s contemporaries, and was well acquainted with
the moral characters of his revolutionary countrymen. He addressed
himself, therefore, to Merlin of Douai, Bonaparte's Imperial
attorney-general and commander of his Legion of Honour; who, for a bribe
of fifty thousand livres--obtained for him, after he had been defeated in
every other court, a judgment in his favour, in the tribunal of
cassation, under the sophistical conclusion that all emigrants, being,
according to law, considered as politically dead, a will in the name of
any one of them was merely a pious fraud to preserve the property in the
family.

This Merlin is the son of a labourer of Anchin, and was a servant of the
Abbey of the same name. One of the monks, observing in him some
application, charitably sent him to be educated at Douai, after having
bestowed on him some previous education. Not satisfied with this
generous act, he engaged the other monks, as well as the chapter of
Cambray, to subscribe for his expenses of admission as an attorney by the
Parliament of Douai, in which situation the Revolution found him. By his
dissimulation and assumed modesty, he continued to dupe his benefactors;
who, by their influence, obtained for him the nomination as
representative of the people to our First National Assembly. They soon,
however, had reason to repent of their generosity. He joined the Orleans
faction and became one of the most persevering, violent, and cruel
persecutors of the privileged classes, particularly of the clergy, to
whom he was indebted for everything. In 1792 he was elected a member of
the National Convention, where he voted for the death of his King. It was
he who proposed a law (justly called, by Prudhomme, the production of the
deliberate homicide Merlin) against suspected persons; which was decreed
on the 17th of September, 1793, and caused the imprisonment or
proscription of two hundred thousand families. This decree procured him
the appellation of Merlin Suspects and of Merlin Potence. In 1795 he was
appointed a Minister of Police, and soon afterwards a Minister of
Justice. After the revolution in favour of the Jacobins of the 4th of
September, 1797, he was made a director, a place which he was obliged by
the same Jacobins to resign, in June, 1799. Bonaparte expressed, at
first, the most sovereign contempt for this Merlin, but on account of one
of his sons, who was his aide-de-camp, he was appointed by him, when
First Consul, his