one of your
countrymen has purchased it for one hundred and fifty louis d'or.

LETTER V.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Those who only are informed of the pageantry of our Court, of
the expenses of our courtiers, of the profusion of our Emperor, and of
the immense wealth of his family and favourites, may easily be led to
believe that France is one of the happiest and moat prosperous countries
in Europe. But for those who walk in our streets, who visit our
hospitals, who count the number of beggars and of suicides, of orphans
and of criminals, of prisoners and of executioners, it is a painful
necessity to reverse the picture, and to avow that nowhere,
comparatively, can there be found so much collective misery. And it is
not here, as in other States, that these unfortunate, reduced, or guilty
are persons of the lowest classes of society; on the contrary, many, and,
I fear, the far greater part, appertain to the ci-devant privileged
classes, descended from ancestors noble, respectable, and wealthy, but
who by the Revolution have been degraded to misery or infamy, and perhaps
to both.

When you stop but for a moment in our streets to look at something
exposed for sale in a shop-window, or for any other cause of curiosity or
want, persons of both sexes, decently dressed, approach you, and whisper
to you: "Monsieur, bestow your charity on the Marquis, or Marquise--on
the Baron or Baroness, such a one, ruined by the Revolution;" and you
sometimes hear names on which history has shed so brilliant a lustre
that, while you contemplate the deplorable reverses of human greatness,
you are not a little surprised to find that it is in your power to
relieve with a trifle the wants of the grandson of an illustrious
warrior, before whom nations trembled, or of the granddaughter of that
eminent statesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some
few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
tyranny.

Some author has written that "want is the parent of industry, and
wretchedness the mother of ingenuity." I know that you have often
approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
the pride or a