The common people, and the middle classes, are neither so ostentatiously devout, nor so basely perverse.  They go to church as to the play, to gape at others, or to be stared at themselves; to pass the time, and to admire the show; and they do not conceal that such is the object of their attendance.  Their indifference about futurity equals their ignorance of religious duties.  Our revolutionary charlatans have as much brutalized their understanding as corrupted their hearts.  They heard the Grand Mass said by the Pope with the same feelings as they formerly heard Robespierre proclaim himself a high priest of a Supreme Being; and they looked at the Imperial processions with the same insensibility as they once saw the daily caravans of victims passing for execution.

Even in Bonaparte’s own guard, and among the officers of his household troops, several examples of rigour were necessary before they would go to any place of worship, or suffer in their corps any almoners; but now, after being drilled into a belief of Christianity, they march to the Mass as to a parade or to a review.  With any other people, Bonaparte would not so easily have changed in two years the customs of twelve, and forced military men to kneel before priests, whom they but the other day were encouraged to hunt and massacre like wild beasts.

On the day of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin, a company of gendarmes d’Elite, headed by their officers, received publicly, and by orders, the sacrament; when the Abbe Frelaud approached Lieutenant Ledoux, he fell into convulsions, and was carried into the sacristy.  After being a little recovered, he looked round him, as if afraid that some one would injure him, and said to the Grand Vicar Clauset, who inquired the cause of his accident and terror:  “Good God! that man who gave me, on the 2d of September, 1792, in the convent of the Carenes, the five wounds from which I still suffer, is now an officer, and was about to receive the sacrament from my hands.”  When this occurrence was reported to Bonaparte, Ledoux was dismissed; but Abbe Frelaud was transported, and the Grand Vicar Clauset sent to the Temple, for the scandal their indiscretion had caused.  This act was certainly as unjust towards him who was bayoneted at the altar, as towards those who served the altar under the protection of the bayonets.

LETTER XXV.

Paris, August, 1805.

My lord:—­Although the seizure of Sir George Rumbold might in your country, as well as everywhere else, inspire indignation, it could nowhere justly excite surprise.  We had crossed the Rhine seven months before to seize the Duc d’Enghien; and when any prey invited, the passing of the Elbe was only a natural consequence of the former outrage, of audacity on our part, and of endurance or indifference on the part of other Continental States.  Talleyrand’s note at Aix-la-Chapelle had also informed Europe that we had adopted a new and military diplomacy, and, in confounding power with right, would respect no privileges at variance with our ambition, interest or, suspicions, nor any independence it was thought useful or convenient for us to invade.