Cambaceres has been severely reprimanded by the Emperor for showing too much partiality for the Royal Prussian Black Eagle, by wearing it in preference to the Imperial Legion of Honour.  He was given to understand that, except for four days in the year, the Imperial etiquette did not permit any subjects to display their knighthood of the Prussian Order.  In Madame Bonaparte’s last drawing-room, before His Imperial Majesty set out for the Rhine, he was ornamented with the Spanish, Neapolitan, Prussian, and Portuguese orders, together with those of the French Legion of Honour and of the Italian Iron Crown.  I have seen the Emperor Paul, who was also an amateur of ribands and stars, but never with so many at once.  I have just heard that the Grand Master of Malta has presented Napoleon with the Grand Cross of the Maltese Order.  This is certainly a negative compliment to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, “that the Grand Master, Commanders, Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more.”

I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies, that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc., are to be members.  The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are to be hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses, Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into this revolutionary sisterhood.  Had the Continent remained tranquil, it would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum.  I should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in petto.  Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of confidence, has been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that it is truly superb.  The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at six hundred thousand livres.

LETTER XXVI.

Paris, October, 1805.

My Lord:—­Since Bonaparte’s departure for Germany, fifteen individuals have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the—­Western Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple.  Their crime is not exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that they were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia, Sweden, and England to support his claims.