected, how vitiated the Revolution made him, and that but lately
+          his principal associates were, like himself, from among the vilest and
+          most vulgar of the rabble. It is not necessary to be a keen observer
+          to remark in Napoleon the upstart soldier, and in Joseph the former
+          low member of the law; but I defy the most refined courtier to see in
+          Lucien anything indicating a ci-devant sans-culotte. He has, besides,
+          other qualities (and those more estimable) which will place him much
+          above his elder brothers in the opinion of posterity. He is extremely
+          compassionate and liberal to the truly distressed, serviceable to
+          those whom he knows are not his friends, and forgiving and obliging
+          even to those who have proved and avowed themselves his enemies. These
+          are virtues commonly very scarce, and hitherto never displayed by any
+          other member of the Bonaparte family.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          An acquaintance of yours, and&mdash;a friend of mine, Count de T&mdash;&mdash;-,
+          at his return here from emigration, found, of his whole former
+          fortune, producing once eighty thousand livres&mdash;in the year, only
+          four farms unsold, and these were advertised for sale. A man who had
+          once been his servant, but was then a groom to Lucien, offered to
+          present a memorial for him to his master, to prevent the disposal of
+          the only support which remained to subsist himself, with a wife and
+          four children. Lucien asked Napoleon to prohibit the sale, and to
+          restore the Count the farms, and obtained his consent; but Fouche,
+          whose cousin wanted them, having purchased other national property in
+          the neighbourhood, prevailed upon Napoleon to forget his promise, and
+          the farms were sold. As soon as Lucien heard of it he sent for the
+          Count, delivered into his hands an annuity of six thousand livres&mdash;for
+          the life of himself, his wife, and his children, as an indemnity for
+          the inefficacy of his endeavours to serve him, as he expressed
+          himself. Had the Count recovered the farms, they would not have given
+          him a clear profit of half the amount, all taxes paid.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A young author of the name of Gauvan, irritated by the loss of parents
+          and fortune by the Revolution, attacked, during 1799, in the public
+          prints, as well as in pamphlets, every Revolutionist who had obtained
+          notoriety or popularity. He was particularly vehement against Lucien,
+          and laid before the public all his crimes and all his errors, and
+          asserted, as facts, atrocities which were either calumnies or merely
+          rumours. When, after Napoleon's assumption of the Consulate, Lucien
+          was appointed a Minister of the Interior, he sent for Gauvan, and said
+          to him, "Great misfortunes have early made you wretched and unjust,
+          and you have frequently revenged yourself on those who could not
+          prevent them, among whom I am one. You do not want capacity, nor, I
+          believe, probity. Here is a commission which makes you a Director of
+          Contributions in the Departments of the Rhine and Moselle, an office
+          with a salary of twelve thousand livres but producing double that sum.
+          If you meet with any difficulties, write to me; I am your friend. Take
+          those one hundred louis d'or for the expenses of your journey. Adieu!"
+          This anecdote I have read in Gauvan's own handwriting, in a letter to
+          his sister. He died in 1802; but Mademoiselle Gauvan, who is not yet
+          fifteen, has a pension of three thousand livres a year&mdash;from
+          Lucien, who, has never seen her.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Lucien Bonaparte has another good quality: he is consistent in his
+          political principles. Either from conviction or delusion he is still a
+          Republican, and does not conceal that, had he suspected Napoleon of
+          any intent to reestablish monarchy, much less tyranny, he would have
+          joined those deputies who, on the 9th of November, 1799, in the
+          sitting at St. Cloud, demanded a decree of outlawry against him. If
+          the present quarrel between these two brothers were sifted to the
+          bottom, perhaps it would be found to originate more from Lucien's
+          Republicanism than from his marriage.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I know, with all France and Europe, that Lucien's youth has been very
+          culpable; that he has committed many indiscretions, much injustice,
+          many imprudences, many errors, and, I fear, even some crimes. I know
+          that he has been the most profligate among the profligate, the most
+          debauched among libertines, the most merciless among the plunderers,
+          and the most perverse among rebels. I know that he is accused of being
+          a Septembrizer; of having murdered one wife and poisoned another; of
+          having been a spy, a denouncer, a persecutor of innocent persons in
+          the Reign of Terror. I know that he is accused of having fought his
+          brothers-in-law; of having ill-used his mother, and of an incestuous
+          commerce with his own sisters.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far
+          be it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them. But suppose all
+          this infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it
+          never has been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be&mdash;what
+          are the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to
+          the enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted? Is the
+          poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of
+          wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons,
+          suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold
+          blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners? Is incest with a sister more
+          shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will
+          not continue the disgusting comparison. As long as Napoleon is unable
+          to acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no
+          right to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have
+          Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the
+          Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise
+          the latter for crimes which lose their enormity when compared to the
+          horrid perpetrations of his Imperial brother.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien's wife, and a person in whose
+          veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he
+          always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has
+          repeated to me many of their conversations. She assures me that Lucien
+          deplores frequently the want of a good and religious education, and
+          the tempting examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance
+          upon the revolutionary scene. He says that he determined to get rich
+          'per fas aut nefas', because he observed that money was everything,
+          and that most persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be
+          enabled to gather treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much
+          above their desert and expectation, instead of being satiated or even
+          satisfied, they bustled and intrigued for more, until success made
+          them unguarded and prosperity indiscreet, and they became with their
+          wealth the easy prey of rival factions. Such was the case of Danton,
+          of Fabre d'Eglantine, of Chabot, of Chaumette, of Stebert, and other
+          contemptible wretches, butchered by Robespierre and his partisans&mdash;victims
+          in their turn to men as unjust and sanguinary as themselves. He had,
+          therefore, laid out a different plan of conduct for himself. He had
+          fixed upon fifty millions of livres&mdash;as the maximum he should
+          wish for, and when that sum was in his possession, he resolved to
+          resign all pretensions to rank and employment, and to enjoy 'otium cum
+          dignitate'. He had kept to his determination, and so regulated his
+          income that; with the expenses, pomp, and retinue of a Prince, he is
+          enabled to make more persons happy and comfortable than his extortions
+          have ruined or even embarrassed. He now lives like a philosopher, and
+          endeavours to forget the past, to delight in the present, and to be
+          indifferent about futurity. He chose, therefore, for a wife, a lady
+          whom he loved and esteemed, in preference to one whose birth would
+          have been a continual reproach to the meanness of his own origin.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          You must, with me, admire the modesty of a citizen sans-culotte, who,
+          without a shilling in the world, fixes upon fifty millions as a reward
+          for his revolutionary achievements, and with which he would be
+          satisfied to sit down and begin his singular course of singular
+          philosophy. But his success is more extraordinary that his pretensions
+          were extravagant. This immense sum was amassed by him in the short
+          period of four years, chiefly by bribes from foreign Courts, and by
+          selling his protections in France.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          But most of the other Bonapartes have made as great and as rapid
+          fortunes as Lucien, and yet, instead of being generous, contented, or
+          even philosophers, they are still profiting by every occasion to
+          increase their ill-gotten treasures, and no distress was ever
+          relieved, no talents encouraged, or virtues recompensed by them. The
+          mind of their garrets lodges with them in their palaces, while Lucien
+          seems to ascend as near as possible to a level with his circumstances.
+          I have myself found him beneficent without ostentation.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Among his numerous pictures, I observed four that had formerly
+          belonged to my father's, and afterwards to my own cabinet. I inquired
+          how much he had paid for them, without giving the least hint that they
+          had been my property, and were plundered from me by the nation. He
+          had, indeed, paid their full value. In a fortnight after I had quitted
+          him, these, with six other pictures, were deposited in my room, with a
+          very polite note, begging my acceptance of them, and assuring me that
+          he had but the day before heard from his picture dealer that they had
+          belonged to me. He added that he would never retake them, unless he
+          received an assurance from me that I parted with them without
+          reluctance, and at the same time affixed their price. I returned them,
+          as I knew they were desired by him for his collection, but he
+          continued obstinate. I told him, therefore, that, as I was acquainted
+          with his inclination to perform a generous action, I would, instead of
+          payment for the pictures, indicate a person deserving his assistance.
+          I mentioned the old Duchesse de &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, who is
+          seventy-four years of age and blind; and, after possessing in her
+          youth an income of eight hundred thousand livres&mdash;is now, in her
+          old age, almost destitute. He did for this worthy lady more than I
+          expected; but happening, in his visits to relieve my friend, to cast
+          his eye on the daughter of the landlady where she lodged, he found
+          means to prevail on the simplicity of the poor girl, and seduced her.
+          So much do I know personally of Lucien Bonaparte, who certainly is a
+          composition of good and bad qualities, but which of them predominate I
+          will not take upon me to decide. This I can affirm&mdash;Lucien is not
+          the worst member of the Bonaparte family.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXI.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;As long as Austria ranks among independent nations,
+          Bonaparte will take care not to offend or alarm the ambition and
+          interest of Prussia by incorporating the Batavian Republic with the
+          other provinces of his Empire. Until that period, the Dutch must
+          continue (as they have been these last ten years) under the
+          appellation of allies, oppressed like subjects and plundered like
+          foes. Their mock sovereignty will continue to weigh heavier on them
+          than real servitude does on their Belgic and Flemish neighbours,
+          because Frederick the Great pointed out to his successors the Elbe and
+          the Tegel as the natural borders of the Prussian monarchy, whenever
+          the right bank of the Rhine should form the natural frontiers of the
+          kingdom of France.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          That during the present summer a project for a partition treaty of
+          Holland has by the Cabinet of St. Cloud been laid before the Cabinet
+          of Berlin is a fact, though disseminated only as a rumour by the
+          secret agents of Talleyrand. Their object was on this, as on all
+          previous occasions when any names, rights, or liberties of people were
+          intended to be erased from among the annals of independence, to sound
+          the ground, and to prepare by such rumours the mind of the public for
+          another outrage and another overthrow. But Prussia, as well as France,
+          knows the value of a military and commercial navy, and that to obtain
+          it good harbours and navigable rivers are necessary, and therefore, as
+          well as from principles of justice, perhaps, declined the acceptance
+          of a plunder, which, though tempting, was contrary to the policy of
+          the House of Brandenburgh.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          According to a copy circulated among the members of our diplomatic
+          corps, this partition treaty excluded Prussia from all the Batavian
+          seaports except Delfzig, and those of the river Ems, but gave her
+          extensive territories on the side of Guelderland, and a rich country
+          in Friesland. Had it been acceded to by the Court of Berlin, with the
+          annexed condition of a defensive and offensive alliance with the Court
+          of St. Cloud, the Prussian monarchy would, within half a century, have
+          been swallowed up in the same gulf with the Batavian Commonwealth and
+          the Republic of Poland; and by some future scheme of some future
+          Bonaparte or Talleyrand, be divided in its turn, and serve as a pledge
+          of reconciliation or inducement of connection between some future
+          rulers of the French and Russian Empires.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Talleyrand must, indeed, have a very mean opinion of the capacity of
+          the Prussian Ministers, or a high notion of his own influence over
+          them, if he was serious in this overture. For my part, I am rather
+          inclined to think that it was merely thrown out to discover whether
+          Frederick William III. had entered into any engagement contrary to the
+          interest of Napoleon the First; or to allure His Prussian Majesty into
+          a negotiation which would suspend, or at least interfere with, those
+          supposed to be then on the carpet with Austria, Russia, or perhaps
+          even with England.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The late Batavian Government had, ever since the beginning of the
+          present war with England, incurred the displeasure of Bonaparte. When
+          it apprehended a rupture from the turn which the discussion respecting
+          the occupation of Malta assumed, the Dutch Ambassadors at St.
+          Petersburg and Berlin were ordered to demand the interference of these
+          two Cabinets for the preservation of the neutrality of Holland, which
+          your country had promised to acknowledge, if respected by France. No
+          sooner was Bonaparte informed of this step, than he marched troops
+          into the heart of the Batavian Republic, and occupied its principal
+          forts, ports, and arsenals. When, some time afterwards, Count Markof
+          received instructions from his Court, according to the desire of the
+          Batavian Directory, and demanded, in consequence, an audience from
+          Bonaparte, a map was laid before him, indicating the position of the
+          French troops in Holland, and plans of the intended encampment of our
+          army of England on the coast of Flanders and France; and he was asked
+          whether he thought it probable that our Government would assent to a
+          neutrality so injurious to its offensive operations against Great
+          Britain.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "But," said the Russian Ambassador, "the independence of Holland has
+          been admitted by you in formal treaties."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "So has the cession of Malta by England," interrupted Bonaparte, with
+          impatience.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "True," replied Markof, "but you are now at war with England for this
+          point; while Holland, against which you have no complaint, has not
+          only been invaded by your troops, but, contrary both to its
+          inclination and interest, involved in a war with you, by which it has
+          much to lose and nothing to gain."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "I have no account to render to anybody for my transactions, and I
+          desire to hear nothing more on this subject," said Bonaparte, retiring
+          furious, and leaving Markof to meditate on our Sovereign's singular
+          principles of political justice and of 'jus pentium'.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          From that period Bonaparte resolved on another change of the executive
+          power of the Batavian Republic. But it was more easy to displace one
+          set of men for another than to find proper ones to occupy a situation
+          in which, if they do their duty as patriots, they must offend France;
+          and if they are our tools, instead of the independent governors of
+          their country, they must excite a discontent among their fellow
+          citizens, disgracing themselves as individuals, and exposing
+          themselves as chief magistrates to the fate of the De Witts, should
+          ever fortune forsake our arms or desert Bonaparte.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          No country has of late been less productive of great men than Holland.
+          The Van Tromps, the Russel, and the William III. all died without
+          leaving any posterity behind them; and the race of Batavian heroes
+          seems to have expired with them, as that of patriots with the De,
+          Witts and Barneveldt. Since the beginning of the last century we read,
+          indeed, of some able statesmen, as most, if not all, the former grand
+          pensionaries have been; but the name of no warrior of any great
+          eminence is recorded. This scarcity, of native genius and valour has
+          not a little contributed to the present humbled, disgraced, and
+          oppressed state of wretched Batavia.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Admiral de Winter certainly neither wants courage nor genius, but his
+          private character has a great resemblance to that of General Moreau.
+          Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern. He may direct as
+          ably and as valiantly the manoeuvres of a fleet as Moreau does those
+          of an army, but neither the one nor the other at the head of his
+          nation would render himself respected, his country flourishing, or his
+          countrymen happy and tranquil.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Destined from his youth for the navy, Admiral de Winter entered into
+          the naval service of his country before he was fourteen, and was a
+          second lieutenant when the Batavian patriots, in rebellion against the
+          Stadtholder, were, in 1787, reduced to submission by the Duke of
+          Brunswick, the commander of the Prussian army that invaded Holland.
+          His parents and family being of the anti-Orange party, he emigrated to
+          France, where he was made an officer in the legion of Batavian
+          refugees. During the campaign of 1793 and 1794, he so much
+          distinguished himself under that competent judge of merit, Pichegru,
+          that this commander obtained for him the commission of a general of
+          brigade in the service of the French; which, after the conquest of
+          Holland in January, 1795, was exchanged for the rank of a vice-admiral
+          of the Batavian Republic. His exploits as commander of the Dutch
+          fleet, during the battle of the 11th of October, 1797, with your
+          fleet, under Lord Duncan, I have heard applauded even in your
+          presence, when in your country. Too honest to be seduced, and too
+          brave to be intimidated, he is said to have incurred Bonaparte's
+          hatred by resisting both his offers and his threats, and declining to
+          sell his own liberty as well as to betray the liberty of his fellow
+          subjects. When, in 1800, Bonaparte proposed to him the presidency and
+          consulate of the United States, for life, on condition that he should
+          sign a treaty, which made him a vassal of France, he refused, with
+          dignity and with firmness, and preferred retirement to a supremacy so
+          dishonestly acquired, and so dishonourably occupied.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          General Daendels, another Batavian revolutionist of some notoriety,
+          from an attorney became a lieutenant-colonel, and served as a spy
+          under Dumouriez in the winter of 1792 and in the spring of 1793. Under
+          Pichegru he was made a general, and exhibited those talents in the
+          field which are said to have before been displayed in the forum. In
+          June, 1795, he was made a lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic,
+          and he was the commander-in-chief of the Dutch troops combating in
+          1799 your army under the Duke of York. In this place he did not much
+          distinguish himself, and the issue of the contest was entirely owing
+          to our troops and to our generals.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After the Peace of Amiens, observing that Bonaparte intended to
+          annihilate instead of establishing universal liberty, Daendels gave in
+          his resignation and retired to obscurity, not wishing to be an
+          instrument of tyranny, after having so long fought for freedom. Had he
+          possessed the patriotism of a Brutus or a Cato, he would have bled or
+          died for his cause and country sooner than have deserted them both; or
+          had the ambition and love of glory of a Caesar held a place in his
+          bosom, he would have attempted to be the chief of his country, and by
+          generosity and clemency atone, if possible, for the loss of liberty.
+          Upon the line of baseness,&mdash;the deserter is placed next to the
+          traitor.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Dumonceau, another Batavian general of some publicity, is not by birth
+          a citizen of the United States, but was born at Brussels in 1758, and
+          was by profession a stonemason when, in 1789, he joined, as a
+          volunteer, the Belgian insurgents. After their dispersion in 1790 he
+          took refuge and served in France, and was made an officer in the corps
+          of Belgians, formed after the declaration of war against Austria in
+          1792. Here he frequently distinguished himself, and was, therefore,
+          advanced to the rank of a general; but the Dutch general officers
+          being better paid than those of the French Republic, he was, with the
+          permission of our Directory, received, in 1795, as a
+          lieutenant-general of the Batavian Republic. He has often evinced
+          bravery, but seldom great capacity. His natural talents are considered
+          as but indifferent, and his education is worse.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          These are the only three military characters who might, with any
+          prospect of success, have tried to play the part of a Napoleon
+          Bonaparte in Holland.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;Not to give umbrage to the Cabinet of Berlin, Bonaparte
+          communicated to it the necessity he was under of altering the form of
+          Government in Holland, and, if report be true, even condescended to
+          ask advice concerning a chief magistrate for that country. The young
+          Prince of Orange, brother-in-law of His Prussian Majesty, naturally
+          presented himself; but, after some time, Talleyrand's agents
+          discovered that great pecuniary sacrifices could not be expected from
+          that quarter, and perhaps less submission to France experienced than
+          from the former governors. An eye was then cast on the Elector of
+          Bavaria, whose past patriotism, as well as that of his Ministers, was
+          a full guarantee for future obedience. Had he consented to such an
+          arrangement, Austria might have aggrandized herself on the Inn,
+          Prussia in Franconia, and France in Italy; and the present bone of
+          contest would have been chiefly removed.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This intrigue, for it was nothing else, was carried on by the Cabinet
+          of St. Cloud in March, 1804, about the time that Germany was invaded
+          and the Duc d'Enghien seized. This explains to you the reason why the
+          Russian note, delivered to the Diet of Ratisbon on the 8th of the
+          following May, was left without any support, except the ineffectual
+          one from the King of Sweden. How any Cabinet could be dupe enough to
+          think Bonaparte serious, or the Elector of Bavaria so weak as to enter
+          into his schemes, is difficult to be conceived, had not Europe
+          witnessed still greater credulity on one side, and still greater
+          effrontery on the other.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the meantime Bonaparte grew every day more discontented with the
+          Batavian Directory, and more irritated against the members who
+          composed it. Against his regulations for excluding the commerce and
+          productions of your country, they resented with spirit instead of
+          obeying them without murmur as was required. He is said to have
+          discovered, after his own soldiers had forced the custom-house
+          officers to obey his orders, that, while in their proclamations the
+          directors publicly prohibited the introduction of British goods, some
+          of them were secret insurers of this forbidden merchandise, introduced
+          by fraud and by smuggling; and that while they officially wished for
+          the success of the French arms and destruction of England, they
+          withdrew by stealth what property they had in the French funds, to
+          place it in the English. This refractory and, as Bonaparte called it,
+          mercantile spirit, so enraged him, that he had already signed an order
+          for arresting and transferring en masse his high allies, the Batavian
+          directors, to his Temple, when the representations of Talleyrand
+          moderated his fury, and caused the order to be recalled, which Fouche
+          was ready to execute.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Had Jerome Bonaparte not offended his brother by his transatlantic
+          marriage, he would long ago have been the Prince Stadtholder of
+          Holland; but his disobedience was so far useful to the Cabinet of St.
+          Cloud as it gave it an opportunity of intriguing with, or deluding,
+          other Cabinets that might have any pretensions to interfere in the
+          regulation of the Batavian Government. By the choice finally made, you
+          may judge how difficult it was to find a suitable subject to represent
+          it, and that this representation is intended only to be temporary.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Schimmelpenninck, the present grand pensionary of the Batavian
+          Republic, was destined by his education for the bar, but by his
+          natural parts to await in quiet obscurity the end of a dull existence.
+          With some property, little information, and a tolerably good share of
+          common sense, he might have lived and died respected, and even
+          regretted, without any pretension, or perhaps even ambition, to shine.
+          The anti-Orange faction, to which his parents and family appertained,
+          pushed him forward, and elected him, in 1795, a member of the First
+          Batavian National Convention, where, according to the spirit of the
+          times, his speeches were rather those of a demagogue than those of a
+          Republican. Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity were the constant themes
+          of his political declamations, infidelity his religious profession,
+          and the examples of immorality, his social lessons; so rapid and
+          dangerous are the strides with which seduction frequently advances on
+          weak minds.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In 1800 he was appointed an Ambassador to Napoleon Bonaparte and
+          Charles Maurice Talleyrand. The latter used him as a stockbroker, and
+          the former for anything he thought proper; and he was the humble and
+          submissive valet of both. More ignorant than malicious, and a greater
+          fool than a rogue, he was more laughed at and despised than trusted or
+          abused.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          His patience being equal to his phlegm, nothing either moved or
+          confounded him; and he was, as Talleyrand remarked, "a model of an
+          Ambassador, according to which he and Bonaparte wished that all other
+          independent Princes and States would choose their representatives to
+          the French Government."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When our Minister and his Sovereign were discussing the difficulty of
+          properly filling up the vacancy, of the Dutch Government, judged
+          necessary by both, the former mentioned Schimmelpenninck with a smile;
+          and serious as Bonaparte commonly is, he could not help laughing. "I
+          should have been less astonished," said he, "had you proposed my
+          Mameluke, Rostan."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This rebuke did not deter Talleyrand (who had settled his terms with
+          Schimmelpenninck) from continuing to point out the advantage which
+          France would derive from this nomination. "Because no man could easier
+          be directed when in office, and no man easier turned out of office
+          when disagreeable or unnecessary. Both as a Batavian plenipotentiary
+          at Amiens, and as Batavian Ambassador in England, he had proved
+          himself as obedient and submissive to France as when in the same
+          capacity at Paris."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          By returning often to the charge, with these and other remarks,
+          Talleyrand at last accustomed Bonaparte to the idea, which had once
+          appeared so humiliating, of writing to a man so much inferior in
+          everything, "Great and dear Friend!" and therefore said to the
+          Minister:
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Well! let us then make him a grand pensionary and a locum tenens for
+          five years; or until Jerome, when he repents, returns to his duty, and
+          is pardoned."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Is he, then, not to be a grand pensionary for life?" asked
+          Talleyrand; "whether for one month or for life, he would be equally
+          obedient to resign when, commanded; but the latter would be more
+          popular in Holland, where they were tired of so many changes."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Let them complain, if they dare," replied Bonaparte.
+          "Schimmelpenninck is their chief magistrate only for five years, if so
+          long; but you may add that they may reelect him."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          It was not before Talleyrand had compared the pecuniary proposal made
+          to his agents by foreign Princes with those of Schimmelpenninck to
+          himself, that the latter obtained the preference. The exact amount of
+          the purchase-money for the supreme magistracy in Holland is not well
+          known to any but the contracting parties. Some pretended that the
+          whole was paid down beforehand, being advanced by a society of
+          merchants at Amsterdam, the friends or relatives of the grand
+          pensionary; others, that it is to be paid by annual instalments of two
+          millions of livres&mdash;for a certain number of years. Certain it is,
+          that this high office was sold and bought; and that, had it been given
+          for life, its value would have been proportionately enhanced; which
+          was the reason that Talleyrand endeavoured to have it thus
+          established.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Talleyrand well knew the precarious state of Schimmelpenninck's
+          grandeur; that it not only depended upon the whim of Napoleon, but had
+          long been intended as an hereditary sovereignty for Jerome. Another
+          Dutchman asked him not to ruin his friend and his family for what he
+          was well aware could never be called a sinecure place, and was so
+          precarious in its tenure. "Foolish vanity," answered the Minister,
+          "can never pay enough for the gratification of its desires. All the
+          Schimmelpennincks in the world do not possess property enough to
+          recompense me for the sovereign honours which I have procured for one
+          of their name and family, were he deposed within twenty-four hours.
+          What treasures can indemnify me for connecting such a name and such a
+          personage with the great name of the First Emperor of the French?"
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I have only twice in my life been in Schimmelpenninck's company, and I
+          thought him both timid and reserved; but from what little he said, I
+          could not possibly judge of his character and capacity. His portrait
+          and its accompaniments have been presented to me; such as delivered to
+          you by one of his countrymen, a Mr. M&mdash;&mdash; (formerly an
+          Ambassador also), who was both his schoolfellow and his comrade at the
+          university. I shall add the following traits, in his own words as near
+          as possible:
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "More vain than ambitious, Schimmelpenninck from his youth, and,
+          particularly, from his entrance into public life, tried every means to
+          make a noise, but found none to make a reputation. He caressed in
+          succession all the systems of the French Revolution, without adopting
+          one for himself. All the Kings of faction received in their turns his
+          homage and felicitations. It was impossible to mention to him a man of
+          any notoriety, of whom he did not become immediately a partisan. The
+          virtues or the vices, the merit or defects, of the individual were of
+          no consideration; according to his judgment it was sufficient to be
+          famous. Yet with all the extravagances of a head filled with
+          paradoxes, and of a heart spoiled by modern philosophy, added to a
+          habit of licentiousness, he had no idea of becoming an instrument for
+          the destruction of liberty in his own country, much less of becoming
+          its tyrant, in submitting to be the slave of France. It was but lately
+          that he took the fancy, after so long admiring all other great men of
+          our age, to be at any rate one of their number, and of being admired
+          as a great man in his turn. On this account many accuse him of
+          hypocrisy, but no one deserves that appellation less, his vanity and
+          exaltation never permitting him to dissimulate; and no presumption,
+          therefore, was less disguised than his, to those who studied the man.
+          Without acquired ability, without natural genius, or political
+          capacity, destitute of discretion and address, as confident and
+          obstinate as ignorant, he is only elevated to fall and to rise no
+          more."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Madame Schimmelpenninck, I was informed, is as amiable and
+          accomplished as her husband is awkward and deficient; though well
+          acquainted with his infidelities and profligacy, she is too virtuous
+          to listen to revenge, and too generous not to forgive. She is,
+          besides, said to be a lady of uncommon abilities, and of greater
+          information than she chooses to display. She has never been the
+          worshipper of Bonaparte, or the friend of Talleyrand; she loved her
+          country, and detested its tyrants. Had she been created a grand
+          pensionary, she would certainly have swayed with more glory than her
+          husband; and been hailed by contemporaries, as well as posterity, if
+          not a heroine, at least a patriot,&mdash;a title which in our times,
+          though often prostituted, so few have any claim to, and which,
+          therefore, is so much the more valuable.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When it was known at Paris that Schimmelpenninck had set out for his
+          new sovereignty, no less than sixteen girls of the Palais Royal
+          demanded passes for Holland. Being questioned by Fouche as to their
+          business in that country, they answered that they intended to visit
+          their friend, the grand pensionary, in his new dominions. Fouche
+          communicated to Talleyrand both their demands and their business, and
+          asked his advice. He replied:
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Send two, and those of whose vigilance and intelligence you are sure.
+          Refuse, by all means, the other fourteen. Schimmelpenninck's time is
+          precious, and were they at the Hague, he would neglect everything for
+          them. If they are fond of travelling, and are handsome and adroit,
+          advise them to set out for London or for St. Petersburg; and if they
+          consent, order them to my office, and they shall be supplied, if
+          approved of, both with instructions, and with their travelling
+          expenses."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Fouche answered his colleague that "they were in every respect the
+          very reverse of his description; they seemed to have passed their
+          lives in the lowest stage of infamy, and they could neither read nor
+          write." You have therefore, no reason to fear that these belles will
+          be sent to disseminate corruption in your happy island.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXIII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;The Italian subjects of Napoleon the First were far
+          from displaying the same zeal and the same gratitude for his paternal
+          care and kindness in taking upon himself the trouble of governing
+          them, as we good Parisians have done. Notwithstanding that a brigade
+          of our police agents and spies, drilled for years to applaud and to
+          excite enthusiasm, proceeded as his advanced guard to raise the public
+          spirit, the reception at Milan was cold and everything else but
+          cordial and pleasing. The absence of duty did not escape his
+          observation and resentment. Convinced, in his own mind, of the great
+          blessing, prosperity, and liberty his victories and sovereignty have
+          conferred on the inhabitants of the other side of the Alps, he
+          ascribed their present passive or mutinous behaviour to the effect of
+          foreign emissaries from Courts envious of his glory and jealous of his
+          authority.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          He suspected particularly England and Russia of having selected this
+          occasion of a solemnity that would complete his grandeur to humble his
+          just pride. He also had some idea within himself that even Austria
+          might indirectly have dared to influence the sentiments and conduct of
+          her ci-devant subjects of Lombardy; but his own high opinion of the
+          awe which his very name inspired at Vienna dispersed these thoughts,
+          and his wrath fell entirely on the audacity of Pitt and Markof. Strict
+          orders were therefore issued to the prefects and commissaries of
+          police to watch vigilantly all foreigners and strangers, who might
+          have arrived, or who should arrive, to witness the ceremony of the
+          coronation, and to arrest instantly any one who should give the least
+          reason to suppose that he was an enemy instead of an admirer of His
+          Imperial and Royal Majesty. He also commanded the prefects of his
+          palace not to permit any persons to approach his sacred person, of
+          whose morality and politics they had not previously obtained a good
+          account.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          These great measures of security were not entirely unnecessary.
+          Individual vengeance and individual patriotism sharpened their
+          daggers, and, to use Senator Roederer's language, "were near
+          transforming the most glorious day of rejoicing into a day of
+          universal mourning."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          All our writers on the Revolution agree that in France, within the
+          first twelve years after we had reconquered our lost liberty, more
+          conspiracies have been denounced than during the six centuries of the
+          most brilliant epoch of ancient and free Rome. These facts and avowals
+          are speaking evidences of the eternal tranquillity of our unfortunate
+          country, of our affection to our rulers, and of the unanimity with
+          which all the changes of Government have been, notwithstanding our
+          printed votes, received and approved.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The frequency of conspiracies not only shows the discontent of the
+          governed, but the insecurity and instability of the governors. This
+          truth has not escaped Napoleon, who has, therefore, ordered an
+          expeditious and secret justice to despatch instantly the conspirators,
+          and to bury the conspiracy in oblivion, except when any grand coup
+          d'etat is to be struck; or, to excite the passions of hatred, any
+          proofs can be found, or must be fabricated, involving an inimical or
+          rival foreign Government in an odious plot. Since the farce which
+          Mehee de la Touche exhibited, you have, therefore, not read in the
+          Moniteur either of the danger our Emperor has incurred several times
+          since from the machinations of implacable or fanatical foes, or of the
+          alarm these have caused his partisans. They have, indeed, been hinted
+          at in some speeches of our public functionaries, and in some
+          paragraphs of our public prints, but their particulars will remain
+          concealed from historians, unless some one of those composing our
+          Court, our fashionable, or our political circles, has taken the
+          trouble of noting them down; but even to these they are but
+          imperfectly or incorrectly known.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Could the veracity of a Fouche, a Real, a Talleyrand, or a Duroc (the
+          only members of this new secret and invisible tribunal for expediting
+          conspirators) be depended upon, they would be the most authentic
+          annalists of these and other interesting secret occurrences.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          What I intend relating to you on this subject are circumstances such
+          as they have been reported in our best informed societies by our most
+          inquisitive companions. Truth is certainly the foundation of these
+          anecdotes; but their parts may be extenuated, diminished, altered, or
+          exaggerated. Defective or incomplete as they are, I hope you will not
+          judge them unworthy of a page in a letter, considering the grand
+          personage they concern, and the mystery with which he and his
+          Government encompass themselves, or in which they wrap up everything
+          not agreeable concerning them.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          A woman is said to have been at the head of the first plot against
+          Napoleon since his proclamation as an Emperor of the French. She
+          called herself Charlotte Encore; but her real name is not known. In
+          1803 she lived and had furnished a house at Abbeville, where she
+          passed for a young widow of property, subsisting on her rents. About
+          the same time several other strangers settled there; but though she
+          visited the principal inhabitants, she never publicly had any
+          connection with the newcomers.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the summer of 1803, a girl at Amiens&mdash;some say a real
+          enthusiast of Bonaparte's, but, according to others, engaged by Madame
+          Bonaparte to perform the part she did demanded, upon her knees, in a
+          kind of paroxysm of joy, the happiness of embracing him, in doing
+          which she fainted, or pretended to faint away, and a pension of three
+          thousand livres&mdash;was settled on her for her affection.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Madame Encore, at Abbeville, to judge of her discourse and
+          conversation, was also an ardent friend and well-wisher of the
+          Emperor; and when, in July, 1804, he passed through Abbeville, on his
+          journey to the coast, she, also, threw herself at his feet, and
+          declared that she would die content if allowed the honour of embracing
+          him. To this he was going to assent, when Duroc stepped between them,
+          seized her by the arm, and dragged her to an adjoining room, whither
+          Bonaparte, near fainting from the sudden alarm his friend's
+          interference had occasioned, followed him, trembling. In the right
+          sleeve of Madame Encore's gown was found a stiletto, the point of
+          which was poisoned. She was the same day transported to this capital,
+          under the inspection of Duroc, and imprisoned in the Temple. In her
+          examination she denied having accomplices, and she expired on the rack
+          without telling even her name. The sub-prefect at Abbeville, the once
+          famous Andre Dumont, was ordered to disseminate a report that she was
+          shut up as insane in a madhouse.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the strict search made by the police in the house occupied by her,
+          no papers or any, other indications were discovered that involved
+          other persons, or disclosed who she was, or what induced her to
+          attempt such a rash action. Before the secret tribunal she is reported
+          to have said, "that being convinced of Bonaparte's being one of the
+          greatest criminals that ever breathed upon the earth, she took upon
+          herself the office of a volunteer executioner; having, with every
+          other good or loyal person, a right to punish him whom the law could
+          not, or dared not, reach." When, however, some repairs were made in
+          the house at Abbeville by a new tenant, a bundle of papers was found,
+          which proved that a M. Franquonville, and about thirty, other
+          individuals (many, of whom were the late newcomers there), had for six
+          months been watching an opportunity to seize Bonaparte in his journeys
+          between Abbeville and Montreuil, and to carry him to some part of the
+          coast, where a vessel was ready to sail for England with him. Had he,
+          however, made resistance, he would have been shot in France, and his
+          assassins have saved themselves in the vessel.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The numerous escort that always, since he was an Emperor, accompanied
+          him, and particularly his concealment of the days of his journeys,
+          prevented the execution of this plot; and Madame Encore, therefore,
+          took upon her to sacrifice herself for what she thought the welfare of
+          her country. How Duroc suspected or discovered her intent is not
+          known; some say that an anonymous letter informed him of it, while
+          others assert that, in throwing herself at Bonaparte's feet, this
+          prefect observed the steel through the sleeve of her muslin gown. Most
+          of her associates were secretly executed; some, however, were carried
+          to Boulogne and shot at the head of the army of England as English
+          spies.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXIV.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;After the discovery of Charlotte Encore's attempt,
+          Bonaparte, who hitherto had flattered himself that he possessed the
+          good wishes, if not the affection, of his female subjects, made a
+          regulation according to which no women who had not previously given in
+          their names to the prefects of his palaces, and obtained previous
+          permission, can approach his person or throw themselves at his feet,
+          without incurring his displeasure, and even arrest. Of this Imperial
+          decree, ladies, both of the capital and of the provinces, when he
+          travels, are officially informed. Notwithstanding this precaution, he
+          was a second time last spring, at Lyons, near falling the victim of
+          the vengeance or malice of a woman.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In his journey to be crowned King of Italy, he occupied his uncle's
+          episcopal palace at Lyons during the forty-eight hours he remained
+          there. Most of the persons of both sexes composing the household of
+          Cardinal Fesch were from his own country, Corsica; among these was one
+          of the name of Pauline Riotti, who inspected the economy of the
+          kitchens. It is Bonaparte's custom to take a dish of chocolate in the
+          forenoon, which she, on the morning of his departure, against her
+          custom, but under pretence of knowing the taste of the family, desired
+          to prepare. One of the cooks observed that she mixed it with something
+          from her pocket, but, without saying a word to her that indicated
+          suspicion, he warned Bonaparte, in a note, delivered to a page, to be
+          upon his guard. When the chamberlain carried in the chocolate,
+          Napoleon ordered the person who had prepared it to be brought before
+          him. This being told Pauline, she fainted away, after having first
+          drunk the remaining contents of the chocolate pot. Her convulsions
+          soon indicated that she was poisoned, and, notwithstanding the
+          endeavours of Bonaparte's physician, Corvisart, she expired within an
+          hour; protesting that her crime was an act of revenge against
+          Napoleon, who had seduced her, when young, under a promise of
+          marriage; but who, since his elevation, had not only neglected her,
+          but reduced her to despair by refusing an honest support for herself
+          and her child, sufficient to preserve her from the degradation of
+          servitude. Cardinal Fesch received a severe reprimand for admitting
+          among his domestics individuals with whose former lives he was not
+          better acquainted, and the same day he dismissed every Corsican in his
+          service. The cook was, with the reward of a pension, made a member of
+          the Legion of Honour, and it was given out by Corvisart that Pauline
+          died insane.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Within three weeks after this occurrence, Bonaparte was, at Milan,
+          again exposed to an imminent danger. According to his commands, the
+          vigilance of the police had been very strict, and even severe. All
+          strangers who could not give the most satisfactory account of
+          themselves, had either been sent out of the country, or were
+          imprisoned. He never went out unless strongly attended, and during his
+          audiences the most trusty officers always surrounded him; these
+          precautions increased in proportion as the day of his coronation
+          approached. On the morning of that day, about nine o'clock, when full
+          dressed in his Imperial and royal robes, and all the grand officers of
+          State by his side, a paper was delivered to him by his chamberlain,
+          Talleyrand, a nephew of the Minister. The instant he had read it, he
+          flew into the arms of Berthier, exclaiming: "My friend, I am betrayed;
+          are you among the number of conspirators? Jourdan, Lasnes, Mortier,
+          Bessieres, St. Cyr, are you also forsaking your friend and
+          benefactor?" They all instantly encompassed him, begging that he would
+          calm himself; that they all were what they always had been, dutiful
+          and faithful subjects. "But read this paper from my prefect,
+          Salmatoris; he says that if I move a step I may cease to live, as the
+          assassins are near me, as well as before me."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The commander of his guard then entered with fifty grenadiers, their
+          bayonets fixed, carrying with them a prisoner, who pointed out four
+          individuals not far from Bonaparte's person, two of whom were Italian
+          officers of the Royal Italian Guard, and two were dressed in Swiss
+          uniforms. They were all immediately seized, and at their feet were
+          found three daggers. One of those in Swiss regimentals exclaimed,
+          before he was taken: "Tremble, tyrant of my country! Thousands of the
+          descendants of William Tell have, with me, sworn your destruction.
+          You, escape this day, but the just vengeance of outraged humanity
+          follows you like your shade. Depend upon it an untimely end is
+          irremediably reserved you." So saying, he pierced his heart and fell a
+          corpse into the arms of the grenadiers who came to arrest him.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This incident suspended the procession to the cathedral for an hour,
+          when Berthier announced that the conspirators were punished. Bonaparte
+          evinced on this occasion the same absence of mind and of courage as on
+          the 9th of November, 1799, when Arena and other deputies drew their
+          daggers against him at St. Cloud. As this scene did not redound much
+          to the honour of the Emperor and King, all mention of the conspiracy
+          was severely prohibited, and the deputations ready to congratulate him
+          on his escape were dispersed to attend their other duties.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The conspirators are stated to have been four young men, who had lost
+          their parents and fortunes by the Revolutions effected by Bonaparte in
+          Italy and Switzerland, and who had sworn fidelity to each other, and
+          to avenge their individual wrongs with the injuries of their countries
+          at the same time. They were all prepared and resigned to die,
+          expecting to be cut to pieces the moment Bonaparte fell by their
+          hands; but one of the Italians, rather superstitious, had, before he
+          went to the drawing-room, confessed and received absolution from a
+          priest, whom he knew to be an enemy of Bonaparte; but the priest, in
+          hope of reward, disclosed the conspiracy to the master of ceremonies,
+          Salmatoris. The three surviving conspirators are said to have been
+          literally torn to pieces by the engines of torture, and the priest was
+          shot for having given absolution to an assassin, and for having
+          concealed his knowledge of the plot an hour after he was acquainted
+          with it. Even Salmatoris had some difficulty to avoid being disgraced
+          for having written a terrifying note, which had exposed the Emperor's
+          weakness, and shown that his life was dearer to him at the head of
+          Empires than when only at the head of armies.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          My narrative of this event I have from an officer present, whose
+          veracity I can guarantee. He also informed me that, in consequence of
+          it, all the officers of the Swiss brigades in the French service that
+          were quartered or encamped in Italy were, to the number of near fifty,
+          dismissed at once. Of the Italian guards, every officer who was known
+          to have suffered any losses by the new order of things in his country,
+          was ordered to resign, if he would not enter into the regiments of the
+          line.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Whatever the police agents did to prevent it, and in spite of some
+          unjust and cruel chastisement, Bonaparte continued, during his stay in
+          Italy, an object of ridicule in conversation, as well as in pamphlets
+          and caricatures. One of these represented him in the ragged garb of a
+          sans-culotte, pale and trembling on his knees, with bewildered looks
+          and his hair standing upright on his head like pointed horns, tearing
+          the map of the world to pieces, and, to save his life, offering each
+          of his generals a slice, who in return regarded him with looks of
+          contempt mixed with pity.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I have just heard of a new plot, or rather a league against
+          Bonaparte's ambition. At its head the Generals Jourdan, Macdonald, Le
+          Courbe, and Dessolles are placed, though many less victorious generals
+          and officers, civil as well as military, are reported to be its
+          members. Their object is not to remove or displace Bonaparte as an
+          Emperor of the French; on the contrary, they offer their lives to
+          strengthen his authority and to resist his enemies; but they ask and
+          advise him to renounce, for himself, for his relations, and for
+          France, all possessions on the Italian side of the Alps, as the only
+          means to establish a permanent peace, and to avoid a war with other
+          States, whose safety is endangered by our great encroachments. A
+          mutinous kind of address to this effect has been sent to the camp of
+          Boulogne and to all other encampments of our troops, that those
+          generals and other military persons there, who chose, might both see
+          the object and the intent of the associates. It is reported that
+          Bonaparte ordered it to be burnt by the hands of the common
+          executioner at Boulogne; that sixteen officers there who had
+          subscribed their names in appropriation of the address were broken,
+          and dismissed with disgrace; that Jourdan is deprived of his command
+          in Italy, and ordered to render an account of his conduct to the
+          Emperor. Dessolles is also said to be dismissed, and with Macdonald,
+          Le Courbe, and eighty-four others of His Majesty's subjects, whose
+          names appeared under the remonstrance (or petition, as some call it),
+          exiled to different departments of this country, where they are to
+          expect their Sovereign's further determination, and, in the meantime,
+          remain under the inspection and responsibility of his constituted
+          authorities and commissaries of police. As it is as dangerous to
+          inquire as to converse on this and other subjects, which the
+          mysterious policy of our Government condemns to silence or oblivion, I
+          have not yet been able to gather any more or better information
+          concerning this league, or unconstitutional opposition to the
+          executive power; but as I am intimate with one of the actors, should
+          he have an opportunity, he will certainly write to me at full length,
+          and be very explicit.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXV.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, August, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;I believe I have before remarked that, under the
+          Government of Bonaparte, causes relatively the most insignificant have
+          frequently produced effects of the greatest consequence. A capricious
+          or whimsical character, swaying with unlimited power, is certainly the
+          most dangerous guardian of the prerogatives of sovereignty, as well as
+          of the rights and liberties of the people. That Bonaparte is as vain
+          and fickle as a coquette, as obstinate as a mule, and equally
+          audacious and unrelenting, every one who has witnessed his actions or
+          meditated on his transactions must be convinced. The least opposition
+          irritates his pride, and he determines and commands, in a moment of
+          impatience or vivacity, what may cause the misery of millions for
+          ages, and, perhaps, his own repentance for years.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When Bonaparte was officially informed by his Ambassador at Vienna,
+          the young La Rochefoucauld, that the Emperor of Germany had declined
+          being one of his grand officers of the Legion of Honour, he flew into
+          a rage, and used against this Prince the most gross, vulgar, and
+          unbecoming language. I have heard it said that he went so far as to
+          say, "Well, Francis II. is tired of reigning. I hope to have strength
+          enough to carry a third crown. He who dares refuse to be and continue
+          my equal, shall soon, as a vassal, think himself honoured with the
+          regard which, as a master, I may condescend, from compassion, to
+          bestow on him." Though forty-eight hours had elapsed after this
+          furious sally before he met with the Austrian Ambassador, Count Von
+          Cobenzl, his passion was still so furious, that, observing his
+          grossness and violence, all the members of the diplomatic corps
+          trembled, both for this their respected member, and for the honour of
+          our nation thus represented.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When the diplomatic audience was over, he said to Talleyrand, in a
+          commanding and harsh tone of voice, in the presence of all his
+          aides-de-camp and generals:
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "Write this afternoon, by an extraordinary courier, to my Minister at
+          Genoa, Salicetti, to prepare the Doge and the people for the immediate
+          incorporation of the Ligurian Republic with my Empire. Should Austria
+          dare to murmur, I shall, within three months, also incorporate the
+          ci-devant Republic of Venice with my Kingdom of Italy!"
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "But&mdash;but&mdash;Sire!" uttered the Minister, trembling.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "There exists no 'but,' and I will listen to no 'but,'" interrupted
+          His Majesty. "Obey my orders without further discussions. Should
+          Austria dare to arm, I shall, before next Christmas, make Vienna the
+          headquarters of a fiftieth military division. In an hour I expect you
+          with the despatches ready for Salicetti."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This Salicetti is a Corsican of a respectable family, born at Bastia,
+          in 1758, and it was he who, during the siege of Toulon in 1793,
+          introduced his countryman, Napoleon Bonaparte, his present Sovereign,
+          to the acquaintance of Barras, an occurrence which has since produced
+          consequences so terribly notorious.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Before the Revolution an advocate of the superior council of Corsica,
+          he was elected a member to the First National Assembly, where, on the
+          30th of November, 1789, he pressed the decree which declared the
+          Island of Corsica an integral part of the French monarchy. In 1792, he
+          was sent by his fellow citizens as a deputy to the National
+          Convention, where he joined the terrorist faction, and voted for the
+          death of his King. In May, 1793, he was in Corsica, and violently
+          opposed the partisans of General Paoli. Obliged to make his escape in
+          August from that island, to save himself, he joined the army of
+          General Carteaux, then marching against the Marseilles insurgents,
+          whence he was sent by the National Convention with Barras, Gasparin,
+          Robespierre the younger, and Ricrod, as a representative of the
+          people, to the army before Toulon, where, as well as at Marseilles, he
+          shared in all the atrocities committed by his colleagues and by
+          Bonaparte; for which, after the death of the Robespierres, he was
+          arrested with him as a terrorist.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          He had not known Bonaparte much in Corsica, but, finding him and his
+          family in great distress, with all other Corsican refugees, and
+          observing his adroitness as a captain of artillery, he recommended him
+          to Barras, and upon their representation to the Committee of Public
+          Safety, he was promoted to a chef de brigade, or colonel. In 1796,
+          when Barras gave Bonaparte the command of the army of Italy, Salicetti
+          was appointed a Commissary of Government to the same army, and in that
+          capacity behaved with the greatest insolence towards all the Princes
+          of Italy, and most so towards the Duke of Modena, with whom he and
+          Bonaparte signed a treaty of neutrality, for which they received a
+          large sum in ready money; but shortly afterwards the duchy was again
+          invaded, and an attempt made to surprise and seize the Duke. In 1797
+          he was chosen a member of the Council of Five Hundred, where he always
+          continued a supporter of violent measures.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When, in 1799, his former protege, Bonaparte, was proclaimed a First
+          Consul, Salicetti desired to be placed in the Conservative Senate; but
+          his familiarity displeased Napoleon, who made him first a commercial
+          agent, and afterwards a Minister to the Ligurian Republic, so as to
+          keep him at a distance. During his several missions, he has amassed a
+          fortune, calculated, at the lowest, of six millions of livres.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The order Salicetti received to prepare the incorporation of Genoa
+          with France, would not, without the presence of our troops, have been
+          very easy to execute, particularly as he, six months before, had
+          prevailed on the Doge and the Senate to resign all sovereignty to
+          Lucien Bonaparte, under the title of a Grand Duke of Genoa.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The cause of Napoleon's change of opinion with regard to his brother
+          Lucien, was that the latter would not separate from a wife he loved,
+          but preferred domestic happiness to external splendour frequently
+          accompanied with internal misery. So that this act of incorporation of
+          the Ligurian Republic, in fact, originated, notwithstanding the great
+          and deep calculations of our profound politicians and political
+          schemers, in nothing else but in the keeping of a wife, and in the
+          refusal of a riband.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          That corruption, seduction, and menaces seconded the intrigues and
+          bayonets which convinced the Ligurian Government of the honour and
+          advantage of becoming subjects of Bonaparte, I have not the least
+          doubt; but that the Doge, Girolamo Durazzo, and the senators Morchio,
+          Maglione, Travega, Maghella, Roggieri, Taddei, Balby, and Langlade
+          sold the independence of their country for ten millions of livres&mdash;though
+          it has been positively asserted, I can hardly believe; and, indeed,
+          money was as little necessary as resistance would have been
+          unavailing, all the forts and strong positions being in the occupation
+          of our troops. A general officer present when the Doge of Genoa, at
+          the head of the Ligurian deputation, offered Bonaparte their homage at
+          Milan, and exchanged liberty for bondage, assured me that this
+          ci-devant chief magistrate spoke with a faltering voice and with tears
+          in his eyes, and that indignation was read on the countenance of every
+          member of the deputation thus forced to prostitute their rights as
+          citizens, and to vilify their sentiments as patriots.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When Salicetti, with his secretary, Milhaud, had arranged this
+          honourable affair, they set out from Genoa to announce to Bonaparte,
+          at Milan, their success. Not above a league from the former city their
+          carriage was stopped, their persons stripped, and their papers and
+          effects seized by a gang, called in the country the gang of PATRIOTIC
+          ROBBERS, commanded by Mulieno. This chief is a descendant of a good
+          Genoese family, proscribed by France, and the men under him are all
+          above the common class of people. They never commit any murders, nor
+          do they rob any but Frenchmen, or Italians known to be adherents of
+          the French party. Their spoils they distribute among those of their
+          countrymen who, like themselves, have suffered from the revolutions in
+          Italy within these last nine years. They usually send the amount
+          destined to relieve these persons to the curates of the several
+          parishes, signifying in what manner it is to be employed. Their
+          conduct has procured them many friends among the low and the poor,
+          and, though frequently pursued by our gendarmes, they have hitherto
+          always escaped. The papers captured by them on this occasion from
+          Salicetti are said to be of a most curious nature, and throw great
+          light on Bonaparte's future views of Italy. The original act of
+          consent of the Ligurian Government to the incorporation with France
+          was also in this number. It is reported that they were deposited with
+          the Austrian Minister at Genoa, who found means to forward them to his
+          Court; and it is supposed that their contents did not a little to
+          hasten the present movements of the Emperor of Germany.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Another gang, known under the appellation of the PATRIOTIC AVENGERS,
+          also desolates the Ligurian Republic. They never rob, but always
+          murder those whom they consider as enemies of their country. Many of
+          our officers, and even our sentries on duty, have been wounded or
+          killed by them; and, after dark, therefore, no Frenchman dares walk
+          out unattended. Their chief is supposed to be a ci-devant Abbe,
+          Sagati, considered a political as well as a religious fanatic. In
+          consequence of the deeds of these patriotic avengers, Bonaparte's
+          first act, as a Sovereign of Liguria, was the establishment of special
+          military commissions, and a law prohibiting, under pain of death,
+          every person from carrying arms who could not show a written
+          permission of our commissary of police. Robbers and assassins are,
+          unfortunately, common to all nations, and all people of all ages; but
+          those of the above description are only the production and progeny of
+          revolutionary and troublesome times. They pride themselves, instead of
+          violating the laws, on supplying their inefficacy and counteracting
+          their partiality.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXVI.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, September, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte is now the knight of more Royal Orders than
+          any other Sovereign in Europe, and were he to put them on all at once,
+          their ribands would form stuff enough for a light summer coat of as
+          many different colours as the rainbow. The Kings of Spain, of Naples,
+          of Prussia, of Portugal, and of Etruria have admitted him a
+          knight-companion, as well as the Electors of Bavaria, Hesse, and
+          Baden, and the Pope of Rome. In return he has appointed these Princes
+          his grand officers of HIS Legion of Honour, the highest rank of his
+          newly instituted Imperial Order. It is even said that some of these
+          Sovereigns have been honoured by him with the grand star and broad
+          riband of the Order of His Iron Crown of the Kingdom of Italy.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Before Napoleon's departure for Milan last spring, Talleyrand
+          intimated to the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here, that
+          their presence would be agreeable to the Emperor of the French at his
+          coronation at Milan as a King of Italy. In the preceding summer a
+          similar hint, or order, had been given by him for a diplomatic trip to
+          Aix-la-Chapelle, and all Their Excellencies set a-packing instantly;
+          but some legitimate Sovereigns, having since discovered that it was
+          indecent for their representatives to be crowding the suite of an
+          insolently and proudly travelling usurper, under different pretences
+          declined the honour of an invitation and journey to Italy. It would,
+          besides, have been pleasant enough to have witnessed the Ambassadors
+          of Austria and Prussia, whose Sovereigns had not acknowledged
+          Bonaparte's right to his assumed title of King of Italy, indirectly
+          approving it by figuring at the solemnity which inaugurated him as
+          such. Of this inconsistency and impropriety Talleyrand was well aware;
+          but audacity on one side, and endurance and submission on the other,
+          had so often disregarded these considerations before, that he saw no
+          indelicacy or impertinence in the proposal. His master had, however,
+          the gratification to see at his levee, and in his wife's drawing-room,
+          the Ambassadors of Spain, Naples, Portugal, and Bavaria, who laid at
+          the Imperial and royal feet the Order decorations of their own
+          Princes, to the nor little entertainment of His Imperial and Royal
+          Majesty, and to the great edification of his dutiful subjects on the
+          other side of the Alps.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The expenses of Bonaparte's journey to Milan, and his coronation there
+          (including also those of his attendants from France), amounted to no
+          less a sum than fifteen millions of livres&mdash;of which one hundred
+          and fifty thousand livres&mdash;was laid out in fireworks, double that
+          sum in decorations of the Royal Palace and the cathedral, and three
+          millions of livres&mdash;in presents to different generals, grand
+          officers, deputations, etc. The poor also shared his bounty; medals to
+          the value of fifty thousand livres&mdash;were thrown out among them on
+          the day of the ceremony, besides an equal sum given by Madame Napoleon
+          to the hospitals and orphan-houses. These last have a kind of
+          hereditary or family claim on the purse of our Sovereign; their
+          parents were the victims of the Emperor's first step towards glory and
+          grandeur.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Another three millions of livres was expended for the march of troops
+          from France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more
+          was requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during
+          two months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men
+          composing them two million livres' worth of rings, watches,
+          snuff-boxes, portraits set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets,
+          as evidences of His Majesty's satisfaction with their behaviour,
+          presence, and performances.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          These troops were under the command of Bonaparte's Field-marshal,
+          Jourdan, a general often mentioned in the military annals of our
+          revolutionary war. During the latter part of the American war, he
+          served under General Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in
+          1783, after the peace, his discharge. He then turned a pedlar, in
+          which situation the Revolution found him. He had also married, for her
+          fortune, a lame daughter of a tailor, who brought him a fortune of two
+          thousand livres&mdash;from whom he has since been divorced, leaving
+          her to shift for herself as she can, in a small milliner's shop at
+          Limoges, where her husband was born in 1763.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
+          organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in
+          the National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel. His
+          known love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public
+          Safety, in 1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of
+          Ardennes and of the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard. On the
+          17th of October the same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies,
+          which obliged the united forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to
+          raise the siege of Maubeuge. The jealous Republican Government, in
+          reward, deposed him and appointed Pichegru his successor, which was
+          the origin of that enmity and malignity with which Jourdan pursued
+          this unfortunate general, even to his grave. He never forgave Pichegru
+          the acceptance of a command which he could not decline without risking
+          his life; and when he should have avenged his disgrace on the real
+          causes of it, he chose to resent it on him who, like himself, was
+          merely an instrument, or a slave, in the hands and under the whip of a
+          tyrannical power.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After the imprisonment of General Hoche, in March, 1794, Jourdan
+          succeeded him as chief of the army of the Moselle. In June he joined,
+          with thirty thousand men, the right wing of the army of the North,
+          forming a new one, under the name of the army of the Sambre and Meuse.
+          On the 16th of the same month he gained a complete victory over the
+          Prince of Coburg, who tried to raise the siege of Charleroy. This
+          battle, which was fought near Trasegnies, is, nevertheless, commonly
+          called the battle of Fleurus. After Charleroy had surrendered on the
+          25th, Jourdan and his army were ordered to act under the direction of
+          General Pichegru, who had drawn the plan of that brilliant campaign.
+          Always envious of this general, Jourdan did everything to retard his
+          progress, and at last intrigued so well that the army of the Sambre
+          and the Meuse was separated from that of the North.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          With the former of these armies Jourdan pursued the retreating
+          confederates, and, after driving them from different stands and
+          positions, he repulsed them to the banks of the Rhine, which river
+          they were obliged to pass. Here ended his successes this year,
+          successes that were not obtained without great loss on our side.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Jourdan began the campaigns of 1795 and 1796 with equal brilliancy,
+          and ended them with equal disgrace. After penetrating into Germany
+          with troops as numerous as well-disciplined, he was defeated at the
+          end of them by Archduke Charles, and retreated always with such
+          precipitation, and in such confusion, that it looked more like the
+          flight of a disorderly rabble than the retreat of regular troops; and
+          had not Moreau, in 1796, kept the enemy in awe, few of Jourdan's
+          officers or men would again have seen France; for the inhabitants of
+          Franconia rose on these marauders, and cut them to pieces, wherever
+          they could surprise or waylay them.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In 1797, as a member of the Council of Five Hundred, he headed the
+          Jacobin faction against the moderate party, of which Pichegru was a
+          chief; and he had the cowardly vengeance of base rivalry to pride
+          himself upon having procured the transportation of that patriotic
+          general to Cayenne. In 1799, he again assumed the command of the army
+          of Alsace and of Switzerland; but he crossed the Rhine and penetrated
+          into Suabia only to be again routed by the Archduke Charles, and to
+          repass this river in disorder. Under the necessity of resigning as a
+          general-in-chief, he returned to the Council of Five Hundred, more
+          violent than ever, and provoked there the most oppressive measures
+          against his fellow citizens. Previous to the revolution effected by
+          Bonaparte in November of that year, he had entered with Garreau and
+          Santerre into a conspiracy, the object of which was to restore the
+          Reign of Terror, and to prevent which Bonaparte said he made those
+          changes which placed him at the head of Government. The words were
+          even printed in the papers of that period, which Bonaparte on the 10th
+          of November addressed to the then deputy of Mayenne, Prevost: "If the
+          plot entered into by Jourdan and others, and of which they have not
+          blushed to propose to me the execution, had not been defeated, they
+          would have surrounded the place of your sitting, and to crush all
+          future opposition, ordered a number of deputies to be massacred. That
+          done, they were to establish the sanguinary despotism of the Reign of
+          Terror." But whether such was Jourdan's project, or whether it was
+          merely given out to be such by the consular faction, to extenuate
+          their own usurpation, he certainly had connected himself with the most
+          guilty and contemptible of the former terrorists, and drew upon
+          himself by such conduct the hatred and blame even of those whose
+          opinion had long been suspended on his account.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          General Jourdan was among those terrorists whom the Consular
+          Government condemned to transportation; but after several interviews
+          with Bonaparte he was not only pardoned, but made a Counsellor of
+          State of the military section; and afterwards, in 1801, an
+          administrator-general of Piedmont, where he was replaced by General
+          Menou in 1803, being himself entrusted with the command in Italy. This
+          place he has preserved until last month, when he was ordered to resign
+          it to Massena, with whom he had a quarrel, and would have fought him
+          in a duel, had not the Viceroy, Eugene de Beauharnais, put him under
+          arrest and ordered him back hither, where he is daily expected. If
+          Massena's report to Bonaparte be true, the army of Italy was very far
+          from being as orderly and numerous as Jourdan's assertions would have
+          induced us to believe. But this accusation of a rival must be listened
+          to with caution; because, should Massena meet with repulse, he will no
+          doubt make use of it as an apology; and should he be victorious, hold
+          it out as a claim for more honour and praise.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          The same doubts which still continue of Jourdan's political opinions
+          remain also with regard to his military capacity. But the unanimous
+          declaration of those who have served under his orders as a general
+          must silence both his blind admirers and unjust slanderers. They all
+          allow him some military ability; he combines and prepares in the
+          Cabinet a plan of defence and attack, with method and intelligence,
+          but he does not possess the quick coup d'oeil, and that promptitude
+          which perceives, and rectifies accordingly, an error on the field of
+          battle. If, on the day of action, some accident, or some manoeuvre,
+          occurs, which has not been foreseen by him, his dull and heavy genius
+          does not enable him to alter instantly his dispositions, or to remedy
+          errors, misfortunes, or improvidences. This kind of talent, and this
+          kind of absence of talent, explain equally the causes of his
+          advantages, as well as the origin of his frequent disasters. Nobody
+          denies him courage, but, with most of our other republican generals,
+          he has never been careful of the lives of the troops under him. I have
+          heard an officer of superior talents and rank assert, in the presence
+          of Carnot, that the number of wounded and killed under Jourdan, when
+          victorious, frequently surpassed the number of enemies he had
+          defeated. I fear it is too true that we are as much, if not more,
+          indebted for our successes to the superior number as to the superior
+          valour of our troops.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Jourdan is, with regard to fortune, one of our poorest republican
+          generals who have headed armies. He has not, during all his campaigns,
+          collected more than a capital of eight millions of livres&mdash;a mere
+          trifle compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions
+          of Le Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions
+          of Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte. It is
+          also true that Jourdan is a gambler and a debauchee, fond of cards,
+          dice, and women; and that in Italy, except two hours in twenty-four
+          allotted to business, he passed the remainder of his time either at
+          the gaming-tables, or in the boudoirs of his seraglio&mdash;I say
+          seraglio, because he kept, in the extensive house joining his palace
+          as governor and commander, ten women-three French, three Italians, two
+          Germans, two Irish or English girls. He supported them all in style;
+          but they were his slaves, and he was their sultan, whose official
+          mutes (his aides-de-camp) both watched them, and, if necessary,
+          chastised them.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXVII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, September, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;I can truly defy the world to produce a corps of such a
+          heterogeneous composition as our Conservative Senate, when I except
+          the members composing Bonaparte's Legion of Honour. Some of our
+          Senators have been tailors, apothecaries, merchants, chemists, quacks,
+          physicians, barbers, bankers, soldiers, drummers, dukes, shopkeepers,
+          mountebanks, Abbes, generals, savans, friars, Ambassadors,
+          counsellors, or presidents of Parliament, admirals, barristers,
+          Bishops, sailors, attorneys, authors, Barons, spies, painters,
+          professors, Ministers, sans-culottes, atheists, stonemasons, robbers,
+          mathematicians, philosophers, regicides, and a long et cetera. Any
+          person reading through the official list of the members of the Senate,
+          and who is acquainted with their former situations in life, may be
+          convinced of this truth. Should he even be ignorant of them, let him
+          but inquire, with the list in his hand, in any of our fashionable or
+          political circles; he will meet with but few persons who are not able
+          or willing to remove his doubts, or to gratify his curiosity. There
+          are not many of them whom it is possible to elevate, but those are
+          still more numerous whom it is impossible to degrade. Their past
+          lives, vices, errors, or crimes, have settled their characters and
+          reputation; and they must live and die in 'statu quo', either as fools
+          or as knaves, and perhaps as both.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          I do not mean to say that they are all criminals or all equally
+          criminal, if insurrection against lawful authority and obedience to
+          usurped tyranny are not to be considered as crimes; but there are few
+          indeed who can lay their hands on their bosoms and say, 'vitam
+          expendere vero'. Some of them, as a Lagrange, Berthollet, Chaptal,
+          Laplace, Francois de Neuf-Chateau, Tronchet, Monge, Lacepede, and
+          Bougainville, are certainly men of talents; but others, as a Porcher,
+          Resnier, Vimar, Auber, Perk, Sera, Vernier, Vien, Villetard, Tascher,
+          Rigal, Baciocchi, Beviere, Beauharnais, De Luynea (a ci-devant duke,
+          known under the name of Le Gros Cochon), nature never destined but to
+          figure among those half-idiots and half-imbeciles who are, as it were,
+          intermedial between the brute and human creation.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Sieges, Cabanis, Garron Coulon, Lecouteul, Canteleu, Lenoin Laroche,
+          Volney, Gregoire, Emmery, Joucourt, Boissy d'Anglas, Fouche, and
+          Roederer form another class,&mdash;some of them regicides, others
+          assassins and plunderers, but all intriguers whose machinations date
+          from the beginning of the Revolution. They are all men of parts, of
+          more or less knowledge, and of great presumption. As to their
+          morality, it is on a level with their religion and loyalty. They
+          betrayed their King, and had denied their God already in 1789.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After these come some others, who again have neither talents to boast
+          of nor crimes of which they have to be ashamed. They have but little
+          pretension to genius, none to consistency, and their honesty equals
+          their capacity. They joined our political revolution as they might
+          have done a religious procession. It was at that time a fashion; and
+          they applauded our revolutionary innovations as they would have done
+          the introduction of a new opera, of a new tragedy, of a new comedy, or
+          of a new farce. To this fraternity appertain a ci-devant Comte de
+          Stult-Tracy, Dubois&mdash;Dubay, Kellerman, Lambrechts, Lemercier,
+          Pleville&mdash;Le Pelley, Clement de Ris, Peregeaux, Berthelemy,
+          Vaubois, Nrignon, D'Agier, Abrial, De Belloy, Delannoy, Aboville, and
+          St. Martin La Motte.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Such are the characteristics of men whose 'senatus consultum' bestows
+          an Emperor on France, a King on Italy, makes of principalities
+          departments of a Republic, and transforms Republics into provinces or
+          principalities. To show the absurdly fickle and ridiculously absurd
+          appellations of our shamefully perverted institutions, this Senate was
+          called the Conservative Senate; that is to say, it was to preserve the
+          republican consular constitution in its integrity, both against the;
+          encroachments of the executive and legislative power, both against the
+          manoeuvres of the factions, the plots of the royalists or monarchists,
+          and the clamours of a populace of levellers. But during the five years
+          that these honest wiseacres have been preserving, everything has
+          perished&mdash;the Republic, the Consuls, free discussions, free
+          election, the political liberty, and the liberty of the Press; all&mdash;all
+          are found nowhere but in old, useless, and rejected codes. They have,
+          however, in a truly patriotic manner taken care of their own dear
+          selves. Their salaries are more than doubled since 1799.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Besides mock Senators, mock praetors, mock quaestors, other 'nomina
+          libertatis' are revived, so as to make the loss of the reality so much
+          the more galling. We have also two curious commissions; one called
+          "the Senatorial Commission of Personal Liberty," and the other "the
+          Senatorial Commission of the Liberty of the Press." The imprisonment
+          without cause, and transportation without trial, of thousands of
+          persons of both sexes weekly, show the grand advantages which arise
+          from the former of these commissions; and the contents of our new
+          books and daily prints evince the utility and liberality of the
+          latter.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          But from the past conduct of these our Senators, members of these
+          commissions, one may easily conclude what is to be expected in future
+          from their justice and patriotism. Lenoin Laroche, at the head of the
+          one, was formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to
+          politics than to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at
+          the end of the session of the first assembly (of which he was a
+          member), forced, for subsistence, to become the editor of an
+          insignificant journal. Here he preached licentiousness, under the name
+          of Liberty, and the agrarian law in recommending Equality. A prudent
+          courtier of all systems in fashion, and of all factions in power, he
+          escaped proscription, though not accusation of having shared in the
+          national robberies. A short time in the summer of 1797, after the
+          dismissal of Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the
+          Jacobins elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he,
+          with other deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return,
+          rewarded with a place in the Senate. Under monarchy he was a
+          republican, and under a Republic he extolled monarchical institutions.
+          He wished to be singular, and to be rich. Among so many shocking
+          originals, however, he was not distinguished; and among so many
+          philosophical marauders, he had no opportunity to pillage above two
+          millions of livres. This friend of liberty is now one of the most
+          despotic Senators, and this lover of equality never answers when
+          spoken to, if not addressed as "His Excellency," or "Monseigneur."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Boissy d' Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the
+          Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was
+          chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions,
+          and in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that
+          dishonoured the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution. A
+          member afterwards of the National Convention, he was sent in mission
+          to Lyons, where, instead of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he
+          inflicted new ones. When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council
+          of Five Hundred, he pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he
+          added, that this oath was in his heart, otherwise no power upon earth
+          could have forced him to take it; and he is now a sworn subject of
+          Napoleon the First! He pronounced the panegyric of Robespierre, and
+          the apotheosis of Marat. "The soul," said he, "was moved and elevated
+          in hearing Robespierre speak of the Supreme Being with philosophical
+          ideas, embellished by eloquence;" and he signed the removal of the
+          ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to humanity! In September,
+          1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to transportation by the
+          Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made him first a
+          tribune and afterwards a Senator.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Boissy d' Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has
+          neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched
+          himself, he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors,
+          benefactors, and friends.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a
+          bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of
+          the same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he
+          attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by
+          a motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France. He
+          seconded another motion of Bonaparte's prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree
+          a corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and
+          Princes. At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself
+          on having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats;
+          and boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a
+          summary justice, those who had escaped the laws. After meeting with
+          well-merited contempt, and living for some time in the greatest
+          obscurity, by a handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he
+          obtained the favour of Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed
+          among other ornaments of his Senate. Sers has just cunning enough to
+          be taken for a man of sense when with fools; when with men of sense,
+          he reassumes the place allotted him by Nature. Without education, as
+          well as without parts, he for a long time confounded brutal scurrility
+          with oratory, and thought himself eloquent when he was only insolent
+          or impertinent. His ideas of liberty are such that, when he was a
+          municipal officer, he signed a mandate of arrest against sixty-four
+          individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball, because they had
+          refused to invite to it one of his nieces.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of
+          that commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities,
+          and all four are slaves.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the
+          liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal. The former
+          is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the
+          sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist.
+          A mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to
+          enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots
+          caused to be massacred or guillotined. When, as a Minister of Justice,
+          he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an
+          affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his
+          accomplices, whose nature had not much of tenderness. As a member of
+          the first assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a
+          deputy of the Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty
+          of the Press. "The laws, you say" (exclaimed he, in the Council),
+          "punish libellers; so they do thieves and housebreakers; but would
+          you, therefore, leave your doors unbolted? Is not the character, the
+          honour, and the tranquillity of a citizen preferable to his treasures?
+          and, by the liberty of the Press, you leave them at the mercy of every
+          scribbler who can write or think. The wound inflicted may heal, but
+          the scar will always remain. Were you, therefore, determined to decree
+          the motion for this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this
+          amendment, that conviction of having written a libel carries with it
+          capital punishment, and that a label be fastened on the breast of the
+          libeller, when carried to execution, with this inscription: 'A social
+          murderer,' or 'A murderer of characters!'"
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to
+          all political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but,
+          after approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them,
+          sold them, or betrayed them. Before the Revolution, a Counseller of
+          Parliament at Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and,
+          since the Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court.
+          Immoral and unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and
+          duplicity are only equalled by his perversity and cruelty. It was he
+          who, on the 10th of August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal
+          Family into the hands of their assassins, and who himself made a merit
+          of this infamous act. After he had been repulsed by all, even by the
+          most sanguinary of our parties and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a
+          Robespierre, a Tallien, and a Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a
+          Counsellor of State, and afterwards as a Senator. His own and only
+          daughter died in a miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous
+          commerce with her unnatural parent; and his only, son is disinherited
+          by him for resenting his father's baseness in debauching a young girl
+          whom the son had engaged to marry.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at
+          one period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for
+          the preservation both of men and things, for the protection of
+          governors as well as of the governed, and that it was the best support
+          of a constitutional Government. At another time he wrote that, as it
+          was impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the
+          licentiousness of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the
+          former; that the liberty of the Press was useful only against a
+          Government which one wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government
+          which one wished to preserve. To show his indifference about his own
+          character, as well as about the opinion of the public, these opposite
+          declarations were inserted in one of our daily papers, and both were
+          signed "Roederer."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand livres&mdash;and
+          he now possesses national property purchased for seven millions of
+          livres&mdash;and he avows himself to be worth three millions more in
+          money placed in our public funds. He often says, laughingly, that he
+          is under great obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted
+          in one day all his debts. All his creditors, after being denounced for
+          their aristocracy, were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have
+          had the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most
+          affected, silly, and disgusting. His wrinkled face, and effeminate and
+          childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion;
+          his confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power,
+          wear such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes,
+          and enervated person, that I have frequently been ready to laugh at
+          him in his face, had not indignation silenced all other feeling. A
+          light-coloured wig covers a bald head; his cheeks and eyelids are
+          painted, and his teeth false; and I have seen a woman faint away from
+          the effect of his breath, notwithstanding that he infects with his
+          musk and perfumes a whole house only with his presence. When on the
+          ground floor you may smell him in the attic.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+        <h2>
+          LETTER XXXVIII.
+        </h2>
+        <br />
+        <p>
+          PARIS, September, 1805.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          MY LORD:&mdash;The reciprocal jealousy and even interest of Austria,
+          France, and Russia have hitherto prevented the tottering Turkish
+          Empire from being partitioned, like Poland, or seized, like Italy; to
+          serve as indemnities, like the German empire; or to be shared, as
+          reward to the allies, like the Empire of Mysore.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          When we consider the anarchy that prevails, both in the Government and
+          among the subjects, as well in the capital as in the provinces of the
+          Ottoman Porte; when we reflect on the mutiny and cowardice of its
+          armies and navy, the ignorance and incapacity of its officers and
+          military and naval commanders, it is surprising, indeed, as I have
+          heard Talleyrand often declare, that more foreign political intrigues
+          should be carried on at Constantinople alone than in all other
+          capitals of Europe taken together. These intrigues, however, instead
+          of doing honour to the, sagacity and patriotism of the members of the
+          Divan, expose only their corruption and imbecility; and, instead of
+          indicating a dread of the strength of the Sublime Sultan, show a
+          knowledge of his weakness, of which the gold of the most wealthy, and
+          the craft of the most subtle, by turns are striving to profit.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Beyond a doubt the enmity of the Ottoman Porte can do more mischief
+          than its friendship can do service. Its neutrality is always useful,
+          while its alliance becomes frequently a burden, and its support of no
+          advantage. It is, therefore, more from a view of preventing evils than
+          from expectation of profit, that all other Powers plot, cabal, and
+          bribe. The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd
+          or nugatory in this assertion.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction
+          in 1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the
+          Divan to invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create
+          a diversion in favour of this country. Our Ambassador in Turkey at
+          that time, Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier, though an admirer of the
+          Revolution, was not a republican, and, therefore, secretly
+          counteracted what he officially seemed to wish to effect. The Imperial
+          Court succeeded, therefore, in establishing a neutrality of the
+          Ottoman Porte, but Comte de Choiseul was proscribed by the Convention.
+          As academician, he was, however, at St. Petersburg, liberally
+          recompensed by Catherine II. for the services the Ambassador had
+          performed at Constantinople.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In May, 1793, the Committee of Public Safety determined to expedite
+          another embassy to the Grand. Seignior, at the head of which was the
+          famous intriguer, De Semonville, whose revolutionary diplomacy had,
+          within three years, alarmed the Courts of Madrid, Naples, and Turin,
+          as well as the republican Government of Genoa. His career towards
+          Turkey was stopped in the Grisons Republic, on the 25th of July
+          following, where he, with sixteen other persons of his suite, was
+          arrested, and sent a prisoner, first to Milan, and afterwards to
+          Mantua. He carried with him presents of immense value, which were all
+          seized by the Austrians. Among them were four superb coaches, highly
+          finished, varnished, and gilt; what is iron or brass in common
+          carriages was here gold or silver-gilt. Two large chests were filled
+          with stuff of gold brocade, India gold muslins, and shawls and laces
+          of very great value. Eighty thousand louis d'or in ready money; a
+          service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly belonged to the
+          Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and brilliants, the
+          intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight millions of
+          livres&mdash;and a great number of jewels; among others, the crown
+          diamond, called here the Regents', and in your country the Pitt
+          Diamond, fell, with other riches, into the hands of the captors.
+          Notwithstanding this loss and this disappointment, we contrived in
+          vain to purchase the hostility of the Turks against our enemies,
+          though with the sacrifice of no less a sum (according to the report of
+          Saint Just, in June, 1794,) than seventy millions of livres: These
+          official statements prove the means which our so often extolled
+          economical and moral republican Governments have employed in their
+          negotiations.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the
+          Sultan became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
+          friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war. The
+          preliminaries of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were,
+          however, soon followed with a renewal of our former friendly
+          intercourse with the Ottoman Porte. The voyage of Sebastiani into
+          Egypt and Syria, in the autumn of 1802, showed that our tenderness for
+          the inhabitants of these countries had not diminished, and that we
+          soon intended to bestow on them new hugs of fraternity. Your
+          pretensions to Malta impeded our prospects in the East, and your
+          obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so well planned schemes of
+          encroachments. It was then that Bonaparte first selected for his
+          representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune, commonly called
+          by Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of military merit, an
+          intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time of peace when
+          seated in the Council chamber.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and
+          married to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented
+          him from starving, for he was as vicious as idle. The money he gained
+          when he chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among
+          prostitutes. To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest
+          means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master
+          of types and of paper.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an
+          acceptable associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the
+          Orleans faction, bought him a printing-office, and he printed the so
+          dreadfully well-known journal, called 'L'Amie du Peuple'. From the
+          principles of this atrocious paper, and from those of his sanguinary
+          patron, he formed his own political creed. He distinguished himself
+          frequently at the clubs of the Cordeliers, and of the Jacobins, by his
+          extravagant motions, and by provoking laws of proscription against a
+          wealth he did not possess, and against a rank he would have
+          dishonoured, but did not see without envy. On the 30th of June, 1791,
+          he said, in the former of these clubs:
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          "We hear everywhere complaints of poverty; were not our eyes so often
+          disgusted with the sight of unnatural riches, our hearts would not so
+          often be shocked at the unnatural sufferings of humanity. The
+          blessings of our Revolution will never be felt by the world, until we
+          in France are on a level, with regard to rank as well as to fortune.
+          I, for my part, know too well the dignity of human nature ever to bow
+          to a superior; but, brothers and friends, it is not enough that we are
+          all politically equal, we must also be all equally rich or equally
+          poor&mdash;we must either all strive to become men of property, or
+          reduce men of property to become sans-culottes. Believe me, the
+          aristocracy of property is more dangerous than the aristocracy of
+          prerogative or fanaticism, because it is more common. Here is a list
+          sent to 'L' Amie du People', but of which prudence yet prohibits the
+          publication. It contains the names of all the men of property of
+          Paris, and of the Department of the Seine, the amount of their
+          fortunes, and a proposal how to reduce and divide it among our
+          patriots. Of its great utility in the moment when we have been
+          striking our grand blows, nobody dares doubt; I, therefore, move that
+          a brotherly letter be sent to every society of our brothers and
+          friends in the provinces, inviting each of them to compose one of
+          similar contents and of similar tendency, in their own districts, with
+          what remarks they think proper to affix, and to forward them to us, to
+          be deposited, in the mother club, after taking copies of them for the
+          archives of their own society."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          His motion was decreed.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Two days afterwards, he again ascended the tribune. "You approved,"
+          said he, "of the measures I lately proposed against the aristocracy of
+          property; I will now tell you of another aristocracy which we must
+          also crush&mdash;I mean that of religion, and of the clergy. Their
+          supports are folly, cowardice, and ignorance. All priests are to be
+          proscribed as criminals, and despised as impostors or idiots; and all
+          altars must be reduced to dust as unnecessary. To prepare the public
+          mind for such events, we must enlighten it; which can only be done by
+          disseminating extracts from 'L' Amie du People', and other
+          philosophical publications. I have here some ballads of my own
+          composition, which have been sung in my quarter; where all
+          superstitious persons have already trembled, and all fanatics are
+          raving. If you think proper, I will, for a mere trifle, print twenty
+          thousand copies of them, to be distributed and disseminated gratis all
+          over France."
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After some discussion, the treasurer of the club was ordered to
+          advance Citizen Brune the sum required, and the secretary to transmit
+          the ballads to the fraternal societies in the provinces.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          Brune put on his first regimentals as an aide-decamp to General
+          Santerre in December, 1792, after having given proofs of his military
+          prowess the preceding September, in the massacre of the prisoners in
+          the Abbey. In 1793 he was appointed a colonel in the revolutionary
+          army, which, during the Reign of Terror, laid waste the departments of
+          the Gironde, where he was often seen commanding his corps, with a
+          human head fixed on his sword. On the day when he entered Bordeaux
+          with his troops, a new-born child occupied the same place, to the
+          great horror of the inhabitants. During this brilliant expedition he
+          laid the first foundation of his present fortune, having pillaged in a
+          most unmerciful manner, and arrested or shot every suspected person
+          who could not, or would not, exchange property for life. On his return
+          to Paris, his patriotism was recompensed with a commission of a
+          general of brigade. On the death of Robespierre, he was arrested as a
+          terrorist, but, after some months' imprisonment, again released.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          In October, 1795, he assisted Napoleon Bonaparte in the massacre of
+          the Parisians, and obtained for it, from the director Barras, the rank
+          of a general of division. Though occupying, in time of war, such a
+          high military rank, he had hitherto never seen an enemy, or witnessed
+          an engagement.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          After Bonaparte had planned the invasion and pillage of Switzerland,
+          Brune was charged to execute this unjust outrage against the law of
+          nations. His capacity to intrigue procured him this distinction, and
+          he did honour to the choice of his employers. You have no doubt read
+          that, after lulling the Government of Berne into security by repeated
+          proposals of accommodation, he attacked the Swiss and Bernese troops
+          during a truce, and obtained by treachery successes which his valour
+          did not promise him. The pillage, robberies, and devastations in
+          Helvetia added several more millions to his previously great riches.
+        </p>
+        <p>
+          It was after his campaign in Holland, during the autumn of 1799, that
+          he first began to claim some military glory. He owed, however, his
+          successes to the superior number of his troops, and to the talents of
+          the generals and officers serving under him. Being made a Counsellor
+          of State by Bonaparte, he was entrusted with the command of the army
+          against the Chouans. Here he again seduced by his promises, and duped
+          by his intrigues, acted infamously&mdash;but was successful.
+        </p>
+        <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p236" id="p236"></a>
+        <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+          <img alt="p236.jpg (68K)" src="images/p236.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+        </div>
+				<br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXIX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Three months before Brune set out on his embassy to
+            Constantinople, Talleyrand and Fouche were collecting together all
+            the desperadoes of our Revolution, and all the Italian, Corsican,
+            Greek, and Arabian renegadoes and vagabonds in our country, to form
+            him a set of attendants agreeable to the real object of his mission.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You know too much of our national character and of my own veracity
+            to think it improbable, when I assure you that most of our great men
+            in place are as vain as presumptuous, and that sometimes vanity and
+            presumption get the better of their discretion and prudence. What I
+            am going to tell you I did not hear myself, but it was reported to
+            me by a female friend, as estimable for her virtues as admired for
+            her accomplishments. She is often honoured with invitations to
+            Talleyrand's familiar parties, composed chiefly of persons whose
+            fortunes are as independent as their principles, who, though not
+            approving the Revolution, neither joined its opposers nor opposed
+            its adherents, preferring tranquillity and obscurity to agitation
+            and celebrity. Their number is not much above half a dozen, and the
+            Minister calls them the only honest people in France with whom he
+            thinks himself safe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When it was reported here that two hundred persons of Brune's suite
+            had embarked at Marseilles and eighty-four at Genoa, and when it was
+            besides known that nearly fifty individuals accompanied him in his
+            outset, this unusual occurrence caused much conversation and many
+            speculations in all our coteries and fashionable circles. About that
+            time my friend dined with Talleyrand, and, by chance, also mentioned
+            this grand embassy, observing, at the same time, that it was too
+            much honour done to the Ottoman Porte, and too much money thrown
+            away upon splendour, to honour such an imbecile and tottering
+            Government.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "How people talk," interrupted Talleyrand, "about what they do not
+            comprehend. Generous as Bonaparte is, he does not throw away his
+            expenses; perhaps within twelve months all these renegadoes or
+            adventurers, whom you all consider as valets of Brune, will be
+            three-tailed Pachas or Beys, leading friends of liberty, who shall
+            have gloriously broken their fetters as slaves of a Selim to become
+            the subjects of a Napoleon. The Eastern Empire has, indeed, long
+            expired, but it may suddenly be revived."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Austria and Russia," replied my friend, "would never suffer it, and
+            England would sooner ruin her navy and exhaust her Treasury than
+            permit such a revolution."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "So they have tried to do," retorted Talleyrand, "to bring about a
+            counter revolution in France. But though only a moment is requisite
+            to erect the standard of revolt, ages often are necessary to conquer
+            and seize it. Turkey has long been ripe for a revolution. It wanted
+            only chiefs and directors. In time of war, ten thousand Frenchmen
+            landed in the Dardanelles would be masters of Constantinople, and
+            perhaps of the Empire. In time of peace, four hundred bold and
+            well-informed men may produce the same effect. Besides, with some
+            temporary cession of a couple of provinces to each of the Imperial
+            Courts, and with the temporary present of an island to Great
+            Britain, everything may be settled 'pro tempore', and a Joseph
+            Bonaparte be permitted to reign at Constantinople, as a Napoleon
+            does at Paris."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            That the Minister made use of this language I can take upon me to
+            affirm; but whether purposely or unintentionally, whether to give a
+            high opinion of his plans or to impose upon his company, I will not
+            and cannot assert.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            On the subject of this numerous suite of Brune, Markof is said to
+            have obtained several conferences with Talleyrand and several
+            audiences of Bonaparte, in which representations, as just as
+            energetic, were made, which, however, did not alter the intent of
+            our Government or increase the favour of the Russian Ambassador at
+            the Court of St. Cloud. But it proved that our schemes of subversion
+            are suspected, and that our agents of overthrow would be watched and
+            their manoeuvres inspected.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Count Italinski, the Russian Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, is one
+            of those noblemen who unite rank and fortune, talents and modesty,
+            honour and patriotism, wealth and liberality. His personal character
+            and his individual virtues made him, therefore, more esteemed and
+            revered by the members of the Divan, than the high station he
+            occupied, and the powerful Prince he represented, made him feared or
+            respected. His warnings had created prejudices against Brune which
+            he found difficult to remove. To revenge himself in his old way, our
+            Ambassador inserted several paragraphs in the Moniteur and in our
+            other papers, in which Count Italinski was libelled, and his
+            transactions or views calumniated.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After his first audience with the Grand Seignior, Brune complained
+            bitterly, of not having learned the Turkish language, and of being
+            under the necessity, therefore, of using interpreters, to whom he
+            ascribed the renewed obstacles he encountered in every step he took,
+            while his hotel was continually surrounded with spies, and the
+            persons of his suite followed everywhere like criminals when they
+            went out. Even the valuable presents he carried with him, amounting
+            in value to twenty-four millions of livres&mdash;were but
+            indifferently received, the acceptors, seeming to suspect the object
+            and the honesty of the donor.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In proportion as our politics became embroiled with those of Russia,
+            the post of Brune became of more importance; but the obstacles
+            thrown in his way augmented daily, and he was forced to avow that
+            Russia and England had greater influence and more credit than the
+            French Republic and its chief. When Bonaparte was proclaimed an
+            Emperor of the French, Brune expected that his acknowledgment as
+            such at Constantinople would be a mere matter of course and
+            announced officially on the day he presented a copy of his new
+            credentials. Here again he was disappointed, and therefore demanded
+            his recall from a place where there was no probability, under the
+            present circumstances, of either exciting the subjects to revolt, of
+            deluding the Prince into submission, or seducing Ministers who, in
+            pocketing his bribes, forgot for what they were given.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It was then that Bonaparte sent Joubert with a letter in his own
+            handwriting, to be delivered into the hands of the Grand Seignior
+            himself. This Joubert is a foundling, and, was from his youth
+            destined and educated to be one of the secret agents of our secret
+            diplomacy. You already, perhaps, have heard that our Government
+            selects yearly a number of young foundlings or orphans, whom it
+            causes to be brought up in foreign countries at its expense, so as
+            to learn the language as natives of the nation, where, when grown
+            up, they are chiefly to be employed. Joubert had been educated under
+            the inspection of our consuls at Smyrna, and, when he assumes the
+            dress of a Turk, from his accent and manners even the Mussulmans
+            mistake him for one of their own creed and of their country. He was
+            introduced to Bonaparte in 1797, and accompanied him to Egypt, where
+            his services were of the greatest utility to the army. He is now a
+            kind of undersecretary in the office of our secret diplomacy, and a
+            member of the Legion of Honour. Should ever Joseph Bonaparte be an
+            Emperor or Sultan of the East, Joubert will certainly be his Grand
+            Vizier. There is another Joubert (with whom you must not confound
+            him), who was; also a kind of Dragoman at Constantinople some years
+            ago, and who is still somewhere on a secret mission in the East
+            Indies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Joubert's arrival at Constantinople excited both curiosity among the
+            people and suspicion among the Ministry. There is no example in the
+            Ottoman history of a chief of a Christian nation having written to
+            the Sultan by a private messenger, or of His Highness having
+            condescended to receive the letter from the bearer, or to converse
+            with him. The Grand Vizier demanded a copy of Bonaparte's letter,
+            before an audience could be granted. This was refused by Joubert;
+            and as Brune threatened to quit the capital of Turkey if any longer
+            delay were experienced, the letter was delivered in a garden near
+            Constantinople, where the Sultan met Bonaparte's agent, as if by
+            chance, who, it seems, lost all courage and presence of mind, and
+            did not utter four words, to which no answer was given.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This impertinent intrigue, and this novel diplomacy, therefore,
+            totally miscarried, to the great shame and greater disappointment of
+            the schemers and contrivers. I must, however, do Talleyrand the
+            justice to say that he never approved of it, and even foretold the
+            issue to his intimate friends. It was entirely the whim and
+            invention of Bonaparte himself, upon a suggestion of Brune, who was
+            far from being so well acquainted with the spirit and policy of the
+            Divan as he had been with the genius and plots of Jacobinism. Not
+            rebuked, however, Joubert was ordered away a second time with a
+            second letter, and, after an absence of four months, returned again
+            as he went, less satisfied with the second than with his first
+            journey.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In these trips to Turkey, he had always for travelling companions
+            some of our emissaries to Austria, Hungary, and in particular to
+            Servia, where the insurgents were assisted by our councils, and even
+            guided by some of our officers. The principal aide-de-camp of Czerni
+            George, the Servian chieftain, is one Saint Martin, formerly a
+            captain in our artillery, afterwards an officer of engineers in the
+            Russian service, and finally a volunteer in the army of Conde. He
+            and three other officers of artillery were, under fictitious names,
+            sent by our Government, during the spring of last year, to the camp
+            of the insurgents. They pretended to be of the Grecian religion, and
+            formerly Russian officers, and were immediately employed. Saint
+            Martin has gained great influence over Czerni George, and directs
+            both his political councils and military operations. Besides the
+            individuals left behind by Joubert; it is said that upwards of one
+            hundred persons of Brune's suite have been ordered for the same
+            destination. You see how great the activity of our Government is,
+            and that nothing is thought unworthy of its vigilance or its
+            machinations. In the staff of Paswan Oglou, six of my countrymen
+            have been serving ever since 1796, always in the pay of our
+            Government.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It was much against the inclination and interest of our Emperor that
+            his Ambassador at Constantinople should leave the field of battle
+            there to the representatives of Russia, Austria, and England. But
+            his dignity was at stake. After many threats to deprive the Sultan
+            of the honour of his presence, and even after setting out once for
+            some leagues on his return, Brune, observing that these marches and
+            countermarches excited more mirth than terror, at last fixed a day,
+            when, finally, either Bonaparte must be acknowledged by the Divan as
+            an Emperor of the French, or his departure would take place. On that
+            day he, indeed, began his retreat, but, under different pretexts, be
+            again stopped, sent couriers to his secretaries, waited for their
+            return, and sent new couriers again,&mdash;but all in vain, the
+            Divan continued refractory.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            At his first audience after his return, the reception Bonaparte gave
+            him was not very cordial. He demanded active employment, in case of
+            a continental war, either in Italy or in Germany, but received
+            neither. When our army of England was already on its march towards
+            the Rhine, and Bonaparte returned here, Brune was ordered to take
+            command on the coast, and to organize there an army of observation,
+            destined to succour Holland in case of an invasion, or to invade
+            England should a favourable occasion present itself. The fact is, he
+            was charged to intrigue rather than to fight; and were Napoleon able
+            to force upon Austria another Peace of Luneville, Brune would
+            probably be the plenipotentiary that would ask your acceptance of
+            another Peace of Amiens. It is here a general belief that his
+            present command signifies another pacific overture from Bonaparte
+            before your Parliament meets, or, at least, before the New Year.
+            Remember that our hero is more to be dreaded as a Philip than as an
+            Alexander.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General Brune has bought landed property for nine millions of livres&mdash;and
+            has, in different funds, placed ready money to the same amount. His
+            own and his wife's diamonds are valued by him at three millions; and
+            when he has any parties to dinner, he exhibits them with great
+            complaisance as presents forced upon him during his campaign in
+            Switzerland and Holland, for the protection he gave the inhabitants.
+            He is now so vain of his wealth and proud of his rank, that he not
+            only disregards all former acquaintances, but denies his own
+            brothers and sisters,&mdash;telling them frankly that the
+            Fieldmarshal Brune can have no shoemaker for a brother, nor a sister
+            married to a chandler; that he knows of no parents, and of no
+            relatives, being the maker of his own fortune, and of what he is;
+            that his children will look no further back for ancestry than their
+            father. One of his first cousins, a postilion, who insisted, rather
+            obstinately, on his family alliance, was recommended by Brune to his
+            friend Fouche, who sent him on a voyage of discovery to Cayenne,
+            from which he probably will not return very soon.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XL.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            My LORD:&mdash;Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;n is now one of our
+            most fashionable ladies. Once in the week she has a grand tea-party;
+            once in a fortnight a grand dinner; and once in the month a grand
+            ball. Foreign gentlemen are particularly well received at her house,
+            which, of course, is much frequented by them. As you intend to visit
+            this country after a peace, it may be of some service to you not to
+            be unacquainted with the portrait of a lady whose invitation to see
+            the original you may depend upon the day after your arrival.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="p338" id="p338"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="p338.jpg (75K)" src="images/p338.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n is the widow of the great and useless
+            traveller, Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n, to whom his relatives pretend
+            that she was never married. Upon his death-bed he acknowledged her,
+            however, for his wife, and left her mistress of a fortune of three
+            hundred thousand livres a year. The first four years of her
+            widowhood she passed in lawsuits before the tribunals, where the
+            plaintiffs could not prove that she was unmarried, nor she herself
+            that she was married. But Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, for a small
+            douceur, speaking in her favour, the consciences of the juries, and
+            the understanding of the judges, were all convinced at once that she
+            had been the lawful wife, and was the lawful heiress, of Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n,
+            who had no children, or nearer relatives than third cousins.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n was travelling in the East Indies when the
+            Revolution broke out. His occupation there was a very innocent one;
+            he drew countenances, being one of the most enthusiastic sectaries
+            of Lavater, and modestly called himself the first physiognomist in
+            the world. Indeed, he had been at least the most laborious one; for
+            he left behind him a collection of six thousand two hundred
+            portraits, drawn by himself in the four quarters of the world,
+            during a period of thirty years.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He never engaged a servant, nor dealt with a tradesman, whose
+            physiognomy had not been examined by him. In his travels he
+            preferred the worst accommodation in a house where he approved of
+            the countenance of the host, to the best where the traits or lines
+            of the landlord's face were irregular, or did not coincide with his
+            ideas of physiognomical propriety. The cut of a face, its
+            expression, the length of the nose, the width or smallness of the
+            mouth, the form of the eyelids or of the ears, the colour or
+            thickness of the hair, with the shape and tout ensemble of the head,
+            were always minutely considered and discussed before he entered into
+            any agreement, on any subject, with any individual whatever.
+            Whatever recommendations, or whatever attestations were produced, if
+            they did not correspond with his own physiognomical remarks and
+            calculations, they were disregarded; while a person whose
+            physiognomy pleased him required no other introduction to obtain his
+            confidence. Whether he thought himself wiser than his forefathers,
+            he certainly did not grow richer than they were. Charlatans who
+            imposed upon his credulity and impostors who flattered his mania,
+            servants who robbed him and mistresses who deceived him, proved that
+            if his knowledge of physiognomy was great, it was by no means
+            infallible. At his death, of the fortune left him by his parents
+            only the half remained.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His friends often amused themselves at the expense of his foibles.
+            When he prepared for a journey to the East, one of them recommended
+            him a servant, upon whose fidelity he could depend. After examining
+            with minute scrupulosity the head of the person, he wrote: "My
+            friend, I accept your valuable present. From calculations, which
+            never deceive me, Manville (the servant's name) possesses, with the
+            fidelity of a dog, the intrepidity of the lion. Chastity itself is
+            painted on his front, modesty in his looks, temperance on his cheek,
+            and his mouth and nose bespeak honesty itself." Shortly after the
+            Count had landed at Pondicherry, Mauville, who was a girl, died, in
+            a condition which showed that chastity had not been the divinity to
+            whom she had chiefly sacrificed. In her trunk were found several
+            trinkets belonging to her master, which she honestly had
+            appropriated to herself. His miscalculation on this subject the
+            Count could not but avow; he added, however, that it was the entire
+            fault of his friend, who had duped him with regard to the sex.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n was, on account of her physiognomy,
+            purchased by her late husband, then travelling in Turkey, from a
+            merchant of Circassian slaves, when she was under seven years of
+            age, and sent for her education to a relative of the Count, an
+            Abbess of a convent in Languedoc. On his return from Turkey, some
+            years afterwards, he took her under his own care, and she
+            accompanied him all over Asia, and returned first to France in 1796,
+            where her husband's name was upon the list of emigrants, though he
+            had not been in Europe for ten years before the Revolution.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            However, by some pecuniary arrangements with Barras, he recovered
+            his property, which he did not long enjoy, for he died in 1798. The
+            suitors of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n, mistress of a large fortune,
+            with some remnants of beauty and elegance of manners, have been
+            numerous, and among them several Senators and generals, and even the
+            Minister Chaptal. But she has politely declined all their offers,
+            preferring her liberty and the undisturbed right of following her
+            own inclination to the inconvenient ties of Hymen. A gentleman, whom
+            she calls, and who passes for, her brother, Chevalier de M de T&mdash;&mdash;,
+            a Knight of Malta, assists her in doing the honours of her house,
+            and is considered as her favourite lover; though report and the
+            scandalous chronicle say that she bestows her favours on every
+            person who wishes to bestow on her his name, and that, therefore,
+            her gallants are at least as numerous as her suitors.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Such is the true statement of the past, as well as the present, with
+            regard to Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n. She relates, however, a
+            different story. She says that she is the daughter of the Marquis de
+            M de T&mdash;&mdash;-, of a Languedoc family; that she sailed, when
+            a child, with her mother in a felucca from Nice to Malta, there to
+            visit her brother; was captured by an Algerine pilot, separated from
+            her mother, and carried to Constantinople by a merchant of slaves;
+            there she was purchased by Comte de C&mdash;&mdash;n, who restored
+            her to her family, and whom, therefore, notwithstanding the
+            difference of their ages, she married from gratitude. This pretty,
+            romantic story is ordered in our Court circles to be officially
+            believed; and, of course, is believed by nobody, not even by the
+            Emperor and Empress themselves, who would not give her the place of
+            a lady-in-waiting, though her request was accompanied with a
+            valuable diamond to the latter. The present was kept, but the offer
+            declined.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            All the members of the Bonaparte family, female as well as male,
+            honour her house with their visits and with the acceptance of her
+            invitations; and it is, therefore, among our fashionables, the 'haut
+            ton' to be of the society and circle of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Last February, Madame de P&mdash;&mdash;t (the wife of Comte de P&mdash;&mdash;t,
+            a relative, by her husband's side, of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n,
+            and who by the Revolution lost all their property, and now live with
+            her as companions) was brought to bed of a son; the child was
+            baptized by the Cardinal de Belloy, and Madame Joseph and Prince
+            Louis Bonaparte stood sponsors. This occurrence was celebrated with
+            great pomp, and a fete was given to nearly one hundred and fifty per
+            sons of both sexes,&mdash;as usual, a mixture of ci-devant nobles
+            and of ci-devant sans-culottes; of rank and meanness; of upstart
+            wealth and beggared dignity.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            What that day struck me most was the audacity of the Senator
+            Villetard in teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with
+            his impertinent conversation and affected piety. This Villetard was,
+            before the Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789
+            by the mob from the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined
+            for theft. In 1791 his patriotism was so well known in the
+            Department of Yonne, that he was deputed by the Jacobins there to
+            the Jacobins of the capital with an address, encouraging and
+            advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in 1792 he was chosen a
+            member of the National Convention, where the most sanguinary and
+            most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon him in
+            the number of their adherents.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph
+            Bonaparte at Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his
+            sovereignty and liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and
+            atheistical party of the Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry
+            off the celebrated Madonna. In the execution of this commission he
+            displayed a conduct worthy the littleness of his genius and the
+            criminality of his mind. The wooden image of the Holy Virgin, a
+            black gown said to have appertained to her, together with three
+            broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic faithful have for ages
+            believed to have been used by her, were presented by him to the
+            Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a horribly
+            blasphemous letter. He passed the next night, after he had
+            perpetrated this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of
+            the Holy Virgin; and, on the next morning, placed one of them,
+            naked, on the pedestal where the statue of the Virgin had formerly
+            stood, and ordered all the devotees at Loretto, and two leagues
+            round, to prostrate themselves before her. This shocking command
+            occasioned the premature death of fifteen ladies, two of whom, who
+            were nuns, died on the spot on beholding the horrid outrage; and
+            many more were deprived of their reason. How barbarously unfeeling
+            must that wretch be who, in bereaving the religious, the pious, and
+            the conscientious of their consolation and hope, adds the tormenting
+            reproach of apostasy, by forcing virtue upon its knees to bow before
+            what it knows to be guilt and infamy.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A traitor to his associates as to his God, it was he who, in
+            November, 1799, presented at St. Cloud the decree which excluded all
+            those who opposed Bonaparte's authority from the Council of Five
+            Hundred, and appointed the two committees which made him a First
+            Consul. In reward for this act of treachery, he was nominated to a
+            place in the Conservative Senate. He has now ranked himself among
+            our modern saints, goes regularly to Mass and confesses; has made a
+            brother of his, who was a drummer, an Abbe; and his assiduity about
+            the Cardinal was probably with a view to obtain advancement for this
+            edifying priest.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Cardinal de Belloy is now ninety-six years of age, being born in
+            1709, and has been a Bishop for fifty-three years, but, during the
+            Revolution, was proscribed, with all other prelates. He remained,
+            however, in France, where his age saved him from the guillotine, but
+            not from being reduced to the greatest want. A descendant of a noble
+            family, and possessing an unpolluted character, Bonaparte fixed upon
+            him as one of the pillars for the reestablishment of the Catholic
+            worship, made him an Archbishop of Paris, and procured him the rank
+            of a Cardinal from Rome. But he is now in his second childhood,
+            entirely directed by his grand vicaries, Malaret, De Mons, and
+            Legeas, who are in the pay of, and absolutely devoted to, Bonaparte.
+            An innocent instrument in their hands, of those impious compliments
+            pronounced by him to the Emperor and the Empress, he did not,
+            perhaps, even understand the meaning. From such a man the vile and
+            artful Villetard might extort any promise. I observed, however, with
+            pleasure, that he was watched by the grand vicar, Malaret, who
+            seldom loses sight of His Eminence.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            These two so opposite characters&mdash;I mean De Belloy and
+            Villetard&mdash;are already speaking evidences of the composition of
+            the society at Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n's. But I will tell you
+            something still more striking. This lady is famous for her elegant
+            services of plate, as much as for her delicate taste in entertaining
+            her parties. After the supper on this night, eleven silver and four
+            gold plates, besides numerous silver and gold spoons, forks, etc.,
+            were missed. She informed Fouche of her loss, who had her house
+            surrounded by spies, with orders not to let any servant pass without
+            undergoing a strict search. The first gentleman who called for his
+            carriage was His Excellency the Counsellor of State and grand
+            officer of the Legion of Honour, Treilhard. His servants were
+            stopped and the cause explained. They willingly, and against the
+            protest of their master, suffered themselves to be searched. Nothing
+            was found upon them; but the police agents, observing the full-dress
+            hat of their master rather bulky under his arm, took the liberty to
+            look into it, where they found one of Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n's
+            gold plates and two of her spoons. His Excellency immediately
+            ordered his servants to be arrested, for having concealed their
+            theft there. Fouche, however, when called out, advised his friend to
+            forgive them for misplacing them, as the less said on the subject
+            the better. When Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n heard of this discovery,
+            she asked Fouche to recall his order or to alter it. "A repetition
+            of such misplacings in the hats or in the pockets of the masters,"
+            said she, "would injure the reputation of my house and company." She
+            never recovered the remainder of her loss, and that she might not be
+            exposed in future to the same occurrences, she bought two services
+            of china the following day, to be used when she had mixed society.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Treilhard had, before the Revolution, the reputation of being an
+            honest man and an able advocate; but has since joined the criminals
+            of all factions, being an accomplice in their guilt and a sharer of
+            their spoils. In the convention, he voted for the death of Louis
+            XVI. and pursued without mercy the unfortunate Marie Antoinette to
+            the scaffold. During his missions in the departments, wherever he
+            went the guillotine was erected and blood flowed in streams. He was,
+            nevertheless, accused by Robespierre of moderatism. At Lille, in
+            1797, and at Rastadt, in 1798, he negotiated as a plenipotentiary
+            with the representatives of Princes, and in 1799 corresponded as a
+            director with Emperors and Kings, to whom he wrote as his great and
+            dear friends. He is now a Counsellor of State, in the section of
+            legislation, and enjoys a fortune of several millions of livres,
+            arising from estates in the country, and from leases in the capital.
+            As this accident at Madame de C&mdash;&mdash;n's soon became public,
+            his friends gave out that he had of late been exceedingly absent,
+            and, from absence of mind, puts everything he can lay hold of into
+            his pocket. He is not a favourite with Madame Bonaparte, and she
+            asked her husband to dismiss and disgrace him for an act so
+            disgraceful to a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but was
+            answered, "Were I to turn away all the thieves and rogues that
+            encompass me I should soon cease to reign. I despise them, but I
+            must employ them."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is whispered that the police have discovered another of Madame de
+            C n's lost gold plates at a pawnbroker's, where it had been pledged
+            by the wife of another Counsellor of State, Francois de Nantes.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This I give you merely as a report! though the fact is, that Madame
+            Francois is very fond of gambling, but very unfortunate; and she,
+            with other of our fashionable ladies, has more than once resorted to
+            her charms for the payment of her gambling debts.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <h1>
+            MEMOIRS OF THE COURT OF ST. CLOUD
+          </h1>
+          <br /><br />
+          <h3>
+            Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in
+            London
+          </h3>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            BOOK 2.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER I.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Since my return here, I have never neglected to
+            present myself before our Sovereign, on his days of grand reviews
+            and grand diplomatic audiences. I never saw him more condescending,
+            more agreeable, or, at least, less offensive, than on the day of his
+            last levee, before he set out to be inaugurated a King of Italy; nor
+            worse tempered, more petulant, agitated, abrupt, and rude than at
+            his first grand audience after his arrival from Milan, when this
+            ceremony had been performed. I am not the only one who has made this
+            remark; he did not disguise either his good or ill-humour; and it
+            was only requisite to have eyes and ears to see and be disgusted at
+            the difference of behaviour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have heard a female friend of Madame Bonaparte explain, in part,
+            the cause of this alteration. Just before he set out for Italy, the
+            agreeable news of the success of the first Rochefort squadron in the
+            West Indies, and the escape of our Toulon fleet from the vigilance
+            of your Lord Nelson, highly elevated his spirits, as it was the
+            first naval enterprise of any consequence since his reign. I am
+            certain that one grand naval victory would flatter his vanity and
+            ambition more than all the glory of one of his most brilliant
+            Continental campaigns. He had also, at that time, great expectations
+            that another negotiation with Russia would keep the Continent
+            submissive under his dictature, until he should find an opportunity
+            of crushing your power. You may be sure that he had no small hopes
+            of striking a blow in your country, after the junction of our fleet
+            with the Spanish, not by any engagement between our Brest fleet and
+            your Channel fleet, but under a supposition that you would detach
+            squadrons to the East and West Indies in search of the combined
+            fleet, which, by an unexpected return, according to orders, would
+            have then left us masters of the Channel, and, if joined with the
+            Batavian fleet, perhaps even of the North Sea. By the
+            incomprehensible activity of Lord Nelson, and by the defeat (or as
+            we call it here, the negative victory) of Villeneuve and Gravina,
+            all this first prospect had vanished. Our vengeance against a nation
+            of shopkeepers we were not only under the necessity of postponing,
+            but, from the unpolite threats and treaties of the Cabinet of St.
+            Petersburg with those of Vienna and St. James, we were on the eve of
+            a Continental war, and our gunboats, instead of being useful in
+            carrying an army to the destruction of the tyrants of the seas, were
+            burdensome, as an army was necessary to guard them, and to prevent
+            these tyrants from capturing or destroying them. Such changes, in so
+            short a period of time as three months, might irritate a temper less
+            patient than that of Napoleon the First.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            At his grand audience here, even after the army, of England had
+            moved towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should,
+            therefore, have been made up, he was almost insupportable. The low
+            bows, and the still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador,
+            the Marquis da Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon
+            Ambassador, Count von Buneau, was addressed in a language that no
+            well-bred master ever uses in speaking to a menial servant. He did
+            not cast a look, or utter a word, that was not an insult to the
+            audience and a disgrace to his rank. I never before saw him vent his
+            rage and disappointment so indiscriminately. We were, indeed (if I
+            may use the term), humbled and trampled upon en masse. Some he put
+            out of countenance by staring angrily at them; others he shocked by
+            his hoarse voice and harsh words; and all&mdash;all of us&mdash;were
+            afraid, in our turn, of experiencing something worse than our
+            neighbours. I observed more than one Minister, and more than one
+            general, change colour, and even perspire, at His Majesty's
+            approach.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I believe the members of the foreign diplomatic corps here will all
+            agree with me that, at a future congress, the restoration of the
+            ancient and becoming etiquette of the Kings of France would be as
+            desirable a point to demand from the Emperor of the French as the
+            restoration of the balance of power.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Before his army of England quitted its old quarters on the coast,
+            the officers and men often felt the effects of his ungovernable
+            temper. When several regiments of grenadiers, of the division of
+            Oudinot, were defiling before him on the 25th of last month, he
+            frequently and severely, though without cause, reprobated their
+            manner of marching, and once rode up to Captain Fournois, pushed him
+            forwards with the point of a small cane, calling out, "Sacre Dieu!
+            Advance; you walk like a turkey." In the first moment of
+            indignation, the captain, striking at the cane with his sword, made
+            a push, or a gesture, as if threatening the person of Bonaparte, who
+            called out to his aide-de-camp, Savary:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Disarm the villain, and arrest him!"
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "It is unnecessary," the captain replied, "I have served a tyrant,
+            and merit my fate!" So saying, he passed his sword through his
+            heart.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His whole company stopped instantly, as at a word of command, and a
+            general murmur was heard.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Lay down your arms, and march out of the file instantly," commanded
+            Bonaparte, "or you shall be cut down for your mutiny by my guides."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            They hesitated for a moment, but the guides advancing to surround
+            them, they obeyed, and were disarmed. On the following afternoon, by
+            a special military commission, each tenth man was condemned to be
+            shot; but Bonaparte pardoned them upon condition of serving for life
+            in the colonies; and the whole company was ordered to the colonial
+            depots. The widow and five children of Captain Fournois the next
+            morning threw themselves at the Emperor's feet, presenting a
+            petition, in which they stated that the pay of the captain had been
+            their only support.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Well," replied Bonaparte to the kneeling petitioners, "Fournois was
+            both a fool and a traitor; but, nevertheless, I will take care of
+            you." Indeed, they have been so well taken care of that nobody knows
+            what has become of them.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I am almost certain that I am not telling you what you did not know
+            beforehand in informing you that the spirit of our troops is greatly
+            different from that of the Germans, and even from that of your own
+            country. Every, one of our soldiers would prefer being shot to being
+            beaten or caned. Flogging, with us, is out of the question. It may,
+            perhaps, be national vanity, but I am doubtful whether any other
+            army is, or can be, governed, with regard to discipline, in a less
+            violent and more delicate manner, and, nevertheless, be kept in
+            subordination, and perform the most brilliant exploits. Remember, I
+            speak of our spirit of subordination and discipline, and not of our
+            character as citizens, as patriots, or as subjects. I have often
+            hinted it, but I believe I have not explained myself so fully
+            before; but my firm opinion and persuasion is that, with regard to
+            our loyalty, our duty, and our moral and political principles,
+            another equally inconsistent and despicable people does not exist in
+            the universe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The condition of the slave is certainly in itself that of vileness;
+            but is that slave a vile being who, for a blow, pierces his bosom
+            because he is unable to avenge it? And what epithet can be given him
+            who braves voluntarily a death seemingly certain, not from the love
+            of his country, but from a principle of honour, almost incompatible
+            with the dishonour of bondage?
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the siege of Yorktown, in America, we had, during one night,
+            erected a battery, with intent to blow up a place which, according
+            to the report of our spies, was your magazine of ammunition, etc. We
+            had not time to finish it before daylight; but one loaded
+            twenty-four pounder was mounted, and our cannoneer, the moment he
+            was about to fire it, was killed. Six more of our men, in the same
+            attempt, experienced the same fate. My regiment constituted the
+            advanced guard nearest to the spot, and La Fayette brought me the
+            order from the commander-in-chief to engage some of my men upon that
+            desperate undertaking. I spoke to them, and two advanced, but were
+            both instantly shot by your sharpshooters. I then looked at my
+            grenadiers, without uttering anything, when, to my sorrow, one of my
+            best and most orderly men advanced, saying, "My colonel, permit me
+            to try my fortune!" I assented, and he went coldly amidst hundreds
+            of bullets whistling around his ears, set fire to the cannon, which
+            blew up a depot of powder, as was expected, and in the confusion
+            returned unhurt. La Fayette then presented him with his purse. "No,
+            monsieur," replied he, "money did not make me venture upon such a
+            perilous undertaking." I understood my man, promoted him to a
+            sergeant, and recommended him to Rochambeau, who, in some months,
+            procured him the commission of a sub-lieutenant. He is now one of
+            Bonaparte's Field-marshals, and the only one of that rank who has no
+            crimes to reproach himself with. This man was the soldier of a
+            despot; but was not his action that of a man of honour, which a
+            stanch republican of ancient Rome would have been proud of? Who can
+            explain this contradiction?
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This anecdote about Fournois I heard General Savary relate at Madame
+            Duchatel's, as a proof of Bonaparte's generosity and clemency,
+            which, he affirmed, excited the admiration of the whole camp at
+            Boulogne. I do not suppose this officer to be above thirty years of
+            age, of which he has passed the first twenty-five in orphan-houses
+            or in watch-houses; but no tyrant ever had a more cringing slave, or
+            a more abject courtier. His affectation to extol everything that
+            Bonaparte does, right or wrong, is at last become so habitual that
+            it is naturalized, and you may mistake for sincerity that which is
+            nothing but imposture or flattery. This son of a Swiss porter is now
+            one of Bonaparte's adjutants-general, a colonel of the Gendarmes
+            d'Elite, a general of brigade in the army, and a commander of the
+            Legion of Honour; all these places he owes, not to valour or merit,
+            but to abjectness, immorality, and servility. When an aide-de-camp
+            with Bonaparte in Egypt, he served him as a spy on his comrades and
+            on the officers of the staff, and was so much detested that, near
+            Aboukir, several shots were fired at him in his tent by his own
+            countrymen. He is supposed still to continue the same espionage; and
+            as a colonel of the Gendarmes d'Elite, he is charged with the secret
+            execution of all proscribed persons or State prisoners, who have
+            been secretly condemned,&mdash;a commission that a despot gives to a
+            man he trusts, but dares not offer to a man he esteems. He is so
+            well known that the instant he enters a society silence follows, and
+            he has the whole conversation to himself. This he is stupid enough
+            to take for a compliment, or for a mark of respect, or an
+            acknowledgment of his superior parts and intelligence, when, in
+            fact, it is a direct reproach with which prudence arms itself
+            against suspected or known dishonesty. Besides his wife, he has to
+            support six other women whom he has seduced and ruined; and,
+            notwithstanding the numerous opportunities his master has procured
+            him of pillaging and enriching himself, he is still much in debt;
+            but woe to his creditors were they indiscreet enough to ask for
+            their payments! The Secret Tribunal would soon seize them and
+            transport them, or deliver them over to the hands of their debtor,
+            to be shot as traitors or conspirators.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER II.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            My LORD:&mdash;I am told that it was the want of pecuniary resources
+            that made Bonaparte so ill-tempered on his last levee day. He would
+            not have come here at all, but preceded his army to Strasburg, had
+            his Minister of Finances, Gaudin, and his Minister of the Public
+            Treasury, Marbois, been able to procure forty-four millions of
+            livres&mdash;to pay a part of the arrears of the troops; and for the
+            speedy conveyance of ammunition and artillery towards the Rhine.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Immediately after his arrival here, Bonaparte sent for the directors
+            of the Bank of France, informing them that within twenty-four hours
+            they must advance him thirty-six millions of livres&mdash;upon the
+            revenue of the last quarter of 1808. The president of the bank,
+            Senator Garrat, demanded two hours to lay before the Emperor the
+            situation of the bank, that His Majesty might judge what sum it was
+            possible to spare without ruining the credit of an establishment
+            hitherto so useful to the commerce of the Empire. To this Bonaparte
+            replied that he was not ignorant of the resources, or of the credit
+            of the bank, any more than of its public utility; but that the
+            affairs of State suffered from every hour's delay, and that,
+            therefore, he insisted upon having the sum demanded even within two
+            hours, partly in paper and partly in cash; and were they to show any
+            more opposition, he would order the bank and all its effects to be
+            seized that moment. The directors bowed and returned to the bank;
+            whither they were followed by four waggons escorted by hussars, and
+            belonging to the financial department of the army of England. In
+            these were placed eight millions of livres in cash; and twenty-eight
+            millions in bank-notes were delivered to M. Lefevre, the
+            Secretary-General of Marbois, who presented, in exchange,
+            Bonaparte's bond and security for the amount, bearing an interest of
+            five per cent. yearly.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When this money transaction was known to the public, the alarm
+            became general, and long before the hour the bank usually opens the
+            adjoining streets were crowded with persons desiring to exchange
+            their notes for cash. During the night the directors had taken care
+            to pay themselves for the banknotes in their own possession with
+            silver or gold, and, as they expected a run, they ordered all
+            persons to be paid in copper coin, as long as any money of this
+            metal remained. It required a long time to count those halfpennies
+            and centimes (five of which make a sou, or halfpenny), but the
+            people were not tired with waiting until towards three o'clock in
+            the afternoon, when the bank is shut up. They then became so
+            clamorous that a company of gendarmes was placed for protection at
+            the entrance of the bank; but, as the tumult increased, the street
+            was surrounded by the police guards, and above six hundred
+            individuals, many of them women, were carried, under an escort, to
+            different police commissaries, and to the prefecture of the police.
+            There most of them, after being examined, were reprimanded and
+            released. The same night, the police spies reported in the
+            coffee-houses of the Palais Royal, and on the Boulevards, that this
+            run on the bank was encouraged, and paid for, by English emissaries,
+            some of whom were already taken, and would be executed on the next
+            day. In the morning, however, the streets adjoining the bank were
+            still more crowded, and the crowd still more tumultuous, because
+            payment was refused for all notes but those of five hundred livres.
+            The activity of the police agents, supported by the gendarmes and
+            police soldiers, again restored order, after several hundred persons
+            had been again taken up for their mutinous conduct. Of these many
+            were, on the same evening, loaded with chains, and, placed in carts
+            under military escort, paraded about near the bank and the Palais
+            Royal; the police having, as a measure of safety, under suspicion
+            that they were influenced by British gold, condemned them to be
+            transported to Cayenne; and the carts set out on the same night for
+            Rochefort, the place of their embarkation.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            On the following day, not an individual approached the bank, but all
+            trade and all payments were at a stand; nobody would sell but for
+            ready money, and nobody who had bank-notes would part with cash.
+            Some Jews and money-brokers in the Palais Royal offered cash for
+            these bills, at a discount of from ten to twenty per cent. But these
+            usurers were, in their turn, taken up and transported, as agents of
+            Pitt. An interview was then demanded by the directors and principal
+            bankers with the Ministers of Finance and of the Public Treasury. In
+            this conference it was settled that, as soon as the two millions of
+            dollars on their way from Spain had arrived at Paris, the bank
+            should reassume its payments. These dollars Government would lend
+            the bank for three months, and take in return its notes, but the
+            bank was, nevertheless, to pay an interest of six per cent. during
+            that period. All the bankers agreed not to press unnecessarily for
+            any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the credit of the
+            bank even by the individual credit of their own houses.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but
+            two sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres&mdash;and those of
+            five hundred livres. At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of
+            livres&mdash;of the former, and fifteen millions of livres&mdash;of
+            the latter, were in circulation; and I have heard a banker assert
+            that the bank had not then six millions of livres&mdash;in money and
+            bullion, to satisfy the claims of its creditors, or to honour its
+            bills.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition
+            of Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty
+            ever be repaired under his despotic government. Even now, when the
+            bank pays in cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten
+            per cent. between purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and
+            this mistrust will not be lessened hereafter. You may, perhaps,
+            object that, as long as the bank pays, it is absurd for any one
+            possessing its bills to pay dearer than with cash, which might so
+            easily be obtained. This objection would stand with regard to your,
+            or any other free country, but here, where no payments are made in
+            gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a cart to carry
+            away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of these
+            metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
+            these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our
+            Government. With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as
+            conviction, and chastisement follows it as its shadow.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St.
+            Martin, where he had for years carried on business in the woollen
+            line, went to the bank two days after it had begun to pay. He
+            demanded, and obtained, exchange for twenty-four thousand livres&mdash;in
+            notes, necessary for him to pay what was due by him to his workmen.
+            The same afternoon six of our custom-house officers, accompanied by
+            police agents and gendarmes, paid him a domiciliary visit under
+            pretence of searching for English goods. Several bales were seized
+            as being of that description, and Debrais was carried a prisoner to
+            La Force. On being examined by Fouche, he offered to prove, by the
+            very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that they were not
+            English. The Minister silenced him by saying that Government had not
+            only evidence of the contrary, but was convinced that he was
+            employed as an English agent to hurt the credit of the bank, and
+            therefore, if he did not give up his accomplices or employers, had
+            condemned him to transportation. In vain did his wife and daughters
+            petition to Madame Bonaparte; Debrais is now at Rochefort, if not
+            already embarked for our colonies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When he was arrested, a seal, as usual, was put on his house, from
+            which his wife and family were turned out, until the police should
+            have time to take an inventory of his effects, and had decided on
+            his fate. When Madame Debrais, after much trouble and many pecuniary
+            sacrifices, at last obtained permission to have the seals removed,
+            and reenter her house, she found that all her plate and more than
+            half her goods and furniture had been stolen and carried away. Upon
+            her complaint of this theft she was thrown into prison for not being
+            able to support her complaint with proofs, and for attempting to
+            vilify the characters of the agents of our Government. She is still
+            in prison, but her daughters are by her orders disposing of the
+            remainder of their parents' property, and intend to join their
+            father as soon as their mother has recovered her liberty.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The same tyranny that supports the credit of our bank also keeps up
+            the price of our stocks. Any of our great stockholders who sell out
+            to any large amount, if they are unable to account for, or unwilling
+            to declare the manner in which they intend to employ, their money,
+            are immediately arrested, sometimes transported to the colonies, but
+            more frequently exiled into the country, to remain under the
+            inspection of some police agent, and are not allowed to return here
+            without the previous permission of our Government. Those of them who
+            are upstarts, and have made their fortune since the Revolution by
+            plunder or as contractors, are still more severely treated, and are
+            often obliged to renounce part of their ill-gotten wealth to save
+            the remainder, or to preserve their liberty or lives. A revisal of
+            their former accounts, or an inspection of their past transactions,
+            is a certain and efficacious threat to keep them in silent
+            submission, as they all well understand the meaning of them.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Even foreigners, whom our numerous national bankruptcies have not
+            yet disheartened, are subject to these measures of rigour or vigour
+            requisite to preserve our public credit. In the autumn of last year
+            a Dutchman of the name of Van der Winkle sold out by his agent for
+            three millions of livres&mdash;in our stock on one day, for which he
+            bought up bills upon Hamburg and London. He lodged in the Hotel des
+            Quatre Nations, Rue Grenelle, where the landlord, who is a patriot,
+            introduced some police agents into his apartments during his
+            absence. These broke open all his trunks, drawers, and even his
+            writing-desk, and when he entered, seized his person, and carried
+            him to the Temple. By his correspondence it was discovered that all
+            this money was to be brought over to England; a reason more than
+            sufficient to incur the suspicion of our Government. Van der Winkle
+            spoke very little French, and he continued, therefore, in
+            confinement three weeks before he was examined, as our secret police
+            had not at Paris any of its agents who spoke Dutch. Carried before
+            Fouche, he avowed that the money was destined for England, there to
+            pay for some plantations which he desired to purchase in Surinam and
+            Barbice. His interpreter advised him, by the orders of Fouche, to
+            alter his mind, and, as he was fond of colonial property, lay out
+            his money in plantations at Cayenne, which was in the vicinity of
+            Surinam, and where Government would recommend him advantageous
+            purchases. It was hinted to him, also, that this was a particular
+            favour, and a proof of the generosity of our Government, as his
+            papers contained many matters that might easily be construed to be
+            of a treasonable nature. After consulting with Schimmelpenninck, the
+            Ambassador of his country, he wrote for his wife and children, and
+            was seen safe with them to Bordeaux by our police agents, who had
+            hired an American vessel to carry them all to Cayenne. This
+            certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER III.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to
+            its generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites. According
+            to the boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have
+            drawn from it within two years more wealth than has been paid in
+            contributions to the Electors of Hanover for this century past, and
+            more than half a century of peace can restore to that unfortunate
+            country. It is reported here that each person employed in a
+            situation to make his fortune in the Continental States of the King
+            of England (a name given here to Hanover in courtesy to Bonaparte)
+            was laid under contribution, and expected to make certain douceurs
+            to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has received from
+            Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte two
+            hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our
+            military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the
+            Electorate.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte
+            who have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and
+            Moreau, without ever serving under him. Edward Adolph Casimer
+            Mortier is the son of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768.
+            He was a shopman with his father until 1791, when he obtained a
+            commission, first as a lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as
+            captain of the first battalion of volunteers of the Department of
+            the North. His first sight of an enemy was on the 30th of April,
+            1792, near Quievrain, where he had a horse killed under him. He was
+            present in the battles of Jemappes, of Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg.
+            At the battle of Houdscoote he distinguished himself so much as to
+            be promoted to an adjutant general. He was wounded at the battle of
+            Fleures, and again at the passage of the Rhine, in 1795, under
+            General Moreau. During 1796 and 1797 he continued to serve in
+            Germany, but in 1798 and 1799 he headed a division in Switzerland
+            from which Bonaparte recalled him in 1800, to command the troops in
+            the capital and its environs. His address to Bonaparte, announcing
+            the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for life
+            and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and
+            abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more
+            self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the
+            fire of a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as
+            their contents are, procured him the Field-marshal's staff. Mortier
+            well knew his man, and that his cringing in antechambers would be
+            better rewarded than his services in the field. I was not present
+            when Mortier spoke so shamefully, but I have heard from persons who
+            witnessed this farce, that he had his eyes fixed on the ground the
+            whole time, as if to say, "I grant that I speak as a despicable
+            being, and I grant that I am so; but what shall I do, tormented as I
+            am by ambition to figure among the great, and to riot among the
+            wealthy? Have compassion on my weakness, or, if you have not, I will
+            console myself with the idea that my meanness is only of the
+            duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will be
+            permanent."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle
+            Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other
+            guest of her father. She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes
+            advantage of her husband's complaisance to console herself both for
+            his absence and infidelities. When she was delivered of her last
+            child, Mortier positively declared that he had not slept with her
+            for twelve months, and the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him
+            than to his valet de chambre. The child was baptised with great
+            splendour; the Emperor and the Empress were the sponsors, and it was
+            christened by Cardinal Fesch. Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on
+            this occasion with a diamond necklace valued at one hundred and
+            fifty thousand livres.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious
+            campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of
+            seven millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands. He is
+            considered by other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent
+            chief; and among our fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as
+            a model of connubial fidelity&mdash;satisfying himself with keeping
+            three mistresses only.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in
+            consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of
+            Bonaparte's confidence and attachment. He was recalled to take the
+            command of the artillery of Bonaparte's, household troops the moment
+            Pichegru, George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial
+            tide had been resolved on. More resistance against this innovation
+            was at that time expected than experienced.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in
+            Hanover, is a man of a different stamp. His father was a chair-man,
+            and he was born at Paris in 1763. In 1779 he enlisted in the
+            regiment called La Vieille Harine, where the Revolution found him a
+            sergeant. This regiment was then quartered at Toulon, and the
+            emissaries of anarchy and licentiousness engaged him as one of their
+            agents. His activity soon destroyed all discipline, and the troops,
+            instead of attending to their military duty, followed him to the
+            debates and discussions of the Jacobin clubs. Being arrested and
+            ordered to be tried for his mutinous, scandalous behaviour, an
+            insurrection liberated him, and forced his accusers to save their
+            lives by flight. In April, 1790, he headed the banditti who murdered
+            the Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles, and who afterwards
+            occasioned the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he served under
+            Jourdan, known by the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who made him
+            a colonel and his aide-de-camp. In 1794, he was employed, as a
+            general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during
+            the campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the
+            general, without much distinction,&mdash;except that he was accused
+            by him of being the cause of all the disasters of the last campaign,
+            by the complete rout he suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August,
+            1796. His division was ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the
+            laws of nations, he arrested M. d' Antraigues, who was attached to
+            the Russian legation. When the Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade
+            him from committing this injustice, and this violation of the rights
+            of privileged persons, he replied: "There is no question here of any
+            other right or justice than the right and justice of power, and I am
+            here the strongest. M. d'Antraigues is our enemy; were he
+            victorious, he would cause us all to be shot. I repeat, I am here
+            the strongest, 'et nous verrons'."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an
+            Ambassador to the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort
+            of Jacobin propagators. Having procured the liberty of Austrian
+            patriots, whose lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet
+            of Vienna had spared, he thought that he might attempt anything;
+            and, therefore, on the anniversary day of the fete for the levy en
+            masse of the inhabitants of the capital, he insulted the feelings of
+            the loyal, and excited the discontented to rebellion, by placing
+            over the door and in the windows of his house the tri-coloured flag.
+            This outrage the Emperor was unable to prevent his subjects from
+            resenting. Bernadotte's house was invaded, his furniture broken to
+            pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the house of the
+            Spanish Ambassador. As a satisfaction for this attack, provoked by
+            his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the
+            Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal,
+            to leave Vienna, which he did on the next day. So disgraceful was
+            his conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made
+            but little impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their
+            intercourse with the Austrian Government.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department,
+            from which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed. When Bonaparte
+            intended to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who
+            spoke as an implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred
+            thousand livres&mdash;calmed him a little, and convinced him that
+            the Jacobins were not infallible or their government the best of all
+            possible governments. In 1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in
+            the Western Department, where he exercised the greatest barbarities
+            against the inhabitants, whom he accused of being still chouans and
+            royalists.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer. In
+            the summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and
+            neutral city of Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military
+            execution, within twenty-four hours, two millions of livres. With
+            much difficulty this sum was collected. The day after he had
+            received it, he insisted upon another sum to the same amount within
+            another twenty-four hours, menacing in case of disobedience to give
+            the city up to a general pillage by his troops. Fortunately, a
+            column of Austrians advanced and delivered them from the execution
+            of his threats. The troops under him were, both in Italy and in
+            Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated were, from
+            their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts. Bernadotte has by
+            these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten
+            millions of livres.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they
+            are in the wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution,
+            where the first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him. The many
+            massacres under Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the
+            Court at Venaigin, no doubt display a most sanguinary character. A
+            lady, however, in whose house in La Vendee he was quartered six
+            months, has assured me that, to judge from his conversation, he is
+            not naturally cruel, but that his imagination is continually
+            tormented with the fear of gibbets which he knows that his crimes
+            have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs others, he thinks
+            it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing
+            him. Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity as
+            well as justice. Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the
+            Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the
+            Black Eagle.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER IV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of
+            Voltaire, in his "Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of
+            his celebrity to the well&mdash;distributed pensions among men of
+            letters in France and in foreign countries. According to a list
+            shown me by Fontanes, the president of the legislative corps and a
+            director of literary pensions, even in your country and in Ireland
+            he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names of your principal
+            authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I have never read
+            nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two or three as
+            editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and scurrilous
+            party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who replied
+            that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been
+            very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification;
+            and that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain
+            over men of greater talents. He granted also that men of true genius
+            and literary eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity
+            of their character than those of Germany and Italy, and more
+            difficult to be bought over. He added that, as soon as the war
+            ceased, he should cross the Channel on a literary mission, from
+            which he hoped to derive more success than from that which was
+            undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings,
+            devoted to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal. Some he has made
+            tribunes, prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his
+            Ministers in foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet
+            been able to given places, he bestows much greater pensions than any
+            former Sovereign of this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a
+            Boileau, a Voltaire, a De Crebillon, a D' Alembert, a Marmontel, and
+            other heroes of our literature and honours to our nation. This
+            liberality is often carried too far, and thrown away upon worthless
+            subjects, whose very flattery displays absence of taste and genius,
+            as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee,
+            who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the
+            most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written,
+            containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the
+            administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand
+            livres in the year&mdash;besides a present, in ready money, of one
+            hundred napoleons d'or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and
+            sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of
+            forty lines on Bonaparte's birthday, an office at Milan, worth
+            twenty thousand livres in the year&mdash;and one hundred napoleons
+            d'or for his travelling expenses.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte's agents for
+            dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater
+            than those fixed for regular literary pensions. Instead of
+            discouraging these foolish and impertinent contributions, which
+            genius, ingenuity, necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he
+            rather encourages them. His name is, therefore, found in more
+            dedications published within these last five years than those of all
+            other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken together for the last
+            century. In a man whose name, unfortunately for humanity, must
+            always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable weakness
+            to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality which
+            some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu's, in
+            company with Duroc. The question turned upon literary productions
+            and the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and
+            foreign authors. "As to the merits or the quality," said Duroc, "I
+            will not take upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally
+            incompetent; but as to their size and quantity I have tolerably good
+            information, and it will not, therefore, be very improper in me to
+            deliver my opinion. I am convinced that the German and Italian
+            authors are more numerous than those of my own country, for the
+            following reasons: I suppose, from what I have witnessed and
+            experienced for some years past, that of every book or publication
+            printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is dedicated to
+            the Emperor. Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German and
+            seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His
+            Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only
+            sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their
+            Sovereign." For my part I think Duroc's conclusion tolerably just.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid,
+            recompensed, or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his
+            munificence more than the Italian Spanicetti and the German
+            Ritterstein. The former presented him a genealogical table in which
+            he proved that the Bonaparte family, before their emigration from
+            Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred years ago, were allied to the most
+            ancient Tuscany families, even to that of the House of Medicis; and
+            as this house has given two queens to the Bourbons when Sovereigns
+            of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore, relatives of the Bourbons;
+            and the sceptre of the French Empire is still in the same family,
+            though in a more worthy branch. Spanicetti received one thousand
+            louis&mdash;in gold, a pension of six thousand livres&mdash;for
+            life, and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home
+            department of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand
+            livres yearly.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the
+            Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of
+            the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte;
+            that he exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the
+            Plantagenet family, the last branch of which has since been
+            extinguished by its intermarriage and incorporation with the House
+            of Stuart, and that, therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only
+            related to most Sovereign Princes of Europe, but has more right to
+            the throne of Great Britain than George the Third, being descended
+            from the male branch of the Stuarts; while this Prince is only
+            descended from the female branch of the same royal house.
+            Ritterstein was presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte's portrait
+            set with diamonds, valued at twelve thousand livres, and received
+            twenty-four thousand livres ready money, together with a pension of
+            nine thousand livres&mdash;in the year, until he could be better
+            provided for. He was, besides, nominated a Knight of the Legion of
+            Honour. It cannot be denied but that Bonaparte rewards like a real
+            Emperor.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same
+            encouragement, and experience the same liberality. In our different
+            museums we, therefore, already, see and admire upwards of two
+            hundred pictures, representing the different actions, scenes, and
+            achievements of Bonaparte's public life. It is true they are not all
+            highly finished or well composed or delineated, but they all strike
+            the spectators more or less with surprise or admiration; and it is
+            with us, as, I suppose, with you, and everywhere else, the multitude
+            decide: for one competent judge or real connoisseur, hundreds pass,
+            who stare, gape, are charmed, and inspire thousands of their
+            acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with their own satisfaction.
+            Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the age, his
+            contemporaries, and, I fear, even posterity.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous
+            patron, the numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy,
+            and Germany, having him for their object, seem to evince. Ten
+            sculptors have already represented his passage over the Mount St.
+            Bernard, eighteen his passage over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that
+            over Pont d' Arcole. At Rome, Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are
+            statues of him representing his natural size; and our ten thousand
+            municipalities have each one of his busts; without mentioning the
+            thousands of busts all over Europe, not excepting even your own
+            country. When Bonaparte sees under the windows of the Tuileries the
+            statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that palace, he cannot help
+            saying to himself: "Marble lives longer than man." Have you any
+            doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded
+            for his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon
+            Bonaparte, was a German of the name of Schumacher. It is, indeed,
+            allowed that he was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than
+            ingenious or considerate. He did not consider that it would be no
+            compliment to give the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man.
+            Schumacher had employed near three years in planning and executing
+            in marble the prettiest model of a sepulchral monument I have ever
+            seen, read or heard of. He had inscribed it: "The Future Tomb of
+            Bonaparte the Great." Under the patronage of Count von Beast, he
+            arrived here; and I saw the model in the house of this Minister of
+            the German Elector Arch&mdash;Chancellor, where also many French
+            artists went to inspect it. Count von Beast asked De Segur, the
+            grand master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant
+            Schumacher the honour of showing him his performance. De Segur
+            advised him to address himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon,
+            who, after looking at it, could not help paying a just tribute to
+            the execution and to the talents of the artist, though he
+            disapproved of the subject, and declined mentioning it to the
+            Emperor. After three months' attendance in this capital, and all
+            petitions and memorials to our great folks remaining unanswered,
+            Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which he asked
+            permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte's tomb to the public
+            for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Where is it now?" asked Fouche.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "At the Minister's of the Elector Arch-Chancellor," answered the
+            artist.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "But where do you intend to show it for money?" continued Fouche.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "In the Palais Royal."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Well, bring it there," replied Fouche.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested
+            by a police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put
+            under the care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other
+            side of the Rhine. Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to
+            return to his home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed
+            for money the model of a grand tomb for a little man. I have just
+            heard that one of your countrymen has purchased it for one hundred
+            and fifty louis d'or.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER V.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our
+            Court, of the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our
+            Emperor, and of the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may
+            easily be led to believe that France is one of the happiest and moat
+            prosperous countries in Europe. But for those who walk in our
+            streets, who visit our hospitals, who count the number of beggars
+            and of suicides, of orphans and of criminals, of prisoners and of
+            executioners, it is a painful necessity to reverse the picture, and
+            to avow that nowhere, comparatively, can there be found so much
+            collective misery. And it is not here, as in other States, that
+            these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty are persons of the lowest
+            classes of society; on the contrary, many, and, I fear, the far
+            greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged classes,
+            descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but who by
+            the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
+            to both.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
+            exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of
+            curiosity or want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach
+            you, and whisper to you: "Monsieur, bestow your charity on the
+            Marquis, or Marquise&mdash;on the Baron or Baroness, such a one,
+            ruined by the Revolution;" and you sometimes hear names on which
+            history has shed so brilliant a lustre that, while you contemplate
+            the deplorable reverses of human greatness, you are not a little
+            surprised to find that it is in your power to relieve with a trifle
+            the wants of the grandson of an illustrious warrior, before whom
+            nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that eminent statesman
+            who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some few solitary
+            walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his capital, would
+            perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded ambition and
+            confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
+            tyranny.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Some author has written that "want is the parent of industry, and
+            wretchedness the mother of ingenuity." I know that you have often
+            approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
+            countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours
+            are disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to
+            flatter the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they
+            have no other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide.
+            How many have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where
+            they have no expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of
+            relief in their necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own
+            hands, is the final prospect of all their sufferings.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
+            ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the
+            son of his uncle's porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade
+            is ruined by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have
+            monopolized all their business. Those who pretend to more dignity,
+            but who have in fact less honesty, are employed in our billiard and
+            gambling-houses. I have seen two music-grinders, one of whom was
+            formerly a captain of infantry, and the other a Counsellor of
+            Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your penny or halfpenny on two
+            veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp&mdash;the one the
+            daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant Marquis,
+            a general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on the
+            Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
+            woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one
+            of the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a
+            recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the
+            present!
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            On the day of Bonaparte's coronation, and a little before he set out
+            with his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking
+            slowly on the Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label
+            was pinned to his hat with this inscription: "I had sixty thousand
+            livres rent&mdash;I am eighty years of age, and I request alms."
+            Many individuals, even some of Bonaparte's soldiers, gave him their
+            mite; but as soon as he was observed he was seized by the police
+            agents, and has not since been heard of. I am told his name is De la
+            Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose property was sold
+            in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time he was shut
+            up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since for
+            some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
+            supported himself lately entirely by begging. The value of the dress
+            of one of Bonaparte's running footmen might have been sufficient to
+            relieve him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is
+            more easy and agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in
+            dungeons than to renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve
+            it. In the evening the remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of
+            the poor Chevalier deprived me of all pleasure in beholding the
+            sixty thousand lamps decorating and illuminating Bonaparte's palace
+            of the Tuileries.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired,
+            or whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now
+            serving as officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French,
+            after having for years fought in vain for the cause of a King of
+            France in the brave army of Conde. Several are even doing duty in
+            Bonaparte's household troops, where I know one who is a captain, and
+            who, for distinguishing himself in combating the republicans,
+            received the Order of St. Louis, but is now made a knight of
+            Napoleon's Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for bowing
+            gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress. As he is a man of
+            real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am
+            convinced that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will
+            not miss it, but prove that he has never been misplaced. Another
+            emigrant who, after being a page to the Duc d'Angouleme, made four
+            campaigns as an officer of the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor
+            of Germany, and was rewarded with the Military Order of Maria
+            Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion of Honour, and an officer of
+            the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French. Four more emigrants have
+            engaged themselves in the same corps as common Mamelukes, after
+            being for seven years volunteers in the legion of Mirabeau, under
+            the Prince de Conde. It were to be wished that the whole of this
+            favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants. I am sure they
+            would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
+            never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged
+            classes are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex
+            have preferred domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are
+            chambermaids or governesses, when they might have been Maids of
+            Honour or ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+            daughter of Marquis de R&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, was offered a place
+            as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat, which she declined, but
+            accepted at the same time the offer of being a companion of the rich
+            Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet of Comte de
+            Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for this choice and
+            preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both
+            to be transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had
+            said in a coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the
+            housemaid of the wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the
+            wife of a ci-devant assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a
+            valuable present to Madame Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that
+            Mademoiselle de B&mdash;&mdash;- was not included in the act of
+            proscription against her father and brother.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested
+            for frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But
+            they are proportionally few, compared with those who, without
+            support, and perhaps without hope, and from want of resignation and
+            submission to the will of Providence, have, in despair, had recourse
+            to the pistol or dagger, or in the River Seine buried their
+            remembrance both of what they have been and of what they were. The
+            suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon an average to
+            amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last three years,
+            one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER VI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that
+            Bonaparte is vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private,
+            personal, or domestic vices, opinions are various, and even
+            opposite. Most persons, who have long known him, assert that women
+            are his aversion; and many anecdotes have been told of his unnatural
+            and horrid propensities. On the other hand, his seeming attachment
+            to his wife is contradictory to these rumours, which certainly are
+            exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it was to oblige Barras, and
+            to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her hand ten years ago;
+            though insinuating, she was far from being handsome, and had long
+            passed the period of inspiring love by her charms. Her husband's
+            conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into a
+            proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an
+            evidence of his affection towards her. As he knew who she was when
+            he received her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not
+            unacquainted with her subsequent intrigues particularly during his
+            stay in Egypt&mdash;policy may influence a behaviour which has some
+            resemblance to esteem. He may choose to live with her, but it is
+            impossible he can love her.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me
+            that, had it not been for Napoleon's singular inclination for his
+            youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first
+            year of his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject
+            had already been made her by Talleyrand. It was then reported that
+            Bonaparte had his eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from
+            the friendship which the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no
+            obstacles to the match were expected to be encountered at St.
+            Petersburg. The untimely end of this Prince, and the supplications
+            of his wife and daughter, have since altered his intent, and Madame
+            Napoleon and her children are now, if I may use the expression,
+            incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte family.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb064" id="pb064"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pb064.jpg (63K)" src="images/pb064.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that
+            Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex. You read
+            last summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the
+            Interior (Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded
+            by our Ambassador at Vienna Champagny. This promotion was the
+            consequence of a disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his
+            mistress, a popular actress, Mademoiselle George, one of the
+            handsomest women of this capital. He was informed by his spies that
+            this lady frequently, in the dusk of the evening, or when she
+            thought him employed in his office, went to the house of a famous
+            milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in an adjoining
+            passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face, always
+            entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as she
+            continued there. The house was then by his orders beset with spies,
+            who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner. To be
+            near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where
+            the very next day her visit to the milliner's was announced to him.
+            While his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner's
+            house through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies,
+            forced the door of the passage open, which was no sooner done than
+            the disguised gallant was found, and threatened in the most rude
+            manner by the Minister and his companions. He would have been still
+            worse used had not the unexpected appearance of Duroc and a whisper
+            to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of this enraged lover. The
+            incognito is said to have been Bonaparte himself, who, the same
+            evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial portfolio, and would
+            have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate, had not Duroc
+            dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair which it,
+            would be best to bury in oblivion.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
+            according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in
+            favour of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant. The quantity
+            of jewels with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed
+            with so much ostentation in the new tragedy, 'The Templars',
+            indicate, however, a Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover.
+            And, indeed, she already treats the directors of the theatre, her
+            comrades, and even the public, more as a real than a theatrical
+            Princess. Without any cause whatever, but from a mere caprice to see
+            the camp on the coast, she set out, without leave of absence, and
+            without any previous notice, on the very day she was to play; and
+            this popular and interesting tragedy was put off for three weeks,
+            until she chose to return to her duty.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the
+            governors of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor
+            were that no notice should be taken of this 'etourderie', which
+            should not occur again.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at
+            Montpellier, having ruined himself in search after the philosopher's
+            stone. To persons in such circumstances, with great presumption,
+            some talents, but no principles, the Revolution could not, with all
+            its anarchy, confusion, and crime, but be a real blessing, as
+            Chaptal called it in his first speech at the Jacobin Club. Wishing
+            to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking of the Bastille at Paris, he,
+            in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and the suburbs to an
+            insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which the governor,
+            to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without resistance. He
+            was denounced by the municipality to the National Assembly, for
+            these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and other
+            Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment. During 1793
+            and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the
+            armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot,
+            and other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of
+            livres&mdash;but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres&mdash;himself.
+            He was, under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his
+            pillage, but bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and
+            Siyes. In 1799, he advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres&mdash;to
+            bribe adherents for the new Revolution he meditated, and was, in
+            recompense, instead of interest, appointed first Counsellor of
+            State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in September, 1800, was sent on an
+            embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him in the Ministry of the
+            Interior. You may see by this short account that the chemist Chaptal
+            has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical stone. He now
+            lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive (from two
+            of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a separate
+            establishment. This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
+            character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither
+            committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER VII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;I have read a copy of a letter from Madrid,
+            circulated among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps, which
+            draws a most deplorable picture of the Court and Kingdom of Spain.
+            Forced into an unprofitable and expensive war, famine ravaging some,
+            and disease other provinces, experiencing from allies the treatment
+            of tyrannical foes, disunion in his family and among his Ministers,
+            His Spanish Majesty totters on a throne exposed to the combined
+            attacks of internal disaffection and external plots, with no other
+            support than the advice of a favourite, who is either a fool or a
+            traitor, and perhaps both.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As the Spanish monarchy has been more humbled and reduced during the
+            twelve years' administration of the Prince of Peace than during the
+            whole period that it has been governed by Princes of the House of
+            Bourbon, the heir of the throne, the young Prince of Asturias, has,
+            with all the moderation consistent with duty, rank, and
+            consanguinity, tried to remove an upstart, universally despised for
+            his immorality as, well as for his incapacity; and who, should he
+            continue some years longer to rule in the name of Charles IV., will
+            certainly involve his King and his country in one common ruin.
+            Ignorant and presumptuous, even beyond upstarts in general, the
+            Prince of Peace treats with insolence all persons raised above him
+            by birth or talents, who refuse to be his accomplices or valets.
+            Proud and certain of the protection of the Queen, and of the
+            weakness of the King, the Spanish nobility is not only humbled,
+            provoked, and wronged by him, but openly defied and insulted.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You know the nice principles of honour and loyalty that have always
+            formerly distinguished the ancient families of Spain. Believe me
+            that, notwithstanding what appearances indicate to the contrary, the
+            Spanish grandee who ordered his house to be pulled down because the
+            rebel constable had slept in it, has still many descendants, but
+            loyal men always decline to use that violence to which rebels always
+            resort. Soon after the marriage of the Prince of Asturias, in
+            October, 1801, to his cousin, the amiable Maria Theresa, Princess
+            Royal of Naples, the ancient Spanish families sent some deputies to
+            Their Royal Highnesses, not for the purpose of intriguing, but to
+            lay before them the situation of the kingdom, and to inform them of
+            the real cause of all disasters. They were received as faithful
+            subjects and true patriots, and Their Royal Highnesses promised
+            every support in their power towards remedying the evil complained
+            of, and preventing, if possible, the growth of others.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Princess of Asturias is a worthy granddaughter of Maria Theresa
+            of Austria, and seems to inherit her character as well as her
+            virtues. She agreed with her royal consort that, after having gained
+            the affection of the Queen by degrees, it would be advisable for her
+            to insinuate some hints of the danger that threatened their country
+            and the discontent that agitated the people. The Prince of Asturias
+            was to act the same part with his father as the Princess did with
+            his mother. As there is no one about the person of Their Spanish
+            Majesties, from the highest lord to the lowest servant, who is not
+            placed there by the favourite, and act as his spies, he was soon
+            aware that he had no friend in the heir to the throne. His
+            conversation with Their Majesties confirmed him in this supposition,
+            and that some secret measures were going on to deprive him of the
+            place he occupied, if not of the royal favour. All visitors to the
+            Prince and Princess of Asturias were, therefore, watched by his
+            emissaries; and all the letters or memorials sent to them by the
+            post were opened, read, and; if contrary to his interest, destroyed,
+            and their writers imprisoned in Spain or banished to the colonies.
+            These measures of injustice created suspicion, disunion, and,
+            perhaps, fear, among the members of the Asturian cabal, as it was
+            called; all farther pursuit, therefore, was deferred until more
+            propitious times, and the Prince of Peace remained undisturbed and
+            in perfect security until the rupture with your country last autumn.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is to be lamented that, with all their valuable qualities and
+            feelings of patriotism, the Prince and Princess of Asturias do not
+            possess a little dissimulation and more knowledge of the world. The
+            favourite tried by all means to gain their good opinion, but his
+            advances met with that repulse they morally deserved, but which,
+            from policy, should have been suspended or softened, with the hope
+            of future accommodation.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Beurnonville, the Ambassador of our Court to the Court of Madrid,
+            was here upon leave of absence when war was declared by Spain
+            against your country, and his first secretary, Herman, acted as
+            charge d'affaires. This Herman has been brought up in Talleyrand's
+            office, and is both abler and more artful than Beurnonville; he
+            possesses also the full confidence of our Minister, who, in several
+            secret and pecuniary transactions, has obtained many proofs of this
+            secretary's fidelity as well as capacity. The views of the Cabinet
+            of St. Cloud were, therefore, not lost sight of, nor its interest
+            neglected at Madrid.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I suppose you have heard that the Prince of Peace, like all other
+            ignorant and illiberal people, believes no one can be a good or
+            clever man who is not also his countryman, and that all the ability
+            and probity of the world is confined within the limits of Spain. On
+            this principle he equally detests France and England, Germany and
+            Russia, and is, therefore, not much liked by our Government, except
+            for his imbecility, which makes him its tool and dupe. His disgrace
+            would not be much regretted here, where we have it in our power to
+            place or displace Ministers in certain States, whenever and as often
+            as we like. On this occasion, however, we supported him, and helped
+            to dissolve the cabal formed against him; and that for the following
+            reasons:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            By the assurances of Beurnonville, Bonaparte and Talleyrand had been
+            led to believe that the Prince and Princess of Asturias were well
+            affected to France, and to them personally; and conceiving
+            themselves much more certain of this than of the good disposition of
+            the favourite, though they did not take a direct part against him,
+            at the same time they did not disclose what they knew was determined
+            on to remove him from the helm of affairs. During Beurnonville's
+            absence, however, Herman had formed an intrigue with a Neapolitan
+            girl, in the suite of Asturias, who, influenced by love or bribes,
+            introduced him into the Cabinet where her mistress kept her
+            correspondence with her royal parents. With a pick-lock key he
+            opened all the drawers, and even the writing-desk, in which he is
+            said to have discovered written evidence that, though the Princess
+            was not prejudiced against France, she had but an indifferent
+            opinion of the morality and honesty of our present Government and of
+            our present governors. One of these original papers Herman
+            appropriated to himself, and despatched to this capital by an
+            extraordinary courier, whose despatches, more than the rupture with
+            your country, forced Beurnonville away in a hurry from the agreeable
+            society of gamesters and prostitutes, chiefly frequented by him in
+            this capital.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is not and cannot be known yet what was the exact plan of the
+            Prince and Princess of Asturias and their adherents; but a
+            diplomatic gentleman, who has just arrived from Madrid, and who can
+            have no reason to impose upon me, has informed me of the following
+            particulars:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Their Royal Highnesses succeeded perfectly in their endeavours to
+            gain the well-merited tenderness and approbation of their Sovereigns
+            in everything else but when the favourite was mentioned with any
+            slight, or when any insinuations were thrown out concerning the
+            mischief arising from his tenacity of power, and incapacity of
+            exercising it with advantage to the State. The Queen was especially
+            irritated when such was the subject of conversation or of remark;
+            and she finally prohibited it under pain of her displeasure. A
+            report even reached Their Royal Highnesses, that the Prince of Peace
+            had demanded their separation and separate confinement. Nothing
+            could, therefore, be effected to impede the progress of wickedness
+            and calamity, but by some temporary measure of severity. In this
+            disagreeable dilemma, it was resolved by the cabal to send the Queen
+            to a convent, until her favourite had been arrested and imprisoned;
+            to declare the Prince of Asturias Regent during the King's illness
+            (His Majesty then still suffered from several paralytic strokes),
+            and to place men of talents and patriotism in the place of the
+            creatures of the Prince of Peace. As soon as this revolution was
+            organized, the Queen would have been restored to full liberty and to
+            that respect due to her rank.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This plan had been communicated to our Ambassador, and approved of
+            by our Government; but when Herman in such an honest manner had
+            inspected the confidential correspondence of the Princess of
+            Asturias, Beurnonville was instructed by Talleyrand to, warn the
+            favourite of the impending danger, and to advise him to be
+            beforehand with his enemies. Instead of telling the truth, the
+            Prince of Peace alarmed the King and Queen with the most absurd
+            fabrications; and assured Their Majesties that their son and their
+            daughter-in-law had determined not only to dethrone them, but to
+            keep them prisoners for life, after they had been forced to witness
+            his execution.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Indolence and weakness are often more fearful than guilt. Everything
+            he said was at once believed; the Prince and Princess were ordered
+            under arrest in their own apartments, without permission to see or
+            correspond with anybody; and so certain was the Prince of Peace of a
+            complete and satisfactory revenge for the attempt against his
+            tyranny, that a frigate at Cadiz was ready waiting to carry the
+            Princess of Asturias back to Naples. All Spaniards who had the
+            honour of their Sovereigns and of their country at heart lamented
+            these rash proceedings; but no one dared to take any measures to
+            counteract them. At last, however, the Duke of Montemar, grand
+            officer to the Prince of Asturias, demanded an audience of Their
+            Majesties, in the presence of the favourite. He began by begging his
+            Sovereign to recollect that for the place he occupied he was
+            indebted to the Prince of Peace; and he called upon him to declare
+            whether he had ever had reason to suspect him either of ingratitude
+            or disloyalty. Being answered in the negative, he said that, though
+            his present situation and office near the heir to the throne was the
+            pride and desire of his life, he would have thrown it up the instant
+            that he had the least ground to suppose that this Prince ceased to
+            be a dutiful son and subject; but so far from this being the case,
+            he had observed him in his most unguarded moments&mdash;in moments
+            of conviviality had heard him speak of his royal parents with as
+            much submission and respect as if he had been in their presence.
+            "If," continued he, "the Prince of Peace has said otherwise, he has
+            misled his King and his Queen, being, no doubt, deceived himself. To
+            overthrow a throne and to seize it cannot be done without
+            accomplices, without arms, without money. Who are the conspirators
+            hailing the Prince as their chief? I have heard no name but that of
+            the lovely Princess, his consort, the partaker of his sentiments as
+            well as of his heart. And his arms? They are in the hands of those
+            guards his royal parent has given to augment the necessary splendour
+            of his rank. And as to his money? He has none but what is received
+            from royal and paternal munificence and bounty. You, my Prince,"
+            said he to the favourite (who seemed much offended at the impression
+            the speech made on Their Majesties), "will one day thank me, if I am
+            happy enough to dissuade dishonourable, impolitic, or unjust
+            sentiments. Of the approbation of posterity I am certain&mdash;"
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "If," interrupted the favourite, "the Prince of Asturias and his
+            consort will give up their bad counsellors, I hope Their Majesties
+            will forget and forgive everything with myself."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Whether Their Royal Highnesses," replied the Duke of Montemar,
+            "have done anything that deserves forgiveness, or whether they have
+            any counsellors, I do not know, and am incompetent to judge; but I
+            am much mistaken in the character of Their Royal Highnesses if they
+            wish to purchase favour at the expense of confidence and honour. An
+            order from His Majesty may immediately clear up this doubt."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Prince of Peace was then ordered to write, in the name of the
+            King, to his children in the manner he proposed, and to command an
+            answer by the messenger. In half an hour the messenger returned with
+            a letter addressed to the favourite, containing only these lines:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "A King of Spain is well aware that a Prince and Princess of
+            Asturias can have no answer to give to such proposals or to such
+            questions."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After six days' arrest, and after the Prince of Peace had in vain
+            endeavoured to discover something to inculpate Their Royal
+            Highnesses, they were invited to Court, and reconciled both to him
+            and their royal parents.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER VIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;I will add in this letter, to the communication of
+            the gentlemen mentioned in my last, what I remember myself of the
+            letter which was circulated among our diplomatists, concerning the
+            intrigues at Madrid.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Prince of Peace, before he listened to the advice of Duke of
+            Montemar, had consulted Beurnonville, who dissuaded all violence,
+            and as much as possible all noise. This accounts for the favourite's
+            pretended moderation on this occasion. But though he was externally
+            reconciled, and, as was reported at Madrid, had sworn his
+            reconciliation even by taking the sacrament, all the undertakings of
+            the Prince and Princess of Asturias were strictly observed and
+            reported by the spies whom he had placed round Their Royal
+            Highnesses. Vain of his success and victory, he even lost that
+            respectful demeanour which a good, nay, a well-bred subject always
+            shows to the heir to the throne, and the Princes related to his
+            Sovereign. He sometimes behaved with a premeditated familiarity, and
+            with an insolence provoking or defying resentment. It was on the
+            days of great festivities, when the Court was most brilliant, and
+            the courtiers most numerous, that he took occasion to be most
+            arrogant to those whom he traitorously and audaciously dared to call
+            his rivals. On the 9th of last December, at the celebration of the
+            Queen's birthday, his conduct towards Their Royal Highnesses excited
+            such general indignation that the remembrance of the occasion of the
+            fete, and the presence of their Sovereigns, could not repress a
+            murmur, which made the favourite tremble. A signal from the Prince
+            of Asturias would then have been sufficient to have caused the
+            insolent upstart to be seized and thrown out of the window. I am
+            told that some of the Spanish grandees even laid their hands on
+            their swords, fixing their eyes on the heir to the throne, as if to
+            say: "Command, and your unworthy enemy shall exist no more."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            To prepare, perhaps, the royal and paternal mind for deeds which
+            contemporaries always condemn, and posterity will always reprobate,
+            the Prince of Peace procured a history to be written in his own way
+            and manner, of Don Carlos, the unfortunate son of the barbarous and
+            unnatural Philip II.; but the Queen's confessor, though, like all
+            her other domestics, a tool of the favourite, threw it into the fire
+            with reproof, saying that Spain did not remember in Philip II. the
+            grand and powerful Monarch, but abhorred in him the royal assassin;
+            adding that no laws, human or divine, no institutions, no supremacy
+            whatever, could authorize a parent to stain his hands in the blood
+            of his children. These anecdotes are sufficient both to elucidate
+            the inveteracy of the favourite, the abject state of the heir to the
+            throne, and the incomprehensible infatuation of the King and Queen.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Our Ambassador, in the meantime, dissembled always with the Prince
+            and Princess of Asturias; and even made them understand that he
+            disapproved of those occurrences so disagreeable to them; but he
+            neither offered to put an end to them nor to be a mediator for a
+            perfect reconciliation with their Sovereigns. He was guided by no
+            other motive but to keep the favourite in subjection and alarm by
+            preserving a correspondence with his rivals. That this was the case
+            and the motive cannot be doubted from the financial intrigue he
+            carried on in the beginning of last month.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Foreigners have but an imperfect or erroneous idea of the amount of
+            the immense sums Spain has paid to our Government in loans, in
+            contributions, in donations, and in subsidies. Since the reign of
+            Bonaparte, or for these last five years, upwards of half the revenue
+            of the Spanish monarchy has either been brought into our National
+            Treasury or into the privy purse of the Bonaparte family. Without
+            the aid of Spanish money, neither would our gunboats have been
+            built, our fleets equipped, nor our armies paid. The dreadful
+            situation of the Spanish finances is, therefore, not surprising&mdash;it
+            is, indeed, still more surprising that a general bankruptcy has not
+            already involved the Spanish nation in a general ruin.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When, on his return from Italy, the recall of the Russian negotiator
+            and the preparations of Austria convinced Bonaparte of the
+            probability of a Continental war, our troops on the coast had not
+            been paid for two months, and his Imperial Ministers of Finances had
+            no funds either to discharge the arrears or to provide for future
+            payments until the beginning of the year 14, or the 22d instant.
+            Beurnonville was, therefore, ordered to demand peremptorily from the
+            Cabinet of Madrid forty millions of livres&mdash;in advance upon
+            future subsidies. Half of that sum had, indeed, shortly before
+            arrived at Cadiz from America, but much more was due by the Spanish
+            Government to its own creditors, and promised them in payment of old
+            debts. The Prince of Peace, in consequence, declared that, however
+            much he wished to oblige the French Government, it was utterly
+            impossible to procure, much less to advance such sums. Beurnonville
+            then became more assiduous than ever about the Prince and Princess
+            of Asturias; and he had the impudence to assert that they had
+            promised, if their friends were at the head of affairs, to satisfy
+            the wishes and expectation of the Emperor of the French, by seizing
+            the treasury at Cadiz, and paying the State creditors in vales
+            deinero; notes hitherto payable in cash, and never at a discount.
+            The stupid favourite swallowed the palpable bait; four millions in
+            dollars were sent under an escort to this country, while the Spanish
+            notes instantly fell to a discount at first of four and afterwards
+            of six per cent., and probably will fall lower still, as no
+            treasures are expected from America this autumn. It was with two
+            millions of these dollars that the credit of the Bank of France was
+            restored, or at least for some time enabled to resume its payments
+            in specie. Thus wretched Spain pays abroad for the forging of those
+            disgraceful fetters which oppress her at home; and supports a
+            foreign tyranny, which finally must produce domestic misery as well
+            as slavery.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When the Prince and Princess of Asturias were informed of the
+            scandalous and false assertion of Beurnonville, they and their
+            adherents not only publicly, and in all societies, contradicted it,
+            but affirmed that, rather than obtain authority or influence on such
+            ruinous terms, they would have consented to remain discarded and
+            neglected during their lives. They took the more care to have their
+            sentiments known on this subject, as our Ambassador's calumny had
+            hurt their popularity. It was then first that, to revenge the shame
+            with which his duplicity had covered him, Beurnonville permitted and
+            persuaded the Prince of Peace to begin the chastisement of Their
+            Royal Highnesses in the persons of their favourites. Duke of
+            Montemar, the grand officer to the Prince of Asturias; Marquis of
+            Villa Franca, the grand equerry to the Princess of Asturias; Count
+            of Miranda, chamberlain to the King; and the Countess Dowager del
+            Monte, with six other Court ladies and four other noblemen, were,
+            therefore, exiled from Madrid into different provinces, and
+            forbidden to reside in any place within twenty leagues of the
+            residence of the royal family. According to the last letters and
+            communications from Spain, the Prince and Princess of Asturias had
+            not appeared at Court since the insult offered them in the disgrace
+            of their friends, and were resolved not to appear in any place where
+            they might be likely to meet with the favourite.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Among our best informed politicians here, it is expected that a
+            revolution and a change of dynasty will be the issue of this our
+            political embryo in Spain. Napoleon has more than once indirectly
+            hinted that the Bonaparte dynasty will never be firm and fixed in
+            France as long as any Bourbons reign in Spain or Italy. Should he
+            prove victorious in the present Continental contest, another peace,
+            and not the most advantageous, will again be signed with your
+            country&mdash;a peace which, I fear, will leave him absolute master
+            of all Continental States. His family arrangements are publicly
+            avowed to be as follow: His third brother, Louis, and his sons, are
+            to be the heirs of the French Empire. Joseph Bonaparte is, at the
+            death or resignation of Napoleon, to succeed to the Kingdom of
+            Italy, including Naples. Lucien, though at present in disgrace, is
+            considered as the person destined to supplant the Bourbons in Spain,
+            where, during his embassy in 1800, and in 1801, he formed certain
+            connections which Napoleon still keeps up and preserves. Holland
+            will be the inheritance of Jerome should Napoleon not live long
+            enough to extend his power in Great Britain. Such are the modest
+            pretensions our Imperial courtiers bestow upon the family of our
+            Sovereign.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the
+            hands of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as
+            long as they find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be
+            the case, they break and throw away. This idiot is made to believe
+            that both his political and physical existence depends entirely upon
+            our support, and he has infused the same ridiculous notion into his
+            accomplices and adherents. Guilt, ignorance, and cowardice thus
+            misled may, directed by art, interest, and craft, perform wonders to
+            entangle themselves in the destruction of their country.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a
+            porter, and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a
+            soldier in one of our regiments serving in the East Indies. Having
+            there collected some pillage, he purchased the place of a major in
+            the militia of the Island of Bourbon, but was, for his immorality,
+            broken by the governor. Returning to France, he bitterly complained
+            of this injustice, and, after much cringing in the antechambers of
+            Ministers, he obtained at last the Cross of St. Louis as a kind of
+            indemnity. About the same time he also bought with his Indian wealth
+            the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard of Monsieur, the present
+            Louis XVIII. Being refused admittance into any genteel societies, he
+            resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to gambling-houses,
+            and he even kept to himself when the Revolution took place. He had
+            at the same time, and for a certain interest, advanced Madame
+            d'Estainville money to establish her famous, or rather infamous,
+            house in the Rue de Bonnes Enfants, near the Palais Royal,&mdash;a
+            house that soon became the fashionable resort of our friends of
+            Liberty and Equality.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our
+            then hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who
+            declined the honour. The Jacobins were not so nice. In 1792, they
+            appointed him a general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax.
+            This modern Ajax, having obtained a separate command, attacked
+            Treves in a most ignorant manner, and was worsted with great loss.
+            The official reports of our revolutionary generals have long been
+            admired for their modesty as well as veracity; but Beurnonville has
+            almost outdone them all, not excepting our great Bonaparte. In a
+            report to the National Convention concerning a terrible engagement
+            of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville declares that, though
+            the number of the enemy killed was immense, his troops got out of
+            the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of one of his
+            riflemen. On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the
+            execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War
+            Department&mdash;a place which he refused, under a pretence that he
+            was better able to serve his country with his sword than with his
+            pen, having already been in one hundred and twenty battles (where,
+            he did not enumerate or state). On the 14th of the following March,
+            however, he accepted the ministerial portfolio, which he did not
+            keep long, being delivered up by his Hector, Dumouriez, to the
+            Austrians. He remained a prisoner at Olmutz until the 22d of
+            November, 1795, when he was included among the persons exchanged for
+            the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present Royal Highness, the Duchess
+            of Angouleme.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed
+            remnants of Jourdan's army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French
+            commander to Holland. In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador
+            to the Court of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same
+            character to the Court of Madrid. In Prussia, his talents did not
+            cause him to be dreaded, nor his personal qualities make him
+            esteemed. In France, he is laughed at as a boaster, but not trusted
+            as a warrior. In Spain, he is neither dreaded nor esteemed, neither
+            laughed at nor courted; he is there universally despised. He studies
+            to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter breaks through the
+            veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness.
+            Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the
+            self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and
+            dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his
+            presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and
+            obscenity, he cannot escape even the most inattentive observer.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years
+            of age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a
+            brother who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor,
+            and another to a merchant who cries dogs' and cats' meat in our
+            streets.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER IX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife
+            with him when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of
+            her tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his
+            resolution. Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much
+            to be in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law,
+            Louis Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the Emperor's absence, the former is the President of the
+            Senate, and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander
+            of the troops in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus
+            Consultum, in case of a vacancy of the throne, and the other
+            supports these civil determinations with his military forces. Even
+            with the army in Germany, Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, is as a
+            pillar of the Bonaparte dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and
+            plots of other generals from an Imperial diadem; while, in Italy,
+            his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as a viceroy, commands even the
+            commander-in-chief, Massena. It must be granted that the Emperor has
+            so ably taken his precautions that it is almost certain that, at
+            first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his death; and the will
+            deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition, carried into
+            execution. These very precautions evince, however, how uncertain and
+            precarious he considers his existence to be, and that,
+            notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the
+            Bonaparte dynasty will not survive him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own
+            creation, or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which
+            they might consider unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte.
+            The superior officers, not included in the above description, are
+            such insignificant characters that, though he makes use of their
+            experience and courage, he does not fear their views or ambition.
+            Among the inferior officers, and even among the men, all those who
+            have displayed, either at reviews or in battles, capacity, activity,
+            or valour, are all members of his Legion of Honour; and are bound to
+            him by the double tie of gratitude and self-interest. They look to
+            him alone for future advancements, and for the preservation of the
+            distinction they have obtained from him. His emissaries artfully
+            disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow everything a
+            Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil officers
+            rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be
+            discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII.
+            Any person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the
+            impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and
+            retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an
+            emissary of the Bourbons.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have often amused myself in conversing with our new generals and
+            new officers; there is such a curious mixture of ignorance and
+            information, of credulity and disbelief, of real boasting and
+            affected modesty, in everything they say or do in company; their
+            manners are far from being elegant, but also very distant from
+            vulgarity; they do not resemble those of what we formerly called
+            'gens comme il faut', and 'la bonne societe'! nor those of the
+            bourgeoisie, or the lower classes. They form a new species of
+            fashionables, and a 'haut ton militaire', which strikes a person
+            accustomed to Courts at first with surprise, and perhaps with
+            indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become
+            reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of
+            military frankness interwoven with the military roughness. Our
+            ladies, however (I mean those who have seen other Courts, or
+            remember our other coteries), complain loudly of this alteration of
+            address, and of this fashionable innovation; and pretend that our
+            military, under the notion of being frank, are rude, and by the
+            negligence of their manners and language, are not only offensive,
+            but inattentive and indelicate. This is so much the more provoking
+            to them, as our Imperial courtiers and Imperial placemen do not
+            think themselves fashionable without imitating our military gentry,
+            who take Napoleon for their exclusive model and chief in everything,
+            even in manners.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            What I have said above applies only to those officers whose parents
+            are not of the lowest class, or who entered so early or so young
+            into the army that they may be said to have been educated there, and
+            as they advanced, have assumed the 'ton' of their comrades of the
+            same rank. I was invited, some time ago, to a wedding, by a jeweller
+            whose sister had been my nurse, and whose daughter was to be married
+            to a captain of hussars quartered here. The bridegroom had engaged
+            several other officers to assist at the ceremony, and to partake of
+            the fete and ball that followed. A general of the name of Liebeau
+            was also of the party, and obtained the place of honour by the side
+            of the bride's mother. At his entrance into the apartment I formed
+            an opinion of him which his subsequent conduct during the ball
+            confirmed.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the dinner he seemed to forget that he had a knife and a
+            fork, and he did not eat of a dish (and he ate of them all, numerous
+            as they were) without bespattering or besmearing himself or his
+            neighbours. He broke two glasses and one plate, and, for equality's
+            sake, I suppose, when he threw the wine on the lady to his right,
+            the lady to his left was inundated with sauces. In getting up from
+            dinner to take coffee and liqueurs, according to our custom, as he
+            took the hand of the mistress of the house, he seized at the same
+            time a corner of the napkin, and was not aware of his blunder till
+            the destruction of bottles, glasses, and plate, and the screams of
+            the ladies, informed him of the havoc and terror his awkward
+            gallantry had occasioned. When the ball began, he was too vain of
+            his rank and precedency to suffer any one else to lead the bride
+            down the first dance; but she was not, I believe, much obliged to
+            him for his politeness; it cost her the tail of her wedding-gown and
+            a broken nail, and she continued lame during the remainder of the
+            night. In making an apology to her for his want of dexterity, and
+            assuring her that he was not so awkward in handling the enemies of
+            his country in battle as in handling friends he esteemed in a dance,
+            he gave no quarter to an old maid aunt, whom, in the violence of his
+            gesticulation, he knocked down with his elbow and laid sprawling on
+            the ground. He was sober when these accidents literally occurred.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Of this original I collected the following particulars: Before the
+            Revolution he was a soldier in the regiment of Flanders, from which
+            he deserted and became a corporal in another regiment; in 1793 he
+            was a drum-major in one of the battalions in garrison in Paris. You
+            remember the struggles of factions in the latter part of May and in
+            the beginning of June, the same year, when Brissot and his
+            accomplices were contending with Marat, Robespierre, and their
+            adherents for the reins of power. On the 1st of June the latter
+            party could not get a drummer to beat the alarm, though they offered
+            money and advancement. At last Robespierre stepped forward to
+            Liebeau and said, "Citizen, beat the alarm march, and to-day you
+            shall be nominated a general." Liebeau obeyed, Robespierre became
+            victorious and kept his promise, and thus my present associate
+            gained his rank. He has since been employed under Jourdan in
+            Germany, and under Le Courbe in Switzerland. When, under the former,
+            he was ordered to retreat towards the Rhine, he pointed out the
+            march route to his division according to his geographical knowledge,
+            but mistook upon the map the River Main for a turnpike road, and
+            commanded the retreat accordingly. Ever since, our troops have
+            called that river 'La chausee de Liebeau'. He was not more fortunate
+            in Helvetia. Being ordered to cross one of the mountains, he marched
+            his men into a glacier, where twelve perished before he was aware of
+            his mistake.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Being afterwards appointed a governor of Blois, he there became a
+            petty, insupportable tyrant, and laid all the inhabitants
+            indiscriminately under arbitrary contribution. Those who refused to
+            pay were imprisoned as aristocrats, and their property confiscated
+            in the name and on the part of the nation; that is to say, he
+            appropriated to himself in the name of the nation everything that
+            struck his fancy; and if any complaints were made, the owners were
+            seized and sent to the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris to be
+            condemned as the correspondents or adherents of the royalists of La
+            Vendee. After the death of Robespierre he was deprived of this
+            profitable place, in which, during the short space of eleven months,
+            he amassed five millions of livres. The Directory, then gave him a
+            division, first under Jourdan, and afterwards under Le Courbe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Bonaparte, after witnessing his incapacity in Italy, in 1800, put
+            him on the full half-pay, and has lately made him a commander of the
+            Legion of Honour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His dear spouse, Madame Liebeau, is his counterpart. When he married
+            her, she was crying mackerel and herrings in our streets; but she
+            told me in confidence, during the dinner, being seated by my side,
+            that her father was an officer of fortune, and a Chevalier of the
+            Order of St. Louis. She assured me that her husband had done greater
+            services to his country than Bonaparte; and that, had it not been
+            for his patriotism in 1793, the Austrians would have taken Paris.
+            She was very angry with Madame Napoleon, to whom she had been
+            presented, but who had not shown her so much attention and civility,
+            as was due to her husband's rank, having never invited her to more
+            than one supper and two tea-parties; and when invited by her, had
+            sent Duroc with an apology that she was unable to come, though the
+            same evening she went to the opera.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Another guest, in the regimentals of a colonel, seemed rather
+            bashful when I spoke to him. I could not comprehend the reason, and
+            therefore inquired of our host who he was. (You know that with us it
+            is not the custom to introduce persons by name, etc., as in your
+            country, when meeting in mixed companies.) He answered:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Do you not remember your brother's jockey, Prial?"
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Yes," said I, "but he was established by my brother as a
+            hairdresser."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "He is the very same person," replied the jeweller. "He has fought
+            very bravely, and is now a colonel of dragoons, a great favourite
+            with Bonaparte, and will be a general at the first promotion."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As the colonel did not seem to desire a renewal of acquaintance with
+            me, I did not intrude myself upon him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the supper the military gentlemen were encouraged by the
+            bridegroom, and the bottle went round very freely; and the more they
+            drank, the greater and more violent became their political
+            discussions. Liebeau vociferated in favour of republican and
+            revolutionary measures, and avowed his approbation of requisitions,
+            confiscations, and the guillotine; while Frial inclined to the
+            regular and organized despotism of one, to secret trial, and still
+            more secret executions; defending arbitrary imprisonments, exiles,
+            and transportations. This displeased Madame Liebeau, who exclaimed:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Since the colonel is so fond of an Imperial Government, he can have
+            no objection to remain a faithful subject whenever my husband,
+            Liebeau, becomes, an Antoine the First, Emperor of the French."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Frial smiled with contempt.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "You seem to think it improbable," said Liebeau. "I, Antoine
+            Liebeau, I have more prospect of being an Emperor than Napoleon
+            Bonaparte had ten years ago, when he was only a colonel, and was
+            arrested as a terrorist. And am I not a Frenchman? And is he not a
+            foreigner? Come, shake hands with me; as soon as I am Emperor,
+            depend upon it you shall be a general, and a grand officer of the
+            Legion of Honour."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Ah! my jewel," interrupted Madame Liebeau, "how happy will France
+            then be. You are such a friend of peace. We will then have no wars,
+            no contributions; all the English milords may then come here and
+            spend their money, nobody cares about where or how. Will you not,
+            then, my sweet love, make all the gentlemen here your chamberlains,
+            and permit me to accept all the ladies of the company for my Maids
+            of Honour or ladies-in-waiting?"
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Softly, softly," cried Frial, who now began to be as intoxicated
+            and as ambitious as the general; "whenever Napoleon dies, I have
+            more hope, more: claim, and more right than you to the throne. I am
+            in actual service; and had not Bonaparte been the same, he might
+            have still remained upon the half-pay, obscure and despised. Were
+            not most of the Field-marshals and generals under him now, above him
+            ten years ago? May I not, ten years hence, if I am satisfied with
+            you, General Liebeau, make you also a Field-marshal, or my Minister
+            of War; and you, Madame Liebeau, a lady of my wife's wardrobe, as
+            soon as I am married? I, too, have my plans and my views, and
+            perhaps one day you will recollect this conversation, and not be
+            sorry for my acquaintance."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "What! you a colonel, an Emperor, before me, who have so long been a
+            general?" howled Liebeau, who was no longer able to speak. "I would
+            sooner knock your brains out with this bottle than suffer such a
+            precedence; and my wife a lady of your wardrobe! she who has
+            possessed from her birth the soul of an Empress! No, sir! never will
+            I take the oath to you, nor suffer anybody else to take it."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Then I will punish you as a rebel," retorted Frial; "and as sure as
+            you stand here you shall be shot."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Liebeau then rose up to fetch his sword, but the company interfered,
+            and the dispute about the priority of claim to the throne of France
+            between the ci-devant drummer and ci-devant jockey was left
+            undecided. From the words and looks of several of the captains
+            present, I think that they seemed, in their own opinions, to have as
+            much prospect and expectation to reign over the French Empire as
+            either General Liebeau or Colonel Frial.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As soon as I returned home I wrote down this curious conversation
+            and this debate about supremacy. To what a degradation is the
+            highest rank in my unfortunate country reduced when two such
+            personages seriously contend about it! I collected more subjects for
+            meditation and melancholy in this low company (where, by the bye, I
+            witnessed more vulgarity and more indecencies than I had before seen
+            during my life) than from all former scenes of humiliation and
+            disgust since my return here. When I the next day mentioned it to
+            General de M&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, whom you have known as an
+            emigrant officer in your service, but whom policy has since ranged
+            under the colours of Bonaparte, he assured me that these discussions
+            about the Imperial throne are very frequent among the superior
+            officers, and have caused many bloody scenes; and that hardly any of
+            our generals of any talent exist who have not the same 'arriere
+            pensee of some day or other. Napoleon cannot, therefore, well be
+            ignorant of the many other dynasties here now rivalling that of the
+            Bonapartes, and who wait only for his exit to tear his Senatus
+            Consultum, his will, and his family, as well as each other, to
+            pieces.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER X.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            My LORD:&mdash;I was lately invited to a tea-party by one of our
+            rich upstarts, who, from a scavenger, is, by the Revolution and by
+            Bonaparte, transformed into a Legislator, Commander of the Legion of
+            Honour, and possessor of wealth amounting to eighteen millions of
+            livres. In this house I saw for the first time the famous Madame
+            Chevalier, the mistress, and the indirect cause of the untimely end,
+            of the unfortunate Paul the First. She is very short, fat, and
+            coarse. I do not know whether prejudice, from what I have heard of
+            her vile, greedy, and immoral character, influenced my feelings, but
+            she appeared to me a most artful, vain, and disagreeable woman. She
+            looked to be about thirty-six years of age; and though she might
+            when younger have been well made, it is impossible that she could
+            ever have been handsome. The features of her face are far from being
+            regular. Her mouth is large, her eyes hollow, and her nose short.
+            Her language is that of brothels, and her manners correspond with
+            her expressions. She is the daughter of a workman at a silk
+            manufactory at Lyons; she ceased to be a maid before she had
+            attained the age of a woman, and lived in a brothel in her native
+            city, kept by a Madame Thibault, where her husband first became
+            acquainted with her. She then had a tolerably good voice, was young
+            and insinuating, and he introduced her on the same stage where he
+            was one of the inferior dancers. Here in a short time she improved
+            so much, that she was engaged as a supernumerary; her salary in
+            France as an actress was, however, never above twelve hundred livres
+            in the year&mdash;which was four hundred livres more than her
+            husband received.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He, with several other inferior and unprincipled actors and dancers,
+            quitted the stage in the beginning of the Revolution for the clubs;
+            and instead of diverting his audience, resolved to reform and
+            regenerate his nation. His name is found in the annals of the crimes
+            perpetrated at Lyons, by the side of that of a Fouche, a Collot
+            d'Herbois, and other wicked offsprings of rebellion. With all other
+            terrorists, he was imprisoned for some time after the death of
+            Robespierre; as soon as restored to liberty, he set out with his
+            wife for Hamburg, where some amateurs had constructed a French
+            theatre.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It was in the autumn of 1795 when Madame Chevalier was first heard
+            of in the North of Europe, where her arrival occasioned a kind of
+            theatrical war between the French, American, and Hamburg Jacobins on
+            one side, and the English and emigrant loyalists on the other.
+            Having no money to continue her pretended journey to Sweden, she
+            asked the manager of the French theatre at Hamburg to allow her a
+            benefit, and permission to play on that night. She selected, of
+            course, a part in which she could appear to the most advantage, and
+            was deservedly applauded. The very next evening the Jacobin cabal
+            called the manager upon the stage, and insisted that Madame
+            Chevalier should be given a regular engagement. He replied that no
+            place suitable to her talents was vacant, and that it would be
+            ungenerous to turn away for her sake another actress with whom the
+            public had hitherto declared their satisfaction. The Jacobins
+            continued inflexible, and here, as well as everywhere else,
+            supported injustice by violence. As the patriotism of the husband,
+            more than the charms of the wife, was known to have produced this
+            indecent fracas, which for upwards of a week interrupted the plays,
+            all anti-Jacobins united to restore order. In this they would,
+            perhaps, have finally succeeded, had not the bayonets of the Hamburg
+            soldiers interfered, and forced this precious piece of revolutionary
+            furniture upon the manager and upon the stage.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After displaying her gratitude in her own way to each individual of
+            the Jacobin levy en masse in her favour, she was taken into keeping
+            by a then rich and married Hamburg merchant, who made her a present
+            of a richly and elegantly furnished house, and expended besides ten
+            thousand louis d'or on her, before he had a mortifying conviction
+            that some other had partaken of those favours for which he had so
+            dearly paid. A countryman of yours then showed himself with more
+            noise than honour upon the scene, and made his debut with a phaeton
+            and four, which he presented to his theatrical goddess, together
+            with his own dear portrait, set round with large and valuable
+            diamonds. Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards hearing that
+            her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy, and that
+            his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his portrait
+            changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving, however,
+            the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the stage,
+            by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her
+            bosom. The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses,
+            which he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had
+            put the whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which
+            all her numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had
+            won it.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded
+            in his turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within
+            three months. She then became the property of the public, and, by
+            her active industry, during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was
+            enabled to remit to France, before her departure for Russia, one
+            million two hundred thousand livres. Her popularity was, however, at
+            that period, very much on the decline, as she had stooped to the
+            most indelicate means to collect money, and to extort it from her
+            friends and acquaintances. She had always lists of subscriptions in
+            her pocket; some with proposals to play in her lotteries for
+            trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her, by the
+            assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of
+            Talleyrand's secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those
+            of the other sex. I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend
+            of our Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian
+            expedition, and who instructed her how to act her parts well at St.
+            Petersburg. I need not repeat what is so well known, that, after
+            this artful emissary had ruined the domestic happiness of the
+            Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his political transactions, and
+            became the indirect cause of his untimely end, in procuring, for a
+            bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and jewels, the recall of
+            one of the principal conspirators against the unfortunate Paul.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short
+            period of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of
+            roubles. For money she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon
+            innocence the punishment merited by guilt. The scaffolds of Russia
+            were bleeding, and the roads to Siberia crowded with the victims of
+            the avarice of this female demon, who often promised what she was
+            unable to perform, and, to silence complaint, added cruelty to
+            fraud, and, after pocketing the bribe, resorted to the executioner
+            to remove those whom she had duped. The shocking anecdote of the
+            Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out of nearly a hundred
+            thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards persuaded her Imperial
+            lover to inflict capital punishment, is too recent and too public to
+            be unknown or forgotten. A Russian nobleman has assured me that the
+            number of unfortunate individuals whom her and her husband's
+            intrigues have caused to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801 was
+            forty-six; and that nearly three hundred persons besides, who could
+            not or would not pay their extortionate demands, were exiled to
+            Siberia during the same period of time.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such
+            great and terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as
+            well as of acquired accomplishments. As I have already stated, she
+            can have no pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating,
+            sings tolerably well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an
+            unusually good share of cunning, presumption, and duplicity. Her
+            husband, also, everywhere took care to make her fashionable; and the
+            vanity of the first of their dupes increased the number of her
+            admirers and engaged the vanity of others in their turn to sacrifice
+            themselves at her shrine.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The immorality of our age, also, often procured her popularity for
+            what deserved, and in better times would have encountered, the
+            severest reprobation. In 1797, an emigrant lodged at an inn at
+            Hamburg where another traveller was robbed of a large sum in ready
+            money and jewels. The unfortunate is always suspected; and in the
+            visit made to his room by the magistrates was found a key that
+            opened the door of the apartment where the theft had been committed.
+            In vain did he represent that had he been the thief he should not
+            have kept an instrument which was, or might be, construed into an
+            argument of guilt; he was carried to prison, and, though none of the
+            property was discovered in his possession, would have been
+            condemned, had he not produced Madame Chevalier, who avowed that the
+            key opened the door of her bedroom, which the smith who had made it
+            confirmed, and swore that he had fabricated eight keys for the same
+            actress and for the same purpose.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            At that time this woman lived in the same house with her husband,
+            but cohabited there with the husband of another woman. She had also
+            places of assignation with other gallants at private apartments,
+            both in Hamburg and at Altona. All these, her scandalous intrigues,
+            were known even to the common porters of these cities. The first
+            time, after the affair of the key had become public, she acted in a
+            play where a key was mentioned, and the audience immediately
+            repeated, "The key! the key!" Far from being ashamed, she appeared
+            every night in pieces selected by her, where there was mention of
+            keys, and thus tired the jokes of the public. This impudence might
+            have been expected from her, but it was little to be supposed that
+            her barefaced vices should, as really was the case, augment the
+            crowd of suitors, and occasion even some duels, which latter she
+            both encouraged and rewarded.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Two brothers, of the name of De S&mdash;&mdash;-, were both in love
+            with her, and the eldest, as the richest, became her choice.
+            Offended at his refusal of too large a sum of money, she wrote to
+            the younger De S&mdash;&mdash;-, and offered to accede to his
+            proposals if, like a gentleman, he would avenge the affront she had
+            experienced from his brother. He consulted a friend, who, to expose
+            her infamy, advised him to send some confidential person to inform
+            her that he had killed his elder brother, and expected the
+            recompense on the same night. He went and was received with open
+            arms, and had just retired with her, when the elder brother,
+            accompanied by his friend, entered the room. Madame Chevalier,
+            instead of upbraiding, laughed, and the next day the public laughed
+            with her, and applauded her more than ever. She knew very well what
+            she was doing. The stories of the key and the duel produced for her
+            more than four thousand louis d'or by the number of new gallants
+            they enticed. It was a kind of emulation among all young men in the
+            North who should be foremost to dishonour and ruin himself with this
+            infamous woman.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Madame Chevalier and her husband now live here in grand style, and
+            have their grand parties, grand teas, grand assemblies, and grand
+            balls. Their hotel, I am assured, is even visited by the Bonapartes
+            and by the members of the foreign diplomatic corps. In the house
+            where I saw her, I observed that Louis Bonaparte and two foreign
+            Ambassadors spoke to her as old acquaintances. Though rich, to the
+            amount of ten millions of livres&mdash;she, or rather her husband,
+            keeps a gambling-house, and her superannuated charms are still to be
+            bought for money, at the disposal of those amateurs who are fond of
+            antiques. Both her husband and herself are still members of our
+            secret diplomacy, though she complains loudly that, of the two
+            millions of livres&mdash;promised her in 1799 by Bonaparte and
+            Talleyrand if she could succeed in persuading Paul I. to withdraw
+            from his alliance with England and Austria, only six hundred
+            thousand livres&mdash;has been paid her.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I cannot finish this letter without telling you that before our
+            military forces had reached the Rhine, our political incendiaries
+            had already taken the field, and were in full march towards the
+            Austrian, Russian, and Prussian capitals. The advanced guard of this
+            dangerous corps consists entirely of females, all gifted with beauty
+            and parts as much superior to those of Madame Chevalier as their
+            instructions are better digested. Bonaparte and Talleyrand have more
+            than once regretted that Madame Chevalier was not ordered to enter
+            into the conspiracy against Paul (whose inconsistency and violence
+            they foresaw would make his reign short), that she might have
+            influenced the conspirators to fix upon a successor more pliable and
+            less scrupulous, and who would have suffered the Cabinet of St.
+            Cloud to dictate to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I dined in company several times this last spring with two ladies
+            who, rumour said, have been destined for your P&mdash;&mdash;- of W&mdash;&mdash;
+            and D&mdash;- of Y&mdash;- ever since the Peace of Amiens.
+            Talleyrand is well informed what figures and what talents are
+            requisite to make an impression on these Princes, and has made his
+            choice accordingly. These ladies have lately disappeared, and when
+            inquired after are stated to be in the country, though I do not
+            consider it improbable that they have already arrived at
+            headquarters. They are both rather fair and lusty, above the middle
+            size, and about twenty-five years of age. They speak, besides
+            French, the English and Italian languages. They are good drawers,
+            good musicians, good singers, and, if necessary, even good drinkers.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Had the citizens of the United States been as
+            submissive to the taxation of your Government as to the vexations of
+            our ruler, America would, perhaps, have been less free and Europe
+            more tranquil. After the treaty of Amiens had Produced a general
+            pacification, our Government was seriously determined to reconquer
+            from America a part of those treasures its citizens had gained
+            during the Revolutionary War, by a neutrality which our policy and
+            interest required, and which the liberality of your Government
+            endured. Hence the acquisition we made of New Orleans from Spain,
+            and hence the intrigues of our emissaries in that colony, and the
+            peremptory requisitions of provision for St. Domingo by our Minister
+            and generals. Had we been victorious in St. Domingo, most of our
+            troops there were destined for the American Continent, to invade,
+            according to circumstances, either the Spanish colonies on the terra
+            firma or the States of the American Commonwealth. The unforeseen
+            rupture with your country postponed a plan that is far from being
+            laid aside.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You may, perhaps, think that since we sold Louisiana we have no
+            footing in America that can threaten the peace or independence of
+            the United States; but may not the same dictates that procured us at
+            Madrid the acquisition of New Orleans, also make us masters of
+            Spanish Florida? And do you believe it improbable that the present
+            disagreement between America and Spain is kept up by our intrigues
+            and by our future views? Would not a word from us settle in an
+            instant at Madrid the differences as well as the frontiers of the
+            contending parties in America? And does it not seem to be the
+            regular and systematic plan of our Government to provoke the
+            retaliation of the Americans, and to show our disregard of their
+            privilege of neutrality and rights of independence; and that we
+            insult them only because we despise them, and despise them only
+            because we do not apprehend their resentment.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have heard the late American Minister here assert that the
+            American vessels captured by our cruisers and condemned by our
+            tribunals, only during the last war, amounted to about five hundred;
+            and their cargoes (all American property) to one hundred and fifty
+            millions of livres&mdash;L6,000,000. Some few days ago I saw a
+            printed list, presented by the American consul to our Minister of
+            the Marine Department, claiming one hundred and twelve American
+            ships captured in the West Indies and on the coast of America within
+            these last two years, the cargoes of which have all been
+            confiscated, and most of the crews still continue prisoners at
+            Martinico, Gaudeloupe, or Cayenne. Besides these, sixty-six American
+            ships, after being plundered in part of their cargoes at sea by our
+            privateers, had been released; and their claims for property thus
+            lost, or damage thus done, amounting to one million three hundred
+            thousand livres.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You must have read the proclamations of our governors in the West
+            Indies, and therefore remember that one dated at Guadeloupe, and
+            another dated at the City of San Domingo, both declare, without
+            farther ceremony, all American and other neutral ships and cargoes
+            good and lawful prizes, when coming from or destined to any port in
+            the Island of St. Domingo, because Bonaparte's subjects there were
+            in a state of rebellion. What would these philosophers who, twelve
+            years ago, wrote so many libels against your Ministers for their
+            pretended system of famine, have said, had they, instead of
+            prohibiting the carrying of ammunition and provisions to the ports
+            of France, thus extended their orders without discrimination or
+            distinction? How would the neutral Americans, and the neutral Danes,
+            and their then allies, philosophers, and Jacobins of all colours and
+            classes, have complained and declaimed against the tyrants of the
+            seas; against the enemies of humanity, liberty, and equality. Have
+            not the negroes now, as much as our Jacobins had in 1793, a right to
+            call upon all those tender-hearted schemers, dupes, or impostors, to
+            interest humanity in their favour? But, as far as I know, no friends
+            of liberty have yet written a line in favour of these oppressed and
+            injured men, whose former slavery was never doubtful, and who,
+            therefore, had more reason to rise against their tyrants, and to
+            attempt to shake off their yoke, than our French insurgents, who,
+            free before, have never since they revolted against lawful authority
+            enjoyed an hour's freedom. But the Emperor Jacques the First has no
+            propagators, no emissaries, no learned savans and no secret agents
+            to preach insurrection in other States, while defending his own
+            usurpation; besides, his treasury is not in the most brilliant and
+            flourishing situation, and the crew of our white revolutionists are
+            less attached to liberty than to cash.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb114" id="pb114"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pb114.jpg (55K)" src="images/pb114.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            Our Ambassador to the United States, General Turreaux, is far from
+            being contented with our friend, the President Jefferson, whose
+            patriotic notions have not yet soared to the level of our patriotic
+            transactions. He refused both to prevent the marriage of Jerome
+            Bonaparte with a female American citizen, and to detain her after
+            her marriage when her husband returned to Europe. To our continual
+            representation against the liberties which the American newspapers
+            take with our Government, with our Emperor, with our Imperial
+            Family, and with our Imperial Ministers, the answer has always been,
+            "Prosecute the libeller, and as soon as he is convicted he will be
+            punished." This tardy and negative justice is so opposite to our
+            expeditious and summary mode of proceeding, of punishing first and
+            trying afterwards, that it must be both humiliating and offensive.
+            In return, when the Americans have complained to Turreaux against
+            the piracy of our privateers, he has sent them here to seek redress,
+            where they also will, to their cost, discover that in civil cases
+            our justice has not the same rapid march as when it is a question of
+            arresting or transporting suspected persons, or of tormenting,
+            shooting, or guillotining a pretended spy, or supposed conspirator.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Had the peace of Europe continued, Bernadotte was the person
+            selected by Bonaparte and Talleyrand as our representative in
+            America; because we then intended to strike, and not to negotiate.
+            But during the present embroiled state of Europe, an intriguer was
+            more necessary there than either a warrior or a politician. A man
+            who has passed through all the mire of our own Revolution, who has
+            been in the secrets, and an accomplice of all our factions, is,
+            undoubtedly, a useful instrument where factions are to be created
+            and directed, where wealth is designed for pillage, and a State for
+            overthrow. General Turreaux is, therefore, in his place, and at his
+            proper post, as our Ambassador in America.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The son of a valet of the late Duc de Bouillon, Turreaux called
+            himself before the Revolution Chevalier de Grambonville, and was, in
+            fact, a 'chevalier d'industrie' (a swindler), who supported himself
+            by gambling and cheating. An associate of Beurnonville, Barras, and
+            other vile characters, he with them joined the colours of rebellion,
+            and served under the former in 1792, in the army of the Moselle,
+            first as a volunteer, and afterwards as an aide-de-camp. In a speech
+            at the Jacobin Club at Quesnoy, on the 20th of November, 1792, he
+            made a motion&mdash;"That, throughout the whole republican army, all
+            hats should be prohibited, and red caps substituted in their place;
+            and that, not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs,
+            should accompany the soldiers of Liberty and Equality."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A cousin of his was a member of the National Convention, and one of
+            those called Mountaineers, or sturdy partisans of Marat and
+            Robespierre. It was to the influence of this cousin, that he was
+            indebted, first for a commission as an adjutant-general, and
+            afterwards for his promotion to a general of brigade. In 1793, he
+            was ordered to march, under the command of Santerre, to La Vendee,
+            where he shared in the defeat of the republicans at Vihiers. At the
+            engagement near Roches d'Erigne he commanded, for the first time, a
+            separate column, and the capacity and abilities which he displayed
+            on that occasion were such as might have been expected from a man
+            who had passed the first thirty years of his life in brothels and
+            gambling-houses. So pleasant were his dispositions, that almost the
+            whole army narrowly escaped having been thrown and pushed into the
+            River Loire. The battle of Doux was the only one in which he had a
+            share where the republicans were not routed; but some few days
+            afterwards, near Coron, all the troops under him were cut to pieces,
+            and he was himself wounded.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The confidence of his friends, the Jacobins, increased, however, in
+            proportion to his disasters, and he was, in 1794, after the superior
+            number of the republican soldiers had forced the remnants of the
+            Royalists to evacuate what was properly called La Vendee, appointed
+            a commander-in-chief. He had now an opportunity to display his
+            infamy and barbarity. Having established his headquarters at Mantes,
+            where he was safe, amidst the massacres of women and children
+            ordered by his friend Carriere, he commanded the republican army to
+            enter La Vendee in twelve columns, preceded by fire and sword; and
+            within four weeks, one of the most populous departments of France,
+            to the extent and circumference of sixty leagues, was laid waste-not
+            a house, not a cottage, not a tree was spared, all was reduced to
+            ashes; and the unfortunate inhabitants, who had not perished amid
+            the ruin of their dwellings, were shot or stabbed; while attempting
+            to save themselves from the common conflagration. On the 22d of
+            January, 1794, he wrote to the Committee of Public Safety of the
+            National Convention: "Citizen Representatives!&mdash;A country of
+            sixty leagues extent, I have the happiness to inform you, is now a
+            perfect desert; not a dwelling, not a bush, but is reduced to ashes;
+            and of one hundred and eighty thousand worthless inhabitants, not a
+            soul breathes any longer. Men and women, old men and children, have
+            all experienced the national vengeance, and are no more. It was a
+            pleasure to a true republican to see upon the bayonets of each of
+            our brave republicans the children of traitors, or their, heads.
+            According to the lowest calculation, I have despatched, within three
+            months, two hundred thousand individuals of both sexes, and of all
+            ages. Vive la Republique!!!" In the works of Prudhomme and our
+            republican writers, are inserted hundreds of letters, still more
+            cruelly extravagant, from this ci-devant friend of Liberty and
+            Equality, and at present faithful subject, and grand officer of the
+            Legion of Honour, of His Imperial Majesty Napoleon the First.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb118" id="pb118"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pb118.jpg (126K)" src="images/pb118.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            After the death of Robespierre, Turreaux, then a governor at
+            Belleisle, was arrested as a terrorist, and shut up at Du Plessis
+            until the general amnesty released him in 1795. During his
+            imprisonment he amused himself with writing memoirs of the war of La
+            Vendee, in which he tried to prove that all his barbarities had been
+            perpetrated for the sake of humanity, and to save the lives of
+            republicans. He had also the modesty to announce that, as a military
+            work, his production would be equally interesting as those of a
+            Folard and Guibert. These memoirs, however, proved nothing but that
+            he was equally ignorant and wicked, presumptuous and ferocious.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the reign of the Directory he was rather discarded, or only
+            employed as a kind of recruiting officer to hunt young conscripts,
+            but in 1800 Bonaparte gave him a command in the army of reserve; and
+            in 1802, another in the army of the interior. He then became one of
+            the most assiduous and cringing courtiers at the Emperor's levies;
+            while in the Empress's drawing-room he assumed his former air and
+            ton of a chevalier, in hopes of imposing upon those who did not
+            remember the nickname which his soldiers gave him ten years before,
+            of Chevalier of the Guillotine.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            At a ball of the Bonaparte family to which he was invited, the
+            Emperor took the fancy to dance with his stepdaughter, Madame Louis.
+            He, therefore, unhooked his sword, which he handed to a young
+            colonel, D' Avry, standing by his side. This colonel, who had been a
+            page at the Court of Louis XVI., knew that it would have been
+            against etiquette, and even unbecoming of him, to act as a valet to
+            Napoleon while there were valets in the room; he therefore
+            retreated, looking round for a servant. "Oh!" said the Emperor, "I
+            see that I am mistaken; here, generals," continued he (addressing
+            himself to half a dozen, with whose independent principles and good
+            breeding he was acquainted), "take this sword during my dance." They
+            all pushed forward, but Turreaux and La Grange, another general and
+            intriguer, were foremost; the latter, however, received the
+            preference. On the next day, D' Avry was ordered upon service to
+            Cayenne.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Turreaux has acquired, by his patriotic deeds in La Vendee, a
+            fortune of seven millions of livres. He has the highest opinion of
+            his own capacity, while a moment's conversation will inform a man of
+            sense that he is only a conceited fool. As to his political
+            transactions, he has by his side, as a secretary, a man of the name
+            of Petry, who has received a diplomatic education, and does not want
+            either subtlety or parts; and on him, no doubt, is thrown the
+            drudgery of business. During a European war, Turreaux's post is of
+            little relative consequence; but should Napoleon live to dictate
+            another general pacification, the United States will be exposed, on
+            their frontiers, or in their interior, to the same outrages their
+            commercial navy now experiences on the main.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy,
+            has assured me that, so far from Bonaparte's subjects on the other
+            side of the Alps being contented and attached to his person and
+            Government, were a victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of
+            Lombardy a general insurrection would be the consequence. During
+            these last nine years the inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment's
+            tranquillity or safety. Every relation or favourite whom Napoleon
+            wished to provide for, or to enrich, he has saddled upon them as in
+            free quarters; and since 1796, when they first had the honour of our
+            Emperor's acquaintance, they have paid more in taxes, in forced
+            loans, requisitions, and extortions of every description, than their
+            ancestors or themselves had paid during the one hundred and
+            ninety-six preceding years.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the
+            people in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse
+            off. Having more national character and more fidelity towards their
+            Sovereign than their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated.
+            Their governor, General De Menou, has caused most of the departments
+            to be declared under martial law, and without right to claim the
+            protection of our happy constitution. In every city or town are
+            organized special tribunals, the progeny of our revolutionary
+            tribunals, against the sentences of which no appeal can be made,
+            though these sentences are always capital ones. Before these,
+            suspicion is evidence, and an imprudent word is subject to the same
+            punishment as a murderous deed. Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he
+            who complains is shot as a conspirator.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape
+            these legal assassinations. They must either desert their country or
+            sacrifice a part of their property. In the former case, if retaken,
+            they are condemned as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the
+            risk that those to whom they have already given a part of their
+            possessions will also require the remainder, and having obtained it,
+            to enjoy in security the spoil, will send them to the tribunals and
+            to death. De Menou has a fixed tariff for his protection, regulated
+            according to the riches of each person; and the tax-gatherers
+            collect these arbitrary contributions with the regular ones, so
+            little pains are taken to conceal or to disguise these robberies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
+            Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the
+            moment or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and
+            deliberately. He calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk
+            of every infamous action he proposes to commit, and determines
+            accordingly. He owed some riches and the rank of the major-general
+            to the bounty of Louis XVI., but when he considered the immense
+            value of the revolutionary plunder, called national property, and
+            that those who confiscated could also promote, he did not hesitate
+            what party to take. A traitor is generally a coward; he has
+            everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his Royalist
+            countrymen in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by your
+            countrymen in 1801.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her
+            one Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who
+            are obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and
+            protection, and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours. He
+            has also in his hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are
+            too bashful to address themselves to himself or his mistresses may
+            deposit their donations, and if they are thought sufficient, the
+            hint is taken and their business done. He never pays any debts and
+            never buys anything for ready money, and all persons of his suite,
+            or appertaining to his establishment, have the same privilege.
+            Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of the special
+            tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of those
+            refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit. All
+            the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid
+            out by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced
+            age and weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying.
+            He is a grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and has a
+            long claim to that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of
+            June, 1790, he made a motion in the National Assembly to suppress
+            all former Royal Orders in France, and to create in their place only
+            a national one. Always an incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon
+            proclaimed himself Ali the Mussulman, De Menou professed himself
+            Abdallah the believer in the Alcoran.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now
+            in complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First. If
+            persons of rank and property would read through the list of those,
+            their equals by birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the
+            sophistry of impostors, dishonoured and exposed themselves by
+            joining in the Revolution, they might see that none of them have
+            escaped insults, many have suffered death, and all have been, or
+            are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip of some upstart beggar,
+            and trampled upon by men started up from the mud, of lowest birth
+            and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not incurable,
+            this truth and this evidence would retain them within their duty, so
+            corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from being
+            any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
+            preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against
+            rocks.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
+            Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections. Wealthy as
+            well as elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted
+            tranquillity, enjoying its comforts without experiencing its
+            vicissitudes, with the esteem of his contemporaries and without
+            reproach from posterity or from his own conscience. Unfortunately
+            for him, a journey into this country made him acquainted both with
+            our philosophers and with our philosophical works; and he had
+            neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from reality, nor
+            judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
+            charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
+            attempted to be put into practice. Returned to his own country, his
+            acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his
+            Government, with his religion, and with himself. In our Revolution
+            he thought that he saw the first approach towards the perfection of
+            the human species, and that it would soon make mankind as good and
+            as regenerated in society as was promised in books. With our own
+            regenerators he extenuated the crimes which sullied their work from
+            its first page, and declared them even necessary to make the
+            conclusion so much the more complete. When, therefore, Bonaparte, in
+            1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was among the first of
+            the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer. The numerous
+            vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
+            commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his
+            opinion. "The faults and sufferings of individuals," he said, "are
+            nothing to the goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility
+            of the whole." To him, everything the Revolution produced was the
+            best; the murder of thousands and the ruin of millions were, with
+            him, nothing compared with the benefit the universe would one day
+            derive from the principles and instruction of our armed and unarmed
+            philosophers. In recompense for so much complacency, and such great
+            patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in 1797, a plenipotentiary from
+            the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at Rastadt; and, in 1802, a
+            vice-president of the Italian Republic. As Melzi was a sincere and
+            disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much approve of the
+            strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that annihilated the
+            sovereignty of his sovereign people. In a conference, however, with
+            Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced that this
+            age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
+            intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading
+            to the point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary
+            that it should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and
+            Bonaparte, to whom he advised him by all means never to give the
+            least hint about liberty and equality. Our Minister ended his
+            fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi to sign a stipulation for a
+            yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he occupied.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets
+            of his philosophy and his schemes of regeneration. He trusted so
+            much to the promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed
+            himself destined to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little
+            surprised when he was ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and
+            salute Eugene de Beauharnais as the deputy Sovereign of the
+            Sovereign King of Italy. He was not philosopher enough to conceal
+            his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad grace to the new Viceroy that
+            it was visible he would have preferred seeing in that situation an
+            Austrian Archduke as a governor-general. To soften his
+            disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and with
+            that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons,
+            where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the
+            intrigues of Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the
+            choice of a president.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Immediately after Bonaparte's return to France, Melzi left Milan,
+            and retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to
+            Talleyrand a letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave
+            to pass the remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives. An
+            answer was presented him by an officer of Bonaparte's Gendarmes
+            d'Elite, in which he was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to
+            return with the officer to Milan, and there occupy his office of
+            Arch-Chancellor to which he had been nominated. Enraged at such
+            treatment, he endeavoured to kill himself with a dose of poison, but
+            his attempt did not succeed. His health was, however, so much
+            injured by it that it is not supposed he can live long. What, a
+            lesson for reformers and innovators!
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;A ridiculous affair lately occasioned a great deal of
+            bustle among the members of our foreign diplomatic corps. When
+            Bonaparte demanded for himself and for his wife the title of
+            Imperial Majesty, and for his brothers and sisters that of Imperial
+            Highness, he also insisted on the salutation of a Serene Highness
+            being given to his Arch-Chancellor, Cambaceres, and his
+            Arch-Treasurer, Lebrun. The political consciences of the independent
+            representatives of independent Continental Princes immediately took
+            the alarm at the latter innovation, as the appellation of Serene
+            Highness has never hitherto been bestowed on persons who had not
+            princely rank. They complained to Talleyrand, they petitioned
+            Bonaparte, and they even despatched couriers to their respective
+            Courts. The Minister smiled, the Emperor cursed, and their own
+            Cabinets deliberated. All routs, all assemblies, all circles, and
+            all balls were at a stop. Cambaceres applied to his Sovereign to
+            support his pretensions, as connected with his own dignity; and the
+            diplomatic corps held forward their dignity as opposing the
+            pretensions of Cambaceres. In this dilemma Bonaparte ordered all the
+            Ambassadors, Ministers, envoys, and agents 'en masse' to the castle
+            of the Tuileries. After hearing, with apparent patience, their
+            arguments in favour of established etiquette and customs, he
+            remained inflexible, upon the ground that he, as master, had a right
+            to confer what titles he chose within his own dominions on his own
+            subjects; and that those foreigners who refused to submit to his
+            regulations might return to their own country. This plain
+            explanation neither effecting a conversion nor making any,
+            impression, he grew warm, and left the refractory diplomatists with
+            these remarkable words: "Were I to create my Mameluke Rostan a King,
+            both you and your masters should acknowledge him in that rank."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After this conference most of Their Excellencies were seized with
+            terror and fear, and would, perhaps, have subscribed to the commands
+            of our Emperor had not some of the wisest among them proposed, and
+            obtained the consent of the rest, to apply, once more to Talleyrand,
+            and purchase by some douceur his assistance in this great business.
+            The heart of our Minister is easily softened; and he assented, upon
+            certain conditions, to lay the whole before his Sovereign in such a
+            manner that Cambaceres should be made a Prince as well as a Serene
+            Highness.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is said that Bonaparte was not easily persuaded to this measure,
+            and did not consent to it before the Minister remarked that his
+            condescension in this insignificant opposition to his will would
+            proclaim his moderation and generosity, and empower him to insist on
+            obedience when matters of the greatest consequence should be in
+            question or disputed. Thus our regicide, Cambaceres, owes his
+            princely title to the shallow intrigues of the agents of legitimate
+            Sovereigns. Their nicety in talking of innovations with regard to
+            him, after they had without difficulty hailed a sans-culotte an
+            Emperor, and other sans-culottes Imperial Highnesses, was as absurd
+            as improper. Report, however, states, what is very probable, that
+            they were merely the duped tools of Cambaceres's ambition and
+            vanity, and of Talleyrand's corruption and cupidity.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Cambaceres expected to have been elevated to a Prince on the same
+            day that he was made a Serene Highness; but Joseph Bonaparte
+            represented to his brother that too many other princedoms would
+            diminish the respect and value of the princedoms of the Bonaparte
+            family. Cambaceres knew that Talleyrand had some reason at that
+            period to be discontented with Joseph, and, therefore, asked his
+            advice how to get made a Prince against the wishes of this Grand
+            Elector. After some consideration, the Minister replied that he was
+            acquainted with one way, which would, with his support, certainly
+            succeed; but it required a million of livres to set the wheels in
+            motion, and keep them going afterwards. The hint was taken, and an
+            agreement signed for one million, payable on the day when the
+            princely patent should be delivered to the Arch-Chancellor.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Among the mistresses provided by our Minister for the members of the
+            foreign diplomatic corps, Madame B&mdash;&mdash;s is one of the
+            ablest in the way of intrigue. She was instructed to alarm her 'bon
+            ami', the Bavarian Minister, Cetto, who is always bustling and
+            pushing himself forward in the grand questions of etiquette. A fool
+            rather than a rogue, and an intriguer while he thinks himself a
+            negotiator, he was happy to have this occasion to prove his
+            penetrating genius and astonishing information. A convocation of the
+            diplomatic corps was therefore called, and the suggestions of Cetto
+            were regarded as an inspiration, and approved, with a resolution to
+            persevere unanimously. At their first audience with Talleyrand on
+            this subject, he seemed to incline in their favour; but, as soon as
+            he observed how much they showed themselves interested about this
+            trifling punctilio, it occurred to him that they, as well as
+            Cambaceres, might in some way or other reward the service he
+            intended to perform. Madame B&mdash;&mdash;s was again sent for; and
+            she once more advised her lover, who again advised his colleagues.
+            Their scanty purses were opened, and a subscription entered into for
+            a very valuable diamond, which, with the millions of the
+            Arch-Chancellor, gave satisfaction to all parties; and even Joseph
+            Bonaparte was reconciled, upon the consideration that Cambaceres has
+            no children, and that, therefore, the Prince will expire with the
+            Grand Officer of State.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Cambaceres, though before the Revolution a nobleman of a
+            Parliamentary family, was so degraded and despised for his unnatural
+            and beastly propensities, that to see him in the ranks of rebellion
+            was not unexpected. Born in Languedoc, his countrymen were the first
+            to suffer from his revolutionary proceedings, and reproached him as
+            one of the most active instruments of persecution against the clergy
+            of Toulouse, and as one of the causes of all the blood that flowed
+            in consequence. A coward as well as a traitor, after the death of
+            Louis XVI. he never dared ascend the tribune of the National
+            Convention, but always gave a silent vote to all the atrocious laws
+            proposed and carried by Marat, Robespierre, and their accomplices.
+            It was in 1795, when the Reign of Terror had ceased, that he first
+            displayed his zeal for anarchy, and his hatred to royalty; his
+            contemptible and disgusting vices were, however, so publicly
+            reprobated, that even the Directory dared not nominate him a
+            Minister of Justice, a place for which he intrigued in vain, from
+            1796 to 1799; when Bonaparte, either not so scrupulous, or setting
+            himself above the public opinion, caused him to be called to the
+            Consulate; which, in 1802, was ensured him for life, but exchanged,
+            in 1804, for the office of an Arch-Chancellor.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He is now worth thirty millions of livres&mdash;all honestly
+            obtained by his revolutionary industry. Besides a Prince, a Serene
+            Highness, an Arch-Chancellor, a grand officer of the Legion of
+            Honour, he is also a Knight of the Prussian Black Eagle! For his
+            brother, who was for a long time an emigrant clergyman, and whom he
+            then renounced as a fanatic, he has now procured the Archbishopric
+            of Rouen and a Cardinal's hat. His Eminence is also a grand officer
+            of the Legion of Honour in France, and a Pope in petto at Rome.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XIV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;No Sovereign Prince has more incurred the hatred of
+            Bonaparte than the present King of Sweden; and I have heard from
+            good authority that our Government spares neither bribes nor
+            intrigues to move the tails of those factions which were dissolved,
+            but not crushed, after the murder of Gustavus III. The Swedes are
+            generally brave and loyal, but their history bears witness that they
+            are easily misled; all their grand achievements are their own, and
+            the consequence of their national spirit and national valour, while
+            all their disasters have been effected by the influence of foreign
+            gold and of foreign machinations. Had they not been the dupes of the
+            plots and views of the Cabinets of Versailles and St. Petersburg,
+            their country might have been as powerful in the nineteenth century
+            as it was in the seventeenth.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            That Gustavus IV. both knew the danger of Europe, and indicated the
+            remedy, His Majesty's notes, as soon as he came of age, presented by
+            the able and loyal Minister Bildt to the Diet of Ratisbon, evince.
+            Had they been more attended to during 1798 and 1799, Bonaparte would
+            not, perhaps, have now been so great, but the Continent would have
+            remained more free and more independent. They were the first causes
+            of our Emperor's official anger against the Cabinet of Stockholm.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When, however, His Swedish Majesty entered into the Northern league,
+            his Ambassador, Baron Ehrensward, was for some time treated with no
+            insults distinct or different from those to which all foreign
+            diplomatic agents have been accustomed during the present reign; but
+            when he demanded reparation for the piracies committed during the
+            last war by our privateers on the commerce of his nation, the tone
+            was changed; and when his Sovereign, in 1803, was on a visit to his
+            father-in-law, the Elector of Baden, and there preferred the
+            agreeable company of the unfortunate Duc d'Enghien to the society of
+            our Minister, Baron Ehrensward never entered Napoleon's diplomatic
+            circle or Madame Napoleon's drawing-room without hearing rebukes and
+            experiencing disgusts. One day, when more than usually attacked, he
+            said, on leaving the apartment, to another Ambassador, and in the
+            hearing of Duroc, "that it required more real courage to encounter
+            with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations, which the
+            person who gave them knew could not be resented, than to brave a
+            death which the mouths of cannon vomit or the points of bayonets
+            inflict." Duroc reported to his master what he heard, and but for
+            Talleyrand's interference, the Swedish Ambassador would, on the same
+            night, have been lodged in the Temple. Orders were already given to
+            that purpose, but were revoked.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This Baron Ehrensward, who is also a general in the service of his
+            country, has almost from his youth passed his time at Courts; first
+            in his own country, and afterwards in Spain, where he resided twelve
+            years as our Ambassador. Frank as a soldier, but also polite as a
+            courtier, he was not a little surprised at the new etiquette of our
+            new court, and at the endurance of all the members of the diplomatic
+            corps, of whom hardly one had spirit enough to remember that he was
+            the representative of one, at least nominally, independent Prince or
+            State. It must be added that he was the only foreign diplomatist,
+            with Count Markof, who was not the choice of our Cabinet, and,
+            therefore, was not in our secrets.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As soon as His Swedish Majesty heard of the unexpected and unlawful
+            seizure of the Duc d'Enghien, he wrote a letter with his own hand to
+            Bonaparte, which he sent by his adjutant-general, Tawast; but this
+            officer arrived too late, and only in time to hear of the execution
+            of the Prince he intended to save, and the indecent expressions of
+            Napoleon when acquainted with the object of his mission. Baron
+            Ehrensward was then recalled, and a Court mourning was proclaimed by
+            Gustavus IV., as well as by Alexander the First, for the lamented
+            victim of the violated laws of nations and humanity. This so,
+            enraged our ruler that General Caulincourt (the same who commanded
+            the expedition which crossed the Rhine and captured the Duc d'
+            Enghien) was engaged to head and lead fifty other banditti, who were
+            destined to pass in disguise into Baden, and to bring the King of
+            Sweden a prisoner to this capital. Fortunately, His Majesty had some
+            suspicion of the attempt, and removed to a greater distance from our
+            frontiers than Carlsruhe. So certain was our Government of the
+            success of this shameful enterprise, that our charge d'affaires in
+            Sweden was preparing to engage the discontented and disaffected
+            there for the convocation of a diet and the establishment of a
+            regency.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            According to the report in our diplomatic circle. Bonaparte and
+            Talleyrand intended nevermore to, release their royal captive when
+            once in their power; but, after forcing him to resign the throne to
+            his son, keep him a prisoner for the remainder of his days, which
+            they would have taken care should not have been long. The Duke of
+            Sudermania was to have been nominated a regent until the majority of
+            the young King, not yet six years of age. The Swedish diets were to
+            recover that influence, or, rather, that licentiousness, to which
+            Gustavus III., by the revolution of the 19th of August, 1772, put an
+            end. All exiled regicides, or traitors, were to be recalled, and a
+            revolutionary focus organized in the North, equally threatening
+            Russia and Denmark. The dreadful consequences of such an event are
+            incalculable. Thanks to the prudence of His Swedish Majesty, all
+            these schemes evaporated in air.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Not being able to dethrone a Swedish Monarch, our Cabinet resolved
+            to partition the Swedish territory, to which effect I am assured
+            that proposals were last summer made to the Cabinets of St.
+            Petersburg, Berlin, and Copenhagen. Swedish Finland was stated to
+            have been offered to Russia, Swedish Pomerania to Prussia, and
+            Scania and Blekinge to Denmark; but the overture was rejected.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The King of Sweden possesses both talents and information superior
+            to most of his contemporaries, and he has surrounded himself with
+            counsellors who, with their experience, make wisdom more firm, more
+            useful, and more valuable. His chancellor, D'Ehrenheim, unites
+            modesty with sagacity; he is a most able statesman, an accomplished
+            gentleman, and the most agreeable of men. He knows the languages, as
+            well as the constitutions, of every country in Europe, with equal
+            perfection as his native tongue and national code. Had his Sovereign
+            the same ascendency over the European politics as Christina had
+            during the negotiation of the Treaty of Munster, other States would
+            admire, and Sweden be proud of, another Axel Oxenstiern.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Count Fersen, who also has, and is worthy of, the confidence of his
+            Prince, is a nobleman, the honour and pride of his rank. A colonel
+            before the Revolution of the regiment Royal Suedois, in the service
+            of my country, his principles were so well appreciated that he was
+            entrusted by Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, when so many were so
+            justly suspected, and served royalty in distress, at the risk of his
+            own existence. This was so much the more generous in him as he was a
+            foreigner, of one of the most ancient families, and one of the
+            richest noblemen in his own country. To him Louis XVIII. is indebted
+            for his life; and he brought consolation to the deserted Marie
+            Antoinette even in the dungeon of the Conciergerie, when a discovery
+            would have been a sentence of death. In 1797, he was appointed by
+            his King plenipotentiary to the Congress of Rastadt, and arrived
+            there just at the time when Bonaparte, after the destruction of
+            happiness in Italy, had resolved on the ruin of liberty in
+            Switzerland, and came there proud of past exploits and big with
+            future schemes of mischief. His reception from the conquerer of
+            Italy was such as might have been expected by distinguished loyalty
+            from successful rebellion. He was told that the Congress of Rastadt
+            was not his place! and this was true; for what can be common between
+            honour and infamy, between virtue and vice? On his return to Sweden,
+            Count Fersen was rewarded with the dignity of a Grand Officer of
+            State.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Of another faithful and trusty counsellor of His Swedish Majesty,
+            Baron d'Armfeldt, a panegyric would be pronounced in saying that he
+            was the friend of Gustavus III. From a page to that chevalier of
+            royalty he was advanced to the rank of general; and during the war
+            with Russia, in 1789 and 1790, he fought and bled by the side of his
+            Prince and benefactor. It was to him that his King said, when
+            wounded mortally, by the hand of a regicide, at a masquerade in
+            March, 1792, "Don't be alarmed, my friend. You know as well as
+            myself that all wounds are not dangerous." Unfortunately, his were
+            not of that description.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In the will of this great Monarch, Baron d'Armfeldt was nominated
+            one of the guardians of his present Sovereign, and a governor of the
+            capital; but the Duke Regent, who was a weak Prince, guided by
+            philosophical adventurers, by Illuminati and Freemasons, most of
+            whom had imbibed the French revolutionary maxims, sent him, in a
+            kind of honourable exile, as an Ambassador to Italy. Shortly
+            afterwards, under pretence of having discovered a conspiracy, in
+            which the Baron was implicated, he was outlawed. He then took refuge
+            in Russia, where he was made a general, and as such distinguished
+            him self under Suwarow during the campaign of 1799. He was then
+            recalled to his country, and restored to all his former places and
+            dignities, and has never since ceased to merit and obtain the
+            favour, friendship, and approbation of his King. He is said to be
+            one of the Swedish general officers intended to serve in union with
+            the Russian troops expected in Pomerania. Wherever he is employed, I
+            am convinced that he will fight, vanquish, or perish like a hero.
+            Last spring he was offered the place of a lieutenant-general in the
+            Austrian service, which, with regard to salary and emoluments, is
+            greatly superior to what he enjoys in Sweden; he declined it,
+            however, because, with a warrior of his stamp, interest is the last
+            consideration.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Believe me, Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the
+            Press than all other engines, military or political, used by his
+            rivals or foes for his destruction. He is aware of the fatal
+            consequences all former factions suffered from the public exposure
+            of their past crimes and future views; of the reality of their
+            guilt, and of the fallacy of their boasts and promises. He does not
+            doubt but that a faithful account of all the actions and intrigues
+            of his Government, its imposition, fraud, duplicity, and tyranny,
+            would make a sensible alteration in the public opinion; and that
+            even those who, from motives of patriotism, from being tired of our
+            revolutionary convulsions, or wishing for tranquillity, have been
+            his adherents, might alter their sentiments when they read of
+            enormities which must indicate insecurity, and prove to every one
+            that he who waded through rivers of blood to seize power will never
+            hesitate about the means of preserving it.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            There is not a printing-office, from the banks of the Elbe to the
+            Gulf of Naples, which is not under the direct or indirect inspection
+            of our police agents; and not a bookseller in Germany, France,
+            Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, or Switzerland, publishes a work
+            which, if contrary to our policy or our fears, is not either
+            confiscated, or purchased on the day it, makes its appearance.
+            Besides our regular emissaries, we have persons travelling from the
+            beginning to the end of the year, to pick up information of what
+            literary productions are printing; of what authors are popular; of
+            their political opinions and private circumstances. This branch of
+            our haute police extends even to your country.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Before the Revolution, we had in this capital only two daily papers,
+            but from 1789 to 1799 never less than thirty, and frequently sixty
+            journals were daily printed. After Bonaparte had assumed the
+            consular authority, they were reduced to ten. But though these were
+            under a very strict inspection of our Minister of Police, they were
+            regarded still as too numerous, and have lately been diminished to
+            eight, by the incorporation of 'Le Clef du Cabinet' and 'Le Bulletin
+            de l'Europe' with the 'Gazette de France', a paper of which the
+            infamously famous Barrere is the editor. According to a proposal of
+            Bonaparte, it was lately debated in the Council of State whether it
+            would not be politic to suppress all daily prints, with the sole
+            exception of the Moniteur. Fouche and Talleyrand spoke much in
+            favour of this measure of security. Real, however, is said to have
+            suggested another plan, which was adopted; and our Government,
+            instead of prohibiting the appearance of our daily papers, has
+            resolved by degrees to purchase them all, and to entrust them
+            entirely to the direction of Barrere, who now is consulted in
+            everything concerning books or newspapers.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb146" id="pb146"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pb146.jpg (95K)" src="images/pb146.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            All circulation of foreign papers is prohibited, until they have
+            previously obtained the stamp of approbation from the grand literary
+            censor, Barrere. Any person offending against this law is most
+            severely punished. An American gentlemen, of the name of Campbell,
+            was last spring sent to the Temple for lending one of your old daily
+            papers to a person who lodged in the same hotel with him. After an
+            imprisonment of ten weeks he made some pecuniary sacrifices to
+            obtain his liberty, but was carried to Havre, under an escort of
+            gendarmes, put on board a neutral vessel, and forbidden, under pain
+            of death, ever to set his foot on French ground again. An American
+            vessel was, about the same time, confiscated at Bordeaux, and the
+            captain and crew imprisoned, because some English books were found
+            on board, in which Bonaparte, Talleyrand, Fouche, and some of our
+            great men were rather ill-treated. The crew have since been
+            liberated, but the captain has been brought here, and is still in
+            the Temple. The vessel and the cargo have been sold as lawful
+            captures, though the captain has proved from the names written in
+            the books that they belonged to a passenger. A young German student
+            in surgery, who came here to improve himself, has been nine months
+            in the same state prison, for having with him a book, printed in
+            Germany during Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt, wherein the chief
+            and the undertaking are ridiculed. His mother, the widow of a
+            clergyman, hearing of the misfortune of her son, came here, and has
+            presented to the Emperor and Empress half a dozen petitions, without
+            any effect whatever, and has almost ruined herself and her other
+            children by the expenses of the journey. During a stay of four
+            months she has not yet been able to gain admittance into the Temple,
+            to visit or see her son, who perhaps expired in tortures, or died
+            brokenhearted before she came here.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A dozen copies of a funeral sermon on the Duc d'Enghien had found
+            their way here, and were secretly circulated for some time; but at
+            last the police heard of it, and every person who was suspected of
+            having read them was arrested. The number of these unfortunate
+            persons, according to some, amounted to one hundred and thirty,
+            while others say that they were only eighty-four, of whom twelve
+            died suddenly in the Temple, and the remainder were transported to
+            Cayenne; upwards of half of them were women, some of the ci-devant
+            highest rank among subjects.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A Prussian, of the name of Bulow, was shot as a spy in the camp of
+            Boulogne, because in his trunk was an English book, with the lives
+            of Bonaparte and of some of his generals. Every day such and other
+            examples of the severity of our Government are related; and
+            foreigners who visit us continue, nevertheless, to be off their
+            guard. They would be less punished had they with them forged bills
+            than, printed books or newspapers, in which our Imperial Family and
+            public functionaries are not treated with due respect. Bonaparte is
+            convinced that in every book where he is not spoken of with praise,
+            the intent is to blame him; and such intents or negative guilt never
+            escape with impunity.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more
+            fond of foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our
+            own, official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at
+            Cologne, and at Mentz, where the 'Gazette de Leyden', 'Hamburg
+            Correspondenten', and 'Journal de Frankfort' are reprinted; some
+            articles left out, and others inserted in their room. It was
+            intended to reprint also the 'Courier de Londres', but our types,
+            and particularly, our paper, would detect the fraud. I have read one
+            of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were extracts from this
+            French paper, printed in your country, which I strongly suspect are
+            of our own manufacture. I am told that several new books, written by
+            foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant Government, are now
+            in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will soon be laid
+            before the public as foreign productions.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention,
+            during his dinner at the restaurateur's of 'Cadran Vert', on the
+            Boulevards, some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the
+            'Moniteur'. As he left the house he was arrested, carried before
+            Fouche, accused of being an English agent, and before supper-time he
+            was on the road to Rochefort on his way to Cayenne. As soon as the
+            banker Tournon was informed of this expeditious justice, as it is
+            called here, he waited on Fouche, who threatened even to transport
+            him if he dared to interfere with the transactions of the police.
+            This banker was himself seized in the spring of last year by a
+            police agent and some gendarmes, and carried into exile forty
+            leagues from this capital, where he remained six. months, until a
+            pecuniary douceur procured him a recall. His crime was having
+            inquired after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having left
+            his card there.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XVI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a
+            captain of the Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law,
+            Napoleon the First, and is now in Germany, making his first
+            campaign. A descendant of a wealthy and ancient Roman family, but
+            born with a weak understanding, he was easily deluded into the ranks
+            of the revolutionists of his own country, by a Parisian Abbe, his
+            instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse Borghese, his
+            mother. He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin club
+            established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the
+            same year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical
+            States, he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman
+            Prince, Santa Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their
+            retreat. To show his love of equality, he had previously served as a
+            common man in a company of which the captain was a fellow that sold
+            cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a
+            scullion of his mother's kitchen. Since Imperial aristocracy is now
+            become the order of the day, he is as insupportable for his pride
+            and vanity as he, some years ago, was contemptible for his meanness.
+            He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who, between the death of a
+            first and a wedding with a second husband&mdash;a space of twelve
+            months&mdash;had twice been in a fair way to become a mother. Her
+            portion was estimated at eighteen millions of livres&mdash;a sum
+            sufficient to palliate many 'faux pas' in the eyes of a husband more
+            sensible and more delicate than her present Serene Idiot, as she
+            styles the Prince Borghese.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The lady is the favourite sister of Napoleon, the ablest, but also
+            the most wicked of the female Bonapartes. She had, almost from her
+            infancy, passed through all the filth of prostitution, debauchery,
+            and profligacy before she attained her present elevation; rank,
+            however, has not altered her morals, but only procured her the means
+            of indulging in new excesses. Ever since the wedding night the
+            Prince Borghese has been excluded from her bed; for she declared
+            frankly to him, as well as to her brother, that she would never
+            endure the approach of a man with a bad breath; though many who,
+            from the opportunities they have had of judging, certainly ought to
+            know, pretend that her own breath is not the sweetest in the world.
+            When her husband had marched towards the Rhine, she asked her
+            brother, as a favour, to procure the Prince Borghese, after a
+            useless life, a glorious death. This curious demand of a wife was,
+            made in Madame Bonaparte's drawing-room, in the presence of fifty
+            persons. "You are always 'etourdie'," replied Napoleon, smiling.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            If Bonaparte, however, overlooks the intrigues of his sisters, he is
+            not so easily pacified when any reports reach him inculpating the
+            virtues of his sisters-in-law. Some gallants of Madame Joseph
+            Bonaparte have already disappeared to return no more, or are
+            wandering in the wilds of Cayenne; but the Emperor is particularly
+            attentive to everything concerning the morality of Madame Louis,
+            whose descendants are destined to continue the Bonaparte dynasty.
+            Two officers, after being cashiered, were, with two of Madame
+            Louis's maids, shut up last month in the Temple, and have not since
+            been heard of, upon suspicion that the Princess preferred their
+            society to that of her husband.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Louis Bonaparte, whose constitution has been much impaired by his
+            debaucheries, was, last July, advised by his physicians to use the
+            baths at St. Amand. After his wife had accompanied him as far as
+            Lille, she went to visit one of her friends, Madame Ney, the wife of
+            General Ney, who commanded the camp near Montreuil. This lady
+            resided in a castle called Leek, in the vicinity, where dinners,
+            concerts, balls, and other festivities celebrated the arrival of the
+            Princess; and to these the principal officers of the camp were
+            invited. One morning, about an hour after the company had retired to
+            bed, the whole castle was disturbed and alarmed by an uproar in the
+            anteroom of Princesse Louis's bedchamber. On coming to the scene of
+            riot, two officers were found there fighting, and the Princesse
+            Louis, more than half undressed, came out and called the sentries on
+            duty to separate the combatants, who were both wounded. This affair
+            occasioned great scandal; and General Ney, after having put the
+            officers under arrest, sent a courier to Napoleon at Boulogne,
+            relating the particulars and demanding His Majesty's orders. It was
+            related and believed as a fact that the quarrel originated about two
+            of the maids of the Princess (whose virtue was never suspected),
+            with whom the officers were intriguing. The Emperor ordered the
+            culprits to be broken and delivered up to his Minister of Police,
+            who knew how to proceed. The Princesse Louis also received an
+            invitation to join her sister-in-law, Madame Murat, then in the camp
+            at Boulogne, and to remain under her care until her husband's return
+            from St. Amand.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General Murat was then at Paris, and his lady was merely on a visit
+            to her Imperial brother, who made her responsible for Madame Louis,
+            whom he severely reprimanded for the misconduct of her maids. The
+            bedrooms of the two sisters were on the same floor. One night,
+            Princesse Louis thought she heard the footsteps of a person on the
+            staircase, not like those of a female, and afterwards the door of
+            Madame Murat's room opened softly. This occurrence deprived her of
+            all desire to sleep; and curiosity, or perhaps revenge, excited her
+            to remove her doubts concerning the virtue of her guardian. In about
+            an hour afterwards, she stole into Madame Murat's bedroom, by the
+            way of their sitting-room, the door in the passage being bolted.
+            Passing her hand over the pillow, she almost pricked herself with
+            the strong beard of a man, and, screaming out, awoke her sister, who
+            inquired what she could want at such an unusual hour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "I believe," replied the Princess, "my room is haunted. I have not
+            shut my eyes, and intended to ask for a place by your side, but I
+            find it is already engaged:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent," said
+            Madame Murat.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "It is very rude of your maid to go to bed with her mistress without
+            first shaving herself," said the Princess, and left the room.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The next morning an explanation took place; the ladies understood
+            each other, and each, during the remaining part of her husband's
+            absence, had for consolation a maid for a bedfellow. Madame Murat
+            also convinced the Emperor that his suspicions with regard to the
+            Princesse Louis were totally unfounded; and he with some precious
+            presents, indemnified her for his harsh treatment.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is reported that the two maids of the Princesse Louis, when
+            before Fouche, first denied all acquaintance with the officers; but,
+            being threatened with tortures, they signed a 'proces verbal',
+            acknowledging their guilt. This valuable and authentic document the
+            Minister sent by an extra courier to the Emperor, who showed it to
+            his stepdaughter. Her generosity is proverbial here, and therefore
+            nobody is surprised that she has given a handsome sum of money to
+            the parents of her maids, who had in vain applied to see their
+            children; Fouche having told them that affairs of State still
+            required their confinement. One of them, Mariothe, has been in the
+            service of the Princess ever since her marriage, and is known to
+            possess all her confidence; though during that period of four years
+            she has twice been in a state of pregnancy, through the
+            condescending attention of her princely master.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XVII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;When preparations were made for the departure of our
+            army of England for Germany, it excited both laughter and murmuring
+            among the troops. Those who had always regarded the conquest of
+            England as impracticable in present circumstances, laughed, and
+            those who had in their imagination shared the wealth of your
+            country, showed themselves vexed at their disappointment. To keep
+            them in good spirits, the company of the theatre of the Vaudevilles
+            was ordered from hence to Boulogne, and several plays, composed for
+            the occasion, were performed, in which the Germans were represented
+            as defeated, and the English begging for peace on their knees, which
+            the Emperor of the French grants upon condition that one hundred
+            guineas ready money should be paid to each of his soldiers and
+            sailors. Every corps in its turn was admitted gratis to witness this
+            exhibition of the end of all their labours; and you can form no idea
+            what effect it produced, though you are not a stranger to our fickle
+            and inconsiderate character. Ballads, with the same predictions and
+            the same promises, were written and distributed among the soldiers,
+            and sung by women sent by Fouche to the coast. As all productions of
+            this sort were, as usual, liberally rewarded by the Emperor, they
+            poured in from all parts of his Empire.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Three poets and authors of the theatre of the Vaudevilles, Barrel,
+            Radet, and Desfontaines, each received two hundred napoleons d'or
+            for their common production of a ballad, called "Des Adieux d'un
+            Grenadier au Camp de Boulogne." From this I have extracted the
+            following sample, by which you may judge of the remainder:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            THE GRENADIER'S ADIEU
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            TO THE CAMP AT BOULOGNE
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The drum is beating, we must march, We're summon'd to another field,
+            A field that to our conq'ring swords Shall soon a laurel harvest
+            yield. If English folly light the torch Of war in Germany again The
+            loss is theirs&mdash;the gain is ours March! march! commence the
+            bright campaign.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            There, only by their glorious deeds Our chiefs and gallant bands are
+            known; There, often have they met their foes, And victory was all
+            their own: There, hostile ranks, at our approach, Prostrate beneath
+            our feet shall bow; There, smiling conquest waits to twine A laurel
+            wreath round every brow.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Adieu, my pretty turf-built hut * Adieu, my little garden, too! I
+            made, I deck'd you all myself, And I am loth to part with you: But
+            since my arms I must resume, And leave your comforts all behind,
+            Upon the hostile frontier soon My tent shall flutter in the wind.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            My pretty fowls and doves, adieu! Adieu, my playful cat, to thee!
+            Who every morning round me came, And were my little family. But
+            thee, my dog, I shall not leave No, thou shalt ever follow me, Shalt
+            share my toils, shaft share my fame For thou art called VICTORY.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But no farewell I bid to you, Ye prams and boats, which, o'er the
+            wave, Were doom'd to waft to England's shore Our hero chiefs, our
+            soldiers brave. To you, good gentlemen of Thames, Soon, soon our
+            visit shall be paid, Soon, soon your merriment be o'er 'T is but a
+            few short hours delay'd.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            * During the long continuance of the French encampment at Boulogne
+            the troops had formed, as it were, a romantic town of huts. Every
+            hut had a garden surrounding it, kept in neat order and stocked with
+            vegetables and flowers. They had, besides, fowls, pigeons, and
+            rabbits; and these, with a cat and a dog, generally formed the
+            little household of every soldier.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As I am writing on the subject of poetical agents, I will also say
+            some words of our poetical flatterers, though the same persons
+            frequently occupy both the one office and the other. A man of the
+            name of Richaud, who has sung previously the glory of Marat and
+            Robespierre, offered to Bonaparte, on the evening preceding his
+            departure for Strasburg, the following lines; and was in return
+            presented with a purse full of gold, and an order to the Minister of
+            the Interior, Champagny, to be employed in his offices, until better
+            provided for.
+          </p>
+          <blockquote>
+            <p>
+              STANZAS
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              ON THE RUMOUR OF A WAR WITH AUSTRIA
+            </p>
+            <p>
+              Kings who, so often vanquish'd, vainly dare <br /> Menace the
+              victor that has laid you low&mdash; <br /> Look now at France&mdash;and
+              view your own despair <br /> In the majestic splendour of your foe.
+            </p>
+          </blockquote>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            What miserable pride, ye foolish kings, <br /> Still your deluded
+            reason thus misleads? <br /> Provoke the storm&mdash;the bolt with
+            lightning wings <br /> Shall fall&mdash;but fall on your devoted
+            heads.
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            And thou, Napoleon, if thy mighty sword <br /> Shall for thy people
+            conquer new renown; <br /> Go&mdash;Europe shall attest, thy heart
+            preferr'd <br /> The modest olive to the laurel crown.
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            But thee, lov'd chief, to new achievements bold
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            The aroused spirit of the soldier calls; <br /> Speak!&mdash;and
+            Vienna cowering shall behold <br /> Our banners waving o'er her
+            prostrate walls.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I received, four days afterwards, at the circle of Madame Joseph
+            Bonaparte, with all other visitors, a copy of these stanzas. Most of
+            the foreign Ambassadors were of the party, and had also a share of
+            this patriotic donation. Count von Cobenzl had prudently absented
+            himself; otherwise, this delenda of the Austrian Carthage would have
+            been officially announced to him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Another poetaster, of the name of Brouet, in a long, dull,
+            disgusting poem, after comparing Bonaparte with all great men of
+            antiquity, and proving that he surpasses them all, tells his
+            countrymen that their Emperor is the deputy Divinity upon earth&mdash;the
+            mirror of wisdom, a demi-god to whom future ages will erect statues,
+            build temples, burn incense, fall down and adore. A proportionate
+            share of abuse is, of course, bestowed on your nation. He says:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A Londres on vit briller d'un eclat ephemere Le front tout radieux
+            d'un ministre influent; Mais pour faire palir l'etoile d'Angleterre,
+            Un SOLEIL tout nouveau parut au firmament, Et ce soleil du peuple
+            franc Admire de l'Europe entiere Sur la terre est nomme BONAPARTE LE
+            GRAND.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            For this delicate compliment Brouet was made deputy
+            postmaster-general in Italy, and a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
+            It must be granted that, if Bonaparte is fond of flattery, he does
+            not receive it gratis, but pays for it like a real Emperor.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It has lately become the etiquette, not only in our Court circle and
+            official assemblies, but even in fashionable societies of persons
+            who are, or wish to become, Bonaparte's public functionaries, to
+            distribute and have read and applauded these disinterested effusions
+            of our poetical geniuses. This fashion occasioned lately a curious
+            blunder at a tea-party in the hotel of Madame de Talleyrand. The
+            same printer who had been engaged by this lady had also been
+            employed by Chenier, or some other poet, to print a short satire
+            against several of our literary ladies, in which Madame de Genlis
+            and Madame de Stael (who has just arrived here from her exile) were,
+            with others, very severely handled. By mistake, a bundle of this
+            production was given to the porter of Madame de Talleyrand, and a
+            copy was handed to each visitor, even to Madame de Genlis and Madame
+            de Stael, who took them without noticing their contents. Picard,
+            after reading an act of a new play, was asked by the lady of the
+            house to read this poetic worship of the Emperor of the French.
+            After the first two lines he stopped short, looking round him
+            confused, suspecting a trick had been played upon him. This induced
+            the audience to read what had been given them, and Madame de
+            Talleyrand with the rest; who, instead of permitting Picard to
+            continue with another. scene of his play, as he had adroitly begun,
+            made the most awkward apology in the world, and by it exposed the
+            ladies still more who were the objects of the satire; which, an hour
+            afterwards, was exchanged for the verses intended for the homage of
+            the Emperor, and the cause of the error was cleared up.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have read somewhere of a tyrant of antiquity who forced all his
+            subjects to furnish one room of their houses in the best possible
+            manner, according to their circumstances, and to have it consecrated
+            for the reception of his bust, before which, under pain of death,
+            they were commanded to prostrate themselves, morning, noon, and
+            night. They were to enter this room, bareheaded and barefooted, to
+            remain there only on their knees, and to leave it without turning
+            their back towards the sacred representative of their Prince. All
+            laughing, sneezing, coughing, speaking, or even whispering, were
+            capitally prohibited; but crying was not only permitted, but
+            commanded, when His Majesty was offended, angry, or unwell. Should
+            our system of cringing continue progressively to increase as it has
+            done these last three years, we, too, shall very soon have rooms
+            consecrated, and an idol to adore.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XVIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Portugal has suffered more from the degraded state of
+            Spain, under the administration of the Prince of Peace, than we have
+            yet gained by it in France. Engaged by her, in 1793, in a war
+            against its inclination and interest, it was not only deserted
+            afterwards, but sacrificed. But for the dictates of the Court of
+            Madrid, supported, perhaps, by some secret influence of the Court of
+            St. James, the Court of Lisbon would have preserved its neutrality,
+            and, though not a well-wisher of the French Republic, never have
+            been counted among her avowed enemies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In the peace of 1795, and in the subsequent treaty of 1796, which
+            transformed the family compact of the French and Spanish Bourbons
+            into a national alliance between France and Spain, there was no
+            question about Portugal. In 1797, indeed, our Government
+            condescended to receive a Portuguese plenipotentiary, but merely for
+            the purpose of plundering his country of some millions of money, and
+            to insult it by shutting up its representative as a State prisoner
+            in the Temple. Of this violation of the laws of civilized nations,
+            Spain never complained, nor had Portugal any means to avenge it.
+            After four years of negotiation, and an expenditure of thirty
+            millions, the imbecile Spanish premier supported demands made by our
+            Government, which, if assented to, would have left Her Most Faithful
+            Majesty without any territory in Europe, and without any place of
+            refuge in America. Circumstances not permitting your country to send
+            any but pecuniary succours, Portugal would have become an easy prey
+            to the united Spanish and French forces, had the marauders agreed
+            about the partition of the spoil. Their disunion, the consequence of
+            their avidity, saved it from ruin, but not from pillage. A province
+            was ceded to Spain, the banks and the navigation of a river to
+            France, and fifty millions to the private purse of the Bonaparte
+            family.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such
+            offerings, would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but,
+            though the Cabinet of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St.
+            Cloud, the pretensions and encroachments of the latter left the
+            former no rest. While pocketing tributes it required commercial
+            monopolies, and when its commerce was favoured, it demanded seaports
+            to ensure the security of its trade. Its pretensions rose in
+            proportion to the condescensions of the State it, oppressed. With
+            the money and the value of the diamonds which Portugal has paid in
+            loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in donations, in tributes,
+            and in presents, it might have supported, during ten years, an army
+            of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have been worse
+            situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort,
+            were more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the
+            extortions themselves were injurious to its resources. The first
+            revolutionary Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his
+            ingratitude and his contempt.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and
+            more vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes. The son of a
+            publican and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and
+            afterwards a postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin,
+            and a terrorist; and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of
+            these different trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity
+            which shocks and disgusts. He seems to say, "I am a villain. I know
+            that I am so, and I am proud of being so. To obtain the rank I
+            possess I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all
+            Divine vengeance. I might be murdered or hanged, but it is
+            impossible to degrade me. On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince,
+            seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will,
+            and I must, always remain the same. Infamy cannot debase me, nor is
+            it in the power of grandeur to exalt me." General, Ambassador,
+            Field-marshal, First Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will always be the
+            same polluted, but daring individual; a stranger to remorse and
+            repentance, as well as to honour and virtue. Where Bonaparte sends a
+            banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes's
+            first mission to Portugal. When commander of the consular guard, in
+            1802, he had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the
+            regimental chest, and, as a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador,
+            as he said himself. His resentment against Bonaparte he took care to
+            pour out on the Regent of Portugal. Without inquiring or caring
+            about the etiquette of the Court of Lisbon, he brought the
+            sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of the Tuileries with him, and
+            determined to fraternize with a foreign and legitimate Sovereign, as
+            he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and First Consul; and,
+            what is the more surprising, he carried his point. The Prince Regent
+            not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor to his
+            child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before he was
+            divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince's consort,
+            a Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to
+            associate.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Avaricious as well as unprincipled, he pursued, as an Ambassador,
+            his former business of a smuggler, and, instead of being ashamed of
+            a discovery, proclaimed it publicly, deserted his post, was not
+            reprimanded in France, but was, without apology, received back again
+            in Portugal. His conduct afterwards could not be surprising. He only
+            insisted that some faithful and able Ministers should be removed,
+            and others appointed in their place, more complaisant and less
+            honest.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            New plans of Bonaparte, however, delivered Portugal from this
+            plague; but what did it obtain in return?&mdash;another grenadier
+            Ambassador, less brutal but more cunning, as abandoned but more
+            dissimulating.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Gendral Junot is the son of a corn-chandler near the corn-market of
+            this capital, and was a shopman to his father in 1789. Having
+            committed some pilfering, he was turned out of the parental
+            dwelling, and therefore lodged himself as an inmate of the Jacobin
+            Club. In 1792, he entered, as a soldier, in a regiment of the army
+            marching against the county of Nice; and, in 1793, he served before
+            Toulon, where he became acquainted with Bonaparte, whom he, in
+            January, 1794, assisted in despatching the unfortunate Toulonese;
+            and with whom, also, in the autumn of the same year, he, therefore,
+            was arrested as a terrorist.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In 1796, when commander-in-chief, Bonaparte made Junot his
+            aide-de-camp; and in that capacity he accompanied him, in 1798, to
+            Egypt. There, as well as in Italy, he fought bravely, but had no
+            particular opportunity of distinguishing himself. He was not one of
+            those select few whom Napoleon brought with him to Europe in 1799,
+            but returned first to France in 1801, when he was nominated a
+            general of division and commander of this capital, a place he
+            resigned last year to General Murat.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His despotic and cruel behaviour while commander of Paris made him
+            not much regretted. Fouche lost in him, indeed, an able support, but
+            none of us here ever experienced from him justice, much less
+            protection. As with all other of our modern public functionaries,
+            without money nothing was obtained from him. It required as much for
+            not doing any harm as if, in renouncing his usual vexatious
+            oppressions, he had conferred benefits. He was much suspected of
+            being, with Fouche, the patron of a gang of street robbers and
+            housebreakers, who, in the winter of 1803, infested this capital,
+            and who, when finally discovered, were screened from justice and
+            suffered to escape punishment.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I will tell you what I personally have seen of him. Happening one
+            evening to enter the rooms at Frascati, where the gambling-tables
+            are kept, I observed him, undressed, out of regimentals, in company
+            with at young man, who afterwards avowed himself an aide-de-camp of
+            this general, and who was playing with rouleaux of louis d'or,
+            supposed to contain fifty each, at Rouge et Noir. As long as he
+            lost, which he did several times, he took up the rouleau on the
+            table, and gave another from his pocket. At last he won, when he
+            asked the bankers to look at their loss, and count the money in his
+            rouleau before they paid him. On opening it, they found it contained
+            one hundred bank-notes of one thousand livres each&mdash;folded in a
+            manner to resemble the form and size of louis d'or. The bankers
+            refused to pay, and applied to the company whether they were not in
+            the right to do so, after so many rouleaux had been changed by the
+            person who now required such an unusual sum in such an unusual
+            manner. Before any answer could be given, Junot interfered, asking
+            the bankers whether they knew who he was. Upon their answering in
+            the negative, he said: "I am General Junot, the commander of Paris,
+            and this officer who has won the money is my aide-de-camp; and I
+            insist upon your paying him this instant, if you do not wish to have
+            your bank confiscated and your persons arrested." They refused to
+            part with money which they protested was not their own, and most of
+            the individuals present joined them in their resistance. "You are
+            altogether a set of scoundrels and sharpers," interrupted Junot;
+            "your business shall soon be done."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            So saying, he seized all the money on the table, and a kind of
+            boxing-match ensued between him and the bankers, in which he, being
+            a tall and strong man, got the better of them. The tumult, however,
+            brought in the guard, whom he ordered, as their chief, to carry to
+            prison sixteen persons he pointed out. Fortunately, I was not of the
+            number&mdash;I say fortunately, for I have heard that most of them
+            remained in prison six months before this delicate affair was
+            cleared up and settled. In the meantime, Junot not only pocketed all
+            the money he pretended was due to his aide-de-camp, but the whole
+            sum contained in the bank, which was double that amount. It was
+            believed by every one present that this was an affair arranged
+            between him and his aide-de-camp beforehand to pillage the bank.
+            What a commander, what a general, and what an Ambassador!
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Fitte, the secretary of our Embassy to Portugal, was formerly an
+            Abbe, and must be well remembered in your country, where he passed
+            some years as an emigrant, but was, in fact, a spy of Talleyrand. I
+            am told that, by his intrigues, he even succeeded in swindling your
+            Ministers out of a sum of money by some plausible schemes he
+            proposed to them. He is, as well as all other apostate priests, a
+            very dangerous man, and an immoral and unprincipled wretch. During
+            the time of Robespierre he is said to have caused the murder of his
+            elder brother and younger sister; the former he denounced to
+            appropriate to himself his wealth, and the latter he accused of
+            fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him. He daily boasts
+            of the great protection and great friendship of Talleyrand. 'Qualis
+            rex, talis grex'.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XIX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, September, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;In some of the ancient Republics, all citizens who,
+            in time of danger and trouble, remained neutral, were punished as
+            traitors or treated as enemies. When, by our Revolution, civilized
+            society and the European Commonwealth were menaced with a total
+            overthrow, had each member of it been considered in the same light,
+            and subjected to the same laws, some individual States might,
+            perhaps, have been less wealthy, but the whole community would have
+            been more happy and more tranquil, which would have been much
+            better. It was a great error in the powerful league of 1793 to admit
+            any neutrality at all; every Government that did not combat
+            rebellion should have been considered and treated as its ally. The
+            man who continues neutral, though only a passenger, when hands are
+            wanted to preserve the vessel from sinking, deserves to be thrown
+            overboard, to be swallowed up by the waves and to perish the first.
+            Had all other nations been united and unanimous, during 1793 and
+            1794, against the monster, Jacobinism, we should not have heard of
+            either Jacobin directors, Jacobin consuls, or a Jacobin Emperor. But
+            then, from a petty regard to a temporary profit, they entered into a
+            truce with a revolutionary volcano, which, sooner or later, will
+            consume them all; for I am afraid it is now too late for all human
+            power, with all human means, to preserve any State, any Government,
+            or any people, from suffering by the threatening conflagration.
+            Switzerland, Venice, Geneva, Genoa, and Tuscany have already
+            gathered the poisoned fruits of their neutrality. Let but Bonaparte
+            establish himself undisturbed in Hanover some years longer, and you
+            will see the neutral Hanse Towns, neutral Prussia, and neutral
+            Denmark visited with all the evils of invasion, pillage, and
+            destruction, and the independence of the nations in the North will
+            be buried in the rubbish of the liberties of the people of the South
+            of Europe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            These ideas have frequently occurred to me, on hearing our agents
+            pronounce, and their dupes repeat: "Oh! the wise Government of
+            Denmark! Oh, what a wise statesman the Danish Minister, Count von
+            Bernstorff!" I do not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a
+            great politician; but I assert, also, that his was a greatness more
+            calculated for regular times than for periods of unusual political
+            convulsion. Like your Pitt, the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian
+            Colloredo, he was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly,
+            according to the present situation of affairs. He adhered too much
+            to the old routine, and did not perceive the immense difference
+            between the Government of a revolutionary ruler and the Government
+            of a Louis XIII. or a Louis XIV. I am certain, had he still been
+            alive, he would have repented of his errors, and tried to have
+            repaired them.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His son, the present Danish Minister, follows his father's plans,
+            and adheres, in 1805, to a system laid down by him in 1795; while
+            the alterations that have occurred within these ten years have more
+            affected the real and relative power and weakness of States than all
+            the revolutions which have been produced by the insurrections, wars,
+            and pacifications of the two preceding centuries. He has even gone
+            farther, in some parts of his administration, than his father ever
+            intended. Without remembering the political TRUTH, that a weak State
+            which courts the alliance of a powerful neighbour always becomes a
+            vassal, while desiring to become an ally, he has attempted to
+            exchange the connections of Denmark and Russia for new ones with
+            Prussia; and forgotten the obligations of the Cabinet of Copenhagen
+            to the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, and the interested policy of the
+            House of Brandenburgh. That, on the contrary, Russia has always been
+            a generous ally of Denmark, the flourishing state of the Danish
+            dominions since the beginning of the last century evinces. Its
+            distance and geographical position prevent all encroachments from
+            being feared or attempted; while at the same time it affords
+            protection equally against the rivalry of Sweden and ambition of
+            Prussia.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Prince Royal of Denmark is patriotic as well as enlightened, and
+            would rule with more true policy and lustre were he to follow
+            seldomer the advice of his counsellors, and oftener the dictates of
+            his own mind. Count von Schimmelmann, Count von Reventlow, and Count
+            von Bernstorff, are all good and moral characters; but I fear that
+            their united capacity taken together will not fill up the vacancy
+            left in the Danish Cabinet by the death of its late Prime Minister.
+            I have been personally acquainted with them all three, but I draw my
+            conclusions from the acts of their administration, not from my own
+            knowledge. Had the late Count von Bernstorff held the ministerial
+            helm in 1803, a paragraph in the Moniteur would never have disbanded
+            a Danish army in Holstein; nor would, in 1805, intriguers have been
+            endured who preached neutrality, after witnessing repeated violation
+            of the law of nations, not on the remote banks of the Rhine, but on
+            the Danish frontiers, on the Danish territory, on the banks of the
+            Elbe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It certainly was no compliment to His Danish Majesty when our
+            Government sent Grouvelle as a representative to Copenhagen, a man
+            who owed his education and information to the Conde branch of the
+            Bourbons, and who afterwards audaciously and sacrilegiously read the
+            sentence of death on the chief of that family, on his good and
+            legitimate King, Louis XVI. It can neither be called dignity nor
+            prudence in the Cabinet of Denmark to suffer this regicide to serve
+            as a point of rally to sedition and innovation; to be the official
+            propagator of revolutionary doctrines, and an official protector of
+            all proselytes and sectaries of this anti-social faith.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Before the Revolution a secretary to the Prince of Conde, Grouvelle
+            was trusted and rewarded by His Serene Highness, and in return
+            betrayed his confidence, and repaid benefactions and generosity with
+            calumny and persecution, when his patron was obliged to seek safety
+            in emigration against the assassins of successful rebellion. When
+            the national seals were put on the estates of the Prince, he
+            appropriated to himself not only the whole of His Highness's
+            library, but a part of his plate. Even the wardrobe and the cellar
+            were laid under contributions by this domestic marauder.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            With natural genius and acquired experience, Grouvelle unites
+            impudence and immorality; and those on whom he fixes for his prey
+            are, therefore, easily duped, and irremediably undone. He has
+            furnished disciples to all factions, and to all sects, assassins to
+            the revolutionary tribunals, as well as victims for the
+            revolutionary guillotine; sans-culottes to Robespierre,
+            Septembrizers to Marat, republicans to the Directory, spies to
+            Talleyrand, and slaves to Bonaparte, who, in 1800, nominated him a
+            tribune, but in 1804 disgraced him, because he wished that the Duc
+            d' Enghien had rather been secretly poisoned in Baden than publicly
+            condemned and privately executed in France.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Our present Minister at the Court of Copenhagen, D' Aguesseau, has
+            no virtues to boast of, but also no crimes to blush for. With
+            inferior capacity, he is only considered by Talleyrand as an
+            inferior intriguer, employed in a country ruled by an inferior
+            policy, neither feared nor esteemed by our Government. His
+            secretary, Desaugiers the elder, is our real and confidential
+            firebrand in the North, commissioned to keep burning those materials
+            of combustion which Grouvelle and others of our incendiaries have
+            lighted and illuminated in Holstein, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The insatiable avarice of all the members of the
+            Bonaparte family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of
+            our philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude
+            from the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the passion of covetousness;
+            that he pillages only to get money to pay his military plunderers,
+            and hoards treasures only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the
+            associates and instruments of his authority.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Whether their assertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself
+            to decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal
+            palaces, from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal
+            domains; from the immense and valuable quantity of diamonds, jewels,
+            pictures, statues, libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and
+            self-denial are certainly not among Napoleon's virtues.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and
+            extensive demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by
+            national. property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial
+            Treasury, or confiscated by Imperial decrees. In Italy, he has, by
+            an official act, declared to be the property of his crown, first,
+            the royal palace at Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls
+            Villa Bonaparte; second, the palace of Monza and its dependencies;
+            third, the palace of Mantua, the palace of The, and the ci-devant
+            ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace situated in the vicinity of
+            Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity of Bologna; fifth, the
+            ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza; sixth, the beautiful
+            forest of Tesin. Ten millions were, besides, ordered to be drawn out
+            of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands for the formation
+            of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former
+            Kings of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of
+            Flanders, of the German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons,
+            etc., who, before the last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of
+            the Rhine. I have seen a list, according to which the number of
+            palaces and chateaux appertaining to Napoleon as Emperor and King,
+            are stated to be seventy-nine; so that he may change his habitations
+            six times in the month, without occupying during the same year the
+            same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at home.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of
+            the Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte.
+            Madame Napoleon has purchased, since her husband's consulate, in her
+            own name, or in the name of her children, nine estates with their
+            chateaux, four national forests, and six hotels at Paris. Joseph
+            Bonaparte possesses four estates and chateaux in France, three
+            hotels at Paris and at Brussels, three chateaux and estates in
+            Italy, and one hotel at Milan, and another at Turin. Lucien
+            Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel at Paris, another at
+            Bonne, and a third at Chambery. He has one estate in Burgundy, two
+            in Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital. At Bologna,
+            Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in the Papal
+            States he has obtained, in exchange for property in France, three
+            chateaux with their dependencies. Louis Bonaparte has three hotels
+            at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons. He has
+            two estates in Flanders, three in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte,
+            and another in Alsace. He has also a chateau four leagues from this
+            city. At Genoa he has a beautiful hotel, and upon the Genoese
+            territory a large estate. He has bought three plantations at
+            Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe. To Jerome Bonaparte has hitherto
+            been presented only an estate in Brabant, and a hotel in this
+            capital. Some of the former domains of the House of Orange, in the
+            Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of our
+            Government, and are said to be intended for him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and
+            his brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left
+            unprovided for. Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at
+            Paris, one at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome. Her estates in
+            France are four, and in Italy two. Madame Bacciochi, Princess of
+            Piombino and Lucca, possesses two hotels in this capital, and one
+            palace at Piombino and another at Lucca. Of her estates in France,
+            she has only retained two, but she has three in the Kingdom of
+            Italy, and four in her husband's and her own dominions. The Princess
+            Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at Rome and four chateaux in the
+            papal territory. At Milan she has, as well as at Turin and at Paris,
+            hotels given her by her Imperial brother, together with two estates
+            in France, one in Piedmont, and two in Lombardy. The Princesse Murat
+            is mistress of two hotels here, one at Brussels, one at Tours, and
+            one at Bordeaux, together with three estates on this, and five on
+            the other side of the Alps. The Princesse Borghese has purchased
+            three plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with a part
+            of the treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc. With her
+            present husband she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates
+            on the Roman territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her
+            with one hotel at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at
+            Genoa, together with three estates in France and five in Italy. For
+            his mother, and for each of his sisters, Napoleon has also purchased
+            estates, or lands to form estates, in their native island of
+            Corsica.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have
+            also experienced his bounty. Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris,
+            Milan, Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and
+            Italy. Seventeen, either first, second, or third cousins, by his
+            father's or mother's side, have all obtained estates either in the
+            French Empire, or in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as all brothers,
+            sisters, or cousins of his own wife, and the wives of his brothers,
+            or of the husbands of his sisters. Their exact number cannot well be
+            known, but a gentleman who has long been collecting materials for
+            some future history of the House of Bonaparte, and of the French
+            Empire, has already shown me sixty-six names of individuals of that
+            description, and of both sexes, who all, thanks to the Imperial
+            liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become people of
+            property.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and
+            distributed within the short period of five years, it is not
+            hazardous to say that, in the annals of Europe, another such
+            revolution in property, as well as in power, is not to be found.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together
+            does not amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have
+            acquired and possess.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at
+            this revolution of property. Richer than any other nation, you have
+            more to apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our
+            frequent enemies and as our national rivals; as a barrier against
+            our plans of universal dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary
+            resources. May we never live to see the day when the mandates of
+            Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured at London, as at Amsterdam,
+            Madrid, Milan, and Rome. The misery of ages to come will then be
+            certain, and posterity will regard as comparative happiness, the
+            sufferings of their forefathers. It is not probable that those who
+            have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest
+            contented until you are involved in the same ruin. Union among
+            yourselves only can preserve you from perishing in the universal
+            wreck; by this you will at least gain time, and may hope to profit
+            by probable changes and unexpected accidents.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial
+            civil list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our
+            army in Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres&mdash;which
+            was divided between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon
+            Bonaparte, Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the
+            Princesse Borghese. By this you may conclude in what manner we
+            intend to treat the wretched inhabitants of the other side of the
+            Rhine. This Daru is too good a calculator and too fond of money to
+            throw away his expenses; he is master of a great fortune, made
+            entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have enabled him for
+            years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the Continent,
+            where he has travelled for no other purpose. On his return here, he
+            became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an annuity
+            of one hundred thousand livres&mdash;not to play; but as this sum
+            would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this
+            Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under
+            pain of being transported to Cayenne. He obeyed, but the bankers
+            soon experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from
+            the other side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations
+            hither, Fouche recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office
+            of an intendant of Bonaparte's civil list, upon condition of never,
+            directly or indirectly, injuring our gambling-banks. He has kept his
+            promise with regard to France, but made, last spring, a gambling
+            tour in Italy and Germany, which, he avows, produced him nine
+            millions of livres. He always points, but never keeps a bank. He
+            begins to be so well known in many parts of the Continent, that the
+            instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and remain so until his
+            departure. This was the case at Florence last April. He travels
+            always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four servants. He
+            is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
+            calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better
+            acquainted than he with the country, where their extortions and
+            dilapidations have been felt and lamented for these ten years past.
+            Augereau, Bernadotte, Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military
+            banditti, have long been the terror of the Germans and the reproach
+            of France.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
+            Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder
+            revolutionary brother&mdash;like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like
+            him, serving as a common soldier before the Revolution. But he has
+            this merit above Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a
+            police spy, and finished his first military engagement by desertion
+            into foreign countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and
+            again deserting, he was also again taken and again flogged. Italy
+            has, indeed, since he has been made a general, been more the scene
+            of his devastations than Germany. Lombardy and Venice will not soon
+            forget the thousands he butchered, and the millions he plundered;
+            that with hands reeking with blood, and stained with human gore, he
+            seized the trinkets which devotion had given to sanctity, to
+            ornament the fingers of an assassin, or decorate the bosom of a
+            harlot. The outrages he committed during 1796 and 1797, in Italy,
+            are too numerous to find place in any letter, even were they not
+            disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable to be
+            believed. He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity into
+            brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
+            themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into
+            dens of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations
+            he prided himself. In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take
+            command of the sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September,
+            hunted away or imprisoned the representatives of the people of the
+            legislative body, he paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the
+            night at Pavia, with a draft for fifty louis d'or on the
+            municipality of that town, who dared not dishonour it; but they kept
+            the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to Gendral Melas, who sent it
+            to Vienna, where I saw the very original.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The general and grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, Van
+            Damme, is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A
+            barber, and son of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier,
+            robbed, and was condemned to be hanged. The humanity of the judge
+            preserved him from the gallows; but he was burnt on the shoulders,
+            flogged by the public executioner, and doomed to serve as a
+            galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his fetters, made him a
+            Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use he made of his
+            good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
+            guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family.
+            He was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his
+            ferocity and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored
+            him to rank and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred
+            thousand livres&mdash;properly applied and divided between some of
+            the members of the Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a
+            governor at Lille, and a commander-in-chief of the ci-devant
+            Flanders. In landed property, in jewels, in amount in the funds, and
+            in ready money (he always keeps, from prudence, six hundred thousand
+            livres&mdash;in gold), his riches amount to eight millions of
+            livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and galley-slave, you
+            must grant this is a very modest sum.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;You must often have been surprised at the immense
+            wealth which, from the best and often authentic information, I have
+            informed you our generals and public functionaries have extorted and
+            possess; but the catalogue of private rapine committed, without
+            authority, by our soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is
+            likewise immense, and surpassing often the exactions of a legal kind
+            that is to say, those authorized by our Government itself, or by its
+            civil and military representatives. It comprehends the innumerable
+            requisitions demanded and enforced, whether as loans, or in
+            provisions or merchandise, or in money as an equivalent for both;
+            the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and carriages; corvees of all
+            kinds; the emptying of magazines for the service of our armies; in
+            short, whatever was required for the maintenance, a portion of the
+            pay, and divers wants of those armies, from the time they had posted
+            themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and on either
+            bank of the Rhine. Add to this the pillage of public or private
+            warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging to
+            individuals, to the State, to societies, to towns, to hospitals, and
+            even to orphan-houses.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of
+            subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for
+            accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite
+            consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of
+            our civil or military commanders. Most of those articles were
+            delivered in kind, and what were not used were set up to auction,
+            converted into ready money, and divided among the plunderers.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
+            Imperial city of Wetzlar. He there put in requisition all private
+            stores of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale,
+            retook them upon another requisition from the purchasers, and sold
+            them a second time. Leather and linen underwent the same operation.
+            Volumes might be filled with similar examples, all of public
+            notoriety.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
+            Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in
+            1790, and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he
+            was born in 1765. Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment
+            of Alsace, to escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there
+            picked up by some Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the
+            men into an insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to
+            emigrate. From that period he began to distinguish himself as an
+            orator of the Jacobin clubs, and was, therefore, by his associates,
+            promoted by one step to an adjutant-general. Brave and enterprising,
+            ambitious for advancement, and greedy after riches, he seized every
+            opportunity to distinguish and enrich himself; and, as fortune
+            supported his endeavours, he was in a short time made a general of
+            division, and acquired a property of several millions. This is his
+            first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously served only under
+            Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed
+            to be attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte
+            seduced into his interest. In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic
+            Republic attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was
+            appointed commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and
+            Ambassador from the First Consul to the Helvetic Government. He
+            there conducted himself so much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte,
+            that, on the rupture with your country, he was made commander of the
+            camp near Montreuil; and last year his wife was received as a Maid
+            of Honour to the Empress of the French.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept
+            by a man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with
+            Ney. With him she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the
+            municipality of Coblentz made her his wife. Her conduct since has
+            corresponded with that of her husband. When he publicly lived with
+            mistresses, she did not live privately with her gallants, but the
+            instant the Emperor of the French told him to save appearances, if
+            he desired a place for his wife at the Imperial Court, he showed
+            himself the most attentive and faithful of husbands, and she the
+            most tender and dutiful of wives. Her manners are not polished, but
+            they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her person, she is
+            lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her society
+            agreeable. The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of
+            her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires. She has a fault common
+            with most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity
+            presents itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from
+            being fortunate. Report says that more than once she has been
+            reduced to acquit her gambling debts by personal favours.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now
+            serving under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat.
+            According to some, he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin,
+            robber, and assassin, long before he obtained his first commission
+            as an officer, which was given him by the recommendation of Marat,
+            whom he in return afterwards wished to immortalize, by the exchange
+            of one letter in his own name, and by calling himself Marat instead
+            of Murat. Others, however, declare that his father was an honest
+            cobbler, very superstitious, residing at Bastide, near Cahors, and
+            destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and that he was in his
+            novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange the frock of
+            the monk for the regimentals of a soldier. In what manner, or by
+            what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796
+            he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with
+            whom he went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in
+            1801, married him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him
+            a governor of Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service,
+            and by his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty
+            millions of livres. The landed property he possesses in France alone
+            has cost him forty&mdash;two millions&mdash;and it is whispered that
+            the estates bought in the name of his wife, both in France and
+            Italy, are not worth much less. A brother-in-law of his, who was a
+            smith, he has made a legislator; and an uncle, who was a tailor, he
+            has placed in the Senate. A cousin of his, who was a chimneysweeper,
+            is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an apprentice to a
+            mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor's chamberlains.
+            He has been very generous to all his relations, and would not have
+            been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial Court,
+            had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank,
+            lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy. The
+            millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an
+            opportunity to gain. His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth
+            three millions of livres.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of
+            liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution&mdash;its
+            promoters, its accomplices, and its instruments. Wherever they
+            penetrate, plunder follows; rapine was their first object, of which
+            ferocity has been but the means. The French Revolution was fostered
+            by robbery and murder; two nurses that will adhere to her to the
+            last hour of her existence."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret
+            deeds of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice. It was
+            under his private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges
+            were guarded; and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined,
+            and Moreau on his way to his place of exile. After the seizure and
+            trial of the Duc d' Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon
+            whether even the soldiers of his Italian guard would fire at this
+            Prince. "If they hesitate," said Murat, who commanded the expedition
+            in the wood of Vincennes, "my pistols are loaded, and I will blow
+            out his brains."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family. Murat
+            was, at first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his
+            brother-in-law, Lucien, whom he even fought; but Napoleon having
+            assured him, upon his word of honour, that his suspicions were
+            unfounded, he is now the model of complaisant and indulgent
+            husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as numerous as Madame
+            Murat's favourites. He has a young aide-de-camp of the name of
+            Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the then
+            Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to
+            have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was
+            desolating Germany.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, the
+            vigilance of the police has much increased: our patrols are doubled
+            during the night, and our spies more numerous and more insolent
+            during the day. Many suspected persons have also been exiled to some
+            distance from this capital, while others, for a measure of safety,
+            have been shut up in the Temple, or in the Castle of Vincennes.
+            These 'lettres de cachet', or mandates of arrest, are expedited
+            during the Emperor's absence exclusively by his brother Louis, after
+            a report, or upon a request, of the Minister of Police, Fouche.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a
+            drunkard and a libertine. When a young and unprincipled man of such
+            propensities enjoys an unrestrained authority, it cannot be
+            surprising to hear that he has abused it. He had not been his
+            brother's military viceroy for twenty-four hours before one set of
+            our Parisians were amused, while others were shocked and
+            scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised by His Imperial
+            Highness.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the
+            boxes, he despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the
+            ground, and to find out who she was. All gentlemen attached to his
+            person or household are also his pimps, and are no novices in
+            forming or executing plans of seduction. Caulincourt (the officer he
+            employed in this affair) returned soon, but had succeeded only in
+            one part of the business. He had not been able to speak to the lady,
+            but was informed that she had only been married a fortnight to a
+            manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her side, jealous of his
+            wife as a lover of his mistress. He gave at the same time as his
+            opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police commissary
+            to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some pretext or
+            other, while some of the friends of Prince Louis took advantage of
+            the confusion to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel. An
+            order was directly signed by Louis, according to which the police
+            commissary, Chazot, was to arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of
+            Lyons, and put him into a post-chaise, under the care of two
+            gendarmes, who were to see him safe to Lyons, where he was to sign a
+            promise of not returning to Paris without the permission of
+            Government, being suspected of stockjobbing (agiotage). Everything
+            succeeded according to the proposal of Caulincourt, and Louis found
+            Madame Leboure crying in his saloon. It is said that she promised to
+            surrender her virtue upon condition of only once more seeing her
+            husband, to be certain that he was not murdered, but that Louis
+            refused, and obtained by brutal force, and the assistance of his
+            infamous associates, that conquest over her honour which had not
+            been yielded to his entreaties or threats. His enjoyment, however,
+            was but of short continuance; he had no sooner fallen asleep than
+            his poor injured victim left the bed, and, flying into his anteroom,
+            stabbed herself with his sword. On the next morning she was found a
+            corpse, weltering in her blood. In the hope of burying this infamy
+            in secrecy, her corpse was, on the next evening, when it was dark,
+            put into a sack, and thrown into the river, where, being afterwards
+            discovered, the police agents gave out that she had fallen the
+            victim of assassins. But when Madame Leboure was thus seized at the
+            opera, besides her husband, her parents and a brother were in her
+            company, and the latter did not lose sight of the carriage in which
+            his sister was placed till it had entered the hotel of Louis
+            Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with his father, in vain
+            claimed her. As soon as the husband was informed of the untimely end
+            of his wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot himself
+            immediately afterwards through the head, but his own head was not
+            the place where he should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it
+            the cause of his wretchedness would only have been an act of
+            retaliation, in a country where power forces the law to lie dormant,
+            and where justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our
+            fashionable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe
+            the word 'amuse' is not improperly employed in this instance. At a
+            dozen parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure
+            has always been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of
+            blame, except at Madame Fouche's, where Madame Leboure was very much
+            blamed indeed for having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed,
+            end tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame
+            Recamier. A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by
+            our criminal tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in
+            the pillory six hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on
+            his shoulders, to work in the galleys for twenty years. His
+            daughter, a young girl under fifteen, who lived with her grandmother
+            (having lost her mother), went, accompanied by the old lady, and
+            presented a petition to Louis, in favour of her father. Her youth
+            and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the unprincipled
+            libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the colour of
+            clemency to guilt. He ordered her to call on his chamberlain,
+            Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer. There,
+            either seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or
+            imposed upon by delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her
+            virtue for an order of release for her parent; and so satisfied was
+            Louis with his bargain that he added her to the number of his
+            regular mistresses.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter
+            in her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the
+            Imperial Treasury, for twelve thousand livres&mdash;destined to pay
+            the upholsterer who had furnished her apartment. This gave him, no
+            doubt, the idea of making the Prince pay a higher value for his
+            child, and he forged another order for sixty thousand livres&mdash;so
+            closely resembling it that it was without suspicion acquitted by the
+            Imperial Treasurer. Possessing this money, he fabricated a pass, in
+            the name of Louis, as a courier carrying despatches to the Emperor
+            in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived safe on the other
+            side of the Rhine. His forgeries were only discovered after he had
+            written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his daughter of
+            all knowledge of what he had done. In the first moment of anger, her
+            Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since forgiven
+            her, and taken her back to his favour. This trick of Deroux has
+            pleased Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of
+            his dangerous talent and vicious character. He had once before
+            released himself with a forged order from the Minister of Police,
+            whose handwriting he had only seen for a minute upon his own mandate
+            of imprisonment.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXIV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Though loudly complained of by the Cabinet of St.
+            Cloud, the Cabinet of St. Petersburg has conducted itself in these
+            critical times with prudence without weakness, and with firmness
+            without obstinacy. In its connections with our Government it has
+            never lost sight of its own dignity, and, therefore, never endured
+            without resentment those impertinent innovations in the etiquette of
+            our Court, and in the manner and language of our Emperor to the
+            representatives of legitimate Sovereigns. Had similar becoming
+            sentiments directed the councils of all other Princes and the
+            behaviour of their Ambassadors here, spirited remonstrances might
+            have moderated the pretensions or passions of upstart vanity, while
+            a forbearance and silence, equally impolitic and shameful, have
+            augmented insolence by flattering the pride of an insupportable and
+            outrageous ambition.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Emperor of Russia would not have been so well represented here,
+            had he not been so wisely served and advised in his council chamber
+            at St. Petersburg. Ignorance and folly commonly select fools for
+            their agents, while genius and capacity employ men of their own
+            mould, and of their own cast. It is a remarkable truth that,
+            notwithstanding the frequent revolutions in Russia, since the death
+            of Peter the First the ministerial helm has always been in able
+            hands; the progressive and uninterrupted increase of the real and
+            relative power of the Russian Empire evinces the reality of this
+            assertion.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Russian Chancellor, Count Alexander Woronzoff, may be justly
+            called the chief of political veterans, whether his talents or long
+            services are considered. Catherine II., though a voluptuous
+            Princess, was a great Sovereign, and a competent judge of merit; and
+            it was her unbiased choice that seated Count Woronzoff, while yet
+            young, in her councils. Though the intrigues of favourites have
+            sometimes removed him, he always retired with the esteem of his
+            Sovereign, and was recalled without caballing or cringing to return.
+            He is admired by all who have the honour of approaching him, as much
+            for his obliging condescension as for his great information. No
+            petty views, no petty caprices, no petty vengeances find room in his
+            generous bosom. He is known to have conferred benefactions, not only
+            on his enemies, but on those who, at the very time, were meditating
+            his destruction. His opinion is that a patriotic Minister should
+            regard no others as his enemies but those conspiring against their
+            country, and acknowledge no friends or favourites incapable of well
+            serving the State. Prince de Z&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; waited on
+            him one day, and, after hesitating some time, began to compliment
+            him on his liberal sentiments, and concluded by asking the place of
+            a governor for his cousin, with whom he had reason to suppose the
+            Count much offended. "I am happy," said His Excellency, "to oblige
+            you, and to do my duty at the same time. Here is a libel he wrote
+            against me, and presented to the Empress, who graciously has
+            communicated it to me, in answer to my recommendation of him
+            yesterday to the place you ask for him to-day. Read what I have
+            written on the libel, and you will be convinced that it will not be
+            my fault if he is not to-day a governor." In two hours afterwards
+            the nomination was announced to Prince de Z&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+            who was himself at the head of a cabal against the Minister. In any
+            country such an act would have been laudable, but where despotism
+            rules with unopposed sway, it is both honourable and praiseworthy.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Prince Adam Czartorinsky, the assistant of Count Woronzoff, and
+            Minister of the foreign department, unites, with the vigour of
+            youth, the experience of age. He has travelled in most countries of
+            Europe, not solely to figure at Courts, to dance at balls, to look
+            at pictures, or to collect curiosities, but to study the character
+            of the people, the laws by which they are governed, and their moral
+            or social influence with regard to their comforts or misery. He
+            therefore brought back with him a stock of knowledge not to be
+            acquired from books, but only found in the world by frequenting
+            different and opposite societies with observation, penetration, and
+            genius. With manners as polished as his mind is well informed, he
+            not only, possesses the favour, but the friendship of his Prince,
+            and, what is still more rare, is worthy of both. All Sovereigns have
+            favourites, few ever had any friends; because it is more easy to
+            flatter vanity, than to display a liberal disinterestedness; to bow
+            meanly than to instruct or to guide with delicacy and dignity; to
+            abuse the confidence of the Prince than to use it to his honour, and
+            to the advantage of his Government.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            That such a Monarch as an Alexander, and such Ministers as Count
+            Woronzoff and Prince Czartorinsky, should appoint a Count Markof to
+            a high and important post, was not unexpected by any one not
+            ignorant of his merit.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Count Markof was, early in the reign of Catherine II., employed in
+            the office of the foreign department at St. Petersburg, and was,
+            whilst young, entrusted with several important negotiations at the
+            Courts of Berlin and Vienna., when Prussia had proposed the first
+            partition of Poland. He afterward went on his travels, from which he
+            was recalled to fill the place of an Ambassador to the late King of
+            Sweden, Gustavus III. He was succeeded, in 1784, at Stockholm, by
+            Count Muschin Puschin, after being appointed a Secretary of State in
+            his own country, a post he occupied with distinction, until the
+            death of Catherine II., when Paul the First revenged upon him, as
+            well as on most others of the faithful servants of this Princess,
+            his discontent with his mother. He was then exiled to his estates,
+            where he retired with the esteem of all those who had known him. In
+            1801, immediately after his accession to the throne, Alexander
+            invited Count Markof to his Court and Council, and the trusty but
+            difficult task of representing a legitimate Sovereign at the Court
+            of our upstart usurper was conferred on him. I imagine that I see
+            the great surprise of this nobleman, when, for the first time, he
+            entered the audience-chamber of our little great man, and saw him
+            fretting, staring, swearing, abusing to right and to left, for one
+            smile conferring twenty frowns, and for one civil word making use of
+            fifty hard expressions, marching in the diplomatic audience as at
+            the head of his troops, and commanding foreign Ambassadors as his
+            French soldiers. I have heard that the report of Count Markof to his
+            Court, describing this new and rare show, is a chef-d'oeuvre of wit,
+            equally amusing and instructive. He is said to have requested of his
+            Cabinet new and particular orders how to act&mdash;whether as the
+            representative of an independent Sovereign, or, as most of the other
+            members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, like a valet of
+            the First Consul; and that, in the latter case, he implored as a
+            favour, an immediate recall; preferring, had he no other choice
+            left, sooner to work in the mines at Siberia than to wear, in France
+            the disgraceful fetters of a Bonaparte. His subsequent dignified
+            conduct proves the answer of his Court.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Talleyrand's craft and dissimulation could not delude the sagacity
+            of Count Markof, who was, therefore, soon less liked by the Minister
+            than by the First Consul. All kind of low, vulgar, and revolutionary
+            chicanery was made use of to vex or to provoke the Russian
+            Ambassador. Sometimes he was reproached with having emigrants in his
+            service; another time protection was refused to one of his
+            secretaries, under pretence that he was a Sardinian subject. Russian
+            travellers were insulted, and detained on the most frivolous
+            pretences. Two Russian noblemen were even arrested on our side of
+            the Rhine, because Talleyrand had forgotten to sign his name to
+            their passes, which were otherwise in order. The fact was that our
+            Minister suspected them of carrying some papers which he wanted to
+            see, and, therefore, wrote his name with an ink of such a
+            composition that, after a certain number of days, everything written
+            with it disappeared. Their effects and papers were strictly searched
+            by an agent preceding them from this capital, but nothing was found,
+            our Minister being misinformed by his spies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When Count Markof left Sweden, he carried with him an actress of the
+            French theatre at Stockholm, Madame Hus, an Alsatian by birth, but
+            who had quitted her country twelve years before the Revolution, and
+            could, therefore, never be included among emigrants. She had
+            continued as a mistress with this nobleman, is the mother of several
+            children by him, and an agreeable companion to him, who has never
+            been married. As I have often said, Talleyrand is much obliged to
+            any foreign diplomatic agent who allows him to be the indirect
+            provider or procurer of his mistresses. After in vain tempting Count
+            Markof with new objects, he introduced to the acquaintance of Madame
+            Hus some of his female emissaries. Their manoeuvres, their
+            insinuations, and even their presents were all thrown away. The lady
+            remained the faithful friend, and therefore refused with indignation
+            to degrade herself into a spy on her lover. Our Minister then first
+            discovered that, not only was Madame Hus an emigrant, but had been a
+            great benefactress and constant companion of emigrants at St.
+            Petersburg, and, of course, deserved to be watched, if not punished.
+            Count Markof is reported to have said to Talleyrand on this grave
+            subject, in the presence of two other foreign Ambassadors:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Apropos! what shall I do to prevent my poor Madame Hus from being
+            shot as an emigrant, and my poor children from becoming prematurely
+            orphans?"
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Monsieur," said our diplomatic oracle, "she should have petitioned
+            the First Consul for a permission to return, to France before she
+            entered it; but out of regard for you, if she is prudent, she will
+            not, I daresay, be troubled by our Government."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "I should be sorry if she was not," replied the Count, with a
+            significant look; and here this grand affair ended, to the great
+            entertainment of those foreign agents who dared to smile or to
+            laugh.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The Legion of Honour, though only proclaimed upon
+            Bonaparte's assumption of the Imperial rank, dates from the first
+            year of his consulate. To prepare the public mind for a progressive
+            elevation of himself, and for consequential distinctions among all
+            classes of his subjects, he distributed among the military, arms of
+            honour, to which were attached precedence and privileges granted by
+            him, and, therefore, liable to cease with his power or life. The
+            number of these arms increased in proportion to the approach of the
+            period fixed for the change of his title and the erection of his
+            throne. When he judged them numerous enough to support his changes,
+            he made all these wearers of arms of honour knights. Never before
+            were so many chevaliers created en masse; they amounted to no less
+            than twenty-two thousand four hundred, distributed in the different
+            corps of different armies, but principally in the army of England.
+            To these were afterwards joined five thousand nine hundred civil
+            functionaries, men of letters, artists, etc. To remove, however, all
+            ideas of equality, even among the members of the Legion of Honour,
+            they were divided into four classes&mdash;grand officers,
+            commanders, officers, and simple legionaries.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Every one who has observed Bonaparte's incessant endeavours to
+            intrude himself among the Sovereigns of Europe, was convinced that
+            he would cajole, or force, as many of them as he could into his
+            revolutionary knighthood; but I heard men, who are not ignorant of
+            the selfishness and corruption of our times, deny the possibility of
+            any independent Prince suffering his name to be registered among
+            criminals of every description, from the thief who picked the
+            pockets of his fellow citizens in the street, down to the regicide
+            who sat in judgment and condemned his King; from the plunderers who
+            have laid waste provinces, republics, and kingdoms, down to the
+            assassins who shot, drowned, or guillotined their countrymen en
+            masse. For my part, I never had but one opinion, and, unfortunately,
+            it has turned out a just one. I always was convinced that those
+            Princes who received other presents from Bonaparte could have no
+            plausible excuse to decline his ribands, crosses, and stars. But who
+            could have presumed to think that, in return for these blood-stained
+            baubles, they would have sacrificed those honourable and dignified
+            ornaments which, for ages past, have been the exclusive distinction
+            of what birth had exalted, virtue made eminent, talents conspicuous,
+            honour illustrious, or valour meritorious? Who would have dared to
+            say that the Prussian Eagle and the Spanish Golden Fleece should
+            thus be prostituted, thus polluted? I do not mean by this remark to
+            throw any blame on the conferring those and other orders on Napoleon
+            Bonaparte, or even on his brothers; I know it is usual, between
+            legitimate Sovereigns in alliance, sometimes to exchange their
+            knighthoods; but to debase royal orders so much as to present them
+            to a Cambaceres, a Talleyrand, a Fouche, a Bernadotte, a Fesch, and
+            other vile and criminal wretches, I do not deny to have excited my
+            astonishment as well as my indignation. What honest&mdash;I do not
+            say what noble&mdash;subjects of Prussia, or of Spain, will
+            hereafter think themselves rewarded for their loyalty, industry,
+            patriotism, or zeal, when they remember that their Sovereigns have
+            nothing to give but what the rebel has obtained, the robber worn,
+            the murderer vilified, and the regicide debased?
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pb214" id="pb214"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pb214.jpg (55K)" src="images/pb214.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <p>
+            The number of grand officers of the Legion of Honour does not yet
+            amount to more than eighty, according to a list circulated at Milan
+            last spring, of which I have seen a copy. Of these grand officers,
+            three had been shoemakers, two tailors, four bakers, four barbers,
+            six friars, eight abbes, six officers, three pedlers, three
+            chandlers, seven drummers, sixteen soldiers, and eight regicides;
+            four were lawful Kings, and the six others, Electors or Princes of
+            the most ancient houses in Europe. I have looked over our, own
+            official list, and, as far as I know, the calculation is exact, both
+            with regard to the number and to the quality.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This new institution of knighthood produced a singular effect on my
+            vain and giddy, countrymen, who, for twelve years before, had
+            scarcely seen a star or a riband, except those of foreign
+            Ambassadors, who were frequently insulted when wearing them. It
+            became now the fashion to be a knight, and those who really were not
+            so, put pinks, or rather blooms, or flowers of a darker red, in
+            their buttonholes, so as to resemble, and to be taken at a distance
+            for, the red ribands of the members of the Legion of Honour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A man of the name of Villeaume, an engraver by profession, took
+            advantage of this knightly fashion and mania, and sold for four
+            louis d'or, not only the stars, but pretended letters of knighthood,
+            said to be procured by his connection with persons of the household
+            of the Emperor. In a month's time, according to a register kept by
+            him, he had made twelve hundred and fifty knights. When his fraud
+            was discovered, he was already out of the way, safe with his money;
+            and, notwithstanding the researches of the police, has not since
+            been taken.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A person calling himself Baron von Rinken, a subject and an agent of
+            one of the many Princes of Hohenlohe, according to his own
+            assertion, arrived here with real letters and patents of knighthood,
+            which he offered for sale for three hundred livres. The stars of
+            this Order were as large as the star of the grand officers of the
+            Legion of Honour, and nearly resembled it; but the ribands were of a
+            different colour. He had already disposed of a dozen of these stars,
+            when he was taken up by the police and shut up in the Temple, where
+            he still remains. Four other agents of inferior petty German Princes
+            have also been arrested for offering the Orders of their Sovereigns
+            for sale.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A Captain Rouvais, who received six wounds in his campaign under
+            Pichegru in 1794, wore the star of the Legion of Honour without
+            being nominated a knight. He has been tried by a military
+            commission, deprived of his pension, and condemned to four years'
+            imprisonment in irons. He proved that he had presented fourteen
+            petitions to Bonaparte for obtaining this mark of distinction, but
+            in vain; while hundreds of others, who had hardly seen an enemy, or,
+            at the most, made but one campaign, or been once wounded, had
+            succeeded in their demands. As soon as sentence had been pronounced
+            against him, he took a small pistol from his pocket, and shot
+            himself through the head, saying, "Some one else will soon do the
+            same for Bonaparte."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A cobbler, of the name of Matthieu, either in a fit of madness or
+            from hatred to the new order of things, decorated himself with the
+            large riband of the Legion of Honour, and had an old star fastened
+            on his coat. Thus accoutred, he went into the Palais Royal, in the
+            middle of the day, got upon a chair, and began to speak to his
+            audience of the absurdity of true republicans not being on a level,
+            even under an Emperor, and putting on, like him, all his ridiculous
+            ornaments. "We are here," said he, "either all grand officers, or
+            there exist no grand officers at all; we have all fought and paid
+            for liberty, and for the Revolution, as much as Bonaparte, and have,
+            therefore, the same right and claim with him." Here a police agent
+            and some gendarmes interrupted his eloquence by taking him into
+            custody. When Fouche asked him what he meant by such rebellious
+            behaviour, he replied that it was only a trial to see whether
+            destiny had intended him to become an Emperor or to remain a
+            cobbler. On the next day he was shot as a conspirator. I saw the
+            unfortunate man in the Palais Royal; his eyes looked wild, and his
+            words were often incoherent. He was certainly a subject more
+            deserving a place in a madhouse than in a tomb.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing
+            too much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing
+            it in preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour. He was given to
+            understand that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial
+            etiquette did not permit any subjects to display their knighthood of
+            the Prussian Order. In Madame Bonaparte's last drawing-room, before
+            His Imperial Majesty set out for the Rhine, he was ornamented with
+            the Spanish, Neapolitan, Prussian, and Portuguese orders, together
+            with those of the French Legion of Honour and of the Italian Iron
+            Crown. I have seen the Emperor Paul, who was also an amateur of
+            ribands and stars, but never with so many at once. I have just heard
+            that the Grand Master of Malta has presented Napoleon with the Grand
+            Cross of the Maltese Order. This is certainly a negative compliment
+            to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then
+            sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, "that the Grand Master,
+            Commanders, Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable
+            ladies, that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a
+            new order of female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of
+            which all our Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public
+            functionaries, etc., are to be members. The Imperial Princesses of
+            the Bonaparte family are to be hereditary grand officers, together
+            with as many foreign Empresses, Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and
+            Baronesses as can be bayoneted into this revolutionary sisterhood.
+            Had the Continent remained tranquil, it would already have been
+            officially announced by a Senatus Consultum. I should suppose that
+            Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and brilliant retinue of
+            German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only say the word to
+            find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in petto. Her
+            mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has been
+            already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
+            it is truly superb. The diamonds of the star on the mantle are
+            valued at six hundred thousand livres.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXVI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, fifteen
+            individuals have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the&mdash;Western
+            Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple. Their crime is not
+            exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that
+            they were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them
+            were entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to
+            Louis XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance
+            of Russia, Sweden, and England to support his claims.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit. Had
+            the prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such
+            crimes, they would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed,
+            or executed without a trial. I suppose them mere hostages arrested
+            by our Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan
+            Departments during our armies' occupation elsewhere. We have,
+            nevertheless, two movable columns of six thousand men each in the
+            country, or in its vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but
+            a cruelty, to engage or allure the unfortunate people of these
+            wretched countries into any plots, which, situated as affairs now
+            are, would be productive of great and certain evil to them, without
+            even the probability of any benefit to the cause of royalty and of
+            the Bourbons. I do not mean to say that there are not those who
+            rebel against Bonaparte's tyranny, or that the Bourbons have no
+            friends; on the contrary, the latter are not few, and the former
+            very numerous. But a kind of apathy, the effect of unavailing
+            resistance to usurpation and oppression, has seized on most minds,
+            and annihilated what little remained of our never very great public
+            spirit. We are tired of everything, even of our existence, and care
+            no more whether we are governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a
+            Napoleon Bonaparte, by a Barras or by Louis XVIII. Except, perhaps,
+            among the military, or among some ambitious schemers, remnants of
+            former factions, I do not believe a Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien
+            Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the Emperor, and formerly
+            popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in all France; at
+            least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their
+            present formidable manner. Should anything happen to our present
+            chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise
+            our characters from their present torpid state. But until such an
+            event, we shall remain as we are, indolent but submissive,
+            sacrificing our children and treasures for a cause we detest, and
+            for a man we abhor. I am sorry to say it, but it certainly does, no
+            honour to my nation when one million desperados of civil and
+            military banditti are suffered to govern, tyrannize, and pillage, at
+            their ease and undisturbed, thirty millions of people, to whom their
+            past crimes are known, and who have every reason to apprehend their
+            future wickedness.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This astonishing resignation (if I can call it so, and if it does
+            not deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as
+            the poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the
+            misery of the people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte,
+            and some few upstart contractors or army commissaries, the greatest
+            privations must be submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes
+            and make a decent appearance. I know families of five, six, and
+            seven persons, who formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty
+            subsistence an income of twelve or eighteen hundred livres&mdash;per
+            year, with which they are obliged to live as they can, being
+            deprived of all the resource that elsewhere labour offers to the
+            industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows on the
+            necessitous. You know that here all trade and all commerce are at a
+            stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as
+            unfeeling as their manners are vulgar and brutal.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
+            revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres&mdash;subsist now
+            on fifteen hundred livres&mdash;per year; and this sum must support
+            six individuals&mdash;the father and mother, with four children! It
+            does so, indeed, by an arrangement of only one poor meal in the day;
+            a dinner four times, and a supper three times, in the week. They
+            endure their distress with tolerable cheerfulness, though in the
+            same street, where they occupy the garrets of a house, resides, in
+            an elegant hotel, a man who was once their groom, but who is now a
+            tribune, and has within these last twelve years, as a conventional
+            deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and Flanders, twelve
+            millions of livres. He has kindly let my friend understand that his
+            youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid to his wife,
+            being informed that she has a good education. All the four daughters
+            are good musicians, good drawers, and very able with their needles.
+            By their talents they supported their parents and themselves during
+            their emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use or
+            advantage. Those upstarts who want instruction or works of this sort
+            apply to the first, most renowned, and fashionable masters or
+            mistresses; while others, and those the greatest number, cannot
+            afford even to pay the inferior ones and the most cheap. This family
+            is one of the many that regret having returned from their
+            emigration. But, you may ask, why do they not go back again to
+            Germany? First, it would expose them to suspicion, and, perhaps, to
+            ruin, were they to demand passes; and if this danger or difficulty
+            were removed, they have no money for such a long journey.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But this sort of penury and wretchedness is also common with the
+            families of the former wealthy merchants and tradesmen. Paper money,
+            a maximum, and requisitions, have reduced those that did not share
+            in the crimes and pillage of the Revolution, as much as the
+            proscribed nobility. And, contradictory as it may seem, the number
+            of persons employed in commercial speculations has more than tripled
+            since we experienced a general stagnation of trade, the consequence
+            of war, of want of capital, protection, encouragement, and
+            confidence; but one of the magazines of 1789 contained more goods
+            and merchandize than twenty modern magazines put together. The
+            expenses of these new merchants are, however, much greater than
+            sixteen years ago, the profit less, and the credit still less than
+            the profit. Hence numerous bankruptcies, frauds, swindling,
+            forgeries, and other evils of immorality, extravagance, and misery.
+            The fair and honest dealers suffer most from the intrusion of these
+            infamous speculators, who expecting, like other vile men wallowing
+            in wealth under their eyes, to make rapid fortunes, and to escape
+            detection as well as punishment&mdash;commit crimes to soothe
+            disappointment. Nothing is done but for ready money, and even
+            bankers' bills, or bills accepted by bankers, are not taken in
+            payment before the signatures are avowed by the parties concerned.
+            You can easily conceive what confusion, what expenses, and what;
+            loss of time these precautions must occasion; but the numerous
+            forgeries and fabrications have made them absolutely necessary.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The farmers and landholders are better off, but they also complain
+            of the heavy taxes, and low price paid for what they bring to the
+            market, which frequently, for want of ready money, remains long
+            unsold. They take nothing but cash in payment; for, notwithstanding
+            the endeavours of our Government, the notes of the Bank of France
+            have never been in circulation among them. They have also been
+            subject to losses by the fluctuation of paper money, by extortions,
+            requisitions, and by the maximum. In this class of my countrymen
+            remains still some little national spirit and some independence of
+            character; but these are far from being favourable to Bonaparte, or
+            to the Imperial Government, which the yearly increase of taxes, and,
+            above all, the conscription, have rendered extremely odious. You may
+            judge of the great difference in the taxation of lands and landed
+            property now and under our Kings, when I inform you that a friend of
+            mine, who, in 1792, possessed, in one of the Western Departments,
+            twenty-one farms, paid less in contribution for them all than he
+            does now for the three farms he has recovered from the wreck of his
+            fortune.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXVII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;In a military empire, ruled by a military despot, it
+            is a necessary policy that the education of youth should also be
+            military. In all our public schools or prytanees, a boy, from the
+            moment of entering, is registered in a company, and regularly
+            drilled, exercised, and reviewed, punished for neglect or fault
+            according to martial law, and advanced if displaying genius or
+            application. All our private schools that wish for the protection of
+            Government are forced to submit to the same military rules, and,
+            therefore, most of our conscripts, so far from being recruits, are
+            fit for any service as soon as put into requisition. The fatal
+            effects to the independence of Europe to be dreaded from this sole
+            innovation, I apprehend, have been too little considered by other
+            nations. A great Power, that can, without obstacle, and with but
+            little expense, in four weeks increase its disposable military force
+            from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and eighty thousand young
+            men, accustomed to military duty from their youth, must finally
+            become the master of all other or rival Powers, and dispose at
+            leisure of empires, kingdoms, principalities, and republics. NOTHING
+            CAN SAVE THEM BUT THE ADOPTION OF SIMILAR MEASURES FOR THEIR
+            PRESERVATION AS HAVE BEEN ADOPTED FOR THEIR SUBJUGATION.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When l'Etat Militaire for the year 13 (a work containing the
+            official statement of our military forces) was presented to
+            Bonaparte by Berthier, the latter said: "Sire, I lay before Your
+            Majesty the book of the destiny of the world, which your hands
+            direct as the sovereign guide of the armies of your empire." This
+            compliment is a truth, and therefore no flattery. It might as justly
+            have been addressed to a Moreau, a Macdonald, a Le Courbe, or to any
+            other general, as to Bonaparte, because a superior number of well
+            disciplined troops, let them be well or even indifferently
+            commanded, will defeat those inferior in number. Three to one would
+            even overpower an army of giants. Add to it the unity of plans, of
+            dispositions, and of execution, which Bonaparte enjoys exclusively
+            over such a great number of troops, while ten, or perhaps fifty,
+            will direct or contradict every movement of his opponents. I tremble
+            when I meditate on Berthier's assertion; may I never live to see it
+            realized, and to see all hitherto independent nations prostrated,
+            acknowledge that Bonaparte and destiny are the same, and the same
+            distributor of good and evil.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            One of the bad consequences of this our military education of youth
+            is a total absence of all religious and moral lessons. Arnaud had,
+            last August, the courage to complain of this infamous neglect, in
+            the National Institute. "The youth," said he, "receive no other
+            instruction but lessons to march, to fire, to bow, to dance, to sit,
+            to lie, and to impose with a good grace. I do not ask for Spartans
+            or Romans, but we want Athenians, and our schools are only forming
+            Sybarites." Within twenty-four hours afterwards, Arnaud was visited
+            by a police agent, accompanied by two gendarmes, with an order
+            signed by Fouche, which condemned him to reside at Orleans, and not
+            to return to Paris without the permission of the Government,&mdash;a
+            punishment regarded here as very moderate for such an indiscreet
+            zeal.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A schoolmaster at Auteuil, near this capital, of the name of Gouron,
+            had a private seminary, organized upon the footing of our former
+            colleges. In some few months he was offered more pupils than he
+            could well attend to, and his house shortly became very fashionable,
+            even for our upstarts, who sent their children there in preference.
+            He was ordered before Fouche last Christmas, and commanded to change
+            the hours hitherto employed in teaching religion and morals, to a
+            military exercise and instruction, as both more necessary and more
+            salubrious for French youth. Having replied that such an alteration
+            was contrary to his plan and agreement with the parents of his
+            scholars, the Minister stopped him short by telling him that he must
+            obey what had been prescribed by Government, or stand the
+            consequences of his refractory spirit. Having consulted with his
+            friends and patrons, he divided the hours, and gave half of the time
+            usually allotted to religion or morality to the study of military
+            exercise. His pupils, however, remained obstinate, broke the drum,
+            and tore and burnt the colours he had bought. As this was not his
+            fault, he did not expect any further disturbance, particularly after
+            having reported to the police both his obedience and the unforeseen
+            result. But last March his house was suddenly surrounded in the
+            night by gendarmes, and some police agents entered it. All the boys
+            were ordered to dress and to pack up their effects, and to follow
+            the gendarmes to several other schools, where the Government had
+            placed them, and of which their parents would be informed. Gouron,
+            his wife, four ushers, and six servants, were all arrested and
+            carried to the police office, where Fouche, after reproaching them
+            for their fanatical behaviour, as he termed it, told them, as they
+            were so fond of teaching religious and moral duties, a suitable
+            situation had been provided for them in Cayenne, where the negroes
+            stood sadly in need of their early arrival, for which reason they
+            would all set out on that very morning for Rochefort. When Gouron
+            asked what was to become of his property, furniture, etc., he was
+            told that his house was intended by Government for a preparatory
+            school, and would, with its contents, be purchased, and the amount
+            paid him in lands in Cayenne. It is not necessary to say that this
+            example of Imperial justice had the desired effect on all other
+            refractory private schoolmasters.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The parents of Gouron's pupils were, with a severe reprimand,
+            informed where their sons had been placed, and where they would be
+            educated in a manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them
+            not to remove them, without a previous notice to the police. A
+            hatter, of the name of Maille, however, ordered his son home,
+            because he had been sent to a dearer school than the former. In his
+            turn he was carried before the police, and, after a short
+            examination of a quarter of an hour, was permitted, with his wife
+            and two children, to join their friend Gouron at Rochefort, and to
+            settle with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be given him for
+            his property, in France. These particulars were related to me by a
+            neighbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been under
+            Gouron's care, but who was now among those placed out by our
+            Government. The boy's present master, he said, was a man of a
+            notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was intimidated, and
+            weak enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt, his personal
+            safety to the future happiness of his child. In your country, you
+            little comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the
+            hands of our rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has
+            been mistaken abroad for affection and content.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of
+            petty tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time,
+            and that, therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful,
+            is also the most occupied of his colleagues. So he certainly is,
+            but, last year, a new organization of this Ministry was regulated by
+            Bonaparte; and Fouche was allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors
+            of State, and an augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries. The
+            French Empire was then divided into four arrondissements, with
+            regard to the general police, not including Paris and its vicinity,
+            inspected by a prefect of police under the Minister. Of the first of
+            these arrondissements, the Counsellor of State, Real, is a kind of
+            Deputy Minister; the Counsellor of State, Miot, is the same of the
+            second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet de la Lozere, of the third;
+            and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the fourth. The secret
+            police agents, formerly called spies, were also considerably
+            increased.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXVIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope's
+            Nuncio was for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame
+            Bonaparte's drawing-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and
+            tell His Holiness to think himself fortunate in continuing to govern
+            the Ecclesiastical States, without interfering with the
+            ecclesiastical arrangements that might be thought necessary or
+            proper by the Government in France.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Bonaparte's policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the
+            Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military
+            supporters; Cambacere's brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and
+            Cardinal, and one of Lebrun's, and two of Berthier's cousins are
+            Bishops. As, however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or
+            generals, have, like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous
+            and blasphemous scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes
+            hesitated about sanctioning their promotions. This was the case last
+            summer, when General Dessolles's brother was transferred from the
+            Bishopric of Digne to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for
+            his successor the brother of General Miollis, who was a curate of
+            Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix. This curate had not only been one
+            of the first to throw up his letters of priesthood at the Jacobin
+            Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied the divinity of the
+            Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of Parisian atheists,
+            the worship of a Goddess of Reason in a common prostitute with whom
+            he lived. The notoriety of these abominations made even his
+            parishioners at Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to regard
+            him as their pastor, though several of them had been imprisoned,
+            fined, and even transported as fanatics, or as refractory.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had
+            been promised, among other things, that, for the future, his
+            conscience should not be wounded by having presented to him for the
+            prelacy any persons but those of the purest morals of the French
+            Empire; and that all his objections should be attended to, in case
+            of promotions; his scruples removed, or his refusal submitted to.
+            When Cardinal Fesch demanded His Holiness's Bull for the curate
+            Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Gonsalvi, showed no less
+            than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy, which made him unworthy
+            of such a dignity. To this was replied that, having obtained an
+            indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper subject; above
+            all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the French. The
+            Pope's Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of the
+            Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to
+            Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he,
+            nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of
+            this request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new
+            Imperial etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the
+            representatives of Sovereigns. On the same evening the Nuncio
+            expedited a courier to Rome, and I have heard to-day that the
+            nomination of Miollis is confirmed by the Pope.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge
+            of the intention of our Government to adhere to its other
+            engagements; but at Rome, as well as in most other Continental
+            capitals, the Sovereign is the dupe of the perversity of his
+            Counsellors and Ministers, who are the tools, and not seldom the
+            pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if
+            possible, still worse served than in this country. Some of the
+            Bishops there, after having done duty in the National Guards, worn
+            the Jacobin cap, and fought against their lawful Prince, now live in
+            open adultery; and, from their intrigues, are the terror of all the
+            married part of their flock. The Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a
+            merchant, by whom he has two children; and, that the public may not
+            be mistaken as to their real father, the merchant received a sum of
+            money to establish himself at Brescia, and has not seen his wife for
+            these two years past. General Gourion, who was last spring in Italy,
+            has assured me that he read the advertisement of a curate after his
+            concubine, who had eloped with another curate; and that the Police
+            Minister at Milan openly licensed women to be the housekeepers of
+            priests.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but
+            relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the
+            breviary for the musket. He married a nun of one cloister, from whom
+            he procured a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of
+            another, deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper,
+            who robbed and eloped from her husband. Last spring he returned to
+            the bosom of the Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a
+            valuable diamond cross, of which he had pillaged the statue of a
+            Madonna, he obtained the dignity of a grand vicar, to the great
+            edification, no doubt, of all those who had seen him before the
+            altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the hospital.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the
+            name of Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys
+            in the same cathedral where he officiates as a priest. Their mother
+            is dead, but her daughter, by another priest, is now their father's
+            mistress. This incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the
+            girl does the honours of the grand vicar's house, and, with naivete
+            enough, tells the guests and visitors of her happiness in having
+            succeeded her mother. I have this anecdote from an officer who heard
+            her make use of that expression.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and
+            unprincipled; but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they
+            take care to save the appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt
+            is the same, the scandal is less. Bonaparte pretends to be severe
+            against all those ecclesiastics who are accused of any
+            irregularities after having made their peace with the Church. A
+            curate of Picardy, suspected of gallantry, and another of Normandy,
+            accused of inebriety, were last month, without further trial or
+            ceremony than the report of the Minister Portalis, delivered over to
+            Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne, after they had been
+            stripped of their gowns. At the same time, Cardinal Cambaceres and
+            Cardinal Fesch, equally notorious for their excesses, were taken no
+            notice of, except that they were laughed at in our Court circles.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government
+            is totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious
+            establishment when the present race of priests is extinguished;
+            which, in the course of nature, must happen in less than thirty
+            years. Our military system and our military education discourage all
+            young men from entering into orders; while, at the same time, the
+            army is both more honourable and more profitable than the Church.
+            Already we want curates, though several have been imported from
+            Germany and Spain, and, in some departments, four, and even six
+            parishes have only one curate to serve them all. The Bishops exhort,
+            and the parents advise their children to study theology; but then
+            the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well as
+            the student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the
+            ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they
+            are either unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else.
+            The Pope, with all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was
+            unable to procure an exception from the conscription of young men
+            preparing themselves for priesthood. Bonaparte always answered:
+            "Holy Father, were I to consent to your demand, I should soon have
+            an army of priests, instead of an army of soldiers." Our Emperor is
+            not unacquainted with the real character and spirit of his
+            Volunteers. When the Pope represented the danger of religion
+            expiring in France, for want of priests to officiate at the altars,
+            he was answered that Bonaparte, at the beginning of his consulate,
+            found neither altars nor priests in France; that if his reign
+            survived the latter, the former would always be standing, and
+            survive his reign. He trusted that the chief of the Church would
+            prevent them from being deserted. He assured him that when once he
+            had restored the liberties of the seas, and an uninterrupted
+            tranquillity on the Continent, he should attend more, and perhaps
+            entirely, to the affairs of the Church. He consented, however, that
+            the Pope might institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary
+            for two hundred young Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military
+            conscription. This is the stock from which our Church establishment
+            is to be supplied!
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXIX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna,
+            and the long stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin,
+            had already caused here many speculations, not quite corresponding
+            with the views and, perhaps, interests of our Court, when our
+            violation of the Prussian territory made our courtiers exclaim:
+            "This act proves that the Emperor of the French is in a situation to
+            bid defiance to all the world, and, therefore, no longer courts the
+            neutrality of a Prince whose power is merely artificial; who has
+            indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no regard to claims." Such
+            was the language of those very men who, a month before, declared
+            "that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or war in his
+            hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch ever
+            was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of
+            the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to
+            his powerful mediation for the return of peace."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers' political jargon
+            has not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered
+            without any official publication. Bonaparte had the adroitness to
+            cajole the Cabinet of Berlin into his interest, in the first month
+            of his consulate, notwithstanding his own critical situation, as
+            well as the critical situation of France; and he has ever since
+            taken care both to attach it to his triumphal car and to inculpate
+            it indirectly in his outrages and violations. Convinced, as he
+            thought, of the selfishness which guided all its resolutions, all
+            his attacks and invasions against the law of nations, or
+            independence of States, were either preceded or followed with some
+            offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance.
+            His political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia
+            than his military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in
+            laying the Hanse Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover;
+            or, rather, all these acts of violence and injustice were merely the
+            effects of his ascendency in Prussia. When it is, besides,
+            remembered what provinces Prussia accepted from his bounty, what
+            exchange of presents, of ribands, of private letters passed between
+            Napoleon the First and Frederick William III., between the Empress
+            of the French and the Queen of Prussia, it is not surprising if the
+            Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of the submission of the
+            Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to fear it, or to
+            think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even honour to
+            feel, the numerous Provocations offered.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or assert to the contrary,
+            their gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise
+            more that State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense
+            they are liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or
+            meanness into their snares. The more legitimate Sovereigns descend
+            from their true dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they
+            approach the baseness of usurpation and the Machiavellism of
+            rebellion. Like other upstarts, they never suffer an equal. If you
+            do not keep yourself above them, they will crush you beneath them.
+            If they have no reason to fear you, they will create some quarrel to
+            destroy you.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It is said here that Duroc's journey to Berlin was merely to demand
+            a passage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in
+            Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops from passing through
+            the Prussian territory in Poland. This request is such as might have
+            been expected from our Emperor and his Minister. Whether, however,
+            the tone in which this curious negotiation with a neutral power was
+            begun, or that, at last, the generosity of the Russian Monarch
+            awakened a sense of duty in the Cabinet of Berlin, the arrival of
+            our pacific envoy was immediately followed with warlike
+            preparations. Fortunate, indeed, was it for Prussia to have resorted
+            to her military strength instead of trusting any longer to our
+            friendly assurances. The disasters that have since befallen the
+            Austrian armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our forced marches
+            through neutral Prussia, would otherwise soon have been felt in
+            Westphalia, in Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania. But should His
+            Prussian Majesty not order his troops to act in conjunction with
+            Russia, Austria, England, and Sweden, and that very soon, all
+            efforts against Bonaparte will be vain, as those troops which have
+            dispersed the Austrians and repulsed the Russians will be more than
+            equal to master the Prussians, and one campaign may be sufficient to
+            convince the Prussian Ministers of their folly and errors for years,
+            and to punish them for their ignorance or selfishness.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his
+            affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number
+            of spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to
+            indicate that Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and
+            inclined to join the confederacy against France. At the last
+            assembly at our Prince Cambaceres's, a rumour circulated that
+            preliminary articles for an offensive alliance with your country had
+            already been signed by the Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg,
+            on one side, and by your Minister to the Court of Berlin on the
+            other; according to which you were to take sixty thousand Prussians
+            and twelve thousand Hessians into your pay, for five years certain.
+            A courier from Duroc was said to have brought this news, which at
+            first made some impression, but it wore away by degrees; and our
+            Government, to judge from the expressions of persons in its
+            confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with Prussia.
+            Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the North of
+            Europe, Bonaparte's numerous and young generals are impatient to
+            enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of
+            Germany are almost exhausted.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXX.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The provocations of our Government must have been
+            extraordinary indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of
+            Berlin from its long and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to
+            the friendly intentions of honest Talleyrand, and to the
+            disinterested policy of our generous Bonaparte. To judge its intents
+            from its acts, the favour of the Cabinet of St. Cloud was not only
+            its wish but its want. You must remember that, last year, besides
+            his ordinary Ambassador, Da Lucchesini, His Prussian Majesty was so
+            ill advised as to despatch General Knobelsdorff as his extra
+            representative, to assist at Napoleon's coronation, a degradation of
+            lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples, though
+            surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as
+            last June, the same Knobelsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the
+            honours at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our
+            army in Hanover who chose to attend there. On this occasion the King
+            lodged in a farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of
+            Koestelith, while our sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte &amp; Co.,
+            were quartered and treated in style at the castle of Putzbull,
+            fitted up for their accommodation. This was certainly very
+            hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent nor politic.
+            Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are convinced
+            that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not merit to
+            be esteemed.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Do not confound this Knobelsdorff with the late Field-marshal of
+            that name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then
+            Ambassador at Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him,
+            NON ET SANS PHRASE, the very words this regicide used when he sat in
+            judgment on his King, and voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE. This
+            Knobelsdorff is a very different character. He pretends to be
+            equally conspicuous in the Cabinet as in the field, in the boudoir
+            as in the study. A demi-philosopher, a demi-savant, a demi-gallant
+            and a demi-politician, constitute, all taken together, nothing
+            except an insignificant courtier. I do not know whether he was among
+            those Prussian officers who, in 1798, CRIED when it was inserted in
+            the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte had been killed in an
+            insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain, that were
+            Knobelsdorff to survive Napoleon the First, none of His Imperial
+            Majesty's own dutiful subjects would mourn him more sincerely than
+            this subject of the King of Prussia. He is said to possess a great
+            share of the confidence of his King, who has already employed him in
+            several diplomatic missions. The principal and most requisite
+            qualities in a negotiator are political information, inviolable
+            fidelity, penetrating but unbiased judgment, a dignified firmness,
+            and condescending manners. I have not been often enough in the
+            society of General Knobelsdorff to assert whether nature and
+            education have destined him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian
+            monarchy.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von
+            Haugwitz who, in 1792, as Prussian Ambassador at Vienna, arranged
+            the treaty which then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles
+            against the Jacobin Cap of Liberty. It is now said in our diplomatic
+            circle that his second mission to the same capital has for an object
+            the renewal of these ties, which the Treaty of Basle dissolved; and
+            that our Government, to impede his success, or to occasion his
+            recall, before he could have time to conclude, had proposed to
+            Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions of liveres&mdash;which
+            it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality. The present
+            respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that whether the
+            mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His Prussian
+            Majesty confides in his army in preference to our parchments.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the
+            foreign department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a
+            friend of the system of neutrality as his predecessor. All the
+            transactions of his administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim
+            that, if he wished his country to take an active part in the present
+            conflict, it would not have been against France, had she not begun
+            the attack with the invasion of Anspach and Bayreuth. Let it be
+            recollected that, since his Ministry, Prussia has acknowledged
+            Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has exchanged orders with him,
+            and has sent an extraordinary Ambassador to be present at his
+            coronation,&mdash;not common compliments, even between Princes
+            connected by the nearest ties of friendship and consanguinity. Under
+            his administration, the Rhine has been passed to seize the Duc
+            d'Enghien, and the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse
+            Towns have been pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the
+            representations against, all these outrages have neither been
+            followed by public reparation nor a becoming resentment; and was it
+            not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on the 5th of April, 1795,
+            concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe all our conquests and
+            Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not probable that the
+            parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if
+            self-preservation does not require it.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned nobleman and an enlightened
+            statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the
+            choice of his Prince. The late Frederick William II. nominated him a
+            Minister of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet. On the 26th of
+            January, 1792, as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the
+            name of the King of Prussia, of the Margravates of Anspach and
+            Bayreuth, and the inhabitants swore before him, as their governor,
+            their oaths of allegiance to their new Sovereign.&mdash;He continued
+            to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these States, until March, 1795,
+            when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator with our republican
+            plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling all differences
+            between Prussia and France, he returned to his former post at
+            Anspach, where no complaints have been heard against his Government.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the
+            place he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain
+            such information as would enable him to fill it with distinction. I
+            have heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and
+            paid private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent
+            him reports of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or
+            machinations. One of these his agents I happened to meet with, in
+            1796, at Basle, and were I to conclude from what I observed in him,
+            the Minister has not been very judicious in his selection of private
+            correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about
+            forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering
+            and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words,
+            which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was
+            as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners
+            corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw
+            him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same
+            accoutrements and the same jargon, assuming an air of diplomatic
+            mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his
+            letters and instructions from his principal. As might be expected,
+            he had the adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I
+            have been told, the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented
+            him from starving.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more
+            knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Ambassador,
+            Marquis of Lucchesini. He went with several other philosophers of
+            Italy to admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin,
+            Frederick the Great, who received him well, caressed him often, but
+            never trusted or employed him. I suppose it was not at the mention
+            of the Marquis's name for the place of a governor of some province
+            that this Monarch said, "My subjects of that province have always
+            been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule in my name but over
+            people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend to chastise."
+            This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his sectaries.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of
+            Lucchesini was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but
+            he was neither his friend nor his favourite, but his listener. It
+            was first under Frederick William II. that he began his diplomatic
+            career, with an appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late
+            King of Poland. His first act in this post was a treaty signed on
+            the 29th of March, 1790, with the King and Republic of Poland, which
+            changed an elective monarchy into an hereditary one; but,
+            notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had guaranteed this
+            alteration, and the constitution decreed in consequence, in 1791,
+            three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated
+            both, and selfishness banished faith.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In July, 1790, he assisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the
+            conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch
+            Ambassadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and
+            Turkey. In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers
+            to the Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the
+            Treaty of Peace between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of
+            Germany. In June, 1792, he was a second time sent as a Minister to
+            Warsaw, where he remained until January, 1793, when he was promoted
+            to the post of Ambassador at the Court of Vienna. He continued,
+            however, to reside with His Prussian Majesty during the greatest
+            part of the campaign on the Rhine, and signed, on the 24th of June,
+            1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive and defensive alliance
+            with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy respected not
+            above eighteen months. In October, 1796, he requested his recall,
+            but this his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious expressions;
+            and he could not obtain it until March, 1797. Some disapprobation of
+            the new political plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz in the
+            Cabinet at Berlin is supposed to have occasioned his determination
+            to retire from public employment. As he, however, continued to
+            reside in the capital of Prussia, and, as many believed, secretly
+            intrigued to appear again upon the scene, the nomination, in 1800,
+            to his present important post was as much the consequence of his own
+            desire as of the favour of his King.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful
+            Hotel de l'Infantado, where his lady's routs, assemblies, and
+            circles are the resort of our most fashionable gentry. Madame da
+            Lucchesini is more agreeable than handsome, more fit to shine at
+            Berlin than at Paris; for though her manners are elegant, they want
+            that ease, that finish which a German or Italian education cannot
+            teach, nor a German or Italian society confer. To judge from the
+            number of her admirers, she seems to know that she is married to a
+            philosopher. Her husband was born at Lucca, in Italy, and is,
+            therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte's brother-in-law,
+            Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a marker at
+            a billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a shilling,
+            as well as many a box on the ear.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your
+            countryman, Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of
+            our generals and public functionaries, as unjust as well as
+            disgraceful. At a future General Congress, should ever Bonaparte
+            suffer one to be convoked, except under his auspices and dictature,
+            the distinction and treatment of prisoners of war require to be
+            again regulated, that the valiant warrior may not for the future be
+            confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous spy; nor innocent
+            travellers, provided with regular passes, visiting a country either
+            for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men taken while
+            combating with arms in their hands.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our ships&mdash;that,
+            during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and
+            Scotland, and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House
+            of Stuart were captured on their return or on their passage; and
+            that your Government never seized the commanders of these vessels,
+            to confine them as State criminals, much less to torture or murder
+            them in the Tower. If I am not mistaken, the whole squadron which,
+            in 1745, carried the Pretender and his suite to Scotland, was taken
+            by your cruisers; and the officers and men experienced no worse or
+            different treatment than their fellow prisoners of war; though the
+            distance is immense between the crime of plotting against the lawful
+            Government of the Princes of the House of Brunswick, and the attempt
+            to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the House of Bonaparte.
+            But, even during the last war, how many of our ships of the line,
+            frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed rebels in
+            Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and yet
+            your generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time
+            when your Sir Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain
+            Wright, were confined in our State prison of the Temple! It is with
+            Governments as with individuals, they ought to be just before they
+            are generous. Had you in 1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages
+            so patiently, you would not now have to lament, nor we to blush for,
+            the untimely end of Captain Wright.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            From the last time that this officer had appeared before the
+            criminal tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was
+            determined on by our Government. His firmness offended, and his
+            patriotism displeased; and as he seemed to possess the confidence of
+            his own Government, it was judged that he was in its secrets; it
+            was, therefore, resolved that, if he refused to become a traitor, he
+            should perish a victim. Desmarets, Fouche's private secretary, who
+            is also the secretary of the secret and haute police, therefore
+            ordered him to another private interrogatory. Here he was offered a
+            considerable sum of money, and the rank of an admiral in our
+            service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of his
+            Government, of its connections with the discontented in this
+            country, and of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them.
+            He replied, as might have been expected, with indignation, to such
+            offers and to such proposals, but as they were frequently repeated
+            with new allurements, he concluded with remaining silent and giving
+            no answers at all. He was then told that the torture would soon
+            restore him his voice, and some select gendarmes seized him and laid
+            him on the rack; there he uttered no complaint, not even a sigh,
+            though instruments the most diabolical were employed, and pains the
+            most acute must have been endured. When threatened that he should
+            expire in torments, he said:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder,
+            while my God receives my soul." During the two hours of the first
+            day that he was stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg
+            were broken, and his nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then
+            passed into the hands of a surgeon, and was under his care for five
+            weeks, but, before he was perfectly cured, he was carried to another
+            private interrogatory, at which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real
+            were present.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated
+            state of his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he
+            must be convinced that it was not the intention of the French
+            Government ever to restore him to his native country, where he might
+            relate occurrences which the policy of France required to be buried
+            in oblivion; he, therefore, had no choice between serving the
+            Emperor of the French, or perishing within the walls of the prison
+            where he was confined. He replied that he was resigned to his
+            destiny, and would die as he had lived, faithful to his King and to
+            his country.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal
+            strength is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate
+            being whose mind is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is
+            weakened by wants. For five months Captain Wright had seen only
+            gaolers, spies, tyrants, executioners, fetters, racks, and other
+            tortures; and for five weeks his food had been bread and his drink
+            water. The man who, thus situated and thus perplexed, preserves his
+            native dignity and innate sentiments, is more worthy of monuments,
+            statues, or altars than either the legislator, the victor, or the
+            saint.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This interrogatory was the last undergone by Captain Wright. He was
+            then again stretched on the rack, and what is called by our
+            regenerators the INFERNAL torments, were inflicted on him. After
+            being pinched with red-hot irons all over his body, brandy, mixed
+            with gunpowder, was infused in the numerous wounds and set fire to
+            several times until nearly burned to the bones. In the convulsions,
+            the consequence of these terrible sufferings, he is said to have
+            bitten off a part of his tongue, though, as before, no groans were
+            heard. As life still remained, he was again put under the care of
+            his former surgeon; but, as he was exceedingly exhausted, a spy, in
+            the dress of a Protestant clergyman, presented himself as if to read
+            prayers with him. Of this offer he accepted; but when this man began
+            to ask some insidious questions, he cast on him a look of contempt
+            and never spoke to him more. At last, seeing no means to obtain any
+            information from him, a mameluke last week strangled him in his bed.
+            Thus expired a hero whose fate has excited more compassion, and
+            whose character has received more admiration here, than any of our
+            great men who have fallen fighting for our Emperor. Captain Wright
+            has diffused new rays of renown and glory on the British name, from
+            his tomb as well as from his dungeon.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You have certainly a right to call me to an account for all the
+            particulars I have related of this scandalous and abominable
+            transaction, and, though I cannot absolutely guarantee the truth of
+            the narration, I am perfectly satisfied of it myself, and I hope to
+            explain myself to your satisfaction. Your unfortunate countryman was
+            attended by and under the care of a surgeon of the name of Vaugeard,
+            who gained his confidence, and was worthy of it, though employed in
+            that infamous gaol. Either from disgust of life, or from attachment
+            to Captain Wright, he survived him only twelve hours, during which
+            he wrote the shocking details I have given you, and sent them to
+            three of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps, with a prayer
+            to have them forwarded to Sir Sidney Smith or to Mr. Windham, that
+            those his friends might be informed that, to his last moment,
+            Captain Wright was worthy of their protection and kindness. From one
+            of those Ministers I have obtained the original in Vaugeard's own
+            handwriting.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I know that Bonaparte and Talleyrand promised the release of Captain
+            Wright to the Spanish Ambassador; but, at that time, he had already
+            suffered once on the rack, and this liberality on their part was
+            merely a trick to impose upon the credulity of the Spaniard or to
+            get rid of his importunities. Had it been otherwise, Captain Wright,
+            like Sir George Rumbold, would himself have been the first to
+            announce in your country the recovery of his liberty.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            My LORD:&mdash;Should Bonaparte again return here victorious, and a
+            pacificator, great changes in our internal Government and
+            constitution are expected, and will certainly occur. Since the
+            legislative corps has completed the Napoleon code of civil and
+            criminal justice, it is considered by the Emperor not only as
+            useless, but troublesome and superfluous. For the same reasons the
+            tribunate will also be laid aside, and His Majesty will rule the
+            French Empire, with the assistance of his Senate, and with the
+            advice of his Council of State, exclusively. You know that the
+            Senators, as well as the Councillors of State, are nominated by the
+            Emperor; that he changes the latter according to his whim, and that,
+            though the former, according to the present constitution, are to
+            hold their offices for life, the alterations which remove entirely
+            the legislature and the tribunate may also make Senators movable.
+            But as all members of the Senate are favourites or relatives, he
+            will probably not think it necessary to resort to such a measure of
+            policy.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In a former letter I have already mentioned the heterogeneous
+            composition of the Senate. The tribunate and legislative corps are
+            worthy to figure by its side; their members are also ci-devant
+            mechanics of all descriptions, debased attorneys or apostate
+            priests, national spoilers or rebellious regicides, degraded nobles
+            or dishonoured officers. The nearly unanimous vote of these corps
+            for a consulate for life, and for an hereditary Emperor, cannot,
+            therefore, either be expressive of the national will, or constitute
+            the legality of Bonaparte's sovereignty.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            In the legislature no vote opposed, and no voice declaimed against,
+            Bonaparte's Imperial dignity; but in the tribunate, Carnot&mdash;the
+            infamously notorious Carnot&mdash;'pro forma', and with the
+            permission of the Emperor 'in petto', spoke against the return of a
+            monarchical form of Government. This farce of deception and roguery
+            did not impose even on our good Parisians, otherwise, and so
+            frequently, the dupes of all our political and revolutionary
+            mountebanks. Had Carnot expressed a sentiment or used a word not
+            previously approved by Bonaparte, instead of reposing himself in the
+            tribunate, he would have been wandering in Cayenne.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Son of an obscure attorney at Nolay, in Burgundy, he was brought up,
+            like Bonaparte, in one of those military schools established by the
+            munificence of the French Monarchs; and had obtained, from the late
+            King, the commission of a captain of engineers when the Revolution
+            broke out. He was particularly indebted to the Prince of Conde for
+            his support during the earlier part of his life, and yet he joined
+            the enemies of his house, and voted for the death of Louis XVI. A
+            member, with Robespierre and Barrere, of the Committee of Public
+            Safety, he partook of their power, as well as of their crimes,
+            though he has been audacious enough to deny that he had anything to
+            do with other transactions than those of the armies. Were no other
+            proofs to the contrary collected, a letter of his own hand to the
+            ferocious Lebon, at Arras, is a written evidence which he is unable
+            to refute. It is dated November 16th, 1793. "You must take," says
+            he, "in your energy, all measures of terror commanded or required by
+            present circumstances. Continue your revolutionary attitude; never
+            mind the amnesty pronounced with the acceptance of the absurd
+            constitution of 1791; it is a crime which cannot extenuate other
+            crimes. Anti-republicans can only expiate their folly under the age
+            of the guillotine. The public Treasury will always pay the journeys
+            and expenses of informers, because they have deserved well of their
+            country. Let all suspected traitors expire by the sword or by fire;
+            continue to march upon that revolutionary line so well delineated by
+            you. The committee applauds all your undertakings, all your measures
+            of vigour; they are not only all permitted, but commanded by your
+            mission." Most of the decrees concerning the establishment of
+            revolutionary tribunals, and particularly that for the organization
+            of the atrocious military commission at Orange, were signed by him.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Carnot, as an officer of engineers, certainly is not without
+            talents; but his presumption in declaring himself the sole author of
+            those plans of campaign which, during the years 1794, 1795, and
+            1796, were so triumphantly executed by Pichegru, Moreau, and
+            Bonaparte, is impertinent, as well as unfounded. At the risk of his
+            own life, Pichegru entirely altered the plan sent him by the
+            Committee of Public Safety; and it was Moreau's masterly retreat,
+            which no plan of campaign could prescribe, that made this general so
+            famous. The surprising successes of Bonaparte in Italy were both
+            unexpected and unforeseen by the Directory; and, according to
+            Berthier's assertion, obliged the, commander-in-chief, during the
+            first four months, to change five times his plans of proceedings and
+            undertakings.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            During his temporary sovereignty as a director, Carnot honestly has
+            made a fortune of twelve millions of livres; which has enabled him
+            not only to live in style with his wife, but also to keep in style
+            two sisters, of the name of Aublin, as his mistresses. He was the
+            friend of the father of these girls, and promised him, when
+            condemned to the guillotine in 1793, to be their second father; but
+            he debauched and ruined them both before either was fourteen years
+            of age; and young Aublin, who, in 1796, reproached him with the
+            infamy of his conduct, was delivered up by him to a military
+            commission, which condemned him to be shot as an emigrant. He has
+            two children by each of these unfortunate girls.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Bonaparte employs Carnot, but despises and mistrusts him; being well
+            aware that, should another National Convention be convoked, and the
+            Emperor of the French be arraigned, as the King of France was, he
+            would, with as great pleasure, vote for the execution of Napoleon
+            the First as he did for that of Louis XVI. He has waded too far in
+            blood and crime to retrograde.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            To this sample of a modern tribune I will add a specimen of a modern
+            legislator. Baptiste Cavaignae was, before the Revolution, an excise
+            officer, turned out of his place for infidelity; but the department
+            of Lot electing him, in 1792, a representative of the people to the
+            National Convention, he there voted for the death of Louis XVI. and
+            remained a faithful associate of Marat and Robespierre. After the
+            evacuation of Verdun by the Prussians, in October, 1792, he made a
+            report to the Convention, according to which eighty-four citizens of
+            that town were arrested and executed. Among these were twenty-two
+            young girls, under twenty years of age, whose crime was the having
+            presented nosegays to the late King of Prussia on his entry after
+            the surrender of Verdun. He was afterwards a national commissary
+            with the armies on the coast near Brest, on the Rhine, and in
+            Western Pyrenees, and everywhere he signalized himself by unheard of
+            ferocities and sanguinary deeds. The following anecdote, printed and
+            published by our revolutionary annalist, Prudhomme, will give you
+            some idea of the morality of this our regenerator and Imperial
+            Solon: "Cavaignac and another deputy, Pinet," writes Prudhomme, "had
+            ordered a box to be kept for them at the play-house at Bayonne on
+            the evening they expected to arrive in that town. Entering very
+            late, they found two soldiers, who had seen the box empty, placed in
+            its front. These they ordered immediately to be arrested, and
+            condemned them, for having outraged the national representation, to
+            be guillotined on the next day, when they both were accordingly
+            executed!" Labarrere, a provost of the Marechaussee at Dax, was in
+            prison as a suspected person. His daughter, a very handsome girl of
+            seventeen, lived with an aunt at Severe. The two pro-consuls passing
+            through that place, she threw herself at their feet, imploring mercy
+            for her parent. This they not only promised, but offered her a place
+            in their carriage to Dax, that she might see him restored to
+            liberty. On the road the monsters insisted on a ransom for the blood
+            of her father. Waiting, afflicted and ashamed, at a friend's house
+            at Dag, the accomplishment of a promise so dearly purchased, she
+            heard the beating of the alarm drum, and looked, from curiosity,
+            through the window, when she saw her unfortunate parent ascending
+            the scaffold! After having remained lifeless for half an hour, she
+            recovered her senses an instant, when she exclaimed:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Oh, the barbarians! they violated me while flattering me with the
+            hope of saving my father!" and then expired. In October, 1795,
+            Cavaignac assisted Barras and Bonaparte in the destruction of some
+            thousands of men, women, and children in the streets of this
+            capital, and was, therefore, in 1796, made by the Directory an
+            inspector-general of the customs; and, in 1803, nominated by
+            Bonaparte a legislator. His colleague, Citizen Pinet, is now one of
+            our Emperor's Counsellors of State, and both are commanders of His
+            Majesty's Legion of Honour; rich, respected, and frequented by our
+            most fashionable ladies and gentlemen.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXIII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;I suppose your Government too vigilant and too
+            patriotic not to be informed of the great and uninterrupted activity
+            which reigns in our arsenals, dockyards, and seaports. I have seen a
+            plan, according to which Bonaparte is enabled, and intends, to build
+            twenty ships of the line and ten frigates, besides cutters, in the
+            year, for ten years to come. I read the calculation of the expenses,
+            the names of the forests where the timber is to be cut, of the
+            foreign countries where a part of the necessary materials are
+            already engaged, and of our own departments which are to furnish the
+            remainder. The whole has been drawn up in a precise and clear manner
+            by Bonaparte's Maritime Prefect at Antwerp, M. Malouet, well known
+            in your country, where he long remained as an emigrant, and, I
+            believe, was even employed by your Ministers.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You may, perhaps, smile at this vast naval scheme of Bonaparte; but
+            if you consider that he is the master of all the forests, mines, and
+            productions of France, Italy, and of a great part of Germany, with
+            all the navigable rivers and seaports of these countries and
+            Holland, and remember also the character of the man, you will,
+            perhaps, think it less impracticable. The greatest obstacle he has
+            to encounter, and to remove, is want of experienced naval officers,
+            though even in this he has advanced greatly since the present war,
+            during which he has added to his naval forces twenty&mdash;nine
+            ships of the line, thirty&mdash;four frigates, twenty-one cutters,
+            three thousand prams, gunboats, pinnaces, etc., with four thousand
+            naval officers and thirty-seven thousand sailors, according to the
+            same account, signed by Malouet. It is true that most of our new
+            naval heroes have never ventured far from our coast, and all their
+            naval laurels have been gathered under our land batteries; but the
+            impulse is given to the national spirit, and our conscripts in the
+            maritime departments prefer, to a man, the navy to the army, which
+            was not formerly the case.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            It cannot have escaped your observation that the incorporation of
+            Genoa procured us, in the South of our Empire, a naval station and
+            arsenal, as a counterpoise to Antwerp, our new naval station in the
+            North, where twelve ships of the line have been built, or are
+            building, since 1803, and where timber and other materials are
+            collected for eight more. At Genoa, two ships of the line and four
+            frigates have lately been launched, and four ships and two frigates
+            are on the stocks; and the Genoese Republic has added sixteen
+            thousand seafaring men to our navy. Should Bonaparte terminate
+            successfully the present war, Naples and Venice will increase the
+            number of our seaports and resources on the borders of the
+            Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas. All his courtiers say that he will
+            conquer Italy in Germany, and determine at Vienna&mdash;the fate of
+            London.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Of all our admirals, however, we have not one to compare with your
+            Nelson, your Hood, your St. Vincent, and your Cornwallis. By the
+            appointment of Murat as grand admiral, Bonaparte seems to indicate
+            that he is inclined to imitate the example of Louis. XVI., in the
+            beginning of his reign, and entrust the chief command of his fleets
+            and squadrons to military men of approved capacity and courage,
+            officers of his land troops. Last June, when he expected a probable
+            junction of the fleet under Villeneuve with the squadron under
+            Admiral Winter, and the union of both with Ganteaume at Brest, Murat
+            was to have had the chief command of the united French, Spanish, and
+            Batavian fleets, and to support the landing of our troops in your
+            country; but the arrival of Lord Nelson in the West Indies, and the
+            victory of Admiral Calder, deranged all our plans and postponed all
+            our designs, which the Continental war has interrupted; to be
+            commenced, God knows when.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The best amongst our bad admirals is certainly Truguet; but he was
+            disgraced last year, and exiled twenty leagues from the coast, for
+            having declared too publicly "that our flotillas would never be
+            serviceable before our fleets were superior to yours, when they
+            would become useless." An intriguer by long habit and by character,
+            having neither property nor principles, he joined the Revolution,
+            and was the second in command under Latouche, in the first
+            republican fleet that left our harbours. He directed the expedition
+            against Sardinia, in January, 1793, during which he acquired neither
+            honour nor glory, being repulsed with great loss by the inhabitants.
+            After being imprisoned under Robespierre, the Directory made him a
+            Minister of the marine, an Ambassador to Spain, and a Vice-Admiral
+            of France. In this capacity he commanded at Brest, during the first
+            eighteen months of the present war. He has an irreconcilable foe in
+            Talleyrand, with whom he quarrelled, when on his embassy in Spain,
+            about some extortions at Madrid, which he declined to share with his
+            principal at Paris. Such was our Minister's inveteracy against him
+            in 1798, that a directorial decree placed him on the list of
+            emigrants, because he remained in Spain after having been recalled
+            to France. In 1799, during Talleyrand's disgrace, Truguet returned
+            here, and, after in vain challenging his enemy to fight, caned him
+            in the Luxembourg gardens, a chastisement which our premier bore
+            with true Christian patience. Truguet is not even a member of the
+            Legion of Honour.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Villeneuve is supposed not much inferior in talents, experience, and
+            modesty to Truguet. He was, before the Revolution, a lieutenant of
+            the royal navy; but his principles did not prevent him from
+            deserting to the colours of the enemies of royalty, who promoted him
+            first to a captain and afterwards to an admiral.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            His first command as such was over a division of the Toulon fleet,
+            which, in the winter of 1797, entered Brest. In the battle at
+            Aboukir he was the second in command; and, after the death of
+            Admiral Brueys, he rallied the ships which had escaped, and sailed
+            for Malta, where, two years afterwards, he signed, with General
+            Vaubois, the capitulation of that island. When hostilities again
+            broke out, he commanded in the West Indies, and, leaving his
+            station, escaped your cruisers, and was appointed first to the chief
+            command of the Rochefort, and afterwards the Toulon fleet, on the
+            death of Admiral Latouche. Notwithstanding the gasconade of his
+            report of his negative victory over Admiral Calder, Villeneuve is
+            not a Gascon by birth, but only, by sentiment.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Ganteaume does not possess either the intriguing character of
+            Truguet or the valorous one of Villeneuve.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Before the Revolution he was a mate of a merchantman, but when most
+            of the officers of the former royal navy had emigrated or perished,
+            he was, in 1793, made a captain of the republican navy, and in 1796
+            an admiral. During the battle of Aboukir he was the chief of the
+            staff, under Admiral Brueys, and saved himself by swimming, when
+            l'Orient took fire and blew up. Bonaparte wrote to him on this
+            occasion: "The picture you have sent me of the disaster of l'Orient,
+            and of your own dreadful situation, is horrible; but be assured
+            that, having such a miraculous escape, DESTINY intends you to avenge
+            one day our navy and our friends." This note was written in August,
+            1798, shortly after Bonaparte had professed himself a Mussulman.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When, in the summer of 1799, our general-in-chief had determined to
+            leave his army of Egypt to its destiny, Ganteaume equipped and
+            commanded the squadron of frigates which brought him to Europe, and
+            was, after his consulate, appointed a Counsellor of State and
+            commander at Brest. In 1800 he escaped with a division of the Brest
+            fleet to Toulon, and, in the summer of 1801, when he was ordered to
+            carry succours to Egypt, your ship Skitsure fell in with him, and
+            was captured. As he did not, however, succeed in landing in Egypt
+            the troops on board his ships, a temporary disgrace was incurred,
+            and he was deprived of the command, but made a maritime prefect.
+            Last year favour was restored him, with the command of our naval
+            forces at Brest. All officers who have served under Ganteaume agree
+            that, let his fleet be ever so superior, he will never fight if he
+            can avoid it, and that, in orderly times, his capacity would, at the
+            utmost, make him regarded as a good master of a merchantman, and
+            nothing else.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Of the present commander of our, flotilla at Boulogne, Lacrosse, I
+            will also say some few words. A lieutenant before the Revolution, he
+            became, in 1789, one of the most ardent and violent Jacobins, and in
+            1792 was employed by the friend of the Blacks, and our Minister,
+            Monge, as an emissary in the West Indies, to preach there to the
+            negroes the rights of man and insurrection against the whites, their
+            masters. In 1800, Bonaparte advanced him to a captain-general at
+            Guadeloupe, an island which his plots, eight years before, had
+            involved in all the horrors of anarchy, and where, when he now
+            attempted to restore order, his former instruments rose against him
+            and forced him to escape to one of your islands&mdash;I believe
+            Dominico. Of this island, in return for his hospitable reception, he
+            took plans, according to which our General Lagrange endeavoured to
+            conquer it last spring. Lacrosse is a perfect revolutionary fanatic,
+            unprincipled, cruel, unfeeling, and intolerant. His presumption is
+            great, but his talents are trifling.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXIV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The defeat of the Austrians has excited great
+            satisfaction among our courtiers and public functionaries; but the
+            mass of the inhabitants here are too miserable to feel for anything
+            else but their own sufferings. They know very well that every
+            victory rivets their fetters, that no disasters can make them more
+            heavy, and no triumph lighter. Totally indifferent about external
+            occurrences, as well as about internal oppressions, they strive to
+            forget both the past and the present, and to be indifferent as to
+            the future; they would be glad could they cease to feel that they
+            exist. The police officers were now, with their gendarmes,
+            bayoneting them into illuminations for Bonaparte's successes, as
+            they dragooned them last year into rejoicings for his coronation. I
+            never observed before so much apathy; and in more than one place I
+            heard the people say, "Oh! how much better we should be with fewer
+            victories and more tranquillity, with less splendour and more
+            security, with an honest peace instead of a brilliant war." But in a
+            country groaning under a military government, the opinions of the
+            people are counted for nothing.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            At Madame Joseph Bonaparte's circle, however, the countenances were
+            not so gloomy. There a real or affected joy seemed to enliven the
+            usual dullness of these parties; some actors were repeating
+            patriotic verses in honour of the victor; while others were singing
+            airs or vaudevilles, to inspire our warriors with as much hatred
+            towards your nation as gratitude towards our Emperor. It is
+            certainly neither philosophical nor philanthropical not to exclude
+            the vilest of all passions, HATRED, on such a happy occasion.
+            Martin, in the dress of a conscript, sang six long couplets against
+            the tyrants of the seas; of which I was only able to retain the
+            following one:
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Je deteste le peuple anglais, Je deteste son ministere; J'aime
+            l'Empereur des Francais, J'aime la paix, je hais la guerre; Mais
+            puisqu'il faut la soutenir Contre une Nation Sauvage, Mon plus doux,
+            mon plus grand desir Est de montrer tout mon courage.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            But what arrested my attention, more than anything else which
+            occurred in this circle on that evening, was a printed paper
+            mysteriously handed about, and of which, thanks to the civility of a
+            Counsellor of State, I at last got a sight. It was a list of those
+            persons, of different countries, whom the Emperor of the French has
+            fixed upon, to replace all the ancient dynasties of Europe within
+            twenty years to come. From the names of these individuals, some of
+            whom are known to me, I could perceive that Bonaparte had more
+            difficulty to select proper Emperors, Kings, and Electors, than he
+            would have had, some years ago, to choose directors or consuls. Our
+            inconsistency is, however, evident even here; I did not read a name
+            that is not found in the annals of Jacobinism and republicanism. We
+            have, at the same time, taken care not to forget ourselves in this
+            new distribution of supremacy. France is to furnish the stock of the
+            new dynasties for Austria, England, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden. What
+            would you think, were you to awake one morning the subject of King
+            Arthur O'Connor the First? You would, I dare say, be even more
+            surprised than I am in being the subject of Napoleon Bonaparte the
+            First. You know, I suppose, that O'Connor is a general of division,
+            and a commander of the Legion of Honour,&mdash;the bosom friend of
+            Talleyrand, and courting, at this moment, a young lady, a relation
+            of our Empress, whose portion may one day be an Empire. But I am
+            told that, notwithstanding Talleyrand's recommendations, and the
+            approbation of Her Majesty, the lady prefers a colonel, her own
+            countryman, to the Irish general. Should, however, our Emperor
+            announce his determination, she would be obliged to marry as he
+            commands, were he even to give her his groom, or his horse, for a
+            spouse.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            You can form no idea how wretched and despised all the Irish rebels
+            are here. O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to
+            Talleyrand, to General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he
+            is looked on with a sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England,
+            must endure with poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently
+            exposed in France. When I was in your country I often heard it said
+            that the Irish were generally considered as a debased and perfidious
+            people, extremely addicted to profligacy and drunkenness, and, when
+            once drunk, more cruelly ferocious than even our Jacobins. I thought
+            it then, and I still believe it, a national prejudice, because I am
+            convinced that the vices or virtues of all civilized nations are
+            relatively the same; but those Irish rebels we have seen here, and
+            who must be, like our Jacobins, the very dregs of their country,
+            have conducted themselves so as to inspire not only mistrust but
+            abhorrence. It is also an undeniable truth that they were greatly
+            disappointed by our former and present Government. They expected to
+            enjoy liberty and equality, and a pension for their treachery; but
+            our police commissaries caught them at their landing, our gendarmes
+            escorted them as criminals to their place of destination, and there
+            they received just enough to prevent them from starving. If they
+            complained they were put in irons, and if they attempted to escape
+            they were sent to the galleys as malefactors or shot as spies.
+            Despair, therefore, no doubt induced many to perpetrate acts of
+            which they were accused, and to rob, swindle, and murder, because
+            they were punished as thieves and assassins. But, some of them, who
+            have been treated in the most friendly, hospitable, and generous
+            manner in this capital, have proved themselves ungrateful, as well
+            as infamous. A lady of my acquaintance, of a once large fortune, had
+            nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence depended upon
+            what she got by letting furnished lodgings. Mischance brought three
+            young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily
+            expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from
+            Bonaparte. During six months she not only lodged and supported them,
+            but embarrassed herself to procure them linen and a decent apparel.
+            At last she was informed that each of, them had been allowed sixty
+            livres&mdash;in the month, and that arrears had been paid them for
+            nine months. Their debt to her was above three thousand livres&mdash;but
+            the day after she asked for payment they decamped, and one of them
+            persuaded her daughter, a girl of fourteen, to elope with him, and
+            to assist him in robbing her mother of all her plate.&mdash;He has,
+            indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the galleys for eight
+            years; but this punishment neither restored the daughter her virtue
+            nor the mother her property. The other two denied their debts, and,
+            as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of accounts, they
+            could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and infamy,
+            however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they
+            delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and
+            the Minister of Police ordered them to be transported as rogues and
+            vagabonds to the colonies. The daughter died shortly after, in
+            consequence of a miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her
+            more than a month, and ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our
+            common hospitals. Thus, these depraved young men ruined and murdered
+            their benefactress and her child; and displayed, before they were
+            thirty, such a consummate villainy as few wretches grown hoary in
+            vice have perpetrated. This act of scandalous notoriety injured the
+            Irish reputation very much in this country; for here, as in many
+            other places, inconsiderate people are apt to judge a whole nation
+            according to the behaviour of some few of its outcasts.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXV.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is
+            incomprehensible to all our military men&mdash;not on account of its
+            profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the
+            present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and
+            it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade
+            Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and
+            yet acknowledge the neutrality of Switzerland, are such political
+            and military errors as require long successes to repair, but which
+            such an enemy as Bonaparte always takes care not to leave
+            unpunished.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The long inactivity of the army under the Archduke Charles has as
+            much surprised us as the defeat of the army under General von Mack;
+            but from what I know of the former, I am persuaded that he would
+            long since have pushed forward had not his movements been
+            unfortunately combined with those of the latter. The House of
+            Lorraine never produced a more valiant warrior, nor Austria a more
+            liberal or better instructed statesman, than this Prince. Heir to
+            the talents of his ancestors, he has commanded, with glory, against
+            France during the revolutionary war; and, although he sometimes
+            experienced defeats, he has rendered invaluable services to the
+            chief of his House by his courage, by his activity, by his
+            constancy, and by that salutary firmness which, in calling the
+            generals and superior officers to their duty, has often reanimated
+            the confidence and the ardour of the soldier.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Archduke Charles began, in 1793, his military career under the
+            Prince of Coburg, the commander-in-chief of the Austrian armies in
+            Brabant, where he commanded the advanced guard, and distinguished
+            himself by a valour sometimes bordering on temerity, but which, by
+            degrees, acquired him that esteem and popularity, among the troops
+            often very advantageous to him afterwards. He was, in 1794,
+            appointed governor and captain-general of the Low Countries, and a
+            Field-marshal lieutenant of the army of the German Empire. In April,
+            1796, he took the command-in-chief of the armies of Austria and of
+            the Empire, and, in the following June, engaged in several combats
+            with General Moreau, in which he was repulsed, but in a manner that
+            did equal honour to the victor and to the vanquished.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The Austrian army on the Lower Rhine, under General Wartensleben,
+            having, about this time, been nearly dispersed by General Jourdan,
+            the Archduke left some divisions of his forces under General Latour,
+            to impede the progress of Moreau, and went with the remainder into
+            Franconia, where he defeated Jourdan near Amberg and Wurzburg,
+            routed his army entirely, and forced him to repass the Rhine in the
+            greatest confusion, and with immense loss. The retreat of Moreau was
+            the consequence of the victories of this Prince. After the capture
+            of Kehl, in January, 1797, he assumed the command of the army of
+            Italy, where he in vain employed all his efforts to put a stop to
+            the victorious progress of Bonaparte, with whom, at last, he signed
+            the preliminaries of peace at Leoben. In the spring of 1799, he
+            again defeated Jourdan in Suabia, as he had done two years before in
+            Franconia; but in Switzerland he met with an abler adversary in
+            General Massena; still, I am inclined to think that he displayed
+            there more real talents than anywhere else; and that this part of
+            his campaign of 1799 was the most interesting, in a military point
+            of view.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The most implacable enemies of the politics of the House of Austria
+            render justice to the plans, to the frankness, to the morality of
+            Archduke Charles; and, what is remarkable, of all the chiefs who
+            have commanded against revolutionary France, he alone has seized the
+            true manner of combating enthusiasts or slaves; at least, his
+            proclamations are the only ones composed with adroitness, and are
+            what they ought to be, because in them an appeal is made to the
+            public opinion at a time when opinion almost constitutes half the
+            strength of armies.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The present opposer of this Prince in Italy is one of our best, as
+            well as most fortunate, generals. A Sardinian subject, and a
+            deserter from the Sardinian troops, he assisted, in 1792, our
+            commander, General Anselm, in the conquest of the county of Nice,
+            rather as a spy than as a soldier. His knowledge of the Maritime
+            Alps obtained, in 1793, a place on our staff, where, from the
+            services he rendered, the rank of a general of brigade was soon
+            conferred on him. In 1796 he was promoted to serve as a general of
+            division under Bonaparte in Italy, where he distinguished himself so
+            much that when, in 1798, General Berthier was ordered to accompany
+            the army of the East to Egypt, he succeeded him as
+            commander-in-chief of our troops in the temporary Roman Republic.
+            But his merciless pillage, and, perhaps, the idea of his being a
+            foreigner, brought on a mutiny, and the Directory was obliged to
+            recall him. It was his campaign in Switzerland of 1799, and his
+            defence of Genoa in 1800, that principally ranked him high as a
+            military chief. After the battle of Marengo he received the command
+            of the army of Italy; but his extortions produced a revolt among the
+            inhabitants, and he lived for some time in retreat and disgrace,
+            after a violent quarrel with Bonaparte, during which many severe
+            truths were said and heard on both sides.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            After the Peace of Luneville, he seemed inclined to join Moreau, and
+            other discontented generals; but observing, no doubt, their want of
+            views and union, he retired to an estate he has bought near Paris,
+            where Bonaparte visited him, after the rupture with your country,
+            and made him, we may conclude, such offers as tempted him to leave
+            his retreat. Last year he was nominated one of our Emperor's
+            Field-marshals, and as such he relieved Jourdan of the command in
+            the kingdom of Italy. He has purchased with a part of his spoil, for
+            fifteen millions of livres&mdash;property in France and Italy; and
+            is considered worth double that sum in jewels, money, and other
+            valuables.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Massena is called, in France, the spoiled child of fortune; and as
+            Bonaparte, like our former Cardinal Mazarin, has more confidence in
+            fortune than in merit, he is, perhaps, more indebted to the former
+            than to the latter for his present situation; his familiarity has
+            made him disliked at our Imperial Court, where he never addresses
+            Napoleon and Madame Bonaparte as an Emperor or an Empress without
+            smiling.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General St. Cyr, our second in command of the army of Italy, is also
+            an officer of great talents and distinctions. He was, in 1791, only
+            a cornet, but in 1795, he headed, as a general, a division of the
+            army of the Rhine. In his report to the Directory, during the famous
+            retreat of 1796, Moreau speaks highly of this general, and admits
+            that his. achievements, in part, saved the republican army. During
+            1799 he served in Italy, and in 1800 he commanded the centre of the
+            army of the Rhine, and assisted in gaining the victory of
+            Hohenlinden. After the Peace of Lundville, he was appointed a
+            Counsellor of State of the military section, a place he still
+            occupies, notwithstanding his present employment. Though under forty
+            years of age, he is rather infirm, from the fatigues he has
+            undergone and the wounds he has received. Although he has never
+            combated as a general-in-chief, there is no doubt but that he would
+            fill such a place with honour to himself and advantage to his
+            country.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Of the general officers who command under Archduke Charles, Comte de
+            Bellegarde is already known by his exploits during the last war. He
+            had distinguished himself already in 1793, particularly when
+            Valenciennes and Maubeuge were besieged by the united Austrian and
+            English forces; and, in 1794, he commanded the column at the head of
+            which the Emperor marched, when Landrecy was invested. In 1796, he
+            was one of the members of the Council of the Archduke Charles, when
+            this Prince commanded for the first time as a general-in-chief, on
+            which occasion he was promoted to a Field-marshal lieutenant.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            He displayed again great talents during the campaign of 1799, when
+            he headed a small corps, placed between General Suwarow in Italy,
+            and Archduke Charles in Switzerland; and in this delicate post he
+            contributed equally to the success of both. After the Peace of
+            Luneville he was appointed a commander-in-chief for the Emperor in
+            the ci-devant Venetian States, where the troops composing the army
+            under the Archduke Charles were, last summer, received and inspected
+            by him, before the arrival of the Prince. He is considered by
+            military men as greatly superior to most of the generals now
+            employed by the Emperor of Germany.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXVI.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;"I would give my brother, the Emperor of Germany, one
+            further piece of advice. Let him hasten to make peace. This is the
+            crisis when, he must recollect, all States must have an end. The
+            idea of the approaching extinction of the, dynasty of Lorraine must
+            impress him with horror." When Bonaparte ordered this paragraph to
+            be inserted in the Moniteur, he discovered an 'arriere pensee', long
+            suspected by politicians, but never before avowed by himself, or by
+            his Ministers. "That he has determined on the universal change of
+            dynasties, because a usurper can never reign with safety or honour
+            as long as any legitimate Prince may disturb his power, or reproach
+            him for his rank." Elevated with prosperity, or infatuated with
+            vanity and pride, he spoke a language which his placemen, courtiers,
+            and even his brother Joseph at first thought premature, if not
+            indiscreet. If all lawful Sovereigns do not read in these words
+            their proscription, and the fate which the most powerful usurper
+            that ever desolated mankind has destined for them, it may be
+            ascribed to that blindness with which Providence, in its wrath,
+            sometimes strikes those doomed to be grand examples of the
+            vicissitudes of human life.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            "Had Talleyrand," said Louis Bonaparte, in his wife's drawing-room,
+            "been by my brother's side, he would not have unnecessarily alarmed
+            or awakened those whom it should have been his policy to keep in a
+            soft slumber, until his blows had laid them down to rise no more;
+            but his soldier-like frankness frequently injures his political
+            views." This I myself heard Louis say to Abbe Sieyes, though several
+            foreign Ambassadors were in the saloon, near enough not to miss a
+            word. If it was really meant as a reflection on Napoleon, it was
+            imprudent; if designed as a defiance to other Princes, it was
+            unbecoming and impertinent. I am inclined to believe it, considering
+            the individual to whom it was addressed, a premeditated declaration
+            that our Emperor expected a universal war, was prepared for it, and
+            was certain of its fortunate issue.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            When this Sieyes is often consulted, and publicly flattered, our
+            politicians say, "Woe to the happiness of Sovereigns and to the
+            tranquillity of subjects; the fiend of mankind is busy, and at
+            work," and, in fact, ever since 1789, the infamous ex-Abbe has
+            figured, either as a plotter or as an actor, in all our dreadful and
+            sanguinary revolutionary epochas. The accomplice of La Fayette in
+            1789, of Brissot in 1791, of Marat in 1792, of Robespierre in 1793,
+            of Tallien in 1794, of Barras in 1795, of Rewbel in 1797, and of
+            Bonaparte in 1799, he has hitherto planned, served, betrayed, or
+            deserted all factions. He is one of the few of our grand criminals,
+            who, after enticing and sacrificing his associates, has been
+            fortunate enough to survive them. Bonaparte has heaped upon him
+            presents, places, and pensions; national property, senatories,
+            knighthoods, and palaces; but he is, nevertheless, not supposed one
+            of our Emperor's most dutiful subjects, because many of the late
+            changes have differed from his metaphysical schemes of innovation,
+            of regeneration, and of overthrow. He has too high an opinion of his
+            own deserts not to consider it beneath his philosophical dignity to
+            be a contented subject of a fellow-subject, elevated into supremacy
+            by his labours and dangers. His modesty has, for these sixteen years
+            past, ascribed to his talents all the glory and prosperity of
+            France, and all her misery and misfortunes to the disregard of his
+            counsels, and to the neglect of his advice. Bonaparte knows it; and
+            that he is one of those crafty, sly, and dark conspirators, more
+            dangerous than the bold assassin, who, by sophistry, art, and
+            perseverance insinuate into the minds of the unwary and daring the
+            ideas of their plots, in such an insidious manner that they take
+            them and foster them as the production of their own genius; he is,
+            therefore, watched by our Imperial spies, and never consulted but
+            when any great blow is intended to be struck, or some enormous
+            atrocities perpetrated. A month before the seizure of the Duc
+            d'Enghien, and the murder of Pichegru, he was every day shut up for
+            some hours with Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Cloud, or in the
+            Tuileries; where he has hardly been seen since, except after our
+            Emperor's return from his coronation as a King of Italy.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Sieyes never was a republican, and it was cowardice alone that made
+            him vote for the death of his King and benefactor; although he is
+            very fond of his own metaphysical notions, he always has preferred
+            the preservation of his life to the profession or adherence to his
+            systems. He will not think the Revolution complete, or the
+            constitution of his country a good one, until some Napoleon, or some
+            Louis, writes himself an Emperor or King of France, by the grace of
+            Sieyes. He would expose the lives of thousands to obtain such a
+            compliment to his hateful vanity and excessive pride; but he would
+            not take a step that endangered his personal safety, though it might
+            eventually lead him to the possession of a crown.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            From the bounty of his King, Sieyes had, before the Revolution, an
+            income of fifteen thousand livres&mdash;per annum; his places,
+            pensions, and landed estates produce now yearly five hundred
+            thousand livres&mdash;not including the interest of his money in the
+            French and foreign funds.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Two years ago he was exiled, for some time, to an estate of his in
+            Touraine, and Bonaparte even deliberated about transporting him to
+            Cayenne, when Talleyrand observed "that such a condemnation would
+            endanger that colony of France, as he would certainly organize there
+            a focus of revolutions, which might also involve Surinam and the
+            Brazils, the colonies of our allies, in one common ruin. In the
+            present circumstances," added the Minister, "if Sieyes is to be
+            transported, I wish we could land him in England, Scotland, or
+            Ireland, or even in Russia."
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            I have just heard from a general officer the following anecdote,
+            which he read to me from a letter of another general, dated Ulm, the
+            25th instant, and, if true, it explains in part Bonaparte's apparent
+            indiscretion in the threat thrown out against all ancient dynasties.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Among his confidential generals (and hitherto the most
+            irreproachable of all our military commanders), Marmont is
+            particularly distinguished. Before Napoleon left this capital to
+            head his armies in Germany, he is stated to have sent despatches to
+            all those traitors dispersed in different countries whom he has
+            selected to commence the new dynasties, under the protection of the
+            Bonaparte Dynasty. They were, no doubt, advised of this being the
+            crisis when they had to begin their machinations against thrones. A
+            courier from Talleyrand at Strasburg to Bonaparte at Ulm was ordered
+            to pass by the corps under the command of Marmont, to whom, in case
+            the Emperor had advanced too far into Germany, he was to deliver his
+            papers. This courier was surprised and interrupted by some Austrian
+            light troops; and, as it was only some few hours after being
+            informed of this capture that Bonaparte expressed himself frankly,
+            as related above, it was supposed by his army that the Austrian
+            Government had already in its power despatches which made our
+            schemes of improvement at Paris no longer any secrets at Vienna. The
+            writer of this letter added that General Marmont was highly
+            distressed on account of this accident, which might retard the
+            prospect of restoring to Europe its long lost peace and
+            tranquillity.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            This officer made his first campaign under Pichegru in 1794, and
+            was, in 1796, appointed by Bonaparte one of his aides-de-camp. His
+            education had been entirely military, and in the practice the war
+            afforded him he soon evinced how well he remembered the lessons of
+            theory. In the year 1796, at the battle of Saint-Georges, before
+            Mantua, he charged at the head of the eighth battalion of
+            grenadiers, and contributed much to its fortunate issue. In October
+            of the same year, Bonaparte, as a mark of his satisfaction, sent him
+            to present to the Directory the numerous colours which the army of
+            Italy had conquered; from whom he received in return a pair of
+            pistols, with a fraternal hug from Carnot. On his return to Italy he
+            was, for the first time, employed by his chief in a political
+            capacity. A republic, and nothing but a republic, being then the
+            order of the day, some Italian patriots were convoked at Reggio to
+            arrange a plan for a Cisalpine Republic, and for the incorporation
+            with it of Modena, Bologna, and other neutral States; Marmont was
+            nominated a French republican plenipotentiary, and assisted as such
+            in the organization of a Commonwealth, which since has been by turns
+            a province of Austria or a tributary State of France.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Marmont, though combating for a bad cause, is an honest man; his
+            hands are neither soiled with plunder, nor stained with blood.
+            Bonaparte, among his other good qualities, wishes to see every one
+            about him rich; and those who have been too delicate to accumulate
+            wealth by pillage, he generally provides for, by putting into
+            requisition some great heiress. After the Peace of Campo Formio,
+            Bonaparte arrived at Paris, where he demanded in marriage for his
+            aide-de-camp Marmont, Mademoiselle Perregeaux, the sole child of the
+            first banker in France, a well-educated and accomplished young lady,
+            who would be much more agreeable did not her continual smiles and
+            laughing indicate a degree of self-satisfaction and complacency
+            which may be felt, but ought never to be published.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            The banker, Perregeaux, is one of those fortunate beings who, by
+            drudgery and assiduity, has succeeded in some few years to make an
+            ample fortune. A Swiss by birth, like Necker, he also, like him,
+            after gratifying the passion of avidity, showed an ambition to shine
+            in other places than in the counting-house and upon the exchange.
+            Under La Fayette, in 1790, he was the chief of a battalion of the
+            Parisian National Guards; under Robespierre, a commissioner for
+            purchasing provisions; and under Bonaparte he is become a Senator
+            and a commander of the Legion of Honour. I am told that he has made
+            all his money by his connection with your country; but I know that
+            the favourite of Napoleon can never be the friend of Great Britain.
+            He is a widower; but Mademoiselle Mars, of the Emperor's theatre,
+            consoles him for the loss of his wife.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            General Marmont accompanied Bonaparte to Egypt, and distinguished
+            himself at the capture of Malta, and when, in the following year,
+            the siege of St. Jean d'Acre was undertaken, he was ordered to
+            extend the fortifications of Alexandria; and if, in 1801, they
+            retarded your progress, it was owing to his abilities, being an
+            officer of engineers as well as of the artillery. He returned with
+            Bonaparte to Europe, and was, after his usurpation, made a
+            Counsellor of State. At the battle of Marengo he commanded the
+            artillery, and signed afterwards, with the Austrian general, Count
+            Hohenzollern, the Armistice of Treviso, which preceded shortly the
+            Peace of Luneville. Nothing has abated Bonaparte's attachment to
+            this officer, whom he appointed a commander-in-chief in Holland,
+            when a change of Government was intended there, and whom he will
+            entrust everywhere else, where sovereignty is to be abolished, or
+            thrones and dynasties subverted.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />
+          <h2>
+            LETTER XXXVII.
+          </h2>
+          <br />
+          <p>
+            PARIS, October, 1805.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            MY LORD:&mdash;Many wise people are of the opinion that the
+            revolution of another great Empire is necessary to combat or oppose
+            the great impulse occasioned by the Revolution of France, before
+            Europe can recover its long-lost order and repose. Had the subjects
+            of Austria been as disaffected as they are loyal, the world might
+            have witnessed such a terrible event, and been enabled to judge
+            whether the hypothesis was the production of an ingenious schemer or
+            of a profound statesman. Our armies under Bonaparte have never
+            before penetrated into the heart of a country where subversion was
+            not prepared, and where subversion did not follow.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            How relatively insignificant, in the eyes of Providence, must be the
+            independence of States and the liberties of nations, when such a
+            relatively insignificant personage as General von Mack can shake
+            them? Have, then, the Austrian heroes&mdash;a Prince Eugene, a
+            Laudon, a Lasci, a Beaulieu, a Haddick, a Bender, a Clairfayt, and
+            numerous other valiant and great warriors&mdash;left no posterity
+            behind them; or has the presumption of General von Mack imposed upon
+            the judgment of the Counsellors of his Prince? This latter must have
+            been the case; how otherwise could the welfare of their Sovereign
+            have been entrusted to a military quack, whose want of energy and
+            bad disposition had, in 1799, delivered up the capital of another
+            Sovereign to his enemies. How many reputations are gained by an
+            impudent assurance, and lost when the man of talents is called upon
+            to act and the fool presents himself.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Baron von Mack served as an aide-de-camp under Field-marshal Laudon,
+            during the last war between Austria and Turkey, and displayed some
+            intrepidity, particularly before Lissa. The Austrian army was
+            encamped eight leagues from that place, and the commander-in-chief
+            hesitated to attack it, believing it to be defended by thirty
+            thousand men. To decide him upon making this attack, Baron von Mack
+            left him at nine o'clock at night, crossed the Danube, accompanied
+            only by a single Uhlan, and penetrated into the suburb of Lissa,
+            where he made prisoner a Turkish officer, whom, on the next morning
+            at seven o'clock, he presented to his general, and from whom it was
+            learnt that the garrison contained only six thousand, men. This
+            personal temerity, and the applause of Field-marshal Laudon,
+            procured him then a kind of reputation, which he has not since been
+            able to support. Some theoretical knowledge of the art of war, and a
+            great facility of conversing on military topics, made even the
+            Emperor Joseph conceive a high opinion of this officer; but it has
+            long been proved, and experience confirms it every day, that the
+            difference is immense between the speculator and the operator, and
+            that the generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains when in
+            the camp or in the field.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Preceded by a certain celebrity, Baron von Mack served, in 1793,
+            under the Prince of Coburg, as an adjutant-general, and was called
+            to assist at the Congress at Antwerp, where the operations of the
+            campaign were regulated. Everywhere he displayed activity and
+            bravery; was wounded twice in the month of May; but he left the army
+            without having performed anything that evinced the talents which
+            fame had bestowed on him. In February, 1794, the Emperor sent him to
+            London to arrange, in concert with your Government, the plans of the
+            campaign then on the eve of being opened; and when he returned to
+            the Low Countries he was advanced to a quartermaster-general of the
+            army of Flanders, and terminated also this unfortunate campaign
+            without having done anything to justify the reputation he had before
+            acquired or usurped. His Sovereign continued, nevertheless, to
+            employ him in different armies; and in January, 1797, he was
+            appointed a Field-marshal lieutenant and a quartermaster-general of
+            the army of the Rhine. In February he conducted fifteen thousand of
+            the troops of this army to reinforce the army of Italy; but when
+            Bonaparte in April penetrated into Styria and Carinthia, he was
+            ordered to Vienna as a second in command of the levy 'en masse'.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Real military characters had already formed their opinion of this
+            officer, and saw a presumptuous charlatan where others had admired
+            an able warrior. His own conduct soon convinced them that they
+            neither had been rash nor mistaken. The King of Naples demanding, in
+            1798, from his son-in-law, the Emperor of Germany, a general to
+            organize and head his troops, Baron von Mack was presented to him.
+            After war had been declared against France he obtained some success
+            in partial engagements, but was defeated in a general battle by an
+            enemy inferior in number. In the Kingdom of Naples, as well as in
+            the Empire of Germany, the fury of negotiation seized him when he
+            should have fought, and when he should have remembered that no
+            compacts can ever be entered into with political and military
+            earthquakes, more than with physical ones. This imprudence,
+            particularly as he was a foreigner, excited suspicion among his
+            troops, whom, instead of leading to battle, he deserted, under the
+            pretence that his life was in danger, and surrendered himself and
+            his staff to our commander, Championnet.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            A general who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp,
+            much less to command armies; and a military chief who does not
+            consider the happiness and honour of the State as his first passion
+            and his first duty, and prefers existence to glory, deserves to be
+            shot as a traitor, or drummed out of the army as a dastardly coward.
+            Without mentioning the numerous military faults committed by General
+            von Mack during this campaign, it is impossible to deny that, with
+            respect to his own troops, he conducted himself in the most
+            pusillanimous manner. It has often been repeated that martial valour
+            does not always combine with it that courage and that necessary
+            presence of mind which knows how to direct or repress multitudes,
+            how to command obedience and obtain popularity; but when a man is
+            entrusted with the safety of an Empire, and assumes such a brilliant
+            situation, he must be weak-minded and despicable indeed, if he does
+            not show himself worthy of it by endeavouring to succeed, or perish
+            in the attempt. The French emigrant, General Dumas, evinced what
+            might have been done, even with the dispirited Neapolitan troops,
+            whom he neither deserted, nor with whom he offered to capitulate.
+          </p>
+          <p>
+            Baron von Mack is in a very infirm state of health, and is often
+            under the necessity of being carried on a litter; and his bodily
+            complaints have certainly not increased the vigour of his mind. His
+            love of life seems to augment in proportion as its real value
+            diminishes. As to the report here of his having betrayed his trust
+            in exchanging honour for gold, I believe it totally unfounded. Our
+            intriguers may have deluded his understanding, but our traitors
+            would never have been able to seduce or shake his fidelity. His head
+            is weak, but his heart is honest. Unfortunately, it is too true
+            that, in turbulent times, irresolution and weakness in a commander
+            or a Minister operate the same, and are as dangerous as, treason.
+          </p>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br /> <a name="pauline" id="pauline"></a>
+          <div class="fig" style="width:80%;">
+            <img alt="pauline.jpg (45K)" src="images/pauline.jpg" width="100%" /><br />
+          </div>
+          <br /><br /><br /><br />
+          <h3>
+            THE ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+          </h3>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+A stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour
+Accused of fanaticism, because she refused to cohabit with him
+All his creditors, denounced and executed
+All priests are to be proscribed as criminals
+As everywhere else, supported injustice by violence
+As confident and obstinate as ignorant
+Bestowing on the Almighty the passions of mortals
+Bonaparte and his wife go now every morning to hear Mass
+Bonaparte dreads more the liberty of the Press than all other
+Bourrienne
+Bow to their charlatanism as if it was sublimity
+Cannot be expressed, and if expressed, would not be believed
+Chevalier of the Guillotine: Toureaux
+Complacency which may be felt, but ought never to be published
+Country where power forces the law to lie dormant
+Distinguished for their piety or rewarded for their flattery
+Easy to give places to men to whom Nature has refused parts
+Encounter with dignity and self-command unbecoming provocations
+Error to admit any neutrality at all
+Expeditious justice, as it is called here
+Extravagances of a head filled with paradoxes
+Feeling, however, the want of consolation in their misfortunes
+Forced military men to kneel before priests
+French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder
+Future effects dreaded from its past enormities
+General who is too fond of his life ought never to enter a camp
+Generals of Cabinets are often indifferent captains in the field
+God is only the invention of fear
+Gold, changes black to white, guilt to innocence
+Hail their sophistry and imposture as inspiration
+He was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly
+Her present Serene Idiot, as she styles the Prince Borghese
+Hero of great ambition and small capacity: La Fayette
+How many reputations are gained by an impudent assurance
+How much people talk about what they do not comprehend
+If Bonaparte is fond of flattery&mdash;pays for it like a real Emperor
+Indifference about futurity
+Indifference of the French people to all religion
+Invention of new tortures and improved racks
+Irresolution and weakness in a commander operate the same
+Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions
+Jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress
+Justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful
+Labour as much as possible in the dark
+Love of life increase in proportion as its real value diminishes
+Marble lives longer than man
+May change his habitations six times in the month&mdash;yet be home
+Men and women, old men and children are no more
+Military diplomacy
+Misfortunes and proscription would not only inspire courage
+More vain than ambitious
+My maid always sleeps with me when my husband is absent
+My means were the boundaries of my wants
+Napoleon invasion of States of the American Commonwealth
+Nature has destined him to obey, and not to govern
+Not suspected of any vices, but all his virtues are negative
+Not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs
+Nothing was decided, though nothing was refused
+Now that she is old (as is generally the case), turned devotee
+One of the negative accomplices of the criminal
+Opinion almost constitutes half the strength of armies
+Prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara
+Prepared to become your victim, but not your accomplice
+Presumptuous charlatan
+Pretensions or passions of upstart vanity
+Pride of an insupportable and outrageous ambition
+Procure him after a useless life, a glorious death
+Promises of impostors or fools to delude the ignorant
+Prudence without weakness, and with firmness without obstinacy
+Saints supplied her with a finger, a toe, or some other parts
+Salaries as the men, under the name of washerwomen
+Satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only
+Should our system of cringing continue progressively
+Sold cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome
+Step is but short from superstition to infidelity
+Sufferings of individuals, he said, are nothing
+Suspicion and tyranny are inseparable companions
+Suspicion is evidence
+They will create some quarrel to destroy you
+They ought to be just before they are generous
+"This is the age of upstarts," said Talleyrand
+Thought at least extraordinary, even by our friends
+Thought himself eloquent when only insolent or impertinent
+Two hundred and twenty thousand prostitute licenses
+Under the notion of being frank, are rude
+United States will be exposed to Napoleon's outrages
+Usurped the easy direction of ignorance
+Vices or virtues of all civilized nations are relatively the same
+Want is the parent of industry
+We are tired of everything, even of our existence
+Were my generals as great fools as some of my Ministers
+Which crime in power has interest to render impenetrable
+Who complains is shot as a conspirator
+With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction
+Would cease to rule the day he became just
+</pre>
+          <br /><br /> <br /> <br />
+          <hr />
+          <br /><br />
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+
+  </body>
+</html>
+