The private journal of Judge-Advocate Larpent

by Francis Seymour Larpent

We have now rain, and the weather cooler again: hitherto it has not been ever very unpleasantly hot, though at times above our summer heat, and with rain and without sun at 69°.

You ask me in your last letter about religion and manners here? The former seems again much what it was before the Revolution. The churches are in general well attended, but principally (as the case is all over the world, I believe,) by your sex in particular of all ages, by the very old of both sexes, who go there to make their peace; and the very young who are taken there by their older friends and relations. With regard to manners, the old French memoirs would still, I think, apply very tolerably to the description of their present state, except that the same things are done and said with rather more coarseness perhaps now than in old times.

Our cavalry have not moved yet, as the approval of the French Government has not arrived. They are intended to move in two columns, one up the Paris road, nearly through Cahors, &c.; the other more to the left, through Angoulême, Poictiers, and to unite at a town on the Seine.

Head-Quarters, Toulouse, May 27th, 1814.—My new friends and acquaintance fall off daily around me, and our party at head-quarters is continually on the decline.

I am not a little amused with the Toulouse paper of yesterday. We, the English, have been for these last six weeks praised to the skies, and treated as, and called the deliverers of Toulouse city and its inhabitants. Soult’s troops are now expected in here in a few days, and the gens-d’armes have actually arrived. The Toulouse Gazette, therefore, exhorts the inhabitants to receive with open arms and to feast, and entertain those brave troops, whose courage and noble conduct they witnessed on the hills, above this city, when fighting for the defence of the inhabitants. They also assure the public, that the statement in an early number of the Gazette, that Marshal Soult owed the safety of his retreat to the clemency of Lord Wellington, under whose guns the French troops filed off, was all an error and mistake (as it certainly was), and that the retreat was in fact as secure as the defence of the heights was noble and courageous. Had we had but about five thousand more men up, to cross the canal at once, this might have been another story. The Gazette should have waited until we were off.

I dined yesterday with a Monsieur Castellan, a gentleman of very good fortune, and who, I understand, has a good house, pictures, library, &c., at Paris, and lands in Normandy and elsewhere. He was formerly, at the commencement of the Revolution, Attorney-general to the Parliament of Toulouse, and on that account desired to be introduced to me, and gave us an excellent dinner. In 1781, he was a man who figured much here, and also in the English papers, on account of his early resistance to the orders of the Court, and being imprisoned in consequence. He was followed by all the inhabitants to his prison, and released in a short time by the triumph of his own party. He seems to be a good constitutionalist.

He mentioned several curious facts of Bonaparte’s tyranny, such as his putting persons to death without trial, and without inquiry. Two of these persons he knew in particular. They were chiefs of La Vendée. When all the hopes of that party were gone, terms were offered to these two men. One came in to sign them, when he was instantly shot. The other, in consequence, remained concealed three years in Normandy. At last he was told privately, that if he would retire from the country quietly, a passport should be given to him. He agreed, received his pass, and made for the coast; but when he arrived near the sea-side two gens-d’armes shot him.

This made a noise; the Juge de Paix began a procès verbal, and the Préfet was active in endeavouring to apprehend the soldiers. The Judge and Préfet were not in the secret. Suddenly a senator came from Paris. The Préfet was suspended from his office, and the Juge de Paix enjoined at his peril not to stir a step in the business. Monsieur Castellan’s servant acted as clerk in the procès verbal which had commenced, and the murder took place close to his estate in Normandy. He therefore, he said, knew the facts.

Another story, for the truth of which he vouched, and which from the circumstances appeared to be true, shows a little the state of Napoleon’s court and their morals. A young cousin of Monsieur de Castellan was the Emperor’s page—a very good-looking boy. At the carnival he was dressed as a girl at the play, and one of the grand chamberlains fell in love with him. The page continued the disguise and the joke every night during the carnival, and was courted and fêted with presents by the lover. At last the discovery was made, and the mortified chamberlain stopped the boy’s promotion in consequence, under the pretence that the page was ordered not to go to the play.

I wished very much to have had time during my visit to Monsieur Castellan to look over a very curious collection of original letters which he had in portfolios, and of which I looked at one or two only. The most valuable were of the Valois family, and were numerous and confidential, coming to M. Castellan through a great-uncle, and derived from an ambassador of the family in Spain. There were several from Catherine de Medicis, mostly about the marriage of her daughters with the Spanish royal family, and which (as she had good occasion to do) she always finished by desiring might be burnt as soon as read.