Includes over 180 illustrations, portraits and maps covering the Russian Campaign of 1812. "These Memoirs are the findings of a professional soldier, sitting in judgment upon the foremost soldier of fortune the world has known. But they are something more than that. They are the observations of a man of the Old Régime, whose lot had been cast in with the new Empire. The soldier who wrote them was a statesman as well—a diplomatist of the school of Talleyrand, but without any of that strange creature's womanish ways. He was also—and one often feels the lack of this quality in memorialists who were near Napoleon—an administrator of sufficient skill to comprehend the Emperor's plans, and to do justice to the recording of them. And finally, he was a man with physical energy enough to match, and on occasion to outdo, the Emperor's own."