present. Great man, complete your work, and make it as immortal as
your glory!"

The authors of this whining appeal are worthy to be associated with
the traitorous daughter of Jacques Necker, Minister of Finance to
Louis XVI., and of those apoplectic monarchs who sought her guilty and
inflammatory aid.

Then we come to another female celebrity, though less notable than
Madame de Stael, who is regarded by the traducers of Napoleon as a
historian because she wrote in her memoirs that which they wished the
world to think of him, and because they flattered themselves that it
exculpated them from the charge of injustice and mere hatred. Madame
de Stael's book, "Considerations sur la Revolution Francaise," made
its appearance. Its violent characteristics inflamed Charles de
Remusat to urge his mother to enter into competition with this work,
the result being the production of Madame de Remusat's memoirs, edited
by her grandson, M. Paul de Remusat. Charles (her son) had reproached
her for having destroyed memoirs she had written previously,[23] but
lurking in her mind was the thought of all the favours she and her
family had received, and her correspondence, teeming with adulation
for the man whom she was now induced to declaim against. The knowledge
that she was about to expose her perfidy "worried" her, and she wrote
to Charles thus:--"If it should happen that some day my son were to
publish all this, what would people think of me?" and the son,
obviously influenced by the mother's fears, delayed until the fall of
the Second Empire the publication of one of the most unreliable and
barefaced calumnies ever produced against a great benefactor.

In her memoirs she says that she and her husband excited general envy
by the high position the First Consul had given them. She was first
Lady in Waiting, and subsequently Lady of the Household, her husband
being "attached to Napoleon's household." She says that she was witty
and of a refined mind, and though she was less "good-looking" than her
companions, she had the advantage of being able to "charm his mind,"
and she was almost the only woman with whom he condescended to
converse. She relates residing in the camp at Boulogne "and having
breakfast and dinner daily with Bonaparte." In the evenings they used
to "discuss philosophy, literature, and art, or listen to the First
Consul relating about the years of his youth and early achievements."

No doubt the young Madame de Remusat