Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena with General Baron Gourgaud.
Translated by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer. (Grant Richards. 7s. 6d.)—This is at once a condensation and a translation of the private Journal of General Gourgaud, which, running to some twelve hundred pages, was published in 1898, and of which Lord Rosebery in his " Napoleon : the Last Phase" has said : "It is sometimes almost brutal in its realism. Gourgand alone of all the chroniclers strove to be accurate, and on the whole succeeded." The translator has excluded from her book, 'which does not reach three hundred pages, most of Napoleon's vitupera- tions of Sir Hudson Lowe and other things, including his too French "anecdotes of his bonnes fortunes." As now presented to us, boiled down, and with an excellent introduction and notes, Gourgaud's Journal must be regarded as one of the most interesting of authentic books about Napoleon. It is emphatically a volume to be dipped into at odd moments, and it undoubtedly exhibits its hero in all his intellectual strength, and all, or nearly all, his spiritual weakness. Napoleon's theology, in spite of his varied and considerable reading, was somewhat amateurish and unsatis- factory. But he had a wide knowledge of affairs, and his judgments on men—although he seems to have been unable towards the end to do justice to Wellington, or understand his hold upon Englishmen—were very shrewd. Thus he is probably correct in saying that Robespierre "will never be well known in history " ; that Danton was "a real party-chief," and "a man capable of anything"; and that, "whatever people may say of abnormal persons like Marat, they are not despicable characters." On the whole, Napoleon's opinions of his countrymen—for he declined to label himself a Corsican—are those most worth studying in this most interesting volume.
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