A countryman of yours then showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene, and made his debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his theatrical goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with large and valuable diamonds.  Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards hearing that her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy, and that his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his portrait changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving, however, the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the stage, by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her bosom.  The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had put the whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which all her numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had won it.

The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.  She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry, during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand livres.  Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect money, and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances.  She had always lists of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play in her lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her, by the assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.

I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of Talleyrand’s secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of the other sex.  I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who instructed her how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg.  I need not repeat what is so well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined the domestic happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his political transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely end, in procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and jewels, the recall of one of the principal conspirators against the unfortunate Paul.

The wealth she plundered in the Russian capital, within the short period of twenty months, amounted to much above one million of roubles.  For money she procured impunity for crime, and brought upon innocence the punishment merited by guilt.  The scaffolds of Russia were bleeding, and the roads to Siberia crowded with the victims of the avarice of this female demon, who often promised what she was unable to perform, and, to silence complaint, added cruelty to fraud, and, after pocketing the bribe, resorted to the executioner