PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:—Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites. According to the boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century of peace can restore to that unfortunate country. It is reported here that each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the Continental States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover in courtesy to Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to make certain douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has received from Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte two hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.
General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau, without ever serving under him. Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768. He was a shopman with his father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first battalion of volunteers of the Department of the North. His first sight of an enemy was on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had a horse killed under him. He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg. At the battle of Houdscoote he distinguished himself so much as to be promoted to an adjutant general. He was wounded at the battle of Fleures, and again at the passage of the Rhine, in 1795, under General Moreau. During 1796 and 1797 he continued to serve in Germany, but in 1798 and 1799 he headed a division in Switzerland from which Bonaparte recalled him in 1800, to command the troops in the capital and its environs. His address to Bonaparte, announcing the votes of the troops under him respecting the consulate for life and the elevation to the Imperial throne, contain such mean and abject flattery that, for a true soldier, it must have required more self-command and more courage to pronounce them than to brave the fire of a hundred cannons; but these very addresses, contemptible as their contents are, procured him the Field-marshal’s staff. Mortier well knew his man, and that his cringing in antechambers would be better rewarded than his services in the field. I was not present when Mortier spoke so shamefully, but I have heard from persons who witnessed this farce, that he had his eyes fixed on the ground the whole time, as if to say, “I grant that I speak as a despicable being, and I grant that I am so; but what shall I do, tormented as I am by ambition to figure among the great, and to riot among the wealthy? Have compassion on my weakness, or, if you have not, I will console myself with the idea that my meanness is only of the duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will be permanent.â€
Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest of her father. She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage of her husband’s complaisance to console herself both for his absence and infidelities. When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier positively declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de chambre. The child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and the Empress were the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch. Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond necklace valued at one hundred and fifty thousand livres.
During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands. He is considered by other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among our fashionables and our courtiers he is held up as a model of connubial fidelity—satisfying himself with keeping three mistresses only.
There was no truth in the report that his recall from Hanover was in consequence of any disgrace; on the contrary, it was a new proof of Bonaparte’s confidence and attachment. He was recalled to take the command of the artillery of Bonaparte’s, household troops the moment Pichegru, George, and Moreau were arrested, and when the Imperial tide had been resolved on. More resistance against this innovation was at that time expected than experienced.
Bernadotte, who succeeded Mortier in the command of our army in Hanover, is a man of a different stamp. His father was a chair-man, and he was born at Paris in 1763. In 1779 he enlisted in the regiment called La Vieille Harine, where the Revolution found him a sergeant. This regiment was then quartered at Toulon, and the emissaries of anarchy and licentiousness engaged him as one of their agents. His activity soon destroyed all discipline, and the troops, instead of attending to their military duty, followed him to the debates and discussions of the Jacobin clubs. Being arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous, scandalous behaviour, an insurrection liberated him, and forced his accusers to save their lives by flight. In April, 1790, he headed the banditti who murdered the Governor of the Fort St. Jean at Marseilles, and who afterwards occasioned the Civil War in Comtat Venaigin, where he served under Jourdan, known by the name of Coup-tell, or cut-throat, who made him a colonel and his aide-de-camp. In 1794, he was employed, as a general of brigade, in the army of the Sambre and Meuse; and during the campaigns of 1795 and 1796, he served under another Jourdan, the general, without much distinction,—except that he was accused by him of being the cause of all the disasters of the last campaign, by the complete rout he suffered near Neumark on the 23d of August, 1796. His division was ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the laws of nations, he arrested M. d’ Antraigues, who was attached to the Russian legation. When the Russian Ambassador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice, and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied: “There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right and justice of power, and I am here the strongest. M. d’Antraigues is our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot. I repeat, I am here the strongest, ‘et nous verrons’.â€
After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Ambassador to the Court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of Jacobin propagators. Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the Cabinet of Vienna had spared, he thought that he might attempt anything; and, therefore, on the anniversary day of the fete for the levy en masse of the inhabitants of the capital, he insulted the feelings of the loyal, and excited the discontented to rebellion, by placing over the door and in the windows of his house the tri-coloured flag. This outrage the Emperor was unable to prevent his subjects from resenting. Bernadotte’s house was invaded, his furniture broken to pieces, and he was forced to save himself at the house of the Spanish Ambassador. As a satisfaction for this attack, provoked by his own insolence, he demanded the immediate dismissal of the Austrian Minister, Baron Thugut, and threatened, in case of refusal, to leave Vienna, which he did on the next day. So disgraceful was his conduct regarded, even by the Directory, that this event made but little impression, and no alteration in the continuance of their intercourse with the Austrian Government.
In 1799, he was for some weeks a Minister of the war department, from which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed. When Bonaparte intended to seize the reins of State, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an implacable Jacobin until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres—calmed him a little, and convinced him that the Jacobins were not infallible or their government the best of all possible governments. In 1801, he was made the commander-in-chief in the Western Department, where he exercised the greatest barbarities against the inhabitants, whom he accused of being still chouans and royalists.
With Augereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plunderer. In the summer, 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of Nuremberg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within twenty-four hours, two millions of livres. With much difficulty this sum was collected. The day after he had received it, he insisted upon another sum to the same amount within another twenty-four hours, menacing in case of disobedience to give the city up to a general pillage by his troops. Fortunately, a column of Austrians advanced and delivered them from the execution of his threats. The troops under him were, both in Italy and in Germany, the terror of the inhabitants, and when defeated were, from their pillage and murder, hunted like wild beasts. Bernadotte has by these means within ten years become master of a fortune of ten millions of livres.
Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in the wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him. The many massacres under Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no doubt display a most sanguinary character. A lady, however, in whose house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing him. Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity as well as justice. Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.
PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:—Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his “Life of Louis XIV.,†that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the well—distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I have never read nor heard of any of those I saw in the list, except two or three as editors of some newspapers, magazines, or trifling and scurrilous party pamphlets. I made this observation to Fontanes, who replied that these men, though obscure, had, during the last peace, been very useful, and would be still more so after another pacification; and that Bonaparte must be satisfied with these until he could gain over men of greater talents. He granted also that men of true genius and literary eminence were, in England, more careful of the dignity of their character than those of Germany and Italy, and more difficult to be bought over. He added that, as soon as the war ceased, he should cross the Channel on a literary mission, from which he hoped to derive more success than from that which was undertaken three years ago by Fievee.
To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted to Bonaparte, he certainly is very liberal. Some he has made tribunes, prefects, or legislators; others he has appointed his Ministers in foreign countries, and on those to whom he has not yet been able to given places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former Sovereign of this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a De Crebillon, a D’ Alembert, a Marmontel, and other heroes of our literature and honours to our nation. This liberality is often carried too far, and thrown away upon worthless subjects, whose very flattery displays absence of taste and genius, as well as of modesty and shame. To a fellow of the name of Dagee, who sang the coronation of Napoleon the First in two hundred of the most disgusting and ill-digested lines that ever were written, containing neither metre nor sense, was assigned a place in the administration of the forest department, worth twelve thousand livres in the year—besides a present, in ready money, of one hundred napoleons d’or. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, received, for an ode of forty lines on Bonaparte’s birthday, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand livres in the year—and one hundred napoleons d’or for his travelling expenses.
The sums of money distributed yearly by Bonaparte’s agents for dedications to him by French and foreign authors, are still greater than those fixed for regular literary pensions. Instead of discouraging these foolish and impertinent contributions, which genius, ingenuity, necessity, or intrusion, lay on his vanity, he rather encourages them. His name is, therefore, found in more dedications published within these last five years than those of all other Sovereign Princes in Europe taken together for the last century. In a man whose name, unfortunately for humanity, must always live in history, it is a childish and unpardonable weakness to pay so profusely for the short and uncertain immortality which some dull or obscure scribbler or poetaster confers on him.
During the last Christmas holidays I dined at Madame Remisatu’s, in company with Duroc. The question turned upon literary productions and the comparative merit of the compositions of modern French and foreign authors. “As to the merits or the quality,†said Duroc, “I will not take upon me to judge, as I profess myself totally incompetent; but as to their size and quantity I have tolerably good information, and it will not, therefore, be very improper in me to deliver my opinion. I am convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numerous than those of my own country, for the following reasons: I suppose, from what I have witnessed and experienced for some years past, that of every book or publication printed in France, Italy, and Germany, each tenth is dedicated to the Emperor. Now, since last Christmas ninety-six German and seventy-one Italian authors have inscribed their works to His Majesty, and been rewarded for it; while during the same period only sixty-six Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their Sovereign.†For my part I think Duroc’s conclusion tolerably just.
Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed, or encouraged by Bonaparte, none have experienced his munificence more than the Italian Spanicetti and the German Ritterstein. The former presented him a genealogical table in which he proved that the Bonaparte family, before their emigration from Tuscany to Corsica, four hundred years ago, were allied to the most ancient Tuscany families, even to that of the House of Medicis; and as this house has given two queens to the Bourbons when Sovereigns of France, the Bonapartes are, therefore, relatives of the Bourbons; and the sceptre of the French Empire is still in the same family, though in a more worthy branch. Spanicetti received one thousand louis—in gold, a pension of six thousand livres—for life, and the place of a chef du bureau in the ministry of the home department of the Kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres yearly.
Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the Bonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion was not Blondel, but Bonaparte; that he exchanged the latter for the former only to marry into the Plantagenet family, the last branch of which has since been extinguished by its intermarriage and incorporation with the House of Stuart, and that, therefore, Napoleon Bonaparte is not only related to most Sovereign Princes of Europe, but has more right to the throne of Great Britain than George the Third, being descended from the male branch of the Stuarts; while this Prince is only descended from the female branch of the same royal house. Ritterstein was presented with a snuff-box with Bonaparte’s portrait set with diamonds, valued at twelve thousand livres, and received twenty-four thousand livres ready money, together with a pension of nine thousand livres—in the year, until he could be better provided for. He was, besides, nominated a Knight of the Legion of Honour. It cannot be denied but that Bonaparte rewards like a real Emperor.
But artists as well as authors obtain from him the same encouragement, and experience the same liberality. In our different museums we, therefore, already, see and admire upwards of two hundred pictures, representing the different actions, scenes, and achievements of Bonaparte’s public life. It is true they are not all highly finished or well composed or delineated, but they all strike the spectators more or less with surprise or admiration; and it is with us, as, I suppose, with you, and everywhere else, the multitude decide: for one competent judge or real connoisseur, hundreds pass, who stare, gape, are charmed, and inspire thousands of their acquaintance, friends, and neighbours with their own satisfaction. Believe me, Napoleon the First well knows the age, his contemporaries, and, I fear, even posterity.
That statuaries and sculptors consider him also as a generous patron, the numerous productions of their chisels in France, Italy, and Germany, having him for their object, seem to evince. Ten sculptors have already represented his passage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his passage over Pont de Lodi, and twenty-two that over Pont d’ Arcole. At Rome, Milan, Turin, Lyons, and Paris are statues of him representing his natural size; and our ten thousand municipalities have each one of his busts; without mentioning the thousands of busts all over Europe, not excepting even your own country. When Bonaparte sees under the windows of the Tuileries the statue of Caesar placed in the garden of that palace, he cannot help saying to himself: “Marble lives longer than man.†Have you any doubt that his ambition and vanity extend beyond the grave?
The only artist I ever heard of who was disappointed and unrewarded for his labour in attempting to eternize the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, was a German of the name of Schumacher. It is, indeed, allowed that he was more industrious, able, and well-meaning than ingenious or considerate. He did not consider that it would be no compliment to give the immortal hero a hint of being a mortal man. Schumacher had employed near three years in planning and executing in marble the prettiest model of a sepulchral monument I have ever seen, read or heard of. He had inscribed it: “The Future Tomb of Bonaparte the Great.†Under the patronage of Count von Beast, he arrived here; and I saw the model in the house of this Minister of the German Elector Arch—Chancellor, where also many French artists went to inspect it. Count von Beast asked De Segur, the grand master of the ceremonies, to request the Emperor to grant Schumacher the honour of showing him his performance. De Segur advised him to address himself to Duroc, who referred him to Devon, who, after looking at it, could not help paying a just tribute to the execution and to the talents of the artist, though he disapproved of the subject, and declined mentioning it to the Emperor. After three months’ attendance in this capital, and all petitions and memorials to our great folks remaining unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which he asked permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte’s tomb to the public for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.
“Where is it now?†asked Fouche.
“At the Minister’s of the Elector Arch-Chancellor,†answered the artist.
“But where do you intend to show it for money?†continued Fouche.
“In the Palais Royal.â€
“Well, bring it there,†replied Fouche.
The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the Rhine. Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model of a grand tomb for a little man. I have just heard that one of your countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d’or.
PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:—Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries in Europe. But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere, comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery. And it is not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and, I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps to both.
When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper to you: “Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise—on the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;†and you sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness, you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling tyranny.
Some author has written that “want is the parent of industry, and wretchedness the mother of ingenuity.†I know that you have often approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide. How many have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final prospect of all their sufferings.
Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of his uncle’s porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all their business. Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses. I have seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry, and the other a Counsellor of Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp—the one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant Marquis, a general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one of the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
On the day of Bonaparte’s coronation, and a little before he set out with his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his hat with this inscription: “I had sixty thousand livres rent—I am eighty years of age, and I request alms.†Many individuals, even some of Bonaparte’s soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he supported himself lately entirely by begging. The value of the dress of one of Bonaparte’s running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and illuminating Bonaparte’s palace of the Tuileries.
Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army of Conde. Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte’s household troops, where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now made a knight of Napoleon’s Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress. As he is a man of real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it, but prove that he has never been misplaced. Another emigrant who, after being a page to the Duc d’Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded with the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion of Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French. Four more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde. It were to be wished that the whole of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants. I am sure they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R———, daughter of Marquis de R———, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat, which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet of Comte de Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for this choice and preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a valuable present to Madame Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B——- was not included in the act of proscription against her father and brother.
I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But they are proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!
PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:—Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic vices, opinions are various, and even opposite. Most persons, who have long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities. On the other hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these rumours, which certainly are exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome, and had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms. Her husband’s conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into a proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence of his affection towards her. As he knew who she was when he received her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her subsequent intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt—policy may influence a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem. He may choose to live with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me that, had it not been for Napoleon’s singular inclination for his youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already been made her by Talleyrand. It was then reported that Bonaparte had his eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were expected to be encountered at St. Petersburg. The untimely end of this Prince, and the supplications of his wife and daughter, have since altered his intent, and Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I may use the expression, incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte family.
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But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex. You read last summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the Interior (Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded by our Ambassador at Vienna Champagny. This promotion was the consequence of a disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress, Mademoiselle George, one of the handsomest women of this capital. He was informed by his spies that this lady frequently, in the dusk of the evening, or when she thought him employed in his office, went to the house of a famous milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in an adjoining passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face, always entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as she continued there. The house was then by his orders beset with spies, who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner. To be near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the very next day her visit to the milliner’s was announced to him. While his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner’s house through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his companions. He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of this enraged lover. The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate, had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and, according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant. The quantity of jewels with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much ostentation in the new tragedy, ‘The Templars’, indicate, however, a Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover. And, indeed, she already treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public, more as a real than a theatrical Princess. Without any cause whatever, but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out, without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no notice should be taken of this ‘etourderie’, which should not occur again.
Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier, having ruined himself in search after the philosopher’s stone. To persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion, and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first speech at the Jacobin Club. Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without resistance. He was denounced by the municipality to the National Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment. During 1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of livres—but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres—himself. He was, under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage, but bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes. In 1799, he advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres—to bribe adherents for the new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of interest, appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him in the Ministry of the Interior. You may see by this short account that the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical stone. He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive (from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a separate establishment. This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.
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—â€
“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.â€
“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.â€
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.â€
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.
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.â€
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.