Memoirs of Napoleon, vol 1 | Page 9

possessed. He knew the routine of public business and public law. His activity and devotion made him indispensable to the First Consul. I knew the qualities which won for him the unlimited confidence of his chief, but I cannot speak with the same assurance of the faults which made him lose it. Bourrienne had many enemies, both on account of his character and of his place" (Savary, i. 418-19).
Marmont ought to be an impartial critic of the Memoirs. He says, "Bourrienne . . . had a very great capacity, but he is a striking example of the great truth that our passions are always bad counsellors. By inspiring us with an immoderate ardour to reach a fixed end, they often make us miss it. Bourrienne had an immoderate love of money. With his talents and his position near Bonaparte at the first dawn of greatness, with the confidence and real good-will which Bonaparte felt for him, in a few years he would have gained everything in fortune and in social position. But his eager impatience mined his career at the moment when it might have developed and increased" (Marmont, i. 64). The criticism appears just. As to the Memoirs, Marmont says (ii. 224), "In general, these Memoirs are of great veracity and powerful interest so long as they treat of what the author has seen and heard; but when he speaks of others, his work is only an assemblage of gratuitous suppositions and of false facts put forward for special purposes."
The Comte Alexandre de Puymaigre, who arrived at Hamburgh soon after Bourrienne had left it in 1810, says (page 135) of the part of the Memoirs which relates to Hamburg, "I must acknowledge that generally his assertions are well founded. This former companion of Napoleon has only forgotten to speak of the opinion that they had of him in this town.
"The truth is, that he was believed to have made much money there."
Thus we may take Bourrienne as a clever, able man, who would have risen to the highest honours under the Empire had not his short-sighted grasping after lucre driven him from office, and prevented him from ever regaining it under Napoleon.
In the present edition the translation has been carefully compared with the original French text. Where in the original text information is given which has now become mere matter of history, and where Bourrienne merely quotes the documents well enough known at this day, his possession of which forms part of the charges of his opponents, advantage has been taken to lighten the mass of the Memoirs. This has been done especially where they deal with what the writer did not himself see or hear, the part of the Memoirs which are of least valve and of which Marmont's opinion has just been quoted. But in the personal and more valuable part of the Memoirs, where we have the actual knowledge of the secretary himself, the original text has been either fully retained, or some few passages previously omitted restored. Illustrative notes have been added from the Memoirs of the successor of Bourrienne, Meneval, Madame de Remusat, the works of Colonel Iung on 'Bonaparte et Son Temps', and on 'Lucien Bonaparte', etc., and other books. Attention has also been paid to the attacks of the 'Erreurs', and wherever these criticisms are more than a mere expression of disagreement, their purport has been recorded with, where possible, some judgment of the evidence. Thus the reader will have before him the materials for deciding himself how far, Bourrienne's statements are in agreement with the facts and with the accounts of other writers.
At the present time too much attention has been paid to the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat. She, as also Madame Junot, was the wife of a man on whom the full shower of imperial favours did not descend, and, womanlike, she saw and thought only of the Court life of the great man who was never less great than in his Court. She is equally astonished and indignant that the Emperor, coming straight from long hours of work with his ministers and with his secretary, could not find soft words for the ladies of the Court, and that, a horrible thing in the eyes of a Frenchwoman, when a mistress threw herself into his arms, he first thought of what political knowledge he could obtain from her. Bourrienne, on the other hand, shows us the other and the really important side of Napoleon's character. He tells us of the long hours in the Cabinet, of the never-resting activity of the Consul, of Napoleon's dreams, no ignoble dreams and often realised, of great labours of peace as well as of war. He is a witness, and the more valuable as a reluctant one, to the marvellous powers of the