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Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London) — Volume 4 by Stewarton
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from France to form pleasure camps in Italy, and four millions more was
requisite for the forming and support of these encampments during two
months, and the Emperor distributed among the officers and men composing
them two million livres' worth of rings, watches, snuff-boxes, portraits
set with diamonds, stars, and other trinkets, as evidences of His
Majesty's satisfaction with their behaviour, presence, and performances.

These troops were under the command of Bonaparte's Field-marshal,
Jourdan, a general often mentioned in the military annals of our
revolutionary war. During the latter part of the American war, he served
under General Rochambeau as a common soldier, and obtained in 1783, after
the peace, his discharge. He then turned a pedlar, in which situation
the Revolution found him. He had also married, for her fortune, a lame
daughter of a tailor, who brought him a fortune of two thousand
livres--from whom he has since been divorced, leaving her to shift for
herself as she can, in a small milliner's shop at Limoges, where her
husband was born in 1763.

Jourdan was among the first members and pillars of the Jacobin Club
organized in his native town, which procured him rapid promotion in the
National Guards, of whom, in 1792, he was already a colonel. His known
love of liberty and equality induced the Committee of Public Safety, in
1793, to appoint him to the chief command of the armies of Ardennes and
of the North, instead of Lamarche and Houchard. On the 17th of October
the same year, he gained the victory of Wattignies, which obliged the
united forces of Austria, Prussia, and Germany to raise the siege of
Maubeuge. The jealous Republican Government, in reward, deposed him and
appointed Pichegru his successor, which was the origin of that enmity and
malignity with which Jourdan pursued this unfortunate general, even to
his grave. He never forgave Pichegru the acceptance of a command which
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