CHAPTER 1.

Causes of Bonaparte's animosity against me.


It is not with the view of occupying the public attention with what
relates to myself, that I have determined to relate the
circumstances of my ten years' exile; the miseries which I have
endured, however bitterly I may have felt them, are so trifling in
the midst of the public calamities of which we are witnesses, that I
should be ashamed to speak of myself if the events which concern me
were not in some degree connected with the great cause of threatened
humanity. The Emperor Napoleon, whose character exhibits itself
entire in every action of his life, has persecuted me with a minute
anxiety, with an ever increasing activity, with an inflexible
rudeness; and my connections with him contributed to make him known
to me, long before Europe had discovered the key of the enigma.

I shall not here enter into a detail of the events that preceded the
appearance of Bonaparte upon the political stage of Europe; if I
accomplish the design I have of writing the life of my father, I
will there relate what I have witnessed of the early part of the
revolution, whose influence has changed the fate of the whole
world. My object at present is only to retrace what relates to
myself in this vast picture; in casting from that narrow point of
view some general surveys over the whole, I flatter myself with
being frequently overlooked, in relating my own history.

The greatest grievance which the Emperor Napoleon has against me, is