[6] Times, March 3, 1801.
[7] In January 1793, quitting his wife, he followed to Paris Aimé de Coigny, Duchess de Fleury, of whom he had become the paramour at Rome, and who had gone to London for her accouchement. Being arrested, he applied to her previous lover Lauzun to procure his release, but was liberated without any necessity of mediation and returned to London.
[8] Pitt was inclined in 1797 to entertain the overture, but the French coup d’état put an end to negotiations. See Fortescue Papers, iii. pp. 356–357. The French authorities ordered Melville’s arrest, but he apparently fled in time, and coolly revisited Paris in 1802.
[9] The Jacobins were scandalised at the pomp with which he entered Paris, where the market-women waited on him to make and receive presents.
[10] Talbot, when acting at Berne in Wickham’s absence in 1797, advanced money to French conspirators for a scheme of massacring the members of the Directory at the Luxembourg, and he applied to his Government for further funds for that purpose; but Grenville and Canning refused to countenance the scheme and directed him to get back the money (Martel, Historiens Fantaisistes). Though thus rebuked Talbot was not dismissed.
[11] J. F. Neville, Leisure Moments.
[12] Detected in 1802 he was hanged for the murder of Sergeant Armstrong at Goree in 1782.
[13] This was a saving of expense, for Napoleon had refused to pay the £2,000,000 demanded for their maintenance.
[14] It is pleasant to think that Lauriston, Macdonald, and Clarke, three men of British extraction, were among the few French generals who on Napoleon’s return from Elba remained faithful to the Bourbons.
[15] M.P. for Eye in 1820.