Although the literature of France could boast of many men of great talent, such as La Harpe, who died during the Consulate, Ducis, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chenier, and Lemercier, yet they could not be compared with Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Fourcroy, Berthollet, and Cuvier, whose labours have so prodigiously extended the limits of human knowledge.  No one, therefore, could murmur at seeing the class of sciences in the Institute take precedence of its elder sister.  Besides, the First Consul was not sorry to show, by this arrangement, the slight estimation in which he held literary men.  When he spoke to me respecting them he called them mere manufacturers of phrases.  He could not pardon them for excelling him in a pursuit in which he had no claim to distinction.  I never knew a man more insensible than Bonaparte to the beauties of poetry or prose.  A certain degree of vagueness, which was combined with his energy of mind, led him to admire the dreams of Ossian, and his decided character found itself, as it were, represented in the elevated thoughts of Corneille.  Hence his almost exclusive predilection for these two authors With this exception, the finest works in our literature were in his opinion merely arrangements of sonorous words, void of sense, and calculated only for the ear.

Bonaparte’s contempt, or, more properly speaking, his dislike of literature, displayed itself particularly in the feeling he cherished towards some men of distinguished literary talent.  He hated Chenier, and Ducis still more.  He could not forgive Chenier for the Republican principles which pervaded his tragedies; and Ducis excited in him; as if instinctively, an involuntary hatred.  Ducis, on his part, was not backward in returning the Consul’s animosity, and I remember his writing some verses which were inexcusably violent, and overstepped all the bounds of truth.  Bonaparte was so singular a composition of good and bad that to describe him as he was under one or other of these aspects would serve for panegyric or satire without any departure from truth.  Bonaparte was very fond of Bernardin Saint-Pierre’s romance of ’Paul and Virginia’, which he had read in his boyhood.  I remember that he one day tried to read ‘Les etudes de la Nature’, but at the expiration of a quarter of an hour he threw down the book, exclaiming, “How can any one read such silly stuffy.  It is insipid and vapid; there is nothing in it.  These are the dreams of a visionary!  What is nature?  The thing is vague and unmeaning.  Men and passions are the subjects to write about—­there is something there for study.  These fellows are good for nothing under any government.  I will, however, give them pensions, because I ought to do so, as Head of the State.  They occupy and amuse the idle.  I will make Lagrange a Senator—­he has a head.”