was a chairman, and he was born at Paris, in 1773. In 1799 he enlisted in the regiment called La Veille Marine, 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.

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Being arrested and ordered to be tried for his mutinous and 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 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, 1795. His division was ordered to Italy in 1797, where, against the laws of nations, he arrested M d'Antraigues, who was attached to the Russian legation. When the Russian ambassador tried to dissuade him from committing this injustice, and this violation of the rights of privileged persons, he replied; "There is no question here of any other right or justice than the right and justice of power, and I am here the strongest. M. d'Antraigues is our enemy; were he victorious, he would cause us all to be shot. I repeat, I am here the strongest, et nous verrons.

After the peace of Campo Formio, Bernadotte was sent as an ambassador to the court of Vienna, accompanied by a numerous escort of jacobin propagators. Having procured the liberty of Austrian patriots, whose lives, forfeit to the law, the lenity of the cabinet of Vienna had spared, he thought that he might attempt any thing; 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 rebel

lion, by placing over the door and in the windows of his house the tri-coloured flags. 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 few weeks, a minister of the war department, from which his incapacity caused him to be dismissed. When Buonaparte intended to seize the reins of state, he consulted Bernadotte, who spoke as an implacable jacobin, until a douceur of three hundred thousand livres (12,000l.) calmed him a little, and convinced him that the jacobins were not infallible, or their governments 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 Angereau and Massena, Bernadotte is a merciless plun derer. In the summer of 1796, he summoned the magistrates of the free and neutral city of Nuremburg to bring him, under pain of military execution, within twenty-four hours, two millions of livres (84,000l.). 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 Aus trians 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 (420,0001.)

Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic: but they are wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the revo

lution, where the first crimes he had perpetrated, fixed him. The many massacres under Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the court at Venaigin, no doubt display a most sanguinary character; a lady, however, in whose house in La Vendee, he was quartered six months, has assured me, that to judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel; but that his imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets, which he knows that his crimes have merited; and that therefore when he stabs others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from stabbing him. Were he sure of impunity, he would perhaps show humanity as well as justice. Bernadotte is not only a grand officer of the Legion of Honour, but a Knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black Eagle.

LETTER XLIV.

Paris, September, 1805.

MY LORD,

BUONAPARTE 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 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 Buonaparte 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 Fieve.

To these men of letters, who are themselves, with their writings, devoted to Buonaparte, 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 give places, he bestows much greater pensions than any former sovereign of this country allowed to a Corneille, a Racine, a Boileau, a Voltaire, a 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 Dagee, who sung the coronation of Napoleone 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, (500) besides a present, in ready-money, of one hundred Napoleone d'ors. Another poetaster, Barre, who has served and sung the chiefs of all former factions, received for an ode of forty lines on Buonaparte's birth-day, an office at Milan, worth twenty thousand livres in the year, (8407.) and one hundred Napoleone d'ors for his travelling expenses.

The sums of money distributed yearly by Buonaparte'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, be rather encourages them. His name is therefore found in more dedications published within these last five years, than those of all other sovereign Princes of Europe taken together for this 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 upon 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 improper in me to deliver my opinion. I am convinced that the German and Italian authors are more numeous than those of my own country, for the following reasons. F 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 sixtysix Frenchmen have presented their offerings to their sovereign.” For my part I think Duroc's conclusion tolerably just.

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Among all the numerous hordes of authors who have been paid, recompensed or encouraged by Buonaparte, 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 Buonaparte 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 Buonapartes 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 d'ors (10007.) in gold, a pension of six thousand livres, (2507.) for life, and the place of a chef du bureaux, in the ministry of the home department of the kingdom of Italy, producing eighteen thousand livres (7507.) yearly.

Ritterstein, a Bavarian genealogist, proved the pedigree of the Buonapartes as far back as the first crusades, and that the name of the friend of Richard Cœur de Lion was not Blondel, but Buonaparte; 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 Napoleone Buona