The peaceable demeanour and honourable conduct of this army is worthy of admiration, and can never be sufficiently praised:  not a single act of brigandage has taken place.  The Austrian officers expressed to me their astonishment at this, and said they doubted whether any other army in Europe, disbanded and under the same circumstances, would behave so well.  I told them the French soldier was a free-man and a citizen and drawn from a respectable class of people, which was not the case in most other countries.  Yes, these gallant fellows who had been calumniated by furious Ultras, by the base ministerial prints of England, and the venal satellites of Toryism, who had been represented as brigands or as infuriated Jacobins with red caps and poignards, these men, in spite, of the contumely and insult they met with from servile prefects, and from those who never dared to face them in the field, are a model of good conduct and they preserve the utmost subordination, tho’ disbanded:  they respect scrupulously the property of the inhabitants and pay for everything.  Mr. L., the young Irish barrister, told me at Dijon that he left his purse by mistake in a shop there in which were 20 napoleons in gold, when a soldier of the army of the Loire, who happened to be in the shop, perceived it and came running after him with it, but refused to accept of anything, tho’ much pressed by Mr. L., who wished to reward him handsomely for his disinterested conduct.  Yes, the French soldier is a fine fellow.  I have served against them in Holland and in Egypt and I will never flinch from rendering justice to their exemplary conduct and lofty valour.  No! it is not the French soldiery who can be accused of plundering and exaction, but what brought the French name in disrepute was the conduct of certain prefects and administrators in Germany who were promoted to these posts for no other reason than because they were of the old noblesse or returned Emigrants, whom Napoleon favoured in preference to the Republicans whom he feared.  These emigrants repaid his favours with the basest ingratitude; after being guilty of the grossest and most infamous concussions on the inhabitants of those parts of Germany where their jurisdiction extended, they had the hypocrisy after the restoration to declaim against the oppression of the Usurper’s government and its system:  but Napoleon richly deserved to meet with this ingratitude for employing such unprincipled fellows.  I believe he was never aware of the villany they carried on, or they would have met with his severest displeasure in being removed from office, as was the case with Wirion at Verdun.[49]

I do not find that the French soldiers with whom I have conversed are so much attached to the person of the Emperor as I was led to believe; but they are attached to their country and liberty; and in serving him, they conceived they were serving the man par excellence of the People.