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.

These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit.  Had the prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed without a trial.  I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments during our armies’ occupation elsewhere.  We have, nevertheless, two movable columns of six thousand men each in the country, or in its vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but a cruelty, to engage or allure the unfortunate people of these wretched countries into any plots, which, situated as affairs now are, would be productive of great and certain evil to them, without even the probability of any benefit to the cause of royalty and of the Bourbons.  I do not mean to say that there are not those who rebel against Bonaparte’s tyranny, or that the Bourbons have no friends; on the contrary, the latter are not few, and the former very numerous.  But a kind of apathy, the effect of unavailing resistance to usurpation and oppression, has seized on most minds, and annihilated what little remained of our never very great public spirit.  We are tired of everything, even of our existence, and care no more whether we are governed by a Maximilian Robespierre or by a Napoleon Bonaparte, by a Barras or by Louis XVIII.  Except, perhaps, among the military, or among some ambitious schemers, remnants of former factions, I do not believe a Moreau, a Macdonald, a Lucien Bonaparte, or any person exiled by the Emperor, and formerly popular, could collect fifty trusty conspirators in all France; at least, as long as our armies are victorious, and organized in their present formidable manner.  Should anything happen to our present chief, an impulse may be given to the minds now sunk down, and raise our characters from their present torpid state.