portant. We have details, indeed, of the difficulty of obtaining men, aud means of transport; but they are of no value. It is, however, a remarkable fact, that among the deficiencies of the levy of the Imperial Guards, in the arm of the Chasseurs alone, one of 1555 men is stated, because several of the departments did not contain individuals of the requisite height and age. The levy for all France was to be only of 12,000: the qualities necessary for a Chasseur are not very rare: to what a condition must the population of that country be reduced when one-eighth of such a levy fails' faute de sujets ayant les qualités requises!'

The section relative to the ministry of the interior is occupied with a very tedious history of a simple, though in one view, curious fact.

The city of Cherbourg, enriched by your bounties, called to a high destiny through the works ordered by your Majesty, comes to implore a favour which would crown all those she has already received: she is ambitious of bearing the name of her sovereign.

The Municipal Council, in declaring this wish, has, at the same time, expressed the desire of being permitted to convey it to your Majesty in the midst of your camps.

I take the liberty of laying before your Majesty the deliberations of the Municipal Council, and of beseeching your Majesty to make known to me your commands. May I flatter the city of Cherbourg with the hope of seeing its wish fulfilled? May I venture to authorize the departure of its deputation ?'-pp. 177, 178.

So writes the minister of the interior.

Then follow the copies from the registers of the proceedings of the Mayor's court; the ballot for the deputation; the vote of money to defray the expenses; in short a minute history, even down to francs and centimes, of the whole transaction.

We shall select two or three sentences from the address of these worthy citizens to their august master.

It was in the midst of camps and in the tumult of arms that your Majesty conceived the sublime idea of causing a great military port to be excavated in the rock of Cherbourg.'

More than a century ago a glorious but unfortunate event had impressed the necessity of having on the waters of the channel a port and a roadstead capable of sheltering the most numerous fleets: but the project was too bold not to fail under the weakness of the last dynasty; it required a soul accustomed to triumph over every obstacle to dare to undertake the subjugation of Nature herself, and to open gulphs where she had elevated mountains.'

Deign, Sire, not to despise it, and give to your city of Cherbourg a new pledge of the paternal affection with which you honour it, by permitting that, from the name of its creator, the city and port which

you

you have founded may bear henceforth the name of Napoleonbourg.pp. 181, 182.

us.

The monstrous impudence of these assertions almost confounds

The weakness of the last dynasty! Napoleon the creator of Cherbourg! It is well known to all who have ever heard of Cherbourg, that the plan, and, to a formidable degree, the execution of that plan, belonged to the old dynasty. Napoleon has added nothing to the idea, and less to the execution than twenty years would probably have produced in any other reign.

What then, our readers will ask, can have induced the inhabitants of Cherbourg voluntarily and gratuitously to approach Buonaparte with such base falsehoods? One of the intercepted private letters from M. Chaulienque to M. Le Comte Roederer (page 305) clears up the mystery. The voluntary and unprompted loyalty of the good city of Cherbourg required it seems to be quickened by an invitation from the minister of interior! in other words, the whole was an arranged piece of mummery in which the puppets of Cherbourg were forced to play the part which the police was pleased to assign to them; and this, we dare say, is the true history of all the addresses under which, for the last six months, the French press no less than the French people has groaned.

The department of Finance affords us but one letter,—it is the confidential report of the stock exchange to the Emperor; and it will seem to those who may have heard of certain late transactions in London, a strange coincidence that the channel of Buonaparte's stock-jobbing report should be one Berenger. Berenger however on the 29th September congratulates his master that the depreciation had at last stopped, (p. 183) and that the 5 per cents. which had gone down as far as 63, were beginning to rise.' We should like to know with what face Berenger reported to his imperial employer, that the 5 per cents. were sold (to the sound of the cannon that thundered his victories of Craon over Paris) at 491.

*

We have already observed upon the organised system of fraud and public deceit upon which, we hesitate not to repeat it, the throne of Buonaparte is built; we had before a perfect view of the system in its external appearance-we have now some of the details of the interior. The present government of France is the true reign of terror; on one side the base fawning or the sullen caution of the suspected; on the other the contemptuous protection, or the jealous vigilance of the suspicious. There is no trust in any man; no confidence any where: there is what the logicians might call a sorites of espionage.' The Empress Regent is watched by the Minister of Police, and the Minister himself by some still meaner agent, and

No. XI, Art. XIV. No. X, Art. VIII.

the

the latter again (for infinite are the degrees of baseness) by some more wretched and more confidential reptile; but all these reports are equally addressed to the despot himself, who alone sees the net that he has spread round them all, and can measure the links of that chain which binds together because it enslaves his empire.

He is the sun of the system of espionage;' all his tributary planets roll unerringly around him, occasionally eclipsing, but always balancing each other, and each, in its own little sphere, attended by obscure satellites which betray its position and its phases; or to use a more appropriate illustration,-France is a practical exemplification of Mr. Jeremy Bentham's pantoptical prison, in which the jailer (the most unhappy wretch of all) sits in the center of his transparent dominion, and sees to the utmost recesses of its crimes and its filthiness, all the proceedings of his aggregation of slaves. The poets give us a terrible idea of eternal solitude; but eternal solitude is paradise to society under such everlasting inspection. The pantopticon would soon become Bedlam, the keeper going mad first; and France herself could not have borne such a discipline, no, not for a week, if she had not been previously reduced to the lowest ebb of existence by the purging and bleeding of twenty years of revolution and war.

It is curious to find addressed to M. Le Baron Fain, Secrétaire intime of H. M. the Emperor and King,' such loose gossip with regard to 'H. M. the Empress and Queen,' as the following. Report of Wednesday, Sept. 29, 1813. Supposed chagrin of Her Majesty.-A report prevailed this morning that Her Majesty, the Empress Queen and Regent, had received no persons at St. Cloud; and as it was not added that Her Majesty was any way indisposed, the cause assigned was, that Her Majesty had received some unpleasant news from the army.

Journey of Her Majesty the Empress.-It is said that Her Majesty has a journey in immediate contemplation; and the prevalent report is, that it is Antwerp which Her Majesty designs to honour with her august presence. Some persons, who pretend to know, say it is Mentz.'p. 343.

It is evident that there was a daily report of this sort of stuff from the fellow, whoever he was, appointed by the Great Napoleon to watch the daughter of Austria, who, nevertheless, was so far removed from her circle as to doubt whether she was proceeding to the Scheldt or the Rhine, to Antwerp or Mentz!

His august brother Don Joseph Napoleon, King of Spain and of both the Indies, who lives at a little villa called Morfontaine, is, in spite of his total seclusion and aversion from public affairs, an object of espionage'-so keen is the appetite of suspicion.

The Minister of Police is the affectionate channel through which Buonaparte

Buonaparte receives news of his family; but what precisely the Police Minister says of Don Joseph we cannot discover, because it was necessary to write it in cypher: but how plain does not this cypher speak-that the Minister of Police has observed something in the King of Spain which he does not venture to communicate in the common mode to his Majesty's imperial brother!

M. Le Senateur Comte Roederer, in a private letter to M. Le Comte Dumas, tells him that he had passed two days at Morfontaine, (or as this great scholar chuses to call it, Mortefontaine,) and he gives a shrewd hint that poor Don Joseph knows that he is in 'surveillance.'

The King maintains himself strictly incognito from all the world, and receives neither ministers, nor senators, nor counsellors of state, nor military men; in short, nobody. You must perceive that his present situation, and the Emperor's absence, render this conduct, in some sort, necessary.'

Since the happy days, however, in which Roederer describes Joseph as 's'accommodant de la vie privée de Mortefontaine,' it has suited Buonaparte's purposes to drag the puppet from his retirement, and turn him into a reviewing general, a kind of chief of the staff of the new levies that defile through Paris. It is a picture ridiculous and yet not unaffecting to see this poor man-who has been an attorney, a commissary, a deputy to the assembly, a senator, a prince, a king of Naples, a king of Spain, and finally a countrygentleman buried in the deepest retirement,-hurried to the place du Carousel,' to perform the odious duties of a superintendant of the conscription.

A few instances more of the system of espionage.'

Every person who enters or departs from Paris is reported to the Emperor, and often by name.

A letter picked up in a hackney coach is transmitted for the perusal of his Imperial Majesty Napoleon the Great—

Holland. Libel.--A Commissary of Police at the Hague picked up in a public coach a paper, which seems to have been dropped out of the pocket of a passenger who was there before him.

'It was a Dutch libel, containing good wishes for the enemy, and

abuse of France.

This coach had conveyed some conscripts, and some guards of the company of reserve.

' Search

Search is making to discover which among them dropped this paper. p. 253.

A pedlar sells a caricature-more matter for the imperial ear.

Jura; Pedlar, Picture of the Pope.-A pedlar travelling through the canton of Arinthoz, Arrondissement de St. Claude, has been selling a picture of the Pope, represented with his hands chained.

it.

He had left this canton before the gendarmerie was informed of

It appears

that the local authorities took no steps against him. He is sought after.'-p. 255.

A poor writing-master at one of the parish schools hangs himself; the emperor must be made acquainted with it.

The Sieur L'Enfant, aged 20, writing-master at the Napoleon Lyceum, who lodged at No. 25, Cour de Commerce, hung himself in the parlour of his apartments. This young man was of a gloomy dispo

sition.'

We are however obliged to the police for one anecdote which it has intercepted;-the subject is Mademoiselle Bertin, long the most famous milliner in Europe; who, having adorned and turned the heads of all the fine ladies in France, lost her own and her life in a singular, and we think, an affecting manner.

"On the third Sunday of the fetes at St. Cloud, she made one among the immense multitude of spectators assembled to behold the Empress. Certain recollections crowded upon her memory, and her lively emotion bathed her cheeks in tears. Her head became giddy and heated with visions. She was brought back to her house, where she was seized with a violent fever. In her delirium, she incessantly repeated, “I have seen the Queen again--I have seen my benefactress once again. Nothing remains for me now but to die." On Thursday she gave up her last breath. Her name, which was for a long time associated with the ridiculous, will be rendered honourable by gratitude.'-p. 338.

6

Old Grétry the musician dies-the theatre Feydeau gives an entertainment to celebrate his obsequies. No collection of people without the Emperor's knowledge! the whole affair is detailed to his majesty! From three several spies he is informed that numbers were turned away from the door, for whom places could not be found. The very taste of the scenery is described; on the curtain was painted a sun, with the name of Grétry in the centre;' and general Count Hulin, governor of Paris, (an attendant, to speak softly, on the last moments of the Duke D'Enghein,) reports in his dispatch to the Emperor on this important subject, that for two days past all the world could talk of nothing else!' Merciful heaven! on the 27th and 28th of September, 1813, while Napoleon was consiguing to foreign and dishonourable graves,

300,000