Book Description

Excerpt from Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. 5 So much has been written about Napoleon, the greater part of which is so justly liable to the suspicion of falsehood, that a corrector and verifier of the various stories respecting him becomes as valuable a contributor to true knowledge as die reporter of new facts. M. de Bourrienne, however, appears in both characters: his position was favourable for the collection of the truth, and his disposition fits him for the business of correction. His comrade at school; his friend in after-life, sharing his young hopes and fears; a partner in his first successes, and then his intimate private secretary; a kind of third hand or other self for many years of conquest, glory and power - no one assuredly has yet entered the lists with such claims to be heard on the subject of Napoleon as M. Fauvelet de Bourrienne. In order to encourage Bourrienne under the arduous labour he continually imposed upon him, Bonaparte would sometimes say, "Bourrienne! we shall go down to posterity together." The vanity of this hope was shown in the answer - "Can you tell me who was the secretary of Alexander?" The author has, however, a good chance of reaching that goal which, perhaps, the secretary might have missed. Undoubtedly, as long as the character and achievements of Napoleon are an object of interest to the student, and it would be difficult to say when they will cease to be so, the work of Bourrienne will be referred to as a most faithful depositary of information respecting a great number of his acts, and moreover of his motives and true character. Other books have given us Napoleon in the field, or in the court; in the saloon, and in the privacy even of his apartments: but Bourrienne shows him in the cabinet, in the private cabinet, the birth-place of all his vast conceptions, and the starting point of each of his great courses - the scene of his mental debates, and the asylum where he retreated to decide, to consider, and to give the first movement to his great designs. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.