BERTRAND, HENRI GRATIEN, COMTE (17 French general, friend and confidant of Napoleon I., was born at Chateauroux on March 28 1773, and died there on Jan. 31 1844. At the outbreak of the Revolution he entered the army as a volunteer. During the expedition to Egypt, Napoleon named him colonel (1798), then brigadier-general, and after Austerlitz his aide-de-camp. His life was henceforth closely bound up with that of Napoleon, who had the fullest confidence in him and made him (1813) grand marshal of the court. Bertrand directed the building of the bridges by which the French army crossed the Danube at Wagram (1809). In 1813, after the battle of Leipzig, his efforts preserved the army from destruction. He accompanied Napoleon to Elba in 1814, returned with him in 1815, held a command in the Waterloo campaign and accompanied Napoleon to St. Helena. He returned to France after Napoleon's death. Louis XVIII. allowed him to retain his rank, and he was elected deputy in 1830. In 184o he was sent to bring Napoleon's remains to France.
B E R T R AN D, JACQUES - LOUIS - NAPOLEON ("ALOYSIUS") (1807-1841), French author, was born on April 20, 1807, in Piedmont. His father was French, his mother Italian. In 1815 the family went to live in Dijon, and he was educated at the college there. His early work, done as a member of the Societe d'Etudes, was mostly concerned with Burgundy and Dijon and their history, and the early poems in La Volupte are of a similar type. In 1828 he became gerant of the Provincial, a monarchist and Catholic paper, his contributions to which brought him to the notice of Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve. He went to Paris in Nov. 1828, and we hear of him at the salons of Hugo and Sainte-Beuve and their circle, especially on one evening when he made a great impression by reciting the Sire de Maupin. During this visit to Paris he showed the mss. of Gaspard de la Nuit to Sainte-Beuve. Then he went back to Dijon, contributed to the Spectateur till it was suppressed under the Ordonnances, and after the revolution of 183o became editor of the Patriote de la Cote d'Or, a liberal and revolutionary paper. He went back to Paris in 1832, where his mother and sister joined him, and they lived in great poverty. He did some journalistic work, failed to get some plays produced, and refused various posts that were offered him. Renduel the publisher bought Gaspard de la Nuit, but never published it. By this time Bertrand was desperately ill with consumption; from Sept. 1838 onwards he was in and out of hospital continuously, and he died on April 29, 1841, and was buried at Vaugirard.
Sainte-Beuve describes Bertrand as "a tall young man of 21 with a yellow complexion, very lively little black eyes, a face mocking and sharp, a little wretched perhaps, and a long silent laugh." Gaspard de la Nuit, a very rare book, has always been highly valued by a small circle of initiates, and was professedly Baudelaire's model for the Petits Poemes en Prose. The hook con sists of a series of short sketches, "engravings after imaginary pictures," written in carefully-balanced paragraphs, usually single sentences.