From the victories gained in Italy originated that wonderful army whose glorious deeds have placed France foremost as a military Power.
During one of the most decisive battles on the fields of Novi, after a days’ hard fighting, and when the victory once more had smiled on his flag, my uncle fell, shot through the heart. When his body, carried reverently by his staff, was brought to his tent, a sealed packet was found on the General’s camp-table—a packet containing an official order from the “Directoire” to assume the supreme command of the French army!
What changes in the destinies of Europe have resulted from this stray shot! Two men then ruling the armies of France—one a staunch Republican, seeking only the welfare of his country; the other an ambitious parvenu, ever ready to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands to his own aggrandisement. Who can say what might have been the result had Bonaparte fallen instead of his brother officer?
I only refer to this episode in the early history of the family whence I spring because I consider that it very likely had to a great extent a direct influence on my after life, even though it occurred a quarter of a century before I made my first appearance in this wicked world. It gave rise to a jealous feeling in my father’s heart and led him to leave the navy.
Soon after Napoleon became the ruler of the French Empire, my father, like the Roman of old, exchanged the sword for the plough. Instead of making a name in the naval engagements of Aboukir or Trafalgar he devoted his life to a quieter and perhaps better purpose—the drainage of the then pestilential morasses of Medoc, which have since acquired a world-wide fame for the production of some of the best wines in the south of France.
In some of the libraries of my native country some useful works are to be found on the culture of the vine, the drainage of land in the south of France, as well as a treatise on artesian wells, which was one of my father’s hobbies—the first of these useful perforations having been made in Medoc, and ultimately the great artesian well of Grenelle, in Paris.