Excerpt from The Bonaparte Letters and Despatches, Secret, Confidential, and Official, Vol. 1: From the Originals in His Private Cabinet
In these Letters, not intended to meet the public eye, he has laid bare the sentiments and motives which influenced his actions during the busy years over which they extend, and thus raised a monumen tum (ere perennius - a monument more imperishable than that designed to cover his ashes in the capital of what was once his mighty empire. They display his unrivalled judgment, sagacity, foresight, and dis crimination - his indefatigable perseverance, activity, industry, and that attention to the minutest circum stances, Without which the success of the most ably combined plans may be endangered. But the monu ment, like a medal, has its reverse; There we dis cover the recklessness of the means employed for accomplishing ends - the duplicity, fraud, hypocrisy, perfldy, rapacity, cruelty, which cast a shade over those higher qualities that would excite unmixed admiration but for the purposes to which they were applied.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.