greed not to press
unnecessarily for any exchange of bills into cash, and to keep up the
credit of the bank even by the individual credit of their own houses.

You know, I suppose, that the Bank of France has never issued but two
sorts of notes; those of one thousand livres--and those of five hundred
livres. At the day of its stoppage, sixty millions of livres--of the
former, and fifteen millions of livres--of the latter, were in
circulation; and I have heard a banker assert that the bank had not then
six millions of livres--in money and bullion, to satisfy the claims of
its creditors, or to honour its bills.

The shock given to the credit of the bank by this last requisition of
Bonaparte will be felt for a long time, and will with difficulty ever be
repaired under his despotic government. Even now, when the bank pays in
cash, our merchants make a difference from five to ten per cent. between
purchasing for specie or paying in bank-notes; and this mistrust will not
be lessened hereafter. You may, perhaps, object that, as long as the
bank pays, it is absurd for any one possessing its bills to pay dearer
than with cash, which might so easily be obtained. This objection would
stand with regard to your, or any other free country, but here, where no
payments are made in gold, but always in silver or copper, it requires a
cart to carry away forty, thirty, or twenty thousand livres, in coin of
these metals, and would immediately excite suspicion that a bearer of
these bills was an emissary of our enemies, or an enemy of our
Government. With us, unfortunately, suspicion is the same as conviction,
and chastisement follows it as its shadow.

A manufacturer of the name of Debrais, established in the Rue St. Martin,
where he had for years carried on business in the woollen line, went to
the bank two days after it had begun to pay. He demanded, and obtained,
exchange for twenty-four thousand livres--in notes, necessary for him to
pay what was due by him to his workmen. The same afternoon six of our
custom-house officers, accompanied by police agents and gendarmes, paid
him a domiciliary visit under pretence of searching for English goods.
Several bales were seized as being of that description, and Debrais was
carried a prisoner to La Force. On being examined by Fouche, he offered
to prove, by the very men who had fabricated the suspected goods, that
they were not English. The Minister silenced him by saying that
Governmen