PARIS, September, 1805.
MY LORD:--A general officer, who has just arrived from Italy, has assured
me that, so far from Bonaparte’s subjects on the other side of the Alps
being contented and attached to his person and Government, were a
victorious Austrian army to enter the plains of Lombardy a general
insurrection would be the consequence. During these last nine years the
inhabitants have not enjoyed a moment’s tranquillity or safety. Every
relation or favourite whom Napoleon wished to provide for, or to enrich,
he has saddled upon them as in free quarters; and since 1796, when they
first had the honour of our Emperor’s acquaintance, they have paid more
in taxes, in forced loans, requisitions, and extortions of every
description, than their ancestors or themselves had paid during the one
hundred and ninety-six preceding years.
Such is the public spirit, and such have been the sufferings of the
people in the ci-devant Lombardy; in Piedmont they are still worse off.
Having more national character and more fidelity towards their Sovereign
than their neighbours, they are also more cruelly treated. Their
governor, General De Menou, has caused most of the departments to be
declared under martial law, and without right to claim the protection of
our happy constitution. In every city or town are organized special
tribunals, the progeny of our revolutionary tribunals, against the
sentences of which no appeal can be made, though these sentences are
always capital ones. Before these, suspicion is evidence, and an
imprudent word is subject to the same punishment as a murderous deed.
Murmur is regarded as mutiny, and he who complains is shot as a
conspirator.
There exist only two ways for the wretched Piedmontese to escape these
legal assassinations. They must either desert their country or sacrifice
a part of their property. In the former case, if retaken, they are
condemned as emigrants; and in the latter they incur the risk that those
to whom they have already given a part of their possessions will also
require the remainder, and having obtained it, to enjoy in security the
spoil, will send them to the tribunals and to death. De Menou has a
fixed tariff for his protection, regulated according to the riches of
each person; and the tax-gatherers collect these arbitrary contributions
with the regular ones, so little pains are taken to conceal or to
disguise these robberies.
De Menou, by turns a nobleman and a sans-culotte, a Christian and a
Mussulman, is wicked and profligate, not from the impulse of the moment
or of any sudden gust of passion, but coldly and deliberately. He
calculates with sangfroid the profit and the risk of every infamous
action he proposes to commit, and determines accordingly. He owed some
riches and the rank of the major-general to the bounty of Louis XVI., but
when he considered the immense value of the revolutionary plunder, called
national property, and that those who confiscated could also promote, he
did not hesitate what party to take. A traitor is generally a coward; he
has everywhere experienced defeats; he was defeated by his Royalist
countrymen in 1793, by his Mahometan sectaries in 1800, and by your
countrymen in 1801.
Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one
Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are
obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection,
and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours. He has also in his
hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business
done. He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money,
and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have
the same privilege. Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of
the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of
those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit. All
the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying. He is a
grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
France, and to create in their place only a national one. Always an
incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
Alcoran.
The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First. If persons of
rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
of lowest birth and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not
incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.
The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections. Wealthy as well as
elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
his own conscience. Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
attempted to be put into practice. Returned to his own country, his
acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
with his religion, and with himself. In our Revolution he thought that
he saw the first approach towards the perfection of the human species,
and that it would soon make mankind as good and as regenerated in society
as was promised in books. With our own regenerators he extenuated the
crimes which sullied their work from its first page, and declared them
even necessary to make the conclusion so much the more complete. When,
therefore, Bonaparte, in 1796, entered the capital of Lombardy, Melzi was
among the first of the Italian nobility who hailed him as a deliverer.
The numerous vexations and repeated pillage of our Government, generals,
commissaries, and soldiers, did not abate his zeal nor alter his opinion.
“The faults and sufferings of individuals,” he said, “are nothing to the
goodness of the cause, and do not impair the utility of the whole.” To
him, everything the Revolution produced was the best; the murder of
thousands and the ruin of millions were, with him, nothing compared with
the benefit the universe would one day derive from the principles and
instruction of our armed and unarmed philosophers. In recompense for so
much complacency, and such great patriotism, Bonaparte appointed him, in
1797, a plenipotentiary from the Cisalpine Republic to the Congress at
Rastadt; and, in 1802, a vice-president of the Italian Republic. As Melzi
was a sincere and disinterested republican fanatic, he did not much
approve of the strides Bonaparte made towards a sovereignty that
annihilated the sovereignty of his sovereign people. In a conference,
however, with Talleyrand, at Lyons, in February, 1802, he was convinced
that this age was not yet ripe for all the improvements our philosophers
intended to confer on it; and that, to prevent it from retrogading to the
point where it was found by our Revolution, it was necessary that it
should be ruled by enlightened men, such as he and Bonaparte, to whom he
advised him by all means never to give the least hint about liberty and
equality. Our Minister ended his fraternal counsel with obliging Melzi
to sign a stipulation for a yearly sum, as a douceur for the place he
occupied.
The sweets of power shortly caused Melzi to forget both the tenets of his
philosophy and his schemes of regeneration. He trusted so much to the
promises of Bonaparte and Talleyrand, that he believed himself destined
to reign for life, and was, therefore, not a little surprised when he was
ordered by Napoleon the First to descend and salute Eugene de Beauharnais
as the deputy Sovereign of the Sovereign King of Italy. He was not
philosopher enough to conceal his chagrin, and bowed with such a bad
grace to the new Viceroy that it was visible he would have preferred
seeing in that situation an Austrian Archduke as a governor-general. To
soften his disappointment, Bonaparte offered to make him a Prince, and
with that rank indemnify him for breaking the promises given at Lyons,
where it is known that the influence of Melzi, more than the intrigues of
Talleyrand, determined the Italian Consulta in the choice of a president.
Immediately after Bonaparte’s return to France, Melzi left Milan, and
retired to an estate in Tuscany; from that place he wrote to Talleyrand a
letter full of reproach, and concluded by asking leave to pass the
remainder of his days in Spain among his relatives. An answer was
presented him by an officer of Bonaparte’s Gendarmes d’Elite, in which he
was forbidden to quit Italy, and ordered to return with the officer to
Milan, and there occupy his office of Arch-Chancellor to which he had
been nominated. Enraged at such treatment, he endeavoured to kill
himself with a dose of poison, but his attempt did not succeed. His
health was, however, so much injured by it that it is not supposed he can
live long. What, a lesson for reformers and innovators!