equally strong dislike of new faces round him--is that he was never again
employed near his old comrade; indeed he really never saw the Emperor
again at any private interview, except when granted the naval official
reception in 1805, before leaving to take up his post at Hamburg, which
he held till 1810. We know that his re-employment was urged by Josephine
and several of his former companions. Savary himself says he tried his
advocacy; but Napoleon was inexorable to those who, in his own phrase,
had sacrificed to the golden calf.

Sent, as we have said, to Hamburg in 1805, as Minister Plenipotentiary to
the Duke of Brunswick, the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and to the Hanse
towns, Bourrienne knew how to make his post an important one. He was at
one of the great seats of the commerce which suffered so fearfully from
the Continental system of the Emperor, and he was charged to watch over
the German press. How well he fulfilled this duty we learn from
Metternich, who writes in 1805: "I have sent an article to the newspaper
editors in Berlin and to M. de Hofer at Hamburg. I do not know whether
it has been accepted, for M. Bourrienne still exercises an authority so
severe over these journals that they are always submitted to him before
they appear, that he may erase or alter the articles which do not please
him."

His position at Hamburg gave him great opportunities for both financial
and political intrigues. In his Memoirs, as Meneval remarks, he or his
editor is not ashamed to boast of being thanked by Louis XVIII. at St.
Ouen for services rendered while he was the minister of Napoleon at
Hamburg. He was recalled in 1810, when the Hanse towns were united, or,
to use the phrase of the day, re-united to the Empire. He then hung
about Paris, keeping on good terms with some of the ministers--Savary,
not the most reputable of them, for example. In 1814 he was to be found