In the present edition the translation has been carefully compared with the original French text.  Where in the original text information is given which has now become mere matter of history, and where Bourrienne merely quotes the documents well enough known at this day, his possession of which forms part of the charges of his opponents, advantage has been taken to lighten the mass of the Memoirs.  This has been done especially where they deal with what the writer did not himself see or hear, the part of the Memoirs which are of least valve and of which Marmont’s opinion has just been quoted.  But in the personal and more valuable part of the Memoirs, where we have the actual knowledge of the secretary himself, the original text has been either fully retained, or some few passages previously omitted restored.  Illustrative notes have been added from the Memoirs of the successor of Bourrienne, Meneval, Madame de Remusat, the works of Colonel Iung on ‘Bonaparte et Son Temps’, and on ‘Lucien Bonaparte’, etc., and other books.  Attention has also been paid to the attacks of the ‘Erreurs’, and wherever these criticisms are more than a mere expression of disagreement, their purport has been recorded with, where possible, some judgment of the evidence.  Thus the reader will have before him the materials for deciding himself how far, Bourrienne’s statements are in agreement with the facts and with the accounts of other writers.

At the present time too much attention has been paid to the Memoirs of Madame de Remusat.  She, as also Madame Junot, was the wife of a man on whom the full shower of imperial favours did not descend, and, womanlike, she saw and thought only of the Court life of the great man who was never less great than in his Court.  She is equally astonished and indignant that the Emperor, coming straight from long hours of work with his ministers and with his secretary, could not find soft words for the ladies of the Court, and that, a horrible thing in the eyes of a Frenchwoman, when a mistress threw herself into his arms, he first thought of what political knowledge he could obtain from her.  Bourrienne, on the other hand, shows us the other and the really important side of Napoleon’s character.  He tells us of the long hours in the Cabinet, of the never-resting activity of the Consul, of Napoleon’s dreams, no ignoble dreams and often realised, of great labours of peace as well as of war.  He is a witness, and the more valuable as a reluctant one, to the marvellous powers of the man who, if not the greatest, was at least the one most fully endowed with every great quality of mind and body the world has ever seen.

R. W. P.

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION.