teasing and insulting the old Cardinal de Belloy with his impertinent
conversation and affected piety. This Villetard was, before the
Revolution, a journeyman barber, and was released in 1789 by the mob from
the prison of the Chatelet, where he was confined for theft. In 1791 his
patriotism was so well known in the Department of Yonne, that he was
deputed by the Jacobins there to the Jacobins of the capital with an
address, encouraging and advising the deposition of Louis XVI.; and in
1792 he was chosen a member of the National Convention, where the most
sanguinary and most violent of the factions were always certain to reckon
him in the number of their adherents.

In December, 1797, when an insurrection, prepared by Joseph Bonaparte at
Rome, deprived the late revered pontiff both of his sovereignty and
liberty, Villetard was sent by the Jacobin and atheistical party of the
Directory to Loretto, to seize and carry off the celebrated Madonna. In
the execution of this commission he displayed a conduct worthy the
littleness of his genius and the criminality of his mind. The wooden
image of the Holy Virgin, a black gown said to have appertained to her,
together with three broken china plates, which the Roman Catholic
faithful have for ages believed to have been used by her, were presented
by him to the Directory, with a cruelly scandalous show, accompanied by a
horribly blasphemous letter. He passed the next night, after he had
perpetrated this sacrilege, with two prostitutes, in the chapel of the
Holy Virgin; and, on the next morning, placed one of them, naked, on the
pedestal where the statue of the Virgin had formerly stood, and ordered
all the devotees at Loretto, and two leagues round, to prostrate
themselves before her. This shocking command occasioned the premature
death of fifteen ladies, two of whom, who were nuns, died on the spot on
beholding the horrid outrage; and many more were deprived of their
reason. How barbarously unfeeling must that wretch be who, in bereaving