Paris.  He told me it had been suggested to him to write against the Emperor.  ‘Notwithstanding the harm he has done me,’ said he, ‘I would never do so.  Sooner may my hand be withered.’  If M. de Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs himself, he would not have stated that while he was the Emperor’s minister at Hamburg he worked with the agents of the Comte de Lille (Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of proclamations in favour of that Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the thanks of the King, Louis XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said that Napoleon had confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the idea of an expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the preparations for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to amuse fools.  The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more seriously conceived or more positively settled.  M. de Bourrienne would not have spoken of his private interviews with Napoleon, nor of the alleged confidences entrusted to him, while really Napoleon had no longer received him after the 20th October 1802.  When the Emperor, in 1805, forgetting his faults, named him Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, he granted him the customary audience, but to this favour he did not add the return of his former friendship.  Both before and afterwards he constantly refused to receive him, and he did not correspond with him.”  (Meneval, ii. 378-79).  And in another passage Meneval says:  “Besides, it would be wrong to regard these Memoirs as the work of the man whose name they bear.  The bitter resentment M. de Bourrienne had nourished for his disgrace, the enfeeblement of his faculties, and the poverty he was reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary offers made to him.  He consented to give the authority of his name to Memoirs in whose composition he had only co-operated by incomplete, confused, and often inexact notes, materials which an editor was employed to put in order.”  And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote what he himself had written in the Spectateur Militaire, in which he makes much the same assertions, and especially objects to the account of conversations with the Emperor after 1802, except always the one audience on taking leave for Hamburg.  Meneval also says that Napoleon, when he wished to obtain intelligence from Hamburg, did not correspond with Bourrienne, but deputed him, Meneval, to ask Bourrienne for what was wanted.  But he corroborates Bourrienne on the subject of the efforts made, among others by Josephine, for his reappointment.

Such are the statements of the Bonaparists pure; and the reader, as has been said, can judge for himself how far the attack is good.  Bourrienne, or his editor, may well have confused the date of his interviews, but he will not be found much astray on many points.  His account of the conversation of Josephine after the death of the Due d’Enghien may be compared with what we know from Madame de Remusat, who, by the way, would have been horrified if she had known that he considered her to resemble the Empress Josephine in character.