Besides his Turkish wife, De Menou has in the same house with her one Italian and two French girls, who live openly with him, but who are obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection, and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours.  He has also in his hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business done.  He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money, and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have the same privilege.  Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit.  All the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying.  He is a grand officer of Bonaparte’s Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in France, and to create in their place only a national one.  Always an incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the Alcoran.

The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First.  If persons of rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors, dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud, of lowest birth and basest morals.  If their revolutionary mania were not incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.

The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee, Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections.  Wealthy as well as elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity, enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from his own conscience.  Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical works; and he had neither natural