It is not as the husband of so many women and the wife of so many men; as the conqueror of Pompey and the Scipios; as the satirist who turned Cato into ridicule; as the robber of the public treasury, who employed the money of the Romans to reduce the Romans to subjection; as he who, clement in his triumphs, pardoned the vanquished; as the man of learning, who reformed the calendar; as the tyrant and the father of his country, assassinated by his friends and his bastard son; that I shall here speak of C?sar. I shall consider this extraordinary man only in my quality of descendant from the poor barbarians whom he subjugated.

You will not pass through a town in France, in Spain, on the banks of the Rhine, or on the English coast opposite to Calais, in which you will not find good people who boast of having had C?sar there. Some of the townspeople of Dover are persuaded that C?sar built their castle; and there are citizens of Paris who believe that the great chatelet is one of his fine works. Many a country squire in France shows you an old turret which serves him for a dovecote, and tells you that C?sar provided a lodging for his pigeons. Each province disputes with its neighbor the honor of having been the first to which C?sar applied the lash; it was not by that road, but by this, that he came to cut our throats, embrace our wives and daughters, impose laws upon us by interpreters, and take from us what little money we had.

The Indians are wiser. We have already seen that they have a confused knowledge that a great robber, named Alexander, came among them with other robbers; but they scarcely ever speak of him.

An Italian antiquarian, passing a few years ago through Vannes in Brittany, was quite astonished to hear the learned men of Vannes boast of C?sar’s stay in their town. “No doubt,” said he, “you have monuments of that great man?” “Yes,” answered the most notable among them, “we will show you the place where that hero had the whole senate of our province hanged, to the number of six hundred.”

“Some ignorant fellows, who had found a hundred beams under ground, advanced in the journals in 1755 that they were the remains of a bridge built by C?sar; but I proved to them in my dissertation of 1756 that they were the gallows on which that hero had our parliament tied up. What other town in Gaul can say as much? We have the testimony of the great C?sar himself. He says in his ‘Commentaries’ that we ‘are fickle and prefer liberty to slavery.’ He charges us with having been so insolen............