PARIS, October, 1805.
MY LORD:--The Counsellor of State and intendant of the Imperial civil
list, Daru, paid for the place of a commissary-general of our army in
Germany the immense sum of six millions of livres--which was divided
between Madame Bonaparte (the mother), Madame Napoleon Bonaparte,
Princesse Louis Bonaparte, Princesse Murat and the Princesse Borghese. By
this you may conclude in what manner we intend to treat the wretched
inhabitants of the other side of the Rhine. This Daru is too good a
calculator and too fond of money to throw away his expenses; he is master
of a great fortune, made entirely by his arithmetical talents, which have
enabled him for years to break all the principal gambling-banks on the
Continent, where he has travelled for no other purpose. On his return
here, he became the terror of all our gamesters, who offered him an
annuity of one hundred thousand livres--not to play; but as this sum
would have been deducted from what is weekly paid to Fouche, this
Minister sent him an order not to approach a gambling-table, under pain
of being transported to Cayenne. He obeyed, but the bankers soon
experienced that he had deputies, and for fear that even from the other
side of the Atlantic he might forward his calculations hither, Fouche
recommended him, for a small douceur, to the office of an intendant of
Bonaparte’s civil list, upon condition of never, directly or indirectly,
injuring our gambling-banks. He has kept his promise with regard to
France, but made, last spring, a gambling tour in Italy and Germany,
which, he avows, produced him nine millions of livres. He always points,
but never keeps a bank. He begins to be so well known in many parts of
the Continent, that the instant he arrives all banks are shut up, and
remain so until his departure. This was the case at Florence last April.
He travels always in style, accompanied by two mistresses and four
servants. He is a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
been felt and lamented for these ten years past. Augereau, Bernadotte,
Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.
In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary
brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a
common soldier before the Revolution. But he has this merit above
Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and
finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign
countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting,
he was also again taken and again flogged. Italy has, indeed, since he
has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than
Germany. Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he
butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with
blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion
had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers of an assassin, or
decorate the bosom of a harlot. The outrages he committed during 1796
and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even
were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable
to be believed. He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity
into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into dens
of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided
himself. In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the
sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or
imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he
paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night at Pavia, with a
draft for fifty louis d’or on the municipality of that town, who dared
not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to
Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.
The general and grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A barber, and son
of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
to be hanged. The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his
fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family. He
was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand
livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the
Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a
commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders. In landed property, in
jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from
prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to
eight millions of livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and
galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.