@tomholmberg Maxime de Villemarest is the ghostwriter for Bourrienne's alleged memoirs. And those 'memoirs' were later exposed for what they were by Comte Boulay de la Meurthe, and other contributors, in Bourrienne et ses erreurs.
Napoleon did read and study his profession profusely. Among others, he read and studied Guibert, Saxe, Lloyd, Villars, Folard, Feuquieres, Bourcet.
Thank you @tomholmberg. Hype and ghostwriting are clearly not modern invention. It’s like the celebrity interview ‘I don’t want to talk about that’. But it’s in your book, ‘Is it?’. If we add to that those who embroidered their own work, and the thirst for anything surrounding the most famous (or infamous) man of his age we can see what makes the legends surrounding Napoleon so difficult to penetrate.
Napoleon's supposed annotations of Machiavelli published by Aimie Guillon de Montleon are generally considered to be forgeries