papers, “these are to replenish your wardrobe;” and he passed on, without listening to the profuse thanks which, with great emotion, I was attempting to express, much more for the consideration and interest in me shown by him than for his present, for I did not then know of what it consisted.  After he passed on I unrolled my papers:  they were three bank-bills, each for a thousand francs!  I was moved to tears by so great a kindness.  We must remember that at this period the First Consul was not rich, although he was the first magistrate of the republic.  How deeply the remembrance of this generous deed touches me, even to-day.  I do not know if details so personal to me will be found interesting; but they seem to me proper as evidence of the true character of the Emperor, which has been so outrageously misrepresented, and also as an instance of his ordinary conduct towards the servants of his house; it shows too, at the same time, whether the severe economy that he required in his domestic management, and of which I will speak elsewhere, was the result, as has been stated, of sordid avarice, or whether it was not rather a rule of prudence, from which he departed willingly whenever his kindness of heart or his humanity urged him thereto.

I am not certain that my memory does not deceive me in leading me to put in this place a circumstance which shows the esteem in which the First Consul held the brave soldiers of his army, and how he loved to manifest it on all occasions.  I was one day in his sleeping-room, at the usual hour for his toilet, and was performing that day the duties of chief valet, Hambard being temporarily absent or indisposed, there being in the room, besides the body servants, only the brave and modest Colonel Gerard Lacuee, one of the aides-de-camp of the First Consul.  Jerome Bonaparte, then hardly seventeen years of age, was introduced.  This young man gave his family frequent cause of complaint, and feared no one except his brother Napoleon, who reprimanded, lectured, and scolded him as if he had been his own son.  There was a question at the time of making him a sailor, less with the object of giving him a career, than of removing him from the seductive temptations which the high position of his brother caused to spring up incessantly around his path, and which he had little strength to resist.  It may be imagined what it cost him to renounce pleasures so accessible and so delightful to a young man.  He did not fail to protest, on all occasions, his unfitness for sea-service, going so far, it is said, that he even caused himself to be rejected by the examining board of the navy as incompetent, though he could easily have prepared himself to answer the few questions asked.  However, the will of the First Consul must be obeyed, and Jerome was compelled to embark.  On the day of which I have spoken, after some moments of conversation and scolding, still on the subject of the navy, Jerome said to his brother, “Instead of sending me to perish of ennui at