on the
field of battle, and amid the most trying circumstances.

After the 10th of August, although belonging to the Republican party, he
had accompanied Louis Sixteenth to the Assembly, and had been denounced
as a Royalist by the Jacobins. In 1795 the Faubourg Saint Antoine having
risen en masse, and advanced against the Convention, General Menou had
surrounded and disarmed the seditious citizens; but he had refused to
obey the atrocious orders of the commissioners of the Convention, who
decreed that the entire faubourg should be burned, in order to punish the
inhabitants for their continued insurrections. Some time afterwards,
having again refused to obey the order these commissioners of the
Convention gave, to mow down with grapeshot the insurrectionists of
Paris, he had been summoned before a commission, which would not have
failed to send him to the guillotine, if General Bonaparte, who had
succeeded him in the command of the army of the interior, had not used
all his influence to save his life. Such repeated acts of courage and
generosity are enough, and more than enough, to cause us to pardon in
this brave officer, the very natural pride with which he boasted of
having armed the National Guards, and having caused the tricolor to be
substituted for the white flag. The tricolor he called my flag. From
the government of Piedmont he passed to that of Venice; and died in 1810
for love of an actress, whom he had followed from Venice to Reggio, in
spite of his sixty years.

The institution of the order of the Legion of Honor preceded by a few
days the proclamation of the Consulate for life, which proclamation was
the occasion of a fete, celebrated on the 15th of August. This was the
anniversary of the birth of the First Consul, and the opportunity was
used in order to make for the first time this anniversary a festival.
On that day the First Consul was thirty-three years old.

In the month of October following I went with the First Consul on his
journey into Normandy, where we stopped at Ivry, and the First Consul
visited the battlefield. He said, on arriving there, "Honor to the
memory of the best Frenchman who ever sat upon the throne of France," and
ordered the restoration of the column, which had been formerly erected,
in memory of the victory achieved by Henry the Fourth. The reader will
perhaps desire to read here the inscriptions, which were engraved by his
order, on the four faces of the pyramid.