whom Bonaparte received with the greatest pleasure. Bonaparte treated
M. Lemercier with great kindness; but he did not like him. His character
as a literary man and poet, joined to a polished frankness, and a mild
but inflexible spirit of republicanism, amply sufficed to explain
Bonaparte's dislike. He feared M. Lemercier and his pen; and, as
happened more than once, he played the part of a parasite by flattering
the writer. M. Lemercier was the only man I knew who refused the cross
of the Legion of Honour.

Bonaparte's general dislike of literary men was less the result of
prejudice than circumstances. In order to appreciate or even to read
literary works time is requsite, and time was so precious to him that he
would have wished, as one may say, to shorten a straight line. He liked
only those writers who directed their attention to positive and precise
things, which excluded all thoughts of government and censures on
administration. He looked with a jealous eye on political economists and
lawyers; in short, as all persons who in any way whatever meddled with
legislation and moral improvements. His hatred of discussions on those
subjects was strongly displayed on the occasion of the classification of
the Institute. Whilst he permitted the reassembling of a literary class,
to the number of forty, as formerly, he suppressed the class of moral and
political science. Such was his predilection for things of immediate and
certain utility that even in the sciences he favoured only such as
applied to terrestrial objects. He never treated Lalande with so much
distinction as Monge and Lagrange. Astronomical discoveries could not
add directly to his own greatness; and, besides, he could never forgive
Lalande for having wished to include him in a dictionary of atheists
precisely at the moment when he was opening negotiations with the court
of Rome.