Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud Part 21

LETTER XX.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The insatiable avarice of all the members of the Bonaparte family has already and frequently been mentioned; some of our philosophers, however, pretend that ambition and vanity exclude from the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte the pa.s.sion of covetousness; that he pillages only to get money to pay his military plunderers, and h.o.a.rds treasures only to purchase slaves, or to recompense the a.s.sociates and instruments of his authority.

Whether their a.s.sertions be just or not, I will not take upon myself to decide; but to judge from the great number of Imperial and royal palaces, from the great augmentation of the Imperial and royal domains; from the immense and valuable quant.i.ty of diamonds, jewels, pictures, statues, libraries, museums, etc., disinterestedness and self-denial are certainly not among Napoleon's virtues.

In France, he not only disposes of all the former palaces and extensive demesnes of our King, but has greatly increased them, by national.

property and by lands and estates bought by the Imperial Treasury, or confiscated by Imperial decrees. In Italy, he has, by an official act, declared to be the property of his crown, first, the royal palace at Milan, and a royal villa, which he now calls Villa Bonaparte; second, the palace of Monza and its dependencies; third, the palace of Mantua, the palace of The, and the ci-devant ducal palace of Modena; fourth, a palace situated in the vicinity of Brescia, and another palace in the vicinity of Bologna; fifth, the ci-devant ducal palaces of Parma and Placenza; sixth, the beautiful forest of Tesin. Ten millions were, besides, ordered to be drawn out of the Royal Treasury at Milan to purchase lands for the formation of a park, pleasure-grounds, etc.

To these are added all the royal palaces and domains of the former Kings of Sardinia, of the Dukes of Brabant, of the Counts of Flanders, of the German Electors, Princes, Dukes, Counts, Barons, etc., who, before the last war, were Sovereigns on the right bank of the Rhine. I have seen a list, according to which the number of palaces and chateaux appertaining to Napoleon as Emperor and King, are stated to be seventy-nine; so that he may change his habitations six times in the month, without occupying during the same year the same palace, and, nevertheless, always sleep at home.

In this number are not included the private chateaux and estates of the Empress, or those of the Princes and Princesses Bonaparte. Madame Napoleon has purchased, since her husband's consulate, in her own name, or in the name of her children, nine estates with their chateaux, four national forests, and six hotels at Paris. Joseph Bonaparte possesses four estates and chateaux in France, three hotels at Paris and at Brussels, three chateaux and estates in Italy, and one hotel at Milan, and another at Turin. Lucien Bonaparte has now remaining only one hotel at Paris, another at Bonne, and a third at Chambery. He has one estate in Burgundy, two in Languedoc, and one in the vicinity of this capital.

At Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, and Rome, he has his own hotels, and in the Papal States he has obtained, in exchange for property in France, three chateaux with their dependencies. Louis Bonaparte has three hotels at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Strasburg, and one at Lyons. He has two estates in Flanders, three in Burgundy, one in Franche-Comte, and another in Alsace. He has also a chateau four leagues from this city. At Genoa he has a beautiful hotel, and upon the Genoese territory a large estate.

He has bought three plantations at Martinico, and two at Guadeloupe. To Jerome Bonaparte has. .h.i.therto been presented only an estate in Brabant, and a hotel in this capital. Some of the former domains of the House of Orange, in the Batavian Republic, have been purchased by the agents of our Government, and are said to be intended for him.

But, while Napoleon Bonaparte has thus heaped wealth on his wife and his brothers, his mother and sisters have not been neglected or left unprovided for. Madame Bonaparte, his mother, has one hotel at Paris, one at Turin, one at Milan, and one at Rome. Her estates in France are four, and in Italy two. Madame Bacciochi, Princess of Piombino and Lucca, possesses two hotels in this capital, and one palace at Piombino and another at Lucca. Of her estates in France, she has only retained two, but she has three in the Kingdom of Italy, and four in her husband's and her own dominions. The Princess Santa Cruce possesses one hotel at Rome and four chateaux in the papal territory. At Milan she has, as well as at Turin and at Paris, hotels given her by her Imperial brother, together with two estates in France, one in Piedmont, and two in Lombardy. The Princesse Murat is mistress of two hotels here, one at Brussels, one at Tours, and one at Bordeaux, together with three estates on this, and five on the other side of the Alps. The Princesse Borghese has purchased three plantations at Guadeloupe, and two at Martinico, with a part of the treasures left her by her first husband, Leclerc. With her present husband she received two palaces at Rome, and three estates on the Roman territory; and her Imperial brother has presented her with one hotel at Paris, one at Cologne, one at Turin, and one at Genoa, together with three estates in France and five in Italy. For his mother, and for each of his sisters, Napoleon has also purchased estates, or lands to form estates, in their native island of Corsica.

The other near or distant relatives of the Emperor and King have also experienced his bounty. Cardinal Fesch has his hotels at Paris, Milan, Lyons, Turin, and Rome; with estates both in France and Italy. Seventeen, either first, second, or third cousins, by his father's or mother's side, have all obtained estates either in the French Empire, or in the Kingdom of Italy, as well as all brothers, sisters, or cousins of his own wife, and the wives of his brothers, or of the husbands of his sisters. Their exact number cannot well be known, but a gentleman who has long been collecting materials for some future history of the House of Bonaparte, and of the French Empire, has already shown me sixty-six names of individuals of that description, and of both s.e.xes, who all, thanks to the Imperial liberality, have suddenly and unexpectedly become people of property.

When you consider that all these immense riches have been seized and distributed within the short period of five years, it is not hazardous to say that, in the annals of Europe, another such revolution in property, as well as in power, is not to be found.

The wealth of the families of all other Sovereigns taken together does not amount to half the value of what the Bonapartes have acquired and possess.

Your country, more than any other upon earth, has to be alarmed at this revolution of property. Richer than any other nation, you have more to apprehend; besides, it threatens you more, both as our frequent enemies and as our national rivals; as a barrier against our plans of universal dominion, and as our superiors in pecuniary resources. May we never live to see the day when the mandates of Bonaparte or Talleyrand are honoured at London, as at Amsterdam, Madrid, Milan, and Rome. The misery of ages to come will then be certain, and posterity will regard as comparative happiness, the sufferings of their forefathers. It is not probable that those who have so successfully pillaged all surrounding States will rest contented until you are involved in the same ruin. Union among yourselves only can preserve you from peris.h.i.+ng in the universal wreck; by this you will at least gain time, and may hope to profit by probable changes and unexpected accidents.

LETTER XXI.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres--which was divided between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte, Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese. By this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine. This Daru is too good a calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have enabled him for years to break all the princ.i.p.al gambling-banks on the Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose. On his return here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an annuity of one hundred thousand livres--not to play; but as this sum would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain of being transported to Cayenne. He obeyed, but the bankers soon experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations. .h.i.ther, Fouche recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of Bonaparte's civil list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly, injuring our gambling-banks. He has kept his promise with regard to France, but made, last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany, which, he avows, produced him nine millions of livres. He always points, but never keeps a bank. He begins to be so well known in many parts of the Continent, that the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and remain so until his departure. This was the case at Florence last April.

He travels always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four servants. He is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.

He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have been felt and lamented for these ten years past. Augereau, Bernadotte, Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.

In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal, Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a common soldier before the Revolution. But he has this merit above Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting, he was also again taken and again flogged. Italy has, indeed, since he has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than Germany. Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion had given to sanct.i.ty, to ornament the fingers of an a.s.sa.s.sin, or decorate the bosom of a harlot. The outrages he committed during 1796 and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable to be believed. He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity into brothels for prost.i.tution; and virgins who had consecrated themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a G.o.d, he bayoneted into dens of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided himself. In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he paid a prost.i.tute, with whom he had pa.s.sed the night at Pavia, with a draft for fifty louis d'or on the munic.i.p.ality of that town, who dared not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.

The general and grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, Van Damme, is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A barber, and son of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned to be hanged. The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows; but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family. He was cas.h.i.+ered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders. In landed property, in jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to eight millions of livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.

LETTER XXII.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth which, from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you our generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and surpa.s.sing often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those authorized by our Government itself, or by its civil and military representatives. It comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded and enforced, whether as loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in money as an equivalent for both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and carriages; corvees of all kinds; the emptying of magazines for the service of our armies; in short, whatever was required for the maintenance, a portion of the pay, and divers wants of those armies, from the time they had posted themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine. Add to this the pillage of public or private warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging to individuals, to the State, to societies, to towns, to hospitals, and even to orphan-houses.

But these and other sorts of requisitions, under the appellation of subsistence necessary for the armies, and for what was wanted for accoutring, quartering, or removing them, included also an infinite consumption for the pleasures, luxuries, whims, and debaucheries of our civil or military commanders. Most of those articles were delivered in kind, and what were not used were set up to auction, converted into ready money, and divided among the plunderers.

In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and Imperial city of Wetzlar. He there put in requisition all private stores of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.

Leather and linen underwent the same operation. Volumes might be filled with similar examples, all of public notoriety.

This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the princ.i.p.al commanders under Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790, and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in 1765. Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some Jacobin emissaries, whom he a.s.sisted to seduce the men into an insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate. From that period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs, and was, therefore, by his a.s.sociates, promoted by one step to an adjutant-general. Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement, and greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and enrich himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a short time made a general of division, and acquired a property of several millions. This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously served only under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.

He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced into his interest. In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Amba.s.sador from the First Consul to the Helvetic Government. He there conducted himself so much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your country, he was made commander of the camp near Montreuil; and last year his wife was received as a Maid of Honour to the Empress of the French.

This Maid of Honour is the daughter of a washer-woman, and was kept by a man-milliner at Strasburg, at the time that she eloped with Ney. With him she had made four campaigns as a mistress before the munic.i.p.ality of Coblentz made her his wife. Her conduct since has corresponded with that of her husband. When he publicly lived with mistresses, she did not live privately with her gallants, but the instant the Emperor of the French told him to save appearances, if he desired a place for his wife at the Imperial Court, he showed himself the most attentive and faithful of husbands, and she the most tender and dutiful of wives. Her manners are not polished, but they are pleasing; and though not handsome in her person, she is lively; and her conversation is entertaining, and her society agreeable. The Princesse Louis Bonaparte is particularly fond of her, more so than Napoleon, perhaps, desires. She has a fault common with most of our Court ladies: she cannot resist, when opportunity presents itself, the temptation of gambling, and she is far from being fortunate. Report says that more than once she has been reduced to acquit her gambling debts by personal favours.

Another of our generals, and the richest of them all who are now serving under Bonaparte, is his brother-in-law, Prince Murat. According to some, he had been a Septembrizer, terrorist, Jacobin, robber, and a.s.sa.s.sin, long before he obtained his first commission as an officer, which was given him by the recommendation of Marat, whom he in return afterwards wished to immortalize, by the exchange of one letter in his own name, and by calling himself Marat instead of Murat. Others, however, declare that his father was an honest cobbler, very superst.i.tious, residing at Bastide, near Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and that he was in his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange the frock of the monk for the regimentals of a soldier. In what manner, or by what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796 he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.

The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of livres. The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him forty--two millions--and it is whispered that the estates bought in the name of his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less. A brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator; and an uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate. A cousin of his, who was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor's chamberlains. He has been very generous to all his relations, and would not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial Court, had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank, lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy. The millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to gain. His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of livres.

It has been a.s.serted before, and I repeat it again:

"It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution--its promoters, its accomplices, and its instruments. Wherever they penetrate, plunder follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but the means. The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence."

General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret deeds of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice. It was under his private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded; and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way to his place of exile. After the seizure and trial of the Duc d'

Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of his Italian guard would fire at this Prince. "If they hesitate," said Murat, who commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, "my pistols are loaded, and I will blow out his brains."

His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family. Murat was, at first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law, Lucien, whom he even fought; but Napoleon having a.s.sured him, upon his word of honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model of complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as numerous as Madame Murat's favourites. He has a young aide-de-camp of the name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the then Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was desolating Germany.

LETTER XXIII.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, the vigilance of the police has much increased: our patrols are doubled during the night, and our spies more numerous and more insolent during the day. Many suspected persons have also been exiled to some distance from this capital, while others, for a measure of safety, have been shut up in the Temple, or in the Castle of Vincennes. These 'lettres de cachet', or mandates of arrest, are expedited during the Emperor's absence exclusively by his brother Louis, after a report, or upon a request, of the Minister of Police, Fouche.

I have mentioned to you before that Louis Bonaparte is both a drunkard and a libertine. When a young and unprincipled man of such propensities enjoys an unrestrained authority, it cannot be surprising to hear that he has abused it. He had not been his brother's military viceroy for twenty-four hours before one set of our Parisians were amused, while others were shocked and scandalized, at a tragical intrigue enterprised by His Imperial Highness.

Happening to see at the opera a very handsome young woman in the boxes, he despatched one of his aides-de-camp to reconnoitre the ground, and to find out who she was. All gentlemen attached to his person or household are also his pimps, and are no novices in forming or executing plans of seduction. Caulincourt (the officer he employed in this affair) returned soon, but had succeeded only in one part of the business. He had not been able to speak to the lady, but was informed that she had only been married a fortnight to a manufacturer of Lyons, who was seated by her side, jealous of his wife as a lover of his mistress. He gave at the same time as his opinion that it would be necessary to employ the police commissary to arrest the husband when he left the play, under some pretext or other, while some of the friends of Prince Louis took advantage of the confusion to seize the wife, and carry her to his hotel.

An order was directly signed by Louis, according to which the police commissary, Chazot, was to arrest the manufacturer Leboure, of Lyons, and put him into a post-chaise, under the care of two gendarmes, who were to see him safe to Lyons, where he was to sign a promise of not returning to Paris without the permission of Government, being suspected of stockjobbing (agiotage). Everything succeeded according to the proposal of Caulincourt, and Louis found Madame Leboure crying in his saloon. It is said that she promised to surrender her virtue upon condition of only once more seeing her husband, to be certain that he was not murdered, but that Louis refused, and obtained by brutal force, and the a.s.sistance of his infamous a.s.sociates, that conquest over her honour which had not been yielded to his entreaties or threats. His enjoyment, however, was but of short continuance; he had no sooner fallen asleep than his poor injured victim left the bed, and, flying into his anteroom, stabbed herself with his sword. On the next morning she was found a corpse, weltering in her blood. In the hope of burying this infamy in secrecy, her corpse was, on the next evening, when it was dark, put into a sack, and thrown into the river, where, being afterwards discovered, the police agents gave out that she had fallen the victim of a.s.sa.s.sins. But when Madame Leboure was thus seized at the opera, besides her husband, her parents and a brother were in her company, and the latter did not lose sight of the carriage in which his sister was placed till it had entered the hotel of Louis Bonaparte, where, on the next day, he, with his father, in vain claimed her. As soon as the husband was informed of the untimely end of his wife, he wrote a letter to her murderer, and shot himself immediately afterwards through the head, but his own head was not the place where he should have sent the bullet; to destroy with it the cause of his wretchedness would only have been an act of retaliation, in a country where power forces the law to lie dormant, and where justice is invoked in vain when the criminal is powerful.

I have said that this intrigue, as it is styled by courtesy in our fas.h.i.+onable circles, amused one part of the Parisians; and I believe the word 'amuse' is not improperly employed in this instance. At a dozen parties where I have been since, this unfortunate adventure has always been an object of conversation, of witticisms, but not of blame, except at Madame Fouche's, where Madame Leboure was very much blamed indeed for having been so overnice, and foolishly scrupulous.

Another intrigue of His Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier.

A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work in the galleys for twenty years. His daughter, a young girl under fifteen, who lived with her grandmother (having lost her mother), went, accompanied by the old lady, and presented a pet.i.tion to Louis, in favour of her father. Her youth and modesty, more than her beauty, inspired the unprincipled libertine with a desire of ruining innocence, under the colour of clemency to guilt. He ordered her to call on his chamberlain, Darinsson, in an hour, and she should obtain an answer. There, either seduced by paternal affection, intimidated by threats, or imposed upon by delusive and engaging promises, she exchanged her virtue for an order of release for her parent; and so satisfied was Louis with his bargain that he added her to the number of his regular mistresses.

As soon as Deroux had recovered his liberty, he visited his daughter in her new situation, where he saw an order of Louis, on the Imperial Treasury, for twelve thousand livres--destined to pay the upholsterer who had furnished her apartment. This gave him, no doubt, the idea of making the Prince pay a higher value for his child, and he forged another order for sixty thousand livres--so closely resembling it that it was without suspicion acquitted by the Imperial Treasurer. Possessing this money, he fabricated a pa.s.s, in the name of Louis, as a courier carrying despatches to the Emperor in Germany, with which he set out, and arrived safe on the other side of the Rhine. His forgeries were only discovered after he had written a letter from Frankfort to Louis, acquitting his daughter of all knowledge of what he had done. In the first moment of anger, her Imperial lover ordered her to be arrested, but he has since forgiven her, and taken her back to his favour. This trick of Deroux has pleased Fouche, who long opposed his release, from a knowledge of his dangerous talent and vicious character. He had once before released himself with a forged order from the Minister of Police, whose handwriting he had only seen for a minute upon his own mandate of imprisonment.