n
ready money; a service of gold plate of twenty covers, which formerly
belonged to the Kings of France; two small boxes full of diamonds and
brilliants, the intrinsic worth of which was estimated at forty-eight
millions of livres--and a great number of jewels; among others, the crown
diamond, called here the Regents', and in your country the Pitt Diamond,
fell, with other riches, into the hands of the captors. Notwithstanding
this loss and this disappointment, we contrived in vain to purchase the
hostility of the Turks against our enemies, though with the sacrifice of
no less a sum (according to the report of Saint Just, in June, 1794,)
than seventy millions of livres: These official statements prove the
means which our so often extolled economical and moral republican
Governments have employed in their negotiations.

After the invasion of Egypt, in time of peace, by Bonaparte, the Sultan
became at last convinced of the sincerity of our professions of
friendship, which he returned with a declaration of war. The
preliminaries of peace with your country, in October, 1801, were,
however, soon followed with a renewal of our former friendly intercourse
with the Ottoman Porte. The voyage of Sebastiani into Egypt and Syria, in
the autumn of 1802, showed that our tenderness for the inhabitants of
these countries had not diminished, and that we soon intended to bestow
on them new hugs of fraternity. Your pretensions to Malta impeded our
prospects in the East, and your obstinacy obliged us to postpone our so
well planned schemes of encroachments. It was then that Bonaparte first
selected for his representative to the Grand Seignior, General Brune,
commonly called by Moreau, Macdonald, and other competent judges of
military merit, an intriguer at the head of armies, and a warrior in time
of peace when seated in the Council chamber.

This Brune was, before the Revolution, a journeyman printer, and married
to a washerwoman, whose industry and labour alone prevented him from
starving, for he was as vicious as idle. The money he gained when he
chose to work was generally squandered away in brothels, among
prostitutes. To supply his excesses he had even recourse to dishonest
means, and was shut up in the prison of Bicetre for robbing his master of
types and of paper.

In the beginning of the Revolution, his very crimes made him an
acceptable associate of Marat, who, with the money advanced by the
Orleans faction, bought him a