In the autumn of 1796 he had a temporary, command of the dispersed remnants of Jourdan’s army, and in 1797 he was sent as a French commander to Holland.  In 1799, Bonaparte appointed him an Ambassador to the Court of Berlin; and in 1803 removed him in the same character to the Court of Madrid.  In Prussia, his talents did not cause him to be dreaded, nor his personal qualities make him esteemed.  In France, he is laughed at as a boaster, but not trusted as a warrior.  In Spain, he is neither dreaded nor esteemed, neither laughed at nor courted; he is there universally despised.  He studies to be thought a gentleman; but the native porter breaks through the veil of a ridiculously affected and outre politeness.  Notwithstanding the complacent grimaces of his face, the self-sufficiency of his looks, his systematically powdered and dressed hair, his showy dress, his counted and short bows, and his presumptuous conversation, teeming with ignorance, vulgarity, and obscenity, he cannot escape even the most inattentive observer.

The Ambassador, Beurnonville, is now between fifty and sixty years of age; is a grand officer of our Imperial Legion of Honour; has a brother who is a turnkey, and two sisters, one married to a tailor, and another to a merchant who cries dogs’ and cats’ meat in our streets.

LETTER IX.

Paris, September, 1805.

My lord:—­Bonaparte did not at first intend to take his wife with him when he set out for Strasburg; but her tears, the effect of her tenderness and apprehension for his person, at last altered his resolution.  Madame Napoleon, to tell the truth, does not like much to be in the power of Joseph, nor even in that of her son-in-law, Louis Bonaparte, should any accident make her a widow.

During the Emperor’s absence, the former is the President of the Senate, and the latter the Governor of this capital, and commander of the troops in the interior; so that the one dictates the Senatus Consultum, in case of a vacancy of the throne, and the other supports these civil determinations with his military forces.  Even with the army in Germany, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Murat, is as a pillar of the Bonaparte dynasty, and to prevent the intrigues and plots of other generals from an Imperial diadem; while, in Italy, his step-son, Eugene de Beauharnais, as a viceroy, commands even the commander-in-chief, Massena.  It must be granted that the Emperor has so ably taken his precautions that it is almost certain that, at first, his orders will be obeyed, even after his death; and the will deposited by him in the Senate, without opposition, carried into execution.  These very precautions evince, however, how uncertain and precarious he considers his existence to be, and that, notwithstanding addresses and oaths, he apprehends that the Bonaparte dynasty will not survive him.