de Mai, which was fixed for the 26th of this month, it seems it is deferred. Your friend L said to me yesterday—" Good God! if such a thing was put off in England in such a manner!" The electoral colleges have some of them arrived at Paris, and have been presented to the Emperor, which seems useless and suspicious. The building for the ceremony in the Champ de Mars is also in a state of forwardness, but there are many who still say that the building will be the only portion of this project carried into effect-in other words, there will be no such assembly. A total secrecy is observed relative to the measures of government, but, as the war is inevitable, there are daily reports of the immediate departure of Napoleon for one of the armies, but for which of them it is not yet said. The Duke of Wellington is generally his allotted antagonist; but a little coxcombry was shewn in a paper of a day or two ago, which named a lieutenantgeneral as a competent opponent for his grace. An officer of rank observed to me on this occasion—“ Il fera très bien y aller lui-même." "*

Visiting an aide-de-camp of the Emperor, I found him employed mapping in detail the country on the Belgian frontier, and was asked by him whether a separation of the Prussian and English armies, and a rapid march upon Brussels, would not surprise our politicians in England. "We can beat Blucher first, and then," added he, smiling, "we shall try your Wellington. No one doubts the undaunted bravery of English soldiers, but the loss of 20,000 men would make the people of London look a little pale. You are rather sparing of your own blood, though I cannot say that you care about that of your friends." The general was right, I thought, in the former part of his remark, and as to the latter, I presume he had been lately reading the comparative valuation of flesh and blood made by Lord Castlereagh in the house of commons, on the 24th, when he set down an Englishman at from sixty to seventy pounds sterling, but assured his friends and the public that he had bargained for the continental creature of the same species and requisite pugnacious properties, at eleven pounds two shillings a head, and would sell them to his countrymen at prime cost.

A mighty merchant--and his trade was man.

"He will do well to go there himself."

LETTER XVII.

Paris, May 30.

you

IN my last letter I mentioned the name of Murat, and told that not only his attempt upon Italy was unconnected with the project of Napoleon, but was regarded here with an evil eye nevertheless, it is not to be supposed but that the court has felt an interest in the success of his projects, which might have disarmed at least one of the enemies of France. The reply made in the Moniteur to the attack on the honour and good faith of the late King of Naples by Lord Castlereagh will have informed you of this; but I doubt whether the defence of Murat would have been undertaken, had it not been for the sake of exposing the honesty of the Bourbon government, and the gullibility of our secretary of state, whom I believe to be the first minister that ever adduced a forged letter, and, let me add, a private family letter, as an argument in favour of a war against a friendly power.

After the complete exposure of these impudent fabrications in the Moniteur, it is astonishing to me that so little has been made of the matter in England. You may be sure I availed myself of the invitation given to any English gentleman present at Paris to examine the minutes and other documents upon which the forgery was formed. On the 23d of this month Mr. L and myself went to the archives, and were there shown the paper in question by the Duke of Bassano and Mr. Joan. This latter gentleman was cabinet secretary to the Emperor, in his former reign, and holds the same situation at present. It was he who took down, from Napoleon's own mouth, the minutes made use of to fabricate the pretended letters; and it was by mere accident, that, reading Lord Castlereagh's speech and the contained correspondence, he recollected, by the remarkable phrase pisser dessus, that he had written down such words at the order of Napoleon, but not at the imputed time. He thus led to a research in that strong box which was left so unaccountably by M. de Blacas at the hotel of the king's household, and which contained, besides many materials for ministerial forgery, details of all the machinations of the French princes since the court of Coblentz, with the names of their agents in France. The Emperor, on the discovery of these papers, ordered all such as compromised individuals to be immediately burnt, excepting only those which were immediately connected with affairs of

state. It is now known and indeed confessed in England, that one of the principal objects of the late Bourbon ministry was to dispossess Murat of Naples. Lord Castlereagh, by his speech, shows that there was an original inclination in himself to serve his cause at congress against that ministry; and I was not surprised when you told me, in one of your letters, that an agent of Murat's in London had made to our government the offer of 80,000 men, to be disposed of as we should point out, and not to be paid until the troops had quitted the Neapolitan territory; and that Lord Liverpool had manifested no little hesitation, and even alarm, praying more than once this agent not to send off his letter to the Neapolitan court before he had given to the English cabinet sufficient time for reflection. They were aware in Paris of this transaction, which has not added to the popularity of Murat. The documents first shown to us were the original minutes of the Emperor's real letters, in Mr. Joan's hand-writing: they were written on the right half of sheets folded in the manner of official papers. The passages left out in the citations of Lord Castlereagh had been marked with red chalk for the Emperor's inspection. We saw the letter dated Fontainbleau, January 24, 1813, addressed to the Queen of Naples, of which these words, occurring after the first sentence-"Your husband is very brave on the field of battle; but he is weaker than a woman or a monk when he does not see the enemy; he has no moral courage”—were made use of in framing M. de Blacas' letter, dated Nangis, the 17th of February, and written, said Lord Castlereagh, at an epoque when Napoleon did not despair of success, and when he treated Murat en maitre (imperiously). The actual letter began, "The king quitted the army the 16th," which words were left out by M. de Blacas, as they would have shown the letter could not have applied to the assumed date and time at Nangis. We next read Napoleon's letter, dated Fontainbleau, January 26, 1813, which begins thus, " 'Je ne parle pas du mécontentement de la conduite que vous avez tenue depuis mon départ de l'armée," and which is conceived in the strongest terms against Murat, does treat him like a valet, tells him to look to his crown, to take this warning, which shall be the last, and not to think that the lion is dead, and that on peut pisser dessus. It was necessary that M. de Blacas should make this letter pass for one written after the battles of the 11th and 12th of March, 1814, in Champagne. Hence the terrible mutilations and additions found in his falsification read by Lord Castlereagh, and

*The letters being handed to Lord Castlereagh by M. de Blacas, I call them his: whether forged by him or Talleyrand is immaterial.

"I do not speak with dissatisfaction of the conduct which you have observed since my departure from the army."

ending gardez votre parole (keep your word), as if Murat had at that time given his word to Napoleon, that his alliance with his enemies was but forced and temporary, and that he would soon show his real intentions and good-will to his brother-inlaw. The actual letter contains no such expressions; but is full, as I said above, of the coarsest abuse, which, if one could suspect the present French ministry of any forgery, one could not think they would have so little regard for the character of their master as to assign for his composition. The third letter, dictated by Napoleon, and taken down by Mr. Joan, was dated Compiegne, August 30, 1811, and was likewise conceived in language of considerable asperity, some of which is copied verbatim in the forgery. The Duke of Bassano told us, that, some time before the commencement of the Russian war, Napoleon had discerned in Murat a disinclination to furnish his contingent of 12,000 men; and that he, the duke, had received repeated orders to write to the king on that subject in the strongest language. Murat returned no anwer to the duke's letter, but corresponded directly with Napoleon, which at last incensed the Emperor, and induced him to use an expression in his letter left out by Blacas, and telling him to correspond, for the future, only with his minister, and write no more to him. You must have observed by what adroitness the addition of the words at Ancona, in the third letter, dated March 7, communicated, though not read to parliament by Lord Castlereagh, so completely alters the sense of the real sentence, which was not used in 1814, as pretended, but in 1811-" I shall see by your conduct [at Ancona] if your heart is truly French." M. de Blacas did not put any date or year to this third falsification; but by the mutilations and additions, wished to make it tally with March 7, 1814, to which time Lord Castlereagh applies it as a proof, that Murat was to show at Ancona that his heart was truly French, in spite of all Napoleon's suspicions and his own declarations to the allies. The falsification of these letters is the clumsiest forgery ever hazarded. We asked the Duke of Bassano how M. de Blacas could have been induced to insert scraps of actual correspondence, the existence and examination of which might disprove the imposition, instead of forging the whole-he said, that the latter would have been the better measure of the two; that the Emperor would have been much embarrassed by such a procedure, as he would only have to deny the letters to have been written, and oppose his word to that of Blacas; that he could only account for the present scheme by supposing the count was blinded by security and impudence, and a wish to be sure of imitating Napoleon's private style, by actually taking some of his phrases. Mr. Joan added, that he thought the lat

ter was the real motive; as, indeed, any one at all accustomed to that style would never mistake any other for it. We remarked, that the boldness was the greater, as the original letters taken from the actual minutes must be in the hands of Murat, who might expose the forgery: to which the duke replied, that when M. de Blacas communicated his forgeries to Lord Castlereagh, he did not expect they would be published; or, if he did, he considered the King of Naples would be beaten and lost before the discovery. At the same time that the falsified minutes were shown to us, we were presented with the minutes of fabricated correspondence, cited by Lord Castlereagh, written in the hand of the Abbé Fleuriel, cabinet secretary for 19 years to Louis XVIII., with which we compared the original minutes. We had only the word of the duke for the Abbé's hand-writing; but Lord Castlereagh's citations were sufficient for our purpose, even without the Abbé's copy. The internal evidence renders the deductions of the Moniteur of the 14th of May inevitable. In the month of January, 1815, Mr. de Blacas wished to convince Lord Wellington that Murat was a traitor to the allies: for this purpose he sends him certain papers, which the duke reads, and returns, on the 4th of January, an answer like that of Pilate-he found nothing against Murat. The duke's note we saw in a hand-writing, which my companion said "he would attest to be that of his grace," and which I knew was written on the paper used by the English foreign office. The note is inserted in the Moniteur of the 14th, textually, even with the trifling neologism in the opening sentence. Mr. de Blacas, seeing the object had failed, was to find some other means of inculpating Murat. On the 4th of March following, he writes then to Lord Castlereagh a note, of which we saw the minute prefixed to the falsification in the Abbé's hand-writing, saying, "Besides the papers I have already shown you, I have also since found, in another bundle, three minutes of letters written by Napoleon, one of which has no date. I have the honour of transmitting copies of them to you, and they are not the least interesting of the pieces which have been discovered in the immense quantity of papers, amongst which we have been obliged to make our researches."

This passage occurs at the end of a letter written by Blacas, on another subject, to Lord Castlereagh, and is extracted in the Moniteur, with the exception of the words at the beginning, which I have underlined. I remarked to the duke this omission, and asked "to what papers Mr. de Blacas alluded." He said, "he did not know: perhaps they were the papers seen by the Duke of Wellington; perhaps they were other forgeries; but that one thing was clear, that the three additional letters were the falsified correspondence founded on the real minutes we had