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Page 8
Part of the system of attack was to call in question the authenticity of
the Memoirs, and this was the more easy as Bourrienne, losing his
fortune, died in 1834 in a state of imbecility. But this plan is not
systematically followed, and the very reproaches addressed to the writer
of the Memoirs often show that it was believed they were really written
by Bourrienne. They undoubtedly contain plenty of faults. The editor
(Villemarest, it is said) probably had a large share in the work, and
Bourrienne must have forgotten or misplaced many dates and occurrences.
In such a work, undertaken so many years after the events, it was
inevitable that many errors should be made, and that many statements
should be at least debatable. But on close investigation the work stands
the attack in a way that would be impossible unless it had really been
written by a person in the peculiar position occupied by Bourrienne. He
has assuredly not exaggerated that position: he really, says Lucien
Bonaparte, treated as equal with equal with Napoleon during a part of his
career, and he certainly was the nearest friend and confidant that
Napoleon ever had in his life.
Where he fails, or where the Bonapartist fire is most telling, is in the
account of the Egyptian expedition. It may seem odd that he should have
forgotten, even in some thirty years, details such as the way in which
the sick were removed; but such matters were not in his province; and it
would be easy to match similar omissions in other works, such as the
accounts of the Crimea, and still more of the Peninsula. It is with his
personal relations with Napoleon that we are most concerned, and it is in
them that his account receives most corroboration.
It may be interesting to see what has been said of the Memoirs by other
writers. We have quoted Metternich, and Lucien Bonaparte; let us hear
Meneval, his successor, who remained faithful to his master to the end:
"Absolute confidence cannot be given to statements contained in Memoirs
published under the name of a man who has not composed them. It is known
that the editor of these Memoirs offered to M. de Bourrienne, who had
then taken refuge in Holstein from his creditors, a sum said to be thirty
thousand francs to obtain his signature to them, with some notes and
addenda. M. de Bourrienne was already attacked by the disease from which
he died a few years latter in a maison de sante at Caen. Many literary
men co-operated in the preparation of his Memoirs. In 1825 I met M. de
Bourrienne in Paris. He told me it had been suggested to him to write
against the Emperor. 'Notwithstanding the harm he has done me,' said he,
'I would never do so. Sooner may my hand be withered.' If M. de
Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs himself, he would not have stated
that while he was the Emperor's minister at Hamburg he worked with the
agents of the Comte de Lille (Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of
proclamations in favour of that Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the
thanks of the King, Louis XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said
that Napoleon had confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the
idea of an expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the
preparations for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to
amuse fools. The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more
seriously conceived or more positively settled. M. de Bourrienne would
not have spoken of his private interviews with Napoleon, nor of the
alleged confidences entrusted to him, while really Napoleon had no longer
received him after the 20th October 1802. When the Emperor, in 1805,
forgetting his faults, named him Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, he
granted him the customary audience, but to this favour he did not add the
return of his former friendship. Both before and afterwards he
constantly refused to receive him, and he did not correspond with him
"(Meneval, ii. 378-79). And in another passage Meneval says: "Besides,
it would be wrong to regard these Memoirs as the work of the man whose
name they bear. The bitter resentment M. de Bourrienne had nourished for
his disgrace, the enfeeblement of his faculties, and the poverty he was
reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary offers made to him.
He consented to give the authority of his name to Memoirs in whose
composition he had only co-operated by incomplete, confused, and often
inexact notes, materials which an editor was employed to put in order."
And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote what he himself had written in
the Spectateur Militaire, in which he makes much the same assertions, and
especially objects to the account of conversations with the Emperor after
1802, except always the one audience on taking leave for Hamburg.
Meneval also says that Napoleon, when he wished to obtain intelligence
from Hamburg, did not correspond with Bourrienne, but deputed him,
Meneval, to ask Bourrienne for what was wanted. But he corroborates
Bourrienne on the subject of the efforts made, among others by Josephine,
for his reappointment.
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'Eughien 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.
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