Las Cases is specially wroth with Sir Robert Wilson, but, even he, cannot successfully whitewash his beloved emperor. His attempted vindication is too long to be reproduced _in extenso_, but it goes to prove how widely spread in the army was the belief that the sick were hurried to their rest at Jaffa. ‘A circumstance, which will not a little surprise those who have yet to learn how little credit is due to public report, and which will serve to show the errors that may creep into history, is that Marshall Bertrand, who was himself with the army in Egypt, (though certainly in a rank which did not enable him to come into immediate contact with the General in Chief) firmly believed, up to the period of his residence at Saint Helena, the story of poison having been administered to sixty invalids. The report was circulated, and believed, even in our army; therefore, what answer could be given to those who triumphantly asserted, “It is a fact, I assure you, I have it from officers who served in the French army at the time.” Nevertheless, the whole story is false. I have collected the following facts from the highest source, from the mouth of Napoleon himself. ‘1st. That the invalids in question who were infected with the plague, amounted, according to the report made to the General in Chief, only to _seven_ in number. ‘2nd. That it was not the General in Chief, but a professional man, who, at the moment of the crisis, proposed the administering of opium. ‘3rd. That opium was not administered to a single individual. ‘4th. That the retreat having been effected slowly, a rear-guard was left behind in Jaffa for three days. ‘5th. That on the departure of the rear guard, the invalids were all dead, except one or two, who must have fallen into the hands of the English.’ But Las Cases, in his zeal, tries to prove too much; for, in a later passage, he says, that since his return to Paris he has had opportunities of conversing with those whose situation and profession naturally rendered them the first actors on the scene, and he finds ‘that no order was given for the administering of opium to the sick,’ and ‘That there was not at the period in question, in the medicine chest of the army, a single grain of opium for the use of the sick.’ So he admits that the emperor had the proposition made to him, by a man who must have known he had not the means to carry it out.