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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 6 by Stewarton
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obliged to keep themselves by selling their influence and protection,
and, perhaps, sometimes even their personal favours. He has also in his
hotel several gambling-tables, where those who are too bashful to address
themselves to himself or his mistresses may deposit their donations, and
if they are thought sufficient, the hint is taken and their business
done. He never pays any debts and never buys anything for ready money,
and all persons of his suite, or appertaining to his establishment, have
the same privilege. Troublesome creditors are recommended to the care of
the special tribunals, which also find means to reduce the obstinacy of
those refractory merchants or traders who refuse giving any credit. All
the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying. He is a
grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
France, and to create in their place only a national one. Always an
incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
Alcoran.

The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First. If persons of
rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
of lowest birth and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not
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