[229] "He certainly had a long conversation with me, which he misrepresents, as might be expected; and it was at the very moment when he was delivering a long prosing speech, which appeared to me a mere string of absurdity and impertinence, that I scrawled on the corner of the chimney-piece the order to withdraw him from his embassy, and to send him as soon as possible to France; a circumstance which was the cause of a good deal of merriment at the time, and which the abbé seems very desirous of concealing."--NAPOLEON, _Las Cases_, tom. ii., p. 94. [230] "In Silesia, Napoleon was very nearly taken prisoner by the Prussians; and at Dresden, he only escaped a plot for his seizure, because Lord Walpole, who was at Vienna, dared not give the signal."--FOUCHÉ, tom. ii., p. 117. [231] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 341. [232] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 351. [233] Ségur, tom. ii., p. 371. [234] "Of 400,000 men in arms, who had crossed the Niemen, scarcely 30,000 repassed that river five months afterwards, and of those two-thirds had not seen the Kremlin."--FOUCHÉ, tom. ii., p. 118. [235] "Sir Walter takes great pains to prove that the extraordinary severity of the winter was not the principal cause of this frightful catastrophe. He is facetious about the snow, to which he believes, or pretends to believe, that the twenty-ninth bulletin attributes the disaster; whereas, it was not the snow alone, but a cold of thirty degrees below zero. And have we not often known, in the severe winters of the north of France, where the cold is slight in comparison with that of Russia--travellers to perish under the snow? How then can it be denied that the extreme severity of the winter was the cause of the disaster?"--LOUIS BUONAPARTE.