Memoirs of Napoleon, vol 1 | Page 4

Royal Artillery
1891

CONTENTS: Preface, Notes and Introduction
Chapter I.
to
Chapter IV.
, 1797

PREFACE
BY THE EDITORS OF THE 1836 EDITION.
In introducing the present edition of M. de Bourrienne's Memoirs to the
public we are bound, as Editors, to say a few Words on the subject.
Agreeing, however, with Horace Walpole that an editor should not
dwell for any length of time on the merits of his author, we shall touch
but lightly on this part of the matter. We are the more ready to abstain
since the great success in England of the former editions of these
Memoirs, and the high reputation they have acquired on the European
Continent, and in every part of the civilised world where the fame of
Bonaparte has ever reached, sufficiently establish the merits of M. de
Bourrienne as a biographer. These merits seem to us to consist chiefly
in an anxious desire to be impartial, to point out the defects as well as
the merits of a most wonderful man; and in a peculiarly graphic power
of relating facts and anecdotes. With this happy faculty Bourrienne
would have made the life of almost any active individual interesting;
but the subject of which the most favourable circumstances permitted
him to treat was full of events and of the most extraordinary facts. The
hero of his story was such a being as the world has produced only on
the rarest occasions, and the complete counterpart to whom has,
probably, never existed; for there are broad shades of difference
between Napoleon and Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne; neither
will modern history furnish more exact parallels, since Gustavus
Adolphus, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Washington, or Bolivar bear
but a small resemblance to Bonaparte either in character, fortune, or
extent of enterprise. For fourteen years, to say nothing of his projects in
the East, the history of Bonaparte was the history of all Europe!
With the copious materials he possessed, M. de Bourrienne has
produced a work which, for deep interest, excitement, and amusement,
can scarcely be paralleled by any of the numerous and excellent
memoirs for which the literature of France is so justly celebrated.

M. de Bourrienne shows us the hero of Marengo and Austerlitz in his
night-gown and slippers--with a 'trait de plume' he, in a hundred
instances, places the real man before us, with all his personal habits and
peculiarities of manner, temper, and conversation.
The friendship between Bonaparte and Bourrienne began in boyhood,
at the school of Brienne, and their unreserved intimacy continued
during the moat brilliant part of Napoleon's career. We have said
enough, the motives for his writing this work and his competency for
the task will be best explained in M. de Bourrienne's own words, which
the reader will find in the Introductory Chapter.
M. de Bourrienne says little of Napoleon after his first abdication and
retirement to Elba in 1814: we have endeavoured to fill up the chasm
thus left by following his hero through the remaining seven years of his
life, to the "last scenes of all" that ended his "strange, eventful history,"
--to his deathbed and alien grave at St. Helena. A completeness will
thus be given to the work which it did not before possess, and which
we hope will, with the other additions and improvements already
alluded to, tend to give it a place in every well-selected library, as one
of the most satisfactory of all the lives of Napoleon.
LONDON, 1836.

PREFACE
BY THE EDITOR OF THE 1885 EDITION.
The Memoirs of the time of Napoleon may be divided into two
classes-- those by marshals and officers, of which Suchet's is a good
example, chiefly devoted to military movements, and those by persons
employed in the administration and in the Court, giving us not only
materials for history, but also valuable details of the personal and inner
life of the great Emperor and of his immediate surroundings. Of this
latter class the Memoirs of Bourrienne are among the most important.
Long the intimate and personal friend of Napoleon both at school and
from the end of the Italian campaigns in 1797 till 1802--working in the
same room with him, using the same purse, the confidant of most of his
schemes, and, as his secretary, having the largest part of all the official
and private correspondence of the time passed through his hands,
Bourrienne occupied an invaluable position for storing and recording
materials for history. The Memoirs of his successor, Meneval, are more

those of an esteemed private secretary; yet, valuable and interesting as
they are, they want the peculiarity of position which marks those of
Bourrienne, who was a compound of secretary, minister, and friend.
The accounts of such men as Miot de Melito, Raederer, etc., are most
valuable, but these writers were