cemetery of Hamburg. It was observed that funeral processions passed
this way more frequently than usual. The customhouse officers, amazed at
the sudden mortality of the worthy inhabitants of the little suburb,
insisted on searching one of the vehicles, and on opening the hearse it
was found to be filled with sugar, coffee, vanilla, indigo, etc. It was
necessary to abandon this expedient, but others were soon discovered.

Bonaparte was sensitive, in an extraordinary degree, to all that was said
and thought of him, and Heaven knows how many despatches I received from
headquarters during the campaign of Vienna directing me not only to watch
the vigilant execution of the custom-house laws, but to lay an embargo on
a thing which alarmed him more than the introduction of British
merchandise, viz. the publication of news. In conformity with these
reiterated instructions I directed especial attention to the management
of the 'Correspondant'. The importance of this journal, with its 60,000
readers, may easily be perceived. I procured the insertion of everything
I thought desirable: all the bulletins, proclamations, acts of the French
Government, notes of the 'Moniteur', and the semi-official articles of
the French journals: these were all given 'in extenso'. On the other
hand, I often suppressed adverse news, which, though well known, would
have received additional weight from its insertion in so widely
circulated a paper. If by chance there crept in some Austrian bulletin,
extracted from the other German papers published in the States of the
Confederation of the Rhine, there was always given with it a suitable
antidote to destroy, or at least to mitigate, its ill effect. But this
was not all. The King of Wurtemberg having reproached the
'Correspondant', in a letter to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, with
publishing whatever Austria wished should be made known, and being
conducted in a spirit hostile to the good cause, I answered these unjust
reproaches by making the Syndic censor prohibit the Hamburg papers from
inserting any Austrian order of the day, any Archduke's bulletins, any
letter from Prague; in short, anything which should be copied from the
other German journals unless those articles had been inserted in the
French journals.

My recollections of the year 1809 at Hamburg carry me back to the
celebration of Napoleon's fete, which was on the 15th of August, for he
had interpolated his patron saint in the Imperial ca