Although Bonaparte spoke so disdainfully of literary men it must not be taken for granted that he treated them ill.  On the contrary, all those who visited at Malmaison were the objects of his attention, and even flattery.  M. Lemercier was one of those who came most frequently, and whom Bonaparte received with the greatest pleasure.  Bonaparte treated M. Lemercier with great kindness; but he did not like him.  His character as a literary man and poet, joined to a polished frankness, and a mild but inflexible spirit of republicanism, amply sufficed to explain Bonaparte’s dislike.  He feared M. Lemercier and his pen; and, as happened more than once, he played the part of a parasite by flattering the writer.  M. Lemercier was the only man I knew who refused the cross of the Legion of Honour.

Bonaparte’s general dislike of literary men was less the result of prejudice than circumstances.  In order to appreciate or even to read literary works time is requsite, and time was so precious to him that he would have wished, as one may say, to shorten a straight line.  He liked only those writers who directed their attention to positive and precise things, which excluded all thoughts of government and censures on administration.  He looked with a jealous eye on political economists and lawyers; in short, as all persons who in any way whatever meddled with legislation and moral improvements.  His hatred of discussions on those subjects was strongly displayed on the occasion of the classification of the Institute.  Whilst he permitted the reassembling of a literary class, to the number of forty, as formerly, he suppressed the class of moral and political science.  Such was his predilection for things of immediate and certain utility that even in the sciences he favoured only such as applied to terrestrial objects.  He never treated Lalande with so much distinction as Monge and Lagrange.  Astronomical discoveries could not add directly to his own greatness; and, besides, he could never forgive Lalande for having wished to include him in a dictionary of atheists precisely at the moment when he was opening negotiations with the court of Rome.

Bonaparte wished to be the sole centre of a world which he believed he was called to govern.  With this view he never relaxed in his constant endeavour to concentrate the whole powers of the State in the hands of its Chief.  His conduct upon the subject of the revival of public instruction affords evidence of this fact.  He wished to establish 6000 bursaries, to be paid by Government, and to be exclusively at his disposal, so that thus possessing the monopoly of education, he could have parcelled it out only to the children of those who were blindly devoted to him.  This was what the First Consul called the revival of public instruction.  During the period of my closest intimacy with him he often spoke to me on this subject, and listened patiently to my observations.  I remember that one of his chief