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 to remove those whom she had duped.  The shocking anecdote of the Sardinian secretary, whom she swindled out of nearly a hundred thousand roubles, and on whom she afterwards persuaded her Imperial lover to inflict capital punishment, is too recent and too public to be unknown or forgotten.  A Russian nobleman has assured me that the number of unfortunate individuals whom her and her husband’s intrigues have caused to suffer capitally during 1800 and 1801 was forty-six; and that nearly three hundred persons besides, who could not or would not pay their extortionate demands, were exiled to Siberia during the same period of time.

You may, perhaps, think that a low woman who could produce such great and terrible events, must be mistress of natural charms, as well as of acquired accomplishments.  As I have already stated, she can have no pretensions to either, but she is extremely insinuating, sings tolerably well, has a fresh and healthy look, and possesses an unusually good share of cunning, presumption, and duplicity.  Her husband, also, everywhere took care to make her fashionable; and the vanity of the first of their dupes increased the number of her admirers and engaged the vanity of others in their turn to sacrifice themselves at her shrine.