How legitimate are these memoirs by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne as a historical source?
From what I've gathered, he exaggerates the close bond the two had but that's all I could find. I'm just looking to figure out if they're worth the read as I picked them up recently for a decent price!
As a read, I couldn't due to the massive bias that Bourrienne has for Napoleon. Many of the memoirs of this time period suffer from the bias of being too close. As a source, it's great but you need to be well versed in the history and historiography in order to get the fullest from the source. Thus I can't recommend it for non academic reading.
Bourrienne's memoirs are among the least useful and trustworthy books written about the period.
It was almost entirely ghost written, a little of it came from notes he had jotted down. He would later go insane, and this ghost written work was published in Brussels as it would never pass for truth in France.
A few years later a 720 page book of corrections titled 'Bourrienne et ses erreurs' would come out just to put to bed all the complete rubbish put forward in that terrible book.