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, Fouché, 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. Fouché 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 £120,000.
In 1805, Bourrienne was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary at Hamburg, and during his stay there he made £290,000 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.
His memoirs are said to have been written by an impecunious and mediocre penman called Villemarest, who also wrote "Mémoires de Constant" (the Emperor's valet), and both books have been very extensively read and believed. Men have got up terrific lectures from them, authors have quoted from them whenever they desired an authority to prove that which they wished themselves and their readers to believe of trumped-up stories of Napoleon's despotism and evildoings. Certainly, Bourrienne is the last and most unreliable of all the chroniclers that may be quoted when writing a history of the Emperor. Neither his character nor any of his personal qualities imbues the impartial reader with confidence in either his criticisms or historical statements.
Men like Fouché, Talleyrand, and Bourrienne, and political women like Madame de Remusat and Madame de Staël, all of whom were brought under the Emperor's displeasure by their zealous aptitude in one way and another for intrigue, disloyalty, and, so far as the men are concerned, glaring dishonesty in money matters, have assiduously chronicled their own virtues and declaimed against Napoleon's incalculable vices, and this course was no doubt chosen in order to avert the public gaze from too close a scrutiny into their own perfidy. Their plan is not an unusual one under such circumstances; rascals never scruple to multiply offences more wicked than those already committed in order to prove that they are acting from a pure sense of public morality and historical truth. If the object of their attack be a benefactor, and one who has been obliged to rebuke or dismiss them for misdeeds, great or small, then they assail him with unqualified hostility.
This unquestionably was the penalty paid by Napoleon for extending clemency to men who, if they had been in the service of any other monarch in Europe, would have been shut up in a fortress, or shot, the moment their perfidies had been discovered. The pity is that so much of this declamatory stuff has been so willingly believed and made use of in order to defame the name of a sovereign whose besetting fault was in relaxing just punishment bestowed on those who, he could never altogether forget, were his companions in other days.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] Montholon wished to have the following simple inscription: "Napoléon, né à Ajaccio, le 15 Août, 1769, mort à St. Helena, le 5 Mai, 1821."
[13] Horne's "History of Napoleon," vol. ii.
[14] Horne's "History of Napoleon," vol. ii.