To estimate rightly Napoleon’s conduct during the negotiations for peace which took place in the conferences at Chatillon it is necessary to bear in mind the organisation he had received from nature and the ideas with which that organisation had imbued him at an early period of life.  If the last negotiations of his expiring reign be examined with due attention and impartiality it will appear evident that the causes of his fall arose out of his character.  I cannot range myself among those adulators who have accused the persons about him with having dissuaded him from peace.  Did he not say at St. Helena, in speaking of the negotiations at Chatillon, “A thunderbolt alone could have saved us:  to treat, to conclude, was to yield foolishly to the enemy.”  These words forcibly portray Napoleon’s character.  It must also be borne in mind how much he was captivated by the immortality of the great names which history has bequeathed to our admiration, and which are perpetuated from generation to generation.  Napoleon was resolved that his name should re-echo in ages to come, from the palace to the cottage.  To live without fame appeared to him an anticipated death.  If, however, in this thirst for glory, not for notoriety, he conceived the wish to surpass Alexander and Caesar, he never desired the renown of Erostratus, and I will say again what I have said before, that if he committed actions to be condemned, it was because he considered them as steps which helped him to place himself on the summit of immortality on which he wished to place his name.  Witness what he wrote to his brother Jerome, “Better never, to have lived than to live without glory;” witness also what he wrote later to his brother Louis, “It is better to die as a King than to live as a Prince.”  How often in the days of my intimacy with Bonaparte has he not said to me, “Who knows the names of those kings who have passed from the thrones on which chance or birth seated them?  They lived and died unnoticed.  The learned, perhaps, may find them mentioned in old archives, and a medal or a coin dug from the earth may reveal to antiquarians the existence of a sovereign of whom they had never before heard.  But, on the contrary, when we hear the names of Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, Mahomet, Charlemagne, Henry iv., and Louis xiv., we are immediately among our intimate acquaintance.”  I must add, that when Napoleon thus spoke to me in the gardens of Malmaison he only repeated what had often fallen from him in his youth, for his character and his ideas never varied; the change was in the objects to which they were applied.