This trick was carried on for a length of time, but no progress was made in repairing the street.  I complained greatly of the delay, even before I was aware of its cause, for the street led to a country-house I had near Altona, whither I went daily.  The officers of the customs at length perceived that the work did not proceed, and one fine morning the sugar-carts were stopped and seized.  Another expedient was then to be devised.

Between Hamburg and Altona there was a little suburb situated on the right bank of the Elbe.  This suburb was inhabited, by sailors, labourers of the port, and landowners.  The inhabitants were interred in the cemetery of Hamburg.  It was observed that funeral processions passed this way more frequently than usual.  The customhouse officers, amazed at the sudden mortality of the worthy inhabitants of the little suburb, insisted on searching one of the vehicles, and on opening the hearse it was found to be filled with sugar, coffee, vanilla, indigo, etc.  It was necessary to abandon this expedient, but others were soon discovered.

Bonaparte was sensitive, in an extraordinary degree, to all that was said and thought of him, and Heaven knows how many despatches I received from headquarters during the campaign of Vienna directing me not only to watch the vigilant execution of the custom-house laws, but to lay an embargo on a thing which alarmed him more than the introduction of British merchandise, viz. the publication of news.  In conformity with these reiterated instructions I directed especial attention to the management of the ‘Correspondant’.  The importance of this journal, with its 60,000 readers, may easily be perceived.  I procured the insertion of everything I thought desirable:  all the bulletins, proclamations, acts of the French Government, notes of the ‘Moniteur’, and the semi-official articles of the French journals:  these were all given ‘in extenso’.  On the other hand, I often suppressed adverse news, which, though well known, would have received additional weight from its insertion in so widely circulated a paper.  If by chance there crept in some Austrian bulletin, extracted from the other German papers published in the States of the Confederation of the Rhine, there was always given with it a suitable antidote to destroy, or at least to mitigate, its ill effect.  But this was not all.  The King of Wurtemberg having reproached the ‘Correspondant’, in a letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, with publishing whatever Austria wished should be made known, and being conducted in a spirit hostile to the good cause, I answered these unjust reproaches by making the Syndic censor prohibit the Hamburg papers from inserting any Austrian order of the day, any Archduke’s bulletins, any letter from Prague; in short, anything which should be copied from the other German journals unless those articles had been inserted in the French journals.

My recollections of the year 1809 at Hamburg carry me back to the celebration of Napoleon’s fete, which was on the 15th of August, for he had interpolated his patron saint in the Imperial calendar at the date of his birth.  The coincidence of this festival with the Assumption gave rise to adulatory rodomontades of the most absurd description.  Certainly the Episcopal circulars under the Empire would form a curious collection.