PARIS, August, 1805.
My LORD:--The arrival of the Pope in this country was certainly a grand
epoch, not only in the history of the Revolution, but in the annals of
Europe. The debates in the Sacred College for and against this journey,
and for and against his coronation of Bonaparte, are said to have been
long as well as violent, and arranged according to the desires of
Cardinal Fesch only by the means of four millions of livres distributed
apropos among its pious members. Of this money the Cardinals Mattei,
Pamphili, Dugnani, Maury, Pignatelli, Roverella, Somaglia, Pacca,
Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to
have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent
anti-Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of
Napoleon the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real
worth.
The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
husband.
Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
choeur) in a convent of his native place. In 1782, whilst he was on a
visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers. Here
he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
professor of, the Alcoran. In that year he found an opportunity to
escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
customers. After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
after Napoleon’s proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
of Lyons. In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
tiara. If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he
must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate his
own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France.
Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the manner
already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this pontiff
would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.
While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married the daughter of a
tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the
republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor. But Madame
Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband’s promotion to the
Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
children reduced to great misery. Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres--informing her that the
same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
instant she left that island. Either thinking herself not sufficiently
paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte
family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she
remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope. On the first day His
Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the
crowd, and to approach his person, when Cardinal Fesch was by his side.
Profiting by a moment’s silence, she called out loudly, throwing herself
at his feet: “Holy Father! I am the lawful wife of Cardinal Fesch, and
these are our children; he cannot, he dares not, deny this truth. Had he
behaved liberally to me, I should not have disturbed him in his present
grandeur; I supplicate you, Holy Father, not to restore me my husband,
but to force him to provide for his wife and children, according to his
present circumstances.”--“Matta--ella e matta, santissimo padre! She is
mad--she is mad, Holy Father,” said the Cardinal; and the good pontiff
ordered her to be taken care of, to prevent her from doing herself or the
children any mischief. She was, indeed, taken care of, because nobody
ever since heard what has become either of her or her children; and as
they have not returned to Corsica, probably some snug retreat has been
allotted them in France.
The purple was never disgraced by a greater libertine than Cardinal
Fesch: his amours are numerous, and have often involved him in
disagreeable scrapes. He had, in 1803, an unpleasant adventure at Lyons,
which has since made his stay in that city but short. Having thrown his
handkerchief at the wife of a manufacturer of the name of Girot, she
accepted it, and gave him an appointment at her house, at a time in the
evening when her husband usually went to the play. His Eminence arrived
in disguise, and was received with open arms. But he was hardly seated
by her side before the door of a closet was burst open, and his shoulders
smarted from the lashes inflicted by an offended husband. In vain did he
mention his name and rank; they rather increased than decreased the fury
of Girot, who pretended it was utterly impossible for a Cardinal and
Archbishop to be thus overtaken with the wife of one of his flock; at
last Madame Girot proposed a pecuniary accommodation, which, after some
opposition, was acceded to; and His Eminence signed a bond for one
hundred thousand livres--upon condition that nothing should transpire of
this intrigue--a high price enough for a sound drubbing. On the day when
the bond was due, Girot and his wife were both arrested by the police
commissary, Dubois (a brother of the prefect of police at Paris), accused
of being connected with the coiners, a capital crime at present in this
country. In a search made in their house, bad money to the amount of
three thousand livres was discovered; which they had received the day
before from a man who called himself a merchant from Paris, but who was a
police spy sent to entrap them. After giving up the bond of the
Cardinal, the Emperor graciously remitted the capital punishment, upon
condition that they should be transported for life to Cayenne.
This is the prelate on whom Bonaparte intends to confer the Roman tiara,
and to constitute a successor of St. Peter. It would not be the least
remarkable event in the beginning of the remarkable nineteenth century
were we to witness the papal throne occupied by a man who from a singing
boy became a renegade slave, from a Mussulman a constitutional curate,
from a tavern-keeper an archbishop, from the son of a pedlar the uncle of
an Emperor, and from the husband of the daughter of a tinker, a member of
the Sacred College.
His sister, Madame Letitia Bonaparte, presented him, in 1802, with an
elegant library, for which she had paid six hundred thousand livres--and
his nephew, Napoleon, allows him a yearly pension double that amount.
Besides his dignity as a prelate, His Eminence is Ambassador from France
at Rome, a Knight of the Spanish Order of the Golden Fleece, a grand
officer of the Legion of Honour, and a grand almoner of the Emperor of
the French.
The Archbishop of Paris is now in his ninety-sixth year, and at his death
Cardinal Fesch is to be transferred to the see of this capital, in
expectation of the triple crown and the keys of St. Peter.