's Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A barber, and son
of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
to be hanged. The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his
fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family. He
was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand
livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the
Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a
commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders. In landed property, in
jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from
prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to
eight millions of livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and
galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.

LETTER XXII.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--You must often have been surprised at the immense wealth which,
from the best and often authentic information, I have informed you our
generals and public functionaries have extorted and possess; but the
catalogue of private rapine committed, without authority, by our
soldiers, officers, commissaries, and generals, is likewise immense, and
surpassing often the exactions of a legal kind that is to say, those
authorized by our Government itself, or by its civil and military
representatives. It comprehends the innumerable requisitions demanded
and enforced, whether as loans, or in provisions or merchandise, or in
money as an equivalent for both; the levies of men, of horses, oxen, and
carriages; corvees of all kinds; the emptying of magazines for the
service of our armies; in short, whatever was required for the
maintenance, a portion of the pay, and divers wants of those armies, from
the time they had posted themselves in Brabant, Holland, Italy,
Switzerland, and on either bank of the Rhine. Add to this the pillage of
public or private warehouses, granaries, and magazines, whether belonging
to individu