As to the Prince of Peace, he is only an imbecile instrument in the hands of our intriguers and innovators, which they make use of as long as they find it necessary, and which, when that ceases to be the case, they break and throw away. This idiot is made to believe that both his political and physical existence depends entirely upon our support, and he has infused the same ridiculous notion into his accomplices and adherents. Guilt, ignorance, and cowardice thus misled may, directed by art, interest, and craft, perform wonders to entangle themselves in the destruction of their country.
Beurnonville, our present Ambassador at Madrid, is the son of a porter, and was a porter himself when, in 1770, he enlisted as a soldier in one of our regiments serving in the East Indies. Having there collected some pillage, he purchased the place of a major in the militia of the Island of Bourbon, but was, for his immorality, broken by the governor. Returning to France, he bitterly complained of this injustice, and, after much cringing in the antechambers of Ministers, he obtained at last the Cross of St. Louis as a kind of indemnity. About the same time he also bought with his Indian wealth the place of an officer in the Swiss Guard of Monsieur, the present Louis XVIII. Being refused admittance into any genteel societies, he resorted with Barras and other disgraced nobles to gambling-houses, and he even kept to himself when the Revolution took place. He had at the same time, and for a certain interest, advanced Madame d'Estainville money to establish her famous, or rather infamous, house in the Rue de Bonnes Enfants, near the Palais Royal,—a house that soon became the fashionable resort of our friends of Liberty and Equality.
In 1790, Beurnonville offered his services as aide-de-camp to our then hero of great ambition and small capacity, La Fayette, who declined the honour. The Jacobins were not so nice. In 1792, they appointed him a general under Dumouriez, who baptized him his Ajax. This modern Ajax, having obtained a separate command, attacked Treves in a most ignorant manner, and was worsted with great loss. The official reports of our revolutionary generals have long been admired for their modesty as well as veracity; but Beurnonville has almost outdone them all, not excepting our great Bonaparte. In a report to the National Convention concerning a terrible engagement of three hours near Grewenmacker, Beurnonville declares that, though the number of the enemy killed was immense, his troops got out of the scrape with the loss of only the little finger of one of his riflemen. On the 4th of February, 1793, a fortnight after the execution of Louis XVI., he was nominated Minister of the War Department—a place which he refused, under a pretence that he was better able to serve his country with his sword than with his pen, having already been in one hundred and twenty battles (where, he did not enumerate or state). On the 14th of the following March, however, he accepted the ministerial portfolio, which he did not keep long, being delivered up by his Hector, Dumouriez, to the Austrians. He remained a prisoner at Olmutz until the 22d of November, 1795, when he was included among the persons exchanged for the daughter of Louis XVI., Her present Royal Highness, the Duchess of Angouleme.
In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed remnants of Jourdan's army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French commander to Holland. In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to the Court of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the Court of Madrid. In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be dreaded, nor his personal qualities make him esteemed. In France, he is laughed at as a boaster, but not trusted as a warrior. In Spain, he is neither dreaded nor esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there universally despised. He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness. Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even the most inattentive observer.
The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another to a merchant who cries dogs' and cats' meat in our streets.
LETTER IX.
PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:—Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his resolution. Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.
During the Emperor's absence, the former is the President of the Senate, and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil determinations with his military forces. Even with the army in Germany, Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an Imperial diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as a viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena. It must be granted that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is almost certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his death; and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition, carried into execution. These very precautions evince, however, how uncertain and precarious he considers his existence to be, and that, notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte dynasty will not survive him.
Most of the generals now employed by him are either of his own creation, or men on whom he has conferred rank and wealth, which they might consider unsafe under any other Prince but a Bonaparte. The superior officers, not included in the above description, are such insignificant characters that, though he makes use of their experience and courage, he does not fear their views or ambition. Among the inferior officers, and even among the men, all those who have displayed, either at reviews or in battles, capacity, activity, or valour, are all members of his Legion of Honour; and are bound to him by the double tie of gratitude and self-interest. They look to him alone for future advancements, and for the preservation of the distinction they have obtained from him. His emissaries artfully disseminate that a Bourbon would inevitably overthrow everything a Bonaparte has erected; and that all military and civil officers rewarded or favoured by Napoleon the First will not only be discarded, but disgraced, and perhaps punished, by a Louis XVIII. Any person who would be imprudent enough to attempt to prove the impossibility, as well as the absurdity, of these impolitic and retrospective measures, would be instantly taken up and shot as an emissary of the Bourbons.