Youth is a pleasant thing; at the commencement of life, crowned with flowers, it goes to conquer Sicily and the delightful plains of Enna. The prayer is intoned in a loud voice by the priest of Neptune; libations are poured from golden cups; the crowd, bordering the sea, joins its invocations to those of the pilot; the paean is chanted, while the sail is deployed in the dawn light and breeze. Alcibiades, clothed in purple and beautiful as Amor, is visible aboard his trireme, proud of the seven chariots he had entered in the arena at Olympia. But scarcely is the island of Alcinous passed, and the illusion vanishes: Alcibiades, banished, will grow old far from his country and die, pierced by arrows, on Timandra’s breast. The companions of his first dreams, slaves in Syracuse, have nothing to ease the burden of their chains but a few verses from Euripides.

You have seen my youth leave shore; it lacked the beauty of Pericles’ ward, a schoolboy at Aspasia’s knee; but it had its morning hours: and its passions and its dreams, God knows! I have described these dreams for you: today, returning home after long exile, I have only truths sad as my years to tell you of. If I can still hear the notes of the lyre sometimes, they are the last harmonies of a poet who seeks to heal himself of the wounds made by the arrows of time, or to console himself for the servitude of age.

You know the mutability of my life in my roles as traveller and soldier; you have understood my literary existence from 1800 to nigh on 1813, the year when you left me at the Vallée-aux-Loups, which at that time still belonged to me, as my political career began. I will presently enter on that career: but, before penetrating that region, I must cover the historical facts which I skipped while concerning myself with my works and my own affairs: these facts are to do with Napoleon. Passing on to him then; let me speak of that vast edifice which had been constructed beyond my dreaming. I will become a historian now without ceasing to be a writer of memoirs; a public topic will support my private confidences; my little tales will cluster round my narration.

When the Revolutionary War broke out, Europe’s kings did not comprehend it; they saw a revolt where they should have seen national change, the end and beginning of a world: they deceived themselves into believing that it only meant the addition of a few provinces torn from France to their own States: they believed in the old military tactics, the old diplomatic treaties, and negotiations between governments; but conscripts went chasing after Frederick’s grenadiers, monarchs went to seek peace in the ante-chambers of obscure demagogues, and dreadful revolutionary ideas undid the schemes of old Europe on the scaffold. That old Europe thought to attack France; it failed to see that a new age was upon it.

Bonaparte in the course of success, full of perversity, seemed to call for the abolition of royal dynasties, in order to render his own the oldest. He made kings of the Electors of Bavaria, Wurtemberg, and Saxony; he gave the crown of Naples to Murat, that of Spain to Joseph, that of Holland to Louis, that of Westphalia to Jérôme; his sister, Élisa Bacciochi, was Duchess of Lucca; he was, by his own account, Emperor of the French, and King of Italy, which kingdom included Venice, Tuscany, Parma and Piacenza; Piedmont being re-united with France; he consented to one of his captains, Bernadotte, reigning in Sweden; by the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine, he exercised the rights of the House of Austria over Germany; he was declared Mediator of the Swiss Republic; he had flattened Prussia; without possessing a single ship he had declared a blockade of the British Isles. England despite its fleet was on the point of being denied a European port where it might discharge a single bale of merchandise or post a letter.

The Papal States were part of the French Empire; the Tiber was a department of France. In the streets of Paris one saw cardinals, semi- captive, who, sticking their heads out of the doors of their carriages, asked: ‘Does he live here, the King of…..? – ‘No,’ the doorman would reply, ‘he’s further on.’ Austria only made amends by handing over its daughter: the rider from the south claimed Honoria from Valentinian with half the provinces of the Empire.

How were these miracles achieved? What qualities did the man possess who gave birth to them? I am going to follow the course of Bonaparte’s great career, which nevertheless passed so swiftly that his age occupies a brief part of the years covered by these Memoirs. The fastidious reproduction of genealogies, the cold examination of facts, and the insipid verification of dates are duties to which the writer is constrained.