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'Enghien may be
compared with what we know from Madame de Remusat, who, by the way, would
have