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 confidant of most of his schemes, and, as his secretary, having the largest part of all the official and private correspondence of the time passed through his hands, Bourrienne occupied an invaluable position for storing and recording materials for history.  The Memoirs of his successor, Meneval, are more those of an esteemed private secretary; yet, valuable and interesting as they are, they want the peculiarity of position which marks those of Bourrienne, who was a compound of secretary, minister, and friend.  The accounts of such men as Miot de Melito, Raederer,