In 1797, General Ney had the command in the vicinity of the free and
Imperial city of Wetzlar. He there put in requisition all private stores
of cloths; and after disposing of them by a public sale, retook them upon
another requisition from the purchasers, and sold them a second time.
Leather and linen underwent the same operation. Volumes might be filled
with similar examples, all of public notoriety.

This Gendral Ney, who is now one of the principal commanders under
Bonaparte in Germany, was a bankrupt tobacconist at Strasburg in 1790,
and is the son of an old-clothes man of Sarre Louis, where he was born in
1765. Having entered as a common soldier in the regiment of Alsace, to
escape the pursuit of his creditors, he was there picked up by some
Jacobin emissaries, whom he assisted to seduce the men into an
insurrection, which obliged most of the officers to emigrate. From that
period he began to distinguish himself as an orator of the Jacobin clubs,
and was, therefore, by his associates, promoted by one step to an
adjutant-general. Brave and enterprising, ambitious for advancement, and
greedy after riches, he seized every opportunity to distinguish and
enrich himself; and, as fortune supported his endeavours, he was in a
short time made a general of division, and acquired a property of several
millions. This is his first campaign under Bonaparte, having previously
served only under Pichegru, Moreau, and Le Courbe.

He, with General Richepanse, was one of the first generals supposed to be
attached to their former chief, General Moreau, whom Bonaparte seduced
into his interest. In the autumn of 1802, when the Helvetic Republic
attempted to recover its lost independence, Ney was appointed
commander-in-chief of the French army in Switzerland, and Ambassador from
the First Consul to the Helvetic Government. He there conducted himself
so much to the satisfaction of Bonaparte, that, on the rupture with your