It might have been supposed that such renunciations, and such offerings, would have satiated ambition, as well as cupidity; but, though the Cabinet of Lisbon was in peace with the Cabinet of St. Cloud, the pretensions and encroachments of the latter left the former no rest.  While pocketing tributes it required commercial monopolies, and when its commerce was favoured, it demanded seaports to ensure the security of its trade.  Its pretensions rose in proportion to the condescensions of the State it, oppressed.  With the money and the value of the diamonds which Portugal has paid in loans, in contributions, in requisitions, in donations, in tributes, and in presents, it might have supported, during ten years, an army of one hundred thousand men; and could it then have been worse situated than it has been since, and is still at this moment?

But the manner of extorting, and the individuals employed to extort, were more humiliating to its dignity and independence than the extortions themselves were injurious to its resources.  The first revolutionary Ambassador Bonaparte sent thither evinced both his ingratitude and his contempt.

Few of our many upstart generals have more illiberal sentiments, and more vulgar and insolent manners, than General Lasnes.  The son of a publican and a smuggler, he was a smuggler himself in his youth, and afterwards a postilion, a dragoon, a deserter, a coiner, a Jacobin, and a terrorist; and he has, with all the meanness and brutality of these different trades, a kind of native impertinence and audacity which shocks and disgusts.  He seems to say, “I am a villain.  I know that I am so, and I am proud of being so.  To obtain the rank I possess I have respected no human laws, and I bid defiance to all Divine vengeance.  I might be murdered or hanged, but it is impossible to degrade me.  On a gibbet or in the palace of a Prince, seized by the executioner or dining with Sovereigns, I am, I will, and I must, always remain the same.  Infamy cannot debase me, nor is it in the power of grandeur to exalt me.”  General, Ambassador, Field-marshal, First Consul, or Emperor, Lasnes will always be the same polluted, but daring individual; a stranger to remorse and repentance, as well as to honour and virtue.  Where Bonaparte sends a banditto of such a stamp, he has resolved on destruction.

A kind of temporary disgrace was said to have occasioned Lasnes’s first mission to Portugal.  When commander of the consular guard, in 1802, he had appropriated to himself a sum of money from the regimental chest, and, as a punishment, was exiled as an Ambassador, as he said himself.  His resentment against Bonaparte he took care to pour out on the Regent of Portugal.  Without inquiring or caring about the etiquette of the Court of Lisbon, he brought the sans-culotte etiquette of the Court of the Tuileries with him, and determined to fraternize with a foreign and legitimate Sovereign, as he had done with his own sans-culotte friend and First Consul; and, what is the more surprising, he carried his point.  The Prince Regent not only admitted him to the royal table, but stood sponsor to his child by a wife who had been two years his mistress before he was divorced from his first spouse, and with whom the Prince’s consort, a Bourbon Princess and a daughter of a King, was also obliged to associate.