Part 23 (1/2)

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 reeable 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 hiiven him for his property, in France These particulars were related to hbour whose son had, for two years previous to this, been under Gouron's care, but as now a those placed out by our Government The boy's present master, he said, was a man of a notoriously bad and ih to re, 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 reat oppressions, of petty tyrants, you reat deal of tih the ues So he certainly is, but, last year, a new organization of this Ministry was regulated by Bonaparte; and Fouche was allowed, as assistants, four Counsellors of State, and an augmentation of sixty-four police commissaries The French Eard to the general police, not including Paris and its vicinity, inspected by a prefect of police under the Minister Of the first of these arrondissements, 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 ti-room, and ordered loudly to write to Rome and tell His Holiness to think hiovern the Ecclesiastical States, without interfering with the ecclesiastical arrangeht necessary or proper by the Govern 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 theured in many of the scandalous and blasphemous scenes of the Revolution, the Pope has so their promotions This was the case last summer, when General Dessolles's brother was transferred frone to that of Chambry, and Bonaparte nominated for his successor the brother of General Miollis, as 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 worshi+p of a Goddess of Reason in a common prostitute hom he lived The notoriety of these abonoles unwilling to go to church, and to regard hih 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 pros, 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 blasphenity To this was replied that, having obtained an indulgence in toto for as 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 Ion towards the representatives of Sovereigns On the sa the Nuncio expedited a courier to Rome, and I have heard to-day that the nomination of Miollis is confir occurrence, His Holiness e of the intention of our Governements; but at Rome, as well as in n 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 So done duty in the National Guards, worn the Jacobin cap, and fought against their lawful Prince, now live in open adultery; and, froues, 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, as last spring in Italy, has assured me that he read the advertisement of a curate after his concubine, who had eloped with another curate; and that the Police Minister at Milan openly licensed worand 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 fro he returned to the boso our Empress a present of a valuable diaed 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 carand vicar of the same Bishop, in the saiti-boys in the same cathedral where he officiates as a priest Their hter, by another priest, is now their father's mistress This incestuous coirl 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 saainst 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 theowns 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 Governious establishuished; which, in the course of nature, must happen in less than thirty years Our e all younginto orders; while, at the same time, the army is both more honourable and more profitable than the Church Already ant 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 ether; and, when once in the ranks, and accustomed to the licentiousness of a , 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 fro 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 forn He trusted that the chief of the Church would prevent the deserted He assured 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 ht institute, in the Ecclesiastical States, a se 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 herewith 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 indeard to claie 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 firsthis own critical situation, as well as the critical situation of France; and he has ever since taken care both to attach it to his triues 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 folloith sorandizement, of indeuers were generally more successful in Prussia than histhe 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 froe of presents, of ribands, of private letters passed 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 subh 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 assert 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 hose spoil they delude selfishness or ns descend fronity, 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 h the Prussian territory in Franconia, and to prevent the Russian troops froh the Prussian territory in Poland This request is such as ht have been expected from our Emperor and his Minister Whether, however, the tone in which this curious negotiation with a neutral poas 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 folloarlike preparations Fortunate, indeed, was it for Prussia to have resorted to her er to our friendly assurances The disasters that have since befallen the Austrian arh 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 n may be sufficient to convince the Prussian Ministers of their folly and errors for years, and to punish thenorance or selfishness

Some preparations made in silence by the Marquis of Lucchesini, his affected absence from some of our late Court circles, and the nu his hotel and his steps, seem to indicate that Prussia is tired of its iainst France At the last assembly 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 froht this nehich at first rees; and our Governe 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 nuenerals are impatient to enrich themselves, as Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the South of Germany are almost exhausted

LETTER xxx

PARIS, October, 1805