conviction that some other had
partaken of those favours for which he had so dearly paid. A countryman
of yours then showed himself with more noise than honour upon the scene,
and made his debut with a phaeton and four, which he presented to his
theatrical goddess, together with his own dear portrait, set round with
large and valuable diamonds. Madame Chevalier, however, soon afterwards
hearing that her English gallant had come over to Germany for economy,
and that his credit with his banker was nearly exhausted, had his
portrait changed for that of another and richer lover, preserving,
however, the diamonds; and she exposed this inconstancy even upon the
stage, by suspending, as if in triumph, the new portrait fastened on her
bosom. The Englishman, wishing to retrieve his phaeton and horses, which
he protested only to have lent his belle, found that she had put the
whole equipage into a kind of lottery, or raffle, to which all her
numerous friends had subscribed, and that an Altona Jew had won it.

The successor of your countryman was a Russian nobleman, succeeded in his
turn by a Polish Jew, who was ruined and discarded within three months.
She then became the property of the public, and, by her active industry,
during a stay of four years at Hamburg, she was enabled to remit to
France, before her departure for Russia, one million two hundred thousand
livres. Her popularity was, however, at that period, very much on the
decline, as she had stooped to the most indelicate means to collect
money, and to extort it from her friends and acquaintances. She had
always lists of subscriptions in her pocket; some with proposals to play
in her lotteries for trinkets unnecessary to her; others, to procure her,
by the assistance of subscribers, some trinkets which she wanted.

I suppose it to be no secret to you that the female agents of
Talleyrand's secret diplomacy are frequently more useful than those of
the other sex. I am told that Madame Rochechouart was that friend of our
Ministers who engaged Madame Chevalier in her Russian expedition, and who
instructed her how to act her parts well at St. Petersburg. I need not
repeat what is so well known, that, after this artful emissary had ruined
the domestic happiness of the Russian Monarch, she degraded him in his
political transactions, and became the indirect cause of his untimely
end, in procuring, for a bribe of fifty thousand roubles in money and
jewels, the recall of on