he who, on the 10th of
August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of
their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act. After
he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties
and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a
Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and
afterwards as a Senator. His own and only daughter died in a
miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural
parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his
father's baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to
marry.

With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one
period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the
preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as
well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a
constitutional Government. At another time he wrote that, as it was
impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness
of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the
liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one
wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to
preserve. To show his indifference about his own character, as well as
about the opinion of the public, these opposite declarations were
inserted in one of our daily papers, and both were signed "Roederer."

In 1789, he was indebted above one million two hundred thousand
livres--and he now possesses national property purchased for seven
millions of livres--and he avows himself to be worth three millions more
in money placed in our public funds. He often says, laughingly, that he
is under great obligations to Robespierre, whose guillotine acquitted in
one day all his debts. All his creditors, after being denounced for
their aristocracy, were murdered en masse by this instrument of death.

Of all the old beaux and superannuated libertines whose company I have
had the misfortune of not being able to avoid, Roederer is the most
affected, silly, and disgusting. His wrinkled face, and effeminate and
childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his
confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear
such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and
enervated person, that I have frequently been