also
never swear allegiance to another Bonaparte.

While the humbled remnants of one sex of the ci-devant privileged classes
are thus or worse employed, many persons of the other sex have preferred
domestic servitude to courtly splendour, and are chambermaids or
governesses, when they might have been Maids of Honour or
ladies-in-waiting. Mademoiselle de R------, daughter of Marquis de
R------, was offered a place as a Maid of Honour to Princesse Murat,
which she declined, but accepted at the same time the offer of being a
companion of the rich Madame Moulin, whose husband is a ci-devant valet
of Comte de Brienne. Her father and brother suffered for this choice and
preference, which highly offended Bonaparte, who ordered them both to be
transported to Guadeloupe, under pretence that the latter had said in a
coffee-house that his sister would rather have been the housemaid of the
wife of a ci-devant valet, than the friend of the wife of a ci-devant
assassin and Septembrizer. It was only by a valuable present to Madame
Bonaparte from Madame Moulin, that Mademoiselle de B----- was not
included in the act of proscription against her father and brother.

I am sorry to say that returned emigrants have also been arrested for
frauds and debts, and even tried and convicted of crimes. But they are
proportionally few, compared with those who, without support, and perhaps
without hope, and from want of resignation and submission to the will of
Providence, have, in despair, had recourse to the pistol or dagger, or in
the River Seine buried their remembrance both of what they have been and
of what they were. The suicides of the vicious capital are reckoned upon
an average to amount to one hundred in the month; and for these last
three years, one-tenth, at least, have been emigrants of both sexes!

LETTER VI.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Nobody here, except his courtiers, denies that Bonaparte is
vain, cruel, and ambitious; but as to his private, personal, or domestic
vices, opinions are various, and even opposite. Most persons, who have
long known him, assert that women are his aversion; and many anecdotes
have been told of his unnatural and horrid propensities. On the other
hand, his seeming attachment to his wife is contradictory to these
rumours, which certainly are exaggerated. It is true, indeed, that it
was to oblige Barras, and to obtain her fortune, that he accepted of her
hand ten years ago; though