He had made considerable progress when the idea struck him that, since the most curious and important part of his work was to come from the interior of the imperial tent, he must secure the co-operation of the man who had been domesticated in it during the entire expedition, and who, besides the extraordinary opportunities he had enjoyed, was a statesman, and a man of letters renowned for his probity :

Having resolved on this line, I repaired straight and without hesitation to M. le Cte. Daru. I arrived, enriched with a thousand pieces of information obtained from other ministers, great officers, marshals, and generals, aides-de-camp, the four private secretaries of Napoleon, his physicians, maîtres d'hôtel, and valets de chambre. This minister was my father's friend, his colleague in the Academy. I had already profited by their communications. His place in my book was consequently marked out beforehand; and as it was to be elevated by the aid I came to ask of him, I had good grounds for reckoning on his obliging concurrence. He thought the work deserved it. Thenceforth, as soon as a book was finished, I came to read it to him, to listen to his remarks, and then collect, in a conversation of several hours of earnest reasoning and discussion on the subject of the following book, all the information that his happy memory never failed to supply.'

M. Daru lent himself complacently to the kind of co-operation that has been described during the entire composition of the work ----begun in 1815, and completed in 1820; but never once, in the course of these innumerable consultations, extending over five years, did he utter an approving word, or give the faintest intimation of an opinion touching style or form; so that the author, with a conscience perfectly satisfied and at rest as to the facts and their appreciation, was left in the most embarrassing uncertainty as to the literary merit of his production. Whether from the distrust thus inspired, or from his being re-engaged in active military vocations, he had given up all notion of publishing and laid aside his manuscript as a legacy to posterity, when, much to his surprise (in 1823 or 1824), he learnt from his father that M. Daru had been speaking in the highest terms of the work, advised publication, and prophesied success.

At their next meeting, M. Daru, laying aside reserve, asked him point-blank why he persevered in deriving no advantage from so sustained a labour. But,' I replied, "if the public should prove as reticent as you have been, what is the use of consulting it when its silence would annoy without convincing me; and I should not be satisfied with an incomplete success. 'Well, in that case,' he rejoined, you would appeal to posterity.' 'Ah, yes,' I exclaimed, like hosts of others; but I am by no means disposed

6

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'I

to swell the number.' Very little additional pressure is required to impel an author in this state of mind to publication. ~ At a subsequent interview, on M. Daru renewing his remonstrances, M. de Ségur said he would follow his advice, on one condition. 'Out with it, then.' After a little hesitation, I resumed: 'Well then, you alone are well acquainted with my book; answer me conscientiously. Are you sure that it would be sufficient to throw wide open to me the folding-doors of the Academy? answer for it,' he replied; and so well, that I give you my vote beforehand.' There was no resisting such an encouragement: the long-secluded manuscript was brought forth, and read over, chapter by chapter, to his father, whose deliberate judgment was in accordance with M. Daru's. But fastidious recasting and polishing, with occasional fits of hesitation, procrastinated what he still regarded as a leap in the dark till 1825; when the entire 'copy' was confided to the celebrated printers, MM. Baudouin, who severely tried his patience by fresh delay.

.The process of printing was long enough in all conscience. If, at the time, they had told me why, perhaps my apprehensions would have been allayed. I have learned since that the compositors paused to read the proofs amongst themselves. But I was kept in ignorance of this first success. When the day of publication arrived, I hurried in my perplexity to isolate myself at Saint-Gratien' (his countryhouse). But, at the end of forty-eight hours, the feverish agitation which came over me, augmented by solitude, led me to return furtively to Paris. There, without stirring out, I abided my fate, when M. Baudouin begged me to call on him. I went, more and more anxious. Jostled on my way by a double file of porters loaded with huge piles of printed sheets, I somewhat impatiently entered the court. As soon as he saw me he ran up; and on his grasping and pressing both my hands, I exclaimed, “Good God, what do you want me for, and what has happened?" "Don't you see? Look; is it not a scene for the Arabian Nights'?" "What! those porters who, ran against me?" Well, it is you, it is your book that they are carrying thus! We are no longer equal to the demand! The first edition of three thousand copies is exhausted already; we must have a second of four thousand as soon as possible, and authority to strike off a third, a fourth, of the same number. It is a success unexampled since Chateaubriand.'"

This was literally true. Congratulations poured in on all sides the grand object of his aspirations, the seat in the Academy, was as good as attained; and he had fairly established his title to a place on that table-land of Fame where, according to d'Alembert, the celebrities, the choice spirits, of all times. and climes are to assemble and shake hands. A duel with General Gourgaud, in which he wounded his adversary, and a

pamphlet

pamphlet-war with Marshal Grouchy, in which he had the best of it, could hardly be called drawbacks: at all events, were far more than counterbalanced by the eager testimony borne to the fidelity of his narratives and descriptions, as well as by the unequivocal signs of their popular effect and impressiveness.

As an ex-Imperialist he was not in high favour at the Tuileries, and Madame la Dauphine in particular was wont to look coldly on him. The first time he met her eye after the publication of his book, she showed signs of emotion, and seemed more than once on the point of addressing him. Struck by her altered manner, he requested an explanation of one of the persons of her suite. What! do you not know? Can you be ignorant that, on reading your account of the unfortunate Prince of Moskow during the retreat, she repeatedly cried out, "Heavens ! why did we not know all this? What heroism! Why did not M. de Ségur publish his book sooner? It would have saved the life of Marshal Ney!"

A still higher compliment was that paid by an eminent professor of history. In the course of a lecture at the Sorbonne, M. Saint-Marc Girardin drew a comparison between the work and the History of Charles XII. by Voltaire; and to justify his preference of M. de Ségur, quoted his description of the Grand Army on the 6th November, when the Russian winter broke upon them in all its horrors, heralded by a piercing wind and a heavy fall of snow. To save the reader the trouble of reference we quote a portion of it:

Les malheureux se traînent encore, en grelottant, jusqu'à ce que la neige, qui s'attache sous leurs pieds en forme de pierre, quelques débris, une branche ou le corps de l'un de leurs compagnons, les fasse trébucher et tomber. Là ils gémissent en vain: bientôt la neige les couvre ; de légères éminences les font reconnaître. Voilà leur sépulture! La route est toute parsemée de ees ondulations, comme un champ funéraire; les plus intrépides ou les plus indifférents s'affectent: ils passent rapidement en détournant leurs regards. Mais devant eux, autour d'eux, tout est neige; leur vue se perd dans cette immense et triste uniformité; l'imagination s'étonne: c'est comme un grand linceul dont la nature enveloppe l'armée! Les seuls objets qui s'en détachent, ce sont de sombres sapins, des arbres de tombeaux, avec leur funèbre verdure, et la gigantesque immobilité de leurs noires tiges, et leur grande tristesse qui complète cet aspect désolé d'un deuil général, d'une nature sauvage, et d'une armée mourante au milieu d'une nature morte.'*

This, his first work, occupies the fourth and fifth volumes of his completed Histoire et Mémoires, and harmonises admirably with

*Liv. ix., chap. 11.

the

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the rest, which is composed on much the same plan and blends personal reminiscences with the Imperial annals in nearly the same manner. "The History of Napoleon and the Grand Army,' he remarks, on resuming his pen, 'is before the world. It is also my own history. Many a time have I figured upon the stage, but invariably without naming myself. I was then more of a witness than an actor, having hardly quitted the Emperor, except for short distances, to carry and see to the execution of his orders. I suffered less than others, notwithstanding my wounds, because, attached to Napoleon, we were almost always under shelter and sufficiently fed.' On most other occasions he names himself without reserve, and the part assigned to him is not unfrequently reversed. He is conspicuous 22 in action where the fight is hottest; he leads more than one charge as desperate as that of Balaclava or a forlorn hope; he receives wounds which make the army surgeons shudder; and has so many hairbreadth escapes, that we wonder by what miraculous intervention he lived to tell of them. The civil or non-military part of his life is also so eventful and sensational, that although we shall keep as much as possible to the passages in which it blends with history, we must bestow a passing attention on those in which he tells us how his character was developed, and how he came to run counter to the hereditary principles of his race.

ער

His education was private and domestic. It was the best that, after his ninth year, his father and mother could give him in the midst of revolutionary dangers and disturbances. On the 21st January, 1793 (the day of the execution of Louis XVI.), they fled to a country-house at Châtenay, near Sceaux, three leagues from Paris.

'It was said that Voltaire had been brought up in it. I remember that the Abbé Raynal came to see my father there. The theories of this historian had just been reduced to practice; he seemed disgusted with them. I heard him reproach himself with the exaggeration of his philosophical writings. He repented his share of the flames in this horrible conflagration, and his having placed torches instead of lustres in brutal hands which used them to consume and destroy all.'

He goes on to say that the Reign of Terror was just beginning ; the family were poor and proscribed; masters and preceptors all abandoned them, and the father was the sole instructor.

This was too much for me; the disproportion between tutor and pupil was too great. In this early age, the age of sensations, and in the middle of the tragic scenes surrounding me, feeble and sickly, my heart was too soon and singularly developed, but alone, but at the Vol. 139.-No. 277.

expense

expense of all the rest, and especially of my mind, which remained in its first infancy. I grew neither in body nor intelligence.'

This lasted three years; and he was in his fifteenth year, when he took up a book of light literature which he had frequently glanced over and thrown by, and from the first words he felt as if a thick internal veil had been torn aside, and as if a new world of ideas, luminous and dazzling, had been opened to him. The readers of John Stuart Mill's Autobiography' will remember that the dark mental cloud which hung upon him was similarly dissipated by his coming accidentally on a passage in the Memoirs of Marmontel. The day after the intellectual glow came upon young de Ségur he was seized with a literary fit, during which he composed comedies. Then, after a serious semi-religious turn, a melancholy meditative mood came over him, when, convinced of the vanity and nothingness of all things including human life, he alternately contemplates suicide à la Werther or the isolation and solitary musings of a hermit. The spell is fortunately broken by a call to Paris.

The view of the world sufficed to originate a fresh transformation, so accidental and contrary to nature was the tendency in which I was well nigh lost: self-love and very soon other kinds of love completed the work.'

Society was just beginning to revive under the Directory, and he was immediately introduced to the best of it by his uncle the Vicomte de Ségur. Dazzled by its novelty and fascinated by its charm, his sole ambition is to shine in it, to sustain the renown of his family for wit, courage, and gallantry. The method he pursued was precisely that of the hero in Les Premières Armes de Richelieu: he fought duels, he compromised female reputations, he wrote love verses. He was indifferent to the political position, ever verging on a crisis; and if he deigned to think of the glories accruing to the French arms, it was to sneer at them, and speak of the young commander in the full career of victory as 'Monsieur' Bonaparte, after the fashion of his clique. Yet this dissipation and frivolity were but another crust or layer which covered and concealed his genuine qualities of head and heart: when these were fairly reached and roused, there was an end of vacillation, folly, weakness, and uncertainty. His real instincts were military; his true vocation was for arms; although here, again, the impulse was accidental; but once given, it determined the whole colour of his life.

'Time pressed, and the humiliation of remaining a burthen on my family. Already I was mournfully making up my mind to become a

middling