Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud (Being secret letters from a gentleman at Paris to a nobleman in London) — Volume 6 by Stewarton
page 61 of 71 (85%)

He will, however, have some difficulty to make a great profit by his
calculations in Germany, as many of the generals are better acquainted
than he with the country, where their extortions and dilapidations have
been felt and lamented for these ten years past. Augereau, Bernadotte,
Ney, Van Damme, and other of our military banditti, have long been the
terror of the Germans and the reproach of France.

In a former letter I have introduced to you our Field-marshal,
Bernadotte, of whom Augereau may justly be called an elder revolutionary
brother--like him, a Parisian by birth, and, like him, serving as a
common soldier before the Revolution. But he has this merit above
Bernadotte, that he began his political career as a police spy, and
finished his first military engagement by desertion into foreign
countries, in most of which, after again enlisting and again deserting,
he was also again taken and again flogged. Italy has, indeed, since he
has been made a general, been more the scene of his devastations than
Germany. Lombardy and Venice will not soon forget the thousands he
butchered, and the millions he plundered; that with hands reeking with
blood, and stained with human gore, he seized the trinkets which devotion
had given to sanctity, to ornament the fingers of an assassin, or
decorate the bosom of a harlot. The outrages he committed during 1796
and 1797, in Italy, are too numerous to find place in any letter, even
were they not disgusting to relate, and too enormous and too improbable
to be believed. He frequently transformed the temples of the divinity
into brothels for prostitution; and virgins who had consecrated
themselves to remain unpolluted servants of a God, he bayoneted into dens
of impurity, infamy, and profligacy; and in these abominations he prided
himself. In August, 1797, on his way to Paris to take command of the
sbirri, who, on the 4th of the following September, hunted away or
DigitalOcean Referral Badge