But there comes a time when Napoleon sees that the price he has to pay for adulation is too high, for, like most over-pampered people, Madame de Remusat seems to have got the idea of equality badly into her head.  She became waspish, exacting, claiming more than her share of emoluments, seeking for attentions which her “amiable sovereign” saw in the fitness of things it would be folly to bestow.  She mistook wholesome justice for tyranny, defied discipline, and not only connived at treason, but prayed for the extinction of him against whom it was directed.  Disaster overtook him, he fell, and in her delirium of malice and joy she bethought it an opportune moment to write what are known as her memoirs, refuting therein all her former eulogies and opinions so vividly told in the “Letters of Madame de Remusat.”  Now that adversity so terrible overshadows the matchless hero of the letters, she throws every scruple aside, and warms to her task in writing unstinted, gross, and manifest libels.  Contrast with the “letters” these quotations from the memoirs.  She avows that “nothing is so base as his soul.  It is closed against all generous impulses; he never could admire a noble action.”  “He possesses an innate depravity of nature, and has a special taste for evil.”  “His absence brought solace, and made people breathe freely.”  “He is devoid of every kind of personal courage, and generous impulses are foreign to him.”  “He put a feeling of restraint into everybody that approached him.”  “He was feared everywhere.”  “He delighted to excite fear.”  “He did not like to make people comfortable.”  “He was afraid of the least familiarity.”  This latter grievance, combined of course with the rest, is quite significant, and we are justified in assuming that the Lady in Waiting has been taking liberties, and has been deservedly snubbed by His Imperial Majesty.  It is perhaps necessary to pause here and remind the reader that on the authority of her son, and subsequently of her grandson, these memoirs were written entirely “without malice,” and the sole object of writing them at all was that “the truth should be told.”

Very well then.  Are we to believe the letters or the memoirs, because in the former she over and over again declares that “his comely manners were irresistible”; but in the memoirs with audacious bitterness she affirms “not only is he ill-mannered but brutal.”

Such effrontery is beyond criticism.  She finds it “impossible to depict the disinterested loyalty with which she longed for the King’s return,” and describes the hero of her letters as a ruthless destroyer of all worth, and being brought so low, she is straitened by the demands of “truth” and “grows quite disheartened.”