be counted in England, where gentlemen were, therefore, not so easily satisfied; and that a woman regarded by them only as an ordinary person would pass for a first-rate beauty among French beaux, on account of the great scarcity of them here.

"You must excuse the Marquis, ladies," said I, in my turn; "he has not been in love in England. There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the whole sex:

"I apply to M. de Talleyrand," answered the Marquis; "he has been longer in England than myself."

"I am not a competent judge," retorted the Minister; "Madame de Talleyrand is here, and has not the honour of being a Frenchwoman; but I dare say the Marquis will agree with me that in no society in the British Islands, among a dozen of ladies, has he counted more beauties, or admired greater accomplishments or more perfection."

To this the Marquis bowed assent, saying that in all his general remarks the party present, of course, was not included. All the ladies, who were well acquainted with his absent and blundering conversation, very good-humouredly laughed, and Madame Murat assured him that if he would give her the address of the belle in France who had transformed a gallant Frenchman into a chevalier of British beauty, she would attempt to make up their difference. "She is no more, Madame," said the Marquis; "she was, unfortunately, guillotined two days before——" the father of Madame Louis, he was going to say, when Talleyrand interrupted him with a significant look, and said, "Before the fall of Robespierre, you mean."

From these and other traits of the Marquis's character, you may see that he erred more from absence of mind than any premeditation to give offence. He received, however, the next morning, a lettre de cachet from Fouche, which exiled him to Blois, and forbade him to return to Paris without further orders from the Minister of Police. I know, from high authority, that to the interference of Princesse Louis alone is he indebted for not being shut up in the Temple, and, perhaps, transported to our colonies, for having depreciated the power and means of France to invade England. I am perfectly convinced that none of those who spoke on the subject of the invasion expressed anything but what they really thought; and that, of the whole party, none, except Talleyrand, the Marquis, and myself, entertained the least doubt of the success of the expedition; so firmly did they rely on the former fortune of Bonaparte, his boastings, and his assurance.

After dinner I had an opportunity of conversing for ten minutes with Madame Louis Bonaparte, whom I found extremely amiable, but I fear that she is not happy. Her husband, though the most stupid, is, however, the best tempered of the Bonapartes, and seemed very attentive and attached to her. She was far advanced in her pregnancy, and looked, notwithstanding, uncommonly well. I have heard that Louis is inclined to inebriation, and when in that situation is very brutal to his wife, and very indelicate with other women before her eyes. He intrigues with her own servants and the number of his illegitimate children is said to be as many as his years. She asked General Murat to present me and recommend me to Fouche, which he did with great politeness; and the Minister assured me that he should be glad to see me at his hotel, which I much doubt. The last words Madame Louis said to me, in showing me a princely crown, richly set with diamonds, and given her by her brother-in-law, Napoleon, were, "Alas! grandeur is not always happiness, nor the most elevated the most fortunate lot."

LETTER XVII.

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