Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud Part 15

This certainly is a new method to populate our colonies with capitalists.

LETTER III.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Hanover has been a mine of gold to our Government, to its generals, to its commissaries, and to its favourites. According to the boasts of Talleyrand, and the avowal of Berthier, we have drawn from it within two years more wealth than has been paid in contributions to the Electors of Hanover for this century past, and more than half a century of peace can restore to that unfortunate country. It is reported here that each person employed in a situation to make his fortune in the Continental States of the King of England (a name given here to Hanover in courtesy to Bonaparte) was laid under contribution, and expected to make certain douceurs to Madame Bonaparte; and it is said that she has received from Mortier three hundred thousand livres, and from Bernadotte two hundred and fifty thousand livres, besides other large sums from our military commissaries, treasurers, and other agents in the Electorate.

General Mortier is one of the few favourite officers of Bonaparte who have distinguished themselves under his rivals, Pichegru and Moreau, without ever serving under him. Edward Adolph Casimer Mortier is the son of a shopkeeper, and was born at Cambray in 1768. He was a shopman with his father until 1791, when he obtained a commission, first as a lieutenant of carabiniers, and afterwards as captain of the first battalion of volunteers of the Department of the North. His first sight of an enemy was on the 30th of April, 1792, near Quievrain, where he had a horse killed under him. He was present in the battles of Jemappes, of Nerwinde, and of Pellenberg. At the battle of Houdscoote he distinguished himself so much as to be promoted to an adjutant general.

He was wounded at the battle of Fleures, and again at the pa.s.sage 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 p.r.o.nounce 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 compa.s.sion on my weakness, or, if you have not, I will console myself with the idea that my meanness is only of the duration of half an hour, while its recompense-my rank-will be permanent."

Mortier married, in 1799, the daughter of the landlord of the Belle Sauvage inn at Coblentz, who was pregnant by him, or by some other guest of her father. She is pretty, but not handsome, and she takes advantage of her husband's complaisance to console herself both for his absence and infidelities. When she was delivered of her last child, Mortier positively declared that he had not slept with her for twelve months, and the babe has, indeed, less resemblance to him than to his valet de chambre. The child was baptised with great splendour; the Emperor and the Empress were the sponsors, and it was christened by Cardinal Fesch.

Bonaparte presented Madame Mortier on this occasion with a diamond necklace valued at one hundred and fifty thousand livres.

During his different campaigns, and particularly during his glorious campaign in Hanover, he has collected property to the amount of seven millions of livres, laid out in estates and lands. He is considered by other generals as a brave captain, but an indifferent chief; and among our fas.h.i.+onables 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 Amba.s.sador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice, and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied: "There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right and justice of power, and I am here the strongest. M. d'Antraigues is our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot. I repeat, I am here the strongest, 'et nous verrons'."

After the Peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an Amba.s.sador 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 ma.s.se 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 Amba.s.sador. 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 Ma.s.sena, 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 ma.s.sacres 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 a.s.sured me that, to judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing him. Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity as well as justice. Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.

LETTER IV.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his "Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names of your princ.i.p.al 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 a.s.signed 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 quant.i.ty 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 mult.i.tude decide: for one competent judge or real connoisseur, hundreds pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sage over the Mount St. Bernard, eighteen his pa.s.sage 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 munic.i.p.alities 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 pet.i.tions and memorials to our great folks remaining unanswered, Schumacher obtained an audience of Fouche, in which he asked permission to exhibit his model of Bonaparte's tomb to the public for money, so as to be enabled to return to his country.

"Where is it now?" asked Fouche.

"At the Minister's of the Elector Arch-Chancellor," answered the artist.

"But where do you intend to show it for money?" continued Fouche.

"In the Palais Royal."

"Well, bring it there," replied Fouche.

The same evening that it was brought there, Schumacher was arrested by a police commissary, his model packed up, and, with himself, put under the care of two gendarmes, who carried them both to the other side of the Rhine. Here the Elector of Baden gave him some money to return to his home, near Aschaffenburg, where he has since exposed for money the model of a grand tomb for a little man. I have just heard that one of your countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d'or.

LETTER V.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries in Europe. But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere, comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery. And it is not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty are persons of the lowest cla.s.ses of society; on the contrary, many, and, I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged cla.s.ses, descended from ancestors n.o.ble, 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 s.e.xes, 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 l.u.s.tre 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 ill.u.s.trious 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 appet.i.te 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 distinguis.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x of the ci-devant privileged cla.s.ses are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other s.e.x 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 a.s.sa.s.sin 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 s.e.xes!

LETTER VI.