oted to the cause of the Bourbons, he had intentionally
distorted facts, with the design of giving hope and consistency to the
royalists, and of intimidating, cooling, and dividing, the partisans
of Napoleon[37].

[Footnote 37: The Duke of Otranto excelled in the art of
bending facts to his own liking. He exaggerated or
extenuated them with so much skill, grasped them with so
much address, and deduced consequences from them so
naturally, that he was often able, to fascinate
Napoleon. More securely to deceive and seduce him, he
loaded him in his reports with protestations of
attachment and fidelity; and he took care to contrive
occasions of adding marginal notes with his own hand, in
which he adroitly displayed in a distinguished manner
his devotion, discernment, and activity. All his reports
in general bore the same stamp: with much of cunning,
and much of talent, they offered to the eye a rare and
valuable assemblage of quickness and judgment, of
moderation and firmness: at every word you might
discover the able minister, the profound politician, the
consummate statesman: in short, M. Fouche would have
wanted nothing, to place him in the rank of great
ministers, had he been what I shall call an honest
statesman (_un ministre honnete homme._)]

The chamber, instead of occupying itself on laws and measures for
promoting the public safety, the introduction of which had been
referred to them, left to the minister the task of proposing them. It
preferred the resumption of its discussions on its favourite subject,
the additional act; and I shall leave it, to waste its time in
abstract dissertations, while I return to Napoleon.

The Emperor, who set out on the 12th at three in the morning, had gone
over the fortifications of Soissons and Laon in his way, and arrived
at Avesnes on the 13th. His anxious thoughts were incessantly turned
toward Paris. Placed as it were between two fires, he seemed less to
dread the enemies he had before him, than those he left behind.

On the 14th of June the whole of his forces amounted to three hundred
thousand men; of which only a hundred and fifty thousand infantry, and
thirty-five thousand cavalry, were in a stat