rged the statesman in the partisan by the curious assertion that
the invasion scare had been got up by the Pitt Ministry for party
purposes.[275] Few persons shared that opinion. The nation was
animated by a patriotism such as had never yet stirred the sluggish
veins of Georgian England. The Jacobinism, which Dundas in 1796 had
lamented as paralyzing the nation's energy, had wholly vanished; and
the fatality which dogged the steps of Napoleon was already
discernible. The mingled hatred and fear which he inspired outside
France was beginning to solidify the national resistance: after
uniting rich and poor, English and Scots in a firm phalanx in the
United Kingdom, the national principle was in turn to vivify Spain,
Russia, and Germany, and thus to assure his overthrow.

Reserving for consideration in another chapter the later developments
of the naval war, it will be convenient now to turn to important
events in the history of the Bonaparte family.

The loves and intrigues of the Bonapartes have furnished material enough
to fill several volumes devoted to light gossip, and naturally so. Given
an ambitious family, styled _parvenus_ by the ungenerous, shooting aloft
swiftly as the flames of Vesuvius, ardent as its inner fires, and
stubborn as its hardened lava--given also an imperious brother
determined to marry his younger brothers and sisters, not as they
willed, but as he willed--and it is clear that materials are at hand
sufficient to make the fortunes of a dozen comediettas.

To the marriage of Pauline Bonaparte only the briefest reference need
here be made. The wild humour of her blood showed itself before her
first marriage; and after the death of her husband, General Leclerc,
in San Domingo, she privately espoused Prince Borghese before the
legal time of mourning had expired, an indiscretion which much annoyed
Napoleon (August, 1803). Ultimately this brilliant, frivolous creature
resided in the splendid mansion which now forms the British embassy in
Paris. The case of Louis Bonaparte was somewhat different. Nurtured as
he had been in his early years by Napoleon, he had rewarded him by
contracting a dutiful match with Hortense Beauharnais (January, 1802);
but that union was to be marred by a grotesquely horrible jealousy
which the young husband soon conceived for his powerful brother.

For the present, however, the chief trouble was caused by Lucien,
whose address had saved matters at the few critical minutes of