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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!