"My evil genius appeared to me and foretold my end, which I found at Leipzig." "I have laid the terrible spirit of innovation which was overrunning the world." That most certainly is genuine Bonaparte. If the bulletins, the dispatches, the allocutions, the proclamations of Bonaparte are distinguished for energy, this energy did not belong to him in his own right: it was of his time, it came from the revolutionary inspiration which grew weaker in Bonaparte, because he marched counter to that inspiration. Danton said: "The metal is boiling over; if you do not watch the furnace, you will all be scalded." Saint-Just said: "Dare!" That word contains the whole policy of our Revolution; they who make revolutions by halves only dig a grave. Do Bonaparte's bulletins rise above that pride of speech? [Sidenote: Napoleon as writer.] As for the numerous volumes published under the title of _Mémoires de Sainte-Hélène, Napoléon dans l'exil._, etc., those documents, gathered from Bonaparte's mouth or dictated by him to different persons, contain a few fine passages on actions of war, a few remarkable appreciations of certain men; but, in the upshot, Napoleon is occupied only in making his apology, in justifying his past, in basing on commonplace ideas accomplished events and things of which he had never dreamt during the course of those events. In this compilation, in which _pros_ and _cons_ succeed one another, in which every opinion finds a favourable authority and a peremptory refutation, it is difficult to separate that which belongs to Napoleon from that which belongs to his secretaries. It is probable that he had a different version for each of them, in order that readers might choose according to their taste and, in the future, create for themselves Napoleons to their liking. He dictated his history as he wished to leave it; he was an author writing articles on his own work. Nothing therefore could be more absurd than to go into ecstasies over chronicles by different hands which are not, like Cæsar's _Commentaries_, a short work, springing from a great head, written by a superior writer; and yet those brief commentaries, Asinius Pollio[376] thought, were neither faithful nor exact. The _Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène_ is good, allowing liberally for the candour and simplicity of the admiration.