When the Memoirs first appeared in 1829 they made a great sensation.  Till then in most writings Napoleon had been treated as either a demon or as a demi-god.  The real facts of the case were not suited to the tastes of either his enemies or his admirers.  While the monarchs of Europe had been disputing among themselves about the division of the spoils to be obtained from France and from the unsettlement of the Continent, there had arisen an extraordinarily clever and unscrupulous man who, by alternately bribing and overthrowing the great monarchies, had soon made himself master of the mainland.  His admirers were unwilling to admit the part played in his success by the jealousy of his foes of each other’s share in the booty, and they delighted to invest him with every great quality which man could possess.  His enemies were ready enough to allow his military talents, but they wished to attribute the first success of his not very deep policy to a marvellous duplicity, apparently considered by them the more wicked as possessed by a parvenu emperor, and far removed, in a moral point of view, from the statecraft so allowable in an ancient monarchy.  But for Napoleon himself and his family and Court there was literally no limit to the really marvellous inventions of his enemies.  He might enter every capital on the Continent, but there was some consolation in believing that he himself was a monster of wickedness, and his Court but the scene of one long protracted orgie.

There was enough against the Emperor in the Memoirs to make them comfortable reading for his opponents, though very many of the old calumnies were disposed of in them.  They contained indeed the nearest approximation to the truth which had yet appeared.  Metternich, who must have been a good judge, as no man was better acquainted with what he himself calls the “age of Napoleon,” says of the Memoirs:  “If you want something to read, both interesting and amusing, get the Memoires de Bourrienne.  These are the only authentic Memoirs of Napoleon which have yet appeared.  The style is not brilliant, but that only makes them the mere trustworthy.”  Indeed, Metternich himself in his own Memoirs often follows a good deal in the line of Bourrienne:  among many formal attacks, every now and then he lapses into half involuntary and indirect praise of his great antagonist, especially where he compares the men he had to deal with in aftertimes with his former rapid and talented interlocutor.  To some even among the Bonapartists, Bourrienne was not altogether distasteful.  Lucien Bonaparte, remarking that the time in which Bourrienne treated with Napoleon as equal with equal did not last long enough for the secretary, says he has taken a little revenge in his Memoirs, just as a lover, after a break with his mistress, reveals all her defects.  But Lucien considers that Bourrienne gives us a good enough idea of the young officer of the artillery, of the great General, and of the First