Some author has written that “want is the parent of industry, and wretchedness the mother of ingenuity.”  I know that you have often approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide.  How many have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final prospect of all their sufferings.

Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of his uncle’s porter.  Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all their business.  Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses.  I have seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry, and the other a Counsellor of Parliament.  Every, day you may bestow your penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp—­the one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant Marquis, a general under Louis XVI.  They, are usually placed, the one on the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand.  I am told one of the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies.  What a recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!

On the day of Bonaparte’s coronation, and a little before he set out with his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his hat with this inscription:  “I had sixty thousand livres rent—­I am eighty years of age, and I request alms.”  Many individuals, even some of Bonaparte’s soldiers, gave him their mite; but as soon as he was observed he was seized by the police agents, and has not since been heard of.  I am told his name is De la Roche, a ci-devant Chevalier de St. Louis, whose property was sold in 1793 as belonging to an emigrant, though at the time he was shut up here as a prisoner, suspected of aristocracy.  He has since for some years been a water-carrier; but his strength failing, he supported himself lately entirely by begging.  The value of the dress of one of Bonaparte’s running footmen might have been sufficient to relieve him for the probably short remainder of his days.  But it is more easy and agreeable in this country to bury undeserved want in dungeons than to renounce unnecessary and useless show to relieve it.  In the evening the remembrance of these sixty thousand livres of the poor Chevalier deprived me of all pleasure in beholding the sixty thousand lamps decorating and illuminating Bonaparte’s palace of the Tuileries.