Plan for a Political Defence of Napoleon; Sketched by Himself

Tuesday, August 27th.—About four o’clock I joined the Emperor in the garden: he had been engaged in dictating during the whole of the morning. The wind was very rough, and the Emperor declined riding out in the calash: he therefore walked about for a considerable time in the great alley through the wood, attended by all the persons of his suite. He jokingly teased one of the party, by observing that he was sulky, and accusing him of being very often discontented and ill-humoured, &c.

The Emperor, on rising from the dinner table, adverted to his recent protest against the treaty of the 2d of August. He expatiated with warmth on the subject, and remarked, while he walked rapidly about the apartment, that he intended to draw up another protest, on a more extensive and important scale, against the Bill that had been passed in the British Parliament. He would prove, he said, that the Bill was not a law, but a violation of every existing law. Napoleon was proscribed, and not judged by it. The English Parliament had done, not what was just, but what was deemed to be expedient; it had imitated Themistocles, without hearing Aristides. The Emperor then arraigned himself before all the nations in Europe, and proved that each would successively acquit him. He took a review of the different acts of his reign, and justified them all.

“The French and the Italians,” said he, “lament my absence; I carry with me the gratitude of the Poles, and even the late and bitter regrets of the Spaniards. Europe will soon deplore the loss of the equilibrium, to the maintenance of which my French empire was absolutely necessary. The Continent is now in the most perilous situation, being continually exposed to the risk of being overrun by Cossacks and Tartars. And the English,” said he in conclusion, “the English will deplore their victory at Waterloo! Things will be carried to such a length that posterity, together with every well-informed and well-disposed person among our contemporaries, will regret that I did not succeed in all my enterprises.”

In course of his remarks, the Emperor occasionally rose to a pitch of sublimity. I shall not follow him into all his details. He promised to dictate the observations he had made, and said that he had already sketched out a plan for his political defence, in fourteen paragraphs.