'

Bonaparte drank little wine, always either claret or Burgundy, and the
latter by preference. After breakfast, as well as after dinner, he took
a cup of strong coffee.

--[M. Brillat de Savarin, whose memory is dear to all gourmands, had
established, as a gastronomic principle, that "he who does not take
coffee after each meal is assuredly not a men of taste."--
Bourrienne.]--

I never saw him take any between his meals, and I cannot imagine what
could have given rise to the assertion of his being particularly fond of
coffee. When he worked late at night he never ordered coffee, but
chocolate, of which he made me take a cup with him. But this only
happened when our business was prolonged till two or three in the
morning.

All that has been said about Bonaparte's immoderate use of snuff has no
more foundation in truth than his pretended partiality for coffee. It is
true that at an early period of his life he began to take snuff, but it
was very sparingly, and always out of a box; and if he bore any
resemblance to Frederick the Great, it was not by filling his
waistcoat-pockets with snuff, for I must again observe he carried
his notions of personal neatness to a fastidious degree.

Bonaparte had two ruling passions, glory and war. He was never more gay
than in the camp, and never more morose than in the inactivity of peace.
Plans for the construction of public monuments also pleased his
imagination, and filled up the void caused by the want of active
occupation. He was aware that monuments form part of the history of
nations, of whose civilisation they bear evidence for ages after those
who created them have disappeared from the earth, and that they likewise
often bear false-witness to remote posterity of the reality of merely
fabulous conquests. Bonaparte was, however, mistaken as to the mode of
accomplishing the object he had in view. His ciphers, his trophies, and
subsequently his eagles, splendidly adorned the monuments of his reign.
But why did he wish to stamp false initials on things with which neither
he nor his reign had any connection; as, for example the old Louvre? Did
he imagine that the letter, "N" which everywhere obtruded itself on the
eye, had in it a charm to controvert the records of history, or alter the
course of time?

--[When Louis XVIII. returned to the Tuileries in 1814 he found that
Bonaparte had been an excellent tenant, and that he had left
everything in very good