PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of
the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
in Europe. But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our
hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans
and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful
necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere,
comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery. And it is
not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty
are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and,
I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged
classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but
who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
to both.
When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or
want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper
to you: “Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise--on
the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;” and you
sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre
that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness,
you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to
relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious
warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that
eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some
few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
tyranny.
Some author has written that “want is the parent of industry, and
wretchedness the mother of ingenuity.” I know that you have often
approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no
other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide. How many
have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no
expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their
necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final
prospect of all their sufferings.
Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
his uncle’s porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
their business. Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses. I have
seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
and the other a Counsellor of Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your
penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
Marquis, a general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on
the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one of
the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a
recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!
On the day of Bonaparte’s coronation, and a little before he set out with
his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
hat with this inscription: “I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
years of age, and I request alms.” Many individuals, even some of
Bonaparte’s soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed
he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of. I am
told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose
property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time
he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy. He has since
for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he
supported himself lately entirely by begging. The value of the dress of
one of Bonaparte’s running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve
him for the probably short remainder of his days. But it is more easy and
agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to
renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it. In the evening the
remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived
me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and
illuminating Bonaparte’s palace of the Tuileries.
Some of the emigrants, whose strength of body age has not impaired, or
whose vigour of mind misfortunes have not depressed, are now serving as
officers or soldiers under the Emperor of the French, after having for
years fought in vain for the cause of a King of France in the brave army
of Conde. Several are even doing duty in Bonaparte’s household troops,
where I know one who is a captain, and who, for distinguishing himself in
combating the republicans, received the Order of St. Louis, but is now
made a knight of Napoleon’s Republican Order, the Legion of Honour, for
bowing gracefully to Her Imperial Majesty the Empress. As he is a man of
real honour, this favour is not quite in its place; but I am convinced
that should one day an opportunity present itself, he will not miss it,
but prove that he has never been misplaced. Another emigrant who, after
being a page to the Duc d’Angouleme, made four campaigns as an officer of
the Uhlans in the service of the Emperor of Germany, and was rewarded
with the Military Order of Maria Theresa, is now a knight of the Legion
of Honour, and an officer of the Mamelukes of the Emperor of the French.
Four more emigrants have engaged themselves in the same corps as common
Mamelukes, after being for seven years volunteers in the legion of
Mirabeau, under the Prince de Conde. It were to be wished that the whole
of this favourite corps were composed of returned emigrants. I am sure
they would never betray the confidence of Napoleon, but they would also
never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.
While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or
ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de
R------, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat,
which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a
companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet
of Comte de Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for this choice and
preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be
transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a
coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the
wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant
assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a valuable present to Madame
Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not
included in the act of proscription against her father and brother.
I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But they are
proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last
three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!