Reasoning in this fashion, my own life, since I attained my twentieth year, has comprised thirty years, which may be divided into two equal parts as to months and days, but which could not differ more widely if one considers the events which passed during these two periods of my existence.

Attached during fifteen years to the person of the Emperor Napoleon, I have seen all the men and all the important things of which he alone was the rallying-point and centre. I have seen still more than that; for I have had under my eyes, in every circumstance of life, the least as well as the most serious, the most private as well as those which belong the most to history and already form part of it; I have had, I say, incessantly in view, the man whose single name fills the most glorious pages in our annals. Fifteen years I have attended him in his journeys and his campaigns, at his court and in the privacy of his family. Whatever step he might decide on, whatever order he might give, it was difficult for the Emperor not to take me, even involuntarily, into his confidence; and it was without my own will that I more than once found myself in possession of secrets which I would frequently have preferred not to know. How many things occurred during those fifteen years! In the Emperor's vicinity you lived in the midst of a whirlwind. It was a succession of swift, bewildering events. You were dazzled, and if you tried to fix your attention for an instant, another flood of incidents came with a rush which carried you off your feet without giving you leisure to consider them.

At present, these times of dizzying activity have been succeeded, for me, by the most absolute repose, in the most isolated of retreats. And again it is an interval of fifteen years which has elapsed since I quitted the Emperor. But what a difference! What is there left to do, nowadays, for those who, like me, have lived amidst the conquests and marvels of the Empire? If, in the vigor of manhood, our life has been blended with the movement of those years, so short but so thoroughly occupied, it seems to me that our career has been long enough and sufficiently well filled. It is time for us to betake ourselves to repose. We may well withdraw from the world and close our eyes. What is there left for us to see which can compare with what we have already seen? Such spectacles do not occur twice in a man's lifetime. After having passed before his eyes, they suffice to replenish his memory during the rest of the time he has to live; and in his retirement he has nothing better to do than to occupy his leisure with the memory of what he has beheld.

And it is this which I have done. The reader will easily believe that I have no more customary pastime than to recur in fancy to the years I spent in the Emperor's service. As far as possible, I have kept myself acquainted with all that has been written about my former master, his family and his court. What long evenings have slipped by like moments while my wife and my sister-in-law have been reading these aloud to the family! Whenever I encountered in these books, some of which are really nothing but miserable rhapsodies, statements that were inexact, calumnious, or false, I took pleasure in rectifying them, or rather in proving their absurdity. My wife, who lived like me and with me in the midst of these events, also acquainted us with her reflections and explanations, and, with no other object but our own satisfaction, she noted down our common observations.

All who came from time to time to see us in our solitude, and who took pleasure in making me talk of what I had seen, astonished and too often indignant at the falsehoods which ignorance or bad faith have vied with each other in retailing about the Emperor and the Empire, evinced to me their satisfaction with the information I was enabled to give them, and advised me to communicate it to the public. But I had never dwelt upon this thought and was very far from imagining that I might some day be the author of a book myself, when M. Ladvocat arrived at our hermitage, and urged me with all his might to publish my Memoirs, which he proposed to bring out himself.

At the time when I received this visit, which I was not expecting, we were reading in the family the Memoirs of M. de Bourrienne, which had just been published by the firm of Ladvocat, and we had more than once remarked that these Memoirs were exempt from that spirit of depreciation or infatuation we had met with so frequently, and not without disgust, in other books treating of the same subject. M. Ladvocat advised me to complete the biography of the Emperor, which M. de Bourrienne, on account of his high position and customary occupations, had been intent on displaying merely on its political side. After the excellent things he had said of this, it still remained to me, according to his publisher, to relate simply and in a manner suitable to my former position near the Emperor, that which M. de Bourrienne had necessarily been obliged to neglect, and which no one could know better than I.

I willingly confess that I found but little to urge against M. Ladvocat's arguments, and that he ended by convincing me when he made me re-read this passage from the introduction to M. de Bourrienne's Memoirs:

"If all the persons who approached Napoleon, no matter at what time or place, will frankly record all they saw and heard, without any sort of prepossession, the future historian will have an abundance of materials. I desire that he who shall undertake this difficult task may find in my notes some hints that maybe useful to the perfection of his work."

And I, too, said I to myself after having re-read these lines attentively, I can furnish notes and explanations, point out errors, stigmatize falsehoods, and make public what I know to be the truth; in a word, I can and I ought to bear my testimony in the long trial which has been going on since the Emperor's downfall; for I was a witness, I saw everything, and I can say: I was there. Others also have seen the Emperor and his court at close quarters, and it must often happen to me to repeat what they have said on the subject; because, what they know, I also was in a position to know. But what I, in my turn, know of details, and what I can relate of secret and unknown matters, no one else has been able to know, nor consequently to say before me. 1

From the departure of the First Consul for the campaign of Marengo, whither I attended him, until the departure from Fontainebleau, where I was obliged to leave the Emperor, I was absent from him only twice; the first time for three times twenty-four hours; the second for seven or eight days. Aside from these brief holidays, the last of which was necessary in order to restore my health, I quitted the Emperor no more than his shadow did.

It has been claimed that no man is a hero to his valet de chambre. I ask permission to hold a different opinion. The Emperor, no matter how close at hand he might be seen, was always a hero, and there was much to be gained by seeing the man in him also, near by and in detail. From a distance one experienced merely the prestige of his glory and his power; on approaching him, one enjoyed in addition, and with surprise, all the charm of his conversation, all the simplicity of his family life, and, I am not afraid to say, the habitual benevolence of his character.

The reader, curious to know in advance the spirit in which my Memoirs will be written, will perhaps like to find here an extract from a letter I wrote to my publisher on the 19th of January last:

"M. de Bourrienne is perhaps justified in treating the political man with severity; but that is not my own point of view. I can only speak of the hero en déshabillé; and then he was nearly always kind, patient, and seldom unjust. He became much attached, and received the attentions of those whom he liked with pleasure and good nature. He was a man of routine. I desire to speak of the Emperor as an attached servant, and in nowise as a censor. On the other hand, I do not wish to make an apotheosis in several volumes. With regard to him I am somewhat like those fathers who recognize defects in their children, blame them severely, but at the same time very readily find excuses for their faults."

I beg pardon for the familiarity, or, if you like, the impropriety of this comparison, on behalf of the sentiment which inspired it. For the rest, I propose neither to praise nor to blame, but simply to relate what is within my own cognizance, without seeking to bias the judgment of any one.

I cannot finish this introduction without saying a few words about myself, in reply to the calumnies which have pursued even into his retirement a man who ought not to have enemies, if, in order to avert this misfortune, it were enough to have done a little good, and never any evil I have been reproached with having abandoned my master after his downfall, with not having shared his exile. I will prove that if I did not follow the Emperor, it was not the will to do so which failed me, but rather the possibility. God forbid that I should here depreciate the loyalty of the faithful servants who remained attached to the last to the Emperor's fortunes; but perhaps I may be permitted to say that, however terrible was the downfall for the Emperor himself, the situation (to speak here of purely personal considerations only) was still honorable enough for those who remained in His Majesty's service, and who were not detained in France by an imperious necessity. Hence it was not personal interest which led me to separate myself from the Emperor. I will explain the motives of this separation.

The truth will also be made known concerning a pretended abuse of confidence of which, according to other rumors, I was guilty with regard to the Emperor. The simple recital of the misapprehension which gave rise to this fable will suffice, I hope, to clear me from all suspicion of indelicacy. But if additional testimonies are needed, I will invoke those of the personages who lived in the greatest intimacy with the Emperor, and who were likewise in a position to know and appreciate what passed between him and me; finally, I will appeal to fifty years of an irreproachable life, and say:

"In times when I found myself so situated that I could render great services, I rendered many, but I never sold them. I might have derived advantage from the measures I took for persons who, as a result of my solicitations, have acquired an immense fortune; and I have refused even the legitimate profit which, in their gratitude, very lively at that epoch, they thought they ought to offer me by proposing that I should have an interest in their enterprise. I never tried to take advantage of the benevolence with which the Emperor so long deigned to honor me, in order to enrich or secure places for my relatives, and I retired poor, after fifteen years spent in the special service of the richest and most powerful sovereign in Europe."

This said, I will await with confidence the judgment of the reader.

1. In support of what I have here advanced, I am happy to be able to cite the opinion expressed by M. de Bourrienne, apropos of a sad occurrence which I will relate in its own place: "We are assured that it was in the night preceding Marshal Macdonald's return to Fontainebleau that Napoleon attempted to poison himself; but as I have no certain details concerning this attempt, and as I will not speak of what I am not very sure, I abstain from giving, as certain persons have done, any conjectures, always hazardous, on a grave matter which was strongly repudiated by Napoleon in his conversations at Saint-Helena. The only person who could solve the doubts that exist on the subject is Constant, who, I am assured, never left Napoleon during that night." Memoirs de M. de Bourrienne, p. 161 t. x.  Return to paragraph text.