nothing left but some furniture, and her subsistence
depended upon what she got by letting furnished lodgings. Mischance
brought three young Irishmen to her house, who pretended to be in daily
expectation of remittances from their country, and of a pension from
Bonaparte. During six months she not only lodged and supported them, but
embarrassed herself to procure them linen and a decent apparel. At last
she was informed that each of, them had been allowed sixty livres--in the
month, and that arrears had been paid them for nine months. Their debt
to her was above three thousand livres--but the day after she asked for
payment they decamped, and one of them persuaded her daughter, a girl of
fourteen, to elope with him, and to assist him in robbing her mother of
all her plate.--He has, indeed, been since arrested and sentenced to the
galleys for eight years; but this punishment neither restored the
daughter her virtue nor the mother her property. The other two denied
their debts, and, as she had no other evidence but her own scraps of
accounts, they could not be forced to pay; their obdurate effrontery and
infamy, however, excited such an indignation in the judges, that they
delivered them over as swindlers to the Tribunal Correctional; and the
Minister of Police ordered them to be transported as rogues and vagabonds
to the colonies. The daughter died shortly after, in consequence of a
miscarriage, and the mother did not survive her more than a month, and
ended her days in the Hotel Dieu, one of our common hospitals. Thus,
these depraved young men ruined and murdered their benefactress and her
child; and displayed, before they were thirty, such a consummate villainy
as few wretches grown hoary in vice have perpetrated. This act of
scandalous notoriety injured the Irish reputation very much in this
country; for here, as in many other places, inconsiderate people are apt
to judge a whole nation according to the behaviour of some few of its
outcasts.

LETTER XXXV.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--The plan of the campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible
to all our military men--not on account of its profundity, but on account
of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances,
half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike
strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the
Bavarian army, and to enter Suabia and yet acknowledge the neutrality of
Swit