In 1825 I met M.de Bourrienne in Paris.

He told me it had been suggested to him to write against the Emperor.

'Notwithstanding the harm he has done me,' said he, 'I would never do so.

Sooner may my hand be withered.' If M.de Bourrienne had prepared his Memoirs himself, he would not have stated that while he was the Emperor's minister at Hamburg he worked with the agents of the Comte de Lille (Louis XVIII.) at the preparation of proclamations in favour of that Prince, and that in 1814 he accepted the thanks of the King, Louis XVIII., for doing so; he would not have said that Napoleon had confided to him in 1805 that he had never conceived the idea of an expedition into England, and that the plan of a landing, the preparations for which he gave such publicity to, was only a snare to amuse fools.

The Emperor well knew that never was there a plan more seriously conceived or more positively settled.