I have read and heard of these and other enormous accusations, and far be it from me to defend, extenuate, or even deny them.  But suppose all this infamy to be real, to be proved, to be authenticated, which it never has been, and, to its whole extent, I am persuaded, never can be—­what are the cruel and depraved acts of which Lucien has been accused to the enormities and barbarities of which Napoleon is convicted?  Is the poisoning a wife more criminal than the poisoning a whole hospital of wounded soldiers; or the assisting to kill some confined persons, suspected of being enemies, more atrocious than the massacre in cold blood of thousands of disarmed prisoners?  Is incest with a sister more shocking to humanity than the well-known unnatural pathic but I will not continue the disgusting comparison.  As long as Napoleon is unable to acquit himself of such barbarities and monstrous crimes, he has no right to pronounce Lucien unworthy to be called his brother; nor have Frenchmen, as long as they obey the former as a Sovereign, or the Continent, as long as it salutes him as such, any reason to despise the latter for crimes which lose their enormity when compared to the horrid perpetrations of his Imperial brother.

An elderly lady, a relation of Lucien’s wife, and a person in whose veracity and morality I have the greatest confidence, and for whom he always had evinced more regard than even for his own mother, has repeated to me many of their conversations.  She assures me that Lucien deplores frequently the want of a good and religious education, and the tempting examples of perversity he met with almost at his entrance upon the revolutionary scene.  He says that he determined to get rich ’per fas aut nefas’, because he observed that money was everything, and that most persons plotted and laboured for power merely to be enabled to gather treasure, though, after they had obtained both, much above their desert and expectation, instead of being satiated or even satisfied, they bustled and intrigued for more, until success made them unguarded and prosperity indiscreet, and they became with their wealth the easy prey of rival factions.  Such was the case of Danton, of Fabre d’Eglantine, of Chabot, of Chaumette, of Stebert, and other contemptible wretches, butchered by Robespierre and his partisans—­victims in their turn to men as unjust and sanguinary as themselves.  He had, therefore, laid out a different plan of conduct for himself.  He had fixed upon fifty millions of livres—­as the maximum he should wish for, and when that sum was in his possession, he resolved to resign all pretensions to rank and employment, and to enjoy ‘otium cum dignitate’.  He had kept to his determination, and so regulated his income that; with the expenses, pomp, and retinue of a Prince, he is enabled to make more persons happy and comfortable than his extortions have ruined or even embarrassed.  He now lives like a philosopher, and endeavours to forget the past, to delight in the present, and to be indifferent about futurity.  He chose, therefore, for a wife, a lady whom he loved and esteemed, in preference to one whose birth would have been a continual reproach to the meanness of his own origin.