Again, the reason given in Gourgaud[123] and the Memoirs[124] as inducing Ney to halt this side of Quatre Bras, namely, that he deemed it unwise to advance further to the front than the main body had proceeded,—judging by the sound of the cannon, which came from the neighborhood of Fleurus and Gilly,—is a very natural[125] one. It is no doubt the reason he gave to the Emperor at their interview that very night at Charleroi. Neither Ney nor Soult have left any statements in writing[126] about the matter. Nor is it claimed that Ney ever made any verbal statement on the subject. Thiers[127] asserts that Soult “frequently said * * * that on the afternoon of the fifteenth of June he heard Napoleon order Marshal Ney to proceed to Quatre Bras,” and he cites the memoirs of General Berthezène, who commanded one of Vandamme’s divisions, to the effect that Soult had told him that Napoleon gave these orders to Ney. On the other hand we have a statement of Ney’s son, then Duke of Elchingen, that Colonel Heymès, Ney’s aide-de-camp, said in 1841 to him,[128] that the name of Quatre Bras was not pronounced in the conversation between the Emperor and Marshal Ney on the afternoon of the 15th. The Duke furthermore tells us[129] that in 1829, Marshal Soult told him and Colonel Heymès that the Emperor had no idea of having Quatre Bras occupied on the evening of the 15th, and gave no orders to that effect. But how is it possible to reconcile this hearsay evidence, with the undeniable fact that the official bulletin states Ney’s headquarters on the evening of the 15th to be at Quatre Bras? It is surely much more likely that these reports by Marshal Ney’s son, of statements by Heymès and Soult, of their recollections, given respectively fourteen and twenty-six years after the occurrence, are defective in some way, than that the bulletin made up on the very evening should have contained a statement that Ney was at Quatre Bras when he had never been directed to go there. The contents of the bulletin must have been known to Soult, the chief-of-staff of the army; in fact, the bulletin itself must have been either actually composed by him or under his immediate direction; and it is simply incredible that he should have inserted a statement that Ney’s headquarters were, on the evening of the 15th, at Quatre Bras if he knew that the Emperor had no intention of having Quatre Bras occupied that evening, and had given no orders to that effect. It is to be noted also that Charras makes but an incidental mention of the bulletin,[130] which is the only bit of contemporaneous evidence that we have, and confines his discussion of the testimony to an examination of these reported sayings of Soult and Heymès. When we take also into account that, in his carefully drawn Narrative,[131] Heymès does not explicitly state that Quatre Bras was not mentioned, that there is nothing whatever from Soult over his own signature, that