Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud Part 23

The parents of Gouron's pupils were, with a severe reprimand, informed where their sons had been placed, and where they would be educated in a manner agreeable to the Emperor, who recommended them not to remove them, without a previous notice to the police. A hatter, of the name of Maille, however, ordered his son home, because he had been sent to a dearer school than the former. In his turn he was carried before the police, and, after a short examination of a quarter of an hour, was permitted, with his wife and two children, to join their friend Gouron at Rochefort, and to settle with him at Cayenne, where lands would also be given him for his property, in France. These particulars were related to me by a neighbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been under Gouron's care, but who was now among those placed out by our Government. The boy's present master, he said, was a man of a notoriously bad and immoral character; but he was intimidated, and weak enough to remain contented, preferring, no doubt, his personal safety to the future happiness of his child. In your country, you little comprehend what a valuable instrument terror has been in the hands of our rulers since the Revolution, and how often fear has been mistaken abroad for affection and content.

All these minutiae and petty vexations, but great oppressions, of petty tyrants, you may easily guess, take up a great deal of time, and that, therefore, a Minister of Police, though the most powerful, is also the most occupied of his colleagues. So he certainly is, but, last year, a new organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche was allowed, as a.s.sistants, four Counsellors of State, and an augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries. The French Empire was then divided into four arrondiss.e.m.e.nts, with regard to the general police, not including Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of police under the Minister. Of the first of these arrondiss.e.m.e.nts, the Counsellor of State, Real, is a kind of Deputy Minister; the Counsellor of State, Miot, is the same of the second; the Counsellor of State, Pelet de la Lozere, of the third; and the Counsellor of State, Dauchy, of the fourth. The secret police agents, formerly called spies, were also considerably increased.

LETTER XXVIII.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--Before Bonaparte set out for the Rhine, the Pope's Nuncio was for the first time publicly rebuked by him in Madame Bonaparte's drawing-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness to think himself fortunate in continuing to govern the Ecclesiastical States, without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangements that might be thought necessary or proper by the Government in France.

Bonaparte's policy is to promote among the first dignitaries of the Gallican Church the brothers or relatives of his civil or military supporters; Cambacere's brother is, therefore, an Archbishop and Cardinal, and one of Lebrun's, and two of Berthier's cousins are Bishops.

As, however, the relatives of these Senators, Ministers, or generals, have, like themselves, figured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has sometimes hesitated about sanctioning their promotions. This was the case last summer, when General Dessolles's brother was transferred from the Bishopric of Digne to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother of General Miollis, who was a curate of Brignoles, in the diocese of Aix.

This curate had not only been one of the first to throw up his letters of priesthood at the Jacobin Club at Aix, but had also sacrilegiously denied the divinity of the Christian religion, and proposed, in imitation of Parisian atheists, the wors.h.i.+p of a G.o.ddess of Reason in a common prost.i.tute with whom he lived. The notoriety of these abominations made even his paris.h.i.+oners at Brignoles unwilling to go to church, and to regard him as their pastor, though several of them had been imprisoned, fined, and even transported as fanatics, or as refractory.

During the negotiation with Cardinal Fesch last year, the Pope had been promised, among other things, that, for the future, his conscience should not be wounded by having presented to him for the prelacy any persons but those of the purest morals of the French Empire; and that all his objections should be attended to, in case of promotions; his scruples removed, or his refusal submitted to. When Cardinal Fesch demanded His Holiness's Bull for the curate Miollis, the Cardinal Secretary of State, Gonsalvi, showed no less than twenty acts of apostasy and blasphemy, which made him unworthy of such a dignity. To this was replied that, having obtained an indulgence in toto for what was past, he was a proper subject; above all, as he had the protection of the Emperor of the French. The Pope's Nuncio here then addressed himself to our Minister of the Ecclesiastical Department, Portalis, who advised him not to speak to Bonaparte of a matter upon which his mind had been made up; he, nevertheless, demanded an audience, and it was in consequence of this request that he, in his turn, became acquainted with the new Imperial etiquette and new Imperial jargon towards the representatives of Sovereigns. On the same evening the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome, and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confirmed by the Pope.

From this relatively trifling occurrence, His Holiness might judge of the intention of our Government to adhere to its other engagements; but at Rome, as well as in most other Continental capitals, the Sovereign is the dupe of the perversity of his Counsellors and Ministers, who are the tools, and not seldom the pensioners, of the Cabinet of St. Cloud.

But in the kingdom of Italy the parishes and dioceses are, if possible, still worse served than in this country. Some of the Bishops there, after having done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and fought against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, from their intrigues, are the terror of all the married part of their flock.

The Bishop of Pavia keeps the wife of a merchant, by whom he has two children; and, that the public may not be mistaken as to their real father, the merchant received a sum of money to establish himself at Brescia, and has not seen his wife for these two years past. General Gourion, who was last spring in Italy, has a.s.sured me that he read the advertis.e.m.e.nt of a curate after his concubine, who had eloped with another curate; and that the Police Minister at Milan openly licensed women to be the housekeepers of priests.

A grand vicar, Sarini, at Bologna, was, in 1796, a friar, but relinquished then the convent for the tent, and exchanged the breviary for the musket. He married a nun of one cloister, from whom he procured a divorce in a month, to unite himself with an Abbess of another, deserted by him in her turn for the wife of an innkeeper, who robbed and eloped from her husband. Last spring he returned to the bosom of the Church, and, by making our Empress a present of a valuable diamond cross, of which he had pillaged the statue of a Madonna, he obtained the dignity of a grand vicar, to the great edification, no doubt, of all those who had seen him before the altar or in the camp, at the brothel, or in the hospital.

Another grand vicar of the same Bishop, in the same city, of the name of Rami, has two of his illegitimate children as singing-boys in the same cathedral where he officiates as a priest. Their mother is dead, but her daughter, by another priest, is now their father's mistress. This incestuous commerce is so little concealed that the girl does the honours of the grand vicar's house, and, with naivete enough, tells the guests and visitors of her happiness in having succeeded her mother. I have this anecdote from an officer who heard her make use of that expression.

In France, our priests, I fear, are equally as debauched and unprincipled; but, in yielding to their vicious propensities, they take care to save the appearance of virtue, and, though their guilt is the same, the scandal is less. Bonaparte pretends to be severe against all those ecclesiastics who are accused of any irregularities after having made their peace with the Church. A curate of Picardy, suspected of gallantry, and another of Normandy, accused of inebriety, were last month, without further trial or ceremony than the report of the Minister Portalis, delivered over to Fouche, who transported them to Cayenne, after they had been stripped of their gowns. At the same time, Cardinal Cambaceres and Cardinal Fesch, equally notorious for their excesses, were taken no notice of, except that they were laughed at in our Court circles.

I am, almost every day, more and more convinced that our Government is totally indifferent about what becomes of our religious establishment when the present race of priests is extinguished; which, in the course of nature, must happen in less than thirty years. Our military system and our military education discourage all young men from entering into orders; while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and more profitable than the Church. Already we want curates, though several have been imported from Germany and Spain, and, in some departments, four, and even six parishes have only one curate to serve them all. The Bishops exhort, and the parents advise their children to study theology; but then the law of conscription obliges the student of theology, as well as the student of philosophy, to march together; and, when once in the ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a military life, they are either unwilling, unfit, or unworthy to return to anything else. The Pope, with all his entreaties, and with all his prayers, was unable to procure an exception from the conscription of young men preparing themselves for priesthood. Bonaparte always answered: "Holy Father, were I to consent to your demand, I should soon have an army of priests, instead of an army of soldiers." Our Emperor is not unacquainted with the real character and spirit of his Volunteers. When the Pope represented the danger of religion expiring in France, for want of priests to officiate at the altars, he was answered that Bonaparte, at the beginning of his consulate, found neither altars nor priests in France; that if his reign survived the latter, the former would always be standing, and survive his reign. He trusted that the chief of the Church would prevent them from being deserted. He a.s.sured him that when once he had restored the liberties of the seas, and an uninterrupted tranquillity on the Continent, he should attend more, and perhaps entirely, to the affairs of the Church. He consented, however, that the Pope might inst.i.tute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a seminary for two hundred young Frenchmen, whom he would exempt from military conscription. This is the stock from which our Church establishment is to be supplied!

LETTER XXIX.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The short journey of Count von Haugwitz to Vienna, and the long stay of our Imperial Grand Marshal, Duroc, at Berlin, had already caused here many speculations, not quite corresponding with the views and, perhaps, interests of our Court, when our violation of the Prussian territory made our courtiers exclaim: "This act proves that the Emperor of the French is in a situation to bid defiance to all the world, and, therefore, no longer courts the neutrality of a Prince whose power is merely artificial; who has indemnities to restore, but no delicacy, no regard to claims." Such was the language of those very men who, a month before, declared "that His Prussian Majesty held the balance of peace or war in his hands; that he was in a position in which no Prussian Monarch ever was before; that while his neutrality preserved the tranquillity of the North of Germany, the South of Europe would soon be indebted to his powerful mediation for the return of peace."

The real cause of this alteration in our courtiers' political jargon has not yet been known; but I think it may easily be discovered without any official publication. Bonaparte had the adroitness to cajole the Cabinet of Berlin into his interest, in the first month of his consulate, notwithstanding his own critical situation, as well as the critical situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it to his triumphal car and to inculpate it indirectly in his outrages and violations. Convinced, as he thought, of the selfishness which guided all its resolutions, all his attacks and invasions against the law of nations, or independence of States, were either preceded or followed with some offers of aggrandizement, of indemnity, of subsidy, or of alliance.

His political intriguers were generally more successful in Prussia than his military heroes in crossing the Rhine or the Elbe, in laying the Hanse Towns under contribution, or in occupying Hanover; or, rather, all these acts of violence and injustice were merely the effects of his ascendency in Prussia. When it is, besides, remembered what provinces Prussia accepted from his bounty, what exchange of presents, of ribands, of private letters pa.s.sed between Napoleon the First and Frederick William III., between the Empress of the French and the Queen of Prussia, it is not surprising if the Cabinet of St. Cloud thought itself sure of the submission of the Cabinet of Berlin, and did not esteem it enough to fear it, or to think that it would have spirit enough to resent, or even honour to feel, the numerous Provocations offered.

Whatever Bonaparte and Talleyrand write or a.s.sert to the contrary, their gifts are only the wages of their contempt, and they despise more that State they thus reward than those nations at whose expense they are liberal, and with whose spoil they delude selfishness or meanness into their snares. The more legitimate Sovereigns descend from their true dignity, and a liberal policy, the nearer they approach the baseness of usurpation and the Machiavellism of rebellion. Like other upstarts, they never suffer an equal. If you do not keep yourself above them, they will crush you beneath them. If they have no reason to fear you, they will create some quarrel to destroy you.

It is said here that Duroc's journey to Berlin was merely to demand a pa.s.sage for the French troops through the Prussian territory in Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops from pa.s.sing through the Prussian territory in Poland. This request is such as might have been expected from our Emperor and his Minister. Whether, however, the tone in which this curious negotiation with a neutral power was begun, or that, at last, the generosity of the Russian Monarch awakened a sense of duty in the Cabinet of Berlin, the arrival of our pacific envoy was immediately followed with warlike preparations. Fortunate, indeed, was it for Prussia to have resorted to her military strength instead of trusting any longer to our friendly a.s.surances. The disasters that have since befallen the Austrian armies in Suabia, partly occasioned by our forced marches through neutral Prussia, would otherwise soon have been felt in Westphalia, in Brandenburgh, and in Pomerania. But should His Prussian Majesty not order his troops to act in conjunction with Russia, Austria, England, and Sweden, and that very soon, all efforts against Bonaparte will be vain, as those troops which have dispersed the Austrians and repulsed the Russians will be more than equal to master the Prussians, and one campaign may be sufficient to convince the Prussian Ministers of their folly and errors for years, and to punish them for their ignorance or selfishness.

Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the number of spies who now are watching his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that Prussia is tired of its impolitic neutrality, and inclined to join the confederacy against France. At the last a.s.sembly at our Prince Cambaceres's, a rumour circulated that preliminary articles for an offensive alliance with your country had already been signed by the Prussian Minister, Baron Von Hardenberg, on one side, and by your Minister to the Court of Berlin on the other; according to which you were to take sixty thousand Prussians and twelve thousand Hessians into your pay, for five years certain. A courier from Duroc was said to have brought this news, which at first made some impression, but it wore away by degrees; and our Government, to judge from the expressions of persons in its confidence, seems more to court than to fear a rupture with Prussia. Indeed, besides all other reasons to carry on a war in the North of Europe, Bonaparte's numerous and young generals are impatient to enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of Germany are almost exhausted.

LETTER x.x.x.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The provocations of our Government must have been extraordinary indeed, when they were able to awaken the Cabinet of Berlin from its long and incomprehensible infatuation of trusting to the friendly intentions of honest Talleyrand, and to the disinterested policy of our generous Bonaparte. To judge its intents from its acts, the favour of the Cabinet of St. Cloud was not only its wish but its want. You must remember that, last year, besides his ordinary Amba.s.sador, Da Lucchesini, His Prussian Majesty was so ill advised as to despatch General k.n.o.belsdorff as his extra representative, to a.s.sist at Napoleon's coronation, a degradation of lawful sovereignty to which even the Court of Naples, though surrounded with our troops, refused to subscribe; and, so late as last June, the same k.n.o.belsdorff did, in the name of his Prince, the honours at the reviews near Magdeburg, to all the generals of our army in Hanover who chose to attend there. On this occasion the King lodged in a farmhouse, the Queen in the house of the curate of Koestelith, while our sans-culotte officers, Bernadotte & Co., were quartered and treated in style at the castle of Putzbull, fitted up for their accommodation. This was certainly very hospitable, and very civil, but it was neither prudent nor politic. Upstarts, experiencing such a reception from Princes, are convinced that they are dreaded, because they know that they have not merit to be esteemed.

Do not confound this k.n.o.belsdorff with the late Field-marshal of that name, who, in 1796, answered to a request which our then Amba.s.sador at Berlin (Abbe Sieges) had made to be introduced to him, NON ET SANS PHRASE, the very words this regicide used when he sat in judgment on his King, and voted LA MORT ET SANS PHRASE. This k.n.o.belsdorff is a very different character. He pretends to be equally conspicuous in the Cabinet as in the field, in the boudoir as in the study. A demi-philosopher, a demi-savant, a demi-gallant and a demi-politician, const.i.tute, all taken together, nothing except an insignificant courtier.

I do not know whether he was among those Prussian officers who, in 1798, CRIED when it was inserted in the public prints that the Grand Bonaparte had been killed in an insurrection at Cairo, but of this I am certain, that were k.n.o.belsdorff to survive Napoleon the First, none of His Imperial Majesty's own dutiful subjects would mourn him more sincerely than this subject of the King of Prussia. He is said to possess a great share of the confidence of his King, who has already employed him in several diplomatic missions. The princ.i.p.al and most requisite qualities in a negotiator are political information, inviolable fidelity, penetrating but unbiased judgment, a dignified firmness, and condescending manners. I have not been often enough in the society of General k.n.o.belsdorff to a.s.sert whether nature and education have destined him to illumine or to cloud the Prussian monarchy.

I have already mentioned in a former letter that it was Count von Haugwitz who, in 1792, as Prussian Amba.s.sador at Vienna, arranged the treaty which then united the Austrian and Prussian Eagles against the Jacobin Cap of Liberty. It is now said in our diplomatic circle that his second mission to the same capital has for an object the renewal of these ties, which the Treaty of Basle dissolved; and that our Government, to impede his success, or to occasion his recall, before he could have time to conclude, had proposed to Prussia an annual subsidy of thirty millions of liveres--which it intended to exact from Portugal for its neutrality.

The present respectable appearance of Prussia, shows, however, that whether the mission of Haugwitz had the desired issue or not, His Prussian Majesty confides in his army in preference to our parchments.

Some of our politicians pretend that the present Minister of the foreign department in Prussia, Baron von Hardenberg, is not such a friend of the system of neutrality as his predecessor. All the transactions of his administration seem, nevertheless, to proclaim that, if he wished his country to take an active part in the present conflict, it would not have been against France, had she not begun the attack with the invasion of Ans.p.a.ch and Bayreuth. Let it be recollected that, since his Ministry, Prussia has acknowledged Bonaparte an Emperor of the French, has exchanged orders with him, and has sent an extraordinary Amba.s.sador to be present at his coronation,--not common compliments, even between Princes connected by the nearest ties of friends.h.i.+p and consanguinity. Under his administration, the Rhine has been pa.s.sed to seize the Duc d'Enghien, and the Elbe to capture Sir George Rumbold; the Hanse Towns have been pillaged, and even Emden blockaded; and the representations against, all these outrages have neither been followed by public reparation nor a becoming resentment; and was it not also Baron von Hardenberg, who, on the 5th of April, 1795, concluded at Basle that treaty to which we owe all our conquests and Germany and Italy all their disasters? It is not probable that the parent of pacification will destroy its own progeny, if self-preservation does not require it.

Baron von Hardenberg is both a learned n.o.bleman and an enlightened statesman, and does equal honour both to his own rank and to the choice of his Prince. The late Frederick William II. nominated him a Minister of State and a Counsellor of his Cabinet. On the 26th of January, 1792, as a directorial Minister, he took possession, in the name of the King of Prussia, of the Margravates of Ans.p.a.ch and Bayreuth, and the inhabitants swore before him, as their governor, their oaths of allegiance to their new Sovereign.--He continued to reside as a kind of viceroy, in these States, until March, 1795, when he replaced Baron von Goltz as negotiator with our republican plenipotentiary in Switzerland; but after settling all differences between Prussia and France, he returned to his former post at Ans.p.a.ch, where no complaints have been heard against his Government.

The ambition of Baron von Hardenberg has always been to obtain the place he now occupies, and the study of his life has been to gain such information as would enable him to fill it with distinction. I have heard it said that in most countries he had for years kept and paid private agents, who regularly corresponded with him and sent him reports of what they heard or saw of political intrigue or machinations. One of these his agents I happened to meet with, in 1796, at Basle, and were I to conclude from what I observed in him, the Minister has not been very judicious in his selection of private correspondents. Figure to yourself a bald-headed personage, about forty years of age, near seven feet high, deaf as a post, stammering and making convulsive efforts to express a sentence of five words, which, after all, his gibberish made unintelligible. His dress was as eccentric as his person was singular, and his manners corresponded with both. He called himself Baron von Bulow, and I saw him afterwards, in the autumn of 1797, at Paris, with the same accoutrements and the same jargon, a.s.suming an air of diplomatic mystery, even while displaying before me, in a coffee-house, his letters and instructions from his princ.i.p.al. As might be expected, he had the adroitness to get himself shut up in the Temple, where, I have been told, the generosity of your Sir Sidney Smith prevented him from starving.

No member of the foreign diplomatic corps here possesses either more knowledge, or a longer experience, than the Prussian Amba.s.sador, Marquis of Lucchesini. He went with several other philosophers of Italy to admire the late hero of modern philosophy at Berlin, Frederick the Great, who received him well, caressed him often, but never trusted or employed him. I suppose it was not at the mention of the Marquis's name for the place of a governor of some province that this Monarch said, "My subjects of that province have always been dutiful; a philosopher shall never rule in my name but over people with whom I am discontented, or whom I intend to chastise." This Prince was not unacquainted with the morality of his sectaries.

During the latter part of the life of this King, the Marquis of Lucchesini was frequently of his literary and convivial parties; but he was neither his friend nor his favourite, but his listener. It was first under Frederick William II. that he began his diplomatic career, with an appointment as Minister from Prussia to the late King of Poland. His first act in this post was a treaty signed on the 29th of March, 1790, with the King and Republic of Poland, which changed an elective monarchy into an hereditary one; but, notwithstanding the Cabinet of Berlin had guaranteed this alteration, and the const.i.tution decreed in consequence, in 1791, three years afterwards Russian and Prussian bayonets annihilated both, and selfishness banished faith.

In July, 1790, he a.s.sisted as a Prussian plenipotentiary at the conferences at Reichenback, together with the English and Dutch Amba.s.sadors, having for object a pacification between Austria and Turkey.

In December of the same year he went with the same Ministers to the Congress at Sistova, where, in May, 1791, he signed the Treaty of Peace between the Grand Seignior and the Emperor of Germany. In June, 1792, he was a second time sent as a Minister to Warsaw, where he remained until January, 1793, when he was promoted to the post of Amba.s.sador at the Court of Vienna. He continued, however, to reside with His Prussian Majesty during the greatest part of the campaign on the Rhine, and signed, on the 24th of June, 1793, in the camp before Mentz, an offensive and defensive alliance with your Court; an alliance which Prussian policy respected not above eighteen months. In October, 1796, he requested his recall, but this his Sovereign refused, with the most gracious expressions; and he could not obtain it until March, 1797. Some disapprobation of the new political plan introduced by Count von Haugwitz in the Cabinet at Berlin is supposed to have occasioned his determination to retire from public employment. As he, however, continued to reside in the capital of Prussia, and, as many believed, secretly intrigued to appear again upon the scene, the nomination, in 1800, to his present important post was as much the consequence of his own desire as of the favour of his King.

The Marquis of Lucchesini lives here in great style at the beautiful Hotel de l'Infantado, where his lady's routs, a.s.semblies, and circles are the resort of our most fas.h.i.+onable gentry. Madame da Lucchesini is more agreeable than handsome, more fit to s.h.i.+ne at Berlin than at Paris; for though her manners are elegant, they want that ease, that finish which a German or Italian education cannot teach, nor a German or Italian society confer. To judge from the number of her admirers, she seems to know that she is married to a philosopher. Her husband was born at Lucca, in Italy, and is, therefore, at present a subject of Bonaparte's brother-in-law, Prince Bacciochi, to whom, when His Serene Highness was a marker at a billiard-table, I have had the honour of giving many a s.h.i.+lling, as well as many a box on the ear.

LETTER x.x.xI.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The unexampled cruelty of our Government to your countryman, Captain Wright, I have heard reprobated, even by some of our generals and public functionaries, as unjust as well as disgraceful. At a future General Congress, should ever Bonaparte suffer one to be convoked, except under his auspices and dictature, the distinction and treatment of prisoners of war require to be again regulated, that the valiant warrior may not for the future be confounded with, and treated as, a treacherous spy; nor innocent travellers, provided with regular pa.s.ses, visiting a country either for business or for pleasure, be imprisoned, like men taken while combating with arms in their hands.

You remember, no doubt, from history, that many of our s.h.i.+ps--that, during the reigns of George I. and II., carried to Ireland and Scotland, and landed there, the adherents and partisans of the House of Stuart were captured on their return or on their pa.s.sage; and that your Government never seized the commanders of these vessels, to confine them as State criminals, much less to torture or murder them in the Tower. If I am not mistaken, the whole squadron which, in 1745, carried the Pretender and his suite to Scotland, was taken by your cruisers; and the officers and men experienced no worse or different treatment than their fellow prisoners of war; though the distance is immense between the crime of plotting against the lawful Government of the Princes of the House of Brunswick, and the attempt to disturb the usurpation of an upstart of the House of Bonaparte. But, even during the last war, how many of our s.h.i.+ps of the line, frigates, and cutters, did you not take, which had landed rebels in Ireland, emissaries in Scotland, and malefactors in Wales; and yet your generosity prevented you from retaliating, even at the time when your Sir Sidney Smith, and this same unfortunate Captain Wright, were confined in our State prison of the Temple! It is with Governments as with individuals, they ought to be just before they are generous. Had you in 1797, or in 1798, not endured our outrages so patiently, you would not now have to lament, nor we to blush for, the untimely end of Captain Wright.

From the last time that this officer had appeared before the criminal tribunal which condemned Georges and Moreau, his fate was determined on by our Government. His firmness offended, and his patriotism displeased; and as he seemed to possess the confidence of his own Government, it was judged that he was in its secrets; it was, therefore, resolved that, if he refused to become a traitor, he should perish a victim. Desmarets, Fouche's private secretary, who is also the secretary of the secret and haute police, therefore ordered him to another private interrogatory.

Here he was offered a considerable sum of money, and the rank of an admiral in our service, if he would divulge what he knew of the plans of his Government, of its connections with the discontented in this country, and of its means of keeping up a correspondence with them. He replied, as might have been expected, with indignation, to such offers and to such proposals, but as they were frequently repeated with new allurements, he concluded with remaining silent and giving no answers at all. He was then told that the torture would soon restore him his voice, and some select gendarmes seized him and laid him on the rack; there he uttered no complaint, not even a sigh, though instruments the most diabolical were employed, and pains the most acute must have been endured. When threatened that he should expire in torments, he said:

"I do not fear to die, because my country will avenge my murder, while my G.o.d receives my soul." During the two hours of the first day that he was stretched on the rack, his left arm and right leg were broken, and his nails torn from the toes of both feet; he then pa.s.sed into the hands of a surgeon, and was under his care for five weeks, but, before he was perfectly cured, he was carried to another private interrogatory, at which, besides Desmarets, Fouche and Real were present.

The Minister of Police now informed him that, from the mutilated state of his body, and from the sufferings he had gone through, he must be convinced that it was not the intention of the French Government ever to restore him to his native country, where he might relate occurrences which the policy of France required to be buried in oblivion; he, therefore, had no choice between serving the Emperor of the French, or peris.h.i.+ng within the walls of the prison where he was confined. He replied that he was resigned to his destiny, and would die as he had lived, faithful to his King and to his country.

The man in full possession of his mental qualities and corporeal strength is, in most cases, very different from that unfortunate being whose mind is, enervated by sufferings and whose body is weakened by wants. For five months Captain Wright had seen only gaolers, spies, tyrants, executioners, fetters, racks, and other tortures; and for five weeks his food had been bread and his drink water. The man who, thus situated and thus perplexed, preserves his native dignity and innate sentiments, is more worthy of monuments, statues, or altars than either the legislator, the victor, or the saint.