After the 10th of August, although belonging to the Republican party, he had accompanied Louis Sixteenth to the Assembly, and had been denounced as a Royalist by the Jacobins.  In 1795 the Faubourg Saint Antoine having risen en masse, and advanced against the Convention, General Menou had surrounded and disarmed the seditious citizens; but he had refused to obey the atrocious orders of the commissioners of the Convention, who decreed that the entire faubourg should be burned, in order to punish the inhabitants for their continued insurrections.  Some time afterwards, having again refused to obey the order these commissioners of the Convention gave, to mow down with grapeshot the insurrectionists of Paris, he had been summoned before a commission, which would not have failed to send him to the guillotine, if General Bonaparte, who had succeeded him in the command of the army of the interior, had not used all his influence to save his life.  Such repeated acts of courage and generosity are enough, and more than enough, to cause us to pardon in this brave officer, the very natural pride with which he boasted of having armed the National Guards, and having caused the tricolor to be substituted for the white flag.  The tricolor he called my flag.  From the government of Piedmont he passed to that of Venice; and died in 1810 for love of an actress, whom he had followed from Venice to Reggio, in spite of his sixty years.

The institution of the order of the Legion of Honor preceded by a few days the proclamation of the Consulate for life, which proclamation was the occasion of a fete, celebrated on the 15th of August.  This was the anniversary of the birth of the First Consul, and the opportunity was used in order to make for the first time this anniversary a festival.  On that day the First Consul was thirty-three years old.

In the month of October following I went with the First Consul on his journey into Normandy, where we stopped at Ivry, and the First Consul visited the battlefield.  He said, on arriving there, “Honor to the memory of the best Frenchman who ever sat upon the throne of France,” and ordered the restoration of the column, which had been formerly erected, in memory of the victory achieved by Henry the Fourth.  The reader will perhaps desire to read here the inscriptions, which were engraved by his order, on the four faces of the pyramid.

First Inscription.

Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul, to the memory
of Henry the fourth, victorious over the
enemies of the state, on the field
of Ivry, 14th march, 1590.

Second Inscription.

Great men love the glory of those who resemble them.

Third Inscription.