The Duchess of Abrantes, who smarted under some severe comments he had made about her husband (Junot), the Duke of Abrantes, while at St. Helena, has been generous enough to say many kind things of him in her memoirs.  One of her references to him is to this effect:—­“All I know of him” (and she knew him well from childhood) “proves that he possessed a great soul which quickly forgets and forgives.”  She is very fond of repeating in her memoirs that Napoleon proposed marriage to her mother, Madame Permon, who was herself a Corsican and knew the Bonaparte family well.

Madame Junot relates another story which is characteristic of Bonaparte.  Such was the enthusiasm of the people on his march towards Paris after landing from Elba, that when he was holding a review of the National Guard at Grenoble, the people shouldered him, and a young girl with a laurel branch in her hand approached him reciting some verses.  “What can I do for you, my pretty girl?” said the Emperor.  The girl blushed, then lifting her eyes to him replied, “I have nothing to ask of your Majesty; but you would render me very happy by embracing me.”  Napoleon kissed her, and turning his head to either side, said aloud, with a fascinating smile, “I embrace in you all the ladies of Grenoble.”

That Napoleon made mistakes no one will dispute; indeed, he saw clearly, and admitted freely, in his solitude, that he had made many.  His minor fault (if it be right to characterise it as such) was in extending clemency to the many rascals that were plotting his ruin and carrying on a system of peculation that was an abhorrence to him.  Talleyrand, Fouche, and Bourrienne frequently came under his displeasure and were removed from his service, but were taken back after his wrath had passed.

Miot de Melito speaks of them as “Bourrienne and other subordinate scoundrels,” and, indeed, Miot de Melito does not exaggerate in his estimate of them.  Fouche says that Bourrienne kept him advised of all Napoleon’s movements for 25,000 francs per month, besides being both partner and patron in the house of Coulon Brothers, cavalry equipment providers, who failed for L120,000.

In 1805, Bourrienne was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, and during his stay there he made L290,000 by delivering permits and making what is known as “arbitrary stoppages,” and besides betraying Bonaparte to the Bourbons, this vile traitor wrote to Talleyrand, a few days after the abdication at Fontainebleau:  “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.