POSTSCRIPT
N the first volume of these Memoirs I attempted to retrace the chief events of my grandmother’s life, and I also narrated the circumstances which induced her to rewrite the manuscript unhappily destroyed in 1815. I considered it necessary to a right comprehension and appreciation of her views that the reader should learn how she had been brought up, what were the position and circumstances of her parents, for what reasons she accepted a place at Bonaparte’s Court, through what phases of enthusiasm, hope, and disenchantment she passed, how by degrees liberal opinions gained a hold upon her, and what influence her son, when he began to make a figure both in society and in political life, exercised over her.
However strong may be his confidence in the success of a publication, it is the duty of an editor to avail himself of every aid, and to make sure, or nearly so, that the author shall in everything be understood. This was all the more necessary in the present instance, because the editor, brought up to entertain the same sentiments, and accustomed to hear the same opinions and the same anecdotes repeated around him, might well be afraid of deceiving himself respecting the worth or the success of these reminiscences. Relatives are seldom good judges either of the intellectual or physical attributes of their kin. Family beauties or prodigies, admired by the fireside or in select coteries, are frequently found to be insignificant personages on a larger stage, and when seen in broader daylight. I therefore thought it well to relate all that might be needed for the instruction of the reader, and, by introducing him into the private life of the author, to account for a mixture of admiration and severity in these Memoirs which sometimes appears contradictory. I should have been excused for adding my own comments upon the ability of the writer and the character of her hero; indeed, such comments would have furnished the subject of a preface, of the kind that we are told ought to precede every work of serious importance. But I carefully avoided writing any such preface, because I had one to offer which would enhance the value of the book to the public, as it enhances it to myself—a preface written by my father more than twenty years ago. I may print that preface now, for success has justified his previsions and our hopes.
When my father wrote the pages that I am about to lay before the reader, the Second Empire was still in existence, and to all appearance secure. Nothing short of a persistent trust in the undeviating principles of justice and liberty could have led any one to believe that its fall was possible or probable. Since then the fullness of time has come, and events have marched with a rapidity which could not have been foreseen. Similar errors have brought about similar reverses; the moody and wavering mind of Napoleon III. has led him to adopt the same course which ruined the brilliant and resolute genius of the great Emperor. My father for the third time beheld the foreigner in France, and vanquished France seeking in liberty a consolation for defeat. He suffered by our misfortunes, as he had suffered by them fifty years earlier, and he had the melancholy honor of repairing a portion of those misfortunes, of hastening the day of the final deliverance of our soil. He contributed to the foundation of a liberal and popular Government on a heap of ruins. The last years of the Empire, the War, the Commune, the difficult accession of the Republic through so many perils, had no power to change his convictions; and he would think to-day just what he wrote twenty-two years ago of the vices of absolute power, of the necessity for teaching nations what conquerors cost them, of the right of his mother to set down her impressions, and of the duty of his son to publish them.
Paul de Rémusat.