urat. Others, however, declare that
his father was an honest cobbler, very superstitious, residing at
Bastide, near Cahors, and destined his son to be a Capuchin friar, and
that he was in his novitiate when the Revolution tempted him to exchange
the frock of the monk for the regimentals of a soldier. In what manner,
or by what achievements, he gained promotion is not certain, but in 1796
he was a chief of brigade, and an aide-de-camp of Bonaparte, with whom he
went to Egypt, and returned thence with him, and who, in 1801, married
him to his sister, Maria Annunciade, in 1803 made him a governor of
Paris, and in 1804 a Prince.

The wealth which Murat has collected, during his military service, and by
his matrimonial campaign, is rated at upwards of fifty millions of
livres. The landed property he possesses in France alone has cost him
forty--two millions--and it is whispered that the estates bought in the
name of his wife, both in France and Italy, are not worth much less. A
brother-in-law of his, who was a smith, he has made a legislator; and an
uncle, who was a tailor, he has placed in the Senate. A cousin of his,
who was a chimneysweeper, is now a tribune; and his niece, who was an
apprentice to a mantua-maker, is now married to one of the Emperor's
chamberlains. He has been very generous to all his relations, and would
not have been ashamed, even, to present his parents at the Imperial
Court, had not the mother, on the first information of his princely rank,
lost her life, and the father his senses, from surprise and joy. The
millions are not few that he has procured his relatives an opportunity to
gain. His brother-in-law, the legislator, is worth three millions of
livres.

It has been asserted before, and I repeat it again:

"It is avarice, and not the mania of innovation, or the jargon of
liberty, that has led, and ever will lead, the Revolution--its promoters,
its accomplices, and its instruments. Wherever they penetrate, plunder
follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but
the means. The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence."

General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret deeds
of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice. It was under his
private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined