Lauriston’s visit was a piece of good fortune for me.  We were always on friendly terms, and I received much information from him, particularly with respect to the manner in which the Emperor spent his time.  “You can have no idea,” said he, “how much the Emperor does, and the sort of enthusiasm which his presence excites in the army.  But his anger at the contractors is greater than ever, and he has been very severe with some of them.”  These words of Lauriaton did not at all surprise me, for I well knew Napoleon’s dislike to contractors, and all men who had mercantile transactions with the army.  I have often heard him say that they were a curse and a leprosy to nations; that whatever power he might attain, he never would grant honours to any of them, and that of all aristocracies, theirs was to him the most insupportable.  After his accession to the Empire the contractors were no longer the important persons they had been under the Directory, or even during the two first years of the Consulate.  Bonaparte sometimes acted with them as he had before done with the Beya of Egypt, when he drew from them forced contributions.

—­[Lauriston, one of Napoleon’s aides de camp, who was with him at the Military School of Paris, and who had been commissioned in the artillery at the same time as Napoleon, considered that he should have had the post of Grand Ecuyer which Caulaincourt had obtained.  He had complained angrily to the Emperor, and after a stormy interview was ordered to join the fleet of Villeneuve—­In consequence he was at Trafalgar.  On his return after Austerlitz his temporary disgrace was forgotten, and he was sent as governor to Venice.  He became marshal under the Restoration.]—­

I recollect another somewhat curious circumstance respecting the visit of Lauriston, who had left the Emperor and Empress at Aix-la-Chapelle.  Lauriston was the best educated of the aides de camp, and Napoleon often conversed with him on such literary works as he chose to notice.  “He sent for me one day,” said Lauriston, “when I was on duty at the Palace of Lacken, and spoke to me of the decennial prizes, and the tragedy of ‘Carion de Nisas’, and a novel by Madame de Stael, which he had just read, but which I had not seen, and was therefore rather embarrassed in replying to him.  Respecting Madame de Stael and her Delphine, he said some remarkable things.  ‘I do not like women,’ he observed, ’who make men of themselves, any more than I like effeminate men.  There is a proper part for every one to play in the world.  What does all this flight of imagination mean?  What is the result of it?  Nothing.  It is all sentimental metaphysics and disorder of the mind.  I cannot endure that woman; for one reason, that I cannot bear women who make a set at me, and God knows how often she has tried to cajole me!’”