sort of melancholy pleasure in
contemplating and renewing the painful traces which so many horrors have
left in it. Is the soul, also, proud of her deep and numerous wounds?
Does she delight in displaying them? Are they a property of which she
has reason to be proud? Is it rather, that after the desire of knowing
them, her first wish is to impart her sensations? To feel, and to excite
feeling, are not these the most powerful springs of our soul?

* * * * *

But in short, whatever may be the cause of the sentiment which actuates
me, I have yielded to the desire of retracing the various sensations
which I experienced during that fatal war. I have employed my leisure
hours in separating, arranging, and combining with method my scattered
and confused recollections. Comrades! I also invoke yours! Suffer not
such great remembrances, which have been so dearly purchased, to be
lost; for us they are the only property which the past leaves to the
future. Single, against so many enemies, ye fell with greater glory than
they rose. Learn, then, that there was no shame in being vanquished!
Raise once more those noble fronts, which have been furrowed with all
the thunders of Europe! Cast not down those eyes, which have seen so
many subject capitals, so many vanquished kings! Fortune, doubtless,
owed you a more glorious repose; but, such as it is, it depends on
yourselves to make a noble use of it. Let history inscribe your
recollections. The solitude and silence of misfortune are propitious to
her labours; and let truth, which is always present in the long nights
of adversity, at last enlighten labours that may not prove unproductive.

As for me, I will avail myself of the privilege, sometimes painful,
sometimes glorious, of telling what I have seen, and of retracing,
perhaps with too scrupulous attention, its most minute details; feeling
that nothing was too minute in that prodigious Genius and those gigantic
feats, without which we should never have known the extent to which
human strength, glory, and misfortune, may be carried.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

VOLUME FIRST.

BOOK I.

CHAP. I.--Political relations of France and Russia since 1807 1

II.--Prussia.--Frederick William 6

III.--Turkey.--Sultans Selim--Mustapha--Mahmoud 18

IV.--Sweden.--Bernadotte 32

BOOK II.

CHAP. I.--Feelin