PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:--Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
vices, opinions are various, and even opposite. Most persons, who have
long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities. On the other
hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
rumours, which certainly are exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it
was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her
hand ten years ago; though insinuating, she was far from being handsome,
and had long passed the period of inspiring love by her charms. Her
husband’s conduct towards her may, therefore, be construed, perhaps, into
a proof of indifference towards the whole sex as much as into an evidence
of his affection towards her. As he knew who she was when he received
her from the chaste arms of Barras, and is not unacquainted with her
subsequent intrigues particularly during his stay in Egypt--policy may
influence a behaviour which has some resemblance to esteem. He may
choose to live with her, but it is impossible he can love her.
A lady, very intimate with Princesse Louis Bonaparte, has assured me
that, had it not been for Napoleon’s singular inclination for his
youthful stepdaughter, he would have divorced his wife the first year of
his consulate, and that indirect proposals on that subject had already
been made her by Talleyrand. It was then reported that Bonaparte had his
eyes fixed upon a Russian Princess, and that from the friendship which
the late Emperor Paul professed for him, no obstacles to the match were
expected to be encountered at St. Petersburg. The untimely end of this
Prince, and the supplications of his wife and daughter, have since
altered his intent, and Madame Napoleon and her children are now, if I
may use the expression, incorporated and naturalized with the Bonaparte
family.
But what has lately occurred here will better serve to show that
Bonaparte is neither averse nor indifferent to the sex. You read last
summer in the public prints of the then Minister of the Interior
(Chaptal) being made a Senator; and that he was succeeded by our
Ambassador at Vienna Champagny. This promotion was the consequence of a
disgrace, occasioned by his jealousy of his mistress, a popular actress,
Mademoiselle George, one of the handsomest women of this capital. He was
informed by his spies that this lady frequently, in the dusk of the
evening, or when she thought him employed in his office, went to the
house of a famous milliner in the Rue St. Honor, where, through a door in
an adjoining passage, a person, who carefully avoided showing his face,
always entered immediately before or after her, and remained as long as
she continued there. The house was then by his orders beset with spies,
who were to inform him the next time she went to the milliner. To be
near at hand, he had hired an apartment in the neighbourhood, where the
very next day her visit to the milliner’s was announced to him. While
his secretary, with four other persons, entered the milliner’s house
through the street door, Chaptal, with four of his spies, forced the door
of the passage open, which was no sooner done than the disguised gallant
was found, and threatened in the most rude manner by the Minister and his
companions. He would have been still worse used had not the unexpected
appearance of Duroc and a whisper to Chaptal put a stop to the fury of
this enraged lover. The incognito is said to have been Bonaparte
himself, who, the same evening, deprived Chaptal of his ministerial
portfolio, and would have sent him to Cayenne, instead of to the Senate,
had not Duroc dissuaded his Sovereign from giving an eclat to an affair
which it, would be best to bury in oblivion.
Chaptal has never from that day approached Mademoiselle George, and,
according to report, Napoleon has also renounced this conquest in favour
of Duroc, who is at least her nominal gallant. The quantity of jewels
with which she has recently been decorated, and displayed with so much
ostentation in the new tragedy, ‘The Templars’, indicate, however, a
Sovereign rather than a subject for a lover. And, indeed, she already
treats the directors of the theatre, her comrades, and even the public,
more as a real than a theatrical Princess. Without any cause whatever,
but from a mere caprice to see the camp on the coast, she set out,
without leave of absence, and without any previous notice, on the very
day she was to play; and this popular and interesting tragedy was put off
for three weeks, until she chose to return to her duty.
When complaint was made to the prefects of the palace, now the governors
of our theatres, Duroc said that the orders of the Emperor were that no
notice should be taken of this ‘etourderie’, which should not occur
again.
Chaptal was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt chemist at Montpellier,
having ruined himself in search after the philosopher’s stone. To
persons in such circumstances, with great presumption, some talents, but
no principles, the Revolution could not, with all its anarchy, confusion,
and crime, but be a real blessing, as Chaptal called it in his first
speech at the Jacobin Club. Wishing to mimic, at Montpellier, the taking
of the Bastille at Paris, he, in May, 1790, seduced the lower classes and
the suburbs to an insurrection, and to an attack on the citadel, which
the governor, to avoid all effusion of blood, surrendered without
resistance. He was denounced by the municipality to the National
Assembly, for these and other plots and attempts, but Robespierre and
other Jacobins defended him, and he escaped even imprisonment. During
1793 and 1794, he monopolized the contract for making and providing the
armies with gunpowder; a favour for which he paid Barrere, Carnot, and
other members of the Committee of Public Safety, six millions of
livres--but by which he pocketed thirty-six millions of livres--himself.
He was, under the Directory, menaced with a prosecution for his pillage,
but bought it off by a douceur to Rewbel, Barras, and Siyes. In 1799, he
advanced Bonaparte twelve millions of livres--to bribe adherents for the
new Revolution he meditated, and was, in recompense, instead of interest,
appointed first Counsellor of State; and when Lucien Bonaparte, in
September, 1800, was sent on an embassy to Spain, Chaptal succeeded him
in the Ministry of the Interior. You may see by this short account that
the chemist Chaptal has, in the Revolution, found the true philosophical
stone. He now lives in great style, and has, besides three wives alive
(from two of whom he has been divorced), five mistresses, with each a
separate establishment. This Chaptal is regarded here as the most moral
character that has figured in our Revolution, having yet neither
committed a single murder nor headed any of our massacres.