were open
to me; the private box of the prima donna, the editorial sanctum, the
dressing-room where the great actress received her chosen few, and
the little supper-table, at which a place would have been a boon to
royalty,--all were mine. To support myself, and maintain a condition
proportionate to my pretended rank, I labored immensely. I wrote for
no less than four of the great journals of Paris. I was the leading
political writer in the Bonapartist "Presse," the royalist in the
"Gazette de la Vendee," and the infuriated defender of the Girondins in
the terrible columns of "Le Drapeau de Pays," theatrical and literary
criticism being my walk in the pages of the "Avant Scene."

Two persons only were in my secret,--Sanson, the subeditor of the
"Presse," and Jostard, who was a royalist agent, and who paid with a
liberal hand all the advocates of the Bourbons. My intimate knowledge of
the secret history of party, my acquaintance with political characters
personally, and, above all, my information on England and English
topics, gave me enormous advantages, and many of my contributions
were attributed to persons high in political station, and speaking the
sentiments of authority. I was well versed in the slashing insolence
of the military style in which the Bonapartists wrote, and knew all the
cant of the Jesuit, as well as the chosen phraseology of the wildest
republican. In this way I attacked and replied to myself vindictively,
and even savagely. Assault and counter-attack, insulting demands and
still more insulting replies, issued forth each morning to amaze the
capital, and make men ask how long could such a polemic be sustained
without personal vengeance?

In my Bonapartist capacity I assailed Pitt unceasingly. It was the theme
of which that party never wearied, and in which all their hatred to
England could be carried without openly wounding the susceptibilities of
the nation. If I assailed the covert treachery of the English minister
by the increased activity in the dockyards during a state of peace, I
hailed that very sign in a Bourbonist article as an evidence that the
cause of the exiled family had not been abandoned in Great Britain;
while in the "Drapeau" I turned attention to the glorious struggle for
freedom then sustained by the blacks of St. Domingo under the chivalrous
guidance of Toussaint, openly declaring that with the negro lay at that
moment the whole destiny of all Europe.

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