Such are the statements of the Bonaparists pure; and the reader, as has been said, can judge for himself how far the attack is good.  Bourrienne, or his editor, may well have confused the date of his interviews, but he will not be found much astray on many points.  His account of the conversation of Josephine after the death of the Due d’Enghien may be compared with what we know from Madame de Remusat, who, by the way, would have been horrified if she had known that he considered her to resemble the Empress Josephine in character.

We now come to the views of Savary, the Due de Rovigo, who avowedly remained on good terms with Bourrienne after his disgrace, though the friendship of Savary was not exactly a thing that most men would have much prided themselves on.  “Bourrienne had a prodigious memory; he spoke and wrote in several languages, and his pen ran as quickly as one could speak.  Nor were these the only advantages he possessed.  He knew the routine of public business and public law.  His activity and devotion made him indispensable to the First Consul.  I knew the qualities which won for him the unlimited confidence of his chief, but I cannot speak with the same assurance of the faults which made him lose it.  Bourrienne had many enemies, both on account of his character and of his place” (Savary, i. 418-19).

Marmont ought to be an impartial critic of the Memoirs.  He says, “Bourrienne . . . had a very great capacity, but he is a striking example of the great truth that our passions are always bad counsellors.  By inspiring us with an immoderate ardour to reach a fixed end, they often make us miss it.  Bourrienne had an immoderate love of money.  With his talents and his position near Bonaparte at the first dawn of greatness, with the confidence and real good-will which Bonaparte felt for him, in a few years he would have gained everything in fortune and in social position.  But his eager impatience mined his career at the moment when it might have developed and increased” (Marmont, i. 64).  The criticism appears just.  As to the Memoirs, Marmont says (ii. 224), “In general, these Memoirs are of great veracity and powerful interest so long as they treat of what the author has seen and heard; but when he speaks of others, his work is only an assemblage of gratuitous suppositions and of false facts put forward for special purposes.”

The Comte Alexandre de Puymaigre, who arrived at Hamburgh soon after Bourrienne had left it in 1810, says (page 135) of the part of the Memoirs which relates to Hamburg, “I must acknowledge that generally his assertions are well founded.  This former companion of Napoleon has only forgotten to speak of the opinion that they had of him in this town.

“The truth is, that he was believed to have made much money there.”

Thus we may take Bourrienne as a clever, able man, who would have risen to the highest honours under the Empire had not his short-sighted grasping after lucre driven him from office, and prevented him from ever regaining it under Napoleon.