general.  A compliment is even paid to Bonaparte in the decree, by which he was provisionally restored to liberty.  That liberation was said to be granted on the consideration that General Bonaparte might be useful to the Republic.  This was foresight; but subsequently when measures were taken which rendered Bonaparte no longer an object of fear, his name was erased from the list of general officers, and it is a curious fact that Cambaceres, who was destined to be his colleague in the Consulate, was one of the persons who signed the act of erasure” (Memoirs of the Duchesse d’Abrantes, vol. i, p. 69, edit. 1843).]—­

Bonaparte said at St. Helena that he was a short time imprisoned by order of the representative Laporte; but the order for his arrest was signed by Albitte, Salicetti, and Laporte.

   —­[Albitte and Laporte were the representatives sent from the
   Convention to the army of the Alps, and Salicetti to the army of
   Italy.]—­

Laporte was not probably the most influential of the three, for Bonaparte did not address his remonstrance to him.  He was a fortnight under arrest.

Had the circumstance occurred three weeks earlier, and had Bonaparte been arraigned before the Committee of Public Safety previous to the 9th Thermidor, there is every probability that his career would have been at an end; and we should have seen perish on the scaffold, at the age of twenty-five, the man who, during the twenty-five succeeding years, was destined to astonish the world by his vast conceptions, his gigantic projects, his great military genius, his extraordinary good fortune, his faults, reverses, and final misfortunes.

It is worth while to remark that in the post-Thermidorian resolution just alluded to no mention is made of Bonaparte’s association with Robespierre the younger.  The severity with which he was treated is the more astonishing, since his mission to Genoa was the alleged cause of it.  Was there any other charge against him, or had calumny triumphed over the services he had rendered to his country?  I have frequently conversed with him on the subject of this adventure, and he invariably assured me that he had nothing to reproach himself with, and that his defence, which I shall subjoin, contained the pure expression of his sentiments, and the exact truth.

In the following note, which he addressed to Albitte and Salicetti, he makes no mention of Laporte.  The copy which I possess is in the handwriting of, Junot, with corrections in the General’s hand.  It exhibits all the characteristics of Napoleon’s writing:  his short sentences, his abrupt rather than concise style, sometimes his elevated ideas, and always his plain good sense.

       Tothe representatives Albitte and Salicetti.

You have suspended me from my duties, put me under arrest, and declared me to be suspected.

Thus I am disgraced before being judged, or indeed judged before being heard.