[228] "Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas?"
[229] "He certainly had a long conversation with me, which he misrepresents, as might be expected; and it was at the very moment when he was delivering a long prosing speech, which appeared to me a mere string of absurdity and impertinence, that I scrawled on the corner of the chimney-piece the order to withdraw him from his embassy, and to send him as soon as possible to France; a circumstance which was the cause of a good deal of merriment at the time, and which the abbé seems very desirous of concealing."—Napoleon, Las Cases, tom. ii., p. 94.
[230] "In Silesia, Napoleon was very nearly taken prisoner by the Prussians; and at Dresden, he only escaped a plot for his seizure, because Lord Walpole, who was at Vienna, dared not give the signal."—Fouché, tom. ii., p. 117.
[231] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 341.
[232] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 351.
[233] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 371.
[234] "Of 400,000 men in arms, who had crossed the Niemen, scarcely 30,000 repassed that river five months afterwards, and of those two-thirds had not seen the Kremlin."—Fouché, tom. ii., p. 118.
[235] "Sir Walter takes great pains to prove that the extraordinary severity of the winter was not the principal cause of this frightful catastrophe. He is facetious about the snow, to which he believes, or pretends to believe, that the twenty-ninth bulletin attributes the disaster; whereas, it was not the snow alone, but a cold of thirty degrees below zero. And have we not often known, in the severe winters of the north of France, where the cold is slight in comparison with that of Russia—travellers to perish under the snow? How then can it be denied that the extreme severity of the winter was the cause of the disaster?"—Louis Buonaparte.
[236] "Sir Walter Scott has not, in this outrage against Napoleon, the merit of novelty: and what is more painful, French writers have been guilty of repeating the ridiculous accusation. What! he who threw himself upon his gigantic adversary at the head of an innumerable army, and conducted it six hundred leagues from his country; who defeated all the armies of his enemy—burned his capital, or was the cause of its destruction—had such a man lost his senses? The expedition to Russia, according to common rules, was ill-judged and rash, and the more so when undertaken without the basis of Poland; and when we consider the formation of the grand army, composed of so many different nations, and that Napoleon persisted in the project in spite of all obstacles, and the disapprobation of the majority of his greatest generals, we are astonished how he succeeded in invading a great portion of the vast territory of Russia, and penetrated as far as the capital of that empire. Whatever his enemies may assert, had it not been for the extraordinary havoc of the winter, the grand army would have returned to the frontiers of Poland, established itself on that line, and menaced the Russian empire anew, and in a more definitive manner, during the following campaign."—Louis Buonaparte, p. 86.
[237] "This was, on Napoleon's part, a new snare held out to the devotedness and credulity of a generous nation; who, struck with consternation, thought that their chief, chastened by misfortune, was ready to seize the first favourable opportunity of bringing back peace, and of at length consolidating the foundation of general happiness."—Fouché, tom. ii., p. 118.