The 13th Vendémiaire had taken place. Bonaparte had fired grapeshot on the rebels on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch.
The Convention had settled on my father to defend it, my father was not in Paris. Barras proposed Bonaparte, and Bonaparte was accepted.
That momentous hour that comes, so people say, once at least in the life of every man, and decides his future, had struck inauspiciously for him.
My father accepted the position instantly, but he did not arrive till the 14th. He found the rebels conquered, and Bonaparte general of the Army of the Interior.
This is the certificate that was given my father; we have copied this precious document from the original.
"LIBERTY—JUSTICE—EQUALITY.
"We, general officers and others, certify and attest that citizen Alexandre Dumas, general in the army, arrived in Paris on the 14th of Vendémiaire, and that he immediately joined his brothers-in-arms in defence of the National Convention against the attack of the rebels; who have this day laid down their arms.
"PARIS, 14th Brumaire, Year IV of the French Republic.
"Signed:
J. J. B. DELMAS; LAPORTE; GASTON; BERNARD, Aide-de-Camp; HUCHÉ, General of Division; TH. ARTEL, Captain Adjutant—General; BERTIN, Brigadier-General; PAREIN, General of Division; ROINAY, Commissaire-Ordonnateur.
Then, at the bottom of all these signatures, in his illegible writing, every letter of which was like a Gordian knot, the man who was going to weld the Revolution by bloodshed wrote these three lines:—
"Certified correct.
"BUONAPARTE, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior."
He dropped the u which Italianised his name three months later, and then signed himself Bonaparte.