[Footnote 25:  “Our plenipotentiaries were massacred at Rastadt, and notwithstanding the indignation expressed by all France at that atrocity, vengeance was still very tardy in overtaking the assassins.  The two Councils were the first to render a melancholy tribute of honor to the victims.  Who that saw that ceremony ever forgot its solemnity?  Who can recollect without emotion the religious silence which reigned throughout the hall and galleries when the vote was put?  The president then turned towards the curule chairs of the victims, on which lay the official costume of the assassinated representatives, covered with black crape, bent over them, pronounced the names of Roberjeot and Bonnier, and added, in a voice, the tone of which was always thrilling, Assassinated at the Congress of Rastadt.  Immediately all the representatives responded, May their blood be upon the heads of their murderers.”—­Duchess of Abrantes, p. 206.]

Napoleon was at this time in Egypt, endeavoring to assail England, the most formidable foe of France, in India, the only vulnerable point which could be reached.  Fifty thousand Russians, in a single band, were marching through Germany to cooeperate with the Austrians on the French frontiers.  The more polished Germans were astonished at the barbaric character of their allies.  A Russian officer, in a freak of passion, shot an Austrian postilion, and then took out his purse and enquired of the employer of the postilion what damage was to be paid, as coolly as if he had merely killed a horse or a cow.  Even German law was compelled to wink at such outrages, for an ally so essential as Russia it was needful to conciliate at all hazards.  Paul deemed himself the most illustrious monarch of Europe, and resolved that none but a Russian general should lead the allied armies.  The Germans, on the contrary, regarded the Russians as barbarians of wolfish courage and gigantic strength, but far too ignorant of military science to be entrusted with the plan of a campaign.  After much contention the Emperor of Austria was compelled to yield, and an old Russian general, Suwarrow, was placed in command of the armies of the two most powerful empires then on the globe.

And who was Suwarrow?  Behold his portrait.  Born in a village of the Ukraine, the boy was sent by his father, an army officer, to the military academy at St. Petersburg, whence he entered the army as a common soldier, and ever after, for more than sixty years, he lived in incessant battles in Sweden, Turkey, Poland.  In the storm of Ismael, forty thousand men, women and, children fell in indiscriminate massacre at his command.  In the campaign which resulted in the partition of Poland, twenty thousand Poles were cut down by his dragoons.  A stranger to fear, grossly illiterate, and with no human sympathies, he appears on the arena but as a thunderbolt of war.  Next to the emperor Paul, he was perhaps the most fantastic man on the continent.  In a war with