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306 SHORT NOTICES April bill had passed the Convention and before it became law ; presumably they had been bribed by the directors of the company. No one noticed that the bill had been altered ; but Chabot, one of the deputies concerned, took fright and denounced the others to the government committees, representing the financial manoeuvres as part of a great political plot to bring the Convention into contempt. Fabre d'Fjglantine, the friend of Danton, had signed the altered bill, along with Delaunay, the undoubted villain of the piece, who forged the signatures of the rest of the committee responsible for the bill. Fabre protested that he had signed without noticing the alterations and was at first believed ; later on he was arrested, and the question of his guilt or innocence is the crux of the affair. Opinions will probably always differ, for the written examinations of the accused deputies which would have shed most light on the transaction are missing, and M. Mathiez shows that the government committees, who were chiefly anxious to track the political plot, made no attempt to discover the truth about the financial scandal ; they did not even examine the directors of the company. M. Mathiez has spared no pains over his book ; he has printed all the essential documents in chronological order and has con- nected them by illuminating notes ; he has given much that is new, including the bill as Delaunay submitted it to the Convention. Above all, he has given two excellent facsimiles of the bill, in its second form with corrections by Fabre, and in its final form. By the help of these the reader can grasp what really happened, as he never could before. It seems ungracious to ask for more when so much has been given, and it is only because M. Mathiez has been so liberal that one cannot help wishing he had reprinted the original of Fabre's Precis Apologetique (his defence) instead of the truncated version of the Bulletin du Tribunal Revolutionnaire, and had included Jopino Lebrun's notes on the trial, which are hard to get at and fuller in places than the Bulletin. E. D. B. M. Lacour-Gayet's book, Napoleon, sa Vie, son (Euvre, son Temps (Paris : Hachette, 1921), is an attempt to evoke the great image of Napoleon I and his time. As might be expected from its dedication to M. Frederic Masson, the work is after the manner of that author. It consists chiefly of a collection of anecdotes taken from sources most diverse, and we may add in some cases most dubious, including even the Memoires de Bourrienne. From such an excellent scholar as M. Lacour- Gayet we had the right to expect different and certainly better things. The book contains numerous illustrations ; those in colour are scarcely worthy of the house of Hachette ; but the photographic reproductions cannot be too highly praised, and they form a most admirable collection illustrative of Napoleonic history. R. F. Sir Plunket Barton is doing sound and useful work in writing the biography of Bernadotte, of which a second volume, Bernadotte and Napoleon (London : Murray, 1921), has now appeared. In this volume the author continues the history of Bernadotte from the time of the coup d'etat of 1799 to the year 1810, when the marshal of France became the crown prince of Sweden, the negotiations which preceded this meta-