Many have considered Bernadotte a revolutionary fanatic, but they are in
the wrong. Money engaged him in the cause of the Revolution, where the
first crimes he had perpetrated fixed him. The many massacres under
Jourdan the cut-throat, committed by him in the Court at Venaigin, no
doubt display a most sanguinary character. A lady, however, in whose
house in La Vendee he was quartered six months, has assured me that, to
judge from his conversation, he is not naturally cruel, but that his
imagination is continually tormented with the fear of gibbets which he
knows that his crimes have merited, and that, therefore, when he stabs
others, he thinks it commanded by the necessity of preventing others from
stabbing him. Were he sure of impunity, he would, perhaps, show humanity
as well as justice. Bernadotte is not, only a grand officer of the
Legion of Honour, but a knight of the Royal Prussian Order of the Black
Eagle.




LETTER IV.

PARIS, September, 1805.

MY LORD:--Bonaparte has taken advantage of the remark of Voltaire, in his
"Life of Louis XIV.," that this Prince owed much of his celebrity to the
well--distributed pensions among men of letters in France and in foreign
countries. According to a list shown me by Fontanes, the president of
the legislative corps and a director of literary pensions, even in your
country and in Ireland he has nine literary pensioners. Though the names
of your principal authors and men of letters are not unknown to me, I