r in character, fortune, or extent of enterprise. For
fourteen years, to say nothing of his projects in the East, the history
of Bonaparte was the history of all Europe!

With the copious materials he possessed, M. de Bourrienne has produced a
work which, for deep interest, excitement, and amusement, can scarcely be
paralleled by any of the numerous and excellent memoirs for which the
literature of France is so justly celebrated.

M. de Bourrienne shows us the hero of Marengo and Austerlitz in his
night-gown and slippers--with a 'trait de plume' he, in a hundred
instances, places the real man before us, with all his personal habits
and peculiarities of manner, temper, and conversation.

The friendship between Bonaparte and Bourrienne began in boyhood, at the
school of Brienne, and their unreserved intimacy continued during the
most brilliant part of Napoleon's career. We have said enough, the
motives for his writing this work and his competency for the task will be
best explained in M. de Bourrienne's own words, which the reader will
find in the Introductory Chapter.

M. de Bourrienne says little of Napoleon after his first abdication and
retirement to Elba in 1814: we have endeavoured to fill up the chasm thus
left by following his hero through the remaining seven years of his life,
to the "last scenes of all" that ended his "strange, eventful
history,"--to his deathbed and alien grave at St. Helena. A completeness
will thus be given to the work which it did not before possess, and
which we hope will, with the other additions and improvements already
alluded to, tend to give it a place in every well-selected library, as
one of the most satisfactory of all the lives of Napoleon.

LONDON, 1836.

PREFACE

BY THE EDITOR OF THE 1885 EDITION.

The Memoirs of the time of Napoleon may be divided into two
classes--those by marshals and officers, of which Suchet's is a good
example, chiefly devoted to military movements, and those by persons
employed in the administration and in the Court, giving us not only
materials for history, but also valuable details of the personal and
inner life of the great Emperor and of his immediate surroundings. Of
this latter class the Memoirs of Bourrienne are among the most
important.

Long the intimate and personal friend of Napoleon both at school and from
the end of the Italian campaigns in 1797 till 1802--working in the same
room with him, using the same purse, the conf