follows; rapine was their first object, of which ferocity has been but
the means. The French Revolution was fostered by robbery and murder; two
nurses that will adhere to her to the last hour of her existence."

General Murat is the trusty executioner of all the Emperor's secret deeds
of vengeance, or public acts of revolutionary justice. It was under his
private responsibility that Pichegru, Moreau, and Georges were guarded;
and he saw Pichegru strangled, Georges guillotined, and Moreau on his way
to his place of exile. After the seizure and trial of the Duc d'
Enghien, some doubts existed with Napoleon whether even the soldiers of
his Italian guard would fire at this Prince. "If they hesitate," said
Murat, who commanded the expedition in the wood of Vincennes, "my pistols
are loaded, and I will blow out his brains."

His wife is the greatest coquette of the Bonaparte family. Murat was, at
first, after his marriage, rather jealous of his brother-in-law, Lucien,
whom he even fought; but Napoleon having assured him, upon his word of
honour, that his suspicions were unfounded, he is now the model of
complaisant and indulgent husbands; but his mistresses are nearly as
numerous as Madame Murat's favourites. He has a young aide-de-camp of
the name of Flahault, a son of Talleyrand, while Bishop of Autun, by the
then Countess de Flahault, whom Madame Murat would not have been sorry to
have had for a consoler at Paris, while her princely spouse was
desolating Germany.




LETTER XXIII.