scape 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 the daughter of a
tinker, by whom he had three children. This marriage, according to the
republican regulations, had only been celebrated by the municipality at
Ajaccio; Fesch, therefore, upon again entering the bosom of the Church,
left his municipal wife and children to shift for themselves, considering
himself still, according to the canonical laws, a bachelor. But Madame
Fesch, hearing, in 1801, of her ci-devant husband's promotion to the
Archbishopric of Lyons, wrote to him for some succours, being with her
children reduced to great misery. Madame Letitia Bonaparte answered her
letter, enclosing a draft for six hundred livres--informing her that the
same sum would be paid her every six months, as long as she continued
with her children to reside at Corsica, but that it would cease the
instant she left that island. Either thinking herself not sufficiently
paid for her discretion, or enticed by some enemy of the Bonaparte
family, she arrived secretly at Lyons in October last year, where she
remained unknown until the arrival of the Pope. On the first day His
Holiness gave there his public benediction, she found means to pierce the