THE PROJECT GUTENBERG MEMOIRS OF NAPLEON

By Bourrienne, constant and Stewarton

1. 
Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte
By louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
His Private Secretary
Edited by R. W. Phipps
Colonel, Late Royal Artillery

2. 
Recollections of the private life of Napoleon, Complete
By constant
premier valet de chambre
translated by Walter Clark

3. 
Memoirs of the court of st. Cloud
by Stewarton
being secret letters from A gentleman at Paris to A nobleman in London

MEMOIRS OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

By louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

His Private Secretary

Edited by R. W. Phipps
Colonel, Late Royal Artillery

1891

PREFACE

By the editors of the 1836 edition.

In introducing the present edition of M. de Bourrienne’s Memoirs to the public we are bound, as Editors, to say a few Words on the subject.  Agreeing, however, with Horace Walpole that an editor should not dwell for any length of time on the merits of his author, we shall touch but lightly on this part of the matter.  We are the more ready to abstain since the great success in England of the former editions of these Memoirs, and the high reputation they have acquired on the European Continent, and in every part of the civilised world where the fame of Bonaparte has ever reached, sufficiently establish the merits of M. de Bourrienne as a biographer.  These merits seem to us to consist chiefly in an anxious desire to be impartial, to point out the defects as well as the merits of a most wonderful man; and in a peculiarly graphic power of relating facts and anecdotes.  With this happy faculty Bourrienne would have made the life of almost any active individual interesting; but the subject of which the most favourable circumstances permitted him to treat was full of events and of the most extraordinary facts.  The hero of his story was such a being as the world has produced only on the rarest occasions, and the complete counterpart to whom has, probably, never existed; for there are broad shades of difference between Napoleon and Alexander, Caesar, and Charlemagne; neither will modern history furnish more exact parallels, since Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Washington, or Bolivar bear but a small resemblance to Bonaparte either in character, fortune, or extent of enterprise.  For fourteen years, to say nothing of his projects in the East, the history of Bonaparte was the history of all Europe!