verella, Somaglia, Pacca,
Brancadoro, Litta, Gabrielli, Spina, Despuig, and Galefli, are said to
have shared the greatest part; and from the most violent
anti-Bonapartists, they instantly became the strenuous adherents of
Napoleon the First, who, of course, cannot be ignorant of their real
worth.

The person entrusted by Bonaparte and Talleyrand to carry on at Rome the
intrigue which sent Pius VII. to cross the Alps was Cardinal Fesch,
brother of Madame Letitia Bonaparte by the side of her mother, who, in a
second marriage, chose a pedlar of the name of Nicolo Fesch, for her
husband.

Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was born at Ajaccio, in Corsica, on the 8th of
March, 1763, and was in his infancy received as a singing boy (enfant de
choeur) in a convent of his native place. In 1782, whilst he was on a
visit to some of his relations in the Island of Sardinia, being on a
fishing party some distance from shore, he was, with his companions,
captured by an Algerine felucca, and carried a captive to Algiers. Here
he turned Mussulman, and, until 1790, was a zealous believer in, and
professor of, the Alcoran. In that year he found an opportunity to
escape from Algiers, and to return to Ajaccio, when he abjured his
renegacy, exchanged the Alcoran for the Bible, and, in 1791, was made a
constitutional curate, that is to say, a revolutionary Christian priest.
In 1793, when even those were proscribed, he renounced the sacristy of
his Church for the bar of a tavern, where, during 1794 and 1795, he
gained a small capital by the number and liberality of his English
customers. After the victories of his nephew Napoleon in Italy during
the following year, he was advised to reassume the clerical habit, and
after Napoleon's proclamation of a First Consul, he was made Archbishop
of Lyons. In 1802, Pius VII. decorated him with the Roman purple, and he
is now a pillar of the Roman faith, in a fair way of seizing the Roman
tiara. If letters from Rome can be depended upon, Cardinal Fesch, in the
name of the Emperor of the French, informed His Holiness the Pope that he
must either retire to a convent or travel to France, either abdicate his
own sovereignty, or inaugurate Napoleon the First a Sovereign of France.
Without the decision of the Sacred College, effected in the manner
already stated, the majority of the faithful believe that this pontiff
would have preferred obscurity to disgrace.

While Joseph Fesch was a master of a tavern he married th