imprisoned the representatives of the people of the legislative body, he
paid a prostitute, with whom he had passed the night at Pavia, with a
draft for fifty louis d'or on the municipality of that town, who dared
not dishonour it; but they kept the draft, and in 1799 handed it over to
Gendral Melas, who sent it to Vienna, where I saw the very original.

The general and grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, Van Damme,
is another of our military heroes of the same stamp. A barber, and son
of a Flemish barber, he enlisted as a soldier, robbed, and was condemned
to be hanged. The humanity of the judge preserved him from the gallows;
but he was burnt on the shoulders, flogged by the public executioner, and
doomed to serve as a galley-slave for life. The Revolution broke his
fetters, made him a Jacobin, a patriot, and a general; but the first use
he made of his good fortune was to cause the judge, his benefactor, to be
guillotined, and to appropriate to himself the estate of the family. He
was cashiered by Pichegru, and dishonoured by Moreau, for his ferocity
and plunder in Holland and Germany; but Bonaparte restored him to rank
and confidence; and by a douceur of twelve hundred thousand
livres--properly applied and divided between some of the members of the
Bonaparte family, he procured the place of a governor at Lille, and a
commander-in-chief of the ci-devant Flanders. In landed property, in
jewels, in amount in the funds, and in ready money (he always keeps, from
prudence, six hundred thousand livres--in gold), his riches amount to
eight millions of livres. For a ci-devant sans-culotte barber and
galley-slave, you must grant this is a very modest sum.




LETTER XXII.