His memoirs are said to have been written by an impecunious and mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote “Memoires de Constant” (the Emperor’s valet), and both books have been very extensively read and believed.  Men have got up terrific lectures from them, authors have quoted from them whenever they desired an authority to prove that which they wished themselves and their readers to believe of trumped-up stories of Napoleon’s despotism and evildoings.  Certainly, Bourrienne is the last and most unreliable of all the chroniclers that may be quoted when writing a history of the Emperor.  Neither his character nor any of his personal qualities imbues the impartial reader with confidence in either his criticisms or historical statements.

Men like Fouche, Talleyrand, and Bourrienne, and political women like Madame de Remusat and Madame de Stael, all of whom were brought under the Emperor’s displeasure by their zealous aptitude in one way and another for intrigue, disloyalty, and, so far as the men are concerned, glaring dishonesty in money matters, have assiduously chronicled their own virtues and declaimed against Napoleon’s incalculable vices, and this course was no doubt chosen in order to avert the public gaze from too close a scrutiny into their own perfidy.  Their plan is not an unusual one under such circumstances; rascals never scruple to multiply offences more wicked than those already committed in order to prove that they are acting from a pure sense of public morality and historical truth.  If the object of their attack be a benefactor, and one who has been obliged to rebuke or dismiss them for misdeeds, great or small, then they assail him with unqualified hostility.

This unquestionably was the penalty paid by Napoleon for extending clemency to men who, if they had been in the service of any other monarch in Europe, would have been shut up in a fortress, or shot, the moment their perfidies had been discovered.  The pity is that so much of this declamatory stuff has been so willingly believed and made use of in order to defame the name of a sovereign whose besetting fault was in relaxing just punishment bestowed on those who, he could never altogether forget, were his companions in other days.

FOOTNOTES: 

[12] Montholon wished to have the following simple inscription:  “Napoleon, ne a Ajaccio, le 15 Aout, 1769, mort a St. Helena, le 5 Mai, 1821.”

[13] Horne’s “History of Napoleon,” vol. ii.

[14] Horne’s “History of Napoleon,” vol. ii.

[15] “Correspondence of Napoleon I.”

[16] Ibid.

[17] Madame Walewska bore him two children.  This caused him to develop the idea of having an heir.

CHAPTER III

THREE GENERATIONS:  MADAME LA MERE, MARIE LOUISE, AND THE KING OF ROME