Napoleon, Bourrienne speaks, partly with much of the natural bitterness
of a former and discarded friend, and partly with the curious mixed
feeling which even the brothers of Napoleon display in their Memoirs,
pride in the wonderful abilities evinced by the man with whom he was
allied, and jealousy at the way in which be was outshone by the man he
had in youth regarded as inferior to himself. Sometimes also we may even
suspect the praise. Thus when Bourrienne defends Napoleon for giving, as
he alleges, poison to the sick at Jaffa, a doubt arises whether his
object was to really defend what to most Englishmen of this day, with
remembrances of the deeds and resolutions of the Indian Mutiny, will seem
an act to be pardoned, if not approved; or whether he was more anxious to
fix the committal of the act on Napoleon at a time when public opinion
loudly blamed it. The same may be said of his defence of the massacre of
the prisoners of Jaffa.

Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne was born in 1769, that is, in the
same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, and he was the friend and companion of
the future Emperor at the military school of Brienne-le-Chateau till
1784, when Napoleon, one of the sixty pupils maintained at the expense of
the State, was passed on to the Military School of Paris. The friends
again met in 1792 and in 1795, when Napoleon was hanging about Paris, and
when Bourrienne looked on the vague dreams of his old schoolmate as only
so much folly. In 1796, as soon as Napoleon had assured his position at
the head of the army of Italy, anxious as ever to surround himself with
known faces, he sent for Bourrienne to be his secretary. Bourrienne had
been appointed in 1792 as secretary of the Legation at Stuttgart, and
had, probably wisely, disobeyed the orders given him to return, thus
escaping the dangers of the Revolution. He only came back to Paris in
1795, having thus become an emigre. He joined Napoleon in 1797, after the
Austrians had been beaten out of Italy, and at once assumed the office of