BOURRIENNE'!

Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de, private secretary of
Napoleon, born at Sens, July 9, 1769, died near Caen, Feb. 7,
1834. He entered the military school of Brienne in 1778, and was
there some 6 years as Napoleon’s school-fellow. From 1789 to
1792, he spent his time as attaché to the French embassy at
Vienna, as a student of international law and northern languages
at Leipsic, and at the court of Poniatowski, at Warsaw. After his
return to Paris, he renewed his intimacy with Napoleon, then a
poor and friendless officer; but the decisive turn taken by the
revolutionary movement after June 20, 1792,’ drove him back to
Germany. In 1795 he again returned to Paris, and there again met
Napoleon, who however treated him coldly; but toward the end of
1796, he applied again to him, and was summoned to headquarters, and installed at once as his private secretary. After the second
Italian campaign,’” Bourrienne received the title of councillor of
state, was lodged at the Tuileries, and admitted to the first consul’s
family circle. In 1802 the house of Coulon, army contractors,
whose partner Bourrienne had secretly become, and for which he
had procured the lucrative business of supplying the whole cavalry
equipment, failed with a deficit of 3 millions; the chief of the
house disappeared, and Bourrienne was banished to Hamburg. In
1806 he was appointed to oversee at Hamburg the strict execution
of Napoleon’s continental system. Accusations of peculation
rising against him from the Hamburg senate, from which he had
obtained 2,000,000 francs, and from the emperor Alexander,
whose relative, the duke of Mecklenburg, he had also mulcted,
Napoleon sent a commission to inquire into his conduct, and
ordered him to refund 1,000,000 francs to the imperial treasury.

Thus, a disgraced and ruined man, he lived at Paris until
Napoleon’s downfall, in 1814, when he stepped forward, had his
million paid back by the French provisional government,’ was
installed its postmaster-general, deposed from this post by Louis
XVIII, and at the first rumor of Napoleon’s return from Elba,
made, by the same prince, prefect of the Paris police, a post he
held for 8 days. As Napoleon, in his decree dated Lyons, March
13, had exempted him from the general amnesty, he followed
Louis XVIII to Belgium, was thence despatched to Hamburg, and
created, on his return to Paris, state councillor, subsequently
minister of state. His pecuniary embarrassments forced him in
1828 to seek a refuge in Belgium, on an estate of the duchess of
Brancas at Fontaine l’Évêque, not far from Charleroy. Here, with
the assistance of M. de Villemarest and others, he drew up his
“Memoirs” (10 vols. 8vo), which appeared in 1829, at Paris, and
caused a great deal of excitement. He died in a lunatic hospital.