The removal of Joseph from the throne of Naples to the throne of Madrid belongs, indeed, to that period respecting which I am now throwing together a few recollections.  Murat had succeeded Joseph at Naples, and this accession of the brother-in-law of Napoleon to one of the thrones of the House of Bourbon gave Bonaparte another junior in the college of kings, of which he would have infallibly become the senior if he had gone on as he began.

I will relate a little circumstance which now occurs to me respecting the kings manufactured by Napoleon.  I recollect that during the King of Etruria’s stay in Paris—­the First Consul went with that Prince to the Comedie Francaise, where Voltaire’s ‘OEdipus’ was performed.  This piece, I may observe, Bonaparte liked better than anything Voltaire ever wrote.  I was in the theatre, but not in the First Consul’s box, and I observed, as all present must have done, the eagerness with which the audience applied to Napoleon and the King of Etruria the line in which Philoctetes says—­

     “J’ai fait des souverains et n’ai pas voulu l’etre.”

   ["I have made sovereigns, but have not wished to be one myself.”]

The application was so marked that it could not fail to become the subject of conversation between the First Consul and me.  “You remarked it, Bourrienne?” . . .  “Yes, General.” . .  “The fools! . . .  They shall see!  They shall see!” We did indeed see.  Not content with making kings, Bonaparte, when his brow was encircled by a double crown, after creating princes at length realised the object he had long contemplated, namely, to found a new nobility endowed with hereditary rights.  It was at the commencement of March 1808 that he accomplished this project; and I saw in the ‘Moniteur’ a long list of princes, dukes, counts, barons, and knights of the Empire; there were wanting only viscounts and marquises.

At the same time that Bonaparte was founding a new nobility he determined to raise up the old edifice of the university, but on a new foundation.  The education of youth had always been one of his ruling ideas, and I had an opportunity of observing how he was changed by the exercise of sovereign power when I received at Hamburg the statutes of the new elder daughter of the Emperor of the French, and compared them with the ideas which Bonaparte, when General and First Consul, had often expressed to me respecting the education which ought to be given youth.  Though the sworn enemy of everything like liberty, Bonaparte had at first conceived a vast system of education, comprising above all the study of history, and those positive sciences, such as geology and astronomy, which give the utmost degree of development to the human mind.  The Sovereign, however, shrunk from the first ideas of the man of genius, and his university, confided to the elegant suppleness of M. de Fontaines, was merely a school capable of producing educated subjects but not enlightened men.