Page:The Marquess Cornwallis and the Consolidation of British Rule.djvu/180

174 dangerous persons from either country, he would be quite willing to send United Irishmen away.

So ended this conference. The discussion was renewed at Amiens by Joseph Bonaparte and Cornwallis. It continued all through December, 1801, and January and February, 1802. The serious part of the correspondence is here relieved by a lively letter from Lord Brome to his father's friend, General Hope. He, Lord Brome, had been occupied with Parisian sights in the morning and with dinners of forty and fifty people in the evening, who had 'the dress of mountebanks and the manners of assassins.' He had seen an odd mixture of ladies, amongst whom was Talleyrand's mistress, whom he calls Mme. Grand, and who was, of course, the divorced wife of M. Le Grand, who figured in a celebrated case in the Supreme Court of Calcutta in connection with Philip Francis. Every Anglo-Indian knows the exclamation of a Puisne Judge of that tribunal to his colleague, Sir Elijah Impey, C.J., when the latter cast Francis in damages to the extent of 50,000 rupees: 'Siccas, brother Impey! siccas!'

The sessions of the Corps Législatif did not fill Lord Brome with reverence: — 'No puppet-show could be more ridiculous.' 'There came in a man dressed in a sort of mountebank dress, who, it was natural to imagine, was going to exhibit on the tight rope, but who turned out to be Citizen Chaptal, Minister of the Interior.' This man, the son of a small apothecary, became distinguished as a chemist, and