au: "I always desired the
return of that excellent Prince, Louis XVIII., and his august family."
But these things are mere shadows of the incomparable villainy of
this thievish human jackdaw.

His memoirs are said to have been written by an impecunious and
mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote "Memoires de
Constant" (the Emperor's valet), and both books have been very
extensively read and believed. Men have got up terrific lectures from
them, authors have quoted from them whenever they desired an authority
to prove that which they wished themselves and their readers to
believe of trumped-up stories of Napoleon's despotism and evildoings.
Certainly, Bourrienne is the last and most unreliable of all the
chroniclers that may be quoted when writing a history of the Emperor.
Neither his character nor any of his personal qualities imbues the
impartial reader with confidence in either his criticisms or
historical statements.

Men like Fouche, Talleyrand, and Bourrienne, and political women like
Madame de Remusat and Madame de Stael, all of whom were brought under
the Emperor's displeasure by their zealous aptitude in one way and
another for intrigue, disloyalty, and, so far as the men are
concerned, glaring dishonesty in money matters, have assiduously
chronicled their own virtues and declaimed against Napoleon's
incalculable vices, and this course was no doubt chosen in order to
avert the public gaze from too close a scrutiny into their own
perfidy. Their plan is not an unusual one under such circumstances;
rascals never scruple to multiply offences more wicked than those
already committed in order to prove that they are acting from a pure
sense of public morality and historical truth. If the object of their
attack be a benefactor, and one who has been obliged to rebuke or
dismiss them for misdeeds, great or small, then they assail him with
unqualified hostility.

This unquestionably was the penalty paid by Napoleon for extending
clemency to men who, if they had been in the service of any other
monarch in Europe, would have been shut up in a fortress, or shot, the
moment their perfidies had been discovered. The pity is that so much
of this declamatory stuff has been so willingly believed and made use
of in order to defame the name of a sovereign whose besetting fault
was in relaxing just punishment bestowed on those who, he could never
altogether forget, were his companions in other days.

FOOTNOTES:

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