Memoirs of Napoleon, vol 1 | Page 8

debatable. But on close investigation the
work stands the attack in a way that would be impossible unless it had
really been written by a person in the peculiar position occupied by
Bourrienne. He has assuredly not exaggerated that position: he really,
says Lucien Bonaparte, treated as equal with equal with Napoleon
during a part of his career, and he certainly was the nearest friend and
confidant that Napoleon ever had in his life.
Where he fails, or where the Bonapartist fire is most telling, is in the
account of the Egyptian expedition. It may seem odd that he should
have forgotten, even in some thirty years, details such as the way in
which the sick were removed; but such matters were not in his province;
and it would be easy to match similar omissions in other works, such as
the accounts of the Crimea, and still more of the Peninsula. It is with

his personal relations with Napoleon that we are most concerned, and it
is in them that his account receives most corroboration.
It may be interesting to see what has been said of the Memoirs by other
writers. We have quoted Metternich, and Lucien Bonaparte; let us hear
Meneval, his successor, who remained faithful to his master to the end:
"Absolute confidence cannot be given to statements contained in
Memoirs published under the name of a man who has not composed
them. It is known that the editor of these Memoirs offered to M. de
Bourrienne, who had then taken refuge in Holstein from his creditors, a
sum said to be thirty thousand francs to obtain his signature to them,
with some notes and addenda. M. de Bourrienne was already attacked
by the disease from which he died a few years latter in a maison de
sante at Caen. Many literary men co-operated in the preparation of his
Memoirs. In 1825 I met M. de Bourrienne in Paris. He told me it had
been suggested to him to write against the Emperor. 'Notwithstanding
the harm he has done me,' said he, 'I would never do so. Sooner may
my hand be withered.' If M. de Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs
himself, he would not have stated that while he was the Emperor's
minister at Hamburg he worked with the agents of the Comte de Lille
(Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of proclamations in favour of that
Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the thanks of the King, Louis
XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said that Napoleon had
confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the idea of an
expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the preparations
for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to amuse fools.
The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more seriously
conceived or more positively settled. M. de Bourrienne would not have
spoken of his private interviews with Napoleon, nor of the alleged
confidences entrusted to him, while really Napoleon had no longer
received him after the 20th October 1802. When the Emperor, in 1805,
forgetting his faults, named him Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg,
he granted him the customary audience, but to this favour he did not
add the return of his former friendship. Both before and afterwards he
constantly refused to receive him, and he did not correspond with him
"(Meneval, ii. 378-79). And in another passage Meneval says: "Besides,
it would be wrong to regard these Memoirs as the work of the man
whose name they bear. The bitter resentment M. de Bourrienne had

nourished for his disgrace, the enfeeblement of his faculties, and the
poverty he was reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary
offers made to him. He consented to give the authority of his name to
Memoirs in whose composition he had only co-operated by incomplete,
confused, and often inexact notes, materials which an editor was
employed to put in order." And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote
what he himself had written in the Spectateur Militaire, in which he
makes much the same assertions, and especially objects to the account
of conversations with the Emperor after 1802, except always the one
audience on taking leave for Hamburg. Meneval also says that
Napoleon, when he wished to obtain intelligence from Hamburg, did
not correspond with Bourrienne, but deputed him, Meneval, to ask
Bourrienne for what was wanted. But he corroborates Bourrienne on
the subject of the efforts made, among others by Josephine, for his
reappointment.
Such are the statements of the Bonaparists pure; and the reader, as has
been said, can judge for himself how far the attack is good. Bourrienne,
or his editor, may well have confused the date of his interviews, but he
will not be found much