red
every step of Gravina to be watched; but he soon discovered that, instead
of wanting this money for a political intrigue, it was necessary to
extricate him out of an amorous scrape. Hearing, however, in what a
scandalous manner the Ambassador had been duped and imposed upon, he
reported it to Bonaparte, who gave Fouche orders to have Valere, Barrois,
and the attorney immediately transported to Cayenne, and to restore
Gravina his money. The former part of this order the Minister of Police
executed the more willingly, as it was according to his plan that Barrois
had pitched upon Gravina for a lover. She had been intended by him as a
spy on His Excellency, but had deceived him by her reports--a crime for
which transportation was a usual punishment.

Notwithstanding the care of our Government to conceal and bury this
affair in oblivion, it furnished matter both for conversation in our
fashionable circles, and subjects for our caricaturists. But these
artists were soon seized by the police, who found it more easy to
chastise genius than to silence tongues. The declaration of war by Spain
against your country was a lucky opportunity for Gravina to quit with
honour a Court where he was an object of ridicule, to assume the command
of a fleet which might one day make him an object of terror. When he
took leave of Bonaparte, he was told to return to France victorious, or
never to return any more; and Talleyrand warned him as a friend,
"whenever he returned to his post in France to leave his marriage mania
behind him in Spain. Here," said he, "you may, without ridicule,
intrigue with a hundred women, but you run a great risk by marrying even
one."

I have been in company with Gravina, and after what I heard him say, so
far from judging him superstitious, I thought him really impious. But
infidelity and bigotry are frequently next-door neighbours.

LETTER XXVIII.

PARIS, August, 1805.

MY LORD:--It cannot have escaped the observation of the most superficial
traveller of rank, that, at the Court of St. Cloud, want of morals is not
atoned for by good breeding or good manners. The hideousness of vice,
the pretensions of ambition, the vanity of rank, the pride of favour, and
the shame of venality do not wear here that delicate veil, that gloss of
virtue, which, in other Courts, lessens the deformity of corruption and
the scandal of depravity. Duplicity and hypocrisy are here very common
indeed, more so than di