confidential
counsellors, upwards of two hundred memoirs, for or against the Christian
religion, were presented to the First Consul by uninvited and volunteer
counsellors,--all differing as much from one another as the members of
his own Privy Council.

Many persons do Madame Bonaparte, the mother, the honour of supposing
that to her assiduous representations is principally owing the recall of
the priests, and the restoration of the altars of Christ. She certainly
is the most devout, or rather the most superstitious of her family, and
of her name; but had not Talleyrand and Portalis previously convinced
Napoleon of the policy of reestablishing a religion which, for fourteen
centuries, had preserved the throne of the Bourbons from the machinations
of republicans and other conspirators against monarchy, it is very
probable that her representations would have been as ineffective as her
piety or her prayers. So long ago as 1796 she implored the mercy of
Napoleon for the Roman Catholics in Italy; and entreated him to spare the
Pope and the papal territory, at the very time that his soldiers were
laying waste and ravaging the legacy of Bologna and of Ravenna, both
incorporated with his new-formed Cisalpine Republic; where one of his
first acts of sovereignty, in the name of the then sovereign people, was
the confiscation of Church lands and the sale of the estates of the
clergy.

Of the prelates who with Joseph Bonaparte signed the concordat, the
Cardinal Gonsalvi and the Bishop Bernier have, by their labours and
intrigues, not a little contributed to the present Church establishment,
in this country; and to them Napoleon is much indebted for the intrusion
of the Bonaparte, dynasty, among the houses of sovereign Princes. The
former, intended from his youth for the Church, sees neither honour in
this world, nor hopes for any blessing in the next, but exclusively from
its bosom and its doctrine. With capacity to figure as a country curate,
he occupies the post of the chief Secretary of State to the Pope; and
though nearly of the same age, but of a much weaker constitution than his
Sovereign, he was ambitious enough to demand Bonaparte's promise of
succeeding to the Papal See, and weak and wicked enough to wish and
expect to survive a benefactor of a calmer mind and better health than
himself. It was he who encouraged Bonaparte to require the presence of
Pius VII. in France, and who persuaded this weak pontiff to undertak