For the last five or six months, since it has been known that a prince, nephew, cousin, and son of emperors or kings formerly very powerful, had proposed to answer the libel, as he calls it, written by M. Taine about Napoleon, we have been awaiting this reply with an impatience, a curiosity which were equally justified,—­although for very different reasons,—­by M. Taine’s reputation, by the glorious name of his antagonist, by the greatness, and finally the national interest of the subject.

The book has just appeared; and if we can say without flattery that it has revealed to us in the Prince a writer whose existence we had not suspected, it is because we must at once add that neither in its manner nor in its matter is the book itself what it might have been.  Prince Napoleon did not wish to write a ‘Life of Napoleon,’ and nobody expected that of him,—­for after all, and for twenty different reasons, even had he wished it he could not have done it.  But to M. Taine’s Napoleon, since he did not find in him the true Napoleon, since he declared him to be as much against nature as against history, he could, and we expected that he would, have opposed his own Napoleon.  By the side of the “inventions of a writer whose judgment had been misled and whose conscience had been obscured by passion,”—­these are his own words,—­he could have restored, as he promised in his ‘Introduction,’ “the man and his work in their living reality.”  And in our imaginations, on which M. Taine’s harsh and morose workmanship had engraven the features of a modern Malatesta or modern Sforza, he could at last substitute for them, as the inheritor of the name and the dynastic claims, the image of the founder of contemporary France, of the god of war.  Unfortunately, instead of doing so, it is M. Taine himself, it is his analytical method, it is the witnesses whom M. Taine chose as his authorities, that Prince Napoleon preferred to assail, as a scholar in an Academy who descants upon the importance of the genuineness of a text, and moreover with a freedom of utterance and a pertness of expression which on any occasion I should venture to pronounce decidedly insulting.

For it is a misfortune of princes, when they do us the honor of discussing with us, that they must observe a moderation, a reserve, a courtesy greater even than our own.  It will therefore be unanimously thought that it ill became Prince Napoleon to address M. Taine in a tone which M. Taine would decline to use in his answer, out of respect for the very name which he is accused of slandering.  It will be thought also that it ill became him, when speaking of Miot de Melito, for instance, or of many other servants of the imperial government, to seem to ignore that princes also are under an obligation to those who have served them well.  Perhaps even it may be thought that it poorly became him, when discussing or contradicting the ’Memoirs of Madame de Remusat,’ to forget under what auspices the remains of his uncle,