Recollections of Napoleon at St. Helena/Preface

The writer of the following pages trusts she will not be thought presumptuous in presenting them to the public. Thrown at a very early age into the society of Napoleon, and of those who composed his suite, she considers it an almost imperative duty to communicate any fact or impression, which, though uninteresting in itself, may still be worth recording as relating to him, and as serving to elucidate his character. Could these recollections of the emperor have been published without having her name appended to them, they would long ago have appeared, but feeling that the sole merit to which they could lay claim consisted in their being faithful records of him, and that if produced ​anonymously, there would be no guarantee for their truth; being moreover desirous to shun publicity, and unequal to the task of authorship, the undertaking has been postponed from time to time, and, perhaps, would have been delayed still longer, but for the pressure of calamitous circumstances, which compels her to hesitate no more, but, with all their imperfections on their head, to send these pages at once into the world.

The authoress may compare her feelings, as she launches her little vessel on the waters, to those of Shelley, when, haying exhausted his whole stock of paper, he twisted a bank-note into the shape of a littic boat, and then committing it to the stream, waited on the other side for its arrival with intense anxiety. Her shipbuilding powers, she fears, are as feeble, her materials as frail; but she has seen the little Paper Nautilus floating with impunity and confidence on the bosom of that ​mighty ocean, which has engulfed many a noble vessel: accepting the augury, she intrusts her tiny bark to the waves of public opinion, not with confidence, however, but with timidity and hesitation,—yet is her solicitude not altogether unenlivened by the hope that it may reach its haven, if wafted by friendly breezes and favoured by propitious skies.

The writer must crave indulgence for the frequent mention of herself during the narrative. The nature of the subject renders this unavoidable.