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Page 9
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.
In the present edition the translation has been carefully compared with
the original French text. Where in the original text information is
given which has now become mere matter of history, and where Bourrienne
merely quotes the documents well enough known at this day, his possession
of which forms part of the charges of his opponents, advantage has been
taken to lighten the mass of the Memoirs. This has been done especially
where they deal with what the writer did not himself see or hear, the
part of the Memoirs which are of least valve and of which Marmont's
opinion has just been quoted. But in the personal and more valuable part
of the Memoirs, where we have the actual knowledge of the secretary
himself, the original text has been either fully retained, or some few
passages previously omitted restored. Illustrative notes have been added
from the Memoirs of the successor of Bourrienne, Meneval, Madame de
Remusat, the works of Colonel Iung on 'Bonaparte et Son Temps', and on
'Lucien Bonaparte', etc., and other books. Attention has also been paid
to the attacks of the 'Erreurs', and wherever these criticisms are more
than a mere expression of disagreement, their purport has been recorded
with, where possible, some judgment of the evidence. Thus the reader
will have before him the materials for deciding himself how far,
Bourrienne's statements are in agreement with the facts and with the
accounts of other writers.
At the present time too much attention has been paid to the Memoirs of
Madame de Remusat. She, as also Madame Junot, was the wife of a man on
whom the full shower of imperial favours did not descend, and, womanlike,
she saw and thought only of the Court life of the great man who was never
less great than in his Court. She is equally astonished and indignant
that the Emperor, coming straight from long hours of work with his
ministers and with his secretary, could not find soft words for the
ladies of the Court, and that, a horrible thing in the eyes of a
Frenchwoman, when a mistress threw herself into his arms, he first
thought of what political knowledge he could obtain from her.
Bourrienne, on the other hand, shows us the other and the really
important side of Napoleon's character. He tells us of the long hours in
the Cabinet, of the never-resting activity of the Consul, of Napoleon's
dreams, no ignoble dreams and often realised, of great labours of peace
as well as of war. He is a witness, and the more valuable as a reluctant
one, to the marvellous powers of the man who, if not the greatest, was at
least the one most fully endowed with every great quality of mind and
body the world has ever seen.
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