Memoirs of Napoleon — Volume 05 by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
page 31 of 125 (24%)
page 31 of 125 (24%)
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effects of desperate struggles. Do you wish to have an idea of their
appearance? You will find a perfect type in the first grenadier put by Gerard at one side of his picture of the battle of Austerlitz. At the time of this fete, that is to say, in the middle of the month of July, the First Consul could not have imagined that the moderate conditions he had proposed after the victory would not be accepted by Austria. In the hope, therefore, of a peace which could not but be considered probable, he, for the first time since the establishment of the Consular Government, convoked the deputies of the departments, and appointed their time of assembling in Paris for the 1st Vendemiaire, a day which formed the close of one remarkable century and marked the commencement of another. The remains of Marshal Turenne; to which Louis XIV. had awarded the honours of annihilation by giving them a place among the royal tombs in the vaults of St. Denis, had been torn from their grave at the time of the sacrilegious violation of the tombs. His bones, mingled indiscriminately with others, had long lain in obscurity in a garret of the College of Medicine when M. Lenoir collected and restored them to the ancient tomb of Turenne in the Mussee des Petits Augustins. Bonaparte- resolved to enshrine these relics in that sculptured marble with which the glory of Turenne could so well dispense. This was however, intended as a connecting link between the past days of France and the future to which he looked forward. He thought that the sentiments inspired by the solemn honours rendered to the memory of Turenne would dispose the deputies of the departments to receive with greater enthusiasm the pacific communications he hoped to be able to make. However, the negotiations did not take the favourable turn which the |
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