The famous diplomatic note of Talleyrand, which, at Aix-la-Chapelle proscribed en masse all your diplomatic agents, was only a slight revenge of Bonaparte’s for your mandate of blockade. Rumour states that this measure was not approved of by Talleyrand, as it would not exclude any of your Ambassadors from those Courts not immediately under the whip of our Napoleon. For fear, however, of some more extravagant determination, Joseph Bonaparte dissuaded him from laying before his brother any objections or representations. “But what absurdities do I not sign!” exclaimed the pliant Minister.
Bonaparte, on his arrival at Aix-la-Chapelle, found there, according to command, most of the members of the foreign diplomatic corps in France, waiting to present their new credentials to him as Emperor. Charlemagne had been saluted as such, in the same place, about one thousand years before,—an inducement for the modern Charlemagne to set all these Ambassadors travelling some hundred miles, without any other object but to gratify his impertinent vanity. Every spot where Charlemagne had walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, was visited by him with great ostentation; always dragging behind him the foreign representatives, and by his side his wife. To a peasant who presented him a stone upon which Charlemagne was said to have once kneeled, he gave nearly half its weight in gold; on a priest who offered him a small crucifix, before which that Prince was reported to have prayed, he bestowed an episcopal see; to a manufacturer he ordered one thousand louis for a portrait of Charlemagne, said to be drawn by his daughter, but which, in fact, was from the pencil of the daughter of the manufacturer; a German savant was made a member of the National Institute for an old diploma, supposed to have been signed by Charlemagne, who many believed was not able to write; and a German Baron, Krigge, was registered in the Legion of Honour for a ring presented by this Emperor to one of his ancestors, though his nobility is well known not to be of sixty years’ standing. But woe to him who dared to suggest any doubt about what Napoleon believed, or seemed to believe! A German professor, Richter, more a pedant than a courtier, and more sincere than wise, addressed a short memorial to Bonaparte, in which he proved, from his intimacy with antiquity, that most of the pretended relics of Charlemagne were impositions on the credulous; that the portrait was a drawing of this century, the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured within fifty, and the ring, perhaps, within ten years. The night after Bonaparte had perused this memorial, a police commissary, accompanied by four gendarmes, entered the professor’s bedroom, forced him to dress, and ushered him into a covered cart, which carried him under escort to the left bank of the Rhine; where he was left with orders, under pain of death, never more to enter the territory of the French Empire. This expeditious and summary justice silenced all other connoisseurs and antiquarians; and relics of Charlemagne have since poured in in such numbers from all parts of France, Italy, Germany, and even Denmark, that we are here in hope to see one day established a Museum Charlemagne, by the side of the museums Napoleon and Josephine. A ballad, written in monkish Latin, said to be sung by the daughters and maids of Charlemagne at his Court on great festivities, was addressed to Duroc, by a Danish professor, Cranener, who in return was presented, on the part of Bonaparte, with a diamond ring worth twelve thousand livres—L 500. This ballad may, perhaps, be the foundation of future Bibliotheque or Lyceum Charlemagne.
LETTER XI.
PARIS, August, 1805.
MY LORD:—On the arrival of her husband at Aix-la-Chapelle, Madame Napoleon had lost her money by gambling, without recovering her health by using the baths and drinking the waters; she was, therefore, as poor as low-spirited, and as ill-tempered as dissatisfied. Napoleon himself was neither much in humour to supply her present wants, provide for her extravagances, or to forgive her ill-nature; he ascribed the inefficacy of the waters to her excesses, and reproached her for her too great condescension to many persons who presented themselves at her drawing-room and in her circle, but who, from their rank in life, were only fit to be seen as supplicants in her antechambers, and as associates with her valets or chambermaids.
The fact was that Madame Napoleon knew as well as her husband that these gentry were not in their place in the company of an Empress; but they were her creditors, some of them even Jews; and as long as she continued debtor to them she could not decently—or rather, she dared not prevent them from being visitors to her. By confiding her situation to her old friend, Talleyrand, she was, however, soon released from those troublesome personages. When the Minister was informed of the occasion of the attendance of these impertinent intruders, he humbly proposed to Bonaparte not to pay their demands and their due, but to make them examples of severe justice in transporting them to Cayenne, as the only sure means to prevent, for the future, people of the same description from being familiar or audacious.
When, thanks to Talleyrand’s interference, these family arrangements were settled, Madame Napoleon recovered her health with her good-humour; and her husband, who had begun to forget the English blockade, only to think of the papal accolade (dubbing), was more tender than ever. I am assured that, during the fortnight he continued with his wife at Aix-la-Chapelle, he only shut her up or confined her twice, kicked her three times, and abused her once a day.
It was during their residence in that capital that Comte de Segur at last completed the composition of their household, and laid before them the list of the ladies and gentlemen who had consented to put on their livery. This De Segur is a kind of amphibious animal, neither a royalist nor a republican, neither a democrat nor an aristocrat, but a disaffected subject under a King, a dangerous citizen of a Commonwealth, ridiculing both the friend of equality and the defender of prerogatives; no exact definition can be given, from his past conduct and avowed professions, of his real moral and political character. One thing only is certain;—he was an ungrateful traitor to Louis XVI., and is a submissive slave under Napoleon the First.
Though not of an ancient family, Comte de Segur was a nobleman by birth, and ranked among the ancient French nobility because one of his ancestors had been a Field-marshal. Being early introduced at Court, he acquired, with the common corruption, also the pleasing manners of a courtier; and by his assiduities about the Ministers, Comte de Maurepas and Comte de Vergennes, he procured from the latter the place of an Ambassador to the Court of St. Petersburg. With some reading and genius, but with more boasting and presumption, he classed himself among French men of letters, and was therefore as such received with distinction by Catharine II., on whom, and on whose Government, he in return published a libel. He was a valet under La Fayette, in 1789, as he has since been under every succeeding King of faction. The partisans of the Revolution pointed him out as a fit Ambassador from Louis XVI. to the late King of Prussia; and he went in 1791 to Berlin, in that capacity; but Frederick William II. refused him admittance to his person, and, after some ineffectual intrigues with the Illuminati and philosophers at Berlin, he returned to Paris as he left it; provided, however, with materials for another libel on the Prussian Monarch, and on the House of Brandenburgh, which he printed in 1796. Ruined by the Revolution which he had so much admired, he was imprisoned under Robespierre, and was near starving under the Directory, having nothing but his literary productions to subsist on. In 1799, Bonaparte made him a legislator, and in 1803, a Counsellor of State,—a place which he resigned last year for that of a grand master of the ceremonies at the present Imperial Court. His ancient inveteracy against your country has made him a favourite with Bonaparte. The indelicate and scandalous attacks, in 1796 and 1797, against Lord Malmesbury, in the then official journal, Le Redacteur, were the offspring of his malignity and pen; and the philippics and abusive notes in our present official Moniteur, against your Government and country, are frequently his patriotic progeny, or rather, he often shares with Talleyrand and Hauterive their paternity.