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Title: Napoleon
Author: Emil Ludwig
Translator: Cedar Paul
Eden Paul
Release date: August 1, 2026 [eBook #79253]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79253
Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NAPOLEON ***
NAPOLEON
Napoleon went forth to seek Virtue, but, since she was not to
be found, he got Power.—GOETHE.
NAPOLEON
[Illustration]
_By_
EMIL LUDWIG
_Translated by_
EDEN _and_ CEDAR PAUL
NEW YORK
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1926
Copyright, 1926, by
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
First Printing, December, 1926
Second Printing, January, 1927
Third Printing, January, 1927
Fourth Printing, March, 1927
Fifth Printing, May, 1927
Sixth Printing, July, 1927
Seventh Printing, September, 1927
Eighth Printing, November, 1927
Ninth Printing, December, 1927
Tenth Printing, December, 1927
Eleventh Printing, January, 1928
Twelfth Printing, January, 1928
Thirteenth Printing, March, 1928
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
_To_
ELGA LUDWIG
_Moscia. Summer 1924_
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE xi
BOOK ONE
THE ISLAND 3
BOOK TWO
THE TORRENT 55
BOOK THREE
THE RIVER 165
BOOK FOUR
THE SEA 357
BOOK FIVE
THE ROCK 545
ENVOY 679
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 683
INDEX 685
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
Buonaparte in 1783. The first known portrait, drawn by his
fellow-countryman Pontornini. Musée Nationale, Versailles 4
General Bonaparte in 1797. After a painting by Jean Guérin.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 36
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society,
Charlottenburg.)
General Bonaparte in 1796. Engraving from the Kircheisen
Collection 68
General Bonaparte. Unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis David.
From the collection of the Duke of Bassano 100
(Photograph by Braun, Paris and Dornach.)
General Bonaparte in 1797. Drawing by Wocher in Basle. Town
Library, Basle 140
General Bonaparte in 1798, during the voyage to Egypt. Sketch
by André Dutertre 156
Bonaparte as First Consul. Painting by Girodet. Musée Nationale,
Versailles 196
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)
Bonaparte as First Consul. Pencil sketch by J. D. A. Ingres.
Germain Bapst Collection 228
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)
Bonaparte in 1802, as First Consul. Engraving by Alexandre
Tardieu. After a drawing by Jean Baptiste Isabey 260
Bonaparte as First Consul. Painting by J. D. A. Ingres. Musée
de Liége 292
(Photograph by Braun, Paris and Dornach.)
The Coronation. Detail from the picture by Jacques Louis David.
Louvre, Paris 324
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)
Napoleon as Emperor. Painting by Vigneux. Count Primoli Collection 356
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society,
Charlottenburg.)
Napoleon as Emperor. Bust by Houdon, Musée de Dijon 388
(Photograph by J. E. Bulloz, Paris.)
The Emperor’s profile. Sketched during Mass in the Tuileries.
Germain Bapst Collection 420
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)
Napoleon as Emperor in 1809. Woodcut from a medal by J. P. Droz 452
Napoleon as Emperor. Engraving by Bourgeois, after a painting
by Jacques Louis David 484
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society,
Charlottenburg.)
Napoleon as Emperor in 1814. Painting by Horace Vernet. Tate
Gallery, London 516
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society,
Charlottenburg.)
Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Engraving by Robert Lefèvre, after
a painting by Muneret 548
Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Woodcut, after a medal 580
Napoleon at St. Helena. Watercolour painting, probably by
a Japanese, with a marginal inscription in Chinese
ideographs concerning the owner. Broadley Collection 612
Death mask of Napoleon. By Dr. Antommarchi 644
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
BOOK ONE
1769. August 15th, Napoleon born.
1779. At School in Brienne.
1784. At the military academy.
1785. Sub-lieutenant of artillery.
1789. To Corsica.
1791. April, lieutenant in Valence.
October, to Corsica.
1792. Putsch in Ajaccio. Banishment.
1793. Captain. Siege of Toulon.
1794. February, brigadier general.
August, arrested.
1795. June, at the Ministry for War.
October, suppression of the Paris rising.
Commander of the Army of the Interior.
1796. March 2nd, Commander of the Army of Italy.
March 6th, married to Josephine Beauharnais.
BOOK TWO
1796-7. Battles of Millesimo, Castiglione, Arcola, Rivoli, Mantua.
1797. At the castle of Montebello.
Peace of Campo Formio.
1798. In Paris till May.
May 19th, embarcation for Egypt.
Battle of the Pyramids.
1799. Jaffa, Acre, Aboukir.
October 7th, landing in France.
November 9th, coup d’état of the eighteenth Brumaire.
December 24th, First Consul.
BOOK THREE
1800. June 14th, battle of Marengo.
December 24th, attempted assassination.
1801. Peace of Lunéville.
Concordat with Pius VII.
1802. Peace with England.
Consul for life. Legion of Honour.
1804. March 21st, duke of Enghien shot.
May 18th, assumption of imperial title.
December 2nd, coronation.
1805. October, Trafalgar.
November, Vienna taken.
December 2nd, battle of Austerlitz.
Peace of Pressburg.
1806. Confederation of the Rhine. Joseph, King of Naples.
Louis, King of Holland.
October 14th, battle of Jena.
Berlin. Continental System.
1807. Battles of Preussisch-Eylau and Friedland.
June 7th, treaty of Tilsit.
Jerome, King of Westphalia.
1808. Rome. Madrid. Bayonne. Joseph, King of Spain. Murat, King of
Naples.
1809. Excommunication. Battles of Aspern-Essling, Wagram, and Vienna.
1810. January, divorce.
April, married to Marie Louise.
1811. March 20th, birth of his son.
BOOK FOUR
1812. Battles of Smolensk, Borodino, Vittoria, Moscow.
December, return to Paris.
1813. April, battles of Lützen and Bautzen.
July, battle of Dresden.
October 16th to 18th, battle of Leipzig.
1814. Battles of Brienne, La Rothière, Champaubert, Montereau,
Bas-sur-Aube, Laon, Arcis-sur-Aube.
April 6th, abdication in Fontainebleau.
April 20th, embarcation for Elba.
1815. February 26th, sails from Elba.
March 13th, outlawed.
March 20th, Paris.
June, battles of Ligny and Waterloo.
June 23rd, second abdication.
July 13th, letter to the prince regent.
July 31st, declared a prisoner.
BOOK FIVE
1815. October 17th, arrival in St. Helena.
1821. May 5th, death.
BOOK ONE
THE ISLAND
The story of Napoleon produces on me an impression like that
produced by the Revelation of Saint John the Divine. We all
feel there must be something more in it, but we do not know
what.—GOETHE.
I
A young woman is sitting in a tent. Wrapped in a shawl, she is suckling
her baby, and listening to a distant rumbling and roaring. Are they still
shooting, though night has fallen? Maybe it is only the sound of one of
those autumn thunderstorms whose echoes reverberate from the mountains;
or perhaps it is nothing more than the murmur from the surrounding forest
of pines and evergreen oaks, where foxes and wild swine have their lairs.
She looks like a gipsy, sitting there with her white breast half covered
by the shawl, brooding within the murky tent, uncertain what the fate of
the day may have been. Now she hears the sound of hoof-beats. Is it he?
He promised to come; but it is a long way from the fighting line, and the
mists are rising.
The flap of the tent is thrown open, letting in a breath of night air.
A man enters. An officer in a coloured tunic and wearing a plumed
head-dress; a slim fellow, nimble of movement; a young patrician, in the
middle twenties. He greets the woman ardently. Springing to her feet,
she gives the nursling to her maid. Wine is brought. Taking the kerchief
from her head, she stands before him, showing chestnut ringlets astray
on a smooth, white brow. An eager question is on her well-shaped lips.
Add to the picture that she has a long chin, a sign of energy; that her
aquiline nose is thrown into relief by the firelight; and that on her hip
there gleams the dagger which in this mountain land she never lays aside.
We see a lovely amazon, daughter of an ancient race, sprung from men of
action and resolution. The woman’s forebears, like the man’s, have for
centuries been leaders and warriors; first across the water in Italy, and
then in this craggy island.
But now, when all have gathered together against the hated enemy, have
joined forces in the attempt to drive out the French, here, in the
wildest part of the mountains, whither the brave girl of nineteen has
followed the husband fighting for their fatherland; who, now, could
recognise in her the brilliant patrician, the magnet of all eyes? Here,
nothing but pride and courage show that she is of noble birth.
The man, full of life and vigour, ever in movement, tells her all his
news. The enemy has been beaten, driven back towards the coast. There is
no escape. Envoys have been sent to Paoli.
“There will be a truce to-morrow. Letizia, we are winning! Corsica will
be free!”
Every Corsican longs for many children. It is a land where an affront is
instantly avenged by a dagger thrust; where the vendetta is sacred; where
family feuds last from decade to decade and from century to century. The
man before us wants many children, to ensure that his race shall persist;
and the woman has learned from mother and grandmother that children are
tokens of honour. She had become a mother at fifteen; but the baby she
has just been nursing was her first boy.
The thought of freedom glows afresh, for the officer is adjutant to
Paoli, the leader of the people.
“No longer shall our children be the slaves of France!”
II
With the coming of spring, despondency prevails. The enemy has landed
reinforcements; the children of the island take up arms once more; again
the young wife accompanies her husband to the war; this time she carries
a child beneath her heart, the child conceived during the storms of the
previous autumn.
“Often, in search of news, I would steal forth from our mountain nook to
the battle-field; I heard the bullets whistling, but I put my trust in
Our Lady”—so she would tell the story in later years.
[Illustration: Buonaparte in 1783. The first known portrait, drawn by his
fellow-countryman Pontornini. Musée Nationale, Versailles.]
In May, the Corsicans were defeated. There was a terrible retreat
through the dense forests and the rugged mountains. Among the multitude
of men and the few women, rode Letizia, big with child, carrying her
one-year-old boy in her arms, seated on a mule. They reached the coast
safely. In June the defeated Paoli, accompanied by a few hundred of his
faithful followers, had to flee to Italy. In July Paoli’s adjutant,
Letizia’s husband, with other envoys, capitulated to the conqueror. The
insular pride was humbled. But in August his wife brought the avenger
into the world.
She named him Napolione.
This woman, who during the campaign had played the heroine and had
shown a man’s courage, must now, in the great house by the seashore,
become a prudent and thrifty housewife. Her young husband, fanciful by
temperament, lived more on plans than on income. For years his energies
were mainly devoted to the great lawsuit concerning his inheritance.
As a student in Pisa, where among his fellows he was known as Count
Buonaparte, he had lived well but learned little. After the birth of
his second son, he cut his studies short. How was he to make a living?
In troublous times, a man of the world takes the world as it is; comes
to terms with the conqueror; all the more since the French, in order to
secure their footing in the island, are inclined to show favour to the
Corsican nobility.
Soon he becomes assessor in the new law-courts; superintendent of a
nursery in which the king of France, eager to turn the new possessions to
account, wishes to grow mulberries; and when the distinguished marshal
comes to stay, no expense must be spared. There are still flocks of sheep
in the hills and vineyards along the coast; his brother, archdeacon
at the cathedral, is well-to-do; and his wife’s half brother, another
priest, a merchant’s son, is skilled in worldly affairs.
By the time his proud and beautiful wife has reached her thirties, five
boys and three girls have been born to her. This is well accordant to the
notions of the islanders, for whom rivalries and vendettas are supreme
virtues. But the rearing of eight children is a costly matter; so, day
by day, the youngsters hear their parents talking about money. At length,
however, the father finds a way out of his difficulties. Accompanied by
his two eldest sons, now ten and eleven years of age, he sails to France,
and journeys from Toulon to Versailles.
He brings recommendations from the marshal in Corsica. The Buonapartes’
Italian title of nobility is confirmed by the Herald’s College in
Paris. To the Corsican official who has been loyal for a decade, King
Louis makes a grant of two thousand francs. The two sons and one of the
daughters are given scholarships in the Nobles’ Schools. One son is to be
a priest; the other, an officer.
III
A taciturn boy, small, shy, and lonely, sits reading in a corner of the
garden. It is his own plot in the school garden at Brienne, and he has
made a fence round it. Really, only a third of the enclosure is his
own, for he has fenced in the plots of neighbours on either side. They
may come in too; but woe to any one else who disturbs his privacy! He
rushes furiously at the intruder. A little while ago, when the boys had
had a fireworks’ display, two of his schoolmates, who had been slightly
burned, had run away to his garden for refuge. He had driven them out,
flourishing a hoe at them.
No punishment will bring him to reason in this matter. The masters shake
their heads and let him go his own way.
“The youngster is made of granite,” says one of them, “but there is a
volcano inside.”
No one may touch this little kingdom of his in the garden, though part of
it is usurped. He has an ardent feeling for his own independence. Writing
to his father, he says: “I would rather be the first among the workmen
in a factory than the last among the artists in the Academy.” Did he get
the idea out of Plutarch? Certainly he has an enthusiasm for that author,
the lives of the great men as sketched by Plutarch, especially the Roman
heroes. Of these, he is always dreaming. No one tells us that he ever saw
this boy laugh.
To his schoolfellows he seems half a savage, or at best a queer
foreigner. He knows scarcely a word of French, and has little inclination
to learn the language of the foe. What a tiny little chap he is, and what
a ridiculous name! His coat is too long. No pocket-money, nothing to
spend, and yet he claims to be of noble birth! The scions of the French
nobility laugh. Who cares about Corsican noblemen?
“If you Corsicans are such brave fellows, why did you let yourselves be
beaten by our unconquerable troops?”
“We were one to ten,” the lad angrily exclaims. “You just wait till I’m
grown up, and I will pay you Frenchmen out!”
“Your father is nothing more than a sergeant, after all!”
An outburst of wrath from the boy, who challenges his tormentor. The
young Napoleon is “kept in.” He writes to his father: “I am tired of
explaining my poverty; of having to endure the mockery of these foreign
boys, whose only superiority is in respect of money, for in nobility of
feeling they are far beneath me. Must I really humble myself before these
purse-proud fellows?” The answer from the island is: “We have no money.
You must stay where you are.”
He stays five years; and, just as his revolutionary feeling is
intensified by every slight, so does his self-confidence grow
proportionally with the growth of his contempt for his fellows. The
masters, indeed, monks one and all, have a good opinion of him, although
he does not make much headway except in mathematics, history, and
geography—subjects which appeal to a precise mind, a seeing eye, and
also to the bitterness of spirit characteristic of one who belongs to a
conquered race.
For always his thoughts turn back to his native island. In secret, he is
angry with his father for having come to terms with the French. He has
made up his own mind. He will get all he can out of the king at whose
cost he now pursues his studies, so that in due time he may use the
knowledge against his patron. He has a presentiment that some day he will
set Corsica free. As yet all the lad of fourteen can do is to pore over
books about his homeland, for he who would make history must first study
history. He devours, too, all that Voltaire, Rousseau, and the great
king of Prussia shortly before his death, have written on behalf of the
liberation of Corsica.
Such a boy as this—solitary, suspicious, questing and rebellious,
brooding rancorously over vast designs—what is he likely to become?
Precociously thoughtful; endowed with a knowledge of men that is beyond
his years. When Joseph, his elder brother, wishes to abandon the priestly
career and to adopt the profession of arms, the youngster writes of him:
“1. He lacks courage to brave the perils of the battle-field.—He will
be a good garrison officer: well-grown and handsome, quick-witted and
therefore inclined to pay frivolous compliments, with his talents he
will always make a good impression in society. But in battle? 2. ’Tis
too late to make a change. He might have got a rich benefice, and what
an advantage that would have been to the family! 3. What branch of the
service will he enter? The navy? (a) He knows nothing of mathematics;
(b) his health could never endure life at sea. He is too light-minded
for the sustained work that will be needed if he is to be an artillery
officer.” These are the reflections of a fifteen-year-old observer, who
sees in himself the qualities that his brother lacks; and it is a perfect
description of Joseph, who was, indeed, his father’s son.
From this same father, Napoleon had inherited versatility and a vigorous
imagination; from his mother came pride, courage, and accuracy; from both
was derived his strong family feeling.
IV
“Only the sword-belt belongs to France; the edge is my own,” thinks
the youth, as he first buckles on his sword. At sixteen he has become
a sub-lieutenant—and he will don uniform a good many more times before
he dies. He has qualified for this rank by a year in the Paris Cadets’
School, where he spent his time as he had spent it at Brienne, poring
over books. A lad of Spartan tastes, he finds the prodigal expenditure
of the sprigs of the French nobility (by whom he is utterly outshone)
extremely distasteful. Since, however, nature sets him, even more than
most young men, in the centre of his own world, he makes a virtue of
necessity, and pens a memorial to the effect that luxurious living is
unsuitable for budding soldiers. He must not get into debt, for he
knows how poor they are at home. Now, when his father dies, the family
affection of this Italian becomes intensified. Though little more than a
boy, he begins to save money in order to help his mother.
After his examination, passed with fair credit, his superiors wrote
of him: “Reserved and diligent, he prefers study to any kind of
conversation, and nourishes his mind upon good authors.... He is
taciturn, with a love for solitude; is moody, overbearing, and extremely
egotistical. Though he speaks little, his answers are decisive and to
the point, and he excels in argument. Much self-love, and overweening
ambition.”
Clad in his new uniform, the little sub-lieutenant goes to join his
regiment at Valence, compelled by his poverty to walk a great part of the
way. Three impulses stir his youthful heart: to despise and make use of
his fellow-creatures, most of whom are empty-headed and pretentious; to
extricate himself from the clutches of poverty; to learn much in order
that he may rule others. The means and the goal are one. He is to be a
leader in the struggle on the island, and then to make himself master of
Corsica.
How dull life is in this garrison town! Of course, a young man should
learn to dance, should taste the pleasures of lively society. He tries
this, but soon abandons the attempt, for his teeming pride makes him want
to hide his poverty. However, any one who holds converse with members
of the burgher class, lawyers and shopkeepers, hears strange talk, gets
wind of things that the young viscounts in Paris never dream of. Is it
really true? Has the spirit of Voltaire’s and Montesquieu’s, and Raynal’s
writings actually climbed down so soon, to stalk among the provincial
petty bourgeois? Is the movement which these prophets were conjuring up
now seriously afoot? Can it be that the revolution is at hand?
Books clamour it abroad. Reading is free as breathing; and when a man
has read all the books in the lending library, he can spare a franc or
two now and again to buy a new book. True, the youth lodges in a café,
and the clicking of the billiard balls in the next room is tiresome.
But it would be still more tiresome to move. In personal habits, he is
conservative.
What about his sentiments? Judge for yourselves. Like every young man
of his generation, he is keenly interested in the State and society.
There he sits in the room next the billiard-room; pale, lonely, in a hot
and stuffy atmosphere. While his comrades, after their short hours of
duty, scatter to seek distraction in gaming or the pursuit of women, the
impoverished lieutenant bends over his books, reading with sure instinct
about the things (and those only) that will be of use to him in days
to come: artillery, its principles and its history; the art of siege;
Plato’s _Republic_; the constitution of the Persian, the Athenian, the
Spartan State; the history of England; the campaigns of Frederick the
Great; French finances; the Tartars and the Turks, their manners and
customs, and the topography of their countries; the history of Egypt
and the history of Carthage; descriptions of India; English accounts of
contemporary France: Mirabeau, Buffon, and Machiavelli; the history and
the constitution of Switzerland; the history and constitution of China,
India, the Inca State; the history of the nobility and the story of
patrician misdeeds; astronomy, geology, and meteorology; the laws of the
growth of population; statistics of mortality.
He did not simply flutter the pages of his books, but was an attentive
reader. There is extant a whole series of copy-books containing
Napoleon’s notes, penned in an almost illegible handwriting. The contents
of these, reprinted, occupies four hundred pages. Here we find a map of
the Saxon heptarchy with a list of the kings for three centuries; item,
the varieties of foot-race in ancient Crete; item, lists of the Hellenic
fortresses in Asia Minor; item, the dates of twenty-seven caliphs, with a
note of the strength of their cavalry, and an account of the misconduct
of their wives.
Especially frequent are memoranda concerning Egypt and India, including
even the measurements of the Great Pyramid and a catalogue of Brahminical
sects. He copies a passage from Raynal: “In view of the position of
Egypt, lying betwixt two seas, and in fact betwixt the East and the West,
Alexander the Great conceived the design of establishing the capital of
his worldwide empire in that country, and of making Egypt the centre of
world commerce. This most enlightened of the conquerors had realised that
if there was any practicable way of amalgamating his conquests into one
consolidated State, it was by this use of Egypt, created as a point of
union between Africa, Asia, and Europe.” Thirty years later, he still had
the words by heart. He had read them so often.
At this date, too, he begins original composition, drafting more than a
dozen essays and projects: the placing of artillery; suicide; monarchical
authority; the inequality of men; and Corsica, above all, Corsica—each
were the topics. Rousseau, the most popular author of those days, is
pulverised by Napoleon’s realism. The young officer is epitomising
Rousseau’s views on the origin of the human race (in the _Discours sur
l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes_), but
abruptly he breaks off the epitome with the comment: “I don’t believe
a word of this.” Then come a couple of pages filled with his own
counterstatement. Human beings were not, to begin with, solitary; nor
were they nomadic. They were happy, and lived apart, because they were
not numerous enough to be forced into close contact. When the population
grew more thick upon the ground, “then imagination came forth from the
cave in which for so long it had been prisoned: self-confidence, passion,
and pride reared their heads; there arose ambitious men with pale
features, who took control of affairs, and mastered the multicoloured
young popinjays, the Lotharios and lady-killers.”
Do not we already hear him rattling his chains, in the dark cavern where
he himself is prisoned with his titanic imagination? Do not we see the
fancy portrait of the young author, pale of visage, full of hatred for
the brilliant lady-killers who are his messmates?
Away from these fellows, who are Frenchmen! His gaze is still fixed upon
his native isle, and it is to the advantage of Corsica that he twists the
new sociological outlooks. We read in one of the essays: “How absurd to
declare that divine laws forbid us to shake off a usurper’s yoke! Were
that so, then every regicide who has clambered into the vacant throne
would be under God’s protection, whereas in case of failure he would have
lost his head. With how much better right, then, can a people drive out a
usurping prince! Does not this speak for Corsicans?... Thus we can shake
off the yoke of France, just as we shook off the yoke of Genoa. Amen.”
Meanwhile, the fledgling genius wished to try its wings, and this
urge led Napoleon to draft a novel on Corsica, and also some short
stories. All were animated by hatred of France, but none of them were
ever finished. Still he was learning his trade, spurred on by poverty,
passion, and sentiment. Imagination rules the world, but cannons are the
instrument whereby imagination realises its purposes. “I have no refuge
but my work. I only change my linen once a week. Since I was ill, I have
slept very little.... I eat only once a day.”
He studies ordnance and munitions of war, always thinking in figures, so
that every one says that he is a born mathematician. Now, side by side
with the drafts of works of imagination, he draws up specifications of
all the localities in the island where he would place batteries, dig
trenches, station troops—if he had but the power! Beneath the network of
poetical thoughts with which he has covered the island, he spreads over
his maps a second network, wherein crosses denote big guns. Maps, maps!
In his room beside the noisy café, he restudies everything conceivable,
copies whole speeches out of the report of the parliamentary proceedings
at Westminster, and sketches the remotest parts of the earth. At the end
of the last of his copy-books, the final entry runs: “St. Helena, a small
island in the Atlantic Ocean. English colony.”
At this juncture he received a letter from his mother. Her powerful
patron, the marshal, was dead; the house had lost its main prop; the
mulberry orchard was no longer to be a means of livelihood; Joseph had
no paid occupation; could the second son give any help? Shortly after
this appeal reached him, he went home on furlough. Are we to consider him
an unacknowledged conqueror, returning to the island of his plans and
dreams? Read what he wrote in his diary:
“Always alone, though in the midst of men, I go back home that I may
give myself up to my lonely dreams and to the waves of my melancholy.
Whither, now, do my gloomy thoughts tend? Towards death. Yet I stand
on the threshold of life, and may reasonably expect to draw breath for
many, many years. For the last six or seven years I have been far away
from my country. How great the joy—to see my own people once more!—What
demon, then, is it that tempts me to self-destruction?—Since misfortune
dogs my footsteps, and nothing gives me pleasure, why should I go on
bearing a life in which, for me, everything goes awry?—What a tragedy in
the homeland? My fellow-countrymen, in chains, kiss the hand that beats
them.—Proud, buoyed up by a sense of his own worth, so lived of yore the
happy Corsican, giving his days to the service of the State, and spending
his nights in the arms of his beloved wife—the nights which nature and
affection made divine for him. With the disappearance of freedom, those
happy times have vanished like a dream. Frenchmen, not only have you
stolen from us our greatest good, but now you are corrupting our morals!
That is how I see my country, and yet I am powerless to help. Are there
not reasons enough for quitting a world in which I must glorify those
whom I hate?—If it were but the life of one individual which stood
between us and our liberties, I should not be slow to act.—Life has
become a burden to me, I have no enjoyment, nothing but pain,—and because
I cannot live after my own fashion, everything is loathsome to me.”
V
After a year spent in Corsica, a year rendered gloomy by money troubles
and family cares, he was still in this mood of despair when his furlough
expired. He returned not to Valence, but to Auxonne. What did the change
matter?
But, at last, recognition comes. His new general, who sees that this
subaltern of nineteen is well informed, puts into his hands the task of
carrying out some works upon the parade ground. “Difficult calculations
are involved; and so, for the last ten days, I have been busied from
morning till night at the head of two hundred men. This unusual
preferment has given some of my superiors a spite against me. They are
furious that so important a job should have been taken out of their hands
and given to a lieutenant.”
The old depression recurs. Promotion will be desperately slow, and when
he becomes a captain he will be retired on half-pay. He will return home,
to be despised because he is a pensioner of the French. At long last,
he will be buried in his native soil. Of that privilege, at least, the
French cannot rob him! Were they, then, nothing but froth, the dreams of
liberty revealed in the books he had read? If mighty France herself was
unable to shake off the yoke of the nobility, to rid herself of venality
and nepotism, how was poor little Corsica to shake off the French tyranny?
The young author fills his diary with new schemes. He would have had
to pay heavily for it if the book had fallen into the hands of his
superiors. “Draft for a memorial concerning monarchical authority. Set
forth details as to the usurped power which kings enjoy to-day in the
twelve monarchies of Europe. There are few of them who have not merited
dethronement.” Thus does he vent his spleen in the faithful diary; whilst
in public on every royal birthday, dressed in gala uniform, he must join
in the cry: Long live the king!
Another year of his youth is spent in the dull routine of such service,
while Napoleon holds his peace and waits, dividing his energies between
imaginative writing and mathematics.
The year of destiny has opened. Into the most out-of-the-way regions of
the slumbering province comes the presage of the trumpets that are about
to sound. We are in the month of June 1789. The melancholy lieutenant
feels that the day of vengeance draws near. Is the arrogance of those who
have so long humiliated him, to bring destruction upon their own heads?
May it not be that the call of the myriads is also the battle-cry of the
island? He takes his _Letters on Corsica_; sends them to his admired
exemplar Paoli, in exile; and writes:
“General! I came into the world when my country was perishing. My cradle
was surrounded by men with the death-rattle in their throats, and by
those whom despair had driven to tears.... With them, hope vanished.
Slavery was the reward of our subjugation. To justify themselves, the
traitors have heaped calumnies upon you.... When I read this, my blood
boiled, and I resolved to scatter the mists. Now I shall blacken with
the brush of shame all who have betrayed the common cause.... If I lived
in the capital, I should find other means.... Owing to my youth, this
undertaking may be fruitless; but I shall be helped by my passion for
truth, my love for my country, and my enthusiasm. If you, General, will
encourage in this work a young man whose coming into the world you saw,
I shall gain confidence.... My mother, Madame Letizia, has charged me to
remind you of the old days in Corte.”
We notice a new tone, a symphony of new tones: the soaring emotion
of the epoch; the gesture of the tyrannicide; the whole equipment of
scintillating words, not an uprush of feeling (as in the pages of his
diary), but deliberately chosen with an eye to their effect. Only one
thing is alarmingly original, quite peculiar to the writer: the decisive
“I” at the opening of the letter, this “I” as a great thesis, fronting
the world. Immeasurable self-confidence is breaking a trail; for now the
drum-taps of a new era are sounding; an era which will give the palm,
not to birth but to action, thus sweeping away the only hindrance that
has hitherto been insuperable. An unprecedented claim is voiced, a claim
which henceforward will never cease to be heard. But at the close of the
letter, with a courteous turn of phrase, he slips back into the familiar,
implying that he looks to Paoli for protection. What adroitness, what
good manners, we find in all the letters of this adolescent, who in
person is still rough and enigmatical!
Paoli, the survival from an earlier day, is annoyed by such arrogance,
and answers with civil irony that young people should not try to write
history.
Four weeks after the sending of the letter, young people begin to write
history, for the first time in the eighteenth century. They storm the
Bastille; the great signal has been given; and France leaps to arms. Even
in the garrison town of our young lieutenant, the masses riot and loot,
until the propertied classes join forces with the troops. Buonaparte
is at his post with his battery in the streets, and helps to shoot down
the people. This is the first time he has fired a gun in real earnest.
He acts under orders from the king’s officers; but there can be no doubt
that he acts whole-heartedly against the mob, which he despises no less
than he despises the nobility.
In the depths of his soul, he regards this as nothing more than a dispute
among foreigners. What does he care about Frenchmen who raise their
hands against other Frenchmen? His brain is fired by a single thought:
“Corsica’s hour has come!” Madness or enthusiasm, an ideal or merely a
catch-word? What matter? Let us carry the message to our island. Apply
for leave; and, in the turmoil of the new movement, be the first to reach
home!
VI
Lieutenant Buonaparte landed on his island like a prophet carrying a new
doctrine to a foreign coast. He was the first to bring the red cockade;
to promise liberty, equality, and fraternity. Was not this a race of free
mountaineers, who of old had been self-governing, but for twenty years
had groaned under the heel of the oppressor—a conqueror who ruled through
the instrumentality of the nobles and the Church, but did not understand
the people?
What did it matter to the young Jacobin that until yesterday he had
lived upon his patrician birth, that solely because of his rank he had
been educated at the king’s cost? What was the king to him? At length
the peoples were to be free to rule themselves. If the new France, just
awakened, had proclaimed the right of self-government, Corsica, which
the old France had loaded with chains, must proclaim its own freedom.
Citizens, the hour has struck! To arms! Let every one wear the red
cockade of the new era; let us form a National Guard, as they have done
in Paris! Let us wrest the means of power from the king’s troops. I am an
artillerist, and I will be your leader!
Twenty years of age, pale of countenance, with cold, blue-grey eyes,
but with a mouth full of glowing phrases, such is the aspect of young
Buonaparte as he hastens through the streets of Ajaccio. Every one in the
little town knows him, and he is followed by a growing number of persons,
some eager for liberty, and others in search of a change of any kind.
To the crowd in the square, he seems a man bringing passionate hopes;
his figure is that of a tribune of the people. In this half-oriental
atmosphere, and among these quarrelsome families (so he says later), “a
man soon learns to study the human heart.”
But there is a set-back. No reinforcements come from the mountains;
and, when the regular troops put in an appearance, they scatter the
revolutionists. Within a few hours, all have been disarmed, though,
for prudence, no arrests are made. This is a further source of
disillusionment. He is not even a martyr, but only a would-be popular
leader who has been defeated; his position borders on the ludicrous.
Yet the fever is still burning in his veins, and at all costs he must
do something to cool himself. A statement of grievances to the National
Assembly in Paris! First of all, in the florid style of the day, an ode
to the new freedom, and then a spate of complaints and adjurations. To
the gallows with the king’s servants! Arm the citizens of the island!—A
committee promptly joins him in signing the document.
Weeks of waiting. What answer will come from Paris? Here is the courier
at last. The island is to be a French province, having the same rights as
the other provinces; in accordance with Mirabeau’s proposal, Paoli and
all the champions of liberty are free to return home. The lieutenant is
taken aback. A province? In spite of the new ideas, and indeed because of
them, the Corsicans are to remain Frenchmen? A strange form of liberty!
But there, already, is the procession, headed by the authorities, on
its way to the cathedral, where the decree from Paris is to receive a
blessing. Buonaparte is prompt to seize the rope which all are seizing.
He pens fiery manifestoes to his fellow-citizens, seeks supporters in the
new political club, and engineers his elder brother’s election to the
town council. Meanwhile he continues to work at his history of Corsica,
and reads to his mother choice passages of what he is writing.
“Can this be the great Paoli?” That is the question Buonaparte asks
himself, when, after twenty years’ exile, the hero of his youthful
enthusiasms returns amid popular acclamations. “His talk and his
appearance are so humdrum, so politic, so unsoldierly.” But it was
expedient to keep on good terms with Paoli, for he was to be the
commander of the National Guard. In the mountains, the young artillery
officer was for some time closely associated with the man who had been
his father’s chief just before his own coming into the world.
When they were sitting together or riding together—the tried veteran and
the darkly aspiring young Corsican,—the latter would eagerly expound
to the former his plans for an armed rising, and even for the forcible
severance of the island from the new France. On these occasions, Paoli
would look at Buonaparte with mingled pride and alarm. He could not but
feel that the author of the _Letters on Corsica_ really had a claim upon
him. But the young fellow had the devil in his body; and (which was
worse) in his brain, for in the man’s brain was the image of the world
throne in solitary splendour. Shaking his head, Paoli would exclaim:
“There is nothing modern about you, Napolione. You come from the age of
Plutarch!”
For the first time in his life young Napoleon felt that he was
understood. The Roman heroes of Plutarch were alone adequate to his
aspirations. Paoli was the first to recognise the Roman in Buonaparte.
At length he has a phrase upon which his self-esteem can luxuriate.
Now, from his country retreat, when at Paoli’s instigation he writes a
manifesto, the superscription penned by his fevered imagination runs
as follows: “23rd day of January in the 2nd year, from my study at
Midilli.” Ridiculous or sublime? However this may be, as soon as he
has issued the dictatorial pronunciamento the young man has to hasten
back to his military duties in France, for his furlough, though renewed
again and again, has finally expired. Is he to sacrifice this last firm
standing-ground? To what end? Why should he stay in the island any
longer? The first place is occupied!
VII
“I am in a peasant’s hut writing to you, after a long talk with the
good folk.... It is four in the afternoon; the weather is fresh but
mild; I thoroughly enjoyed walking. No snow yet, but there is snow in
the air—Everywhere I have found the peasants staunch; ... they are all
ready to die for the constitution—The women are royalists almost without
exception. No wonder for that, seeing that Liberty is fairer than they,
and eclipses them. In Dauphiné, the priests have taken the oath of fealty
to the constitution; they laugh at the bishops.—‘Good society,’ as it is
called (three out of four are aristocrats), affects admiration for the
British constitution. It is true that Peretti threatened Mirabeau with
a dagger. This is little to our credit. The Patriotic Society must make
Mirabeau a present of our national costume: biretta, vest, knee-breeches
and hose, cartridge pouch, stiletto, pistol, and musket. It will
certainly have a good effect.”
Everything in this letter to Napoleon’s maternal uncle, the abbé Joseph
Fesch, bears witness to observation and calculation, the elements upon
which the politician’s influence is based: the weather, the State,
travelling on foot, the conciliation of a man in high position, men’s
motives—all have been the objects of careful consideration. Vanity and
avarice, these are the weaknesses to which an appeal can be successfully
directed. We see deep into his soul when, in a bluntly-worded letter
dating from those weeks, he arraigns an opponent thus: “Your study of
human nature has taught you the price of every man’s enthusiasm; for you,
the difference between people’s characters was summed up in a few gold
pieces more or less!”
Gold pieces! Where were they to be had? Louis, the brother of thirteen,
had come back to France with him. When Lieutenant Buonaparte (he had the
full rank now) and his brother got back to Valence, they had no more
between them than eighty-five francs, to provide for food, clothing, and
the boy’s education. They had to brush their own clothes.
Money! Not for enjoyment (he despises trivial pleasures), but to help
him make his way in the world! Lyons Academy has offered a prize for
an essay. Twelve hundred francs; one could for that sum equip half
Corsica with weapons. “What truths and sentiments is it most important
to inculcate upon men for their happiness?” The lieutenant smiles. The
subject suits him very well. First of all, so to say, he leaves his card
on the academicians who have chosen the theme. They are disciples of
Rousseau. Our essayist opens by extolling the joys of nature, friendship,
ardent idleness—three things which he neither knew nor prized. Suddenly
the argument takes a political turn, against kings, and on behalf of the
universalisation of the free enjoyment of possessions and rights. Then
comes a sinister tone, as if the writer were contemplating in a mirror
his own image as the pallid student of a few years before: “The ambitious
man, pale of countenance, laughing sardonically, plays with crime, and
intrigue is his chosen instrument.... If, at length, he gets his hand on
the rudder of power, he soon wearies of the adulation of the crowd....
Men of great ambition have sought happiness, and have found fame.”
Sublime forebodings, worthy of any of the characters in Plutarch. Soon
the author expresses himself more plainly. His ideal is Sparta; courage
and strength are the outstanding virtues. A Spartan moved through life
as a man moves in the plenitude of his powers. “He was happy because he
lived in accordance with his nature. Only the strong man is good; the
weakling is evil.” Another presage glows in the following utterance: “Men
who are truly great are like meteors: they shine and consume themselves,
that they may lighten the darkness of the earth.”
This was too much for the Lyons Academy, which declared the essay
“unworthy of commendation.” A fresh disappointment! The effort had
brought neither money nor renown. With indefatigable assiduity, none the
less, he resumes work on his Corsican novel, and pens a dialogue on love.
What? Does this word, too, shed its lustre into the youth’s sombre mind?
Are we to have an outpouring in the Rousseauist vein? Hearken to the
words of our lieutenant, now twenty-two years of age: “I, too, was in
love once, and learned enough of it to despise definitions, which only
confuse the issue. I deny its justification; nay, more, I regard it as
injurious to society and destructive to the happiness of the individual.
Men could bless heaven if they were quit of it.”
Fanfares interrupt these political and social musings, fanfares from
Paris! Louis XVI, attempting to escape, had been caught at Varennes and
brought back. The people had triumphed, and the revolutionary movement
was intensified. On the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille,
the Red lieutenant proposed a toast to the patriots. From the island
came to him sounds of confusion, the heart-beats of anarchy—for during
these wild years the ripples of turbulence spread from Paris in widening
circles, to reach distant shores. In Corsica, too, civil war is imminent.
Back there, for a second venture!
VIII
Now the lieutenant has to play the part of Coriolanus. Catch voices,
catch men; for, since the people have come into power, it is necessary
to cultivate popularity. Archdeacon Lucien Buonaparte has chosen this
convenient hour for dying, and the family is in easier circumstances.
Mother’s brother Fesch, another cleric, has been prevailed upon to join
the Jacobin Club. Joseph can influence opinion in the town council. Is
there any other man in the island competent to direct a battery? Of
course the leader of the National Guard would have the real power in his
hands. But suppose one should fail to secure election?
This time his furlough lasts only till the new year. Better be careful!
He writes to his commanding officer: “Urgent circumstances have forced
me to outstay my leave. But I have nothing to reproach myself with: more
sacred duties, tenderer obligations, are my excuse.” He hopes that he
will not be cashiered. No answer! Well, he must take the risk.
Now comes the election of the commandant of the National Guard. Kinsmen
everywhere, but that does not suffice. His mother keeps open house for
party friends; often sympathisers from the hills have to be put up for
the night; this is the way to catch votes. “At that time,” writes a
comrade, “he would for a season be taciturn and reflective; then he
would be genial once more, pleasant to all comers, conversationally
inclined, prepared to visit any one who might be of use, and doing his
utmost to win adherents.” When the commissaries come, he has one of them
forcibly detained in his house; and he arranges that the supporters of
a rival shall have a thrashing. This is a Corsican election! But when
the palpitating day draws to a close, Napoleon has gained his end. He is
second in command, with the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Shall he seize the opportunity, this Italian, of sending in his papers
in France? Shall he leave the French service? Better be careful, still!
From the memoirs of great commanders he has learned that it is always
wise to leave a line of retreat open. “In this difficult posture of
affairs,” he writes to Valence, “a good Corsican’s post of honour is
in his native country. That is why my own folk keep me from returning
to France. Since, however, I am not one to compromise where duty is
concerned, I had it in mind to resign my commission.” But, far from
sending in his papers, he asks for arrears of pay, and actually speaks
of France as “your nation.” In answer, he is cashiered by the French
military authorities.
Thus he has become a soldier of fortune more speedily than he had wished.
He is without firm standing-ground; his only rights are the revolutionary
rights of a National Guardsman, the member of a force which may go
to pieces directly a reverse is sustained. Hic Rhodus! He must take
advantage of the latent civil war between the townsfolk of Ajaccio and
the Guard; must fan the flames, so that, amid the general confusion, he
may assume the role of saviour! Is not the citadel, now occupied by the
king’s regular forces, a standing menace? Did not Frederick and Cæsar
always begin by storming citadels? Seize the commander of the regulars,
drive out this well-born booby, and thus, at one stroke, free the island!
France, now involved in wars, will be unable to reconquer Corsica. The
liberator will become a popular hero, and old Paoli will be no more than
a legend.
On Easter Sunday, 1792, an open struggle occurred. Was the National Guard
provocative; were the townsfolk playing double? Who began the affray? An
everlasting problem! This much is certain, that Buonaparte, at the head
of his battalion, tried to seize the fortress. But the garrison was not
to be intimidated. Guns were trained on his men, and he had to withdraw.
A complaint against the young officer was lodged in Paris; he was accused
of armed rebellion, and a trial for high treason was impending. His
exculpatory phrases deceived no one. Paoli, who had from the outset been
somewhat alarmed at the zeal of his turbulent fellow-islander, hastened
to proclaim his own loyalty to France, and to cashier the son of his old
friend.
“If you turn against me, Paoli, I will turn against you,” thought
Buonaparte. “You had better be careful what you are about! To Paris,
post-haste. Not for nothing is there a revolution there!”
Through the streets of the French capital, these hot summer days, strolls
our adventurer, for whom everything has gone awry. He has neither money
nor position. In France, he is a lieutenant, but regarded more or less
as a deserter; in Corsica, he is a cashiered lieutenant colonel. The
gravest charges are likely to be brought against him, and to-morrow
he may be actually starving. The Jacobins are his last hope, and he
joins Robespierre’s faction, for nothing can save him but the fall of
the dynasty. To him, the complete break up of the old order has become
essential.
Life in Paris is costly. He pawns his watch, and, in spite of this,
gets into debt—a thing he has hitherto been sedulous to avoid. Fifteen
francs due to a wine-dealer! He proposes to his friend Bourrienne that
the pair shall become house-agents. Does he envy those who sit in high
places? No, he merely despises them. “Any one who sees at short range all
that is going on, must admit that the peoples are hardly worth wooing
for their favours. Here, human beings are perhaps even more base and
calumniatory.—Enthusiasm is merely enthusiasm, and the French nation is
outworn. No one seeks anything but his own advantage, and every one tries
to push his way into the first rank.—Ambition undermines everything. To
lead a quiet life, for oneself and one’s family, that is the only lot
worth having, with a fixed income of four or five thousand francs—if
imagination would but cease to torment one, would quiet down!”
Woe to him who is thus plagued by a lively imagination! What colossal
possibilities may be cooling in this Parisian cauldron, may arise out of
the chaos of this titanic time! Being an Italian, a foreigner, he can
contemplate with equanimity the destinies of these Frenchmen, and, as
a cold-blooded adventurer, can seek to turn their fortunes to his own
account. The Jacobins are already coming to the front.
When the sansculottes storm the Tuileries, Buonaparte is among the
onlookers. What are the thoughts of the man under the harrow? “Thank
God, we are free once more.” But what does the army officer say? “I saw
soldiers threatened by civilians, and was terribly shocked.—Had the
king shown himself on horseback, he would have gained the victory; such
was the mood that morning.” A few days earlier, when the king had been
masquerading in the red cap of liberty, Napoleon had written: “What a
fool! Why didn’t he use grape-shot? If a few hundred of the mob had been
shot down, the others would have run away!”
Still, his main feeling was one of liberation. His opponents had been
overthrown. The day after the storming of the Tuileries, he wrote to
his uncle: “You needn’t worry about your nephews. They will know how
to look after themselves.” The new government does the handsome thing
by Napoleon. Not merely is the deserter taken back into the service,
but he is promptly raised to the rank of captain. He has, however, no
inclination to hasten to his regiment. What does it matter to him that
the king of Prussia is on the Moselle? What does he care about the wars
of France? “I am a Corsican! Back to the island!”
IX
Is it possible? Has not the fresh wind from the sea, has not even the
pure breeze from the mountains, been able to dispel that partisan spirit
into which, everywhere, the struggle of ideas tends to degenerate?
Calumny, corruption, anarchy: these are the forms which the strife has
assumed in the island. Saliceti, the Corsican delegate to the Convention
in Paris, is Paoli’s mortal enemy, and is therefore friendly to the
Buonapartes now that they have turned against Paoli. The Jacobin Club in
Ajaccio is divided, but revolutionary feeling is in the ascendant; and
Paoli, the only honest man in the island, is stigmatised as a traitor
because he is a moderate.
Who holds the reins of power? Every one and no one. Mutual suspicion is
ripe, for in Paris the guillotine has been set up, the king has passed by
that red road, and no one knows who will be the ruler there to-morrow. In
Corsica, all go armed, and not the mountaineers alone; but orders from
the coastland break unavailingly against the crags of the interior. Every
one, here, is his own king; every one, his own avenger. Can there be a
better field for this adventurer, who has nothing more to lose? He makes
a third attempt to become master of the island.
Brother Joseph, Brother Lucien, and Uncle Fesch, all have adherents,
but Napoleon is the first to gather the scattered forces. He has the
confidence of the deputy, who needs a skilled artillerist to help him
in the next faction fight. For the same reason, the Club is inclined to
court his favour. Might it not be a good move to accuse Paoli of treason
against France? We know that he has been influenced by his twenty years’
enjoyment of British hospitality, and is it not in his mind to sell us to
England? If Lucien were to go to Marseilles, and whisper the suspicion
in the commissary’s ears, Saliceti would soon be shouting it in the
Convention. A little island like Corsica is a hot-bed of intrigue. Since
public life is controlled by two or three families, family life becomes
merged in public life.
Ere long the Convention sends representatives to Corsica. Officers are
appointed and dismissed without Paoli’s leave or advice. Buonaparte, now
a captain in the French service, regains in the island his position as
commander. Before this, his abilities and the affection of his soldiers
have enabled him to usurp the command once more, and the official
appointment is no more than an endorsement of an accomplished fact. His
chances are improving.
Then comes a terrible order from Paris. Paoli is to be arrested. But his
opponents have overreached themselves. The hearts of the islanders warm
towards the veteran hero. All rally to his support, and he defies the
order.
Young Buonaparte is at a loss. Always he has had his ear at the heart of
the people, not in the spirit of a lover, but in the investigatory mood
of a physician. He tries to gain time, seeks a middle course, publicly
proclaims himself on the side of the maligned Paoli; but also explains
that he is a supporter of the sagacious Convention. Yet the Convention
mistrusts this supporter, and now issues a warrant for his arrest also.
Paoli likewise suspects him of wanting to have a foot in both camps. In a
Paolist manifesto we read: “Since the brothers Buonaparte have supported
the slander, and have sided with the commission, it would be beneath the
dignity of the Corsican nation to have anything more to do with them.
Enough to abandon them to remorse and public execration.”
The enemies of the family raided the Buonaparte mansion, looted the
place, and would have made short work of the inmates had not these
already taken refuge with the commission.
Perhaps Buonaparte had wanted events to take this course. He had given
the authorities in Paris plain proof that he was a staunch revolutionist.
Certainly, they were now ready to show their trust in him. He, who
a year before had led the Corsican volunteers against the French
governmental artillery, was now made commander of this same artillery
against the Corsican volunteers. Big guns! True, the others occupy the
best positions, but at length he has power, ample power, with orders to
protect the coast. Now then, Paoli, for our last duel!
But the old man, enjoying the full tide of popular favour, has also the
best of it as a soldier. He holds the citadel. When Napoleon, acting this
time as a Frenchman, makes his second attempt to storm that stronghold,
he succeeds no better than before. A last endeavour is made to take the
fortress from the islands. It is fruitless!
There is no longer a place for him and his in Corsica. They are banished
by popular decree, and declared outlaws. The mother, so proud of her
descent; her two sons, her two daughters, and her brother—all have been
rendered shelterless by Napoleon’s unsuccessful attack on Paoli. They
must escape from the island at a few hours’ notice. Through the silent
woods, in whose recesses twenty-four years earlier she had found safety
from the French, Letizia has now to flee towards the coast under the
protection of the French. All her possessions are in the hands of her
enemies. Nothing is left to her beyond the clothes she wears.
The artillery officer, twenty-three years of age, stands on the deck
of the sailing ship that is bearing him to Toulon. Throughout the long
June evening, he watches the coast recede; every cape, every ridge,
is familiar to him. Thrice he has tried to conquer the island, as its
liberator. Now he has been driven out by the Corsicans as a Frenchman.
He is full of rage and of a thirst for revenge. The victories of France
will strengthen him, and in days to come he will, after all, be master of
Corsica!
But as he sails westward, and as the French coast draws near, our
adventurer enjoys the sense of freedom that comes to him who is
everywhere at home. Such is the happy lot of the man who has no country.
X
“How shabby their dresses are!” thinks Letizia Buonaparte, when her two
half-grown girls come home from the market with their poor purchases.
The refugees are living on the fourth floor of a confiscated house in
Marseilles (the owner, a nobleman, has been guillotined). The mother is
in the early forties. The three children with her are earning bread for
the family as best they can; the two youngest are still in Corsica,
cared for by relatives. Since the Buonapartes are “persecuted patriots,”
they receive a part of their rations from the commandant. Letizia, who is
proud as ever, makes no complaints.
Soon Napoleon, who is travelling, has the chance of putting some
lucrative opportunities in his brother’s way, affairs connected with the
supply of munitions of war. Maternal Uncle Fesch lays aside the priestly
habit and becomes a man of business, in the silk trade. Then Joseph, who
is of fashionable exterior, resembling his father in appearance, and,
as the eldest, following the father’s example in styling himself Count
Buonaparte,—wins the hand of one of the two heiresses of a Marseilles
silk merchant. Napoleon entertains thoughts of marrying his sister-in-law
Désirée, the late silk merchant’s other daughter.
He is on the move throughout this summer; now at Nice, with his regiment;
now on the Rhone; now at Toulon. All the time, his soldier’s eyes are
on the look out; his artillerist’s brain is noting the actual and the
potential fortifications along this strip of coast. Soon he will make
good use of the knowledge now acquired. Meanwhile he writes political
dialogues. One of them in conversational form, appears as a pamphlet,
printed at the public expense.
In this conversation, the manufacturer is of a familiar type. The
well-to-do folk of Toulon, like their brethren in Marseilles, are, in
fact, under Robespierre’s rule, afraid of losing their heads or even
their property. Concern for their money-bags tends to make them ever more
solicitous for the welfare of the sometime royal house, now in exile.
At length, in the hope of saving their capital, they call the enemies
of France to their aid, handing over the remnants of the navy to the
English, who in return promise them protection.
This is a fearful blow for the young republic. On all fronts, France
is at grips with the forces of reaction. Belgium has been lost; the
Spaniards are advancing over the mountains; in Vendée, the Bourbon
cause is gaining ground. Then comes the crowning disaster of Toulon.
The republic calls up its last man for active service, enlists women,
transforms the whole of France into an armed camp. Experts are doubly
welcome.
Before Toulon, preparations are being made to drive out the English. As
to how this is to be done, the Convention leaves that to the commander
of the forces, originally a painter of pictures, in whom revolutionary
enthusiasm is to make up for the lack of technical knowledge of the art
of war.
Then it came to pass that young Captain Buonaparte, returning from
Avignon whither he had been sent for a consignment of gunpowder, paid
a visit to his fellow-countryman Saliceti, who introduced the young
artillerist to the painter-general. After dinner, the dilettantes went
for a stroll, and happened upon a 24-pounder, several miles from the sea.
They began to boast of all that the gun would do. The expert assured them
that, in its present position, it would be useless. He fired four shots
to show them that the sea was quite out of range. Dumbfounded, they kept
Buonaparte at Toulon, and set him to work.
“At last, one end of the rope is in my hands. Grip and hold fast!” thinks
the lonely man with the strong will. With amazing activity, our captain
has heavy guns brought from all possible places along the coast. In six
weeks, he has more than a hundred pieces of ordnance at his disposal.
Now he will give a display of his talents as military commander. What is
his plan? He will mount batteries on the tongue of land which divides
the bay into twin harbours, and will thus cut off the hostile fleet from
access to the sea. The British commander will not stay to be shot at in a
mousehole with no outlet. He will set light to the arsenal and withdraw
his forces from the town.
“Fantastical nonsense!” say the amateurs, mockingly. But Buonaparte,
who has friends in the Convention, has a complaint lodged there against
his chief. He also sends to Paris his scheme for the bombardment of
Toulon, many pages of manuscript, containing, in addition, counsel of a
more general nature: “Our fire must always be concentrated. If we can
breach the wall, the balance will incline to our side, resistance will
be fruitless, the place will be won. To live, we must divide; to strike,
we must unite. Victory is impossible without unity of command. Time is
everything!” Thus does a captain of twenty-four write to the central
authorities.
He has a powerful ally in Paris, the younger Robespierre, who has the
reputation of a man of talent, and is not completely overshadowed by his
all-powerful brother. “Should you ever need a man of iron for street
fighting,” said Joseph Robespierre to Maximilien, “a young man, a new
man—then it must be this Buonaparte.” Indeed, the Corsican adventurer
had already been asked whether he would become military guardian of the
terrorists, but considerations of caution had led him to decline. Now
his plan was approved, and the painter-general was recalled. Who would
replace him?
Buonaparte gnashes his teeth. Another dilettante! The new general is a
medical man. He spends his time nosing out conspiracies hatched by the
nobility—and meanwhile the enemy occupies the precious tongue of land.
From Paris there had come State carriages filled with “men of genius,”
clad in brilliant uniforms, and resolved to end the siege of Toulon,
to take the place out of hand. Buonaparte led them to an unprotected
battery. When the enemy opened fire, and they looked round vainly for
cover, their guide said gravely: “We do without cover, nowadays; we
have patriotism instead.” This young man with blue-grey eyes is more
interested in actions than in intentions. Further complaints, and a
new change in command. This time the chief is a tried warrior, who is
prompt to appoint Napoleon battalion commander, and to adopt the young
artillerist’s plan for driving the enemy from the tongue of land.
When, finally, Toulon is stormed (still in accordance with Buonaparte’s
designs), his horse is shot under him; and he is wounded in the calf
by an English lance—this being his first and almost his last wound.
Moreover, it is his first victory, although he is not the official
commander; and it is a victory over England. The enemy retreats to the
ships, fires the arsenal, and withdraws, all in one night, just as
Napoleon had foretold.
Conflagration and death, battle and the terrors of a naval port in which
thousands of treasonable burghers are trying to escape the avengers; amid
all the fierce passions of this December night, through the reek and the
cries, across heaps of corpses, and to the accompaniment of the agonised
curses of drowning civilians and the exultant shouts of looting soldiers,
a new star rises in the firmament—Napoleon’s fame.
XI
The popular festival held in Paris to celebrate the liberation of
Toulon and fresh victories on the northern and eastern fronts, spreads
Napoleon’s name among the masses. He is raised to the rank of brigadier
general, and his chief, sending in a report in which the subordinate is
given due credit as the originator of the plan of siege, adds (betwixt
fear and admiration) the amazing sentence: “Even though the Convention
were to slight him, he would still force his way to the front.” But five
other young officers are likewise mentioned in despatches, and when for
the first time Napoleon sees his own name in the “Moniteur” there can be
no doubt that he is vexed at being merely one among so many. How hard it
is to climb!
Already, however, there are some young fellows who have noted the rising
of the new star. Marmont and Junot, unknown officers, want to join their
fortunes to his. He appoints them his adjutants; Brother Louis, too, now
sixteen years of age. He has a group!
Big guns! The Convention commissions him to fortify the whole stretch
of coast from Toulon to Nice. Is not Genoa, Corsica’s ancient enemy,
farther along the coast? He who takes Genoa, has the island in his
hands. Is not Genoa full of diplomats and agents? This is the place for
weather-breeding among the neutrals; here, any one with sharp eyes and
keen ears can learn a great deal, and keep his information to himself. He
gets himself appointed people’s commissary, which gives him precedence
over the chiefs in Genoa. Ostensibly the appointment is made that he may
help in the settlement of frontier questions.
In reality, this is the first step of Buonaparte the diplomatist. He
intrigues with agents of various kinds, while taking note whether the
representatives of France in that part of the world are genuinely
revolutionary or only making a pretence of revolutionary fervour. At the
same time, he keeps his eyes open to see where the cannons are. He comes
back to Nice to write his report, and, without warning, he is arrested.
For, meanwhile, Robespierre had fallen, and had perished by the
guillotine. There is a general movement of repudiation. Every one wishes
to make out that only under compulsion did he hold converse with the
tyrant. Those who wish to prove themselves guiltless, look round for
victims. The best victims will be those who are not in Paris to make
a fight for it. Quick, quick, lest we should be suspected of having
belonged to Robespierre’s faction! General Buonaparte! He has just been
on a secret mission to hostile Genoa. Lay the traitor by the heels! He
was colloguing with Robespierre to bring about the destruction of our
southern army. Hale him to Paris for trial!
Napoleon is in Fort Carrée near Nice. All his papers have been seized.
It is his birthday. “To-day I am twenty-five,” he thinks, as he glances
seaward through the grating. If he could lean out of the window, he would
catch a glimpse of Corsica. How many attempts he has made there, only to
be defeated! Was the destiny of a young aspiring soul ever before built
upon such a series of catastrophes? What has Plutarch to say on this
matter? Cashiered, banished, outlawed—as far as Corsica is concerned.
Now, after all his plans, he is a prisoner of France. Next week,
perhaps, he will be standing in the barrack yard, with his back against
the wall, awaiting a score of bullets. What is to be done?
His faithful followers advise him to flee. He answers in an impassioned
tone such as we rarely encounter in the sixty thousand of Napoleon’s
letters. He thanks them for their friendly counsel, but says: “Men may
treat me unjustly; no matter, so long as I am innocent. My conscience
is the tribunal before which I judge my own conduct, and my conscience
is untroubled. Do nothing, for you would only compromise me.” The one
genuine phrase in this letter wherein he poses as a martyr, is the last.
To Junot, the enthusiastic admirer, he speaks of motives which Junot
will understand. In reality, since he knows that there is not a jot of
evidence of complicity with Robespierre, he does not wish to compromise
himself. Flight would be an admission of guilt.
Writing from prison to an influential diplomat, he says: “I am somewhat
affected by the tragical death of the younger Robespierre, for I loved
the man and believed him genuine. Nevertheless, had he been my own father
I would have stabbed him had he wished to become a tyrant.” Is not that
spoken like a true Roman? With even more circumspection, he writes to
the Convention: “Although innocent of the charge, I shall never make any
complaint against the committee, whatever it may decide.... But now hear
me! Strike off my chains, and restore to me the respect of patriots! An
hour afterwards, if the wicked clamour for my corpse, I shall be ready. I
hold my life at little account, for I have risked it in the trenches too
often. Nothing but the thought that I can serve my country enables me to
endure my burdens cheerfully.”
A week later, he is free. Saliceti, his fellow-countryman in the
Convention, had been his accuser. Now, when the Corsican deputy has got
over his first fright and feels that his own neck is safe, he pledges his
word that Buonaparte is innocent. But at the close of his statement, he
adds a phrase which is an unconscious prediction of the young officer’s
triumphs: “Besides, we need him in the army.”
XII
How he is shunned! Powerful friends, to whom he sends letter after
letter, long epistles, make no answer. He writes beseechingly for little
things, such as “a good surveying outfit for the army,” when he wishes
to force an influential comrade to reply. All at once comes a signal
from the island. Old Paoli has summoned the English to his aid. Corsica
must be saved for France! Back to Paris, in order to fan the flames. The
expedition is actually decided on, and he eagerly hopes to secure the
command. In a fortnight the fleet is back at Toulon, having sustained a
reverse. Fresh disappointment! Why did they not put him in charge? Had
he not conquered Toulon, fortified the coast—all with an eye towards the
campaign against Corsica?
Reaction is in full swing. Napoleon is suspect. The authorities offer him
high command in Vendée, for this will separate him from his adherents. At
the same time he is transferred to the infantry, as a “supernumerary.”
How mortifying to a highly skilled artillerist!
The pale young man grew paler than ever, for he had made up his mind to
refuse. He expostulated with the People’s Commissary for War, who, in
reply, twitted him with his youth. Napoleon looked the commissary, who
knew little of active service, straight in the eyes, and said: “A man
matures quickly on the battle-field, and it is from the battle-field that
I come.” Refusal to obey orders; expectation of dire consequences; just
as it had been three years before.
[Illustration: General Bonaparte in 1797. After a painting by Jean
Guérin. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society, Charlottenburg.)]
What had I better do? Report sick? Apply for leave? The out-of-work
general turns the possibilities over in his mind. Better stay where I am.
Paris is the world’s navel. True, Marmont and Junot, who have joined him
without leave, are also penniless. What’s Bourrienne doing? Speculating?
Well, I can try that too, but assignats are falling. How badly you staged
the last affair. Did you think you could make a coup d’état without
cannon? But to Saliceti, who in his turn has had serious charges brought
against him, and is being sheltered by a fellow-countrywoman, he writes:
“You see, I might have paid you back in your own coin.... Who has played
the better part, you or I? I might have taken vengeance on you, but have
not done so.... Go in peace, to seek a refuge where you can, and meditate
upon your country to better advantage. My lips will always be sealed
about you. Take counsel with yourself, appreciate my motives ... they are
noble and magnanimous.”
During these summer weeks, the flood of life is obscurely murmuring, is
heavily pulsing against the shores. He is profoundly moved by _Ossian_,
the book of melancholy passion; and he is stirred by the tragical end
of plays he witnesses, hastening from the theatre that his mood may
not be jarred by the subsequent farce. “How preposterous, in this new
opera, to give a happy ending to _Paul and Virginie_ by having the girl
rescued!”—“But what is happiness?” asks the lady to whom he says this.
“Happiness?” answers Buonaparte. “The highest possible development of my
talents.”
Just now they are lying fallow, that is what troubles him. He is a
prey to increasing dejection and dumb rancour. When a comedy is being
played (the wife of one of his friends reports this), every one else
is laughing, but Buonaparte sits there in frozen silence. Sometimes he
vanishes, to reappear with gloomy aspect at the other side of the stalls.
Often enough his lips are twisted in an unsuccessful attempt to smile.
He is an irresistible raconteur of campaign stories, but his laughter
on these occasions is rough. He is often to be seen wandering through
the streets, short in the leg, thin, sallow, sickly, irritable of mien,
“awkward, hesitant, wearing an old round hat, from beneath which two
badly powdered ‘dog’s ears’ project, scurf upon his collar, his ungloved
hands are long and lean and dark, ill-fitting boots.”
He now plans a book traffic with foreign lands; but his first attempt,
with a consignment to Basle, miscarries.
Sometimes he visits drawing-rooms, for, as he writes to his brother,
every one here seeks distraction.... There are women all over the place,
at the theatre, in the Bois, at the Library. The prettiest of girls are
to be found in the studies of the learned. Indeed, it is right that women
should rule here, for the men are infatuated, living only through and for
women.
When Buonaparte is in the salon of Barras, the tribune (who outdoes
himself in splendour and extravagance, so that all Paris talks; who can
never have enough women round him), when he stands there among women
famous for their beauty like Tallien and Récamier, he, who is small
and gloomy and angular, can only make an impression by cleverness and
caprice. Even then he seems a freak.
Always the solitary, he only “lets himself go” in his long letters
to his brothers. He is educating Louis, and writes: “The lad is a
good soldier. What especially pleases me is that he combines so many
excellent qualities: ardour, spirit, health, talent, trustworthiness,
good-nature.... He will certainly be the best of us four. Of course,
none of us have enjoyed his advantages in the matter of education.” He
is thinking of having Jerome, the youngest, sent to Paris. He is at odds
with Lucien. This talented brother is his rival. Indeed, Lucien vies with
Napoleon in his knowledge of men, was the first to understand Napoleon,
did so already when he was seventeen while his brother was twenty-three.
“In Napoleon,” wrote young Lucien to Joseph, “I detect an ambition which
is not wholly selfish, but is greater than his love for the public
welfare. In a free State he would certainly be a dangerous man. He seems
to me inclined to become a despot. I think he would become one, were
he king. At any rate, his name would be a terror to posterity and to
sensitive patriots.” In Lucien’s mouth, such grandiose vaticination is no
mere playing with words. His own ambition is so intense that in this age
and country he regards a development of the kind as quite possible for
his brother, and he is mortified at the prospect that Napoleon is likely
to outshine him.
For the nonce, Napoleon is in low spirits. He envies Joseph, whom money
and happiness have made independent. He offers Joseph support in the way
of introductions and papers; advises him to use the depreciated currency
for the economical purchase of an estate. Yet we find him already writing
to his elder brother, apropos of a letter on political questions: “Your
letter was too dry; you must learn to write better than that.”
A home! He wants a home of his own, like Joseph. More eagerly in each
successive letter he urges Joseph to make sure for him of the wealthy
sister-in-law, with whom he has been in affectionate correspondence for
more than a year. When she is slow to make up her mind, he presses for a
decision. His brother and one of his intimate friends have married well;
comrades of his own age occupy prominent positions. Only he, with his
surging thoughts and imaginative schemes, remains lonely and does nothing.
“If you are going away for a long time,” he writes to Joseph, “send me
your portrait. We have lived so long in close companionship that our
hearts are intertwined. No one knows better than you how wholly I am
yours. As I write these lines, I am more moved than almost ever before,
feeling that it will be long before we meet again. I cannot write any
more. Farewell, mon ami.”
He is in a melting mood, and at times he seems utterly discouraged. “To
clamber upwards from step to step, this is rather like an adventurer,
like a man who is trying to make happiness.” Finally he says: “Life is a
trivial dream, which fades away....”
XIII
Suddenly everything is in a flux. A new Minister for War has been
appointed, and he is eager to effect changes on the Italian front. Does
any one know of a new man to whom the command there can be entrusted?
The enquiry passes from one to another, until some one recommends
Buonaparte. He is summoned to the War Office. For years he has been
making himself familiar with the Italian coast and the Italian frontier,
and forthwith he expounds a detailed plan for a campaign in northern
Italy, against Sardinia and Austria. It is substantiated by a display of
intimate knowledge of the Alpine passes; of the weather and the snows;
of seedtime and harvest; of the administration, the temperament, and
the characteristics of the territories and the populations concerned.
After the conquest of Lombardy, between February and July, the powerful
position of Mantua must be wrested from the Austrians. Then the Army of
Italy must move northward, and in Tyrol must effect a junction with the
sister army, the Army of the Rhine. The joint forces will threaten Vienna
and this will compel the emperor to accept a peace which will fulfil all
that France has been expecting or imagining for years past.
Overwhelmed by the cataract that issues from this brain, the minister can
only say: “Your ideas, General, are equally brilliant and bold. We must
examine them closely. Write a report for the committee. You can take your
time.”
“My plan is ready now. I can write it down in half an hour.”
“A notable design,” say the members of the Committee of Public Safety
when the report has been read to them; “notable, even if impracticable.”
In any case, such an intelligence as this must be utilised in the
Operations Department. A few days afterwards he has a seat in this
department, where everything is decided.
The great moment has come, the turning-point of his youth. At length he
stands on the threshold of his career. The chance has come suddenly, for
everything is sudden in this eruptive era. From now, when he is barely
twenty-six, he will for twenty years, with unremitting vigour, move
onwards towards his goal, drawing the chain of thought and action after
him. Suddenly, twenty years hence, the chain will snap.
Napoleon’s work begins. With burning energy, attending carefully to
little things because his aim is the greatest of things, he devotes
himself to “affairs.” The veil is lifted, for here he finds the most
secret reports concerning all the armies of the republic. At the same
time, his daily association with the leading civilian figures in France
gives him authority. The suggestive influence of his personality makes
itself felt.
What is the first thing he aspires to gain for himself? Neither the
command in Vendée nor the command of the Army of the Rhine. These are
attainable, tangible magnitudes. Here, at the centre of all the real
fronts, nothing allures him so much as the thought of a command which
as yet lives only in his imagination; in a battle-ground which does not
exist, but which he wants to create to-day, and which he will again want
to create seventeen years hence. Asia! Directly he gets to work at the
centre of things, he begins to emphasise the importance of galvanising
Turkey into activity, of introducing artillery and the modern art of
war on the Bosphorus, for in due time they can from that centre be used
against the Russians and the Austrians. In fancy, he already sees himself
conversing with the sultan, beyond reach of the eyes of these everlasting
republicans, in an obscure and closed country into which the doctrine of
liberty has never made its way—a land where a man can still do whatever
he pleases. Twelve days after his entry into the ministry, he asks to be
transferred to Turkey.
The application is refused. Powerful opponents are already beginning
to be afraid of this man. They want to get him out of the War Office;
to send him to the front. His protest takes a new tone. As if he were
foreseeing all the successes that are still hidden in his own heart,
he begins to dictate. “General Buonaparte, who commands the artillery
under the most critical circumstances and has contributed to the greatest
successes, expects from the justice of the members of the Committee
that they shall reinstate him in his functions, and shall spare him the
distress of seeing his position usurped by men who have always kept
themselves in the background, ... but who now press forward to snatch the
fruits of victories whose dangers they well knew how to avoid.”
In the third person, in the iron style of the historian. Roman.
It avails nothing. Once more the insubordinate officer’s name is struck
from the lists, and for a second time he has to yield. But he feels that
his hour draws nigh; nothing, now, can seriously shake his position. A
fresh change of government is at hand. Announcing to his brother the
impending transformation, he says that he himself is in the good graces
of all the party leaders who will have military posts at their disposal.
“The prospect is rosy. Even were it otherwise, a man must live in the
present. He who has courage, despises the future.”
Because he despises it, it serves him. Henceforward, men will serve him
for the same reason.
A fortnight after this letter had been written, a conflict broke out
between the government and the moderates, who were backed by the
royalists. Once more, there was fighting on the boulevards, as there had
been three years earlier. The National Guard is four times as strong
as the governmental forces. Either from caution or from cowardice, the
general of the Convention parleys with the leaders of the Guard. He is
declared a traitor, and placed under arrest. The Convention meets in a
panic. It is defenceless, intimidated by the left-wing and right-wing
revolutionaries, who, for various reasons, have joined forces.
In the evening, Buonaparte hastens to the Convention, for a successor
to the arrested general is needed, and he learns that the name of one
of his rivals has been proposed. The heart of the silent onlooker
beats furiously. Will his name now be mentioned? If he is asked to take
command, shall he accept a task which he had refused in the days when
Robespierre was supreme? Does not every one who leads soldiers against
the people make himself hated, precisely because of his success? “Appoint
Buonaparte!” Yes, his name has come up. “I turned the matter over in my
mind for nearly half an hour.” Such a mission will not bring renown, but
it will bring power. He presents himself before the committee. It is past
midnight; the tumult is expected to begin early next morning; everything
must be ready within a few hours.
In this situation, he demands that he shall be absolutely free from
civilian supervision. This seems a monstrous request to make of the
revolution, one of whose new principles it is to lay especial stress upon
supervision of the dreaded military arm. “If you appoint me, I shall be
responsible, and must have a free hand. To-day, it was the fault of the
people’s commissaries that the general found himself in so precarious a
position. Do you expect that the people will give us permission to open
fire upon the people?” The only man he will share the command with is
Barras, who is the most powerful among the leaders, but is in his hands.
The minutes are passing. There is no choice.—Buonaparte was entrusted
with the defence of the government, a fortnight after his name had been
erased from the list of general officers.
For seven years the Parisian populace, when roused to action, has had
to encounter nothing more than extemporised opposition. That is why the
revolution has always made headway. Buonaparte is the first to prepare
for the struggle. In one night, he transforms the Convention into a
fortress. Even the alarmed deputies are supplied with weapons. They are
still more frightened when they hear talk of cannon.
A young cavalry officer, Murat by name, undertakes to bring forty big
guns from the suburbs. Murat thus opens a great career on the same day as
his chief. Out in the streets he finds the masses, who are likewise on
the prowl for artillery. Buonaparte cannot protect the Convention without
ordnance. There are hours of tension, during which he must tranquilly
devote himself to the disposition of his slender forces. At length, at
five in the morning, he hears the rattling wheels of his old friends the
big guns. Murat’s men were mounted, and they have won the prize. Forward!
Within two hours, everything must be ready.
In well-armed companies, the crowd advances threateningly. The lawyers
in the Convention are shaking in their shoes. Speech after speech is
made from the tribune, urging a parley, advocating the withdrawal of the
troops. In the daylight, the situation is so menacing that the civilians
utterly lose heart. They weaken; towards noon, some of the troops want
to fraternise with the people. Night is falling. Now or never! Is
the commander to allow the mob to triumph? In like circumstances, he
had laughed at the weakness of King Louis. Shall he himself play the
weakling, when he is in command of the guns?
It is probable that Buonaparte ordered the firing of the first shot,
or perhaps extorted the order from Barras, although in his report, and
subsequently, he declared that his opponents had this “crime against the
French people” on their consciences. Anyhow, the firing begins. The big
guns win the day; blood besprinkles the pavements; the crowd scatters;
in two hours the streets are clear. That night, Napoleon writes to his
brother: “At length it is over; my first wish is to send you news.... We
posted our troops, the enemy attacked us in the Tuileries. We killed a
lot of them, our own casualties being thirty killed and sixty wounded.
We have disarmed the companies of the National Guard, and everything is
quiet. As usual, I have escaped without a scratch. Brigadier General
Buonaparte. Postscript. Luck is on my side. My compliments to Désirée and
Julie.”
This is Napoleon’s first bulletin of victory. The enemy are Frenchmen;
the battle-field is Paris; the offenders are revolutionists; most of the
fatalities are on the opposing side; the signature, which in earlier and
subsequent letters consists of nothing but the name, includes, to-day,
the writer’s military title. Everything is calculated for effect. But his
feelings break through, and in the postscript he discloses to his brother
the two things he has most at heart: Luck and Woman.
At a later date he said: “I have two men within me, the man of the head
and the man of the heart.”
XIV
On the tribune of the Convention stands Buonaparte with his officers,
hailed by the acclamations of the assembly, to whom the youthful saviour
is being presented. He scarcely notices the applause, for such triumphs
of the moment seem of little value to him. Coldly surveying the hall, he
thinks: “So you are the leaders of the nation. You trembled with fear
when you heard the thunder of the guns! You shall not forget how to
tremble! I have become your protector. I shall go on protecting you until
you have become my humble servants.”
As a matter of course, he is appointed to the command of the Army of the
Interior. He now has a great following: cashiered officers, who hope
to climb in the footsteps of the cashiered general; officials who have
dreaded the reaction; all who feel that they have been rescued. But the
crowd must be learning to hate him; for, in that darkling hour, hundreds
of unarmed citizens, idle spectators, women have perished. What is that
to him? It is not his aim to be loved.
Now, when he suddenly has money and servants and carriages at his
disposal, he wants nothing for himself, everything for his kin. His
younger brothers are given good positions; his mother can once more live
a life after her own heart, and gratify her taste for saving; Joseph
has the offer of several posts; there are places for the most distant
relatives. But the letters become rarer, and the very first of them
sounds a new note: “I shall do everything I can to help you, shall spare
no effort which can contribute to your happiness.” From brother, he has
become protector, head of the family.
During these weeks, when he is tasting the joys of fulfilment, he becomes
involved in the only passion of his life.
Désirée has missed her chance. Only a few weeks before, writing from the
office of the general staff, he had implored Joseph to intervene on his
behalf, to demand a prompt answer. “I am burning with desire to have a
home of my own.” At the same time, in several of his letters, we find
more frequent references to charming women, allusions which betray a
happy prospect of success. He has come to know la femme de trente ans,
in her power and her beauty. He has made advances to two such women, in
quick succession: one of them a Corsican of noble birth, a friend of his
mother’s; the other, a pretty cocotte, Chénier’s mistress. Both of them
are considerably older than he, and neither of them favours his suit. But
the atmosphere surrounding these practitioners of the art of love, the
electric atmosphere of the new salon, has exercised its influence on him:
“A kiss for the two ladies: for the first, on the lips; for the second,
on the cheek.” Since he has hitherto known almost nothing of women, his
lonely heart is susceptible.
Immediately after his appointment, the new generalissimo issues a decree
against bearing arms. A search is made, and all weapons in civilian hands
are confiscated. Now a boy of twelve, with engaging manners, turns up
at the general’s office with a plea for the return of his dead father’s
sword, which has been taken away from his mother. Napoleon concedes the
point, and shortly afterwards the mother comes to thank him. What an
elegant woman—wayward, gracious, captivating! Thirty or more; who can
say? Not so much beautiful, as enthralling; slender; distinguished, but
with a slightly foreign air; the dark skin of the Creole, for she was
born in Martinique, though brought up in Paris; and during the days of
the Terror she has learned to conquer by her charms.
When the general pays her a visit at the little house in an
out-of-the-way suburb, his eyes, sharpened by his own experience of
poverty, detect evidence of an endeavour to put a good face upon poor
circumstances. This does not trouble him. An army officer, who now, at
the age of twenty-seven, can for the first time dispose of means which
enable him to live as he pleases, he prizes money, but he does not prize
rich people. Just as in the life of affairs, men can only move him by
their capacity, by what they can do; so women can only please him by
their capacity—by their personal appearance, their nature, and what they
can make of these.
Josephine makes a great deal, as she needs to do. From Martinique, her
tropical home, she was able to save nothing when she lost her husband,
Vicomte de Beauharnais. For years she was separated from him, but was
reunited with him after her return to Paris from a prolonged visit to her
native island. During the Terror, he was executed as a royalist; and she
spent three terrible months in gaol, to be liberated after Robespierre’s
fall on the very day when Buonaparte was imprisoned. Friends came to her
assistance in her difficulties; but her position and that of her two
lovely young children, Hortense and Eugene, was precarious.
In this genteel poverty, it is expedient for her to make the best use of
her charms. In any case, she is a born coquette, and is urged towards
amorous adventures by the spur of her own love of pleasure. At this time,
she is Barras’ mistress, her handsome friend Tallien having taken up with
a wealthy banker, handing over the man of might to Josephine. However,
the two women hold Barras in joint control. The Committee of Public
Safety supplies them with horses and carriages. But Beauharnais, being of
gentle birth, knows how to give attractive dinner parties, and associates
with members of both factions, although the counts and marquises
who frequent her house leave their wives at home. She has become an
adventuress of the revolution.
Well, what about Buonaparte himself? Any change in the political
situation may cost him his position. What more is he, as yet, than an
adventurer of the revolution? If Murat had failed to shark up those guns
the other night, the general would have been shot. Life is insecure, both
for him and for Josephine.
What can be easier than to befool this misanthropic and misogynistic man
in whose dumb soul the schoolmaster at Brienne had long ago discovered
the hidden volcano? For the first time in his life he is in the toils of
a woman, an expert in love; he is consumed by his passion for the Creole
beauty. To Josephine, it seems a stroke of luck, and in cold blood she
decides on marriage.
“You have seen General Buonaparte at my house. He is to become a father
to my orphaned children, a husband to my widowed self.... I admire
the general’s courage, and I wonder how much he knows.... But, I must
confess, I am alarmed at the energy which animates all his doings. In his
questing glance there is something inexplicable, which intimidates even
our Directors. What ought to please me most, the passionate ardour he
displays, is the very thing which makes me hesitate. Now that I am past
my first youth, can I hope that I shall be able to keep alive in him an
affection so stormy that it borders on madness?”
This lady of refinement does not fully understand what threatens her, and
yet in the depths of her soul she shudders at the foreboding that she is
to become the play of elemental forces. For, if this man who covets all
or nothing and cannot rest until he has all, this man who has never given
himself up to any one person or any one thing because it has been his
unceasing wish to gain every one and everything, if Napoleon now gives
himself for the first and only time in his life, he will stake his whole
being, and will fetter it to the personality of the woman whom he clasps
in his arms.
“I am waiting for you; I am wholly filled with you; your picture and
the intoxicating evening leave my senses no peace. Sweet, incomparable
Josephine, what have you done to my heart? Are you angry with me? Do you
look sad? Are you ill at ease?... But I find calm when I give myself up
to my passion, that on your lips, at your heart, I may fan the flames
which burn me. How plain it was to me last night that your picture can
never replace the real you. At noon you will start; in three hours I
shall see you; till then, mio dolce amor, a thousand kisses! But you must
not give me kisses, for they burn my blood!”
He does not tell her his plans, and yet he tells her something more.
“These Directors fancy that I need their protection. They will consider
themselves happy, some day, to secure mine. I shall make my way with the
sword.”—“What do you think,” writes Josephine, “of this faith in success?
Can such self-confidence be based on anything else than immeasurable
conceit? A brigadier general is to protect the heads of the government!
I don’t know what to make of it; and yet, often enough, this ludicrous
self-assurance makes me believe that anything is possible which the
strange man wants to achieve.”
We feel as if we were standing in front of the iron door which guards
a glowing human heart, and looking through the key-hole into the fiery
furnace of a soul.
But this woman, whom he possesses, why does he take her to wife? That
he may possess her for himself alone? His egotism is against it, and,
besides, he would be deluding himself. To gain advantages? In respect
of money, and in respect of influence with the powerful, she can offer
him nothing that he does not already enjoy. Of course she might prove
useful to him; he is certainly flattered that she is of noble birth; and
beyond doubt he has taken into consideration the fact that if she, who
had a place in the days of the old regime, becomes his wife, this will
put an end to the whispers that he is “only a Corsican.” Yet it is as
a Corsican, with the family feeling of an Italian (a feeling that has
come down to him through the generations, and masters even him), that he
desires marriage with a woman of birth. Finally, is it not obvious that
this man who is so utterly self-centred must passionately long for a
perpetuation of his own ego?
The one thing in the world which Napoleon cannot make without another’s
aid is an heir, and this heir must be made out of good materials. He
is no man of the people. He has come into being amid the struggles of
old families, and beneath a coat-of-arms bearing two stars which he now
wishes to fuse into one. If he has helped to break down the prejudices
against the masses, he has been moved along this course by delight in
the elemental energy of action, and never by humanist feelings. Why
should he wish to mix his blood with that of the people? When he marries
the woman who long ere this has granted him all, he does so because, in
both branches of her ancestry, she is the offspring of a long line of
noble forebears. It is her birth, in addition to her charms, which makes
her a welcome figure in a drawing-room, despite her reputation and her
position. Since the Thirteenth Vendémiaire, Barras, the most powerful of
the Directors, has regarded Buonaparte as his main prop—and he wishes
to bind the general to his service by handing over Josephine. In this
realm of erotic freedoms, a man who should wish, of a sudden, to insist
on points of honour would simply make himself ridiculous. There are no
knights and ladies now, but only citizens and citizenesses, who pair and
separate as they please.
Barras has long since decided that Napoleon shall command the Army of
Italy; and when Josephine, womanlike, is unable to make up her mind,
Barras gives her a definite pledge to this effect. There are good
reasons, too, why he should send the dangerous man to the most difficult
front. Napoleon’s great plan, the one which has procured him his
position on the general staff, is now sent to Nice, and comes back with
annotations by the commander-in-chief there. The man who has drafted the
plan, says that worthy, must have been a lunatic. He had better come and
try his own hand at the job. That is exactly what the Directory has been
angling for. The writer of the criticism is recalled, and the “lunatic”
is sent to take his place.
The position is assured; the prudent Josephine hesitates no longer. A
legal friend has to certify that no birth certificate is now obtainable
from the blockaded island in the West Indies, and that the authorities
must therefore take the lady’s word for the statement that she is
twenty-eight. Since this knocks five years off her age, the bridegroom is
gallant enough to add a year to his own. Thus the marriage begins with
a twofold falsification of dates. A marriage settlement arranging for
the division of property is signed, although the vicomtesse owns nothing
but debts, and the warrior declares that his only possessions are his
clothes, his uniform.
In the wedding ring, the words “To Destiny!” are engraved.
Two days later, he leaves Paris. Eleven crazy love letters are sent to
her from eleven halting places. In Nice he joins his army, and takes over
a command which will lead him beyond the frontiers of Europe.
It is the season of the equinoctial gales. From a turret he looks across
at the enemy coast, and thinks: “This is the place I have always coveted
as a starting-point. Behind me lies Paris; and her bedchamber, hung with
mirrors. That is happiness. It is mine. Over there, across the mountains,
in that hostile land, is fame. The goal of my desire.”
As he turns away, he catches sight of a familiar line of mountains
shimmering in the distant blue. No longer does this hold his attention.
It is his lost homeland. The island.
BOOK TWO
THE TORRENT
So divine an illumination is always linked with youth and
productivity; and, in very truth, Napoleon was one of the most
productive men that ever lived.—GOETHE.
I
The towering peaks form a white, serrated ridge that thrusts upward
into the blue of morning. Gleaming with perpetual snows, dangerous as
the adventure he has undertaken, the Alps look down threateningly upon
the bay, and mock the teeming crowds of men. Invincibly does nature,
in symbolic fashion, here call a halt to the commander; here she has
interposed a barrier between the land of his fathers and his new
fatherland.
But he, who never trusts in force alone, who always outbids force with
prudence, has to good purpose been pondering the old problem. Hannibal
crossed the Alps; he, Napoleon, will go round them. If we come to grips
with the enemy at the weakest point, where the Apennines press close to
the Alps and a slight depression facilitates an entry, we need not wait
for the summer. The earlier in the year, the firmer the snows, and the
less danger from avalanches. Forward, into the land of my fathers!
Delay will be fatal. Not that the enemy is a danger to him. His foes
are asleep in winter quarters: the Austrians in the east of Lombardy;
the Sardinians in the west of the Lombard plain; and the numerous petty
republics and duchies, the fragments of Italy, are not expecting an
attack until the thaw has come. But the French soldiers are hungry.
Paris, on the verge of ruin, through depreciation of the currency, can
send them nothing but almost valueless assignats; and all of these
disappear into the greedy maw of the army contractors. “France would
tremble,” said one of the generals in his letters home just before
Bonaparte’s arrival, “could every one know how many are dying here of
famine and disease.” What will the new commander do if he brings neither
money nor bread with him?
“Soldiers, you are half starved and half naked. The Government owes
you much, but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage, do
you honour, but give you no glory, no advantage. I will lead you into
the most fertile plains of the world. There you will find flourishing
cities, teeming provinces. There you will reap honour, glory, and wealth.
Soldiers of the Army of Italy, will you be wanting in courage and
firmness?”
A faint cheer from the ranks answered the new commander when, at the
first parade, he addressed his men in the foregoing words. But when they
were all back in camp, one said to another: “General doesn’t look very
weatherproof, with his yellow hide. Fine talk, that, about the fertile
plains. He’d better let us have some boots first, so that we can march
there!” The people of Israel must have grumbled in much the same fashion
when Moses spoke of the Promised Land. The new commander encounters
nothing but opposition.
Who knows him among the soldiers of this army, which has now been
encamped for three years on the crests of the hills? Those of them who
remain, that is to say: for a fourth of the men are in hospital; and an
equal number have been killed, or taken prisoner, or have deserted! The
officers? Will not they, like those captains in Auxonne seven years ago,
be inclined to encounter this wonderful young man’s orders with passive
resistance rather than ready obedience? Look at him as he sits there
writing and calculating; his powdered hair is cut in a fringe over his
forehead, but lengthens towards the back of the head to hang down over
his shoulders; his coat is simple and scantily embroidered; he walks up
and down and issues dictatorial orders, this foreigner whose French is
still faulty. Not an officer in his staff is well-disposed towards him,
except the three or four faithful followers whom he has brought with him.
One of these latter tells us: “They looked upon him as a mathematician or
a visionary.”
What if he be both at once, and for this very reason a man of genius?
At first, he seems to be nothing but a calculator. Consider one of his
early letters to the Directors—for he promptly opens an epistolary
campaign, carried on side by side with a campaign of cavalry and by
guns, waged with the same ardour and the same success. “You are asking
me to perform miracles, and I cannot do that.... Only with prudence
and foresight can we achieve great ends. It is but a step from victory
to defeat. In affairs of magnitude I have learned that, in the last
resort, everything invariably turns upon a trifle.” But to Carnot, the
great army organiser, to whom he can say much that is unsuitable for his
official dispatches, he writes, gnashing his teeth: “Would you believe
it, that I have not a single engineer officer here, not one who has ever
taken part in a siege!... You can hardly conceive how furious I am that
I have no artillery!” His actual resources totalled 24 mountain guns,
4,000 underfed horses, frs. 300,000 in silver, and enough food to supply
his 30,000 men for a month on half rations. With these vestiges of an
equipment, he is to conquer Italy!
Nevertheless, having undertaken the venture, he makes the best of the
materials at his disposal. Getting to work like a hurricane upon this
crowd of pitiful men who have run to seed, upon corps some of which have
already begun to sing the royal anthem again, with indefatigable energy
he succeeds in transforming them into a republican army.
Here are some of his doings on the third day after his arrival. Sending
a hundred and ten workmen to make a road. Suppression of a mutiny in a
brigade. Quartering of two artillery divisions. Orders to two generals in
case of horse stealing. Answer to the requests of two others concerning
their commands. Order to a general in Toulon to bring his men to Nice.
Order to another general to call up the National Guard of Antibes. Order
to a general to find the most efficient officers in the mutinous brigade.
Address to the general staff. Review of troops, with orders of the
day.—During the first twenty days, one hundred and twenty-three written
orders relate solely to the provisioning of the troops; among them are
numerous complaints concerning peculation, short weight, and inferior
goods; and these orders are issued on the march, from twelve different
headquarters, in the interludes between six skirmishes.
For hardly has he passed through the narrow defiles than, in accordance
with his new principle, he has massed his forces to attack first one
and then the other of the allied foes, and in two battles he defeats
and separates them. In truth, these were mere advance-guard skirmishes,
as becomes the nature of the French, and the previous training of these
troops, which as yet know nothing of a great movement in open lines. At
this stage of his campaign, speed and boldness are more important than
elaborate strategy.
When he is on one of these breathless rides, in the deep mountain
valleys, through the passes, amid the thunder of his own and the enemy
cannon, suddenly the glass covering Josephine’s miniature (which he
carries in the inner pocket of his tunic, and has kissed hundreds of
times) shivers into fragments. Growing paler than ever, he reins in his
charger, and says to Bourrienne: “The glass is broken. My wife is ill or
unfaithful. Forward!”
Everything depends upon the fulfilment of his first old pledge. He knows
that if, this once, he is able to do what he has promised, the army
will believe him; and if it believes him, it will soon believe in him.
In actual fact, a fortnight after his prophecy had been uttered, the
army, which had won its first victories on entering the downward grades,
found itself on the last elevation. The soldiers raised a hearty cheer.
After the weary days in the narrow valleys, they at length caught sight
of the plains of Piedmont lying at their feet, stretching out into the
immeasurable distance, blossoming in the spring weather, offering all
that they had gone short of for so long. The Po and other rivers were
flowing towards the horizon, and at length the world of snows lay
behind. “As if by a magician’s spell, they had been enabled to cross the
gigantic barrier, which had seemed to them like the frontier of another
world.”
“All this is yours!” Their commander has forced one of the two opponents,
the king of Sardinia, to make truce, thus compelling the surrender of
everything that grows on Sardinian territory. This first truce of his
campaigns was secured by Bonaparte through cunning and bluff, for he
threatened the enemy with the use of overwhelming forces, which he did
not possess, and, indeed, could not have used, pressed as he was on both
sides. The soldiers are amazed; their general is a man of his word!
Literally, in a fortnight, he has fulfilled his promise.
Henceforward, the men under his command put their trust in Bonaparte. It
is as Bonaparte that he begins to sign himself from the outset of the
campaign. Since Italy is the enemy, he will have nothing more to do with
an Italian name.
Ere long, he will change his name again.
II
Why was he victorious? How can we explain that during the next few weeks
he was able to deliver blow after blow? What is the solution of this
riddle?
First of all, he owes his success to youth and health. A body that can
endure interminable riding without fatigue; the power to sleep at any
moment, and to wake whenever he pleases; a stomach which can digest
anything, and makes no complaint at being put on short commons; eyes that
see and arrange everything.
But it is to the revolution that he is indebted for the fact that at the
age of twenty-seven, when his splendid powers are in their first vigour,
he has risen to a leading place, and can wield unrestricted dictatorship.
Only, thanks to the new ideas of equality, in a world which prizes a man
for what he does and not for his birth, can any one become a leader in
the prime of youth and after so rough an apprenticeship.
Look at the men who are in the field against him. Archduke Charles, with
his delicately shaped and decadent Habsburg nose, how can he, with his
education, vie with the Corsican in indifference to hardships, rival
Bonaparte in knowledge of men? How can Beaulieu, the Austrian commander,
cope with the French general? The former is seventy-two; the latter,
twenty-seven. General Colli suffers from gout, and has to be carried
throughout the campaign. Alvintzy is in the middle sixties. The king
of Sardinia is an old man. What can the excellent General Wurmser, who
is deaf, and a slow, elderly gentleman, cautious in his movements, do
against a commander who thinks nothing of changing his headquarters
every day, who surrounds himself with young men, and who takes “Time is
everything,” for his motto?
The oldest man in Napoleon’s circle is the faithful Berthier, now
forty-two, whom the new commander has taken over from his predecessor
because Berthier has a good knowledge of the country. For two decades he
is to be Bonaparte’s slavishly devoted chief of general staff. Next to
be mentioned comes Masséna, a man of ardent temperament, who had been a
cabin boy and a vagrant, and had served fourteen years under the Bourbons
without rising to the rank of sergeant major; now, within a few weeks,
he was to become a general. Augereau, too, a deserter from three armies,
boaster, adventurer, and great thief. Such were the men drawn from the
dregs of society out of whom their commander, the youngest of them all,
was soon to make heroes and generalissimos, and subsequently princes and
dukes.
In every dispatch, he recommends for promotion those, and only those, who
have displayed courage. Thus, after three battles, a grenadier rises to
the rank of colonel, and will climb yet higher. On the other hand, many
of the generals whom he has taken over with his command are dismissed
with blunt censure: “Good enough for office work, knows nothing of war.”
His subordinates do not necessarily incur his displeasure because they
are beaten: “The fortune of war, dear Masséna, changes from day to day.
To-morrow, or later, we shall win back what you have just lost.” But a
division which has done badly is paraded to hear a rating. He says that
he will have a mocking inscription worked upon its colours. Then the
soldiers cry to him from the ranks: “To-morrow we will lead the van.”
Next day, he has a thousand more enthusiasts among the troops. When they
are victorious, in the orders of the day he calls them comrades and
friends. Thus does he lead the sons of the people.
For it is a people’s army that he is leading; that is the second great
factor of his success. This, too, he owes to the revolution. Indeed,
the people’s army is an expression of the revolution. The soldiers on
the Austrian side must be used thriftily, for they cost a great deal,
and it is not easy to replace them. They are drawn from a larger number
of nationalities than the German emperor himself rules. Six different
languages are spoken in the army, and there is no community of thought
to hold it together. But the French are fighting as a united nation of
thirty millions, and their army will be capable of perpetual regeneration
for twenty years to come.
What is the French army fighting for? The new freedom of the republic,
and to spread throughout the world the few and simple ideas which animate
it! The French are fighting for the world revolution, and nothing short
of that. But the army is not in pursuit of purely ideal aims. It has to
defend liberty against the environing forces of legitimate monarchy,
against the legitimists who are more concerned with self-defence than
with the cause of the fallen Bourbons. The French cannot achieve their
end by simply defending their own frontiers. They are surrounded by kings
and emperors who wish to keep their peoples from any attempt to imitate
the French revolution, and are therefore trying to destroy the very focus
of the new ideas. Thus France is forced to assume the offensive as a
means of self-defence. Those who in such a fashion become conquerors in
spite of themselves, are surely entitled to declare that their conquests
are achieved in the name of liberty.
This brings us to the third factor of Napoleon’s success. While the
commander is engaged in the attempt to conquer Lombardy, and then Italy,
for France, he issues a series of manifestoes to tell the inhabitants
of the territories he is invading that he comes to free them from the
Habsburgs and the Sardinians, from dukes and patrician senates. Will not
all who have been discontented with the old order be roused to action
by the torrential force of such appeals? Have not the oppressed masses
long had it in mind to rid themselves of their rulers? Have not the ideas
of the revolution crossed the frontiers years ago, rousing, in many of
the towns, students and burghers to revolt? Here in Italy were young
people who longed for freedom; leaders who had been vainly clamouring
for “Italia unità.” The revolt, though still in chains, was rattling its
chains outside the kings’ palace doors. The malcontents were ready to
welcome the invading army, and to believe in its mission.
The commander, a man of Italian blood, bearing an Italian name, and
speaking Italian as his mother tongue, was not for them a French warrior.
He was the herald of liberty and equality, and the two great words headed
all his letters. How terrible would be the disillusionment, should the
invader prove, after all, a foreign oppressor! The commander is well
aware how much turns upon this. Will he be able to keep his famished army
within bounds? Can he make his soldiers behave as well as if they were
fresh from a well-provisioned garrison town?
“Looting is on the wane,” he writes home. “The thirst of an army which
lacked everything has been quenched. There is an excuse for the poor
devils. They have spent three years in the marches of the Alps, and now
I have led them into the Promised Land! A famished soldier perpetrates
excesses which make one ashamed of being a man.... I intend to restore
order, for I will not remain in command of a robber band.... To-morrow I
am going to have several privates and a corporal shot, for having looted
the plate from a church. Discipline will be re-established within a day
or two. Italy has been amazed at the valour of our soldiers, and shall be
amazed at their good behaviour. There have been terrible moments; things
have happened which have made me shudder. Thank God, the retreating enemy
behaved even worse!”
He puts his men on their honour. “Swear to me”—thus runs one of his early
manifestoes—“to spare the peoples you are liberating; otherwise you will
be the scourges of the people! Your victories, your courage, the blood
of our fallen brothers, will be lost; honour and glory, too! I and my
generals would blush at leading an undisciplined army!” Hard to carry
out, despite his adjurations. Throughout the campaign, he is hampered by
this problem of looting. Again and again he issues orders to his generals
telling them they are to shoot any one who fails to hand over his plunder
within twenty-four hours, even if the stolen goods be horses and mules.
There are revolts and counter-attacks. Priests and nobles, agents of
the princes, incite a town to resist. He is pitiless in his shootings,
ruthless in his reprisals, whenever, in the conquered territory, any one
raises a hand against the new master. But this becomes increasingly rare,
for in the towns he is skilful in enlisting the civic sense on the side
of a new order which assumes imposing lineaments. He understands (and
this is an additional factor of success) the Italian temperament; knows
how to appeal to the sense of historic veneration: “Peoples of Italy,
the army of France comes to break your chains. It is a friend to all the
peoples. Have confidence! Your property, your customs, your religion,
shall be respected.” He goes on to speak to them of Athens, Sparta,
classical Rome.
History inspires him. While with rapid strokes he is making history,
history gives his spirit wings. In boyhood, he had studied Plutarch;
as lieutenant, he had read the history of all times; now, from moment
to moment, he turns the knowledge to account. Knowing who has ruled in
every part of these territories, understanding how the governments he has
overthrown came into being, he has appropriate measures for each area.
Time-honoured figures are ever present to his imagination; he wants to
resemble them, to outdo them. Thus, whatever he does is conceived in a
historic setting; and he compels his army, the country with which he is
dealing, and, soon, Europe as a whole, to breathe the same atmosphere.
These first victories, which in reality are nothing more than big
skirmishes, are by the magic of his words transformed into battles, and
the battles are magnified into history. In this way, half of what he
achieves is achieved by the power of words. To the lands he is freeing,
to his soldiers, he invariably suggests that they have done the whole
thing themselves. Read his proclamation to the army in Milan.
“Soldiers, like a torrent you have rushed down from the heights of the
Apennines.... Milan is yours.... We are the friends of all the peoples;
but, above all, we are the friends of the offspring of Brutus and Scipio
and the other great men who are our models. To re-establish the Capitol,
to set up there the statues of the heroes, to awaken the Roman people
which for centuries has been paralysed by servitude—that is the fruit of
your victories, that will amaze posterity. It is your title to immortal
fame that you have given a new visage to the most beautiful land in
Europe.... Then you will return to your homes, and your neighbours will
point you out to one another, saying: ‘He was with the army in Italy!’”
Did a commander ever before make such alluring appeals to soldiers and
peoples, to friends and foes? Who understood so well as Napoleon how to
influence people through their imaginations instead of through a sense of
obedience? At Arcola he shouts to his men: “Are you cowards, or are you
the victors of Lodi?” In a month or two, he will be urging them onward by
reminding them that they are the victors of Arcola. “We have crossed the
Po, and have opened the second campaign,” he writes to the Directors. All
his reports to Paris are penned with consummate art. What he writes is
the truth, but it is so skilfully adorned that it develops a life of its
own as soon as the government communicates it to the press, and when from
France it makes its way into foreign lands.
With the pen, Bonaparte rounds off the victories he has won with the
sword.
III
“I have received your peace treaty with Sardinia. The army has approved
it.”
The Directors quake as they read the words. The arrival of this dispatch
cancels the joy they had felt at the coming of so many captured colours.
When, before, had a general in the field dared to write in such a fashion
to his government? “For this letter, the young hero ought to be stood up
before a firing squad,” cry his opponents. But the fame of his victories,
the glory of his conquest of Lombardy, have already secured him so strong
a position in the hearts of the people that no one dares attack him.
Recently, when the governmental commissary, his fellow-Corsican Saliceti,
came to his camp, Bonaparte ignored the official’s authority, and himself
signed the truce with Sardinia. These negotiations were the first in
which he proved his mettle as diplomatist. When the other side wanted to
bargain, he took out his watch, named the hour at which he had decided
to attack, and said they had better make up their minds quickly. “I may
lose battles,” he said, “but no one will ever see me lose minutes either
by over-confidence or by sloth.” With this truce, he for the first time
dispossessed a king. Without asking for instructions, he entered into
negotiations with the dukes, with Tuscany. Was he not, before long, to
do the same thing with the pope? What was the best way of dealing with
this dangerous conqueror?
“We will send him a partner,” thought the Directors, with a smile. “Let
him share the supreme command with Kellermann, while Saliceti decides
upon political issues.” Orders to this effect reached him at Lodi, on the
day of battle.
That was the first real battle he had won. A colossal bluff and a bold
movement enabled him to storm the bridge over the Adda and to defeat the
alarmed Austrians. There were to be much greater victories in days to
come; but, in the history of the man’s spiritual development, not one of
them was to equal this in importance.
For now, after a battle which decided the first part of his campaign,
having taken much booty and sustained only trifling losses, and having
made himself master of a territory opened to him by an hour’s struggle
on the bridge,—this evening, Bonaparte feels for the first time how
obscure plans and brilliant exploits of war, dream and reality, are
interconnected. The consciousness of his own powers makes him realise
that boundless possibilities lie before him. That was the first time on
which a word concerning such aims crossed his lips. To his friend Marmont
he said: “I feel that deeds await me of which the present generation has
no inkling.” Long afterwards, in retrospect, he declared: “That evening,
after the battle of Lodi, I first became aware that I was an exceptional
man; from then I date the awakening of an ambition to do the great things
which hitherto had existed for me only as the fantasies of a dream.”
Such was his mood when the new orders came from Paris. What? The conquest
of two or three continents was looming before his imagination—and he was
to go halves with Kellermann? He strode up and down the room, pursing his
lips, and then he issued his fiat to the government:
“If you put hindrances in my path, if you make my actions dependent upon
the commissary’s decision, ... you must not expect any more good results
from me.... Here it is indispensable that you should have absolute
confidence in your commander. If I do not enjoy that confidence, I shall
without complaint endeavour to win your approval in some other post.
Every one has his own way of making war. General Kellermann has more
experience, and would doubtless do it better; but, together, we should
do it badly. I cannot serve the country unless I have your complete
and undivided trust. Much courage, I know, is needed to write you this
report, for it would be easy to charge me with ambition and pride! But
you are responsible for my having to express my feelings.... I cannot
serve jointly with a man who regards himself as the best commander in
Europe. For the rest, one bad general is better than two good generals.
With war, as with governance, it is a question of tact.”
The general does not seem inclined to yield up his place to any one. If
the authorities in Paris insist on a divided command, is it not likely
that he will march ahead on his own initiative, gain further victories
with his unaided talents, then turn back to threaten France, and, as a
condottiere, overthrow the government? The Directors think it will be
better not to insist; with a smile, a wry one this time, they give way.
After his first, noiseless victory over the government, Bonaparte feels
he is master. Henceforward he behaves, substantially, as a king who
is his own commander-in-chief, but who can only secure reinforcements
and other requisites by reiterated adjurations. For months and years,
therefore, his dispatches are still written in the tone of a subordinate;
of one who does not threaten, but advises. Yet in reality he acts all the
time as if he were already in the land of the sultan, towards which his
masterful character draws him.
The Paris courier has been sent off. Bonaparte’s first “No” is on its
way. Another restless night in camp, and then to Milan!
In everything, he imitates the Roman general celebrating a triumph. As of
old, the prisoners lead the way, the only difference being that nowadays
they are not in chains. They are followed by five hundred cavalrymen.
The citizens, who are used to seeing brilliant uniforms, are astonished
at the tattered tunics, the sorry screws, the jaded appearance of the
riders; and they are still more amazed when they see the thin little man
on the inconspicuous white nag, at the head of his weary-looking suite.
How grey the whole procession looks in the light of this brilliant spring
day. At the gate the venerable archbishop, with a train of counts and
dukes, bids him welcome. He dismounts, but does not draw near to the
reception committee; he merely listens with forced politeness to the
words of greeting. The onlookers are wondering what answer he will make.
For a few seconds he keeps his lips tightly pressed together, and then
contents himself with a single sentence, to the effect that France wishes
the Lombards well. Remounting, he salutes, and rides on.
Leaders and crowd are deeply impressed; no enthusiasm, only astonishment.
Not a sign of arrogance about this conqueror; nothing but resolution, and
a force of will before which all must bend. Was his conduct deliberately
planned to produce such an impression, though never before had he
experienced anything of the kind? Was he “play-acting”? If so, all the
more remarkable his knowledge of men; all the more plain that he was a
master of the ruler’s art!
Nevertheless, he is absent-minded to-day, for he has not all that he
wants.
Now, the streets echo to the shouts of the crowd, who cannot restrain
their expressions of astonishment as they watch the men who follow the
commander—marching in a slack and almost disorderly fashion, clad in
scarecrow uniforms patched with many colours. These Frenchmen seem in
almost sorrier case than the prisoners!
[Illustration: General Bonaparte in 1796. Engraving from the Kircheisen
Collection.]
The commander is taking his ease in the archbishop’s palace. He is
having a bath. Hot baths are his one luxury, a luxury that he will
continue to indulge in down to the day of his death, taking them hotter
and hotter, staying in them longer and longer, as time goes on. Nothing
can break him of the habit, for a hot bath is the only thing which really
refreshes him, soothes his nerves. In the evening there is a reception.
“You will be free, and in a safer position than the French. Milan will be
the capital of this new republic, which has a population of five million.
You shall have five hundred pieces of ordnance, and the friendship of
France. From among you I will choose fifty men, who shall rule the
country in the name of France. Adopt our laws, modifying them to suit
your own customs.... Be sagacious and united, and all will go well. Such
is my will. If Habsburg should again seize Lombardy, I swear to you that
I will take up your cause, that I will never desert you. If your land
perishes, I shall be no more. Athens and Sparta did not last for ever!”
Never since the days of Plutarch’s heroes did a commander talk like this.
It was the conqueror’s first speech from the throne, and was compounded
of all the elements with which, in his speeches and letters, he was to
work upon the mind of Europe for twenty years to come. Everything is
single and definite; there is so much fixity of purpose that every one
wishes to comply. You are vassals, but free. I am your master, but I
will protect you. Five hundred pieces of ordnance and the friendship of
France. “Such is my will.” Then it is all over.
Through the May night, the wealthy town blazed with fireworks and
resounded with music. The young commander-in-chief has moved on to the
Palazzo Serbelloni; the banquet is over, and he stands at the window. The
triumphal entry of which he dreamed in youth, towards which his virginal
fancy strained, has now been accomplished. Does he look forward or back?
With what is his mind busied?
“What do you imagine the Parisians are thinking of us?” he asks his
adjutant. “Do you expect they are satisfied?” When Marmont makes the
conventional reply, Napoleon goes on: “But Paris has seen nothing, so
far. The future hides much greater victories. The goddess of fortune
has not smiled on me that I may scorn her. The more she favours me, the
greater shall be my demands. In a few days we shall reach the Adige; then
Italy will be at our feet. Perhaps we shall cross the river, and press
onward. Our age has produced nothing great. I want to set an example.”
IV
A royal couch in the Serbelloni Palace; never has he lain so soft before.
But it is far too wide for one! Where is Josephine? What are triumphal
entries and victories worth, without her? Fireworks and flags! Why has
she not come? Is she really ill? Has she a lover?—He lies awake for hours.
From the very first this man, who inspired respect even in the veterans
among the generals, imperilled that respect by his way of showing his
wife’s picture to all and sundry, and when he was in the middle of a
conversation about service matters. “You will come soon, won’t you?” So
he wrote in one of his almost daily letters. “You must come to me. I want
you on my heart, in my arms! Quick! Fly, fly!” He knows her frivolous
disposition; that her senses are easily aroused; that she is always ready
to give herself up to new impressions, new admirers. But now, now! What
can be keeping her? He had expected her to come to Milan. His ambition
had been to escape thither from the savagery of the campaign, that in
one of the palaces of that city he might give her capricious charms a
splendid setting worthy of her and himself.
But there is something which our great calculator has left out of his
calculations. By his very feats of arms, he has kept her away from
his side. For years in Paris she has been living in the half-world.
Now, in this city which she loves, she wishes to shine forth in an
assured position, as wife of the great commander whose name is in every
newspaper, on every one’s lips. Does the little general really think she
married him for love? When the first captured colours are exhibited,
she drives out among the people, and, while she is loudly cheered, she
thinks to herself how much more gratifying this is than to rough it in
foreign towns surrounded by unmannerly soldiers. She seldom writes to
him. His own words grow ever more urgent. “Have you a lover, have you
taken up with some stripling of nineteen? If so, you have reason to dread
Othello’s fist!” She laughs, and says to Tallien: “A queer fellow, this
Bonaparte!”
Another day, in the middle of a letter to Carnot dealing with urgent
affairs, he writes: “I am in despair. My wife won’t come here. I am
sure she must have a lover, and that that is what keeps her in Paris. I
loathe women, one and all!” Then comes a letter in which she grasps at an
expedient. Since there is no other way of avoiding the dangers and the
dirt of camp life, she writes to him that she has hopes....
Thunder and lightning! Have all the spirits of good fortune united to
shower blessings on him? Among his successes, that was the only thing he
lacked to complete his happiness. For, if destiny is to carry him to the
lofty altitudes he foresees, to the heights he has resolved to scale,
then his greatest need is to have heirs. But this battle is only planned,
not yet won; new dangers are impending. He shudders. Is it true? Is it
his child?
“I am sorry!”—the words are penned in his almost illegible handwriting on
the commander-in-chief’s official stationery. “I have been pestering you
with complaints, and you are ill. Love had robbed me of reason. Forgive
me, but I think I shall never be reasonable again. My life is an unending
dream; gloomy forebodings make it hard for me to breathe; I have lost
all hope. Write me ten pages, for nothing else can console me. You are
ill, you love me, you are with child, and I never see you. Who takes care
of you? Hortense? I love the sweet girl more than ever when I think of
her as taking care of you.... Soon you are to have in your arms a child
as fascinating as yourself. If I could only spend a whole day with you.
You know, if I saw a lover with you, I should instantly tear the man to
pieces!”
But who is to help her through her time of trouble? There is no
friendship in the world, only the ties of blood. “I am in despair,” he
writes to Joseph under the same date. “My wife is ailing; I do not know
whether I am standing on my head or my heels; dreadful forebodings rack
my heart. Write to me, I implore you. Since early childhood, we have
been bound together by kinship and affection. Do for her what I would
so eagerly do for you.... You know how much I love her; know her ardent
nature; know that I have never loved so passionately, that Josephine is
the first woman whom I have adored. Her condition drives me crazy....
But as soon as she is well again, well enough to travel, she must come
to me. I must have her in my arms; I love her to distraction, and cannot
live without her. If she no longer loves me, there is nothing more for me
in the world. Oh, mon ami, do not keep the courier more than six hours
in Paris; send him back to me with an answer which will give me new
life. Be happy! For myself, nature has doomed me to win none but outward
victories!”
On the same day, he dictates, inter alia: Order to Berthier to occupy
Alessandria; dispatch to the Directors concerning urgently needed
reinforcements; ultimatum to the Genoese Senate anent the murder of
soldiers; letter introducing Murat to the same Senate; plan to sell some
cannon which are still left on the Riviera; order to Masséna to procure
ammunition from the arsenal in Venice; order to Lannes to advance no
farther; order to send all suspects to Tortona; order to send a division
to Toulon; report to Kellermann that money and troops are on the way.
His letter has an effect. Joseph asks Josephine to come with him to
Milan. What pretext can she find for refusing? She sighs, packs her
trunks, sheds tears at a farewell festival in the Luxembourg, gets
into the carriage. After all, to-morrow is the thirtieth of June, the
season is at an end, and she has good company for the journey. Of course
Joseph, her vis-à-vis, is a homely fellow, but Junot is a dapper young
man; Fortuné, her lap-dog, is a darling, as ever. Then there is Charles,
another young officer whose acquaintance she has recently made, and who
has danced attendance on her ever since. Is he on the lookout for a
career, or a conquest? What a choice Christian name, Hippolyte! How fine
he looks in his chasseur uniform. He tells such amusing stories, has an
expert knowledge of the latest shawls and wigs, and his legs are so well
turned!
Milan. Bonaparte is away? More battles near Verona? No matter, this is
a lovely place! Such a splendid palace; they all flock to pay their
respects. But Hippolyte is hors concours; no one can rival the grace with
which, sword clanking, he strides up and down the Corso. What a pity one
has to be circumspect in one’s behaviour under so many prying eyes. But
Hippolyte knows his way about, and has found a discreet staircase....
Suddenly there is a stir of excitement. The commander-in-chief is coming
from Verona. For two days and two nights, the lava of this volcano
overwhelms her.
V
Thrice do the soldiers of Emperor Francis try to relieve Mantua, which
Bonaparte is besieging. Mantua is the key position. Old Wurmser, marching
down beside Lake Garda with fresh troops, drives back the opposing
forces. If Bonaparte is to make front against him, Mantua must be
abandoned for a time. Meanwhile, however, the enemy has blocked the line
of retreat upon Milan. A terrible reverse, and the French army is in the
utmost danger. Bonaparte, hastening from Milan, rides under the hot July
sun across the plain, busily inspecting one division of the army after
the other, gathering all his strength, for the fate of the whole campaign
is at stake. A period of the utmost activity, and of extreme tension.
“Since I left you,” he writes on one of these evenings, “I have been sad.
I can only be happy when I am near you. I spend my whole time thinking
of your kisses, your tears, your bewitching jealousy. The charm of the
incomparable Josephine is perpetually rekindling the flames of my heart
and my senses. When shall I be free, at length, free from cares and
duties, free to devote all my time to you, with nothing in the world but
to love you.... Since I have known you, I have come to respect you more
day by day, which shows how wrong La Bruyère was when he said that love
comes suddenly. Everything in nature runs its course, and increases by
degrees.... Be less beautiful, less tender, and above all less jealous.
Your tears inflame my blood.... Join me quickly, so that, before we
die, we may be able to say: ‘We have had so many happy days!’ A million
kisses, even for your horrid Fortuné!”
Neither now nor later could the commander-in-chief rid his home of this
lap-dog. He tells us that on his wedding night the dog was in bed with
Josephine. “I had to choose between sleeping beside the beast or not
sleeping with my wife. A terrible dilemma, but I had to take it or leave
it. I resigned myself. The dog was less accommodating. I have the marks
on my leg to show what he thought about the matter!”
Amid the hurly-burly, the general’s lady arrives at Brescia. Almost
immediately she has to be sent back to Milan. She has a narrow escape of
being seized by the enemy, together with some recruits and cannon. Now
she has an excuse, and, in the future, she will be slower to comply with
his invitations.
During these weeks, Bonaparte for the first time loses courage, though it
is only for a few hours of one night. Instead of simply issuing orders,
he holds a council of war, much to the astonishment of his generals. In
this critical situation, he proposes to retreat across the Po, but the
mad Augereau thumps the table, shouting: “For the sake of your own fame,
I insist that we attack.” He flings from the room. The counsels of the
others are divided.
See him before the decision, brooding over his maps. He is alone. Moths
are fluttering round the candles, and at last burn themselves to death.
The midsummer night is sultry. As he listens to the drums and the
shouting without, he thinks: “To-morrow will settle whether we can keep
Lombardy. Perhaps it will be the turning point in my fame, my destiny.
Shall I stake all on one card? What if Wurmser’s strength is greater than
the reports say? Josephine is sleeping now, in the great bed. Or, who
knows, she may be laughing softly in the embrace of some puppy who has
bewitched her.”
He decides to fight. Next day, he is victorious at Castiglione.
Soon afterwards, he writes: “Three days without a letter from you; I
have written daily. This separation is terrible; the nights are long
and savourless, the days monotonous.” At this time, Josephine writes
to Tallien in Paris: “I am bored to death.” He is busied in battles
and victories; she is fêted and honoured. To both of them life seems
wearisome: to him, because she is too far away; to her, because he is too
near. Three days later: “The enemy has been beaten, my darling. Eighteen
thousand prisoners, the others dead or wounded. Wurmser has only Mantua
left. This is the biggest success yet: Italy, Friuli, and Tyrol are saved
for the republic. In a few days we shall see one another again, that is
the reward for labour and pains. A thousand glowing kisses!”
When the commander can draw breath, the statesman must turn every moment
to account. In Modena he assembles deputies from all the States as far
south as Bologna, and at a formal sitting he gives them a constitution,
that they may unite to form henceforward one State, the new republic. Is
he happy, now that he is at work State-building? His wife in Milan must
be in love with some one, or she would write to him differently!
“Your letters are cold”—this is from Modena on the same day. “Their tone
suggests that we must have been married for half a century at least.
Friendship and winter, it is odious and spiteful. What more am I to
expect of you? That you have ceased to love me? That is an old story.
That you should hate me? Well and good. That is what I wish. Everything
degrades, save only hatred. But indifference with a heart of marble,
lack-lustre eyes, languid gait?... A thousand kisses, tender as my heart.”
Fresh crises call him northward once more. He comes, he fights, he is
driven back. The gloomy November weeks, in which his fate again trembles
in the balance, are not gladdened by any consolation from her. Far from
it, for his most intimate friends, alive to all that goes on in Milan,
venture cautious hints that my lady Josephine is having a merry time
there. This is the day after the defeat at Caldiero. He sends to Paris a
despairing appeal for reinforcements.
Complications thicken; courage wanes; every one turns for help to the
chief. He seems to be thinking with thirty heads these days, when the
battle of Arcola is impending. It is in a crazy mood of despair that
he writes to her in the evening, his pen storming over the paper: “I
no longer love you, I hate you. You are hateful, stupid, inept. You do
not write to me, do not love your husband. What are you doing all day,
Madame? What important business makes it impossible for you to write to
the man who loves you?... Who is the fairy prince that claims all your
time, so that you cannot write to your husband? Take care, Josephine:
some fine night, the door will burst open, and I shall be there! Quite
seriously, I am uneasy, my pretty one. Do write me four pages full of
sweet words which will warm my heart with joy and happiness. In a few
days I hope to clasp you in my arms, and to cover you with a million
kisses, hot as the equator.”
How his heart flutters, uncertain whether she is still to be trusted,
miserable if she be unworthy of trust. There is a crisis in his own soul
as well as out there on the battle-field. Responsibility, uncertainty,
storm in the heart of this man, who has perhaps already been dishonoured
in his private life, and to-morrow may be dishonoured as a military
commander—the man who still hopes to rule the world. During these days,
when a suicide occurs among the troops, he issues an order: “The soldier
must conquer the pain and the melancholy of the passions.”
Two days after the date of the letter last quoted, he is standing near
Arcola on a bridge spanning the Adige. The enemy is bombarding this
bridge. The French troops shrink back; there seems no way of forcing
a passage across the river. At length, after repeated summonses, the
soldiers advance once more, but there are calls from the ranks to
Napoleon: “Do not go any farther, General. You will be killed, and then
we shall be lost!” Marmont is a little in the van. Turning round to see
if his men are following, he notices that the commander is in the arms
of Muiron, the adjutant, apparently wounded. Around them a group of
motionless figures. Now that the movement of the vanguard is arrested,
the troops seek the shelter of the embankment. Bonaparte, who has
recovered, stumbles and falls into the ditch at the foot of the dyke. His
brother Louis and Marmont drag him out. A horse! Confusion, shots; Muiron
covers the general with his own body, is hit, and falls. Bonaparte saves
himself on horseback.
That evening in camp, he is greatly depressed. Second day’s fighting,
and a vain attempt to storm the enemy’s position. This abominable river.
Seems impossible to get across it. For a long time, the fortunes of the
third day are no better than those of the first two.
At the eleventh hour, he has recourse to cunning. While the fight on the
river rages uncertainly, he sends all the trumpeters and drummers he can
get together, with part of the guard, in a wide half-circle to reach a
position in the enemy’s rear. There the charge is sounded. The wearied
Austrians are panic-stricken, and one of their divisions draws back. The
French, encouraged by the rout of part of the foe, assume that all the
opposing army is retreating, and act accordingly. Courage and ruse have
snatched victory out of a morass of despair. The name of another village
becomes famous. Arcola medals are struck in Paris. A picture is painted,
showing the commander on the bridge of Arcola, waving imaginary colours.
The danger is over for a time. The enemy supports are withdrawn from
Mantua, and soon the town must fall. Bonaparte makes a fresh disposition
of his troops, and hastens to Milan. At length he will be able to
administer the province from the capital, and have Josephine and hold her
fast.
But Josephine is harder to catch than Wurmser. “I reach Milan, rush to
your house, having thrown aside everything in order to clasp you in my
arms. You are not there! You are gadding about somewhere, running away
when I come to seek you. You care nothing about your Napoleon. A whim led
you to give me your love, and now fickleness has made you indifferent.
Inured to dangers, I know how to meet reverses of fortune.... Don’t put
yourself about, amuse yourself, happiness is made for you, all the world
is happy to have the chance of pleasing you, your husband alone is most
unhappy.”
Next morning. “You have no reason to trouble yourself about the happiness
or unhappiness of a man whom you do not love. But it is my fate to love
you.... Take no part in the unhappiness of your husband, who lives only
for you. It would be unjust if I were to ask you to love me as I love
you. Who can expect delicate lace to weigh as heavy as gold.... My fault
is that nature has denied me the charms which might bind you to me. What
I do deserve is nothing more than this, that Josephine should show me
a little consideration, a little respect, for I love her to the verge
of madness, her and her alone. Farewell, adorable woman.... If I were
certain that she could no longer love me, I would hide my pain, and would
content myself with being useful to her whenever I could.... I open the
letter once more, to send you a kiss. Ah, Josephine! Josephine!”
What a confession! With ardour and ambition he pushes forward to the
goal, but the enemy has escaped, and what is to be done? Resignation must
be the first aim after a failure, not raging and cursing. A man must
retain his self-respect, and act prudently. A little mockery, embellished
with courtesy, will have its due effect. Next day, he has turned things
over in his mind. I must have her. How shall I lure her back? To extol
my exploits does not move her in the least. What does influence her?
Flattery and service. Such is his calculation. A miscalculation: for he,
who is masterful with kings, fails to see that the charming Josephine
would fear a master, even though she would not worship him; that nothing
makes her more secure in her own position than his confessed passion.
Napoleon’s mistake is the outcome of his pride. His pride will lead him
to the limits of what is humanly possible, but will in the long run
mislead him into the greatest of his blunders. Now, it is pride that
prevents his veiling a passion which he does not master because he does
not wish to do so. After all his carefully planned phrases to the effect
that he wishes to be of use to her, the foolish human heart drives him,
with the gesture of a love-sick youth, to tear open his letter that he
may “send a kiss.”
VI
What is Paris saying?
Paris is radiant, for, after long years, it once more has a hero to
worship. Bonaparte’s picture is in all the shops; rhymed comparisons of
him with the heroes of antiquity are in every one’s mouth; the actors
speak of him when instructions are sent to announce a new victory; the
colours he has taken from the enemy are on show at the Luxembourg; his
reports, cut about by the Directors, appear in the “Moniteur.” Songs,
medals, caricatures (a recent importation from across the Channel),
enliven the boulevards.
He knows all this. He knows, likewise, that the rapid growth of his
popularity is alarming the Directors, who feel that he has long ceased to
be their creature. “The fellow’s perpetual victories will be the death
of us,” they think, and put their heads together. A people’s army is
invincible, but it is dangerous unless its officers are genuinely devoted
to the government. For the last seven years, it has been the rulers’ way
to threaten with the guillotine any general who has dared to meddle in
politics on his own account. “A commander who does not comply with our
orders, who makes light of the commissaries we send to his camp, must be
dismissed, even if his name be Napoleon Bonaparte. Saliceti is too much
under his thumb, being a fellow-Corsican, and having an uneasy conscience
because he betrayed Bonaparte not very long ago. Let us send another
commissary, Clarke, who is both prudent and ambitious.”
Elegant and high-spirited, himself a general, Clarke, while on the
journey to Milan, looks forward to twisting Bonaparte round his fingers.
That gawky little fellow in the threadbare uniform whom he had often
met at Barras’ should be easy enough to deal with. But in the Palazzo
Serbelloni, the envoy is abashed before the commander. Napoleon has not
grown any taller, certainly; but the manner of his entries and exits,
while all wait for his coming or make way for his going, suggests the
ruler rather than the simple warrior. The commissary has a courteous
reception, but he is far from being able to penetrate Bonaparte’s secret
plans and report them to his masters. On the contrary, within a couple
of days the commander-in-chief has full knowledge of the Directors’
private designs, about which Clarke ought to have kept his mouth shut.
The commissary has bowed before the higher authority. “Here is the man of
the future,” says he to himself; and promptly changes sides. Napoleon’s
suspicions are now confirmed. He knows that the Directors are using his
conquests as mere pawns in the game they are playing to secure peace
with the Austrians. They have no intention of keeping Italy, and still
less do they think of revolutionising it. Now that he is fore-warned, he
will make all his preparations to thwart the government’s plans.
But he still has need of the Directors. “Reinforcements! Reinforcements!
Not in name only, not on paper merely, but armed men in the flesh.... My
best soldiers are wounded; none of my staff officers and generals are
fit for active service. The new levies are raw and unsteady. The army is
reduced to a handful of exhausted warriors. We are forsaken in the middle
of Italy. The few brave fellows left to me, are marked out for death
unless you send ample reinforcements. Soon may strike the hour of the
valiant Augereau, the indomitable Masséna, Berthier, myself. What will
happen then to the lads in the ranks? This thought makes me cautious. I
no longer dare to defy death, for if I were to fall it would demoralise
those who are the object of all my care.”
Could anything be more artfully phrased?
Yes, he has another string to his bow. When he does not threaten imminent
destruction, he cajoles with gifts. Month after month, to this government
whose only resources have for some time been piles of almost worthless
paper currency, he sends a consignment of hard cash, gold extorted from
princes and republics by the terms of truce. He is the first commander to
send money home, instead of continually demanding money. And in addition
he has little presents to spare for the Directors. “I am sending a
hundred of the finest horses I can lay my hands on, to replace any you
may have that are not really good enough to draw your carriages.”
He asks for the troops quartered in the southern provinces of France,
and is told that they are needed for home service. “It is better,” he
rejoins, “that there should be broils in Lyons, while we keep Italy,
than conversely.” When told to leave all diplomatic negotiations to the
commissaries, his answer runs: “For such matters, you do not merely
need a one and only general; you must see to it that no one and nothing
interfere with him in his work.... My advance is no less precise than my
thought process.... We have to do everything with a weak army: thrust
back the German troops; lay siege to fortresses; keep our lines of
communication open; threaten Genoa, Venice, Tuscany, Rome, and Naples;
show our strength here, there, and everywhere. For this, absolute unity
of the military, political, and financial command is indispensable....
Unless the general remains the great centre, you will be exposed to
incessant danger. I hope this language will not be ascribed to personal
ambition. For my own part, I am unfortunately overburdened with honours,
and my health has been so seriously undermined that I may soon have to
ask you to appoint my successor. I can no longer mount a horse; nothing
is left to me but courage.... I am continuing the negotiations. Troops!
troops!—if you want to keep Italy. Bonaparte.”
The more popular he becomes, the more often does he tender his
resignation, though his health is in truth excellent, and day after day
he rides until his horse stumbles from fatigue. Woe to the Parisian
lawyers if they run counter to his wishes! While he strengthens France’s
power in Italy, he is consolidating his own influence in Paris; this is
his new idea. Although he neither champions popular freedom nor believes
Italy ripe for it, he insists upon the formation of the “Cisalpine
Republic,” against the wishes of the Directors—among whom Carnot, at
least, is a convinced democrat, though he wants to use Italy as a pawn in
the French game.
This is the first occasion on which Bonaparte builds up an organism
out of centrifugal forces. In days to come, he will repeat the process
again and again, on an ever grander scale of creation, his aim being to
establish a United Europe. He now welds together the half dozen petty
States of northern Italy, prescribes their constitution, appoints and
dismisses their officials. Throughout, he is the dictator, and yet all
the time he acts on rational principles and allows for elasticity in
matters of detail. He issues brilliant proclamations, announcing that
these States are to be free whether they like it or not, and that they
are to pay him promptly in hard cash for the privilege.
“The French Republic has sworn hatred of the tyrants, brotherhood with
the peoples. This principle of the constitution is the principle of the
army as well. The despot who has so long kept Lombardy enslaved, has done
great injury to France.... The victorious army of an insolent monarch
was compelled to spread terror among the conquered. But the republican
army, while waging war to the death against its enemies, the kings,
gives a pledge of friendship to the peoples it has set free. Respect for
property, humanity, and religion—this is our animating principle. But the
Lombards owe us, who are their brothers, a fair return.... Lombardy must
support us with all her resources. We need provisions, for France is so
far away that we cannot supply our requirements thence. We are entitled
to them by the right of conquest; friendship must hasten to offer them to
us. We have to requisition twenty million francs from the provinces. They
are so rich that this will not be a serious burden.”
Then he takes whatever he wants out of the taxes, the countryside, the
camps, the arsenals, and the domains. In the articles of every truce,
he demands money, oxen, and pictures. If he sends pictures and statues
to Paris, this will not, of course, stabilise the currency; but it
will tickle the vanity of the Parisians, and win him popular favour.
In a period of intense financial stringency, Bonaparte, with Italy as
his source of supply, stocks the Louvre with precious works of art,
contributing far more than the most resplendent of kings.
But all the time, while he is ruthlessly extorting money from the
Italians, he is not less ruthless with Frenchmen who are trying to
feather their own nests. In one of his early despatches, he writes: “The
army consumes five times as much as it should, because the commissariat
officers are falsifying their accounts.... Prodigality, venality, and
peculation are rife. There is only one thing to do: a committee of three
must be appointed, with power, during from three to five days, to shoot
every dishonest administrator.” When the deliveries of hay are found to
be short weight, he declares: “It is of the utmost importance that not
one of these rascals shall escape. Too long have the army and the country
been the victims of cupidity.” Innumerable are the documents bearing his
signature which are directed against these plunderers. When the influx
of women camp-followers exceeds all bounds, he issues the following
order: “Any woman found among the troops without a permit twenty-four
hours after the posting of this notice, will be blackwashed and publicly
exposed for two hours.”
On the other hand, this strict disciplinarian was humane in his desire to
put an end to some of the barbarities which still characterised war in
those days: “The infamous practice of flogging men to make them disclose
secrets, must come to an end. The only result of torturing people in this
way is that the poor wretches say whatever they think will please their
captors. I forbid the use of means that are equally repugnant to humanity
and reason.”
VII
As a diplomat, he strengthens all the instruments of diplomacy: flattery
and threats; lying and frankness—or sometimes, even in diplomatic
negotiations, he will play the bluff soldier. He is especially shrewd in
his dealings with the Vatican.
As thorough-going revolutionists, the Directors wish to put an end to
the temporal power of the pope; for the Papal States are the focus of
the religion which revolutionary France has rejected. The prospect of
this moral success, to be gilded by the wealth of the Vatican, charms
them more than all Bonaparte’s activities in the formation of border
States. They insist upon his advancing against Rome. Now he will be able
to see it close at hand, this city with which, from childhood onwards,
his imagination has associated power, greatness, and fame. Like Cæsar,
he will be able to pluck laurels from the Capitol, for the papal troops
cannot stand against him for a moment.
But he holds his hand. For him, the pope is the only ruler who cannot
be dethroned by big guns. He sees the idea behind the papacy, with
its millennial influence on France and Europe; he knows the moral
repercussions of martyrdom, and he has determined not to wage war
upon the pope, unless it be a make-believe. “The influence of Rome is
incalculable. It was a serious error to break with this power, which will
profit by our mistake.”
He moves southward, and, literally, crosses the Rubicon, but there he
stops. Because he is the stronger, he offers a truce; henceforward this
will be his technique. The aged pope accepts the offer, for Bonaparte is
wise enough to leave all ecclesiastical questions open. Pius VI promises
to pay France several millions; to hand over one hundred pictures, busts,
vases, or statues as the French commissioners shall determine. There
are only two articles for which the commander-in-chief makes a specific
demand: He wants the busts of Junius Brutus and Marcus Brutus from the
Capitol. He is a Roman from Corsica; he crosses the Rubicon, spares Rome,
and does not enter the city; but he requisitions the busts of the two
heroes of antiquity.
When the pope fails to pay up, and makes difficulties, Napoleon sets
out towards Rome a second time, but does not go to the city. After a
trifling skirmish, he is willing to make peace. He will soon want to use
his soldiers in the north. A pope on the run would carry his treasures
with him, and what would there be left then for the poor Directors in
Paris? On his own initiative, he actually pardons the French priests
who have refused to take the oath of allegiance to the constitution and
have sought refuge in Rome. He makes friends everywhere among the clergy,
compares a “citizen archbishop” to one of the apostles, and writes as
follows in several of his letters to high ecclesiastics: “The teaching of
the Gospels is based on equality, and is therefore the most suitable for
any republic.” What will they say to that in Paris, where Christ has been
done away with?
Finally, he sends to the pope, who is on the point of taking to flight,
an assurance that there is nothing to be afraid of. “Tell the Holy Father
that I am not an Attila; and that even if I were, the Holy Father should
not forget that he is a successor of Leo.” He thus dresses himself in
historical trappings when he is dealing with the oldest of the thrones.
But when the nuncio is slow to sign the new agreement, the polished man
of the world is suddenly metamorphosed into a soldier, who tears up the
draft and throws it into the fire. “We are not discussing terms of peace,
Monsignore; there is merely a suspension of hostilities.” The other side
is alarmed. He doubles his demands, and this time he gets what he wants.
Thereupon the pope writes his “dear son” a letter, and gives the child of
the revolution his blessing.
He never wraps up his doings in mystery, as the diplomats of those days
were wont to do. An hour after his first truce has been arranged, he
discussed recent happenings with the freedom of a historian in the next
generation. Talking to the conquered Piedmontese over the dinner table,
he says: “My attack on the castle of Cossaria was needless; but your
movement of the 17th was a sound tactical manœuvre.”
At the end of the second campaign, he again shows himself a master in
respect of both self-confidence and moderation. He has moved forward out
of Lombardy in the beginning of March, and by the end of the month he
is already in Styria, a few days’ march from Vienna. If the Army of the
Rhine follows up his blow by similar victories, they will be able to
dictate peace to Emperor Francis. Yet he chooses to halt, and to offer
peace to the vanquished. True, the Army of the Rhine is still a good way
off, whilst Austria and Hungary are arming themselves in frenzied haste.
To stay where he is as a menace, this is the conqueror’s logic.
Bonaparte, however, is a statesman. The Directors want peace before
the elections, and he still has need of the Directors. How would it
be if he, he alone, the soldier, were to bring France the peace for
which she has been waiting five years? Is he to share the glory of this
achievement with his rivals in the Army of the Rhine? The fortune of
war is uncertain, and none but the foolhardy will tempt it unless they
must. Once more he has broken the troops of the Empire, cut off as they
are from the Rhenish armies. For a year, Europe has been afraid of
the new commander; it will become him now to make a gesture of peace,
so that people may learn to revere the new statesman. Without courtly
periphrases, and as an equal, he writes to the defeated Austrian leader,
Emperor Francis’ brother:
“Commander-in-Chief, Sir! Our valiant soldiers are waging war and want
peace. Has not the war lasted six years? Have we not killed enough
people; have we not brought enough suffering upon mankind? Everywhere
there is a reaction towards humaneness, and almost everywhere the enemies
of France have laid down their arms. Your nation is the only exception.
The omens of this new campaign are sinister. However it may end, each
of us will slay a few thousands of the other’s soldiers; and yet, in
the end, we shall make peace, for everything comes to an end, even the
fiercest hatred.... You, who stand so near to the throne, uplifted above
the petty emotions of statesmen and governments, are not you disposed to
win for yourself the title of benefactor of mankind, saviour of Germany?
I regard it as quite possible for you to save your country by force of
arms. But, even then, Germany will be laid waste. If these lines could
save the life of but one man, I should pride myself more upon my civic
crown than upon the melancholy renown of the battle-field.”
This letter makes a strong appeal to Archduke Charles. A highly cultured
man, declared enemy of all wars, and only acting as commander-in-chief
from a sense of duty, with this document in his hand he will be able
to make headway against the war party in Vienna and to influence the
emperor. For what would happen should they refuse? Bonaparte would
certainly publish his letter and their reply. He would have another
chance of parading before Europe the humanist ideals of the republic,
and contrasting with them the feudal militarism of the empire. He would
lay the country waste with fire and sword, while censuring us before the
world for our truculence. He is following up his letter by advancing his
troops, and he has already occupied Leoben.
The emperor’s envoys arrive. The French commander meets them at the foot
of the stairs, speaks of the emperor and the archduke with respect. When
they beg for a ten days’ truce (during which Vienna will be able to
continue preparations for war), he answers by inviting them to supper.
After the meal, he agrees to a five days’ suspension of hostilities.
While comparative calm now reigns in Vienna, the Directors in Paris are
much perturbed. Is this general of ours going to make the Great Peace
all by himself? If he can do that, he will only have to come to Paris
afterwards, and with one hand he will be able to push us from our seats.
Most politely, therefore, they instruct him to await the coming of the
envoy they are sending. All the more does Bonaparte press the other
side for a decision. He knows what reports concerning him are current
in Paris, and he cracks his whip over the Directors’ heads: “I should
like to have a rest. I have justified your confidence in me; in all my
undertakings I have hazarded my life; I have covered myself with more
glory than the most fortunate man could wish; now I have advanced upon
Vienna, leaving Italy’s lovely plains behind me, as I advanced once
before in search of bread for the army which the republic could no longer
feed. Calumny vainly attempts to discredit my intentions. My civic
career, like my military career, will be unique and simple.”
Ironies, beneath whose mask the writer is moving towards unnamed goals.
Endless negotiations. But why should the matter drag on? Give us
Belgium and Lombardy. You can compensate the dispossessed princes with
possessions in the Holy Roman Empire! Habsburg accepts this principle,
for neither the emperor nor any one of the German princes is concerned
any longer about the Holy Roman Empire. It is very old, in poor health,
and will soon be laid in the tomb. This plan will give France a finger in
the pie across the Rhine. But how Habsburg is to be compensated for the
loss of Lombardy, remains uncertain.
Opportune is the arrival of letters from Venice reporting insurrections
against the French and the murder of a number of French soldiers. At
length the day of vengeance has come! Venice, too, is outworn, and ripe
for destruction. “Since the discovery of the Cape route to the Indies
and the rise of Triest and Ancona, Venice has been on the decline,” he
writes to the Directors, to soothe their conscientious scruples—i.e., for
use in a justificatory campaign. “It will hardly survive the blow. This
wretched and cowardly population, unfitted for freedom, without land or
water, must, of course, be handed over to those to whom the hinterland
is allotted. First of all, we shall take the ships, empty the arsenal,
carry off the big guns, and close the banks; we shall also keep Corfu and
Ancona.” Thus weakened, the Lagoons were to pass to Habsburg.
Bonaparte dealt in summary fashion with the old lords of the region,
with the few patrician families which, as the successors of strong men,
had ruled Venice for centuries, and had made of it one of the most
reactionary States in the world. “You have stirred up the peasants
against us,” he wrote to the doge while the negotiations with the
Austrians were in progress. “Thanks to you, every one is shouting: ‘Death
to the French!’ Hundreds of our soldiers have already perished through
your machinations. Do not lie to me! You incited these disturbances. Do
you imagine that because I am in the heart of Germany I shall be unable
to enforce respect for the greatest nation in the world? I shall take
vengeance for the blood of my companions-in-arms. War or peace! Unless
you instantly hand over the ringleaders, I shall declare war.”
This is his tone when he wishes to terrify a dozen tottering old
patricians. When the envoys from the Senate come to his camp, he
pretends to fly into a passion: “I shall have no more constitution and
no more Senate. For Venice, I shall be a second Attila. Make me no more
proposals. I will be your lawgiver.” When the city is being handed over,
the doge, a man of ninety, falls dead—the last doge of Venice. Bonaparte
never forgot this scene.
Has he done with Italy now? Has not he got all he wants; has not he
reached his end?
There is no end, for every step forward opens a new vista. Venice is
merely a springboard, whence he can start his swim into the open sea. The
islands first; then the Adriatic; and now he contemplates a more distant
horizon. When he was in Ancona a while back, forcing his terms of peace
upon Rome, he stood on the shore, looking seaward. There were the Ionian
Islands, and beyond them lay Turkey. He wrote: “From this point, we could
reach Macedonia in twenty-four hours; the place would be invaluable for
our influence upon the destinies of the Turkish Empire.” As brigadier on
the general staff he had thought of engulfing himself in Turkey. From
Ancona he sends agents to open up relationships with powerful pashas in
Janina, Scutari, and Bosnia.
Now, when he is in Leoben, he makes sure of the island possessions of
Venice, arranges for the occupation of Corfu and Zante, “to control
simultaneously the Adriatic and the East. No one will be able to save
the Turkish Empire. We shall watch its death agony. The occupation of the
Ionian Islands leaves us the choice between supporting Turkey and making
sure of our own share of the spoils.”
The political reality underlying this is an attack on England. France
has long looked forward to the acquisition of strongholds in the
Mediterranean, and to thus imposing a barrier between England and India.
In Bonaparte, this general aim acquires the impulsive energy of a
personal ambition. He does not want the East that he may inflict a mortal
wound on England as his arch enemy; he is in search of means to injure
England that thereby he may win the East. Since his imagination always
runs far ahead of his achievements, Europe, of which but yesterday he
first seized a corner, is already beginning to seem too small for him. He
says to Bourrienne:
“Only in the East have there been great empires and mighty changes; in
the East, where six hundred million people dwell. Europe is a mole-hill!”
VIII
A high-arched room, in the baroque style; the walls are white, picked out
with gold. On a long couch upholstered in green silk, a sixteen-year-old
lieutenant, a spoiled darling, with the fawning manners of a page, is
sitting between two women of ripe beauty. One of them is the youth’s
mother; but when her smiling glance roves coquettishly over the
surrounding group of smartly dressed officers, we gather that she is
thinking far less of maternal obligations than of hours in which such
boys as hers are engendered. Without words, she seems to add: “Creole
women are adepts in the art of love!” Another connoisseur in the same
art is the handsome general who stands behind her, craning forward
over her shoulder that he may see far down into her corsage—as fashion
and the lady’s pride in her charms make it easy for him to do. This is
Masséna, whose talent as a soldier is to be ever prompt to attack,
being too unrestrained and uncultured to count the cost; but his flaming
impetuosity often saves his troops in moments of danger. His temperament
is so ardent, that he must always have at least two women in his train;
and his appetite for money is no less keen. Money and women—he steals
both, whenever he has the chance.
All the qualities that Masséna lacks, you will find in the little man
with the big head who stands in front of the ladies making conversation.
He is ugly, touchingly grotesque in his movements, and at the moment
intoxicated by his success in winning—no one knows how—the love of a
pretty member of the Visconti family. This is Berthier, chief of general
staff, unresting in his activity; a man who will do administrative work
one day, and take a fortress by storm the next; a great student of maps,
for he is one of the few among these officers who is well grounded in the
theory of his profession.
There is Murat, theatrically decked out in green satin, twisting the huge
plumed hat he holds in his hands. Of proletarian birth, like most of the
men at this remarkable headquarters, he is fond of talking in asides.
Now he laughs too loudly because the ribald Augereau, the avaricious and
extravagant peasant’s son, has been telling him an after-dinner story.
Murat, though he fears neither artillery fire nor the frowns of princes,
is now painfully embarrassed because Josephine calls to him across the
room. She wants to hear the joke!
But Joseph, a man of the world, who dreads what the enfant terrible may
blurt out, nods meaningly to Murat, implying to him that for God’s sake
he must hold his tongue. Elise is sitting in the embrasure of one of the
windows. Not so good-looking as the other women, and finding her husband
a bore, she is apt to be censorious, and would carry tales to Mother
Letizia, who abhors Josephine’s loose morals.
Now comes the bright sound of laughter from the garden. That is
Pauline’s birdlike voice. She is making the most of the days of freedom
left to her before her marriage to General Leclerc, the husband chosen
for her by Napoleon. She is playing blind-man’s-bluff with Hippolyte, and
her pleasure in the game is doubled by the knowledge that she is annoying
Josephine.
Here is the chief, coming slowly along the passage. For two long hours
he has been walking up and down with the Parisian dramatist Arnault.
This companion has been carefully chosen. The newcomer has asked many
questions about the army and the battles. Bonaparte has answered them
with a detailed report of his own doings, which he knows that Arnault
will spread far and wide. Now he has steered the conversation to the
topic of the governmental crisis, long drawn out. As the two come into
the reception room, he says, ostensibly with indifference, and yet with
emphasis enough to fix the words in Arnault’s memory: “I can hardly
conceive any other way out of their difficulties than that they should
bend before the power of one strong man. But where is such a man to be
found?”
As Bonaparte enters, the officers rise to their feet, break off all
conversation, and look expectantly at this man of twenty-seven, though
most of them are older than he and all of them a good deal taller. Only
the page continues to loll on the couch, for Eugene knows that his mother
is unchallenged mistress of the house.
We are at Montebello, the huge castle near Milan, where Bonaparte is
passing the summer. He is almost wholly the statesman now, for the war
has been ended by the arrangement entered into at Leoben, and nothing
more is needed than a formal ratification. He might be in Paris,
receiving the adulation of which he dreamed in youth; but he prefers
to stay in Italy. He will not return to Paris until the political
consequences of his victories have assumed a concrete form, until the new
States are consolidated and the Italian business over and done with.
Meanwhile, during the many months he spends at Montebello, the life there
is not so much that of a military headquarters, as that of a minor court.
But in no respect does he behave like an upstart. There are no pretences.
In everything he will make his influence felt as one who is a child of
the revolution that established a regime of equality. He has appointed
sons of the people to the leading positions in his army; but he has no
fear of what his noble guests, the dukes and princes of Italy, may think
of it, should one of his valiant generals commit a solecism. He sees no
reason for hiding his origin like a parvenu, although his adoption of
French nationality might well incline him to conceal his Corsican birth.
In actual fact, he parades it. Before the close of the previous year,
he had summoned the whole family to Milan. Now, with lavish oriental
hospitality, he has invited them all to Montebello, and those who seek
his favour must show his relatives due honour. Half Italy pays court to
him, for his name is already acquiring the mythical power of that of a
man of destiny. Besides the numerous persons who wish to harness their
fortunes to his chariot, not a few come from afar to ask the sage’s
advice concerning family matters and private affairs.
He has found it hard to persuade his mother, proud and a woman of strict
principles, to make friends with Josephine, whose reputation is an
offence to her. Josephine reciprocates Madame Letizia’s dislike; but
Napoleon, though he idolises his wife and can refuse her nothing, compels
her to observe the outward forms of respect. Now, the friction between
the two women has become even greater than at first. “This Creole says
soft nothings to every man, and kisses every woman, instead of attending
to her business of bearing children.” The Corsican mother has given birth
to thirteen. Josephine’s barrenness dishonours Napoleon and his family.
Letizia fancies that in the eyes of many of his adversaries she can read
satisfaction and mockery because the great man cannot procreate a child.
But it is not his fault. Josephine has led, and still leads, too loose a
life. That is what is amiss.
When Letizia first met Napoleon again, after his battles and victories,
she embraced him and said:
“You are thinner than ever! You are wearing yourself out!”
“Not a bit of it. I am really living, now!”
“Yes, for posterity....”
“Well, do you call that dying?”
When he leaves her, he says to her: “Do take good care of yourself,
Mother. If you die, there will be no one left with any authority over
me.” His Corsican clannishness is almost as strong as his cosmopolitan
self-confidence.
Three sisters, three brothers, and Uncle Fesch are, in their various
ways, enjoying themselves at Montebello. The fascinating Pauline, sixteen
years of age, cannot forgive Josephine, who, in deference to Napoleon’s
wishes, has interfered with her plans for a love marriage. She weds
Leclerc in the castle chapel, and at the same time Elise and Bacciochi
have to resolemnise their union in church, for the chief is eager to keep
in the good graces of the Vatican. After the ceremony Letizia, who has no
interest in these intrigues, returns to Corsica.
“This island, this province,” as Bonaparte now calls it, as if it were
an island or a province like any other, has now been regained from
the English, who had occupied it in response to Paoli’s call for aid.
Bonaparte managed the affair from a distance, while busied in his
campaign on the mainland. One foggy night, a couple of dozen Frenchmen,
taking with them plenty of money and an abundance of weapons, landed in
Corsica “to encourage the patriots,” circulate pamphlets, and so on.
Napoleon also sent Saliceti, his friend and his opponent of earlier days.
Thus, by proxy and from afar, he was able to achieve what he had thrice
failed to do in person.
“Can it really be only four years?” thinks Signora Letizia, when those
who had driven her and hers into exile receive her with acclamations. Is
this the very citadel which was for so long the centre of Napoleon’s
thoughts and feelings? Now, simply because he orders it, Elise’s husband
is to be commandant there. For a long while, already, Lucien has been
intendant of the forces. To Napoleon, in Italy, his native island now
seems an ancient family seat, a romantic and medieval spot where his
kindred can dwell when convenient. With a contemptuous smile, not long
ago, he had read a letter from the Bourbon pretender, in which Louis
offered him the title of duke, or even hereditary viceroy, of Corsica, if
he would espouse the royalist cause.
In Montebello, Bonaparte first learns how to separate his private life
from his public life—a lesson which those born in the purple learn from
childhood upwards.
The guardianship of the castle, strangely enough, is entrusted, not to
French soldiers, but to three hundred Polish legionaries. In several of
his battles, there had been danger that he would be taken prisoner, so he
has formed a bodyguard, forty strong. They are called guides, are chosen
from among the tallest and best of his soldiers, and have a dare-devil
for their leader.
The castle is thronged with orderlies and couriers. Envoys are flocking
from all quarters. The lion of St. Mark and the key of St. Peter gleam on
foreign epaulettes; Vienna, Leghorn, and Genoa are also represented at
Montebello. Napoleon lives in state. Following the custom of the country,
he keeps open house. Interested spectators are admitted to the gallery
of the banqueting hall; and he drops a hint, lest they should forget to
spread the news when they return home, that like them he drinks the wine
of the country.
The reports of those who come to see him on service matters or other
official business express astonishment that this young commander-in-chief
is never embarrassed. He is dignified and yet perfectly natural; always
the most simply dressed man in the company. None the less, he knows quite
well how to keep people at a distance. Though nearly every one who comes
to see him towers over him in stature, he never tries to appear taller
than he is. Instead, those conversing with him are inclined to stoop a
little, and thus seem to be paying court to him. Henceforward, throughout
life, he is able from his natural defect to derive an advantage whose
ultimate psychical consequences are incalculable. One of the visitors
to Montebello wrote: “Should this man have the luck to escape death in
battle, within four years he will be in exile or seated on a throne.” The
writer was only three years out in his reckoning.
A student of his epoch, one who knows how fame is manufactured, he has
in attendance an able journalist, the first publicity agent in history,
whose business it is to blow Napoleon’s trumpet in Paris and subtly to
discredit the Directors. Being a disciple of Plutarch, Bonaparte knows
through whose agency the story of great men’s deeds is handed down to
posterity; that is why the faces of poets, historians, artists, and men
of science are so often seen at his Italian castle. A year before, a few
days after the triumphal entry into Milan, and when overwhelmed with
urgent business, he had found time to pen the following remarkable lines
to a great astronomer:
“The sciences which are the glory of the human mind, the arts which
beautify the world and bequeath great deeds to our offspring, must be
cherished with especial care in free States. All men of genius, all those
who are famous in the world of learning, are Frenchmen, no matter to what
country they may belong.” Hitherto, such men have had to lead a retired
life. Now, freedom of thought prevails; intolerance is a thing of the
past, there are no despots left. The talented can foregather under his
patronage, and fearlessly tell him all their wishes. Any such person who
wants to go to France may be sure of a cordial reception, “for the French
people would rather win a great mathematician, painter, or other man of
note, than win the wealthiest of provinces. That is why, Citizen, I ask
you to make these sentiments widely known among the great men of Milan!”
He commissions an attaché, who, like most of his tribe, has little to
think about and nothing to do, to make a register of the art treasures in
the possession of the petty States of Italy. In subsequent treaties, he
demands the best of these for Paris.
For the Paris Conservatoire, he instructs experts to make copies of the
best Italian music. Writing on this topic, he says: “Of all the arts,
music has the strongest influence on the passions, and for that reason
the legislator must make it one of his chief concerns. An inspired
symphony composed by a master cannot fail to stir our feelings, and
has far more influence than a treatise on morality, which convinces
our reason without affecting our conduct.” When he becomes a member of
the Institute, he flaunts this title at the head of all the letters he
writes as commander-in-chief, and declares: “The true power of the French
Republic must henceforward consist in this, that no new idea shall arise
anywhere which is not the property of France.” In confidential talk he
says: “The soldier must, above all, regard his commander as wiser and
more cultured than himself; and the soldier will regard this title with
respect for the very reason that its meaning is obscure to him.”
Such actions disclose, not the statesman alone, but the man born to
rule, the prince who regulates every gesture, every word that he says or
writes, with an eye to the legend as to his personality which he wishes
to inculcate upon his people. But when the door is closed, and he is
among intimates, he opens his heart.
Here is a description of Napoleon as he was in those days, penned by an
exceptionally shrewd observer: “The power of the man impressed every one
with whom he came in contact.... His demeanour was still rather ungainly
at times; but there was something imperious in his nature, his glance,
and his speech. Every one obeyed his orders. In public, he deliberately
tried to heighten this impression. In private life, on the other hand,
he was unconstrained, genial, and even confidential; with a taste for
witticisms, which were never ill-natured, but were merry and discreet.
Frequently, he shared in our amusements. He did not take his work too
strenuously, not finding it necessary at that time to measure out his
hours; and in leisure moments he was always accessible. But when he had
withdrawn to his work-room, his door was closed to every unauthorised
intruder, without distinction of rank.—He needed a great deal of sleep,
like all people of nervous temperament and very active mind. I have often
known him to stay in bed for ten or eleven hours at a stretch; but if it
was necessary to wake him up, he was unperturbed, and could easily make
up for the lost hours afterwards—or could store up reserves of sleep in
expectation of a strenuous time. He had the precious faculty of being
able to go to sleep wherever and as often as he pleased. Fond of vigorous
exercise, he rode very often, and at a great pace, though he had an
exceedingly bad seat.”
He has a taste for talking, and chooses politics or general questions of
life as his theme; if the conversation flags, he suggests the telling of
stories; should this be followed by a general silence, he spins a yarn of
his own, pregnant and humorous.
The loveliest women set their caps at him in vain; he is wholly devoted
to Josephine. Not, indeed, so frenzied in his adoration as he was a year
back, when she betrayed or disillusioned him; it is she, and she alone,
who has trifled away this passion for self-surrender. Now there is a
moving note in his tone towards her; a fervent courtship, a smile, a
petition: “You are sad,” he wrote to her while still in the field. “You
do not write; are you longing to get back to Paris? Have you ceased to
care for me? The thought makes me wretched. My life has become unbearable
since I have known that you are not happy. Perhaps I shall soon make
peace with the pope; then I shall join you at once.” Three days later:
“The peace with Rome has just been signed. Bologna, Ferrara, and Romagna
are ceded to us.—But there is not a word from you! Good God, how have I
offended you?—I fear you know only too well how absolute is your power
over me! For life, wholly yours.”
Now, at Montebello, he is for the first time tasting the joys of
uninterrupted connubiality, while he is delighted to watch Josephine’s
winning charm in social intercourse. Occasionally he steals time for a
brief love festival. They drive across to Lake Maggiore; and when, among
the rhododendron bushes beneath the baroque stone edifices on Isola
Bella, Grassini, the heroine of La Scala, uplifts her thrilling voice and
sings an appassionata by Monteverde, Napoleon sits wrapped in thought,
his companion’s hand clasped in his own.
“In the carriage”—so his adjutant relates—“he would take marital
liberties which were apt to be rather embarrassing to Berthier and me.
But it was all so simple and natural, that there was no ground for
offence.”
IX
What is Paris saying?
Since yesterday, there has been a watchman on duty there. Hitherto,
the cabinet ministers had all been nothing more than lawyers; now, a
statesman was at work in that innermost circle. Sprung from the old
nobility of France, a bishop, then as a republican placed under the ban
of the Church by the pope, Talleyrand had recently spent years of waiting
in the United States. Now he was back in Paris, and had grasped a share
of power. The recently elected Chambers were predominantly “right,” and
had been railing against the Directors; the commander-in-chief in Italy
wanted to revolutionise Europe; he wished to perpetuate the war; the rape
of Venice was an infamy. Perhaps many of the accusations were only too
true, but when the echoes of what was being said in the place of words
made their way into the place of deeds, they could not fail to arouse
the contempt of the man of might. He sent the Chambers a memorial, or,
rather, a memento: “Speaking in the name of eighty thousand men, I warn
you that the days when cowardly lawyers and pitiful chatterers could
allow valiant soldiers to be butchered are over and done with!”
[Illustration: General Bonaparte. Unfinished portrait by Jacques Louis
David. From the collection of the Duke of Bassano.
(Photograph by Braun, Paris and Dornach.)]
At this date, Bonaparte had dispatched Augereau to defend the Directors,
as he himself had defended them a year or two before; for the growing
power of royalists and priests were becoming an ever greater menace to
the new constitution of the Republic. If either of the Bourbon brothers
should venture to set foot on French soil, all the malcontents would
flock to his standard, and in a hand’s turn he would win his way to the
throne. But the Bourbons stayed in their safe retreats, and the Directors
could risk a little coup d’état. Now, they were five instead of three,
and felt more self-confident.
Called to office after this coup, an expert was for the first time in
charge of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. From afar, he measured the
strength of his only rival. Though he had never seen Bonaparte face to
face, he knew him for the coming man. To begin with, at any rate, he was
willing to play second fiddle, and set to work that he might win the
confidence of one greater than himself.
In all respects, Talleyrand was Napoleon’s counterpart. Not a born
negotiator; passionless, except for his avarice; cold and crafty, never
natural and frank; always adapting himself to the mood of those he
wished to use as his tools. His cynic’s head, his long, pointed, prying
nose, now surmounted the gold-braided collar of the republic; they would
surmount the imperial and the royal uniform; and then, for a fourth time
in the service of the ruler of the French, he would don the livery of
the bourgeois king. For forty years he served the man who happened to be
in power; but never unreservedly, and therefore he was never tied to any
ruler’s fortunes. Lamed by an accident in childhood, he was unable to
enter the army, and became a priest, remembering that, in this guise, the
great Richelieu had been master of France. Talleyrand was the only man
in the country able to measure his strength against that of Bonaparte.
Never would the man of destiny be able to shake off Talleyrand even
when he had come to hate the subtle diplomat; and when the final breach
between the two men occurred, it was at the very time when Talleyrand,
with a smile, could limp across the body of the master he had cast down
and enter the cabinet of the enemy. Talleyrand was the man who overthrew
Napoleon; but, if we think of elemental forces, Napoleon was felled by
his own hand.
Talleyrand’s breadth of view and utter lack of principle make their
due impression on the distant Bonaparte. These September days, the
commander has gone to Udine, to sign the peace whose preliminaries had
been arranged in the spring. In this sprig of the old nobility, in this
connoisseur of the rococo, in this cold nihilist, Napoleon sees the
tool he will need. Hitherto, he has wanted none but soldiers. Now, when
he has become a statesman, he wants and finds a statesman. While he is
discussing matters with the Austrians, he sends the new Minister for
Foreign Affairs a long letter (a letter of betrothal, we might call it),
disclosing his whole political programme:
“The organisation of French power has only just begun—Despite our good
opinion of ourselves,—we Frenchmen are still tyros in political matters.
As yet we do not even understand the difference between executive,
legislature, and judiciary. In such a State as ours, where all authority
issues from the nation, where the people is sovereign—governmental power,
in the full comprehensiveness I ascribe to it, must be regarded as the
true representative of the nation, who rules in accordance with the
constitution.”
“Does your heart express itself so openly, Bonaparte?” thinks the
inscrutable recipient, smiling to himself as he reads.
“It is an immeasurable misfortune that, in the eighteenth century, a
nation of thirty million persons should still be compelled to take up
arms in order to save the country. These forcible means are a burden upon
the legislator, seeing that a constitution for human beings must take
human beings into account.”
“Is your aim so high?” muses the reader, with astonishment. “He is
already sated with martial fame, and aspires, under the new constitution,
to become dictator!” Talleyrand reads on:
“Why should we not make sure of Malta?—I had good reason for confiscating
the estates of the Knights of Malta.—With Malta and Corfu in our hands,
we should be masters of the Mediterranean. If we cannot dislodge England
from the Cape, we must take Egypt. With twenty-five thousand men and from
eight to ten ships of the line, the expedition could be risked. Egypt
does not belong to the sultan. I wish you could find out what impression
an Egyptian expedition would make upon the Porte.—The break-up of the
huge Turkish Empire, day by day more imminent, must lead us to think of
our trade in the East.”
As he sits in the Foreign Office, reading this, the diplomat raises his
eyebrows yet higher. He feels that the writer is a man of genius, if not
the very devil. A week or two later, comes another letter.
“If our doings are guided by a sound policy, which is nothing else than
the calculation of combinations and chances, we shall for a long time to
come be the Great Nation and the arbiter of Europe. The scales are in
our hands, and, should fate be propitious, within a few years there may
be great happenings. To-day, these may seem the vague anticipations of a
visionary enthusiast; but a cold, pertinacious, and far-sighted man will
be able to make them a reality.”
X
How slow these German diplomats are to make up their minds. For weeks we
have been at it, discussing matters far on into the night, and still the
titled negotiators hesitate to sign the document, though any reasonable
man would come to a decision in an hour or two! Throughout, the Austrians
are looking over their shoulders at the emperor in Vienna. In the room
where the conversations take place, there is an empty throne on which the
shadowy Francis is supposed to be sitting beneath the canopy. “Better
carry that chair away before we begin,” says the commander. “I have never
been able to see a raised seat without wanting to sit in it.”
His letters to the enigmatical Minister for Foreign Affairs, those fervid
preludes, had been nothing more than the soliloquies of a man chafing at
idleness, to whom weeks spent in thinking about peace seem wasted, even
though the peace be one for which Europe has been longing for years. His
patience is exhausted, and he assumes a menacing tone: “I have been too
lenient with you,” he growls to the Austrians. “I might have made the
conditions much harsher! You are frittering away my time. I stand before
you as the equal in rank of any of your princes. Don’t talk to me about
congresses.... With the means at our disposal, in a couple of years we
Frenchmen can conquer the whole of Europe. Not that we want to do so.
Our wish is to give our citizens peace, and quickly.... You tell me that
this, that, and the other are your instructions. If, when the sun is
shining, your instructions said that night had fallen, would you insist
that it was dark?”
At last, to give them a salutary fright, he bursts into a rage, dashes a
vase to the ground, and thus forces them to sign the peace in which every
one gets what Napoleon had promised six months before in Leoben.
When Europe learns the news, there will be a sigh of relief. But what
is going on in Bonaparte’s mind? The day after he has signed at Campo
Formio the peace which ends a six years’ war, the peace he has fought for
and won, he writes to the Directors, in the most matter-of-fact way: “It
is absolutely indispensable to our government that we should speedily
overthrow the English monarchy. Unless we succeed in doing this, we can
be sure that the corruption and the intrigues of these active islanders
will ruin us. The moment is favourable. Let us concentrate our energies
upon increasing our navy, so that we may crush England. Then Europe will
be at our feet.” He issues a manifesto to the navy: “Comrades! Now that
we have established peace on land, let us conquer the freedom of the
seas. Without your aid, the glory of the French name could be carried
only through a corner of the Continent. With your help, we shall cross
the ocean, and the fame of our nation will reach the most distant lands!”
His mind is full of titanic schemes. As he gallops along the causeway
of his great deeds, fame vanishes behind him in the dust raised by
his charger’s thundering hoofs, but fame ever looms in front of him,
beckoning from the mirage of his fresh designs. In this spirit he hastens
back to Milan, to Montebello, whence he is to give Italy her final
orders; for now, carrying the peace treaty, he will go to Paris. In the
tone of a prince speaking to his people, Bonaparte issues a proclamation
to the newly formed Cisalpine Republic:
“Yours is the first nation in history to win freedom without partisan
struggles, without a revolution, and without a blow. We have given you
liberty, and you will know how to keep it!... Let your minds be full
of the sense of your own strength, and of the self-respect proper to
the free man.... Had the Romans of old used their powers as the French
are using their powers to-day, the Roman eagles would still wave above
the Capitol, and the human race would have escaped being dishonoured by
eighteen centuries of slavery! To consolidate your liberties, and with
the sole end of bringing you happiness, I have completed a task such as
hitherto has only been performed by ambition and the will-to-power....
In a few days I shall leave you.... Your happiness and the glory of your
republic will always be matters very dear to my heart.”
Is this a warrior blowing a trumpet? Is it a poet, into whose mouth the
ecstasy of life puts words that are to arouse popular enthusiasm? During
these very days, in the company of a diplomat belonging to this very
country, he is strolling to and fro in the park of Montebello. His whole
nature is straining towards Paris; his companion is a good listener, and
a man of ability. Napoleon, in one of those bursts of frankness which
genius sometimes allows itself, delivers himself as follows:
“Do you fancy that I have won my triumphs in Italy that I may help the
lawyers of the Directory ... to achieve greatness? Or can you imagine
that I want to stabilise the republic? What a ridiculous notion, a
republic with thirty million inhabitants! With our customs! With our
failings! France will soon forget these whims. The French need glory
and the gratification of their vanity, but they do not understand the
elements of freedom. Look at the army! Our victories have restored the
French soldier to his true self. I am the idol of the soldiers. If the
Directors, for instance, were to try to withdraw my commission, they
would soon see who is master of the army.
“The people needs a chief, made resplendent by fame and victory; it does
not want theories and governments, the phrases and the oratory of the
ideologues. Give the masses a toy! They will play with it, and allow
themselves to be led—provided always that the leader is adroit enough to
hide his true aims! Here in Italy, it is not necessary for me to be so
circumspect.... Still, the time is not yet ripe. For the present, it is
necessary to yield to the fervour of the moment, so here we shall have
two or three republics after the French model.... Peace is opposed to my
interests.... If peace were firmly established, and if I were no longer
at the head of the army, I should have to renounce the power and position
I have gained, and should have to pay homage to the lawyers in the
Luxembourg. If I leave Italy, it is only that I may play the same part
in France. But that fruit, likewise, is not yet ripe. Paris is divided.
There is a Bourbon party, and I cannot fight on its side. In due time I
shall weaken the republicans, but I shall not do so to the advantage of
the old dynasty!”
Such are Bonaparte’s real plans. What he says is true: “Everything has
happened as I foresaw; and I believe that I am the only person in the
world who is not surprised. So will it be in the future; I shall make my
way whithersoever I will.”
A stream of confessions is forcing a way for itself. The words have
come down to us in the memoirs of the man who heard them; of course the
speaker would have denied them, had the hearer then ventured to repeat
them. But it is true that he is far from being satisfied with what he has
hitherto achieved. Seated beside Bourrienne in the carriage in which he
is driving away from Italy after a stay of nearly two years, he says: “A
few more campaigns like this, and we shall have made a fairly great name
for ourselves, a name that will go down to posterity.” When his friend
interposes that Bonaparte has already secured a notable reputation, the
commander laughs him to scorn:
“You flatter me, Bourrienne! If I die to-day, ten centuries hence my
record will not occupy more than half a page in universal history!”
XI
The Luxembourg palace has been transformed into an amphitheatre. Weapons
and colours, the latest trophies, are displayed, side by side with the
gold-blazoned slogans of the revolution, on the venerable walls within
which, of old, the satellite peers used to circle round their central
luminary, the king of France. Paris has assembled, and all are dressed in
gala attire, as if for a May Day festival—though it is chill December.
The front seats are filled with pretty women, friends of the men in
power, for they want to get a close view of the little commander with the
leathery yellow skin, the hero of the occasion.
“He has already been a week in Paris, and not a soul has set eyes on him.
Why does he modestly shun the acclamations of his people?”
“There is the signal for the entry! Look, the five Directors are coming
on to the platform!”
The chorus sings the anthem of liberty, the crowd joining in the refrain.
A pause. The sound of clanking sabres and clinking spurs is heard upon
the perron without. People crane from the windows, look down from the
roofs. He is coming! He is coming!
Napoleon wears a field uniform, for this looks less pretentious. His mien
is grave and unassuming, as with firm step he strides along the gangway
to the dais. He carries a roll of paper, and three adjutants follow in
his train. But, as well as these, hard upon the heels of the plainly
uniformed little figure with the martial gait, comes a man wearing silk
stockings, and resplendent in gold lace; he walks with a limp. At this
moment, a cannon shot is heard, the first shot of a salute; the sometime
lieutenant of artillery is being honoured in appropriate fashion.
Thunders of applause shake the building, and are echoed outside by the
thousands who are waiting to greet Napoleon on his departure. Quiet once
more. Talleyrand is speaking. Brilliantly, smoothly, with undercurrents
of meaning which few can understand, he praises the classical simplicity
of their great general, the saviour of his country, who scorns pomp,
and is a servant of the things of the spirit. The minister closes with
the words: “All France will be free; save only him, perhaps—that is his
destiny.”
Applause, as usual; but is there one among these thousands, even among
those in the inner councils, who realises the profound truth of the
closing phrase? Does any one of the auditors feel the poignancy of the
satire?
Napoleon quietly comes to the front. What is he going to say?
“The French nation had to fight with its kings in order to win
freedom.... Religion, feudalism, monarchy, have in turn ruled Europe for
two thousand years. The era of democratic constitutions has only just
begun. It has been your achievement to extend the domain of the Great
Nation to its natural frontiers. You have done more. The two loveliest
countries of Europe, renowned for science, art, and genius, see the
spirit of freedom, buoyed up by hope, rising out of the tombs of their
ancestors. These are the pedestals on which two mighty nations are
uplifted. I have the honour to present you the treaty of Campo Formio,
ratified by Emperor Francis.... As soon as the fortunes of the French
nation are established upon the best organic laws, Europe, too, will be
free.”
The soldierly voice is silent. For a moment, not a sound is to be heard.
Then come salvos of applause. Are they applauding the speech? It lacks
the charm of the popular orations and the speeches from the tribune with
which the walls of Paris are often placarded. The hearers are astonished;
many of them are positively amazed. Alarm and veneration are the
prevailing sentiments. The applause is not for the speech, but for the
man. He has spoken on many fronts, has harangued a crowd in Corsica, but
has never before addressed society folk, or politicians.
His speech was that of a statesman. At first perhaps not a soul but
Talleyrand understood it. All that he had said of their own epoch,
seemed false. England and America had been democracies for many, many
years. France had been fighting nearly a decade for her recognition as
a democracy. Now, at last, recognition had come, in this peace with
Germany. There was the tangible proof of it in the parchment which
betokened peace on the Continent.
But the story was not finished—such was the implied menace that sounded,
with a metallic ring, from the concluding words of the statesman hidden
in the soldier. The Directors understood his meaning, knew that the
threat was for them. But Barras pulled himself together, delivered a
fulsome speech, and then, for the first and last time embraced the little
general, whose wife he would infinitely rather have held in his arms.
Josephine, where was Josephine? Why was she absent on the great
occasion? No one knows with certainty how or where she spent these weeks.
She did not reach Paris until a month after Napoleon. When she came, she
was serene, charming, rather tired. In Paris, she promptly resumed her
old life, and took up the threads of some of her old amours.
Meanwhile, another woman had entered Napoleon’s orbit. She was handsome,
but was too intelligent to please him. This was Necker’s daughter,
Madame de Staël. An influential woman, as well as an interesting; it
was at her suggestion that Talleyrand had been appointed Minister for
Foreign Affairs. She besieged Bonaparte with letters; she would fain
have harnessed him to her chariot wheels, but he jibbed at the prospect.
Now, when she had met him in the flesh, he parried her advances with a
few civilities; but he could not prevent this talented woman from seeing
further into his mind than most men had succeeded in doing. Here is her
pen picture of the commander, an early impression:
“His face is thin and pale, but not unpleasing. Being short of stature,
he looks better on horseback than on foot. In social life, he has rather
awkward manners, though he is by no means shy. When he is on the alert,
he is a little contemptuous in his bearing; whereas his natural demeanour
is a trifle common. The contemptuous pose suits him better.... When he is
speaking, I am enthralled by an impression of his pre-eminence, though
he has none of the qualities of the men of the study and of society.
If he recounts his personal experiences, he often discloses the lively
imagination of an Italian.... But I always become aware of a profound
irony, which nothing escapes, neither the sublime, nor the beautiful, nor
even his own fame.... I have known not a few men of note, some of them
savage by disposition, but the dread with which this man fills me is a
thing apart. He is neither good nor bad, neither gentle nor cruel. He is
unique; he can neither inspire nor feel affection; he is more and less
than a man. Character, mind, speech—all have a strange stamp. This very
strangeness helps him to win over the French.
“He neither hates nor loves; for him, no one exists but himself; all
other people are merely ‘number so-and-so.’ A great chessplayer, for whom
humanity-at-large is the adversary he hopes to checkmate. His success
is quite as much due to the qualities he lacks as to the qualities he
possesses.... Where his own interest is involved, he pursues it as the
just man seeks virtue; if his aim were good, his perseverance would be
exemplary.... He despises the nation whose applause he seeks; there
is not a spark of fervour intermingled with his craving to astound
mankind.... I have never been able to breathe freely in his presence.”
If we discount in these sentences all that may reasonably be regarded as
due to the mortified vanity of a notable and much admired woman, enough
will still remain to be worthy of careful study. Each moment she tries
to pierce his armour, only in the next breath to acknowledge herself
his prisoner. She moves in a Rousseauist world of abstract virtue and
goodness, with which a dictator can have nothing to do, and she therefore
cannot regard Bonaparte with enthusiasm; but nevertheless she foresees
his aim, which was not publicly disclosed till near the end of his
career, and hers is the credit of having been the first to recognise his
genius.
“Picture to yourself a little man,” writes a German at this date in one
of his letters home. “No taller than Frederick the Great; very regularly
and slenderly built; lean, but sturdy; a large head; high forehead;
dark-grey eyes; thick, dark-brown hair; Grecian nose, so long that it
almost hangs down over the mouth; his mouth is full of humaneness and
grace; the firm chin is rather prominent. His movements are brisk, but
he has a fine and dignified bearing. You may see him run down a long
staircase in five or six strides, and yet, as he finishes the last
stride, he stands before you as graceful as ever. Unless he is fixing his
gaze upon some object he particularly wishes to examine, he is generally
looking upwards. It was always a delight to me to contemplate his
beautiful, deep, sensitive eyes, at once severe and kindly, like those of
our own Frederick.”
XII
On the way to Paris, Napoleon had had to spend a few days in Rastatt,
to discuss with the imperial envoys certain details connected with the
carrying out of the peace treaty and the evacuation of Mainz. Here,
expected with mingled curiosity and scepticism, he had assumed royal
airs. He had alternately scolded and made much of the envoys, as best
suited his plans at the moment, giving one of these Austrian counts a
watch and the other a jewelled hat-buckle. “The two poor envoys were
amazed that I had so much money to spend, for they were as poor as church
mice.”
This oriental lavishness in present-giving, the outcome of kindliness
quite as much as of arrogance, will be a persistent characteristic. He
will become known as a caliph who loves to shower gifts, displaying a
mingled disdain and generosity which throw a searching light upon his own
spiritual make-up. But if he has to acknowledge some genuine service,
then this same man (who from underlings exposed to danger demands
scrupulous exactitude in the fulfilment of duty) will express his thanks
in the most courtly fashion, as if he were one of Arthur’s knights, and
the world a jousting-place. The warrior who has captured so many of the
enemy colours is given one of the flags from Arcola, as a keepsake. He
passes it on to General Lannes, writing:
“At Arcola, there was a moment when the fortune of the day was so
uncertain that nothing but the utmost bravery on the part of the leaders
could have saved the situation. Thereupon, bleeding from three terrible
wounds, you left the field hospital, resolved to conquer or die. Again
and again I saw you in the foremost ranks of the brave. You were the
first ... to cross the Adda. Yours must be the honour of owning and
guarding this glorious flag.”
He knows exactly how his words will affect the people of Paris. If he
makes a public display of such expressions of approval, he is just as
sedulous to draw near to the footlights when he has to censure or to
condemn. That is one of the tricks of his trade.
Now, he is careful to behave in such a way that all Paris, every one
of his opponents, the whole press, shall exclaim: “The modesty of
true greatness!” Twice more, during these days, he makes ceremonial
appearances, one of them being at a festival held in his honour by
Talleyrand. He had hastened to pay his respects to the Minister for
Foreign Affairs on the day after his return to Paris. Neither of them had
as yet disclosed his ultimate plans, but Bonaparte, in his dealings with
this scion of the old nobility, had not forgotten to speak of his own
exalted antecedents. “You are the nephew of the archbishop of Rheims,”
he had said in the first half hour. “One of my uncles, who helped in my
education, is an archdeacon—in Corsica, you know, that means much the
same as being a bishop in France.” In this way Napoleon implied that he
was no parvenu whom a man of ancient lineage was, in his heart, entitled
to despise. From the first, he looked upon Talleyrand as a possible
antagonist.
He has bought the little house in which Josephine used to live. Here he
leads a retired life, with his wife, who has at length arrived in Paris.
His circle is small, consisting of his brothers and a few friends who
come and go. He often wears mufti, drives out alone, avoids parties, is
easy of access. When he is cheered at the theatre, he draws back into
the recesses of his box. This is the man who, a little while ago at
Montebello, was keeping up a princely state. “If I am seen three or four
times at the theatre, people will cease to notice me,” he says to an
intimate. “You expect me to be pleased by such public demonstrations?
There would be quite as big a crowd to see me guillotined!”
He invites men of learning to his house; attends most of the sittings
of the Institute, and is willing to read a paper there now and again;
discusses mathematics after dinner with Laplace, and shows the astronomer
new Italian methods of calculating orbits; argues with Chénier about
poetry, and even metaphysics (if he can’t help himself!).
But he silently follows, all this time, every move made by the Directors,
whose power is continually on the wane. Knowing them to be his secret
enemies, he keeps out of their path, and has them watched by his
brothers. He gathers information as to the relative strength of the
various parties, and ponders his own course. “Paris has no memory. A new
reputation drives out an old one; and if I linger here inactive, I shall
be lost. I must not stay here.” Often he walks to and fro in the garden,
arms locked behind, thinking.
“Too soon. Better wait until they have made a complete mess of things.
Become their colleague, a member of the Directory, just when the pillars
are crackling? A good thing that I am not yet forty, as the law demands.
Meanwhile, I must capture the fancy of the crowd! How? There is peace
throughout the Continent. Hardly a rival left to dread. Hoche, the
most dangerous of them, is dead, thanks be! One of Josephine’s lovers;
a handsome fellow, certainly. His passing troubled her little; she is
inconstant by nature. Carnot thrust aside, Moreau defeated. Augereau, in
command of the Army of the Rhine, is jealous of me; I must put a spoke
in his wheel. The Corsican stalwarts have little influence now; but that
woman who came to warn me against the risk of poisoning was stabbed next
day; there are conspiracies. Too soon. I must leave Paris once more.
“Get to work against England? That would be the best plan, if only these
idiots had not allowed the navy to get into so wretched a condition!
I’ve been worrying them about the matter ever since the siege of
Toulon. During the naval war of the last five years, we’ve lost half a
dozen sea-fights. What about invasion? If only that were possible! Any
one who could defeat England would be master of the world. Sail along
the coast, study the possibilities, and then, if there seems no chance
of a successful landing on the other side of the Channel, back to the
Mediterranean! Only there, in the East, can I throw off all restraint,
and keep France a-quiver with curiosity and excitement. Egypt’s the
place, in the footsteps of Alexander; and there we can strike England a
shrewd blow!”
After long preparations, the general visits Dunkirk and the Flemish
coast. He asks questions wherever he goes, not forgetting to
cross-examine fishermen and smugglers. Returning unexpectedly, he gives
Josephine a fright, but it escapes his notice that she hastens to pen a
few lines to the secretary of an old flame. In his campaigns, hundreds
of spies have brought him secret missives; what would he say if he could
read this one? “Bonaparte has come back this evening. Please tell Barras
how sorry I am that I cannot come to supper after all. Say that he is
not to forget me. You know better than any one what my position is.—La
Pagerie Bonaparte.”
Thus undermined is the marriage in which he still puts his trust. Thus
equivocal is the position of Barras, the impotent Director, who hates
and mistrusts the mighty commander of the forces. Thus nonchalant is
Josephine, as with carefree heart she makes her way through society,
passing her time in women’s boudoirs and men’s bedrooms—and, among the
men, she has to put up with Bonaparte, although when she signs her
married name she prefixes to it her maiden name, as though she were still
mistress of her own destinies and free to choose her lover.
No doubt Barras is cursing Bonaparte this evening, but next day the
general writes to him and the other Directors a long report, which
begins as follows: “Even with our best efforts, it will take us several
years to get the upper hand at sea. The invasion of England would be
a desperate venture; it will only be possible if we take the islanders
by surprise.... We shall need long nights, so it must be in winter.
Consequently we cannot make the attempt till next year. Before then,
it is likely enough that hindrances will have arisen on the Continent.
Perhaps the great moment has been lost for ever.”
After this amazingly perspicacious renunciation of his scheme for the
invasion of England, he goes on to formulate a yet more amazing plan
for achieving the same end by other means. Substantially, he proposes
eight naval campaigns, ranging from Spain to Holland, all the political
conditions and consequences being carefully considered. If, however,
ships and money are not forthcoming, the next best expedient will be to
attack English commerce, beginning in Egypt, whence Bonaparte could get
back to direct further operations against England.
Enough for the Directors to hear the word Egypt, and they are ready to
agree to this last plan. He shall have the command there, and all the
help they can give. So dangerous a man as this—the farther away he is,
the better! Best of all would be, to make an end of him!
The Egyptian plan is not new; it has been mooted at intervals for years.
Talleyrand had brought it forward in connection with Bonaparte’s letter,
though his comment had been: “The leader of this campaign would not need
to be a man of exceptional military talent.” Was this remark prompted
by a wish to keep Bonaparte in France, or was it nothing more than a
spiteful innuendo? However that may be, the talented commander, when he
read the words at a much later date, wrote in the margin: “Crazy!” But we
anticipate. He drafted the terms of his own nomination as chief of the
Army in the East: plenipotentiary powers; a commission to take Malta and
Egypt, to drive the English from the Red Sea, to cut a canal through the
Isthmus of Suez in order that France may be secure in the possession of
the Red Sea.
With feverish energy he now devotes himself to preparations for the new
undertaking. He has long been familiar with all the essentials of the
problem. The Mediterranean is his home. In childhood, he was wont to
contemplate the Moor’s head on the scutcheon of Corsica; sailing ships
from Africa often visited the island; not long ago, he had deprived Genoa
and Venice of their fleets; he was already in touch with Tunisians and
Greeks, with Albanians and Bosnians. Over all these machinations brooded
the spirit of Alexander, who had chosen Egypt as the centre of his world
empire.
For the first time, during these weeks of waiting, do the elements
of Bonaparte’s nature become formally compacted within him. What has
been no more than a scheme of the unbridled imagination, the plan of
one who aspires to resemble the most splendid exemplars of the ancient
world, is now dissected, pondered, weighed in the calculating brain; it
is refashioned, reconsidered; by degrees it is adapted to the actual
possibilities of the situation. When preparing his Egyptian campaign,
Bonaparte attempts, in the grand style, to unite the calculator with
the dreamer, while it escapes his notice that there is an incalculable
residue. His imagination, nourished upon dreams of the heroic age, blinds
him to the fact that we are no longer living in the days of classical
antiquity, that caliph and conqueror can no longer command millions of
unthinking slaves, that even in distant Africa the peoples are awakening.
Bonaparte is making ready for a titanic and insoluble conflict; and
the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more defiantly will he
continue his vain attempts to solve it.
This man of genius, born two thousand years too late, is already spinning
the threads of his own doom. With the hand of a demigod, he is sketching
the outlines of his own fate.
XIII
“I am going to the East,” he writes to his brother, “with all the means
to ensure success. Should France need me, ... should war break out and
take an unfavourable turn, I shall come home, and public opinion will be
more solidly on my side than it is now. But if the fortune of war should
favour the republic, if another commander like myself should appear upon
the scene, I shall, perhaps, be staying in the East, do the world more
service than he can.” When Bourrienne asks how long they are to be away,
Bonaparte answers: “Six months or six years.”
At the last moment, fate wants to give him another warning. In Rastatt,
Austria refuses to cede the left bank of the Rhine; in Vienna,
Bernadotte, who is French envoy there, is so provocative that a new war
already seems imminent. Would it not be better to stay in Europe? But the
Directors speed the departure, saying that matters have now gone too far
to withdraw. In May, exactly two years after Napoleon’s entry into Milan,
four hundred ships set sail from Toulon. Josephine waves farewell to
her husband, and (doubtless with more concern) to Eugene. Not until the
whole mighty apparatus has been set in motion at the master’s nod, does
he disclose to his subordinates the goal of the voyage. All are on deck,
watching the gradual disappearance of the European coast; but Napoleon,
on the “Orient,” standing beside the mainmast among the eight-pounders,
is not, like the others, looking back at Europe. His gaze is directed
towards the south-east.
At the same hour, Nelson and three other British admirals, standing on
the decks of their ships, are searching the seas with telescopes for
a sign of the hated enemy, who is, it is supposed, about to sail for
Sicily. Where is he to be found? Yesterday, Nelson’s fleet was scattered
by a storm. Days pass before the ships can get together again, and the
very storm which had detained Bonaparte for twenty-four hours in Toulon,
saves the French. They reach Malta before the English fleet, and seize
the important island by a coup de main. By the time the cat arrives, the
mouse is gone. Under all sail, Nelson presses on to Egypt, but finds no
one there, for he has outstripped the enemy. He tries the Syrian coast.
Nothing! Back to Sicily. No one! “The Devil has the devil’s own luck,”
says Nelson, cursing himself and the foe.
The French fleet is four weeks on the voyage, and Napoleon, who is a bad
sailor, spends most of the time in bed. Is not this symbolic? Will the
seasick general ever win to the command of the sea? He is restless lying
down, and, to pass the weary hours, he makes Bourrienne read aloud to him.
For on board this fleet there are not only two thousand guns. A
whole university is sailing to the East. Astronomers, geometricians,
mineralogists, chemists, antiquarians, bridge-builders, road engineers,
orientalists, political economists, painters, poets—one hundred and
seventy-five learned civilians, with hundreds of boxes full of apparatus
and books. Everything in this land of ancient story is to be meticulously
studied. For France, Bonaparte is to win a colony, and for himself an
African reputation. The soldiers have bluntly nicknamed these learned
passengers, collectively, “the donkeys.” But Bonaparte prizes them, and
his wrath breaks loose on any of his officers who grumble at the presence
of so many “idlers.” He has chosen his experts with the utmost care,
and has thought out every detail of what they are to do. He has brought
a font of Arabic type, extracted with great difficulty from the State
printing house. He has taken especial pains in the choice of books for
the library with which the flagship is freighted for the voyage to Egypt.
Novels are good for officers; and when he finds them reading novels, he
laughs good humouredly. For himself, he has only _Werther_ and _Ossian_,
works of passion, his inseparable companions. On this journey, however,
he seldom reads them.
What does Bourrienne read aloud to the chief? Travels in Egypt, which
have been collected from various quarters, from Rome and elsewhere;
Plutarch; Homer; Arrian’s account of Alexander’s campaigns; the Koran,
which, logically enough, is housed among the political works, beside the
Bible and Montesquieu.
After dinner, he is fond of holding sessions of “the Institute.” He uses
the name jestingly, and yet in the discussions he takes it seriously
enough. He propounds a subject for debate, and nominates the champions.
Mathematics and religion are his favourite topics on these occasions, for
he has always been both calculator and dreamer. There sits the famous
Monge, a man with a crooked nose, a receding forehead, and a massive
chin; Napoleon has admired him for years, and thinks more of him than
of any of the others. Beside Monge is Desaix, whom Bonaparte has just
summoned from the Army of the Rhine; he has a thick nose and thick
lips, a somewhat negroid but kindly face, and the strategist rivals
the mathematician in the shrewdness of his eyes. Look at Kléber, a man
of fearless countenance, full of courage and resolution; beside him,
Laplace, who peers earnestly at the company from beneath his eye-shade;
next is Berthollet, with a head like a ram. Kléber runs atilt at
geometry; but when one of the professors wishes to take up the cudgels on
behalf of the things of the spirit, Bonaparte signs to him not to waste
breath, and points with a smile to Berthier, who has fallen asleep in the
corner over the _Sorrows of Werther_.
The weather is getting much warmer. Napoleon, wishing to breathe the
night air, lies on deck till a late hour. His intimates are sitting round
him in a circle, and discussion turns on the planets, on the question
whether they are inhabited. Pros and cons are voiced by the disputants.
This leads to the problem of the creation. The sons of the revolution,
disciples of Voltaire, be they generals or be they professors, are
agreed upon one point, that the universe and its origin are rationally
explicable in terms of natural science, without reference to the idea of
God. Napoleon lies there, listening in silence. Then, pointing to the
stars, he interjects:
“You may say what you like, but who made all those?”
XIV
Bonaparte rides slowly across the desert sands to look upon the face
of the Sphinx. The eyes of stone and the eyes of steel meet. Like the
Sphinx, he knows how to be silent, but we can guess his thoughts.
“Alexander stood here. Cæsar stood here. They lived two thousand years
after this image was sculptured, as I live two thousand years after them.
Immeasurable empires, consecrated to the sun, extended around the Nile.
Millions obeyed the will of one. What the ruler dreamed, was fashioned
by his slaves with their myriad hands. Everything was possible to him.
The king was the son of the gods. All obeyed him as the descendant of
the original conqueror. Because that first conqueror named himself king,
and son of the gods, all believed him. Here, in the East, it is possible
to say to human beings, ‘I am your god,’ and all believe. Europe is a
mole-hill.”
Soon, not many miles away, Napoleon makes ready for battle. Eight
thousand Mamelukes, the best cavalry in the world, are ready to crush
the invader. He rides up and down in front of his troops, points to the
pyramids in the distance, and exclaims: “Soldiers, forty centuries are
looking down on you.” The Mamelukes charge the French, but are driven
back by artillery fire; their camp is soon in Bonaparte’s hands; they
flee to the Nile, crossing the river in boats and by swimming; since it
is notorious that they always have gold with them, the fight continues
for hours on the bank and in the water until the victors have secured
some of the treasure.
In Cairo, he knows how to win the support of the pashas and the sheiks.
He gives out that he loves and venerates the Turks and the sultan.
He is only attacking the Mamelukes, who are their enemies likewise.
Periphrases, bowings and scrapings, elaborate metaphors—these come
natural to him, the man of the Mediterranean who is half an oriental.
They are devices for lying even more circumstantially than do the
diplomats of Europe with their speedier and directer methods. Here he is
following the oriental custom. While still on board the “Orient,” he had
dictated to his interpreter a letter to the pasha of Egypt. It began as
follows:
“Thou who shouldst be supreme over all the beys, but hast, as I know,
neither power nor prestige in Cairo, thou wilt welcome my coming.
Assuredly thou knowest that I have it not in mind to do anything against
the Koran or against the sultan. Come, therefore, to my help, and join
with me in cursing the godless race of beys!”
To approximate his own creed to the faith of Allah, he begins, like a
conjuror, to juggle with the Trinity. First of all he explains that he
has conquered the pope and the Maltese, and that for him the Koran is
the word of God just as much as the Bible. But, at a later date, when
the forces sent to dislodge his own are being disembarked, he argues as
follows: “Allah is Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet. To the divan of
Cairo, chosen from among the ablest, most learned, and most enlightened
of men! The blessing of the Prophet be upon you!” He goes on to say that
he has allowed these men to be landed in order that he may kill them
all at one blow, “which will be a glorious sight for Cairo.” There were
Russians on board the invader’s ships. “The Russians hate all who, like
you and myself, believe in one God, for, in their own legends, they speak
of three gods. They will learn, soon enough, that there is but one God,
the father of victory, who graciously fights on the side of the good.”
Out of this potpourri of the religious, which ends on a more pagan
note than he seems to be aware, he subsequently extracts unchristian
France as a political instrument, saying that the religion of France is
especially akin to Mohammedanism. He is continually appealing to the
Koran as the basis of his thought. The holy book which he has included
in the political section of his travelling library, shall be made to do
him good service. When he dismisses a dangerous cadi in Cairo, he finds
a justification for his action in the Koran: “All that is good comes
from God; he gives us victory.... Whatever I undertake must succeed. All
those whom I call my friends, thrive. But any one who helps my enemies,
perishes.”
If he had but had the luck to have been born here in Egypt four thousand
years ago, he would have gained the victory by the power of suggestion
alone. But nowadays even these brown fellows are sceptical! He despises
them, while showering them with superlatives; but, at the same time,
he threatens to punish with the utmost rigour any of his soldiers who
injure a native. The first order of the day to the Army in the East runs:
“The peoples with whom we are now in contact do not treat their women as
we treat ours. Nevertheless, any one who harms a woman is looked upon
as a monster here as in Europe. Looting enriches very few, dishonours
all, destroys the sources of aid, and makes us hated by those with whom
it is to our interest that we should be friends.” No one is to enter a
mosque, and groups must not even assemble round the doors. By cajolery
and threats, by tolerance and intrigue, by Allah and the sword, by all
the methods of the oriental, Bonaparte secures an authoritative position
within a few weeks.
At length he can regard himself as master in the East. Is he any the
happier for that?
Junot has received a letter about Josephine. If only this letter, like
hundreds more, had been intercepted by the English! Then, at least,
Napoleon could still have enjoyed the bliss of ignorance! For Junot feels
it his duty to tell his commander and old friend all about the matter. It
concerns Hippolyte Charles, as well as Josephine. Napoleon had cashiered
the young man. Josephine had found him a job with an army contractor, and
had lost sight of him for a time. But she has met him again, has come
across him at a fashionable dancing school. Her old passion has revived.
He has such graceful hips! He makes such elegant sallies! Now he has the
added charm of wealth. Meanwhile, Josephine has bought a fine estate near
Paris (though it is not yet paid for); the young dandy is living with
her at Malmaison as master of the house....
Bonaparte walks up and down as he talks things over with Junot. He grows
paler and paler; his face twitches; twice or thrice he strikes his
forehead despairingly with his fist. Suddenly, turning upon Bourrienne,
who is sitting in front of the tent, he says: “You are not a true friend!
These women! Josephine! You ought to have told me. Junot, he is really
my friend. Josephine—and I am more than two thousand miles away! How can
she betray me like this? Damn these puppies and coxcombs! I’ll make short
work of the lot of them. I will divorce her. Yes, a public, sensational
divorce! I will write instantly. I know everything. If she is guilty,
farewell! I will not be a mock for the flâneurs on the boulevards.”
Bourrienne tries to pacify him; tells him that fame is more important
than family happiness. “Fame! What is that worth? I would give everything
in the world, so much do I love her, if only Junot’s news were false.”
But the English may intercept and publish anything he writes, so in his
letter to his brother Joseph he can do no more than hint at this private
calamity. The missive has a peculiar charm, which is perhaps given to
it by the writer’s enforced restraint, by the need for using veiled
expressions. Tædium vitæ of genius at its climax. This private letter is
penned the day after a victorious and virile despatch:
“No other country in the world is so rich as Egypt in maize, rice,
vegetables, and meat. Barbarism reaches its highest level here. There is
no money, not even for paying the troops. In two months I can be back in
France. Look after my interests, I beseech you; I have a great deal of
trouble at home; the veil has been torn off once for all—I have no one
left in the world but you. Your affection is precious to me. Only one
thing could increase my bitterness—if I were to lose you, if you also
were to play the traitor. How terrible that all my affections should be
concentrated upon one personality. You understand me? Make arrangements
that as soon as I return home I shall have at my disposal a country
house near Paris or in Burgundy, a place where I can spend the winter in
absolute seclusion. Mankind has become loathsome to me. I need rest and
solitude. Greatness bores me to death. The fount of feeling is dried up.
At twenty-nine years of age, I find that fame is vanity. I’ve got to the
end of everything. Only one resource is left to me, to become an absolute
egoist. I shall keep my house in Paris, and not hand it over to any one!
I have nothing more than what I brought into the world with me. I have
never been unjust to you, that you must admit, though I have often wanted
to be. You will understand. Kiss your wife for me, and Jerome. Bonaparte.”
This cynicism and misanthropy, the desire for vengeance and the demand
for satisfaction, have at length, and for the first time, become merged
in a symphony of melancholy. The melancholy note had been sounded twelve
years before in his diary, but since then it has been silent. A heart
that desired to give itself wholly, in which trust had been ever renewed
despite many disillusionments, now seems to have been pierced through and
through. Victory, glory, to be a second Alexander—all dust and ashes. If
a man is deceived where he least deserves it, and where he has trusted
with all the ardency of youth, what is greatness to him? He begins
his letter with rice and vegetables, and ends with solitude and utter
disheartenment. What is left for him in the world besides his brother? “I
have got to the end of everything.”
XV
A blow quickened him back to life.
Returning from a ride in the desert, he entered Marmont’s tent to find
that all his associates were greatly perturbed. What had happened? The
French fleet had been destroyed. The day before, there had been a
sea-fight in Aboukir Bay, and only four ships had escaped. All the rest
had been sunk or captured by Nelson.
The officers stood in gloomy silence. The grenadier on sentry duty in
front of the tent understood, every one understood, the meaning of this
reverse. Napoleon’s face paled, but he recovered his composure instantly,
realising that it was his business to restore the morale of the others.
After a brief pause, he was ready with encouraging words: “So we are cut
off in Egypt. Good. We must keep our heads above the stormy waters; the
sea will soon be smooth once more.—Perhaps we are predestined to change
the face of the East. Here we must remain, or achieve a grandeur like
that of the ancients!”
A terrible reverse! What will Paris say? He is not admiral of the
fleet, and was not present at the battle of the Nile, but the disaster
will certainly affect his prestige. How are we to get home again? On
Turkish ships? But will the sultan remain neutral any longer? He has
been wavering between Russia and France, and will be likely, now, to
turn against the French. England, too. The fleet annihilated; thirteen
battleships gone. How many years will it be before we can again face
England on the high seas? A decade, perhaps. Allah is Allah, but behind
what cloud was my star hidden?
No, not my star! For, when he reports the defeat, he conceals nothing,
but is careful to explain in his official despatches that fortune had
delayed Nelson’s return until the French had been able to secure their
footing in Egypt.
Weeks of uncertainty. This is a new phase in Bonaparte’s life. He must
remain inactive, while he waits for news that will throw light upon the
state of affairs in Europe. If England keeps good watch, perhaps no
letter will be able to cross the seas. For the first time in his career,
he begins to wonder how he can kill time. The administration of a whole
army, the suppression of disturbances, the rehabilitation of crumbling
fortresses—these are no more than variants of idleness. The hours
hang heavily, and he becomes more nervous, more fanciful than of yore.
Bourrienne tries to tranquillise the commander’s mind, saying: “Let us
wait till we hear what the Directory proposes to do!”
“The Directory? A dung-heap! The Directors hate me, and will leave me
here to rot!”
If he could only ride! But it is too hot, at any rate to ride in uniform,
and an attempt to wear Arab clothing has been abandoned. Sometimes he
goes for a ride, in spite of the heat. When, on his return, he finds that
no despatches have come, he grows meditative:
“Do you know what I have been thinking, Bourrienne?—If I ever see France
again, my greatest ambition will be to conduct a campaign on the Bavarian
lowland. There I could win a great battle, and take vengeance for
Blenheim. Then I should retire to my country seat, and lead a quiet life,
perfectly contented.” The fire still glows; the kettle goes on simmering!
In the plain of the Po, his restless spirit was yearning for the East;
having made his way to Egypt, he craves for Bavaria; and always he thinks
in terms of battles.
Now, when his future is so uncertain, when he is perhaps cut off from all
chance of returning home, and when there is no longer a strong tie of
personal affection to bind him to distant Europe, he opens negotiations
with the shah of Persia and Tippoo Sahib, England’s enemies: asking
the former for a right of way to India; and offering the latter an
alliance, and deliverance from “The iron yoke of England.” The prospect
of following in Alexander’s footsteps looms nearer. But when he comes
to practical calculations he begins to doubt the possibility: “Only if
fifteen thousand men can be left here, and I have another thirty thousand
at my disposal, shall I be able to venture a march on India.”
Although all remains in the realm of fancy, such imaginative excursions
fill Bonaparte’s happiest hours; he luxuriates in these vast plans.
Four years later, he declares: “In Egypt alone did I feel free from
the trammels of civilisation; and there I seemed to have the means of
realising all my dreams. I pictured myself on the road to Asia, the
founder of a new religion, mounted on an elephant, wearing a turban,
and holding a new Koran which contained my own message. My plan was to
weld the experiences of two worlds, to force history into my service, to
attack the English power in India, and, through my conquests there, to
reopen communications with Europe.”
Are these the visions of a poet? Or is it that the conqueror and the poet
are close kin? In Egypt, he has a romantic name for himself, “Sultan El
Kebir”—he is, in truth, always the sultan, more or less. El Kebir is his
third name, as visionary as the whole campaign.
His lively imagination, his spleen on account of his wife’s
infidelity—these combine with the influences of climate and lack of
occupation to drive him into an amourette. A pretty young woman, the
wife of a lieutenant, had sailed with the army from Toulon, in male
attire. She was the illegitimate daughter of a cook, had herself been a
dressmaker before marriage, was piquant, blonde, violet-eyed. He takes
her to himself, and sends her husband back to France on official service.
She soon learns to play Cleopatra’s part boldly and charmingly; graces
the head of his table; drives out with him. But Eugene, her rival’s son,
is adjutant, and his duty is to follow the carriage on horseback. This
conjuncture is disagreeable to all parties, and so the young man is given
furlough.
Eugene knows more than he cares to know about the scandal attaching to
his mother’s name; Bonaparte has himself enlightened the youth. What a
painful situation! His mother, not far on in the thirties, is a coquette,
and makes his step-father (the hero of the nation!) ridiculous in all
men’s eyes by her open and shameless intrigue with a young coxcomb
who is but little older than her son. Eugene himself has to look on
while Napoleon, commander-in-chief of the army and pasha of the new
French colony, flaunts his mistress before the public gaze. The little
dressmaker, who would probably find the handsome adjutant more to her
taste than his step-father, laughs gaily, showing her white teeth.
Anyhow, she has cut out the Creole countess, and she glories in the new
spirit of equality. Napoleon Bonaparte is the central figure of the
composition. All he asks of the young woman is that she shall give him a
child.
An heir, that is what he has been wanting for years! If she will but
provide one, he will marry her, for divorces can be arranged. One of his
ruling passions is the desire to found a family. The mother would be of
working-class origin? So are most of his generals! What matter, so long
as the child is legitimate, and of the blood of Bonaparte? He believes in
the equality of all who play an active part in the world; but he believes
no less strongly in legitimacy. The hereditary succession of kingship is
over and done with. The hereditary succession of efficiency is the new
doctrine. Such is the fallacy by which his mind is enslaved.
After a while, he says savagely to one of his confidants: “The silly
fool of a woman does not even know how to make children!” The gibe is
retailed to her, and she exclaims mockingly: “It’s not my fault, you
know!” Bonaparte hears of the rejoinder, and his face is shadowed. He
has no proof to the contrary, nothing but the inner consciousness of a
productivity such as no mortal has ever had before.
His spirit embraces the whole world in its grasp. But if nature has
denied him the capacity for reproduction, the foundation of all activity
has been shattered. His self-confidence would collapse.
XVI
In the Institute, the commander-in-chief sits as an equal among equals.
He never tries, in argument there, to gain a victory by rank instead of
reason. Yet many of the questions that are discussed relate to army
matters of immediate practical importance, such as the filtering of Nile
water, the erection of windmills, the search for ingredients needed to
make gunpowder. On one occasion, Napoleon grew heated. Berthollet said
quietly: “You are wrong, my friend, for you have lost your temper.” A
naval surgeon supported Berthollet. “You men of science are as thick as
thieves,” exclaimed Bonaparte. “Chemistry plays the cook for medicine,
and plays the assassin for science!” The surgeon’s answer came pat: “But
how, Citizen-General, would you define the conqueror’s art?” Within the
republic of learning, this equality pleased the dictator, whom elsewhere
hardly any one now ventured to contradict.
For weeks in succession, the orders of the day ended with the words: “No
news from France.” Everything was at a standstill; widespread uncertainty
prevailed. Amid the general inertia, the travelling university was an
exception; the savants were hard at work, studying, advising, ever ready
to help in the second line. As far as they were concerned, this time of
waiting was a great opportunity for research. A thorough investigation of
the country and its resources was in progress: the fishes of the Nile and
the minerals of the Red Sea, the flora of the Delta and the constituents
of the desert sand—all were now for the first time being elaborately
scrutinised. The exploitation of the natron lakes and the Nile mud was
under consideration. The physicians of the expedition were enquiring
into the causes of oriental plague; and of trachoma, the terrible form
of ophthalmia which is so frequent a cause of blindness in Egypt. A
dictionary and a grammar were printed; some of the buried temples of
Upper Egypt were disinterred; the Wells of Moses were discovered. One
day, an engineer officer came back from Rosetta bringing with him a
granite slab on which there was a polyglot inscription, chiselled in
Greek and in two variants of the ancient Egyptian picture-writing. The
riddle of the hieroglyphs had been unriddled.
What especially interested the commander, however, was the possibility
of cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Suez. He made long journeys
in the desert, always exposed to the danger of Bedouin raids; traced
the line of the ancient canal; planned the course of a new channel. All
his speculations were confirmed half a century later by Lesseps. Not
like an adventurer whose schemes have miscarried, but in the spirit of a
conqueror, he designed to separate the continents and link the seas.
Now at length! Some merchants on small vessels have managed to slip
through the English lines. From them, Napoleon learns that the
destruction of the French fleet off Aboukir has brought about a general
transformation. The sultan has entered into an alliance with Russia,
and the two powers have declared war on France. Achmed, the Turkish
commander, is marching on Egypt through Syria. The malcontents in Cairo,
encouraged by these tidings, rise in revolt. The insurrection is quelled
by artillery fire, and the heads of the rebels are exposed on pikes as a
warning. “This will have a salutary effect. Clemency is no good here.”
On the whole, the commander is more relieved than alarmed. If the Turks
are marching southwards, so much the better; at length he will have a
chance of beating them in open fight.
From most of his close associates he conceals his deeper cause for
anxiety. When he left France to occupy Egypt, his aim was to secure a
position that would help him in his scheme for the conquest of India.
“With ships, we can cross the seas; with camels we can cross the
desert.” He had allowed fifteen months for the conquest of Egypt and the
consolidation of his power there, and for the preparation and equipment
of his forces for the Indian campaign. That would need forty thousand
men, as many camels, and one hundred and twenty field-guns. He had asked
for extensive reinforcements; ships, guns, and men. These were to support
his land army by sea.
The battle of the Nile had frustrated his fine schemes. The English
were blockading the coast; the sultan had become his enemy; Egyptian
sentiment was now hostile. But it was Napoleon’s way to adapt his plans
to changing circumstances, and it seemed to him that he could derive
advantage from the turn of events. The Turks and the English are going to
make a joint landing? That threatens our very existence here? Well, then,
let us attack to escape destruction! Seize all the magazines and ports
from the Turks, arm the Syrian Christians, stir up the Druses! If we were
to take the fortress of Acre, opinion in Cairo would veer round to our
side. By June, we shall be in Damascus; shall thrust outposts forward
into the Taurus; march eastward with 26,000 Frenchmen, 6,000 Mamelukes,
and 18,000 Druses. Desaix will come direct from Egypt. The sultan will
find it expedient to keep quiet. The shah of Persia has already agreed to
our marching by way of Bassora and Shiraz. By March, if Allah favours us,
we shall reach the Indus.
Once more, Bonaparte fashions a splendid dream out of pressing
embarrassments. He sets out for Syria.
There are practically no roads. Sometimes he rides as many as forty-five
miles in fifteen hours, invariably by night, without water, and almost
always with the vanguard. When Jaffa falls, three thousand Turkish
soldiers surrender. What on earth is he to do with them? Keep them
prisoner? His own men are on short commons; and, besides, he would then
have to spare thousands of Frenchmen to guard the Turks. Send them home?
He has no ships. Exchange them? The Turks have no prisoners. Set them
free? Then they will reinforce Acre, the next stronghold. What on earth
is he to do? Council of war!
All are in favour of killing the prisoners. Only a few days before,
the Turks killed one of our envoys! Our own troops would be infuriated
if they were to go hungrier still because of these fellows. Bonaparte
wavers, thinks matters over for three days, and finally agrees. The
prisoners are marched down to the sea and slaughtered. Subsequent
military critics, especially the Germans, have agreed that there was no
choice.
Acre lies before us. There we shall find stores of new weapons. Then
onwards towards the north! The great dream renews itself during these
weeks. Now that Turkey has declared war, he is completely isolated, and
forced into a life-and-death struggle. Everything is possible, for needs
must when the devil drives. But he is not quite easy in his mind about
the Indian scheme, for he mentions an alternative plan to one of his
officers: “After I have seized Acre, I shall march upon Damascus and
Aleppo, augmenting my army as I go, for I shall announce to the people
the overthrow of the tyrannous pashas. Then, with overwhelming forces,
I shall take Constantinople, make an end of Turkey, and found a new and
great empire. This will bring me immortal fame. Perhaps I shall then make
my way home through Adrianople or Vienna, after annihilating the house of
Habsburg.”
Always the same visions, magnified now, when the situation grows
desperate.
He reaches Acre. Not a big fortress, but well supplied with modern
weapons, and defended by English officers and artillerists. Three
successive attempts to storm the place are fruitless. English battleships
arrive to support the besieged, and threaten the besiegers.
At last, after eight months, he has direct news from Paris! It is little
to his taste. Talleyrand has not gone to Constantinople to treat with the
sultan. Is the rogue hedging? The French Republic is at war with Naples
and Sardinia. Moreau and Augereau, Bonaparte’s rivals, have high command.
Why, in God’s name, do we squat here on the burning sands, inactive?
Storm the place! Are our schemes to be wrecked against these miserable
walls?
Who is in charge of the defence! Phélippeaux is there, a skilled
engineer, one of Napoleon’s old comrades at the Cadets’ School in Paris,
afterwards an émigré who had entered the English service!
Why can they not take the place by storm? Bonaparte has no patience
for a slow siege, for starving his enemy into surrender. The whole idea
is foreign to his impetuous temperament. A fortress, like a woman, must
be taken by storm, or not at all. He cannot beg, serve, or woo; and he
cannot wait. Now time presses, and to wait is out of the question. Storm!
The soldiers begin to murmur. Even among the officers there are
mutterings which are the heralds of mutiny. “Let us have Kléber for our
leader; he is humane and gentle.”
Bonaparte sits in his tent, thinking matters over. A terrible hour! Is
England to be ever invincible, even on land, even here in the East?
Is the siege to drag on for months? Impossible! Europe is full of the
clash of arms. Turn back, without having won a victory? An unprecedented
experience, an entirely new feeling; but there is no choice. The
enterprise must be abandoned. Back to Egypt! It is only half the truth
to say that Acre barred his march upon India. Who can tell whether, if
the fortress had been taken, he would have pressed on towards the Indus
notwithstanding the ominous news from Paris. We should have to reckon
with incalculable feelings here. Every coincidence is symbolical. Before
Acre and on the Po, France is at war with the same monarchical coalition.
None but the son of the revolution can save the situation. Contrary to
his usual custom, he does not ride in the van, but for hours after the
columns have started southward, till nightfall indeed, he stays behind on
an elevation to contemplate the stubborn fortress, his mind filled with a
sort of ferocious melancholy.
A ghastly retreat. No roads, no water, the plague as rearguard. Is
Bonaparte’s career to be ruined by the desert and the black death? Calm
of aspect, he visits the sick in hospital, and encourages them wherever
possible. The doctor points to fifty cases as hopeless. They must be
put out of their misery, thinks Bonaparte; their path to death must be
smoothed. With a royal assumption of responsibility, he orders a lethal
dose of opium. The doctor demurs. It remains uncertain whether some one
else carried out the order. “In such circumstances,” he says later, “I
would have had my own son poisoned.”
Two thousand sick men and six thousand who are still in health make their
way slowly through the desert. Every four of the healthy has to carry a
comrade who is too ill to walk, for there are not enough horses to bear
the sick and the maimed. The staff officers are all marching with the
rest. This is by Napoleon’s command. An equerry asks him which horse he
will ride. “Did you not hear the order?” retorts the commander, striking
the man with his whip. “Every one on foot!”
At length the retreating army reaches Cairo. By entering with a triumphal
display of captured colours, and by proclamations and marches, he makes a
vain attempt to delude the people of Egypt.
What is Paris saying? What shall he tell Paris? We did not occupy Acre,
because the plague was raging there! That was why we withdrew from the
siege! In the Institute, a committee is appointed to substantiate this
tale. A doctor stands up, and, in the presence of a hundred savants,
refuses to attach his name to this fiction. The commander yields with a
wry face, but bears no grudge against the stalwart, whom he promotes more
than once in years to come.
The Turks now arrive by sea, intending to make an end of the French.
Once more, the whole existence of the expeditionary force is at stake.
The enemy is to land in Aboukir Bay, just a year after the battle of the
Nile. He lets them land, and then inflicts a crushing defeat on them,
though their army outnumbers his by two to one. After the battle, Murat
meets him, and embracing him, says: “General, you are as great as the
world, but the world is too small for you!” Bonaparte writes to Cairo:
“You will have heard of the battle on the shores of Aboukir Bay, one of
the finest I have ever seen! Of the army the enemy had landed, not a man
escaped.”
At this time he notices among the Mamelukes who have entered his service
a tall, handsome fellow with blue eyes, a Georgian named Rustam, who has
five times been sold as a slave. Fidelity is written on his countenance.
Napoleon gives him a sword with an enchased hilt and scabbard, and makes
him his body-servant. For fifteen years, Rustam sleeps outside his
master’s door.
After the victory at Aboukir, Napoleon enters into a parley with the
admiral of the blockading fleet. Ostensibly he wishes to discuss an
exchange of prisoners with the English. Really he is hungering for news;
newspapers are worth more than king’s crowns. Some one manages to get
hold of what he covets, and an adjutant brings them into his tent. The
commander is asleep. “Here are newspapers, General. Bad news.” He sits
up. “What’s happened?”
“Scherer has been beaten. We have lost nearly the whole of Italy.”
Napoleon jumps out of bed, seizes the papers, and goes on reading them
all through the night, with an occasional pause for an outburst of wrath.
At dawn, he sends for his admiral-in-chief, is closeted with the seaman
for a couple of hours, and then sets out for Cairo.
“I have made up my mind to return to France,” he says behind shut doors
to the faithful Marmont. “You will come with me. Our armies in Europe
have been defeated. God knows where the enemy will have got to by now.
Italy is lost. What are they about, these incompetent idiots at the head
of affairs? Stupidity and corruption! I have borne the whole burden
single-handed, and by my victories have propped up a government which
could never have maintained itself but for me. As soon as I leave,
everything collapses. If I start at once, I shall get to Paris almost
as soon as the news of my latest victory. My presence will restore
confidence to the troops, and will reanimate the citizens with hopes for
a happier future.”
“My future,” he thinks, as soon as Marmont has gone. “People will say
I have abandoned the army in Egypt. It will get along all right under
Kléber. I came here to found a colony. It is founded, and the Turks have
been beaten. Help can only come from France, and no one but myself can
send it. I have nothing more to gain here, but everything to win on the
battle-fields of Europe. Thirty years! How many days before I can get
away? The admiral says it is a bad wind for Toulon, and that English
warships swarm in the Mediterranean. I’m afraid I can’t get to Paris in
an air-balloon! But Paris is the heart of the world. I must risk the sea
passage.”
XVII
They show no lights, the two small frigates which had once flown Venetian
colours. The vessel freighted with the commander is the “Muiron,” thus
rechristened in memory of the lieutenant who had died to save him at
Arcola. Fifteen years later he is to do still more honour to this name.
Here, off Cape Bon, is the most dangerous point. Literally, they sail
through the English fleet, for they know the ships by their lights. An
August night, but cold, for the mistral is blowing. They sit on deck in
the starlight, feeling dull and rather depressed. Let’s liven things
up with a game of cards; there’s just light enough to play! Bonaparte
cheats, and is delighted that no one notices. Next morning, with
mischievous glee, he owns up, and restores his ill-gotten gains.
What a different voyage from that of fifteen months ago! Only two ships
now, and then there were four hundred. Half of the army is dead bones.
True, France still holds the land of ancient story—but for how long? The
hopes of striking an effective blow against England have been dashed.
What has become of the plan for a landing at Dover? Gone to join the
scheme for the invasion of India! He has had to steal away furtively from
Egypt, for there might have been a mutiny had his impending departure
become generally known among the soldiers of the army of occupation.
Kléber was not appointed commander-in-chief until Napoleon had gone. The
last order of the day had been dry and brief. The civilians had been sent
to Upper Egypt, for Monge and Berthollet, who were in the know, and were
now on board, might have blabbed the news to their colleagues. But poets
were a nuisance! One of the fellows, keen-witted, had guessed what was in
the wind, and had stolen aboard the frigate, whose destination was still
undisclosed. Oh, well, let the beggar come along. He and his tribe are
the brokers of fame, so we can’t do without them. After the last victory,
Paris will be on our side.
For weeks, the two frigates are in continual danger. “What would you
do, if the English fleet were to heave in sight? Fight? Impossible!
Surrender? You would none of you like that any better than I should. The
only other alternative is to blow up the ship.” A general silence. Monge,
who is sitting beside the commander, grows pale. “That shall be your
charge,” adds Napoleon, turning to him with a mischievous smile. A few
days later, a ship is sighted, and is wrongly supposed to be an English
man-of-war. The mathematician vanishes, and is found afterwards at the
door of the powder magazine.
This incident gives us the measure of Bonaparte’s authority.
After a six weeks’ cruise in the Mediterranean, an island is sighted
on a fine October morning, a familiar ridge of mountains is seen or
the horizon. The captain of the frigate consults his chart. “That is
Corsica,” says Bonaparte unhesitatingly. Does he order the seamen to
clap on all sail and make for the island? No, they must find out,
first, whether the place is still French. But a strong wind is blowing
shoreward, and, even under light canvas, progress is rapid. His thoughts
run swiftly, too.
“‘Still French?’ My question used to be, ‘French yet?’ Only six years
ago. I was twenty-four then, and to be master of this island seemed to
me the greatest thing in the world. Since then, I have had Italy at my
feet; Egypt has been conquered; Paris smiles. All has happened as if by
natural sequence. The wind is freshening. What will be the answer from
the shore?” The signals show that the harbour is open to a French ship.
The native island of the man without a country is home to him once more.
They land, and all Ajaccio crowds to the harbour; thousands who once
cursed the name of Bonaparte are now eager to welcome him. He regards
the throng cynically. Many address him with the familiar “thou”; and
hundreds wish to shake hands with him. He accepts these demonstrations
unmoved. But suddenly he hears a voice: “Figlio! Caro figlio!” Camilla is
speaking, his old nurse, a vigorous peasantwoman, hardly fifty years of
age. The sight of her is the only thing that stirs his emotions.
Napoleon makes for his ancestral home, which his mother has had set
in order once more, though she is away just now. He summons those
best fitted to give him the news he craves. There, beside the family
hearth, he learns what has, during the last three months, happened to
his creations. Mantua and Milan have gone, and with them most of Italy,
won by his feats of arms three short years ago. Genoa is still French,
though hard to keep. Masséna has been forced back through Switzerland!
The English have landed in Holland! What is the first thing to do? Make
for Nice! Instantly take the lead! Win back all in a storm of victories.
“What’s that you say?” Two of the Directors forcibly removed! Only
by such tricks can the shaky government still keep in power? General
Moulin is one of the Directors? Moulin, who the devil is he? The other
substitute? Sieyès, you say? Another coup must be impending—perhaps a
forcible change of government. We must make all speed for Paris. On
board! On board! Take a big rowing boat in tow!
Two days’ sail towards Toulon. Twilight when the coast is sighted. The
lookout man reports English ships. “Put about!” orders the admiral.
“Forward!” thunders Bonaparte. In case of need, we can make the shore
in the big rowing boat! Once more his star blinds the enemy; once more
he escapes capture by the English. Night falls. Impossible to land at
Toulon? Let us make for Fréjus, then. Uncharted rocks there? Rocks
everywhere! In sight of the French coast after a seven weeks’ voyage, we
must run all risks to land!
Does this Italian love the country on which he now sets his foot? To him
it is nothing more than the fiddle on which he can play a better tune
than on any other instrument.
Next day, in the little town of Fréjus, Bonaparte’s name is on every
one’s lips. Why is the harbour full of rowing boats, laden with
sightseers? Why this popular rejoicing? What has the man done in Africa,
that the inhabitants of the provincial town should greet him as if he
were a Roman imperator celebrating a triumph? An official says something
about quarantine. “We prefer the plague to the Austrians, and the
Austrians are almost at our gates!” shouts the crowd, escorting him
through the streets as a deliverer.
“France seems to be in a bad way,” thinks the man in the carriage, as
he acknowledges the vociferations. “It looks as if every one had been
waiting for me. A while back would have been too soon. To-morrow would
have been too late. I have come at the right moment.”
He drives westward from Fréjus, and stays for a time in Aix, questioning
every one he meets. At Aix, a copy of a letter comes into his hands,
an old letter that had miscarried: “The Directory is waiting for you,
General; for you and your brave companions!” This was written in the
panic of rulers who are at their wits’ end for a saviour! What had
he better do? Stay where he is for a time, and write before going to
Paris. “Egypt is wholly ours, and safe from invasion.—I was cut off from
newspapers till the end of July, but when I heard of your troubles I
instantly set out for home. I had to take all risks, for my place was
the spot where I could be of most use. Had there been no frigate, I
should have wrapped myself in my cloak and should have sailed in the
first cockle-shell I could find. With Kléber in command, Egypt is in good
hands. When I left, the whole country was under water—the best Nile for
fifty years.”
[Illustration: General Bonaparte in 1797. Drawing by Wocher in Basle.
Town Library, Basle.]
This carefully worded epistle goes as a herald to Paris. The people
there must be told who is on the way. His northward journey is a via
triumphalis; salutes are fired everywhere. Passing through Valence,
he recognises among the onlookers the good woman who keeps the café
where he used to lodge, the place with the billiard room; he gives her
a keepsake from the East. In Lyons, he waits two or three hours to see
the performance of a hastily extemporised drama, “The Hero’s Return.”
Everything shows the powerful spell already exercised by his name.
Perhaps the most signal instance is the sensational end of Baudin, one of
the best of the deputies, who utters a shout of joy on hearing the news
of Napoleon’s return, and drops dead from surcharge of emotion. The light
that radiates from the commander is so strong that it kills.
Paris draws near. He is still gathering news. But about private affairs,
about Josephine, he can ask no questions. Is he already a divorcé? Where
are his brothers? The news of his coming has been noised abroad; why
has no one come to meet him? She, where is she? Will she, after all, be
waiting for him in the mirrored room, ready to welcome him with a smile?
In the grey dawn he passes the octroi, drives along the outer boulevards,
turns into his own little street. There is the house. A woman stands
alone at the door. Who is it?
His mother.
XVIII
“Bonaparte’s landing is one of those events which at first we hesitate to
believe. The news spread over night at theatres and in social gatherings.
In the most obscure pot-houses, people were drinking to celebrate his
return....” “Every one hails him with delight, for he brings us new
hope....” “Glory, peace, and happiness follow in his train.”
These and similar items catch Bonaparte’s eye as he flutters the
newspapers. Day by day he can read an abundance of details, mingled
truth and falsehood, concerning his aspect, demeanour, and dress. Even
the opposition press pins its hopes on him: “His Egyptian campaign has
miscarried; but what matter? He is satisfied with having undertaken it,
and it is difficult to say whither his rashness may lead. All the same,
his bold ventures restore our courage.”—He is received with acclamation,
and his plans are consolidated.
But his wife is away. When the news that he had landed reached Paris,
she was dining with Gohier, the first of the five Directors. She and
her host were equally alarmed. Both had uneasy consciences, and now the
volcano was rumbling beneath them. Some time ago, Barras (who during this
period seems still to have been an occasional recipient of her favours)
had advised her to procure a divorce from the absent and almost vanished
adventurer, and to marry handsome Hippolyte. She had received no letters
from Napoleon. If he had written any, they must have miscarried. But her
brother-in-law’s hostile attitude showed her what was in the wind. Barras
was right. She would do well to act first.—Then Paris was electrified by
the news of Napoleon’s great victory over the Turks. Perhaps it would
be wiser, after all, to stay in her present safe harbourage. Unstable
and frivolous, she had of late been coquetting with the thought of
reconciliation. A glance at her own image in the mirror, a knowledge
of the way she could turn men’s heads, sufficed to convince her of the
possibility.
Now, at Gohier’s table, she pulls herself together, and her host tries
to outdo her in self-command. They drink to the general’s return. She
hurries home, packs up all that can set off her beauty to the best
advantage, and in a trice is driving southward. As her carriage rattles
past the barrier, she thinks: “Act promptly, and take the enemy by
surprise—is not that the secret of his military success? On the return
journey, I shall be with him day and night, and shall win him over before
the tale-bearers can get at him!”
But she misses him, learns that he has passed her, and hastens back to
Paris. She has lost three precious days, during which his relatives have
told him all the scandal. True, some of his intimates warn him against
applying for a divorce. In Paris, a cuckold is always a figure of fun.
He is resolute, however: “I have done with her. What do I care about the
chatter? It will only last for a day or two.” He has her trunks packed,
and carried down to the porter’s lodge, so that she shall not enter the
house. Could he give plainer proof that he dreads his own weakness?
She comes, breaks through the first line of defence, enters the fortress.
He has locked himself in. She calls to him and pleads with him through
the door. During her journey, the more she has come to realise that his
name is in every one’s mouth, the more fervent have been her hopes for a
reconciliation, and the more has her pride been humbled. But the citadel
holds out. At length she decides to call up reinforcements for a final
assault. Hortense and Eugene must come to her aid. They clamour, beseech,
shed tears. Thus a night passes.
No dispassionate observer can fail to understand Josephine’s motives in
making this ridiculous scene. What of Bonaparte himself, the man with so
profound a knowledge of the human soul? Was he duped by a woman?
There he lies, returned after a long absence, with his head full of
schemes for the conquest of a nation. Let us try to follow his thoughts.
“They have deceived me one and all. The government, the political
parties, my own companions-in-arms, were all endeavouring, during my
absence, to exclude me from power, for they regarded me as a danger to
themselves. As long as I was out of range, no one wanted me back; my
brothers no more than the rest. This capricious woman, whose pretty whims
I have never tried to restrain—would it be reasonable for me to expect
that she should have spent a year and more thinking of no one but her
absent husband, whose return seemed ever more unlikely as the days went
by? When I am there, she is fascinating. If I make truce with her now,
when the game is in my hands, she will agree to all my conditions, and I
can exact guarantees for the future. What a lovely voice she has. There
cannot have been any falling off in her charms, or she would not have so
many admirers. What a fool, compared with her, was that little woman in
Egypt, and even she could not give me an heir. Where shall I find a woman
who will make a more perfect lover and a better wife than Josephine?
Besides, she has had two children, and may yet have more.”
He opens the door and, heroic in his silence, suppresses, once and for
all, the accusations with which his heart is filled. In this matter, as
in others, he holds fast to his resolves. Next day she confesses that she
is in debt to the tune of two million francs. He pays without a word.
It is hard for his brothers, and still harder for his sisters, to accept
the situation; but they do not venture a remonstrance.
Nor is there time for the further discussion of family matters. Events
are on the wing. His brothers have not been idle while he has been
away. Joseph, after being envoy in Rome, is now on guard as one of the
Parisian deputies. Lucien is leader of the opposition, although, being
only twenty-four, he is under the legal age. A brilliant orator, dreaded
in debate, a Hotspur with a taste for theatrical displays, burning with
ambition, too headstrong for constructive work. He and Sieyès have been
working at plans for a coup d’état on their own, but they lack the
support of a great soldier whom the troops would follow. Now the soldier
has come, and Lucien will keep his private wishes to himself. He, too, is
a Bonaparte.
Dangerous, inscrutable, and cunning is Joseph’s new brother-in-law,
Bernadotte. He is slow in coming to greet Bonaparte. When he does
come, and Bonaparte speaks of the desperate situation of the republic,
Bernadotte rejoins: “It will be able to make headway against its enemies
both abroad and at home!” He looked searchingly at his interlocutor, and
for a moment the masterful eyes of the two men clash. But Bonaparte,
controlling his emotions as usual, attempts a diversion to political
issues, speaks again of the dangers, and then passes severe strictures on
the Jacobin Club. Thereupon Bernadotte breaks in: “Your brothers founded
it!”
Bonaparte is still loathe to take offence, and replies: “Well, well,
General, I would rather live in the woods than in a State where there is
no security!”
Bernadotte, mockingly: “Good God! What security is lacking to you?”
Now, Bonaparte is about to make an angry rejoinder, but Josephine
intervenes to keep the peace. And yet the hidden fact is that Josephine
is, in a sense, the cause of the dissension. For Bernadotte has married
Désirée Clary, to whom Napoleon had once paid court, with whom he had
not found favour when he was still obscure, and to whom he had preferred
Josephine when his fortunes were on the mend. Now he can forgive neither
himself nor Bernadotte. Throughout his career, Bonaparte will try, by
showering benefits on her, to atone to Désirée for what she has lost by
not marrying him, though it was mainly her doing that they did not become
man and wife. For her sake, he continually advances Bernadotte, who no
less persistently betrays him.
All that his brothers and other intimates have told him about affairs
in Paris during his absence, their picture of anarchical corruption and
violent impotence, fills him with forebodings and urges him to speedy
action. The number of the holders of power must be reduced, and their
term of office must be lengthened. The government is a plateau; it must
become a towering peak. A ten years’ triumvirate—that will be the best
plan.
At the Luxembourg they are all uneasy, now that he is back. Every one of
the Directors mistrusts him, and each of them is suspicious of his four
co-Directors likewise. Which of them is intriguing with Bonaparte? Sieyès
is on friendly terms with Lucien, Barras with Josephine, Gohier with
both. What about Ducos? Is General Moulin to be relied on?—Immediately
after reaching Paris Bonaparte had sent Moulin a Damascus blade with a
diamond-studded hilt, and Moulin could not in decency refuse the gift.
Such are the secret thoughts of the Directors. Look at Bonaparte’s
get-up when he first came to pay us his respects! Did any one ever see a
general in such a rig? Much more like an adventurer! Mufti; green coat;
round hat; Mameluke sword. The man wants to dazzle Paris into believing
him a pasha. Did you notice that he has had his hair cut short? Wants
to win people by an affectation of simplicity! Yet to-day he comes to
call in great style. General on horseback, with all his aides. Brilliant
uniforms. Paris agog. Very sinister, this change of aspect. Look at the
way he sits and questions the five of us, as if he were a monarch holding
audience.
“Why do you let the man impose on you?” say his enemies angrily to the
Directors. “He made a frightful mess of the Egyptian campaign. Your
proper course is plain enough. Have him arrested for deserting the army
under his command! He’s got something up his sleeve, you may be sure!”
Bonaparte, meanwhile, receives visits from Jacobin leaders and Bourbon
agents; gives advice to all and sundry, but tells no one what he really
thinks; behaves like a man of family who has just returned from a long
journey, and, with an air of good-natured boredom, allows his relatives
to tell him all about their squabbles while he has been away. He has
been home for two weeks now. The tension is increasing. Affairs of State
are at a standstill, or nearly so; for the Five, who should be carrying
on the work of government, are busied in intrigue. Amid the general
confusion, the Councils have utterly lost prestige. The new constitution
is rocking in the blast, but no one seems to know from which quarter
the wind is blowing. Who is the real holder of power in the State? Who
controls the army? General Moulin? General Bonaparte?
While no one can tell from day to day how the relationships between
Napoleon and the government are likely to shape themselves, he goes
to the Institute to deliver a lecture on the vestiges of the ancient
Suez canal, and describes the Rosetta stone. On November 1st, there
is a State banquet in honour of a victory won by Masséna. Where is
Bonaparte? No doubt it is not to his taste to celebrate the triumphs of a
brother-in-arms!
That evening he is closeted with Lucien and Abbé Sieyès. Talleyrand has
at length brought him in touch with the ablest of the Directors. Sieyès
and Bonaparte, the man who has rediscovered the constitution and the man
who has rediscovered the secret of power, sit face to face; they vie with
one another in ambition and in intellectual ability. “I have made the
Great Nation,” says the general. “You could not have done so, had we not
first made the Nation,” counters the abbé.
They discuss the details of the proposed coup d’état. On the critical
day, they will spread the report that a Jacobin conspiracy is afoot.
The Councils, in alarm, will transfer their sessions from Central
Paris to Saint-Cloud. “As a measure of precaution,” Bonaparte will be
entrusted with the command of the Paris garrison. Sieyès has come to an
understanding with Ducos. Persuasion, threats, or money, will induce the
other three Directors to resign. Barras will take money. But what about
Gohier? “Make short work of it,” says Lucien. “Dissolve the Councils by
force.” But at night Napoleon, when he is alone, turns matters over in
his mind:
“Force! How silly it was to use force four years ago! We see where it has
led! The supreme art is to maintain the appearance of legality. Without
cannon or bloodshed, without arrests and parties, that is the secret of
the ideal coup d’état. Otherwise you set up something that may last a
year before it wears out. After ten years of revolution, the republic is
heartily sick of it all. She is an amazon who has borne arms till she is
tired, and now asks nothing better than to be led by a strong man. She is
ready for me.
“Can I depend upon Sieyès? Behind that receding forehead of his, he
thinks too much. For ten years he has been building constitutions, but
he is nothing more than the ideologue whom a vigorous general can use
before casting aside. Had I not arrived in the nick of time, he would
have joined forces with Moreau. I shall turn the pair of them to account.
I know I can trust Berthier, Bourrienne, Murat, Marmont, and Leclerc.
Is Lucien faithful? For the time being. Bernadotte? His spiteful look
betrayed his true feelings. Still, he will not come into the field
against me. What about Talleyrand? A dangerous man, and for that very
reason I must have him on my side. Moulin? No time to waste; there are
too many generals in Paris. Watch out!”
Next evening he went to Talleyrand’s, for a private talk with that
intriguer. They sat late, discussing plans. Suddenly there was a noise
in the street. Trotting horses, which stop in front of the door. The
patrol? “Bonaparte turned pale, and I fancy I must have done the same,”
wrote Talleyrand in his Memoirs. Both men believe that they are about
to be arrested. Lights out, and on tiptoe to the balcony. False alarm!
An ordinary street scene, nocturnal revellers and police, nothing more.
The conspirators breathe again. But why do not the Directors have them
arrested on suspicion? The answer is simple. Bonaparte is already too
commanding a figure to be touched!
On the 6th, there is a banquet at the Luxembourg. Bonaparte and Moreau
are the guests, but the latter has the place of honour, and the hosts
eye Bonaparte askance. He reciprocates his entertainers’ suspicions, and
eats nothing but bread and eggs, handed him by a trusty servant. After
half an hour, he makes his excuses, and goes back to his confederates, to
talk over the plan for bringing about the downfall of the men with whom
he has just been dining. Next evening, Talleyrand, Roederer, and Sieyès,
dine with Bonaparte; Jourdan and Bernadotte, who are to be won over, have
also been invited. After dinner, he asks Jourdan what is to happen. This
simple question is evidence enough of the prevailing crisis. Two generals
who have never before exchanged a word except about commonplaces, meet,
and look one another in the face. “What is going to happen?” enquires
one. The other significantly grips his sword-hilt. The plotters agree to
take action in forty-eight hours. The parts to be played by members of
the inner ring are assigned. Murat, Lannes, and Marmont are to inform the
officers of the three branches of the service; Berthier will acquaint the
general staff.
Lucien undertakes to manage affairs in the Council of Five Hundred.
He is president for the month, having been elected in honour of his
brother’s return. The president of the Council of Ancients is also a
party to the conspiracy. The bedells will be told to overlook certain
names when notices of the sitting are sent out. As soon as Bonaparte
has been appointed commander of the Paris garrison, he will hand over
the Tuileries to Lannes and the Palais Bourbon to Murat. Gohier and his
wife will be invited to breakfast by Josephine—eight o’clock. Bonaparte
will offer himself to Barras for luncheon, in order to put Barras off
his guard. Joseph will persuade his brother-in-law Bernadotte to keep
quiet, if Bernadotte will not actively participate. Roederer writes the
proclamation. His son knows a friendly printer who will set it up and
machine it—on the quiet.
“Was Brutus’ mood so paltry?” thinks Bonaparte. “But, in truth, we too
wish to slay some one—Anarchy! A new era, a new century, to be ushered in
by such petty and distasteful means! Camp life is cleaner!”
XIX
November 9th, a foggy autumn morning; the Eighteenth Brumaire is dawning.
A bustle in the street opposite Bonaparte’s house; officers arriving on
horseback and in carriages. Is the blow to be struck at last? Most of
those present were with him in Italy. The house is too small for such
a concourse. They stroll up and down in the garden, discussing their
chances; lively and cheerful as if they were on the Rhine. Appearances
must be kept up. No one must be able to say that uniformed officers were
about so early. All goes well. Messengers come to confirm the carrying
out of the programme; both Councils were summoned at seven o’clock, but
undesirable members have not received notice. The initiates were the
first comers, and, as soon as there was a quorum, Lucien in the Council
of Five Hundred and his colleague in the Council of Ancients had proposed
Bonaparte’s appointment to the command of the Paris garrison.
Here is the messenger with the commission, duly sealed! The formalities
are being strictly observed. The general joins his faithful followers.
Everything goes on as if they were in camp. With a great suite, he rides
through the town, to the amazement of a huge crowd, which does not,
however, show any political interest. A dragoon regiment which had been
through the Italian campaign with Napoleon turns up on the Boulevard
Madeleine without awaiting the orders of its colonel. Other officers
follow with Ducos and Marmont. The latter summoned them at an early hour.
When they said they could not come for lack of horses, he borrowed some
from a riding-school.
The Tuileries garden is crowded. Many remain on horseback; but Bonaparte
dismounts and enters the Council of Ancients. Is he going to make a
speech to people whom he despises, in this dark and unfamiliar hall?
Why does he not take the oath to the constitution, the constitution he
is about to destroy? The law directs that a general appointed to a new
command should take this oath. Evading the formality, he speaks from the
rostrum:
“The republic is in danger.... Recognising this, you have passed a law
that will save it. Do not search history for examples that may give
reason for restraining your activities. No epoch in history is like the
end of the eighteenth century, and in that end there is nothing like this
moment.... We want a republic based on liberty and equality. We shall
have it. With the aid of all the friends of liberty, I shall save the
republic. In my own name and in that of my companions-in-arms, I swear it
to you!”
“We swear it!” comes like an echo through the open doors of the hall.
The Ancients move uneasily in their seats. “Companions-in-arms?”
But Bonaparte has left the hall, drawing a breath of relief. These
lawyers’-eyes; bespectacled eyes! Effete pygmies! Has he noticed that he
spoke to them as if he were on the parade ground, and that they did not
like his tone?
His words and his voice have a very different ring outside, when, having
remounted his charger, he summons his troops to save the republic. Then
comes a report from Lucien, who has meanwhile adjourned to the following
day the sitting of the Council of Five Hundred. What is that you say? The
Directors’ guard is on the way hither? Do they come as friends or foes?
“Is Sieyès sending them?” Their colonel says no. The two men laugh.
In fact, Sieyès, pale of countenance, is still at the gate of the
Luxembourg. For the last fortnight, our clever abbé has been taking
riding lessons. It had been his design to ride at the head of his guard
to join his new comrades. Before all the world, he would show his
equality with these comrades by leaning from his saddle and embracing
them. But the guard has started without his orders; their colonel has
brought them to the Tuileries, riding hell-for-leather, too hot a pace
for the abbé. Almost unnoticed, and much crestfallen, Sieyès drives
after them in a carriage, with Ducos, who is pliable, by his side. Every
one in the know is aware by this time what will happen to the other three
Directors.
Moulin looks at the matter from a soldier’s standpoint. He estimates the
opposing force at the Tuileries to be eight thousand strong, and his
adjutants report to him that all the important points of the town are in
Bonaparte’s hands. He writes, therefore, saying: “At your service.”
Honest Gohier is at home, blustering ineffectually. He had not thought
it advisable to accept the strange invitation to an eight o’clock
breakfast, and had been content to send his wife. Now, a sort of hostage,
she is drinking tea with Josephine, while Bonaparte is betraying her
husband—not, indeed, stealing his mistress, but stealing France. When the
first news comes, Gohier sends to his colleagues, summoning them to a
meeting of the Directory. No one turns up. Moulin has joined Sieyès and
Ducos. Barras says he is in his bath.
When Talleyrand, the messenger of fate, visits Barras, the Director is
shaving; he seems to be devoting the day to the arts of the toilet! But,
at a glance or two from the other augur, he throws up the game, being
content to ask for a safe-conduct. When his secretary brings this demand
to Bonaparte, the general harangues the man publicly in the Tuileries
garden: “What have you done with France, that I should let you off so
easily? I gave you peace, and I find war.... What have you done with the
hundred thousand Frenchmen who were the companions of my glory? They
are dead! We can go no farther along that road, for in three years it
leads to despotism! We want a republic based on equality and liberty,
toleration and morality!”
Thus berated, the little secretary shakes in his shoes. In reality,
Bonaparte is perfectly calm, but it suits him to simulate wrath in the
presence of so many witnesses. In a couple of hours, all Paris will hear
of it.
Here comes Gohier. He does not lack courage, anyhow. Bearding the man
of power surrounded by his troops, Gohier reminds him of his duty to the
Directory.
“The Directory no longer exists!” storms Bonaparte. “The republic is
in danger, and I intend to save it. Sieyès, Ducos, and Barras have
resigned.” As he speaks, a letter from Moulin is brought to him. “Are not
you in league with Moulin? No? Well, here is his resignation too. You are
the last. Do you intend to hold out all by yourself?”
Gohier is a stickler for the law, and refuses to give way. He goes back
to the Luxembourg, and there he and his friends are kept under guard by
five hundred men until all is over. Barras is waiting at home, uneasy
till he has the answer to his message. What if Bonaparte were now to
take vengeance? Who can depend on Josephine’s moods? Here is Talleyrand
back again, with the safe-conduct and a bag of gold. As to this last,
no one knows whether Barras had the fingering of the money, or whether
Talleyrand kept it as messenger’s fee.
Thus the five heads of the republic were rendered powerless by General
Bonaparte. But this was only the first day. To-morrow, at Saint-Cloud,
greater difficulties may have to be faced. Lucien, who has been all over
the place, and is fully informed, exclaims with well-grounded anger: “The
whole job ought to have been finished in one day! You have left them too
much time! The Five Hundred are already crying out that they have been
tricked! To-morrow all will be in the melting-pot once more! The only
thing to do is to send soldiers to clear out the Chambers, and to put the
most dangerous members of the Councils under arrest.”
Certainly there may be complications to-morrow. Bernadotte had wanted
the Jacobin Club to appoint him general of the opposing forces. “But the
fellows were in too great a funk!” The generals unsympathetic to the coup
d’état must be put under lock and key. Bonaparte’s associates urge this
again and again, but in vain. He is resolute to maintain the semblance of
legality.
“People would say I was afraid of the generals. No one shall have a right
to accuse us of illegality. No parties; no force! The whole people must
be associated with the decision through the votes of its deputies! No
civil war! What begins with the shedding of civilian blood, will come to
a shameful end!”
But at night, prepared for all eventualities, he has loaded pistols handy
to his bedside.
XX
Next morning, an endless string of carriages and carts, an endless
succession of riders and pedestrians, makes its way to Saint-Cloud, as
if to see a great military review. Bonaparte, too, drives instead of
going on horseback attended by a bevy of mounted officers. That might
be provocative. He has made up his mind to observe constitutional
formalities to the very last moment. Could any one say that there had
been a breach of law the day before? Are not the Councils entitled to
remove their sittings to a spot beyond the precincts of the town, if
they think that this would be safer? Is it not within their competence
to appoint a new commander for the Paris garrison? Had not the Directors
the right to resign? Will any one pretend that the Jacobin peril, which
is the occasion for these happenings, is imaginary? To-day, at public
sittings, the Councils will alter the constitution. Three rulers will be
provisionally appointed. Borrowing a title from ancient Rome, they can be
called Triumvirs, or, perhaps better, Consuls. Then the Councils will be
prorogued, everything being done in due form of law.
But the deputies hold other views. Like cloud-drifts hanging low,
they flit through the valleys of this forsaken palace, discussing the
situation, and giving vent to their protests. Since the hall that is
being furbished up for the sitting will not be ready before one o’clock,
they have plenty of time to foment their wrath.
In a small room fronting on the park, sit the three men who will be
Consuls to-morrow. At least Sieyès and Ducos remain seated most of the
time, but the third walks up and down impatiently, as his adherents come
and go to report. He thinks: “How infernally slow civilians are! They
have needed a whole morning to arrange a few benches. Then they must take
an oath one by one, a thing which our recruits do in chorus, and get
through it all in a couple of minutes! Why should I have to wait in a
back room while these lawyers are deliberating in the council chamber?”
The Ancients meet upstairs in the Salle Apollo; the Five Hundred,
downstairs in the Orangerie. Spectators, safe people, throng the hall of
the Five Hundred. When, after the swearing-in, the discussions at length
begin (Lucien is in the chair), the protests of the opposition gain
weight from the circumstances. Speakers point to the threatening force
of soldiery outside. When some of the orators exclaim: “No dictatorship!
This Cromwell wants to bind us in chains!” almost all the delegates
applaud. The reports that come to the back room are more and more
unfavourable. The officers grow restive: “Chase the beggars out! What
else have we got our men here for?”
Bonaparte’s only answer is a cold glance. Buckling on his sword, he
silently mounts the stairs to the hall of the Ancients. Two or three
of the stalwarts follow him, shaking their heads. Is he going to talk
once more, as he did yesterday, instead of shooting? Amazed but curious,
the president allows him to speak. Will he put up a better case than
yesterday, speaking to the point, and not simply haranguing them about
himself?
“Yesterday, I was sitting quietly at home when you summoned me....
To-day, I am overwhelmed with calumnies.... Since my return, all parties
have been busied with my name.... The Council of Ancients must decide
quickly. I am no intriguer. You know me. Have I not given proof and to
spare of my devotion to the country?... Am I, a man whom even the great
coalition could not conquer, to tremble before a few rioters? If I am a
crafty schemer, you may well be all Brutuses!”
Uneasy stirrings; smiles. Why does he speak, instead of acting? He is
not sure of his ground, for he goes on to say: “All France shall know
what we have lived through.—Every one of the parties wishes to turn this
crisis to its own account, and every one of them would like me to side
with it. But I have come to the Councils. If you hesitate, and if liberty
is overthrown, you will be answerable to the world and to posterity!”
His periods grow ever more confused. The Ancients surround the rostrum,
interrupting him, demanding names. Suddenly he turns, and waves his
hand towards the doors, as if pointing to the soldiers, who are out of
sight. He seems to be looking for an exit. He apostrophises the invisible
soldiers:
“You, comrades, whom I see united in this circle, raise your bayonets
with which we fought our way to victory together, raise them against my
breast! But if an orator in foreign pay dares to call your general an
outlaw, smite the wretch with the thunderbolts of battle! The god of
battles and the goddess of good fortune are on my side....”
Will not a burst of laughter sweep the speaker away, and his coup d’état
along with him? At length Bourrienne comes up to him from behind, takes
him by the arm, and whispers in his ear: “Do stop, General. You really
don’t know what you’re saying!” He turns, and follows Bourrienne from the
hall. A deputy devoted to his interest takes the floor promptly, and does
his best to put a good face upon the matter.
[Illustration: General Bonaparte in 1798, during the voyage to Egypt.
Sketch by André Dutertre.]
Outside, he draws a breath of relief. What could have been the matter
with him? Why had his brain been clouded? Amid all the turmoil of battle,
he is calm, fully master of himself; his decisions are well-rounded,
brilliant, and cool, like polished marble spheres. Why is he unequal to
the occasion on this day of days, when his whole future is at stake?
Because he is a man who knows how to command, but does not know how to
beg. He can cajole, threaten, feign hesitation, lie; outdoing in these
arts all the diplomatists with whom he negotiates treaties. He meets them
as equals, but is always sustained by the feeling that, if he does not
get his way by diplomacy, he can enforce his wishes by artillery fire. He
can endure everything, except having to ask favours, and except having
to submit to a law which is not of his own making. He wants order and
legality, but not such as existed before he established them!
With titanic energy, as he already foresees, he will lead this country
towards order, will found an orderly State after a decade of chaos. No
one will be the worse for humble birth or for poverty, since all will
have equal opportunities. But in these halls to-day sit lawyers, ridden
by the spirit of faction, corrupt, outworn, besoiled by the grime of
party politics. He is to implore them to be good enough to give him (and
others) a power which has long been his, and which stands outside there,
impatient to get to work!
He, who in the Institute could sit quietly among the savants, learning
and questioning, is so little able to understand the mood of these
legislative assemblies that he actually fancies the day already won. He
sends a message to Josephine to tell her that all is going well; says a
few encouraging words to his followers, and goes quickly downstairs to
play a similar part before the Council of Five Hundred. It is just as
well that his friends take the precaution to send into the hall with him
four stalwart grenadiers, whose strength and loyalty can be thoroughly
depended on.
No matter that this escort is quite out of keeping with his determination
to be strict in the observance of parliamentary forms! Followed by his
grenadiers, carrying hat and riding whip in his hand, he enters the
hall of the Five Hundred. “Bonaparte!” All turn towards the door. The
Jacobins shout: “Down with the tyrant! Down with the dictator! Outlaw
him!” A few of the more hefty among the Five Hundred hurl themselves
upon him; the grenadiers rally to his protection, encircling him, and
sheltering him with their big bodies from the angry Jacobins’ blows. The
combat sways to and fro for a while, a knot of struggling and shouting
people. Then, step by step, the five force their way backwards towards
the door. Outside, surrounded by his own supporters, he is for a moment
too much discomposed to speak; but, rallying quickly, he makes for the
back room.
During the Italian campaign, Bonaparte was under fire in the front
ranks on several occasions. At Lodi, and again at Arcola, he had been
in imminent peril. But here, he was for the first time involved in a
rough-and-tumble affray where fire-arms and cold steel are against
the rules. Towards the close of his career, he was to have a similar
experience. In such a chance medley, he could not draw his sword. He
must assume his antagonists to be unarmed, though some of them were in
truth armed. To use his sword seemed to be in hopeless conflict with the
fundamental principles of the coup d’état—as he envisaged it.
But at length he has to abandon these principles of his. In person, he
has been rescued from the blows of his adversaries, but their fists have
shattered his doctrine. Force has been used against him. He strides
furiously up and down the room; his pride is touched to the quick; in his
anger, he scratches his cheek till his finger-nails are bloody. Blood?
In an instant he has recovered his composure. This blood will be most
useful! Attempted assassination in the council chamber! He will show his
soldiers how these villains have manhandled the commander of Paris! The
pretence that the other side had been the first to break the law, frees
him from the tyranny of his principles.
In the assembly hall, meanwhile, Lucien is fighting for him. “Hors la
loi! Outlaw him!” cry most of the deputies. Lucien tries to still the
clamour with voice and bell. The attempt is vain. A formal demand is
made for a vote on Bonaparte’s outlawry, and every one knows what that
means in revolutionary Paris. Since there is no other way out of the
difficulty, Lucien, whose pose to-day is that of the defender of law and
order, with an imposing gesture throws off his toga and storms out of the
hall. None too soon!
He finds his brother with the troops. Napoleon had turned pale when
the news had been brought of the vote of outlawry. Then, running to
the window, he called to the troops: “To arms!” Going out, he mounted,
and was quick to notice that the soldiers were not sufficiently moved,
were not yet ripe for action. Night was falling, and all were waiting
on events. Lucien came out, leapt into the saddle, and the two brothers
rode up and down the front. Outside the railings were Sieyès and Ducos in
a carriage, ready for flight to-day, or to become rulers to-morrow, as
events might decide. The movement seemed to be without a head.
Then Lucien grasped the opportunity. He could make a better job of
speaking to the soldiers than Napoleon had made of speaking to the
deputies:
“Soldiers, as president of the Five Hundred I tell you that in the hall
there the majority is being terrorised by a handful of armed Jacobins.
These rascals are in English pay. They have dared to outlaw your general,
who was appointed by the Councils. They actually tried to assassinate
him. Look at the wounds! Use your bayonets to guard him against their
daggers, so that the deliberations concerning the welfare of the country
can be conducted in peace! Recognise as deputies none but those who come
with me into the midst of your ranks. Drive out the rest, all who would
stay in the hall!”
Napoleon listens with pinched lips. When Lucien has finished, he speaks
in his turn, shouting: “Kill any one who resists. Follow me! I am the god
of battles!” Lucien, who is afraid of another speech, hisses: “For God’s
sake, hold your tongue!”
“Long live Bonaparte!” shout the soldiers, who regard the brothers as
military and civil authority conjoined. But not a man moves. All is lost,
if they will not march now. Lucien grasps at the last expedient. With
a theatrical flourish, he snatches an officer’s sword and points it at
Napoleon’s breast: “I swear that I will run my brother through, should he
ever dare to threaten the liberties of France!”
The phrase has the desired effect. Murat orders the sounding of a general
advance, summons a troop of soldiers to follow him, and shouts: “Lads,
chuck the whole rabble of them out of the hall!” At length he has raised
a laugh. With bayonets at the charge, but good-humouredly and without
hurting any one, they thrust from the hall any of the deputies that
are valiant enough to offer resistance. In the failing light, there
is a confused scene in which red togas, birettas, and the caps of the
guardsmen are intermingled. The last of the fleeing deputies escape
through the windows.
The priceless Lucien now hastened upstairs to the Council of Ancients.
Grossly exaggerating the injuries sustained by his brother at the hands
of the Jacobin deputies, he induced the Ancients, in a panic, to appoint
the three Consuls, and to adjourn their sitting until a late hour that
night. Then the leaders foregathered in a small café for a meal, being
all much in need of food.
That night, the most trustworthy among the deputies reassembled in the
deserted hall at Saint-Cloud. By the light of a pair of candles, the
thirty who were left to represent the people of France voted whatever
they were told. While a hundred or so people of fashion, pretty women and
their gallants, mockingly watched the midnight ceremony—while all went
smoothly, society-at-large being quite undisturbed and the proletariat
unruffled—the indefatigable Lucien insisted that the political mass
should be worthily celebrated. At two in the morning, to the sound of
drums, the three Consuls took the oath. “Long live the republic!” called
a few weary voices.
At three o’clock, Consul Bonaparte drives back to Paris with Bourrienne.
He looks straight in front of them, saying never a word. Not until he is
at home, and Josephine is present, does he open his mouth:
“I say, Bourrienne, did I talk a frightful lot of nonsense to-day?”
“A fair amount, General.”
“Those idiots drove me crazy. I’m no good at speaking in public
assemblies.”
Then, instead of going on to talk about the coup d’état, or to
congratulate himself upon its amazing success (for from to-morrow onwards
he will rule France) he alludes to personal enmities. Bernadotte’s
conduct is what rankles!
“That fellow Bernadotte! He wanted to betray me! His wife—his wife has a
great deal of influence over him. I should have thought I had done enough
to placate him! You were there, and you know. I regret having gone so far
to please him. He will have to clear out of Paris. There is no other way
in which I can pay my score.... Good-night, Bourrienne. To-morrow night
we shall sleep in the Luxembourg.”
BOOK THREE
THE RIVER
One who thoughtfully ponders the centuries,
Surveys the whole in the clear light of the spirit;
All that is petty has vanished from sight;
Oceans and continents alone are of account.—GOETHE.
I
About twenty men are seated round a large oval table. Some are quite
young, some middle-aged, some elderly. They are plainly dressed, in
accordance with the fashion of 1800, when wigs were no longer worn,
and lace was out of date; those of them that are in uniform are not
resplendent with gold braid, and they wear no orders. Some have the
bold, self-confident look of the man of action; others, the thoughtful
mien of the savant. From town and from countryside, from office and from
laboratory, they come, but are unified by a common experience and a
common aim. For ten years, they have been living through a revolutionary
epoch; they meet to bring that epoch to a close. Around them is the chill
splendour of the Tuileries, the palace of the last Bourbon kings. The
golds and the reds of the rich carpets and the silken hangings are out
of keeping with their bourgeois circumstantiality; the silvery sheen of
the candles, reflected in rainbow tints from the myriad facets of the
candelabras, recalls an era that scintillated with light and glowed with
colour.
The Directors before them had been wont to entertain their lady friends
in royal halls, but that was in the Luxembourg, the former meeting-place
of the peers of France. The Tuileries seemed full of Ghosts. Did not
a curse lie upon the place? The dictator had broken the spell. Two
months after the coup d’état, he had come with his fellow Consuls to
take possession of the palace, which exerted a magical lure upon his
imagination. Yet when, seven years after the arrest of the last scion of
the royal line, the first of the bourgeois rulers made his formal entry,
the affair had a strong flavour of burlesque. The Parisians could not
but laugh to see the numbers of the hackney carriages peeping out from
beneath the slips of paper which had been carelessly pasted over them.
This seemed to symbolise the ludicrous aspect of time’s revenges.
The Consul’s own mood was no less haphazard as he looked round with
childlike curiosity. “Well, here we are in the Tuileries,” he said to one
of his friends; “let’s see to it that we stay here!”
Several of those now seated at the oval table, had waited here of
old—wearing powdered wigs, lace jabots, and pumps—tremulous with
eagerness to learn whether His Majesty would receive them, and when. Some
of them had sat at a similar table in the Luxembourg. There had been no
stability about those deliberations. Laws had come and gone, urgency
orders and exceptional provisions; transitional decrees had pushed
foregoing decrees out of the way; three constitutions had risen and set,
had shot up into the air swiftly and brilliantly like rockets, to vanish
like these and to fall like rocket-sticks. The whole decade during which
the new ideas had been trying to realise themselves in the concrete,
had passed swiftly over Paris like a single night, amid a confusion of
flashing lights and rumbling drums. The city had been like an armed camp
with no fighting fronts and no battles, but perturbed by the to-and-fro
march of armed political parties, deafened by the noisy wrangling between
the old order and the new wishes, dazzled by the glare of venturesome
ideas, confused by the clamour of disappointed hopes and the clash of
warring ambitions—a titanic bacchanal of liberty, equality, and cozenage.
Surveying the medley, looking down from the skies, were the shades of the
two men whose books had set the whole in motion: Rousseau, with eyes of
disgust; Voltaire, with a mocking smile.
But suddenly the tumult had been stilled. That little man at the head
of the table had stilled it, the little general in the well-worn green
uniform. Not that he, presiding over the Council of State, is in fact
presiding over the State; the parties have withdrawn into their caves,
satisfied or rancorous, but at any rate silenced. France, weakened by
clubs and corruption, by the Terror and the demagogues, is turning back
(like an adventuress weary of errant amours) to the arms of a strong man
who can master her.
Enough, now, for Bonaparte that he should aspire to fulfil this masterful
lover’s role. No longer did he need to fight for the position. The man
for whom France was longing, must be a man of order; must be one who
had never before held power, who belonged to no party, and who none
the less enjoyed popular favour. He must, therefore, be a soldier and
a conqueror. Moreau lacked the self-confidence and adroitness needed
to make him a successful rival; the other great generals were dead or
overshadowed; there were no civilian competitors. After Bonaparte’s
outstanding military successes, it was easy for him to win supreme power
in the State. He would have won it without a struggle had he not been so
stubborn in his desire to observe constitutional formalities.
The attempt to be strictly constitutional had been a ludicrous failure,
and had imposed artificial obstacles in his path. Yet this very fact was
a token and a guarantee of his political talents. He was a man with a
firm grip on the sword-hilt, but he was also a man who clearly understood
the limits of the power of the sword. “Do you know,” he said in those
days, “what amazes me more than all else? The impotence of force to
organise anything. There are only two powers in the world: the spirit and
the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the
spirit.” Napoleon was the greatest military commander of his day, but
neither now nor later was it his habit to strike the table with mailed
fist, neither in Paris at this juncture nor elsewhere when negotiating a
truce or a peace or an alliance. He was a political genius, who prized
the sword, indeed, but prized it only as one of the two powers. His ear
was never deafened by the clash of arms. As now, so for fifteen years to
come, he is ever on the watch for indications of public opinion; always
listening to the voice of the people, a voice which defies calculation;
a voice which Napoleon, a man of figures, vainly tries to calculate.
Precisely because of his failure to do this, the attempt to reckon with
public opinion is always alluring to the imaginative side of his nature.
Because Bonaparte believes in the power of the spirit more than in the
power of the sword, he strives for order and peace more resolutely than
for war and conquest. The history of the next ten years will prove it.
For him, order denotes equality, but not liberty. He adopts into his
dictatorship the former of these two gods of the revolution. Except
for a few vacillations, he will cherish equality to the end, despite
appearances to the contrary. But liberty? What is liberty? “Both the
savage and the civilised man need a lord and master, a magician, who
will hold the imagination in check, impose strict discipline, bind man
in chains, so that he may not bite out of season; one who will thrash
him, and lead him to the chase. Obedience is man’s destiny; he deserves
nothing better, and he has no rights!” These threatening words of the
misanthropist disclose no more than half of his secret thoughts. Through
all the phases of his rule, he is ever in search of the efficient man,
and to such a man he grants power over thousands; just as he himself,
through energy and diligence, through natural and acquired superiority,
has won to power over millions. In spite of all, he is the son of the
revolution; and in this sense he will remain the son of the revolution,
whatever forms his power may assume.
In part, that is the explanation of the mysterious influence he wields.
The wider his domain extends, the more plainly do all realise that
they are living in a system which promises to every efficient man the
gratification of his wishes, and guarantees to every efficient man place
and power and wealth; which does these things because the Master has
himself risen out of the crowd. He shows this, now, in his very first
step. Sieyès has drafted a constitution. There is to be a grand elector,
a president who can only represent and sign his name. With soldierly
curtness, Bonaparte puts his pen through the item. “Away with this fat
hog!” Instead, there is to be a First Consul, with plenary powers, and
plenty of work. He is to be war lord and also director of foreign policy;
he is to appoint all ministers and envoys, councillors of State and
prefects, officers and judges. Thirty nominated senators are to elect
their colleagues; but neither the Senate nor the Legislative Assembly
nor the Tribunate is to have any power to initiate legislation. These
bodies are merely brought into existence to give politicians a platform
for their orations, and to provide senators with high salaries and
opportunities for a resplendent life.
Although everything was dependent upon the will of one man, that one
man insisted that those dependent on him should themselves be men, and
not mere names. Neither birth nor pretentiousness nor prominence in a
political party could lead to the front in the army or in civil life.
Nothing but energy and capacity could ensure promotion. Such was the
principle upon which Napoleon chose the members of the Council of State.
This last was a round table of experts, selected by the dictator on his
own initiative. Among them was Laplace, whom, to honour the Institute,
Napoleon had also appointed Minister for Home Affairs—an appointment
the great mathematician held for a time, until he turned back from the
mechanics of the State to the mechanics of the heavens. There, too,
was Roederer, official and journalist, the most independent man to be
encountered by Napoleon during twenty years, and the most valuable
recorder of conversations. Tronchet, also, one of the finest jurists of
the age, was there. In the council chamber, all alike were citizens,
and addressed one another by that plain title. Royalists and Jacobins
sat there side by side, under a regime of equality, since reason was
enthroned.
When the minutes of the sittings are shown to the citizen-consul, he
says: “It is essential to give a full and accurate report of the opinions
expressed by legal luminaries, for their words are weighty; but what we
soldiers and moneyed men think is of little account. In the heat of the
moment I have often said things which an instant afterwards I saw to have
been unjust. I do not wish to seem better than I am.” When he noticed
that the councillors were simply echoing whatever he said, he was quick
to call them to order: “You are not here, gentlemen, to agree with me,
but to express your own views. If you do that, I can compare them with
mine, and decide which is better.”
The sittings, often enough, do not begin before nine in the evening, for
up till then the Consul has been dealing with the urgent affairs of the
day. They may last till five o’clock in the morning. The councillors get
very tired during the small hours. Perhaps the Minister for War goes
to sleep. Napoleon shakes them up, exclaiming: “Do let’s keep awake,
citizens. It’s only two o’clock. We must earn our salaries.” He, who
presides, is indeed one of the youngest of the company, being now thirty.
But in three campaigns he has learned how to watch over the interests of
hundreds of thousands. Was not the management of an army which set out
from the Alps, crossed the sea, and marched far into the desert—was not
this the best school for the study of State administration? There, too,
he had to think of money and bread, of rights and laws, of rewards and
punishments, of rest and obedience and order.
During the very first night after the coup d’état, he had appointed
two committees to draft a legal code; this was the first act of his
dictatorship! The prevailing chaos had been the outcome of a lack of law.
Down to the outbreak of the revolution, there had been no unified legal
system in France. The revolution brought the promise of such a system;
but even now, after eleven years, the promise was unfulfilled. That first
summer, three great lawyers were set to work; four months later a draft
of the Civil Code, subsequently rechristened the Code Napoléon, was
ready; then the draft was discussed in the Council of State. In eighteen
months the laws were voted. They passed into effect in 1804.
After more than a century, this Code is still the law of France; it
was adopted in many of the lands conquered by Napoleon, having great
influence on the legislation of Central and Southern Germany, Prussia,
Switzerland, and Spain; and its influence spread still farther afield,
to Central America and South America. All that is new and morally
decisive in the Code Napoléon is revolutionary law. The law-book which
the Dictator discussed in all its details for many months, the law-book,
many of whose most contentious points were the direct outcome of his
decisions, borrowed the fixed principles of reason that had been sketched
in the first days of the revolution. Experienced and dispassionate
minds, under Napoleon’s guidance, worked them up, purified them, and
made them into a new system of the rights of man. In this system, there
was no longer a hereditary nobility; all children had an equal share in
inheritance; all parents became legally responsible for the maintenance
of their children; Jews became equal with Christians before the law;
civil marriage was open to all, and was dissoluble.
Concerning this matter, as concerning all matters of family law, his
Corsican family feeling persistently influenced his judgments: “We know
that adultery is not a rare occurrence, but an ordinary one; that it can
happen on any convenient sofa.... Some sort of restraint must be imposed
upon these women who commit adultery for trinkets or verses, for Apollo
and the nine Muses.”
His sense of order leads him to be a thorough-going supporter of
marriage. He even sees to it that women shall follow their husbands
into transportation, “for how can we forbid a woman to do so when she
is convinced of her husband’s innocence? Or is this conviction of hers
to deprive her of her rights as married woman; is she to lose the title
of wife, and to become the man’s concubine? Many men have only become
criminals owing to their wives. Are we to forbid those who have been the
cause of the misfortune from sharing that misfortune?” He also thinks
highly of the custom of old Roman days, when, at marriage, the woman was
formally described as passing from her father’s guardianship into that of
her husband. “That would be excellent in Paris, where women do as they
please. It would influence some of them, though not all.”
Therefore, though he favours divorce, it must not be too easy: “What
would happen to the most intimate of natural ties if people were suddenly
to become estranged? Unless we make divorce difficult, a young woman
will be ready to marry a quite unsuitable man, for fashion, convenience,
simply to get a roof over her head. The law must warn her against
this.... In truth, there are only three valid grounds for divorce:
attempted murder, adultery, and impotence.”
Such are the plastic thoughts of this expert in human nature, whose
mathematical talents still leave him free to subsume facts under ideas;
one who has an intelligence well fitted for the consideration of laws,
seeing that it is equally swayed by theory and practice, by energetic
activity and sceptical suspense. The conflict of trends within the
legislator’s mind is obvious, and it was intensified by his thoughts
concerning Josephine’s former infidelity and present faithfulness. (We
know that she manifested a lively interest in the drafting of those
sections of the Code that related to divorce! Napoleon at this time was
already wondering whether, if his wife remained childless, he would
not have to divorce her for reasons of State. Her own dread of this
possibility led her to use her influence in favour of strengthening the
marriage tie, whereas he was driven by self-interest to insist that
marriage must not be indissoluble.)
It is a personal feeling, too, which drives him to avoid scandal, to save
the honour of marriage. He opposes the interference of the law-courts in
conjugal questions; prefers that such matters should be settled by mutual
understanding, so that the veil shall not be stripped off. “The desire
of both parties for divorce is an indication that divorce is necessary.
It is not the business of the court to establish the fact that this
mutual desire exists; the court has simply to pronounce the divorce when
the desire exists.” His strong family feeling leads him to add that
maltreatment, perversion, and adultery should be concealed beneath the
formula of mutual desire; the need for divorce is to be settled at a
family council, and the judge has merely to confirm this decision.
For the same reason, he introduces a semi-divorce, a judicial separation
from bed and board. This is always to be arranged after a mutual
private understanding, for it will be a barrier to the possibility of
reconciliation if the grounds for the separation have been made public.
His aim in all these matters is to maintain family life; he is a champion
of order, an anti-revolutionist. His social sense is so strong that
he maintains it would be necessary to punish an adulterous woman by
criminal procedure unless she were punished by being divorced. Similar
considerations regarding the sanctity of marriage lead him to raise the
age at which marriage becomes permissible. At the revolution it had
been lowered to thirteen for women and fifteen for men; he insists upon
fifteen and twenty-one respectively.
For children, the Code promises all the things which the ensuing century
is slowly to build up. Under the fatherhood of the man to whom they are
born in lawful marriage, they have a secure position even before they
enter the world. True, “the father cannot recognise the child as his own
if he has been absent for fifteen months”—the figure is specified by
Napoleon—“and has fought at Marengo.” But, a man of position as well as
a man of the world, he concludes by saying: “I will sacrifice honour to
truth, but why should I sacrifice the wife’s honour when no one will gain
thereby? If the husband is not sure of his dates, he had better hold his
tongue; the child’s interest is paramount.”
When some one proposes to restrict the elder children’s right to
maintenance, he rejoins: “Is a father to have the right to drive his
fifteen-year-old daughter out of the house? Let us suppose him to have
an income of sixty thousand francs, can we allow him to say to his son:
‘You are old enough to tend for yourself; be off with you to work!’ If
we limit this duty, we shall tend to make children entertain thoughts
of putting their father out of the way.” The suggestion is made that
adoption shall be feasible by simple declaration before a notary, with
revolutionary speed. He opposes the plan:
“We are not concerned here with a trivial formality. Human beings are
controlled through their imaginations; that is what distinguishes them
from animals. The main defect of the newer legislation is that it makes
no appeal to men’s imaginations. A soldier does not face death in order
to earn a few pence a day, or to win some paltry order of merit. None
but the man who touches his heart, can stir his enthusiasm! A notary
cannot touch our hearts merely because we pay him a fee of twelve francs;
that is why we need a legislative act. What is adoption? An imitation of
nature, a sort of sacrament. By the will of society, the offspring of
one human being’s flesh and blood is supposed to become the offspring of
another’s flesh and blood. Could any action be more sublime? Thanks to
it, two creatures between whom there is no tie of blood, become inspired
by a natural mutual affection. Whence must this action come? Like the
lightning, from on high!”
“In these sittings,” says Roederer, “the First Consul manifested those
remarkable powers of attention and precise analysis which enabled him for
ten hours at a stretch to devote himself to one object, or to several,
without ever allowing himself to be distracted by memory or by errant
thoughts.”
Bonaparte is filled with respect for the logicality and mental energy of
the octogenarian Tronchet; and the old lawyer responds with admiration
for the analytical faculty and the sense of justice of the young Consul,
who, in the case of every ordinance, asks: “Is it just?” and “Is it
useful?” He is never tired of enquiring how predecessors have solved the
problems under consideration, paying special attention to Roman law and
to the legal institutions of Frederick the Great.
Not only are thirty-seven laws discussed at this table; furthermore,
the Consul propounds question after question concerning other matters.
How is bread made? How shall we make new money? How shall we establish
security? He makes all his ministers send detailed reports, and this is
a great tax upon their energies. But he affects not to notice that they
are overworked, and when they get home they often find letters from him
requiring an immediate answer. One of his collaborators writes: “Ruling,
administering, negotiating—with that orderly intelligence of his, he
gets through eighteen hours’ work every day. In three years he has ruled
more than the kings ruled in a century.” He spoke to every expert in the
phraseology of the craft, so that none of them could ever plead in excuse
that his questions had not been understood. Even the most hidebound
royalists were amazed at the technical accuracy of his enquiries.
His unfailing memory was the artillery wherewith he defended the fortress
of his brain. Ségur, returning from an official inspection of the
fortifications on the north coast, sends in a report. “I have read your
report,” says the First Consul. “It is accurate, but you have forgotten
two of the four guns in Ostend. They are on the high road behind the
town.” Ségur is astonished to find that Napoleon is right. His report
deals with thousands of guns, scattered all over the place, but the chief
pounces on the omission of two.
By slow degrees, the huge machine (which for ten years has been standing
still or moving backwards) is set in regular motion once more. Throughout
the last decade, all the reports from the provinces have been full of
complaints regarding the lack of public safety, sanitation, and order;
the louis-d’or used to exchange for twenty-four francs, but now the ratio
is one to eight thousand; the Directory’s attempt to stabilise the franc
has been an utter failure; the newly enriched have bought up the State
domains, the Church lands, and the seignorial estates. No one is paying
taxes. What is the new dictator going to do about it all?
Within a fortnight after the coup d’état, he had arranged for the
establishment of tax-collecting offices in all the departments, for,
as he put it: “Security and property are only to be found in a country
which is not subject to yearly changes in the rate of taxation.” Two
months later, the Bank of France came into being; next year, there were
new boards to supervise taxation, the registration of landed property,
and forestry. Whereas his predecessors had simply squandered the State
domains, he used what was left of them to defray repayment of national
debt. The funds rose from 7 to 17; he continued the process of debt
cancellation, renovated the Chambers of Commerce, regulated the Stock
Exchange, put an end to speculation in the depreciated currency, stopped
the frauds of the army contractors and other war profiteers, and by these
and similar measures restored manufacturing industry whose productivity
had sunk to a quarter or half of its former level.
What was his magical spell?
At the head of affairs was himself, a man of indomitable energy, and
incorruptible. Men of the same stamp, energetic, diligent, and bold, were
put in charge of the ministries, the departments, and the prefectures.
Favouritism was done away with; sinecures were abolished. Preferment was
obtainable only by the efficient, and to them it came regardless of birth
or party. All officials, down to the mayors, were appointed from above,
and paid from above—“a hierarchy, all First Consuls in miniature,” to
quote his own words.
There was no political opposition. “No reaction is possible,” he
prophesied. “I have not relied upon the credit or upon the strength of
a party, and am therefore indebted to no one.—The men of intelligence
who, a little while ago, were perpetrating crimes, are now being used by
me to upbuild a new social edifice. There are excellent workmen among
them but the trouble is that they would all like to be master builders.
Typically French, that trait; every one thinks himself competent to
rule the country!” Being careful to satisfy all parties, he gives the
two most coveted portfolios to two rogues, mutually hostile, but both
men of remarkable ability. Having done this, he is able to say: “What
revolutionist can fail to have confidence in the social system when
Fouché, the Jacobin, is Minister of Police. What nobleman would be
unwilling to live under Talleyrand as Minister for Foreign Affairs? I
have one of them on my right, and the other on my left. I open a wide
road, in which all can find room.”
To all the prefects and all the generals the order went forth: “No more
clubs; no more parties. Tell the National Guardsmen and the citizens
whenever you can, if a few ambitious fellows still feel the need to
hate, that the rudder of State is now in strong hands, accustomed to
overcome obstacles.” A few weeks after the coup d’état, he issued a great
proclamation, commending the new constitution to the people. It closed
with the simple and lofty words: “Citizens, the revolution has returned
to the principles with which it began. It is at an end.”
II
It is not war.
“Returning to Europe after eighteen months’ absence, I find that war has
broken out once more between the French Republic and Your Majesty. The
French people summons me to the first position in the State.” In these
terms, shortly after the coup d’état, he addresses the German emperor,
just before marching against him. Napoleon writes as proudly as any
monarch, as if before the journey he had already been the first man in
the State; and he writes with the natural dignity to which, in large
measure, he owes his success. That is his way. In this manner he puts
his adversary in the wrong. But the emperor is unmoved. Well, Bonaparte’s
plans were made long since; he has only to carry them out.
First of all he surrounds himself with a guard, every member of which
must have been through four campaigns—as many as the commander, but no
more. Then, while he sends Moreau to fight on the Rhine, he makes his
own preparations for an adventure in Italy. If he were to come along
the coast, as he did four years ago, they would be ready for him. He
must find a new plan! At Dijon, in full view of the Austrian spies, he
collects from the rawest levies a pitiful reserve corps, and smiles as
he reads the mocking comments in the Viennese papers. Meanwhile, he
prepares a force of 32,000 men, no more, but the finest soldiers under
his command. They are for a bold venture of which no one dreams, any
more than they dreamed of his Egyptian campaign. Did not Hannibal cross
the Alps, bidding the mountains make way for him? But nowadays a general
must get cannon through the passes! Cut down trees, then, and make huge
sleighs on which to drag the ordnance over the snows!
Thus in the spring after the coup d’état an army climbs the Great St.
Bernard, for the first time in two thousand years. The old monks in
the hospice can hardly believe their eyes. The herdsman who guides the
commander’s mule, prattling the while about his wishes and his troubles,
will soon afterwards learn that he has been talking to a fairy godmother,
will be enriched by the gift of a house and a farm. Even the common
soldiers seem to realise the epic character of this campaign, and vie
with one another in their zeal to drag the guns. They are following
their tried and trusted leader; they are returning to that Lombardy
whither, four years ago, he had led them as to the Promised Land; these
reflections, and the urgency of the occasion, increase the mysterious
suggestiveness of the expedition. So little do the Austrians realise
what is impending, that their chief, writing to a lady friend in Pavia,
tells her she is quite safe there; no need to leave. Twelve hours later,
Bonaparte enters the town.
Nevertheless, the great blow seems to him a questionable success. When,
in the middle of June, he attacks the Austrians in the plain, the enemy,
whose forces greatly outnumber his, drives him back. Where is Desaix with
the promised reserves? The affair begins to have the look of a general
rout. The commander, by the roadside, flicks the dust nervously with
his riding-whip, as he watches the beaten army pass by. “Stand firm!
Wait a little! Reinforcements are coming! Only an hour!” But the flight
continues. Has fortune, too, been routed? At length Desaix arrives, and
hurls himself on the dismayed Austrians; the dragoons charge; the enemy’s
lines are broken. The battle of Marengo, which Bonaparte had lost at
five o’clock, was won by Desaix at seven—but Desaix fell in the hour of
triumph.
Sad at heart, Napoleon remained on the field of battle. The best of his
generals was dead; but an even more painful thought was that Desaix, not
himself, had won the victory. He himself had been defeated. Maybe he was
consoled by the knowledge that he alone had designed the whole campaign,
and that he alone was responsible for the plan of battle in accordance
with which Desaix had arrived in time to snatch success out of the jaws
of failure. Perhaps he realised that this great battle, which opened and
closed the campaign, had been won by him no otherwise than the Eighteenth
Brumaire. Then, also, he had lost the day, and the crown of victory had
been gained for him by another!
Yet in neither case can this judgment be maintained when all the
circumstances are reviewed. Only three or four miles from the spot where
this evening he dictates to Bourrienne the report of the battle, is
the point on the map into which, four months earlier, he had thrust a
pin, saying (to this same Bourrienne): “Crossing the Alps at the Great
St. Bernard, I shall fall upon Melas, cut off his communications with
Austria, and meet him here in the plains of the River Scrivia at San
Giuliano.”
This was no time for reminiscences! Statesman as well as commander, he
was already parleying with Vienna, acting on the principle: “We must
fight and negotiate at the same time.” Now, on the battle-field, he
writes again to Emperor Francis:
“The cunning of the English has neutralised the effect which my simple
and frank advances must otherwise have had on Your Majesty’s heart. War
has become actual. Thousands of Frenchmen and Austrians are no more.—The
prospect of the continuance of such horrors is so great a distress to
me, that I have decided to make another personal appeal to you.—On the
battle-field of Marengo, amid grief and pain, surrounded by fifteen
thousand corpses, I implore Your Majesty, it behooves me to give you an
urgent warning. You are far from the scene, and your heart cannot be so
deeply moved as mine is on the spot. You rule over many States.—Let us
give our generation peace and tranquillity. If the men of later days are
such fools as to come to blows, they will learn wisdom after a few years’
fighting, and will then live at peace one with another.”
This long letter, of which only a few of the most weighty sentences have
been quoted here, is as brilliant as had been his plan for the battle
of Marengo, and it was as fruitful as his victory. For the first time
it gave plain expression to his longing for peace. In days to come, he
will write half a dozen such letters after as many decisive victories. Is
Bonaparte, the great military commander, a pacifist after all?
By no means, but he is not a swashbuckler either. His nerves always
remain sensitive to the impressions of the battle-field; and he has an
unfailing reserve of scepticism as regards successes won merely by the
sword. He is fond of camp life, and he has a chessplayer’s love for the
great game of war; but, before all, he is a statesman. It was in this
very plain of Lombardy that the sense of statecraft first awakened in
him. It was there that, with kings and countries as pieces, he began to
play that other great game of chess, the diplomatic game. Delight in the
use of spiritual force has taken possession of his soul. He will never
renounce the sword, will never allow its edge to become blunted. It is as
the wielder of the sword that he is acclaimed as the hero of Europe. But
he also has the Golden Goblet, and does not wish to risk it anew every
year.
He knows, too, that, while France is always eager for glory, an even
greater need at the moment is tranquillity. Above all, the country has
need of him, personally; but he has enemies in his rear. Before, it
mattered little that he should be away for a year or two at a time;
but now, when he is dictator, so long an absence would be fatal. These
multiple considerations explain his letter to Emperor Francis—surely an
unparalleled despatch from a conqueror on the battle-field. As soon as he
has written it, he hastens to Milan.
What is Paris saying?
Is the capital satisfied at length? Is it not like Josephine, before whom
one can pour out all the treasures of the world—to find only that she
takes them as a matter of course, and holds out her hand for more? Paris
is by no means enthusiastic about the new master. “For eleven years,”
writes Roederer in his diary, “the Parisian’s first thought on waking
in the morning had been: ‘When shall we be able to rid ourselves of
tyrants?’ Now, the Parisians were saying: ‘Everything seems to be going
on well. But these enterprises that are being started, this capital that
is being invested, these houses that they are building, these trees that
they are planting—what will happen to the lot of them, if the Man should
perish?’—His supreme calling was not the general’s, but the statesman’s.
His victories, indeed, had made him the cynosure of all eyes; but it
was his talent for statecraft that had raised men’s hopes.” Thus the
Parisians are uneasy, but wellwishing. One among them, however, foresees
the future, and writes to Napoleon at the theatre of war:
“General, I have just returned from the Tuileries, and shall not attempt
to describe either the enthusiasm of the French or the amazement of
foreigners.... Will posterity believe the miracle of this campaign?
Favourable, indeed, are the auspices that preside over your homecoming!
Never has there been an empire that was not founded upon miracle. In this
instance, miracle has become reality.”
Napoleon smiles, thinking: “In truth, Talleyrand is more than a
flatterer; he is a soothsayer! But why does he give a name to my secret
thoughts? Would he play the part of the Roman of old, who tempted Cæsar
with a crown?”
Here is another missive from Paris. A police report from Fouché, who
tells how Talleyrand had recently summoned a few intimates to discuss
what had better be done should the Consul have a misadventure, or
perchance be defeated. The news of Marengo had come while they were at
supper! “So he was alarmed!” thinks Bonaparte. “There were stirrings
of what remained of a conscience. Good friends! Fine confidants! Their
alleged concern for my safety, is but the mask for their secret longing
to rid themselves of their master!”
Is it a mocking smile or is it an expression of pensive anxiety that
purses Napoleon’s lips? Certainly, he must be back in Paris as soon as
possible! But this evening he goes to the Scala, where the heroine is the
lovely Grassini—whose advances he had scorned a year or two back. Now she
sings for his ear, has eyes for him alone; and though she may be piqued
that his beckoning nod comes so late, the handsome Italian prima donna
gives herself to the conqueror of Italy for the asking. She shall go to
the Paris opera. As star, or as his mistress? Time will show!
Since in Germany, too, the enemy has been defeated, the subsequent peace
of Lunéville is extremely favourable to France, the Rhine frontier being
conceded, and the re-establishment of the Cisalpine Republic agreed to.
Could more have possibly been achieved by a few weeks’ campaign? His
colleagues and other false friends make ready to receive him as hero
of the hour; they write to him about plans for a triumph. “I shall make
an unlooked-for entry into Paris,” he rejoins, with malicious double
meaning; “and I have no desire for triumphal arches or any kind of
ceremonial. I have a sufficiently good conceit of myself to scorn such
plummery. The only genuine triumph is public content.”
A little later, he writes in a vein that is equally modest, or equally
proud: “I accept the offer to erect a monument in my honour and should
like a site to be chosen. But I would rather leave the actual building of
the monument to future centuries, should these confirm your good opinion
of me.” It is as if he could sense the coming storm of iconoclasm, could
foresee that in less than twenty years his idolaters of to-day will be
rolling his eagles in the dust!
After his return, the dictator devotes all his energies to the
consolidation of peace. He outsoars himself: for whereas formerly, by
forced marches and crashing blows, he has imposed his will on one country
after another, now, by shrewd negotiation, he cements peace with his
sometime foes. Within two years of his seizure of power, France is at
peace with Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Russia, Naples, Spain, Portugal and
even with England.
Nine legitimate and therefore ardently legitimist rulers now recognise
the republic which they had been fighting for a decade. France, which
two years before had been threatened by disruption from within and by
dangerous impacts from without, had become the leading power on the
Continent.
It is as First Consul, not as general and not as emperor, that Bonaparte
leads the revolution to victory. In a Europe all the rest of which
(except for Switzerland) is ruled by kings and princes, he not only
establishes peace between the new ideas and the old forces, but also,
unchallenged, compels his border States, Holland and northern Italy, to
adopt the consular constitution. Neither Austria nor England attempts
to interfere when, with a turn of the hand, he extends his grip over
Piedmont, Genoa, Lucca and Elba. At the same time, when the compensation
of the princes on the left bank of the Rhine is in question, the members
of the oldest reigning houses of Germany throng around the great
huckster, the man who has robbed them of their lands—thus teaching him to
despise birth and heritage, nobles and crowns.
Only one chasm gapes in the structure he is building, but he will be able
to close it.
At the opening of the revolution, Reason took the place of Christ.
Indeed, this anti-Christian notion became extremely popular. Bonaparte
stood almost alone in his rejection of it. Four years earlier, in Italy,
he had granted the pope all kinds of things which Paris wished to
refuse; and, for reasons of his own, he had always been chivalrous in
his attitude towards the clergy. Now he wished to heal the breach that
had existed for ten years between France and the Church. He did not do
this because he was a believer. “Among the Turks, I was a Mohammedan;
now I shall become a Catholic.” He knew that this oldest of the powers
could not be conquered either by the sword or by the spirit. He must come
to terms with it in order to make use of it. “Catholicism kept the pope
in being for me,” he said later: “and, in view of my grip upon Italy, I
continued to hope that sooner or later I should be able to bend him to my
will. What immense influence I should then wield! What a means to have at
my disposal in my dealings with Europe!”
It will be difficult to make Paris accept the rehabilitation of the
Church! As a preliminary step, he is actually willing to present himself
before the bishops in the guise of a philosopher: “I am aware that in
no State can a man be truly virtuous and upright unless he knows whence
he comes and whither he is going. Unaided reason cannot tell us these
things. Without religion, we grope in the dark. But the Catholic faith
throws a clear light upon the origin and the destiny of human beings.”
Rome is dumbfounded for a time, when this and similar speeches are
reported; but the shrewdest of worldly sages can find his master in
the Vatican. When Cardinal Consalvi comes to Paris in order to discuss
matters with Napoleon, and, at the first official audience, the consul
wishes to browbeat him, the prince of the Church smilingly stands his
ground. What a spectacle for Talleyrand, who looks on in silence! Still,
agreement is reached on various important points, such as the celibacy
of priests, the choice of bishops by Rome, and the re-establishment of
the old canon law. But though these concessions are made to the Church,
the payment of stipends by the State, which gives the latter decisive
influence, is to remain.
A great ceremony in Notre Dame seals the agreement. The Consul, with the
other State dignitaries, had wanted only to come for the Te Deum; but he
found it expedient, after all, to attend Mass, stipulating that he was
not to be expected to take the sacrament, “or to participate in all the
rest of the hocus-pocus that makes a man ridiculous.” To his brother, he
said on this occasion: “We’re going to Mass to-day. What will Paris say
about it?”
“The audience will look on at the play, and will hiss if it does not
please.”
“Then I shall have the church cleared by the guards!”
“But what if the grenadiers join in the hissing?”
“They won’t. My old war-dogs will be just as respectful in Notre Dame as
they were in the Cairo mosques. They will keep their eyes on me, and when
they see that their general is serious and well behaved, they will follow
his example, saying to themselves, ‘Those are the orders of the day!’”
III
The ground is still unsteady beneath his feet. His consulship is for ten
years only, and there are but eight years more to run. Then a rival may
take his place. He is dependent on popular favour, which he must court,
and which he despises. What sort of a position is that for the head of
a State in his dealings with foreign potentates? They will not take him
seriously, any more than if he were an American president. Turning these
thoughts over in his mind, he makes a sign to the Senate.
Always compliant (being dependent on his good graces), the Senate now
proposes to ensure that the First Consul shall hold office for an
additional term of ten years after the expiry of the present term. Put
out of humour by this suggestion, he jogs the senators’ thoughts and
induces them to propose a lifelong tenure of the consulship. But, prudent
as Cæsar, he says that the matter must be referred to the “people,”
the source of all power. A plebiscite is taken, and there are nearly
four million ayes against a handful of courageous noes. His powers are
enlarged. He now has sole authority to sign treaties with foreign States;
he alone appoints the senators, who are themselves entitled to dissolve
the Chambers; and he is granted the right to appoint his successor. When
he compares his position with that of other European rulers, and notices
that they all wear crowns, he consoles himself with the naïve sophism:
“Henceforward, I am as good as the other sovereigns, for they, likewise,
rule for life only!”
By no means all among the millions who have voted for him are his
whole-hearted adherents. Even in Paris, when he makes a triumphal entry
into the Luxembourg, there is so little public applause that he says
afterwards to his Minister of Police: “Why did you not work up opinion
beforehand?”
Said Fouché: “We are still the children of the ancient Gauls, of whom it
was said that they could neither endure liberty nor tolerate oppression.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Citizen Consul, that, in your last steps, the Parisians fancy
they see the loss of liberty, and a tendency towards absolutism.”
“I should not care to rule for six weeks, if I had but the shadow of
power, and could not be master!”
“You have only to be humane, strong, and just, at one and the same time,”
rejoins the fox (who never showed any of these qualities himself), “and
soon you will win all hearts once again.”
“Public opinion is capricious. I shall know how to mend it,” said
Bonaparte, turning his back on his interlocutor.
A two-minutes’ talk like this, and Napoleon has made up his mind. He
dismisses Fouché, but not because he is afraid of the ex-cleric (whom he
despises, rather). He abolishes the Ministry of Police, and transfers its
functions to the Ministry of Justice, “for I wish to show Europe that
my policy is peaceful, and that the French love me sincerely.” We must
get used to such phrase-mongering, in which he cloaks his policy. To
keep Fouché quiet, he makes the ex-minister a senator. When, on leaving
office, Fouché discloses to the Consul a reserve fund of two and a half
million francs, Bonaparte is amazed, and tells him to keep half the sum
“as a token of personal regard.” In the anteroom, the departing Fouché
grins over his mental arithmetic, adding the undisclosed residue of the
reserve to the amount of the First Consul’s gift.
Such are Bonaparte’s methods with a dangerous man who knows too much. As
for public opinion, he can take his measures to get that on his side.
It is because he is determined not to be indebted to any party or any
individual, that he demands a popular ratification of his appointment as
Consul for life, just as he had asked for popular approval after the coup
d’état. The result gives him assurance that the revolution is over. “This
consultation of the people has a twofold advantage. Besides confirming
the prolongation of the consular term, it throws light on the sources
of my power, which otherwise might have seemed ambiguous.” The phrasing
shows that he is aware of his dangerous position betwixt revolution and
legitimacy. To the very last, he will be worried by this problem.
Like a Roman imperator, Bonaparte wishes to concentrate all the powers of
State in his own hands; but whereas the Roman’s title to power was the
commandership of the armies, Napoleon is supreme because of his supreme
efficiency. That is why he bases his power, not upon the army, which
loves him, but upon the people, to which he is hostile. He wants to be
“tyrant,” in the classical sense of the term; but he wishes to be tyrant
on a democratic footing, as the outcome of a free popular decision. The
people, the source of power, is to transfer power to Napoleon. None knows
better than he the weakness of any such fiction, but it is imposed on him
by the spirit of the age. After all, Bonaparte can fearlessly quote in
his own favour the revolutionary principle that power must go to talent
instead of to birth, for where can a more talented man than himself be
found? But instead of contenting himself with talent as the source of
his power (the talent that has brought him victory in war and in peace,
the talent that has enabled him to grasp the reins), he muddies this
splendid source by a popular vote, feels morally compelled to do so, and
even fancies that he is clarifying the waters by his action. If Bonaparte
saves the revolution, he certainly kills the republic.
These ideas are not the outcome of calculating policy, but of the mood
which seeks its stimulus in classical life. It is the same mood as that
which draws him towards the East; the same mood as that which, on the
day of the coup d’état, led him to make a fool of himself before the
Councils. “Your place is among the men of Plutarch,” said the first who
really understood Bonaparte in early youth. The Consul was not a democrat
in the sense that he believed in popular sovereignty. What he lacked was
such days as those of classical antiquity, when genius did not need to
entrench itself behind representative assemblies, but held sway on its
own initiative; or Asia, where, even in modern times, there are monarchs
in the literal sense. In his work-room at Saint-Cloud there are two
busts, Scipio’s and that of Hannibal’s. No other position than that of
Roman emperor or that of caliph was suited to his temperament.
Immediately after the coup d’état, the Bourbons, with a childlike
frankness, had made advances to him. The brother of the executed king,
now Count of Provence, and in future days to reign as Louis XVIII, asked
the son of the revolution to help him to the throne. The demand was
thrice repeated, and a handsome reward was offered. The Consul made no
answer to the first two applications. To the third he replied as follows:
“Sir, I have received your letter, and thank you for what you are so
kind as to say about myself. You cannot seriously wish to come back, for
your return would cost a hundred thousand lives. You must sacrifice your
personal interests to the peace and happiness of France, and history will
thank you for the sacrifice. I am not insensitive to the misfortunes of
your family.... I shall be happy to do all in my power to contribute to
the welfare and tranquillity of your retirement. Bonaparte.”
Very different is Napoleon’s reception of the Vendée royalists, for he
hopes to win them over to his side. At first they fail to understand him
when, after a long time of waiting, the man of destiny, wearing his old
green coat, and with untidy hair, makes advances to them.
“Come over to my side. Mine will be the government of youth and
enthusiasm!... You struck shrewd blows for your princes.... But your
princes have by no means covered themselves with glory. Why were they not
in Vendée to lead the fight? Was not that their place?”
“They were kept in London by political considerations,” answered the
nobles.
“They should have crossed the Channel in the first fishing smack they
could get hold of,” he answered passionately, and, so the report runs,
“in a voice that seemed to come from the depths of his stomach.” Yes, my
fine noblemen, from the depths of his stomach! The phrase carries with
it the implications of an incident in universal history which was still
recent, still vivid in Napoleon’s memory. That was the tone proper to
the bold adventurer who, in a tiny frigate, had made his way across the
storm-tost Mediterranean, through the enemy fleet, to reach the coast
where power was his for the seizing. Hear how he mingles flattery and
threats, the young wizard who has turned the whole continent upside down!
“What would you like to be? General or prefect? You and yours can have
whatever you please, if you will come over to my side. Nothing? Would you
think it a disgrace to wear the coat that Bonaparte wears?... Unless you
will make peace, I will march against you with a hundred thousand men,
and burn your towns to ashes!”
“If you do,” answers the count firmly, “we shall annihilate your columns.”
“You dare to threaten me?” he exclaims—this time “with a terrible voice.”
But upon receiving a matter-of-fact answer, he is calm once more. The
noble emissaries retire in disgust, having achieved nothing, having been
perplexed by his foreign accent, and by the impetuous imagination, which
leads him to complicate the issues to such an extent that it is often
hard to follow his meaning.
None the less, the Consul induces a great many of the émigrés to return,
disarming their hostility by making suitable provision for them. Forty
thousand families promptly come back. At the same time, he negotiates
with the Jacobins, although these, “with their metaphysics, are enough
to ruin twenty governments.” He feels sure of the support of those who
follow the middle courses of democracy, for the democratic masses feel
safe under his rule, now that Paris is no longer a sort of civilian camp,
and now that (a benevolent despot) he is doing all in his power to bring
better times.
Consider these instructions issued to various authorities:
“If the cold should be sharp, as it was in 1789, you must have fires
kept alight in the churches and market-places, so that as many people
as possible can warm themselves.”—“The winter is very severe, meat is
dear, we must provide work in Paris. Get on with the cutting of the
Ourcq canal, with the construction of the Quai Desaix, with the paving
of the back streets.”—“The law directs that all beggars shall be laid
by the heels. Were we to do nothing more than this, our conduct would
be barbarous and absurd. Arrest them, certainly, that you may give
them work and food. We must have several homes of refuge in every
department.”—“There are a great many out-of-work shoemakers, hatters,
tailors, and saddlers. See to it that five hundred pairs of shoes are
made every day.” He writes to the Minister for War saying that special
orders for supplies for the artillery are to be issued. To the Minister
for Home Affairs: “We must provide work, especially this month before
the holidays. Issue an order that in May and June two thousand of the
Saint Antoine workmen are to supply chairs, chests of drawers, armchairs,
etc.... Send me your proposals to-morrow, so that a beginning may be made
promptly.”
He reads a by-law that no one wearing a workman’s blouse is to walk
through the Tuileries garden. Instantly he has the regulation cancelled,
and gives express permission for such people to go through. He learns of
a proposal to close the public reading-rooms: “I won’t allow anything of
the kind. I have not forgotten my own experience, how useful it was to
know of a well-warmed room where I could read the newspapers and recent
pamphlets. I will not allow others who are as poor as I was then to be
robbed of these comforts.” In the Théâtre Français, the stalls are to be
very cheap on Sundays, “so that the people may enjoy the performance.”
There are to be no gambling hells in France: “They bring families to
ruin, and I should set a bad example were I to tolerate them.”
By his new education law, he establishes public elementary schools,
middle schools, lycées, and technical colleges, throughout the country.
There are to be six thousand free scholarships, and a third of these
are to be reserved for the sons of specially deserving persons. Within
three years, there are 4,500 elementary schools, 750 middle schools,
and 45 lycées. He honours the Institute by choosing a third of his
first senators from among its members. The Ministry for Home Affairs
is instructed to draw up lists “of the ten best painters, sculptors,
composers, musicians, architects, and other artists whose talents make
them worthy of support.” He orders great frescoes to be painted, which
shall depict striking incidents in his battles. He gives his reasons for
this State regulation of art, saying: “People complain that we have no
literature. That is the fault of the Minister for Home Affairs!”
But if he tranquillises persons of all occupations by bringing them
prosperity, what opening will be left, in this nation of the ambitious,
for the pursuit of fame? If there is to be no war and no court life,
where will the French find an outlet for their vanity? He answers this
question by founding the Legion of Honour.
The Legion will form a group of stalwart supporters, for those who
have taken a solemn oath to resist any attempt at the restoration of
the feudalist regime will not be so likely to side against Bonaparte.
Besides, it is not to be merely an officers’ club, inasmuch as the aim
is to provide distinctions for all who do good service. He therefore
appoints a natural philosopher to the office of arch-chancellor; and
when, in the Council of State, a warning reference is made to the kinship
between these orders of distinction and the abuses which have been swept
away, he answers with perfect seriousness:
“I doubt if there has ever been a republic without such distinctions.
You declare that they are toys for children. Well, grown men are led by
toys. I would not say that from a rostrum, but in a council of sages
and statesmen I can speak my mind. I do not think that the French
love liberty and equality; they have not been changed by ten years of
revolution; they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They are
accessible to only one sentiment, the love of honour. That is why we must
have distinctions.... Soldiers must be allured by fame and pay.... Here
is a new kind of money assessed at a different valuation from current
coin. Its source is inexhaustible. With no other kind of money, is it
possible to reward actions which are so sublime that they cannot be
valued in current coin.” In these notable words, we hear the rippling of
the three fountains of his soul: contempt for mankind, understanding of
the masses, and the critical aloofness of the foreigner who has chosen a
new fatherland.
IV
On Christmas Eve, 1800, the Consul was driving to the opera. Josephine
and her daughter were following in another carriage. In a narrow street
an empty cart partially blocked the way, and caused a halt. The cart was
pushed aside, and the coachman whipped up his horses. The instant after
the carriage had passed, an infernal machine hidden in the cart exploded.
About twenty persons were killed, but no one in either Napoleon’s or
Josephine’s carriage was hurt. On reaching the opera, Napoleon went
straight to his box. When his wife arrived, he said calmly: “Josephine,
those rascals wanted to blow me up; send for a copy of the music.”
Outwardly unmoved, he listened to the performance of Haydn’s recent work,
_Creation_.
Ordinarily, good music made him forget all his schemes; but this evening
his brain was busily at work, pondering the causes and foreseeing
the consequences of the attempt on his life. It mattered little who
“the rascals” were, revolutionaries of the left or revolutionaries of
the right. He knew well enough that he had plenty of enemies on both
sides. The question was, whether it would suit him best to assume that
his would-be assassins belonged to the right or to the left. His mind
was soon made up on this point. Had the attempt been successful, the
consequences for France would have been immeasurably great. Well, the
consequences of the unsuccessful attempt should be no less momentous. It
was a lucky chance, and he would make it solve the problem of personal
power.
Next morning, when people came to offer congratulations on his escape,
and when all were agreed in the opinion that the outrage must have been
planned by the royalists, with assumed heat Napoleon declared they were
absolutely mistaken. “This was the work of Septembrists, intellectuals,
the non-commissioned officers of the revolution—persons with a bolder
imagination and more culture than the masses, but in close touch with
them, and always ready to spur on the workers!” When, in the Council of
State, a proposal was made to institute special proceedings, Bonaparte
objected on the ground that the method would be too slow. His speech was
impassioned:
“Either we must do nothing at all, and, like Augustus, forgive the
sinners; or else we must act promptly, take far-reaching steps which will
guarantee social order once for all.... No ordinary criminal procedure
will suffice; this is a matter for statesmanship.... Blood must flow.
As many of the guilty must be shot as there perished innocent persons
in the streets. Two hundred of these raging wolves must be seized and
transported. They are always watching and waiting for their prey. All our
troubles are due to these metaphysicians!”
Old Tronchet shakes his head. The attempt had been the work of émigrés
and Englishmen.
“Are you proposing that I should transport noblemen or priests?” asked
Napoleon angrily. “Vendée is quiet, and I do not want to banish the
servants of the most widely spread religion in the world. I shall have
to dismiss all the members of the Council of State, for, with two or
three exceptions, every one of you believes in this fable of a royalist
plot.... Do you think me a child? Am I to say that the country is in
danger? Has France ever been in better case since the revolution, the
army more victorious, the country more peaceful? A pretty thing that men
who have never been among the true friends of liberty, should now display
so much concern for liberty! Do not think to excuse yourselves by saying:
‘I defended the patriots in the Council of State.’ That might go down in
a drawing-room, but it will not go down here, among the most enlightened
men in France!” He abruptly closes the sitting. Do the councillors
understand his drift?
These alarums and excursions are not the outcome of any sense of personal
danger, for if that were his motive, if his own alarmed will-to-live were
at work, he would seek out the real offenders as object for vengeance.
The whole scene was statecraft. Whom can we frighten here at home? Whom
can we pacify across the frontier? That is what the Consul is asking
himself. Those are the considerations that guide his actions. Of course,
there is a personal motive as well. He thinks that his own safety can
best be guarded by draconian measures. “I did not sleep well o’ nights,”
he said at a later date, “until I had had these leaders of the great
towns sent across the seas. I was not afraid of the sort of conspirator
who gets up at nine o’clock in the morning and puts on a clean shirt!”
At the same time, he is infuriated by an anonymous pamphlet, “Cæsar,
Cromwell, and Bonaparte,” in which the writer advocates the establishment
of a hereditary monarchy. Who is daring to disclose his own secret
thoughts, even though the indiscreet pamphleteer is a sympathiser? When
one of his confidants says that the only thing wrong with the pamphlet
is that the disclosure is premature, Bonaparte lets the observation
pass. But these two attempts, the attack on his body and the attack on
his mind, have terrible consequences as far as freedom is concerned.
The Tribunate and the Chambers are purged of a fifth of their numbers,
Constant, Chénier, and other noted democrats being excluded; sixty-one
out of seventy-three newspapers are suppressed; pamphlets and plays
are subjected to a censorship. When the Council of State reminds him
of the freedom of the press, he answers: “Do you think that, in such a
situation, we can allow public meetings?... And is not every journalist
an orator? Do not the subscribers to his newspaper really form a club?
Calumny is like an oil spot, which always leaves traces.... In England
it is different; there the Government is old-established; here it is
new. People would write worse things about me day by day; saying, for
instance, that I am so afraid of being poisoned that I dare not eat!...
The only way of keeping the political parties in check is to deprive them
of their battle-ground.”
Sound reasoning, appropriate measures. But the spirit of free thought
stands weeping at the door; her fascinated gaze is fixed upon power
enthroned.
V
The man who was certainly in part responsible for the before-mentioned
pamphlet, perhaps its author, the man who had thus inflicted a grave
injury upon the First Consul, was the very man who had been his main
buttress on the Eighteenth Brumaire, and who had saved the situation that
day—Brother Lucien. The most gifted of Napoleon’s four brothers, six
years younger than the Consul, scaling the heights of ambition at an even
earlier age than his great brother, though helped in his upward progress
by that brother’s prestige, Lucien coveted the highest for himself. To
stand in the shadow of Napoleon’s great name, to be under his protection,
and even to be the object of his love—these were more galling to Lucien
than Napoleon’s disfavour in later days. He never forgot the incidents of
the coup d’état. He had been the king-maker. How, then, could he obey the
man whom he had raised to the throne?
[Illustration: Bonaparte as First Consul. Painting by Girodet. Musée
Nationale, Versailles.
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)]
Needs must, however. Shortly after Brumaire, he becomes Minister for
Home Affairs, a mere instrument of the master brain. Is it not natural
that he should critically examine all that comes to him from the chief,
wondering whether he can make a better job? Hostile to Josephine, he is
hostile to her confidants. This brings him into conflict with Fouché,
who is always ready to blame the Minister for Home Affairs for anything
untoward, like the publication of the pamphlet.
By temperament, Lucien was as unscrupulous and amoral as his brother.
Though very like his brother, he lacked the boldly calculating brain, and
may even be said to have had semi-criminal traits beneath his smiling
exterior. A Napoleon, like the other, but one degree more adventurer and
several degrees less statesman. At twenty-five years of age, Lucien was
powerful and yet embittered, his audacious spirit urging him to more
and yet more hazardous adventures. His first wife was an innkeeper’s
daughter; he sold monopolies; speculated in grain; lived beyond his
means, instead of setting to work; bought the finest house in Paris,
furnished it sumptuously, rebuilt it, and refurnished it; gave splendid
banquets, indulged in amateur theatricals, wrote verses. All these
extravagances were undertaken in the half-conscious desire to eclipse his
brother.
Between two such men, in such a relationship, how can a breach be
avoided! Lucien taunts the Consul, saying that he, Lucien, had won the
victory on the Nineteenth Brumaire. In the first flush of his wrath,
Napoleon has it in mind to banish Lucien; but, in the end, he is content
to deprive the young man of ministerial office. This will put a term to
the monetary scandals attaching to Lucien’s abuse of his position. Lucien
goes to Madrid as envoy. His ability in this new post enables him to work
successfully against England, and also to divert the flow of a good many
millions into his own pockets. Being now a widower, he soon returns, and
marries his lady love, a beauty whose reputation is of the same sort as
Josephine’s in earlier days. The First Consul is furious, for he has
been working to promote a marriage that would have brought political
advantages.
Joseph, too, man of the world and good fellow, is inclining to join the
ranks of the sceptics, now that, with his brother’s aid, he has risen
to wealth and power; he frequents Madame de Staël’s circle, and speaks
critically of the Consul. He is no longer content with the position of
envoy in Rome, refuses the presidency of the Italian Republic and the
chancellorship of the Senate; cannot forget that he is the eldest; looks
upon himself as head of the family.
Louis still vacillates, the poet in his temperament taking charge from
time to time. For years he is in love with one of Josephine’s relatives,
and has no affection for Hortense, whom he is forced to marry. Years
afterwards he will sing the love of his heart.
Jerome, the youngest, good-natured and frivolous, is brought up by his
brother with paternal strictness. “I send you Citizen Jerome Bonaparte,
who is to serve as a midshipman. As you know, he must be kept under
strict discipline. See to it that he fulfils all his duties.”
His sisters, again; he has loaded them with money and honours, but they
give him little thanks, and are incessant in their demands for more.
There is Elise! She and Lucien, her favourite brother, vie with one
another in escapades that are the talk of Paris. At amateur theatricals,
they disport themselves in pink tights, and the Consul thunders:
“Disgraceful behaviour! While I am wearing myself out trying to make
people moral and respectable once more, my brother and my sister appear
before the footlights almost naked!” But as soon as his back is turned,
they laugh merrily, and follow their own bent.
Caroline, who has married General Murat, is already involving her husband
and Bernadotte in intrigues against the Consul. The public learns nothing
of these matters, but they come to Napoleon’s ears, and he says angrily
that Murat deserves to be shot.
Pauline loses her husband in a colonial campaign. She does not regret
the loss. By her second marriage, she becomes Princess Borghese in Rome.
Her innocence is no more than a cynical pose, but her brother remains
fonder of her than of any of the others. Even when the looseness of her
life imperils his reputation, and he thinks it necessary to remonstrate,
he words his remonstrances cautiously.
Uncle Fesch, at first a priest, and then an army contractor, now enters
political life and resumes the clerical habit. Napoleon secures his
appointment as archbishop and then as cardinal. All the Bonapartes
exploit the man of power, that they may win money and position, lead a
splendid life, and enjoy themselves, whereas in his life of superhuman
toil there is little scope for pleasure.
Only his mother continues to hold aloof. Although she is not better
pleased with Josephine now than formerly, although she is still the
woman of Corsica and continues to talk an island dialect, he invites
her, immediately after the coup d’état, to come and live with him in the
Tuileries. She refuses, prefers to stay with Joseph. At the first great
parade he holds in the courtyard of the palace, when she appears on the
balcony among the highest State officials, she is very simply dressed,
all in black, and yet looks prouder than Josephine, hard by, decked
out in peacock array. Letizia mistrusts all this splendour, being now
inured to the vicissitudes of life. When any one tries to flatter her by
speaking of her son’s greatness and power, she sagely answers, in her
Italian French: “Pourvou que cela doure.”
What is the source of these family dramas, some of which will end in
farce, others in tragedy?
In Napoleon’s heart, had he been nothing more than a parvenu of the
familiar type, he would, when pressed by his nearest and dearest for a
share in his good fortune, graciously or ungraciously, but infallibly,
have kept this dozen or so of men and women far from his circle of
influence, for he would have been fain to conceal an origin which
conflicted with his affectation of French nationalism. He is dictator
of France, and yet every time his mother opens her mouth she reminds
all the nationalists of his foreign birth. Here is the sister of a man
who ranks with kings, and she plays the maddest pranks before the eyes
of the monarchs of Europe, who naturally delight in pointing the finger
of scorn at the ill-breeding of the upstart’s relatives. His brothers
wallow in the practice of corrupt methods which it was a primary aim of
the revolution to abolish. All this occurs in Paris, where irony has ever
been the fundamental tone of criticism!
Yet he does not merely tolerate these embarrassing kinsfolk; he is
continually showering honours on them, promoting them to high office,
making them his representatives abroad.
Herein we see the working of his Italian blood, and, above all, of his
island upbringing. Every Corsican family, patriarchal by tradition,
is clannish to the core, while filled with sentiments of hatred and
vengefulness towards the rival houses of the puny isle. Such traditions
are older than those of many of the royal families, and as a result
of them the urge towards the gratification of pride and towards the
vindication of honour is more powerful than the desire for wealth. With
this inborn clannishness is associated and intertwined the intense
longing of a conqueror to preserve for the heirs of his body all that he
has snatched for himself by the strength of his genius and through the
favour of fortune. Nevertheless, destiny (tragical in its working, being
conditioned by his innermost sentiments, and therefore inexorable) has
made this man childless. The wife, into whose arms he has been driven by
all the passion of love, the wife who has borne two healthy children in
previous marriage, remains barren in her second union; and the infirmity
of barrenness, but for which the history of Europe would have taken a
different turn, is obviously a consequence of her devotion to the art of
love, of the facile amorousness with which she won Bonaparte’s affection
and held him for a time in thrall. For, when she first met him, she was
little over thirty; and, as for him, in subsequent relationships with
other women, he was able to procreate three sons. He urgently needs a
legitimate heir. Even an heiress would serve his turn. There can be no
doubt that Josephine’s failure to satisfy him in this crucial instance
had a decisive effect on his plans.
In view of the plenitude of his powers, how could it be otherwise? During
the first years of his rise, Roederer propounds the great theme: “The
royalists are saying: ‘Who will be Bonaparte’s successor!’ If you die
to-morrow, what will happen to us? You must nominate your successor.”
“What you suggest would not be a strong policy.”
“France would be more at ease if she knew who was to succeed you.”
“I have no children.”
“You could adopt one.”
“That would not meet the difficulties of the moment. I can see no other
way out than that the Senate should appoint my successor. Only three of
the senators and myself should know his name. But who is it to be?”
“They had better choose a lad of twelve.”
“Why do you want him to be a child?”
“A boy who can grow up in your school; one whom you can train and love.”
At length the Consul, driven into a corner, exclaims: “My natural heir is
the French people.”
The man who speaks is not old. He is little more than thirty. Though
he is appointed dictator for ten years only, he plainly foresees that
he will be monarch. But he is already alarmed by the dangers of the
position. When he looks round in search of an heir, his only hope is in
his brothers. The best return they can make for the gifts he showers on
them is that they should raise up heirs to his name, heirs who will at
least have the advantage of Bonapartist blood. That is why Napoleon is so
furious with Lucien, not because he has taken a wife with a bad name, but
because he has taken a wife with no name. Lucien must get a divorce, and
thus win freedom to marry a woman of royal blood.
Lucien refuses, quite as much owing to spite for his all-powerful brother
as owing to affection for his wife. He is, indeed, fond of her; but he is
so ambitious that he would sacrifice anything in the world for the sake
of supreme power. After a stormy scene between the pair, Bonaparte comes
into Josephine’s room, and his voice is shaken with emotion as he says:
“It is all over! I have given Lucien his dismissal.”
Similar considerations explain the long-lasting quarrel with Louis, to
whom Josephine looks for the salvation of her own line. He cannot endure
Josephine’s daughter Hortense, who reciprocates the dislike and loves
another man. Josephine, however, forces her to marry Louis, and the son
of this ill-assorted union becomes Napoleon’s darling, and is looked
upon as likely to be the heir. Thereupon, his sisters begin to intrigue,
spreading abroad the report that Napoleon is really the father. Through
these disputes, the unity of the family is shattered, at the very time
when Europe envies it for its good fortune. Letizia sides with the young
people who have been forced into a marriage; and also espouses the cause
of the ostracised Lucien, whom she follows to Rome. There she can live
happily, far from the glowing star that has sprung from her womb. There
she can live as an Italian, a wealthy and respected associate of Rome’s
leading families, and treated by the pope with all the honours due to a
woman of royal blood.
What if Bonaparte were to divorce Josephine? His sisters, who hate “the
old woman,” do what they can, and trot attractive beauties up and down
in full view. As Josephine grows older, Napoleon’s relations with her
become more tranquil, but he needs her friendship. He has ceased to be
fastidious and has transient love affairs with one pretty actress after
another, or makes this or that companion of his sisters the mistress of a
few evenings or a night or two.
Georges, who, like all the rest, is afraid of him, describes him as “an
amiable and considerate man,” who plays hide and seek with her, helps her
to undress, and bends to her “childish caprices.” Since her Christian
name is Josephine, he refuses to call her by it, and invents for her an
Italian name. She is Giorgina. He asks her to tell him her own story,
listens attentively, and nods approvingly—for he has taken care to learn
all about her, and is pleased that she tells him the truth.
Sometimes the Consul’s servants catch sight of him in the evening, as, in
his stockinged feet, he steals up a secret winding staircase to visit the
lovely Duchatel. She is gentle, slender, and blonde—the type he prefers.
Duchatel is one of Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting. He likes to play cards
with her sometimes, talking to her in an undertone about matters of love,
while the uneasy Josephine, at another card table, strains her ears to
catch what he is saying. The lady-in-waiting retires. Napoleon follows,
to find her in the place of assignation. His wife, beside herself,
pursues them, rattles the door-handle. Napoleon comes to the door in a
rage. Next day he threatens her with divorce, but he is softened by her
tears.
These amours are but occasional. He is always up to the eyes in work.
Besides, he has made up his mind to avoid what has proved disastrous to
so many kings. He will not squander his resources on inamoratas, and he
will not allow them to interfere in matters of State. As regards affairs
of love, he is prematurely old. It is with a sense of shock that we find
this man of thirty writing in a letter to a friend: “My old heart, which
now knows human beings for what they are....”
Josephine is racked with anxiety about his conduct, just as formerly he
was racked with anxiety about hers. She relies on dresses, hats, the arts
of the toilet; spends more than the late queen of France; and has still
so little reticence that, though she is the first lady in the land, she
cannot refrain from telling her maid when the Consul has spent the night
with her. He forgives her much. Sometimes she sits at the weary man’s
bedside, reading to him in her lovely alto voice. He thanks her with his
eyes. He is conservatively inclined, this man of the revolution. Rarely
does he part with a general, dismiss an official. How, then, shall he
divorce this woman whom he loves, despite her faults?
In the pleasant gardens at Malmaison, where during his year’s absence in
Egypt she lived with her light-of-love, Hippolyte, he runs races with
Bourrienne, Rapp, and a few men of letters, while Eugene and Hortense
look on. When he trips and falls, he joins merrily in the others’
laughter. Then he gets into his carriage for the drive to Paris, saying:
“Now I can put my head in the collar once more.”
VI
“Bonaparte very seldom writes with his own hand. He dictates everything,
while walking up and down his study; dictates to a young man of twenty
named Méneval, the only one who has the entry to this study and the three
other rooms of the private suite. No use approaching Méneval; nothing to
hope in that quarter; indeed, no one would dare to try. But the First
Consul himself jots down the memoranda that relate to his most important
plans. This ... very special map, he locks up with his own hand, and
always carries the key about with him. If he leaves his study, Méneval
has to put the map away in a cupboard screwed to the floor. Of course the
map might be stolen, but it would instantly be missed. Suspicion would at
once fall upon Méneval and the underling, who cleans the study and lights
the fire, so the underling would have to make a bolt for it.... All the
secret memoranda concerning his military operations must be in it, and
since the only way of overthrowing his power would be to destroy his
plans, the theft of this map would bring everything to naught.”
Who writes the foregoing? A Bourbon spy? Or is it a traitor among the
Consul’s intimates?
Neither the one nor the other. The young man of twenty named Méneval
writes it; and it is dictated to him by his chief, the First Consul,
who is walking up and down the study. Acting on Bonaparte’s orders, the
Minister for Justice is sending a provocative agent to Munich, where the
man is to get in touch with English agents of the Bourbons. The letter
is to be part of the outfit. Many other details are given. We are told
more about the royalist menial who cleans the study and lights the fire;
what this fellow will get if he brings off the coup successfully; where
he will spend the night during his escape. The commander is drafting the
plan of a little campaign directed against himself.
He has good reason to be on his guard. Uneasy winter weeks are these,
during which he collates the data sent in by a hundred spies in London,
Vendée, and Paris itself. “Has the time come to strike?” his agents are
continually asking. “Wait,” he replies, and quietly goes on gathering
information. At length he has all the proofs in his hands. His deadly
enemies of the extreme right and the extreme left, the royalists and the
Jacobins, have joined forces for the destruction of their great enemy.
Pichegru, the friend of the Bourbons, and Moreau, the champion of the
republicans who are opposed to the dictatorship, are working together.
Both the generals are his rivals. Now is the time to strike.
When the plot became public property, alarm spread across Europe. The
legitimate rulers were amazed at Napoleon’s perspicacity, but put their
trust in his enemies, whose number must be greater than the “Moniteur”
was willing to admit. The English ambassador compromised! The great
Moreau in jail!—Bonaparte hesitates a long time before arresting Moreau,
having high esteem for the man who had shared his laurels. On the day
of the arrest, the Consul sends repeatedly for news. Is his memory at
work? Less than four years ago, he himself had a scare that night in
Talleyrand’s house when he believed his own arrest to be imminent! The
trial is distressing; Moreau’s complicity is clearly proved; but Napoleon
thinks it better to pardon the victor of Hohenlinden on condition
of withdrawal to the United States. Pichegru is found strangled in
prison. Thirteen of the conspirators are executed. A man named Querelle,
personally involved in the conspiracy, reveals that one of the Bourbon
princes has been privy to the plot.
The Consul lends an eager ear. A Bourbon prince! Talleyrand draws
attention to the fact that for a long time the duke of Enghien has been
living close to the Rhine frontier—presumably in order to watch through
a telescope what is going on in France. Would a man spend his time thus
inertly in Baden, simply in order to make love to a cardinal’s niece? The
duke of Enghien is a scion of the house of Condé; he is a Bourbon, and is
in English pay. Most likely he is the Bourbon prince incriminated in the
affair. At any rate, he is in touch with the agents who swarm in South
Germany. An example must be made of this suspect of the blood royal. That
will put an end to the reiterated attempts on the part of the exiled
Bourbons to disturb the peace of France and to trouble the sleep of its
master!
In a lengthy despatch, the Consul orders an attack on the little Badenese
town of Ettenheim, just across the Rhine. The number of boats and the
soldiers’ rations are prescribed with as much care as if the expedition
were the siege of Mantua. Three hundred dragoons make a raid into Baden
and carry off the duke. Four days later, he is brought in secret to the
fortress of Vincennes.
Two of Napoleon’s confidants warn the dictator that no compromising
documents have been found among the duke of Enghien’s belongings. But
Talleyrand, who has ever an eye to his own future, advises court martial
and the severest measures, knowing that the moral reprobation thus
aroused will, in the end, prove disastrous to Napoleon. Brother Joseph is
alarmed at the same thought. He reminds Napoleon of the veneration they
had shared for the great Condé during their cadet days; of the verses
they had recited about the hero of the seventeenth century. Was the only
remaining descendant of that famous man to be slaughtered?
“I have made up my mind to pardon him,” answers the Consul. “But that is
not sufficient. I feel that I am strong enough to have him fighting on my
side.”
Joseph returns home, able to reassure Madame de Staël and his other
quests.
The duke, who was two years younger than Napoleon, and who would probably
have won renown but for the peculiar political circumstances which had
brought Napoleon fame and power, was tried by court martial the same
evening. With a brave and knightly bearing, he faced the twelve staff
officers who formed the court, while a member of the Council of State,
acting as prosecutor, asked the questions that had been drafted by
Napoleon.
“Did you never have any dealings with English agents?”—“No.”—“Was it
not your intention, if Pichegru’s conspiracy had been successful, to
cross the Rhine and invade Alsace?”—“No.”—“Have you been in receipt
of an English pension?”—“Yes.”—“Did you wish to enter the English
service?”—“Yes, in order to free my country.”—“This means that you
placed yourself at England’s disposal in order to take up arms against
France?”—“How can a Condé return to his homeland except under arms?”
A death sentence follows, and next day at dawn the duke of Enghien is
shot.
In one respect the treatment of the duke of Enghien was definitely
illegal. The French had no right to kidnap him in foreign territory and
to bring him across the frontier. Once he was on French soil, there was
legal warrant for condemning him to death as a person who (according
to his own admission) desired by force of arms to overthrow the extant
form of State. With the primary reservation regarding the French raid
into Baden, of course absolutely indefensible, the condemnation was
technically just.
Nevertheless, as Talleyrand subsequently said of the affair, it was worse
than a crime—it was a blunder. In time of revolution, hundreds are put
to death who are more innocent than was this prince. Even though he may
not have been privy to the plot, he would have hailed with delight the
assassination of the usurper, and would, sword in hand (to quote his
own words), have joined in the march on Paris to take vengeance on any
of the regicides who remained alive. There would have been very little
said about the court martialling and shooting of this young officer, had
he not been a Bourbon, had he not been a symbol of that prince-ridden
Europe whose system had been ended on French soil by the revolution. The
shooting of the duke of Enghien was a challenge to a dozen thrones, and
to the many millions of Europeans who believed in rule by divine right.
It gave the signal for a rallying of forces against the dictator who
had had neither part nor lot in the reign of terror, and who during his
seven years as military commander and as statesman had never committed an
outrage.
The day after the execution, a few tongue-tied and crestfallen guests
were seated at his board. Josephine was doing her best to hide her fears,
and Napoleon had been taciturn despite his tumultuous thoughts. Then,
suddenly, he broke out: “At any rate, they will know now what we can
do. Henceforward, I hope, they will leave us in peace.” After dinner,
he walked up and down the room, explaining to the silent listeners his
reasons and what he thought of it all. Continuing to pace the room, he
went on to speak movingly of genius, of statesmanship, and above all of
Frederick the Great, for whom he had so profound an admiration:
“Ought a statesman to indulge in feelings? Is he not an isolated
individual, always alone though always in company? Policy is his
telescope, which must neither reduce things in size nor magnify them.
Even while he is attentively watching the course of events, he must be
pulling the strings which move them. Often enough, ill-matched horses
are harnessed to his chariot. Do you think he can allow himself to heed
some of those feelings which may in other respects be of great importance
to the welfare of society?... How often he will have to do things which
seem quite out of keeping with the whole!... Try to get outside the
limitations of your own epoch, enlarge your imagination instead of being
content merely to blame, and you will see that those great personalities
you had regarded as violent and cruel, are nothing but statesmen! They
know themselves better than others know them; they are the best judges
of their own conduct; if they have true ability, they will even know how
to control their passions, for they will be competent to calculate the
precise effect of these.”
Suddenly breaking off this monologue, which discloses some of the
deepest recesses of his soul, he sends for the documents bearing on the
conspiracy and has them read over to him.
“You see,” he says, “we have incontrovertible proof that the conspirators
wanted to spread disorder in France, and hoped, through killing me, to
slay the revolution! It was my business to defend the revolution, to
avenge it! The duke was a conspirator just like another, and had to be
treated in the same way as the others.... The madmen seek to kill me,
though they would gain nothing by it, for a gang of fanatical Jacobins
would take my place.... These Bourbons! If they ever do regain power,
I will wager that their first concern will be with etiquette. If they
were prepared to share in the rough and tumble of the battle-field,
with its blood and its grime!... But how can they expect to win back a
kingdom with a letter dated from London and signed Louis? All the same,
letters like that will incriminate incautious recipients.... I have shed
blood; I had to. Perhaps I shall shed more in the future. But always
without passion, quite simply, because blood-letting is indicated. I am a
statesman: I am the French revolution, and shall know how to protect it!”
Abruptly he dismisses his guests.
Such is his mood; such are his motives, his views, the undercurrents of
his feelings. But his notable inferences are not yet disclosed.
VII
A week after the court-martialling of the duke of Enghien a committee
of the Senate comes to see the Consul, with a very remarkable twofold
request: for the establishment of a State tribunal and the foundation
of a monarchy. This is a cautious improvisation, to test the current of
popular opinion. Can anything be more logical, or simpler? To scare the
terrorists, to safeguard the head of the State, two things are requisite,
a State tribunal and an heir!
As with all the decisions of his life, so also this premature resolve
to become an emperor is an outgrowth of circumstances. In none of the
decisive moments of his career, do we find evidence that he had a
definite scheme of life, which he systematically endeavoured to realise.
When he first invaded Italy, it was not in search of the crown of Milan,
and still less in search of the crown of France. But, as he winged his
soaring flight, the natural sequence was that wider and ever wider vistas
of land and sea should unfold themselves before his eyes. What happened,
was a fulfilment of his own guiding principle: “He will not go far who
knows from the first whither he is going.” Improvisation, which, in
amazing fashion, characterises so much of his activity, merely deprives
him of the nebular glory of the mystical hero. As far as details are
concerned, it leaves him free to make exact preparations, while restoring
to him, as a whole, a liberty and a guilelessness which strengthen his
genius.
Was the desire to become emperor a mistake? What urged him towards the
adoption of such a role?
First of all, the imaginative side of his nature, which for the second
time is blinding the cold reason of the calculator. Thus was it in
Egypt, and thus was it to be for a third time in Russia. His ideal
drives him to take this step. He had grown to manhood amid dreams of the
antique world; classical imagery had filled his mind; his dictatorial
nature necessarily craved for the forms of Roman imperialism. A poetical
temperament which makes him look upon the successive occurrences in his
life as phases in the unrolling of a saga, and makes him feel, on the
very evening after a battle has been won, that the battle has already
passed into the realm of history; this engine, driven by the power of
fantasy; this eye that looks upward and beyond to see how posterity will
crown his deeds with fame—they need a symbol which no one has to-day, but
which shone over Europe two thousand years ago.
Yet the mathematician in him also needs this symbol; the statesman needs
it, that he may safeguard his country without perpetual wars. Lastly, and
perhaps most passionately of all, the man with strong family attachments
needs it; the man who feels he has won nothing, if what he has won be no
more than an adventurer’s prize that will perish with the winner.
“The name of king is outworn. It carries with it a trail of obsolete
ideas, and would make me nothing more than the heir of dead men’s
glories. I do not wish to be dependent upon any predecessor. The title
of emperor is greater than that of king. Its significance is not wholly
explicable, and therefore it stimulates the imagination.” Here, in two or
three sentences, are compendiously disclosed the impetuous and the hot,
the cunning and the cold, motives of his soul.
Does he see the dangers, or does he overlook them? What are his
antitoxins? “What is a throne? A piece of wood covered with satin!” When
he has become emperor he will ask the question and answer it thus, more
than once. But with this satin-covered piece of wood, as he knows, he
can influence grown men, just as he could influence them with the toys
of the Legion of Honour. Indeed, the glamour of the throne is stronger,
and therefore he will take the establishment of his throne more seriously
than he took the foundation of the Legion of Honour. It is an instrument
of policy, a means for the management of men. In the real world, where no
one can call familiar spirits to his aid, the private person, the poet
or the philosopher, can raise his head heavenward without bearing the
burden of a crown; but the statesman needs the insignia of power, for the
dull populace cannot believe in the reality of power unless he who wields
power wears the insignia.
Are we to suppose that he, who can calculate all eventualities, does not
see the danger that lurks in the symbol of the crown? Does he not know
that for thousands of years people have regarded the monarch as akin to
God? If he is aware of this, how without disaster will he be able to
harmonise the illusion with his political cynicism? If the crown is the
gift of his genius, how can he bequeath it without bequeathing the genius?
Nevertheless, all his endeavours, like those of the emperors of ancient
Rome, are now concentrated upon the bequest of power. He, whose own
genius has taught him that genius is always aboriginal and primary; he
who with his own eyes has seen hereditary power perish amid blood and
grime, and whose inmost heart said aye to the act of regicide; he, who
to-day reproaches the Bourbons, not with their origin, but with the
cowardice that keeps them trembling in their mouseholes; he, Napoleon
Bonaparte, who feels himself to be the one man of a millennium; he, a
principle of whose rule it is to grant honour and wealth only to merit
and courage and talent; he, who is the symbol of revolt incorporated in
human flesh—believes that in the place he has fought and won for himself
through the storms of eight years, he will be able to perpetuate his
blood for the sole reason that it is his own!
He knows Plutarch and the story of the Cæsars. He has studied the history
of the great kings of France and England and Prussia, and has learned to
look with contempt upon their decadence. And yet he is ready and eager
to restore the hereditary principle for the succession to this, the
highest office in the State! Here, and here only, he wishes to combine
the newest of the new with the old, so that, as he says later in a
phrase both profound and tragical: “I might achieve that harmony which
I regarded as essential for the tranquillity of the world, a solitary
man, driven forward by the impetus of my own personality. That is why I
dropped sheet-anchors everywhere.”
But side by side with these heroic words, which sufficed to class him
with the heroes of Plutarch, were housed the simplest feelings of
domestic life. For, when his confidant Roederer urged him to seek a new
wife, who would bear him a son, Napoleon answered in great excitement:
“Hitherto I have always ruled justly. It might be to my interest to seek
a divorce. But what right have I to put away a good wife merely because
I have become a greater man than I was when we married? She would have
followed me into exile or imprisonment. Now I am to divorce her? I am
not strong enough to do that. A human heart beats in my bosom; my mother
was not a tigress.” After Josephine’s death, he would be free to choose
a new partner. But, as things are, what will be the best way of solving
this problem of the succession? “My brothers, like myself, were born in
petty circumstances, but they did not force themselves upwards unaided as
I did. The man who is to rule France must either be born to greatness, or
he must be one of those whose inborn strength enables them to distinguish
themselves from the herd.”
In this last idea is implicit the disastrous error which in due time is
to lead him to inevitable destruction.
For the nonce, however, all is done quietly and soberly, just as on two
previous occasions. Wishing to be independent of the parties and to stand
above them, he again demands a popular vote; and the very Frenchmen who
twelve years earlier had destroyed, not only the king, but kingship, now
re-establish both, doing this with even more enthusiasm than when, two
years before, they had made Napoleon Consul for life. In a few days,
everything is settled. First of all there are votes in the Chambers. In
the Senate, only three adverse votes, those of personal enemies. In the
Tribunate, Carnot is alone in recording his dissent, Carnot who admires
Napoleon, but is a far-sighted devotee of the principle of freedom.
The result of a plebiscite is overwhelmingly in favour of the adoption
of the imperial title with hereditary succession. In May 1804, the new
constitution is promulgated. It is short and businesslike, as if it were
a mere paragraph modifying an old constitution.
He never affects to believe that his power has a mystical origin, or even
that it really springs from the people. See him, a few days after he has
been proclaimed Emperor, seated in a bow window one evening after dinner.
He is astraddle on a chair, with his chin resting on the back. For a
long time he is silent while Josephine and Madame de Rémusat are talking
(the latter records the incident). Then he stands up, turns to Madame
de Rémusat, and, after posing for a while as an easy-going and cheerful
man of the world, of a sudden, with that free gesture which always
amazed his associates and still amazes posterity, he tore off the veil,
disclosed his motives, expounded his thoughts as if he had been writing a
predecessor’s history:
“You were all very angry with me about the execution of the duke of
Enghien. You seem still to be fond of traditional memories. My own
memory goes back only to the time when I began to be something. What is
a duke of Enghien to me? An émigré, more important than the others, and
therefore one whom it is all the better to destroy.... Two years ago,
power dropped into my hands in the most natural way in the world....
It is true that the duke compelled me to cut the crisis short. I had
expected to carry on the Consulate for another two years, although its
forms conflicted with the reality of things. France and I could have
walked along arm-in-arm for a while longer, for France had confidence in
me, and wanted everything that I wanted. But after this conspiracy, which
was to set the Continent in motion, it was necessary to show Europe the
error of her ways....
“The political parties I wished to conciliate, the royalists and the
Jacobins, will not lose heart as long as they have somebody to dread.
I realised, therefore, that no pact between them could be concluded,
but that it would be possible to conclude one with them to my own
advantage.... Now, they have been reduced to silence. Still opposed
to me are the republicans, the cranks who believe that Europe will
look on quietly while a republic is being established upon the ruins
of a monarchy.... That is why I preferred the imperial dignity to a
dictatorship, for in an empire people no longer feel that they are
travelling in unmapped country....
“You will soon see what a lure court etiquette will exercise on the
émigrés. The old familiar forms of address will win over the nobility....
You French love monarchy. It is the only form of government which really
suits you. I will wager, Monsieur de Rémusat, that you feel a hundred
times more at ease now that you call me ‘Sire’ and I address you as
‘Monsieur’.... Your vanity was always being bridled; the strictness of
the republic would have bored you to death.... Liberty is no more than a
pretext; equality is your hobby horse; the people are content to be ruled
by a prince who comes from the army.... To-day, soldiers and people are
on my side. A man who could not rule under such conditions would be an
idiot.”
He broke off, resumed a formal demeanour, and gave Monsieur de Rémusat an
order of no importance whatever in the dry tone of the absolute master.
These moments of confession; these quarters of an hour in which we stand
opposite him, silently listening and watching, while he lounges on his
chair, this newly made emperor of thirty-four in his well-worn green
coat, looking askance up and down the room, rising to walk restlessly to
and fro, pouring out his most intimate thoughts and then with a brusque
transition cutting off all the springs of familiarity; when we see him
in such movingly close proximity, in scenes full of nature and purpose,
full of surrender to destiny and animus against the present—we can see
and hear for ourselves even more than he frankly discloses in simulated
self-forgetfulness. We become aware of his easy contempt for persons
of noble birth, which is none the less conjoined with a secret wish
to make a good impression on them; we discern programmes which he is
always willing to adapt to changing circumstances; we observe the robust
cynicism aroused in him by the folly of mankind, and see that it exists
side by side with the foreign character traits of this Corsican, the very
traits which enable him to rule the lovely Marianne with such gallant
rigour.
Of course he discloses no more than half his motives, for he is here
confining himself to political issues. Still, at the outset of the
imperial epoch these political issues exert a predominant influence.
It seems as if, to begin with, he regards the change of title with the
utmost sobriety: “My brother will not hear a word of his new title,”
writes Napoleon to Madame de Staël. “He says he is just the same man he
was before, and at the same time he puts on great airs. The truly great
man is the one who fully realises that such empty names, which only the
system of society compels us to assume, make no difference to friendship,
to family life, or to social relationships. I am certain that since I
have been ‘Your Majesty,’ not one of those who live with me will have
been able to detect any difference in me.”
Yet it is an event that now for the third time he takes leave of his
name. It may be nothing that the leading persons in the country who
appear at the first court reception address him and Josephine as “Sire”
and “Madame,” and that the members of the noblesse, who on this same
polished floor fifteen or twenty years earlier had said “Sire” and
“Madame,” should feel their hearts revive as they bandy courtiers’
compliments. That may be nothing. Certainly, as regards essential nature,
clothing, and deportment, the Emperor of to-day is no different from the
Consul of yesterday.
But the proclamation, the thousand and one letters, memoranda, and
decrees, will henceforward be signed with a new name. For eight years
they have been signed with the rudiments of a “Bonaparte.” Now he signs
with a name which he himself has never written since he was a child,
and which his nervous hand will speedily compress into an initial N.
and a flourish. Josephine has always addressed him as “General.” His
brothers and his sisters have for a long time past spoken to him with
the ceremonial “you” instead of the familiar “thou” (the change was
initiated, not by the Consul himself, but by Joseph). Only his mother in
rare moments of expansion has occasionally used her son’s Christian name;
and she utters it in her own dialect as “Napolione.”
There is a profound significance in the newness of this name when, adding
to it a brand-new title, he writes for the first time in his life:
Napoleon I., Emperor of the French.
VIII
With the first steps, the dilemma begins. The new coins he issues bear
the legend: “Emperor according to the Constitution of the Republic”—this
paradox will dog him for another four years. When the anniversary of
the taking of the Bastille and the outbreak of the revolution comes
round once more, he celebrates it with imperial pomp. The gesture
may look sublime, but it is nothing more than a measure of political
expediency. Even on this very first occasion, the anniversary of the
day of liberation is postponed to a Sunday. A year or two later, the
commemoration is completely ignored. With it vanishes the revolutionary
calendar, for the old one is restored by degrees.
All flock to his standard. Ere long, one hundred and thirty of those who
twelve years earlier had voted for the king’s execution, hold office
under the Emperor. This is the revolutionary picture caricatured in
France, while Europe looks on, watching how first the forms, and then by
slow stages the content, for whose sake so much blood has been shed, are
laid aside in the museum of history. What can Europe do but smile?
Still more broadly smiles the old noblesse. In the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, which the emperor watches as closely as he watched the
working-class quarter of Saint Antoine, anecdotes are rife concerning
the new master in the old Tuileries. Now that he is called “Sire,” just
like the last of the Bourbons, all the lorgnettes are turned on him, and
he has become the focus of criticism. As far as his own personality is
concerned, so great is his native dignity that he is practically above
criticism; in Milan, already, when no more than a general of the French
Republic, he ruled simply because he was there. But his relatives, with
their childish curiosity and jealousy, and with their gossip about
everything that goes on in the palace, soon become the targets of
mockery. Magnified by rumour, and carried across the frontiers, this
ridicule besmirches the master.
Henceforward England keeps in Paris, in addition to ordinary spies,
a horde of quilldrivers, whose tales find credence whenever they are
enlivened with wit. Caricatures pass from hand to hand, showing the
little lieutenant being taught by the great Talma how to walk like an
emperor—Napoleon, who has often taught Talma the best way of playing the
royal roles in Corneille! How otherwise could old Europe defend herself
against this saga which had become reality? The only resource was to
degrade to farce what was being staged with all the crude seriousness of
tragi-comedy.
For the Emperor needs a court! It is his way to do everything with due
attention to detail; but the details of court life are beyond the range
of his studies, and he has to call in the experts of the old regime. The
sometime chamberlain at the court of the late king must lay aside his pen
(literature had been the resource of his retirement), to resume his staff
of office. Josephine, who at first is attended by no more than a few of
the ladies of the former court, is at a loss as to the management of an
empress’ train. What has become of Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting?
She is still alive, and keeps a school in Paris. Bring her forth from her
obscurity! She comes, and in the same rooms, before the same mirrors,
arranges the folds of the train round these Creole feet which know very
different dances from those of the poor dead queen.
The Emperor organises his court with the same seriousness and the same
precision as if he were organising the general staff of a new army. No
one knows better than Napoleon the vanity of these things: “I am well
aware that plenty of people are writing unfavourably about them. Even
you, Monsieur Roederer, are not complaisant enough to suppose that I have
a little common sense! You ought to understand without my telling you
why I have given my new marshals, plain republicans though they be, the
title of ‘Monseigneur’; it is only to safeguard my own imperial title of
‘Majesty’? The marshals, having grand titles of their own, cannot make
fun of mine.” His very first undertakings as Emperor involve him in the
toils of such contradictions.
The two ex-consuls (these are the only offices suppressed by the Emperor)
become respectively arch-chancellor and arch-treasurer of the Empire.
Talleyrand, as grand chamberlain, brings back the old arts and graces
into the old house. How easy it would be for the Emperor to appoint
none but gentlemen and ladies of the old regime to the leading offices
at court! Instead, he chooses the scions of the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, the men who have risen with him: Berthier, Murat, Lannes,
Ney, and Davoust. Fourteen generals, who in youth had been bakehouse
lads, stable boys, waiters, cabin boys, or vagrants, must now exchange
their campaigners’ uniforms for the gold-braided coats of the marshals
of France, must double their military duties with offices at court, must
wear lace ruffs and buckled shoes; their wives must learn how to curtsey
in the grand manner, how to stand and sit properly, how to scratch at
the door instead of knocking—all that Europe may see how the Emperor, who
was himself a lieutenant, promotes his lieutenants according to merit.
Marmont is there, still wearing his arm in a sling; he is decked out in
silk and satin and gold; but the slit sleeve, with its reminiscence of
martial glory, seems to mock the splendour of his breeches. The Emperor
tactfully drops out of the ceremonial two details that were degrading to
the dignity of the courtiers: the presentation of the shirt at the king’s
levee, and the kissing of the ruler’s hand.
But how is the charm of the rococo court to be revived, now that a
soldier sits upon the throne? True, that, after hours of deliberation,
it is possible to decide what colours the empress and the highnesses
(Napoleon’s relatives) must wear when they go out hunting. When, however,
the time has come to bring down the stag, and the Emperor’s thoughts
are wandering in other fields, no one else ventures to shoot, with the
result that the stag escapes because the chief sportsman has so much else
on his mind. The ceremonial “was conducted as if to the sound of drums;
everything seemed to happen at the storming pace; and the dread which
he inspired in all, drove away grace and ease.... Court life was cold
and dull, was gloomy rather than dignified. Since we were following a
prescribed ritual, our inner feeling was that we were only machines which
some one had placed upon the new gilded couches.”
The Emperor is bored by ladies’ society. With blunt circumstantiality,
he asks how many children they have had, and whether they suckle their
own babies. He tries to make himself agreeable, but often fails, when
his thoughts range to other matters. At Saint-Cloud, in a room full of
ladies, he can find nothing to say but, again and again: “How hot it is
here!”
All the same, every one attached to the court grows rich. He gives
princely salaries to the court officials, and only shows thrift in his
payments to some of the members of the old noblesse, maliciously implying
that such work is nothing more than their duty. In general, he pays
munificently, for “ambition is the mainspring of action. People work so
long as they are aspiring upwards.... I have made senators and princes
in order to promote ambition, and to make them dependent on me.” He thus
uses both honours and money to attach people to his cause, making, not
friends, but dependents.
He knows the value of money; and though at all the critical moments of
his career he surprises us by improvisation, we are, in general, just as
much astonished by the way in which he continually displays a bourgeois
rationality and foresight. His own demands are moderate. The Emperor’s
personal salary is fixed at twenty-five millions, the amount paid to the
late king; but where as Louis had spent forty-five millions, Napoleon
saves twelve. The whole court, resplendent though it is, does not cost a
fourth as much as the Bourbon court. France, which has to foot the bill,
owes this economy to the care and knowledge of the master, who once had
to live on ninety francs a month, and even now declares that he could get
along well enough with twelve hundred francs a year and a horse.
There was no change in his routine of life. The Emperor was called
at seven, and held his first reception at nine. Most of the day, his
secretaries were engaged in taking down from dictation. This dictation
was at the speed of ordinary conversation, and must be transcribed with
perfect accuracy. At night, when he had some difficulty in sleeping,
Méneval must come to record his master’s night thoughts. His dinner took
twenty minutes, and he hardly noticed what he was eating. He was much
more plainly clad than his gaily bedecked courtiers; and when, on State
occasions, he had to dress ceremoniously, he was always in a bad temper
while being arrayed, and greatly relieved when he could doff his finery.
When he entered Saint-Cloud after the place had been done up, he regarded
it with disfavour, saying: “Rooms like this are suitable for a kept
woman; they lack seriousness.”
He does not allow himself to be enslaved by anything, and never insists
that his bed or his meals or the lighting shall be just so and no
otherwise. Even the snuff-box that he always carries is no more than
a toy. The only things which the Emperor finds indispensable are open
fires, hot baths, eau-de-cologne, Chambertin, and clean linen twice a day.
Josephine is extravagant. Her seven hundred dresses and two hundred and
fifty hats, her jewels, her shawls, and her hair-dressing, cost millions;
and although the Emperor wants her to shine in all the splendours which
he scorns for himself, he often grumbles at the preposterous totals of
the bills.
His brothers and sisters squander money too. He gives them everything,
and they are never satisfied. There is an absurd rivalry between the
five couples (Lucien is still banished) and Josephine, whom all the
others detest. Of the six grand dignitaries who draw fabulous salaries,
four are his near relatives, by blood or by marriage. Joseph is grand
elector; Louis, constable; Eugene, arch-chancellor of State; and Murat,
high admiral. Since the brothers are to be styled Imperial Highnesses,
the sisters have their noses put out of joint, and make a collective
demand, complaining that Hortense, as the wife of Louis, has become
Imperial Highness, while they are “nothing.” He eyes them for a moment,
and replies with a witticism which deserves a place in universal history:
“When I listen to you, I can almost believe that His Majesty our father
of blessed memory must have bequeathed us crown and realm!”
Indeed, one could almost believe it. For when he complies with their
demand, with a good nature he is not apt to show towards others, and
when for ten years to come he showers honours and wealth, crowns and
territories, upon these brothers and sisters who show no gratitude,
who never obey him, and never cease to trouble him—we cannot but ask
ourselves once more what can be the prejudice which blinds his eyes
where they are concerned. His pride is great; he is lonely in his
self-confidence; his path is that of a pioneer; in this instance as in
others, his motives must be mixed; in part obscurely felt, in part coldly
calculated.
He is half an oriental, and it tickles his fancy to bestow diadems as
he used to bestow swords and snuff-boxes; but all the same, he warily
contrives that power shall be given to those only on whom he can rely.
Well, what is thicker than blood? Even his companions-in-arms seem to
him less trustworthy than his relatives; but for his trust in them, his
relatives will repay him with ingratitude, and in the end his sister will
betray him. Because in this one respect he infringes his own principle of
equality and departs from his determination to choose only the efficient,
because he appoints brothers and nephews to high office and looks upon
them as his heirs, he cannot give them the free hand which it is his
way to give all his generals within the limits of their commissions. By
treating his relatives as an all-powerful minister treats princes who are
still under tutelage, he enrages them, and lays up a store of bitterness
for himself.
Joseph is already animated by a mocking spirit. He tells his daughter
to address His Majesty as “Consul”; holds disputations in democratic
circles; refuses to become a minister of State; but accepts an allowance
of two millions as an imperial prince, and lives at the Luxembourg, which
his brother hands over to him. At length Napoleon loses patience. The
ostensible cause of his anger is a trifle, but all the rage of his heart
is now vented in this complaint:
“What on earth is Joseph thinking about? Does he imagine that he has been
made prince in order to hobnob with my enemies and walk up and down the
streets of Paris in brown surtout and round hat? I have sacrificed my
own personal pleasures in order to become what I am. I am as well fitted
as another to shine in society!... But things of that sort do not help a
man to rule. Does he dream of disputing with me for the supreme power? My
strength is builded on a rock!...
“Do you know what he ventured to say to me recently in the presence
of two others? I ought not to have my wife crowned; the step would be
opposed to his interest; it would give Louis’ children a better position
than his, because they would be the grandsons of an empress! He had the
impudence to talk to me about his rights and his interests! He wanted
to touch me on the raw! He might almost as well have boasted he had
slept with my mistress, or hoped to do so soon. My mistress! Power is my
mistress! The conquest of that mistress has cost me so much that I will
allow no one to rob me of her, or to share her with me!”
Thus does the volcano suddenly spout forth great rocks, in the midst of
a conversation about trifles. But the rest of the conversation does not
turn wholly on trifles. He speaks bitterly of his brothers and sisters,
comparing them with Eugene and Hortense. “My stepchildren always side
with me. If their mother is put out because I take a fancy for a pretty
girl, they say to her: ‘Oh, well, he’s still quite young, you know. You
mustn’t make a fuss. No doubt he has faults, but you must not forget how
much he has done for us all.’”
But nothing will keep him from pushing his brothers’ advancement. When
Joseph refuses all other occupations, Napoleon forces him into the army.
“He must have military rank, get a nice wound, and win a good reputation
for himself. I shall only give him easy jobs. Then he can win a battle,
and I shall be able to promote him to a higher rank than all the other
commanders.” It sounds like the education of a degenerate son by a great
father.
Louis has an enthusiasm for poetry; he becomes chief of the imperial
guard, so that he may have a dignified position; but he can stay at home
when the guns begin to shoot.
Murat and Caroline are frightfully extravagant; their table service is of
gold. “As for Caroline, my own sister, if I have to discuss anything with
her, I must make longer speeches than at the Council of State....
“The whole lot of them are always thinking about my death. It’s rather
nasty of them to be continually bringing that into my mind.... Were it
not that I find some happiness in my home life, I should be miserable!
Why are they always so suspicious of my wife? What has she more than
they? Diamonds and debts!... She’s a good wife to me, and does them no
harm! She’s rather fond of playing the empress, with her jewels, her
dresses, and the whimsies natural to her age. I have never been blinded
by love. But I am just. She shall be crowned, even if it costs me two
hundred thousand men!”
Thus he is continually bickering with a family which he could reduce to
nonentity in a moment, but from which he is unable to cut adrift.
Only one of them is incorruptible, asks for nothing, and holds aloof.
Lucien writes from Rome:
“Mother thinks that the First Consul is wrong to take the Bourbons’
crown. She has uneasy presentiments which she will not confide to me. Her
dread is that a gang of fanatics will assassinate the Emperor.”—While
this dignified mother of the family, still a beautiful woman though
well over fifty, is led by her knowledge of the world and her gloomy
forebodings to keep herself to herself, while she holds her tongue and
only mentions her anxieties to a few intimates, in the Tuileries her
children are quarrelling about titles and precedence, disputing who is to
sit at the Emperor’s right, debating whether they are entitled to walk
out of the room in front of a sovereign prince!
Then Napoleon summons Madame Mère to Paris. But here is one who will
not obey him. At first she makes excuses. When more urgent commands are
sent, she sets out on the journey, but takes her time, and does not reach
Paris for the most splendid festival that a mortal mother can ever have
witnessed. She hears and reads all that a gaping world says and writes
about the affair. Her only comment is: “Pourvou que cela doure!”
IX
Meanwhile, Letizia’s protector the pope has become more compliant, and
is already on the way to Paris. What else could the Holy Father do?
The man of might had summoned him, and the Emperor must be kept in a
good humour. Besides, he who is to be crowned is an Italian. As one of
the cardinals had put it, in the decisive conclave: “After all, we have
this satisfaction, that we are taking vengeance on the Gauls by setting
an Italian family to rule over these barbarians.” Napoleon is still
regarded as a foreigner in France! But why does he not go to Rome for his
coronation? Why is he not content to be anointed in Rome, as Charlemagne
had been, and all the emperors of the west since Charlemagne’s day? What
does he want a pope for at all?
In this matter, once more, he is trying to harmonise the new with the
old. At first he is silent about details, and merely asks the pope “to
give the highest religious consecration to the anointing and crowning of
the first Emperor of the French.” For weeks, letters have been exchanged
between Rome and Paris, but the exact nature of the ceremony still
remains obscure. Pius VII. is in an uneasy frame of mind as he draws
near to Paris, and his spirit is by no means one of benediction. Never
before has a pope been summoned in this way, much as a great physician is
summoned. When the Emperor meets the pope at the gate of the city, the
Holy Father does not fail to note that Napoleon neither kneels to receive
a blessing nor kisses hands in token of fealty. Paris is a town where
people’s faith is unstable and where popes are held in little honour. The
visitor is chilled.
But Josephine is different. All devotion, she confides to him that she
and her husband were not married in church, and that therefore from the
pope’s point of view they are not married at all. She is eager to grasp
the opportunity of consolidating her union, which seems to her frail in
view of her barrenness. Taking the hint, Pius insists upon a religious
celebration of the marriage before he will crown her as empress. In the
palace chapel, two days before the festival, Uncle Fesch, clad in purple,
solemnises the union of the pair who eight years before had needed the
intervention neither of priests nor civilian officials before coming
together. There are no witnesses, not one who could laugh over this
comedy in which cheating is still the order of the day—for even the
Corsican uncle is not aware what is about to happen.
On December 2, 1804, in Notre Dame, an abundance of precious stones
reflects the light of a myriad candles, so that the place looks more like
a banqueting hall than a church. Everything has been prepared for weeks
beforehand. A skilful museum director has even produced a colourable
imitation of Charlemagne’s sceptre. Ancient parchments from the days of
the Roi Soleil had been consulted, to ensure that the crowning of this
revolutionist should vie in every respect with that of the legitimate
monarchs of France. Ségur had studied the etiquette of the occasion with
the utmost care; Isabey had rehearsed the whole affair with an array of
dolls; the old palace, Paris, France, were in a fever.
The Emperor is in a pleasant humour. Early in the morning he makes sure
that Josephine’s crown is a good fit. The great procession drives to the
cathedral. Napoleon, robed in an antique imperial mantle, strides to the
high altar leading the empress by the hand. Josephine’s charm helps to
divest the great moment of a certain sense of embarrassment. Surrounded
by attendant cardinals, the pope is seated, waiting. The organ peals
forth.
Then, when the appointed instant has come, and all are expecting this man
who has never bowed the knee to any one, to kneel before the Holy Father,
Napoleon, to the amazement of the congregation, seizes the crown, turns
his back on the pope and the altar, and, standing upright as always,
crowns himself in the sight of France. Then he crowns his kneeling wife.
None but the pope had known his intentions. Informed at the eleventh
hour, Pius had lacked courage to threaten immediate departure. Now, all
he could do was to anoint and bless the two sinners. Moreover, the crown
on the Emperor’s head is not a Christian crown at all, but a small
pagan circlet of golden laurel leaves. All who describe the occasion
agree in saying that the Emperor was pale but handsome. He resembled
Emperor Augustus; and from now onwards, as if by some mystical power, his
features grew more and more like those of the first emperor of Rome.
Thus, in this symbolical hour, Napoleon reduces to mockery the
legitimate formalities he is affecting to copy. Furthermore, he makes a
laughing-stock of the pope, who will not forget the slight. In an instant
the cloud of Bourbon reminiscence has been scattered; the flavour of
imitation and parody has vanished; and on the steps of a temple there
stands a soldier, a Roman imperator, whom a dozen years before this day
no one had ever heard of, who since then has performed no miracles but
only done deeds, and has now crowned himself with the golden laurels of
these deeds. But his mantle is broidered with golden bees, the emblem of
activity.
Several incidents show that he has not, throughout this day of his
coronation, wholly surrendered to the mood of a man who has made his own
destiny.
When he was seated on the throne, crown on head, with the pope in front
of him, he said in a low aside to his brother: “Joseph, if only Father
could see this!” The remark, poignant at such an hour in the mouth of a
man who was never wont to speak of his father, is fundamentally natural.
The perfect simplicity, the unsophisticated innocence, of his course of
action, lead his mind back to his origin. Memories of family feuds on
the island, of the pride and ambition of the Corsican clans, direct his
thoughts towards the stock from which he has sprung.
Semblance never holds his attention, which always reaches out to the core
of reality. Thus he is not bewildered even in this amazing hour. When
he wants to whisper something to his uncle, who stands just in front of
him during Mass, he gives the cardinal a gentle dig in the back with his
sceptre. As soon as all is over, and, alone with Josephine, he goes in
to dinner, he says with a sigh of relief: “Thank God we’re through with
it! A day on the battle-field would have pleased me better!” At their
little dinner he tells her to keep on her crown, as if he and she were
poet and actress, for, he says, she is charming, his little Creole woman
as empress. Thus, in the most natural way in the world, he unmasks the
whole masquerade, and we are at ease once more as we see the son of the
revolution laughing his own empire to scorn.
[Illustration: Bonaparte as First Consul. Pencil sketch by J. D. A.
Ingres. Germain Bapst Collection.
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)]
The freedom of spirit shown by the foregoing petty details is splendidly
illuminated by an admission he made the same evening, when, to a
confidant, he summed up the whole matter with sceptical emotion: “No,
Decrès, I have come into the world too late. There is nothing great left
for me to do. I do not deny that I have had a fine career, but what a
difference between me and the heroes of antiquity. Look at Alexander, for
instance. After he has conquered Asia, he declares himself to be the son
of Jupiter, and the whole East believes him, save only his mother and
Aristotle and a handful of Athenian pedants. But if I, nowadays, were to
declare myself the son of the Father Eternal, every fishwife would laugh
in my face. There is nothing great left for me to do.”
This was said a few hours after he had crowned himself emperor; said
quite simply and quite truthfully. Is it not plain why the East has
always allured him, and will continue to allure him? By nature he is
endowed with immense powers, and is overburdened by their incredible
weight. Nothing can be adequate to his aspirations, now that he has
learned how readily people obey the man who can command obedience by
his skill and by his deeds. He is strong in his own strength; what does
Voltaire’s enlightenment, what does Rousseau, matter to him? How can
he wish to establish democracy, to install popular government, when he
knows the weakness of the popular instincts, and all the corruptness of
the leaders of the people? To expand his sway, to spread his name widely
and ever more widely, to leave more record of himself in the book of
universal history than that half page of which he spoke a few years ago,
to sacrifice life itself to the little golden circlet on his head, to do
these things without enjoyment and without leisure and without pause—this
is all that life now offers.
When, during these days, the sketch for an imperial seal is laid before
him, and he sees a lion couchant, he draws his pen across the picture,
and writes in the margin: “An eagle volant.”
X
But with a sinister energy the dangerous fluid of divine right radiates
from the golden circlet, and slowly spreads its waves through the brain
of the wearer, the chosen man. Vainly he endeavours to master and
transform the millennial force that has been stored up in this crown, or
to make light of it; it masters him, and from time to time forces him to
quit the realm of his self-control. When, a year after his coronation as
emperor, he crowns himself in Milan with the iron crown of the Lombards
(for the border States, like France itself, are to become monarchies),
his voice reverberates through the cathedral as he thunders the
traditional formula of the Carlovingian kings: “God gave it to me, woe
to him who touches it!” Of course, it is only the statesman who speaks,
for sound political reasons saying something he does not believe. But,
though he is well aware of the contradiction, he will not always be able
to solve it with the same vigour as in Notre Dame.
In the first place, the new position makes it necessary to impose new
fetters on the mind. The Ministry of Police is revived; and France is
parcelled out into four great sectors, in which the most trusty members
of the Council of State, each with an army of spies, keep watch upon
the mood of the country, for he wants to collect “moral statistics.”
Fouché is reappointed Minister of Police, and, since Napoleon’s ties with
Talleyrand become increasingly close, the Emperor is by degrees enmeshed
in the nets of the two great intriguers—though he is aware that they are
playing a double game between himself and the Bourbons, and, by a second
relay of spies, fruitlessly endeavours to keep watch and ward over his
watchers.
Sinister figures, these two ex-clerics, whom he hates, who hate him, but
whom he will never be able to shake off.
Fouché is a man of humble origin, pale, with a cold manner, taciturn,
parchmenty. Though orders flash on his breast and a lace ruffle waves
there, were it not for his piercing eyes he would look like a mummy in
court dress.
Talleyrand is in all respects the man of noble birth. Lame though he be,
the prettiest women pay court to him. His charm is that of a rolling
sphere, whose living summit is everywhere and nowhere. The assertion
that he betrayed his master only for the sake of France, is belied by
his immeasurable avarice and venality. For the nonce, he continues to
serve the Emperor; but, from the first, the two men have mistrusted one
another. Once, indeed, Talleyrand made a sacrifice for Napoleon. Late
in the evening, when the two were on a journey together, the Emperor
summoned the minister to his bedside for a talk about public affairs.
Suddenly Napoleon fell asleep, and Talleyrand sat on guard till morning,
not stirring, lest he should wake his master. That is his version of
the affair. But the man’s whole nature is so remote from any idea of
sacrifice or sympathy, that we may suppose rather that his motive was the
hope that Napoleon might reveal some important secret by talking in his
sleep.
A dozen times every year, the name of Madame de Staël crops up. Afraid
of her and her works, he keeps her away from Paris with an obstinacy
which arouses wonder. Yet she says of him: “His look grows infinitely
tender when he speaks to women.” Throughout Europe, the champions of the
freedom of the spirit fall away from him; Byron, who had greatly admired
him; Beethoven, who cancels the original dedication of the _Eroica_ to
Napoleon. With painfully mixed feelings the Emperor must have read the
tribute of the mad tsar Paul, who had already acclaimed the First Consul
as the suppressor of the revolution.
Since Marengo, he has been doing his utmost to maintain peace on the
Continent, and for four years he has been successful. His hope is that
the re-establishment of monarchy will appease the united princes, will
assuage the anger they still cherish against France. The death of two
men comes to thwart his plans. Tsar Paul is murdered, and this enemy of
England is succeeded by a youthful son, an idealist, trained by French
apostles of the enlightenment, a man with democratic leanings, gentle,
muddle-headed, animated by the wish to be a better sovereign. Alexander,
therefore, quickly comes to an understanding with England, where, after
Fox’s brief predominance and death, a transient attempt at peace with
France has been followed by a revival of the old jealous enmity. England
fails to evacuate Malta as had been arranged, imposes new conditions, and
is the first to break the peace. Once more there arises the menace of a
European coalition under English leadership, a coalition that will aim at
a Bourbon restoration, for talent enthroned in France sets so dangerous
an example to all other countries.
Thus, a year after the coronation, the war with England is resumed, and
will not end until Napoleon’s star sets. There is no campaigning, at
first; simply a state of war, in which this great military commander
cannot force a decision, and which, therefore, he cannot bring to a
close. England has two notable advantages over her continental rivals,
and over France in particular. It is an island realm; and it spreads
athwart the world. Napoleon’s historical sense, growing ever more alert,
shows England to him as a new empire of Alexander, extending like
Alexander’s from homeland isles and peninsulas to Asia and to Africa,
invincible so long as it remains a united whole. The dream of our new
oriental splits upon this rock.
On this rock, too, are wrecked the mathematician’s calculations. The
day after Aboukir, he had said that a decade would be needed for the
rebuilding of France’s fleet. Half that time has elapsed, and England’s
naval predominance has steadily grown. During the brief peace, the
soldiers of the unsuccessful Egyptian campaign are brought back to France
in English bottoms; England is confirmed in the possession of the Cape
and other overseas colonies; and France has more urgent claims on her
energies than the building of the new fleet.
Fundamentally, what was a ship to the Emperor? He was competent to
design a big gun, to cast it, to place every screw; and to repair every
wheel and every shaft of an ammunition wagon. He knew when every horse
in a cavalry squadron would have to be re-shod, and how much it would
cost; and he knew exactly how many loaves a field bakery could turn
out a day. This far-reaching knowledge was one of the secrets of his
predominance; made his subordinates zealous in their terror of his
incessant control, whether in peace time or in war time; aroused respect
for the all-embracing intelligence of the chief; and ensured the exact
carrying-out of his military ideas.
But one who would know a ship, must grow up in a ship, just as one who
would know ordnance must have passed his youth among big guns. Even
though his admirals were astonished to find how quickly he made himself
at home in naval matters, how shrewd were his questions, and how sensible
were his orders, still their commendation of Napoleon was no more than
the praise of a kindly expert who, tacitly, is criticising a talented
amateur. Napoleon knew this well enough. Since he lacked a great admiral
quite as much as a great fleet, and had never been willing to entrust
the conduct of a campaign to any subordinate, he invented a new kind of
war which was to enable him, after all, to get the better of England.
The European ports from Hamburg to Taranto were to be closed to English
ships, and thus the nation of traders was to be vanquished in a trade
war. At the same time, he revived his plans of invasion; for, could he
but set foot on the island, he would be the military commander, and in
his own element.
Just as he had done before the Egyptian campaign, so now in Boulogne, he
studies the possibilities of embarkation and disembarkation. On land, his
fantasy has found satisfaction and his mathematical powers have gained
conquests in ardent imaginings; and yet, all the time, his battles have
been realities, have realised these imaginings. But here, at sea, he is
an amateur, not an expert; is, for the first time, the onlooker instead
of the man of action. In none other of his private letters do we find
sentences akin to those which he writes from the coast to Josephine after
a stormy night in which a gunboat has broken away from her moorings:
“A wonderful sight! The minute-guns were firing; watch-fires were
lighted along the coast. A raging, foaming sea; uncertainty and anxiety
throughout the night. But a kindly spirit brooded over the ocean and the
night. No lives were lost, and I lay down to sleep with the feeling that
I had been witnessing a romantic and epic vision—so that I could almost
believe that I had been looking on quite alone.”
A wonderful sight; but, alas, only a sight! The Ossianic note is sounded
again, for the first time after fifteen years. Napoleon waxes romantic.
How moving and how significant are the closing words of this artist, who
suddenly feels that he has been robbed of the human material with which
he works, and who is even a little alarmed (we cannot help but read this
through the lines) at the unwonted sensation of being quite alone.
The unfamiliar element leads him astray. When a storm is threatening,
he orders a naval review. Admiral Bruix does not carry out the order.
The Emperor finds that no preparations are being made, and sends for the
admiral. A terrible scene.
“Why did you not obey my orders?”
“Your Majesty can see that for yourself. You would not needlessly risk
brave men’s lives in such weather!”
The Emperor, surrounded by his rigid officers, turns pale with wrath, and
says: “Sir, I have given you an order. The consequences are no concern
of yours. Do what you are told!”
“Sire, I cannot obey.”
An ominous pause. Napoleon strides towards Bruix, riding-switch in hand,
threateningly, though the switch is not raised. The admiral draws back a
step, and lays his hand on his sword-hilt. A petrified group.
“You will leave Boulogne within twenty-four hours, and betake yourself to
Holland. Rear-Admiral Magon, carry out my orders.”
A naval review is held in a raging storm. A number of chaloupes are
capsized, and their crews struggle in the water. The Emperor, to save
himself, jumps into the first boat; all who can, follow his example. Two
hundred bodies are washed ashore next day.
This incident, unique in Napoleon’s career, a blunder, an act of cruelty,
a direct disobedience on the part of a subordinate, is a warning symptom.
But there is a third indication.
A year before, an American inventor had come to Paris, and had offered
the French admiralty two new inventions: one of them a ship to be
propelled by steam power instead of by the wind; the other, a submarine
boat which was to sink ships by the discharge of a kind of torpedo.
“The man is a charlatan,” was Napoleon’s comment on Fulton, after an
experiment in which the inventor’s “plunging boat” had secured a partial
success; and he brushed the whole matter aside. If the American had
brought him models of a machine gun and a field telegraph, he would have
opened his purse.
Napoleon failed to conquer England because this was the one matter in
which he was not confident of victory. Failure was inevitable because
here, and here only, his self-confidence was at fault; because his belief
in his own powers was weakened by his want of expert knowledge and by the
inaccessibility of the foe. By land! Yes, if he could only get at this
island by land! The thought brings back to his mind the scheme of five
years ago, when he had planned an attack on India by way of Herat. But
for such a scheme, quiet and time are needed.
His first aim is to keep the peace, to bring about which he has worked
with his best powers for years. Immediately after the coronation,
he writes in this sense to six monarchs, addressing each in a style
appropriate to his correspondent’s character, thinking out the effect of
every detail, and considering even the exact working of his signature.
Note, for instance, how he writes to the shah:
“My reputation reaches so far, that you cannot fail to know who I am and
what I have done; how I have made France supreme among the nations of
the West; and how great an interest I take in the rulers of the East....
Orientals are full of courage and spirit, but their ignorance of certain
arts and their neglect of military discipline put them at a disadvantage
in war when they are faced by soldiers from the North.... Write me your
wishes, and we will renew friendly and commercial relationships....
Written in my Imperial Palace of the Tuileries ... in the first year of
my reign. Napoleon.” But, in the heading, the document sets forth a title
which never existed, a title which Napoleon obviously uses to show the
ruler of Persia that the writer is the general who made himself famous
in the Egyptian campaign. The document purports to come from “Bonaparte,
Emperor of the French.”
On his table, as he signs the letter to the shah, lies a letter to George
III., though England and France are at war. It is penned with wonderful
art, and is both moving and politic: “Does not all the blood that is
being shed without apparent advantage to any one, touch the consciences
of the governments? I am not ashamed to take the first step. It seems to
me I have shown the world that I have no dread of war and its caprices.
My heart, indeed, longs for peace; but war has never dimmed my fame.
I implore Your Majesty not to deprive yourself of the good fortune of
restoring peace to the world! Do not leave this precious task to your
children. Never was there a more favourable opportunity of stilling
angry passions. If this chance be missed, what will be the outcome of the
war? During the last ten years, Your Majesty has won more territory and
more treasure than all Europe possesses. What further could you expect
from the war?”
How could the writer fail to smile at the realisation that the last
argument could with equal force be turned against himself? The appeal
is fruitless, for neither England nor the rulers on the mainland will
tolerate the new power of France or its upstart emperor. A fourth
coalition of the princes against the republic is imminent.
During the years of peace, he has been tolerably well content. His
intimates at Malmaison have often described him as cheerful. Now he
must take up arms once more, and resign himself to the knowledge that
“it lies in the nature of things to continue this struggle between the
past and the future, for the enduring coalition of our enemies makes it
essential to attack them if we are to escape annihilation.” There is
the simple truth, spoken without exaggeration and without bitterness.
If he did not create this nature of things, at any rate he stabilised
it. Even though the first wars of France in the revolutionary epoch were
purely defensive, the subsequent campaigns became offensive, and were
transformed into wars of conquest by the impetus of the people’s army and
the outstanding genius of its commander.
Nevertheless, when he is thus challenged by opponents whom he has twice
defeated, can we wonder that concrete plans which have hitherto followed
his soaring imagination at a respectful distance, should now, likewise,
begin to outsoar the boundaries of reason? In the opening years of the
nineteenth century and here in the West, the Emperor might have kept the
peace for another decade, that in the end he might measure his strength
against England’s in Asia. But when Europe’s persistent desire for
revenge upon revolutionary France spurs him into action, he conceives the
great plan of a unified European realm. Now for the second time (and
for the last time down to our own days) a great and saving work will be
attempted, and the attempt will fail.
Thus it is that Napoleon’s crowning political thought issues out of a
personal defensive. Now, when a new coalition is being formed, and formed
against him, his ideal takes a fresh shape. For years his inward gaze
has been concentrated on Alexander; now, instead, he sees the figure
of Charlemagne. He goes to Aix-la-Chapelle, for a ceremonial visit to
the tomb of the great Frankish emperor. “There will be no peace in
Europe,” he says at this time to his trusted companions, “until the whole
continent is under one suzerain, an emperor whose chief officers are
kings, whose generals have become monarchs.... Would you tell me that
this plan is but an imitation of the old imperial constitution? Well,
there is nothing new under the sun!”
This gradual transformation of his ideal, and the sustenance of the new
ideal by the historical imagination, has immeasurable consequences.
Precisely because the adoption of the Carlovingian scheme involves for
him a renunciation, he storms forward in pursuit of it as if he were
fighting for a province. The haste with which he tries to reconstruct the
empire of Charlemagne is new, is symptomatic of a fever which will drive
him towards new goals before he has reached the old ones.
XI
Since the spring, his army has been assembled in Boulogne in readiness
for the repeatedly postponed landing in England. But in the autumn, when
the menace of a fresh Austrian attack becomes a certainty, with a change
of plans which is decided on in a couple of days and is carried out in a
fortnight, he directs all his forces eastward, and is across the Rhine in
advance of the news of his first movement. Just before leaving the coast,
he dictates to Daru the whole scheme of the attack on Austria, “the
order and length of the marches, the meeting places of the columns, the
attacks by storm, the movements and the blunders of the enemy—all this
two months before the events, and at a distance of six or seven hundred
miles from the scene of action.”
Austria had good reason for taking up arms once more. On the knob of the
new king of Italy’s sceptre, the lion of Venice was graven. This, and
the seizure of Genoa, were urgent warnings to the Habsburg ruler not to
venture across the Alps a third time. Francis must be content to fight
the matter out on German soil. England was liberal with proffers of
money; and the inexhaustible forces of Russia were again available for
the coalition, as they had been when it was victorious during Bonaparte’s
absence in Egypt. The new tsar was determined to overcome Europe’s old
prejudice against Russia, and, with an exchange of roles, to draw his
sword against the tyrant of the West. The secret of Napoleon’s fighting
technique had been learned, and this time the engineer should be hoist
with his own petard.
But the soldier of genius can evolve new methods of victory. By forced
marches he encircles the Austrians before they realise what is afoot,
encloses them in an iron ring at Ulm, and compels the capitulation of an
army which has not even a chance to fire a shot. “I have attained my end,
and have annihilated the Austrian army by simple marches. Now I shall
turn against the Russians. They are lost.”
The habit of success is making him thrifty of his words. “I had a
rough time of it, rougher than necessary,” he writes to Josephine;
“wet through day after day for a week, and my feet very cold.” Among
the gold-bedizened marshals, who are for the first time parading their
splendours on foreign soil, stands Napoleon to receive the capitulation
of Ulm. He wears the uniform of a private soldier, a mantle weather-worn
at elbows and skirt, a hat without a cockade. His arms are locked behind.
Of the imperial purple there is no sign.
Once more, as on the evening after Marengo, he offers peace, sends an
admonitory letter to the defeated Austrian emperor, writing as usual
with the frankness which is so annoying to the diplomats of Europe: “You
will understand that it is only right and proper if I take advantage of
my good luck to impose, as condition of peace, that you should give me
guarantees against a fourth coalition with England.... Nothing would
make me happier than to combine the tranquillity of my people with your
friendship, upon which I venture to make a claim, despite the number and
strength of my enemies in your entourage.” At the same time, he marches
on Vienna.
Then, while he is advancing at topmost speed, comes a blow. He learns
that two days after his victory on land had come the sea-fight of
Trafalgar, when England had almost annihilated the French fleet. Eighteen
ships have been lost; Nelson is dead; the French admiral is a prisoner.
Is this another disastrous hour, like the one when the news of Aboukir
reached him in the desert? Courage! Then the situation was a hundredfold
more difficult. We are not now cut off from Paris by the sea; we need
no ships. With redoubled speed he marches on Vienna, which the enemy
surrenders without a blow.
But the tidings of Trafalgar have renewed Francis’ fixity of purpose,
and have made Alexander firmer than ever. Both try to win over Prussia,
which hesitates, and protracts negotiations. Napoleon vainly tempts
the tsar with the promise of Turkey. In Brünn there is a great game of
hide-and-seek, in which each power tries to keep the others in suspense
and is disavowed by its own plenipotentiaries. The Emperor is the only
ruler who improvises a political idea. Two days before the decisive
battle, for which preparations are already being made, he writes to
Talleyrand, who is negotiating in Brünn:
“I should have no serious objection to handing over Venice to the elector
of Salzburg, and Salzburg to the house of Austria. I shall take Verona
... for the kingdom of Italy.... The elector can call himself king of
Venice if he has a fancy that way.
“The electorate of Bavaria would become a monarchy.... I will give
back the artillery, the magazines, and the fortresses, and they must
pay me five millions.... To-morrow, I think, we shall have a pretty
big battle with the Russians. I have done my utmost to avoid it, for
it is only useless bloodshed. I have exchanged a few letters with the
tsar, and learn from what he writes that he is a good fellow, with bad
counsellors.... Write to Paris, but don’t say anything about the battle,
for that would make my wife anxious. You don’t need to worry. I am in a
very strong position here, and my only regret is for the almost needless
bloodshed which the battle will cost.... You write home for me; I have
been in camp among my grenadiers for the last four days, and have to
write on my knees, so I can’t manage many letters.”
Such is the Emperor’s mood just before the most famous of his victories.
While he is studying his maps, noting the name of every Moravian village,
the width of every stream, and the condition of every road, and while he
does his best to keep himself warm by the camp-fire, he is thinking of
the ministers in Paris who are awaiting his commands, and of his wife
who may be anxious. In the same half hour, he drafts a new programme
for the partition of four or five States, talks of new crowns, of war
indemnities, and of handing over fortresses. Twice his laments for the
useless bloodshed light up the written page like the rising sun of one of
these December days. Need we be surprised that such a man conquers the
legitimate princes, who at this moment are dining in their palaces?
In the evening, when he learned the enemy’s movements, he clapped his
hands, and, “trembling with joy” (the words are his adjutant’s), said:
“They are walking into the trap! They are delivering themselves into my
hands! By to-morrow evening, their army will be annihilated!”
Then he sits down with his staff to supper in a peasant’s hut, and,
an unusual thing with him, remains at table for some time after his
meal, emotioned and musing. He goes on to speak at considerable length
concerning the nature of tragedy. From this, he passes to Egypt: “If I
had taken Acre, I should have donned a turban, have clad my soldiers in
wide Turkish trousers. But only in the utmost need should I have exposed
my Frenchmen to serious danger; I should have made of them a corps of
immortals, the Holy Battalion. I should have fought the war with the
Turks to a finish by the use of Arab, Greek, and Armenian levies. I
should have won a great battle at Issus, instead of in Moravia, should
have become Emperor of the East, and should have made my way back to
Paris through Constantinople.” The concluding words, so one who heard
the soliloquy tells us, were accompanied with a smile, as if to show his
awareness that he was being carried away by a rapturous dream.
But is not the scene we are describing a dream? Must we really and
truly believe that, little more than a century ago, a mortal man, the
understudy of a demigod, stormed across modern Europe and remoulded it
in accordance with his will? Did it not all happen in the Homeric age,
when two princes in single combat would settle the fate of generations?
Or, perhaps, he is a character in a fairy-tale, this man in the middle
thirties, a little fellow, seated in a wattle-and-dab hut, on an unknown
plain. He wears a greasy coat, a clammy shirt; stuffs potatoes and onions
into his hungry mouth. Next day, by this one battle, he will renew the
glories of Charlemagne, dead a thousand years since. Now, over night, his
unbridled imagination wanders across Asiatic deserts, where a stone-heap
successfully resisted him; dwells on that old frustrated plan; while his
errant thoughts follow the wraith of the Macedonian to the Ganges.
Day dawns. A year ago, on the altar steps in Notre Dame, he had crowned
himself with the circlet of golden laurels. In a fervent proclamation,
he reminds his soldiers of that day, and concludes with the promise that
for this once he will keep out of the firing line.
Never before has history recorded such words uttered by a commander. They
have always been eager to declare their determination to defy death in
the forefront of the battle. Napoleon, whose grenadiers have seen him
in twenty fights and regard him as a heavenborn leader, can venture to
tell his men that he will reward their valour by being careful of his own
safety.
Then the Emperor defeats both his enemies, and makes famous for a
thousand years an out-of-the-way spot of which no one had ever heard
before—the plain of Austerlitz.
“Soldiers,” he says next day to the victors, “I am pleased with you....
Name your children after me, and if one of them should prove worthy of
us, I will make him my own son and appoint him my successor!” That is the
emotional note he keeps for the army. To his wife, he writes as simply as
possible: “I have beaten the Russian and Austrian armies. Rather tired,
after a week in the open, when the nights have been chilly. To-night I
shall sleep in a bed, in Prince Kaunitz’ fine castle. I’m wearing a clean
shirt, the first time for a week.... I hope to get two or three hours’
sleep.”
Quite a simple matter, these momentous happenings! It is but a new
song in the rhapsody when, a day later, Emperor Francis comes to Count
Kaunitz’ castle, to beg for an interview with the little Corsican
lieutenant. But the bird has flown. When the two men meet at length,
it is in a windmill. Napoleon greets his brother emperor courteously,
saying: “I regret, Sire, that I must receive you here, in the only palace
I have entered for two months.” What self-confidence in the soldier
interviewing the man born in the purple; what subtle mockery in the mouth
of one who knows that in his distant capital, at news of his splendid
victory, flags will soon wave and songs resound.
But the distinguished guest, a man of sound sense and good breeding,
knows how to parry the thrust: “Your present quarters are so profitable
to you, Sire, that I think they cannot fail to please you.” Both smile;
and unobtrusively they eye one another up and down, for, though they have
fought for a decade, they have never met. Of the same age, they had both
reached power at twenty-six or thereabouts, though in such different
ways; and neither of them can foresee how close Napoleon’s will-to-peace
is one day to bring them, or how widely Francis’ will-to-revenge will
ultimately sever them.
“Yesterday I had the German emperor in camp with me and we had two
hours’ talk.... He threw himself on my generosity. But I took good
care of myself, as I am used to doing.... We have agreed to make peace
promptly.... The battle of Austerlitz is the finest of all I have fought.
We have taken forty-five regimental colours, more than one hundred and
fifty guns, the flag of the Russian guard, twenty generals, and thirty
thousand prisoners in all. More than twenty thousand killed—a ghastly
sight!” Did the jubilant outburst of a conqueror ever come to a stranger
close? He luxuriates in the figures of his gains, and then, suddenly, the
corpses of the dead rise before his eyes! Henceforward, such references
become frequent; he writes in simple and heartfelt words about bloodshed.
In the peace negotiations, the minister has a contest with his master.
The day after Austerlitz, Talleyrand writes to the Emperor: “How easy
would it be, now, to destroy the Habsburgs once for all. But it would
suit our book better to strengthen them, to give them a fixed place in
France’s system!” Napoleon, however, enforces the peace of Pressburg, in
which the old German empire is shattered into fragments, while Austria
vanishes from Germany and Italy. What is in the conqueror’s mind?
Europe! A league of States under French hegemony. Russia is Asia; England
is detached, an island. The Continent must be unified, must consist
of middle-sized and small powers overshadowed by the eagles of France,
and democratically ranged side by side. Now, after Austerlitz, the new
thought takes shape. The victory has put it within his power to realise
the greatest aim of a European, the unification of Europe.
He did not set out towards this goal. It was a gradual growth, the
fruit of circumstances. He did not deliberately provoke the wars that
were fought when the new idea was in its inception. Since Marengo, his
chief wish has been for peace. At that time, Austria had been loath to
make peace. The Austrian renewal of the attack was a logical outcome of
legitimist theory, for Habsburg and the revolution could not jointly
rule Europe. Austerlitz had settled the dispute once more. Now it had
become possible to reunite Charlemagne’s resurrected Europe. But neither
the kings and emperors (who were only beaten, not convinced), nor he
himself (who had gained all by the sword and not by persuasion), could
march along the way of the spirit towards the unification of Europe. The
determinisms of his own past left Napoleon no option but to create his
United States of Europe by force. Not till ten years later did he come to
see that he had been seeking to achieve a great end by false means.
When he came to understand this, it was too late; he was impotent, in the
great epilogue of his exile.
XII
“Tell the pope that I am keeping my eyes open; tell him that I am
Charlemagne, the Sword of the Church, his Emperor, and as such I expect
to be treated.”
Thus threateningly he writes to Rome. If he must bow before this
mole-hill, at least he will enforce obedience. His demeanour is infused
with a new tone since Austerlitz and Pressburg. From conquered Austria,
he writes in a dictatorial style which neither he nor Europe has
hitherto known. The queen of Naples, despite his yearlong warnings, has
permitted English ships to anchor in the bay. An army order is issued:
“The Bourbon dynasty has ceased to reign in Naples.” Simultaneously, he
writes to Brother Joseph: “I think I have already told you that I intend
the kingdom of Naples to accrue to my family, so that, like Switzerland,
Holland, Italy, and the three German kingdoms, it may belong to my
federated States or, rather, to the French Empire.”
Henceforward he endeavours to make the plan a reality, the plan whereby
Europe shall be governed by one emperor with kings as vassals. Paris,
which now acclaims the conqueror, shall be the capital city of the
Continent. The Emperor has, in the best sense of the term, “come home
again.” He exclaims: “This campaign has made me fat! I believe that if
all the princes of Europe were to ally themselves against me, I should
develop an absurdly wide paunch!” In such a mood does he hurl himself
from recent events into new adventures and allow them to run their course.
During the next few months he organises, from Paris, the following
realms: Joseph becomes king of Naples; the princes of Bavaria and
Württemberg are turned into kings; Baden is changed into a grand duchy;
Eugene weds a daughter of the House of Wittelsbach; a Badenese hereditary
prince marries a niece of Josephine’s; a Württemberg princess is reserved
for his youngest brother; sixteen States of southern and western Germany
are joined together to form the Confederation of the Rhine, vassals of
the Emperor, liable for the payment of tribute and the provision of
troops, and the sixteen German princes hasten to Paris to vow allegiance,
hoping to get a share for themselves in the great mart; a dozen small
principalities are wiped out; imperial fiefs are established for
Talleyrand, Berthier, and Bernadotte.
Meanwhile Napoleon announces, curtly and conclusively: “Holland has no
executive. She must have one. I will give her Prince Louis. We will
frame a treaty.... For me the whole matter is settled: either thus, or
annexation to France.... Not a minute must be lost.” Why “not a minute”?
Holland has been dependent for years; she only needs a crowned vassal;
her dependence is to be made clearer by the phrasing, “Napoleon bestows
his brother on Holland.” The Dutch object? Then they shall be gobbled up;
the choice is quickly made. Louis does not care for the honour; climate
bad; health weak? “It is better to die sitting on a throne, than to live
a mere prince in France.” Hortense must become a queen, Josephine is
aglow for the consummation; the Dutch must present a solemn petition, and
must be graciously received by the Emperor in the Tuileries. But Napoleon
is so overcome by the irony of the situation, he is so contemptuous, that
after the audience he cannot resist telling his little nephew (son of the
new king of Holland), in front of the ladies of the court, the fable of
the frogs who wanted a king.
What next? His sisters are complaining and intriguing. Are there no more
kingdoms available? The pity of it. Oh well, a few grand duchies must be
vacated! Through Murat’s promotion, Caroline becomes grand duchess of
Cleves; Elise is made grand duchess of Tuscany; and the lovely Pauline
Borghese weeps because she is nothing more than princess of Guastalla.
“Why, it’s no more than a village! And I’m to be princess of that?”
Still, she soon finds consolation in an ocean of diamonds and lovers.
None of the clan are equal to the occasion. King Joseph, in his first
proclamation, compares the love of his subjects (who have never clapped
eyes on him till yesterday) towards himself with the love of the French
towards their emperor. He covers himself with ridicule, and makes the
Emperor furious. King Louis utters piteous sighs because the war with
England forces him to interfere with “his country’s” trade; and he sends,
instead of troops, long letters to the Emperor filled with complaints.
“Really, you are throwing unnecessary burdens upon me,” replies Napoleon,
in a hectoring tone. “It is all due to your narrow-mindedness and
your lack of interest.... I wish you were not always whining!... Leave
wailing and complaining to women; a man must be determined.... You are
governing far too gently. You allow me to bear the full brunt of the war
expenses.... See to it that you raise an army of thirty thousand men. You
only think of yourself; that is neither good nor magnanimous.... More
energy!”
Elise, who dominates her husband, gives a constitution to Tuscany, holds
reviews of the troops, changes her favourites every quarter, and amuses
Napoleon by an assumption of the imperial style: “My people is content;
the opposition is crushed; your commands, Sire, have been carried out. I
am much pleased with the Senate; it is showing deference to my authority.”
Murat, for excess of zeal, draws upon himself a reprimand phrased with
Napoleon’s customary bluntness: “I have seen decrees issued by yourself
which are quite senseless. You seem to have lost your reason!... All you
appear to have in mind is to reign and nothing more!”
Pauline, however, is immortalised by Canova, in a work which outlasts all
the realms Napoleon has set up.
Young Jerome, who has gone to America in his capacity of midshipman,
has meanwhile married a lady of the middle class without consulting his
family. The Emperor, who has more crowns to dispose of than siblings to
give them to, and cannot spare any of his brothers, is outraged by this
marriage. He pursuades his mother to utter a prohibition. When the young
man’s ship puts in to Lisbon, the vessel is surrounded; Jerome alone is
permitted to land. Bidding the lady farewell, the youthful husband swears
everlasting troth; he travels alone to Paris; is received by the Emperor
with threats and lures; at length he gives up his spouse for the sake
of princely honours and a post as admiral; maybe, even, he will become
a king. The wife fruitlessly endeavours to land on the Continent; she
journeys to England, where she brings a child into the world. There she
meets Lucien, her companion in misfortune. He has been well received by
the English, and settles in the island realm with his wife and children.
He writes poetry. An epic. What is it called?
_Charlemagne._
The only member of the family who is active, loyal, and, for the most
part, judicious in his undertakings is Napoleon’s step-son Eugene. The
Emperor loves him, publicly praises his work whenever possible, and now,
when Eugene becomes viceroy of Italy and spouse of the Bavarian Princess,
Napoleon writes: “You are working too hard, dear son. That is all very
well for yourself, but you have a young wife who has hopes.... Why do
you not go once a week to the theatre and occupy the royal box?... One
can accomplish much business in a short time. I am leading the same kind
of life as yourself, but my wife is getting on in years—also I have
more business to deal with!” To his step-daughter-in-law, from whom he
categorically demands a male heir (seeing that Hortense’s son has but
one life, and the dynasty needs additional safeguards!), he writes:
“Do not give us a daughter, please! Here is a recipe for you: drink
some undiluted wine, daily—only you’ll never believe me!” When, in his
despite, she gives birth to a daughter, he says: “If one begins with a
daughter, one is destined to have a dozen children!”
How marvellously Napoleon, the great stylist, can accommodate his tone to
every circumstance—to inspire dread or to flatter, to praise, to spur on,
to punish, or to persuade. He pours this out upon a family which is ever
acting in opposition to him, and expends himself thus in the interludes
of all his other business.
The Emperor’s mother lives in Paris, as retired a life as her son will
allow. She is watchful and conciliatory. He has installed her in the
Trianon; gives her one million a year. No one understands why she is
so thrifty. Some use the word “miserly.” But she maintains that “we
Corsicans have experienced many revolutions; all this may come to an
end; what will then happen to my children? It is better that they should
come to their mother, than go to strangers who might leave them in the
lurch.” From time to time she holds a reception, where she carries
herself with natural dignity, and far more regally than many of her
children who wear the royal crown. If any one haggles as to the price
of the beads with which she works, she smiles and says: “No, you can’t
impose upon me. I do not play the princess as my daughters do.” Though
she is the mother of the Emperor, and of kings and princes, she laments
that not a single trustworthy person is in her immediate entourage. She
only unbends over a game of reversi with old friends of hers; or when she
chats of an evening with her faithful servant, discussing “the happy days
gone by.... They all say that I am the happiest of mothers. In truth I am
always full of worry. Every news item makes me tremble lest the Emperor
lie dead upon the battle-field.”
On Sundays, following the tradition of her patrician ancestors, she
dines with her children at the Tuileries. She does not invariably obey
the Emperor; and when he constrains her, she is resentful. No doubt
he is aware that she is too proud to accept the relationship which
circumstances have established between them; and whenever he looks in the
mirror, he cannot fail to see his increasing personal resemblance to his
mother, in forehead, mouth, eyes, and hands. Sometimes he teases her:
“Do you find life at court tedious? Look at your daughters! Why do you
hoard your money? You ought to spend freely!”
“You’d better allow me two millions instead of one, if that is what you
want. But it’s my nature to be thrifty.”
She has as keen an eye for the detection of flatterers as Napoleon
himself, and gently warns him against them from time to time. Though
she never asks anything for herself, she will often enough beg him to
help the numerous Corsicans who come to visit her, and thus does her
best for whilom family friends. Once, indeed, and late in the day,
she puts in a plea for something she has much at heart. She would like
Ajaccio to become the capital of Corsica, instead of Corte. A stirring of
family pride! The Emperor issues a decree to this effect, understanding
perfectly well what moves her, and says: “My mother was born to reign
over a kingdom.”
But she cannot get him to do anything for Lucien. “I love him more than
all the others,” she says, “because he’s not been so lucky.” The Emperor
is adamant: “No feelings of affection can weigh against reasons of State.
I will only accept as relatives, those who serve me. He who does not soar
with me, ceases to belong to my family.”
XIII
At Paris, in his study, Napoleon has a silent witness of his activities;
a bronze bust of Frederick the Great.
He had grown up in the days when the renown of the last of the famous
commanders was still fresh; and, indeed, he had become lieutenant before
the king died. Like all the generals of the day, in the art of war he was
a disciple of Frederick. He had not yet come into personal contact with
the Prussian army, but he still had considerable respect for it, although
Frederick’s immediate successor had won no laurels against the soldiers
of France. He knew Frederick William III. to be foolish and weak; and
if, none the less, he tried to induce the Prussian ruler to enter into
an alliance, and hoped to turn Prussia’s antagonism towards Austria and
Russia to his own uses, it was because he continued to entertain an
unavowed respect for the only foreign army in Europe which had covered
itself with glory during the eighteenth century. But when Prussia
showed him, not her strongest side, the military, but her weakest, the
political, his respect waned.
In the previous year, before Austerlitz, he had offered Frederick
William an alliance. After Trafalgar, when Francis and Alexander were
courting Prussia, and after Austerlitz, when the indications were in
favour of France, the weakling monarch continued to vacillate, always
hoping to better his position by neutrality. Then, when the Emperor was
stronger than ever before, the Prussian ruler seized the first pretext
for making warlike preparations against France. Had not Napoleon violated
Prussian neutrality last year by marching through Ansbach?
What has really decided the king’s attitude is the mood of the democrats,
in conjunction with his dread of mortified national pride, and, in
especial, with his uncertainty as to the loyalty of some of his bellicose
generals. In Nuremberg, a bookseller had been tried by court martial and
shot for publishing a lampoon against the French army and circulating
it in places which, in accordance with the terms of the treaty, were
legitimately occupied by French troops. The decision of the court was
formally just; but the indignation it aroused, being moral, was juster.
The Emperor realised this, and wanted to avoid war. He proposed a mutual
withdrawal of troops. Through the mouth of his envoy, he explained that
Frederick William had only to say whether the presence of French soldiers
in Westphalia annoyed him. Then he wrote personally to the king: “I hold
unalterably to our alliance.... But if your answer shows me that on your
side you repudiate this alliance, and put your trust solely in the power
of arms, then indeed I shall be compelled to make war. Nevertheless,
battles and victories notwithstanding, my feelings will remain unchanged.
Since I regard this war as a wicked one, I shall, even then, propose
peace.”
In private, however, with mingled feelings of anger and contempt, he says
hard things about Prussia. He cannot believe that country to be so mad as
it seems. “Its cabinet is despicable; its sovereign a weakling; its court
ruled by young officers who will risk anything.”
A fortnight before the outbreak of war, he still finds it impossible to
believe in its coming.
He is mistaken. The men of noble birth who officer the Prussian army,
the men who, under Frederick the Great, defeated France, and were
subsequently defeated by France, want to rehabilitate themselves. The
middle classes are inspired with ardent nationalist sentiments. The
Prussians are ready to “risk anything”; their eyes are fixed on a
protectress in whom they trust. The queen of Prussia is a passionate
advocate of war, for the tsar is now allied with Prussia, and during his
stay in Berlin she has recognised in him the manliness that is lacking in
her husband. After Austerlitz, Alexander had promptly withdrawn into his
own realm, to await a more favourable opportunity. Now the opportunity
had come.
We learn from Talleyrand that Napoleon was full of secret disquietude at
having to draw the sword once more. He had been dazzled by the feats of
the great Frederick’s soldiers. Never before had he fought against an
army famous in story. “I fancy we shall find them tougher metal than the
Austrians.” All the more reason for getting quickly across the Rhine! A
week after the beginning of the advance, he gains his first victory. At
Saalfeld, the best of the Prussians fell, Prince Louis Ferdinand, the
first and finest blossom shattered in the first storm.
Confusion prevails among the Prussians, and the king contributes to its
spread. General Scharnhorst had advised him to attack two weeks earlier,
but the irresolute ruler had waited for the French offensive. The duke of
Brunswick is commander-in-chief; but instead of leaving the management
of the campaign to this officer, at the last moment the king comes to
the fighting front. “We don’t know whether the headquarters should be
called royal or ducal.” The duke obeys the king when he ought to command.
Questions of precedence necessitate the division of the forces into
three army corps, for Prince Hohenlohe, who is a reigning prince, cannot
possibly fight under a duke. Once more the enemy holds out the hand
of friendship. Two days before the main battle, and while confident of
victory, Napoleon writes:
“I do not wish to derive any advantage from the folly of your advisers,
whose blunders in statesmanship amaze Europe.... Well, we are at
war.... But why should we lead our subjects to slaughter one another?
I care nothing for a victory that is bought with the lives of many of
my children. If I were at the beginning of my career, and had reason
to dread misadventure in battle, I should have no right to use such
language. But, Sire, you will be defeated. You will sacrifice the
quiet of your days and the lives of your subjects without the smallest
justification.... I have nothing to gain from Your Majesty; I do not
want and never have wanted anything from you. This war is unwise! I know
that my letter may wound your royal sensibilities, but the circumstances
make bluntness essential. I am telling you what I really think....
Restore peace to yourself and your territories. Even if I could never
be your ally, you will always find in me a man, ... whose greatest wish
it is never to shed blood by making war with princes who are not the
adversaries of his industry, his commerce, and his policy.”
Louise, who has followed her husband to the front, is a woman with more
peaceful instincts than is pleasing to the ambition of the generals on
the headquarters staff. When the letter is read, however, she agrees
with their scornful view that Napoleon writes as he does because he is
afraid of a catastrophe to himself. Is she, then, unable to realise that
destiny has placed her among these men to-day, that she may influence
her weak-willed husband in the direction of a humane settlement of the
dispute? She cannot see it! Napoleon is nothing but “an infernal monster
risen out of the mire,” and to-morrow he must fall!
“My affairs march very well,” writes this monster, meanwhile, to his
wife. “Everything is going just as I should like. The king and the
queen are in Erfurt. If they want to see a battle, they will have this
gruesome delight. I feel splendid. Although I am travelling from eighty
to a hundred miles a day, I have put on weight. I go to bed at eight in
the evening, get up at midnight, and remember when I do so that you have
not yet retired to rest.” The last night before the battle he refuses to
go to bed. At three in the morning, one of his officers urges him to take
a nap, but he exclaims: “Impossible! I have my plans here” (he touches
his forehead), “but nothing yet in my maps!” Then he quickly explains
the whole plan. “Do you understand?... To horse with you and find me a
place from which I can get a commanding view of the battle-field. I shall
be there at six.” Then he throws himself on the camp-bed, and instantly
falls asleep.
In the course of that night, the Prussian headquarters staff is informed
by its scouts that remarkable movements are going on among the French
troops. Oh, well, to-morrow will be time enough to discuss the matter!
But before the day dawns, the Emperor has ridden along the front, has
fired his guard with enthusiasm, has recalled the day of Austerlitz.
He defeats the Prussians near Jena, while simultaneously Davoust is
routing a superior force of the enemy at Auerstädt.
When the valiant duke of Brunswick is fatally wounded, no one ventures to
take over the command. They all lose their heads, and what is left of the
army of the great Frederick flees in disorder through Saxony eastward.
“Chère amie, I did some fine manœuvring against the Prussians, and won
a great victory yesterday. Twenty thousand prisoners, and we took about
a hundred cannon and colours.... Have been camping here for a couple of
days. I’m feeling splendid. Farewell. Take good care of yourself, and
love me.”
In Weimar, he meets the reigning duchess. Charles Augustus, the duke,
has been in a warlike frame of mind for the last twenty years. He is
Prussophil, and, in defiance of advice, has joined issue with the
Emperor. Now, as Prussian general, he is in full flight after the
disaster at Jena. No one knows his whereabouts. The court has also fled
from Weimar. Only the duchess and her minister, Goethe, remain behind.
When the Emperor sees the lady for the first time, he says: “I am sorry
for you! How could the duke ...!” But to his amazement (for he is always
against women’s rule—in especial, when the woman happens to be a German)
the duchess answers him with so much clarity, simplicity, and dignity,
explains the duke’s friendship with Prussia in so steadfast a manner,
that he is shaken, behaves courteously, returns in the evening in order
to have a long talk with her, and, after having vowed the annihilation of
her dynasty, promises her that nothing shall be done to injure the duchy.
Why?
Because this woman has never interfered in politics, has not now affected
a knowledge she does not possess, but in simple camaraderie has spoken
on behalf of her absent husband, and with princely demeanour has pleaded
for her country. She has made use neither of cajolery nor anger, but has
kept the golden mean between pride and deference becoming to a conquered
monarch. Years afterwards, the Emperor remembered this woman who by her
noble bearing had saved her country and her dynasty.
In Berlin, he meets another woman. Count Hatzfeld, who has been
negotiating with the conqueror on behalf of Berlin, writes indiscreetly
to one of the discredited generals, and gives him details concerning the
strength of the French troops. His letter is intercepted. The Emperor, in
a rage, declares he is to be shot as a spy. Berthier is depressed by the
command; Rapp endeavours to soften Napoleon. Countess Hatzfeld is brought
to see him; she falls at his feet. He invites her to Potsdam: “When I
showed her the count’s letter she answered me guilelessly, with a sob,
and with deep emotion: ‘Yes, that is certainly his handwriting.’ As she
read the document the tone of her voice moved me to my innermost being.
I pitied her. You see,” he concludes his report to Josephine, “I love
good, simple, and gentle women.”
Love? There stands the man of might; the countess is naught to him as far
as her womanhood goes; hardly has he noticed her figure or her dress. But
these natural passions, womanly pleadings, tears, and silences, move him
deeply. He throws the letter into the fire: “The proof I had has been
burned. Your husband is safe.”
Thus does Napoleon the Conqueror deal with two German women whose
husbands have fought against him. He deals leniently with them because
their conduct appeals to his heart.
He dislikes Queen Louise. A politician, that woman, who has driven her
country and her consort into a disastrous enterprise, who has egged this
quiet-loving man into war when he could have had peace with honour.
Napoleon execrates such a woman. Since she seizes every opportunity to
spit fire at him, he determines to strip her of all her womanly dignity.
He jeers at her in official bulletins: “She is a woman with beautiful
features but little brain.... She must be terribly tortured by pangs
of conscience for all the suffering she has brought upon her country.
Her husband is a man of honour who desired happiness and peace for his
people.”
He has made a triumphal entry into Berlin. His suite is brilliantly
dressed, but he is as simply clad as ever, and his hat is adorned with
a cockade worth about a penny. Nothing interests him so keenly as Sans
Souci. He holds the sword of the great Frederick in his hands, and takes
it away as a trophy more priceless than any other he could ever find in
his whole life. He would not exchange it for the throne of Prussia. But
he heartily despises Frederick’s descendants, and publicly attacks the
queen:
“In the queen’s rooms was found the tsar’s picture, which he himself had
given her. Also there was her correspondence with the king.... These
documents go to prove how unhappy those princes can be who permit their
wives to interfere in affairs of State. Notes and State papers reeked of
musk, and lay beneath ribbons and laces and other fal-lals of the toilet.”
An unworthy tone! He seems to have forgotten the patriotic impulse of
the queen. If, however, we compare these taunts with what the best and
greatest of contemporary Prussian statesmen, the non-Prussian Baron vom
Stein, wrote about Queen Louise, we can understand the Emperor’s humour,
though hardly excuse it.
Serious considerations restrain him from destroying the house of
Hohenzollern, though he had already drafted a decree to dethrone the
king. Napoleon has to bear the tsar in mind. In Berlin he thinks in
terms of Europe as a whole: “On the Elbe and on the Oder we have won our
India, our Spanish colonies, and our Cape of Good Hope.” The grandiose
words as yet only announce the start of the voyage; but with mighty
strokes of the oar he is now to round the cape of his hopes. In the
castle at Charlottenburg he dictates the greatest, most un-bloody, and
most dangerous of all his declarations of war: Charlemagne closes all the
harbours of Europe against English ships. If the island cannot be reached
by his sword? Well, henceforward, Europe shall be placed out of her
reach! All merchandise, parcels, postal communications, etc., from and to
England and her colonies are to be held up; every Englishman at large on
the Continent is now a prisoner of war.
How is the carrying-out of the scheme to be supervised? Hitherto, action
has always followed close upon the heels of thought. Now, he has to
make treaties with various States, and, first of all, with Russia and
Austria. Austria has fragments of the sometime realm of Poland within
her frontiers; but Russia wants them for herself; Poland, tossed between
the two, pays allegiance to neither. As to a god, the Poles turn to the
Emperor. He, the champion of the freedom of the peoples, must come to
their aid and free them. What is to be done? How does Napoleon solve the
Polish problem?
“Shall I set up the throne of Poland anew, and thus restore a great
nation to life? God alone, who has the fashioning of all things in his
hands, can solve this riddle.” Words of Delphic cunning, which he sends
forth throughout Poland. God alone sees the smile with which he signs
the proclamation! In addition he takes three measures. He demands that
the Poles shall provide troops, for “not until you have an army of forty
thousand men will you be worthy of the name of Nation.” Next he proposes
to the Austrians an exchange of Galicia for Prussian Silesia. But the
real key to the Polish problem he fishes out of the Bosphorus, for he
tells the sultan to drive the Russians out of Moldavia, and to meet him,
the Emperor, on the Dniester; thereby he hopes to bind, not only Russia,
but also the trembling Austria, to the lower Danube.
There he sits in Sans Souci, the ancient candelabra in Frederick’s study
scintillate over his head, Voltaire’s picture smiles sideways, through
the wraith, at his great fellow-countryman. He sits alone at his game of
chess, calculates the moves of his unseen opponent, his glance takes in
wider and wider circles; suddenly the traits of his new ancestor suffer a
change, the big blond beard vanishes, the nose is flatter, the eyes lose
some of their confident glance, then become bolder again: instead of the
great Charles, he is facing the great Alexander. Yes, now, indeed, he
will conquer England in India! World dominion hovers before his eyes.
A new opponent leaps on to the board. Couriers bring the news of a revolt
in Spain. He pales. The whole game is imperilled. Once more Napoleon sees
clearly that he who would vanquish England must gain Russia’s friendship.
But in order to conquer Russia or to win her over to his side, he needs a
fulcrum. He has one ready to hand: Poland in revolt. Napoleon journeys to
Warsaw.
While in imagination he had, during these weeks, been weighing the fate
of continents, his heart had felt lonely. Yet he did not trouble himself
about women. Only to his wife did he write gallant things: “I love you,
and long for you.... These Polish women [in Posen] are all Frenchwomen in
their hearts. But for me there is only one woman. Do you know who she is?
I would tell you what she is like, only I should have to flatter her too
much, so that you could recognise yourself in the description. Seriously,
my heart can say naught but good of her. Oh, these long nights, all
alone!”
Josephine, with the keenness of a foxhound, senses a rival under these
cajoleries. But she has no reason, as yet, to be jealous, or to make so
long a journey. He answers her that “the agitation of your letter tells
me that you beautiful women know of no limits to your powers. What you
wish must come to pass. I, on the other hand, recognise that I am the
most enslaved of men. My master has no mercy on me, for my master is the
nature of things.”
Hardly has he finished touching upon these airy trifles in weighty
words, when a courier brings him tidings of the great consequences of a
trifling affair: the beauty to whom Caroline had introduced him in the
previous winter, and who was expecting a child before he went away, has
been confined. At last! It is then proved that he does not lack the power
which Dame Nature grants to other men! A great gift from above. A boy. He
turns to his intimate and exclaims with the ingenuous delight of a youth:
“Duroc! I’ve got a son!”
XIV
The brilliantly lighted ball-room forms a background where Poland
displays her greatest beauty and her most precious jewels. This is the
evening of evenings. In the old palace of Poland’s kings at Warsaw, the
Emperor of the French is to be shown the calibre of the nation that has
been suffering so long. Will he admire the national dance, its music and
its figures? Will the eyes of the ladies ravish him, those eyes which are
pools of Slavic melancholy? Will the flattery of the speeches or the
idolising comparisons appearing in the newspapers make his heart as wax?
Such, according to the sanguine, are the questions upon which hang the
fate of the nation. The procession has passed by; he has spoken to many
in cheerful vein; now he is standing in a recess, dividing his attention
between his interlocutor and the dancers. He is thinking of Paris, where,
for seven years, he has never failed to be in January.
[Illustration: Bonaparte in 1802, as First Consul. Engraving by Alexandre
Tardieu. After a drawing by Jean Baptiste Isabey.]
Suddenly his gaze is focused on a special point, and he forgets to carry
on the conversation. A hundred watchful eyes follow the glance of the
huntsman. Who is the quarry? A little later he approaches a group, asks
for the names of those composing it, and smilingly, with a courtliness of
manner rarely shown by him on public occasions, he draws the lady of his
choice out of the circle of her companions. She is a gentle, fair-haired
beauty, dainty and small, has blue eyes, appears to be of a yielding
disposition, and is eighteen years of age. She is simpler in her dress
than any of the others, and her behaviour is correspondingly quiet and
without display or the lures of coquetry. The Emperor chooses her as
partner in a contra-dance, delights in her grace and her lovely voice,
finds her broken French bewitching. While she smiles and is covered with
confusion, her name is whispered from room to room throughout the palace:
Countess Walewska.
“Who is she?” asks Napoleon later of his friend Duroc. She is the
daughter of an ancient line, the family so impoverished that the lady has
been married off to a wealthy old count whose youngest grandchild is ten
years older than the new wife.
“I had eyes only for you,” he writes to the countess next day. “I admired
only you, and longed to be with you alone. Send me an answer quickly, in
order that the fire which is consuming me may be appeased. N.” But the
messenger, Duroc, returns with neither answer nor tidings of any sort.
The Emperor is nonplussed. Something quite new. Twelve years ago the
brigadier general had had such a rebuff. But Napoleon, never. Have not
all women, whether princesses or actresses, have not all the beauties,
invariably come to him at his slightest nod of invitation? The more
enchanting, therefore, is this lady who shrinks back so virginally from
the unveiled desire of a man.
“Have I displeased you? I hoped the opposite. Or has your first feeling
vanished? My passion grows. You rob me of my rest. Vouchsafe a little
joy, a little happiness, to the poor heart that would fain worship you!
Is it so hard to give me an answer? You now owe me two.” This second
letter is unsigned. Suppose an amateur of such matters to come across
it in a collection of love letters, would he dream of ascribing its
authorship to Napoleon? Neither heavy nor dictatorial, neither emotional
nor stilted, but romantic rather is the tone. Nevertheless, since worldly
convention demands that she should pay no heed to his suit, again his
missive remains unanswered. Terrible the position of the adjutant who for
the second time has failed in the carrying out a movement ordered by his
chief. The Emperor, controlling his passion, thinks:
“If neither my pleading nor my rank has any effect on this tender
creature, I must try to gain my end by a half-promise, which I need not
regard as binding.” He writes: “There are moments in life when high
position is a heavy burden. That is borne in on me at this moment.... If
only you would! None but you can overcome the obstacles which separate
us. My friend Duroc will do what he can to make it easy for you. Oh,
come, come! All your wishes shall be fulfilled! Your country will be even
dearer to me, if you have compassion on my heart. N.”
Now we should recognise his wonted style, even without the capital N.
Nevertheless, how amazingly the loneliness of the man of might breathes
from these lines. The third love-letter is intelligently composed, and
therefore achieves its purpose—but it discloses to us the tragical mask
of destiny, the destiny of one who wishes to walk along the course he
has planned for himself, and who is sacrificing his human happiness to
this heroical monomania. He roams through the splendid palace, arms
locked behind. For weeks his mood has been one of yearning, but always he
has been alone. For months he has hardly been near a woman. Now, having
fallen passionately in love, storm-tost, he dismisses his secretaries,
will not discuss matters with his generals, refuses to admit deputations,
will not go out riding. The whole mechanism he has constructed is
stationary. The palace, the army, Paris, Europe—let them wait. He, more a
slave than any other, refuses to-day to obey the nature of things; a man
of thirty-seven whose wife, well past forty, no longer stirs his passion.
Profoundly moved by a girl, twice rebuffed, he must devise lures from his
other realms, must tempt her with the freedom of her country, in order
that, after nearly a decade of quiescent feeling, he may spread upon the
shoulders of a young woman the mantle of his yearning for tranquillity.
She, alarmed at the assault of this virile will, sits the same afternoon
among her friends and relatives who are urging the sacrifice upon her,
for Poland’s sake. In this mood, she at length goes to see him. The three
evening hours she spends with him are spent in tears. By gentle arts he
restores her to calm, and to her astonishment she finds that this dreaded
man of iron is a tender wooer.
“Marie, sweet Marie, my first thought is yours!” she reads next morning.
“I shall see you at dinner. I pledge you my word. Please wear the nosegay
that I send; it will be a secret messenger of our feelings amid the
crowd; thus we shall understand one another. If I lay my hand on my
heart, you will know that it is wholly yours; for answer, press your
flowers to your bosom. Love me, my charming Marie; do not take your hand
away from the flowers.”
Not until three days later does she become his. Then she comes to
see him every evening. But, as well as this, she must be present at
every reception, for otherwise he stays away. What is she to him? The
second creature in the world who asks nothing from him; his mother
was the first. Never has he known another woman who did not expect his
magician’s hand to shower on her the treasures of the universe: jewels,
palaces, crowns, money. This woman wants nothing from him, and gives him
everything. Countess Walewska is the quiet and loving companion whom
Napoleon’s stormy soul has sought. It will be long before he will be
willing to part from her. “She is an angel. It may justly be said that
her spirit is as lovely as her features.”
Josephine wants to come? Now? He smiles. Since the Cairo days, Bonaparte
has never had a mistress while campaigning, whereas his generals have
had plenty of love-affairs. There can be no doubt that the story of this
intrigue, distorted of course, will quickly be carried to Paris, and in
a veiled form will find a way to Josephine’s ears. She is waiting there,
waiting to be summoned to his side. Now, in the most graceful way in the
world, he deceived the wife who had deceived him for years. The weather,
the roads, the public insecurity, made it impossible. “How gladly should
I be spending the long winter nights at your side.... If you are always
weeping, then you lack courage and character. I cannot endure cowardly
people. An empress must have courage!”
Now he betrays her. “I laughed when you wrote to me that you had taken
a husband in order to be with him. In my simplicity, I had believed
that woman was made for man; man for country, family, fame. Forgive my
ignorance. One can always learn something from lovely women.... Besides,
I could not think of any lady with whom I was exchanging letters. If
there really were one, I can assure you she would have to be as beautiful
as a newly opened rose. Does that apply to the lady of whom you speak?”
See how this ambiguous trifling amuses him. His heart is so light
sometimes. He can play the gallant as if there had never been a
revolution in the world. When, after a few weeks, he resumes a
campaigner’s life, his farewell to his Polish inamorata is an au revoir.
Now Russia is open to him for the first time, a land like the desert.
Endless steppes, covered with snow or mud; no bread, and hardly any
roads. After a few skirmishes, the tsar slowly retreats. Can we follow
him? Whither is he enticing us? Who will feed the army? There is nothing
in this land to be seized, nothing such as there is in prosperous
Germany, no storehouses. Had not a few hundred Polish Jews, shrewd
speculators, seen the chance of striking good bargains, the regiments
would have perished, at this early date, in the year 1807. When the
Emperor, whose carriage has perforce been left behind, is riding towards
Pultusk, he hears murmurs from the ranks. This is a sound he has almost
forgotten; he heard it for the first and last time eight years ago at
Acre. His generals report suicides among the men. Thousands of starving
soldiers desert, to become marauders. The Emperor is dumbfounded at
the news, but what can he do? “I know my Frenchmen,” he says. “It is
difficult to march them on distant expeditions. France is too beautiful.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that when he compels the Russians to
fight, for the first time he should fail to conquer in the open field.
He is not actually beaten at Eylau, but both the contending armies
sustain terrible losses, and the issue is indecisive. A first warning not
to campaign against Russia! Report after the battle: the soldiers are
rifling the potato clamps for food, and the horses are tearing straw from
the roofs. The whole countryside is filled with invalided soldiers, and
none of the colonels know how many men are left in their commands. The
Emperor speaks:
“We shall stay here a couple of days more, and then withdraw a few
miles. Post guards on all the bridges over the Vistula; no one must be
allowed to cross, except the amputated. Don’t bother about stragglers; no
punishments.” But these signs of the disintegration of his army trouble
him more than in former days. A cramp of the stomach, from which he has
already suffered at times, becomes more frequent, and he says: “I bear
within me the germs of an early death, and shall die of the same trouble
as my father.” Cancer is the family heritage: his grandfather, his
father, his uncle, Lucien, and Caroline, all perished of this disease.
He writes to his brother: “We are living here amid snow and mud, without
wine, bread, or brandy.” But this is a private missive. From Osterode,
where he is housed in a barn among the soldiers, and eats whatever they
can shark up for him (a comrade among his men, as he had been years
before in Italy), his bulletins to Paris speak of a great victory, and of
a Russian rout. The casualties are stated at a third of the true figures.
The French army is in fine case, and can stay where it is for a year if
thought best.
For the second time he must learn that his nerves are not made for
waiting. Here, as in Egypt, this commander finds that there is something
uncanny about standing still. Only once more in the whole course of his
fifteen years as a conqueror will there be another such pause of two or
three months in a place far from Paris. Both these epochs of tedious
consideration, cautious negotiation, are filled out in the interludes of
work by giving free rein to his pent-up emotions. They are filled out
with idylls.
Finckenstein, a fortified Prussian castle, is now the scene of his
activities, while he is awaiting the thaw on the roads and in the hearts
of his adversaries. There are huge fireplaces, which are a delight to
him, “for I love to look into the fire at night when I can’t sleep.” The
place is roomy enough to house the envoys and couriers. For ten weeks,
the world is ruled from here. In the great bedroom upstairs, he has had
his iron camp-bed set up beside the huge four-poster.
No one knows that the Polish countess occupies the next room—or hardly
any one except Constant, his valet, and Rustam, the Mameluke. She rarely
goes out, and then only after dark. The time is passed in embroidery,
reading, and waiting, until the door opens, and he enters, to devote
himself to her for a time. He has his meals with her alone. In these
two rooms are the commander’s headquarters, and here the Emperor has
enshrined his idyll. There are no dynastic wishes to trouble him as in
Paris, no jealousies, and no bargainings for jewels; there is no wish to
shine; nothing but the desire to remain hidden from the world, a wordless
wish in the eyes of this sweet girl of eighteen who has learned to love
him.
“I know,” he says to her, “you would rather live without me. Yes, yes,
don’t protest; I know it! But you are good and gentle; your heart is
pure. You don’t want to rob me of the few hours of happiness which you
can give me every day? To think that people regard me as the happiest of
men!”
A dispatch comes to tell him that his nephew and heir, the son of King
Louis, is dead. How the news affects him is shown by his moving words
to Josephine; but he cannot tell his wife all the thoughts that now
enter his mind at Finckenstein. That little cocotte in Cairo, what he
had really hoped from her was a son. How if this beautiful woman, this
noblewoman whom he loves, were to give him an heir? Would he then make
her his empress? Why not? He looks at Walewska, but keeps his own counsel.
What is Paris saying?
With ear attent, he listens to the rumours that reach him across the
Polish steppe. The funds are falling. Malicious jests are current on the
boulevards. “Where are our brave lads?” ask the Parisians. Caution is
needed! What begins as a gentle shower, may turn into a raging storm; and
the man who knows how to control the thunder is far away. He offers the
beaten Prussians a separate peace, and even proposes a conference, but
Queen Louise holds firmly to the alliance with the tsar. Austria, too, is
deaf to his voice.
Despite all, here and now, with enemies to right and to left of him, and
without any firm standing-ground, he begins to dream once more of the
conquests of Alexander. Messengers bearing heavily sealed letters ride
forth from the courtyard of Finckenstein; strangers bringing dispatches
arrive from remote lands and make their way to him across distant
mountains. To this northern headquarters comes a Persian envoy, and the
messenger of the King of Kings reverently bows his head to greet the
sublime Emperor of the West. Next day, Napoleon and the Persian emissary
come to an understanding. The Emperor will force the tsar to give back
Georgia to the shah. In return, the shah will spur on the Afghans and
the tribes of Kandahar to attack the English in India; he will equip an
army for the invasion of Hindustan. If the Emperor wishes to send an army
against India, his men shall have free passage across Persia.
Hardly has the Persian departed, when a gorgeously attired Turk rides
in past the astonished sentries, bringing golden gifts and a dispatch.
A bespectacled oriental expert translates it. Standing in front of
the fire, the Emperor, having reduced the eastern bombast to sober
proportions, dictates a letter to the sultan: “I regret very much that
you ask for no more than five hundred men instead of several thousand....
State your demands clearly, and whatever you want shall be instantly
done. Get into communication with the shah of Persia, for he, too, is an
enemy of the Russians.... I offered your envoy the artillerymen and other
soldiers you need, but he would not accept them, being afraid of hurting
Mohammedan susceptibilities. I am so powerful, and I am so desirous for
your victory (I wish this because of my friendship for you, and not on
political grounds alone), that I can deny you nothing.”
The same day, he writes to Brother Louis, who has been sending urgent
appeals from his new kingdom, a letter which may be regarded as a
sort of general instruction for kings, and which occupies five pages
of print. He also sends orders to Joseph, as to the latter’s conduct
in Naples. To Jerome, who in Breslau is commanding a corps of pretty
actresses instead of his soldiers, Napoleon writes to ask why his
brother never sends complete reports, and why he has left six hundred men
in Schweidnitz, four hundred in Brieg. “Let me know your exact plans,
down to the smallest details, so that I can form an accurate picture
of your situation.” He likewise sends a missive to all the bishops in
France. They are to institute a public thanksgiving for the Emperor’s
victories; but he aims, also, at exercising personal influence on each
of his episcopal correspondents, for he has learned that the dispute
between himself and the pope is making the ecclesiastics more and more
uneasy in their consciences. Meanwhile he sends a dozen orders to Fouché:
concerning Madame de Staël, and the extent of her influence; concerning
the salons of the aristocratic quarter; and so on. He enquires about
the two leading Parisian theatres; their condition, their finances, and
their repertoire. “What has become of my librarian?” he asks in another
letter. “Is he dead, or enjoying himself in the country? That would
be a fine way of fulfilling his duties! I ordered him to send me all
newly published books, and to let me have the publishers’ announcement
lists, but I have not had a word from him.” Draft for a new historical
university, where young people may learn about modern happenings as
well as the story of ancient days. To the Minister for Home Affairs:
“Literature needs encouragement. Let me hear your proposals for livening
up the various forms of belles lettres.” Enquiries as to the building of
a new Stock Exchange and of the Madeleine. How can six millions be best
applied for the encouragement of manufactures, and what will be the best
way of raising the money? Two millions are to be spent in renovating his
palaces. Arrangements must be made for the Paris newspapers to publish
articles ostensibly based on information from Bucharest and Tiflis, and
describing Russia’s desperate situation.
He smiles, glancing at his demure little friend. “You marvel at my
manifold activities? I have to keep watch on all my posts. Before, I was
only an acorn. Now I am an oak, the ruler of nations. All eyes are fixed
on me because I am in so outstanding a position. A man must play his
part, and cannot always be natural. But, for you, I will become the acorn
once more.” Simple words, tranquilly uttered. One more evening with her,
and then he must take the field again, for May has come, and the idyll
ends with the leaving of winter quarters and the extinction of the fires
at Finckenstein. He will see her again. They are both sure of this. But
were he to forget her, he could read the posy in the ring she gives him:
“If you cease to love me, forget not that I love you.”
XV
On the Memel, where it flows past Tilsit, a huge raft is anchored in
mid-stream. The tree trunks and the planks are covered with carpets,
and in the centre a tent gleams in the June sunlight, with the colours
of France and of Russia flying above it. On the western and the eastern
banks are ranged the guards of the two emperors. Boats set out from
either shore. Napoleon and the tsar enter the peace-tent simultaneously.
The soldiers, who were shooting one another only ten days back, cheer
lustily, and those in front, who can see, pass the word to the thousands
in the rear. The foes of yesterday have embraced, their masters have made
friends.
Immediately after the great victory of Friedland, Napoleon, as was his
way, had offered his hand to the vanquished. At the opening parleys,
since the appropriate response had not been made by the sultan, he had
given a hint that the tsar might well hope, some day, to establish the
cross once more on the dome of St. Sophia. The words were carefully
chosen, for he knew that the man to whom they would be reported next
day, a romanticist and a mystic, would be amenable to their influence.
Alexander had been prompt to take the proffered hand of friendship. Now
the enemies of Austerlitz and Friedland stood face to face in amicable
converse. Napoleon coldly scrutinised his only serious rival on the
Continent, a young man with feminine lineaments, compact, delicately
moulded, rosy; hearing and eyesight rather weak. In an instant he felt
assured that the tsar was a man whom he could win over.
By the end of a fortnight, the sometime adversaries have not merely
entered into an alliance, but have made friends. How has this come about?
“He is an amiable and pleasant fellow, a hero of romance,” says Napoleon
of him at this time. Inasmuch as the Emperor is bored by novels, and has
no use for heroes of romance in the practical world of his calculations,
there is an undercurrent of criticism in these pretty phrases. But he
adds: “A handsome young man, more intelligent than is usually supposed.”
At a later date, Napoleon utters profound truths regarding Alexander:
“The tsar is an attractive figure, well formed to exercise a victorious
charm on those with whom he comes in contact. Had I been inclined to
surrender to superficial impressions, I should have become devoted to him
instantly. But there is something peculiar about him, which I can best
express by saying that in all he is and does there seems to be something
lacking. The strangest point about the matter is that it is impossible
to foresee precisely what will be lacking in any given instance, for
the defect is infinitely variable.” Thus, the man whose friendship is
all-important to him seems to him utterly feminine. His final judgment
takes the form of an overwhelming compliment: “Were Alexander a woman, I
think I should fall passionately in love with him.”
It is not surprising that such a man should in a trice be mastered
by the seductions of the man of power; nor is it remarkable that
subsequently the tsar should forsake the Emperor, for the surrender
and the abandonment are both feminine. No one has ever given a better
description of Alexander than Metternich: “A mingling of masculine merits
with feminine defects; favourite ideas, imperfectly thought out, initiate
sudden impulses. As a result, sudden embarrassments. He gives his word
too quickly, and then finds it very difficult to keep; not strong enough
for ambition in the grand style, and not weak enough for mere vanity; the
man of the world rather than ruler. There is a sort of periodicity in his
enthusiasms and disenchantments, a periodicity of five-year terms during
which an idea waxes and wanes. At the close of each cycle, a new one
opens. To begin with, he is a liberal. Then he is filled with hatred for
the Frenchman; then he passes under the Frenchman’s influence.”
Five years hence, the new period will come to an end, and the friends of
to-day will be at war again.
Maybe Napoleon already foresees this in the splendid tent, where for
two hours the emperors discuss the affairs of the world; certainly he
foresees it during the long dinners and during the rides and drives
together. Napoleon’s handling of Alexander is masterly. At first, the
Emperor assumes the role of the cavalier, who cannot sufficiently extol
the heroism of the Russians; then he conveys the implication that ere
long he must surround himself with a bodyguard of his ministers, lest
he should be carried away by the tsar’s charm. At table, in order to
dazzle Alexander, he talks of his good luck—a thing to which the man
of destiny rarely alludes. He tells an anecdote, for which this is the
only warrant, of an incident that had happened in Egypt. He had fallen
asleep beneath an ancient wall, which had suddenly crumbled to pieces
without injuring him. Awaking, he found in his hand something which at
first he believed to be a stone, but which, on examination, he saw to be
a wonderfully beautiful cameo of Augustus. Could any playwright invent
a more marvellous scene than this one invented by the Emperor, in an
after-dinner hour, to stir the imagination of the mystical idealist, his
companion?
Enthralled, the tsar listens to the man of wonders. If he could only know
all that Napoleon knows! “I feel that I am not really emperor as you are,
for I am dependent on my generals.” He asks a hundred questions about the
art of war. Naïvely, when the two men are out walking together, the tsar
asks: “What sort of position is this? How would you defend it, and how
would you attack it?”—“I explained matters to him; and I told him that,
if I were ever again at war with Austria, he should lead an army corps of
thirty thousand men under my orders, so that he could learn the art of
war.”
Was ever woman in such humour wooed? Soon an offensive and defensive
alliance is concluded.
“The lands between the Elbe and the Memel” (this is a secret note to
the treaty), “are to form the barrier between the two great empires,
a barrier to render harmless all the pin-pricks which, in disputes
between nations, are apt to precede the firing of the guns.” In this
treaty, each party to the alliance gives only in order to take; and
in a couple of words the tsar sacrifices Prussia, the Emperor Poland,
although each of the two rulers has pledged a woman to maintain the
integrity of her country. Almost grotesque is the calm with which, seated
in a small room in an out-of-the-way and little known town hard by the
shores of the Baltic, the two men pore over the map and cut pieces out
of countries like Hotspur and Owen Glendower in the play. The Emperor
gives Coburg, Mecklenburg, and Oldenburg, whose rulers have ties with the
tsar, receiving the Ionian islands and Cattaro in return. Only when the
tsar asks for the Bosphorus, does the Emperor demur. “Constantinople?
That carries world dominion with it!” In the thorny thicket of these
negotiations, we have stumbled upon the decisive word that slumbers
beneath the treaties and notes. It is plain that when two men are
dividing the world between them, they will in the long run come to blows.
The king of Prussia joins their company; and, since he lacks dignity and
intelligence, he is ignored by both the emperors. Napoleon privately
considers him a dullard, possessing neither talent nor character, and
adversely criticises everything connected with him; even his dress, which
is the uniform of a hussar, headgear and all complete. Since the king is
anxious about the very existence of Prussia, he leaves no stone unturned
to secure the safety of his State, and summons the queen to Tilsit. The
Emperor, curious to see his beautiful foe, intimates that he would be
pleased to receive the lady there. He uses the neutral zone as a pretext
for not setting out to meet her; but he has a charming residence prepared
for her reception. Then, with a brilliant suite, though himself dressed
in the simplest attire, he rides forth to visit her, and is received by
the queen, who stands at the head of the flight of steps to welcome him.
She is clad in white silk, adorned with ancient jewels, beautiful and
bitter. With seemingly innocent words, Louise breaks down the unbearable
constraint:
“Sire, I hope you will excuse these narrow steps.”
“What would one not excuse to reach such a goal,” he answers. But when he
continues to speak in this complimentary tone, she says with dignity:
“Sire, have we come here to speak of trifles?”
Then she pleads as spouse and mother, and appeals to his “magnanimous
heart.”
“You will be glad to be back in Berlin?”
“Not in all circumstances. It depends upon you whether we return home
without sorrow in our hearts.”
“Madame, I should be only too pleased....”
When she moved to speak, he interjected:
“Madame, how came Prussia to venture upon this war?”
“The fame of Frederick the Great deceived us as to our strength.”
“How many times have I offered peace? Austria showed more wisdom after
Austerlitz.”
“To-day, I beg you to establish a claim upon our gratitude.”
“Have you not, yourself, destroyed my friendship for Prussia?”
“Your heart is noble; it unites with other fine qualities, the possession
of a great character.”
“Unfortunately, general considerations often stand in the way of special
wishes.”
“I do not understand questions of high politics; yet I do not feel that I
am foregoing any of my dignity as a woman if I assure you....”
He listens to her with growing interest. She notices “a kindly smile
trembling at the corners of his mouth, which seemed to guarantee
success,—when, at that moment, the king entered the room.”
The conversation has no political consequences, but the human appeal has
been very great. “It was just as well that the king put in an appearance
when he did,” the Emperor says to the tsar with a spice of coquetry.
“I might have made her promises.... An exquisite woman. Instead of
depriving her of a crown, one is tempted to lay one at her feet.” After
another talk with Queen Louise, Napoleon writes to Josephine: “She is a
bewitching woman, and is most amiable in her behaviour towards me. But
you have no cause for jealousy.... I should have to pay dearly for it
were I to play the gallant here.... She has been punished for her love
of domination; but she has displayed much character in the midst of her
misfortunes.... One has to concede that she said many sensible things.”
Even more amazing is his effect upon her, who had once called him an
infernal monster. She writes: “His head is shapely, his lineaments are
those of a thinker, his whole appearance reminds one of a Roman emperor.
When he smiles, his mouth assumes a kindly expression....”
This is Napoleon’s greatest victory. What other woman has, after a few
weeks’ acquaintance, been able to portray him more charmingly? And yet
she has reasons enough to detest him, for, in spite of the humility of
her attitude, he is as unyielding as iron. Soon, however, she arouses his
irritability. When, at last, everything has been signed, and the Emperor,
“in consideration of his friendship for the tsar,” has secured the
kingdom of Prussia against dissolution (though monstrous cantles have
been sliced off!), she cannot refrain from making renewed attempts to
soften him. Finally, he sees her into her carriage, and she seizes this
opportunity to ask him, for the last time, why so mighty a man should
have foregone the chance of earning her eternal gratitude. He throws
courtesy to the winds, and answers with ironical bitterness:
“What will you, Madame? I am to be pitied, for this is obviously the work
of my evil star!”
XVI
What is Paris saying?
“Even were I ten thousand miles away from my homeland, I could not leave
the field free for bad citizens to stir up my capital to strife!” He has
now been ten months absent—longer away than ever before or afterwards.
He tightens up the home government all the more rigorously since he fears
that his censorious Parisians are slipping out of his hands. This city,
renowned for its biting wit, is not only venting its feelings in songs
and jokes that are the delight of the boulevards; it is now assuming a
sceptical tone, and is more amused than impressed by his expeditions.
Yes, he is right, these Parisians need to be ruled by “an iron hand in
a velvet glove.” Now they are to experience both again, only the velvet
seems to have worn rather thin. Indeed, the whole tone of the capital has
become lax and disorderly. Do they want to return to Directory days, when
every one said and printed exactly what he pleased?
A new and more rigid censorship of newspapers and plays is introduced.
Historical drama must deal only with matters of the remote past; and even
Corneille, his ideal, is pruned of certain passages. Before every opera
he must be consulted, not merely as to the general question of acceptance
after it is written, but earlier, as to the choice of topic; religious
subjects are forbidden, and mythology is recommended. With lavish means,
on the imperial scale, a university is founded, modelled after the Jesuit
schools he detests; the professors are exempt from military service,
but to some extent celibacy is insisted on. Chateaubriand is attacked,
and his “Mercure de France” is suppressed, because in opposition salons
he has criticised the Emperor, and has quoted Tacitus the historian as
having taken vengeance on Nero the tyrant.
Madame de Staël’s new requests for permission to return to Paris are
rejected, “for she is able to make people think, people who had never
learned or had forgotten how to think.” To the arch-chancellor he writes:
“Summon Count R., and let him know that his wife’s boudoir is the talk of
Paris.” To Fouché: “You are not policing Paris properly. Malicious gossip
is ripe. Keep watch on the speeches that are being made at Citerni’s
restaurant and in the Café Foy.” That young people may learn who pleases
God, every child in France patters the following catechism: “We owe our
Emperor Napoleon I. love, respect, obedience, loyalty, military service,
... ardent prayers for his welfare, ... because God has showered gifts on
him in peace and war, and has made him God’s image on earth.”
He has moved a long way. When the heir of countless generations believes
such things of himself, others (or some of them) can believe them of
him. But it is only three years since the Emperor, on the day of his
coronation, had said that every fishwife would laugh in his face were he
to declare himself the son of God....
Is he no longer the same man? As of old, in personal matters he renounces
display. He will not have money lavished on his study. Here, apart
from the great writing table, there are only a small settee (on which
he lounges when he is dictating, unless he wanders about the room),
two tall bookcases, a couple of chandeliers, and the bust of Frederick
the Great; in another simply furnished study, he has a bust of Cæsar.
Looking through some bills, he says: “I was charged much less when I was
lieutenant. Why should I pay more than any one else?” When the private
theatre of the palace is to be done up, he remarks: “There must still be
a lot of upholstered benches and candelabras that were supplied at great
expense for my coronation. No doubt they are stored away somewhere.”
When Rémusat exceeds the Emperor’s wardrobe allowance of twenty thousand
francs, he is dismissed, and his successor is handed a long inventory of
requirements, a list personally drafted by the Emperor: “I think we can
make a few more savings even than this. See to it that the tailor does
his work properly. Lay the new clothes out for my inspection and approval
on the day of delivery, and then put them away at once in my drawers.”
In the case of uniform coats which are to be delivered every quarter, he
remarks: “This coat must last three years.... In addition, forty-eight
pairs of white breeches and waistcoats, at eighty francs a suit = frs.
3840. One pair of breeches and one waistcoat must be delivered every
week, and they must last three years.... Also twenty-four pairs of shoes,
to be delivered a pair every fortnight, must last two years = frs. 312.”
Shirts are the only things he orders in large quantities, to be delivered
a dozen every week, must last six years.
Here, in his intimate life, he is the same man as before; just as, when
he is campaigning, he is the old Bonaparte—a man of few enjoyments. But
upon the formalities of majesty, upon court ceremonial, upon all the
outworn display of the world whose power he has broken, he will squander,
not money alone, but, more precious, time, and, more precious still,
human dignity and his own freedom.
He no longer laughs sarcastically when those who dwell in the
aristocratic quarter frequent his court; he is genuinely pleased. His
mood is difficult to understand. The men of birth who had mortified him
in his cadet days by making fun of his poverty, now throng the court
of this same Corsican, and their shadows on the shining parquet floor
seem to mock the humility of their gestures. They are all back in the
Tuileries now, the Montmorencys, the Montesquieus, the Radziwills, the
Noailles, the Narbonnes, the Turennes, who for years had sworn the death
of the upstart. The princes of the Confederation of the Rhine clank
through the halls in their German uniforms; the Mecklenburger pays
his court to the empress; the heirs apparent of Baden and Bavaria are
privileged to hear the discussions at the Council of State. To the old
nobility this was a pastime; to the Emperor it was policy, for he wished
to make sure of the allegiance of their class.
But now there happens something which should never have happened.
Napoleon, the man who counts his coats as he counts his soldiers; the man
who in the army gives promotion only for good service, and will never
make an inefficient soldier a lieutenant merely because he is some one’s
son or nephew; the man who sits contentedly in a barn among his officers,
or by the camp-fire among his grenadiers; the man who has expunged the
privileges of birth from his legal code; the man who has contraposed the
new idea of individual ability to the old idea of hereditary dignity,
and has thus turned a whole continent upside down—this same Bonaparte,
in the autumn of the year 1807, founds a new nobility, “because it is a
part of human nature that a man should wish to hand down to his children,
not property alone, but also tokens of esteem.” Counts and princes, dukes
and majorats, were created, not, as before, in order to bestow a supreme
dignity upon the bravest marshals, the ablest senators and ministers, but
that the sons and grandsons of these new nobles, ne’er-do-wells, wealthy
Parisian idlers, and degenerates, might enjoy the privileges which the
men of a whole decade had fought and bled to abolish!
Even the Legion of Honour was now desecrated by its own creator, for
these appointed knights, every one of whom had done good service to his
country, were to be entitled to bequeath the semblance of this service as
well as their property; and the great dignitaries were to bequeath their
princely rank and appellation. Certainly, the bequest did not carry with
it any special civic privileges, but none the less the new institution
conflicted with the spirit of the Code Napoléon. “Liberty,” he wrote
with too much truth in a private letter at the time of the issue of this
decree, “liberty is only the need of the few whom nature has endowed with
exceptional talent; and there is no danger in restricting it. The crowd
loves equality. I do not injure the many when I distribute titles without
raising the old question of birth; they are bourgeois crowns, which any
one can win. Clever men impart their own movement to those whom they
rule. My movement is an upward one, and therefore the nation must move
upwards.... I know that these dukes whom I am endowing so richly that I
make them independent of me, will endeavour to elude me, and that they
are relying on what they call the caste spirit. But I can run quicker
than they, and shall soon overtake them.”
Rarely has a great error had so grand a foundation. Not many months
before, in his letters, he had positively cudgelled his brother for
having founded a nobility in Holland; and, speaking of his own intention
to do the same thing, had excused himself by saying that the Dutch were a
trading people, and that in the militarist French Empire matters were on
an altogether different footing. But in the very fact that he himself had
transformed France into a militarist State, lay the first danger; and the
second danger was the imperial crown, which, with inexorable logic, was
now diffusing its ancient symbolical power athwart his realm.
Before, when he had been Consul, he could with impunity bestow civic
crowns, gather honour and glory into a Legion, and transmit the
stupendous momentum of his flywheel to the strongest of the lesser
wheels in his country. But when he granted estates to the best among
his followers, he had to supply titles to go with their estates, titles
which were necessarily inheritable; and when to the second and third
best he now gave titles without lands, the recipients naturally begged
that the titles, too, should be hereditary. Thus in a generation,
several thousand, and in three generations, as many as twenty thousand,
would bear these new titles, not for services rendered, not for deeds
splendidly performed, but with the semblance of superiority, and, if not
with the political privileges attaching of old to birth and title, still
with the social privileges which in former days had aroused revolt in the
masses.
The treason and ingratitude which he is here laying up in store will in
due time open his eyes to his mistake. In truth, the death sentence he
passes on equality will prove to have been a more grievous blunder than
the execution of the duke of Enghien. Then he was destroying a scion of
the past; now he is creating forebears who will resuscitate that past.
The resolve issues from a moody mind; for this is a dark year in
Napoleon’s soul, although nothing seems to be going awry. “You do not
understand the nature of human motives,” he said at this period to an
honest democrat. “You democrats are unable to draw distinctions between
one another, whereas personal interest plays its part in what every one
does. Look at Masséna. He has won an abundance of fame; but what he wants
now is to become a prince, like Murat and Bernadotte. Soon he will get
himself killed in the forefront of the battle, thanks to his eagerness to
win this distinction. Ambition is what spurs the French!”
He grows colder in his manner, forbids his brothers to speak to him
uninvited, is less regular in the arrangement of his work, needlessly
extends sittings far into the night. Even at Fontainebleau, in the
interludes between hunting and festivities, he will have nothing but
tragedies staged; rises from his bed at midnight, and dictates to his
secretaries till morning; can only soothe the increasing irritability of
his nerves by spending hours in a hot bath. The cramps in his stomach
trouble him more frequently and grow more severe.
He has periods of gloom like those from which he suffered in youth,
speaks of the roaring of the sea and the moaning of the wind, has the
candles shaded when he is listening to the mournful songs of Italian
singers. None of his associates understand these moods; they can only
wonder, and they guess at political motives. They do not realise that
now, when the dream of his fancy is being fulfilled, he cannot but be
disillusioned by the fulfilment, which comes otherwise than he had
dreamed, and far too slowly. “You are just like all the rest of them,”
he says roughly to one of his ministers who congratulates him on the
treaty of Tilsit. “I shall not be master until I have signed the peace of
Constantinople!”
Worldwide power! Asia! These are the thoughts that continue to pulse in
his brain. If he, who is always studying the tragical figures of the
heroes of antiquity in search of his own image, could find the true
reflexion of his own soul, it would be in the verses at this time being
written by a German poet to describe the inner aspect of the Faustian
unrest which he, the Emperor, with ever more violent blows, is now
producing in the countries of Europe.
But these dark hours are followed by others in which his mind recovers
the wonted clarity of its calculations. Thus, to the tsar, the other
ruler of vast territories, he writes this imaginative programme:
“An army of fifty thousand Frenchmen and Russians, with perhaps a few
Austrians, could march to Constantinople, and thence hurl itself upon
Asia. Once it had reached the Euphrates, England would lie at the feet of
the Continent.... Within a month of our coming to an understanding, our
armies can be at the Bosphorus: the influence will make itself felt as
far as India.... Of course the arrangements could only be concluded in a
personal interview with Your Majesty. Everything can be signed and sealed
before the middle of March. By May 1st, our troops will be in Asia, yours
in Stockholm. England will collapse beneath the weight of the events with
which the atmosphere will be charged. It is true that Your Majesty and I
have proposed to enjoy peace within our far-flung empires.... But it is
always wise and politic to do what destiny commands.... That will make
this crowd of pygmies bow their heads, the pygmies who cannot see that
the prototype of the present age must be sought in the remote periods of
history, and not in the newspaper articles of the century that has just
closed.... In these few lines I am pouring out all my soul before Your
Majesty.”
All his soul? Part of it, since the jewels are cut for the delectation
of a muddle-headed idealist whose own dreams will be reflected with
rainbow tints from their sparkling facets. But the undertaking has
its elements of well-considered realism. At about this time he has an
interview with a general who has been in India. This expert declares the
scheme practicable, and the Emperor’s hesitations superfluous. Thereupon,
the latter repeatedly strokes his visitor’s face with both hands, and
“bubbles over with an almost childlike joy.”
Thus imaginative was Napoleon.
The present leads him once more to the shade of Charlemagne. The previous
year he had thought of visiting Rome to have himself crowned Emperor of
the West. The pope was to lose all temporal authority, and to content
himself with a few millions as revenue; but the cardinals had vetoed
the scheme. Thereupon he had rancorously exclaimed: “The whole of
Italy will be subject to my laws. I will not disturb the independence
of the Holy See, if Your Holiness will pay me the like consideration
in temporal matters. No doubt Your Holiness is sovereign in Rome, but
I am Emperor of Rome!” This threatening demeanour, this Carlovingian
defiance, is in sharp conflict with the constitutional law on which his
power is assumedly based. In Rome, as in India, he aims at the forcible
realisation of things which only the vision of his great forerunners
created.
More and more frequent become the signs which show that Napoleon’s
historical fantasies are tending to outsoar the limits which, were he
still an accurate calculator, he would regard as attainable—and terrible
will be the ultimate result.
In Rome, for the time being, he is still the stronger; but so much has
the habit of command grown upon him, so overweening has his belief in his
unconquerable sword become, that he has lost sight of the moral canons
which, ten years earlier, he (then a mere military commander with no
experience in political matters) had with clear insight defended against
the hectoring Directors, and had subsequently, though at considerable
risk to his popularity, incorporated in the Concordat. Now he writes to
Eugene that one of the cardinals has died leaving a history of the popes.
“If it represents an attempt to set forth all the harm the popes have
done to the Church and to Christendom, let it be published forthwith.”
Because the pope refused to exclude English ships from his ports, the
Emperor occupied Ancona, relying “upon the protection of God, who crowns
all my enterprises with his glory—If Your Holiness would like to give
my envoy his papers, you are at liberty to do so. I should even prefer
that you should receive the English, or the caliph of Constantinople.—In
conclusion I pray to God that he may keep you for many years more at the
head of our Holy Mother the Church. Your pious son, the Emperor of the
French and the king of Italy, Napoleon.”
The year before, simultaneously with these burlesque menaces, he had
sent warnings through Uncle Fesch that his own role resembled that of
Constantine, and had touched upon the old struggle of the Middle Ages
about investiture: “For the pope, I am Charlemagne, seeing that I have
joined the crowns of France and Lombardy, and that my dominions border
on the East.... On condition of good behaviour, I shall make no change
in the outward semblance of things, but if the pope thwarts me I shall
degrade him to the status of a Roman bishop, ... and shall introduce the
Concordat into Italy: for whatever can make people happy in France, can
make them happy in Italy as well; and what does not contribute to the
happiness of life in one land, cannot do so in the other.”
This is truly Lutheran terminology! The man who lets his imagination
riot when his temporal affairs are merged in historical mysticism,
becomes circumstantially clear when religious mysticism is a cloak for
worldly concerns. Napoleon’s reasoning inclined him towards Protestantism
throughout life, and it was only on grounds of policy that he resisted
the inclination to impose Lutheranism on France. Having determined to
make short work of it with the Head Shepherd (since the pope hesitated
to give England the go-by), he proposes to sweep away the hindrance that
severs the North Italian and the South Italian kingdoms, that he may at
length have all Italy for his own—the Italy of which he wrongfully calls
himself king.
Now he writes to Eugene, the viceroy, in the style of his military
decrees: “The present pope has too much power. Priests are not made to
rule. Why will he not render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and
refrain from troubling my States? Perhaps the time is not far distant
when I ... shall summon the Churches of France, Germany, Italy, and
Poland to a council, and settle matters without the pope.” He wants
to secure a majority among the cardinals by the appointment of French
cardinals, but the pope will not allow their number to be increased,
and proposes to make up for this refusal by agreeing to crown Napoleon
Emperor of the West. Now, however, what he had vainly asked for a
year earlier has ceased to charm his imagination. Since it has become
possible, he regards it as already achieved; and when the pope shows
himself pliable in money matters, Napoleon makes this an occasion for
further exactions. He threatens “to reunite this group of my crown lands
with the Empire at once, and to revoke the gift of Charlemagne.”
In a word, having a large appetite, he will make one mouthful of all the
Papal States. Thereupon the enraged pope breaks off the negotiations,
the Emperor has Rome occupied, and in April the Papal States become a
province.
Napoleon, who has ranged from Cairo to Vienna, and will range from Madrid
to Moscow, Napoleon, who has often been in Italy, hesitates to set
foot in Rome; caution or circumstance always keeps him away. He never
confirms by actual inspection the image he has carried in his mind from
boyhood upwards. Now for the second time his generals take possession of
what he had been wont to regard as the Eternal City. No member of his
entourage protests against the occupation. But his mother feels it to be
a mistake, and her distress affects her health. Whereas formerly she had
been content to say sceptically of her son’s great fortune: “if only it
lasts!” now, with a presage of destruction, she confides her misgivings
to her intimates:
“I foresee that he will bring disaster on himself and all his family. He
should be content with what he has. He tries to grasp too much, and will
lose all!”
XVII
“What the German peoples ardently desire is that persons who are
not of noble birth but are talented shall have equal rights to your
consideration and to office, so that there may be an end, once and for
all, to any kind of subordination, and to all intermediaries between the
ruler and the lowest classes of the population. The advantages brought
by the Code Napoléon, publicity of legal procedure, and trial by jury,
will be characteristics of your monarchy. To lay my whole thought before
you: for the consolidation of this monarchy, I look more to the effects
just named than to the results of the greatest victories. Your people
must have a liberty, an equality, and a prosperity hitherto unknown in
Germany. This way of ruling will be a stronger barrier between you and
Prussia than the Elbe, than fortresses, than the protection of France.
What nation would ever wish to go back to Prussian rule when it had once
experienced the advantages of a liberal government?”
In these sentences (which are written as a private lesson, and are
not penned with an eye to public effect), the Emperor expounds to his
youngest brother the great mission that is being entrusted to the latter
when he takes charge of the new kingdom of Westphalia. Jerome’s task
was to plant the fundamental ideas of the revolution on German soil, a
pioneer work, this introduction of the first glimmer of self-government
in a part of western Europe where hitherto the inhabitants had known
only how to obey. In Holland and Italy, ideas of self-government were by
no means new. But as far as concerned the princes of the Confederation
of the Rhine, although, acting under orders, they could introduce the
new legal codes, they lacked the traditions and the talents that might
have made it possible to initiate such changes from within. We can now
understand the historic mission of the youngest of the Bonapartes. He was
to make a great experiment in democracy; he was to transform four million
Germans from subjects into citizens. Had this impetus been successful,
the whole nation might have been spared resubjugation to princely
arrogance after the War of Liberation.
But the young man of twenty-three who, coming at the end of this long
family, had been reared as a prince, regarded his kingship as a gallant
adventure, in which money and vital energy could be squandered. Youth
was like champagne, which bubbles when the cork is drawn. He forsook the
arms of his Württemberg consort for those of innumerable mistresses; ran
into debt, became involved in manifold scandals, and procreated children
all over the place; amused himself more than his subjects; and, by this
traditional deportment of one born in the purple, succeeded for decades
to come in discrediting the fine notion of the choice of the fittest.
There was something to be said for the German view that, if they must
have a prince to ride across fields and men, they would like him to be
one who had inherited the position. Jerome, however, laughed at the
world’s mockery, and even laughed at his great brother’s exhortations.
Napoleon had a predilection for his youngest brother, the sort of
weakness that fathers are apt to have for the latest born of their sons.
The brio of the young man’s life was in keeping with his own tempo.
Besides, Jerome was always amiable, took nothing amiss. For instance, on
one occasion he asked Napoleon to make him commander-in-chief, and showed
no offence at a refusal couched in the following terms: “Are you serious?
After you have been through six campaigns, and after you have had a half
a dozen horses shot under you, you can ask me again!”
When Jerome went to war, he took his whole court with him—not the queen,
indeed, but all the prettiest of her ladies. He issued proclamations in
the style of the Roi Soleil. But he was not mortified to receive the
following imperial admonition:
“I have read an order of the day issued by you, in which you make
yourself ridiculous. You are king, and the Emperor’s brother! Fine
qualities in war! In war, a man must be a soldier before everything. When
I am in camp, I need neither ministers nor luxury. You must camp with the
advance guard, be in the saddle day and night, march with the advance
guard, so that you may get all the news without delay. If you don’t like
that, you had better stay at home in your palace! You make war like a
satrap! God in heaven, you never learned that from me! I ride in front of
the skirmishers, and do not allow even my minister for foreign affairs to
follow me.... You make vast claims; you have a certain amount of talent
and a few good qualities, but these are put quite in the shade by your
follies. Furthermore, you are insufferably conceited, and know absolutely
nothing of public affairs.”
The king sticks the letter into his jabot with a laugh. But the Emperor?
Cannot he realise, while he talks to his brother like a father, that
every one to whom he gives unmerited power endangers the very essence of
power? That these golden crowns and the extemporised coats-of-arms he
provides for them create very unstable kings and princes? That homunculus
escapes from the phial and makes fun of his master? This perennial
weakness where his relatives are concerned leads him, at times, to assume
what is a very unusual role for him, that of the good-natured man;
for, though he begins by issuing orders to his brothers, he very often
gives way to them in the end. “My brother, inclosed you will find the
constitution of your kingdom”—thus he begins a missive of instruction in
matters of high politics, with a sentence that might have been taken out
of a comic opera. When he is in a friendly humour, he will end a letter
full of reproaches with a paternal smile: “Mon ami, I love you, but you
are so frightfully young!”
Napoleon is no longer young. Inevitably, as his plans grow, there must
be an increase in that harshness which, in him, is mainly the outcome
of overwork. When, twelve years earlier, he had come down from the Alps
as a conqueror and his fame had spread before him across the plain of
Lombardy, his youth had endowed the novelty of this campaign with a
sort of romantic innocence which carried his contemporaries off their
feet. Now, when the mountain torrent has long since widened into a
river, bearing on its broad bosom ships freighted with the treasures
of the world, and when the river is drawing near to the ocean in which
its waters will soon mingle with all the waters of the earth; now,
the gravity of this labour of Atlas has stamped its imprint upon his
features, has written its message in his heart. Rare have become the
hours of tranquillity, few the moments of merriment and sportive humour;
and the heroical cynicism of his mission moulds him before the eyes of
the world into a statue of bronze.
True, he had sent for his Polish countess. She was installed in the
very street where Josephine had first charmed him, and where, again and
again, a quaint superstition led him to house his lady friends. Walewska
is munificently provided for, and Napoleon’s physician visits her every
day. But, though there is no secret about the matter, she leads a retired
life, does not use the box at the opera he has reserved for her, and
seldom sees him now that she has come to Paris. This is an interlude
between one idyll and the next. He has made up his mind that the child
she is to bear him will be a son; and the event may have still greater
consequences to-day than it would have had yesterday.
For the first of his illegitimate children, the one of whose birth he
had received tidings in Berlin (when he had been reassured to learn that
there was no justification for the common belief that he was sterile),
has been put out of court by the mother’s unwise importunity. Shortly
after his return to Paris, she had called. He would not see her, sending
a message to say that he received no one whom he had not summoned. He
provided her with a house and an income, and would have nothing more to
do with her. But he had the boy brought to him, and playfully teased
the little chap. For a moment, he even thought of adopting him. All had
to be done secretly. The invisible master, whom he called the “nature
of things” and on rare occasions “fate,” forbade him the unconcealed
enjoyment of this most natural of scenes in our human life, one in which
Napoleon could not play his part until he was nearly forty. At length he
had a son of his body, who might become his heir. Yet he, Emperor of the
West, could not step forward and say: “This is my son!” Wishing to give
the boy at least half his own name, he called him Léon.
But the mother had become completely estranged from him, and Napoleon
soon ceased to have any serious thought of making the child his
successor. Perhaps he thought that the boy came of a bad stock; maybe he
had a foreboding that this half Napoleon would become a half criminal and
an outright ne’er-do-well.
All the more vigorously does his advance in years urge him towards a new
marriage. There are long conversations between Napoleon and Josephine,
between reason and sorrow; and after them it is not Josephine alone
in whom the servants note the traces of tears. “How terrible to die
childless!” he says on one occasion. Nevertheless his fondness for his
helpmate increases. We know how difficult he found it to break with
any of his collaborators; and his temperamental conservatism makes him
cling to this first companion of his rise. “If I were to divorce her,”
he says to Talleyrand who advises him to take this step, “the witchery
of my home would be gone. I should have to go to school again in order
to understand the ways and fancies of a young wife. The empress adapts
herself to me perfectly, and understands me so well. Besides, it would be
very ungrateful to divorce a woman who has done so much for me.” Such are
the motives, tender and reasonable, respectable and convenient—in a word,
thoroughly middle class—which make the man cleave to his wife.
But the difficulties grow in number, and the need for a decisive step
becomes more urgent. While he ponders the moral impression which his
divorcing Josephine will make in France (where she inspires far more
personal affection than he does), he, as his manner is, lays his
plans deliberately, that, at last, he may make an advance which no
one anticipates, and will enable him to fulfil two wishes at once. He
arranges for an interview with a man whom he has long needed, and whom he
may now need more than ever. His mother is always interceding with him
on Lucien’s behalf; now, Napoleon, who is travelling in Italy, sends for
Lucien.
The conversation between the brothers is the most interesting of all
Napoleon’s recorded conversations, and has been reported by Lucien with
fidelity and picturesqueness. Napoleon is there portrayed to the life.
XVIII
Lucien was now just thirty-two. It was on a December evening when he had
reached the castle of Mantua, after a journey during which the dread of
imprisonment, aroused by his brother’s summons, had been continually
present to his mind. On entering a room extravagantly lighted by
numerous candelabra, he was blinded for a moment by the glare. Then he
heard Rustam’s voice announcing him: “Sire, your brother Lucien!”
The man to whom the announcement is made does not stir. He is seated
at a large round table, which is covered by a huge map of Europe, the
biggest Lucien has ever seen. Supporting his head on his left hand, with
the other hand he is thrusting coloured pins into the map, pins which
presumably represent army corps or whole armies. It is so many years
since Lucien has seen his brother, and Napoleon has changed so much, that
the visitor is not quite sure whether he is looking at the Emperor, and
he remains motionless for several minutes. At length the man sits up,
yawns, rubs his back against the chair, takes up a small bell from the
table, and rings it with one strong movement. The visitor advances a step
or two:
“Sire, I am Lucien.”
The Emperor jumps up from his chair, dismisses the servant, and takes
his brother by the hand affectionately, though with a certain amount of
reserve. Lucien feels called upon to embrace Napoleon, who does not repel
the advance, but accepts it with a passive coldness, as if no longer used
to such intimacies. Then, taking the visitor by the hand once more, he
pushes Lucien gently away to scrutinise him the better:
“So it’s you, is it? How are you? How is your family? When did you leave
Rome? Have you had a pleasant journey? What about the pope? How is he?
Does he like you?”
[Illustration: Bonaparte as First Consul. Painting by J. D. A. Ingres.
Musée de Liége.
(Photograph by Braun, Paris and Dornach.)]
Lucien notes the nervousness masked by this flood of questions, turns
them off lightly, and says he is glad to find his brother in good health.
“Yes, I’m very well.” He pats his waistcoat, and adds: “I’m getting fat,
and I’m afraid I shall get fatter still.” He looks keenly at Lucien,
takes a pinch of snuff, and says: “As for you! Do you know that you are
looking uncommonly well? You used to be rather too thin. Now, you are
almost handsome.”
“Your Majesty is good enough to make fun of me.”
“No, no, it’s quite true. But let’s sit down and have a talk.” They seat
themselves opposite the huge map, the Emperor fidgets with the pins, and
Lucien waits for him to begin. But, since Napoleon does not open the
ball, the younger man says, hesitatingly: “Sire....” At this moment, the
Emperor sweeps all the pins flat, and says abruptly: “Well, what have you
to say to me?”
Lucien replies that he hopes his brother has forgiven him.
“You can have my pardon soon enough. It depends entirely on yourself.”
Lucien expresses his willingness to do anything compatible with his
honour.
“Well and good, but what sort of things will square with your honour?”
Lucien speaks of nature and religion.
“But politics, Sire; do politics mean nothing to you?”
Lucien demurs, saying that he has retired into private life.
“It rested entirely with yourself. You could have been a king just as
well as your brothers.”
“Sire, my wife’s honour, my children’s position....”
“You keep on speaking of your wife, when you know perfectly well that she
has never been your wife. Is not, and never will be, for I shall never
recognise her.”
“Ah, Sire!”
“No, never, though the heavens should fall! Since you are my brother, I
can forgive the wrong you have done me. But upon her my curse will rest!”
There is a long tirade, until at length Lucien intervenes, laughing
nervously, and saying:
“Moderate your words, Sire. There is a proverb: ‘La processione torna,
dove esce,’” and Lucien thinks it expedient to add a French translation.
When Napoleon continues to talk of his brother’s wife as a woman of bad
reputation, and Lucien shows signs of taking offence, the Emperor tries
to mollify him by admitting that these reports may be calumnious, but
adds that nothing will induce him to recognise her. Besides, it is now
a fundamental law, as firmly fixed as the Salic law, that no marriage
in the Emperor’s family is valid without the Emperor’s consent. Lucien
reminds him of the date of the marriage, and Napoleon answers: “Yes, but
the law was passed because of what you had done!” This Napoleonic logic
makes Lucien smile.
“What are you laughing at? I don’t see anything laughable in it! I know
what you and your wife and my enemies say about the matter. You choose
your friends from among my enemies. But no good Frenchman approves of
what you have done. The only way in which you can regain popular esteem
is by espousing my cause, like Jerome.”
Lucien, who is in the Emperor’s hands, has absolutely determined to let
nothing affront him. But he is spurred into opposition, springs to his
feet, and does not sit down again:
“Your Majesty is mistaken! When your courtiers approve your attitude
towards me as thanks for the services I was so happy to render you, they
are only acting after their kind. On my side, too, my servants tell me
that I am right!”—At these words, Napoleon’s brow is furrowed, his eyes
flash, and his nostrils work, “an unmistakable sign of rage in members
of our family.” But Lucien has taken the bit between his teeth, and goes
on: “What ought the nation to do for me? What gratitude does it owe me?
It ought to look upon me as the saviour of the man who has saved it.... I
am proud to think that it will rather be inclined to compare me with you
than with Jerome. No, Sire, public opinion, which is mightier by far than
all the kings in the world, assigns every one to his true place, whatever
courtiers may say.”
Napoleon grows calmer. Instead of flying into a passion, as Lucien
dreaded for a moment, he controls himself, and says quietly:
“Talleyrand is right. You speak of the affair with an ardour worthy of
a political club. Such eloquence, Citoyen, is, believe me, long since
out of fashion. I am well aware that you did me good service on the
Nineteenth Brumaire; but as for having been my ‘saviour,’ of that proof
is lacking. This much I remember clearly, that you disputed with me the
unity of power which I needed for the saving of France, and that I and
Joseph spent half a night before we could get you to pledge yourself to
silence when these questions should be touched upon.... Finally, after
the victory, you were inclined to oppose my personal elevation, and this
conduct on your part releases me from all obligation to show gratitude.
“But you, do you owe me no gratitude? When you ‘saved’ me at Saint-Cloud,
were not you yourself in mortal peril? I sent my grenadiers to save you
from the hands of assassins. And if you, a bad brother, an unnatural
brother, had really allowed that vote of my outlawry to be taken, do
you imagine that I should have been such a fool as to accept the decree
unresistingly? Had I not adherents enough, with God’s aid, to defend this
head that was destined to wear so many crowns?” He goes on to speak for a
whole hour of those days, and of Corsican compatriots who had helped him;
suddenly gives the conversation an intimate turn; speaks of his generals
and the extent of their devotion; refers to political conflicts in which
the brothers had held divergent views, and shows how his view had been
right. Then he changes the subject, saying abruptly:
“Enough. That is all ancient history, like your great day of the
Nineteenth Brumaire. I did not summon you that we might deliver lectures
to one another.” A long pause.
“Listen to me, Lucien, and weigh my words carefully, for, above all,
let us avoid getting heated.... I am too powerful to have any desire to
lose my temper. You have come to me trustfully. Corsican hospitality
shall never be violated by the Emperor of the French. This virtue of
our forefathers and fellow-countrymen is a guarantee for your absolute
safety.” The Emperor strides up and down the hall for a long time,
pulling himself together, and then turns to Lucien, whose hand he takes
and presses:
“We are alone here. You see? We are alone. No one can overhear us. I am
wrong about your marriage.... Knowing your wilfulness as I did, knowing
your self-love—for everything, you know, depends on self-love, which
regards itself as a virtue, just as we princes dignify by the name
of policy everything which turns on our passions—I ought not to have
interfered with your union. People slandered your wife to me, though some
ventured to speak well of her, especially Mamma, who loves her, saying
she makes you happy and is a good mother.... Lebrun, indeed, has sung
her praises so often that Josephine once told the good fellow he must
be in love with her himself. I was very much amused at my wife, who has
more of a temper than people fancy. Still, I must say that Josephine
never shows her claws to me! Well, I have no disrespect for your wife,
but I detest her because this passion of yours for her has robbed me of
the most capable of my brothers. However, her beauty will pass; you will
be disillusioned; then, returning to political life, you will oppose my
policy, and I shall have to take measures against you whether I like it
or not; for—let me say this to you—unless you are on my side, Europe is
too small for the pair of us!”
“You are making fun of me.”
“No, I’m in earnest; friend or foe! It is easier for you to-day than
ever before. You need not be surprised: there has been a change in my
family policy. You will see soon enough. Your children, which hitherto I
have wanted to exclude, can now be of great use to me, but they must be
dynastically recognised. The offspring of a marriage I do not recognise
can have no right to the throne. Tell me, then, what would you do in my
place?”
Lucien advises him to make the Senate pass a simple resolution to the
effect that the children come within the right of succession.
“Of course I know that I can do that, but I must not. As you said just
now, public opinion has to be conciliated. What would the family, the
court, France, which all watch my slightest movements, say about such a
step? A recantation of that kind would do me more harm than the loss of a
battle.”
Lucien points out that he cannot possibly ask pardon for a marriage which
had been entered into long before Napoleon’s accession to the throne.
“Grant my request, Sire. You will have no more faithful servant than I.
All the rest of my life will be an expression of my gratitude.”
The younger man goes on talking for a long time, and throughout his
speech Napoleon is incessantly taking snuff, but spilling most of
the tobacco, so nervous is he, growing more and more anxious; in his
perplexity exclaiming at length: “Good God, you press me hard, and I
am weak. But I shall not be so weak as to move the Senate to pass the
resolution you ask for. I cannot recognise your wife!”
Thereupon Lucien, who is now almost beside himself, says: “Well, then,
Sire, what do you really want of me?”
“What do I want? Simply that you should divorce your wife.”
“But you have always maintained that we are not married, so how can we
get a divorce?”
“I expected you to say that. What do you think I can mean by asking you
to procure a divorce? Obviously, thereby I recognise your marriage, but
not your wife. The divorce will be the best thing for your children, just
like all that you have hitherto refused to do, all that I have so much
wanted you to do: to annul the marriage and divorce her.”
“That would be a dishonour for me and my children, and I will never do
it!”
“Why is it, that with all your mother wit, you cannot see the difference
between my earlier proposals and my present ones. In the former case, if
your marriage had been declared null, your children would have become
bastards!”
Lucien points out the difference between his children’s dynastic rights
and their civic rights. “You can bestow your thrones upon whom you will,
Sire, for you won them at the point of the sword. But no one shall cheat
my children out of their share in the modest heritage of Carlo Bonaparte,
for they are as legitimate as any one else’s both by canon law and by
State law. The pope has even given one of my daughters the name of his
mother!”
“Calm yourself!... Of course the divorce I ask for implies the
recognition of your marriage. Nor do I wish to force an actual separation
from your wife. She shall be honoured in accordance with her merits if
she will make this sacrifice to my policy and to the future interests of
France. I would even pay her a visit. But if she refuses, you and she
will both be blamed for having sacrificed the true greatness of your
children to your own egoism, and your children will curse your memory!”
Lucien answers mournfully.
“You are really incorrigible,” rejoins Napoleon. “You take everything so
tragically. I am not asking for any tragedies! Think it over.”
After Lucien has again and again insisted upon his point of honour, and
has several times wished to take leave, the Emperor once more brings up
the distribution of the thrones. Eugene’s position in Italy is merely
provisional, and he would much rather see Lucien installed there.
Napoleon complains about Hortense, too. None of them are satisfied.
“Pauline is naturally the most reasonable in the matter of ambition, for
she is the queen of fashion. Besides, she grows more lovely day by day.
Josephine is ageing, and is greatly distressed about a divorce.”
Lucien pricks up his ears. Napoleon goes on as if he were talking at
random:
“Can you believe it? She always bursts into tears when her digestion
is a little upset, for she fancies she is being poisoned by those who
would like me to marry some one else. That is despicable. Still, in the
end, I shall have to get a divorce. I ought to have taken the step long
ago, and I should have had quite big children by now; for, I may as well
tell you”—he speaks earnestly—“people are wrong in thinking it is my
fault we have no children. I have several. Two I know of for certain.”
He mentions, without naming her, Léon’s mother; and then, wonder of
wonders, the Polish countess. “She is an exquisite woman, an angel....
You laugh to see that I am in love. Yes, I really am; but I never forget
considerations of policy. She wants me to marry a princess. Of course, as
far as feelings go, I would much rather raise my beloved to the throne.
You, in your dealings with your wife, ought in like manner to be guided
by considerations of policy!”
“Sire, I should act as you are doing if my wife were only my mistress.”
The Emperor grows more and more animated; speaks of a fixed intention to
get a divorce; deplores having given the Bavarian princess to Eugene,
who does not care for her and did not choose her for himself; remarks
that he might long since have had Lucien’s daughter betrothed to the
prince of Asturia “or some other great prince, perhaps even a great
emperor.... Your divorce would have to precede mine, or be simultaneous.
Then there would be less chatter about my divorce; for yours, in view of
your obstinate refusal for so long previously, will certainly arouse more
interest. Will you do me this service? I think you really ought to.”
Lucien looks at him so quizzically that the Emperor is amazed, eyes his
brother up and down, and says: “Why not?”
Lucien smiles at the unreasonableness of the demand. Napoleon is
embarrassed, but returns to the charge. Suddenly he addresses his brother
as “my dear President” (Lucien having long ago been president of the
Council of Five Hundred), and adds with emphasis: “Service for service,
of course—and this time you will not find me ungrateful!”
Lucien sank “into a sort of reverie, which was by no means unpleasant,”
so that for a few moments he hardly noticed what Napoleon was
talking about. Before long he realised that the Emperor was saying,
confidentially, that his only reason for wanting Lucien’s divorce was
that this would probably minimise the effect of his own on public
opinion. Lucien, as tactfully as he could, alluded to his own advantages,
pointing out that his wife was a young woman and was not barren. Napoleon
took no offence. “Your wife, oh, yes, your wife, didn’t I tell you? She
will become the duchess of Parma, your eldest boy will be her heir,
without having any claim of succession to your rights as a French prince.
For this is only the first stage to which I shall raise you, until
something better can be found: an independent crown.”
At the word “independent,” Lucien cannot restrain a smile, for he is
thinking of the part his brothers have to play. Napoleon notices the
expression on his face.
“Yes, independent. You will know how to reign.... You need only take your
choice!” His eyes flash fire, and he bangs the enormous map with the
flat of his hand. “I’m not talking at random. All this belongs to me or
soon will. Even to-day, I can do what I please. Would you like to have
Naples? I will take it away from Joseph.... Italy, the loveliest jewel
in my imperial crown? Eugene is no more than viceroy. He hopes to become
king, expects to outlive me, but he will be disappointed in this matter.
I shall live to be ninety, for I cannot do with less than that for the
complete consolidation of my empire. Besides, Eugene will not suit me in
Italy, after I have divorced his mother. Would you care for Spain? Do you
not see that it is ripe to fall into my hands, thanks to the blunders of
the Bourbons you are so fond of? Would you not like to be king in the
country to which you went as envoy? What would you prefer to have? It is
for you to say. Anything and everything is at your disposal, if only you
will divorce your wife before I divorce mine!”
Lucien is spell-bound for a time by the feverish haste with which
Napoleon speaks. At last he says: “Not even your lovely France, Sire,
would bribe me to this divorce; and besides....” He hesitates; but the
Emperor guesses his thoughts, and says dryly, with an imperious air such
as Lucien has never before seen him assume:
“Do you think that you, as a private individual, are in a more secure
position than I upon my throne?... Do you believe that your friend the
pope is strong enough to protect you against me if I should seriously
propose to take measures against you?” After reiterating arguments and
enticements, he says in a formal tone: “You may be quite sure of this:
everything for the divorced Lucien; nothing for the undivorced!”
Lucien glances at the door, as a hint to the Emperor that he would be
glad to be given his dismissal; but Napoleon takes him by the hand, and
says “in a vague tone, and with a demeanour which might mean anything”:
“If I get a divorce, you will not be the only other one. Joseph is merely
waiting for my divorce to arrange for his own. Madame Julie has been
good for nothing but to bring girls into the world, whereas I urgently
need boys. The only use of girls is to marry them off in advantageous
alliances. Besides, your eldest girl is nearly fourteen, so you tell
me; just the right age. Won’t you send her to Mamma? If you do what I
want, I will get Mamma to arrange something good for her.... You are
not afraid that we shall do any harm to your spoiled darling? Tell her
we shall be good friends, and that I will not pull her ears as if she
were a child.... I need more nephews and nieces! The divorced Josephine,
the grandmother of Hortense’s children, will always be the enemy of my
legitimate and my adopted sons.” Then, murmuring as if to himself, “It
must be done. I have no other way of undermining the power of Louis’ and
Hortense’s children.”
He comes back to the subject of his own illegitimate children, says
he intends to adopt them, enters into details, and suddenly exclaims:
“You cannot suppose that I have not the power to legitimise my natural
children, just as Louis XIV. declared his bastards, the fruit of a
twofold adultery, to be within the right of succession to the throne.”
Again he speaks of Joseph’s intention to procure a divorce, and, when
Lucien is sceptical, he rubs his hands delightedly, saying:
“Yes, yes! Joseph and you will both divorce your wives! We will all three
get divorces, and then marry again, all of us, on the very same day!”
He adds a number of quips in the like merry vein. Then, suddenly: “But
why have you become so serious? One might think you a sage of classical
antiquity! You must stay with me for three days. I’ll have a bed made
ready for you in the next room to mine!”
He presses this invitation. Lucien, who dreads his brother’s
blandishments, has to invent an excuse, and says that one of his children
is ill.
His wife, he goes on to say, has suffered because of the Emperor’s
dislike; so much so, that he had been afraid at one time her anxiety and
distress about the matter would be too much for her.
“Is that really so? I’m sorry. You must take care of her! Whatever
happens, she must not die before you get your divorce, for if she did I
should not be able to legitimise her children!”
Lucien pretends that he will think the matter over.
“That’s all right. Well, well, go if you must! But be sure to keep your
word!” Napoleon takes Lucien by the hand, and at the same time presents
his cheek for a kiss, which is not as brotherly as it might be. Lucien
departs, and when he is in the anteroom he hears the Emperor calling:
“Méneval!”
Lucien quickens his steps, for again the dread of imprisonment has seized
him.
No one, no historian and no imaginative writer, has ever given a
more brilliant description of Napoleon than the foregoing, penned by
his brother with obvious fidelity. This evening, the Emperor is in a
quandary. He wants the help of a man whom he cannot coerce, and one
who in certain respects is his equal. In the light thrown by Lucien,
Napoleon’s character becomes positively transparent. He develops himself
under our very eyes, showing us all the interplay of his motives.
He lavishes temptations in the endeavour to overpersuade his adversary.
Every move is carefully thought out, that it may exercise its appropriate
influence upon the ambition of his interlocutor, whom he tries to win by
the studied gradations of the dialogue. The visitor finds him brooding
over the map of Europe, and is greeted in a way which is to alarm and to
inspire confidence by turns. The wife, the bone of contention, is first
vilified and then extolled. Napoleon goes back to the phraseology of the
Jacobin Club, calls his brother “citizen,” pulls out one emotional stop
after another. He reminds Lucien that they are both Corsicans; says with
a challenging irony that Europe is too small for the pair of them; talks
of Mamma and Pauline, of Joseph and Louis, using names that carry with
them reminiscences of the nursery in which the Bonaparte children had
played together. Thus he spins his web round Lucien.
And yet—this is the marvel—we are shown the bubbling up of his nature,
the beating of his heart, the quivering of his brain. Again and ever
again, imagination and passion seem to carry him beyond the limits of
self-restraint. Though his brother is a declared opponent, he makes
all kinds of confessions: about Josephine and the countess; about his
stepchildren and his generals; about his own blunders and his new,
far-reaching plans. There is a flood of confidential admissions. Why?
Because this Lucien, though an adversary, though no less gifted than
Talleyrand, is a brother, and therefore, to the clannish Napoleon, is,
in spite of everything, worthy of confidence. It moves us to see the way
in which Napoleon detains him in private talk for hours, till midnight
is long past; how he presses Lucien to stay for a few days, that they
may thrash matters out; and how Lucien insists on going, not because he
really needs to, but because he does not wish to bow before the force of
his brother’s genius. For there is a secret contest between the pair, not
about love or divorce, not about honour or crowns. To-day, just as seven
years before, when the younger man could not bring himself to obey the
elder, the contest is between the innermost self-esteem of one rival and
of the other. After all these years, in the privacy of his own thoughts
Lucien is still convinced that he could have managed everything much
better than Napoleon.
And yet, all the time, he loves him after his own fashion. Every word of
his report betrays the obscure enmity between the brothers, the enmity
that lives side by side with love. That is why he concedes nothing.
The memory of the Nineteenth Brumaire has to be revived, and once more
each of them is confident he was right. While these expert realists are
talking, with the old phrases on their lips, the old verbiage about the
greatness and the safety of France, they are really moved by nothing
but their own passions. We seem to see them posturing before the crowd
(a doubt seizes them—“We are alone here. You see. We are alone. No one
can overhear us”); but in truth they are alone, in a strange and foreign
castle, beneath huge candelabra, on which the candles are burning low.
Nevertheless, despite Napoleon’s wealth and all his crowns, despite his
stupendous powers of intellect and imagination, how poor a man he is,
entangled in the threads of destiny, the threads which he has spun, but
which are now spinning themselves in defiance of his wishes! For all his
omnipotence, he is the slave of an incalculable, much-courted power,
public opinion, which will not allow him to effect a reconciliation
with his brother, to recognise his own children, or to marry the woman
he loves. The impotence of the man of might is displayed in his own
exclamations. He asseverates his power to do anything and everything—and
yet he dare not do what he wants. How pleased he is with his brother,
whose affairs he could manage so beautifully now that they have met after
many years of separation. If Lucien would only stay with him, were it but
for three days, they would certainly be able to come to an understanding.
“Good God, you press me hard, and I am weak.”
During this night when an emperor was offering his brother a choice
among the thrones of Europe, was there not talk of the heritage of
Carlo Bonaparte, a poor nobleman, on a small, out-of-the-way island?
Did the Emperor of the French, who will never hear a word of his being
a foreigner in France, conjure up the shade of the Corsican; was it he
who evoked the penates of his birthplace for the protection of Brother
Lucien, a negotiator in a hostile camp? Surely what we are recounting is
a saga, told at midnight beside the fireplace in Mantua? Yes, it is the
saga which the little Corsican lieutenant has woven out of the threads of
his life: first a narrow band; but as he trails it after him, twists it
and loops it, mixes colours and patterns, by degrees a carpet is formed;
greater and more varied become the pictures produced out of the one
thread, pictures of lands and thrones, of seas and men.
The whole has been woven in the most natural way in the world. Not by a
miracle, but only through the working of his talents, has the man become
master of men. To-night he wants to add yet another to the long list of
his subjects. He has not enough time, even though he hopes to live till
he is ninety. He cannot allow his brothers to have girl children, or
to live with the women of their choice. But if these undesired nieces
throng his stage, he must set up new nephews against them. If a wife is
in danger of dying of grief, she must at least be good enough to wait
until she is divorced. When the men of the family have at length forsaken
the wives who are barren or can only bear daughters, then, on the same
day, they will take new wives unto themselves—and all will go happily
ever after. Look at him, when the conversation is drawing to a close,
rubbing his hands in his satisfaction, the little magician who stands in
front of his immense map. By the time he has impaled all the countries
with his coloured pins, impaled them like butterflies to put away in his
collection—well, by that time the candles have burned out and a large
slice of to-morrow has already been devoured.
XIX
The Spanish dynasty seemed about to fall. Immediately after the
conversation recorded above, war was declared. Had not the Emperor
already predicted it? A king who had degenerated into being his wife’s
souteneur; a queen who only lacked courage to be a Messalina; a faithless
minister; hatred between father and son; rascality, bribery, and
corruption—to such a pass had sunk the house of Bourbon! He who wished to
dethrone those who represented it, must use the same means as were used
by the Spanish royal house itself. Never before had Napoleon’s actions
been more fiercely unscrupulous; never before had the degeneracy of his
opponent been a more useful weapon to his hand. He had always adapted his
methods to his adversary; and, in the case of this decayed dynasty, he
had recourse to the wiles and trickery similar to those which the Spanish
house availed itself of in a last effort to preserve its integrity.
Absorbed in his schemes, he forgot the Spanish people, which was in no
way responsible for such princes, and which in no way resembled the royal
rulers: in days to come the Emperor was bitterly to rue his forgetfulness.
He who is for England, is against me! In support of this principle,
Napoleon had already chased the Portuguese royal family from the throne.
Now, since Spain, too, is on the side of England, in a prolonged intrigue
he turns to his own advantage the struggle between the king and the crown
prince; brings the latter to the front; then orders him to withdraw
in favour of the father; and, finally, at a meeting of all parties in
Bayonne, is able, by threats and cunning, to ensure that the Spanish
crown shall be his own. The Mediterranean must belong to him; the coasts
at any rate, from Gibraltar to Cattaro. This is an essential part of the
war on England.
At first his generals have an easy task in their work of conquest. “Do
you know why I am invading Spain?” says Napoleon to Metternich. “I must
feel safe at my back.” Alas for him when he is no longer safe in that
quarter!
On the critical day when he has settled matters with the Spanish princes,
and has arranged that they shall be kept in a mild imprisonment, he is
in a condition of moderate intoxication. The new crown gives him fresh
impetus. He no longer sees Spain; his eyes are turned to contemplate the
worldwide empire of Spain in the days of her vanished glory. On this
occasion, a witness tells us, “the Emperor spoke, or rather dictated,
at great length, in the Ossianic vein, ... like one whose heart was
uplifted.... In his picturesque, metaphorical style, he referred to the
powerful kingdoms of Mexico and Peru, describing the might of their rule
and their influence. Never have I heard him display such a wealth of
imagery as on this day. He was sublime.”
The one thing he lacks is an occupant for the vacant throne, since
Lucien has not accepted the bribe. The only way out of the difficulty
will be a general post, like that which occurs when a vacancy is filled
in the upper ranks of the officialdom and every one is promoted a step.
Let us do away with the kingdom of Holland, make it into a province,
and discrown Louis. The victim protests: “It does not suit me to be
governor of a province. A king must rule by divine right.... How could
I demand loyalty from my people if I myself were false to the oath I
swore when I ascended the throne?” Napoleon is troubled once more by the
consequences of having founded a dynasty. This modern Roman should have
put his provinces in charge of generals and regents, whom he could recall
whenever he pleased. But the ermine in which he dresses his puppets, all
the apparatus of coronation and Mass and anointing, awaken ideas which
were being laid to rest, and fully justify little King Louis in his
refusal. Joseph is more accommodating. Till yesterday, he was king in
Naples: why should he not be king in Madrid to-morrow? Shortly after the
Bayonne intrigue, King Joseph I. enters his new capital, acclaimed, not
indeed by the hearts of the people, but by the proper number of salute
guns and all the ceremonial suitable to the occasion. Murat, whose wife
has long been pestering her brother for a crown, Murat the son of the
proletariat, becomes king of Naples, and thus the imposing couple gain a
statelier field for their intrigues, and in due time for their treason.
But this Spanish affair is a great adventure, and has serious
consequences. There is muttering “at the Emperor’s back,” for the
Spaniards are proud, and will not endure the conquest without a struggle.
In front, across the Rhine, all the Prussians and all the Austrians who
hate the Emperor have now reason to dread that Prussia and Austria may
share the fate of Spain, and have good grounds for yet another renewal
of their offensive. In Berlin, Napoleon had declared that on the Elbe
he had conquered the Ganges. Now he fails to see that in his dealings
on the Tagus he is raising up new enemies on the Danube. But he knows
that he cannot do as he pleases in Spain unless the tsar holds Austria
in check for him. The tsar is a man of unstable character. The only
way to win over Alexander is by suggestion, as two years before, in
Tilsit, and for this a personal interview will be necessary. The Emperor
thereupon proposes to meet the tsar in central Germany, half way between
their respective empires, thus initiating a form of policy new to him, a
conference. Always before, when he has left France, it has been sword in
hand, and he has invariably paved the way for negotiations by fighting.
Now, to avoid a fight, a conference table is established in Erfurt.
Napoleon prepares for this new sort of campaign with as much care as
if he had been preparing for a military expedition. Day after day he
summons court officials and other dignitaries. “My journey must be
extremely imposing. I want great names for the headquarters, ... and
I wish to amaze Germany by the splendour of the occasion.” For others
are coming besides the tsar. The great double stars are attracting
all the lesser stars. How can he best influence this assembly? The
play’s the thing wherein he’ll catch the conscience of the kings! He
stage-manages his theatre elaborately, devotes much thought to the cast,
amends passages, and gives Talma (for whom he feels something akin to
friendship) hints as to what requires to be emphasised—all with an eye to
the royal audience. “You are going to play your parts in a theatre where
the stalls will be filled with kings.”
In actual fact, the evenings at the theatre form the climax of the
Erfurt weeks. Among the audience are four kings and thirty-four princes,
rivalling one another in the splendour of their retinues. The Emperor of
the West and the Emperor of the East occupy the royal box. Almost every
evening, this distinguished audience sees and hears what the kings of
saga or the kings of history proclaim, what they struggle for, what they
suffer. Talma, as Orestes, thunders forth:
The gods are the rulers of our times,
And yet fame is created by our own deeds.
Why should the heart allow the heavens to threaten?
Resolve to become immortal
And you will be as gods upon the earth!
The next evening they see Voltaire’s _Mahomet_, of which the Emperor is
especially fond, were it only because the hero so seldom quits the stage.
The prophet’s disciple exclaims:
All men are equal; it is not birth,
But virtue alone which makes them different.
There are certain mortals favoured by the gods,
Who achieve everything by their own merits,
Who owe nothing to their forefathers.
Such a one is he whom I have chosen as master;
He alone, in all the world, has deserved his position.
Is there any one among the audience whose heart does not beat faster as
he glances at the man up there in the royal box—though the passion may
be a passionate antagonism? The princes by right of birth may dread to
look at the Emperor, but at least their eyes will seek one another as
if to secure a common understanding. They do not dare to smile. They
tremble before the man who sits there in a plain green coat, the man who
is revolt incorporated in human form. He knows what the German princes in
the stalls do not yet know, that a new and stronger utterance will soon
be made by Mahomet:
See, the Roman Empire falling into ruins,
That great torn body, whose scattered limbs
Lie spread about the earth dishonoured and lifeless:
On these fragments of a world we shall upbuild the far-flung East,
A new god reveals himself to the blind world!
Finally, the Emperor’s policy of to-day and to-morrow is voiced in the
words:
Who was it made the master a king?
Victory alone has crowned him! But now
To the name of Conqueror he will add
The name of Peacemaker.
At this instant, when all glance at him questioningly, Napoleon makes a
slight movement as a sign that such is actually his intention, and for
a political instant the illusion of the theatre is dispelled. But when,
next evening, Œdipus proclaims: “A strong man’s friendship is a gift of
the gods!” the two emperors rise and clasp hands.
Napoleon knows well enough that Alexander is not a strong man, that his
friendship is not a gift of the gods. He tries, therefore, by suggestion,
to win over this vacillating personality. If the tsar is to be influenced
to move along the lines laid down in the letter previously quoted, if
he is to agree to divide with Napoleon the empire of the world, he will
require a course of psychomagnetism, renewed from day to day. Napoleon
rarely leaves the tsar to his own thoughts, but treats him like a woman
who is to be wooed and won. The only person who is allowed to help the
Emperor in this matter is Talleyrand.
The diplomat still limps after Napoleon as the Emperor strides forward,
though recently the differences between the two men had found vent.
Talleyrand’s shrewdness had led him—sooner than Napoleon, sooner than any
one—to detect the first cracks in his master’s system. A year before,
after the drawn game of Eylau, he had foreseen the possibility of his
master’s failure in Russia. This had come to him as the vision of a great
statesman, and he had promptly deduced therefrom the mission of a great
and statesmanlike traitor. Matters had been privately arranged between
Napoleon and Alexander; the Emperor was relying on the tsar (to the
exclusion of Talleyrand); Napoleon was cherishing a Carlovingian dream,
interpenetrated with thoughts of Cæsarism: the fantastical elements in
Napoleon’s schemes for world conquest had estranged Talleyrand from his
master’s policy. But instead of cutting adrift from Napoleon, he had been
content, on specious pretexts, to resign his ministerial post, receiving
instead a lucrative position among the dignitaries of the empire. Both
men hoped to gain by the change; Napoleon thinking that he would be able
to keep better watch on Talleyrand, and Talleyrand fancying that he would
be able to keep better watch on the Emperor’s secret thoughts. He was
still grand chamberlain; and Champagny, his successor as minister, was a
butt for Napoleon’s shafts of ridicule. Thus, even after the divorce from
his master, Talleyrand remained the sultan’s favourite, and his power
was redoubled by his shifts as a trickster no longer hampered by official
responsibility.
His doubts as to the stability of Napoleon’s position were confirmed
by the progress of events in Spain. Directly he saw that the Emperor’s
mind was set on this act of plunder, he realised that its upshot would
be disastrous, and for that very reason encouraged his master to the
venture. Since the days of Louis XIV., said Talleyrand, the Spanish
crown had always been an apanage of the rulers of France. Napoleon,
when his mind had been rendered effervescent by this and similar
pseudo-arguments, decided upon the occupation of Catalonia “for the
duration of the war with England.” Now the intriguer promptly returned to
a critical attitude, and laughed to himself when the Emperor gave him the
ignominious task of entertaining the infantes of Spain in their durance
at his mansion near Valençay.
He wants privacy, that he may keep watch on the kidnapped princes, and,
through their instrumentality, not only spy upon England, but also keep
England informed. Thence it is but a step to open betrayal, and that
step Talleyrand now takes. This is in keeping with his whole career as
a statesman. Henceforward he sends Tolstoy and Metternich (the envoys
of Tsar Alexander and Emperor Francis in Paris) private information.
How can he make his duplicity square with his duties to the master, to
whose service he is pledged as imperial official, court official, and
confidential adviser?
There is a scene about the matter.
“Well, you see,” says the Emperor on his return from Spain, “they all
walked into the net I spread for them!”
“I think, Sire, you have lost more than you have won by what has happened
at Bayonne.”
“What do you mean?”
“Something quite simple. Let me explain my meaning by an example. If a
man of standing commits follies, keeps mistresses, treats his wife and
his friends badly, he will be blamed; but his wealth and his power
will enable him to regain the good opinion of society. But if the same
man cheats at cards, he is expelled from good society, which will never
forgive him.”
The Emperor turns pale—so Talleyrand reports and will not speak to him
for the rest of the day. Why does he not drive the plain speaker out
of his circle? Why does he not banish Talleyrand to the West Indies?
Napoleon receives a moral castigation from a scion of the old nobility,
and still keeps the man in his entourage! Or was Talleyrand lying? We
may have all the more confidence in the diplomat’s memoirs, seeing that
they were written twenty years later, after the Restoration; were written
to show how he had always played double, and (of course, owing to his
respect for the claims of the legitimate rulers!) had served his imperial
master only by halves. We can assume that the words were actually spoken,
and to a man to whom hardly any one now spoke the truth, to a man whom
even fewer now ventured to affront. Why does Napoleon keep Talleyrand in
his service?
“He is the only one who understands me,” said the Emperor of Talleyrand
again and again. That accounts for much. Talleyrand’s unscrupulous way
of thinking, his freedom from all qualms of conscience, furnished a
tilting-ground on which the Emperor could joust freely when running a
political course. The others had principles or considerations which must
first be leapt over. Because Talleyrand was exempt from all prejudices of
class and time, and also lacked the ordering ideas with which Napoleon
fashioned his realm out of the chaos of chances, the wily opportunist,
whose only passion was for money, was the best adviser of the other
realist, who could only assuage his stormy imagination in a perpetual
succession of new plans.
That is why they understood one another, though only in the superficial
regions of their respective characters. Napoleon never plumbed the depths
of the treason that Talleyrand was preparing.
Here, in Erfurt, the great day for the double-dealer has at last dawned.
When the German princes gather round him and listen as he talks of the
Emperor, he gives little heed to these pygmies, for there is some one
else who will pay a far higher price for information, will pay both in
political advantages and in ready cash.
Alexander is prompt to seize the opportunity! The Russian has been well
informed by his representative in Paris, and is almost as inquisitive
concerning this Frenchman as he is concerning the Emperor. Talleyrand
soon meets the tsar in the reception room of the Princess of Thurn and
Taxis, who keeps open house every evening after the play. Talleyrand’s
report of the encounter, written several decades later, reads like the
utterance of a Mephistopheles: “The arts which I had prepared for the
capture of the tsar were quite unneeded. At my first word he understood
me, just as I had wished him to understand.”
The play of their eyes conveyed a meaning which was not manifest in the
words, for on the first day Talleyrand had said to the tsar: “Sire, what
are you thinking of doing here? It lies with you to save Europe. But you
will not succeed in your task unless you become a match for the Emperor.
The French people is civilised: their ruler is not. The ruler of Russia
is civilised: his people is not. Thus, the ruler of Russia should be the
ally of the French people.... Your Majesty should not allow yourself to
be inveigled into any disciplinary measures against Austria, but should
consent to undertake the same duties towards that country as those my
master has undertaken.”
During the long evenings, over a glass of punch or a dish of tea,
Talleyrand (who, like Napoleon, knows the manifold arts of the seducer)
instils into the tsar’s brain all the truths and the hopes he wishes
to bring to life within this suggestible spirit. The tsar shows his
appreciation of the diplomat’s indiscretions at France’s expense by
bestowing his favour upon the Emperor’s confidential adviser. He promises
the hand of a Russian princess to one of Talleyrand’s nephews; she is
the richest heiress in the eastern realm.
Alexander, who in any case had come to Erfurt in a cautious frame of
mind (for his relatives had succeeded in arousing suspicions before he
started), is now for the first time able to resist Napoleon. In their
private interviews, each is always trying to humbug the other; the
honeymoon atmosphere of Tilsit has vanished, and the tsar’s enthusiasm
for the Emperor is a thing of the past.
Napoleon is taken aback. He makes Talleyrand draft the new treaty of
alliance. Then, with great labour, he transcribes it, inserting his own
emendations, and takes it to Alexander, who has to promise that no one
shall hear a word of what is written in this secret document. The tsar
gives the required pledge; but the very same evening he hands Talleyrand
the amended treaty, so that the author of the draft learns what
alterations his master has made. In the end, this treaty is not signed.
At night, the Emperor summons Talleyrand, who plays the part of Iago
admirably. The Emperor says: “I can make no headway with him; he takes
such short views.”
“But he is completely under your spell, Sire.”
“He makes you think so, and you are taken in by him. If he is really fond
of me, why won’t he sign?”
“He is a man of knightly faith,” answers Talleyrand. “His simple word and
his inclinations will bind him more strongly than a treaty.”
“I shall not talk to him about this matter any more; for if I do, he
will think I have it very much at heart. Our private interviews will
be enough to make Austria believe that there is a secret treaty.... I
cannot understand your fondness for Austria, a country whose whole policy
recalls that of our old regime!”
When fundamental principles are under discussion, Talleyrand is apt to
become more communicative: “It seems to me that Austrian policy is also
that of the new regime, and I venture to say it ought to be your own
policy. People count on you, Sire, to safeguard civilisation.”
“Civilisation!...” Napoleon halts in front of the fireplace, and, with
a sudden change of tone, says softly: “Do you know why no one will
negotiate with me plainly and straightforwardly? Because I have no
children.... That is the secret. People are afraid of me, and every one
wants to snatch what advantages he can. This is an unfortunate state of
affairs for the world, and it must be altered.”
A few days pass. Intercourse between the two rulers seems more cordial;
etiquette has been forgotten; they come and go freely, like ordinary
friends in private life. Napoleon spreads his nets cunningly. He says to
the tsar: “Yes, I need rest; I need a home. How can one get these when
one has no children? My wife is ten years older than I,” he goes on,
falsely adding four years to Josephine’s tale. “Please excuse me. What I
have just said may sound rather absurd, but I do not wish, where you are
concerned, to hide the stirrings of my heart.” A pause. “Hullo, I see
it’s almost dinner time, and Baron Vincent is still waiting my leave to
depart.”
The kings of the drawing-room are fond of describing Napoleon as a man
of camps; but how prettily he can introduce a delicate topic just before
dinner, so that he can slip away without having it discussed at this
state. Late that evening he summons Talleyrand to his bedside; orates,
questions, suggests combinations, and issues orders by turns. At length
he speaks of divorce. “Fate constrains me to it, and it is essential to
the tranquillity of France. I have no successor. Joseph is a man of no
account, and his children are all girls. I must found a dynasty, and my
consort must be the daughter of a great line. Alexander has sisters, and
one of them is of suitable age. Have a talk with Romanzoff. When the
Spanish affair is settled, I shall discuss the partition of Turkey. Tell
him this, and use other arguments as well. I know you have long been in
favour of the divorce.”
Next day, Talleyrand broaches the topic with the tsar, who has been
influenced by the suggestion the Emperor has instilled with his
assumption of melancholy overnight. “No one fully understands the man’s
character,” says Alexander, much moved. “All the commotion he spreads
abroad is an inevitable outcome of his position. No one realises how good
he is. You know him so well. What is your opinion?”
Talleyrand has no intention of saying what he really thinks, but deems it
expedient, at this juncture, to let Alexander know what Napoleon had let
fall about the Russian princess. “I should have no objection,” rejoins
the tsar promptly, “but I cannot dispose of my sister’s hand without my
mother’s consent.”
Thereafter, a long conversation between the emperors, and a renewal of
intimacy; Alexander spends some more evenings with Talleyrand, talking
over the teacups—but no conclusion is reached. The expanded treaty
of alliance between the emperors is not signed at Erfurt, nor is the
marriage to Alexander’s sister arranged. Although Napoleon receives more
adulation than ever before, he is disappointed at having to leave without
his treaty and without his Russian bride. The only one who brings home
substantial advantages is Talleyrand, for he has secured the new niece’s
millions.
Meanwhile the thirty-eight princes have been cajoled or threatened,
rewarded or ignored, by the Emperor and his train. “In Erfurt,” writes
Talleyrand, “not a man among them was bold enough to face the lion.... On
the last day he was surrounded by princes whose armies he had seized or
destroyed, whose States and existence he had curtailed, but not one of
them ventured even to proffer a request. The only wish of them all was
to be seen; and to be seen last if possible, in order to remain in his
memory.”
In any case, Napoleon thinks Vienna will believe that to have been
settled which unfortunately has not been settled. Fear will achieve
what he has failed to secure through a treaty. He does not know that
Talleyrand has betrayed him to Metternich, saying: “It rests with you
to restore your relationships with Russia to the intimate footing that
existed before Austerlitz. Nothing but an alliance between Austria and
Russia can save the vestiges of Europe’s independence.” The Austrian
diplomat writes exultantly in his report: “At length we have entered a
new epoch, in which allies offer themselves to us from within the French
Empire.”
Farewells are taken. The Emperor, watched by the princes, exchanges
a brotherly kiss with Alexander. All the onlookers are profoundly
impressed by this token of friendship in the pair who rule the world. But
Talleyrand, hat in hand, smiles inwardly, for over the teacups at the
German princess’ he has been able to undermine the foundations of this
friendship.
In four years his labours will bear fruit, and the fruit will poison
Napoleon.
XX
Brightly, against this dull background of German princelets, shines the
torch of the German spirit. “I have gained only one thing here to take
back with me to Paris: that you will have a pleasant memory of me.” To
the Weimar circle, the Emperor says these words on the evening of his
departure, for here and in Erfurt he has spent several evenings among
those who are the true princes of Germany—princes who have no ancestors,
but only genius. Himself a genius without ancestors, it is solely among
them that he feels at home; though, during this fortnight, he experiences
so much that increases his misanthropic contempt for his fellow-men,
a contempt which has its counterpart in the respect he feels for the
German spirit. The works of the masters of German literature are, indeed,
unknown to him; but he knows their reputation, he knows the position
they occupy in the invisible German and the imperial French Republic.
That is why he seeks them out.
Two years before, in Potsdam, he had summoned Johannes von Müller to his
presence, and nothing throws a stronger light upon the significance of
their conversation than the reserve with which the Prussianised Swiss
historian treats the incident. With all the precision of a mind that knew
so well how to classify its materials, the Emperor was able, without
periphrases, to come direct to the topics which must interest every
historian, and were especially interesting to this one. Within three
minutes, the pair were deep in the profoundest problems of history.
The Emperor spoke of Tacitus. Then he sketched the main epochs of
intellectual life, and waxed enthusiastic concerning the wonderful
manner in which Greek culture was renovated by Christianity when Roman
culture was decaying. How adroit had been the Greek tactic, when Greece,
conquered by the Roman sword, had found a way to reassert her dominance
over the things of the spirit. These words, addressed by Napoleon so soon
after the battle of Jena to a man of learning in Prussian service, convey
both recognition and a challenge. The Emperor showed himself even more
affable by going on to advise Müller to write a history of the Napoleonic
exploits—advice he had never given to any Frenchman. Then he spoke of the
basis of all religions, and of the need for religion. “The conversation
was a long one,” writes Müller. “It embraced nearly all lands and nations
in its scope.... The more interesting he became, the more did he drop
his voice, so that at length I had to come very close to him, and no one
else in the room can have heard what he was saying. Much of it, indeed, I
shall never disclose.”
From this remarkable conclusion to a bald report, we may infer, not only
the discretion of the grave historian, but also the splendid frankness
which the Emperor could show when holding forth in monologue to a man of
mark.
Now, in Weimar, he pays especial attention to old Wieland, compares him
to Voltaire, but asks him rather critically when he mixes up romance and
history. “A man of outstanding intelligence, like you, should know how to
keep them apart. Running them together is apt to lead to confusion.”
Something more serious than literary criticism is involved, for when
Wieland ably defends his misuse of history, and goes on to speak of
virtue as an example, the Emperor pulls him up with customary bluntness,
saying: “But don’t you know what happens to people who are always
expounding virtue in the realm of fable and nowhere else? In the end they
come to believe that virtue itself is nothing more than a fable.”
Napoleon turns back to Tacitus, for he always keeps a sharp eye on this
Roman historian, as if the man, like Madame de Staël to-day, might
still work mischief in Parisian drawing-rooms. As a development of this
criticism, speaking in a modern ball-room, Napoleon utters great things
concerning the activities of men: “Tacitus has not sufficiently studied
the causes and the inner motives of events. His enquiries into the
mystery of actions and states of mind have not been sufficiently profound
to enable him to hand down an unprejudiced judgment to posterity. A
historian should take men and nations as they are, should appraise them
as their time and their circumstances have made them.... I have heard
him extolled because he would fain make tyrants dread the people, but
that would be very unfortunate for the people! Perhaps I am boring you?
We did not come here to talk about Tacitus. Look how beautifully Emperor
Alexander dances!”
Wieland has been waiting for this moment. In a carefully prepared speech,
he defends the old Roman against the new, so that, at the end, the
Weimarian dignitaries and any others who are listening cannot restrain
their jubilation.
The Emperor has listened attentively. All now look at him, wondering what
he will say. Will he politely withdraw from the discussion? Napoleon,
as if on the battle-field, has been wondering upon what private
information his adversary’s unexpected attack can have been based, and
how the onslaught can best be parried. Unquestionably, the speech was not
improvised. But how on earth had it entered Wieland’s mind to get up that
particular topic? Suddenly the Emperor, who in the interim has talked to
hundreds upon hundreds of persons, recalls his conversation with Johannes
von Müller two years back.
“I certainly have a strong opponent,” he says, when the old gentleman
has finished the harangue. “You make full use of your advantages. Do you
happen to be in correspondence with Herr Müller, whom I met in Potsdam?”
Every one in the audience smiles, including Wieland, who is fonder of wit
than of himself, and frankly rejoins:
“Yes, Sire, it was he who told me that you do not like Tacitus.”
“Well, I do not admit defeat,” says the Emperor. He returns to his Greek
and Christian ideas, develops them further and more boldly, for he
sees that the clever old Wieland is a sceptic: “Furthermore,” he says
in low tones, shading his mouth with his hand, and coming close to his
interlocutor, “it remains an open question whether Christ ever lived.”
Conqueror and poet. One of them is still in his prime, a ruler who has
re-established the Christian faith upon the ruins of the revolutionary
cult of reason, but is now more or less at odds with the Church. The
other is a venerable poet, a pagan whom Napoleon has just coupled with
Voltaire, a man who has maintained the cause of reason against the cause
of Christ, a member of a conquered nation, and physically so frail
that again and again he has to lean on the back of a chair. The former
whispers to the latter that it is probable Christ never lived. But the
old man has for half a century been justly regarded as the wittiest among
the Germans. He will show the Emperor that, in the intellectual world at
any rate, a German can courteously exchange thrusts with a Frenchman, and
he hastens to reply: “I know that there are foolish people who doubt
that Christ lived. But it would be just as absurd to doubt that Julius
Cæsar lived; or that you, Sire, are alive to-day!”
Thus with a sally in the French manner Wieland upholds both German
courtesy and wit, and the historicity of Christ. The Emperor, without
committing himself, is content to drop the subject, and to clap the poet
on the shoulder, saying: “Excellent, excellent, Herr Wieland!” Then
raising his voice, he talks to his ball-room audience about the value
of Christianity as one of the buttresses of the State. But although he
was obviously eager to continue his talk with Wieland, the latter showed
plainly that he was too tired to stand any longer, and thus the old man’s
fatigue put a premature end to a scene which the aid of a couple of
chairs might have made even more valuable.
One of the silent witnesses of this conversation was Goethe.
A few days earlier, in Erfurt, the Emperor had had an hour’s talk with
Goethe. They were together in a room where, as was Napoleon’s custom
when on a journey, he breakfasted, received, commanded, philosophised,
and signed documents. Their conversation was a union of two minds, the
balancing of counter-poised electrical forces. It was a process of mutual
accommodation in which the two greatest men of their day contemplated
the world together; a duologue in which most of their thoughts were
never uttered, and in which the best elements were an expression of the
homage the two paid one another. Goethe, who learned everything from
nature, though in the reality of the world of men he could only find the
confirmation of his previous imaginings, felt that this conversation was
one of the greatest events in his life, and he described it as such. To
the Emperor it was less significant.
For Goethe had followed the Emperor’s course for a decade, marvelling
all the while; and in his old age he said such profound things about
Napoleon that a century after their utterance they have not been
excelled. Napoleon, on the other hand, knew almost nothing about
Goethe; in especial, he never surmised the poet’s personal admiration
for himself, since the German had hitherto confided his feelings only
to his intimates, and even now kept his own counsel. Though the Emperor
had read _Werther_ several times, the mood that work had aroused was
as completely a thing of the past as those youthful feelings which are
merely compensatory derivatives for an unoccupied imagination. What this
grey-headed poet now signified, was at that time not realised by more
than a hundred Germans, and hardly one Frenchman; and, since his name
in his own country was little known (and, where known, was unpopular
and evoked no enthusiasm), it was natural that the Emperor should know
nothing of him save that he had written some wonderful things which were
unknown to any except the poet’s immediate circle, and that Goethe, at
the time of the battle of Jena, was minister to that Saxon prince who had
incurred the Emperor’s displeasure. When Napoleon summoned Goethe to an
audience, he had less to expect from the poet than he had expected from
Müller and from Wieland.
But such as Napoleon and Goethe need but look in a man’s eyes to know all
about him. Napoleon sits breakfasting at a large, round table; on his
right is Talleyrand; on his left, Daru. Now he looks up, and, seeing the
poet framed in the doorway, invites Goethe to approach. The Emperor is
silent, amazed. There stands the sexagenarian, the most beautiful, the
halest of old men, Goethe in the calm of his age, at the pinnacle of a
strenuously wrought harmony of spirit, a harmony he had never possessed
before and was so soon to lose. Napoleon is too full of admiration to
speak. Then, more to himself than to his companions, he says:
“Voilà un homme!”
That is the golden shaft which pierces the heart and illuminates the
scene: the word of a seer, deeply felt, an impression rather than a
judgment—and it is meet that such it should be. For, precisely because
the world ruler does not know that a world ruler is now before him,
this utterance, the like of which he had never made to or of any one in
the past and which he is never to make in the future, shows the godlike
kinship of a genius with his brother genius. It is as if two elemental
forces hovering on high had recognised each other through a rift in the
clouds, and had, despite themselves, stretched out arms to one another
until the tips of their forefingers had met; then the mists of time once
more rose between them. A fleeting moment in the course of a thousand
years; there has been nothing to compare with it since the meeting
between Diogenes and Alexander.
Goethe’s discretion prevented him from recording the conversation for
many a year, and even then the record was incomplete. Other memoirs
provide us with fragments only.
Napoleon praises _Werther_, and adds: “I do not like the end of your
romance.”
“I can well believe that, Sire. You would rather that a romance had no
end.”
The Emperor calmly accepts this wellnigh threatening epigram. He then
continues to criticise the story, saying that Werther’s love was not
the only factor of the catastrophe, for ambition was likewise at work.
The poet laughs (in two letters Goethe mentions this—a freedom rarely
indulged in when the Emperor was present), and admits that the criticism
is sound; but he adds that surely an artist may be forgiven for using an
artifice which few readers will detect.
[Illustration: The Coronation. Detail from the picture by Jacques Louis
David. Louvre, Paris.
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)]
The Emperor is well content with his little victory in the other man’s
domain. Turning now to drama, he makes “very remarkable observations,
like one who had studied tragedy with the closest attention, in the
spirit of a judge presiding over a criminal trial, and of one who keenly
regretted the departure of the French theatre from nature and truth.” He
spoke unfavourably of the drama of destiny, saying that it was a relic of
less enlightened days:
“What have we to do with destiny now! Politics are destiny!”
As he utters these words, he gives an object lesson in his own fashion,
turning to Daru to discuss requisitions, and then speaking to Soult who
has just entered. Turning back to Goethe, he manœuvres to get the poet to
himself, and asks personal questions. Then he assumes the offensive:
“Does it please you here, Herr Goethe?”
But Goethe, too, knows how to seize political opportunities, and rejoins:
“Very much; and I hope these days will also prove advantageous to our
little country.”
“Is your people happy?” asks the Emperor, not noticing that he has
phrased the question as if he were talking to a sovereign prince—for he
must often have used such words in conversation with rulers. Really, he
has no interest now in Saxony, and is thinking: “How can this man of
genius be useful to me? What a pity he does not write history. But as a
novelist he might describe this congress, or he might write a play.—He
would certainly do either much better than our folk; and, besides, this
would have redoubled value coming from a foreigner.” He therefore says:
“You would do well to stay here for the whole period of the conference,
that you may write your impressions of this great drama. What does Herr
Goethe think of the suggestion?”
Napoleon ends with this question (so unconsonant with his customary
dictatorial manner) almost all his advances to the poet who is so hard to
lure out of his reticence. Goethe says cautiously:
“I have not the pen of a classical author.”
“That’s in the political vein,” thinks the Emperor. But what he says is:
“Your duke has invited me to Weimar. For a time he was sulky, but now he
is in a better humour.”
“If he was sulky, Sire, the punishment was certainly rather sharp; but
perhaps I ought not to express an opinion on these matters. At any rate,
we all owe him reverence.”
“Splendid!” thinks Napoleon. “He stands in front of his master, but lets
me see he knows that the duke is a donkey. I must get this man to write
my ‘Cæsar’ for me! The effect in France would be bigger than that of
winning a battle!” His spoken words are:
“Tragedy should be the school of kings and peoples; there is no other
field in which the poet can win such laurels. Why do you not write
‘Cæsar’s Death,’ more worthily, more splendidly than in Voltaire’s
attempt? This might be the greatest work of your life. The aim of the
tragedy would be to show how much happiness Cæsar would have conferred
on the human race had he been given time to carry out his far-reaching
plans. Come to Paris! I urge you to do so! Thence you will get a wider
prospect of the world, and there you will find the most abundant
materials for new imaginative creations.”
The poet expresses his thanks for the proposal, and says he would deem
himself happy were it possible to accept.
“That is as far as I had better go,” thinks the Emperor, as he had
thought recently in his dealings with the tsar; “if I am too insistent,
he will fancy I have a strong interest in the matter. It is very strange!
He wants nothing from me, not even to shine in my presence. What can
charm him out of himself, this incorruptible man? He must come and see
the plays we are presenting here; that will stimulate his ambition to
write better ones.”
Out loud: “I hope you will come to the theatre this evening. You will
find a lot of princes there. Do you know the prince-primate? You’ll
see him in his box, fast asleep, with his head pillowed on the king of
Württemberg’s shoulder. Do you know the tsar? You ought to dedicate
something to him in honour of Erfurt!”
Thus the Emperor gives a third hint. Will Goethe take it? But the poet
only smiles civilly, and candidly declares:
“I have never done anything of that sort, Sire, and therefore I have
never had occasion to repent it.”
A touch! A touch! The Emperor of the French cannot but feel it!
Marvellous to relate, the son of the revolution tries to strengthen his
position by referring to the Roi Soleil:
“In the reign of Louis XIV., our great authors held other views!”
“No doubt they did, Sire; but we do not know whether they may not have
repented.”
“How true!” is the Emperor’s thought when he hears this sceptical
answer, which is really a skirmisher’s attack on the part of the German.
Consequently, he makes no attempt to detain the poet when the latter,
with a deprecatory gesture, himself closes the interview and bids the
Emperor farewell—another breach of court traditions, with which Goethe is
perfectly familiar.
Thus the amazing upshot of this uncanny conversation between the two
men of genius is that the Emperor, to whom the duologue was merely
interesting, had vainly solicited a favour of the poet to whom it was
the greatest encounter in his life. The explanation is simple: The
Emperor wanted to make use of the poet, whereas the poet did not need
the Emperor. Napoleon wanted Goethe to write for him. But to Goethe,
Napoleon’s actions were merely the precious material which enabled him
to penetrate to the heart of the other’s genius; and he could do this
without a journey to Paris.
Although the poet did not respond to the Emperor’s invitation by so
much as a poetically worded compliment, years afterwards, in a tragical
moment, Napoleon remembered the man whom, by three great words, he had
set apart from all contemporaries.
XXI
Two months after this conversation, Napoleon is in Madrid, standing in
front of the picture of Philip II. He has been over the palace, and has
made a quick transit through the galleries; but here, in front of this
conqueror’s image, he stands so long that the members of his suite watch
in dumb amazement while the Emperor seems to be holding converse with the
king. The man contemplating the picture is unable to say: “Upon my realm
the sun never sets.” Perhaps this worldwide empire cannot be achieved
without the aid of the Inquisition—which Napoleon has just suppressed,
when invading Spain. Has he always been too lenient? Too democratic?
Still, he has, in a dozen countries, put liberty in harness, that she may
be broken in to dragging the dictator’s chariot. Perhaps the trouble is
that he talks and writes too much? Philip, with the unfathomable eyes,
was always silent. He does not look happy. But who is happy?
A gloomy and joyless war had led the Emperor to this southern capital,
for the intrigues with which the Spanish affair had been begun had
wrought their own revenges. The kings and princes with whom he had dealt
so high-handedly in the previous spring, had deserved no better fate; but
the Emperor had failed to understand the temper of the Spanish people.
When these had taken up arms in defence of their injured pride, the
Emperor had regarded the insurgents as mere windbags. “They were worthy
countrymen of Don Quixote. Ignorance, arrogance, cruelty, cowardice—these
made up the spectacle before our eyes. Monks and inquisitors had stolen
away Spanish brains.... Their soldiers were like the Arabs, and would
only fight from behind the protection of walls; their peasants were no
better than fellaheen; their monks were ignorant and dissolute; their
grandees were degenerate, and had neither energy nor influence.”
Entangled in this error, he failed to realise that, though he might
conquer them to-day, his conquest would be for the day only. To-morrow
the Spaniards, supported by England (which here finds its greatest
rallying point), will begin to shoot once more from the houses, and who
shall hinder them? The Emperor was already willing to admit it to his
confidants. To Vincent, who had been a comrade in his earliest campaigns,
he said:
“This is the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life! Can you think
of any possible way in which I can free myself from the embarrassment?”
“You have simply to withdraw, Sire, and leave the country to itself.”
“Fine words! Remember my position. I am a usurper. To gain this position,
I needed to have the best head and the best sword in Europe. If I am
to keep what I have won, all must be convinced of this. There must be
no falling off in the prestige of my head and my sword. In face of a
watchful universe, it is impossible for me to say that I have made a
serious mistake, and to withdraw with a defeated army. You must see for
yourself that the thing can’t be done. I am still asking for your advice!”
Conviction that he has made a blunder, and that it is impossible for him
to retrieve it; crude admissions made to an old companion-in-arms, whose
advice he asks; is this young Bonaparte, or Napoleon growing old? In a
week, he had beaten Frederick’s famous army. But in Spain, he effects
very little in eight months. When he has to deal with armies in a country
which can feed his soldiers, a country with roads and towns, he is always
victorious; but when he must campaign in trackless regions, such as the
desert, the plains of Poland, or the mountains of Andalusia, the tempo
is too tedious for his impetuous nature, and the circumstances are too
incalculable for his mathematics.
His royal brother, instead of supporting him in this perplexing
situation, makes difficulties. King Joseph wants to be a Spaniard, and
to win his subjects by kindness. There are scenes between the brothers.
With good reason the new king feels that he has made himself ridiculous
by having to run away, and because he can only return under shield of
the advancing Emperor. But with even better reason does the man of iron
complain to Roederer about the king:
“Joseph wants to be loved by the Spaniards, and to make them believe in
his affection. Kings cannot inspire affection through tenderness. They
must make themselves feared.... He writes that he wants to retire to
Morfontaine; at this busiest of moments, he proposes to leave me in the
lurch.... He says that he would rather pass the time at his country-seat
than in a land bought with blood unjustly shed.... The blood is that
of the foes of France! If he is king of Spain to-day, it is because he
wanted to be; he could have stayed in Naples had he wished. Support me? I
need no family.... My brothers are not Frenchmen, as I am.... The king of
Holland, too, talks about going into private life. It seems to me that I,
if any one of us three, have the best right to retire to Morfontaine!”
Why does he not break with Joseph? Here is Marshal Soult, commander
in Spain, and perhaps the most highly prized among all his generals.
Why does he not give Soult a crown, just as he has given one to Murat?
“Joseph writes to say that if I value any one more highly than himself,
that is the man I had better make king. I certainly did not make Joseph
a king because I thought such a lot of him! If I distributed thrones
according to merit, I should have made a very different choice! I need
my family to stabilise my dynasty, for that is the system on which I am
working.”
Now, in Madrid, he issues decrees to establish the new order of things;
which is welcomed by few, loved by no one, threatened by England, and
detested by the Spanish people. Nothing can restrain him. Only last
October he had written to his wife from Weimar, saying that the tsar had
been dancing, but he himself would not dance, for “forty years are forty
years.” Moreover, he often makes fun of the way in which he is putting
on fat. Yet on Christmas Eve, afoot, he crosses the Sierra de Guadarrama
in a snowstorm, as if he had still been the general at Lodi. He defeats
the English; but on these miry roads, deep in snow, he is no more able to
follow them in retreat than he could follow the Russians after Friedland;
and he gnashes his teeth when the enemy escapes to the ships. Shall he
follow up the other portion of the English forces, away there in the
mountains? That would be to withdraw the nucleus of his power still
farther from France. Here he is, waiting in the centre of Castille; but
what is Paris saying?
He is in camp at Astorga when the courier arrives. Now he will learn what
is going on at home. As he is reading one of the letters, he begins to
tremble with a dumb wrath. Silently he paces up and down for an hour,
without saying a word even to those who are deepest in his confidence.
Then he suddenly issues order that the headquarters staff is to return.
For his own part, leaving army and generals, he hastens to Valladolid,
and thence to the frontier.
“King Philip was right with his unfathomable gaze!” thinks the Emperor as
he drives northward in his travelling carriage. “Instead of abolishing
the Inquisition in Spain, I should have set it up in France. A conspiracy
in Paris, and not one organised by the enemy! Fouché and Talleyrand, whom
I could only use because they hated one another, and because each watched
the other and told tales, have become reconciled and have entered into an
alliance. Murat in it, too!”
The warning letters, which had decided him to return, were from Eugene
and from his mother. Letizia is active in spite of her years; active
in playing her part when danger threatens, though she withdraws when
festivals are the order of the day. She is the Corsican mother, and
safeguards her children. The scope of Talleyrand’s treason, and how long
he has been playing a double game, can at present only be guessed. That
he has advised the Austrian envoy to take the offensive against France
immediately, now when the Emperor is busy elsewhere, is not known, for
there are no incriminatory documents. Even if such documents were in
the Emperor’s possession, how could so great a master have such great
servitors arrested? Slowly and invisibly has the power proceeding from
himself grown in their hands, ultimately to be turned against him whom
they hate. During the fortnight’s journey to Paris the waters of his
wrath are rising against these creatures of his making.
Arrived in the capital, the Emperor calls a Council of State composed of
many senators and all his ministers, that they may be witnesses to his
vengeance. The two delinquents are present. Napoleon loses no time before
he begins his attack on Talleyrand: “You are a thief and a scoundrel, for
whom nothing is sacred. You would sell your own father! I have showered
benefactions upon you, and yet there is nothing that you would refuse to
do against me. You it was who advised me to undertake the mad venture
in Spain, and now you criticise it to all and sundry. It was you who
informed me of the duke of Enghien’s whereabouts and incited me to take
ruthless measures against him.... You have intrigued with the dethroned
Spaniards who were placed in your charge. To-day, because you consider
the Spanish affair a mistake, you have the effrontery to declare that you
had always warned me against it.... You shall restore to me the keys of
your office as grand chamberlain.... I could break you like glass if I
chose; I have the power! But I despise you too much to give myself the
trouble!...”
For half an hour, Napoleon holds forth in this fashion. His hearers sit
petrified. Silently, Talleyrand bows, and withdraws: “What a pity,” he
says smilingly to a friend he meets outside, “that so great a man should
be so ill-mannered!” Within the council chamber, the Emperor now proceeds
to his attack on Fouché, whom he charges with having failed to work up
public opinion, with having supported the enemies of the Emperor....
His hearers sit petrified. Silently, Fouché bows—and remains! The Emperor
commands that the higher officials shall renounce all right of criticism;
they are to become mere tools of his thoughts. He declares menacingly
that doubt is the first step on the road to betrayal, which, in its turn,
becomes actual as soon as it takes the form of opposition.
Meanwhile, all Paris is convinced that both the unfaithful servants are
to be banished or placed in confinement. But neither is dismissed! Fouché
remains, for who could replace the man with a hundred eyes? Talleyrand,
smiling as ever, continues to come to court; he has retained his official
position; at the Sunday receptions, he always places himself so that his
master cannot fail to see him; answers in the stead of his neighbour
when the Emperor has put a question to the latter; and, in general,
demonstrates the truth of Lannes’ soldierly judgment: when Talleyrand is
kicked from behind and one is conversing with him at the moment, not a
sign of his feelings can be detected in his face! Ere long he is to be
seen once more, limping away from the chill festivities in the brightly
lit Tuileries, following in his master’s wake to resume his labours in
the Emperor’s study, for “he is the only man with whom I can really talk!”
Weighty matters have to be talked over. Germany has awakened; slowly
she is beginning to stir; all eyes are fixed on Austria. The Prussian
king hesitates as usual; and an order, dated from Madrid, has banished
Baron vom Stein from Prussia. Tyrol is seething with mutiny, like Spain;
Austria, now allied not only with England but also with Turkey, is arming
for the fifth time. What matters it, then, that Saragossa, after a heroic
struggle, should have fallen? Troops cannot be withdrawn from Spain so
long as insurrection is rife. How can a war be undertaken, seeing that a
vast army of a quarter million men is tied up in Spain? It is precisely
on account of this situation that Austria has found courage to take up
arms against the Emperor.
The Russian menace is Napoleon’s last hope. When the Russian envoy,
Romanzoff, is leaving for St. Petersburg, the Emperor overwhelms him with
gifts and with promises. Thinking to make himself agreeable to the tsar,
he pledges himself to the evacuation of Prussia; and urges Alexander, for
his part, to proclaim the alliance of the two emperors to a trembling
central Europe.
But Alexander vacillates; he allows himself to be reassured by Vienna,
Berlin, and London; timid and hesitant as he is, he yields to the threats
of his grand dukes (who to a man detest Napoleon), and yet cannot make
up his mind to go whole-heartedly over to their side; Vienna’s hopes of
securing one of the tsar’s sisters as bride for an Austrian archduke are
frustrated: the tsar elects to remain neutral!
The Emperor is cut to the quick by his friend’s breach of faith;
indeed, it is the unkindest cut of all. He has given too much personal
confidence, his pride is wounded, his labour lost. Literally, there
remains nothing for him to do but to raise an army out of the very earth:
the levies for the following year are now being called up, a year in
advance; money must be procured by every possible and impossible means;
the funds have fallen to 78, in consequence of the Spanish affair. Still,
Austria is ready far earlier than he had expected. When, in April, the
semaphore announces that the enemy is on the march, and Napoleon is
informed of the news in his bed at ten o’clock that night, he orders the
mobilisation of his troops for midnight, and is furious when the unwieldy
machine is not ready until four hours later.
When he arrives in Bavaria, he sees the mistakes committed by the
Austrians in their advance. He can hardly believe his good luck; it was
as if “he grew; his eyes gleamed, and with a delight which his glance,
his mood, and his movements all betrayed, he exclaimed: ‘I’ve got
them! Their army is lost! A month hence, and I’ll be in Vienna!’” He
underestimates the time: he will be there in three weeks! He incites his
soldiers to marches of over sixty-five miles in forty hours, and beats
his foe in a series of five battles. Later he was to call these five days
his finest achievement from the point of view of manœuvring. The last
day he is wounded on the foot; and, since fate wills that the legend of
his invulnerability (in which the army whole-heartedly believes and to
which even he is inclined to lend an ear) shall be exploded, the bullet
hits his Achilles’ tendon.
But he speeds away again, and crosses Germany. Napoleon’s carriage is
outwardly plain, but within it is comfortably built. The Emperor can
sleep in it; by day he can govern from it, just as well as from the
Tuileries or from a tent. He is the first to overcome the friction which
brings movement to a standstill; and, though he does not travel as fast
as we do nowadays, he travels faster than any man ever travelled before.
Five days take him from Dresden to Paris. In a number of lock-up drawers
within the carriage, he collects reports, dispatches, memoranda; a
lantern hanging from the roof lights up the interior; in front of him
hangs a list of the different places he must pass through, including
where relays of horses are awaiting him. Should a courier reach him,
Berthier, or another official who happens to be at hand, must take down
the more pressing orders, while the carriage goes jolting on its way.
Before long, orderlies are to be seen flying off in every direction.
On the box seat, the Mameluke is enthroned in solitary grandeur. Two
postilions whip up the six horses. The carriage is surrounded by a crowd
of equerries, pages, and light cavalrymen; when the procession sets
forward, the road is all too narrow to accommodate it, eddies of dust and
heat envelop it, night and fog encompass it. The peasants stand aside to
let the tornado pass; they are agape with wonderment and firmly believe
that the devil is hiding inside the great Napoleon. He leaves behind him
a trail like that of a paper-chase: for he throws out of the windows of
the carriage, not only all the envelopes and other useless paper, but all
the reports he does not wish to file (torn into tiny fragments); all the
newspapers he has read; and, finally, books, which he glances at when he
has a moment to spare, and then consigns to their fate in the mud of the
highway.
Wherever he gets out of his carriage, a hot bath is ready for him. Then,
at two in the morning, he will dictate till four, snatch three hours’
sleep, and start off again at seven. At his halts, four light cavalrymen
surround him in a square, and follow him in all his movements, if,
for instance, in the daytime he studies the country through his small
telescope. Should he need the large telescope, he uses the shoulder of
the page in waiting as a rest. Whether his halt be short or long, in
wartime the map is always ready to his hand, in carriage or tent, in camp
and by the watch-fire. Any member of his escort who fails to show him
in the map the precise point where the halt has been made, the area he
now wishes to study, receives a volley of abuse—be it Berthier himself,
Prince of Neuchâtel. Through all countries, for the whole duration of his
life, the map follows him, pierced with coloured pins, illuminated at
night by twenty or thirty candles, and with a pair of compasses lying on
it. This is his altar, before which he offers up his prayers. It is the
real home of the man who has no home.
Now, without a blow, he takes Vienna for the second time, and occupies
the same room as of old in the palace of Schönbrunn; but the war is not
over.
For what has meanwhile been happening in his wide realms is unfavourable
to him, and encourages the enemy. There is bad news from Spain; in
northern Italy, Eugene has been fighting unsuccessfully; and since, at
this instant, Murat has to advance from Naples, the Roman Emperor makes
as short work of it with Rome as the Hohenstaufen had done many centuries
before. Four years ago, at the same writing table, he had penned a decree
annihilating the royal house of Naples. Now he repeats the manœuvre
with the pope. Since Napoleon, at this juncture, has to strike with his
sword in all directions, he no longer troubles himself about moral and
political consequences, and ventures this dangerous edict for little
better reason than that a junction must be effected between his armies in
Italy.
But anger is a contributory cause. When he had been in Spain at the
beginning of the year, he had let fall expressions showing how out of
humour he was with Rome: “Last year, the pope was impudent enough to
neglect sending us the consecrated candles he sent the heads of other
States. Write to Rome saying that we don’t want any, not even for the
three kings of our house. Say that at Candlemas I always get consecrated
candles from my own clerics, and that the value of these things does not
depend upon purple or the other insignia of power. In the realm of the
shades, there will be priests just as good as the popes! Thus a candle
blest by one of my own clergy will be just as holy as one sent by the
pope. I won’t have his candles, and none of the princes of my house may
accept them.”
In this way he trumped the pope’s trick, like a Protestant, like a
revolutionary. Such was Napoleon’s mood, in the slough of the Spanish
roads and battles. Now, in Schönbrunn, he bluntly deprives the Holy
Father of power as sovereign prince. The pope is relegated to the
Vatican, and assigned a revenue of two millions.
Many members of the Emperor’s retinue are shocked, for some of them are
good Catholics, and it is only five days from the feast of Pentecost.
Is he not challenging God? Those in whom faith becomes intensified into
superstition are likely enough, ere long, to find confirmation of their
presentiments. In five days, at Pentecost, Napoleon will be defeated for
the first time in his life.
Some regard the battle of Aspern-Essling as indecisive; at any rate, no
one can consider it a success for Napoleon. When the bridge across the
Danube was swept away, this was just as much and just as little due to
chance as were all the great happenings whereby at Lodi, Rivoli, Marengo,
and on many other occasions, he had, by precisely such improvisations,
wrested victory from God. A friend of his youth, Marshal Lannes, is
mortally wounded. Napoleon hastens to the dying man’s side, and, so the
story runs, his old comrade shows hostility both in word and glance.
That evening Napoleon sits long before his untasted supper, silent, and
refusing to see any one.
“Conquered? Conquerable?” he muses, staring forth gloomily into the
future. “Has Achilles’ heel indeed been hit? That marksman aimed better
than Talleyrand. No, it was my own fault. Too hazardous to cross the
river in full view of the enemy! Lannes was right; he was already half
way over. What is Paris saying? What will be the best way of reporting
this in Paris?” In uneasy mood, he goes back to Schönbrunn, a huge,
lonely palace in the midst of a hostile land. His Polish mistress! If
only he had had the lovely Walewska with him. She is sitting now in a
Polish castle, far away, but her thoughts fly towards him. His hopes of a
child by her last year had been dashed.
He sends for her.
Strange news from Rome! To Napoleon’s edict of deposition, the pope
has promptly replied by a bull of excommunication. Does this alarm the
Emperor? He laughs. He laughs at Catholic mediævalism, and the soldier,
the self-made man, thinks:
“Is this vengeance for my having, in Notre Dame, snatched from him the
crown which the holy man wanted to place on my head with his own hands?
And what is holy? It is doubtful if Christ ever lived; the only certain
thing is that we can make use of him. But in these enlightened days, none
but children and nursemaids are afraid of curses. I have been outlawed
twice ere this, on the Nineteenth Brumaire, and in Corsica. Such farces
bring good luck!” Much refreshed by these thoughts, he prepares for the
counterstroke on the Marchfeld, and at Wagram is again victorious, as in
thirty battles, his excommunicated weapons being too much for the pious
archduke Charles. Towards the end of his two days’ battle, when all was
going well, and the commander was overpowered by fatigue, he made Rustam
spread a bearskin for him on the battle-field, told the Mameluke to call
him in twenty minutes, lay down, and fell fast asleep for the prescribed
period, to awaken fully reinvigorated. The war was finished, and a truce
was agreed on. Next day, reporting the new victory to his wife, he adds:
“I’ve been burned as brown as a berry.” He has been thoroughly toned up,
and his mood is rejuvenated.
Returning to Schönbrunn, he finds Walewska awaiting him. How many lovely
women have glided through the secret portals and discreet chambers of
this vast palace, to revivify the Habsburgs? Now the adventurer from the
Mediterranean sends evening after evening to fetch the countess, who is
housed near by; and again and again he warns the groom of the chambers
to be careful lest the carriage should be overturned on the rough road.
For the second time, the pair live three months together. He had looked
forward to this in Finckenstein, and had promised her that it should
happen; but the where and the when depended on the course of universal
history, and not wholly on himself.
In a few weeks, she knows that she is with child. Will she this time give
him the gift that he has been asking from women for twelve years, and
has only once received? Thus, the idyll gains a new content; and when,
at midnight on August 15th, lying in her arms, waiting for his fortieth
birthday to dawn, and thinking how early next morning salutes and bell
peals will hail the coming of this day, throughout France, and indeed
in all the countries over which he rules,—the day to which the pope
had complacently transferred the feast of St. Napoleon—may it not seem
strange to him that the first to congratulate him should be this beauty
of twenty summers, who can speak but haltingly the two languages in which
he is at home, and whose glances convey more meaning than her words? His
thoughts may well fly back to that time ten years ago when he sailed
homeward from Egypt, hazarding all to the luck of the seas, out of which
the great English net could so readily have fished him. Now he is a
different man, but not a happier one, for he is the slave of “the nature
of things.”
He is different, also, from the man he was two years ago in Finckenstein.
Then he was the builder of a world empire, the potentate to whom the
kings of the East and the kings of the West paid homage; now, that empire
is on the defensive, and even a great victory like that he has just won,
can only be turned cautiously to account.
On the day of Wagram, his people in Rome had committed a blunder of which
he has only just heard:
“I am very much annoyed at the arrest of the pope. That was an idiotic
thing to do! You should have arrested Cardinal ——, while leaving the pope
at his ease in Rome.” He had laughed at the symbolic power of the bull
of excommunication. “Excommunication” is an empty word, an airy nothing,
which the French bishops can blow away; but as statesman he realises
instantly that the imprisonment and deportation of the Holy Father are
very serious matters. This rash action has put him in the wrong, for a
banished pope is morally stronger than a pope fulminating bulls.
Other letters are coming to hand, from Spain this time, telling how
England has made good her losses there; and how, in the forest wilds,
the visible-invisible Spanish people, allied with England, is standing
more stoutly to arms. The news from Paris is that Fouché has overstepped
his orders, and has called up the National Guard everywhere; his obvious
intention has been to intensify the dread of England throughout the
country, and to fan the flames of discontent among the newly levied
conscripts.
A difficult and dangerous situation, and one whose difficulties and
dangers thicken as the radius widens. The despatches from Rome and Paris
are a week old, and those from Spain date from more than a fortnight
back. By the time fresh orders from Schönbrunn can reach Valladolid, the
whole position will have changed. If only he had the power to issue his
commands with the velocity of light, then he would be able to rule the
world from this office on the Danube. As things are, he must cut short
the negotiations, which Austria, encouraged by England and Hungary, has
been protracting for weeks. When, recently, the victor demanded a third
of the monarchy, with nine million souls, he was met with a refusal.
Now he pursues a different plan. With the splendid frankness which
is so baffling to diplomats of the old school, in one of his endless
conversations (this particular talk with Count Bubna lasted seven hours),
he explains his own difficulties to his opponent:
“I was to blame for Aspern-Essling, and suffered for my mistake: but the
confidence of my soldiers remain unshaken.” In broad outline, he sketches
his own tactics on the battle-field. “But I will tell you the mistake you
are always making.... You draw up your plans the day before the battle,
when you do not yet know your adversary’s movements, or what positions
you will have to occupy. But for my part, I never issue orders long in
advance, and am especially cautious overnight. At peep of day, I send
out my scouts, survey the field for myself, and keep my troops in mass
formation as long as I am still in doubt.... Then I hurl myself on the
enemy, attacking him wherever the ground makes attack most favourable....
You are right when you remind me that my free use of artillery fire
causes much bloodshed. But what am I to do? My troops are weary; my men
want peace. That is why I have to be sparing with the bayonet, and to use
cannon more than formerly.”
Later he comes to the condition of the alliances: “To-day I am sure of
the tsar, but what guarantee have I that he will stand by me? As regards
Prussia, I have known for a long time that that country is oscillating
between you and me.” Suddenly he demands only half of what he had asked
before, disavows his minister, and offers an alliance. Needs must, for he
has to get back to Paris. A new basis for negotiation! Austria is to lose
a fragment to the Confederation of the Rhine, and another to Russia; a
pathway to the Balkans has to be left open for Napoleon. Several more
weeks pass in negotiation. His impatience is soothed by the bright
glances of Walewska.
In October, Napoleon is holding a great review in Schönbrunn. A young
man forces his way into the palace. He is arrested. When searched, he is
found to be carrying a long knife and the picture of a girl. Examined in
the guard room, he refuses to give any information, and says he will only
explain himself to the Emperor in person. Soon the lad of eighteen, a
fair-haired youth, serious of aspect, frank and courageous but courteous,
is confronted with Napoleon. His name is Friedrich Staps, and he is the
son of a Tyrolese pastor. Napoleon questions him in French, Rapp acting
as interpreter.
“Yes, I intended to kill you.”
“You must be mad, young man, or ill.”
“I am neither mad nor ill, but in the full possession of my faculties.”
“Then why do you want to kill me?”
“Because you are ruining my country.”
“Your country?”
“It is mine, as it is that of all good Germans.”
“Who was the instigator?”
“No one. My heart told me that by killing you, I should do good service
to Germany and to Europe.”
“Have you ever seen me before?”
“In Erfurt. Then I believed you would make no more wars, and I was your
greatest admirer.”
The Emperor sends for his physician, in the hope that the young fellow
will be declared a lunatic; but the doctor, having made his examination,
says that Staps is of sound mind.
“I told you so,” says Friedrich.
The Emperor is uneasy. He is loath to make an end of so frank and bold a
youth. He has not to do here with a partisan, with a conspiracy, with one
who is out to destroy a principle; he has not to do with an ideologue,
but with an idealist. Germany has sent forth against him a Brutus with a
long knife.
“You are distraught. You are bringing affliction on your family. Ask my
forgiveness, and say you are sorry. Then I will grant you your life!”
Never before has Napoleon spoken thus, at any rate to an assassin. The
young man remains steadfast. Has Napoleon lost the power of suggestion?
“Well?”
“I do not want your forgiveness, and I am not sorry. My only regret is
that I have failed.”
The Emperor grows angry.
“The devil! A crime means nothing to you, then?”
“To kill you would not be a crime, but a public service,” says Staps,
still perfectly respectful, indeed, thoroughly well bred.
“Hm. Whose portrait is this?”
“The girl I love.”
“Will she approve this attempt of yours?”
“She will be sorry it has miscarried, for she hates you as much as I do.”
“What a pretty girl,” thinks the Emperor looking at the miniature in his
hand. “Am I really to be baffled by this young fellow? No, I will save
him, will pardon him. What does it matter to me if he hates me?” Still
holding the miniature, he looks Staps squarely in the face: “If I pardon
you, I suppose it will gladden the heart of this girl?”
Friedrich’s blue eyes flashed, and he says firmly:
“Then I shall be able to kill you after all!”
The Emperor turns away, and leaves the prisoner to his doom. To
Champagny, who is present, he talks for a long time about the
Illuminates. Then, with a sudden transition he says:
“We must make peace. Drive back into the town. Summon the Austrians. We
are practically agreed on the main points, and the only trouble relates
to the war indemnity. The difference amounts to fifty millions. Reduce
the demand by half. Get the matter settled. I was satisfied with the last
draft. Add whatever clauses you think necessary. I leave everything in
your hands. Make peace.”
So great is the impression wrought by the youth. We cannot call it alarm.
Caution is too mild a word. The trouble is that a shadow has fallen
across his soul. After negotiating for three months, the Emperor, simply
that he may save one day, leaves the conclusion of the peace to his
minister. He has Staps examined once more, but the enthusiast prefers
death to recantation. Next morning at six, the minister brings the treaty
which has been arranged during the night. The Emperor, well content,
praises his minister:
The same morning, the assassin is shot, and the Emperor returns to
the topic: “The thing is unprecedented! So young a man, a German, a
Protestant, well brought up; and such a crime! How did he meet his end?”
The answer is that Staps, in face of the firing squad, had cried in loud
tones: “Liberty for ever! Death to the tyrant!” The Emperor holds his
peace.
Napoleon commands that the long German knife shall be brought back with
him to Paris.
XXII
The Empress Josephine is lying in a swoon on the floor. Napoleon summons
the palace prefect, and orders him to bear her to her chamber. The
Emperor goes in front, carrying a lighted candle. Since the staircase
is narrow, he passes the candlestick to a servant, and helps Bausset
to carry Josephine. He carefully lays her on her bed, and, in a state
of great excitement, leaves the room. Hardly is he out of sight, when
the empress opens her eyes: cries and fainting fit were all a pretence!
Bausset betrayed her secret later, stating that, as he carried her up the
stairs, she had whispered that he was holding her too tightly, and was
hurting her.
All the same, fear and sorrow are in very truth her portion; for she has
been informed that she must leave the Tuileries, where, for more than a
decade, she has ruled as queen. The Emperor himself has broken the news
to her. Matters cannot continue as in the past: every one is counting on
his death: across the frontier are the Germans with their long knives;
here at home is Fouché, colloguing with the English. Napoleon needs a
son; and his son must be the child of a princess of royal blood. The
scene with Josephine took place shortly after his return from Schönbrunn.
Probably he was feeling sore because he could not place his Polish love,
who bore his child in her womb, straightway upon the throne. For a
certainty, he did not as yet know the name of his future bride.
Mother, sisters, brothers, are sitting in silence, with stony faces,
round the table, in family conclave: Josephine is likewise present. She
can detect the smothered joy in the minds of these witnesses who at
last have gained their end. The “old woman” must go! With uncontrolled
emotion in his voice, the Emperor declares that all hope of an heir from
the empress is quenched, and that it is solely on this account that he
must part from her. “God alone knows how hard a step this is for me to
take.... But no sacrifice is too great for the sake of France.... For
fifteen years, the empress has made my life beautiful by her presence.
She was crowned by my own hands.... I have determined that she shall
preserve the rank and the title of empress; and, above all, that
she shall look upon me as her lifelong friend.” Josephine exercises
admirable self-control, but asks the arch-chancellor to read her words of
acquiescence.
The memorandum concerning the divorce is then signed by all. Napoleon’s
signature is more legible than usual. It is vigorous, and a long, firm
flourish underlines his full name: he thus brings a very serious matter
to a close, in manly fashion. Nervously, Josephine adds her signature
to the right of his, quite near, as though pleading for his support.
Madame Mère writes her M. as her son has written his N., and follows him,
likewise, in the concluding flourish.
That night, Josephine makes an amazing entry into his room, and
approaches his bed, tears streaming down her face, and her hair falling
round her shoulders. Next day, supported by Napoleon, a veritable Niobe,
she quits the palace and drives to Malmaison. Before leaving, however,
she has (foolishly perhaps) besought Méneval to speak of her as often as
possible to the Emperor.
Napoleon went alone to Trianon, which was at this time unoccupied. There
he held a death watch such as no lover had ever held before over the love
from whom he was to be eternally severed: he remained there for three
days, absolutely inactive—this being as great an achievement as if a
Buddhist holy man had for three days done Napoleon’s work! He received
no one, he dictated never a word, read nothing, noted down nothing; for
three days the mighty wheel stood still, the wheel which for fifteen
years had rotated by the strength of its own impetus. Soon afterwards he
visited his divorced lady at her house in Malmaison. Then he wrote to her:
“I found you to-day in a worse condition of mind than I had hoped, mon
amie.... You should not give yourself up to so profound a melancholy.
Take good care of your health, which is so dear to me. If you love
me, then show me how strong and happy you can be. You cannot doubt my
fondness, or all the tenderness I feel for you. You cannot believe that I
shall ever be happy if you are unhappy.... I was very sad when I got back
to the Tuileries; the great palace seemed so empty; I felt so lonely....
Farewell, chère amie; sleep soundly, and remember that I wish it
thus....” After fifteen years of intimate association, the man of forty
writes in so natural and so grateful a fashion—though at the same time we
may detect a gentle hint of a determined will that commands.
Then come endless calculations: he will allow her three millions per
annum; the set of rubies he will pay extra for: “this will cost me quite
four hundred thousand francs and I will have it valued, for I do not
wish to be cheated by the jeweller.... In the wardrobe at Malmaison you
should find five to six hundred thousand francs. You can take this money
in order to increase your silver plate and your underclothing. I have
ordered a beautiful china service for you, but I have told the makers to
await your commands, for I wish it to be really lovely.... The page who
saw you this morning, tells me you were weeping.... I shall take my meals
all by myself.... Have you really lost courage since going to Malmaison?
And yet that house has been the witness of our happiness, and our
feelings for one another. These feelings must never change; nor can they,
at least as far as I am concerned.... I should so much like to pay you a
visit; but first I must know if you are a valiant woman or a weakling.
I am rather weak myself, and am suffering greatly. Farewell, Josephine.
Good-night.”
A melting mood has once more taken possession of him. The tone resembles
that of the passionate letters sent from Milan by the young general to
his faithless wife in Paris. It is set in a minor key; and the same
melody that surged up and soared above the whole orchestra of his senses
in those days, is now played by the ’cello as a solo echoing through the
desolate halls of the Tuileries.
Shortly after this, a masked ball was given by the arch-chancellor. Among
the guests was Princess Metternich, whose husband had formerly been envoy
at the court of Paris. A man clad in a green domino took her by the arm
and led her aside. Every one knew who he was, for although no one fully
knew Napoleon unmasked, the masked Napoleon was impossible to mistake:
the tragi-comedy of genius in this world. After a few quips, he asked her
whether she thought that an archduchess would accept the offer of his
hand.
“I do not know, Sire.”
“Were you in the archduchess’ place, would you accept the offer?”
“I should certainly refuse it,” says the Viennese lady with a smile.
“How unkind! Will you write to your husband, to ask his views on the
matter?”
“I think you had better say that to Prince Schwarzenberg, Sire; he is the
envoy now.”
Thus with one of his improvisations does Napoleon begin his new wooing
after the divorce. It is a splendid return to the straightforwardness of
the revolution. The same evening, he instructs Eugene, who next morning
approaches the Austrian ambassador. None of the Habsburg clan understand
promptness and simplicity in such campaigns; but to the Emperor these
qualities come naturally. The tsar makes no sign. Vienna, beaten in four
wars, must at length be pacified. What could be more obvious than this
solution? Why get a divorce if you do not forthwith do your utmost to
attain the unattainable?
The Corsican family feeling is at work once more. He, who so rarely holds
a council of war, summons a family council before the divorce and before
the marriage. There they sit, just as six weeks earlier, round the oval
table; all the great dignitaries are there; according to the report
of one of those present, general embarrassment prevails. The Emperor
announces his desire for an heir, and then speaks with an assumption of
dubiety:
“Were it possible for me to be guided by personal feelings alone, I
should choose my bride out of the circle of the Legion of Honour,
from among the daughters of the heroes of France, and should make the
worthiest of Frenchwomen empress of the French. But a man must adapt his
actions to the customs of his own century, to the usage of other States,
to political considerations. Many sovereigns have sought my alliance, and
I do not think there is any reigning house to which I cannot propose this
personal tie. Three of them have now to be considered: the Austrian, the
Russian, and the Saxon. I should like to hear your views.”
Thus does the curse of legitimacy break once more into the mighty
dictator’s private preserve. Legitimacy is the rock on which he will be
shipwrecked. Why should he not choose Countess Walewska whom he loves?
Or, if the empress is to be a Frenchwoman, why not a daughter of one of
those heroes to whom he has given kingdoms? He has shaken the old world
to its foundations; has with his own hands placed two crowns on his
head; has kept kings of ancient lineage waiting in his ante-rooms; has
dethroned one such, and placed an innkeeper’s son upon the vacant throne.
Has he done all these things that to-day, debarred from the choice of the
woman of his heart, on the prowl for an heir, he must “adapt his actions
to the customs of his own century”—customs which hitherto he has defied
like a demigod?
But no such unconventional possibilities are discussed in these cold,
imperial halls, for one and all are against a Frenchwoman. Eugene and
Talleyrand are for Austria. Murat demurs, saying that Marie Antoinette
had brought bad luck to France. Some voice the advantages of a Russian
alliance. Others favour Saxony. The Emperor listens to their views,
closes the sitting, and does what he has already made up his mind to do.
That same evening he sends a message to Vienna. The only one present
at the council who saw clearly was the minister who had strongly urged
the claims of Russia, but who did not venture to utter his real reasons
except in private; “Within two years, we shall certainly be at war with
both the monarchies with whose ruling house the Emperor does not ally
himself by marriage—and Austria is the only one of the three a war with
which would not be dangerous!”
By the Emperor’s instructions, the court of St. Petersburg is informed
that he has been kept waiting too long. Furthermore, it would be
inconvenient to have a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church in the
Tuileries. Finally, he has been informed “that Grand Duchess Anna, who
is fifteen years old, is not yet ripened to womanhood. Inasmuch as, in
young girls, two years elapse between the appearance of the first signs
of womanhood and complete maturity, this will not suit the aims of the
Emperor, who does not wish to be married for three years before he can
have a child.” This gynecological excursus is the last we hear of the
Russian wooing which had begun so inauspiciously in Erfurt.
But the Habsburgs are a prolific family, so that he may regard an
Austrian princess as practically guaranteed against barrenness. When he
learns that the mother of his chosen bride has given birth to thirteen
children, that one of her ancestresses has had seventeen, and another
actually twenty-six, the Emperor exclaims: “That’s the kind of womb I
want to marry!” There could be no doubt about the answer to his proposal;
Francis would accept it, and his eighteen-year-old daughter would
comply.... Acceptance is taken for granted in the first letter of his
courtship, which the Emperor writes with his own hand, legibly in places,
for it is penned with Méneval’s aid, and with more pains than might be
gathered from an inspection of the schoolboy script:
“Chère Cousine, The brilliant qualities which distinguish your person
have aroused in us the desire to serve you and to honour you. Inasmuch
as we are approaching the emperor, your father, with the request that he
will entrust us with Your Imperial Highness’ happiness, may we venture to
hope that you will graciously accept the sentiments which move us to this
step. Dare we flatter ourselves that you are not deciding on this step
solely from a sense of duty and filial obedience?... If Your Imperial
Highness has no more than a trace of inclination towards us, we shall
carefully cherish this sentiment, and make it our supreme task to be
agreeable to you always and in all things, so that we may look forward to
the happiness of winning your whole heart....”
Did ever a great genius write a more preposterous letter? He knows
perfectly well that her acceptance will be dictated by filial obedience
and nothing more; that she cannot possibly have a trace of liking for the
devil who, during the years of her childhood, has been despoiling her
father of one province after another, so that she has learned to cross
herself at the sound of his name. He knows that he has better things to
do, that he has other supreme tasks, than to make himself agreeable to a
little goose, who is not distinguished by any other quality than by the
luck of being born a Habsburg; who is neither beautiful nor wise, neither
brave nor passionate. Yet the equivocal nature of his position constrains
Napoleon, who has never asked a favour, to write such a letter as the
foregoing!
With the gesture of a sultan, he gives to his friend Berthier (who is to
woo for him by proxy in Vienna) tokens of affection for his bride: his
miniature set in diamonds, and jewellery worth one-and-a-half-millions.
But at the proxy wedding in the Hofburg, Napoleon is represented by the
bride’s uncle, Archduke Charles, whom he has worsted in a dozen battles.
The Emperor, meanwhile, gives more attention to clothing and furniture
than to affairs of State; orders for Marie Louise a trousseau to the tune
of five millions, for what she is bringing with her has cost only half a
million; studies all the details of Marie Antoinette’s journey, lest the
Habsburgs should be able to plume themselves on breaches of etiquette;
orders fashionable coats from his tailor, and buckled shoes from his
shoemaker; goes out hunting, rides vigorously, in the hope of sweating
off his fat; even finds that his dancing days are not yet over.
While on her way to Paris, Marie Louise receives a love letter, quite
illegible, for all she can make out is the capital N. of the signature;
flowers greet her wherever she halts for the night; in Compiègne she is
expecting to be received by the terrible man whom she is to wed; he is
waiting there for her with all his family.
But suddenly, with a surge of vigorous youth, the firm will and the
fierce impatience of the revolutionist break through this hedge of
antiquated formalities. Laying aside his new embroidered coat, and
donning his old uniform, he jumps into a calash undecorated with armorial
bearings, and drives to meet the bridal procession. There it is; the
horses are being changed in a downpour of rain. He wants to take Marie
Louise by surprise, but her master-of-the-horse, recognising him,
exclaims, “His Majesty”; so the little coup fails to come off. In a
moment he is in the carriage beside her, dismisses the lady-in-waiting,
kisses his bride, laughing the while, for he is wet through. In her
embarrassment, she finds a pretty phrase: “Your portrait does not flatter
you, Sire!”
“She is by no means beautiful,” he meditates, as he takes stock of her.
“Marked with smallpox, though not badly, thick lips; watery blue eyes;
full-bosomed for her years; but fresh and young.”
With disgust, that evening, the masters of the ceremonies see their
whole programme, which has been rehearsed for weeks in advance, torn to
tatters. The meeting with the imperial family has been effected with
scant formality; all come and go as they please; the girls who present
bouquets must cut their compliments short, for every one is wet and cold;
supper is improvised, with Caroline as third at table. At one in the
morning the whole company retires to rest. But the Emperor has taken his
uncle the cardinal aside, and has asked Fesch, as an authority upon these
matters, whether Marie Louise is not already his wife, thanks to the
proxy marriage in Vienna. “Yes, Sire, according to civil law,” answers
the priest, foreseeing what is about to happen.
Next morning the Emperor has breakfast for two brought to the empress’
bedside. Within an hour all Compiègne knows.
By this night attack, made on the spur of the moment, Napoleon conquers
the world of legitimacy after the same fashion as he has conquered it
in the field, taking the Habsburg fortress by storm, as beseems his
reputation.
With a mischievous double meaning, he writes next day to his unsuspecting
father-in-law: “She fulfils all my hopes, and we do not cease to give
one another proofs of the tender feelings that unite us. We suit one
another exceedingly well.... Allow me, therefore, to thank you for
this lovely gift.” Uncle Fesch does not give their union the blessing
of the Church until after they have made their imposing entry into
Paris. In Josephine’s case, he was eight years too late; this time the
sanctification has been delayed no more than a fortnight.
The Emperor finds his bride charming. “You should all marry Germans,” he
tells his intimates; “they are gentle, good, unspoiled, and as fresh as
roses.” He is delighted that she gets on well with his family. Domestic
peace is new to him. He graces the intimacies of the toilet with his
presence; pinches her cheeks caressingly; calls her his “bonne petite
animale.”
Two or three weeks later, there is news from Poland. The child conceived
during the weeks at Schönbrunn has been born—a boy. There is a strange
medley of feelings in Napoleon’s soul. From that same Austrian palace,
where he has stayed only in the absence of its rightful owner, has come
the new wife, who as yet gives no signs of capacity for doing her duty.
He vacillates; sends for the Polish countess. But, soon after this,
Marie Louise finds that she is with child. “The Emperor’s jubilation
almost passes description,” writes Metternich to Vienna. At this early
stage, the empress’ condition is solemnly announced to the Senate and the
nation; prayers for the successor to the throne are to be said; there is
to be a festival of rejoicing as sumptuous as those of pagan times.
When the lovely Walewska arrives, he gives her everything she can ask
for; sees the baby and fondles it; makes it a count of the Empire, with
the chancellor for guardian. But nothing beyond this unites the sometime
lovers. Napoleon has become a respectable married man.
In all respects, now, this man’s career seems to be transcending familiar
limitations, outstepping traditional horizons. Thus among the women who
have crossed his path new relationships begin. The Polish countess,
whose eyes Josephine would at one time have been glad to scratch out,
is invited to Malmaison. Walewska brings Josephine Napoleon’s son, that
son whose absence from her own womb decided Josephine’s fate. See the
group on the terrace. One of them is a grey-headed woman, who was born in
the West Indies, had a taste of prison, and then became empress of the
French. The other, young and blooming, was brought up in an impoverished
Polish noble family, was married off to a wealthy old man, and was then
switched into a new career through Napoleon’s chance glimpse of her at
a ball. Between them is the child of the man who had loved both and
forsaken both, that he might compel a stupid little Habsburg girl to
immortalise a name which had long ere this immortalised itself.
When the empress’ hour comes, he has to make a choice great as destiny
itself. Paris knows, France knows, that the young wife is in labour. All
are waiting for the heir; enemies are dreading him before he is born;
the common people, who at such moments are always dynastically inclined,
are praying for mother and child. Throughout the night Napoleon has
been watching by his wife’s bedside, but has withdrawn for a time. The
accoucheur brings him dread tidings: “The child is in a bad position;
there is danger to the life of both mother and infant!”
The whole structure of his dynastic schemes is tottering. What will he
say, this man of iron, when the doctor asks whether the first thought is
to be for the mother or for the child? Will he not answer that, before
all, it is necessary to save the child, for whose first cry millions
besides Napoleon are waiting? What does Marie Louise matter? When she has
borne him a healthy boy, she will have fulfilled her earthly mission.
Surely the Emperor can have no choice?
“Do exactly what you would do if an ordinary citizen’s wife were in
labour. The mother’s life comes first!”
Two hours later, however, the baby has been born, and the mother is
in good case. With rapt attention, Paris counts the cannon shots.
Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—so far, it may only be a girl. But when the
twenty-second gun booms out, the whole city is in a frenzy of delight.
The crowd surrounding the old Bourbon palace cheers madly. The salute
is still thundering. The little lieutenant of artillery stands by the
window, mechanically noting the calibre of the guns from the pitch of the
gun-fire, glancing down upon the mutable many without—while his thoughts
reach far back into the past, and roam yet farther forward into the
future.
The groom-of-the-chambers sees that there are tears in the cold,
grey-blue eyes.
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor. Painting by Vigneux. Count Primoli
Collection.
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society, Charlottenburg.)]
BOOK FOUR
THE SEA
It is essential that this man shall be ruined!... But
since, here below everything takes place by natural causes,
the daimons trip him: thus, in the end, even Napoleon is
overthrown.—GOETHE.
I
The old struggle in Napoleon’s mind between mathematics and fantasy had
ripened. The issue of the struggle was now to decide the history of his
world dominion.
For now, at the climax of his career; fortified by his ties with the
Habsburgs, ties for whose sake he had broken the familiar associations
of years of married life; fortified by having a legitimate heir, whose
birth gave firm anchorage to his adventurer’s dynasty; having gained
the mastery over conspiracies, and having learned to dominate all the
political parties—he was once more free as he had been eleven years
earlier, when the victory of Marengo had safeguarded the tranquillity
he needed for the internal development of France. True, England was
unconquered; but Russia seemed still friendly. True, Spain was uncoerced;
but Europe from Reggio to Hammerfest was allied to France, this being a
euphemism for dependence on France. For the last time in his life, he was
free to make a great decision.
Had he been nothing more than a mathematician, he would have been content
with his calculations within the resuscitated realm of Charlemagne, and
dreams of world dominion would have yielded place before the reality
of the United States of Europe under France’s leadership. Had he been
nothing but a visionary, he would have aimed, like a new Alexander, to
march towards the Ganges; and England would have been merely a pretext
for his onslaught on India. But he was both mathematician and visionary,
and was therefore in danger of disavowing himself. For, as calculator, he
failed to grasp an eminently real factor which could not be expressed in
figures. The moods of un-uniformed men in Spain and in Germany could play
no part in the cipherings of a military commander who thought in terms
of army corps and big guns. Nevertheless such moods should have come
within the scope of his visions as a seer!
Thus during these decisive years, after the birth of his heir, and before
his next warlike designs have become active, his mind is alternately
dominated by his two fundamental impulses, and the whole future depends
upon which of the two will be supreme when the moment for action comes.
Will his awakened fantasy warn him that it is dangerous to brave the
anger of exasperated peoples, or will his calculating faculty disclose to
him the danger that will await him on the distant road to the East? What
will happen should he err in both respects? Then, indeed, his whole world
will go up in flames.
He feels that his powers are ripening. In addition to the two energies
we have been considering, a third is growing to maturity, the sense of
destiny. Words unheard before, or rarely expressed, now find voice: “I
feel that I am being driven towards an unknown goal. But as soon as I
have reached it, as soon as I no longer have an inexorable mission, an
atom will suffice to overthrow me. Till then, no human powers can effect
anything against me. The days are numbered.”
Truly they are numbered; and through these prophetic words there already
breathes the foreboding of an exit, although he does not know the way
thither. Now, on the path towards the tragical catastrophe, the clarity
of his inner vision is dimmed. Yet he himself speaks of the campaign
against Russia as the “fifth act,” though the full significance of the
term is not apparent to him. Tones like those of his youthful days
resound in the new harmony. “I have got to the end of everything,” he had
said when he was thirty, on the Nile. Now, at forty-three, he declares in
the Council of State: “All this will last as long as I do, and no longer.
Perhaps when I am dead, my son will think himself well off if he can be
sure of an income of forty thousand francs a year.”
But at the same time his ardour increases. Since those days when it
seemed to him that (thanks to the acceleration of genius) he had got to
the end of everything, since the days of the Egyptian campaign, he had
been guided by a religious faith that it was his destiny to become a
second Alexander. Now, when for the first time he is equipped with means
for the carrying out of his design, is he to annihilate his dream by
figures, which are not more potent in the world than dreams? When the
arch-chancellor wishes him a happy new year, he answers, as if suddenly
rejuvenated: “I must grow wise if you are to be able to repeat this
greeting thirty years hence.”
Napoleon never grew wise, but he was always clever. When he finds that
his commercial warfare is reacting to the detriment of his own country,
he disregards his own prohibitions, and grants licenses for the import
of certain raw materials and dyes from England, in part because they are
urgently needed for French industry, and in part because the articles
in question are among the requirements of Parisian luxury. Soon, in all
continental countries, huge sums are made by smugglers who import the
very colonial produce which the Emperor wishes to prevent his chief enemy
from marketing. These goods are then retailed at a great profit. Is the
smartest dealer in Europe to be robbed of his gains by smugglers? He
would rather have the business under his own control, so he imposes a
fifty per cent. duty on all the colonial produce his agents can find on
the Continent, and pouches these receipts for France. Since at the same
time he has all English woollen textiles that he can lay hands on burned,
he opens opportunities for illicit gains which are so large that for
their sake people will ignore the risks of draconian punishments. He has
to carry on a guerilla warfare, just as in Spain, though this time he is
fighting the nation of shopkeepers with trade weapons.
It is likewise a war of decrees. Since Paris has prohibited all trading
in English wares, London reciprocates by demanding from all neutral
countries enhanced dues for permission to call at the blockaded ports.
Paris counters this move by declaring that the vessels of neutrals which
shall call at the ports of London or of Malta, run the risk of capture
as prizes. London responds by sending her ships out under false colours,
and Paris thereupon has all merchantmen trading in Mediterranean waters
overhauled and searched. The American government forbids its citizens
to have business dealings with Europe, or even to have any private
intercourse with the Continent; but the Emperor promises all kinds of
privileges to the Americans if they will cease to call at English ports.
So paradoxical is the situation resulting from the endeavour to strangle
overseas trade, by which Napoleon had hoped to extort the freedom of the
seas!
The Emperor’s hopes are rising. The English pound sterling is still
quoted at seventeen francs, the English banks are failing, and in
parliament the opposition is against the continuance of the war. In spite
of this, his peace proposals are rejected. The disturbances in Spain are
at once the cause and the consequence of England’s defiant attitude.
There is still an army numbering a quarter million men stationed in
Spain; and, despite all endeavours, Wellington’s thirty thousand are not
driven out, for the bands of native insurrectionaries led by officers and
monks carry on unceasing guerilla warfare against the French invaders.
The Emperor’s quarrel with the pope stiffens the antagonism of the
monks. While French children on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees are
being taught that Napoleon is God’s vicegerent, Spanish children on the
southern slopes are learning that the Emperor is the devil incarnate and
that the murder of a Frenchman is a deed pleasing to the Almighty.
In so fanatical a land, where hardly any regular troops are left for the
French to fight against, Napoleon’s generals feel out of their element.
Disunion prevails. Masséna is sent against Portugal. At the same time,
Napoleon deprives Joseph of four provinces. When the king journeys to
Paris to demand the cancelling of the decree, the Emperor declares
that his brother has ceded these lands. Napoleon places a general to
administer each province, and appoints a marshal in supreme command. He
carries out this Roman system of ruling through military governors thus
ruthlessly and persistently because of his intense disappointment in the
rule of the members of his family to whom he has allotted crowns, and,
above all, in the behaviour of his brothers. Terrible battles, made more
ghastly by famine and disease, are meanwhile forcing Masséna to retreat.
The Emperor, in a fury, recalls him.
Will Napoleon at length realise that his presence is essential? Marshals,
officers, and, above all, the rank and file of the army, eagerly await
his coming. Full well does he know this; and yet he does not go. Does
he fear assassination at the hands of some fanatical Spaniard? Or is
it treachery at home that deters him; such conspiracies as those which
called him back to Paris so suddenly when he was encamped near Astorga?
Is he to get enmeshed in this southern corner of his empire at the moment
when the whole is at stake? What is Spain to him? He chooses the oldest
of his companions-in-arms: Marmont is sent to clear up the mess and bring
the campaign to an end.
The second kingly brother had, with good reason, thrown up his job.
Napoleon had deprived him of all the Dutch territory on the left bank of
the Rhine; had insisted upon the removal of the rest of the protective
duties against France; and (this was the worst of all) had angered the
Dutch, who are traders and seamen, by the measures he had compelled them
to take against England. The Emperor had expected both his brothers to
run counter to the currents of national feeling in their respective
kingdoms, underestimating alike the strength of popular sentiment and the
sense of honour of the two men he had forced to become monarchs. It would
have been easier for military governors to cope with the rising tide of
nationalism and to dispense with a feeling obligation towards the people
they ruled, than it was for kings burdened with historic crowns.
When Louis found it impossible to put up any longer with the Emperor’s
tutelage, he abdicated in favour of his younger son, and fled by night
from his kingdom for an unrevealed destination. Napoleon’s catchpolls
sought him far and wide in Europe, to discover him at length in Austria.
The Emperor was greatly enraged, yet he could not but see that he was
himself more to blame than Louis. He therefore made no attempt to punish,
but sent his own body physician to care for the fugitive, who had excused
the flight on the ground of illness. To his mother, the Emperor wrote
saying that there were tidings of Louis’ whereabouts. “You need not be
anxious; but his conduct has been of a kind which can only be explained
by his illness. Your very affectionate son, Napoleon.”
The wording of this subscription stands out among the numberless letters
in which the dictator of Europe was accustomed to express his will to
those who usually received these missives with trembling. The fugitive
king, meanwhile, drawing a breath of relief, settled down to a literary
life in Graz, writing in three volumes under the title _Marie, ou les
peines d’amour_ (1808), the story of the love affair which the Emperor
had so ruthlessly frustrated. But when Joseph wished to follow Louis’
example, feeling that he would rather retire into private life than
continue to play the part of king in a pack of cards, he was restrained
from abdication by the iron hand of the Emperor. Napoleon considered
that his democratically inclined brother would do more mischief as an
intriguer in Paris than in his position as nominal chief and military
commander; so Joseph had once more to put his hand to the task of war,
for which, to the Emperor’s great annoyance, he was utterly unfitted.
The most frivolous members of the family, Jerome and Pauline, were
amusing themselves with love affairs. Murat and Caroline were immersed
over head and ears in old and new intrigues. As for Elise, she had so
much printed in the Tuscan newspapers anent her reviews and hunting
parties that the Emperor was even more annoyed by her craze for notoriety
than by the things she actually did, and wrote to her, saying: “Europe
pays very little heed to what the grand duchess of Tuscany is doing.”
The most dangerous man in his family circle has not yet become an object
of his menaces. Since the old king of Sweden was on friendly terms with
England, the Emperor had made him abdicate in favour of an uncle; and
the new ruler, who is devoted to the cause of Napoleon, has declared
war against England. Being old and childless, he thinks he cannot
please the Emperor better than by appointing as successor one who is
closely connected with Napoleon by marriage. Thus it is that Bernadotte,
Joseph’s brother-in-law, who during the wars has made friends in Swedish
Pomerania, is unexpectedly nominated crown prince of Sweden—as a result
of a complicated intrigue, in which Fouché has played a considerable
part. The Emperor would have found it difficult, in any case, to object
to this selection of a French general as heir to a foreign throne; and it
was practically impossible for him to interfere with the promotion of his
sometime rival, the man who had nearly prevented the coup d’état of the
Eighteenth Brumaire, and had subsequently become the husband of the woman
whom Napoleon had once thought of marrying. “A good soldier,” growled the
Emperor; “but with no talent for ruling; one of the old Jacobins, with a
bee in his bonnet like the rest of them, and therefore he will never be
able to keep his position on a throne.... Still, I could not interfere,
were it only because it would be impossible to do anything more effective
against the English than to set a French marshal upon the throne of
Gustavus Adolphus.... I am glad to be quit of him.”
Is he really so carefree? Hitherto these folk whom he cannot trust have
always been kept under his own eyes in Paris.
Bernadotte triumphans! Soon, at last, he too will wear a crown, and will
not even have to thank this detested Bonaparte for the gift. To Napoleon,
therefore, who till yesterday was Bernadotte’s supreme war lord, the
crown prince of Sweden now writes a bitter-sweet letter, offering
soldiers and iron, but asking for money. The Emperor smiles. He knows
what is written between the lines, and makes no direct answer. He has
Bernadotte informed that he does not correspond with royal princes. His
old opponent will not forget the gibe. In less than two years, Bernadotte
will take vengeance for it, and for all that has gone before!
Ruefully, the Emperor watches the flames that are springing up
everywhere, the flames his family mania has lighted. He does not conceal
from his intimates that he is disappointed with his kin and his nobles.
Writing to one of them at this time, Napoleon says: “I ought never to
have had Murat and my brothers crowned. Live and learn!... It was a
mistake, too, to give back the confiscated estates to the émigrés. I
should have kept the lands as State domains, and have been content to
allow the former owners a modest income. I can’t stomach them, these
people of the old regime; their light and airy graces are out of keeping
with my serious temperament. I myself did not succeed to a heritage,
but was content to take what belonged to no one. I ought to have been
satisfied with the appointment of governors and viceroys. Some of my
marshals, even, are beginning to dream of greatness and independence.”
At length he has realised that it is dangerous to play the emperor! His
troubles are the fruit of his wish to safeguard a dynasty (this meaning
that the spirits of revolt and of genius, from whose union Napoleon has
sprung, are to be taught to walk in the paths of legitimate mediocrity).
They are the outcome of the weak moments of a man who in his hours of
strength believed in the immortality of deed and of fame, of a man who
in these hours of strength felt no need of the perpetuation that is
achieved by means of a family line. The brothers, and brothers-in-law,
and marshals, who all shine by reflected light, will take vengeance ere
long. When his star pales, and the skies of Europe are overcast, they
will still try to shine across the Continent in the afterglow of his
splendour!
Deeply ingrained in him was the illusion that his good fortune would be
transmitted to his son. When, after the boy’s birth, a great reception
was held, and all the notables came to offer congratulations, the
Schwarzenbergs were among the guests. Schwarzenberg, as Austrian envoy
in Paris, had done much to promote the marriage. The Emperor, full of
gratitude, went up to Princess Schwarzenberg and, taking from his coat a
scarab pin, presented it to her, saying:
“I found this scarab in the tomb of an Egyptian king, and have worn it
ever since as a talisman. Please accept it; I no longer need such a
mascot.”
He feels that the birth of his son has placed him above all possibility
of danger, and that everything will go well with him in future. He can
have no further need for an amulet!
These kings, these brothers, have been but a substitute for the sons that
were lacking. Now, when he can feast his eyes on a son of his body, he
recognises his mistake, and the disastrous consequences of Josephine’s
barrenness are plainer than ever. Too many battles have been fought,
too many years have passed, there has been too much self-restraint and
self-denial, for it to be possible now to give this heir a great place in
his system. The boy has been born too late. The tempo of Napoleon’s life
has been so rapid. The man who at two-and-twenty was still a lieutenant,
had become an emperor at thirty-four. Such a man should have had his
first-born son long before the age of forty-one. He has recklessly
expended his vital energies, and cannot look forward confidently to many
years of power. How can he reasonably expect to establish the child
securely as his successor?
It is, indeed, a poignant sight. Watch this man who is now growing old
with fearful speed, as he dandles the long-desired infant on his knees,
tries his own hat on the baby’s head, watches the child crawling on the
floor while he sits at breakfast, and even (when the youngster grows a
little older) allows him to run about the study. Napoleon is playing the
war game, with little wooden rods representing soldiers dispersed over
the floor, and is planning how to make an end of Wellington in Spain.
The boy is brought to the door. According to the rule of the house, the
governess may not cross this threshold, so Napoleon himself goes to the
door for the child, sets him down among the mimic armies, and, with the
tolerance of a grandfather, lets the child play riot with the battle.
Laughing, he pulls faces at his infant son in front of the looking-glass;
buckles round the body of the two-year-old the sword with which he
has conquered Europe; and, with his actor’s instincts, feels that the
boundaries between jest and earnest are being broken down. Imaginings are
ripening into reality, while all that has seemed to him real is not more
than an image and a parable.
He says that the child is “spirited and sensitive. Just what I want him
to be.... My son is sturdy, and in splendid health. He has my lungs, my
mouth, and my eyes.... I do hope he will turn out well.” In such simple
fashion he writes to Josephine, and to her only. He insists upon her
keeping up the old tone of comradeship, and scolds her when, after the
divorce, she writes to him as “Your Majesty.” “You have written me an
unkind letter. I am always the same; my feelings do not change.... I
shall say no more until you have compared this letter with yours. Then
you can judge for yourself which of us two is more friendly, you or I.”
To no one else can he speak so simply, unless it be to Berthier, whom he
often calls his “wife.” The only thing that annoys him with Josephine is
that she is always running into debt. He thinks that she ought to be able
to save half of her allowance of three millions. “Then in ten years you
would have put by fifteen millions for your grandsons.... Let me know
that you are quite well again. I am told that you are getting as stout
as one of our good Norman peasant women.” But when Josephine continues
to be spendthrift, he tells the steward of her property not to make her
any further payments till evidence is forthcoming that she is no longer
squandering money.
He sees very little more of her, however; and he will have nothing to do
with the lady friends of earlier years. His attitude towards marriage
is that of a respectable citizen, and that of an Italian. Besides, as a
sovereign prince he wishes to set a good example to his subjects. Since
Marie Louise makes no nationalist pretensions (for, being of a dull,
easy-going, and fickle temperament, she has promptly come to regard
herself as a Frenchwoman), the two get on very well together. He has
always time to spare for her. When she is learning to ride, he walks
patiently at her bridle. He, who has never waited before, will even wait
when she is late for dinner. She is not afraid of him, and is saucy
enough to tell the Austrian envoy that she thinks her husband is a little
afraid of her. It is important to the Emperor that he should make a good
impression upon the Hofburg. Regarding it as politically expedient that
a report of his wife’s happiness shall be sent to Vienna, he brings
Metternich to see the empress, and tells the envoy to stay until some
one fetches him. Napoleon goes away, locking the door of the room after
him. He does not release the prisoners for an hour, and then, with a sly
laugh, asks Metternich whether he is satisfied, now, that the empress is
happy.
These are nothing more than jests, but that he can find it possible
to make them in a period of grave decisions indicates that there is a
certain release of tension in his heavily laden heart. In truth, Marie
Louise’s only service to him was that, during the years with which we are
now dealing, her freshness did actually bring him such a solace.
But the marriage did not effect the desired release of political tension.
Felix Austria, accustomed to gain advantages by these royal marriages,
had hoped for a couple of provinces as dower, but had received nothing.
All the more, therefore, must Emperor Francis feel rancorous on account
of the humiliation inflicted upon him by the little Corsican; for, as
soon as the gates of the Hofburg had closed behind Marie Louise, he could
not but regard the marriage as detrimental to his dignity. To appease his
legitimist misgivings, the Habsburg ruler had a search for Buonaparte
ancestors made in musty old Tuscan documents, and when next he met his
son-in-law was able to assure the latter that the Buonaparte lineage
had been traced as far back as the eleventh century. At that time, said
Francis, there had been members of the family in Treviso. Thereupon the
first and last of the Buonaparti made the delicious answer:
“Thank you, Sire. I prefer to be the Rudolf of my race!”
Witty, but unwise, for such words from an upstart sovereign could not
but rankle in the mind of this descendant of an ancient line! When, as
would soon come to pass, the question whether the emperor of Austria
was to take sides for or against his son-in-law was to be decided by
Francis’ mood, the memory of this and similar slights may have played a
considerable part. Napoleon recognised this when it was too late. “Had I
but made myself agreeable to that simpleton, who knows but that in the
plains of Leipzig there might have been a hundred thousand fewer men in
the opposing army!”
All the same, the revolutionist admired many of the ways of the
legitimate ruler. One day he caught sight of a letter his wife had
addressed to her father as follows: “His Sacred Majesty, the Apostolical
Emperor.” Napoleon considered this an excellent idea; and in private,
no doubt, his thoughts turned to Alexander of Macedon who had declared
himself to be the son of Jupiter.
The apostolical emperor was especially out of humour with his son-in-law
on the pope’s account. Napoleon was continually tightening the bonds
round the Holy Father. Pius VII. was kept at Savona. A man by no means
learned in canon law, he was cut off from his advisers, and subsequently
deprived of his papers, in order to make him pliable. A schism was
threatening. Thirteen of the cardinals had failed to put in an appearance
at the Emperor’s wedding, for the pope would not recognise the divorce
which Fesch had pronounced. Now Napoleon has cases filled with the
Vatican State papers brought to Paris, thus arousing the belief that he
really intends to make this city the capital of Christendom; he summons
a council at which the prelates of his European realm appear; he extorts
a decree depriving the pope of the investiture in case of dissent, and
ultimately compels Pius to agree to this—at any rate for France.
Europe is troubled by these matters, and split into factions. On the
whole, the Russians and the Poles are glad that things are going ill
with the Roman pontiff; the Prussians and the English are, of course,
delighted; but what arouses general surprise is that the inhabitants
of the Papal States are also on the side of the Emperor. This little
country, now doubly robbed of its master, is glad to accept the Code
Napoléon, modern education, a rational system of administration, vigorous
road construction, and the draining of the Pontine marshes. Whereas the
son of the revolution has long since brought back the old spirit of Rome
to Paris, he now transplants young revolutionary practice from Paris to
Rome. Thus does Napoleon build bridges.
The excommunicated Emperor cunningly tries to turn the curse against
the pope. When, in newly annexed Holland, he receives the clergy in the
presence of the Protestants, he rebukes the bishops as follows: “Are you
of the religion of Gregory VII.? I am not. My religion is that of Jesus
Christ, who said: ‘Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s.’ In
accordance with the same text, I render unto God the things which are
God’s. I have received my sceptre from God. But I wear a worldly sword,
and know how to use it! God erects thrones. I did not raise myself to my
throne: God set me upon it! You poor mortals wish to resist? You will
not pray for your monarch, because the priest of Rome has excommunicated
him? Do you think I am the sort of man to kiss the pope’s toe?... Prove
to me, imbeciles, that Jesus has appointed the pope his vicegerent, and
that the pope has power to excommunicate a monarch!... Be good citizens,
and sign the Concordat. You, Mr. Prefect, must take such measures as will
prevent my hearing any more of these matters.”
To so preposterous a travesty of his own innermost thoughts has Napoleon
come. He does not believe a word of what he is here thundering out;
and in private mocks at this official doctrine, as he has always done.
Nonetheless, to the circlet of golden laurels with which he had crowned
himself before the eyes of the priest of Rome, there now attaches a
vestige of divine right which makes the crown a heavy one to wear.
II
“Kindly inform me why the price of salt in the neighbourhood of Strasburg
has risen one sou.”
Closely following upon the heels of this enquiry to the Ministry for
War, comes a command to the Admiralty: two entire fleets are to be
constructed in the course of the next three years, one Atlantic fleet
and one Mediterranean fleet; the latter against Sicily and Egypt, the
former against Ireland. As soon as the Spanish affair is in better case,
preparations are to be made for an expedition to the Cape in 1812. An
army of from sixty to eighty thousand men is to be got ready for an
attack on Surinam and Martinique. “Having eluded the enemy cruisers,” the
expeditionary forces are to share out the two hemispheres.
We see how closely at this date, when imaginative fantasies threaten to
develop into adventures, the exact observations of the father of his
country are allied to the rhapsodical plans of the world conqueror. For
that is what Napoleon now attempts: he is actually trying to realise his
old dream of world conquest.
“You want to know whither we are going? We shall have done with Europe;
then, as robbers of robbers less bold than ourselves, we shall march to
the attack, seize India, over which they have made themselves masters....
I must take India ... in the rear, if I am to strike successfully at
England.... Just imagine Moscow occupied, the tsar conciliated or killed
by his people, perhaps a new, dependent throne,—and tell me whether
an army of Frenchmen, reinforced by auxiliary troops from Tiflis,
cannot press forward to the Ganges, and thence, at a touch, destroy the
whole structure of English commerce!... At one blow, France would have
established the independence of the West and the freedom of the seas!”
A witness reports that while he was voicing these ideas “his eyes shone
with a wonderful light, and he went on to point out the reasons for the
adventure, all the difficulties it entailed, the means of achievement,
and the prospects of success.”
Shall the tsar be conciliated or killed? That is the question which
troubles the Emperor the whole year round. Calculations and presentiments
make him desire to have Alexander as his friend rather than his enemy.
Napoleon has nothing to gain by a defeat of Russia. On the contrary!
He dreads being forced into this war, and endeavours, as on former
occasions, to avoid it; though only if the tsar, as previously agreed,
shall participate in the great final struggle as an ally. Napoleon keeps
the tsar under observation, and perceives that suggestions are having
less and less effect upon Alexander. He therefore writes to a prince of
the Confederation of the Rhine in these amazing terms: “This war will
break out in spite of the tsar, in spite of me, and in spite of the
interests of the two empires.”
Never before had the Emperor or the Consul declared, in such words, that
war was unavoidable. Precisely because all rational need for the campaign
was lacking this time, he found it necessary to proclaim the war with the
tsar to be the work of fate. At the very first hand-clasp, in the peace
tent on the Memel, the seed of this war was sown. During the days of
intimacy which followed, when the encounter blossomed into friendship,
that seed invisibly took root and grew. In later days, Talleyrand’s
treacherous diplomacy cherished its growth; and when, at Erfurt, the
emperors embraced, they could already feel between them the coils of
the snake. That they did not become related by marriage was neither an
accident nor the outcome of a conscious desire: it was consequent upon
the mistrust which had invaded the tsar’s mind, a mistrust of which
he could not rid himself and which was to prove well founded. Two men
wishing to divide Europe between them, could not see with complacency
the half in a rival’s hands. Their intentions were honourable at the
outset; but they were impossible of fulfilment. The day of contest must
inevitably come at last. “He alone is still weighing upon the pinnacle of
my edifice. My rival is young; daily his strength is waxing; daily mine
is waning.” This gloomy recognition spurs him ever onward.
It is useless to try to interpret such decrees of destiny as the outcome
of political causes.
Somewhat earlier, the Emperor has asked the tsar to lay an embargo on
all neutral ships, as he himself has done, and thus give England the
death-blow. The tsar cannot agree to this, for it would fatally injure
his own sea-borne trade; he will only continue, as before, to confiscate
all the prohibited goods he discovers, but he needs colonial wares from
the neutrals. Being unable to stop this leak in the East, the Emperor has
to exercise redoubled care on the German coast, and he therefore annexes
the mouths of the Weser and the Elbe with the Hansa towns and part of
Hanover. “Circumstances demand these new guarantees against England.”
Oldenburg is swallowed up with the rest, though the heir to this duchy
has married Alexander’s sister.
The Emperor’s high-handed proceedings were a logical outcome of his
policy, but they were necessarily an offence to the tsar. Alexander
regarded them as a breach of the treaty of Tilsit, in which the
integrity of Oldenburg had been guaranteed. He issued a circular to
the powers protesting against this insult to his house, a remonstrance
almost equivalent to a declaration of war. In this document he enquired
what could be the use of alliances unless the treaties in which they
were incorporated were strictly observed, so that the cabinets of Europe
could not but smile at the concluding words of the circular, in which he
described the alliance between Russia and France as permanent. His next
step was a ukase in which he threw Russia open to colonial goods, while
imposing prohibitive import duties on wine and silk, the products of
French industry.
The maps lie spread on the tables in St. Petersburg and Paris. Where can
either power best harass the other? The tsar proposes to make peace with
Turkey. The Emperor incites Austria to seize Serbia, to advance towards
Moldavia and Wallachia, promising not to interfere; this will keep
Alexander busy. Metternich nods assent, but does not move. “What about
Poland?” thinks Alexander. “Has not Napoleon already enlarged the duchy
of Warsaw by the addition of Galicia? Is there any guarantee that he will
not re-establish the kingdom of Poland?” Caulaincourt, French ambassador
in Russia, who admires the tsar and wants peace, gives the desired
guarantees. But the Emperor would only agree to a secret ratification.
If the differences between France and Russia should culminate in war, he
will need Poland for his operations against the tsar; Polish hopes must,
therefore, be fostered. Penetrating this design, Alexander demands an
open treaty, which shall put an end to Polish expectations.
When Masséna is defeated in Spain, the Emperor entertains fresh doubts.
Caulaincourt, who is back in Paris, does his utmost to intensify these
misgivings, dilates on the tsar’s will-to-peace, and ventures far in his
defence of Alexander. The Emperor leads him on; hears all he has to say;
asks a thousand questions concerning the tsar and the court, Alexander’s
piety, the nobles, and the peasants; takes Caulaincourt by the ear, a
sign of affability.
“You must be in love with him!”
“I am in love with peace.”
“So am I. But I will not allow any one to dictate to me. Evacuate Danzig,
forsooth! Next I shall have to ask Alexander’s permission before I can
hold a review in Mainz. You are a fool. I am an old fox, and know the
people with whom I am dealing.... We must deprive this Russian colossus
and his hordes of the power to inundate the south once more.... I shall
advance northwards, and re-establish there the old boundaries of Europe.”
Quite unsubstantial reasons, masks, mere pretexts. Warningly Caulaincourt
quotes Alexander’s words: “I shall learn from his own teachings, which
are those of a master. Our climate will make war for us. The French are
not inured to it as we are. Miracles only happen when the Emperor is
present, and he cannot be everywhere.” Napoleon is greatly moved by these
words; he tramps restlessly up and down the room; the conversation lasts
for hours. Since he cannot refute Caulaincourt’s arguments, he makes
vague answers behind which his titanic wishes loom.
“A well-fought battle will put an end to the fine resolves of your friend
Alexander.... He is false, ambitious, and weak; he has the character
of a Greek. Believe me, it is he, not I, who wants this war, for he
cherishes a hidden design.... He is out of humour because I did not take
his sister.” When Caulaincourt gives proofs to the contrary, Napoleon
says: “I have forgotten the details.”—Forgotten! This is a new word in
the Emperor’s mouth. He knows his position to be weak; himself a man of
facts, he now brushes away those which he finds inconvenient.
He sends a more resolute envoy to the tsar. When a proposal comes from
St. Petersburg that Warsaw shall be exchanged for Oldenburg, the Emperor
says threateningly to the Russian ambassador, raising his voice so that
every one in the room may hear: “Not one Polish village!”
But these political incidents and discussions are merely the forms of
destiny. Schemes flash like lightning through his brain; his soul is
devoured by wishes: and he will rather reveal these things to a dangerous
enemy like Fouché than to a shrewd adherent like Caulaincourt. He cannot
rid himself of the ex-Jacobin and ex-cleric. Last year, he had cashiered
the Minister of Police, for Fouché was obviously intriguing with England.
But Napoleon was as lenient as he had been at the time of the conspiracy
which had brought him back hot foot from Astorga. Instead of banishing
the man, the Emperor had appointed him senator—at the same time writing
to him words which give a glimpse into the inferno of these struggles
between the monarch and the spy: “Although I do not doubt your devotion,
I find it necessary to have you watched all the time. This is a fatiguing
necessity, and I should not be called upon to do anything of the kind.”
But though he dismisses Fouché from his ministerial post, and has the
watcher watched, Napoleon cannot get on without him, and talks to him
about the most private matters.
“Since my marriage, people fancy that the lion is asleep. They will soon
learn whether I am asleep. I need eight hundred thousand men, and have
them; I shall tow all Europe in my wake. Europe is nothing more than
an old woman, and with my eight hundred thousand men I can make her do
whatever I please.... Did not you yourself say to me: ‘You let your
genius have its way, because it does not know the word impossible.’ How
can I help it if a great power drives me on to become dictator of the
world? You and the others, who criticise me to-day and would like me to
become a good-natured ruler—have not you all been accessories? I have not
yet fulfilled my mission, and I mean to end what I have begun. _We need
a European legal code, a European court of appeal, a unified coinage, a
common system of weights and measures. The same law must run throughout
Europe. I shall fuse all the nations into one._... This, my lord duke,
is the only solution that pleases me....” Having said this, he suddenly
sends Fouché from the room.
Here we have it plainly disclosed, Napoleon’s vision of the United
States of Europe. The plan is recorded by one who, in his memoirs,
would fain have discredited the Emperor—this plan with its extremely
rational deductions and its daimonic inspiration. Europe is no longer
a “mole-hill” as it was in the days of Milan and Rivoli, when he was
nothing more than General Bonaparte, and when to the young man of
genius all possible adversaries seemed too petty. Fifteen years later,
Europe has become a plastic material; and Bonaparte is the emperor,
the legislator, the great orderer, the enemy of the anarchy out of
which he sprang, the modeller who would mould the clay into a splendid
whole. Throughout the intervening years he has been marching along a
predestined path; now he displays before us, in this statement of his
aims, the productive consequences towards which he has been moving along
that road of force through ever new hecatombs of slaughter. Behind him
lie Charlemagne’s visions of a united Europe; in front of him glide new
forms; and Cæsar, half way towards the realisation of his dream, is well
aware that the spirit will ultimately overpower the sword. He has himself
said this; and what he is now striving to establish by force with the aid
of eight hundred thousand men, will some day come into existence as a
voluntary amalgamation based upon reason and necessity. All the nations
will fuse into one.
This, my lord duke, is the only solution that pleases me.
III
While Napoleon is pouring his thoughts into Fouché’s ears, Alexander is
pouring gold into Talleyrand’s pockets, and no doubt Talleyrand is going
shares with Fouché. The bank could have informed Napoleon to whom Count
Nesselrode, the new secretary to the Russian embassy, was paying out such
large sums of money. From month to month Talleyrand lets Russia know
how the French preparations for war are advancing, and when they will
be completed. The limping Mephistopheles must have smiled to himself,
sometimes, when Russia paid him for his information with licenses for the
import of English goods into Russian harbours—documents which he could
sell for hard cash in Paris!
Is the tsar richer than the Emperor? Russia is still allied to France,
but the Russian market has been closed to French goods, and the famous
1811 vintage has one purchaser the less. Since England and Spain have
long ceased to be customers, French industry is in a bad way. But when
the Minister for Finance urges peace because tranquillity is essential to
the restoration of French finances, the Emperor cuts him short by saying:
“Not at all! It is true that our finances are disordered, but that is why
we need war!”
This argument was valid in the past, when the general had sent from
Italy the money which the indebted Directory needed, and when, as Consul
and Emperor he had made money by his wars. The French State, suffering
more than any other from the effects of the blockade it had itself
established, showed a deficit for the first time, though the deficit
amounted to hardly more than fifty millions. Yet, even now, the Emperor
refused to sanction any kind of State loan; “that would be immoral,
for it would lay a burden upon later generations.” Nevertheless, he
introduced indirect taxes and monopolies; nor did he act unwisely in
doing so, since he expected to acquire fresh markets, and thereby more
stable finances, from the Russian war. But victory was essential!
He enthusiastically lays his plans before the Chambers of Commerce.
“England has harmed herself far more by her blockade than she has harmed
any other country; she has taught us how to dispense with her products.
In a couple of years’ time, Europe will have adapted herself to the new
ways of feeding her populations. Soon, we shall have more than enough
beet sugar and shall be able to do without cane sugar.... Every year
I draw only nine hundred millions revenue from my own country; three
hundred millions I put away, and store in the cellars of the Tuileries.
The Bank of France is full of silver; the Bank of England has none.
Since the peace of Tilsit, I have received more than a milliard francs
in indemnities. Austria is bankrupt. England and Russia will soon follow
suit. I alone have money!”
All the same, no one has much faith in his fine words. The more the
Emperor’s plans for world conquest force the pace of recruiting, the
more keenly does he keep watch upon the internal tranquillity of France.
As the ruthlessness of his dictatorship increases, the mood of the
citizens of France becomes gloomier and gloomier. Any criticism, even
in the remotest corner of the realm, is immediately pounced upon and
prosecuted. There are more than three thousand persons locked up in
gaol without trial, because this one “hates the Emperor,” or this other
has certain “religious outlooks,” or another has written, “in private
letters, unfriendly expressions in regard to the government.” A new
press bureau, with the absurd name of “Bureau of Public Opinion,” is
established to manufacture political trends. When a Dutch newspaper
publishes the statement that it is within the competence of the pope to
excommunicate kings, not only is the journal suppressed, but the author
of the offending article is arrested. In a certain book, an appreciation
of the English constitution has to be deleted; another work has to be
rechristened “Campaigns of Napoleon the Great,” whereas the author’s
original title had been “History of Bonaparte.”
While oppression of thought is rampant, it is not inconsonant with the
imperialistic spirit to find that such men as Monge and Laplace, Guérin
and Gérard, are willing to accept baronial honours. And when the French
version of _The Robbers_ is prohibited in Hamburg, the last of the
republicans recall with ironical bitterness the day twenty years earlier
when the revolution had conferred the right of French citizenship upon
its German author.
What cares the Emperor for the mood of these ideologues? Under the spell
of the evolution of his own powers, his eyes fixed upon the goal of his
life’s aspiration, he misjudges now, as earlier in his struggle with
the pope, the moral impression he is making upon his contemporaries.
Yet in the past he had never failed to take this into account; at each
step, he had questioned public opinion. Now, he allows the newfangled
Bureau to manipulate public opinion: “What do I care for the opinion of
the drawing-rooms and the babblers! I recognise only one opinion, that
of the peasants!” Certain it is that the peasants are his most faithful
supporters, mainly because he rescued their lands from the dangers
threatened by the revolution. Now that the Spanish war has swallowed up
larger and larger armies, the peasants have to pay eight thousand francs
for a substitute, simply to save the few remaining sons to carry on the
work of agriculture on the lands of their fathers. Many thousands of
these young men are trying to evade service; and those who in the early
days of the war would have joyfully rallied to the colours, have now
to be rounded up by mobile columns or forced into the ranks by threats
against their families and the communes to which they belong.
Why should the Emperor be surprised at such a change of mood? Had not
General Bonaparte set out to carry the ideas of the revolution to the
peoples groaning under the yoke of emperors and kings? Did not the
First Consul go forth to repel in his one campaign, did not the Emperor
likewise go forth to repel in his three wars, the ever-renewed onslaughts
of the allied monarchs? That by wars thus forced upon him he won more
than freedom for the land of his adoption, that by the battles of
Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram he obtained new provinces from the enemy,
was the outcome of his genius, and encouraged the people’s army to fresh
deeds of valour. Even the rivalry with England was comprehensible to the
French people; had it not been ever thus in the days of their fathers
and grandfathers before them? But what could the peasant of Provence
make of these purely political struggles in Spain and in Russia? The
Emperor could not explain to him the plan for setting up a United States
of Europe. Men had disappeared in the rivers of Andalusia, the names of
which fell haltingly from a Frenchman’s lips. The peasant needed the
support of his son’s young arm, now that the years were creeping onward.
So it was that he purchased his son’s freedom from military service, and
growled as he paid.
What had the German peasants to say when, addressed as “contingents,”
they answered the call of their kings and accompanied the foreign Emperor
into distant lands? Thousands of peasants from the valley of the Main
were dispatched to Spain; Jerome sent thirty thousand Westphalians to the
Oder; Saxons guarded the Vistula; Württembergers and Bavarians flowed
in a steady stream eastward, for “if the princes of the Confederation
of the Rhine” (thus writes the Emperor to one of these same princes)
“give me the least cause to doubt their willingness to undertake a joint
defence, then, I tell them frankly, they are lost. I prefer open enemies
to untrustworthy friends.” Such is the crack of the master’s whip. He
deals more politely with the Habsburg. All being well, Austria may even
be rewarded for her aid by receiving Silesia.
Germany, composed as she is of many small and disintegrated fragments,
serves Napoleon admirably in his jig-saw game with the nations. The three
southern States have had their inhabitants and their lands bartered and
exchanged at will; and, since Eugene has lost his throne to the Emperor’s
son (the baby was made “King of Rome”) he is immediately installed as
ruler in the hastily concocted “grand duchy of Frankfort.”
What of Prussia? Why should Prussia continue to exist? Had he not, in
Tilsit days, merely preserved this kingdom to please the tsar? But
he is about to destroy the tsar! By notices and decrees, the Emperor
announces that now, just before the war with Russia begins, Prussia is
to be parcelled up. Does he not know that for the last year Prussia
has been the ally of Russia, and that in a secret treaty the tsar has
promised Frederick William his assistance? The Emperor hears much of
defiant songs, of volunteer corps, of discontent in the universities, of
the Tugendbund. Beware! Remember Spain! Do not trust to the proverbial
“tolerance and coldness of these north Germans”! Surely it would be wiser
to utilise the Prussian army before destroying it....
The great-hearted Scharnhorst assures Frederick William that now is the
time to strike. But Metternich, in Vienna, tricks the Prussian general
when he proposes an alliance, and advises him to seek alliance with
Russia rather than with the Habsburg emperor. For only if the man with
whom he exchanges these words of false friendship, becomes an opponent,
only if Prussia enters the war as Austria’s enemy, can Austria hope to
enclose Silesia once more within her borders. At the same time Hardenberg
bends before the Vienna wind, to-day as always. The king, who will take
no risks, and who considers Napoleon absolutely unconquerable, at last
makes up his mind to enter into alliance with the Emperor; his resolution
comes too late to secure favourable terms. Silesia and Poland are already
alive with troops, and Prussia is surrounded. In such circumstances it is
natural that she should be treated as a vassal, should have to tolerate
the passage of armies, should have to put up with requisitionings, should
have to look on patiently while her eastern fortresses are manned by
French soldiers and her auxiliary corps commanded by foreign marshals.
Metternich writes to his master in gleeful mood: “Prussia need no longer
be reckoned among the powers.”
And yet! And yet! Although Europe, from Capua to Tilsit, at the outset
of 1812, is rallying to Napoleon’s standard, although his arm reaches
from Finisterre to Bukovina, he feels how uncertain is the outcome of his
campaign, and, as Count Ségur tells us, starts up from the conning of his
interminable lists and calculations to exclaim in terror: “I am not ready
to undertake a war in such far-off lands! I need three years more!”
But the machine rolls on; no master hand can stay it. An inner impulse
urges him forward; the whole history of his rise to power impels him;
all the shades of vanished years drive him on. He, who has built so many
harbours wherein to seek refuge in times of storm and stress, is in the
end tossed out upon the open sea, more roughly, more speedily than he
had wished, and, with the wild determination of the adventurer, he now
recklessly seizes the steering-wheel which for so long he has manipulated
with statesmanlike care. “Do you not see,” he exclaims to his brother,
“that I can only keep my seat upon this throne by means of the fame
which brought me to it? That a private individual such as I, who has
merely risen to become a ruler, dare not call a halt? That such a one is
constrained to mount higher and ever higher, and is doomed to perish the
moment he stops climbing?”
His soul is a-flicker with excitement, so that at one moment he is eager
for the final struggle, and at the next dreads it. His letter to the
tsar, with which, as heretofore, he begins the campaign, still preserves
a friendly tone. At the same time he says to a Russian colonel who is
on spy duty in Paris: “Since the tsar is young and I have yet many
years to live, I had thought to preserve the peace of Europe by means
of our good feelings towards one another. My feelings have not changed.
Tell him this; and say, in addition, that if the fates decree that the
two greatest powers of the world are to come to blows over girlish
peccadilloes, I shall enter the lists as a gallant knight, without hatred
and without enmity. I suggest to him the possibility of our meeting for
breakfast together between our respective outposts.... I still hope
that we shall not spill the blood of hundreds of thousands of brave men,
simply because we cannot agree as to the colour of a ribbon!”
How his own unrest vibrates through these brilliant subterfuges, which
he specially adapts to cajole Alexander’s feminine disposition! A grey
gauntlet of steel is hurled from one world power to the other; the great
fight between birth and genius is now to take place in all its grandeur.
And he who, after two decades of dreaming, sees his dream descending out
of the clouds earthwards, talks as if nothing more were at stake than a
girl’s quarrel or the colour of a piece of ribbon—when in reality the
fate of the world hangs in the balance!
IV
What is passing in Alexander’s mind? Estranged from the Russian nobility,
railed at by his mother, cheated out of his hopes of setting up the
cross once more on St. Sophia, deeply concerned about Poland (which
his adversary threatens to liberate)—there are reasons enough, both
in political and court life, why he should no longer regard Napoleon
as his friend. After Tilsit, Metternich had said that it would take
five years for the tsar’s feelings to swing to the opposite pole.
That period had now elapsed, and although the tsar’s was one of those
nervous temperaments in which moods decide actions, on his side, too,
the struggle could assume allegorical greatness. But he lacked a grand
aim and a lofty thought. He was not even fighting to win warlike renown
against the master craftsman in the art of war. The impulses that drove
him to the fight were merely the outcome of a confused mysticism, in
whose waters he had drowned his old veneration for the magician of Tilsit.
Politically, he makes two successful moves in the game, one of these
being intimately adapted to the peculiarities of human character, and
therefore weighty with consequence. To cope with Napoleon, he needs
tranquillity on his southern and his northern borders. He finds means
to keep the sultan neutral; but in the case of Sweden he manages even
better, for he is able to secure an alliance. He and Bernadotte meet on
the frontier; and here, for the second time, the tsar of all the Russias
succumbs to the charm of a French revolutionary. Sweden is in danger of
English vengeance. Norway belongs to the Francophil Danes. The community
of interests between Sweden and Russia secures expression when Russia, in
return for a promise of help in the coming war, guarantees that Sweden
shall have Norway.
But this prospect of territorial enlargement is not the thing that spurs
Bernadotte to action. He, who is king in Napoleon’s despite, cares no
more about his new subjects than those who had become kings by Napoleon’s
favour cared about theirs. But the tsar, too, has an imagination. Looking
forward to the winning of this game, he sees in broad outline what
lies beyond. He sees, not only the Emperor’s defeat, but the Emperor’s
destruction; and while Napoleon, at the head of the greatest army known
to history, is slowly advancing to swallow up the tsar, Alexander is
promising Bernadotte, the friend of Bonaparte’s youth, no less a prize
than the throne of France.
To such heights, this summer, do the opposing eagles soar.
In Dresden, the Emperor treats all the princes to the spectacle of a
review, just as he had done four years earlier in Erfurt. The only
sovereign from among that company who is absent, is the one he is now to
fight. But Alexander’s place has been taken by the Habsburg ruler. Only
once before have Napoleon and Francis met, on the day after Austerlitz.
Twice, since then, has the victorious Emperor of the French occupied the
Austrian’s abandoned capital. When peace had been made between them, and
the victor had wedded the daughter of the vanquished, the girl had been
sent alone from Vienna to distant Paris.
Now Marie Louise sits between husband and father at the sparkling board,
and to outward seeming all is well. The father-in-law is pledged in
alliance, and the Emperor has appointed his wife regent of France. But
vainly has he forbidden her to be so foolish as to attempt the outshining
of her step-mother on these festal occasions. The empress from Paris
sheds tears at the prohibition, while the empress from Vienna weeps
because her pearls are smaller than those worn by Marie Louise. The old
jealousies between the principalities and powers now find vent in family
quarrels which the courtiers try to gloss over. When a health is drunk to
the boy who should be a tie between all four of them, both the men and
both the women drown their thoughts in their champagne, though each knows
perfectly well what the others are thinking.
The December meeting in the windmill near Austerlitz, and the May meeting
in the palace of the Saxon kings! Son-in-law and father-in-law will never
set eyes on one another again.
Meanwhile, half a million men are being ranged between Königsberg and
Lemberg. The master of these legions journeys to Posen, and announces
the “Second Polish War,” for his ostensible aim is merely to wrest
Poland from the tsar—most of the old kingdom, at any rate, as far as
Smolensk. “There or in Minsk,” he tells a confidant, “the campaign will
end. I shall winter in Vilna, organise Lithuania, and live at Russia’s
expense. If, then, peace cannot be secured, I shall, next year, advance
into the centre of the enemy’s land, and stay there until the tsar
becomes pliable.” The whole disposition of Napoleon’s troops is made in
accordance with this scheme. At Russia’s expense? What supplies can he
get from Russia? Has he accurate information regarding the resources of
this foreign land?
In Gumbinnen, he sends for a Prussian president. Speaking of the stores
of grain he has collected in the German ports, and proposes to have sent
to Kovno, he says:
“I presume there are plenty of mills in Kovno?”
“No, Sire; very few mills are to be found there.”
The Emperor looks at Berthier “dubiously.” This glance of the supreme
war lord at his chief of general staff is a fore-shadowing of the
disillusionments he is to experience in the unknown land beyond the
Memel. It is not the mere lack of mills which disturbs him, but the
fact that he is taken by surprise. For a whole year, the Emperor has
been preparing the great campaign. Troops, parks of ammunition, reserve
corps, fourteen hundred pieces of ordnance, siege trains, bridge-building
materials, pontoons, have been assembled from seven realms, counting
the Confederation of the Rhine as one. Eight Baltic fortresses are used
as storehouses, to which hundreds of ships and thousands of wagons
bring wheat and rice. Some of the wagons are drawn by oxen which are
destined for the slaughter house at the end of their journey—a symbol of
compulsory military service, in which a man serves only that he may die.
Now Napoleon learns that he is about to enter a country without mills.
He can build them, no doubt; but at what cost in time and men! Are other
surprises awaiting him across the Russian border? It will be impossible
to carry fodder for one hundred and fifty thousand horses. That is why
he has waited till June, when the grass will be green. But what if the
steppe should disappoint him here?
And what if his men’s spirit should disappoint him?
On the frontier, warning voices make themselves heard. He is told that
these young recruits are hardly able to endure the long marches, and that
the heat will be too much for them. In Dresden, Murat had vainly asked
for furlough. Now, in Danzig, he and Berthier and Rapp are dining with
the Emperor in gloomy silence. Napoleon, emerging from his thoughts of
world conquest, suddenly asks Rapp: “How far is it from Danzig to Cadiz?”
Rapp is bold enough to answer: “Too far, Sire!” Thereupon the master
rejoins:
“I can see, gentlemen, that you no longer have any taste for fighting.
The king of Naples would rather be back in his pretty kingdom; Berthier
would like to be playing the sportsman in Grosbois; Rapp would fain be
enjoying the sweets of Parisian life!”
The marshals answer never a word, for they will not deny that it is so.
But that it should be so, is a new experience for Emperor Napoleon.
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor. Bust by Houdon, Musée de Dijon.
(Photograph by J. E. Bulloz, Paris.)]
When he reaches the Memel, the symbolic significance of the Russian
frontier captivates his imagination to such an extent that he is the
first to cross the river, and he gallops several miles eastward before
returning slowly to the bridge. Well, he is over now, and this time,
in very truth, he has crossed the Rubicon. At his nod, three armies
advance into the interior of Poland. The main army is under his immediate
command, the second being commanded by Eugene, and the third by Jerome.
Why does he venture to entrust a whole army to the leadership of this
amateur (who made such a fool of himself in the last war), even with the
safeguard of veteran generals as advisers? Napoleon thinks he can risk
it. The enemy has at most three hundred thousand men.
Where is the enemy? In two armies, led by Barclay de Tolly and Bagration.
They are somewhere in Lithuania, far away, and the total force is only
one hundred and seventy thousand. Napoleon’s overestimate of the strength
of his opponents was a disastrous error, for if he had himself had
fewer mouths to feed, he would have had a much better chance of getting
adequate supplies for his soldiers. Why is he so keen on superiority of
numbers? General Bonaparte was used, with forty thousand men, to defeat
an enemy that greatly outnumbered him, his method being to crush one wing
of the foe after another. The cumbrous multitude he has collected for the
present campaign is symptomatic of his own increasing age, and of the
lust for power which makes him pile up weight, instead of equipping the
spirit with wings. Is he no longer the commander of the days of Rivoli?
In a sense, he is still that commander, for, even with this gigantic
array of troops, he will be a victorious invader. His first army will
march from Tilsit upon Vilna, to take up a position between the Russian
detachments, so that his second and third armies can separately defeat
the enemy. But the Russian distances weaken his influence. Upon a front
of such vast extent, he cannot show himself everywhere. Those who command
under him are too independent of one another (Davoust and Murat nearly
fight a duel), and yet they are too dependent upon him. Never did he
suffer more than in this campaign from the lack of speedy means of
communication. His was the central brain in all his undertakings, so that
a telegraph would have been far more useful to him than to his opponents.
The Russians are aware of their own weakness. Neither of the two
commanders ventures to stand firm. Both of them withdraw before the
invaders, at first without any mutual understanding, to get into touch
later, far in the rear. These are not the tactics of inspired leaders.
Though the Russians do the right thing, it is merely because they are
afraid of the forces that outnumber theirs, and because they dread the
great name of Napoleon. They are but instruments in the hands of fate.
For a time, the Emperor pauses in his advance. In Vilna, he says: “If
Monsieur Barclay imagines that I am going to run after him to the Volga,
he is making a great mistake. We will follow him to Smolensk and the
Dvina, where a good battle will provide us with quarters.... It would
certainly be destruction were we to cross the Dvina this year. I shall go
back to Vilna, spend the winter there, send for a troupe from the Théâtre
Français, and another to play opera. We shall finish off the affair next
May, unless peace is made during the winter.”
News from the outer world is satisfactory. At length the United States
has declared war on England, and has gained some victories at sea. In
England the opposition, which wants peace, is gathering strength. Even in
Spain things are not going so badly. Forward! A good battle!
But where is the enemy? The Emperor goes scouting, accompanied by only
one officer; there is no trace of the Russians. Uneasiness grows. Since
the invaders are marching light, and therefore too quickly, part of the
army, on bad roads and amid heat and rainstorms, gets separated from its
commissariat, upon which everything depends. In Vilna he fails to find
the tsar, though Alexander has been there just before. At this moment,
news is brought that the supplies are delayed, for the commissariat
wagons have stuck fast in a morass, and the vessels that are bringing
other supplies have run aground in the river; moreover, ten thousand
horses have perished, through gorging themselves upon rank grass. The
shortage cannot be hidden from the troops, who scatter through the town,
and plunder so recklessly that there will be no supplies left for the
next comers.
The Emperor can get nothing from the inhabitants of this land either by
threats or cajoleries; and yet he detests rapine, which leads to chaos.
The Lithuanians note that even now he has not granted the Poles the
promised kingdom. They do not hail him as a liberator, as the people
of Lombardy had done long years before. They give no help; they give
nothing; they are hardly willing to accept in payment the forged rouble
notes, millions of which he has had printed in Paris. They pray.
What is to be done? Now is the time to win over the tsar. He writes: “All
that has taken place is out of keeping with Your Majesty’s character,
and with the personal consideration you have sometimes shown me in
the past.... When I crossed the Memel, I had it in mind to send you
an adjutant, as I have always done in previous campaigns.” But, since
the tsar had refused to receive his last envoy, “I realised that the
invisible providence whose power and dominion I recognise would decide
this matter, as he had decided so many others.... Nothing, therefore, is
left but to conclude with the request that you will remain convinced of
the steadfastness of my kindly feelings towards you.”
Before writing this long and unctuous letter, in which nothing is genuine
except the perplexity and the faith in destiny, he has had a conversation
with a captured general who is to convey the missive. The way in which
the Emperor hectors the prisoner, smacks of comic opera: “What does
the tsar expect from this war? I have seized one of his best provinces
without firing a shot, and neither of us knows what we are quarrelling
about!” Then, as his way was, he spent an hour or more pointing out the
Russians’ mistakes, asking why they had not defended Vilna, and talking
to this captive just as if he had been berating one of his own generals
in Spain. “Are you not ashamed of yourselves?” is the burden of his
song. He waxes enthusiastic about the Poles, whom as a rule he frankly
despises; but now it suits him to make much of their contempt for death.
He says that he has thrice as many soldiers as the tsar, and much more
money, so that he will be able to carry on the war for three years. These
falsehoods are uttered in simulated anger, which he allows to flash out
by fits and starts. The Russian meets bluff with bluff, saying that in
Muscovy they have made preparations for a five years’ campaign. But now
the turn has come for one of the Emperor’s bursts of frankness, in words
suited to the ears of this officer blown him by a chance wind, but of
course designed to impress the tsar, to whom they will be reported.
“I am the man of calculations. When I was in Erfurt, my reckonings
convinced me that it would suit my book better to walk hand in hand with
you Russians, instead of quarrelling with you. We might still have been
good friends.... Then the tsar made peace with me, when his country
wanted war; now he makes war on me, when his country wants peace. It
puzzles me that so distinguished a man can have anything to do with such
persons as some of his present advisers.... How can any one make war
through a council of war? If at two in the morning a good idea enters
my mind, in a quarter of an hour I have issued my orders, and half an
hour later my outposts are executing it. But what happens among you?”
Napoleon shows the prisoner a letter from the Russian general staff
which his men have intercepted. “You can take it with you, for it will
while away the tedium of your journey.... Tell the tsar I pledge him my
word that five hundred and fifty thousand men have already crossed the
Vistula. But I am a man of calculations, not a man of passion. I am still
willing to enter into negotiations. What a glorious reign he might have
had, if he had not broken with me!”
The general is alarmed by this flood of confessions. But in the evening,
when he dines with the Emperor and three of the marshals, he is placed on
an entirely different footing, for the Emperor proceeds to cross-question
him like an explorer eager for information.
“Have you any Kirghiz regiments?”
“No, but we are making experiments with Bashkirs and Tartars, who are
very like the Kirghiz.”
“Is it true that when the tsar was in Vilna, he went to tea every day
with a pretty lady there? Let me see, what was her name?”
“The tsar is courtly to every lady.”
“Is it true that Baron vom Stein dined with the tsar?”
“All persons of note were invited to dinner.”
“How can the tsar tolerate such a man as Stein at his table! Does he
think the fellow can be fond of him? Angels and devils cannot be good
companions.... What is the population of Moscow? How many houses? How
many churches?... Why are there such a lot of churches?”
“Because our people are very pious.”
“Nobody is pious nowadays. Which is the shortest way to Moscow?”
“All roads lead to Rome, Sire. You can choose your own route to Moscow.
Charles XII. marched by way of Pultava.”
At this mischievous answer, the Emperor thought fit to turn the
conversation. As for the general, he had wit enough to report in St.
Petersburg that Napoleon was extremely nervous.
This nervousness increases mile after mile. The Emperor tries to join
battle, but the Russians evade the issue. Barclay, who is waiting for a
junction with Bagration, retreats aimlessly; Bagration does not come,
for he believes that he is facing, not Jerome, but the main body of the
invaders. Still, Bagration retreats. Jerome, who ought to follow him
up, is too slow in his movements, so that Davoust, who is waiting for
a junction with Jerome, has to let the enemy slip. The Emperor, in a
rage, cashiers Jerome (who retires in dudgeon to Cassel), and gives the
command to Davoust. Too late! His fondness for Jerome, the braggart, has
cost him the chance of a decisive battle. As difficulties increase, the
Emperor redoubles the pace of his advance; but as the tempo is quickened,
the difficulties are redoubled. There is no means, now, of providing
for the army. The retreating Russians burn their storehouses. No bread,
no vegetables, nothing but meat. Dysentery breaks out. The horses eat
the thatch from the roofs, and collapse in great numbers, so that their
corpses line the road. During this advance in which there are no battles,
the Bavarian leader estimates the losses of his corps at nine hundred men
a day.
What is Paris saying?
Very little news comes to hand; hardly a word even from the empress. It
seems as if the couriers were already being cut off. But here is a report
from the Tuileries, written by the governess, to let him know how the
child is getting on. He rejoins: “I hope to hear from you soon that the
last four teeth have been cut. I have seen to it that the nurse shall get
everything she needs. You can assure her of this.”
See the Emperor in the sun-parched steppe; before him rises the smoke
of the burning villages he has yet to reach, behind him the stench of
decomposing bodies. The strange food and the unaccustomed heat lead to
a recurrence of his attacks of gastric spasm; he can no longer bear to
ride, and, since wheeled traffic is constantly coming to grief, he
covers great distances on foot, accompanied by the whole of his staff,
pursued by the thought: Where is the fight to take place? Couriers arrive
less frequently, and, when they do come, bring no news calculated to
interest him in his present state of nervous tension. Yet here he is,
pacing up and down within his tent; and the pen of his secretary, instead
of, as usual, ordering masses of men to move from one place to another,
hastens over the paper to record the master’s concern about the four
teeth which are still lacking to an infant in a forlorn palace twelve
hundred miles away. Soon the Emperor will be in Vitebsk. How far is it
thence to Paris?
“Too far, Sire,” is re-echoed from unseen lips.
At last! We’ve got him! There stands Barclay, held in check for the
moment by Murat! He thinks to escape to Smolensk on the morrow; such are
the tidings! The hour has struck. But the Emperor is ill, irresolute.
With unwonted consideration, he does not wish his exhausted army to
go straight from the heat of the march into the heat of battle; with
unwonted caution, he wishes to collect more troops than he really needs
before beginning the attack, in order that the battle may be “another
Austerlitz.” He waits till morning.
The Russian laughs. Under cover of the morning mists, he makes good his
retreat; and when the air clears not a trace of the foe is to be seen,
nor can a guess be made as to the direction he has taken. At midday the
Emperor returns from the search, flings his sword on the table, and
exclaims:
“Here I remain. Let us rally our forces. The campaign of the year ’12 is
at an end.” When Murat urges him to continue the forward march, Napoleon
answers: “In ’13 I shall be at Moscow; in ’14 at St. Petersburg. This war
will last three years!”
It is time that the scattered army should be reorganised. Nearly a third
of the forces has been struck off the lists, although no battle has taken
place; the country has devoured them. Where are the auxiliaries—the
Prussians under Macdonald, the Austrians under Schwarzenberg? Trustworthy
news is lacking. Too far! What a country! How is one to pass the weary
hours when there is no fighting? Wait? In Cairo there were a hundred
men of science in his train, and the country was full of unsolved
riddles.—The following letter bears witness to a sense of boredom the
Emperor has not known since the days of his lieutenancy:
“Send us some entertaining books,” the secretary writes to the librarian
in Paris. “If there are some good novels, new or old, which the Emperor
has not read, or memoirs pleasantly written, we should be most grateful;
for time hangs so heavily on our hands in this place.”
Can we not see him standing in front of his tent in his old green coat?
He takes one pinch of snuff after another, and from time to time looks
through his telescope across the plain. Then a grenadier approaches
with a paper in his hand; the Emperor reads it, puts it away; the two
secretaries gaze dumbly from the gloom of the tent, like two tamed
animals awaiting the nod of their tamer. Rustam sits apart Turk fashion;
for him alone is the weather never too hot. All movement is paralysed,
activity is stopped, one can go neither forward nor backward. Napoleon
calls towards the tent: “Méneval! Order some novels!”
News comes at last: England has secured a treaty with the tsar and with
the Spanish regent. This arouses the Emperor: he sees in it the birth
of a fresh coalition; perhaps, even, encirclement. Must he really lie
up here till Europe rises against him or goes to sleep? Over there is
Smolensk. The two Russian armies have doubtless by now met in the town.
That is where the real Russia begins: surely they will not evacuate and
burn the old town of the Blessed Virgin, as they have been doing in the
Polish and Lithuanian wilderness! Should victory be achieved at Smolensk,
then the march on Moscow or St. Petersburg can be undertaken at will.
He questions his generals. Many of them utter words of warning. But the
Emperor replies: “Russia cannot continue this sacrifice of her towns.
Alexander can only begin negotiations after there has been a big battle.
No blood has yet been spilled. Even if I have to march as far as the holy
city of Moscow, I am determined to force a fight and win!”
At last the two Russian armies have effected a junction; they plan a
systematic retreat, preceded by a stubborn resistance; wave after wave of
the weary French army breaks against the walls of Smolensk. The veterans
think of Acre, thirteen years gone by.... In the end, the town falls,
but it falls amid the flames; a heap of ruins is all that is left in the
victor’s hands. Is the Emperor beginning to understand the moral strength
of this people? Can he not see that day by day its mood becomes more
fanatical, that it would rather burn its ancient holy things than leave
them to the enemy? There remains nothing for a starving army to plunder.
The Emperor, indeed, is in sorry plight. King Lear upon the heath. Power
crumbles in fragments from his body; every gesture melts in the air; from
afar the laughter of the rational world comes echoing, to be lost in the
void. An end must be made. A second message is sent to the tsar. No use
writing, for that last letter from Vilna has remained unanswered. Once
more a captured general is ushered into his presence, and once more the
Emperor’s secret meditations are unveiled. In conclusion he says:
“Can you write to the tsar? No? Still, you can write to your brother
at headquarters and tell him what I am saying to you. You will greatly
oblige me if you tell him that you have seen me and that I have charged
you to write to him. He would do me a real service if he himself would
let the tsar know, or get the grand duke to do it for him, that my
greatest wish is to conclude peace.... What are we fighting for? Of
course, if you were the English, that would be a different matter!
But the Russians have done nothing to me. You want to buy coffee and
sugar cheaply? Very well. That can be arranged. But do you fancy it
will be easy to beat me? Then get your council of war to consider the
situation; if it thinks the Russians can achieve a victory, choose your
battle-ground.... Otherwise I shall be compelled to take Moscow, and, in
spite of every precaution, I shall perhaps not be able to save it from
destruction. A capital which has been in the possession of the enemy, is
like a woman who has lost her honour.... What do you think? If the tsar
wishes to conclude peace, surely none will oppose him?”
As a young lieutenant, as a young general, he had never asked a favour;
he could not; he knew only how to command. Even to kings he wrote in the
tone of a commander, and the word “please” had only twice passed his lips
during the course of this last decade: the first time, when he asked the
pope to anoint him emperor; the second time, when he besought Francis of
Habsburg for his daughter’s hand. Yet to-day, what a tone! What thoughts
must be passing through the captive’s mind at the moment when his sword
is given back to him!—Can this be the master of the world? Has he not
begged me, a poor man, begged me and my brother, to do him a service? How
came these things to be? Has he no other messenger? Coffee and sugar are
to blame, it seems, for the fact that an army of hundreds of thousands
of men is perishing in my land! And, as though the whole thing were some
brilliant game of chess, the master player sends his challenge, while
Little Mother Russia is suffering and weeping, and sees one of her cities
after the other go up in flames, and the images of her saints reduced to
ashes!
The letter to the captive general’s brother is duly written, passes
Berthier’s censorship, is delivered—but is never answered. The Emperor is
beside himself with rage: he passes through a period in which he makes
impulsive and vacillating decisions. When Rapp asks whether the army is
to go forward or to retreat, Napoleon answers: “The wine is poured out;
it must be drunk to the last drop. I am for Moscow.... Too long have I
played the emperor; it is time I became the general once more.” The eyes
of the officer light up as he recognises the old ring in the voice!—We
are at the beginning of September.
On the sacred soil of the heath near Borodino, Kutusoff, Barclay’s
successor, must at length put up a fight. The armies now are of equal
strength: this is the game the Emperor proposed. No one sleeps, for
to-morrow, to-morrow at last, the battle will be joined! Then will golden
Moscow lie at our feet, and all our troubles will be at an end. In the
middle of the night, a courier arrives from Paris. The Emperor, bending
over his maps, asks if there is anything urgent to attend to. Silently
his secretary hands him a dispatch from Spain: Wellington has gained a
decisive victory over Marmont in the fight near Salamanca. The Emperor
reads the report, makes no comment, and resumes his interrupted work. At
the eastern extremity of Europe, at the point where it loses itself in
the Asiatic wastes, in a few hours he is to vanquish the Russians. This
is no time to trouble his mind as to the significance of the victory of
the detested Briton at the southern extremity of Europe. Day has dawned.
To-day, as every day, the guards call the salute: “Vive l’Empereur!”
He shows them his son’s picture, which the courier that night had brought
him from Paris. There they stand, the old war-dogs, never dreaming
that France has been beaten in Spain, but admiring the portrait of the
beautiful boy who is their leader’s very own son. When the picture is
brought back to the tent, the Emperor says, speaking like a poet: “Hide
it away. He is too young to look upon a battle-field.”
In fierce fighting, on this day of Borodino, salient points are taken,
lost, and retaken. The guards shout. They want to decide the issue, here,
on the Moskva, as they have so often done before. His generals beseech
him to order the advance, and his intimates urge him to action, but he
will not give the word. For the first time, when the fight is on, he
will not stir from his place. He is feverish, panting for breath, racked
with a cough, and his legs are swelled. He sits motionless on his horse,
and cannot make up his mind to order the advance of the guards, although
the fate of the day seems to hang on it. “Suppose there should be another
battle to-morrow? What men shall I have left to fight it with?” At night
the Russians withdraw. Next day, when the fallen are counted on the
field, they number seventy thousand dead or half-dead—more than in any of
his previous battles. The Emperor exclaims:
“Fortune is a strumpet. I have often said so. Now the truth is coming
home to me.”
But the way to Moscow is open. Half a million men had been chosen for the
invasion. One hundred thousand of them are still following him, when,
from an elevation, with his back towards the setting sun, he first sees
the city of a thousand cupolas, and upon the hill in its centre that
fragment of the East, the Kremlin. Napoleon, as he gazes at the sight, is
filled with weariness rather than with exultation, and he says in a low
tone:
“Moscow! It is time!”
V
“Where are the keys of the city? Why are not the mayor and corporation
here to hand them over?”
For the greater part of the afternoon he waits while the army marches
past him, waits for the keys of the town. At Vienna and Milan, at Madrid
and Berlin, he had ridden through the gates as a conqueror. Are these
Tartars ignorant of the fine old Roman custom? From afar can be heard the
noise made by Kutusoff’s soldiers, as the half-beaten army evacuates the
Eastern side of the town, while Napoleon’s men are streaming in from the
west. The advance guard of the French and the rear guard of the Russians
are almost in touch. It is a silent entry, for the town is like a city
of the dead; the houses are empty. “Still, there are plenty of houses,”
think the weary campaigners; “we shall find food, and be able to sleep at
our ease.”
The Emperor and his staff ride slowly through the streets whose silence
is so ominous. The Kremlin is their destination. Here is the ancient
fortress. The newcomers look with astonishment at its walls. All the
gates are open, but there is no one there to act as guide. The golden
and red halls are forsaken, as in the vision of a dream. The invaders
make their way into a huge room where the windows are boarded up. The
grenadiers knock the boards away with the butt ends of their muskets, and
the Emperor recognises by the canopy that he is in the coronation room of
the tsars of Muscovy; but the throne is veiled.
Peace is the only thing lacking to him in this moment of fulfilment.
Where is the peace? He has nothing but a victory. Who has cheated him
of its fruits? Only the vast, strange land; the steppe has cheated him
to-day, as the desert cheated him thirteen years ago. Why did he not
free the serfs in Lithuania, and thus win guides and new soldiers, as he
had planned to do aforetime with the liberated Arabs? What if he were to
adopt this policy now? The town is deserted, but there are peasants in
the surrounding countryside. Why not summon them, make terms with them?
We are masters here; this enigmatic realm can still offer much of what we
desire!
Night comes, but sleep is coy. “Let us do some work, then, to distract
our minds,” he says to Caulaincourt. He opens the map of Poland;
satisfies himself that it was impossible to stay there; in six weeks he
can be in St. Petersburg. The muster rolls (they are his Bible, which
he always takes with him on a journey, and perpetually cons even in
peace time) show him what forces are still at his disposal. His spirits
rise as he looks at the columns of figures. “In a few weeks I could get
together a quarter of a million men here. There are plenty of roofs to
cover them, but what about food? The city seems to be in the middle of a
desert!”
A red glare shows through the windows. Fire! Oh, well, we’re used to
that. There were several fires here and there yesterday evening. But
orderlies rush in, and generals arrive. A hundred messengers have
reported the outbreak of fires all over the city. Not accidental fires,
but prearranged, for the fire-engines have been broken or removed. Do
these lunatics mean that Holy Moscow should go up in flames? What will
the Emperor do? Ségur, who was with him in these dark hours, tells us
what happened:
“It seems as if the encircling flames have spread to the Emperor’s mind.
By turns, he leaps to his feet, sits down again, or tramps hastily
through the rooms of the palace. His abrupt movements betray his terrible
agitation. He abandons an urgent task, resumes it, abandons it once more,
that he may fling the window wide. He exclaims:
“‘What a dreadful sight! Their own work! So many palaces! How stupendous
a decision! Who could have expected anything of the kind? What men they
are! They are Scythians!’
“Suddenly we are informed that the Kremlin has been mined. Some of the
servants are panic-stricken; the guard quietly awaits orders. The Emperor
smiles incredulously, but he continues to pace convulsively to and fro,
halting at every window to watch the raging element as it seizes the
bridges and the gates, simultaneously imprisoning him and besieging
him. The air is full of smoke and flying sparks; the equinoctial gale
increases the fury of the conflagration.
“Murat and Eugene arrive hotfoot, force their way to the Emperor, and
urge him to flee. In vain! Napoleon, master in the palace of the tsars,
is steadfast. He will not yield even to devouring flame. But suddenly
comes the cry: ‘Fire in the Kremlin!’ The Emperor is to see the danger
close at hand.
“A Russian military policeman has been seized in a turret of the
arsenal. Brought before the Emperor, the man admits that he has fired
the Kremlin, acting under orders. The Emperor makes a sign of rage and
contempt. The prisoner is led out into the courtyard and is cut down by
the grenadiers. This incident decides the Emperor’s action.
“We hasten down the northern staircase, and the Emperor orders us to
guide him out of the town. But all the gates of the citadel are blocked
by the flames. At length an alley-way leading to the Moskva is discovered
between two rocks. Through this narrow passage we are able to escape from
the Kremlin. But what has been gained? How can we cross the river? The
soldiers, blinded by the sparks and deafened by the storm, do not know
where they are, and the streets are hidden amid the smoke. The only way
out of the inferno is through a winding street where the houses are on
fire.
“Heedlessly the Emperor strides along this dreadful exit, undismayed
by the crackle of the flaming beams and by the crash of the falling
roofs.... We can hardly breathe, so intense is the heat. Our guide loses
his way, and we should all have ended our lives in the flames had not
some marauders belonging to the first army corps recognised the Emperor
and found a way for him and the rest of us out of the smoking ruins.
“We meet Davoust. He has been injured on the Moskva, but has had himself
carried back among the blazing houses, hoping to find the Emperor or
perish with him. The general embraces Napoleon in a fever of delight.
The Emperor responds in friendly fashion, but with that calm which never
leaves him in the hour of danger.”
He awaits the end of the conflagration in the Petroffsky palace, a
suburban retreat. On the fourth day, he returns to the Kremlin, where
very little damage has been done. On the fifth day, his patience gives
out. For the third time, he writes to the tsar. Even now, when he is in
possession of the capital, he feels he is grasping at the air. He is so
cut off from the enemy that once more he has to make use of a Russian
prisoner (this time only a captain), in order to find a contact with the
tsar. Napoleon receives the man in the throne room. Does he sense the
heroic grotesqueness of the scene? An officer of no account, powerless,
unknown, is the representative of Holy Russia; before him, in the storied
hall of the tsars, stands the mighty Emperor of the French, the conqueror
at whose slightest nod all Europe trembles. The Emperor speaks, chaffers,
poses conditions with this man, as though the occasion were another
Tilsit and the captain the tsar.
“I am conducting a purely political war,” Napoleon reiterates. “All I
need is the fulfilment of our treaties. Had I taken London, I would not
have offered to leave it so speedily. From here, however, I intend very
soon to withdraw. If the tsar wants peace, he must let me know of his
desire.... I am setting you free, but on condition that you make your way
to St. Petersburg. The tsar will be glad to see an eyewitness of recent
happenings in Moscow. You must tell him everything.”
“I shall not be permitted to enter his presence, Sire.”
“Appeal to Court Chamberlain Tolstoy. He is an upright man. If he fails
you, get the tsar’s body servant to introduce you to his presence, or you
must approach His Majesty during one of his daily walks....” The captain
gets cold all over; it seems to him that he is being urged to commit a
crime, an attempt on the tsar’s life. He can promise nothing; stammers.
The Emperor says: “Very well. I shall write a letter to your emperor and
you must see that he gets it.” This last missive, which finds its way
from one emperor’s hands into those of the other, is the strangest of the
trio.
“My Lord Brother.... Beautiful, magical Moscow exists no more.... This
deed is loathsome, and to no purpose. Did you wish to rob me of my
means of support? They were in the cellars, to which the flames never
penetrated. How could you consign to destruction the loveliest city in
the world, a city it has taken hundreds of years to build; how could you
lay it waste for so little gain!... Out of kindness, and in the interests
of Your Majesty, I have now taken charge of the town which the Russian
army had sacrificed. At least the municipal authorities and the militia
should have been left in the city, as was the case in Vienna, on two
occasions, and in Berlin and Madrid; Milan, likewise, acted thus when
Suvaroff entered at the head of his army.... It is surely impossible that
you, with your high principles and your good heart, can have consented
to such abominations, for they are unworthy of a great ruler and a great
nation. Your people were so busy getting the fire-engines away, that they
abandoned one hundred and fifty pieces of ordnance.... I have warred
against Your Majesty without bitterness. A sign from you, before or
after the last battle, would have stayed my forward march; nay, for Your
Majesty’s sake, I should have wished to forego my entry into Moscow....
If you have preserved any of your former friendship towards me, you will
receive this letter favourably. In any case, you will be grateful to me
for informing you of the recent occurrences.”
The letter of a tutor to his pupil, angry and threatening, written from
the depths of his isolation, with intent to rouse the recipient. Thus
might an impeccable moralist write to a ne’er-do-well! The whole epistle
turns upon the two words “receive favourably”; this is the aim; on these
words are built up the writer’s hopes. Will the letter fulfil its mission?
The advance of the invader, the threatening proximity of the foe, the
burning of Moscow, have filled all hearts in St. Petersburg with despair.
The court is for peace. Can a more favourable opportunity present itself?
The enemy is becoming more embarrassed day by day. Emperor Napoleon is
eager for negotiations. The madcap grand duke Constantine is in favour
of a parley; the tsarina-mother, she who hates the upstart, who refused
her daughter to him as bride, who railed at Alexander for weeks after
the Tilsit meeting, even she advises the tsar to clasp hands once more in
friendship with the Emperor. Now is the time!
But Alexander held firm. Two men were responsible for his unwonted
steadfastness. One was a Frenchman, Bernadotte. He and the tsar had
recently met in Finland, and Bernadotte had strengthened Alexander in his
determination to persevere, had even handed back the Russian auxiliary
corps which the tsar had lent for the conquest of Norway. Bernadotte’s
hatred was so fierce, he had so inflexibly made up his mind to destroy
Napoleon, and he so greedily coveted the crown of France which the tsar
had promised him, that he would stick at nothing.
The other was a German, the best the nation had nurtured in its downfall
and in its fight for freedom. Four years had passed since Napoleon
pronounced a verdict of outlawry on Baron vom Stein. The baron spent them
far from his homeland; and had become the tsar’s trusted adviser. In
every respect he was Napoleon’s exact contrary. He was now to fight the
Emperor to a decisive issue.
This time Stein would conquer.
VI
In many lands, among the many wise and energetic men, who for seventeen
years had pitted themselves against the General, the Consul, and the
Emperor, none proved equal to the task except Talleyrand and Stein: The
former did so, because he succeeded in paralysing Napoleon’s productive
will by the genius of his malicious cunning; the latter, because, to
Napoleon’s amoral energy, he contraposed a moral energy which was
wedded to fervour. Just as Stein embodied the virtues of the Germans,
so Napoleon gathered into himself the talents of the Italian character;
and yet, since neither Teutonic virtues nor Italian talents are mutually
exclusive, but, rather, cut athwart one another, each man could
understand the opponent so far, that Stein, had he been a Frenchman
(Carnot’s blood brother), might have proved the mainstay of the Emperor.
Pride and practical good sense would have brought the two men together.
But this mutual respect could never have bridged the abyss of alienation
which must have continued, in spite of everything to hold them asunder.
For, just as Napoleon lived entirely without feeling for a fatherland;
just as he would gladly have made his career anywhere, and merely placed
the French before other peoples because he chanced to be their emperor,
so, on the other hand, Stein lived and wrought entirely for the sake of
his fatherland; and his Teutonic solidity (firmly rooted in the native
soil), the whole weight of his rich soul, remained estranged from the
agility, the swiftness, which was so essential a part of Napoleon’s
make-up, and which the Emperor utilised so adroitly. Here was a statesman
whose one thought was Germany and the Germans, who wanted unity among the
stocks speaking the same speech, even if such unity had to be achieved
against the wishes of the weakling princes. Over the way stood the man
who could only think in terms of Europe and Europeans, people whom he
wished to weld together for a fight against the self-same princes.
A baron of the empire, and therefore an independent though petty prince,
Stein was a worthy son of ancestors who for seven centuries had tilled
and ruled the same fragment of German soil. Having left the home of his
fathers for one reason only, that he might serve the nation, he regarded
with mistrust, and soon with growing contempt, the other German princes,
who were so eager to barter lands and liberties—their own and their
subjects—for the favour of the world conqueror. Napoleon, sprung from
an impoverished noble stock, a man who had in early youth been driven
forth from the ancestral vineyard, despised these lickspittle princes
as heartily as did Stein, and in secret he honoured none but the few
irreconcilables.
But whereas the contempt with which he regarded the decadence of the
European princes was mingled with amusement, Stein’s attitude towards
them was purely one of rancour. Their innate impotence, which encouraged
the self-confidence of the brilliant upstart, was a challenge to the
self-respect of Stein, the man who would fain believe in the knightly
order to which he belonged; and just as the Corsican used his own career
as an argument to strengthen his conviction that a new and splendid epoch
was in the making, the German could not fail to consider the behaviour
of his fellow-princes as melancholy evidence of the collapse of the old
order, and must perforce regard the king of Prussia with a contempt no
less hearty than the hatred he cherished for the Emperor of the French.
Thus Napoleon’s pronouncement of outlawry against Stein was symbolic of
the differences between the two men in respect of nationality, class, and
epoch. Had the imperial baron been a king, he would, far more worthily
than any Habsburg, or Hohenzollern, or other among the defeated monarchs,
have embodied, in opposition to the son of the revolution, that idea of
legitimacy for which the German nation was willing to battle with no less
ardour than it would display in the fight against the foreigner. Apart
from the duke of Brunswick and one or two of the younger princes, Stein
stood alone in those days as saviour of the pride and dignity of the
German rulers.
Now his great moment has come. From Madrid, the Emperor had sent forth
his decree of banishment against the Prussian minister. Twice, for
this, time was to exact vengeance. Now was the first occasion. Nothing
but the sentence of outlawry had brought Stein into contact with the
tsar, for whose soul he was wrestling with his old enemy. In all
Alexander’s vacillations, no influence did more to strengthen him than
the indomitable spirit of the German exile. When the Emperor, not long
before, holding forth to the Russian general, had spoken with so much
acerbity about Stein, it was because, from afar, he had sensed this
influence, and because he was afraid of the imperial baron. He knew
Stein to be a vigorous idealist, an undismayed monarchist; and he knew
that in the decisive hour such a man was likely to exercise a potent
suggestive influence upon the tsar, also an idealist, though irresolute
and timid. Stein, knowing human character as he did, and knowing that
the tsar, in a hazy fashion, was eager to live in accordance with the
moral law, would dilate upon Napoleon’s contempt for morality and itch
for dictatorship. Stein would not tempt Alexander with countries to be
annexed, but with principles to be obeyed; and would rouse to action
a modern monarch who would know better than the German princes how to
defend rule by right divine.
This German was the only person at the tsarist court who had no axe to
grind. Driven from his own home by the homeless Napoleon, he was ready
betwixt night and morning to change his present hospitable asylum for
any other. The tsar knew that Stein was not a place-hunter, but an
independent foreigner whose counsel was not tainted by any thought of
personal advantage; for this reason, he had more trust in the German
baron than in his own Francophil minister. Perhaps he had heard of the
splendid words uttered by the German when the news of the burning of
Moscow had arrived. Stein, sitting at table, had raised his glass, and
had exclaimed: “Three or four times, ere this, I have lost my baggage. We
must get used to throwing away such things. Since we must die, let us be
valiant.”
His enemy in Moscow will soon make up his mind to the same thing. He
throws away the baggage of the past, and marches on; he makes up his mind
to retreat. Not a word has come from St. Petersburg. Five weeks have been
wasted, and the winter draws near! He has been waiting on events, waiting
and listening; this is ill suited to his temperament, out of keeping with
his energetic nature. The novels he has ordered from Paris have not yet
come to hand, so he hunts up whatever can be found in the Kremlin. But he
reads very little. After meals, which, contrary to his usual custom he
protracts to the uttermost, he sometimes lies for hours, book in hand,
but meditating with fixed gaze.
What is there to do in a burned city where nothing is left to organise!
On one or two evenings, the Emperor has some French plays performed
by a troupe of actors which had remained behind at the time of the
evacuation. This reminds the holiday-making ruler of the charter of the
Comédie Française, and he sends instructions for its amendment. Half the
day is whiled away in issuing army orders which by no means appear to
emanate from a wearied brain, and are far from being commonplace; on the
contrary, they are as crystal clear as in earlier days. But since nothing
remains to be hoped for, since provisions are dwindling and the cold
season is imminent, he calls a council of war in mid-October, although he
knows that only one way lies open to him.
Daru counsels: make the winter quarters here; await reinforcements from
liberated Lithuania; in the spring, march upon St. Petersburg. The
Emperor remains for long in a brown study. Then he says:
“That is the advice of a lion. But what will Paris say? Who can calculate
the effect of six months’ separation? France may grow accustomed to my
absence; Germany and Austria might turn it to account.” The only possible
order is for the whole army to turn back. What trophies shall we bring
back with us to Paris? The giant cross of gold from the church of St.
John within the Kremlin walls is taken down from the cupola that it may
be set up on the dome of the Invalides. But can we not devise some better
revenge against the false friend? The Emperor orders the Kremlin to be
blown up.
Eight miles away from Moscow he reins in, and waits for news of the
explosion. The unending stream of the grand army flows steadily by the
Emperor; it is flanked by the sick and the wounded; it is laden with
booty, rested but undisciplined. At last come tidings: the explosion has
missed fire. He is silent. But when Rapp expresses anxiety about the
approach of winter, Napoleon rebukes him, saying: “Can’t you see how
lovely the weather is, even to-day, on October 19th? Do you not recognise
my star?”
Such words hardly ever fall from his lips, and this day he is full of
cares. He realises that the baggage train is going to cause delay, and
yet he has not the heart to order his men to leave their booty behind;
they must have something to take home. Russian troops have encircled the
French army, and recently they pressed so hard on Murat’s squadrons as to
drive these back upon the town. On the eastward march, the Emperor had
longed for nothing so much as a good action to take place; but now, on
the westward march, there is nothing he dreads more than to have to put
up a fight. Get to Smolensk as quickly as possible; we will find winter
quarters there!
Is the beginning of his career falling into step with the end? Again,
as in Egypt, the army marches with the baggage in the middle; again
the troops have to defend themselves from the swarming enemy. Once
the Emperor is saved from being made prisoner only by the presence of
mind of one of his men. “Cossacks! Turn about!” cries Rapp, pointing
to a thicket. The Emperor will not follow this advice. The adjutant,
thereupon, seizes the bridle-rein and turns Napoleon’s horse round. “You
must!” Never, in his whole life has he heard such an order addressed to
him. What is he to do? Reason tells him to flee.
But the Emperor remains where he is, and draws his sword. Rapp, Berthier,
Caulaincourt, do the same. They place themselves to the left of the road
and await the riders, who are barely forty paces away. Then the officers
of the suite cover Napoleon until the guard cavalry comes to the rescue
and puts the Cossacks to flight.
New thoughts flit through his brain after this adventure. Shall Alexander
harness him to a triumphal car? He procures a dose of poison from his
physician, and wears it always in a black silk bag around his neck, in
case he should be made a prisoner. Since the day when he was so nearly
captured, the ambition of every Russian flying column is to procure the
head of the “wicked infidel.” Russian headquarters issues a warrant
against the Emperor; it is embellished with his picture, and orders the
corps leaders to have “every man of small stature” among the prisoners
brought before them for examination: any one of them may be Emperor
Napoleon!
As in Egypt the heat of the march had killed hundreds of men, so now does
the Russian cold devour them by thousands. Snow and ice bring down the
horses, guns get stuck, munition wagons are blown up, cavalry soldiers
must pad the hoof, frozen men line the roads.
Not more than fifty thousand reach Smolensk, one-tenth of all the
invading host. They have no more supplies, and cannot winter here. The
freezing army pushes forward. Thousands have thrown their weapons away;
now, even the guard weakens. The Emperor comes among his grenadiers:
“You see the disorder of my army. These poor deluded men are throwing
their muskets away. Are you going to follow this shameful example? If so,
then there is no hope left to us! On you the whole future of the army
depends!” He marches among them. A silent procession (thus described
by one who met it): first come the generals, few of whom are mounted.
Ghosts in rags, in scorched cloaks, lean, grey, with matted beards, bent
and silent: prisoners of fate. These are followed by the Holy Legion, a
legion composed of officers, most of them leaning upon sticks, their feet
swathed in remnants of sheepskin. Then come the survivors of the cavalry
guard.
Last of all three men on foot: to the right, the king of Naples, no
longer concerned about his peacock splendours; to the left, the viceroy
of Italy. In the middle walks a little man, wearing a Polish fur coat and
a cap of red fox, and helping himself along with a birchen staff. Thus in
silence he wends his way through Russia.
VII
What is Paris saying?
He does not know. For the first time since he was in Egypt, his
calculations concerning Paris have no solid foundation in fact. Not
to know what is going on in his capital: a dreadful position this,
like that of a traveller who fancies that during his absence his wife
may be betraying him! Writing to Maret in Vilna, he says: “For more
than a fortnight I have had no courier, so that I am in the dark as to
all that is going on ... in France and Spain.... The army is terribly
disorganised. It would take at least a fortnight to set things straight,
but we cannot possibly spare the time. Shall we be able to maintain our
position in Vilna? Only if we are not attacked during the first week.
Food! Food!... Make sure that there shall be no foreign envoys in Vilna,
for the army is not in a fit condition to be seen. Send them all away.”
Here is the courier at last. Why does the Emperor turn pale? What
terrible news can have come from Paris? Can anything have happened there
worse than what he has just been living through? The fact is that,
through English newspapers, through letters, and through rumour, France
has long since learned the whole truth, which had been glossed over in
the Emperor’s bulletins. Many of the Parisians are fickle, and many of
them are easily reduced to despair. A good part of Paris has already
given up the Emperor for lost. Alarmist reports and spiteful quips are
rife on the boulevards. But what is this item?
A coup d’état had been planned, and had been frustrated. But what a
background of discontent is revealed! Malet, who had been a general
in the days of the republic, had years before been concerned in a
conspiracy, imprisoned, and then committed to a lunatic asylum. Having
received distorted news about the Emperor’s disasters and the burning of
Moscow, he had escaped. With a number of accomplices, he had published
a forged dispatch announcing Napoleon’s death. The conspirators had
seized the Minister of Police; had declared a provisional government;
had bamboozled the National Guard, the militia, the prefects, and even
veteran generals. At length, however, two undismayed officers had seen
through the cheat, had seized the conspirators, and from the balcony of
the governor’s residence had shouted, “Vive l’Empereur.” Therewith the
spectre had been laid.
In his tent, on which the snow is falling, the Emperor contemplates this
document with dismay. More serious news even than that which recently
arrived from Salamanca! The offenders had been shot; the whole affair
had fizzled out. But for a time the conspirators had been masters of the
Paris police, and one who controls the Paris police is master of France!
No carriages would venture into the streets! When an elderly nobleman
had asked what was afoot, a workman had laughed, saying: “Citizen, the
Emperor is dead. At noon the republic will be proclaimed!” Greatly shaken
by the tidings, the Emperor drops the newspaper containing these details,
and says to his intimates:
“What about the dynasty? Did no one think of my wife, my son, all the
institutions of the Empire? I must get back to Paris instantly!”
The dangerous possibilities revealed by this interlude, flash like
lightning through his mind. “The workman who laughs—he is the people! I
toil day and night for years at my great building; I break with the woman
I love, and take an emperor’s daughter to wife, that our heir, the pledge
of earthly immortality, may grow up in our palace. Then some foolhardy
officer, a man no one has ever heard of, has merely to call out that the
Emperor is dead, and instantly a clamour about ‘citizens’ and ‘republic’
rises once more from the people! The regent, the heir, the Council of
State—all these count for nothing? The bottomless cask of the Danaids!
But I will make a bottom for it. Like the Capets, I will have my son
crowned in my own lifetime, and muster my faithful supporters in Paris!”
Fortified by the approach of danger, the Emperor grips the reins firmly
once more. “He is pale, but his face is calm; nothing in his features
gives any sign of trouble.” His health is better, too. Now the army nears
the Beresina. Having received false intelligence to the effect that
the auxiliary armies are close at hand, he draws his own forces more
compactly together, and has the rest of the baggage train burned, that
the horses may be freed to draw the remaining guns. If only the bridge is
still standing! He writes: “Should the enemy have seized the bridge-head
and burned the bridge in order to prevent our crossing, it would be very
serious.”
Next day they come to the river. No bridge, no boats; two armies
outnumbering the French are waiting on the other shore; between runs the
broad river with marshy banks. Is there any way out of the difficulty?
He makes a shrewd plan, like those of his early days as general. He will
decoy the Russians away. Out of eighteen hundred horseless cavalrymen of
the guard, of whom only eleven hundred still have their weapons, he forms
two battalions. Then he has all the regimental eagles burned, for even in
this dread hour Napoleon thinks of honour and glory, and he will not risk
the loss of colours to the enemy. After midnight, he at length lies down
in his tent, where he overhears Duroc and Daru, who believed him to be
asleep, discussing in an undertone the possibility of a catastrophe. The
phrase “State prisoner” has caught his ear. He fingers the black bag he
is wearing round his neck, and sits up in bed:
“You think they would dare?”
“I would not trust the enemy’s magnanimity,” says Daru, composedly.
“But France! What would France do?”
Daru’s answer is evasive; but when pressed, he says: “I think, Sire, the
sooner you are in Paris, the better. When you are there, you will have a
better chance of saving us all.”
“Then you feel I am a burden on you here?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“And you don’t want to be State prisoners?”
There is a long silence. Then the Emperor resumes:
“Have my ministers’ reports been destroyed?”
“Hitherto you have always refrained from giving us the order.”
“It must be done. Destroy the lot of them. We are in a very difficult
position.”
This is the only admission of the kind made by the Emperor during all
the weeks of the Russian campaign. It is the voice of a man who regards
himself as a moriturus. But nature is more sensible than fate, and in a
few moments he is fast asleep.
Next morning, while the enemy has been lured down stream and is being
kept at a distance by artillery fire, the sappers, neck-deep in the
freezing water and amid the drifting ice, hastily build two bridges.
The crossing of the river takes two days more. With the cavalry, which
swims the stream, the army still numbers about twenty-five thousand men.
The Emperor, though the risk of his being taken prisoner is imminent,
remains until all have crossed; and then, on the third day, surrounded by
the old guard, he too makes his way over the river. But there are still
stragglers to come, and these perish during the next few days betwixt ice
and fire.
In the ensuing week the Emperor’s life is twice in danger. The first
peril is from a Cossack attack. On the next occasion the trouble is
an assassination plot in which one of his own Frenchmen is engaged.
It is early on the morning of December 5th when Major Lapie meets the
officers of the Prussian guard of honour in front of the Emperor’s tent.
“Now then, gentlemen, the hour has come!” The senior captain is to cut
down the Mameluke, and then to make an end of Napoleon. Presumably the
conspirators have seen Schiller’s _Wallenstein_ on the German stage! The
Prussian wants the Frenchman to do the deed, but Lapie says he is not
sure of his men. Then Caulaincourt, to whom the conspirators’ behaviour
seems suspicious, comes forward, claps his hands, and says: “Now,
gentlemen, it is time to start!”
That evening the Emperor, who has not heard a word of the affair, summons
his marshals. “I shall be stronger when I can speak from my throne in the
Tuileries than I am at the head of an army which has been destroyed by
the cold.... Had I been a Bourbon, born to rule, it would have been easy
for me to avoid making mistakes.” He takes the marshals aside by turns,
asking each for his advice; he flatters, praises, and encourages; he
smiles and charms. Obviously his design is to counteract the possibility
of revolt.
Next, he tells Eugene to read them his latest bulletin, the first in
which he admits disaster. “Men who had not been sufficiently steeled by
nature to rise superior to all vicissitudes of fate and fortune, lost
courage and equanimity, and could dream of nothing but misfortune and
defeat. But those who were equal to the occasion were able to keep up
their spirits, and regarded every fresh difficulty as a fresh opportunity
for glory.”
The only reason why the army had wasted away was the rigour of the
climate. “His Majesty has never been in better health.”
The unfeeling, metallic tone! Again we are listening to General Bonaparte
who, having recovered confidence in his destiny, and having regained
health, is able to use the old language. The incisive sentence at the
close is, of course, added for the special benefit of Paris, which for
several weeks has had no news as to his state of health. But, on the
whole, the mood in which he ends the Russian campaign, exactly six months
after it had begun, is one of heroic cynicism. The command of the army is
handed over to Murat, who is to lead the survivors home. There are still
nine thousand men under arms.
Now there is something new. The Emperor embraces every one of the
generals present. Is this the last coup of a trickster who wants to
strengthen their waning loyalty? Is he really overcome by his feelings?
Every one of these soldiers, that evening, could feel the beating of the
Emperor’s heart.
He gets into the sleigh with Daru and Caulaincourt, and the three drive
away. To be on the safe side, he travels under an assumed name, that of
his secretary, Rayneval. This is his fifth name. The fourth had been
Napoleon.
When they are driving through the snows across the Polish plain, he
suddenly has the sleigh stopped at a cross road. This must be near
Countess Walewska’s mansion; he wants to go there. Napoleon is on the
flight from Russia, his head full of world-shaking plans; he is forsaking
his army because Paris needs him and he needs Paris—and now comes this
lyrical thought, the painful recollection of a frustrated idyl. But the
urgent warnings of his companions, who remind him that they are alone
in a couple of sledges and that Cossacks are scouring the countryside,
induce him to abandon his plan. He wraps his furs around him once more
and goes to sleep.
Five days afterwards he leaves the sleighs waiting on the bridge near
Warsaw, and at noon goes on foot with Caulaincourt into the town.
Should any one recognise him, they will face it out, and declare that
the interlocutor is seeing ghosts, or must be mad. Napoleon sends
Caulaincourt to the embassy; but, in order to keep his own identity
secret, he himself goes to an inn, which, of all names in the world,
still calls itself the Hôtel de l’Angleterre. The low-ceilinged
white-washed room is cold; there is only green wood, and the maidservant
cannot get the stove to light; he must keep on his furs, his cap, and
his big boots, while he tramps up and down the room, thrashing his arms
like a coachman to keep himself warm. It is thus he is found by two
Polish noblemen for whom he has sent through the embassy. They can hardly
believe their eyes, but the ghost laughs at their astonishment.
“How long have I been in Warsaw? A week? No, only a couple of hours. It
is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. How are you, Monsieur
Stanislas?... Dangers? Not a bit of it. I thrive on excitement. The more
I am tossed to and fro, the better I feel. The shadow kings grow fat in
their palaces, but I put on flesh when riding my nag in the field.... So
you’ve been anxious here? The army is in splendid condition. I have still
one hundred and twenty thousand men! Gave the Russians a good hiding
everywhere. They never ventured to stand up against me. The army will
winter in Vilna. I am returning to Paris, and there I shall raise three
hundred thousand soldiers! In six months I shall be back on the Memel.
“I have been through other fights! At Marengo I was beaten until six in
the evening, but next day I was lord of Italy. At Aspern-Essling I made
myself master of Austria, though the archduke believed he had held me in
check there. It was not my fault that the Danube rose sixteen feet in
one night. But for that, I should have finished off with the Habsburgs
once for all. However, it was written in the stars that I was to marry an
archduchess....
“The same thing in Russia. I can’t prevent its freezing there. Morning
after morning, the report was that ten thousand horses had perished
during the night. Bon voyage! Our Normandy horses cannot endure the cold
like the Russians; the same with our soldiers.... Perhaps people will say
that I stayed too long in Moscow; but the weather was beautiful, and I
was waiting for peace. A great political drama! Nothing venture, nothing
have. One step from the sublime to the ridiculous!... Who could have
foreseen the burning of Moscow?... I never felt better in my life!”...
Such is the spate of words that for two hours flows from the mouth of
a man who, after unspeakable losses, wishes to give the impression of
desperate courage.
Napoleon becomes an adventurer. To impress these Poles, who will pass on
what he says, he invents an army which has vanished long since; cold
which really did nothing more than complete the destruction that other
forces had begun; battles he never fought. He intersperses these figments
with historical parallels of worldwide significance; treats what has just
been happening as if it were ancient history; appeals to providence; and
repeats no less than four times the cynically imposing aphorism about the
sublime and the ridiculous, which blunts the edge of criticism. Great
realist though he is, the world and what he is doing with it are becoming
drama to him; and thus Napoleon, when his own fortunes are declining, is
slowly mounting the ascent towards supreme irony.
The two Poles see nothing of all this. Their thoughts are concentrated
upon their country’s debts, and they would fain get money from this man
who is still numbered among the great ones of the earth. They seize their
opportunity when at length there is a pause in the torrent of speech. He
gives them an order on the treasury for six millions, which he thinks
will buy support for him in Poland. Then his visitors wish him a happy
journey, and, with secret scorn, watch the incognito drive away hastily
in his sleigh.
[Illustration: The Emperor’s profile. Sketched during Mass in the
Tuileries. Germain Bapst Collection.
(Photograph in the Kircheisen Collection.)]
Day and night, night and day, they glide swiftly westward; for Germany,
too, is under snow. Day and night, night and day, questions, commands,
and plans are churning in his brain. “Is England really invincible? Now,
the English can trade freely in the Baltic; English goods can enter
Cadiz, and can make their way into the Levant.” He must put off his
scheme for the conquest of India, but will abate no jot of his other
designs! Will the Confederation of the Rhine still answer to his nod?
How will it be possible to explain this crash in Russia? The disaster
cannot be hushed up indefinitely. Is there any chance of raising another
hundred and twenty thousand men in France? Next year’s levies must be
called up in advance. Make peace with the pope at once, and with Spain
likewise, for he must feel safe at his back. A National Guard, that was
the best thought of the revolution; in that way he will be able to raise
a million armed citizens within three months.
Night. Change of horses. He thrusts out his head. “Where are we?”
“In Weimar, Sire.”
“Weimar? How is the duchess? And how is Herr Goethe?”
VIII
Forty bowed backs receive the beaten war lord on his return home. The
sight of the court dresses which he has embroidered with his contempt
revives his belief in the folly and the weakness of these men whose only
wish is to be ruled. But his glance strays to the bars of the golden cage
in which the son of liberty has locked himself up. He does not realise
that the people of his capital are weary and disaffected; and instead
of following the example of his own youth, instead of with disarming
frankness acknowledging the faults he hopes to better, he postures as
Cæsar before his servile officials, and rails at the weather god, though
but yesterday he had boasted his power to make what weather he pleased
throughout Europe.
During the nine days’ drive from Warsaw to Paris, the uncertain mood of
the adventurer had given place once more to the steadily aspiring flame
of the imperator. Although the Russian winter had set in later than
usual, he carries off the reverse by saying: “The army sustained heavy
losses, but that was because the winter began so early.... The king of
Naples is not fitted for high command, and he lost his head after my
departure.... All the same, I have three hundred battalions left, without
bringing a single man back from Spain.”
Has his contempt for his fellows risen to such a pitch that he can serve
up these fables to experienced men who have known the truth for months?
But their consciences are uneasy. They feel responsible for the October
putsch, or at any rate guilty for not having made an end of the whole
business within the first quarter of an hour. On the other hand the
Emperor, whose own heart accuses him, is glad to play the accuser, for
it galls him that in the decisive hour they should have forgotten the
empress and the heir to the throne. In memorable words, at the first
reception in the Tuileries, he tries to hammer his point into the heads
of his councillors.
“The apostles of the rights of man are really to blame for all that
has happened. They declared rebellion to be a duty. They flattered the
people, imputing to it a sovereignty it is incapable of exercising. They
destroyed respect for law by establishing the supremacy of an assembly
which knew nothing of administration and law, instead of holding fast to
the nature of things! Any one who wishes to build up a State once more,
must be guided by the very opposite principles. History depicts the human
heart, and we must study history if we would learn the merits and defects
of legislation.... When I undertook the reconstruction of France, my
prayer was that I might be spared for a considerable number of years,
seeing that what has been destroyed in a moment will take a long time to
refashion. The State needs courageous officials. ‘The king is dead; long
live the king!’ That was the watchword of our fathers. The phrase makes
us realise the advantages of monarchy.”
Were it not for the prettily turned expression about history and the
human heart, Emperor Francis might have subscribed to this speech, and
it might have been an ornament to the pages of any of the familiar
expositions of monarchical doctrine. Why should people go on quarrelling
about such matters? The ancient dispute between tradition and revolution
has been settled, now that the son of the revolution has acknowledged the
supremacy of tradition. No matter whether an heir be named Bourbon or
Bonaparte! When we compare the two fathers we see that they are very much
alike! His marriage with the daughter of one who rules by right divine
has complicated the problem, and has sophisticated his own genius.
Or does he believe no more than half of what he is saying? Before
setting out on the Russian campaign, he had frankly explained his plans
to Metternich: “The legislature belongs to me; all I need is to put the
key of the deliberative chamber in my pocket. France is less suited for
democracy than a good many countries.... When I get back, therefore,
I shall transform the Senate and the Council of State into an Upper
House and a Lower House, most of whose members I shall myself nominate.
These will constitute a real popular representation, consisting only of
experienced business men, without an ideologue among them. Then France
will be satisfactorily ruled, even under a prince who is a mere figure
head (and such will come), for whom the ordinary education of hereditary
princes will suffice.”
These Cæsarist ideas betray the monarchist, but also the sceptic.
Although, when he shows people his son’s portrait, they tell him that
the little boy is the loveliest child in France, the flattered father
knows perfectly well that dynasties last a long time whereas genius is
fleeting. Foreseeing the decadence of his own blood, having studied that
decadence in the annals of all princely houses, he wants to rid himself
of waverers that he may fortify the position of his heir. For the very
reason that he understands the contradiction inherent in monarchy, he
wishes to build his own monarchy on a rock.
For the time being, his business is to buttress it anew with the power
of the sword. What has been the fruit of the war games in which he
moved his myriads over Europe? Those leather-bound muster rolls of his
contained the death sentences of numberless youths, even though there
were marshals’ batons to be won by a few among the best of them! Of the
old guard, four hundred men, and of the cavalry guard, eight hundred men,
made their way back to Königsberg; a few thousand officers and sergeants,
broken men most of them, have survived the storms of war. Except for the
auxiliaries, who are not under France’s orders, that is all that remains
of the Emperor’s hosts. Marshal Ney, on his flight from Russia, seems
like a hero out of a Greek tragedy when he reaches Prussia, and makes
his way into the first Prussian government office on his route. When old
acquaintances look at him incredulously, as if questioning who this man
can be, he rejoins with a superb gesture: “I am the rear guard of the
Grand Army.”
A new army must be made, and it must be made in a few weeks. The year
1813 will supply one hundred and forty thousand recruits, but where are
the rest to come from? The Emperor has a magic wand, and can conjure
up men whenever he needs them. The passing of a new law is all that is
requisite for the levying of the National Guard and for the drafting
of eighty thousand soldiers from the dependencies of France. Add one
hundred thousand belonging to the oldest conscript levies; and call up
the youngsters who should not, properly speaking, be enrolled until
1814. Soon he will have half a million under arms once more. “The French
people,” he says to the Prussian envoy, “will follow me whatever I do,
and, if needs must, I shall arm the women!”
With unbroken will, he charms into existence the innumerable machines
without which he cannot ply his trade. But how shall he explain these
unexpected measures to the people? The enemy is far from the frontier.
A stroke of luck! At the close of the year, Yorck, a Prussian general,
acting on his own initiative, enters into an agreement with his Russian
neighbours, declares the force under his command neutral, and thus opens
the door to a change in the military situation for which the German
nation has long been eager. The Emperor can use the incident in order
to whip up the enthusiasm of the French. For the moment, the treason
of his ally costs him no more than twenty thousand men; but it serves
as the text for a manifesto in Paris, and for hectoring letters to the
princes of the Confederation of the Rhine. He would not, says Napoleon,
need their help at all, had not Yorck’s secession compelled his army to
withdraw.
The summons of France is actually obeyed. The German princes, including
the Habsburg ruler, once more collect money and levy troops. One of them
is servile enough to send an assurance that he is “delighted to be able
to give the Emperor opportunity for winning fresh laurels.” The king
of Prussia cashiers Yorck, and assures the Emperor of his fidelity to
the alliance. But Frederick William conveys a hint to the tsar, goes to
Breslau, wobbles between the parties, what time a wave of enthusiasm is
spreading far beyond Prussia’s borders, and threatening to sweep away the
debile monarch. Youths, politicians, and poets are voicing the call of
national sentiment. Stein is the man to treat with the tsar on behalf of
his country, and in Königsberg the baron takes matters into his own hands.
The Emperor is ever on the watch. In a circular, he warns the princes
against the intrigues of those “who by rebellion and revolution are
trying to give Germany a new form. Should they succeed in infecting the
Confederation of the Rhine with their doctrines, intolerable sufferings
may await these territories.”
He feels the stirring of the new spirit. Now, for the first time, does
the Emperor seem to become aware of the growth of a national sentiment
among the Germans, as among the Spaniards. Shortly before the Russian
campaign, he had said that hardly so much as a night watchman was needed
to keep the Germans quiet. “Since Germany has no America, nor yet a
sea, nor yet a great number of strongholds, nor even Englishmen as
there are in Spain, there is nothing to be afraid of, and would not be
though the Germans were as lazy, dirty, superstitious, and monk-ridden
as the Spaniards. How could there be anything to fear from such honest,
reasonable, cool-headed, and patient people, who have so little
inclination to violence that throughout the war not one of our soldiers
has been murdered in Germany?”
A wonderfully true picture of the Germans, and yet there is a slight
miscalculation. He has overlooked the romanticism by which these people
can be stirred, and without a knowledge of which they cannot be
understood. Of course the Italian, with his fiery imagination, cannot
grasp the nature of an imagination that works slowly and lacks ardour.
Napoleon, who knows how monarchical the Germans are in their sentiments,
believes that when he holds the princes in his hands he must be master of
the German people.
Besides, were the Germans a people? Was this realm, which ten years
earlier had been formally liquidated by the abdication of the last of its
emperors, really anything more than a “metaphysical concept”? Only for a
moment, only for two years, will the German peoples be united. Then, as
soon as the enemy’s power has been broken, they will fall asunder once
more. Not for half a century, and not until another Napoleon threatens
them, will they at length become a nation—though even then, only a
fragment. So atrophied was Napoleon’s own sense of nationality, that the
quarrels and jealousies of the German princes made him believe that the
Germans were disintegrated for all time; whereas, had he been able to
understand the forces that were at work, he would have realised that the
jealousies of the rival sovereign houses were the only obstacle to the
reunion of these kindred stocks.
But the sublime breathing of history sometimes determines the rhythm of
an epoch even in despite of the will of the genius that animates it. In
sweeping curves, during these years, the spirit of liberty returns to
her primal home in the hearts of the people. For, just as Bonaparte, in
the name of liberty, had defeated the princes and stirred the peoples
to revolt; so now, in the name of liberty, the peoples arose to defeat
him, the prince of princes. Doubtless this great movement of destiny
was complicated by numerous petty wishes, and blurred by minor circles.
It is not the force of legitimism which now, after twenty years, is at
last gathering strength to slay the spirit of revolt. Pallid, disunited,
decadent, and with never a great figure among them, are the princes in
the league they form against the one man who rules in virtue of his
self-made power.
But the fact that the peoples of Spain and Germany are eager to force
their princes into the fight, gives to the tragical collapse of the
usurper a semblance of poetical justice, and that is why we who look on
find it easier to bear the sight of the slaying of the lion by the spears
cast by such a legion of hunters.
IX
Letizia looks anxiously at her son. His face is clouded, though he keeps
his thoughts to himself. What can she do to help him? Intimates? Many of
them, she sees plainly enough, are betraying him. He needs his brothers,
that he may have the support of steadfast hearts, even though he thinks
them lacking in intelligence. She therefore puts her trust in her other
sons, writes to London and to Graz, smooths the path for reconciliation.
One day, after a decade of estrangement, comes a letter from the
ambitious Lucien, who says he is always at Napoleon’s service.
But the Emperor cannot believe that he, the mightiest of his family,
needs any assistance from the others. Though he has always regarded
Lucien as the most capable of his brothers, he proposes merely a formal
promotion. In imperial fashion, he answers through his mother: “Please
write to let him know in my name that his letter has awakened an echo
in my heart. I think of raising him to the throne of Tuscany. He loves
the fine arts. It will suit him to reign in Florence, and to revive the
glories of the Medicis.” There is no place for Lucien at the centre of
things! As for Louis, who also offers to devote his powers to the cause
of France (in so far as he can honourably do this), and who sends a copy
of his last volume of verse—the ex-king of Holland is met with a rebuff:
“The idea you seem to have formed about my position is quite erroneous.
I have more than a million men under arms, and two hundred million
francs in my war chest. Holland remains French.... Still, I am ready to
greet you in the spirit of one who brought you up as if he had been your
father.”
The Emperor reads this answer to his mother before sending it. She tries
to mitigate its harshness in a long covering letter; tells Louis how
pretty his children have grown; urges him to come to Paris in any case.
“The Emperor has forgotten to give me your poems. I will ask him for
them, and will let you know what I think of them when next I write.”
Next day, the old lady finds a savage article in the “Moniteur,” in
which she learns that the king of Naples will have to recall his envoys
from Vienna. When she asks what this signifies, her friends reluctantly
explain that Murat has been persuaded by Caroline to intrigue with the
Habsburgs, so that the pair are now playing double. Letizia writes
to upbraid her daughter. Joseph is out of humour, for he thinks that
Napoleon is not supporting him properly in the Spanish war. She does her
best to appease him through the instrumentality of his wife. Furthermore,
she tries to mollify Jerome, whom the Emperor had sent home in disgrace.
Finally, she gets to work on Hortense, who is doing all she can to hinder
Louis’ coming to Paris.
Now a woman well over sixty, she does her utmost to keep the peace
between her sons, daughters, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law. But it
seems to her that the greatness for which the world envies her family has
brought in its train nothing but discord, jealousy, arrogance, ostracism,
and betrayal. Her thoughts fly back to her native island, where her
kindred always formed a united front against other clans. Moreover, her
eyes, though old, are clear-sighted; and she sees that the star of the
Buonaparti is paling.
The Emperor has little personal feeling about these matters. In his
present situation, he regards them from a purely political outlook.
No doubt he says to himself that Murat and Caroline are traitors; but
his main concern is, how he can make sure of the support of Murat’s
soldiers. He therefore writes in a conciliatory strain to Caroline; keeps
her husband informed about the impending campaign; and asks for troops,
which Murat ultimately agrees to send, for both he and Caroline think
that Napoleon may prove victorious after all, and are afraid of being
dethroned unless they keep in his good graces. At the same time, they
wish to have a secure footing in the other camp, and therefore conclude
secret treaties with England and with the ex-king of Sicily (whose
dominions they themselves have filched).
Napoleon even seeks to conciliate Bernadotte, though he cannot but regard
the crown prince of Sweden as a treacherous kinsman and an enemy of his
house. He offers Pomerania as the reward of alliance and the prize of
victory. But for Bernadotte, the bid is not high enough; this Frenchman
prefers to join the coalition against France. His ambition is to reign
there; France is worth more than Pomerania. Bernadotte enters into
especially close relationships with Prussia. In Berlin he meets Madame
de Staël, and these fellow-countrymen of the Emperor, united in their
detestation of him, foregather among the oppressed Prussians.
A third enemy, whom the Emperor approaches with blandishments during
these feverish weeks, is the captive pope. Pius VII. has been brought
to Fontainebleau, and Napoleon gets to work on him through the
instrumentality of prelates devoted to the imperial cause, adding
personal suggestion until the old man gives way. How great will be the
power of the Church (this is the Emperor’s theme) when Catholicism has
been re-established throughout Germany! By trifling concessions upon
matters of form, and by cunning devices, Napoleon is able to secure a
new Concordat. Thanks to this reconciliation with the Church, he is able
to recruit new Catholic soldiers in all the lands under his sway. When
the pope, a week after signing the Concordat, wants to revoke it, the
Emperor says with a smile: “Your Holiness, being infallible, cannot have
made a mistake in entering into this arrangement!”
During these weeks, a desire for peace suddenly spreads throughout
Europe. The pope wants peace on the Vistula, and Metternich wants it in
London. Count Bubna, with whom Napoleon had negotiated years before in
Schönbrunn, comes to Paris to advise peace, for Vienna can neither send
nor refuse the troops which the Emperor has demanded. In February, peace
can be had for the asking. Why does the man who needs peace most of all,
make impossible stipulations?
For ten years, one war after another has been practically forced upon
the Emperor as a consequence of his first victories. Now, when he is in
grievous peril, and when his isolation is increasing, the will-to-war
grows in him as in the early days of his career. When unconquered, he
would gladly have laid aside the sword; now, after his defeat, he craves
for new victories. But though his shield has been tarnished in Russia,
though he would fain win fresh glories for himself and for France, these
are but the pretexts of destiny. In very truth, he is stiff-necked, and
will prove himself to be so at three congresses during this year 1813.
The reason is that all the elements of his character are now rolling
inexorably forwards; the reason is that, “in accordance with the nature
of things,” he is advancing along a road on which he must march to the
bitter end.
Forward! Since the war must be, the allies are arming everywhere. England
makes treaties with Sweden and Prussia; to conciliate the latter, the
tsar renounces his claims to East Prussia; Prussia calls Germany to arms;
Austria makes a truce with Russia, tries to enter into an agreement with
Saxony and Bavaria and even King Jerome. Emperor Francis withdraws his
troops to Cracow, ostensibly to save them for the coming campaign.
“The first step towards desertion!” exclaims Napoleon, when this news
comes to hand. He must now withdraw his own forces from the Vistula to
the Oder. In Vienna, he once more offers Silesia. The offer is declined
with thanks, for the Austrian role is to be one of armed mediation.
While the whole world is thus preparing for the struggle, and when in
the middle of March the first signal is given in Paris by the Prussian
declaration of war, Talleyrand, in his open ambush, says with a smile:
“The hour has struck; the Emperor Napoleon must become king of France.”
A remarkable flash of insight, on the part of one who cannot but hope
that no step so sensible as this shall be taken—and who must, none the
less, at bottom, wish for it. Nevertheless matters have gone too far; not
the levying of troops alone, but the preparations in the minds of men.
Every one knows that the last great combat is imminent, that nothing can
avert it. The only one who could have called a halt, and will not do so,
is driven onward in his own despite, and he is weary. There are new signs
of this growing weariness.
First of all, there is the simplicity upon which he insists in his
environment. “I want my journeys to be very differently arranged. I shall
not take so many people with me; fewer cooks and less table furniture; no
meal to consist of more than three courses.... I shall not take any pages
with me; they are of no use whatever; only two bedmakers instead of four;
two tents instead of four; and so on.” At the same time, he orders plans
for a small palace, “a comfortable place rather than an imposing one
(the two things are incompatible); ... my room must open on the garden;
... or, preferably, I must have a north room and a south room, according
to the season; all arranged as in a well-to-do country gentleman’s
mansion.... It is to be a holiday seat, or a dwelling for a man in his
declining years.”
In 1805, when he was in the plenitude of his powers, he had said: “The
war need not take long. I am still good for six years, but then it will
be time to call a halt.” Now, when he takes the field once more, four
months after his return from Russia, his mien is quiet and careworn as
he steps into his travelling carriage in the courtyard at Saint-Cloud.
He leans back among the cushions, with his hand pressed to his forehead.
To Caulaincourt, his travelling companion, he acknowledges his distress
“at having so soon to leave my good Louise and my lovely boy. I envy the
poorest peasant in my dominions. By the time he grows old, he has already
paid his debt to his country, and can stay at home with his wife and
children. I am the only person whom an inexplicable fate leads back ever
and again into the field.”
No more pages, he is in his declining years, wants to stay at home with
wife and child—and this is only seven years after the programme just
quoted! Are these fourth-act moods, these shadows that fall across his
soul, merely the consequences of the Russian catastrophe? Are they not,
rather, the essential causes of new defeats? The moods of a man growing
prematurely old, one whose work is often interfered with by illness,
one who is being increasingly mastered by the natural inclinations of
a family man well on in the forties. He wants to spend at the domestic
fireside the evening of a life which is not equipped for seven or eight
decades like that of his mother or his brothers.
He is himself in the frame of mind with which he had reproached his
marshals at Danzig less than a year ago, when he had declared they would
rather have an easy life of it in their country seats than go campaigning
with him. Is not such a longing natural in a man who has been working
himself to death for twenty years, and who has chosen the bee for his
escutcheon?
But those on whom the Parcæ bestow the ecstasies of youth, must pay for
it by the oncoming of age. He has had such wonderful successes that he
must not expect to garner also the joys of content in achievement. He has
conjured up the gods; now they have come!
X
At the first review in Mainz, there are only one hundred and eighty
thousand men instead of the three hundred thousand he had hoped to
assemble there. The army is very short of cavalry; the equipment is
inadequate, for it has been far too hastily got together; the best guns
have been lost in Russia, or are tied up in Spain; the general staff has
been decimated; the ambulance service is defective. He sees all that is
amiss, but even this imperfect army reminds him of old times and old
happiness. He recalls the April days in Cannes and Nice, seventeen years
before, when he had taken over the command of half-starved and ragged
soldiers, that he might lead them through the mountains to victory. With
these memories surging up in his mind, he gathers his energies, and
utters the darkly challenging words: “I shall conduct this war as General
Bonaparte.”
Such is the signal, a mingling of impetus and self-restraint, with which
he launches himself into the first battle. At Lützen, he exposes himself
more than he has done for years. During the first day’s fighting, he does
not sleep at all; on the second day, when everything is going well, he
has his bearskin spread on the ground in the middle of Marmont’s corps;
and when, an hour later, they wake him to let him know that all is going
on well, he leaps to his feet with the ironical remark: “You see, the
best things come to one while one is asleep.”
But hardly has the general won this victory than the emperor-politician
resumes the ascendant. He sends letters in all directions; forces the
vacillating king of Saxony to a decision, talks to the princes of the
Confederation of the Rhine about providence and the fortune of war, that
he may keep them up to the scratch; sends his ministers to the Russian
outposts; abruptly and informally offers the tsar Poland in exchange
for Prussia, and suggests other territorial rearrangements, until
Alexander weakens; and he writes to Emperor Francis in terms of unusual
self-commendation: “Although I personally led all the movements of my
army, and was several times within range of grape-shot, I have not had
even a graze.” The words and the actions are those of one who feels weak,
and would fain appear strong. Henceforth the warnings of fate thicken.
True, he gains another victory at Bautzen, but does not take any
prisoners. On the second day of the battle, he is riding under fire,
accompanied by Caulaincourt and his friend Duroc—the latter having for
a decade been his inseparable companion in the field. Men are being
shot down in his immediate neighbourhood. He gallops to an adjoining
elevation; adjutants follow him. Dust and smoke; a tree close at hand is
smashed to splinters. He thunders past. On the hillock, a young officer
comes up to him and stammers: “Marshal Duroc has been killed.”
“Impossible! He was at my side a moment ago!”
“The cannon ball which struck the tree, brought down the marshal as well.”
The Emperor slowly rides back into camp. He says:
“When will fate have a little discrimination? What will be the end of
it all? Caulaincourt, my eagles are again victorious, but my star is
setting.”
Duroc has not been killed outright, but he is dying. Terrible is the
aspect of this shattered comrade. Greeting and farewell, both men in
tears. Duroc murmurs: “I told thee at Dresden what would happen; the
inner voice.... Give me some opium.”
This tone, the sudden use of “thee,” the last request of a man who has no
fear of death. The Emperor walks unsteadily as he leaves the cottage.
From a farmyard, he contemplates for a while the spot where his friend
had fallen, and then makes his way to the place where the guard is
encamped, with his own tent in the middle. That evening, wearing his
grey field-coat, he sits gloomily on a campstool, apart from his suite;
he listens to the sounds of the camp, where the guardsmen are cooking
supper and calling to one another; in the distance, the men of a yager
corps are singing a song. Bivouac fires are glowing in the half-darkness
of the May night; two burning villages flame like torches in the sky. An
officer draws near, and hesitates to give his report. Before the words
are spoken, the Emperor understands that Duroc is dead.
Next day, he orders the purchase of land where a memorial is to be
erected, and he pens the inscription: “Here died, gloriously, in the arms
of his friend the Emperor, struck down on the field of battle by a cannon
ball, General Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Emperor Napoleon.”
General Bonaparte used to have no time for such feelings. He concealed
his heart-ache, and stormed onward, even when he lost his wife’s love.
Now it behoved him to push forward into Silesia, to follow up the
Russians into Poland, to take advantage of the misgivings of the allies;
and, by delivering blows in rapid succession, to fetter the vacillating
Austrian to his side. In later years, he said frankly that his failure to
do these things had been the greatest mistake in his life. Once more, the
deliberations of the emperor are impeding the activities of the general.
His private letters from France are full of reports concerning the
clamour for peace. “What especially determined my course of action was
Austria’s preparation for war, and the desire to gain time. This led me
to interrupt the course of my victories.” In Silesia, at the beginning of
June, he agrees to a six weeks’ truce, thus giving his adversaries time
to attain complete unity at the congresses of Reichenbach and Prague.
Is he deceived as to the frame of mind of the wavering German princes?
He knows them all. “The Saxons are just as German as the others, and
would gladly follow Prussia’s example. The king is faithful to me, but
I do not trust his troops.... Austria’s impudence is indescribable.
While uttering honeyed words, she tries to snatch from me Dalmatia and
Istria.... There never was anything so false as the court of Vienna. If,
to-day, I were to grant Austria’s demands, she would ask to-morrow for
Italy and Germany.” Now, when he sees that the Habsburg ruler is about
to go over to the enemy, he realises too late that his marriage has
been a mistake, for he has gained nothing by it, and has lost much. His
own patrician family feeling had made him believe that there must be an
imperial family feeling. The old tone of contempt for hereditary monarchs
is at length heard once more. To his intimates, he again and again says
frankly what he thinks of the kings who are kings by birth:
“Among those who are born to sit on the throne, the ties of nature count
for nothing. The interests of his daughter and his grandson will not move
Emperor Francis an inch from the calculations of his cabinet. These men
have no blood in their veins, nothing but frozen politics! What pygmies
they are, the kings by the grace of God—and the grace of Napoleon! My
leniency has been my blunder. In Tilsit I could have crushed them, but I
was too generous. History should have taught me that houses so degenerate
deserve neither loyalty nor faith! Now, England is filling their coffers
with gold. But I shall prove myself a better statesman than these born
kings who never leave their golden cages!”
In this atmosphere of intrigue, when he has to rub shoulders with princes
who dare not fight either for him or against him, traitors are his best
confidants.
The Emperor therefore summons Fouché, to whom he says: “Your friends
Bernadotte and Metternich are my worst enemies. Your Bernadotte can do
us an immense amount of harm, for he is able to give my enemies the key
to our policy, and he can explain to them the tactics of our armies....
His head has been turned because legitimate princes flatter him!” There
we have it once more, the word whose mystical power explains half of
Napoleon’s perpetual unrest. He can never refrain from a tremor when he
speaks of the legitimate rulers, whom he regards with mingled contempt
and envy. Whether he is mimicking them, or whether he is railing at them,
he, who is an upstart, is always pondering this problem of birth.
Instead of listening to the call of the nations, which soon rises clear
above the babble of the princes, he can only look on with malicious
delight at the manœuvres of the chessplayers in the cabinets. He watches
how England doles out subsidies to Prussia; how Alexander and Francis
hold converse about the weakness of their ally, the king of Prussia; how
Frederick William, in his dread of revolution, disbands the enthusiastic
Landsturm, refuses to give high office to Scharnhorst the boldest and to
Stein the ablest of his advisers, dismisses and banishes Schleiermacher
for a speech voicing the popular sentiment. The Emperor sends Fouché on a
secret mission (in plain words, as a spy) to the congress of Prague.
In Spain, meanwhile, though Napoleon in the north has been strengthening
his position by two victories, Joseph has been utterly crushed by
Wellington at Vittoria. The king of Spain has run away. When the princes
learn in Prague that the south of France now lies open to an English
invasion, their inclination to defiance is promptly strengthened. The
Emperor, who had left the best of his generals to fight for Joseph in
Spain, is beside himself with wrath. “He alone is to blame!” writes
Napoleon to Paris. “The English reports show how utterly stupid was his
command. Never was anything so absurd! Of course he is no soldier, but he
is responsible.... Make the king understand that he is not to see any one
till I come back.... Otherwise his house in Paris will become a centre of
intrigue, and I shall have to put him under arrest, for my patience is at
an end. I will no longer have my affairs imperilled out of consideration
for idiots who are neither soldiers nor statesmen!”
His eldest brother is his closest intimate in the family,—and now the
Emperor thinks that Joseph in a private house in Paris is more to be
dreaded even than as king in Madrid! Will Napoleon at length learn his
lesson, and, after this outburst, leave Joseph at peace? Hardly! For
even little Jerome has an army once more, and is again making a mess of
things; he gives one of the generals new marching orders, with the remark
that he is acting on instructions from the Emperor. The latter hears of
it too late. “I will not tell you in plain terms what I think of your
conduct; enough that I will not tolerate it any longer! If you again make
false representations of the kind, I shall publish an order of the day
to the effect that in future no attention is to be paid to anything you
say.... By such behaviour you may disturb the march of my whole army. It
is sheer cheating!”
Soon afterwards Junot, one of the oldest of his comrades, becomes
affected with megalomania; he loses a battle in Illyria, and then, in a
fit of frenzy, throws himself out of a window. Bourrienne, who had for a
time been cashiered on account of peculation, and had then been appointed
chargé d’affaires in Hamburg, had, after all, to be dismissed once more
for the old offence. “If he dares to interfere in public business, I
will have him arrested, and make him disgorge his ill-gotten gains!”
Bernadotte, the most faithless, has actually landed in Pomerania with
his Swedes, has advised the allies to stand firm, and will deceive them
as he has deceived others. To crown all, a sworn enemy of the Emperor is
now to join the opposing combination. General Moreau, who had been exiled
to America for his share in Cadoudal’s conspiracy, is on his way to join
the foes of France, and will share with Bernadotte the distinction of
fighting against his native land.
In this situation, on the horns of a dilemma, too cautious to turn his
victories to account, and too powerful to accept the terms on which alone
he would be able to make peace, the Emperor has recourse to his whilom
methods. He invites Metternich to Dresden, and tries to win over the
Austrian diplomat by suggestion. The interview is typically Napoleonic,
lasting nine hours without a break. The Emperor gains nothing by it, but
posterity gains a great deal.
Standing in the middle of the room, his sword buckled on and his hat
under his arm, the Emperor receives the minister. After making formal
enquiries about his father-in-law’s health, he forthwith assumes the
offensive: “So you, too, want war. Well, you shall have it. I have
crushed the Prussians at Lützen, and have beaten the Russians at Bautzen.
You are waiting for your turn? Be it so, we shall meet again in Vienna.
Men are incorrigible! Three times I have replaced Emperor Francis on his
throne; I have promised always to live at peace with him; I have married
his daughter. Even at that time I thought: ‘You are making a fool of
yourself.’ Still, I did it; and now I regret it!”
We see that he is not disposed to be civil; that to his father-in-law’s
envoy, on whom he wishes to make a good impression, he is blunter than
he had been to Francis on the day after Austerlitz. Metternich speaks of
world peace, which will only be possible if the Emperor is willing to
accept a reasonable curtailment of his dominions. It will be necessary to
give back Warsaw to the tsar and Illyria to the emperor of Austria, to
set the Hansa towns free, to enlarge Prussia.
“What you are asking is that I shall dishonour myself. I will die rather
than cede a hand’s breadth of soil. Your born kings can accept defeat
twenty times over, and still go back to their palaces. I am the child of
fortune, and I cannot do this! My power will not outlast the day on which
I cease to be strong, on which I cease to be feared.... Through the cold
of Russia I lost everything except honour.... Now I have a new army; you
shall see it; I will hold a review for your benefit!” Here we have once
more the pride of the born soldier facing those who are born kings; here
we have General Bonaparte. When the minister ventures to declare that
this army of which Napoleon speaks would be glad if peace were made,
the Emperor cuts Metternich short with one of his amazing outbursts of
frankness:
“It is not the army that wants peace! My generals want it! Really, I have
no generals left. The cold of Moscow has demoralised them all. There, the
bravest among them cried like children. A fortnight ago, I could still
make peace; now, after two victories, I can no longer do so.”
“Europe and you, Sire, will never come to terms. When you have made
peace, it has been nothing more than a truce. To you, success and failure
are equally strong motives for war. This time the whole of Europe will
fight against you.”
The Emperor laughs savagely:
“Do you think to destroy me by a coalition? How many of you are there,
then, Messieurs les Alliés? Four, five, six, twenty? The more, the
merrier!” He goes on to warn Metternich against counting on Germany,
whose peoples he is holding together by the presence of his soldiers and
whose princes are held together by their dread of Austria. He advises
armed neutrality, so long as the negotiations are going on in Prague,
whereas Metternich talks of armed mediation. These finesses of the old
diplomacy are to mask the gulf between them. Then, for a whole hour, they
dispute about the relative strength of the opposing armies, each claiming
the possession of exact information about the other side.
“I have detailed and accurate lists of your forces,” says the Emperor.
“I have had so many spies at work, that I know to a unit even how many
drummers you have. But no one knows better than myself how much or how
little value to attach to these secret service reports. My calculations
are based on more exact data, upon mathematical inferences. In the last
resort, no one has more than he can have.” The Emperor shows the Austrian
envoy the muster rolls of the Austrian army, which till yesterday
had been part of the French alliance. Metternich can see for himself
whether the figures are accurate. The Emperor then spends hours upon a
description of the Russian campaign. When the minister remarks that the
imperial troops are composed of striplings, and asks what Napoleon will
do when these children, like those who have gone before them, have been
swallowed up by the war, the Emperor is overcome with wrath. He turns
pale, his features are distorted, and he shouts at Metternich:
“You are not a soldier. You do not know what passes in a soldier’s mind.
I grew to manhood on the battle-field. Such a man as I does not care a
snap of the fingers for the lives of a million men!” He flings his hat
into a corner of the room. Now, there is nothing assumed about his anger,
and what he has just said is the revelation of an innermost truth. The
man who turns pale at the sight of a dying horse, who cannot bear to see
a human being pass away, remains and must remain impassive when, in his
army lists, he adds up the figures, shifts the hundreds of thousands
from column to column, and erases the myriads of slain. Is not war made
with human lives, and does it not end with corpses? What is the use of
reproaching a craftsman for using the tools of his trade? But as far as
morals are concerned, the minister has the best of the argument, and he
would have been glad if all France could have heard Napoleon’s words.
“France has no reason to complain,” says the Emperor more calmly. “To
spare France, I have sacrificed Germans and Poles. In Russia I lost
three hundred thousand men, but only a tenth of them were Frenchmen!”
Meanwhile, he has picked up his hat for himself, a thing he has certainly
not done for the last ten years; he has acted sensibly, as if he had
still been General Bonaparte. Then he plants himself in front of the
Austrian and says:
“It was exceedingly stupid of me to marry an archduchess. I was trying
to weld the new with the old, to make Gothic prejudices square with
the institutions of my own century. Now I can see the whole extent of
my error! The blunder may cost me my throne, but I will bury the world
beneath its ruins!”
This tragical admission is the climax of the interview, and the
turning-point of the problem of war or peace. The rancour engendered
in him by his own mistake spurs him on, regardless of prudential
considerations, into the fight with a coalition whose forces outnumber
his by three to one. Like a great gambler who realises that he has
made an irretrievable blunder, he is impelled by the stubbornness
characteristic of such natures as his to stake all upon a single throw.
He will show that, blunder notwithstanding, he can still win.
By the time he dismisses Metternich, he has fully recovered composure.
His hand on the door-handle, he says: “We shall see one another again
before you leave?”
“I am at Your Majesty’s service. But I have no longer any hope of
succeeding in my mission.”
The Emperor looks at him quizzically, and taps him gently on the
shoulder: “Do you know what will happen? You will not make war on me!”
After three days’ negotiation, Metternich wishes to depart, but the
Emperor is afraid of the final rupture. Napoleon summons the Austrian
envoy several times, and then invites him to an early interview in the
garden. The two men walk up and down.
“Now then, you must not assume this injured air!” In ten minutes
they arrange for a prolongation of the truce, and talk about further
conversations in Prague. Everything is left hanging in the wind; and
in the memorandum he signs with Metternich, the Emperor recognises his
father-in-law’s position of armed neutrality, which can only be a stage
on the way to war. Then he drives off to Mainz, that he may see once more
the wife who is daughter of that same Austrian ruler. He has appointed
her regent in Paris again, but has expressly forbidden his ministers
to submit certain kinds of documents for her consideration. “There are
details with which a young woman’s mind must not be besmirched.”
Had the Habsburg archduchess been a staunch wife and an affectionate
daughter, she would have journeyed on to Vienna, and would have brought
about a reconciliation which there was really nothing to prevent except
the two men’s wounded pride. She had a passably good understanding. Only
a few weeks before, the Emperor, writing to Francis, had said: “She fills
the post of prime minister to my great satisfaction.” We cannot for a
moment suppose that now, at the height of the crisis, he can have failed
to let her know all the hazards of the hour, were it only to ensure that
in the event of a breach her feelings would be on his side. But the
little goose made no move. Her only concern was to send costly gifts
which would make an impression on her relatives.
In Prague, each party keeps the other in suspense; Fouché does his master
harm by gossiping with all and sundry; Bernadotte cements his alliance
with his new friends. When, at the last moment, it seems possible that
the Emperor may give way, Alexander and Frederick William are so much
alarmed at the prospect that they compel Metternich to make the terms
more exacting, for they realise that so favourable an opportunity is
not likely to recur. The Emperor now angrily draws back, and on the day
after the expiry of the truce he receives his father-in-law’s declaration
of war. No doubt, in the interval, he has secured reinforcements; but
he can no longer trust the Confederation of the Rhine, and has to keep
watch upon his German auxiliaries. He stands to arms in Saxony and
Silesia, faced by Schwarzenberg in command of three armies, two of them,
respectively led by Blücher and Bernadotte, holding Silesia and the
north. With Schwarzenberg is Moreau, who has just arrived, and who, on
his last visit to Germany, had been the conqueror of that country.
Thus paradoxical is the marshalling forces in the game of chess. Under
the Emperor of the French, are fighting three German kings against
a German general, who a little while back had been the Emperor’s
subordinate in the war against Russia. Against Napoleon, are fighting two
French generals. One of them is leading Prussian troops against the man
who had for years pushed him to the front; nor is this general really
a royalist, for he, too, is a son of the revolution. Blücher is the
only true-hearted foe, for Blücher, whom Napoleon defeated seven years
earlier, has never fought on the Emperor’s side, and has never espoused
his cause. The one element in Napoleon’s favour is that three monarchs
have their fingers in Schwarzenberg’s pie, three commanders who know as
little about the trade of war as Brother Joseph did in Spain.
At the end of August, the Emperor opens the second Saxon campaign with
a great victory near Dresden. But on the third day, when he might have
followed up the allies and scattered them, he is seized by a violent
attack of gastric spasm. For a whole hour he fancies he has been
poisoned; his will is paralysed, and he withdraws instead of pursuing.
Thereby he loses an army corps, and thus (according to the report of
Daru, his daily companion) “causes the disaster of 1813.” In this first
battle against the hated Bonaparte, Moreau falls. Is it an omen? When the
Emperor hears the news, the rivalry of his youth flames up anew, and from
his very soul he cries: “Moreau is dead! My star!”
His other army has been defeated by Blücher on the Katzbach. Once more,
considerations of statesmanship outweigh those of generalship. How can I
divide my adversaries? It will be better to spare Bohemia for the sake of
Austria, for the defeat has aroused alarm there. He will make a surprise
march on Berlin, and will thus lure the Prussians out of Silesia.
But what the tsar had said years ago is still true.... Miracles only
happen when the Emperor is present, and he cannot be everywhere. He
is thus hampered in his great enterprise. Lack of fighting spirit,
difficulties of food-supply, and the frequency of desertion, are
continually making it necessary for him to visit his flanking armies: so
that in popular parlance, in consequence of his rushings to and fro, he
is nicknamed the “Bautzen Messenger.” His armies suffer more and more
from lack of food. They are so thickly set upon the ground that they have
long since eaten the country bare.
Nevertheless, he has not nearly enough soldiers. Since the 1814 levies
are already with the colours, he orders the Senate to call up also
those of 1815, and even the men whose liability to service has nearly
expired on account of advancing years—the very peasants whom, when
setting forth on this campaign in a mood of self-pity, he had envied
for their fortunate position. But when will the reinforcements arrive?
Who will train them, and how long will it take? Vainly now, at the end
of September, he sends an envoy to his father-in-law, to talk of peace;
he is prepared to make great sacrifices, “if only you will listen.”
But Francis remains firm, and is at length able to detach an important
member of the Confederation of the Rhine: the king of Bavaria falls away.
Thereupon the anxious chessplayer, round whom the clouds are gathering,
says to his old comrade something which he has never before been willing
to admit:
“Marmont, my game is going awry.”
With this admission, the Emperor’s genius spreads its wings and flies
away.
XI
On Düben Heath is a Saxon fortress, Düben Castle. There, one morning,
the Emperor is at work, planning the march on Berlin, the defeat of
Bernadotte and Blücher, smashing blows which will finish off the enemy.
Then a number of generals are announced. He comes out of his study to
meet them, knowing what they want, for his intimates have kept him
informed of the growing discontent among the leaders, who wish to winter
quietly on the Rhine. Marshal Ney has recently reported: “I am no longer
master of my army.” One of the visitors begins to speak hesitatingly;
a second puts forward dubious reasons; then, nodding to encourage one
another, they all obsequiously beg him not to march on Berlin. Leipzig
will be a better point of attack.
The Emperor listens to them in silence as he wonders: “Is my power
vanishing?” At length he replies: “The secession of Bavaria is imminent.
A movement on Leipzig, a backward movement, will arouse despair among the
soldiers. But I will think over what you have said.” He spends the rest
of the day alone, refusing himself to all visitors, brooding over his
maps. Caulaincourt, on duty outside, listens for sounds from within, but
can only hear the windows rattling in the October gale which is howling
round the castle. At length he is allowed to enter. The Emperor walks up
and down, and, speaking rather to himself than to Caulaincourt, he says:
“The French cannot endure reverses.” Then he sinks into a reverie.
Next day he announces that they will go to Leipzig. It is October 15th:
general animation; orders are issued; every one is delighted. Discussing
with Marmont the latest steps of the Habsburg ruler, Napoleon says in
conclusion: “I prefer a man of honour who simply keeps his word, to a
conscientious man who does what he thinks right.... Emperor Francis
has done what he believes to be the best for his subjects; he is
conscientious, but he is not a man of honour.”
Next day begins the great “Battle of the Nations.” The Emperor has only
one hundred and eighty thousand men against three hundred thousand of the
allies; by the evening he has won only part of the battle-field. On the
second morning Bernadotte arrives with reinforcements. The Emperor sees
that things are going badly, and would like to withdraw, but he cannot
make up his mind to a step that would give the impression of defeat. Once
more he tries negotiation. General Merveldt has been taken prisoner;
his sword is restored on parole; he is to go to Emperor Francis with
proposals for an armistice.
“I will retire behind the Saale, while the Russians and the Prussians
withdraw beyond the Elbe, and you Austrians go back into Bohemia;
Saxony must remain neutral.” Then, livening up, he develops to this
enemy general nothing less than a new plan for Europe. Hanover is to
be returned to England; the Baltic coast is to be freed; any of the
princes of the Confederation of the Rhine who wish to do so can leave the
Confederation; Poland, Spain, and Holland are to be independent; the only
reservation is as regards Italy, which must not become Austrian. “Be off
with you! You have a splendid peace mission. Should fortune favour it,
you will earn the love of a great nation. But if your side refuse peace,
we shall know how to defend ourselves.”
General Merveldt departs in amazement, and his report seems incredible
to his master. What! The Emperor Napoleon, in the course of war, between
battles, is willing to renounce half Europe and chooses a prisoner to
bring this offer? We did not know he was so weak.
The Emperor is anxiously awaiting his emissary’s return. Till far on into
the night, therefore, he refrains from issuing orders for the morrow; he
speaks of the ties of kinship, and of his wife and child. Suddenly he is
attacked by his gastric trouble, and staggers against the wall of the
tent, his face pale. They wish to send for his physician. “No! my tent is
transparent. If I am up and about, every one is at his post.”
“At least lie down, Sire!”
“No, I will die standing.”
“Do let me fetch the doctor, Sire.”
“No, I tell you! I can send a sick soldier to hospital. But who can send
me?” Terrible moments pass. “I’m getting better now. See to it that no
one comes into the tent!”
Half an hour later, he issues orders, but not for a retreat. Instead, the
army moves a little nearer to Leipzig. The enemy now outnumbers him by
two to one.
When day comes, he takes up his headquarters in a windmill. The attack
upon the French starts from three sides. It appears that, at the last
moment, Bernadotte has persuaded the Saxons to turn their guns against
France. “Infamous!” exclaims the Emperor, and all around echo the word.
Saxon officers who remain faithful to him, break their swords. A dragoon
belonging to the escort wheels his horse, and shouts: “We’ll do for them
yet, the scoundrels! We Frenchmen, too, are here! Vive l’Empereur!” The
whole escort follows him at the charge. Soon a young officer, who has
seized one of the Saxon eagles, gallops back with it to the Emperor, and
collapses from his wounds as he arrives. “These sons of France!” says
Napoleon softly.
On the second day of battle, he loses sixty thousand men. He is beaten,
but even the German critics say of the affair: “The allies did not secure
an overwhelming victory, such as might have been expected from the
enormous preponderance of their forces.”
During the hasty retreat of the defeated army through the town of
Leipzig, the Emperor dictates orders for the withdrawal. “They had
brought him a wooden stool,” writes an eyewitness. “On this, he now
fell into a slumber of exhaustion, his hands loosely folded in his lap.
In gloomy silence the generals were standing round the fire, while the
soldiers were marching past a little way off.”
Next morning the pursuing enemy spread disorder in the streets; a bridge
was blown up prematurely, so that the rear guard was forced to surrender;
one of the marshals escaped by swimming across the river, another was
drowned, several were wounded and taken prisoner. When, subsequently
Macdonald came across Augereau, for whose corps he had been waiting,
Augereau laughed him to scorn: “Do you think me such a fool as to let
myself be slaughtered in a Leipzig suburb? I won’t do that for a madman’s
sake!”
Here we have it for the first time, a sign that one of Napoleon’s
oldest companions-in-arms has become completely indifferent to the
Emperor’s fame; is animated by the mere will-to-live, reasonable enough
in a private soldier, but unworthy of a marshal of France. On the very
same day, another friend of Bonaparte’s youth writes to the Emperor,
complaining that in the report of the previous day’s fighting his
services have been overlooked, although for ten hours he had held a part
of the plain for whose defence another man is now given the credit.
“Never in my life have I served you more faithfully than I did on this
occasion.... Sire, I could not suffer anything worse than to be forgotten
at such a time.” The letter is signed, “Marmont.”
These two utterances on the day after Leipzig are the shadows of coming
events. Marmont and Augereau will both desert the Emperor in the decisive
hour.
Fifty miles away, Goethe is sitting in his room at Weimar. Napoleon’s
picture has fallen from its nail. The poet has heard the sound of the
Leipzig guns. The first news of the French defeat has arrived. Though
none of the allied generals can say, yet, whether the Emperor may not
be able to collect his forces once more, and to resume his career of
victory, Goethe, who only a few months earlier had declared Napoleon to
be invincible, already realises the full extent of the disaster. On the
day of the retreat, as if everything had happened a hundred years before,
and the whole matter had become legendary, he writes the following verses:
He who feels courage in his royal breast
knows no shudderings, treads gladly
the undermined road leading to the steps of the throne,
knows the danger and nevertheless mounts confidently.
The golden circlet’s tremendous burden,
he does not try its weight; resolute and calm,
he presses it gladly on his bold brow,
and bears it lightly, as if it were a laurel crown.
Thus didst thou. What seemed so far away,
thou hast tranquilly learned to make thine own;
and whatever fierce obstacles might block the path,
thou sawest them, contemplated them, and understood them.
A joyful day dawned, it summoned thee,
thou wast summoned, and thus it came to pass....
And thou still standest despite all that has happened to thee,
despite the foe, who, with war and death
threatens thee from without and from within....
The peoples are agape, they chatter, they are full of vain imaginings—
What do they care for, but games?...
The false world, it wooes us for our treasure,
for our favour, for our position,
and, even if one makes one’s lover one’s equal,
love does not suffice him, he wants the whole kingdom.
So was it with this man!—And now, declare it abroad,
even if it cost you your life:
To every man, be he whom he may,
there comes a last happiness and a last day.
At the same date, Schelling writes: “I do not believe that Napoleon’s end
is yet very near. If I am right, he will still be spared; and, even if
all his helpers fall away from him, he will still live to drink the cup
of humiliation to the dregs.” When, almost immediately afterwards, the
Bavarians definitively changed sides, Hegel wrote: “In Nuremberg, the mob
has welcomed the incoming Austrians with the most hateful jubilation....
Nothing more contemptible can be imagined than the mood and the conduct
of the burghers.”
Three outstanding Germans, immediately after Leipzig!
Certainly, it is far from being a final defeat. Fighting, and fighting
victoriously, the Emperor withdraws. In Erfurt, Murat presents himself,
wishing to go back to his kingdom. The master allows him to do so,
saying: “By next May, I shall have an army of a quarter of a million on
the Rhine!” Thus does his intelligence work; such is the quality of his
imagination; he can still think only in hundreds of thousands. In Mainz,
his troops are attacked by typhus, and he hastens to move what is left
of them across the Rhine. During the retreat, he works from three in the
morning till eleven at night.
Meanwhile, the advancing allied headquarters are thronged by the princes
who are deserting the cause of Napoleon. All is promptly forgotten
and forgiven. But there is one honest man left who finds strong words
to describe what is happening: “What do you think of these wretches’
behaviour?... They have had better treatment than they deserve.... All
these princelets are weaklings, to whom a far more honourable existence
has been conceded than their pitiful conduct would seem to justify....
The retention of their sovereignty, which consists in pretentiousness,
pleasure seeking, and the lust for dominion, has cost them nothing more
than the blood of their subjects.”
Such is Baron vom Stein’s judgment concerning his peers, the German
princes.
XII
Letizia is sitting by the fire. In her hand is a letter from Mainz, in
which her son answers her intercession for Louis by imposing certain
conditions. But this is not what troubles her; she is thinking of the
Emperor’s parenthetical allusion to the turn in his fortunes. He writes:
“In this situation, when all Europe is rising against me, and my heart is
so full of care....” She has never warned him of the impending dangers;
they are both of them too proud for that. But she has often uttered her
foreboding to intimates, with her phrase “Pourvou que cela doure!” She
has never been disturbed by the thought of any disaster to herself. She
thinks only of her dear ones. Who will help them when everything falls
to pieces? To whom, she is now asking herself, can the Emperor look for
support?
When he returns, she has to endure the recognition that the treachery
begins among her own children. Murat, who is always led by a keener
intelligence than his own (that of Caroline), signs a truce with England
and enters into an alliance with Austria. Elise has an adviser, Fouché,
who keeps away from Paris until the Emperor’s fall. “The only thing
that could save us all would be the Emperor’s death.” Such are the
ex-minister’s words to the Emperor’s sister. But Elise writes to her
mother asking what dances are to be given that winter in Paris. Louis
defies orders, and, being unable to stay in Austria any longer, comes to
Paris without leave. Napoleon proposes to banish him to a distance of two
hundred miles from Paris. The mother intercedes between the pair; there
is a further interview, as a result of which Napoleon and Louis are once
more estranged. Jerome has left his subjects in the lurch, and has fled
incognito from Cassel. Joseph, despite the Emperor’s reiterated requests,
persists in his refusal to undertake the defence of Paris. Lucien keeps
his distance, still in a bad humour.
Such is the gallery of brothers and sisters, the relatives upon whom for
a decade the Emperor has been trying to build up his dynasty. What can
be the feelings of a mother who has always cherished the most tender
affection for that one of her children who happened to be suffering most
keenly?
But in Morfontaine a cheerful mood prevails. The company there consists
of Joseph, the Spanish king without a country; Jerome’s wife, a queen in
like situation, whose father has gone over to the allies; the sometime
grand inquisitor of Spain says Mass in the chapel; there are two colonial
bishops; German, Spanish, and Italian courtiers without a court—a
brilliant company, like the audience at private theatricals, watching
actors who will soon come down from the stage to take their place on the
floor of the drawing-room. Only one of them hopes to draw a big fish out
of the troubled waters, Bernadotte’s wife, Joseph’s sister-in-law, the
woman to whom twenty years before the Emperor had given the go-by. She
knows that her husband, commander of one of the allied armies, is already
on the Rhine; she hopes that ere long, in Notre Dame, he will place
Josephine’s crown on her pretty brown head.
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor in 1809. Woodcut from a medal by J. P.
Droz.]
At this country-seat, more intrigues are carried on against Napoleon
than Joseph is aware of; for Joseph is not himself an intriguer; he is
merely easy-going and vain. The Emperor recognises this, now that it is
too late, and says to Roederer:
“That has been one of my mistakes. I fancied I needed my brothers for the
dynasty, but it is safe without them. It has been brought into being in
the heart of the storm by the nature of things. The empress suffices....
Everything has been quiet for a year past. There is only disquiet when
Joseph lives in Paris.... He cannot forget that he is the first-born.
Was there ever anything more absurd? If he were talking of our father’s
vineyard, that would be another story!... His interests are in women,
houses, furniture. He likes to go out rabbit shooting, and to play blind
man’s buff with the girls. I am tied to nothing; care not a jot for
houses or for women; though I do feel a little concern about my son.”
Thus does his monomania make headway in these weeks of increasing peril.
We see that all the rest, court included, has been nothing more than a
game. He cares not a jot for anything outside the one passion of his
soul—except that he is a little concerned about his son.
He now quickly makes up his mind to restore the Spanish crown to King
Ferdinand, who is set at liberty; but the Cortes must approve the treaty.
This is Talleyrand’s advice, for Talleyrand has now been recalled to the
Tuileries. Insistence on ratification by the Cortes will delay matters.
The traitor’s aim is to keep a French army in the south, so that France
may be weakened for the benefit of the allies, for whose cause Talleyrand
is now working. Joseph protests.
“My present situation makes it impossible for me to think of any sort
of foreign dominion,” writes the Emperor to his brother. “I shall
deem myself lucky if the peace treaty will allow me to keep the old
boundaries of France. Everything is crashing round me. My armies have
been destroyed, and it will hardly be possible to make the losses good.
Holland is gone, and Italy is uncertain.... Belgium and the Rhine
province are discontented; the Spanish frontier is held by the enemy....
How is it possible, at this crisis, to think of a foreign throne?” When
the prefect of police advises him to leave a larger body of National
Guards in Paris, during the campaign that is now imminent, he rejoins:
“Who can guarantee that they will be faithful to me? Am I to leave so
large a force in my rear?”
He is in despair. Surely there is no other word for the description
of these thoughts? His family, his allies, his own capital, all seem
untrustworthy to him. Thus completely has his mood changed since the
battle of Leipzig. Count Lavalette, Postmaster General, one of the most
honest men in Paris, who often came to see him at this time, found
him one evening in a condition of great depression. Napoleon received
Lavalette in his bedroom, standing in front of the fire, his hands
stretched out towards the blaze. The visitor, though a stout-hearted
fellow, advises peace, saying that the French are mutable. But when
he ventures to mention the name of the Bourbons, on whom perhaps the
Emperor’s mantle may fall, Napoleon turns away from the fire and silently
throws himself on the bed. When, a few minutes later, the count draws
near, he finds that Napoleon is sleeping.
These healthy reactions are a sign of returning courage. Napoleon’s
overthrow is close at hand; he foresees the catastrophe; but when people
talk to him about the Bourbons, to whose throne he has mounted and who
may dispossess him in turn, he cannot be bothered with the topic. It
bores him, and he goes to sleep.
Awakening reinvigorated, he recognises that the Bourbon sympathies of
the northern provinces are a danger; he notes that the funds have fallen
to fifty, and that the shares of the Bank of France have declined to
half their former value; and he finds that the new National Guard, which
after all he is obliged to call up, fails to materialise. He therefore
gladly accedes to a proposal that issues from the allies in Frankfort.
They are as disunited as he can possibly wish. Metternich, being a
statesman, thinks it will be better not to occupy Paris. The tsar, being
a romanticist, wants to take vengeance for Moscow by blowing up the
Tuileries. In the end, Austria gets her way. The offer to France is that
the country is to retain her natural frontiers; the Rhine, the Alps, the
Pyrenees. The Emperor feels that he is saved. Without a moment’s delay
he will accept the Frankfort proposal. Maret has actually drafted the
dispatch.
Suddenly he changes his mind. Why? Perhaps he has been put out of temper
by the opposition voiced in the Chambers. There, at length, the members
are showing themselves refractory. “We will not vote further armaments
unless the government agrees that they are to be used only for defence.
The Emperor must pledge himself to carry out all the laws that protect
liberty.” Thunders of applause greet these words. For the first time in
fifteen years, an assembly has ventured to criticise Napoleon. In his
hatred for all Chambers, the Emperor flies into a passion, forbids the
printing of the speech, closes the House, receives a few of the deputies,
scolds them:
“The throne is nothing more than a piece of wood covered with satin.
I, and I alone, represent the people. I am the State. If France wants
a different constitution, let her find another monarch for herself. Do
you think my words proud? I utter them because I have the courage, and
because France owes her greatness to me.” After this language in the vein
of the Roi Soleil, on New Year’s Day he openly threatens the deputies,
and says he will have them closely watched.
That very day, Blücher crosses the Rhine.
Thus, after twenty years of effort, and after six great wars, the more or
less united powers of Europe and the old monarchical idea, incorporated
in a Prussian field marshal, have made their way back across the boundary
river of the revolution—and in the same hour, the heir of these modern
ideas scatters their representatives and threatens imprisonment. With
a similar logic, the manifestoes of the conflicting worlds have changed
places. In Notre Dame, where for twenty years nothing has been heard
but thanksgiving services, prayers are now offered up on behalf of the
success of French arms. From the allies, on the other hand, who have so
long heard talk of success of the French arms as heralding the liberation
of conquered peoples, come assurances to conquered France that the
invaders are “liberators.”
The legitimists have at length learned from their great foe the technique
of his battles and his proclamations. But if they are able to turn the
lesson to good account, it is only because of their preponderance of
power, and because of the weariness of a nation, which, after twenty
years of glory, now seeks nothing but repose.
To begin with, they weaken their position by asking too much; for when
they offer nothing better than the old frontiers of 1792, the Emperor
breaks off negotiations, and makes ready to repel their onslaught. In
spite of all difficulties, he is able to strengthen his fighting front.
His spirits are now steadily rising. When a pious count advises him to
send the empress and her ladies to kiss the relics of Ste. Geneviève,
Napoleon bursts out laughing, and says: “You’re a pretty bigot! I am
going to fight it out!”
But to whom, in this stern moment, does he entrust the capital? Who
merits all his confidence?
Joseph! Joseph, who understands nothing about war and has been keeping
open house for the Emperor’s enemies, becomes lieutenant general of
France and governor of Paris! This domestic peace treaty throws a glaring
light upon the Emperor’s isolation, upon his lack of confidence in his
supporters, and upon his family feeling. Shortly before leaving for the
front, Napoleon has coldly ordered his brother to choose between openly
declaring himself to be the friend of the empress-regent or continuing to
be banished from Paris. “You can live in retirement at your country-seat,
so long as I am alive. If I die, you will be killed or imprisoned. At
Morfontaine, you will certainly be of no use either to your own people or
to France, but at any rate you will not do me any harm. Make your choice.
Feelings, whether friendly or hostile, are useless and out of place.”
The tone is that of a man fighting to save his crown. He reckons with the
likelihood of death; burns a great many State papers; and provides for
his natural sons. Little Léon is to receive a fixed income, Walewska’s
boy is to have a big majorat. As for his legitimate heir, who is now
nearly three years old, Napoleon has the child in his arms when he
takes leave of the officers of the National Guard. “I entrust to you
the dearest of my possessions. You are answerable!” Once more he urges
tenacity on his brother; once more he leaves his wife regent of their
son’s realm. Next morning he quits Paris.
He will not re-enter the city for more than a year, after devious
wanderings.
XIII
In a few weeks he is beaten.
His first strokes are successful. Near Brienne, where he forces Blücher
to retreat, and where he himself takes so active a part in the fight
that he is obliged to draw his sword in self-defence, he recognises
the tree under which “as a twelve-year-old youngster I used to sit and
read Tasso.” A romantic encounter which links his later life with those
early days when his dreams were first dreamed! His historical feeling
concerning himself grows in such circumstances to legendary proportions.
Immediately thereafter, Blücher gains a victory over him near La
Rothière. Paris is threatened. The Emperor’s strength seems broken.
Caulaincourt, in a letter, begs him to yield; Maret does the same by word
of mouth. Napoleon pays little heed to what Maret is saying; absently,
he flutters the pages of a book by Montesquieu. Then, pointing to a
passage, he bids Maret read aloud. “I know of nothing nobler than the
determination of a monarch of our day to prefer to bury himself beneath
the ruins of a throne rather than accept proposals to which no king
should ever hearken.”
“I know of something nobler still!” exclaims Maret. “That you should
sacrifice your glory and thereby fill the abyss wherein, otherwise,
France will find her grave!”
“Very well,” answers the Emperor. “Make peace. Caulaincourt can conclude
it, and sign the documents. I shall bear the shame. But do not claim
from me that I myself should dictate my own abasement!” Maret writes to
Caulaincourt in Châtillon, where he is negotiating anew with the enemy.
Caulaincourt demands confirmation. Meanwhile the Emperor has veered
about. He writes to Joseph: “Hold the gates bravely. Have two guns
mounted and see that the National Guard takes up its position there....
Place fifty men at each gate armed with service muskets, one hundred
with fowling pieces, and one hundred with pikes. Thus, each gate will be
guarded by two hundred and fifty men.”
Crœsus has become a beggar! Only six months ago, nay, even three months
back, Napoleon would have added three noughts to the figures! But now,
encircled by the conglomerated forces of so many princes, two cannon
and a hundred fowling pieces must suffice to save Paris! He sees the
absurdity, for the same evening Maret finds him depressed. The minister,
however, tries to persuade the Emperor to dictate the conditions of
peace: Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine are to be free, Italy must
be yielded up, everything which Bonaparte and Napoleon conquered must be
given back in order that he may keep Paris and the piece of wood covered
with satin. He will sign to-morrow, he says. Those who love him, tremble
at thought of the moment when with one stroke of the pen he will lose all
that his warlike deeds have won.
But fate guards him from this. News comes during the night. The enemy’s
position is worse than it seemed the previous day. Once more the war
lord’s imagination gets to work. When, next morning, Maret arrives with
the papers for the Emperor’s signature, he finds his master brooding over
the map. Napoleon hardly notices his entrance. All the minister can catch
is a few hurried words:
“Other matters are to the fore! I am determined to smash Blücher!” When,
at the self-same hour, Joseph’s letter arrives wherein he states that
Paris is in peril, Napoleon, in the interludes of issuing army orders,
dictates, from the depths of his heart, this rock-like answer:
“Should Paris be taken, I shall no longer continue to live.... I have
commanded you to do all that is needful to safeguard the empress, the
king of Rome, and our family.... I have the right to claim the assistance
of my kin, for I have helped them so often in the past....
“If Talleyrand considers that the empress should in any case remain in
Paris, this advice is secret treachery. Do not trust him! For sixteen
years I have associated with him, and have often given him favours. But
nothing is more certain than that he is the greatest enemy of our house,
now that luck has forsaken us. Take my advice to heart. I understand
events better than the young folk. If I lose the fight and die, you will
be the first to hear of it.... I fancy that Madame Mère could find asylum
with the queen of Westphalia. For God’s sake, do not allow the empress
and the king to fall into the hands of the enemy! Austria would then lose
interest in the war, and would take the empress to Vienna. England and
Russia would make the French see things from their outlook, and our cause
would be lost....
“Perhaps I shall conclude peace in a day or two.... Never since the
world began has a sovereign allowed himself to be taken alive in an open
city.... So long as I live, I must be obeyed. If I die, my reigning son
and the regent his mother must not allow themselves to be taken, were it
only for France’s honour. On the contrary, they must withdraw with the
last of their soldiers and entrench themselves in the remotest village.
Otherwise it might be said that I had sacrificed my son’s throne....
“I would rather know that my son had been killed than that he was
being brought up in Vienna as an Austrian prince. I have never seen
_Andromache_ played without lamenting the fate of Astyanax, and I have
always regarded it as a stroke of good fortune that his father did not
live to see it. You do not know the French people. The consequences of
these vast events are incalculable!”
This hunted man is panting for breath. For the first time since his
youth, death or collapse seems close at hand; perhaps both. When he
writes commanding Joseph to prepare for either eventuality, the two main
elements of his soul are mingling, and both are scattering sparks. His
calculating temperament is reckoning up the disastrous consequences that
would ensue, should Austria’s ambition cease to be operative; but at
the same time his idea of the destiny of his nearest and dearest takes
a soaring flight. Were he to fall next day, this letter would remain
to show that honour and glory had been the last flames of his heroic
imagination. But to-day, as always, everything discloses a meditation
upon the historical parallels which have throughout life been his spur to
greatness.
Thus the letter is the burning-cold document of a statesman and poet, and
only in this frame of mind is it becoming for a Napoleon to perish.
At the same time, he is a great military commander to the last. When
he divides the remnants of his army into two halves, and begins by
defeating Blücher with one of them in a brilliant advance, the six
battles he fights in nine days, from Champaubert to Montereau, are
still in the avalanche tempo of General Bonaparte. But that the names
of these battle-fields are French, tells us the whole story; hitherto
his victories have always borne foreign names. At Montereau he is an
artillerist once more, training the guns with his own hand as at Toulon.
He cries: “Forward, comrades! The cannon ball that will hit me has not
been cast!”
He has settled accounts with Blücher. Now to deal with Schwarzenberg!
But the Austrian is afraid of having his renown as commander dimmed,
and is sedulous to avoid a decisive conflict; he actually writes direct
to Berthier, suggesting that a truce be arranged in Châtillon. Enough
for the Emperor to read this, and his lust for battle is redoubled.
Another letter to Joseph, written with his own hand this time, breathing
defiance, shrewd, bold:
“You have been talking to my wife about the Bourbons, but you should
avoid such topics. I have no wish to take shelter behind my wife.... That
would only sow dissension between us.... I have never tried to win the
applause of the Parisians, for I am no stage puppet.... Besides, the real
Paris is something very different from the passions of the three thousand
persons who are raising all the clamour. Of course it would be easier
to explain that one cannot levy any soldiers, than it is to make the
attempt.... Je vous embrasse!”
It is many, many years since he has penned these words at the close of
a letter. Not since the Marengo days has he written thus to any of his
brothers or to any of his commanders—and Joseph is both. His heart is
beating more vigorously. Next day, writing to Savary, who has informed
him about a petition to the monarchs, and about the regency and fears
and intrigues, his phrasing is more incisive, and bears witness to the
excitement of a campaign:
“They shall learn that I am still the man of Wagram and Austerlitz!
I will have no intrigues in the State.... Let me tell you that if a
petition against the public authority is being circulated, I will arrest
King Joseph and all the others who sign it!... I want no tribunes of the
people! I myself am the great tribune!”
Meanwhile the allies are quarrelling. The tsar wants Paris to be placed
under a Russian governor until the nation chooses Bernadotte or another;
Austria will hear of nothing but a Bourbon restoration; Schwarzenberg
wants peace to be made at once, and instead of joining battle is content
to assume “a military attitude.” But Blücher, who has remarshalled his
forces, simply cries “Forward!” and is on the march. When the allies
once more send a proposal for the re-establishment of the old frontiers
of France, the Emperor is enraged, saying: “I am so angry, that I feel
dishonoured by the mere suggestion.” Being reminded that the enemy
outnumbers him by three to one, he answers heroically: “I have fifty
thousand men. Add myself, and you get a hundred and fifty thousand!”
Now, at the beginning of March, when he is to attack Blücher once more,
for the command of his other army he puts his trust in Marmont, his
earliest companion-in-arms.
But the spirit of revolt is rising. It had shown itself to Napoleon
at Düben Castle in the previous autumn; during the winter it had been
fomented in his brother’s circle; now it was to eventuate in treason
under fire. Marmont, the first among men still above ground who had
served under Napoleon, is also the first to betray him. Oudinot and
Macdonald have lost the battle of Bar-sur-Aube. Now, at Laon, Marmont
makes no more than a pretence of fighting, leaves his artillery in the
town square, thus snatches victory from his master, and even allows
himself to be surprised in his camp. “The Emperor would have been
justified in cutting him down,” says Berthier, “but is so fond of him
that, after making a scene, he has left him in command of his corps.”
What is more natural than that, during these days, his heart should go
out to the friends of his youth? But Marmont is not the only traitor to
whom he is lenient! Augereau, who had fought beside him at Rivoli, begins
to make signals to the Austrians, fails to be at his post. The reprimand
he receives is an affectionate one. Napoleon writes to him almost as if
they were still brothers in the field, as of old.
“Six hours’ rest were not enough for you?... What pitiful excuses you
are making, Augereau! No money! No horses! I command you to take the
field within twelve hours of receiving this. If you are still the old
Augereau of Castiglione, you can keep your command. But if you find the
burden of your sixty years so heavy, hand over the command to the oldest
of your generals. The country is in danger!... You should be the first
in the firing line. We must all put on our seven-leagued boots, and must
find the reckless courage of ’93. If the French soldiers see your plumes
at the outposts, you will be able to lead your men whithersoever you
please.”
Here we have General Bonaparte once more. The red of sunset reminds us of
the glories of sunrise.
Owing to Marmont’s retreat, the Emperor is left unsupported at
Arcis-sur-Aube, and has no more than a few thousand men with which
to face a great army. Defeat is inevitable. During the height of the
battle, a dust eddy sweeps across the field. A thousand dragoons are
panic-stricken, and take to flight, shouting: “The Cossacks!” The
Emperor gallops forward into the press. “Dragoons! Turn and fight! You
are running away, but I stand firm!” He draws his sword and charges
the enemy, followed only by his staff and the bodyguard. Six thousand
Cossacks take to flight. It is years upon years since he has led a
cavalry attack. His horse is shot under him, and he mounts another.
Berthier reports that the Emperor was obviously hoping to find death on
the field.
But death does not come for the asking. No more than Cæsar, Cromwell, or
Frederick, is Napoleon destined for this swift, heroic end. Such men are
something more than military commanders, and must live out their lives
as leaders of nations,—even though they have to fight against their own
nation. Henceforward the blows thicken, and each blow is symbolical.
But who can wonder if, at last, men forsake the despiser of men? He has
made princes of his soldiers; should it surprise us that they prefer
their princedoms to a soldier’s death? Need we wonder that a wife sprung
from an ancient ruling house, married off to an upstart, should be quick
to repudiate him and to become a Habsburg once more? That his brothers,
in whom he has shown too much trust, should, when disaster comes, think
of themselves rather than of the man to whom they owe everything?
When, in his last letters to Marie Louise, he asks her to write to her
father, she complies with a bad grace, and, instead of following the
example of Maria Theresa, she pens cold letters which can serve as hints
to her father and his ministers. News reaches the allied headquarters
that the English have landed in Bordeaux, and that the Bourbon flag has
been hoisted there; a letter from the Emperor to his wife is intercepted,
a letter in which he announces his intention to withdraw behind the
Marne. It is enough; at length all are agreed for the march on Paris.
In this utmost danger, Napoleon has still a last bold shift. He will arm
the peasants as a national reserve; they will be ready to his hand, for
they hate the invading foreigners. But now tidings come that Marmont has
allowed himself to be beaten once more, and is withdrawing to Paris with
Mortier. Like one who hears that his house is on fire, the Emperor storms
back towards Paris, entrusts the command of his troops to Berthier, and
rides citywards with his bodyguard. Then, leaving everything behind,
he jumps with Caulaincourt into a post-chaise, hoping it will not be
too late to seize the reins of power. After how many victories has he
not driven in such a carriage through the gates of his capital? Always
his thoughts have circled round the problem, “What is Paris saying? How
shall I find things there?” But now there is only one idea pulsing in
his brain: Will three persons stand firm till I come; three to whom I
can entrust the safety of the realm? The empress as regent, Joseph as
governor of Paris, Marmont as leader of the strongest corps!
Night. Change of horses. A squad of soldiers led by an officer. The
officer reports: “I am under Marshal Mortier’s orders, and am seeking
quarters for the troops that are being withdrawn.”
“Troops being withdrawn? Where is the empress? Where is King Joseph?”
“Her Majesty, with the king of Rome, fled yesterday to Blois. King Joseph
left Paris to-day.”
“Where is Marmont?”
“I don’t know, Sire.”
Beads of sweat form on the Emperor’s forehead; his lips twitch nervously;
he is horrified at the news. He breaks out: “Forward! To-morrow the
guards will be here. The National Guard is on my side. Once within the
walls of Paris, I shall only leave the town as a conqueror or as a dead
man!”
With difficulty, Caulaincourt persuades him to renounce this foolhardy
design. The Emperor orders that Marmont’s corps is to take up its
position behind the Essonne. Then he says to his minister: “Hasten to
Paris! Go on negotiating for a treaty. I have been betrayed and sold. You
have full powers. I will wait for you here. It is not far. Forward!”
He drives a hundred paces nearer, and can see the waters of the Seine.
But what is mirrored therein? The enemy’s watch-fires! At the outposts,
the invaders are cooking supper and singing songs; while the Emperor,
on the left bank with two post-chaises and a few servants, watches them
under cover of the darkness.
Then he has the carriage turned, and drives to Fontainebleau.
XIV
Next morning, Talleyrand is sitting in his bedchamber, submitting to the
ministrations of his valet. This statesman of the revolution still has
his wig dressed in the rococo style. The door is thrown open, and almost
before the servant has time to announce him, Count Nesselrode hurries
in to greet the friend of many years’ standing. He gets covered with
powder from head to foot, Talleyrand informs us. Two hours later, the
tsar himself comes to stay with his intimate friend as guest; he will not
put up at the Elysée for fear of bombs. The moment for which Napoleon’s
minister has worked indefatigably for six years has come at last, and
the smiling victors shake hands with a sense of moral righteousness:
virtue has triumphed! After knocking at the gates of Paris for two and
twenty years, the legitimist monarchs have at length been admitted.
This is their great moment. They have ridden into the city. A small
party of Bourbon supporters has hailed them as liberators; the Faubourg
Saint-Germain has rallied. Elsewhere in Paris, silence reigns. Every one
is calmly waiting to see whether, on the morrow, Napoleon or Louis is to
be called master.
The Emperor’s fate is sealed, for Joseph, in his cowardly flight and in
spite of Napoleon’s warnings, has not taken Talleyrand along with him,
but has left that cleverest and most dangerous of enemies in Paris. It is
not fixity of purpose on the part of the nation that brings the Emperor
to his doom; nor are the four allied foes unanimous as to his fate. He is
ruined by the co-operation of faithless servants and treacherous friends,
under the guidance of a man who is both—for Talleyrand, with the good
graces of the tsar, takes upon himself the spiritual leadership of the
next ten days. Now the intriguer is in his true element.
Yesterday he received another guest. Talleyrand by no means hates the
Emperor, but has from the first sign of Napoleon’s decline, forsaken
his master in order that he himself may climb. He has no wish to wreak
vengeance on a prisoner, and, indeed, has no reason for revenge.
Still, it would be convenient were the disturber of the peace quietly
to disappear; and therefore he promises a goodly reward to a certain
Maubreuil (a monarchist officer with an adventurous past) if this man
“will carry out an important commission on the road to Fontainebleau.”
But the adventurer’s heart fails him at the last moment, and he is
content to attack Jerome’s brave young wife and carry off her jewels,
instead of making an attempt on Napoleon’s life. Blücher, too, on his own
initiative, has sent a detachment with definite orders to make an end of
the Emperor.
“Well, what does France want?” asks the tsar of the abbé, as a man of
wide experience. Talleyrand has long had in mind the restoration of the
former king, but he thinks it best to ask whom Alexander would recommend.
Somewhat diffidently, the tsar mentions the name of Bernadotte.
Talleyrand smiles: “France does not want any more soldiers. If we wanted
one we should keep the one we have already, the finest soldier in the
world. No other, in his place, would find a hundred men to follow him.”
Talleyrand says this to the conqueror, says it in plain words to the
tsar; the defeated Emperor at Fontainebleau could have wished no greater
tribute of admiration than such words from such lips in such a situation.
A day later, Talleyrand summons the Senate, and the legislature confirms
the decision that the Emperor must abdicate. There is a general swing
of opinion in this direction. Caulaincourt is the only one who puts up
a fight for Napoleon, and tries to win over the tsar. For a moment,
Alexander’s impressionable heart is touched; the image of his whilom
friend rises before his mind; he wavers, and says that he will do his
best with his allies to save the crown for the king of Rome.
But while the impotent Caulaincourt is trying to persuade the vacillating
tsar, and is doing what he can to save the house of Bonaparte, at this
same hour on the third of April, Talleyrand has summoned Marshal Marmont
who, with his twelve thousand men across the Seine, is still a power,
since the main body of the allies has not yet reached Paris.
See them sitting there, Napoleon’s companion-in-arms and senior officer,
hobnobbing with the doyen of the Emperor’s ministers. The diplomat
reasons coldly with the soldier, who hardly needs to listen to the
arguments. He is hopelessly disillusioned, tired out. His faith had been
shaken three years ago in Spain. His thoughts run this wise: “What is
the use of trying to march with a dead man? The king is dead; long live
the king! At the military academy, we were all monarchists. His defeat
is a proof that the Bourbons have the right of it. The only choice is
between being stood up in front of an old wall or taking one’s stand
behind an old throne. The oath of allegiance? That has been abrogated.
The ties of friendship? Only the other day, he was scolding me after the
Laon affair.” Acting on the suggestion of his old acquaintance, Marmont
writes to Schwarzenberg, the allies’ commander-in-chief:
“By the decree of the Senate, the army and the people have been released
from their obligation of fealty to Napoleon. I am ready to promote an
understanding between people and army, in order to avoid civil war.”
Upon this pretext, which he subsequently endeavoured to fortify with
the excuse of patriotism (the paltry argument of every turncoat), the
Emperor’s senior marshal destroys the Emperor. Augereau, in a shameful
proclamation, is quick to follow Marmont’s lead.
At the time when Talleyrand is winning over the marshals, the Emperor in
Fontainebleau is reviewing his guards. To them he exclaims: “Never shall
we allow any one to wear in Paris the white cockade of the émigrés....
In a few days we will attack the enemy in Paris!” The officers brandish
their swords enthusiastically, shouting: “À Paris! Vive l’Empereur!” He
waves his hand to them, and, smiling joyfully, he briskly mounts the
steps, surrounded by his last ministers in their embroidered coats.
Soon afterwards, a carriage draws up in the courtyard. Caulaincourt steps
out; he is pale, having passed the night in a vigil. He approaches the
Emperor. Berthier enquires: “Well, my lad, how goes it?” The minister
hesitates to answer, for he does not like Berthier’s tone. Are the very
nearest going to fall away too? He finds the Emperor at work.
“What do they want of me?” asks Napoleon eagerly.
“Great sacrifices, that you may retain the crown for your son.”
“You mean that they refuse to treat with me! They want to make a helot of
me, to hold me up as a warning to all those whose genius enables them to
rule men and to make the born kings tremble on their ancient thrones!”
Bonaparte’s metallic tone! Such is the mood produced in the Emperor by
the sight of his guards, by the perusal of his latest muster rolls, by
the study of his maps. Now the minister mentions the most moderate of the
tsar’s demands. Napoleon is to abdicate in favour of the king of Rome,
and then the terms of a regency will be discussed. But there is talk of a
Bourbon restoration. The Emperor leaps to his feet:
“They are mad! The Bourbons in France; they would not be able to hold
their position for a year! Nine-tenths of the nation cannot endure them;
my soldiers will never serve under them. They have lived for twenty years
upon the alms of a foreigner, at war all the time with the fundamental
principles of their homeland! The Senate consists entirely of regicides,
or the sons of regicides. I was a newcomer, with nothing to take
vengeance for; a man whose only business it was to upbuild.... No doubt
they can draw profit out of the crash, can exile me and my family; but
the Bourbons—never!”
Thus does his work roll before his mind as in a rhapsody, lighted up by
his contempt for those whom he succeeded and who are now to succeed him.
He becomes the soldier once more. “They demand my abdication. Will the
crown then be secure for my son? I have still fifty thousand men. They
will march with me to Paris. After the victory, the people shall decide.
If, then, the French want to chase me away, I will go.” See the conflict
in his soul. As statesman, he is willing to abdicate, that his son may
reign; as soldier, he is still eager to fight, that he may retain all.
But while enthusiasm grows in the rank and file of his army, while the
common soldiers are willing to give their lives for the Emperor, the
marshals are malcontent. Although they have not yet heard of Marmont’s
defection, they cherish like wishes, and would gladly shake off their
allegiance to Napoleon if they could do so decently. This marked
difference between the mood of the men and that of their leaders is
once more a vengeance for the system of titles and monetary rewards
with whose aid the military commander, when he had become an emperor,
had transformed generals into marshals. Next day, the seniors among
them are of one mind. Ney, Macdonald, Oudinot, and Lefèvre, in the most
subservient way possible, speak to him of the advantages of abdication.
The Emperor shows them his maps, which are again beset with coloured
pins; he points out to them that the enemy is in an unfavourable
position, and enumerates his own resources. All is vain! The frame of
mind they had shown in Düben Castle, intensified a hundredfold, blocks
his way. Silently he dismisses them, for he wants to think over a plan.
Mentally, he has mustered his forces, and the total of his additions does
not seem to him a bad one. A conditional renunciation, therefore, will
not betoken anything more than an armistice, a postponement.
A few hours after the audience of the marshals, he sends for
Caulaincourt, and points to a holograph document on the table:
“There is my abdication. You can take it to Paris.”
The minister reads:
“Since the allied powers have declared that Emperor Napoleon is the
only obstacle to the peace of Europe, Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his
oath, declares himself ready, for the welfare of his country, which is
inseparable from the rights of his son, from those of the regency of the
empress, and from the maintenance of the laws of the Empire, to descend
from the throne, to give up France and even life itself.”
What a style! A diplomatic document, involved in its phraseology,
cautiously worded, ambiguous, penned for the inspection of diplomats of
the old school. Nothing of Napoleon in it. The minister begs for the
companionship of two of the marshals for so important a mission.
“Take Marmont and Ney,” says the Emperor, adding, “Marmont is my oldest
comrade.”
“Marmont is not here.”
“Macdonald, then.”
Late that evening, three hours after the interview with Napoleon, the
plenipotentiaries are at the Elysée confronting the allied princes and
ministers. Most of the negotiations are carried on between the tsar
and Caulaincourt. The latter’s contention that the French are heartily
against the Bourbons has its effect; the parleys continue far into the
night. Suddenly an announcement is made in Russian; the Frenchmen do not
understand. Thereupon the tsar speaks: “You are relying, gentlemen, upon
the unshakable loyalty of the troops towards the imperial regime. Well, I
have just been informed that the advance guard, the sixth army corps, has
deserted the Emperor. It has come over to our lines.”
The allies’ task has become easier; they now demand instant and
unconditional abdication. Meanwhile the Emperor sends one courier after
another from Fontainebleau to his minister. He writes:
“If they refuse to negotiate with me, what kind of a treaty will it
be?... Bring back my act of abdication, I command you.... I will sign no
treaty!”
Next day at six o’clock in the morning the Emperor is at work with
Berthier. A captain is introduced, an adjutant of Mortier’s.
“Well, what news?”
“The sixth army corps has gone over to the enemy. It is marching to
Paris.”
The Emperor seizes him by the arm and shakes it.
“Marmont? Are you sure? Did the troops know where they were being led?”
“During the night they were led into the Austrian camp. They were told
that they were marching against the enemy.”
“My men have to be duped before they can be torn away from me! Did you
see Marmont at the time he set out?”
“No, Sire.”
“The cavalry, too?”
“In close columns.”
“Where is Mortier?”
“He sent me to tell you that his corps will be loyal to you in life and
in death. He awaits Your Majesty’s orders. The young guard is ready to
die for you. All young France is ready!”
The emperor steps close up to the young officer, looks him straight in
the eyes, and with a friendly gesture allows his hand to slip under the
fringe of the epaulette so that it may rest on the captain’s shoulder.
Thus does the ageing Napoleon find support once more in the young men of
France.
When Caulaincourt brings the demands, he is accompanied only by Macdonald.
“Where is Ney?”
Silence. A pause. Then he is told the conditions. They probe him to the
quick. To disavow the dynasty! For a decade the dynasty has been his goal.
“My personal withdrawal did not suffice? Must I, with my signature,
disinherit my wife and my son? I cannot do this! I won their throne for
them by my deeds!” The paradox has taken such deep root in his thoughts
that he has ceased to be aware of his existence. Then he counts his
troops again.
“I have twenty-five thousand men here; I can speedily bring up another
eighteen thousand from Italy; Souchet has eighteen thousand, Soult forty.
I shall fight!...”
The remaining troops are loyal, but the leaders are weary of the
struggle. Why does he not place himself at the head of his guards?
Because he can only think in terms of marshals, because the feudalist
atmosphere is cutting him off from his stalwarts.
Here they all come again! They warn him, even Berthier joins with the
others now, that Fontainebleau can easily be surrounded. He listens to
them with dignified composure. Then he abruptly asks them whether they
are prepared to march with him to the Loire; or to Italy, where they can
join Eugene’s forces. Behind the proposal, we sense new plans of our
adventurer. But the men who stand before him are marshals and Frenchmen;
they breathe the words “civil war”; they advise him to abdicate. The
island of Elba has been chosen for his dwelling place; he had better take
what he can get! He dismisses them.
“None of them has either heart or reins! I am not so much beaten by
fortune, as by the ingratitude of my brothers-in-arms. It is infamous.
All is over!”
Without, in the drawing-room, groups of courtiers and dignitaries have
assembled. Voices are hushed as though a king lay dead. All are awaiting
the signature. The Emperor is well aware of this, he allows no one to
enter his room, he will keep them waiting till morning. After a feverish,
sleepless night, his negotiators find him sitting in his dressing-gown
before the fire, a broken man and pitiable.
They bring him the deed which they have signed in Paris that night. He
is to receive Elba, and two million francs as annual subsidy; he is to
retain the title of Emperor; he is to have a guard of four hundred men.
Talleyrand had warned the allies that this proximity of the lion to
France was a menace; he suggested Corfu, and even mentioned St. Helena.
Fouché endeavours to shield the Emperor from a slow descent from the
heights; in elegantly phrased letters he suggests that Napoleon should
go straight to America, where, as a free citizen, life could be started
anew.—The farther away from the coasts of Europe, the better!
All this leaves the Emperor cold. He is visioning something different.
He sees how Macdonald is standing the test; in his secret heart he
is comparing this marshal with those others who have shown so much
ingratitude; he feels now that he has not honoured the man enough. In
this hour when he has to sign his abdication, Napoleon says:
“I have not sufficiently rewarded you. Now I can do no more. Take the
sword which Sultan Selim gave me and keep it in remembrance.” While all
are waiting for the signature, the Emperor sends for the gilded scimitar,
and embraces the general as he presents it. Then Napoleon signs the act
of abdication.
“The allied powers having declared that Emperor Napoleon is the sole
obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor,
faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his
heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and that there is no sacrifice,
not even that of life, which he is not ready to make for the interests of
France.”
The deed is done! All breathe freely again. The generals and the
courtiers leave Fontainebleau; Maret alone remains. They hasten to Paris;
even Berthier throws himself into the arms of the provisional government.
Talleyrand and Fouché are at the head of things.
But the Emperor remains another nine days in his palace, and he is
not alone. Around him, unshaken, his guards are encamped; they still
muster twenty-five thousand men. Who else is with him? His brothers
have taken to their heels. What is Josephine doing, at Malmaison? After
she has wept, and sworn that she will follow the forsaken Emperor, she
receives Napoleon’s conqueror with sparkling eyes and adorned with all
the pitiful appeal of a Niobe. The tsar wishes to play the part of a
knightly cavalier, and succumbs to the renowned charms of the first
empress. But Hortense, her daughter, receives the tsar’s visit coldly and
off-handedly. As soon as he is gone, she hastens to Fontainebleau and
remains with the Emperor till his departure.
At first, his mother is with him. But, wishing to see her in safety, he
persuades her to go away with Jerome. They will meet again later. When
the empress says good-bye to Letizia, she utters polite commonplaces
and wishes her mother-in-law well. The old lady, who sees through Marie
Louise, and knows that all she cares for is security and enjoyment,
answers this daughter of the Habsburgs: “That will depend upon you, and
upon your future conduct.”
The Emperor has no word from wife or son in reply to his numerous letters
and messengers. While for himself he asks neither land nor money, for her
he demands that, in addition to Parma, she should have Tuscany, or at
least a strip of it which would bring her lands nearer to Elba and thus
set up a link between man and wife. He writes to her advising as to the
best halting-places on the route; Corvisart is to decide which waters
will do her health most good; she is to take her personal treasure with
her. Then he writes to the palace prefect that all the diamonds which are
not her or his personal property must be given back to the treasury, for
they belong to France.
Meanwhile the government has sent a confidential agent to the Tuileries
with orders to seize the imperial treasure. All the gold and securities,
valued at one hundred and fifty millions, were taken away; in plain
words, stolen. These sums had been saved by Napoleon from his civil list
during the fourteen years of his rule. His silver plate, all personal
articles of value, his golden snuff-boxes, and even his handkerchiefs
embroidered with the initial N., were taken at the same time. The order
for this bears, among others, Talleyrand’s signature. The Emperor, who
until yesterday was the wealthiest man in Europe, journeys to Elba with
three million francs as his fortune!
He is profoundly disheartened. Can anything disillusion him further?
Lucien writes to the pope the day after the abdication, and becomes a
Roman prince. Murat, acting on the advice of Fouché (who holds the net
of intrigues during these last weeks), has entered Rome, has advanced
his troops towards Tuscany, invading Elise’s realm—always spurred on
by Caroline, and always in alliance with England, which has occupied
Tuscany. Elise, who at the last moment has staked on the wrong hazard,
and has through a false calculation remained faithful to her brother,
flees before her sister’s troops, brings a child into the world while
lying up at a mountain tavern, and in Bologna is taken prisoner by the
Austrians. The only two of the pack who have behaved decently are Jerome
and his wife.
The last days pass in sinister silence. “If a carriage drives into the
palace yard, all prick up their ears. Is any one coming to bid Napoleon
farewell? No one comes while affairs are being wound up. But a day or
two before the departure, a veiled lady arrives, late in the evening. No
one knows her, and she is not admitted. Countess Walewska waits a whole
night, and when she goes away in the morning she leaves a letter for him.
He sends after her, but she has gone. He writes:
“Marie!... The feelings which animate you touch me profoundly. They are
worthy of your lovely soul and the goodness of your heart.... Think
affectionately of me! Never doubt me! N.”
As soon as he has recovered his old tranquillity of mind, the Emperor
is promptly animated with new energy. Has he not an island as base of
operations? Who knows what may come of it? Corsica, too, is an island in
the Mediterranean! He orders a monograph and studies the geography and
statistics of Elba. “The air is wholesome, the inhabitants are honest
folk, and I hope that my good Louise will like the place well enough.”
He chooses his four hundred men; but the whole guard wants to go with
him, though this will involve leaving wife and children. Among them are
men whose hearts he had won two-and-twenty years earlier when he had
been captain in Toulon, men who had followed his fortunes from Cairo to
Moscow, through sixty battles.
He cheers up. Discussing predetermination with the palace prefect, and
how death has passed him by during the last battles, he adds:
“A violent death is cowardice. I can see no greatness in shirking
responsibility in that manner, like one who has gambled away his
fortune.... Suicide is incompatible with my principles and with the
position I have occupied in the world.” They walk up and down the terrace
in silence for a time, and then he says with a smile: “Between ourselves,
a living drummer is better than a dead emperor!”
All the formalities have been accomplished; the allied commissioners
who are to accompany him to Elba, four in number, have arrived; the
start is fixed for noon. He writes in simple terms to tell his wife,
and concludes: “Farewell, my good Louise. You can rest assured of the
courage, the tranquillity, and the affection of your husband. N.” He adds
as a postscript: “A kiss for the little king!”
The start will be an easy matter, for no one has come to take leave.
But there are to be leave-takings after all. The old guard is waiting
for him in the palace yard, drawn up in a square. As he comes down the
steps, thousands of eyes are fixed on him. He must say something. What
can he say? For twenty years he has only spoken to these men just before
a battle and just after a victory, to inspire them or to thank them.
Well, he will thank them now, though there has been no victory; he will
thank them for the hundred victories of the past. He steps forward. “Vive
l’Empereur!” He enters the square, and says:
“Soldiers of my old guard, I take leave of you. For twenty years I have
seen you always upon the path of honour and glory. During the last few
weeks, you have been models of bravery and fidelity, just as in the
years of good fortune.... But there would have been civil war. That is
why I sacrificed all other interests to those of the country. I am going
away.... You, friends, continue to serve France. Her happiness has been
my only thought. My good wishes go with you. Do not mourn my fate. If I
have determined to go on living, it is that I may increase your fame. I
shall write the story of the great deeds we wrought together. Farewell,
my children. I would gladly press you all to my heart. At least let me
kiss your colours!”
The general holds out the colours. Napoleon embraces him, and kisses the
flag. “Good-bye, comrades!” He gets into the carriage. “Vive l’Empereur!”
He drives away.
The war-hardened veterans stand there, blubbering like children. Their
father has gone away. Never had he spoken to them more movingly. The
dignified pathos of ancient Rome, the ardent imagery of his manifestoes,
the similes and the exaltations, have vanished with the fever of
battle. This Emperor spoke like a commander, this commander spoke like
a company leader. His words were manly, blunt, and restrained. When he
kissed the colours, it was an unparalleled gesture; never before had he
done anything of the kind. They will tell their grandchildren what the
great Emperor, their “petit caporal,” has said to them this day. The
grandchildren will tell their grandchildren in turn, and so the story
will go down the generations.
But hardly has he left this soldierly atmosphere, in which he grew to
manhood and then to greatness, when he has to face the mob. After the
sobs of his old soldiers, come clamour, cries, and curses! As the train
of carriages drives swiftly through Provence, the threatening shouts of
the people deafen him: “Down with the tyrant! Kill the wretch!” In the
villages where the horses are changed, women rage round his carriage,
screaming at him, flinging stones, trying to force the coachman to
shout “Vive le Roi!” At one of these villages, the crowd has prepared
an effigy, a uniform coat stuffed with straw and smeared with mire
and blood. Here they hail him with the cry: “Kill the murderer!” The
carriages press on at top speed and the journey becomes a flight.
Napoleon’s first flight.
With rigid face, the Emperor looks at the mob and listens to the cries of
execration. Are these the same people who ran beside his carriage, eager
to catch a glance from his eyes? They are indeed the same! What he is now
experiencing, he had foreseen, with the seer’s vision of the misanthrope,
at his first entry into Paris when the crowd had jubilantly welcomed
him as conqueror. He sits huddled in a corner of the carriage, pale and
silent; at each halt, the foreign commissioners jump out to guard the
windows of his coach. Will he bear all this without making a sign? Will
he draw his sword? He does not wear one now. In mufti, he can get away
from his country, but not in his green uniform. Only once before has
he had such an experience. It was on the Nineteenth Brumaire, when the
radicals were shaking their fists at him. Then he did not draw his sword.
Then, as now, he was powerless against the mob, for it was not his trade
to beat the mutable many, nor was it his talent to persuade them. He is
not a tribune; he is an emperor. One who can command as well as he, can
do nothing but command. If he fights, it must be in a battle.
Movement! Air! In a lonely road, he has the carriage stopped, and one of
the post-horses taken out of the traces. He fixes a white cockade on his
plain round hat, and rides in front of the carriages, outstripping them,
his servant following. Thus he makes his way to Aix, but halts short of
the town, enters a wayside inn, and gives his name there as Campbell, a
British colonel. This is his sixth name.
The little Provençal maid who waits at table prattles: “They’ll finish
him off before he reaches the sea!” “Colonel Campbell” nods, saying “Of
course, of course!” to all her utterances. Then, when he is left alone
with his servant, his head droops on the man’s shoulder, he has a nap to
make up for two sleepless nights. Kindly nature, this is your gift to the
greatest of your warriors! When he wakes, the recent sounds and sights
recur to his mind. With a shudder, he says in low tones:
“Never again! I shall be happier in Elba than ever before. The sciences
now, nothing more. I do not want to wear another European crown. You have
seen what the people really is. Was I not right to despise man?”
When the carriages reach the inn, he thinks it wise, warned by his
previous experiences, to change his clothes once more. Since time
presses, he puts on the uniform of an Austrian general which belongs to
Commissioner Koller; surmounts it with the cap of Truchsess, the Prussian
colonel; and has a Russian cloak hung round his shoulders by Shuvaloff.
Thus bedecked in a carnival costume, pieced together from garments
belonging to the three allied powers, a fool on the heath, does Emperor
Napoleon escape from his country.
Fréjus at last! This is the port where he landed on his return from
Egypt, a beaten commander, who had lost all the battleships of France,
and ought to have been tried by court-martial! But how enthusiastic,
then, had been his reception by this leaderless people, for the memory
of his successful Italian campaign was still fresh. Then, he had driven
through triumphal arches on the journey to Paris; the journey he had now
been making in the reverse direction, in danger of being stoned, and
escaping murder only by a mummer’s disguise! Fifteen years lie between,
the rebirth of a State, the glory of a nation. Europe lies between, the
clash of arms, dead soldiers rotting in their graves, the returning hero
received with frenzied acclamations, a marshal rising from pothouse
to palace, men of genius taking sides for and against the conquering
nation—and a circlet of little golden leaves which the foreigner from
the Mediterranean island had, with the simplicity of the self-made man,
placed on his own brow.
XV
How big Corsica is! How high her mountains! Bastia is an admirable
harbour; its fortifications can be seen through a spyglass. If taken from
the eastern side....
When the ruler of Elba rides among the hills of his new home, the
silhouette of his old home lies spread before him; everything looms
larger across the water. Forty times bigger, ten times as many
inhabitants; he has all the figures, to a unit, in his head. Elba is
nothing more than a mole-hill.
On the clear May morning when he landed, he was welcomed by a deputation
of peasants and petty burghers in Porto Ferrajo. Timidly they had paid
their compliments to the man who was to reign over them. But their
astonishment was great when, instead of inviting them to a banquet,
he leapt into the saddle and rode off to inspect the fortifications.
On the morrow, orders began to fly about the sleepy little isle:
Pianosa was to have two more batteries; the mole must be lengthened;
the roads improved. When first the four hundred grenadiers appeared in
the land, the natives looked at them askance as men of a foreign race.
Soon, however, the forces were increased by the creation of a foreign
battalion, and a National Guard. Napoleon once more has an army of over a
thousand men; soon he has a small flotilla likewise. What for? Just for
him to see after and take care of. He has a Council of State; Bertrand
and Drouot (the generals who have accompanied him into exile) and a dozen
inhabitants of the island, are members; and, together with Napoleon who
presides over the assembly, they discuss improvements in the iron mines
and the salt pits. Have you no mulberry culture here? The silkworms bring
in good money over there, in Lyons; and if the French government imposes
a tariff upon our produce, we can easily sell to Italy.
Save! We are so poor, and France makes no move to pay the promised
allowance. The white house is smaller than the one in Ajaccio, and
very much simpler; but there is no money for building additional
accommodation; and when the “grand marshal” Bertrand draws up a list of
mattresses and other bedgear, his master underlines the mistakes,—for he
has every detail of his establishment by heart.
Is this indefatigable man never to realise what a parody is his
administration over the tiny island, the diminutive army, the small
household? Never! Here in Elba, where in the best of spirits and health
he throws himself whole-heartedly into his undertakings, he comes to
realise that it was not the masses that had allured him. To order, to
build, to press his finger into the wax of humanity, these things he
must do, urged onward by the impulse of his artist’s soul. But, since
humanity is not as wax, and since his constructions can never be finished
and are always vibrant with life; since the opposition of material
forces also takes a hand in the game, even when matter seems to have
been conquered—he can only fulfil his mission by coercing and conquering
the human spirit, by issuing orders and bringing suggestions to bear, by
constant vigilance and constant upbuilding; in a word, by ruling. He has
never been a dilettante or a parvenu; and, this being so, he drives the
little wheel to-day with just as much precision and earnestness as he had
driven the earth’s sphere in former days.
But soon, when most of his enterprises are in good going order, he feels
he is becoming lazy, even when he is studying mathematics. This causes
him to reconsider his position.
“It is by no means difficult to accustom oneself to a life of
meditation,” he writes, “if one possesses within oneself the necessary
reserves. I work hard in my study; when I emerge I have the delightful
spectacle of my old grenadiers in front of me.... Born kings must suffer
terribly when they are dethroned, for pomp and etiquette are the very
marrow of their lives. For my part, I have always been a soldier, and
became a king only by chance, so that these things have been nothing but
a burden to me, whereas wars and camps come naturally. Out of my great
past, I regret naught but my soldiers. After all my treasures and my
crowns, my most cherished possessions are the couple of French uniforms
they have allowed me to keep.”
These are the words of an unpretentious king. Do people not believe him?
And does Europe laugh when, in his kingdom of Lilliput, he preserves
the forms of kingship? Does Europe begin to suspect a secret in the
island? The innate dignity, whereby long ago the young general had wrung
respect from the bearers of inherited rank, to-day is still able to hold
satirical visitors in check. Every one admires the natural simplicity of
the lonely man who, despite the exiguity of his dwelling, still holds to
the title of “Majesty.” He lives in his island sans palace or fittings,
sans court or ministers, only surrounded with the aureole of his deeds.
This return home brings solace to his heart—for Elba is Italy. The
peasant speaks to him in the language Napolione had learned at Letizia’s
knee. The Mediterranean amid whose waters he was born and reared, the
islands with their quiet shores, do they not all of them bring back
memories of youthful days? Stone-pines, fig trees, and crags; the white
houses among the vineyards; the sails, and the fishermen’s nets; pride of
clan, and the headkerchief worn at church; all these things seem to take
him gently by the hand and lead him back to the dreams of childhood. Now
the storm-racked nerves relax, and at length know a spell of repose. In
these wholesome months, the Emperor comes to look upon his career as a
visionary flight into the land of childish imagination; and it is only
when he contemplates the men of his old guard that he realises something
did happen during the years that separate Corsica from Elba.
“The Emperor lives very contentedly on his island,” writes one who
accompanied him there. “He seems to have forgotten the past. The
management of his small household gives him occupation; he is now looking
out for a suitable site to build his country-seat; we ride, and drive,
and sail round the coasts as much as we please.”
Since he has plenty of time on his hands, and since thrift is essential,
he examines everything, to the minutest details. Just as, in the
Tuileries, he himself drew up the list of his clothing, so now, in Elba,
he says to Bertrand: “My underlinen is in a lamentable state. Part of it
has never been unpacked, and it has not been marked. Give orders that
everything must be laid out in drawers and presses, and that no one is to
be given anything belonging to our court without furnishing a receipt....
There are not enough ordinary chairs. Have a sample sent from Pisa; they
must not cost more than five francs apiece.”
Europe laughs when it hears of this. Posterity stands bewildered before
such energetic renunciation.
Once only do we hear a gentle sigh. He has climbed to the top of a hill
whence he can look over the whole of his realm. Surveying the prospect,
he says: “One must acknowledge that the island is very small.” Like
distant thunder, the fate of a man seems to rumble in these words; for an
all too great imagination, confined within the narrow limits of Europe
and cribbed within the circle of the folk intelligence of the nineteenth
century, is doomed at the outset to be crushed.
With the summer, comes his mother. She, alone, is happy. Her son is
no longer threatened with assassination or with battles. Here, all is
peaceful and warm; Elba is almost as lovely as Corsica. Daily intercourse
with him renews for her the good old times. It is as well that she has
come; for, from the millions which she alone has put by, she now brings
her son what he needs; and when he receives her banknotes, may we not
picture mother and son smiling at one another? On his name-day, she
invites him to a little rustic feast.
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor. Engraving by Bourgeois, after a
painting by Jacques Louis David.
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society, Charlottenburg.)]
A dozen and more St. Napoleon days she has spent in Paris: the guns would
fire the salute from the Invalides, Masses would be said; Senate and
ministers, the court and foreign diplomats, would throng the halls of the
Tuileries. When, in the evening, the rooms were filled with guests, and,
amid the strains of music, there came and went all that France possessed
of great names, of beauty, and of precious jewels; when the fireworks
filled the August night-sky with brightness, and thousands of tiny lamps
formed the initial N.—Letizia, surrounded by the kings who were the fruit
of her womb, would stand silent and proud, thinking the old words so full
of ominous warning. But to-day she is blithe; to-day she compares this
jocund festivity with the little town of Ajaccio; to-day, for the first
time, she thinks: “All the same, we achieved something fine!”
Letizia had been able, while in Rome, to heal many wounds dealt in the
heat of the fray. The pope, on his return, had pardoned the mother of
his sometime foe. She was not surprised when the whole court, when even
her secretary (a Corsican), speedily went over to the Bourbon king. Has
she not always foretold it? Caroline, alone, is not permitted to appear
before her.
Pauline, Princess Borghese, merry and brilliant, does not hang long in
the wind. She has always been the most affectionate, and has been clever
enough to prefer real diamonds and nights of love to uncertain thrones
and crowns. She comes to the island, so that, with her mother, she may
bring cheer to the Emperor. She shakes out a basketful of gossip and news
for his delectation.
Hardly a word from his brothers. One letter comes from Lucien. What
propositions can he be laying before his banished brother? Will he, who
lives in princely fashion in Rome, with magnanimous generosity offer
Napoleon money or bring his influence to bear in his imperial brother’s
behalf? What does the “Prince of Canino” by the pope’s grace write in his
letter? He owns smelting furnaces, and Elba has iron ore wherewith to
feed them: he asks his brother to provide him with the minerals. Crowns
and gold, he has refused; but iron, which his brother still possesses, he
can make good use of. Maybe he, who is a poet, is enjoying the farce of
these blast-furnaces! Is it not a kindness that one still thinks of the
exile? Who else writes?
Josephine is dead. A few weeks after Napoleon’s departure, she died at
Malmaison. No one knows if she ever wrote to him; what is certain is
that she left debts amounting to three millions, which he had to pay.
Hortense has been separated from her husband. She has become a duchess,
and has made her most graceful curtsey before the Bourbon king, in the
very room where she and her mother had held sway for so long. Little
Léon, whom Letizia had for a time with her in Rome, resembles his father;
he is reported to be courageous and full of pranks. These are all the
members of Napoleon’s family about whom he has news.
An English vessel brings the unknown lady who visited Fontainebleau
to the island. In a marquee, beneath the chestnut trees, the Emperor
receives Countess Walewska. For two days and two nights they are
inseparable. The Emperor only issues forth to give the necessary orders,
and the four-year-old boy, dressed in the Polish national costume, plays
in the meadow with the tall grenadiers. The Emperor would like to keep
Walewska by his side, but he does not wish to provide the empress with
an excuse for not coming to live with him. Thus, for the second time,
he sacrifices on the altar of the Habsburg princess the phantom of his
happiness. Walewska sails away. Her ship encounters bad weather, and the
Emperor is filled with restless anxiety until he receives tidings that
she has arrived safely at Leghorn.
How marvellously are the threads weaving themselves into the tissue of
a legend! With wizard spells this man of forty-five links up epochs and
customs. Here he is, a petty prince on a Mediterranean isle: he receives
his beloved, the lady with whom he had lived in the imperial palace at
Schönbrunn when he himself was an enemy and unknown to the proprietor;
to-day he is once again this man’s foe, and another woman whom he had
invited to his arms from the self-same palace has long since forsaken
him; yet his natural son, born in a lonely castle in Poland, is playing
beneath the trees of the southern land and wears the dress of a foreign
folk which the Emperor had once promised to free. Who could believe that
all this had come to pass within five years? A hundred years seemed
likelier for the accomplishment of so many events. With such nets, what
other fish could one expect to catch but the golden ones of the fairy
tale? A thousand years ago a great emperor was banished and left forsaken
on an island; but from a distant realm a beautiful, tragical woman found
the way to him across the sea, and brought him his son.
In truth Napoleon is forsaken by wife and child. This loss cuts him no
less, maybe even more cruelly, than the loss of power, for his conception
of marriage is conservative and bourgeois. Constantly, even during the
via dolorosa of his last journey through France, he has written to Marie
Louise; he has planned a new house for her. But his letters remain
unanswered. Believing that his correspondence has been intercepted, he at
last writes to the grand duke of Tuscany, her uncle, begging for news;
for “I trust that Your Royal Highness has preserved a little friendliness
towards me, in spite of the events which have changed the sentiments of
so many men.... If so, I beg that you will look favourably upon the tiny
commune which feels the same towards you as does Tuscany....” Ay, thus
writes the prince of this diminutive isle, a prince with no more than
twenty thousand subjects, to the mighty grand duke! But the grand duke
keeps silence.
When Napoleon realises the sluggishness of the human heart, his old
defiance regains the ascendant. It is with a sense of relief that we
hear his well-known voice ring out again, after the anguish of this
grovelling letter—a letter that would never have been written but for his
wife’s sake. He exclaims: “These sovereigns, who were wont to send me,
in all solemnity, their delegations of ambassadors, who gave a daughter
of their blood to share my bed, and who called me ‘Brother,’ are now
cursing me as a usurper, and spit upon my picture since they cannot
spit upon the original. They have bespattered the majesty of kings with
mud! What is the title of emperor? Had I no other name to bequeath,
posterity would laugh.... In classical days, the vanquished were robbed
of their children, that these might be paraded before the people when the
conqueror was celebrating his triumph....”
What must be the tenor of Napoleon’s thoughts when he learns how, on that
shameful day of cowardice and confusion, the lad of four had refused to
leave the palace of his father; of how, when the little king of Rome
had met his grandfather for the first time, he had uttered the innocent
words: “I have seen the emperor of Austria. He is not handsome.” This
was precisely what Napoleon had wished to avoid. The fate of Astyanax
has been prepared for the boy; and even though he is made much of, the
child is well aware that he must no longer mention his father’s name.
Though he has received the symbolical names of Napoleon Francis and
thus embodies the unhappy union of two antagonistic worlds, the name of
Napoleon is soon destined to be heard no more. For, when the young cuckoo
is introduced into the Habsburg nest, he is called Francis, and nothing
else. Later, when the empress’ secretary is leaving Vienna and presents
himself to take farewell, the boy draws him into a window recess and says
in a hurried whisper: “Tell my father I love him tremendously!”
What must be the tenor of Napoleon’s thoughts when he hears gossip
about a certain Neipperg, an Austrian officer, a man of no account, and
one whose only way into history is through the bedroom of a Habsburg
princess—who would herself never have been heard of had it not been for
her marriage to Napoleon. Thus terrible are the blows of fate, and his
intimates think it natural enough when they see their master weeping over
his boy’s portrait.
But now Pauline arrives, fascinating as ever, in the best of spirits.
To amuse him, she mimics the grimaces that are made by the worthies
of the island and their wives when, at the weekly receptions, the
Emperor asks them how many children they have, and whether they
think he ought to build a hospital. As the year draws on, Italians
from the mainland come in increasing numbers. Persons with
satisfactory recommendations—historians, poets, men of birth, and even
Englishmen—secure a good reception; and he will talk to them for hours,
though only of the past, with never a word about the future. He is
delighted to hear such visitors rail at the Austrian regime which has now
been set up once more, but he will pay no heed to conspirators who wish
him to come to Italy as leader of a revolt. His thoughts range towards
the other coast, and by slow degrees mature into plans.
What is Paris saying?
To him this is still the question of questions. The news brought to him
in the journals twice a week, and the information he gleans from his
visitors, lead him to turn new possibilities over in his mind. But it
must not be supposed that Napoleon began the new epoch with a definite
plan. When he landed in Elba, it was an open question in his mind whether
he would ever quit the island. Still, the thought of future possibilities
was intensified in him by the usual forebodings of an adventurer—the
adventurer he had become since the failure at Moscow. “A living drummer
is better than a dead emperor.” Slowly, as the conditions change, he
makes plans and rejects them, renews and modifies his designs. They turn
upon what is happening in Paris and in Vienna.
What is Paris saying about the Bourbons? Hardly is Napoleon away, when
they make their “entry” after the usual manner of exiled kings who
return; and though the newspapers, under duress of the censorship the
Emperor had established, lie like troopers, in his remote island he can
learn the ridiculous truth. Four persons are sitting in a small carriage.
The Parisians, whose risibilities are easily touched, certainly have
something to laugh at. The king is there, in an amazing rig-out, in
plain clothes, but decked with gigantic epaulettes; a man so fat that he
has three chins; and he smiles at the gaping crowd. Beside him is the
duchess of Angoulème, her face tearful with reminiscence. On the opposite
seat are the prince of Condé, a very old man, and the duke of Bourbon;
they wear the uniforms of the good old days, which none of the younger
onlookers have ever seen before. This carriage, freighted with the
resurrected ghosts of those who had been laid to rest twenty-two years
ago, was attended by Emperor Napoleon’s sulky-looking guard, men whose
uniforms, shot and slashed, bore witness to the titanic struggles that
had been waged in the interim.
The Emperor makes eager enquiries concerning the habits of his successor
on the throne, and is gratified to learn that Louis has taken over his
room without making any changes. The king’s demeanour is said to be far
from regal. According to a German description of this date, Louis was
“extremely obese, so fat that he can hardly walk. Wearing black satin
boots, he is supported on each side, and would stumble over a straw. He
is clad in a sort of blue soutane with a turn-over red collar and hanging
golden epaulettes of an antique pattern.” This sort of thing keeps the
Emperor amused for a whole hour. For a dozen years, England has been
publishing caricatures depicting Napoleon’s camp manners in the palace
of the Bourbons, and now this legitimate ruler, set up by England, is a
veritable caricature of a monarch. What is Louis doing to show his good
will towards the people?
He has granted a constitution? But soon comes news that this gracious
gift exists only on paper. The old inequalities, the privileges of caste,
which had cost the present king’s brother his head, are quietly stealing
in through the back door. The nobles are not liable to military service,
and men of humble birth have no chance of rising to high office. The
new nobility is made a mock of. King Louis, a good old man, reasonable
enough, is led by his brother, the gloomy count of Artois. Around the
latter are concentrated the vengeful émigrés, who are demanding the
return of their property; but the law guarantees the rights of the actual
holders. The king, therefore, gives peerages and large pensions to the
émigrés.
What is this? So the clergy is rising to power once more! The priests are
on the side of the old nobility, and by threats of hell-fire induce the
dying to execute wills in favour of the sometime owners of confiscated
property. On Sundays, though the new constitution guarantees religious
freedom, all business is suspended under threat of punishment. Religious
processions again make their way through the streets. But there is a
reaction against ecclesiasticism. When Christian burial is refused to an
actress who has lived a gay life and is the darling of the Parisians,
there is a riot, the first under the restored regime.
People are beginning to see how much they owed to their foreign
liberator. With intense delight, the exile contemplates a caricature
showing Louis riding pillion behind a Cossack, making his way into France
over French corpses. When Wellington, the conqueror of Spain, comes to
Paris as British ambassador, he meets angry glances when he walks the
streets. What is the new regime doing for the thousands who may no longer
remain soldiers? The officers are put on half-pay, and those who are not
practising Catholics are cashiered. A new royal guard, consisting of
gentlemen of noble birth, is richly endowed; the nobles’ military academy
is reopened; but the schools for the orphans of members of the Legion of
Honour are done away with. Disillusionment spreads through France more
quickly than the Emperor had expected.
But the tone in Elba is not Jacobin. Napoleon does not abandon
his system, although he recognises his mistakes: “France needs an
aristocracy. For its foundation, however, time and memories are
requisite. I made princes and dukes, and gave them land and wealth; but
they were men of low birth, so it was impossible to make noblemen of
them. I tried, therefore, to unite them by marriage with old families.
Had I been granted the twenty years I wanted for the establishment of
France’s greatness, I could have done much. Fate willed otherwise.”
On the whole, like a chessplayer when the game is finished, he frankly
acknowledges the wrong moves that have led to his defeat. Nor is he
cautious in the choice of persons to whom he pours out such confessions.
He tells English visitors that he ought to have made peace after Dresden.
But when they ask why he did not make peace in Châtillon, he answers
proudly:
“I could not make a peace dishonourable to France. Belgium was part of
France when I rose to power. Could I cede the lands I had conquered,
and go back to the Bourbon frontiers? Never!... I am a born soldier.
Suddenly, I found myself in the midst of the revolution. The throne was
vacant. I took it, and kept it as long as I could. Now I am once more
what I was to begin with, a soldier....”
Those who know the man will recognise from such thoughts that he is still
unbroken. But what amazes us is the freedom with which he speaks of the
past. Never, in Elba, does he show any desire to falsify his history. And
yet, during the first months, he believes his career finished, and has no
thought of trying a new coup de main. He even fancies that he would like
to become a justice of the peace in England. “What would happen to me if
I went to England? Would people throw stones at me? The London mob is a
dangerous factor.” The Englishmen to whom he thus talks assure him that
their country is hospitable. He makes a mental note of this assurance.
The Vienna congress is the first thing to set him in motion. Four
monarchs, allied against one republic, were at length able, after a
decade, to annihilate it; five monarchs, now all united, had assembled to
reorganise Europe, and there was no longer an enemy worth considering to
hold them in check; but four and a half conquerors (if the Bourbon ruler
can be accounted as half) were soon to be disunited, thanks to the inborn
jealousy with which each one of them regarded his fellows. Does the tsar
want to take the whole of Poland as his share of the spoil; and does
Prussia want Saxony? What will happen, then, to Galicia; and what about
the worthy king of Saxony, Bourbon’s ally? A split is inevitable. By
New Year, three months after the opening of the congress, the coalition
has been broken up. Ministers and potentates who had so recently been
celebrating their victory in a series of festivities, have begun to cheat
one another. The Habsburg ruler is now allied with England and France
against the Russians and the Prussians, by whose side the Austrians had a
few months earlier been fighting against Napoleon.
Metternich’s levity, laziness, vanity, intriguing disposition (this is
Stein’s description), dominated the situation: “he twists our excellent
and victorious monarchs round his fingers.” A Saxon nobleman writes from
Vienna: “The king of Prussia is the embodiment of wrath.... The king
of Denmark is ... well-meaning and sometimes intelligent. The king of
Bavaria looks like an uncouth and morose wagoner. The grand duke of Baden
is huge, gloomy, vain, and robust.... The old duke of Weimar lives as
jovially as ever he did.” The hopes of the man of Elba rise as he reads
and hears all this. “My time will come,” he thinks, “when the congress
goes up in the air!” Henceforward, he is in receipt of secret information
concerning the currents of opinion in Vienna. The faithful Maret is able
to arrange an intelligence service. But while the congress, a brightly
lit pleasure ship, rolling for lack of ballast, is intriguing and
enjoying itself, in the crow’s nest sits Napoleon’s old enemy, keeping
anxious watch. He has his spies in Leghorn, who report every ship that
sails to Elba, and tell him the names of the passengers.
Thus do the old adversaries eye one another across mountains and seas and
across the documents of the diplomats, until it seems as if all these
people of importance had come together in Vienna to furnish a lively
setting for the game of chess the two experts are playing. Does either of
them recall that night just before the Eighteenth Brumaire, when they
had been scared by the clatter of hoofs from the mounted patrol, and had
turned pale in their dread of arrest?
This much is certain, that at Vienna Talleyrand remains a shrewd judge of
men. Regarding Murat as a dangerous personality, he would like to have
the king of Naples shipped off to the Azores, nearly a thousand miles
from the nearest continent. But his ruling passion, avarice, comes in
the way. At the congress, Murat, driven into a corner in the defence of
his kingdom, promises Talleyrand a large sum of money in return for the
minister’s princedom of Benevento. Talleyrand therefore drops the plan
against Murat, and concocts a new scheme. The Emperor is to be kidnapped.
But the spies in Leghorn report that this will only be possible if one of
the four captains who command his ships can be suborned.
When Napoleon gets wind of these intrigues, the adventurer’s blood of
his Corsican home runs swiftly through his veins. He has the defences
of Elba strengthened, and his artillerymen are trained in the use of
hand-grenades. “I am a soldier, and am ready to face a firing squad.
But I will not be deported! Before they can do that they will have to
take my citadel by storm.” No attempt is made. In Vienna there is now a
better understanding, and the likelihood of the rupture of negotiations
diminishes. In France, however, disaffection to the Bourbons is growing.
The general upshot is to stimulate the Emperor’s determination. His
thoughts run as follows:
“If the congress closes with a peace festival after all the documents
have been signed, the phalanx will have been reconstituted. But now, when
it is still imperfectly consolidated, a touch will break it to pieces.
France is murmuring against the Bourbons; Paris makes fun of them; every
one detests the allies. There are a hundred signs to show that the old
army is devoted to me—the Emperor. The Bourbons are fainthearts, and will
run away. As soon as I regain my position, my son and heir will be sent
back to me.”
Calculations, only calculations; and never has he reckoned more soberly.
None the less, though he considers his figures with the utmost care, in
the last resort he relies upon psychological reactions. “I count upon
taking them by surprise. A bold deed upsets people’s equanimity, and they
are dumbfounded by a great novelty.” He adds: “I am the cause of France’s
unhappiness. I must effect a cure.” In the end of February, he sends for
his treasurer. “Have you plenty of money? How much does a million in gold
weigh? What is the weight of a hundred francs? How much does a box filled
with books weigh?... Take a couple of packing cases, put all the gold
coin you have at the bottom, and fill up the case with my books; my valet
will give them to you. Discharge the present staff of servants; pack
their trunks and pay them off. Everything must be kept strictly secret.”
In alarm, the man hastens to General Drouot. They exchange glances, but
keep their own counsel. Next day, Napoleon orders that no ships are to
leave the harbour. Everything has been quietly prepared; an expedition
like that to Egypt, but on a small scale.
On the eve of his departure, he plays a game of écarté with the ladies;
but he soon leaves the table and goes into the garden, whence he does not
return. His mother, according to her own story, finds him sitting under a
fig tree. After brief hesitation, he lays his hand on her forehead, and
says, much moved:
“I will tell you all about it. No one else must know, not even Pauline.”
Then he goes back to his old tone, as if he were talking to Berthier:
“I must tell you that I am leaving next evening.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Paris.” A pause. “I should like your advice.”
The mother’s heart stops beating for a moment. How she has enjoyed the
last six months; the period of quiet intercourse with her son. An end
to the tranquillity and the security! But Letizia is a proud woman and
a clever one. She knows that nobody can hold him back when he has made
up his mind, and that the only effect of anxious dissuasion will be to
disturb his composure. She says:
“Follow your destiny. It cannot be God’s will that you are to die from
poison, or after an inactive old age; though it may well be his will that
you are to die sword in hand. Let us put our trust in Mother Mary.”
On the last evening, the authorities are summoned by their sovereign.
He announces his imminent departure. “I have been extraordinarily well
pleased here. As a sign of confidence, I am leaving my mother and my
sister. To your care, too, I entrust this country, to which I attach
great importance.” The governor and the mayor express their lively
regret. The tone befits the departure of a distinguished guest, who has
been spending a few months in a lovely island for the benefit of his
health, and is sorry that the time has come for his return home.
He goes on board, and at dawn seven little frigates, carrying a thousand
men and a few guns, set sail for the French coast. He stands on the deck.
The outlines of Elba, where he has lived so peacefully, and of Corsica,
where many years before he had made stormy attempts to force his way
upwards, fade into the distance. Slowly the coast of the French Riviera
begins to show clearly through the mists of the first day of March. Let
us look into the Emperor’s mind:
“What is the minimum? Defeat and death. What is the maximum? Europe?
No use thinking any more about Europe! The dream of the United States
of Europe is finished. I cannot get another million Frenchmen, and
the foreign nations are not ready for my scheme. I must give France a
constitution, and must accommodate myself to governing through Chambers.
The time for dictatorships is over. Besides, we are not in Paris yet.
What will the army do?”
His thoughts are coloured with the spirit of the time. He is a man of
forty-five, with more past than future; no longer young enough to take
the world by storm, but not too old for a desperate venture. Thus does
Napoleon again draw near to French shores, in a mood betwixt courage and
renunciation.
XVI
The mountains are calling, the valleys are echoing, as the procession
of a thousand men who landed at Cannes wends its way through one Alpine
village after another. An enthusiastic crowd encircles the old guard
which has pursued its way along the road of history without jubilation
and without sorrow, imperturbable as a rock. The peasants, these sons of
the hills, in the self-same hamlets, had once before seen him, a lean,
small, unknown general; in those days he had relieved them from the
burden of maintaining an undisciplined soldiery, and had led the troops
over the Alps to victory. These mountain folk were the first to see the
miracle he wrought; they plumed themselves on the thought that from their
villages the Emperor had gone forth. And now, of a sudden, he is among
them again! Surely the procession of the thousand will work a spell, and
seem to be the march of prophets and saviours?
They come from their mountain fastnesses; women and children bring up the
rear; songs against the king are composed and sung; in the lesser towns,
the bolder spirits force the city fathers to go forth to meet the new
comer; for more than a hundred miles he encounters none but peasants.
Napoleon had reckoned upon this. He would not face a march through Aix
and Avignon, through the monarchical provinces. He preferred to leave
his few cannon behind in the snow-covered mountain paths, in order the
quicker to reach Dauphiné. Here the peasants had received the most
generous distribution of the nobles’ lands. They are full of anger now
against king, priest, and émigré, who, after the lapse of twenty-five
years, are contesting the peasants’ right to hold these lands. Was not
the great revolution made to protect the poor? Was it not made by
peasants in the country and workmen in the town? The Consul had not taken
back anything from them; even the Emperor had only called up their sons;
they have never ceased to look upon him as one of themselves, for their
minds moved slowly and their hearts were constant. Now, the king had
come back again, and forthwith the nobles had begun to squabble over the
fields the peasant had tilled.
The souls of the countryfolk were heavy at the change of fortune. Fifteen
years ago the mood had been similar when Napoleon, returning from Egypt
in his little ship, had landed, and the whole of southern France had
hailed him as saviour. What can have happened in the last ten months, to
make these people receive with every token of joy the man whom they had
so recently execrated? True, he had passed through another part of the
country at that time; and the national misfortune had needed a scapegoat.
His disfavour among the folk had been as brief as his defeat. But belief
in him lasted as long as the years of his glory.
What will the first troops we meet do? He himself, when he took leave,
had urged them to serve the fatherland. And the fatherland was the
king! They wear the Bourbon’s white cockade, they eat the king’s bread,
from the lips of patrician officers they have received a new and ugly
picture of the erstwhile leader. Everything will depend on his power of
suggestion. Uncertain feelings govern his heart as he strides inland from
Cannes. To his left, lies the fort of Antibes. Does he recognise the
tower wherein he was thrown when Robespierre fell? In just such a tower,
the Bourbon will fling him, against just such a wall Europe will stand
him, if he should fail on the morrow to accomplish what his glance and
his word have so often succeeded in doing before.
Outside Grenoble, near La Mure, he has his first encounter with the royal
troops. They have orders to exterminate him and his “band of brigands”;
the officers have taken the oath to the king just as in former days they
had taken the oath to the Emperor. The order to attack is given. Is the
blood of brethren to be shed? That is what Napoleon has spent a lifetime
in avoiding. Is this highway to be turned into a battle-field? He alights
from his horse, takes ten strides towards them, and shouts:
“Soldiers of the fifth army corps! Don’t you know me? If there is one
among you who wishes to kill his Emperor, let him come forward and do so.
Here I am!” Saying which, he throws open his grey cloak.
A terrible pause. What will happen?
Those are our brethren! This is our general! We have seen him in so many
battles, standing on a hillock, or sitting over the bivouac fire, or
facing the musket shots and cannon balls! Must not nature and remembrance
overpower the influence of recent vows? The soldiers cry: “Vive
l’Empereur!” A general running to and fro ensues, guards and soldiers
mingling; caps are stuck upon bayonet points—what does one more hole
in the blue cloth matter? An hour later, two thousand instead of one
thousand fall in behind their leader.
This encounter on the high road to Grenoble, this moment of time, his
call, his aspect, were decisive. The man of action had won back to
leadership through his own deed; the middle-aged warrior had regained
life, power, and realm, by a look and a word. Thus he reaches Grenoble.
By a manifesto he communicates his thoughts to the people:
“Frenchmen!... After the fall of Paris my heart was torn, but my spirit
remained unshaken.... My life belongs to you, and must once more be made
useful to you. In my exile, I heard your plaints and your cries.... You
accused me of too long a slumber, saying I was sacrificing the interests
of the country to my own repose. Encompassed by dangers, I have sailed
over the sea. Now I am in your midst, to demand my rights, which are also
your rights.
“Soldiers! We are not conquered!... Marmont’s treachery delivered the
capital into the hands of the enemy, and disorganised our army.... Now
I have come! Your general, who was elected to the throne by the suffrage
of the people, and raised aloft on your shields, has returned to you.
Rally to him!... Wear the tricolour cockade again, the cockade of our
days of victory! Let the eagles which you bore at Ulm and Austerlitz, at
Jena, Eylau, and Friedland, at Eckmühl and Wagram, at Smolensk and on the
Moskva, at Lützen and Montmirail, once more wave on high!... Possessions,
rank, and glory, for yourselves and for your children, have no worse foes
than those princes who have been forced upon you by foreign powers....
Victory will guide us forward through the storms, and the eagles shall
fly from one church steeple to the other until at last they alight on
Notre Dame!”
Vive l’Empereur! The troops in Grenoble, together with the imperial
nobles, come over. Seven thousand men follow him to Lyons. Lyons comes
over. Masséna, who had been serving the king, journeys from Marseilles
and pays homage to the Emperor.
“Where is Ney?” Embarrassed silence. “With the king?”
They tell him about the council of war in Paris. Since the terrible news
was brought, the fat king and his lean court have sat there trembling.
The “Moniteur,” which had lied in Napoleon’s favour for fifteen years,
now lies on behalf of the king: the Emperor, it announces, is dead. Just
as they are deliberating what to do, old Count Condé enters the room and
asks his royal cousin whether on Maundy Thursday the king himself should
not officiate at the washing of feet. The king is writing a manifesto to
the army. But who is sitting by him, his mainstay, the true leader of the
Bourbon army? What is the man’s name?
It is Marshal Ney. When, on the retreat from Moscow he had been cut
off from the main body and appeared to be lost, his master had cried:
“Ney is lost! I would give the two hundred millions from my cellars in
the Tuileries, if I had him again!” Now he rises from among the royal
plenipotentiaries gathered round the conference table; he swears to
annihilate his sometime master. But when the breeze of general enthusiasm
sweeps by him, he veers; his corps dons the tricolour cockade, and in
Besançon he sends word to the Emperor that he would like to write a
vindication of his conduct. But the Emperor waves the proposal aside,
saying: “Tell him I love him the same as ever, and that to-morrow I shall
embrace him.”
What a master-stroke! True, he forgives; but he leaves Ney on tenterhooks
till the morrow. Next day, the marshal stammers: “I love you, Sire; but
as a son of the fatherland ... I was forced to kneel down before that fat
hog to receive the cross of St. Louis! Had you not come, we should have
chased him away ourselves.”
“Marvellous! How vacillating he is, how pale!” These thoughts flit
through the Emperor’s mind as he asks his questions.
The count of Artois has fled. The very morning of the flight, the guards
had sworn to die with him; by midday, they had rallied to the Emperor.
Such behaviour does not please Napoleon, and he keeps this portion of
the guard at arm’s length. But there is one man who had remained loyal
to Louis until the Bourbon was in safety; not till then does he change
sides. This recruit, Napoleon welcomes, and with his own hand decorates
him with the emblem of the Legion of Honour!
But what a change! The more this avalanche of soldiers grows as he
marches forward towards Paris, the more peaceful do his speeches become.
In one town after another, he addresses the municipal councillors and the
citizens in the following words: “War is at an end. Peace and liberty!
The principles of the revolution must be protected from the onslaughts of
the émigrés. The treaties with Europe must be adhered to. France will win
back her glory without war. We must be content to be the most esteemed
nation, without trying to dominate other countries.”
Does the people grasp the significance of the new tone? If the nation
understands, is there belief in its genuineness? Must one be content?
Glory without war? To a high official, an old acquaintance whom he meets
on the march and in whom at length he finds an intelligent listener after
addressing dull-witted citizens and partisan officers, he gives this
political explanation:
“The spirit of the people is changed. In earlier days, the nation thought
only of glory; now it thinks only of liberty. In the past, I brought the
nation glory; I will not withhold liberty now. Freedom can be enjoyed in
full, when power rests upon a good constitution.... Only—no anarchy! That
would bring us back to the days of the despotic republicans, when every
one had a finger in the pie. I shall retain only so much power as is
essential for governing properly.”
In the naïve closing sentence lies the new problem. He has broached the
question; he is determined to stabilise the basic ideas of democracy.
One thing is the same as on the Eighteenth Brumaire: no party politics!
“I don’t want to write to them,” he says, when advised to forgive the
turncoats. “They would believe that I was pledged to them. How are things
in the Tuileries?”
“Nothing has been changed; not even the eagles have been removed.” He is
gay, bubbling over with good humour. He laughs.
“I suppose King Louis found the eagles decorative! What are they playing
at the theatre? How is Talma? Were you at court? I’ve been told that the
Bourbons looked like parvenus, did not know what to talk about, nor how
to behave.”
How inquisitive he is! How full of malicious joy! How he yearns for the
air of Paris! He seeks his revenge in mockery, he whom the others had so
long held up to ridicule. He is told of the parsimony of the court. He is
shown the king’s effigy on a twenty-franc piece.
“Do you see? They’ve got it again: ‘God protect the king’! My device
is: ‘God protect France’! They’ve left out those words. They were always
like that: everything for themselves; nothing for France!” In the course
of three minutes he enquires after twenty persons. When he is told that
Hortense has been made a duchess, he answers simply:
“She should have called herself Madame Bonaparte. That name is worth more
than all the rest.”
His words are symbolic of the new epoch. If he calls himself Bonaparte
once more, grants a constitution, allows liberty, and does not grasp at
more power than he actually needs, he can make himself king of France.
Then, after the failure of his attempt at the unification of Europe, he
will still be able to become the happy exemplar of a modern prince by
God’s grace. He has always ruled as circumstances might dictate. Now,
called to power for the second time, and after his imaginative flight
towards far horizons, he will still prove himself a master. The road lies
open.
The road to Paris is likewise open. The Bourbon king has run away, and
the majority of the inhabitants are on the Emperor’s side. Any one
who might still have dreaded a fight with the last royal troops, must
have overestimated them. When the Emperor is yet a hundred miles from
the capital, the remnants of the royal guard flee from the city. The
Emperor’s army overtakes the king, but allows him to escape to a seaport,
being content to take the silver he is carrying off with him in sixty
carts, and to seize his cannon. France has a hearty laugh at this fat old
gentleman, who had been escorted from England to Paris by enemy soldiers,
and now makes all speed back to England with the soldiers of France
chasing him.
Paris is calm. The town has long since forgotten how to take the
initiative. During the twenty days between the Emperor’s landing in
the south and his arrival at the capital, the thermometer of the press
registers the following degrees: “The monster has escaped from his place
of exile.”—“The Corsican werewolf has landed at Cannes.”—“The tiger
appeared at Gap, troops were sent against him, the wretched adventurer
ended his career in the mountains.”—“The fiend has actually, thanks
to treachery, been able to get as far as Grenoble.”—“The tyrant has
reached Lyons, where horror paralysed all attempts at resistance.”—“The
usurper has dared to advance within a hundred and fifty miles of the
capital.”—“Bonaparte moves northward with rapid strides, but he will
never reach Paris.”—“To-morrow Napoleon will be at our gates.”—“His
Majesty is at Fontainebleau.”
When, at length, without having had to fire a shot, the Emperor mounts
the steps of the palace he had been compelled to leave thirteen months
before, Paris is overawed by his soldiers, and the émigrés have fled with
the king. All is quiet. He notes the fact, listens attentively, and says:
“They have let me come, just as they let the others go.”
Now he has his first disappointment! The march on Paris had been
glorious, and in after days he spoke of it as the most splendid
experience in his life. But here, in the city which will ultimately
decide his fate, the city whose favour he has wooed more assiduously than
he ever fought for any realm, the city he has never wholly conquered, he
encounters moral resistance. Those whose favour he courts are no longer
in the arms of their new friend; but they are listless, as if, after
excess of passion, their vital energy had run down. Still, here he is,
and he must bestir himself.
He looks to Vienna for a sign.
A week after Napoleon’s landing in France, Metternich goes to bed at
three o’clock, and is awakened at six by a messenger who hands him a
despatch. He reads the inscription on the envelope, “General Consulate,
Genoa,” angrily turns over and goes to sleep again. He does not open
the missive till several hours later, to read: “Campbell, the English
commissioner, has just called to enquire whether Napoleon has been seen
in Genoa. He has vanished from the island of Elba.”
The bomb! Those who were yesterday still intriguing against one another,
now become thick as thieves once more. The vows which have so often been
broken are renewed. The first to think of declaring the man an outlaw
is Baron vom Stein, whom Napoleon had outlawed five years earlier. The
possibility is discussed, but father-in-law Francis of Habsburg cannot
make up his mind to the step; he would like to ask Marie Louise first.
Four years ago she was devoted to her husband. She has never breathed
a word of complaint to her father or to any of her women friends. Why
should she? Napoleon had done whatever she wanted; she had been courted
and wealthy; he had been the most equable of husbands; the parents had
shared in the games of the little boy. Will she now become the Emperor’s
advocate?
The wife of Napoleon and the mistress of the Austrian officer prefers to
take up her pen and write a formal declaration to the congress. She will
have nothing to do with the Emperor, and she will put herself under the
protection of the allies. Such is her answer to that hour when Napoleon
had had to choose between the mother’s life and the child’s, and had
decided in favour of the mother. Not until his wife has cast her vote
against him, is the Emperor made an outlaw: “The powers declare that
Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself outside the bounds of civil and
social relationships, and that as an enemy and disturber of the peace of
the world he is consigned to public prosecution.”
The tidings leave him unmoved. He is used to being outlawed. When he left
Corsica, he and all his relatives were under sentence of outlawry. The
word “outlaw” had been shouted at him in the Orangerie at Saint-Cloud.
The pope had pronounced the major excommunication against him. All three
anathemas had glanced harmless from his coat of mail, so that he deemed
himself impregnable. But this fourth ban will lay him low.
He still continues to hope in the Habsburg. Announcing his intention to
summon the Electoral Colleges of the Empire to a great assembly, he
speaks of the gathering, in Carlovingian terminology, as a Champ de Mai,
for he intends to have the empress and his son crowned there. He thinks
that this will ensure Austrian support, and writes to his wife:
“I am master of France. The people and the army are wild with enthusiasm!
No one but the so-called king has run away to England.... I expect you
here in April with my son.” The thought of his dynasty is ineradicable.
But even this most natural of feelings assumes a distorted form, for
his feelings are in pawn to the old world. Writing to the man who has
just outlawed him, he says: “At the moment when providence has recalled
me to the capital of my States, it is my chief desire, the object of my
tenderest inclination, to see my wife and son once more.” He goes on to
speak of his wife, who must certainly reciprocate his longing. Then:
“All my endeavours are directed towards the firm establishment of this
throne which the love of my people guarantees and restores to me; and
towards handing it down to my son in due time, based upon an imperishable
foundation.... Since a lasting peace is essential to the attainment of
this important and sacred aim, there is nothing nearer to my heart than
to remain at peace with all the powers.”
Is this sublime, or is it ridiculous? Napoleon renounces war, and
abandons his designs on Europe. He speaks truth when he says that he
needs nothing more than France. The monarchs who had conquered him last
year have formed a new alliance against him, and have declared him an
outlaw. The sentence of outlawry has been signed by Emperor Francis, in
the Austrian capital, with Marie Louise’s express authorisation. She
had left him after the last defeat; had thrown up the regency which
she had sworn to carry on faithfully; had taken the boy with her; had
thrown herself into another man’s arms, and is still living with him: the
Emperor knows these things. But now, instead of beginning the new era
with a clear-cut severance from all that has overthrown and disappointed
him, he begins by suing for the friendship of this old throne which had
triumphed over his new one.
This is the ban, this is the outlawry, which will for the second time
bring him to his doom.
XVII
The adventurer now becomes a rat-catcher, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
Bourbon had been clever enough to invite the best talents to serve him;
and as a result of this, when once the royalist national anthem had been
sung, all went smoothly for him. Some of these men know not whether
to go or to stay: they wait upon events. But Napoleon, who has always
commanded, who has never canvassed for any one’s services, places the
flute of the tempter to his lips: he knows that now is the time for
suggestion and smiles. The loyal few, he restores to their posts, with
a shake of the hand. Maret, Davoust, and Caulaincourt, form part of his
ministry.
He knows all that those who have proved ungrateful have been doing,
and he judges them by their record. Officials, officers, and court
dignitaries, again flock to his levees. A count of the old aristocracy
comes likewise. Napoleon had called this man back from exile and had
made him senator; but at the Bourbon restoration the count had gone over
to the king. Now, as the Emperor draws near, the count casts his eyes
heavenward and seems to imply that his actions were dictated by God’s
inscrutable will. The Emperor smiles. Not a word is exchanged. But the
count comes no more to court. When, on the other hand, one of Marmont’s
generals, a man who had delivered a decisive speech in the war council
before the marshal’s defection, approaches Napoleon and begins to
stammer out an explanation, the Emperor does not smile. He says, in an
overbearing tone: “What do you want of me? Can you not see that I do not
know you?”
Here is Oudinot: for twenty years he was Bonaparte’s companion-in-arms;
now he comes back to the Emperor. “You see, Oudinot? You were worshipped
as a god by the Lorrainers; two hundred thousand peasants were ready,
even last year, to go through fire and water for your sake. To-day I have
to protect you against these same peasants!”
Here is Rapp. He has wavered longer than the rest, and even now comes
hesitatingly to his master. “You’ve kept us waiting a long time! Did you
really want to take up arms against me?”
Rapp is an Alsatian, half a German, and as such he is more a man of duty
than a man of feeling: “My duty, Sire, constrained me.”
“Diable! The soldiers would not have obeyed you; your Alsatians would
have stoned you!”
But Rapp is nothing if not thorough: “You must admit, Sire, the position
was a difficult one. You abdicate, you leave France, you advise us to
serve the king, you come again....”
“Were you often here? How did they treat you? At first, I suppose, they
flattered you. Soon they’d have chucked you out of doors. That is what
your fate would have been.... Have you read Chateaubriand’s pamphlet? Is
it true that I am a coward on the battle-field? They are always accusing
me of ambition because they have nothing better to say. Does one get as
fat as I, if one is constantly being spurred on by ambition?... Once
again, General, we must serve France. Then we can be gathered to our
fathers.”
In such a debonair and lively manner does he play with this doughty and
decorous old comrade. But Rapp holds his own: “You must admit, Sire, that
you made a mistake in not concluding peace after Dresden. You treated as
nonsensical my reports concerning German sentiment....” The Emperor is
quick with his repartee:
“You do not understand what such a peace would have meant!” Suddenly
his tone changes into one more suitable to the camp than to this palace
and to this hour; it is intimate and familiar, and goes home to Rapp’s
heart: “Or were you perhaps afraid of beginning a fresh war, you who for
fifteen long years had acted as my adjutant? When you returned from Egypt
you were nothing more than a soldier. I have made a man of you. To-day
you can have whatever you like to ask for.... I shall never forget your
conduct before Moscow. At Danzig you achieved the greatest that any man
could achieve. Ney and you, you belong to the tiny legion of those who
have strength of character!” The Emperor embraces him, kisses him again
and again. Then, pulling Rapp’s moustache, he says:
“Eh? One of the braves of Egypt and Austerlitz—and you wanted to forsake
me! You shall take command of the army on the Rhine, while I am dealing
with the Prussians and the Russians. In two months, I hope you will
be receiving my wife and my son in Strasburg. From to-day, you are my
adjutant!”
“At your orders, Sire!”
Had the Emperor ever seen _Wallenstein’s Death_ performed on the German
stage, as had, perhaps, that would-be murderer in Poland? He must have
this fellow, Rapp, about him. The man is fundamentally honest, and is as
brave as he is honourable; of all the Grand Army, he is the officer who
was most frequently wounded. He only went over to the king from a sense
of duty; he is not to be bought by the lure of promises. And yet, in a
quarter of an hour, he is not only the Emperor’s man once more, but has
accepted the posts of army commander and adjutant, as of old. Fidelity,
Napoleon realised it well, is what the Emperor most urgently needs.
Ney’s case is a more difficult one. Remorse keeps Ney sleepless. With
distraught countenance and extravagant words he addresses his master:
“Perhaps you have heard, Sire, before I marched to Besançon, I said at
the council of war—here, in the Tuileries, I promised the king—”
“Well, what did you promise?”
“To bring you in an iron cage, and place you before his throne—”
The Emperor stiffens. Then: “Foolishness! Such thoughts are unworthy of a
soldier!”
“You are mistaken, Sire,” exclaims the Marshal yet more excitedly; “allow
me to finish. I said it, yes—but—I wanted to hide my real feelings—”
The Emperor is incensed. Ney quickly withdraws, and only after the lapse
of two months takes command in the campaign. Thus near to madness had
these iron warriors been brought through their struggle between duty
and inclination, when the one great will which mastered them had been
withdrawn. Berthier, who also rallied to Napoleon, had gone through the
same experience.
“The donkey,” exclaims the Emperor leniently, when talking of his old
favourite. “He’s a good fellow. I ask nothing of him than that he should
present himself before me in the uniform of the royal guard!” But
Berthier, since the Emperor’s return, rushes all night through the rooms
of his mansion, and at last throws himself headlong from a balcony, like
Junot, to perish on the cobbles instead of dying in the battle-field.
Forwards! We have no time for loitering! Who else is there? Ah, Madame
de Staël pops up again. This old opponent writes to him, admires his
conduct, and promises that if he will restore the two million francs
which France still owes her father, she will in future devote her
literary gifts to the cause of France. The pity of it! Through making
this stipulation, so splendid a woman must come down to history as beaten
in the game! The Emperor mischievously replies that, to his great regret,
he is not wealthy enough to fulfil her condition.
Who else is there? Marmont? Augereau? They are declared outlaws by the
Emperor, because they sold the fatherland to the foreigner. And then, at
long last, Talleyrand likewise! The lightning flashes that travel from
Vienna to Paris and from Paris to Vienna strike a deadly blow at this
hostile friendship which has lasted for eighteen years. Each man thinks
in his secret heart: “A pity that so fine a brain should be working for
the other side!”
What about the second of the Dioscuri? Fouché is back again! He takes
up his service as Minister of Police in the twofold capacity of working
for and against his master. He says of the Emperor: “Well, he’s here. We
none of us exactly wished him back again; now we shall have to keep close
watch on him.... The man has returned even madder than when he left. I
give him three months!” Meanwhile, he corresponds with Metternich; but
spies soon tell the Emperor, who angrily apostrophises him: “You are
a traitor!” Lavalette, who is in waiting, hears the words through the
half-open door. “Why do you consent to be my minister if you mean to
betray me? I know that you are exchanging letters with Metternich through
the intermediation of a bank official in Basle. I could have you hanged,
and all the world would applaud my action.” Fouché’s answer has not been
recorded!
The minister owed his present position to his radical outlook, for he had
been a revolutionary in theory ever since Robespierre’s time. The Emperor
needed him in the cabinet as a decoy for the democrats. But Fouché not
only betrayed his master to Metternich, he likewise betrayed Metternich
to the radicals; he wanted to set up a republic—with Fouché at the head.
Carnot, who was a more violent antagonist of the king than even the
Emperor himself had been, now, for the first time since the days of the
Directory, entered the ministry.
But, as spiritual leader, the Emperor wins over his whilom enemy,
Benjamin Constant, a friend of Madame de Staël. This old-time democrat,
who had recently been thundering in the press against the brigand of Elba
and comparing him to Attila and to Genghis Khan, is needed now that the
Emperor proposes to govern through Chambers. Napoleon, therefore, invites
Constant to an audience. The Emperor has not seen him for fifteen years.
The interview, recorded by Constant, occupies four pages of print. We
are shown, without periphrases, the last transformation of Napoleon,
the statesman who was ever ready to adapt his course to the demands of
practical politics.
“The nation again wishes for tribunes and assemblies. It has always
wanted them, for it threw itself at my feet when I climbed to power....
I assumed less power than was actually conceded me. To-day, all is
otherwise. The preference for constitutions, for elections, for speeches,
is again to the fore. This is, however, the desire of a minority. The
majority desires myself, alone.... I am not only the soldiers’ Emperor;
I am also the Emperor of the workers and peasants.... Thus, in spite of
all, the people comes back to me. I treat the people severely, I never
flatter the people; and yet the people cries: ‘Long live the Emperor!’
This is because there are common bonds between us....
“It is otherwise with nobility. The nobles thronged my ante-rooms
begging and receiving the posts they coveted.... But no common bond has
ever existed between us. The horse submitted to the rider, it had been
well trained; all the same, I felt it tremble beneath me.... Yes, I
endeavoured to set up a world monarchy, and for this I needed unfettered
power. Who, in my place, would not have wished to do likewise? Did not
the world itself encourage me? Princes and subjects hastened to come
beneath my sceptre’s sway.... But if France is to be the whole of my
dominions, then a constitution is better....
“Tell me your ideas. Freedom of speech, free elections, responsible
ministers, freedom of the press?... I am agreeable to all this.
Especially the freedom of the press. To try and crush this any longer
would be absurd.... I am the man of the people. If the people really
wants freedom, I must give it.... I am no longer a conqueror; I can no
longer be a conqueror. I know what is possible and what is impossible. My
sole mission now is to set France on her feet once more and to give her
a constitution adapted to the temperament of her people....
“I do not hate freedom, although I gave it a wide berth when I met it
on my way. I understand liberty; I was nourished on this idea. The
labours of fifteen years have been destroyed; if I wished to begin all
over again, I should need twenty years and should have to sacrifice two
million men.... I want peace; I can get it only through victory. I will
not fill you with false hopes; I foresee a terrible war. In order to win
through, I must have the support of the people. The people will ask for
freedom in exchange for its support. Very well, the people shall have
freedom.... My situation is a new one for me. I am getting older. At
forty-five one is no longer the man one was at thirty. The repose of a
constitutional king would suit me excellently. And I am sure that this
state of things would meet with the approval of my son.”
Such were the basic ideas of Emperor Napoleon on his return from Elba;
he was to become king of France. That his ideas are genuine and his
intentions pure, is proved by the realism of his motives. We have not to
do with a man who pretends to a change of heart; this is no hero who,
in commune with his maker upon an island, has become a saint. Here we
have the man himself, wishful to rule as circumstances permit; a man
who has ever been mindful of public opinion. He recognises that he has
to do with a new epoch. If he himself did not inaugurate such an epoch,
at least, through his fall, he made its realisation possible. Napoleon
feels that a land which has experienced the dictatorship of genius, can
no longer revert to the dictatorship of inheritance. If the spirit of
the revolution has become petrified into a single huge figure, a new
structure must arise from its ruins, and the stone blocks that are used
in the building must be so placed as to secure wider levels and a less
tapering pinnacle. In very truth, the son of the revolution, even when
he becomes a tyrant, cannot be succeeded by a king who reigns by God’s
grace. He can only be succeeded by democracy.
For this reason, the Emperor deals more severely with the émigrés than
he was wont; he confiscates estates; he disbands the royal guard; and
does at the end of his career what he should have done at the start,
namely, he abolishes feudal titles, thus ridding himself of the old
nobility whose false compliments had cost him so dear. By these decrees
he recreates the revolutionary spirit, and makes it stronger than it has
been since his coronation, eleven years earlier. He issues the following
declaration to the civil authorities:
“I have returned to-day for the same reason which brought me back from
Egypt: because things are not going well with the fatherland.... I do not
want to carry on any more wars. We have to forget that we were masters of
the world.... In those days, I pursued the aim of creating a great United
States of Europe, and I was compelled to neglect many points of home
policy which would have secured the freedom of the citizens of France.
Now I shall work for no other object than for France’s consolidation and
tranquillity, for the protection of property, for the free interchange
of ideas: the prince must be the first servitor of the State.” Among
the hearers are many who, but a year ago, amid the thunder crashes of
the catastrophe, had listened to other words uttered by these self-same
lips: “I am the State.” Nevertheless they pin their faith to his new
constitution, whose elaboration is entrusted to Constant.
When the constitution is placed before them, they are alarmed.
“Additional Act?” Are we once more to be cheated? The democrats pour
forth a hail of criticism. Simultaneously, news comes from Vienna: the
powers declare war on Napoleon; no harm shall come to France. A signal!
For twenty years, so the saying runs through the land, we have desired
peace. At last we have got it. Is it once more to come to an end? “I
cannot hide the fact from you any longer,” says a councillor of State to
the Emperor; “the women are your declared enemies, and these opponents
are always dangerous in France.” No one wants any more levies to be made.
Instead of two hundred and fifty thousand men, only sixty thousand answer
his call.
This decision of the powers is an expression of the mood of the princes,
and not of the peoples they govern, for these, just like the French
people, are eager for repose. The sentence of outlawry is not so much a
political move as an insistence on a point of honour, and the expression
of Emperor Francis’ desire to exact moral vengeance. But it gnaws at
the foundation of Napoleon’s power. When he had first come back, France
had been in his favour. Since, however, all the other States of Europe
are against him, France will make no more sacrifices on his behalf. The
funds, which had risen when he reached Paris, fall.
The Emperor is alarmed. An intimate, from whom he has asked news of
the recruiting campaign, says to him: “Your Majesty will not be left
unsupported.” To which the Emperor replies in low tones: “I was almost
afraid I should be!”
His friends find him less active than of yore; he is fatter, his features
are lax, he needs many hot baths, and lies in them a long time; he takes
a great deal of sleep. “He seemed full of cares,” writes one of his
circle. “The self-confidence of his speeches, his authoritative tone, had
vanished.”
Only four weeks ago, at his first advent, he appeared rejuvenated and
lively. Why this relapse?
First and foremost, his wife’s behaviour has shaken him. A semi-anonymous
letter from Vienna, addressed to Lavalette, has fallen into his hands.
Herein are described Marie Louise’s scorn for the Emperor, her love for
Neipperg; and a number of shameful details are added. The Emperor is
surprised holding this letter, in his dimly lighted study, crouched over
the fire, silent.
When Méneval, who was to have accompanied Marie Louise on her return
journey to Paris, comes back from Vienna, he finds the Emperor, in
the very midst of these eventful weeks, lying on a sofa, sunk deep in
reverie. For many hours that day, and for half the next, the secretary
has to give his master a precise account of everything that is happening
over there, of all he has observed. The Emperor spoke as though
“overwhelmed by a calm sorrowfulness, and seemed so resigned that I was
deeply moved. He was no longer confident of victory, and I felt that his
belief in his good luck, which had sustained him during the march to
Paris, had forsaken him.” Méneval has to describe every trait and gesture
of the little son. The Emperor, an ageing man, paces to and fro in the
garden on this day in May, alone; he has to rely on a stranger’s word to
know what his boy is like, whether the child is growing up to resemble
his father or his grandfather.
These things weigh him down. Tragically, the conflicts within him are
renewed. Now that he wishes to be a democrat in response to the spirit of
the time, now that his will-to-peace is great, the menace from without
frustrates his attempts to establish democracy or maintain peace. If no
one in Europe were to lift a finger in order to replace Louis on the
throne, Napoleon might content himself with ruling within the boundaries
of France, might introduce the freedoms he had promised. But the powers,
which have no more lands to reclaim (since they have received back all
that was ever taken from them, and now possess what they had had before
the revolution), come forward as they had in ’92, because the wind
blowing from this stormy corner of Europe threatens their inherited calm,
and because none of the monarchs can sleep sound o’ nights so long as
their Bourbon cousin is standing on the English shore of the Channel
looking plaintively across the waters towards France, the land of his
fathers.
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor in 1814. Painting by Horace Vernet.
Tate Gallery, London.
(From the “Corpus Imaginum” of the Photographic Society, Charlottenburg.)]
Never had Napoleon taken up arms more reluctantly than he did when this
war was forced upon him by the Vienna decree. Never had the rapidity and
clear-sightedness of a dictator or the sympathy of public opinion been
more necessary to him than in this terrible crisis. Just now, when every
one wants peace, he is obliged to arm for war; just now, when he is to
bestow liberties on the people, his actions are hampered at every turn.
The struggle of the legitimists with this interloper (the upshot of which
had been his own legitimisation), the struggle which had placed him on
the throne, is resumed when, too late, he is cured of his longing to pose
as legitimate monarch. Though he is reaching out towards liberty once
more, he is now to sustain his final defeat.
Thus the great renewal gets no further than the Additional Act to the
Constitutions of the Empire, which, as earlier with his great decrees, he
leaves to the approval of the “sovereign people.”
Nevertheless, the sixty-seven articles evolved out of Constant’s head
contain all the newer democratic elements; they are a great advance upon
English constitutional law, and remain as a model for the whole of the
subsequent century. No one henceforward can be imprisoned or banished
without due form of law; religious belief and the press are to be free.
The legislative body is changed into a Lower House, the Senate becomes an
Upper House without the former privileges, all deliberations are open to
the public, both Houses may initiate legislation and reject the budget,
the ministers are to be responsible to parliament, the interpretation of
the law devolves upon the Chambers.
A number of new laws, each a dagger in the dictator’s heart! Yet he
yields in everything save two points which he carries, after a lively
debate against Constant: the hereditariness of the peerage, into which
“after one or two successful battles,” the nobility would again pour;
and his right to confiscation, for “without this right I should be
defenceless against the party factions. I am not an angel, but a man who
cannot allow himself to be attacked without meting out punishment.”
These two concessions to him create as bad an impression as the words
“Additional Act” had done. Since he will allow no discussion on the
matter, but only consents to the empty form of a plebiscite, as he
had done in the days when he wished to become consul for life and
subsequently emperor, the democrats begin to grumble, and no one is aware
how greatly the nation is to be congratulated on this latest work of its
leader. Instead of the four million votes he had received of yore, his
constitution receives only just over one and a half million votes, for
most of the citizens abstain.
A few venture to protest. Honest Carnot says: “Your Additional Act has
not pleased the people; it will not meet with acceptance. Promise me
that you will amend it. I must tell you the truth, for your and our
salvation hangs upon your tolerance.” His tone is upright, but wholly
unprecedented. Since the days when Bonaparte was a lieutenant no one had
ever spoken thus to him. He makes a gesture of annoyance, and Carnot
continues: “This word alarms you, Sire? Yes, you must show tolerance in
the face of the national will.”
“The foe is at our gates,” answers the veteran soldier. “First of all,
help to chase him away. Then I shall have time to occupy myself with your
liberal panaceas.” Even though he profoundly recognises the demands of
the new age, he finds it impossible to deliberate with representatives of
the people.
Napoleon knows only how to command!
XVIII
On a bright spring morning, the plain is lively as on days of high
festival. The Parisians are flocking in crowds to the Champ de Mai.
The whole town has come forth to this revival of the Carlovingian folk
assembly. The old troops are there, and the new. The platforms are gaily
decorated with tricolours. Six hundred deputies and several hundred
peers are waiting for the Emperor, who is to take the oath to the new
constitution before starting on his campaign. It is the first time for
two or three years that the people of the gay city have had a chance of
glutting their lust for merrymaking. Under the king, all had been sober
and staid.
Now the procession is coming forth from the town; from afar can be heard
the fanfare of the trumpets, and every one is expecting the hero of the
occasion, the warrior Napoleon, to be dressed as beseems the posture of
affairs, seeing that within a few days he will be fighting for throne and
country at the head of his troops. Rumour has run through Paris saying
that he still wears his old green coat, in which people love best to see
him.
But what is the pageant which unfolds itself?
First comes the guard of honour, followed by the eagles and the colours;
then heralds and pages, clad in many-coloured costumes, as if in an
allegorical picture; then the Emperor’s coronation coach, drawn by eight
horses. In it is seated a man picturesquely attired in white silk, almost
overshadowed by a hat decked with huge ostrich plumes, and burdened by
his vast coronation mantle; a solitary man, glittering with gold. Is this
the Emperor?
The masses are dumbfounded, for they wanted to fraternise with their
ruler returned from exile; they are stupefied by the spectacle of a
Cæsar whose chill splendours seem to repel the cordiality they would
fain exhibit. Painful indeed is the forlorn aspect of this middle-aged
man, whose wife has not returned to him and whose son is far away, as he
drives among the gaping crowds in his stately chariot.
When, after High Mass, the spokesman of the new Chambers confronts the
Emperor, this citizen speaks in tones which ring athwart the plain:
“Trusting your pledges, the deputies will sagaciously revise our laws,
and harmonise them with the constitution”—the implication being that the
representatives of the people are not yet satisfied, but want more than
this Additional Act. Then the spokesman of the Chambers and the citizens
expresses his hopes of victory, and wishes success to the eagles.
The Emperor has to hide his vexation. He announces the new constitution,
and swears to observe it faithfully. Then the soldiers must acclaim
the oath. But they can hardly recognise their master in this pompously
attired ruler. They want the old green coat; their hero should be wearing
the tricolour cockade, not gold and plumes. Their cheers lack enthusiasm.
An eyewitness writes: “These were not the cheers of Austerlitz and
Wagram. The Emperor could not fail to notice it.”
A week later, when he opened both Houses with a speech from the throne,
he was careful to avoid everything which had put people out of humour
at the Champ de Mai. The Lower House promises to devote its energies to
the defence of the nation; but goes on to say: “Even the will of the
victorious ruler would not induce the nation to transcend the bounds of
defence.” The peers in the Upper House utter a like warning in their
address, saying: “The French government will never be led away by the
seductions of victory.” Napoleon stands there constrained to silence, but
trembling with wrath. He would like to sweep them all away, but dares not
even give them the lie.
Among the new peers is Lucien. He has come to join his brother after
all. A glance and a hand-clasp have reconciled the brothers. For the
first time in his life he is styled prince and imperial highness. He is
the Emperor’s companion, delivers speeches, even gives lectures in the
Institute, and receives large sums of money. Louis is ill, and does not
come. Jerome is ready and willing. Hortense must replace the missing lady
of the house, and her sons have once more become important to the man
without a son. Napoleon appears on the balcony with his nephews, to show
the crowd, to show France, that the Emperor still has heirs. Unseen, the
spirit of irony contemplates this tragical conclusion to the history of
his dynastic delusion.
Once he drives with Hortense to Malmaison, but goes alone into the room
where Josephine died, to come forth from it in silence.
Next day he sets out for the war, hoping it will be his last war. It is.
Carnot, to whom at this late hour he divulges his plan, strongly advises
him to wait until the army has been reinforced. Neither the Russians
nor the Austrians can arrive before the end of July. The English and
the Prussians will not venture to attack until their allies have joined
them. During these six weeks, Napoleon could double his forces, transform
France into an armed camp, fortify Paris on the side whence the onslaught
will come. The Emperor shakes his head:
“I know all that. But it is essential that I should win a brilliant
victory without waiting so long!”
He knows what is at stake. It is his way to assume the offensive. But the
master of figures would have done well to wait awhile, and collect his
forces. “I must win a brilliant victory soon!” Is not that the thought
of a beaten champion? Perhaps it is; but the gloomy vaticinations of the
ruined Cæsar are fortified by the memories of General Bonaparte. Not
since his youth has he ventured to do what he now proposes, to advance
with a small army, without reserves, mobile, swift. Such, then, is his
plan. He will not give his four opponents time to get together. The two
that appear to be ready must be separately attacked and defeated. That is
the picture which hovers before his mind. What Napoleon, the Emperor, now
begins at Charleroi, when his prospective opponents are the Prussians and
the English, Bonaparte, the unknown general, had begun at Millesimo, when
his prospective opponents were the Austrians and the Piedmontese. His
last battle is the parallel of his first.
But during these twenty years, all the commanders of Europe have learned
the tactics of the new master of the art of war; and he, during these
twenty years, has worn out his machinery. Moreover, swift though his
movements are in the days before Waterloo, he no longer possesses the
old tempo. As in his recent campaigns, so now, anxious considerations
hamper the boldness of his attack. Having taken Charleroi, he fails next
day to make a mass onslaught on Blücher, sends Ney with half the army
along the Brussels road against the English, only to learn with alarm
in the afternoon that he is faced by the whole of the Prussian army. He
sends to recall the marshal, writing: “The fate of France is in your
hands.” Ney, instead of continuing his advance, must envelop the Prussian
enemy. Too late! Ney has become involved in the fight with Wellington at
Quatre Bras, can spare only one army corps, and sends it to a place where
it can be of no use. This makes it impossible for him to gain a victory
over the English, and he is driven back.
Napoleon, this same day, fighting with only half his army at Ligny,
secures a victory.
The last victory! Blücher falls from his wounded horse, and is reported
killed. Gneisenau retains composure, prevents the retreat from
degenerating into a rout, and sends to let his ally know that they can
form a junction at Wavre the next day. With an inertia which we should
wonder at did we not know that Napoleon is ailing and prematurely old,
the Emperor makes no move on the day after his victory. Too late he
sends Grouchy with thirty thousand men to follow up the Prussians, not
believing that they can reorganise their forces speedily, or that after
the heavy losses they have sustained they will be able to effect a
junction with the English. Yesterday, he had dealt with the Prussians
singly; to-morrow he will be able to defeat the English, now cut off from
their allies. His seventy thousand men will suffice. He fails to allow
for Gneisenau’s imperturbability and for Blücher’s impetuosity.
For the first time, he underrates an opponent. At Friedland,
Aspern-Essling, and Laon, he was not beaten. Nor was he beaten in Russia.
At Leipzig, and at Arcis-sur-Aube, he was defeated; but it was because
he had only a small army with which to meet the onslaughts of vastly
superior forces; those of three great powers in one case, and those of
four in the other. Never, yet, had any isolated commander been able to
say: “I have defeated Napoleon.”
Now he thinks too much of his victory, and too little of his opponent.
For the first time he fails to focus his lens accurately, with the result
that one point escapes his reckoning. But it is not that he makes a
wanton and ill-considered onslaught. Nor is the trouble on this occasion
that family feeling makes him entrust leadership to inefficient hands.
If he had kept Grouchy’s force with him, his enemy would have scarcely
outnumbered him. But the course of the decisive battle shows that this
error in calculation was not the main cause of the French defeat.
The final cause, as any one can recognise who studies all the elements in
Napoleon’s fate, was the man’s advancing years.
His activity was undermined by his ailments, and that is why, on the
morning of the battle of Waterloo, he failed to attack promptly. In the
middle of June, the sun is above the horizon by four. If the Prussians
were able to march upon the roads that had been softened by the recent
heavy rains, the French veterans could have done the same—for the
Emperor’s soldiers on this occasion were almost all of them tried men.
But he waits till noon, that he may place his guns better when the ground
becomes less sodden! At Jena, in October, in a Scotch mist, he had headed
his troops, shouted to encourage them, attacking so early in the morning
as to arouse many of his foes from their slumbers. To-day he waits till
noon.
The loss of this half-day is to destroy him. He rides to an elevation
bearing the fatal name of La Belle Alliance; he arranges his troops
in three lines, rides along the front, shouts to his men in metallic
phrases; he is going to break through the enemy and enter Brussels; he
already has the proclamation to the Belgians in his pocket. He has only
wasted half a day!
In the afternoon, when battle is already joined, news comes that Bülow’s
corps is advancing. The Emperor turns pale, and sends Grouchy orders to
come back. Will the orders reach him? If they do, will he be able to
disengage himself from the enemy? Everything turns upon the fortune of
the next hour. The English must be beaten before the Prussians can come
to their aid. Napoleon delivers a great cavalry attack on the centre, but
the English stand firm. Shall he use the old guard? Not yet! Not yet!
Bülow is already beginning to fire. At all costs he must keep the line
of retreat open, for otherwise there may be a catastrophe. But, in fact,
the English forces are already half defeated. It is five o’clock, and the
guard might have finished their defeat, for at this hour Wellington sent
a message to his Prussian ally: “Unless your corps keeps marching, and
attacks without respite, the battle will be lost.” This would have been
the moment for an attack by the old guard, but once more caution makes
the Emperor hold his hand at the critical moment. He sees that a second
Prussian corps is about to attack.
A dread decision! A brilliant gamester staking his last coins, but to-day
he must not be beaten. At length, towards seven, he sends the last five
thousand guardsmen, the veterans, to the attack. Now, it is only a
forlorn hope. “Vive l’Empereur!”
This cry has shaken half Europe. Is it not a century old? In a decade
it has gained a legendary force throughout the Continent. But what is
imperishable? Even the eagles of Marengo are not imperishable. Is the
mythical energy of this cry, Vive l’Empereur, to subside with the setting
of to-day’s sun? Yes, to-morrow it will be heard no more!
The second Prussian corps pours a deadly fire on the guard, which yields
ground. The opposing force continues to grow; at eight, the third army
corps appears on the scene, and a hundred and twenty thousand of the
allies are now attacking half that number of Frenchmen. The battered
French army takes to flight, and Bonaparte, in his last hour as a
commander, is for the first time in his life commander of a routed army.
After an hour on horseback in the open, exposed to the British fire, the
Emperor rides into the centre of one of the two remaining French squares.
When these, likewise, break up, he gallops across country protected only
by mounted grenadiers. Though in bodily pain, he has to stay in the
saddle until five in the morning, when he is able at length to secure a
few hours rest in an old cart.
Is he discouraged?
By no means! What is Paris saying? This is the thought which continually
drives him onward. He does not venture, as he had done last year, to
assemble the guards in Laon or Soissons, or to betake himself to one of
the fortresses. He thinks only of Paris, as the place from which more
soldiers can be gathered. Calculations, as of old: “I can still mobilise
a hundred and fifty thousand men; with the National Guard, there will be
three hundred thousand in all. That will be enough to stop the advance
of the enemy.” The last orders he sends to Paris end with the words:
“Courage! Firmness!”
Two days later, he is once more in the Elysée, which he had left so
recently. Has the whole campaign been a dream? In nine days he has lost
the empire which he had fought nine years to win.
XIX
Not lost yet!
In the cabinet and in the Chambers, opinions are divided. He sits in
council with his brothers and his ministers; he is worn out, but there
is no sign of collapse. What does he propose? To work hand in hand with
the Chambers? Far from it; he proposes dictatorship. In this national
crisis, he needs, for a short time, full freedom of movement. Some of
the ministers point out to him that the Chambers no longer trust him.
Then Lucien takes the floor, and with all the fire of a youth urges the
Emperor to dissolve the Chambers, declare Paris in a state of siege, take
all power into his hands, get together the remaining troops—thus alone,
now, can France be saved!
He listens. Sixteen years have passed since that November day at
Saint-Cloud when this very Lucien had made the same proposal, and, with a
single speech, had snatched his brother from the abyss. Then Lucien had
raised Napoleon higher than he had wished. The Emperor approves the plan,
but does not instantly act on it. Instead, he listens while Davoust, the
Minister for War, refuses to place the remnants of the armed forces at
his disposal. While they are disputing, news comes from the Chamber of
Deputies. It has declared itself in permanent session, will regard any
attempt to dissolve it as high treason, and will impeach any one who may
dare to try. “I can see only one man between us and peace,” said old
Lafayette from the rostrum. “If we rid ourselves of him, peace will be
ours for the asking!”
Is this the cry of the people? Paris is perfectly calm, so it is nothing
more than the cry of a liberated democracy. But it is also the cry of a
society which loves change and bears adversity badly, for the House of
Peers now passes a vote identical with that of the Chamber of Deputies.
The Chambers demand that the Emperor shall appear before them. Why does
he not go? Who would venture to oppose him openly? “I ought to have
gone,” he said subsequently, “but I was tired out. I could have dissolved
them, but I lacked courage; I am only a man, after all. My memories of
the Nineteenth Brumaire terrified me.”
Now the Chambers send for the ministers. The Emperor replies that he
has forbidden them to go. The Chambers rejoin that they will depose
him unless the ministers come. He gives way. He sends Lucien and the
ministers to the Chamber of Deputies, and they report that he has formed
a commission to negotiate with the enemy. “The powers will not treat with
him!” cry the Chambers. “They have outlawed him. He must abdicate. If he
refuses, we shall depose him!”
While this is going on in the Chambers, the Emperor, much agitated, is
walking to and fro in the garden with Constant. At length he is roused,
and flames out:
“Not my own future, but that of France is at stake! Have they considered
the consequences of my abdication? The army is grouped round me. Do they
think they can fight the general dissolution with ideology? I could
have understood it if I had been repelled when I landed three months
ago. But to-day, when the foe is only a hundred miles from Paris, they
cannot overthrow a government without suffering for it. A fortnight
back, to repudiate me would have been a bold action. Now, I am part of
what the enemy is attacking, a part of France which it is their business
to defend. France will sacrifice itself if it sacrifices me! It is not
liberty which would fain depose me, it is Waterloo—fear!... All I want
now is to be the commander; but even if part of the troops were to fall
away, I should promptly replace them by workmen, who can readily be moved
to revolt.”
At this moment, the two men in the garden hear shouts from the avenue,
“Vive l’Empereur!” Whose are these last voices raised for Napoleon? The
workers from Saint-Antoine; men whose troubles he had remembered in
days of need, men who cared little about the suppression of liberty,
for equality had made them free. There they were, peering through the
railings which separated the son of the revolution from them just as
it had separated the kings, but shouting through the bars of the cage
into which he had shut himself: “Dictatorship! National Guard! Vive
l’Empereur!”
“You see?” said Napoleon to Constant. “I never loaded those fellows
with honours. What have they got to thank me for? I left them poor men,
just as I had found them. Nothing but instinct leads them to me. If I
liked, these rebellious Chambers would be dissolved within the hour....
I need merely say the word, and all the deputies who oppose me would be
butchered! But for one man, the price is too high. Blood must not flow in
Paris!”
This mood of renunciation, which is akin to justice, this refusal to
employ brute force in his extremity, just as he had refused (to begin
with) sixteen years earlier, resembles the mood of Brumaire. But what was
then the prudence of a statesman who did not wish to tarnish the origins
of his long career of power, is now a prudence which does not beseem
the adventurer he is to-day. Nevertheless, his unwillingness to use the
bayonets with which, to-day, he could again have cleared the Chambers,
is one more sign of his recognition of the new epoch, which wants more
freedom and less force.
Meanwhile, the Chamber of Deputies is in secret session. Lucien has
presented the imperial message. The deputies are willing to discuss
matters. Some of them speak, in civil terms, of the abdication as a
sacrifice necessary for France. Honest Carnot mounts the rostrum, and, in
this moment of disaster, is almost alone in espousing the cause of the
Emperor whom almost alone he had openly attacked in the days when all
others had been subservient to the man of the hour. But now Sieyès, too,
speaks in favour of the Emperor, speaks like a Roman of old: “Napoleon
has lost a battle.... Let us help him to drive the barbarians from our
country, for no one else is equal to the task. If, when he has done it,
he wants to play the despot, we can hang him. But to-day we must march
with him shoulder to shoulder!”
Lafayette springs to the rostrum once more: “Have you forgotten where the
bones of our sons and our brothers whiten? In Africa, on the Tagus, on
the Vistula, amid the snows of Russia. Two million have been the victims
of this one man who wanted to fight all Europe! Enough!” In the small
hours, the Chamber demands Napoleon’s abdication.
The Emperor hesitates. In the morning there is another cabinet council.
Much agitated, he paces the room, uttering gibes about these Jacobins,
foreseeing a new Directory. Then the commandant of the Palais Bourbon
arrives with a message from the Chambers. He stammers when he attempts to
discharge his commission, but at length manages to get the words out. If
the Emperor does not abdicate, the Chambers will outlaw him. Savary and
Caulaincourt come in. All present urge him to the step, for even Lucien
has given up the game. The Emperor says:
“I have accustomed them to great victories, and now they do not know how
to endure a single day of adversity. What will happen to France?” He adds
in low tones: “I have done what I could.”
After this epilogue of six words, which tells the whole story, at noon
he dictates his declaration to the people. He is making the sacrifice,
his political life is at an end, he proclaims his son emperor as Napoleon
II., the Chambers must establish a regency. To whom does he dictate these
words? Who among his intimates can hold the pen firmly enough to write
them down?
Lucien! The brother who for years from the enemy coast had gazed
enviously at this city and this throne; who, if he had been a little
less of a poet, might long since have collected the malcontents around
him; and who might even now come to the front, not indeed as a second
Napoleon, but at least as a second Bonaparte—and that would be something.
Lucien sits there, a man of forty now. He had been no less ambitious
than the Emperor, but had had to content himself with the modest career
of a virtuoso and a Mæcenas. For four whole weeks, now, he has been
an imperial prince! Smiling inwardly, he pens his great brother’s
abdication; writes from dictation, still a mere hodman, but this time
animated with a humorous sympathy which atones for the old discords.
For, in truth, it is the eternal recurrence of the similar. As before,
come cries from the Chambers, “Outlaw him!” As before, five Directors,
like those Bonaparte had once deposed, are appointed. They call
themselves a provisional government. But when they proceed to elect from
among their own number one to function as president of the Directory, who
is chosen to take over the authority from Napoleon’s hands? Who, by his
own vote, has decided his own choice as president?
Fouché.
But the Chamber has become less turbulent. Those who, yesterday, were
thirsting for Napoleon’s blood, to-day send a deputation to thank him
for his abdication. To these polite gentlemen the Emperor says: “I fear
things will turn out badly, now that there is no head. I trust France
will never forget that my sole object in abdicating was to promote the
welfare of the nation, and that I have abdicated in favour of my son.
Only under my dynasty, will France remain free and happy.”
At the very time when he is saying this, Fouché and the others are
considering the possibility of having one of the Orleanist Bourbons,
a member of the Brunswick family, or even the king of Saxony, as
Napoleon’s successor. Moreover, the five Directors are appointed to form
a government, not a regency; and, in his decrees, Fouché often speaks of
the nation, but never of Napoleon II. The Emperor notes all this, but
holds his peace. Slowly his dream of a dynasty vanishes, the dream for
whose realisation he has fought half a lifetime. It has become for ever
unattainable. When Lavalette comes to see him in the evening, he is in a
hot bath, has been there for several hours.
“Where am I going? Why not to America?”
“Because Moreau went there.”
To the Emperor this answer seems surcharged with emotion, for he has
serious thoughts of seeking an asylum in the United States, and he asks
the government for a frigate. But the only answer is a request that he
should leave Paris, for crowds are flocking round the Elysée, clamouring
for a dictatorship. He burns a number of documents, and then betakes
himself to Malmaison.
In the garden there, the garden that is full of memories of Josephine,
he passes two whole days in a state of reverie. The few who remain
faithful to him are there: his mother, Hortense, Caulaincourt, Lavalette,
Lucien, even Joseph. But when the Emperor asks who will go with him, the
answers are evasive. Letizia, indeed, will go gladly, but he thinks that
at her age it would be dangerous. Lavalette has a daughter growing up,
and his wife is expecting another child; perhaps he will follow later.
Drouot, who shared the Elba exile, is wanted in France. The secretary had
promised the day before to accompany Napoleon into exile, but now his
mother, who is blind, has implored him not to leave her. “You are right;
you must stay with your mother,” says the Emperor, turning away.
Pauline, before the last campaign, had pressed her jewels on him; now
Hortense offers him a diamond necklace; a quixotic return of imperial
gifts, a gesture suitable to the strange turn in his fortunes. He tells
Hortense she will have a million, but no one knows if it will ever be
paid. Lucien and Eugene get money, and he gives little Léon something for
his mother—still dealing in hundreds of thousands.
But he does all these things like a man in a dream. He does not say a
word about the last few weeks, but talks only of old times, and chiefly
of Josephine. “I have promised the minister to go away. I shall start
to-night. I am weary of myself, of France, and of Paris. Make your
preparations.”
Whither away? Conjectures, deliberations. Spectral is the tone of the
manifesto he now addresses to the army:
“Soldiers!... I am with you even though I am away. I know every corps.
If any one wins a victory, I shall approve his courage.... Show, in days
to come, that, before all, you serve your country, show it by obeying
me; and show that I have earned your affection (if indeed I have earned
it) by my ardent love for our common mother. One more storm, and the
coalition will be shattered! Napoleon will know you by the blows that
you deal out. Save the honour and the liberty of the French. Be what you
have been for twenty years, and you will be unconquerable!”
The government suppresses the document, but could have published it
without risk. No one could be more aloof, no living man could have become
more completely a part of history, than this man who speaks of himself as
if he were speaking of a stranger. He seems to be no longer present in
the flesh.
Suddenly he is startled! The old sounds assail his ears. The noise of
cannon shots reaches him from the plain of Saint-Denis; the foe is at the
gates. Officers and soldiers, scarred and tattered, but hastily patched
up, bring him the news, vague and dispersed like the sound of the firing.
Instantly he returns to life. “In two detachments? You must attack and
defeat them separately; first one and then the other.” At night he
elaborates a plan for the defence of Paris. Next morning it seems as
if the familiar sounds had rejuvenated him, and he writes to the five
Directors as General Bonaparte had written of old:
“I offer to place myself at the head of the army. At sight of me, the
soldiers will recover their courage, hurl themselves on the foe, and
punish him. I pledge you my word as general, soldier, and citizen that I
will not retain the command an hour after the victory has been won. I vow
to conquer, not for myself but for France.”
It is impossible that after such words he should fail to conquer, unless
he is slain in the first onslaught. In this mood of impending death, he
writes his magnificent letter. Napoleon, in the garden, surrounded by his
remaining officers, restlessly awaits the answer.
Fouché’s great moment has come. To this ex-master of his, to the man whom
he so cordially detests, he does not even vouchsafe a written answer.
The Emperor, who is trembling with eagerness to take up arms, and who
has never since he grew to full manhood had to wait for another man’s
permission, tears the response out of the returning messenger. It is
curt: The Emperor is mistaken if he thinks the members of the government
are such fools as to entertain his proposal; all they ask is that he
should go away as soon as possible. Napoleon says bitterly: “I ought to
have hanged him long ago. Now I must leave the job to the Bourbons.”
Mufti; a rapid gathering together of necessaries; Hortense sews her
necklace for him into a black silk belt. For a few minutes he entertains
the thought of Corsica, with Lucien as governor of the island. His
mother’s eyes sparkle. But he knows that the scheme is impracticable.
America is his last resource. The only thing lacking is the frigate
for which he has been asking. All are aware that every hour increases
the risk to his liberty. It is said that Wellington has demanded his
surrender, and the number of the deputies in favour of his being handed
over is steadily increasing. Lavalette urges him to start, but the
Emperor is stubborn.
“I cannot leave without an order from the government to the captain.”
“Why not, Sire? Have the anchor weighed, promise the crew money, send
the captain ashore if he won’t set sail. You may be sure that Fouché has
already promised to hand you over to the allies.”
“Drive to the Minister for the Navy!”
The councillor drives to Decrès’, and finds him in bed. Decrès refers the
messenger to Fouché, saying: “I can do nothing.”
Fouché cannot be found. The councillor gets back to Malmaison at one in
the morning. The Emperor is awakened, gets up, still thinks the United
States will be best, but hesitates. “Over there, they will grant me land,
or I will buy an estate and till it. I shall end where mankind began. I
shall live upon the produce of my fields and my herds.”
“But what if they propose to hand you over?” enquires the secretary.
“Then I shall go to Mexico. There I shall find patriots at whose head I
can place myself.”
“The leaders there might turn against you.”
“All right; I shall leave them and go to Caracas. If I don’t like it,
I shall go on to Buenos Ayres or to California. I shall sail across
the seas until I find a city of refuge where I can be safe from the
persecutions of my fellows.”
“But what if the English catch you, Sire?”
“I must risk that. A bad government, but a great nation, noble and
generous. England will treat me properly. Besides, there is no choice. Am
I to allow myself, like a ninny, to be taken prisoner here by Wellington,
to be led in triumph through the streets of London like King John the
Good of old? Since they have no use for my services here, I must go
elsewhere. Ability will do the rest.”
“Your Majesty was not made for flight.”
“Flight! What are you talking about?” He looks at the secretary
“questioningly and proudly.”
“The English must certainly be on the watch for you already. Your end
ought to be the worthiest possible.”
“Suicide, like Hannibal? Leave that to weaklings and persons of
disordered mind! Whatever fate may hold in store for me, I would never
deliberately shorten my life by a single day.”
“I did not mean that, Sire. But what if you were to hand over liberty
and life to the enemies of France in order to save France? That is how
Napoleon the Great should act.”
“All very fine, but to whom am I to hand myself over? To Blücher? To
Wellington? They have no plenipotentiary powers. They would simply take
me prisoner, and do what they pleased with France and with me.”
“The tsar, perhaps?”
“You do not know the Russians! Still, I will think the matter over. To
sacrifice my own person would be easy enough. The question is, whether it
would help France?”
Almost every element that goes to make the statesman seems to have been
eliminated from this all-too-human dialogue. Here is an adventurer
hankering after fresh voyages in every corner of the world. Here is the
man without a country, the ocean traveller without any earth under his
feet, always on board, always driven hither and thither, a bold pirate
fearless of death. Ay, fearless of death! The dry manner in which, once
again, he waves aside the idea of suicide, the sober realism of his
outlook, this grasp at the flying moment, the old-time dauntlessness of
the islesman—what unconquerable vital energy!
Now he is to start. The last person with whom the Emperor has a quiet
talk is his mother. But a soldier rushes in; he will not let any hold him
back: the soldier is Talma. The call of his heart and his love of the
tragical have urged him to come for a great farewell; he feels he must be
there. Later he is to represent this leave-taking between mother and son,
in all its dignified simplicity, in a pathetic scene on the stage. Then
the Emperor invites young General Gourgaud, the scatter-brained idealist,
into his dilapidated carriage. Bertrand and his wife, who had lived with
him in Elba, and two others, accompany him. They drive to Rochefort, to
the port where they hope to find a frigate. The pace is too slow for a
fugitive. He still looks over his shoulder, listening for the call which
shall summon him back at the eleventh hour. They meet two regiments
marching northward. The men raise a cheer, and the Emperor discusses with
the generals the possibility of overthrowing the government if he places
himself at their head and marches on Paris.... Away again, at length the
long drive is over, and he stands gazing at the Atlantic Ocean. Joseph is
there, and urges Napoleon to charter a brig which is taking a cargo of
spirits to America. The Emperor assumes the name of Muiron, his seventh
name. This name calls up the vision of another coast, the Mediterranean
with its many isles, and Corsica, and then Italy; and again he sees the
young, small, lean general, with long hair falling on his shoulders
and cold grey-blue eyes, and the bridge of Arcola where the fate of a
man and a country hung in the balance; and he sees Lieutenant Muiron
fling himself before the young general in the mêlée, he sees Muiron
fall, and he knows that by this love-death the lieutenant’s name will
be immortalised. It would seem that once again a new epoch is opening
before the genius of energy, and that across the seas, in new zones, on
uninhabited prairies, the adventurer will swing himself into the saddle,
will watch the increase of his herds; maybe, even, will travel to Mexico
and become the leader of a band of rebels!
But God is wiser.
He sees to it that this great life shall have an epilogue such as no
man has ever lived through before, an epilogue which shall fitly round
off its tragical poesy. Once more the Almighty stifles the adventurous
impulse in the soul of Napoleon; once more there are days of questioning,
negotiation, vacillation—ten days before the final decision.
The Emperor crosses to a small island. They think of chartering two
fishing smacks which the English will never dream of searching for
Napoleon; but in the end he rejects the plan. There are two American
ships available. Negotiations are entered into with a Danish sloop.
Enthusiastic youths from the naval training school propose to carry
him off in an advice-boat. Sixteen midshipmen will spirit him out of
the harbour at dead of night. They sit packed together in the little
room, feverishly discussing the plan with Las Cases, the Emperor’s new
confidant. The man to whom this madcap venture is proposed, talks over
the situation coolly with his companions, asking each in turn for an
opinion as to the best course. Most of them advise a return to the army,
for there are still good prospects that the soldiers in the south will
support him. He emphatically refuses:
“Nothing will induce me to light up a civil war. I will have no more to
do with politics; I need repose; I shall go to America!”
But his self-respect makes him shrink from the thought of escaping in
disguise.
News comes that the Bourbon has re-entered the land of his fathers, once
more under the protection of allied troops. The path of escape seaward
is now blocked by an English cruiser which bears the ominous name of
“Bellerophon.” The Emperor has missed his chance. Here are his thoughts:
“A return to Paris is impossible. The port is blockaded. Shall I allow
myself to be seized like a pirate, and taken in chains to London? England
has been my foe for twenty years. Next to the French, the English nation
is the greatest and the most distinguished in the world. Have I not been
an Emperor? Has not, from of old, chivalry toward a fallen enemy aroused
universal admiration? In Corsica, they knife any one who violates the
rights of hospitality.”
Making up his mind, he dictates the following letter to the prince regent:
“Your Royal Highness, Exposed to the factions which distract my country
and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have closed my
political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon
the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection
of their laws, and beg Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the
most persistent, and the most generous of my enemies, to grant me this
protection. Napoleon.”
Eight lines, three words of respect, neither arrogance nor humility,
almost courtly. There is, however, one word which embodies the pathos
of the step he is taking, and assumes that his adversary will give
moral guarantees; that in this century, after such a life, Napoleon
will be as welcome a guest in the enemy land, as of old in Persia had
been—Themistocles. It is overwhelming self-confidence, based upon
historical parallels, which determines the last great step of his
career, as, in youth, it had determined his first advances to Paoli. Now,
this self-confidence will be his ruin.
Next day, Las Cases hands the letter to the captain of the “Bellerophon,”
and negotiates with Maitland for Napoleon’s reception on board.
Admiral Hotham, Maitland’s immediate superior, was not a party to the
negotiations, but had long since received orders to seize the fugitive if
possible. In accordance with international law, this was quite in order,
for England, with the other powers in Vienna, had decreed Napoleon’s
outlawry. But it is an undisputed fact that Captain Maitland, supreme
on his own ship, guaranteed his guest’s liberty, saying: “Napoleon will
receive all proper attention in England. Our people are generous and
democratic.”
No record was taken at the time of the terms of the understanding in
accordance with which the man who had been the master of Europe went on
board one of his enemy’s ships. Nevertheless, it was not an affair of
hours, but, rather, of days; not the outcome of haste and desperation,
but the logical conclusion of a long chain of reasoning. Napoleon’s own
experience of the last twenty years had shown him that verbal agreements
are untrustworthy, whereas written agreements are comparatively reliable.
Yet he takes this last step, one of profound historical significance,
without any written document having been signed, sealed, and delivered.
In truth, he cannot await an answer from London. He trusts, however,
not in the mere word of a captain in the navy, but in the moral effect
of what he is doing. That is why, just before going on board the
“Bellerophon,” he writes the above-quoted heroic lines, addressed to
the ruler of the land in which he seeks hospitality, and the supreme
commander of all its navies.
Then, in uniform, Napoleon boards the British vessel.
XX
Maitland stands on the quarter-deck. Napoleon raises his hat, a thing
he has not always done to greet princes, and addresses the captain as
follows: “I come to place myself under the protection of your king and
your laws.” The British naval officers are introduced to him, and he
asks about the sea-fights in which they have been engaged. Then, with
the detachment of a man discussing ancient history, he talks about the
English navy and the French, says that the English sailors are cleaner
and more efficient, and argues with his host about certain punishments
customary in the navy after a fight. Then he passes to generalities:
“I really cannot understand why your ships have defeated our French
vessels so easily. The best of them were ours to begin with. A French
ship is stronger in every respect than an English vessel of the same
type. It has more and heavier guns, a larger complement.”
“I have already explained that to you, Sir. Our seamen have had more
experience than yours.”
Napoleon does not move an eyelash. The conversation remains strictly
academic; they talk of the nautical science of their respective countries.
“If you had tried to escape in a French frigate,” says Maitland, “you
would have seen for yourself how well we can shoot.”
No repining! Here stands a gamester who has lost the game. All that the
Emperor troubles to dispute is Maitland’s contention that two frigates
with a few twenty-four pounders could not possibly have got the better
of the “Bellerophon,” which carried seventy-four heavy guns. The captain
proves that it would have been impossible. Napoleon examines the ship’s
guns, praises what he sees, but has some criticisms to make here and
there. Maitland declares afterwards, when alone with his own people, that
he has been amazed by the extent of the Emperor’s technical knowledge.
The ship puts out to sea.
Meanwhile, the legitimate ministers and kings are discussing their
course. Not a single member of this circle proves great enough to advise
a great gesture, before Europe and before history. Ten days after leaving
the roads of Rochefort, the “Bellerophon” anchors in Plymouth harbour.
It is a fine morning in the end of July, and the water is thronged with
rowing boats full of people anxious to catch a glimpse of the caged lion.
Since no decision has yet arrived from London, civilian visitors are
not allowed on board. But it is a great time for the crew. They can see
Napoleon every day, and he converses with any of them that are able to
speak French. The gaping crowds in the boats are the thousands who for
twenty years past have heard nothing but abuse and mockery of “Boney”;
have seen numberless caricatures of him, depicted as a hideous monster.
Now, they are all animated with the same curiosity; they all want to
feast their eyes upon this dread spectre.
For the most part, Napoleon stays in his cabin. He does not want to
become a raree-show. A few days’ patience, and he will be able to go
ashore, and live where he pleases. At length, however, feeling the need
for fresh air, he comes up the gangway and mounts the poop. There he
stands, the great defeated foe, in his old world-famous green coat;
defenceless. Thousands of eyes instantly converge on him, so that it
seems as if he must be consumed in their fire.
But the man with the simple, impenetrable countenance, who is thus
pilloried, must radiate an aura of dignity and suffering, for an
extraordinary thing happens. Thousands of heads are bared. As far as
Napoleon’s gaze can reach, on the boats, the ships, throughout the
harbour, not a man remains covered. The greeting is universal, but
for one exception. Only one man among all those onlookers keeps his
three-cornered hat on his head. It seems as if the whole nation were
willing to pay the Emperor the homage which a pettifogging captain
withheld.
Such was the judgment of the British nation, which in this tense moment
cleared itself from all the contumely so soon to be heaped upon its
name. The waiting lasted three days. On the fourth, British officers
entered the Emperor’s cabin, and laid before him a paper containing the
government’s decision. No direct answer had come from the prince regent.
The document was to the effect that it would not be consistent with the
government’s duties towards England and her allies to allow General
Bonaparte any further opportunity of disturbing the peace of Europe, and
it would therefore be necessary to restrain his liberty to “whatever
extent may be necessary for securing that first and paramount object.”
St. Helena would be his place of residence, as it was healthy, and would
admit of a smaller degree of restraint than might be necessary elsewhere.
He could take with him three officers, a physician, and twelve servants.
Such was the reply of the modern Xerxes.
Napoleon, we are told, “laid the paper on the table, and, after a pause,
began to protest in vigorous terms.” He said:
“I am not a prisoner of war!... I came on board the ‘Bellerophon’ of my
own free will, after previous negotiation with the commander. I threw
myself on your protection, and claimed the rights of hospitality. The
tricolour was still waving over Rochefort and Bordeaux. I might have
gone back to the army; or might for years have lived secretly among the
people, who were devoted to me.
“Instead, I came to this country as a private person. I asked the
commander of one of your warships whether he was disposed to take me
and my train to England. He told me he had orders to this effect from
his government. If I have fallen into a trap, your government has acted
dishonourably and has dishonoured your flag.... St. Helena will kill me
in three months. I am used to riding twenty leagues a day. What can I do
on a little rock at the world’s end? I will not go!... If your government
wishes to kill me, that can be done here.... I gave the prince regent an
opportunity of performing the finest action of his life. I have been the
greatest of his country’s foes, and I paid you the highest compliment in
the world by voluntarily entrusting myself to your protection.... What
you are proposing will be an everlasting disgrace to the whole British
nation!”
The most characteristic point in this protest, which he renews in
writing, is the moral indignation with which it thrills. International
law is but lightly touched upon, for what he claims is a hero’s right.
Such were the words spoken in the heat of the moment, in that small
cabin, to the officers who had brought him notice of his doom, and
who subsequently recorded them for posterity. Though spoken in haste,
they have a historical ring and some of the sentences are modelled for
imperishability. A soul has been wounded, a soul that is mourning, not so
much on account of its own loss of freedom, as because the world fails to
recognise greatness.
Thus, in the first moment of his doom, he recognises that which,
a century later, cannot be more profoundly expressed by the great
grandchildren of the men of those days, who have been brought up on
contemplation of the legend of Napoleon’s career. Themistocles feels that
he has been betrayed. Once again, one of these legitimate princes has
failed to seize the opportunity of performing the finest action of his
life. A man void of imagination, a weakling in possession of brute force,
he crushed the great and splendid thing which has fallen into his hands.
But from under the brutal pressure of this fist, the spirit of what he
is crushing rises in a tenuous column. He upon whom the doom is enforced
has acquired a power over himself, a power which sustains him in his
powerlessness—stoicism. After the first outbreak, he bears the injustice
with indomitable firmness, enduring for ten days the indignity of his
position at Plymouth, and unruffled while England seizes his baggage and
his money.
In due course, the Emperor and his companions were transferred to the
“Northumberland,” which set sail for St. Helena. It was on an August
morning that, for the last time, Napoleon set eyes on the coast of
France, looming through the mist. But what did he care about the coast?
The centre of his interest lay many miles to the eastward—Paris, which
he had wooed more hotly than all the rest of the world, Paris, which had
rejected his suit.
By evening, he loses sight of Europe, which he has ruled. Darkling is the
sea, which he has never been able to rule. He stands in the bows, not
looking backwards, nor forwards either. As on the voyage to Egypt, he
looks upwards towards the stars. He is seeking his own star.
A great saga is drawing to its close.
BOOK FIVE
THE ROCK
On Judgment Day, before God’s throne,
There stood at last, Napoleon.
The Devil had his list begun
Of crimes the Bonapartes had done,
When God the Father, or God the Son,
Cut Satan short before God’s throne:
“Don’t bore us all to death with reading
A German professorial pleading!
If you’re bold enough to face him,
In your kingdom you may place him.”—GOETHE.
I
The sea spreads out into the vast distance. It is like a mirror of steel.
The man on the rock, hands clasped behind, stares across the watery
plain. He is lonely, so lonely.
One looking at him from a distance would see a fat man with short legs, a
man of uncertain age. He is wearing a green coat, decorated with the star
of the Legion of Honour; silk stockings; three-cornered hat in his hands.
The head is large; the brownish hair makes a bush at the back; there is
no sign of whitening. The short neck springs from powerful shoulders.
The features are as if hewn out of stone, with a yellowish tint, like
the marble of an ancient statue that has been darkened in the course of
the ages; no wrinkles, but the classical profile is somewhat marred by
the heaviness of the chin. The only beautiful features are the nose and
the teeth. These last are perfect, and he has never lost a tooth. His
hands, too, are beautiful. All through his campaigns he was scrupulous
in his care for them; and, when correcting the letters and despatches
he dictated, he generally used a pencil in order that he might avoid
staining his fingers with ink.
The doctors have told us a good deal about his physical condition.
“Pulse never more frequent than 62; bosom well padded, almost like a
woman’s, and with very little hair; partes viriles exiguitates insignis
sicut pueri.” He himself knows much about his body, he has studied his
battle-field of his life in order that here, likewise, he may utilise his
forces to the best advantage.
“I have never yet heard my own heart beating; it is almost as if I had
none,” he says, half seriously. Moderation, he assures us, is the secret
of his amazing faculty for work. “Nature has bestowed on me two valuable
gifts: the capacity for sleeping whenever I want to; and the incapacity
for committing excesses in drinking and eating.... However little a man
may eat, he always eats too much. One can get ill from over-eating,
but never from under-eating.” The alternation between campaigning and
sedentary life enables him again and again to escape from the air of the
study, and to fortify his constitution by long rides and drives. “Water,
air, and cleanliness are my favourite medicines.”
With a body thus steeled, he can drive without stopping from Tilsit to
Dresden, nearly five hundred miles, and be quite fresh at the journey’s
end: can ride fifty miles from Vienna to Semmering, breakfast there,
and be back at work in Schönbrunn the same evening; can gallop in five
hours from Valladolid to Burgos, a distance of about eighty miles. After
long rides and marches through Poland, he reaches Warsaw at midnight
and receives the new authorities at seven next morning. These are the
excesses he practises to restore the balance of his natural forces. After
a long spell of sedentary life, he will start off on a ride of seven
days, or will go out shooting for the whole day; after great exertions,
he will keep his room for twenty-four hours. He believes that his energy
has saved his life. He says to Metternich: “Sometimes death only comes
from lack of energy. Yesterday, when I was thrown out of my carriage, I
thought I was done for. But I had just time to say to myself that I would
not die. Any one else in my place would have been killed.”
His muscles are powerful, but his nerves are sensitive. Accustomed to
command, he cannot endure anything in the nature of compulsion. If his
coat is at all tight, he tears it off; the same with shoes that pinch
him in the slightest. On these occasions, he will box his servants’
ears. If he has to wear court dress, they watch out while they help him
on with his coat. When his mind is busy (when is it not?) he will push
away his breakfast, jump up from his chair, and stride about, talking,
issuing orders. His handwriting is nothing more than a series of violent
contractions of the hand which cannot keep up with the furious pace
of his thoughts; a sort of involuntary shorthand, which in places has
not been deciphered after a hundred years of study. He cannot endure
the smell of paint or size; he always masks unpleasant odours by using
eau-de-Cologne. If his nerves are utterly exhausted, he soothes them in
a hot bath. When the war with England broke out, he worked continuously,
with four secretaries, for three days and three nights, and then spent
six hours in his bath dictating dispatches. This nervous irritability is
the antithesis of his slow circulation. He thinks that, the constitution
of his nerves being what it is, he would be in danger of going mad, “if
it were not that my blood works so slowly.”
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Engraving by Robert Lefèvre,
after a painting by Muneret.]
But there is no evidence at all that his nervousness ever rose to the
pitch of convulsions, that he suffered from epilepsy. This illness
usually begins in childhood, and none of his schoolmates have reported
that he had fits. Never was any one’s life more closely watched than
Napoleon’s; and the documents upon which the assertion that he was an
epileptic is based are scanty, confused, and untrustworthy.
As long as his body remained healthy, he was able to endure all the
tensions and shocks to which he was exposed. It was when he was
approaching forty that he began to show the first symptoms of a stomach
trouble which was in those days summarily diagnosed as cancerous. Beyond
questions, the tendency to it was inherited. During the last three years
of warfare, he was put out of action in decisive hours by paroxysms of
gastric spasm. His courage and resolution were practically unimpaired;
had it not been for these attacks, the history of his decline would have
been different.
II
The soul which governed this body was driven forward by three fundamental
powers:
Self-confidence, energy, imagination.
“I am not as other men; the laws of morality and convention cannot be
applied to me.” In these cold words, he emphasises the “I” with which
he began his first political writing in the days of his youth. They are
a plain acknowledgment of a fact, by a man of thirty to whom nothing
is more alien than vanity. “I alone, because of my position, know what
government is,” he said when he was Consul. “I am persuaded that no one
save myself could govern France at this moment. Were I to die, it would
be a great misfortune for the nation.” He utters such words seldom,
and only when he is with an intimate; but these sayings show with what
scientific aloofness he could contemplate the phenomenon, Napoleon. When,
during the Russian disaster, he was asked who in spite of all would
defend him in France, he replied: “My name.”
His contemporaries and posterity have held this fundamental feeling to
be ambition. That view is mistaken. Common ambition distinguishes itself
from Napoleon’s self-confidence as a restless, climbing animal does from
a bird of prey whose free flight, by a law of nature, assumes wider and
wider circles as it swings heavenwards. Napoleon’s aspiration is neither
restless nor envious: it is nothing but his natural disposition which, as
Consul, he once charmingly explained to his friend Roederer:
“I have no ambition whatever; or if I have, then it is so inborn, so
intimately knit up with my very life, that it is as the blood in my
veins. It does not incite me to outstrip my associates.... I have never
had to fight for or against it; it does not urge me to greater speed
than is natural to me, it comes out only when circumstances and my ideas
demand.”
Already in the days when he was a general, ideas and circumstances forced
upon him the conviction that he was the man predestined to rebuild
France. It is nothing other than the conviction of his mission which
makes him say to Roederer: “Circumstances have changed. I am now one of
those who found States, not one of those who ruin States.” Another time,
he speaks of Corneille, but he means himself when he says: “Whence did
this man acquire his antique greatness? From himself, from his soul?
Very well. Do you know what that is called, My Lord Cardinal? It is
called genius. Genius is a flame, which comes from heaven, but seldom
finds a head ready to receive it. Corneille is a man whom the world has
recognised.” When his interlocutor observed that the poet had not seen
the flame, so how could he recognise it, the Emperor answered scornfully:
“Precisely for that reason I consider he is a great man!”
He thus, indirectly by anticipation, announces his own genius to the
world, just as Goethe had announced his own.
The will-to-power, not as an endeavour or even as a question, but,
rather, as simplicity, dwells within him close at hand. He calls interest
the key to ordinary deeds; the will to govern the intellect, he describes
as the strongest of all the passions: and the artistic urge of genius,
he depicts in the following words: “I love power, yes, I love it, but
after the manner of an artist: as a fiddler loves his fiddle in order to
conjure from it tone, chords, harmonies.”
That is why it is his nature to command. “Wherever I may be, I command,
or else I keep silence.” He might have added: “I negotiate,” for he had
spent a quarter of his time in negotiating. Even as a young general of
twenty-seven, he aroused the respect of all who came in contact with
him. He never learned to obey; but to command came to him naturally at
the very outset, just as a calf stands and walks in the first hour of
its life. Because this power of commanding comes so naturally, he never
acquires the art of asking; because he can command as no other, he is
denied the gift of being able to ask favours.
His self-confidence confers on him a natural dignity that amazes and
angers the legitimist world, which believes dignity to be consonant only
with heredity and culture. The friends of his youth stand embarrassed
when they recognise him as their commander in the field and yet
realise the solitude which his position as leader entails. All his
companions-in-arms speak of him with spontaneous homage. One of his
intimates writes: “When he speaks, every one listens, for he speaks as
an expert; if he is silent, his silence is respected; and no one would
venture to say that he was silent because of ill humour. We all felt that
between him and us there lived a great thought which was wholly occupying
his mind and forbade familiar accost.” This statement is all the more
surprising since it was made during a campaign, when tent life usually
breaks down barriers. With absolute ingenuousness he once said, while
playing and chatting with friends at Malmaison: “I have no sense of the
ridiculous. Power is never ridiculous.”
An adept at analysis, the greatest psychologist of his epoch, he knows
all about his own qualities, and is therefore able, by degrees, to
elaborate these instincts into principles. “The goodness of a king,” he
informs his brother Louis, King of Holland, “must always bear a regal
stamp and must never be monkish.... The love which a king inspires should
invariably be a manly love, wedded to reverence, fear, and esteem. If
people speak of him as ‘a good man,’ his rule is a failure.” This love
and fear which he himself inspires has the greatest practical results.
Nevertheless, the dignity which holds people at a distance is not
assumed, for a leading element in it is a bewildering naturalness, which
grows with the years and with his successes. His unsophisticated and
frank realism, the sterling simplicity of his character, shows itself
in a hundred gestures and words, and in the freshness with which he
repeatedly makes fun of his own ardency. He expresses this in a profound
saying: “A truly great man will rise superior to the events which he
himself has brought about.” The greatest successes, whose fateful origin
and consequences he fully grasps, he sums up to his intimates in a
schoolboy’s laugh. Many have reported this, for between the boisterous
gaiety of a soldier and the most delicate curl of the lip are many
shades of good humour; he possesses all.
On the eve of his coronation he exclaims: “Is the result not truly
delightful, to be named brother by the kings?” Or he sends his
ambassador to St. Petersburg with the words: “Our brother in Russia is
fond of luxury and festivity. Very well, then, give him his fill of
them!” Sometimes his simplicity of manner infringes etiquette, and the
legitimists blanch: “When I was an insignificant lieutenant,” he begins
once at table with the kings in Dresden. General consternation! Every one
gazes into his plate. Napoleon clears his throat: “When I had the honour
of serving as lieutenant in the second artillery regiment at Valence....”
Or he is sitting with the tsar in Tilsit, and, since he is ever eager to
learn, he asks off-handedly across the table: “How much does your tax
on sugar bring in yearly?” We are told that this question places all
present in a state of grave embarrassment. Why? Because, as a big man of
business, he calls money by its name; whereas the kings never mention it
by name, though they are glad enough to reap the harvest!
Since he was not vain, he knew when he had made mistakes. His whole life
long he was in the habit of saying that next day he might lose a battle;
he frequently consulted his friends and his experts, and was inspired
with the feeling of God-given necessity. How well Napoleon could bear to
be told the truth, we can learn from Marmont—who, when he praises, is one
of the most trustworthy of witnesses, for he wrote his memoirs long after
the Emperor had publicly stigmatised him as a traitor. “Napoleon had a
strong sense of justice, and would readily forgive an improper word or
other sign of anger in one who had good grounds for complaint, provided
of course he was alone with the offender.... He made kindly allowance for
others’ weaknesses and could never resist the appeal of well-grounded
sorrow. One who chose time and place, could say anything to him. He was
always willing to listen to the truth. Though it did not invariably
influence him, there was no danger in uttering it.”
He saw through the wiles of flatterers, and they gained nothing from him.
Byzantine bombast, devoid of political value, infuriated him. “How could
you depict the French eagle tearing the English leopard to pieces, at a
time when I cannot safely send even a fishing-smack out to sea? Break up
your moulds instantly, and never show me anything of the kind again!”
On the other hand, those who fearlessly speak the truth to him, impress
him. He praises Chateaubriand, who has attacked him. In the days when
he was Consul he was wont, after a sitting of the Council of State, to
invite to dinner the man who had most vigorously opposed his wishes. In
the Russian campaign, a captive general tells him some home truths about
the burning of Moscow. Napoleon dismisses the prisoner in a rage; but
presently has him recalled, and shakes the Russian’s hand, saying: “You
are a brave man!” Méhul plays a trick on the Emperor, producing his new
opera as the work of an Italian composer, and thus earning approbation.
Paisiello also plays a trick by introducing into one of his own
compositions an aria by Cimarosa, a composer whose work Bonaparte cannot
endure. The Consul applauds; and when afterwards told of the deception,
he only laughs.
Madame de Staël has been a worry to him for fifteen years, voicing
Europe’s call for freedom. He suppresses her books, banishes her from
Paris, continues to take measures against her even when he is in Russia,
speaks of her as the dangerous driving-wheel which sets the salons in
motion; but he pays this enemy the high compliment of dreading her, and
acknowledges as much in many of his private letters.
In the Bavarian muster rolls, he comes across the name of a former
regimental comrade, a declared royalist. He makes this man his military
attaché. They have not met for fourteen years. Now, during the
campaign, they meet, and the old companion introduces himself. The
Emperor rides with him out of the press, dismounts, and sits down on a
convenient stone; the other wishes to hold his horse. “Let be,” says
Napoleon; “that’s not your business,” and beckons a chasseur to take the
bridle-rein. The Emperor promptly becomes reminiscent: “Do you remember
how, at the lieutenants’ mess in Besançon, you flung your table napkin
down and shouted: ‘I will not sit beside an officer who belongs to the
Jacobin Club!’ That is ancient history, and is of no consequence now.” He
beckons his attendant staff and points to his interlocutor, saying: “Look
at this fellow. Ability of the old school. He and I worked at equations
together.” Then, coming down to practical matters: “Have you plenty of
ammunition? What is your artillery like? How soon will you be ready?”
Unique, perhaps, in Napoleon’s life, is the scene at Erfurt in the year
of 1813, when von Müller, the Weimar chancellor, braves his anger. Two
privy councillors have written letters in cipher. These have been seized
at the outposts. The writers have been arrested. Müller has been sent
for. The Emperor has stormed at him, threatening to burn Jena, to shoot
the culprits. Müller breaks in impetuously: “No, Sire, you will not
commit this abomination! You will not tarnish your record for all time by
shedding innocent blood!” In his excitement, the German presses so close
that the Emperor anticipates a personal attack, and lays his hand on his
sword-hilt. Müller is dragged back by a companion. A pause. “You are a
bold man, but I see that you are a good friend. Berthier shall look into
the matter once more.” The privy councillors are pardoned.
This scene, creditable to both participants, is another proof of
Napoleon’s invulnerable dignity. It is invulnerable, unless the arrow is
poisoned. A sense of honour is the vulnerable point of self-confidence.
“If the French people expects certain advantages from me,” said Bonaparte
when First Consul, “it must put up with my weaknesses, and the chief
of these is that I cannot endure an affront.” It was he who said:
“I am a man whom people may kill, but will not affront.” Bourrienne
tells us that from Bonaparte’s earliest days he had no faith in law
or morality, but always believed in honour. This compensated for his
fundamental amoralism. The power exercised over him by his conception
of honour distinguishes him absolutely from the condottieri of the
Renaissance, with whom he ought never to have been compared. When he
is Consul, betwixt night and morning he breaks off his intimacy with
this very Bourrienne, who has been his private secretary for so long,
because Bourrienne is involved in an unsavoury financial scandal. Years
afterwards, he refuses to admit Bourrienne to the Legion of Honour,
saying: “One who worships the golden calf may have money, but not
honour.” When a bill signed by King Jerome goes to protest, Napoleon
writes: “Sell your diamonds, your silver plate, your furniture, your
horses—anything to pay your debts. Honour comes first!”
He was so sensitive on this point that after his coronation he summoned
to his presence a notary who had long before advised Josephine against
marrying a person of doubtful character; Napoleon wished to rehabilitate
himself in this man’s mind. In exile at St. Helena, he remembered how his
German teacher in Brienne had always treated him with contempt: “I should
very much like to know whether Herr Bauer ever learned how I made good!”
He is a stickler for morality, just as he is for honour. “Nothing can
be worse in a ruler than immorality. He makes it fashionable, and it
poisons society.” Napoleon does not say this merely because he has been
warned by the example of the Bourbons and the Directors. He has an inborn
sense of decency, which is part of his dignity. No one has ever recorded
having heard Napoleon, the soldier, tell an obscene story. Nor did he
ever listen to one complacently. When he becomes First Consul, he forbids
Josephine to have anything more to do with friends of hers who are
leading gay lives. Years afterwards, when the empress allows Tallien to
visit her, Napoleon writes to reprimand his wife, saying: “I can see no
excuses for Tallien. I know that some poor devil has married her with her
eight bastards, and I despise her even more than I did before. She was an
amiable cocotte; now she is nothing more than a common woman.”
Talleyrand, who has had a liaison for many years, is told that he must
marry his inamorata or quit Napoleon’s service within twenty-four hours.
Berthier is made a prince, but the same condition is imposed on him,
Napoleon saying: “This passion of yours has lasted too long, and is
becoming ridiculous. You are a man of fifty, but may live to be eighty,
and these thirty years are left you for marriage.” The revolution had
encouraged nudity in mythological representations, but Napoleon wants
nakedness to be draped. When, in one of the squares there is set up a
fountain where there is a group of naiads with water spouting from their
breasts, he has “these wet-nurses” removed as improper, and decrees that
“the naiads were virgins.” His own women friends must not make themselves
conspicuous. He lavishes money on them; but if they are actresses, he
does not allow his liaison to be used as a reason for promotion. On the
other hand, like any bourgeois he boasts of sharing his wife’s bedroom,
saying: “It has a remarkable influence upon conjugal life, strengthens
the man’s influence, guarantees his faithfulness, promotes intimacy and
good morals; a couple will never become estranged if they spend the whole
night together. As long as Josephine and I kept this custom, she was
familiar with all my thoughts.”
One of the most sublime forms of his egotism is gratitude. This is
not ordinary kindness, but the pride of a man who feels he is unique,
and overwhelms with benefits any one who has ventured to be useful to
him, lest he should possibly remain in the other’s debt. That was the
consideration which really underlay his frequently declared policy, that
he would never make use of any party, lest he should incur obligations.
We must not look upon these things in a romantic light. But it is an
actual fact that he was not content to promote only the friends of his
youth, his fellow-students at the military academy. As soon as he rose
to power, he found for the priest who had been headmaster at Brienne a
sinecure at Malmaison as librarian—without any books! The sometime school
porter became lodge keeper at his country house. A young lady of noble
birth to whom, in his lieutenant days, he had once paid court for a whole
evening, and who sixteen years later applied for help to the Emperor,
received what she wanted, together with a post for her brother, and a
friendly letter. He remembered many of his former associates in his will.
Years after his brief intimacy with “Giorgina,” when he hears that she is
in difficulties (though she has made no application to him), he provides
her with a competency.
Hitherto we have been talking about money, or money’s worth. But the
nature of his gratitude is different when he loves, as in the case of
Josephine. When we consider his relationships with her, we realise the
truth of Marmont’s tribute, which is all the more remarkable as coming
from an enemy: “He had a grateful, kind, indeed affectionate, heart.” At
the time of the coronation, he says to Roederer: “What right have I to
put away a good wife merely because I have become a greater man than I
was when we married?... Before all, I am a just man.” A little later, he
writes to Josephine: “As far as I am concerned, I deem ingratitude the
greatest weakness any one can have.”
III
Napoleon’s self-confidence, his self-esteem, his egotism, lies at the
root of his wavering between revolution and legitimacy. Relying entirely
upon himself, scorning all whose pride rests upon the accident of birth,
he has nevertheless to take the egotism of others into account in so
far as this egotism becomes embodied in achievement. And yet he is
constitutionally incapable of suffering others to be on an equal footing
with himself. For his own sake he has to choose the most capable to
fill administrative and other positions, and yet he has to please the
masses: he must stand for equality of all, and at the same time bear the
individual in mind. These contradictions give rise to a tragical conflict.
Both the weapons he has chosen for his battle of life, namely, the spirit
and the sword, he conceives of in a revolutionary sense. “Why is the
French army the most dreaded in the world? Because the officers became
émigrés; non-commissioned officers replaced them, and became generals.
One can lead a people’s army with non-commissioned officers, for they
have risen from the people.” For years, Napoleon refused to confer the
grand cross of the Legion of Honour upon Metternich and Schwarzenberg. It
was only after their gallant behaviour during the fire at Schwarzenberg’s
mansion, that the Emperor relented, and conferred the decoration. The
orders which his brother, the king of Holland, distributed with so lavish
a hand, Napoleon would not allow to be worn in Paris. He sends his
brother the following memorandum for kings:
“How can one give this indelible mark of appreciation to a man one does
not know, to a person who may before long prove to be a rogue? Learn
to know those who gather round your throne! The wish to distribute
decorations should not be gratified suddenly, as one can gratify a
desire to go out for a day’s shooting. Noteworthy achievements must
come first.... You have as yet done nothing to deserve the honour of
decorating others with your effigy....”
His egotism makes him emphasise the advantage of the lack of any ancestry
to an original or unusual person. When flatterers suggest that one of
his Italian forebears should be canonised, he calls the suggestion an
idiocy. Metternich lays before Napoleon an ancestral tree manufactured
in Vienna from records of the Buonaparte family in Tuscany. The Emperor
says: “Take these papers away!” In the official gazette, Napoleon has
the following notice inserted: “To all questions as to when the house
of Bonaparte began, the answer is simple: on the Eighteenth Brumaire.
How can one show so little tact and good breeding for all one owes the
Emperor as to stress the question of his ancestry?” Once he is so angry
because some one has contradicted him in this matter of his genealogy
that he exclaims: “I shall not suffer any one to insult me by treating me
as if I were a king!”
Then come transitions in which the cleavage begins to show itself. “I
shall be the Brutus of the kings and the Cæsar of the republic:” which
saying is certainly ambiguous. “I know of no aristocracy but the rabble
which I have allowed to escape; and of no rabble but the aristocracy
which I have created:” here there is hardly any ambiguity. “Tacitus is
praised because he made the tyrants fear the people—and that was a very
bad thing for the people:” which is open to but one interpretation.
No one, in the presence of such a man, can be satisfied with the facile
assertion that Napoleon only pretended to believe in the principles of
freedom until he attained to power, and then promptly betrayed them. On
the contrary, we have here to do with a spiritual struggle. This is the
one problem with which the self-confident man had to wrestle; a problem
he never solved.
“I am the man of the people: its pulse beats in unison with my own....
The aristocracy remains always aloof, and never forgives.” Such
utterances show us the original trend of his character. Inasmuch as he
overcomes this trend, never becomes an ideologue, but gets the better
of his inborn sympathies, he is a statesman of genius. Of course it is
ridiculous when he, who only rewards merit, decorates his baby son’s
cradle with the grand cordon of the Legion of Honour; or again, when he
has the deposed king of Spain, who addressed him as “cousin,” informed
through the intermediation of Talleyrand that the Emperor must be
addressed as “Sire.” These weaknesses are grotesque, and yet they are
superficial; he himself recognises them and spurns them if the mood is
upon him. When he is hesitating whether he shall send Eugene, or perhaps
better still Talleyrand (a man sprung from the old noblesse), to prepare
the ground for the “imperial diet” at Erfurt, he suddenly, in virile
fashion, ceases to bother about the question: “After all, what does it
matter to me whether I am criticised? I will show them that I do not
care.”
A more serious problem, both for him and for us, is when the origin and
the laws of the right of succession to the throne come up for discussion.
“It is false to call me a usurper; I have simply taken the unoccupied
place which Louis could not keep for himself. Had I been Louis I should
have hindered the revolution in spite of the amazing progress which has
accrued to thought because of the change.... My strength is in my good
luck; I am as new as the Empire.” Yet, in spite of this somewhat confused
reasoning, he ventures a step farther, and writes to Brother Louis: “I
hold myself responsible for everything that has happened since Clovis’
days down to the days of the Committee of Public Safety; and I shall
consider everything that is deliberately said against the governments as
an attack on myself.”
Thus we see that his egotism reaches so paradoxical an intensity in
the championship of legitimacy, and that he sails so near the serious
acceptance of rule by divine right (which is otherwise only used by
him as a political formula), that he makes himself responsible for the
actions of those very kings whose dethronement has opened the way to his
rise!
All his life he restlessly hovered round this question of status. At
Kaunitz Castle, during the night after Austerlitz, while at every minute
Austrian and Russian colours, captive generals, and dispatches from the
beaten commanders, are being brought to him, he thrusts everything aside
because the courier from Paris has entered the room. Then he does the
same with all the tidings from the capital, in order to read a letter
full of gossip from a lady, who tells how the Fronde of the Faubourg
has sworn never to put in an appearance at court. He is furious: “Ah! so
these people fancy that they are stronger than I? Very well, gentlemen of
the old aristocracy, we shall see! We shall see!” This is on the evening
after the battle of Austerlitz!
Here we see such hatred as that which a man gradually comes to feel for
a woman who stubbornly resists his wooing. He must win over the spirit
of tradition, cost what it may. One evening, not very long before the
scene just described, he takes Roederer from the drawing-room into the
billiard-room, begins knocking the balls about, and then says, apropos of
nothing in particular:
“Your Senate has no feelings for the aristocratic, no esprit de corps in
favour of the imperial system.”
“Sire, it is devoted to your person.”
“That is not what I want. It must be devoted to my mantle, no matter
who wears it. The mantle ought to be enough to guarantee the safety of
the wearer. This is the aristocratic spirit, which is lacking to you
ideologues!”
The whole problem of hereditary succession is implicit in these
considerations; it logically develops therefrom, leading to the second
marriage, and thus to the tragical issue. There are only two things which
Napoleon cannot create unaided: children and ancestors. He therefore asks
the world of legitimate rulers to enter into an alliance with him, which
will settle his difficulty as far as offspring is concerned, and will
also provide his children with an ancestry. He is not really a man of the
people, but a nobleman; and who can complain because he regards himself
as such?
“I am in a peculiar position. The genealogists want to trace my pedigree
back to the deluge, while there are some who describe me as sprung from
the lower middle class. Truth lies between. The Bonapartes are a good
Corsican family, not celebrated, but certainly better than these coxcombs
who believe themselves entitled to humiliate us.”
This is the tone of the sixteen-year-old lad, scion of the lesser
territorial nobility, whom a handful of counts made fun of at the
military academy and slighted at the boarding school in Paris. They are
the very words which the young man had used in his letters and literary
sketches when the noblesse of monarchical France had mortified him.
Nothing can expunge the memory of his early mortifications. It may well
be that, but for these never-to-be-forgotten affronts suffered at the
hands of a few silly young marquises, his whole outlook upon the question
of legitimacy would have been different; his court life, his marriage,
his destiny, would have been different; and therewith the course of
European history would have been other than it was.
His egotism finds expression in the struggle with France, just as it
does in the struggle with the noblesse. He does not wholly belong to
the high nobility, and therefore throughout life he remains critical
of the pretensions of birth. In the same way, though formally he was a
Frenchman, he was not French by blood, and he was therefore irritably
critical of the French, just as he was irritably critical of the
noblesse. He conquered both, but never felt perfectly secure in either of
his conquests.
But he had more success with France than with the legitimists. Because he
is not really a Frenchman, France never becomes his legitimate spouse;
she remains his beloved mistress. He knows this; he wooes, gives himself,
renounces; and from the perpetual uncertainty of his relationship to
France, he derives the keenest joys of his life. “I have only one
passion, only one mistress: France. I lie by her side. She has never been
untrue to me; she pours out her blood for me, and lavishes her treasures
upon me. If I need half a million men, she gives them!” When he chides
his mistress, he does it as a jealous lover; he rules her “with an iron
hand in a velvet glove”; he gratifies all her caprices; and he knows
better than any one else how to allure her by the glamour of fame and
fantasy. That is why she beams on him when he comes home victorious;
that is why she gives him her children.
Yet lover and mistress remain critical of one another. Mutual jealousy
persists. Neither of them ever forgets the wish to master the other.
Hear his exclamation in the tone of a despotic lover: “I swear that I
do everything for the sake of France alone! If I do not give her more
liberty, it is because she does not need more!” He is standing in the
middle of his drawing-room, scrutinising his guests sharply as he speaks
to them with raised voice. Among intimates, he will often use harsher
words: “Always the same old Gauls! The same frivolity, the same vanity!
When, if ever, will these be replaced by a proper pride?”
The French, likewise, remain sceptical. Must they not, in confidential
talks, say of this Italian the very thing that he once wrote to his
brother Louis? “Since you ascended the throne, you have forgotten that
you are a Frenchman, and have strained every nerve to persuade yourself
that you are a Dutchman. The foreign environment tickles your fancy,
but it is still foreign.” Roederer writes of Napoleon: “He is making a
mistake. They are by no means so enthusiastic about him as they were
about Lafayette (who did nothing practical for them). At bottom, they
merely admire and respect him because he is useful to them.”
Such a liaison cannot fail to end tragically. The mistress discards her
lover when he is no longer useful to her.
Tragical, too, is the ending of another embodiment of his egotism, its
noblest incorporation. “I wish I could be my own posterity, and read
what such a poet as Corneille would make me feel, do, and say.” From
boyhood’s days down to the time of his exile, in the island where he was
born and in the island where he died, his self-esteem is nourished on
historical parallels. History, he said, was the only true philosophy. Had
he not had his peculiar feeling for history, Napoleon’s career would have
been very different; nay, it would have been impossible. His political
calculations are fed from two sources, history and imagination; the first
of these streams being intellectual, and the second passionate. It is
history alone which gives him alighting places on his flight. In his own
age he is unique; he travels alone; nowhere but in history can he find
prototypes by whose example he can guide his impetuous progress. With
Cæsar, the lieutenant begins to soar. At Rochefort, the Emperor ends the
active phase of his existence by trusting too implicitly in the heroic
example of Themistocles.
Between the opening and the close, we find numberless indications of
the way in which his imagination remains at work, mirroring the great
incidents of classical and modern history. Why is he opposed to Tacitus
and Chateaubriand? Because they warn the people against tyrants. Why does
he blame the assassins of Cæsar? Because he wishes to defend his own
sentence upon the duke of Enghien. When he is First Consul, he actually
thinks of writing a few chapters of Roman history, to prove “that Cæsar
never wanted to become king, and that he was murdered because he wished
to re-establish order by uniting all parties.” He goes on to add that
Cæsar had been killed in the Senate House, and that in the Senate were
forty Pompeians, personal enemies of the dictator. Napoleon’s unexpressed
inference is that he must clean up the Senate, and he does so.
In the Roman style, he sketches the ideas for eight splendid bas-reliefs
which, on triumphal arches, are to illustrate the doings of his reign;
they are to be representations of fact, devoid of self-commendation,
and only in a formal sense illustrations of historical egotism. He
summons historiographers and imaginative writers from all civilised
lands, and converses with them for hours, in order that, through their
intermediation, he may win the approval of posterity. When his portrait
seems to him too crudely lifelike, he says that Alexander never sat to
Apelles; David must paint him “in a tranquil attitude, mounted upon a
fiery steed.” It pleases him to write army orders when he is sitting
in Frederick the Great’s study; at Sans Souci, to invite the biographer
of the former master of the house to dine with him; in Lombardy, to
visit the arch of Augustus, in Egypt, the pillar of Pompey, and on these
monuments to inscribe the names of those who have recently fallen; in
Madrid and Moscow, to study the environment and the habits of Philip and
of Catherine. But his pleasure in these things is not purely æsthetic.
The hours he devotes to them are heroical; they are Napoleon’s true
recompense; they are realisations of his earliest dreams.
With his own hand, he is continually writing his own history. The young
general records his first victories in orders of the day; with each
new campaign, and after every battle, he adds to the long series; and
the work is done with the hand of an artist, is wrought with an eye to
immortal fame. When he is offered the crown of Italy, he surveys his own
deeds of little more than five years ago as if they had come down in
legend: “When, a few years later, we learned on the banks of the Nile
that our aims had come to naught, we were bitterly distressed at this
evil turn of fortune; but, thanks to the courage of our armies, we were
able to appear in Milan at a time when Italy believed us to be still on
the shores of the Red Sea.” Actually, in the interim, he had, before the
eyes of all the world, trampled on the constitution of France, and even
the meanest herd in the Apennines knew of his return from Egypt.
When he is carrying on a struggle with the pope he pens a long letter,
and sends it to Eugene for the latter to copy, since ostensibly it is to
be a letter from Eugene to the pope; therein Eugene is made to say that
Napoleon can only be compared to Cyrus and Charlemagne.
At the height of his career, he says to his Austrian ambassador: “Don’t
you make any mistake, I am a Roman emperor, in the best line of the
Cæsars. Chateaubriand has compared me with Tiberius, who could only
travel from Rome to Capri. A pretty idea! Trajan. Aurelian—that would
be another story. They were self-made men, who shook the world out of
old ruts. Do you not see the resemblances between my regime and that of
Diocletian? The net so widely spread; the Emperor’s eyes everywhere; the
civil authority omnipotent throughout an empire that is fundamentally
warlike.... A man is born to be a Cæsar.”
This is not a proclamation, not a political letter, not an attempt to
seduce any one. The words are spoken lightly, in a drawing-room, without
emotion and without ulterior aim, with all the simplicity of a man aware
of his own strength.
After victories and successes, this historical feeling for his own
personality becomes as objective as the attitude of the chessplayer
towards the pieces on his board. We seem to be contemplating a man whose
fondness for the game is the only thing which makes him want to win;
and who, as soon as he has won, can converse dispassionately with his
defeated opponent about the mistakes they have made and the artifices
to which they have had recourse. When he is talking to enemy generals
whom he has taken prisoner or with whom he is negotiating, he will say:
“You ought to have done this, that, or the other. There, you were in an
advantageous position. That would have been an excellent move.”
Immediately after his victory at Wagram, he says to Count Bubna: “I am
certain that you are damnably strong, for you can deliver shrewd blows.
At what figure do you estimate my forces?... You appear to be uncommonly
well informed! Would you care to have a look at my army?... No? Well, at
least you had better study my position on this map. It was my own fault
when I failed to win a victory at Aspern-Essling. I got the punishment I
deserved.”
Only with regard to one matter does this detachment fail him—Waterloo.
In St. Helena, an English surgeon ventured to say that people in England
would be glad to hear his opinion of Wellington. The remark was followed
by an embarrassing silence.
Fame is the supreme goal of his egotism; substantially, it is the only
goal. All his energies are directed towards this end: his consciousness
of his uniqueness; his historic sense; his sense of honour; his
dignity; the boy’s dreams, the youth’s plans, the man’s deeds, the
prisoner’s unrest. Posterity is the great confused picture which fills
his imagination; and the desire of his heart would seem to be rather
the Latin “gloria” which thinks of future generations, than the French
“gloire” which suns itself in the smile of contemporaries. He is animated
by a daimonic being’s eager wish for immortality, although he knows that
he must share the fate of all mortal men. “Better never to have lived;
than to exist, and pass without leaving a trace.”
He modifies the coronation oath by swearing, not only to protect the
realm and the happiness of France, but also to rule for the glory of his
people. On one of the battle-fields of Henry IV in Normandy he has a
column erected with the inscription: “Great men love the fame of those
who resemble themselves.” Frederick’s sword is “more precious than all
the treasures of the king of Prussia”; but it is not only when he is
campaigning that his thoughts turn towards the future. When he is having
houses built for the unemployed, his order to the minister to whom the
task is entrusted ends with the phrase: “We must not pass out of the
world without leaving traces that will commend us to the thoughts of
posterity.” At the close of his career as Emperor, he refuses to make
peace on terms that will involve the renunciation of territories upon
whose conquest part of his fame depends; and towards the end of his life
he utters a melancholy parable, darkly significant, lonely as his own
destiny:
“The love for glory is like the bridge which Satan tried to build across
chaos in order to make his way into paradise. Glory is a connecting link
between past and future, from which an abyss separates him. I leave to my
son nothing but my name.”
IV
Energy is the second element in Napoleon’s make-up. How does this quality
show itself?
First of all in calculation. Never a trace of the flash of genius; but,
rather, continuous weighing, over-elaborating, discarding:
“I have known myself to argue with myself over the thoughts concerning
a battle, and have contradicted myself.... When I have drawn-up a plan
of battle I am the most pusillanimous of men. I magnify the dangers and
the incidents, am in a terrible state of excitement even when I seem
cheerful; I am then like a girl who is going to have a baby.” This is the
mood of an artist during the conception of his work. He once described
these feelings to Roederer in even franker terms:
“I am always at work; I think a great deal. If I appeared to be ever
ready and equal to any occasion, it is because I have thought over
matters for long before I undertake to do the slightest thing; I have
foreseen all eventualities. There exists no guardian angel who suddenly
and mysteriously whispers in my ear what I have to do or to say.
Everything is turned over in my mind, again and again, always, whether I
am at table or at the theatre. At night, I wake up in order to work.”
This constant deliberation builds up something within him which he names
“the spirit of things:” the precision, which penetrates he touches; the
thinking in numbers, to which he ascribes part of his success and for
which he has to thank his mathematical training. There is nothing too
small for this brain; for the sum total of millions of details is a plan
whose scope is world embracing. If one of his officers writes to say that
the Emperor’s instructions have been carried out, Napoleon waives this
general statement aside and demands details. Nothing is so small but
he wants to know all about it and judge its importance for himself. He
writes to Eugene, who is in Italy:
“How is it possible that you are distributing three million seven hundred
and forty-seven thousand rations of meat?... I can calculate a similar
gross total for dried vegetables, wine, salt, and spirits. But I want
calculations according to corps. I am robbed of fifty per cent., even
as much as seventy per cent.... How can you allow them to calculate for
one million three hundred and seventy-one thousand rations of hay? I
should have to provide twelve thousand horses to eat it, not counting
the Istrians and Dalmatians! You know I have only seven thousand.... The
office charges are insane! Frs. 118,000 for four months! That equals frs.
400,000 a year! Such a sum should suffice for the whole of Italy!”
This is but one example among many. Thousands of such letters, hailing
from every corner of the military and civil administration, personally
dictated, are to be found in the volumes of correspondence, and must
sadly disappoint those who expect to find only ideas and temperament
in the letters. He is the man who, in the midst of his wars in Italy,
writes home that they must concoct a letter, nominally written by a
German patriot and dealing with Austrian politics, and have it circulated
throughout Germany; again, in the throes of a campaign, he has to write
to Murat, King of Naples, detailing how the latter is to behave at balls
or when he visits the theatre, whom he is to invite and whom to exclude
from his invitations. While the preparations are being made for the
Erfurt gathering, he suddenly remembers that some one must be there to
introduce the actresses to the gallant grand dukes. He never demonstrates
more forcibly the way he formulates destinies in figures than by the
following incursion into social life: “Each household should have six
children, seeing that, on the average, three are sure to die. Of the
three who survive, two should replace the father and mother; the third
will serve for an unforeseen emergency.”
His precision of thought goes to such grotesque lengths!
A third means for expressing this energetic faculty is his tempo.
“Activity! Speed!” he writes with his own hand at the foot of an
order. The king of Prussia has depicted this peculiarity with especial
felicity: “We need but see him ride: he always gives his horse rein, and
never troubles about what may be happening in his rear!” But Napoleon
negotiated better than he rode, for he never negotiated until after long
reflection. “Not a moment must be lost,” is the slogan even when nothing
presses for decision. The instinctive impetus of an overburdened but
short life drives him forward; it seems as if he could not arrive quickly
enough at the end of his career. He writes to Bernadotte, in the course
of a campaign: “I have lost a whole day through you, and the fate of the
world hangs upon one single day.”
The drive he imposes upon himself has its reaction upon those who serve
him. He drives them, not only in the field, but also in circumstances
which ordinary governments would take months to decide. He demands a
treaty with Russia from Talleyrand, saying it is to be drawn up and ready
in a couple of hours. To explain the reasons for his second marriage, he
wants a circular letter sent to all his ambassadors and consuls; this
is to be drafted “in the course of the day.” One night he is immersed
in thoughts concerning the embellishment of Paris. Next morning he says
to his Minister for Home Affairs: “I require that Paris shall have two
million inhabitants by the end of ten years. I want to do something
useful and great for the city. What do you suggest?”
“Provide the town with a good water-supply, Sire,” and the minister
expounds a plan whereby the Ourcq water can be conveyed to Paris.
“Your proposal is good. Summon G.; he must send five hundred men to La
Vilette to-morrow, in order to start work on the canal.”
Another of his weapons is memory. “I always know my position. I cannot
remember a single Alexandrine, but I never forget a figure relating to
my military situation.” This is the productive memory. Although he
pronounces them abominably, he retains the names of all the important
places—important from his point of view—in all the countries where he
has fought. The Postmaster General reports that the Emperor is able to
mention, offhand, distances which he himself has to hunt up in works of
reference. On his way back to Paris from the camp at Boulogne, Napoleon
encounters a troop of soldiers who have lost their way, asks the number
of their regiment, whence they set out, and when. He tells them their
line of march! “Your battalion will be at H. this evening.” At this time,
two hundred thousand men were on the march close at hand!
His technique is to arrange things in his head “as in a wardrobe.” He
says: “When I wish to put any matter out of my mind, I close its drawer
and open the drawer belonging to another. The contents of the drawers
never get mixed, and they never worry me or weary me. Do I want to sleep?
I close all the drawers, and then I am asleep.”
Among the numerous heraldic emblems which might have tickled the fancy of
an upstart—stars, tutelary deities, saints, beasts of prey—he finds none
to please him. He chooses the bee, thus emphasising once more his opinion
that a man of talent who aspires and works unceasingly, can achieve
everything that can otherwise be achieved through what is vaguely spoken
of as genius. He declares that genius is industry; meaning, of course,
that genius is industry among other things. He says that work is his
element, that for which he has been created. Had he left nothing behind
him, had all his works perished, still his industry and his glory would
have been an emblematic stimulus to the youth of countless generations
after he had passed away.
Many witnesses testify to his amazing powers of continued work. Roederer,
who was his close companion during the Consulate, writes as follows:
“That which especially characterises him is the power and persistence of
his attention. He can work for eighteen hours at a stretch, it may be at
one piece of work, it may be at several in turn. I have never seen his
mind flag. I have never seen his mind without a spring in it, not when
he was physically tired, not when he was taking violent exercise, not
even when he was angry. I have never seen him distracted from one affair
by another, neglecting the matter in hand for one which he is about to
work. Good or bad news from Egypt never interfered with his attention
to the civil code, and the civil code never interfered with the steps
it was necessary to take for the safety of Egypt. No one was ever more
wholly immersed in what he was doing, nor did any one ever make a better
distribution of his time among all the things he had to do. Never was any
one more stubborn in rejecting the occupation or the thought which was
not appropriate to the hour or the day; nor was any one ever more adroit
in seizing an occupation or a thought when the right moment had come.”
He robbed hundreds of his fellow workers of health and youth, because
he demanded too much of them when he demanded from them what he exacted
from himself. His private secretary would be sent for at a late hour,
and would get to bed at four in the morning; at seven, the poor man
would find new tasks ready for him, and would be told that they must be
finished within two hours. When Napoleon and his secretary were together
all day, one dictating and the other writing from dictation, at meal
times the chief would order food for two, and would share with his
subordinate at a corner of the work-table, just as he would have shared
with his adjutant on a boundary stone. During the Consulate he would
sometimes begin a sitting with his ministers at six in the evening and
keep it up till five next morning. In the three months at Schönbrunn, his
official correspondence comprised four hundred and thirty-five letters
occupying four hundred folio pages of print. This was only his political
and administrative correspondence; in addition he wrote a great many
private letters, and delivered innumerable orders by word of mouth.
These are the main forms of his energy. It is with their aid that he
enters upon his duel with the world, availing himself of their interplay,
and speaking of his genius as a talent for combination. In his plans
and orders, he is fond of the phrase “at the given moment.” He is not
hampered by any principle; is always willing to modify his scheme to
suit the weather of destiny, to adapt his combinations to the slightest
modifications of the situation. This man of iron will had a most supple
intelligence. While forcing all those with whom he came in contact to
bend before his resolves, he himself showed a wonderful elasticity in
compliance with the will of circumstances.
“The weakness of a captain who, instead of forcing his way into port,
preferred to let himself be chased on the open sea—this, and some of
the trifling defects of our frigates, were the reasons why I failed to
change the face of the world. Had Acre fallen, we should have made our
way to Aleppo by forced marches, have enlisted Christians, Druses, and
Armenians; have speedily reached the Euphrates: thence I should have gone
to India, and should have stablished new institutions everywhere.”
Whether these vaticinations were historically tenable, may remain an
open question; but his belief that he could have done what he describes,
bears witness to his realism. In this world of figures and magnitudes,
for Napoleon everything depends upon the individual behaviour of the
individual man at his post. Since the failure of any one individual may
give the totality of circumstances a new trend, he is always ready to
adapt the trend of his own intelligence to changing circumstances. But he
does not himself attribute his successes to this, saying that they were
due to his having been born at the right moment, and that under Louis
XIV. he would only have become a marshal like Turenne.
Napoleon’s energy is very little disturbed by the passions. His
self-confidence and his sense of dignity made self-command easy to
him, and, being habituated to surprise, he was always fully master of
himself. “Since I am used to great events, they make no impression on
me at the moment when they are reported; I feel the pain an hour later.”
This sometimes makes him appear more stoical than he might wish people
to believe him. When Hortense’s boy dies, he tells her to be composed,
saying: “To live means to suffer; but the brave man is continually
striving for self-mastery, and achieves it in the end.”
Nevertheless, he sometimes loses his temper. The fierceness of his
passion is then proportional to his pride, the irritability of his
nerves, and the impatience of his creative will—the will of one who
needed a thousand hands to complete his work. The stories about his
threatening an ambassador with his fist, and similar outbursts of
violence, are fabulous; but there is trustworthy evidence as to the
terrible moment when Berthier had infuriated the First Consul by his
tactlessness. Led on by Talleyrand as Mephistopheles, Berthier, in the
Tuileries, had urged upon the Consul the need of assuming the title of
king. Bonaparte’s anger flashed from his eyes, his lips twitched, he
seized the offender by the throat, and pushed him back against the wall,
shouting: “Who put you up to raising my bile in this way? You will pay
for it, if you dare to do anything of the kind again!”
Even amid his anger, his faculty for combination is at work, and he
realises that the notion cannot have originated in the good Berthier’s
mind. In its psychical significance the scene is unique.
Often he is a rough, irritable soldier, who furiously lifts a badly
closing window off its hinges and hurls it into the street; lashes a
groom with his whip; when dictating a letter, utters curses against the
addressee, which his secretary suppresses; even before the vicars-general
speaks in an unseemly way, asking, “Which of you leads this blockhead of
a bishop by the nose?”
One of these vicars-general, who has been absent from duty for a long
time, returns, and comes to report.
“Where have you been, misérable?”
“At home, with my people.”
“How dare you stay away so long when you know that your bishop is such a
damned fool?”
More important are the occasions when he simulates anger to gain some
political end. Occasionally he gives the show away afterwards. “You think
I was in a rage?” he says in Warsaw. “You are making a mistake. While
I have been here, my wrath has never exceeded bounds.” One day he is
playing with his little nephew and gossiping with the court ladies, in
the best of humours. The English ambassador is announced. Instantly his
face changes like an actor’s, his features are convulsed, he turns pale,
strides towards the Englishman and storms at him for a whole hour in the
presence of numerous witnesses. He is genuinely angry with England and he
is genuinely annoyed at being disturbed by this visit; but the wrathful
mask, the scene he makes, the angry expressions he uses, are political
expedients.
The frequency of such incidents made many people believe that Napoleon
was a passionate man. Talleyrand has more insight: “He’s a perfect devil.
He humbugs us all, even about his passions, for he knows how to act them,
though they are really there!”
Self-command and coldness are so dominant in him that he never takes the
vengeance that might seem appropriate to his irritable sense of honour
and to the extent of his power. He never punished rivals or traitors
unjustly. He only banished those whom he had good reason for wishing
out of the way; and it was a point of chivalry with him to leave beaten
enemies, great or small, unmolested.
Here is a scene with the Badenese envoy. The envoy asks compensation
for the duke of Brunswick. The Emperor angrily refuses: not because the
duke is supposed to have incited Prussia to make war against France; but
because, long before this, during the first campaign against France in
1792, he had issued the famous manifesto of Coblenz, in which he had
said that in Paris he would not leave one stone standing on another.
“What harm had this city done to him?” fiercely enquires the Emperor two
decades later, the man who in those days had been Lieutenant Bonaparte.
“This affront must be avenged!”
V
Napoleon’s energy is most conspicuous in his role of conqueror. But in
this case it finds a more spiritual expression than one would be led
to anticipate from a soldier. “I have seldom drawn my sword; I won my
battles with my eyes, not with my weapons.” To gain a knowledge of his
soul, it is not important to understand the new forms of his art of war;
of importance is to understand the way in which his whole being vibrated
before, during, and after a fight. In this, too, he is wholly original.
Even courage, that fundamental virtue of the soldier, assumes in Napoleon
a form peculiar to himself. During his youthful days, and again during
the last campaigns he displayed so much personal courage that he can
venture to say, “no soldier is proof against cowardice”; but such moments
of panic fear must be utilised against the foe. What he believes himself
almost alone to possess is “two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage”: courage
in face of the unforeseen, the sudden; courage which demands presence of
mind and power of determination. But he despises the “chivalrous” courage
of the duel, which he crushingly describes as “cannibal courage.”—“Since
you have both fought at Marengo and Austerlitz you do not need to give
any further proofs of your courage. Women are fickle, and so is good
luck. Go back to your regiments and become comrades again.”
The commander of armies clearly recognises the line of demarcation
between humaneness and coldness. The same man who, in his study, could
exclaim to Metternich: “Such a man as I does not care a snap of the
fingers for the lives of a million men”; will say on the field of battle:
“If the kings of the world could contemplate such a sight as this, they
would hanker less after wars and conquests.” Another time he writes
to Josephine: “The earth is strewn with dead and bleeding men; this
is the obverse of war; the heart is tortured at the sight of so many
victims.” Calculation and feeling are at cross purposes in this case,
and he excuses himself for the duties imposed by his own craft: “He who
cannot look upon a battle-ground dry-eyed, allows many men to be killed
purposelessly.” This is what he wants above all to avoid. For the great
aim, Europe entrusts him with a million men: his lesser aim, the taking
of this trench or that bridge, must be thriftily achieved, for “he who
heedlessly allows ten men to be killed where at most two need have died,
is answerable for the lives of eight men.”
Since most of his wars are fought from political necessity, and are
always conducted without hate, as soon as the fight is finished the foe
ceases to exist. He writes from Schönbrunn: “I am appalled to learn that
the eighteen thousand prisoners on the island of Lobau are suffering from
hunger; this is inhuman and unpardonable. Have twenty thousand rations
of bread sent there immediately; a similar amount of flour for the
bake-houses.” But when, after the truce, soldiers are still being killed
by the embittered Tyrolese, he is furious, and orders that “at least
six of the larger villages are to be plundered and burned, so that the
mountain folk may not soon forget the vengeance that has been exacted.”
War is for him an art, “the most noteworthy art, one which contains
within itself all the other arts.” Like a true artist, he declares that,
in the long run, this art cannot be taught: “You fancy that because
you have read Jomini you are fitted to be a leader in war?... I have
fought in sixty fights, and I can assure you that I have learned nothing
from any of them. Cæsar used the same tactics in his last battle as
he had used in his first.” In typical artist fashion, he contradicts
himself in the definitions of those things in which he is a master.
After the Spanish campaigns, he delivers the following lecture to one
of his generals: “War is decided far more by the power of strategical
calculation than by material forces.” At another time he will maintain
that it is the superior numbers or the moral courage of the troops which
constitutes the deciding factor. Sometimes he even goes so far as to say
that inspiration decides an issue: “The result of a battle hangs on a
thread and is mostly the outcome of a sudden thought. One approaches the
enemy according to a prearranged plan, one comes to blows, one fights for
a while, the critical moment draws near, a spark of inspiration flames
up—and a small reserve division does the rest!”
More logically, but not less as the artist, he speaks of the decisive
moment which, after a couple of engagements, one can find out for oneself
without any difficulty. “Such moments are not more than quarter hours....
In every battle a moment comes when the bravest of soldiers would like
to turn tail: it needs but a trifle, but a plea, to put heart into him
again.” This power of suggestion has won him many a victory, for soldiers
constitute the only mass to which he can speak with effect. The soldier
understands him, because Napoleon is simple. The Emperor even describes
war as “a simple art like everything that is beautiful.” By this
contention he seems to uphold the idea that war is the highest of all
arts. “The military profession is a freemasonry ... and I am the grand
master of its lodge.”
He draws this personal influence from the history of his own rise, which
is known to every soldier. As a young general, he had learned to put
up with his dependence on the civil authority; and as emperor he still
commiserates his royal adversaries because their generals’ activities
are frustrated by civilian control. On the other hand, he knows the
dangers of amateurishness, and writes to Joseph: “When the king himself
commands, the soldier does not feel commanded. The army applauds him as
when a queen is riding by. If one is not oneself a general, one must give
the generals full power of command.”
Because he is the only ruler in Europe who has risen from the ranks, from
youth upwards he remains familiar with details, and always understands
how things look to an officer on the fighting front. “There is nothing
connected with the art of war which I cannot do with my own hand: power,
siege engines, artillery.” But he does not concern himself with these
details unless it is necessary, and laughs at the romantic anecdote in
a book where he is said, one night, to have taken over the duties of a
sentry who had gone to sleep at his post: “That is a civilian’s idea, the
sort of thing a lawyer would think of, and was certainly not written by a
soldier.”
But he is a stickler for equality in the army, and in this matter
remains true to the revolution until the very end of his career. No one
is promoted unless his record in the service justifies the advancement.
If Napoleon makes an exception in the case of his brothers, we must
remember that after he has made them kings he continues to scold them
as if they were subalterns. He writes to Jerome, commenting on a report
from Silesia: “Besides, your letter is too clever for my taste.... What a
man needs in war is precision, firmness, simplicity.” When Joseph plays
the prince in Boulogne, and vies with Marshal Soult in the splendour of
his receptions, Napoleon scolds him. “In the army, no one must put the
commander in the shade. On review days, it is the general and not the
prince who must give a dinner. At a review, a royal colonel is a colonel
and nothing more. Discipline can tolerate no exceptions. The army is a
whole. Its commander is everything. Keep to your own regiment.”
[Illustration: Napoleon as Emperor in 1815. Woodcut, after a medal.]
Nevertheless, a wounded commander-in-chief has become a private soldier.
At Eylau, where there have been heavy losses, the Emperor forbids a
famous surgeon to go out of his way in order to care for a wounded
general: “Your business is to attend to all the wounded, and not to any
one in particular.” A German officer reports that after a fight Napoleon
would often stand by the wounded and see that they were carefully lifted
into the stretchers: “If this good fellow pulls through, there will be
one victim the less.”
In all the memoirs, we read how in camp the Emperor would foregather
with his men at the bivouac fire, ask whether their food was being
properly cooked, and laugh at their replies. When they confided all their
troubles to him, and often said “thou” to him, this was not the assumed
good fellowship of a condescending monarch, but a genuinely paternal
relationship. If he calls them “my children,” to them he is their “little
corporal,” meaning the comrade who takes the responsibility. “I have
received your letter, dear comrade,” he writes to a veteran grenadier
who wishes to re-enter the service. “You need not speak to me of your
deeds, for I know you to be the bravest grenadier in the army. It will be
a pleasure to see you once more. The Minister for War will send you your
orders.”
He never confides his plans to any one; but when it is a question of
rewarding merit, he calls in Everyman as adviser. After a fight, he often
forms a circle, speaks to the officers, the non-commissioned officers,
and the rankers individually, asking who were the most valiant, rewarding
then and there, allotting eagles with his own hand. “The officers pointed
out, the soldiers confirmed, the Emperor approved,” relates Ségur as
eyewitness.
It is true that Napoleon loves war, but as a fine art, just as he loves
power. It is true that he laughs incredulously at a traveller who tells
him a tale of a Chinese island where there are no weapons.
“What do you mean? But they must have weapons!”
“No, Sire.”
“Pikes, anyhow; or bows and arrows?”
“Neither the one nor the other.”
“Daggers!”
“Not even daggers.”
“But how the devil do they fight there?”
“There has never been a war on the island.”
“What, no war?”
It sounds to the traveller as if the very existence of such people under
the sun outrages the Emperor. The thought stirs a soldier’s bile!
All the same, he looked forward to the coming of peaceful days, not with
an ardent desire for them perhaps, but with the seer’s vision. He showed
his superiority to all the modern commanders against whom he fought, in
that he, the greatest soldier of the new times, declared the primacy of
the spirit over the sword. When Canova made a statue of him in which he
was shown with a threatening mien, he said contemptuously: “Does the man
think I achieved my conquests with blows of my fist?” But, more than
this, he himself defined a commander as something above and beyond a
soldier. When First Consul, he said in the Council of State:
“In what does the commander’s superiority consist? ‘In his mental
qualities: insight, calculation, decision, eloquence, knowledge of men.’
But all these qualities are what make a man shine in civil life.... If
bodily vigour and courage sufficed the commander, any brave private could
be a leader of armies. Everywhere, crude force now yields ground to moral
qualities. The man with the bayonet bows before the man who possesses
exceptional knowledge and understanding.... I knew perfectly well what I
was about when, as the head of the army, I bore the title of Member of
the Institute; and the youngest drummer understood what I meant.”
At a later date, he spoke more decisively.
“_War is an anachronism. Some day, victories will be won without cannon
and without bayonets.... Whoever troubles the peace of Europe, wants
civil war._”
Remember that these are the words of Napoleon, the military commander.
VI
His energy is concentrated on human beings. Very rarely does he come into
conflict with natural forces; and whenever he does so, he is beaten.
But, in general, all he has to do is to compel men to conquer, for him,
the mountains and the miles. Human beings are the material in working
with which the energy and the imagination of this artist are destined
to become weary; them he must overcome if he is to do his work at all.
No mortal ever conquered more men than did Napoleon. He subjugated, not
only armies and peoples, but something more: individuals, and the best of
these.
To achieve his goal, he followed the road of contempt; and used as his
means, glory and money. Self-confidence and experience had convinced him
that every one acts only from self-interest; that some are driven to
grasp at money through love of pleasure, or avarice, or clannishness;
that others seek public recognition in order to gratify their vanity,
their jealousy, or their ambition. Denying the force of ideal motives,
Napoleon relied exclusively upon material means; and if the spur of
ambition occasionally assumed the aspect of a desire for eternal glory,
this occurred against his will, but the magic of his personality
sometimes exercised a more puissant lure than the well-calculated
material attractions offered by others. To quote Goethe: “Napoleon, who
lived wholly for ideas, was nevertheless unable to grasp the nature of
ideal motives; he repudiated the ideal, denied that there was any such
thing, at the very time when he himself was eagerly trying to realise the
ideal.”
Yet to Napoleon the Mephistophelian conception of men was as alien as it
was to Goethe. He said: “Most people bear within themselves the seeds
of good and of evil, of courage and of cowardice. Thus is human nature
created: upbringing and circumstance do the rest.” Since, for twenty
years, he needed this human nature, daily and in quantities of a hundred
at a time, the subtlest knowledge of it was a primary condition of his
success. Among all the materials which Napoleon bent to his uses, the
human heart was the most familiar.
“I am a great friend of analysis.... ‘Why’ and ‘How,’ are such useful
questions, that they cannot be uttered too often.” Coldly and clearly as
a nerve specialist, he controls all psychical symptoms, utilises every
method for the attainment of such control, and trusts especially to
physiognomy—for he knows his Lavater. He is fond of reproving people.
“According as they react, I discover the pitch of their souls. If I
strike brass with a glove, it gives back no tone: but if I strike with a
hammer, it rings out.” A person meeting Napoleon for the first time, is
gripped by the magnetism of his glance.
By talking and questioning, he makes himself acquainted with the atlas of
human types, an atlas he is ever enlarging. He questions so long that a
stranger grows embarrassed, confused, and alarmed; he questions until his
questions become ridiculous; but he must at all costs get the information
he needs, even if he is not negotiating. In what way can the twenty
minutes that a doctor sits at Napoleon’s table in St. Helena be put to
the best use by the ex-Emperor?
“How many patients suffering from ailments affecting the liver had you on
board? How many cases of dysentery? What is the fee for a consultation
in England? What is the pension awarded to an army surgeon?... What is
death, or how would you define it? When does the soul quit the body? When
does a body first receive a soul?”
Another means is monologue. One of his intimates declares that the right
of the Emperor to hold forth in monologue was the only real pleasure his
high estate awarded him! We have testimonies concerning other men of
action: but who ever talked so much as Napoleon! Since he always faces
the world alone, he must continually hold forth that he may convey his
suggestions to the world. His conversations often lasted from five to
eight hours, some of them ten or eleven hours; and during the greater
part of them Napoleon took the floor. We must admit that this was more in
accordance with the Italian manner than the Roman; Italian, too, were the
rapidity of his utterance, and his foreign accent: but he gesticulated
little; and only when much moved did he unclasp his hands—generally they
were clasped behind his back, as if he wished to throw out his chest
against the world.
Upon all who serve him, he lavishes money with oriental profusion. But
as far as his personal expenditure is concerned, he is thrifty. During
the Consulate he says: “A man who has been through so many wars will have
acquired a little property whether he will or no. I have a private income
of from frs. 80,000 to frs. 100,000, with a house in town and a country
mansion. What more do I need? If I should get out of humour with France,
or France with me, I should retire from public life without a qualm....
But every one round me is stealing; the ministers are weak. Some people
must be laying by vast sums.... What is to be done about it? France is
corrupt through and through. It has always been like that; as soon as a
man becomes a minister, he builds himself a palace.... Do you know what
they are trying to make me pay for my installation in the Tuileries?
Two millions!... It must be cut down to eight hundred thousand. I am
surrounded by a pack of scoundrels.”
“Your great operations,” answers Roederer, “must cost you much more than
these domestic defalcations.”
“All the more reason why I should watch over my personal expenditure.”
This conversation tells us how the head of the State, a man of thirty,
regards money. He needs nothing for himself, and complains of the
venality and profusion of those by whom he is surrounded; acknowledges
that he has himself made money out of the wars; rails at the tradesmen
who want to charge two millions for the equipment of a palace, when,
as far as his own taste is concerned, he sees no reason for spending
anything at all. Amid the frightful corruption which is a heritage of the
revolution, he fights with the army contractors and war profiteers; but
as soon as, by drastic punishments, he has succeeded in putting an end to
this scandal, he assigns preposterous incomes to his marshals, some of
whom receive more than a million francs a year. As Consul, he rids the
State of the thieves who are making away with the national property; and
then, as Emperor, he burdens this same State with extortionate salaries.
Still, there are a few persons who make money thanks to their
relationship with him, though without his aid. “When I have nothing
left,” he says to Talleyrand, “I shall turn to you. Tell me honestly, how
much have you made out of me?”
“I am not a rich man, Sire, but all that I have is at your service.”
Napoleon’s way of dealing with men is modified by a hundred and one
considerations. If we wish to study the variations of his technique, we
must class his instruments in groups.
Generals and marshals are the easiest to keep dependent, for they have
unceasing opportunities of winning military renown; and, since he pays
them so liberally for their services, they grow more and more wealthy.
By loading them with money, he gains two ends, spreading effulgence
around himself, and keeping his most powerful officers in a state of
dependence. It delights him to see these soldiers unused to money
spending extravagantly, running into debt, and then turning to him for
help in their difficulties. He leads them from profusion to want, and
then back to profusion again. At the same time, he gives them little
scope for originality, reserving important decisions for himself, so that
even the commanders of armies rarely have a chance of proving themselves
men of genius. He shrewdly regulates his public mention of them in his
bulletins, both in respect of time and form, so that, through their
vanity and jealousy, he can get his way with his generals.
The result is that their sentiments towards him are a mingling of hatred
and love, whereby they are chained to his service more firmly than if
the feeling had been one of pure affection. Perhaps only two of them are
wholly devoted to him, Berthier and Duroc, whose love for him he compares
with that of a child and a dog. Ney speaks of himself as a loaded musket
which is fired when and where the Emperor orders. Napoleon, for his part,
has a personal affection for those only who have risen with him, and
in his memoirs he pays his tribute to them. He extols Desaix’s mental
balance. Moreau has “more instinct than genius”; whereas Lannes has “more
courage than sense,” though as time goes on he makes good in the latter
respect. Kléber seeks glory only as a means of enjoyment. Masséna is
not really courageous until he is under fire. Murat “has not a spark of
intelligence, but what dash! He is a duffer and a hero.” Napoleon cannot
break away from these witnesses of his rise, although almost all of them
have learned the weight of his anger. In his tent, after Wagram, Napoleon
thunders at Marmont for having made a mess of things, and a quarter of an
hour later appoints him marshal.
Sometimes the Emperor’s misanthropy got the better of him. “In those
moods, I begin to distrust even my companions-in-arms; that causes me
intense suffering, and I do everything I can to rid myself of such
horrible suspicions.” Yet he really knew. Lannes’ death touched him to
the quick, but he never really uttered the moving farewell words which
he publishes. Indeed, he confided to Metternich: “Lannes hated me. When
I heard that, on being wounded, he had called out my name, I knew it was
all up with him. He called on me as a dying atheist calls on God.”
The remembrance of friendships formed in youth does not prevent him
from scolding the most exalted of his marshals like schoolboys when he
considers they have behaved foolishly or have been wanting in courage.
He says to Junot: “Your conduct was unprecedented, extraordinarily
indiscreet.... You have a strange notion of your military duties. I don’t
recognise you!” To a general in Lombardy: “Under your command, there has
been very little honesty and a great deal of avarice; but I never knew
until to-day that you were a coward. Leave the army, and never let me see
your face again!” In Spain, one of his generals capitulated in the open
field. Six months later, this man ventured to appear before Napoleon at a
review. The Emperor stormed at him in full hearing of the troops; would
not be appeased. The witnesses say that the scene lasted a whole hour. “A
man may have to surrender a fortress. The fortune of war is uncertain,
and defeat is always possible. Any one can be taken prisoner. The thing
may happen to me to-morrow. But honour, before all! On the battle-field,
a commander’s business is to fight: and if he capitulates instead, he
deserves to be shot.... A soldier must know how to die. Have we not all
to face death?... As a subject, you committed a crime in capitulating; as
a general, a stupid blunder; as a soldier, your action was cowardly; but
as a Frenchman, your surrender was dishonourable!”
He alarmed the diplomats of his day by a frankness which none of them
trusted. “Tact, and putting all the cards on the table, will do better
service in diplomacy than cunning. The tricks of the diplomats of the
old school are out of date; all their rogueries have been exposed long
since.... Nothing betrays weakness more than the attempt to deceive.”
Just before the renewal of the war with England, he tells the British
envoy how many years it will take before France can face England at sea,
but he explains how quickly he can increase his army to four hundred
thousand. In Schönbrunn, he says to the Austrian negotiator: “That is my
last word. If you defeat me, I shall propose more favourable terms; but
if I gain the victory, I shall make them harder. What I want is peace.”
He studies every shade of expression when he wishes to influence the
envoys of foreign powers. We see this especially when he is adapting his
demeanour towards the Austrians with an eye to the Habsburg traditions.
He waits for the formal reception on his birthday, and then, faced by
the semicircle of the diplomats, he stops in front of Metternich to say:
“Well, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, what does your emperor want? Would he like
me to come to Vienna?” This is calculated to intimidate the Austrian
envoy, and at the same time to advertise Napoleon’s threatening attitude
throughout Europe. But two days later, when Metternich comes to a private
interview, the Emperor says: “To-day, we won’t play at being Emperor of
the French and Austrian envoy. There is no audience now, so we need not
make any fine speeches.”
Shortly before the conclusion of the first peace with Austria, he wishes
to avoid meeting the defeated archduke in Schönbrunn, lest he should
commit himself prematurely to peace terms. He therefore arranges that
the meeting shall take place in a hunting lodge. “I shall spend only two
hours there: one of them will be occupied in having dinner, and the other
will be devoted to talk about the war and to mutual protestations of
respect.” When the First Consul receives Count Cobenzl, he has personally
arranged the stage in the Tuileries; writing-table in the corner; no
chairs, so that they will have to sit on the sofa; only one lamp, no
lights in the chandelier, although it is late in the evening. When
Talleyrand ushers in the Austrian, the room seems almost dark, and the
Consul, on the farther side of it, is scarcely visible; the stranger is
perplexed, and has to sit exactly where his host chooses.
He is even more subtle in his dealings with the princes. During the years
of his supreme power, he ceases to pay them visits. In Tilsit, he becomes
the host within two days; in Dresden, though he is the king of Saxony’s
guest, he plays the master. He avoids having anything to do with queens.
When Queen Louise pathetically implores justice, he begs her to sit down.
“Nothing interrupts a tragical scene more effectually than this. When
people sit down, tragedy becomes comedy.”
In his dealings with the peoples he was less happy, and his only
tolerable successes were secured with the French and the Italians. During
the Consulate, he said in the Council of State: “My policy is to rule
in accordance with the will of the majority. This, I think, implies the
recognition of the sovereignty of the people. I became a good Catholic
when I wanted to finish the war in Vendée; in Egypt, I was a Turk; when I
wished to win over the Italians, I was an ultramontane. If I reigned over
the Jews, I should rebuild Solomon’s temple. That is why I propose to
talk about freedom in that part of San Domingo where the slaves have been
liberated, while maintaining slavery in the other part of the island.”
His policy was not very successful in the negro republic; he did better
in Poland, which he tried to win over by festivities and phrases; and
better still with the Jews. These had been granted equal rights by
the revolution, and on the Rhine many of them were doing harm by the
practice of usury. Napoleon, who knew their value as traders, did not
have recourse to crude prohibitions. He bethought himself of Jewish laws
and customs; summoned to Paris their highest council, the Sanhedrin,
which had not met for centuries; left the decision to this body, and was
able to arrange that the supreme Jewish authority should forbid usury as
sinful. But in Spain he made a complete mess of things, overlooking the
risks he was running, and advising Joseph to make himself agreeable to
the whole nation “by instilling fear into the rabble.”
The Germans puzzled Napoleon most of all. They had everything he lacked,
and none of the things he had. He therefore, even in the midst of his
successes, regarded them with a mixture of fear and admiration; they
seemed to him uncanny. When he went to Erfurt and wished to influence
the German princes by the drama, he told the managing director not to
stage any comedies. “No one understands comedies on this bank of the
Rhine. Corneille’s _Cinna_ might be played, for therein great interests
are portrayed; then a scene depicting royal clemency, which would
certainly have a good effect.” He went on to misquote _Cinna_. Rémusat,
having put him right, said: “In this sacred office, to which God’s grace
has appointed the king, the past is justified, and the future is free.
He who is advanced to this office, cannot be held culpable; whatever he
does, he remains invulnerable.”
“Splendid!” exclaims the Emperor, “especially for the Germans, who
always cling to the same ideas, and are still talking about the death
of the duke of Enghien! We must broaden their moral outlook. That will
be good for people with melancholy ideas, the sort of persons with whom
Germany is filled.” It is as if he were talking about German music, of
which he knows practically nothing; but really he is thinking of German
philosophy. The one is as uncongenial to him as the other, for he is fond
of Italian arias and the wisdom of Voltaire, but says that “Kant is an
obscure writer.” This misconception of his prevents him from foreseeing
the possibility that so slow-moving a people may one day become inspired
with a passionate enthusiasm.
Perhaps the reason for the misinterpretation lies in the impracticability
of understanding the masses of a foreign nation. In northern Italy, he
did indeed make headway, for he was a young man, his ideas were naïve,
the yearning of the oppressed was still fresh in him; and he was the
herald of the revolution. But the dictator could no longer bring a torch
to foreign peoples. Nevertheless, he continued to watch the sentiments of
the masses. “A ruler should reign for the masses, without asking whether
he is pleasing Mr. So-and-So.... Men of mark look from above, and have
no party ties; one who belongs to a party, is a slave.” Such were his
principles, but his actions told another story.
The masses, even in France, saw a man who made himself dreaded. They
feared him for a decade, but became sceptical at his first failure. “A
ruler should be dignified in his demeanour towards the people,” says
Napoleon. “But he must not flatter the crowd, which will then think
itself cheated if he does not give it everything. You ask me why I make
threatening speeches? I make them in order to avoid having to do the
things I threaten!”
But this severity is, in the long run, out of keeping both with his own
simplicity of nature and with the instincts of the crowd. He could not
seduce the masses by the offer of fame and money, so he showed them
symbols: crowns and coronation ceremonies; courts and splendour and
princes: but the people felt the growing distance between them and their
ruler, and were not deceived.
When the people of Paris learned that the Emperor, in his theatre, would
no longer allow King Henry to say, “I tremble,” but only, “I shudder,”
because, though a king (being only a man) may tremble, he may not admit
it—the crowd must either feel angry or become derisive. But the crowd
did not hear the words in which the Emperor instructed Talma how to play
Cæsar:
“When Cæsar utters his long tirade against kingship, saying, ‘for me, in
whom the throne inspires nothing but contempt,’ he does not mean a word
of what he says. He only talks like that because he knows that his Romans
are standing behind him, and wishes to persuade them that the throne is
an abomination to him. In reality, it is already the goal of his desire.
Consequently those words ought not to be spoken with conviction.”
He wants to use religion, just as he uses the drama, that he may lull the
masses to sleep. Here is what the newmade Consul says to the Council of
State: “What I see in religion is, not the mystery of the incarnation,
but social order. It associates with heaven an idea of equality, which
prevents the poor from massacring the rich. Religion has the same sort
of value as vaccination. It gratifies our taste for the miraculous,
and protects us from quacks; for the priests are worth more than the
Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the German dreamers.... Society cannot
exist without inequality of property; but this latter cannot exist
without religion. One who is dying of hunger when the man next him is
feasting on dainties, can only be sustained by a belief in a higher
power, and by the conviction that in another world there will be a
different distribution of goods.”
Though he knows all this, and though he takes kindly measures for the
relief of the poor, he can never free his mind from thoughts of the
rabble and the mob. When he turns from contemplating the princes to
contemplating the masses, his contempt for his fellows diminishes, but
not enough. The masses, like the princes, are to be used for his own
ends. He says: “The men of intelligence who have changed the world,
have never done so by influencing the leaders, but have always set the
masses in motion. He who influences princes is only an intriguer, and his
results are second rate; but he who moves the masses, changes the face of
the earth.” Democracy came between him and the people; and what he has to
say about parliamentarism is not creative but critical:
“The republic is the political form which elevates the soul and contains
the germ of great things: but, precisely because of its greatness, it
will sooner or later perish; for it needs a unified authority to maintain
its power, and this must lead either to despotism or to a patriciate.
The latter is the worst of despotisms; Rome, Venice, England, and even
France are instances. If the republic wishes to attain greatness, the
central authority must be established upon a permanent parliamentary
majority; ... but this can be secured only by corruption, which is the
cancer of the peoples, and a terrible weapon in the hands of the central
authority. The liberals have discovered the expedient of constitutional
monarchy. That is a mezzo termine, which has its advantages, but only
when the popular assembly, whose business it is to bridle the monarchical
authority, is elected by universal suffrage.”
Napoleon recognised the existence of all the problems that confronted
the nineteenth century; but he never understood the social problem, with
which his own story began.
VII
Imagination, the third element of his personality, is the real driving
force of his self-confidence and his energy. Continually at war with
the calculating part of his nature, fantasy, in the end, brings this
harbourer of opposites to destruction. The imaginative power, which
links the poet to the statesman (enabling both unceasingly to dwell
in the affective world of strangers as well as in their own), is also
the source of his knowledge of men and his guide to the management of
men. But always his energy interacts with other qualities. One who, for
analytical purposes, would force the living whole of his character into
the framework of a system, cannot avoid, from time to time, breaking
threads that he may bind other threads together.
“I know not what I do, for everything depends on events. I have not a
will of my own, but expect everything from their outcome.... The greater
one is, the less can one have a will. One is always dependent upon events
and circumstances.” Such words, casually introduced into a letter from
husband to wife, express the distantly visible forms of his fantasy; for
only the imaginative man, not tied to systems and principles, trusts
himself to the movements of the moments, allows his spirit to roam
freely, and discovers his course as he goes. In this sense, his whole
career is improvisation, though in the converse way from that in which
most people improvise. He calculated little things in advance with great
precision; whereas his worldwide designs were originated, transformed,
improvised, in accordance with circumstances and developments. “One who
has become familiar with affairs, despises all theories, and makes use
of them only like the geometricians, not in order to move forward in a
straight line, but merely to keep heading in the same direction.”
This direction, this fundamental idea of the statesman, was, moreover,
only possible in a man whose mind was simultaneously imaginative and
mathematical. It is his most ardent vision and his coolest calculation;
it is his political aim, his hope, his ambition: Europe. If this vision
could be realised only by force of arms, that was because of the
fierceness with which the first republic of Europe was again and again
attacked by the European princes. We have seen how earnestly he strove
for peace. No doubt he chose his means badly, his error being due to
the time, the circumstances, and his own domineering character. But his
mistakes as to method still leave undiminished the genius of the seer
who looked forward towards an aim which was again to become an object of
statesmanship a hundred years after his fall.
“There are in Europe more than thirty million Frenchmen, fifteen million
Italians, thirty million Germans.... Out of each of these peoples, I
wanted to make a united national whole.... That would have supplied
the best chance of establishing a general unity of laws; a unity of
principles and thoughts and feelings, of outlooks and interests.... Then
it would have been possible to think of founding the United States of
Europe after the model of the United States of America or of the Greek
Amphictyonic League.... What perspectives of strength, greatness, and
prosperity this opens up!... For France, unity has been wrought; in
Spain, it has proved unattainable; to establish the Italian nation, I
should have needed twenty years; to make the Germans a nation, would
have required still more patience, and all I could do was to simplify
their monstrous constitution. At the same time, I wanted to pave the
way for the unification of the great interests of Europe, just as I
had unified the parties in France.... The transient mutterings of the
peoples troubled me little; they would have been reconciled to me by
the result.... _Europe would soon have become one nation, and any who
travelled in it would always have been in a common fatherland.... Sooner
or later, this union will be brought about by the force of events. The
first impetus has been given; and, after the fall and the disappearance
of my system, it seems to me that the only way in which an equilibrium
can be achieved in Europe is through a league of nations._”
Here there is no talk of a dictatorial welding together of different
stocks, or of an enthusiastic fraternisation. He speaks only of
interests, and of a preliminary unification of these on a national and
racial basis. The work of the nineteenth century was to inaugurate the
preliminaries by the establishment of the nations. The twentieth century
opens with the realisation of the Napoleonic idea.
VIII
The effects underlying his energy and his imagination are dominated by
the clarity of his thought. Napoleon hated less, and loved more, than he
would have been willing to admit. In this domain, we find the converse of
what happens in the matter of his sympathies in war time, when a million
men are coldly sacrificed, while one man wounded and bleeding touches him
to the heart. Since his fantasy needs enormous masses, he is enraged when
Joseph says: “I am the only person who cares for you.” Napoleon rejoins:
“Nothing of the sort. I need five hundred million men to love me.” In
these icy words glows the volcano which one of his school masters heard
rumbling long ago.
Emotionally convinced of his mission to order the affairs of the
nations, he deliberately rejects anything that may distract him from this
aim, and nothing sustains him but his monomania. Even in the drama, he
objects to the interweaving of love stories, saying: “Love is a passion
which should only be the main theme of a tragedy, and never a subsidiary
motif.... In the days of Racine, it was the whole content of a human
life. That happens in a society where no great deeds are being done.”
If love becomes intrusive, he annuls it. “I have no time to be bothered
with feelings and to repent them like other men.... There are two
motives to action: self-interest and fear. Believe me, love is a foolish
blindness!... I love no one, not even my brothers—Joseph a little, from
force of habit, and because he is the elder. I am fond of Duroc, too;
he is serious and resolute; I believe the man has never shed tears in
his life!... Let us leave sensibilities to women. Men should be firm of
heart and strong of will, or else they should have nothing to do with
war or governance.” Another time: “The only friend I have is Daru; he is
unfeeling and cold; that suits me.” Last of all, in St. Helena: “A man of
fifty has done with love.... I have an iron heart. I never really loved;
perhaps Josephine, a little; but then I was only seven-and-twenty. I
incline to the view of Gassion, who once said to me that he did not love
life well enough to give it to another being.”
Always half ashamed of his feelings; ever ready to make excuses for them;
“perhaps,” “a little.” Yet this is the same man who said: “I am the slave
of my way of feeling and acting, for I value the heart much more than the
head.” This very feeling is his fantasy.
One in whom egotism is supreme, will be more inclined to jealousy than
to love. His first letters to Josephine show him devoured by jealousy.
Years later, as Consul, when he is inspecting his new bridge in course of
construction across the Seine, he has to step aside with his companions
for a moment to let a carriage pass. In the carriage sits Hippolyte,
his sometime rival. That was long ago; everything has been condoned;
the man’s name is never mentioned in his presence. But now, at a chance
encounter in the street, Bonaparte grows pale and confused, and takes a
little while to recover composure.
From time to time, he shows an involuntary kindliness. On one of the
Italian battle-fields, he sees a dog howling over the dead body of its
master. “The poor beast seemed to be asking for an avenger, or begging
help. I was profoundly moved by the dog’s suffering, and at that moment
I should have been very much in the mood to grant quarter to an enemy. I
understood why Achilles surrendered Hector’s body to the weeping Priam.
Such is man; so little can he count upon his moods. Impassively I had
sent my soldiers into the battle; dry-eyed I had watched them marching
past in an advance where thousands of them would meet their fate; then I
was shaken to the depths by the howling of a dog.”
Affectionate tones are to be heard in many of his letters. To Cambacérès:
“I am so sorry to hear that you are not well. I hope it is only a passing
trouble. If you did not take so much medicine, you would be better
already.... But anyhow, you must do your utmost to get well, if only
because of my friendship for you.” To Corvisart: “Dear Doctor, I wish
you would see to the arch-chancellor and to Lacépède: the former has
been ailing for a week, and I am afraid he is in the hands of a quack;
Lacépède’s wife has been ill for some time. Give them the benefit of your
advice, and cure them as soon as you can. You will save the life of a man
of note, and one who is very dear to me.”
Chénier, who has written against him for years, is assisted by him in
poverty and given a secure position. Carnot, for ten years an enemy of
the Emperor, is heavily in debt; Napoleon learns this, settles the debts,
and refuses to hear of being given a note of hand; reckons up the pay
which Carnot would have received as general in active service, makes this
calculation the basis of a large pension; and when Carnot says he would
like to do some work for his money, Napoleon commissions him to write
a military treatise, lest his pensioner should have to undertake duties
that might go against the grain.
During the Hundred Days, learning that some of the Bourbon princes
are greatly distressed for lack of money, he sends them large sums
anonymously. On one occasion his secretary is asleep, and he himself has
nothing particular to do; he looks through a pile of begging letters, and
writes in the margin of each the amount of an allowance which is to be
given to the sender. Hundreds of officers whom, in fits of anger, he has
sworn to have shot, remain at their posts—to forsake him in the end. When
he orders Jerome to get a divorce, he is alarmed at his own harshness.
After he has written to enforce his command with threats he sends a
letter to his mother saying that she had better write to Jerome at once
and get his sisters to write as well, “for if I have passed judgment on
him, nothing can alter it, and his life will be spoiled.”
From his few friends, he demands blind devotion. Never is the
self-centred nature of Napoleon more plainly shown than in the words the
exile speaks to Montholon, from whom he has been temporarily estranged:
“I love you like a son, for I believe that you love me only; otherwise
you could not love me at all. According to my way of feeling, it is not
in our nature to love several persons at once. People deceive themselves
in these matters; they cannot even love all their children with the same
intensity. For my part, at any rate, I want to be the supreme object of
affection in the case of those whom I love and honour with my confidence.
I cannot bear partings. They stab me to the heart, for my disposition is
too sensitive; spiritual poison affects the body more powerfully than
arsenic.”
Logically enough, he dislikes western views concerning the enlightenment
of women. He always hankers after the East, and in this matter he is an
oriental. “Nature intended women to be our slaves; and it is only because
of our distorted outlooks that they venture to describe themselves as
our rulers.... For one who can influence us in a good direction, there
are a hundred who will only lead us into follies.... What a mad idea to
demand equality for women! They are our property, we are not theirs; for
they give us children, but we do not give them any. They belong to us,
just as a tree which bears fruit belongs to the gardener.... In this
difference, there is nothing degrading; every one has his privileges, and
every one his duties. You, ladies, have beauty, attractiveness; but also
dependence.”
IX
Throughout life, the imagination of this creator was troubled by the
thought of the Creator. This ruler of men was greatly disturbed that
there should be no one who ruled all men. It was not that he ever
regarded himself as divine; he laughed at all mystical interpretations
of his own power: but there was one great power which remained
uncoercible—no matter whether it were called God, destiny, or death. How
do self-confidence and fantasy escape from this snare?
First of all by the rejection of dogma. “My firm conviction is that Jesus
... was put to death like any other fanatic who professed to be a prophet
or a Messiah; there have been such persons at all times. For my part,
I turn from the New Testament to the Old, and there I find one man of
mark, Moses.... Besides, how could I accept a religion which would damn
Socrates and Plato?... I cannot believe that there is a god who punishes
and rewards, for I see honest folk unlucky, and rogues lucky. Look at
Talleyrand; he is sure to die in his bed!... How could I have remained
independent if I had been subject to the influence of a confessor to
threaten me with the pains of hell? Think what powers a confessor who is
a rascal can exercise!...”
In this matter he is consistent; from childhood, when he would not
go to Mass, until the end of his life, he rejected (for himself) all
the religions. The man who, in his own life, would not recognise the
existence of miracle, and ascribed everything that he was able to achieve
to the working of the healthy human understanding, boldness, power of
combination, knowledge of men, and imagination, could not possibly
believe in the miracles recorded in the Bible. He was perfectly logical
when he told one of his subordinates it was impossible that two million
men could have quenched their thirst at the Wells of Moses.
Even more uncongenial to him is any dread of a great assize. He does not
talk about morality; or at most, he does so with some political end in
view. Only towards the last, on the island, he says once in an evening
conversation with his intimates: “How happy should we be here if I could
confide my troubles to God, and could expect from him happiness and
salvation! Have I not a just claim to it? I, who have had so unusual a
career, have never committed a crime, and need not fear to step before
God’s judgment seat and await his sentence. Never has the thought of
committing a murder entered my mind.”
For these reasons, he does not falter in the days of misfortune. Five
years before the end, he expresses the hope that he will die without a
confessor, but adds that no one can be certain what he will do in his
last hours. In fact, this heart of steel was steadfast to the end.
Nevertheless, his ideas as to the nature of the creation developed,
and just as the revolutionist became a legitimist, so the materialist
became a theist. But these developments were not transformations;
there was simply a broadening of the basis of his thought. Throughout
life, he had a sense that things had come into existence by a natural
process: “When out hunting, I had the deer cut open, and saw how like the
beast’s internal organs were to those of a human being. Man is merely
a more perfect creature than a dog or a tree. The plan is the first
link in a chain whose last link is mankind.” It should be remembered
that the Emperor had not read Goethe’s _Zur Morphologie_, or Lamarck’s
_Philosophie zoologique_. He had actually refused to receive Lamarck.
Still more remarkable are his deductions concerning psycho-physical
processes. In a Christmas discourse at St. Helena, he expresses his
doubts as follows: “How can any one understand that God should sanction
the caprices of a ruler who sends thousands of men into battle that they
may die for him?... Where is the soul of a child; or that of a madman?...
What are electricity, galvanism, magnetism? In these lies the great
secret of nature. I am inclined to believe that man is a product of
these fluids and of the atmosphere; the brain sucks them in and imparts
life, and the soul is composed of them. After death, they return into
the atmosphere, whence they are sucked up again by other brains.” After
giving utterance to these Goethean motifs, he is alarmed at his own
temerity. Breaking off suddenly, he says, as a soldier among soldiers:
“Oh, well, my dear Gourgaud, when we are dead, we are simply dead.”
Side by side with this scepticism, there exists and expands a theism. To
Laplace, who denies the existence of God, he says: “You should be more
ready than any one else to admit that God exists, for you, more than
most, have seen the wonders of creation. If we cannot actually see God
with our own eyes, this is because he did not wish our understanding to
reach so far.” On another occasion: “We believe in God because everything
around us testifies to his existence.” In St. Helena: “I have never
doubted the existence of God, for, even if my reason were incompetent to
grasp him, still my inner feelings would convince me of his reality. My
temperament has always been in harmony with this feeling.”
How shall such a spirit come to terms with destiny? Since his self-esteem
makes it impossible for him to believe that any man can have beaten
him, he is forced to ascribe his defeat to fate. But this sense of the
workings of destiny is present in his mind before the final overthrow;
it accompanies him throughout life, and appears to be an equivalent for
the reverence, devotion, and faith by which other men live. With the
aid of his belief in destiny, Napoleon wages a heroic struggle. In his
strongest moments, he feels that he wears armour of proof: “I have a soul
of marble. The lightnings were unable to destroy it, but broke on it in
vain.” Once he expresses his defiance even more poetically: “Should the
heavens fall down on us, we shall hold them off with the points of our
lances!”
But these defiant moods are rare. In general, he is resigned to fate.
There are hundreds of his sayings to bear witness to this. Here are
three: “All that happens, is written; our hour is fixed, and no one can
postpone it.... No one can escape his fate.” To the duchess of Weimar:
“Believe me, there is a providence which guides all. I am merely its
instrument.” To Johannes von Müller: “Fundamentally, all things are
linked together, and are subject to the unsearchable guidance of an
unseen hand. I have only become great through the influence of my star.”
In such tropes we see awareness of God and a sense of dependence welded
into pride in his own mission. At these times, a prophetical effulgence
seems to radiate from him, but is obscured again and again by the
self-confidence of his iron energy.
Yet Napoleon was far from believing in his star as another man may
believe in a god or a talisman. He could not bear to have the greatness
of his deeds minimised by insistence on his good fortune. He was,
therefore, far less superstitious than other men of his type. Louis
brings him a valuable knife, but hesitates to give it to him; Napoleon
snatches it from his brother’s hand, saying: “Don’t bother, it won’t
cut anything but bread!” He scolds Josephine because she consults
fortune-tellers; but then, being curious, asks her to tell him all about
the hocus-pocus. He wants to have the signing of the peace of Pressburg
postponed for a few days, that it may take place after the reintroduction
of the prerevolutionary calendar; but he does not order this, being
content to use the unwonted phrase, “that would please me very much.”
Schwarzenberg’s death, in 1820, is a great relief to him; for when a
fire broke out in the Schwarzenberg mansion at the ball given in honour
of Napoleon’s second marriage, the Emperor had interpreted this as a bad
omen for himself; now Schwarzenberg’s death is a derivative for his own
uneasy forebodings!
Apart from these trifles, in a life so packed with important happenings,
we do not hear of a single day during twenty years on which he forms,
postpones, or modifies a resolution on superstitious grounds. But he
makes an adroit use of his “star” and his “destiny” for political or
rhetorical purposes. Since he wishes to pose before Europe as the Man
of Destiny, he tries to work upon suggestible minds like Alexander’s by
such turns of phrase as the following: “It is wise and politic to do
what fate commands, and to march on the road along which we are led by
the irresistible course of events.” His mind is fond of playing with
the kindred notions of destiny, circumstance, and chance; and while
he regards destiny as involved in more or less obscurity, he believes
himself able to calculate the chances of a coming battle with almost
mathematical certainty. “In these matters one must be careful not to make
a slip, for an overlooked fraction can modify the whole result.... To
people of mediocre intelligence, chance will always remain a mystery; but
to the clear-sighted, it becomes a reality.”
Sometimes he lumps them all together—talents, destiny, and power,—and
shows himself an energetic fatalist when he says: “Against attempts on my
life, I trust in my luck, my good genius, and my guards.”
In this virile spirit, he strides resolutely along betwixt life and death.
A modern tragedy depicts a man who wishes to die. Napoleon says that
the portrait is well limned, but unnatural: “A man must wish to live,
and must know how to die.” That is why, from youth upwards, he opposes
suicide; first, in an essay; then, in an order of the day; then, with
the reiterated argument that suicide is cowardice, especially in hours of
misfortune. A careful study of the documents shows that the story of his
having attempted suicide just before the first abdication is apocryphal.
The leading memoirs make no reference to the matter, and such accounts
as we have are at second hand and untrustworthy. There is no doubt that
during his last battles Napoleon deliberately sought a soldier’s death;
but he never tried to poison himself.
Yet it was not only in those last days at Fontainebleau, and after
Waterloo, that he suffered from tedium vitæ. The weariness recorded in
the diary of the lad of sixteen, and in the letter which the man of
thirty wrote from Cairo to his brother, were little in evidence during
the most energetic years of febrile activity. Those who trouble to ask
whether persons of genius are happy, will have to agree that this man of
genius, who was not fitted by nature for happiness, enjoyed during the
climax of his career, hours of content, and even sublime moments. But
there were periods of doubt:
“For the tranquillity of France,” says Bonaparte at Rousseau’s tomb, “it
would have been better if this man had never lived.”
“Why, Citizen Consul?”
“He paved the way for the revolution.”
“Surely you are not the man to deplore the revolution?”
“Time will show whether it would not have been better for the peace of
the world if neither Rousseau nor I had lived.”
Gradually these doubts fade. But what he never loses is the sense of
daimonic loneliness, which increases as his soaring flight leads him to
chillier altitudes. “There are times when life is hard to bear.” Since
the sea has always been unfriendly to him, there is only one place where
he really feels at home—the desert, which to him is the image of the
infinite. The desert is the sublime vacancy which expands before him when
the myriad-faceted pictures of ordinary life sink from sight.
But never was Napoleon more perfectly freed from the tyranny of his
thoughts, never was he happier, than when seated alone in his box at the
theatre, watching a tragedy being enacted.
Nothing else could restore his inner peace of mind; for, since he loved
less than most, he was doomed to a tragical loneliness, the price he had
to pay for his egotism. “There is neither happiness nor unhappiness,”
he said. “The life of a happy man is a picture showing black stars on a
silver background. The life of an unhappy man is a picture showing silver
stars on a black background.” But it is not these heroic images which
best characterise the loneliness of a soul. Even more poignant voices
reach us from the familiar arena of the daily struggle:
“Don’t you understand, Caulaincourt, what is going on here? The folk I
have got together want to enjoy themselves; the poor devils don’t realise
that a man has to fight before he can get the repose he longs for. What
about myself? Have not I a palace, a wife, a child? Do I not weary myself
to the utmost with every possible kind of tension? Do I not day by day
give my life to my country?”
He gives his life to his work, for that is what he means when he talks of
his country. A human note, gently plaintive, and fraught with the lofty
irony of the finale, sounds when he says on the island:
“The whole time I was bearing the world on my shoulders. ’Tis rather a
tiring job!”
X
A volcano made the island, which was flung up from beneath the waters
thousands upon thousands of years ago. Forth from the midst of the sea,
projects the gloomy mass of rock. Steep, black, and deeply furrowed are
the walls of lava that run down from the heights into the waves. The
chasm above the harbour looks like the gate of hell to one who first
sees it from a ship; and the traveller fancies that these dark ramparts
must have been built by the hands of demons. Nothing betrays the work
of man but the cannon placed among the rocks. When the voyager lands,
the ground crunches softly beneath his feet, for the soil is made of
disintegrated lava. He is treading the road of death.
An extinct volcano in the Atlantic Ocean, two thousand miles from Europe
and nearly a thousand from Africa, guarded by British guns—such is the
rock of St. Helena, on which this limitless life might have ended like a
tragedy of Æschylus. But, owing to the mendacity of a moralising century,
the malice of English oligarchs, and the dry spitefulness of a colonial
governor, the island becomes the stage for a tragi-comedy.
The diligence of a few farmers and the energy of the East India Company
had made the place pleasant enough. Hundreds of frigates had, by degrees,
brought garden mould, building stone, and timber. But since no one would
stay long on the rock unless under compulsion, there were twelve hundred
negro slaves and Chinese to serve the five hundred whites who dwelt there
for a few years at a time.
No one can stay there. On this island, no one reaches the age of sixty,
and very few live to be fifty; the climate is deadly. We are in sunless
tropics, where the fierce heat of the equator is variegated with cloud
bursts, and where within an hour a damp sultriness may give place to a
cold downpour. The skin of those who, just before, were dripping with
sweat, is suddenly chilled by the storming south-east trade wind, whose
vapours are arrested by the rock. One who, after a burning day, ventures
abroad in the evening, will pant for breath as he walks. Those who stay
for a year, suffer from dysentery, giddiness and fever, vomiting and
palpitation. Above all, they suffer from liver disease. Whenever England
tried to station a squadron at St. Helena, the sailors died by hundreds;
the ships had to put out to sea, and to keep under sail. The officials
and the planters fall sick. Unless they have the luck to live in one of
the four or five sites protected from the wind, they and their families
are soon compelled to seek some healthier place of residence.
The inhabitants will tell you that one of the most unwholesome regions
is a chilly tableland seventeen hundred feet above sea level; a lonely
place, on the windy side of the island, made specially insalubrious by
the persistence of fogs. There grow sparse gum trees, blighted by the
trade wind, gnarled and twisted, leaning away from the prevailing blast.
The St. Helenians call the region Deadwood. Here is Longwood. That is
the place selected by England as the one in which the sick foe can most
certainly be killed. It was not a temporary asylum, chosen hastily and in
an emergency; it was not originally intended for the Emperor; it was made
ready for him while he was living elsewhere on the island, in poor case,
but still in fairly good health.
Till yesterday, Longwood had been a stable, built fifty years before,
and only at the last moment transformed into a dwelling-house. Negroes,
and the carpenters of the “Northumberland,” fixed a wooden floor over
the mud of the interior, neglecting to clear away the cattle dung. Soon
after the Emperor’s entry, the planks rotted and broke, the stinking
damp soaked through the flooring, and he had to move into another room.
For himself and his followers, a home has been made out of a cow-shed, a
wash-house, and a stable. In his bedroom, a dark and narrow corner, the
brown nankeen which covers the walls is stained with saltpetre; smells
from the kitchen invade it. In this last point it resembles the lodging
he had in a café thirty years ago when he was lieutenant in Valence.
But in that earlier abode his books kept dry; here they are attacked by
mould. The dining-room is lighted through a glass door; the drawing-room
is furnished with a worm-eaten mahogany suite; the servants’ quarters are
flooded by the rain, for the roof here is made of roofing-felt.
The Emperor lives in two small rooms, each about fourteen feet by
twelve, and ten feet high. The bedroom boasts a threadbare carpet,
muslin curtains, a fireplace, painted wooden chairs, two small tables,
a wash-hand-stand, and a sofa. The work-room has a bare table, under
which two chairs are tucked; rough shelves closely packed with books, and
an extra bed where he would rest sometimes in the daytime or which he
would use on the nights when he was restless and sleepless. The bedroom
contains some trophies rescued from his ruin; the little camp-bed he had
used at Austerlitz, hung with green silk curtains; a silver lamp; and, on
the wash-hand-stand, magnificent silver ewers and basins.
These rooms, and indeed the whole premises, swarm with rats, which kill
the fowls, gnaw the leg of a sick horse, bite General Bertrand in the
hand, and spring out of Napoleon’s three-cornered hat as he takes it from
the sideboard.
Who lives in the house besides the rats? Three counts and one baron with
their families (all of them officers, and accustomed to court life), two
valets, and the rest of the Emperor’s staff with their dependents; nearly
forty persons in all, when they first land. After six years, at the end
of Napoleon’s life, the number has been reduced by half.
Las Cases and his young son hold out for a year. Marquis and émigré,
older than the Emperor, a sprig of the Faubourg, count of the empire, it
was not until the Hundred Days that Las Cases became one of Napoleon’s
close associates. He was a man of the world, author of some works on
geography; later he was to write his _Memorial of St. Helena_, which is
said to have brought him thousands of pounds. He was shorter than the
Emperor, and as lean as General Bonaparte had been. He was cultured,
pleasant of temper, always ready to serve: certainly the most agreeable
companion and secretary the prisoner had. He entertained the Emperor
with witticisms the Parisians had made at Napoleon’s expense, thereby
unfolding the comic obverse of a tragic career. Las Cases taught the
Emperor English, thus widening the scope of the exile’s reading. When
the two men exchanged notes in English, the count would underscore the
Emperor’s mistakes. Las Cases, under various pretexts, finally abandoned
the island, and left a vacant place which during the last years of the
Emperor’s life was never to be filled.
For Bertrand, sometime governor of Illyria, and devoted to the Emperor,
is touchy, and is too proud to write from dictation; in other respects,
he observes a faultless passivity, except when he shows fear of offending
his wife. This lady, a beautiful creole, half-English with the head of a
young lord, had been loath to share Napoleon’s exile. At Plymouth, she
had tried to throw herself overboard; she is miserable, thinks of Paris,
and weeps over her youth; consorts much with the enemy. One day her place
is empty at the Emperor’s board. Napoleon says that his house is not
an inn; Bertrand is aggrieved at the reproach, and does not put in an
appearance next day. Then the Emperor is so unhappy that he cannot eat,
and pushes his plate away, saying softly and with deep melancholy: “If,
in Longwood, they are going to fail in their respect for me, my lot is
bitterer than if it had happened in Paris.”
Gourgaud is unbearable. The young general had been through the last
campaigns as Napoleon’s adjutant. His affection for his chief has made
him accompany the Emperor to St. Helena; but he is quite unable to
overcome his feelings of wonder at his self-sacrifice. After a few weeks’
sojourn on the island he meets a charming lady, and writes in his diary:
“O liberty, why am I a prisoner?” He is useful to the Emperor because of
his erstwhile position on the general staff; he is conversant with the
science of strategy, understands maps and mathematics. Not a day goes
by, however, but Gourgaud is offended. Innate vanity and jealousy are
increased a thousandfold by the narrowness of the circle; he becomes the
incarnation of the grotesque, which, from the first day on the island,
begins to encompass the Emperor about. Gourgaud has the temperament of
a snarling dog; he cannot allow Las Cases to take precedence; Napoleon
vainly tries to smooth the young man’s ruffled plumes, and only by
resorting to command is he able to prevent a duel. “You followed me here
in order to comfort my life, so you are brothers. Am I no longer here to
care for you? And are you not aware that the eyes of strangers are upon
you?”
The Emperor learns patience upon the rock. He also learns
considerateness, especially where Gourgaud is concerned. A dozen times
and more, he speaks to the young man in fatherly fashion; tries to
persuade him to bear with his companions; cajoles him with the promise
of a wealthy and beautiful Corsican bride. Another time he sends the
general to a little festivity in the town: “You will meet the Baroness
Stürmer there, and see Lady Lowe. At your age, it is always agreeable
to consort with pretty women. You will go to sleep filled with pleasant
thoughts, and by to-morrow morning you’ll feel fit for work once more.
We’ll talk over the Russian campaign....” A voice from Tartarus! But
next day Gourgaud again takes offence because in a picture of the group
which has been painted by one of the valets, he appears in civilian
dress. A few days later he reminds his master of an episode near Brienne:
Gourgaud saved Napoleon’s life by cutting down a Cossack who was about to
attack the Emperor. The Emperor pretends to have forgotten; Gourgaud is
outraged, saying that all Paris was buzzing with talk of the incident.
Napoleon smiles: “You are a brave man, but amazingly childish.”
Las Cases’ servant steals a diamond cross belonging to Gourgaud; in order
to secure peace, the Emperor has to put the cross in his own pocket, and,
later, present it to Gourgaud with the assurance that he had taken it
himself. Again, Gourgaud complains that he is short of money and has not
enough to keep his mother in comfort. The Emperor writes: “General! We
are here on a battle-field. He who runs away because he does not receive
enough money, is a coward!... I do not owe you any thanks. If you had
remained in France you would have been executed, for you had a command
in the ’15 campaign!” In rare moments only, does the rage in his heart
find such vent. Napoleon does, indeed, tell Gourgaud that he is free to
leave any day he pleases. But immediately afterwards the Emperor turns
the conversation on to cannons, gun-carriages, and cartridges. Next day
he says:
“My dear Gourgaud, how glum you look! Have a cold rub down; that’ll do
you good. One must curb one’s imagination, otherwise one is liable to go
mad; it is like the Danube: at the source of the river one can cross it
in a bound.... When I die, I shall leave no family behind me but you. I
am no longer wealthy, but I have a few million still. In addition you
will inherit my writings. I know what I owe you. But, while we are here,
I want my friends to cheer me, and not to make me sadder by pulling long
faces.... Do you fancy that I have no terrible moments? At night I wake
up and think of what I was and to what I have come.”
When such poignant words are uttered at the table of this tiny court,
all sit silent and tremble. Each one feels that from this room, this
house, this island, an echo like a belated rock-fall from the volcano
must surely find its way to Europe’s shore. For a few days thereafter,
intrigues are discontinued and enmities subside. But next week, over
a trifle, the quarrels break out anew. Gourgaud can stand life on the
island no more. He leaves at the end of two years. He makes friends with
the English, and, when he bids farewell to Emperor and island, he sails
away with letters of introduction from the governor who is the deadly foe
of his master.
[Illustration: Napoleon at St. Helena. Watercolour painting, probably by
a Japanese, with a marginal inscription in Chinese ideographs concerning
the owner. Broadley collection.]
Count Montholon is the most loyal of the exile’s companions. As a
youngster of ten he had been instructed by Captain Buonaparte in
mathematics. Later, he had served in two score battles under his master,
and was much at the Emperor’s court. Many decades after Napoleon’s death,
he proved his fidelity to the House of Bonaparte; for, just as now he
offers up six years of his life to live with his exiled master on this
rocky site, so, too, he devotes six further years to Napoleon’s nephew,
sharing the third Napoleon’s captivity in a fortress. The only drawback
in St. Helena is that the count’s wife does not get on with Madame
Bertrand. One day the countess declares in the hearing of all that the
Bertrands’ latest born is puny because the mother’s milk is good for
nothing.
Meanwhile Madame Bertrand is reckoning that her eldest is sure to be
made grand marshal as soon as Napoleon II ascends the throne. How much
jealousy rages in these breasts because, meanwhile, under Napoleon I,
Bertrand remains “grand marshal,” while Montholon superintends culinary
affairs and Gourgaud attends to the Emperor’s stable. Besides, none of
them have enough to do. Their duties cannot occupy more than two hours of
the endless day. At last things come to such a pass in this ramshackle
palace that the members of the little court can only communicate with one
another in writing. Even Countess Montholon and her children have in the
end to forsake the Emperor and the island.
Who is really loyal, loyal in his heart of hearts?
Three servants. Marchand, the valet, who has attended the Emperor for
the last four years; and two Corsicans who, in the hurry of departure,
Napoleon had pressed into his service, thereby linking up the island of
his birth with the island of his latter days. These servants never have
any dealings with the English foe, who would gladly draw their secrets
from them. Cipriani has a special reason for his reticence: as sergeant
he had seized Capri from the governor of Capri who to-day is governor
of St. Helena. Santini occasionally asks for a day off in order to go
shooting. But his sport is soon stopped when the fact gets known that he
intends to shoot “that monster, the governor,” and then to put a bullet
through his own head.
The Emperor sternly forbids his man to contemplate any such deed, for who
in Europe would not immediately cast suspicion on himself? But when the
servant has withdrawn, the master thinks indulgently: “We Corsicans are
all like that!”
XI
A lean, middle-aged man with restless movements, red-haired, freckled,
with a large brown patch on the cheek; his throat is stringy; he has pale
golden eyebrows shading eyes which can look no one in the face; he is
clad in a British uniform—such is the governor of the prison.
He lives in a fine country house, in the most sheltered part of the
island, with a garden which is the oldest and most luxuriant in St.
Helena. When he pays his first visit to Longwood, the Emperor says:
“Execrable! A real hang-dog face, like that of a Venetian sbirro. He
glared at me with the eye of a hyena caught in a trap. Perhaps he is my
executioner.”
It was not Sir Hudson Lowe’s position which made him seem so obnoxious to
the prisoner, who was on excellent terms with two or three army officers
and with the admiral. But Lowe had been an English Fouché on the small
scale, had been chief of the spy service in Italy, and had taken over his
present delicate task in Fouché’s spirit. It was true that the peace of
Europe depended on his watchfulness; and since, in Europe, people loved
sleep more than greatness, one section of the public was hounding Lowe on
to be brutal.
The English press was describing the prisoner in atrocious terms. One of
the most noted of English journals pilloried him as the murderer of the
Jaffa prisoners, described his sisters as whores, and spoke of Murat as
a waiter; a special law was passed to make any attempt at freeing him
a capital offence, with the proviso that the offender would be denied
spiritual consolation on the way to execution; the prince regent was
said to have “besmirched his name” by presenting some fowling-pieces to
Napoleon. The honour of England is saved only by the Whigs; and by the
formal protest of two members of the House of Peers, the duke of Sussex
and Lord Holland. Lady Holland ventures to send the Emperor books and
fruit; another noblewoman, who in earlier days had wanted to raise a
corps of amazons against him, now boldly espouses his cause in London; a
great English lawyer writes twenty-one theses to prove that Napoleon’s
detention after peace has been signed is illegal; Thomas Moore and Lord
Byron save England’s credit before the tribunal of history. Germany’s
good fame is rescued by the fierce attacks upon Lowe in the German press,
attacks that go on for years.
The governor is attacked because he has turned the whole island into a
prison. He has issued regulations arranged in twenty-four paragraphs,
informing the captains and crews of vessels that touch at St. Helena
about all the things that are forbidden, under penalty; posters in
the streets of Jamestown prohibit contact with the French; no one may
approach Longwood without a written permit. Every movement of the
prisoners is watched through a telescope; for six long years British
officers keep their eyes riveted on the place of detention, but can
rarely see anything more noteworthy than the lizards on the roof.
Semaphores keep the governor informed as to all that is going on. They
report: “General Bonaparte is out of bounds.”—“He is accompanied.”—“He
is alone.”—One flag was kept in reserve for a terrible emergency, to
announce the news that General Bonaparte had vanished. This blue signal
was never hoisted.
The “bounds” are a twelve-mile ring round Longwood, subsequently
restricted to an eight-mile ring; at 9 p.m. (or, when the restrictions
are increased, at sunset), a cordon of sentries at fifty paces’ interval
is posted. If Bertrand, who lives at Hutt’s Gate (a small villa about a
mile away), is summoned by the Emperor after nightfall, he is escorted to
Longwood by two soldiers with fixed bayonets—these bayonets, so runs the
order, “must point at the Frenchman’s heart.”
The Emperor, who has for thirty years been accustomed to horseback
exercise, may not go out of bounds unless accompanied by a British
officer. He protests, “Not because I object to the red uniform more
than another; after their baptism of fire, all soldiers are alike. But
I refuse to do anything which involves the acknowledgement that I am
a prisoner.” When in high spirits, as he was sometimes in the early
days of his captivity, he would defy the regulations. Once he gave the
English officer the slip, rode across country with Gourgaud, burst into
a private plantation, saying to the owner: “Don’t let any one know that
we have been here!” But during the latter part of his stay at St. Helena
he kept within bounds, and, indeed, rarely left the grounds of Longwood.
Sometimes he would order his horse for a ride; and then, when all was
ready for the start, overwhelmed with bitterness at sight of the officer
who was to accompany him, he would countermand the order and re-enter the
house.
The result of this lack of outdoor exercise is that his health suffers
more and more. The climate alone would have brought premature death, but
confinement to the house quickens the pace of his maladies. For lack of
movement, his legs swell. Furthermore, while Sir Hudson Lowe is giving
dinner parties, for weeks at a time Napoleon cannot get even fresh water
or milk. His stomach trouble grows much worse. The sick man would like
a wider bed, but there is no room for one; he must content himself with
rigging up a sofa beside his camp bed.
He and his companions have been deprived of their money. The letters he
writes to France asking for funds are intercepted. Being positively in
want, he has some of his silver plate put up to auction. When this is
reported to the governor by semaphore, the inhabitants are forbidden to
buy; Lowe himself purchases the articles at knock-down prices through
an agent. Six months later, when the governor reads in the newspapers
what Europe thinks of his conduct, he is greatly incensed, makes the
regulations stricter than ever, supplies Longwood with uneatable meat and
sour wine.
Like the villain in the folk-tale, Lowe is continually on the lookout for
new ways of mortifying his prisoner. On the anniversary of Waterloo, he
holds a great review close to Longwood. He invites “General Bonaparte”
to Plantation House on the prince regent’s birthday. Another invitation
is “to meet the countess” (Lady Loudoun, wife of the governor general
of India). When the mail brings him a new lampoon against Napoleon, the
governor sends it to one of the Emperor’s companions; but when a bust of
the king of Rome, modelled by an admirer, arrives, he proposes to impound
it, for documents may be hidden in its interior. He intercepts a letter
from Napoleon to the prince regent, in which the prisoner begs for news
of his wife and child; refuses to allow a Viennese traveller who has seen
the little boy to visit Longwood; and when, through the kindly thought of
a nurse and the loyalty of a valet, a lock of the boy’s hair at length
reaches the Emperor by devious channels, Lowe sends home a detailed
report concerning the obvious dangers of a conspiracy to liberate the
caged eagle.
To begin with, the gaoler sees the prisoner a few times. “Throw away that
cup of coffee,” says the Emperor after one of these interviews; “the man
was near it.” From the first, Lowe does his utmost to shorten Napoleon’s
life. When the Emperor’s vital energies begin to flag, the governor
deprives him of the services of the English surgeon in whom Napoleon
has confidence because this man, O’Meara, has refused any information
beyond medical bulletins. O’Meara is one of those on whom Lowe has to
keep a wary eye. It is not enough to surround Longwood with spies; the
whole island is beset with them; they watch all the officers; and when
they have nothing better to do, they watch one another. Soon a network
of intrigue envelops the little house, whose interior is hung with yet
another network—that of the jealousies which of old had been so rife in
the Tuileries.
In the third year of the captivity, O’Meara reports to London that the
Emperor’s liver trouble has been greatly aggravated by the climate, the
dampness of his dwelling, the lack of exercise, and the vexations to
which the prisoner is subjected. It is amazing that the illness does not
advance with more rapid strides. This would happen, were it not for the
energy with which the patient bears up, and were it not that his body
has not been weakened by any excesses.—Since this report is shown to the
British Minister for Foreign Affairs, and presumably to the prince regent
as well, and since in spite of it the Emperor is kept for three years
more at St. Helena instead of being sent to the Azores or some other
suitable place, the bad faith of Napoleon’s custodians may be taken as
proved—and Lowe was a worthy interpreter of his instructions.
The man’s animus, and the craftiness of his designs, are well shown by a
passage in one of his reports. Lowe says he will arrange matters so that
Napoleon will be able to resume horse exercise. Otherwise the prisoner
might die of apoplexy, and that would be extremely inconvenient. Death
from some lingering disorder would be better, for then the British
doctors would have no difficulty in certifying that death was due to
natural causes.
In the early days at St. Helena, the Emperor compiles a long official
protest (it occupies twelve pages of print); it contains all his grounds
of objection, and he has a private copy made upon silk, hoping that he
will be able to smuggle it away to Europe. In this document he reiterates
his refusal to allow himself to be addressed as “General Bonaparte,” for
that implies a disavowal of his position as popularly elected Consul and
Emperor. He remarks that he had proposed, as a reasonable compromise, to
name himself Duroc or Muiron, after one of his two dead adjutants; but
that England had refused to concede to him this “privilege accorded to
persons of sovereign rank.” The governor had even attempted to address
him as General “Buonaparte.”
In this tragi-comical fashion, after bearing seven names, he returns
with the eighth, to the first name by which he had been known.
Soon there are actual hostilities. The lust of battle glows once more
in the prisoner. He displays a vigour of hatred which in former days he
had hardly ever shown in words, for then he had simply annihilated the
objects of his wrath. Longwood, too, inaugurates a system of signals,
though a less conspicuous one than that of the British, who use flags
and semaphores. When the governor approaches, the Emperor, warned by his
vedettes, hastens indoors, and tells his servants to say he is “not at
home.” Once, however, he is taken by surprise in the garden; Lowe bluntly
tells him that his establishment is too costly, and asks him to cut down
expenses. The soldier flames in the Emperor.
“How dare you talk to me of such matters? You are nothing but a gaoler.
You have only commanded brigands and deserters. I know the name of every
English general who has won distinction. All I have ever heard of you
is that you were one of Blücher’s quilldrivers, and a robber captain
who never had the honour of commanding real soldiers.—Don’t send me any
more food! I will take meals with those brave fellows of your 35th, over
there; not one of them will refuse to share his rations with an old
fellow-soldier. You can dispose of my life as you please, but not of my
heart. That is still as proud on this rock as it was when all Europe was
awaiting my orders.—You would stick at nothing. You would poison me if
you had the courage, or were sent orders to do so!”
Without a word, the governor turns on his heel, mounts his horse, and
gallops away. The Emperor compares past and present. “In the Tuileries, I
should have blushed at such a scene.”
For ever, the governor remains on the watch, negotiates about details
with the Emperor’s companions, but does not see the living Napoleon
again. One day, however, Lowe makes another attempt, persists in spite
of a refusal to admit him, wants to see with his own eyes that “General
Bonaparte” is still there. The servant announces this importunacy. Then
the governor hears the Emperor shout through the door:
“Tell him he can bring his executioner’s axe if he likes. But if he wants
to enter my room, he must do so over my dead body. Give me my pistols!”
Lowe was able to satisfy himself as to the general’s presence when
Napoleon lay dead.
XII
The Emperor rises as late as possible, so that the day may seem shorter.
He rings; Marchand enters; Napoleon asks about the weather, slips on
his white morning gown, and retains his headgear—a red chequered Madras
kerchief he has been wearing all night. The red kerchief seems to be a
whimsical parody of the turban he once dreamed of donning! Cold douche
and rub—but of eau-de-Cologne, alas, there is none! Then Dr. O’Meara
pays a visit. He speaks Italian with the Emperor, and gossips over the
ludicrous happenings on the island. Sometimes there is no sugar to
sweeten the coffee. Has the mailship come to port with fresh newspapers?
Nothing as yet. Gourgaud arrives and writes from dictation. Where were
we? The pyramids? The Emperor paces to and fro in the narrow room; a map
of Egypt lies spread on the table.
He breakfasts with Gourgaud since the young man chances to be there.
The talk is of artillery fire, and means of defence against it. In the
afternoon, lounging on the sofa in the bedroom, he reads. The old home
on the other island was certainly more comfortable. A couple of bound
volumes of the “Moniteur” pass the hours. If he wearies of reading, his
book will sink on to his knees, and his gaze will wander to Isabey’s
portrait of wife and child. Nearby, on the white lacquered shelf, are
two eagles, candlesticks, from Saint-Cloud. Between them is the marble
bust of his son; and, hanging to the faded gilt frame of the mirror, four
miniatures of the boy. There is also a picture of Josephine; and the gold
watch of Rivoli, suspended by a chain made from the fair plaited hair of
Marie Louise, hangs to the wall. There hangs also the silver alarum clock
of Frederick the Great. Jetsam from the past, adorning his last, tiny
bedroom!
He dressed for dinner in the old green coat; sported the decoration of
the Legion of Honour; wore white silk stockings, and shoes with golden
buckles. He was waited on at table by his Parisian servants in their rich
liveries of green and gold. The table in his fusty dining-room was set
with a dinner service of Sèvres depicting Napoleon’s battles, branched
candlesticks, glass globes crowned with eagles. Cipriani carved for His
Majesty and served his master with great ceremony. Conversation was
usually carried on in monosyllables; it concerned the cost of various
things in Paris; the price of the throne and the sceptre. After dinner,
the company would pass into the drawing-room for a reading of Corneille;
the same plays over and over again; the Emperor read with too much
feeling to read well. Sometimes his hearers would nod: “Madame, you are
asleep!” or, “Gourgaud, wake up!”
“At your orders, Sire.”
Occasionally he plays chess with Bertrand or reversi with Montholon. Then
it is time to withdraw.
“What o’clock is it?”
“Eleven, Sire.”
“Another victory over time. One day the less!”
Thus passed more than two thousand days and nights. His campaigns in
Italy and Egypt and his coup d’état had taken half the time!
The best way of getting through the weary hours is by reading and
dictating. For five-and-twenty years he had had no time for reading; in
earlier days he had devoured and annotated a whole library of books. What
is he reading to-day?
The things which the young man had not had an opportunity of reading. In
those days, standing outside the closed portals of the world, he gathered
materials from all sides, went to first-hand sources: a practically
minded student. Now, standing on the further side of the portals of
the world, which have now closed behind him, he surveys the material:
a sceptical philosopher. In those days, he searched history; now, he
searches the poets, and especially relishes those passages from the poets
which apply to his own case. An epic lies behind him; in the epics of
others, he tries to find his prototype.
First of all, the _Iliad_. He sometimes browses over this till midnight.
“Now, at length, I understand Homer. He is, like Moses, a child of his
epoch: poet, orator, historian, lawgiver, geographer, theologian.... I
am specially struck by the rough manners of the heroes as compared with
their lofty thoughts.” Napoleon finds ease of heart in Homer. He cares
less for the _Odyssey_. This seems to him no more than the story of an
adventurer: he himself is more than that. Next in order of preference
come Sophocles’ _Œdipus_, a tragedy of banishment; Æschylus’ _Agamemnon_;
Milton’s _Paradise Lost_; the Bible. Corneille and Racine depict, in
the French style, the heroes of antiquity, who for thirty years have
been his models: unending are his readings of _Cinna_ and _Philoctète_.
Ossian rises out of the roar of the Atlantic: this he reads in an Italian
translation. In addition, the satirists of the social life of Europe:
Molière, whom in the ardent years of conquest and success the Emperor
had scorned; and Beaumarchais’ _Figaro_ and the _Barbier de Séville_.
Finally, all the latest publications, whether memoirs or pamphlets, and,
preferably, anything against himself.
The golden day for him was when the ship arrived with cases of books. In
the course of his stay, he collected three thousand volumes; they were
ranged on the bare damp shelves. Unfortunately, he reads so fast that a
book hardly lasts him an hour, and the servant is kept busy carrying away
armfuls of finished books which only a day before had been brought from
the shelves. As soon as a book is read (or rejected) the Emperor flings
it on to the floor.
In the early days on St. Helena, Napoleon’s actions were performed at his
erstwhile speed, a speed which was many times faster than that of any of
his associates. He forgot that now it was expedient to go slower. The
consequence was that the few duties the prisoner imposed upon himself
came to an end too quickly.
When, on taking leave of the imperial guard, he had promised that, during
his reign in Elba, he would record their deeds, this had only been
thought of as a way out of the threatened idleness. In the days of his
first exile, he had begun no such record. Now, during the first year of
his second exile, he dictates the whole of his memoirs. This work too,
like all else in his life, is begun on the inspiration of the moment.
Some pamphlets have arrived. In one of them, his landing at Cannes in
the year ’15 is falsely described. He tells his doctor the true sequence
of affairs; paces up and down, declaiming; motions to Montholon while
continuing his tirade, and dictates, without a pause, the whole chapter
dealing with his return from Elba. Separated from his archives by five
thousand miles and more, lacking documents, from his unerring memory, and
with an inspiration unsurpassed in the days of his greatest activity, he
dictates the story of the Hundred Days. Then, suddenly, he breaks off.
What’s the use of it all?
Another day, the report of an incident in the Lower House excites him:
he thereupon dictates for fourteen hours without a rest. Those who take
down his words, collapse, and replace one another at the task. Napoleon
laughs them to scorn, and continues his dictation. Or, again, he sends
for Montholon in the middle of the night to pen his recollections of more
recent times.
Since he loves above all to dwell on his early victories, his friends at
first advise him: “Perhaps Your Majesty might set about describing the
Italian and Egyptian campaigns, and the days of the Consulate?” Set about
describing! No one seems to notice, and least of all the Emperor, that
these events are being spoken of as one might speak of the Thirty Years’
War. And just as, in those days, the man in whose heart and brain these
things first took birth had projected his thoughts to the ends of the
earth and had commanded his legions, so now, to the last instruments in
his service, he communicates the details of his early campaigns, and in a
few weeks describes how he conducted the wars from 1796 to 1799. Up and
down, up and down, the Emperor paces, noticing nothing, wholly absorbed.
Without, doors bang, people talk; the amanuensis is disturbed by these
noises; not so Napoleon.
Las Cases, after taking down the description of the battle of Arcola,
exclaims: “That’s finer than the _Iliad_!” The Emperor makes a wry face,
and laughingly rejoins: “Bah! You still fancy yourself at court! I
shall rewrite that chapter twenty times ere I shall be satisfied.” This
expostulation is only a defence against flattery, for he has no intention
of writing the chapter again; all he does is to make certain emendations
when it is read over to him.
On the other hand, he dictates the events of Waterloo over and over
again. Since, in spite of his historical objectivity, he cannot
understand the result of this battle which undid him, he is always
searching for new formulations. When, through the good offices of some
sympathetic Englishmen, an opportunity occurs for smuggling documents to
Europe, he works laboriously at the battle of Waterloo in order to dim
England’s glory in the eyes of the European continent. But, he avers:
“this task always makes me sad.”
In these memoirs, there are errors here and there. They are not due to
lapses of memory, but to the author’s desire to emphasise his own place
in history. Such errors are not more serious than those to be found
in Cæsar’s works, are not serious errors at all. When he erroneously
records that in his lieutenant days he received the gold medal from
the academy of Lyons for his solution of a problem, and states that
the money prize was of great use to his mother; when telling the story
of his battles he ascribes to himself certain deeds which, in reality,
had been performed by his generals (at Marengo, for instance); when he
invents a treaty in which the tsar, before the Russian campaign, is
made to propose the division of Europe we have inaccurate statements
regarding the individuals concerned, but the broad facts are correct. It
is true that, in accordance with his conception of the hero, he formally
idealises the hero’s deeds; but he seems to us to lose more than he
gains thereby. Since he is describing the period of his rise to power,
he cannot materially falsify the facts: the immeasurable consequences of
his first victory were bound to give rise, on the one hand, to a certain
boastfulness, and, on the other, to detraction. But these volumes, which
deal for the most part with the exploits of the commander, furnish but
little real knowledge of Napoleon. Where we have to seek for the true
Napoleon is in the memoirs of those who had the privilege of recording
his conversations in exile.
Soon, indeed, his pleasure in dictation evaporates. Though he had
intended to dictate in a few weeks the campaign of 1800 which had lasted
but that amount of time, he postpones this labour, and tells Gourgaud
to collect material bearing upon the Russian campaign. Then the young
general, who had himself participated in the campaign of 1812, sets to
work to read—not a Russian work dealing with the campaign, but an English
work dealing with the life of the Emperor who is there, three rooms away,
and could probably furnish full particulars!
Napoleon, the movement of whose mind was from events to ideas, and very
rarely from thought to deed, is still true to type. When he reads news
from Paris, he dictates rejoinders which demonstrate his expertise, and
he compiles financial schemes. From his rock, from his little room, he
answers the sounds coming from the outer world, although the sounds are
no summons and his answer dies away into the void. He often proposes
to write a treatise on the art of war, but he gives the notion up, “for
the generals who in days to come get beaten will blame me, and say they
were following my principles.... I could instruct them, for I am a good
teacher; but I cannot have my principles of warfare set down in print.”
He mistrusts every systematisation, for he is essentially a man who has
learned by experience, by the unexpected. But if an isolated problem
crops up in the course of a book he is dictating, then he deals with it
in the precisest of terms. Thus, he makes Gourgaud calculate how much
water a fire hose can deliver, for he wants to introduce the fire hose to
combat the consequences of artillery fire.
Congenial society occasionally shortens the day. Or visitors come to see
the Emperor. English travellers, men of learning, colonial magnates, are
admitted to audience. On their return to Europe, they bear witness to
his mental alertness. Napoleon himself desires such reports to be spread
abroad, for they can do nothing but good to his cause now that Las Cases’
diary has aroused fresh sympathy for his plight.
“Scatter your complaints throughout Europe! I myself do not complain.”
And he adds the orphic saying:
“I command, or else I hold my peace.”
His visitors tell him interesting things. An English admiral, whose
vessel had been lying off the coast during the battle of Waterloo,
assures the Emperor that Wellington had already given orders to ship
the English army because Blücher did not arrive. When his companions
inform him of the enthusiasm with which the enemy officers were filled
after their interview with the Emperor, he says, assuming the role of
the revolutionary: “Of course, these people belong to us. They all come
from England’s third estate, and are the natural foes of their haughty
aristocracy.”
All the men in the services are on his side. English sailors, on shore
leave for a day or two, will prowl round the place all night. At the
first opportunity, they pounce upon him, stuttering incoherent words,
presenting him with flowers. The Emperor claps them pleasantly on the
shoulder. When the garrison is changed, he receives the members of the
officers’ corps, exactly as though they had been Frenchmen and he their
army chief. They form a semicircle; he asks, “How many years’ service;
how many wounds? I was greatly pleased with the 53rd regiment. I shall
always be delighted to hear of good strokes of luck coming in its way.
You are sad, Admiral Bingham, that these brave soldiers are leaving you.
To comfort your heart, My Lady must bear you a little Bingham!” The army
men laugh. The admiral blushes. When, next day, the transport hoists
sail, the men give the prisoner three hearty cheers. A few months later,
all Europe is agog with the anecdote.
On another occasion, he sees a medal displayed on the chest of a captain,
half raises it, and reads: Victory at Vittoria. The Emperor allows the
decoration to slip from his fingers, and passes without a word to the
next visitor.
Each of England’s allies sends a commissioner to the island. They are
there merely to gratify the curiosity of their sovereigns. The prisoner
refuses them access to his presence, and, though they are here on
this desolate rock with the sole purpose of seeing that he is in safe
custody, during all the years of their sojourn they never clap eyes on
him once. Here is a fresh focus of intrigue and boredom. The only one
of the commissioners whom the Emperor allows his suite to make friends
with is Monsieur le Marquis. This is the representative chosen by His
Very Christian Majesty King Louis XVIII to keep watch on his formidable
predecessor. The marquis sees that Napoleon gets all the most recent
periodicals; the Emperor reciprocates by the loan of books. When tidings
are brought announcing the assassination in France of a Bourbon duke,
General Bonaparte sends his condolences to the marquis of the old
nobility by the intermediation of Count Bertrand, who is also a sprig of
the noblesse. A scene out of comic opera!
When the prisoner is in happy vein he seeks other pastimes. One evening
he spends fluttering the pages of the official year-books of his reign,
and says, like the bewitched tinker in the old folk-tale: “It was a fine
empire. I ruled eighty-three million human beings; more than half the
population of Europe!” He spends the whole of another evening with Las
Cases chatting over old times. They laugh, the Emperor’s spirits rise, he
orders champagne to be brought, and before they realise it the hands of
the clock point to eleven. Napoleon says delightedly: “How quickly the
time has gone! What agreeable hours! My dear fellow, you are sending a
happy man to bed.”
Words which grip one perhaps more poignantly than any complaint could do.
He takes Montholon’s seven-year-old child on his knee and recites La
Fontaine’s fable of the wolf and the lamb. The child has not fully
understood, and makes a delicious muddle of lamb, wolf, and His Majesty.
Another happy half hour in the Emperor’s life! Again, he strolls up and
down the room in the evening after dinner, humming an Italian aria, and
laughing gleefully, for he has just read that King Louis always speaks of
him as “Monsieur de Buonaparte.” If he has a sleepless night, he makes
Las Cases tell him anecdotes from the Faubourg; or he says to Gourgaud:
“Let us exchange stories about love affairs. I never had enough time to
spare for women. Otherwise they would have ruled my life for me.” If he
gets bored in his bath, he takes the opportunity of demonstrating to
Gourgaud why the pressure of the water upon a floating body is equal to
the weight of the body. On one occasion, in the drawing-room, he has his
own height and that of his companions measured against the door.
Sometimes he will not dress or go out in the morning, putting off both
until the afternoon. On one of these occasions, after an exceptionally
torrid evening, he does not re-enter the house till midnight, and says
that he has won a real victory by staying out so long. Another day he
goes up the stair-ladder into his valet’s garret, having been told
that it is so nicely furnished. He is shown his own wardrobe, which is
stowed away there, and is amazed to find what a lot of clothing he still
possesses. He fingers the uniform he had worn as Consul (a gift from the
city of Lyons), the spurs he had worn at Wagram, the cloak of the Marengo
days. He makes no comment; goes down the stair-ladder in silence.
Amid these desperate attempts to kill time, does the prisoner come across
no one whose situation moves him?
Yes, there is one. Of all the dwellers on this rock, the one whose lot
touches the Emperor’s heart most profoundly is a slave, a Malay who
passes by the name Tobias, has been kidnapped, sold into slavery, and
cast up on this remote island. Napoleon comes across him working in the
garden, or meets him in the road, is never weary of studying him, and
gives him a gold coin whenever he sees him. The Malay thanks him in
broken English: “Good gentleman.”
“Poor devil!” says the Emperor to his companion, obviously picturing
himself in the position of this dusky piece of flotsam. “Snatched from
his family, torn from his home, robbed of himself, sold into slavery! Was
there ever a greater piece of wickedness? If a captain did it, he was a
villain; but if the crew combined to seize poor Tobias, they were hardly
responsible. Wickedness is always individual, never collective. Joseph’s
brethren could not make up their minds to kill him, but Judas betrayed
his master.”
After the next encounter with the Malay: “What a pitiful machine man is,
after all! Not one bodily wrapping like another; not one soul that does
differ from all the rest. Those who fail to recognise this, make a great
many mistakes. Had Tobias been a Brutus, he would have hurled himself on
death; an Æsop, and he would have been governor by now; a good Christian,
and he would have blessed his chains. But he is only poor Tobias, so he
is none of these things, merely bows his head in his simplicity and goes
on with his daily task.”
The two continue their walk: “Certainly it is a long way from poor Tobias
to King Richard. But the deed which brought the fellow here is no less
shameful, for this man had his family, his friends, his own life. What a
crime to have condemned him to slave on this island until the day of his
death!” Suddenly, Napoleon stops short, and eyes Las Cases quizzically:
“I read from your face that you are thinking he is not the only sufferer
of the kind on this island.” Las Cases nods assent, and the Emperor
bursts out with a youth’s ardour: “There is no warrant for such a
comparison! True, the violence done to us is more refined in its cruelty,
but, in compensation, we are more distinguished victims.... The world has
its eyes fixed on us. We are the martyrs of an immortal cause! Millions
weep for us, the fatherland sighs, the spirit of glory mourns....
Adversity, too, has its heroism and its fame. Had I died on the throne,
surrounded by all the emblems of power, I should have remained a riddle
to many. To-day the wrappings have been stripped from me; thanks to my
misfortunes, every one can judge me in my nakedness.”
Subsequently, the Emperor buys the slave, wishing to send him back to his
own land and his own folk, but the governor forbids the repatriation: “It
is plain to me that General Bonaparte is trying to win the hearts of the
coloured population, in the hope of setting up a second negro empire, as
in San Domingo.”
Tobias, therefore, remains a captive; a slave in a far country, like the
Emperor.
XIII
“I am very old to make a journey of two thousand leagues. Perhaps I
should die on the way; but, never mind, I should die nearer you.”
Thus writes his mother. The Emperor reads the letter again and again,
when it is delivered to him a year after it was penned. The powers
forbade the journey: who could tell, the old lady might concoct a plan
for his escape! Letizia had been banished from France when the other
members of her family were expelled. For the second time in her life, she
is unable to go to her island home: the first time had been long ago when
Corsica was in revolt; now, Europe stands in the way. She, therefore,
goes to Rome, where the moral power of the pope upholds her; always
making fresh attempts to secure her son’s removal to a more healthy
abiding place. Although the tsar is favourable to such a transfer,
Habsburg and England are determined Napoleon shall die; so there is
nothing more to be done. Neither mother nor any of the brothers and
sisters is allowed to send money to the exile.
When the monarchs assemble in Aix-la-Chapelle for the congress, Letizia
writes to the princes: “A mother, more bowed with grief than words can
tell, has long been hoping that the meeting of your imperial and royal
highnesses would give her back her life. It is impossible that the
captivity of Emperor Napoleon should not come up for discussion. Your
magnanimity, your power, and your memory of earlier events, will surely
incline Your Imperial and Royal Majesties to work for the liberation of
a prince for whom you once professed friendship. I pray to God and to
you, for you are God’s representatives on earth. Interests of State have
their limits. Posterity, which confers immortality, admires a generous
conqueror.”
No answer.
Later the captive learns that his mother has been accused of fostering a
conspiracy in Corsica. She is said to have provided money amounting to
millions. The pope is ordered to send his secretary of State to see the
old lady and to make enquiries. Letizia gives the emissary the following
message: “Tell the pope, and may the monarchs mark my words: If I were so
fortunate as to possess all these millions they have credited me with, I
should certainly not spend them in buying champions for my son’s cause.
He has enough of them already. I would, rather, equip a fleet capable of
rescuing him from the island where he is unjustly detained.”
What a feeling of pride and elation fills the son’s heart as he reads
his mother’s words! But he never hears of Letizia’s bitter remark to
an Austrian noble: “Why is my daughter-in-law amusing herself in Italy
instead of joining her husband in St. Helena?”
Round what sun are the other planets turning? What an anticlimax!
Lucien and Joseph have gone to America, and are later joined by Jerome.
They assume exotic titles. The Spanish revolutionaries have offered their
ex-king the crown of Mexico. This piece of news excites the prisoner:
“Joseph will refuse. He is too fond of the pleasures of life to bother
himself again with the burden of a crown—and yet, it would be a stroke
of luck for England that the whole problem of Spanish America should be
solved in this way. For if Joseph were to become king of Mexico a breach
with France and Spain would be inevitable. For myself, his acquiescence
would be weighty with consequences. He loves me and would use his
position as a weapon to coerce England into treating me differently.
Unfortunately, he is sure to refuse.” Thus quickly and hopefully does
Napoleon, in the first year of his captivity, toy with every fresh
opportunity.
The other brothers and sisters retire into obscurity. Jerome alone lives
to be an old man, and, in the days of the third Napoleon, appears once
more at court. The Emperor receives few letters from his brothers and
sisters. Caroline begs her mother to send some money. Letizia refuses:
“All I have belongs to the Emperor, from whom I have received all I
possess.” To Lucien she writes: “When one is no longer king, one makes
oneself a laughing-stock if one tries to live ostentatiously. Rings may
adorn the fingers; but, if they fall off, the fingers still remain.”
Hortense and Pauline once more play comedy as they had done at Malmaison.
Other tidings give Napoleon food for thought. Bernadotte becomes king.
And Désirée? At last Napoleon’s early love wears a crown; she also lives
to see the Second Empire. Countess Walewska, now a widow, marries a
French nobleman. He approves the step, passes her situation in review,
considers all he has done for her son, and then says complacently: “She
is rich, and must have saved.” The tactless Gourgaud makes answer: “Your
Majesty paid Madame Walewska ten thousand francs a month.” The Emperor
blushes, and asks with embarrassment: “How do you know that?”
King Murat and Marshal Ney are both shot after court martial. Their
master accepts their fate with soldierly fortitude. His only annoyance is
that Murat should have been such a fool as to land in Calabria. He bears
his brother-in-law no grudge. Even Marmont, who lives happily under the
Bourbons, comes in for no more reproach than: “I am sorry for Marmont;
I was really fond of him. He’s not a bad fellow. They appealed to him
through his feelings. He fancied he was to be saviour of his country, and
behaved like a madman. He would have done better to shoot himself....
Human nature is weak.”
And yet it is precisely Marmont who stifles every movement which might be
of advantage to the exile. Murmurings against the Bourbon ruler spread
throughout the land. But when, once more, the émigrés and the members of
the new nobility are placed in great positions, notwithstanding their
lack of qualifications for such posts, and a Richelieu is given high
office in spite of his long absence from France and his ignorance of
French affairs; when Lafayette, the veteran fighter for liberty, becomes
leader of the proletariat and makes ready for a new revolution, gathering
his forces in the clubs and even in the schools, and preparing among
the troops “the men of the coming day,” to clear out the Bourbons, who
can only maintain their position by the aid of foreign armies; when
the radical provinces, eager to flaunt the tricolour cockade, rally in
support of Napoleon II—it is Marmont, Bonaparte’s eldest comrade, who
crushes the movement, and thereafter becomes minister.
The Emperor composedly reads that Louis XVIII. has dissolved the Chambers
because many of the members favour Orleans or Napoleon. Executions for
treason are the order of the day. But who is the most trusted associate
of the Bourbon? A little nobody of a Corsican, whom Letizia once upon a
time had made her private secretary—a sinecure job created to provide the
man with a livelihood. Since all these events take place during the first
year, the Emperor is filled with hope, and meditates upon the chances of
a fresh revolution.
“What a cruel decree of fate that just at this moment I should be held
prisoner! Who is there to set himself at the head of things? Who will
be there to save thousands of the bravest from the scaffold?” He stays
alone in his room until the morrow, when he speaks absently of Elba.
Soon stranger ships heave in sight, the prisoner counts the shots. What
is happening? The Emperor sends his friends to gather tidings; they hear
nothing; but hope is strong. “What children we are, to be sure,” he
exclaims next day. “And I, instead of giving a good example, am no better
than the rest of you. Were I in America, I should think of nothing but my
garden.”
Nevertheless, he would not have gone to America. He owns as much when
he says: “If I were in America with Joseph, instead of suffering here,
nobody would ever think of me, and my cause would be lost. I may have
another fifteen years of life, but I am doomed to die here—unless France
should summon me.”
These hopes are not unfounded. England considers it wise to increase
the garrison from two hundred men to three thousand, in order to keep
guard on one individual, although the cost of the troops in St. Helena
is £320,000 a year. Still, there are possibilities, for the soldiers are
whole-heartedly on his side. On one occasion six officers were arrested.
They had come from Rio de Janeiro, and had planned to get the Emperor
away in a kind of submarine. Again, two captains, travellers to India on
a ship which has touched at the island, make him proposals for an escape:
Napoleon listens attentively, but decides not to accept. On a third
occasion, Montholon breaks in on the Emperor while he is at work with
Gourgaud to remind his master that the passport of a certain individual
expires in an hour’s time and a decision must be made. Montholon writes:
“It had been proposed to take the Emperor to America for the sum of one
million francs payable on landing. The Emperor’s word would suffice.
Unfortunately I may not divulge any more of the scheme, lest I expose
the originator, for whose loyalty to the Emperor we must be eternally
grateful. The Emperor listened to me, and considered all I had to say:
he paced to and fro several times in silence, asked Gourgaud and myself
for our opinions. He took no part in the discussion. In the end, he said:
‘You must decline the offer.’”
There he stands, he has not been captive a year as yet, passably well
in health, athirst for action, goaded by the pin-pricks of a mighty
government and a puny governor. Before him opens out the possibility of
escape, escape with the aid of English officers. The fact that risk is
attached does not alarm one who is used to bold enterprises. There he
is, dictating the story of his youth, when suddenly, at the end of his
career, a friend makes proposals that are certainly not cobwebs of the
brain. Napoleon is silent, he questions, he is silent again. Then: “You
must decline the offer.” Why?
Because France is once more in a state of unrest, and so he decides
to stay where he is. He is so sure of a change of feeling among the
people that, later, when a ship is sighted and signals to the station,
the Emperor says: “Perhaps the vessel brings news of my recall. If the
prince regent dies, the young queen will summon me to England. She was
always against my being sent to St. Helena.” When, on the outbreak of
fresh revolts in Paris, his companions mention the possibility of France
demanding his return, he concedes the point, adding:
“But what can they hope from my return? That I should again conduct wars?
I am too old. That I should seek for fresh glories? I am sated with
them.... It will be much better for my son that I should stay here. If
Christ had not died upon the cross, he would not have become the Son of
God. My martyrdom will give the crown back to my son, if he lives.”
Napoleon’s feeling for the dynasty is as deep as ever. His preoccupation
with the thought of founding a line overpowers, in his maturer years, his
impulse to action, to adventure, and even to win fame.
Though he is inspired with these lofty moods of hope and heroical
renunciation, nevertheless despondency overwhelms him at times; then he
becomes greatly depressed, and the most trifling upset in the household
will seem an intolerable burden. When Bertrand stays away from dinner in
a pet, the Emperor is out of sorts for days: “I know that I have fallen
from my high estate, but that one of my nearest companions should rub
it in is dreadful....” He groans. Las Cases offers to intervene. “No, I
forbid it. I had to say that much. But now all is forgotten and I shall
behave as though I had noticed nothing.” If travellers should wish to
see him on such days, he refuses, saying: “Tell them, dead men do not
receive visitors.” Occasionally Napoleon broods alone for the whole
evening, sends at last for one of his companions, says a word or two, and
dismisses him.
A quarrel arises between Montholon and Gourgaud as to whose room shall
be furnished first, the Emperor has to mediate, the countess weeps,
the Emperor proposes a game of chess. Dinner. A reading from the Book
of Esther. Sometimes these scenes verge on the grotesque: a cow has
escaped, the Emperor shows his vexation, Gourgaud sits glum throughout
dinner because he is responsible for the cow, and is feeling aggrieved
by his master’s anger. After dinner, the Emperor speaks of Islam and
his preferences for the Mohammedan faith, then passes to a discussion of
the trinity; finally he withdraws, making painful attempts to conceal
his angry mood and muttering between his teeth: “Moscow! Five hundred
thousand men!”
Gourgaud, who has left him overnight in an agreeable state of excitement,
finds him next day in a gloomy temper: “What sort of an education will
they give my son? Will they teach him to loathe his father? Hateful
thought!” When Las Cases, who has copied out the chapter on Waterloo,
deplores that victory should have been snatched from the Emperor’s grasp,
Napoleon makes no reply, but says to Las Cases’ son in a voice which
seems to come from a great distance: “My lad, go and fetch _Iphigenia in
Aulis_; that will do us good.” Or he has Racine’s _Andromache_ read to
him.
I am come to the place where my son
lies captive: for one moment only,
allow my tears to flow with his!
This is all that is left to me
of Hector and of Troy. Permit me, Lord,
to visit him once on every day....
But the Emperor breaks in on the reading with the cry:
“Enough! Leave me; I would be alone!”
XIV
With the growing inactivity and boredom, the moods of this tortured heart
become more and more agonising; this many-toned instrument can no longer
be controlled; discords arise.
He has been an emperor! How can he cease to play the part to which the
society of a handful of courtiers and the degrading mockery of the enemy
constrain him? In order to protest against the use of the title of
general and against the illegality of his captivity, he drives out, at
first, in full imperial grandeur, his carriage drawn by six horses, and
an equerry in uniform riding at each door. His companions appear before
him in general’s uniform or in court dress; no one opens conversation
uninvited; when he takes his walks in the garden his suite does not
approach till he gives a sign; visits are announced by an adjutant
general, booted, and wearing a sword. When Gourgaud rises as Countess
Montholon enters the room, he is reproved for this breach of etiquette.
Meanwhile he makes fun of the whole thing, mockingly calls Gourgaud
“my grand master of the horse,” or announces at table: “I have been
anointed by the pope; thereby I have become a bishop, and have the power
to consecrate you as priests.” When he teases his friends about their
all being in the “Dictionary of Weathercocks,” whose pages he is at the
moment fluttering, Gourgaud ventures to say that the Emperor himself
deserves a place in it. “Oh; and pray why?”
“Because you first of all recognised the republic, Sire, and yet, later,
you were the crown.”
“You are right. Oh, well, the Empire was certainly the best of the
republics!”
At the feast of Epiphany, he has a cake made for the children. Then
he crowns little Napoléon Bertrand as king. When he is informed that
there has been a complaint from the governor about the expenses of his
household, and that, now that the price of meat has risen to forty sous,
they must be more moderate in their consumption, he turns the matter off
with a laugh, saying: “Parbleu! You might have answered that it costs us
more than a crown.”
Never before has so much self-control been forced on him. Impassively he
reads Lowe’s answer to a statement of grievances from Bertrand, who had
said something about “the Emperor.” The governor writes that he is not
aware of the presence of any emperor on the island.—The prisoner asks
Gourgaud to order his horse to be saddled. Gourgaud replies that he has
not seen the animal for three days, since the blacksmith insists on being
paid three napoleons before he will send it back. The Emperor masters his
anger, and says nothing more at the time; but next day he bursts out at
Gourgaud: “Why did you insult me by talking to me about the blacksmith’s
bill?” The day before, by a superhuman effort, he had managed to restrain
his wrath, but by the torturing thoughts of the intervening hours his
pride had been broken. The adjutant’s sullen reply had disturbed the
Emperor’s equanimity quite as much as Austria’s desertion had done in
earlier years.
A soldier and a southron, he is choked sometimes by the passion for
vengeance. On one occasion, when uneatable meat is served at dinner,
he contents himself with the remark: “I should trouble little about
myself, if I could only feel sure that some day our humiliations would be
proclaimed to the world, so that those who are responsible for them would
be covered with shame!”
With a sublimity of spirit which grows in him now, he tries to moderate
the natural rebelliousness of his disposition: “I am living here under a
weight, so to speak; a weight which compresses the spring, but does not
break it. Resignation—that is the dominion of reason, the real triumph of
the soul.” This masterful man does his utmost to regulate his own conduct
in accordance with the foregoing axiom. Subsequently he says: “Misfortune
has its good side; it teaches us truths.... For the first time, I am able
to contemplate history as a philosopher.”
For the first time, too, he is able to contemplate the present with a
tranquil mind. During the early weeks of his stay on the island, when
he was out walking with a pretty young Englishwoman, he conversed with
her agreeably about various topics: how the climate was bad for the
complexion; Ossian; the plantations. At this moment some negro slaves
carrying heavy boxes crossed the path, and the lady called to them
imperiously: “Get out of the way!”
The Emperor interposed: “But, Madame, please remember that the men are
carrying burdens!”
Collapse of lady! Yet Napoleon Bonaparte himself would not have been so
considerate in the days before he came to St. Helena.
In all matters now, except when he is playing the shadow emperor in
pursuance of his feud with Lowe, Napoleon adopts a simplicity of life
which outdoes that even of his poorest days as a lieutenant. When for
some time there has been very little to eat, and the cook has had to eke
things out with French beans, he eats them enthusiastically, praises the
dish and the cooking.
“In Paris, I could get along with twelve francs a day. Dinner frs. 1.50;
reading room; theatre in the evening, pit; I should hire a room for
frs. 20 a month. I should only want one servant; and I should associate
exclusively with people of like fortune. One can be happy in any station
in life. When my mother sang lullabies over my cradle, there was not a
word about what I was destined to become. I believe ‘Monsieur Bonaparte’
would have been quite as happy as ‘Emperor Napoleon.’ Everything in life
is relative.”
His doctor has a fainting fit. Coming to himself, he finds that he is
being attended to, not by a servant, but by the Emperor in person.
Napoleon has lifted him on to the bed, has unfastened the collar of his
shirt, and is kneeling beside him, administering vinegar.—When Cipriani,
the Corsican servant, is dying, the Emperor asks the doctor whether a
visit from the master would stimulate the man’s flagging forces.
“The excitement would kill him.”
“Oh, well, I suppose I had better not go.”
When playing reversi, he establishes a bank. For whose benefit? The money
is to be used to buy the freedom of the most beautiful female slave on
the island. One evening, his companions find him at work beside the lamp,
slowly and carefully stitching the pages of a manuscript.
Sometimes, however, his dreams reawaken, and flutter against the bars
of the cage. “I wish they would transfer me to a desert island, where
I could have two thousand people of my own choice, with muskets and
cannon. I should found a glorious colony, and should end my days happily
in that model land. There I should not find it necessary to be at grips
all the time with antiquated ideas.” Having said this apropos of nothing
in particular, he passes on to the details of the scheme, dictating
specifications—how much money and stores would be needed for the founding
of his colony.
A chained sculptor, his plastic impulses must be content with such
outlets in the world of imagination; but, side by side with these
capriccios, he displays a heroic simplicity. One day, during the early
weeks at St. Helena, he is out riding with Las Cases. “We came to a field
that was being ploughed. The Emperor dismounted, and took the handles of
the plough. With incredible speed, he drove a long and perfectly straight
furrow. All this without saying a word until he had finished, when he
told me to give the ploughman a napoleon. We remounted, and rode on our
way.”
XV
“No one but myself can be blamed for my fall. I have been my own greatest
enemy, the cause of my own disastrous fate.”
This admission, the profoundest of all those made by the exile shows
that Napoleon has completely outgrown the cloudy Cæsarist fancies of
his middle period. Had he been a believing Christian, the confession
would have rounded off his atonement upon the rock. His sense of
responsibility, however, is not directed towards God but only towards
himself, and therefore the utterance represents a great man’s final
settlement of accounts with destiny. But, at the same time, it is a last
outburst of defiance, for his self-overweening esteem made it impossible
for him to admit that there were any greater forces in the world than his
own. Napoleon alone could overthrow Napoleon.
The remark was not the outcome of transient depression. During the
closing years of his power, he had again and again spoken to his
intimates about his faults and errors; now, upon the island, such
admissions are frequent. Some of them are ardent, and some of them are
cold; for even in these self-examinations there is an alternation between
fantasy and realism. From time to time, we have the heartfelt cry of a
penitent: “When I close my eyes, all my mistakes parade themselves before
me, like figures in a nightmare.” Or, again: “I wanted too much.... I
strung the bow too tightly, and trusted too much in my good fortune.”
But he will coldly reckon up the cases in which he has failed to
understand men, coming at this late hour to views which the ablest
observers had held while he was still on the throne. The reader who knows
his story will require no comment on the remarks that follow.
“I considered Emperor Francis a good man; but he was only a blockhead,
and in Metternich’s hands he became an instrument for my destruction.”—“I
ought to have left Talleyrand at his post. What concern was it of mine
that he was plundering the foreign chancelleries. I should have been
content with having him closely watched. He served me well, as long as
he could hope to make anything out of me. If I had kept him in office,
I should still have been on the throne.”—“If only that man Fulton, with
his steamboat, had been right, I should have been master of the world.
But those idiots of savants made fun of his invention, just as they make
fun of electricity. All the same, gigantic powers are hidden in steam and
electricity!”
He regrets that at Tilsit he had decided to maintain the Hohenzollern
dynasty. He regrets having crossed the Memel too early; having crossed
it in 1812, before he had settled matters in Spain. He regrets that, in
defiance of Carnot’s advice, he began the last campaign too early, and he
regrets that at Waterloo he did not send the guard forward soon enough.
Most of all, he regrets having, when his power was finally broken,
entrusted himself to England, instead of to the tsar, or, better still,
to the United States. Always, when he hears of crises in France, he
regrets that he did not go to America.
“From that vantage ground I should have been able to guard France against
humiliation from abroad, reaction from within; the dread of my return
would have sufficed. In America I should have established the centre of
a new French fatherland. Within a year, I should have had sixty thousand
men grouped round me.... It would have been the most natural place of
refuge—a land of vast expanses where a man can live in freedom. If I had
had a fit of the blues, I should have mounted a horse, ridden hundreds of
miles, enjoyed travel with the ease of a private individual, lost amid
the crowd. In Europe I was too popular; bound up, in one way or another,
with every nation.... As a fugitive, and disguised, I could certainly
have escaped to the United States; but both expedients would have been
undignified. I put my trust in the approach of danger, thinking that the
nation would be forced to turn to me as its saviour; that is why I stayed
as long as possible at Malmaison and in Rochefort. The destiny that
brought me to St. Helena was the outcome of those feelings.”
This is the most productive of his meditations. The other mistakes of his
career had entailed such complicated consequences that it was impossible
for him to trace what might have been had he acted otherwise. But the
final resolve at Rochefort had, as its inevitable upshot, brought him
to this rock. In that respect, therefore, his mind was continually
busied with alternative possibilities. Although, when in fancy he roams
across the American prairies, he sometimes pictures himself as founding
new States there, and sometimes as galloping through the wilds, we may
ascribe it to the infinite variety of human passions that he should at
the same time justify his final blunder on patriotic grounds.
His critical faculty is most keenly at work when he is pondering his
dynastic aspirations. In the last days of the Empire, he had confided
his doubts to a few choice spirits; now, when it is too late, he freely
acknowledges his error. “I was a softy where my family was concerned; by
sticking to their point they could get anything out of me. What terrible
mistakes I made there! If my brothers had communicated a common impulse
to the masses I placed under their rule, we should have been able to
make our way to the ends of the earth!... I was not so lucky as Genghis
Khan, whose four sons vied with one another in their father’s service.
If I made any one king, he instantly regarded himself as king by divine
right; the mere word was as infective as the plague. The new king was no
longer my representative, but became a fresh enemy; instead of serving
me, he wanted to make himself independent. I was the only stumbling block
in his path. In the twinkling of an eye, they all became kings warranted
genuine; under my protection, they all tasted the sweets of dominion. I
alone bore the burden. Poor devils! Once I had been defeated, the enemy
did not even bother to declare their formal deposition.”
That was as far as his penitence reached. However self-critical he might
be, Napoleon never uttered a word of regret for having assumed a crown,
or for having wished to found a dynasty. On the contrary, again and again
he returned to his basic social idea: “I was the natural mediator in
this struggle between the revolution and the past; my empire was in the
interests of the rulers as well as in that of the peoples. My aim was
the social rebirth of Europe; fate interfered before I had completed my
task.” In line with his general conception of kingship, he deplores that
the kings should have made an end of Murat. They would have done better
to show the peoples that kings are above the law. Though the guillotining
of King Louis had opened the road along which he himself had advanced
to a throne, he condemned the act of regicide; not because he regarded
the Bourbons as competent rulers, but because continuity seemed to him
essential.
[Illustration: Death mask of Napoleon. By Dr. Antommarchi.]
For he will never misunderstand Europe’s historical conditions; he
will never try to establish offhand in Europe that which he dreams of
establishing in the promised land of America or in the utopian island
of his fancy. He always sees what is, as an outgrowth of what has been;
always transforms the extant, instead of destroying it; he never wants
to build entirely anew. Consequently, he does not discard the old forms,
but uses them as a foundation for his new buildings. With a passion for
ordering and arranging, and with a hatred for destruction, he feels how
much can be done when the basis is secure. “When I rose to power, people
thought I was going to be a Washington. Words cost nothing! In America,
the role would have suited me well enough; there would have been no merit
in adopting it on the western side of the Atlantic. In France, I could
only become a Washington as a king among kings.”
That is the truth as he sees it. Since, at bottom, he despises the purple
he has hung round his own shoulders, he would have been careful to avoid
taking it to America, just as Washington had resisted the solicitations
of his officers. By birth, he had been neither proletarian nor prince,
but a member of a petty noble family which had fallen on evil days. Thus
his position was an intermediate one, sandwiched between the classes. In
his conversations with Englishmen about England, he displayed the naïveté
of his class feeling, and his faith in the right of succession, for he
closed an attack upon the British nobility in the following remarkable
way:
“It is not a handful of nobles or rich men that makes a nation, but the
mass of the people. True, as soon as the mob gains the upper hand it
adopts an alias, and speaks of itself as the People; whereas, if it is
conquered, a few poor wretches are hanged, and spoken of as robbers and
rebels. ’Tis the way of the world: mob, robbers, rebels—or heroes. As the
fortune of war may decide!”
After a reading of Voltaire’s _La mort de César_, he remarks that in
youth he had himself wanted to write a “Cæsar.” One of his auditors,
with a courtly double meaning, says that the Emperor has done so.
Napoleon laughs the flatterer to scorn. “I? You poor babe! Yes, if I had
been completely successful! But, in fact, Cæsar had no better luck than I
have had—for he was assassinated!”
Closely associated with his self-criticism is his own estimate of
his deeds. His historical sense, which is an integral part of his
composition, leads him to an objective clarity in his contemplation of
himself; perhaps an attitude of mind we may vainly seek for elsewhere in
history before his day. Las Cases tells us that Napoleon talks of his
career as if three hundred years lay behind him; and Countess Montholon
movingly observes: “It seemed to me as if we found ourselves in another
world, and I was listening to a Dialogue of the Dead.”
He stubbornly defends his alleged crimes, the poisoning of the
plague-stricken in Jaffa, the execution of the duke of Enghien. One
day he is seized with the impulse to confide to an English physician
the whole story of the Enghien episode; since, as Consul, he ran the
risk of being murdered, a counterstroke was necessary. Another time he
deliberately sets himself to the task of finding out what O’Meara really
thinks of him. The Emperor knows the doctor to be whole-heartedly devoted
to his person, but of independent character. They are sitting over a jug
of porter, drinking together. Napoleon suddenly puts his question:
“What sort of a man did you think I was before you came to know me? Speak
your mind frankly!”
O’Meara gives the description of an amoral chimera, a man capable of any
crime to achieve his end.
“I expected as much!” exclaims the Emperor. “Probably many Frenchmen
think the same. They’ll be saying: Yes, he climbed to the top of the
ladder of fame, by his own efforts; but in his climb he had to commit
many atrocities.’” Thereupon he launches forth into vehement self-defence.
One night he summons Montholon in order to dictate the thoughts which
throng his sleepless brain. He sets down how he was ever inclined
to peace, how before a battle and after a victory he always entered
negotiations. Or he compares the two revolutions, adding: “Cromwell
achieved his aim when he was in the full maturity of his age, and
attained to the highest rung of the ladder through cunning and hypocrisy.
But Napoleon came to the fore as a stripling, and his first steps are
illuminated with deeds of glory.... Whose blood have I shed? Who can
boast that in my place he would have acted differently? What epoch
confronted with similar difficulties has ever come through with such
blameless results?... I believe it to be without parallel in history
that a plain man should have attained to such amazing power without
committing a single crime. In face of death itself, I could make no other
declaration.”
Something now occurs which takes us wholly by surprise. Instead of, in
the midst of this harangue, laying the blame for ill success on others,
instead of allowing his inborn misanthropy to storm the heavens in
resentment, he shows us that his days of exile have fostered his sense
of justice. He who, for a lifetime, had declared that cupidity lay at
the root of all men’s endeavours, and had dealt with his fellows on that
presupposition, now becomes a cautious analyst; the man of power becomes
a philosopher; Napoleon becomes tolerant.
Now, he declares that mankind is prone to gratitude rather than to
ingratitude; the only trouble is, people always expect more thanks
than the deed is worth. Las Cases informs us that his greatest censure
nowadays is expressed by silence. He defends even those who were
faithless: Augereau, Berthier, were not equal to the magnitude of their
positions; he excuses his brothers. From the altitude of these judgments,
he surveys the wide perspective with a tolerant eye. We seem to be
listening to the imprisoned Socrates when we read:
“It is difficult to give people their due.... Do they even know
themselves? Those who forsook me would never have believed, in the days
of their good fortune, that a time would come when they would deny me....
Our last trials were more than human nature could endure. As a matter
of fact, I was left in the lurch rather than actually betrayed, just
as Peter denied his master.... Perhaps they have already shed tears of
repentance. Who ever had more friends and more adherents than I? Who has
ever been more beloved?... My fate might have been far worse!”
XVI
The Emperor’s companions keep diaries. He is well aware of this; he even
has a look into one of them, but he reserves his thoughts. As a realist
he calculates the monetary worth of these records, and he foretells what
the writers will earn when they publish their books after his death; his
only mistake is that he underestimates the amount. He bequeaths to each
of his secretaries those portions of his writings which he has dictated
to them severally. But he is correct in his estimate of the incalculable
value the diaries will have for posterity in the study of himself.
Accustomed as he is to dictate, he shapes his sentences carefully
even when conversing, so that his hearers may record his sayings with
advantage. The value to future generations is thus enhanced, and
these summaries of his thoughts raise him above his present wearisome
existence. His passionate feeling for historical events drives him to
this self-expression, no less than regard for those who shall come after.
Five days pass, sometimes, without his seeing anybody; he reads and
he writes nothing. The future gives him no more food for thought. But
during these periods of seclusion he surveys his life as a whole. Then
his soul is shaken, and his lightning glance searches through and
through his personality for a hundred hours at a stretch. Never has any
man before him had to submit to such a scrutiny. The tension of his
being is at these moments greater than at Austerlitz, more elemental
than in the Council of State: he is a bound Prometheus, one who wishes
to promote human happiness; and, shackled to the rock, he groans. Yet
he is but a little man in an old green coat! The visions, the dreams,
which for twenty years he was able and willing to conjure into reality,
he now dissects into ideas. Thus, in the end, he becomes the severest
commentator upon his own life story.
A book arrives. It is a collection of his manifestoes and decrees. He
reads. Then he throws the volume aside, strides to and fro, and says to
Las Cases:
“Every future historian will have to allow me my share.... Facts speak
for themselves. I closed up the chasm of anarchy, and put an end to
chaos. I cleansed the revolution from the filth it had accumulated, I
ennobled the peoples, I stabilised the thrones. I encouraged all those
who had talents, rewarded every merit, and widened the boundaries
of fame and glory.... Could not historians protect me against many
grave charges?... If I am accused of despotism, they can claim that
dictatorship was necessary in the circumstances. Is it freedom I
attacked? They can answer that anarchy was still threatening on our very
threshold. Love of war? I was never the aggressor. Striving for world
dominion? This arose accidentally, because of the conditions of the time.
Too ambitious? Yes, true indeed. But my ambition was of the sublimest:
to found the kingdom of reason, with full development and unrestricted
enjoyment of all the human faculties. The historian may deplore that such
ambition could not wholly attain its goal.” After a momentary silence,
he concludes: “There, my dear fellow, in a few words, you have my entire
story.”
Here he is on the defensive. But neither in such moods nor in any other
do we ever hear him rave enthusiastically over his battles. In all the
six years of his captivity, he does not seem, even once, to have sung the
praises of General Bonaparte. If he is summing up what he achieved, he
says:
“My fame does not rest upon my forty victorious battles, nor does it lie
in the fact that I bent the monarchs to my will. Waterloo will wipe out
the memory of so many victories; the last act makes one forget the first.
What will never pass away, is my book of laws, the minutes of my Council
of State, my correspondence with my ministers.... Through its simplicity
my code of laws has had more effect than any civil codes before it; the
schools I have set up, my methods of instruction, are creating a new
generation; crime has decreased during my rule, whereas in England crime
has become more prevalent.... _I wanted to found a European system, a
European code of laws, a European court of appeal; there would have been
but one people throughout Europe._”
He reads in an English newspaper that Napoleon has hidden away vast
treasures. He leaps to his feet, and dictates, to the man who happens to
be his companion at the moment, these splendid sentences:
“Would you like to know about Napoleon’s treasures? Yes, they are vast,
but they are not hidden away. The harbours of Antwerp and Flushing,
where there is room for the largest fleets in the world, harbours which
are open all through the winter; the waterworks at Dunkirk, Havre, and
Nice; the huge docks at Cherbourg; the port of Venice; the high roads
from Antwerp to Amsterdam, from Mainz to Metz, and from Bordeaux to
Bayonne; the passes over the Simplon, Mont Cenis, La Corniche, and Mont
Genèvre, which open up the Alps in four directions, and excel all the
constructions of the Romans. Then there are the roads from the Pyrenees
to the Alps, from Parma to Spezia, and from Savona into Piedmont; the
bridges across the Seine, and the bridges of Tours and of Lyons; ...
the Rhine-Rhone canal and the draining of the Pontine marshes; ...
the re-establishment of the Church destroyed by the revolution; the
setting up of new industries; the new Louvre; warehouses, streets, the
water supply of Paris, the quays along the Seine; ... the revival of
the weaving mills in Lyons; more than four hundred sugar factories;
the repair and embellishment of the royal palaces at a cost of frs.
50,000,000, and the refurnishing of them out of Napoleon’s private
fortune at a cost of frs. 60,000,000; the redemption of the only
remaining crown diamond, the Regent, which had been pawned to Jews in
Berlin for frs. 3,000,000; the Napoleon Museum, where all the works
of art had been obtained by purchase or by the peace treaties; many
millions for the support of agriculture and horse breeding.... These are
the treasures of Napoleon, which represent an expenditure of milliards,
and will outlast the centuries! These are the monuments which defy
calumny.... Moreover, history will record that they were all erected
while long wars were being waged, and without loans being raised to pay
for them!”
There he is in his little room, in the narrow house, on the rock in
the midst of the sea, defending his work, and, with a regal gesture,
shaking things together pell-mell—main roads, sugar factories, crown
diamonds, and the Catholic Church! Foreseeing the criticisms of history,
he is fully aware of the truth about himself; though a century will
elapse before posterity will begin to see in him something more than the
military commander whose fame (as he says) was dimmed by the failure at
Waterloo.
One evening, after dinner, the question assumes a personal aspect. An
inquisitive member of his circle has asked when he was happiest, and all
present give their ideas. Napoleon tells them that he was made content by
his marriage and when his son was born, “I cannot say happy, but content.”
“When you were First Consul?”
“I was not yet sure enough of myself.”
“At the coronation?”
“In Tilsit, I think. By that time I had learned the vicissitudes of
fortune; Preussisch-Eylau had been a warning to me, and nevertheless I
had won a victory there; I had dictated the terms of peace; the tsar
and the king of Prussia were paying court to me. But no, I am wrong,
that was not the best. The happiest days I ever knew were after my first
victories in Italy, when the masses surrounded me, shouting: ‘Evviva il
liberatore!’ I was only twenty-six, but I foresaw what I might become.
It was as if I were being lifted up into the air, and the world were
disappearing beneath my feet!”
With a sudden transition, he hums an Italian song, and then stands up,
saying: “Ten o’clock. Time for bed.”
How pale do these comparisons of happy moments seem in contrast with
the fiery rhapsody of his deeds! It was in the work he did that was
concentrated the life happiness of the man who enjoyed nothing but the
completed action. He surveys his past; doubts this suggestion and that,
saying that he was no more than “content,” and finally hears again the
first chorus of evvivas. In imagination he is again the youth soaring
upwards; and in the evening of his life, spent in this tropical exile,
the vision of fame floats once more before his eyes. That was what the
disciple of the classical heroes had set out to win—fame!
Fame, whose lure he had felt for the first time on the island of his
birth, still allures him on the island to which he had been banished.
Moreover, he knows that it is the glamour of warlike fame which has made
him most widely known among men. He asks whether there can be any one in
Paris who has never heard of Napoleon; he does not really mean Paris,
but the world. When Las Cases tells him how, in the remotest valleys of
Wales, shepherds had asked for news of the First Consul, or how yellow
men in China had spoken of him in the same breath with Tamerlane, then
the Emperor Napoleon forgets the shame and the weariness of his life on
the rock, and knows his happiest moments. If he is in such a mood, some
trifling item in the newspaper may arouse a flight of fancy:
“Yes, the reaction is doomed! Nothing can destroy great principles; they
will endure for ever in the light of the wonderful deeds we have done!
The first stains have been washed out in the waters of glory, and now
the principles are immortal.... Adorned with our laurels, acclaimed by
the peoples, sanctified by treaties with the powers, they are breathed
from all lips and hearkened to by all ears.... They will rule the world;
will become the faith and the morality of all the peoples; and, say what
you will, this new epoch is associated with my name. I lighted the torch;
friends and foes alike will acclaim me the leading champion, the greatest
representative of the new principles. After my death, for the nations I
shall still be the sun of their rights; my name will be the war cry of
their struggle, the slogan of their hopes!”
Still, these heroics about himself lack the right conclusion. Politically
he overestimates the value of his martyrdom; it has not been able to
save the dynasty: but he does not foresee the effect which this last act
of the drama will have upon the hearts of men. A soldier’s death looms
before his eyes; he had sought it under fire on the last battle-fields;
again and again he turns his own story over in his mind, in search of
the romantic moment which would have been the most appropriate close; he
often recurs to the subject in conversation. Like a playwright he looks
for the fitting climax: “I ought to have died in Moscow. Till then my
fame was undiminished.... If only heaven had sent me a bullet in the
Kremlin! My dynasty would have been established; history would have
compared me with Alexander and Cæsar. Whereas, as things have turned
out, I am practically nothing.” On another occasion he thinks that death
shortly before attaining the goal, would have had even more effect on
posterity: “Had I fallen at Borodino, my death would have been like
Alexander’s. A death at Waterloo would have been a good one. But perhaps
Dresden would have been better. No, no, at Waterloo would have been best.
The love of the people, their mourning!”
Once he summarises the whole as follows:
“Taking it all in all, what a ballad my life has been!”
XVII
Sunrise. A man stands at the door of a house where all the inmates are
still asleep. He wears a white coat, red slippers, a broad-brimmed straw
hat; he holds a spade in one hand, and rings a huge bell with the other,
rousing the sleepers to work. A wall is to be raised, a ditch lengthened;
land is to be reclaimed from the inroads of the sea; this is the scheme.
Doors open, tent-flaps are flung back, and from all directions men flock
to the master’s side. They are armed with shovels, rakes, axes; and are
eager to carry out the Emperor’s commands.
He resembles the centenarian Faust.
The last year of his life has opened. He has made up his mind, come what
may, to stay on this rock; and, since no one offers to make a verdant
bower for him, he has decided, after yearlong feuds and resistance to his
plans, to make a garden for himself. A half-circle of wall is to protect
the growths from too much sun, from the trade wind, and from the watchful
eye of the sentry. Cisterns are to store rain water; within the ramparts,
earth is distributed for the flowers and the bushes; four-and-twenty
large trees are planted; peaches, oranges, and, in front of his window,
an oak. The trees have been imported from the Cape, and are brought
to Longwood with the aid of the English artillery regiment—an old
acquaintance of the Peninsular War. Chinese gardeners, Indian coolies,
French servants, English stablemen, all help in the work; the doctor
must take a hand too, with Montholon and Bertrand; and when the English
officer on duty draws near, he sees the Emperor take a turf from his
grand marshal’s hands, fit it into its place on the bank, and pat it down
carefully. But since Napoleon knows that transplanted soldiers must be
especially well treated in foreign parts, he waters the square of grass
assiduously.
The work goes on for seven months; and, when it is finished, the garden,
so swiftly brought into being on the rock, is regarded as a wonder. The
governor’s daughter comes secretly to look at it. This is the last
miracle wrought by Napoleon.
It is because he has become aware of the decline in his energies, that he
has decided to beautify the place in which he is to pass the remainder
of his days. He is overheard murmuring to himself Voltaire’s line: “See
Paris once more? I cannot hope for that.” When his birthday comes round,
he says it will be the last, gives the children presents; “at dinner,
where we were all assembled, he beamed on us like a father in the family
circle.”
That autumn, he takes his last ride, a long one, going out of bounds for
the first time after four years.
He seldom dictates now, but has a fancy to do so sometimes at night
when sleep will not come; dictates comments on the battles of Turenne,
Frederick, and Cæsar; literary criticism upon Voltaire’s _Mahomet_ and
Virgil’s _Æneid_; remarks on suicide, which he had condemned long ago
when he had been a lieutenant. His best secretaries, Gourgaud and Las
Cases, have left the island long since. For a quarter of an hour at a
time, he will stand drumming with his fingers on the door of the veranda,
watching the gulls, or gazing at the clouds; he no longer scrutinises the
ships through the telescope; he is only waiting for death.
The news of a fresh conspiracy against the Bourbons, originating in the
army and widely supported by civilians, no longer excites him. During
the last six months of his life, he rejects two schemes of rescue. “It
is written in the stars that I am to die here. In America I should be
assassinated, or forgotten. Nothing but my martyrdom can save my dynasty.
That is why I prefer to stay in St. Helena.”
His mortal illness gains on him. The climate of the island is dangerous
to persons whose livers are healthy when they first come; Napoleon, at
thirty-five, had foretold that he would die of liver trouble like his
father, and his liver complaint is greatly aggravated. He says that his
stomach burns like fire; in some of the paroxysms, he rolls on the floor
in agony. He complains of a pain in the gastric region, “like the stab
of a penknife.” He shivers with cold, though he is burning within; when
hot compresses are applied, they can never be hot enough for him.
He watches his symptoms, and studies their meaning; will not take any
medicine until its action has been explained to him. He says ruefully:
“I have got so fond of my bed that I would not exchange it now for a
throne. What a pitiful creature I have become! I, who hardly ever needed
sleep, pass my days in lethargy. It seems a desperate resolve merely to
open my eyes. Often enough, I used to dictate on different topics to four
secretaries at once. In those days, I was Napoleon.” His mood vacillates
between heroic pathos and irony. When his valet reports that a comet is
visible, the Emperor rejoins: “That was the sign before the death of
Cæsar.” But when his doctor declares that there is no comet to be seen,
the sick man says: “Well, people die without comets!”
His medical attendant is a Corsican named Antommarchi. Owing to the
quarrel with the governor, the prisoner had no doctor for a year after
O’Meara’s departure. At length Madame Letizia, after much effort, was
able to arrange for the sending of this compatriot as his physician,
together with two priests, a body servant, and a cook. Thus it is that,
after years of silence, the Emperor hears trustworthy details about his
mother. Once, during these last days, he says in simple words what she
means to him: “All that I am and was, I owe to my mother; she taught me
her own principles, and encouraged in me the habit of work.”
Now there are five Corsicans round the lonely man. Only two of them are
any good: the body servant and the cook. Of the two priests, one is a
deaf old man, partially paralysed, and unable to articulate clearly; the
other, fresh from the seminary, is ignorant and uncouth. Antommarchi,
too, is a young man, inexperienced but pretentious. Still, the sight of
these islanders, men of his own race, revives memories of his Corsican
home. Hence, towards the close, feelings reawaken which in early life he
had stifled because of his determination to be a Frenchman. Napoleon dies
as he was born, an Italian.
He often talks Italian, now, or intersperses his French with strange
locutions literally translated from his mother tongue. When he reads
an attack made on him by a senator who declares that in the day of the
Empire France had chosen her master from among a people whom the Romans
did not consider good enough, to use as slaves, Napoleon’s comment is
that it is a great compliment to the Corsicans, “for the Romans knew that
this people could not be forced to serve.... Besides, Corsica, lying
between France and Italy, was an appropriate birthplace for a man who was
to rule both.”
Then, suddenly, it is again his fatherland. “Ah, Doctor, where are the
lovely skies of Corsica? If only I could have fled thither, the people
would have received me with open arms, and would have become my family.
Do you think that the allies could have mastered me in Corsica? You know
our mountaineers, their courage and their pride! I am familiar with every
ravine in the island, every stream!” He declares that he would fain have
made much of this island (about which he never troubled after leaving
it), would have signalised his love for it before all France. Only his
misfortunes had prevented his carrying out these plans. He speaks of the
spiritual greatness of the islanders, of their veneration for honour, of
the blood feuds they hand down from generation to generation; he speaks
of Paoli. “Everything is better there, the very smell of the ground. If
my eyes were shut, I should recognise it; I have never come across it
anywhere else.... No longer to own the house where one was born, to be
homeless—this is to be without a fatherland!” Thus late, thus painfully,
and thus indirectly, does this man without a fatherland make his great
discovery; or thus late does he acknowledge his true feelings.
The Corsican doctor has no great sympathy with the Emperor; he does
not credit Napoleon’s sufferings; he believes them to be simulated for
political ends, in the hope of a removal to Europe; and is absent during
the worst paroxysms. Thus the political use the Emperor has made of his
ailments works out its own revenge; for now, when he is really dying, his
own compatriot regards his sufferings as spurious. There is ample record
of these differences between doctor and patient. Napoleon wishes to get
rid of Antommarchi, and asks Lowe to have him sent back to Europe. This
is a new triumph for the governor, to whom the quarrel between the great
Corsican and the little is useful ammunition. Only four weeks before
the Emperor’s death, his gaoler once more tries to force a way into his
presence, and the consequent excitement is very bad for Napoleon.
The number of the faithful diminishes, as if to justify the misanthropist
at the close of his life. Now, in the very last weeks, four of the
servants and the old priest set sail for Europe; two others fall sick,
and the last remaining members of his suite are meditating flight:
Montholon is corresponding with the countess about the possibility of a
substitute; Bertrand is about to yield to the continued solicitations of
his family, and return to France. Montholon, to induce him to remain, has
to assure him that when the Emperor talks of being seriously ill, this is
not done merely to play upon Bertrand’s sympathies. When Bertrand finally
decides to remain, the invalid is greatly encouraged. The only one who
never thought of leaving, was Marchand, the valet. The Emperor says to
him: “If this goes on much longer, no one will be left here but you and
me. But you will look after me till the end, and will then close my eyes
for me.”
What really cuts him to the heart is that the man who has been his close
companion for so many years should now let long-hidden truths peep out.
He has had an argument with Bertrand, who says: “It would have been
the happiest day in my life if, after the deposition of the king, the
Convention had raised the duke of Orleans to the throne.” The Emperor
makes no immediate rejoinder, but afterwards says bitterly: “Bertrand,
who owes everything to me, whom I made one of the grand officers of my
empire!”
As his strength wanes, he looks round for something to lean on, and, for
the first time in his life, he appeals to his relatives for help. Pauline
is the dearest of them. Dictating a letter to her in the third person,
he gives a bulletin of his condition, and ends as follows: “The Emperor
earnestly hopes that Your Highness will acquaint influential Englishmen
with his situation. He is dying on this dreadful rock, forsaken by all.
His death struggle is terrible.”
In the middle of April, three weeks before the end, behind locked doors,
he dictates his will to Montholon. Then the amanuensis has to redictate
the document to the Emperor, for it must be in his own handwriting, that
it may be above suspicion. The Emperor sits writing for five hours, in
a cold sweat. The testament is characterised alike by statesmanlike
greatness and by human feelings; it represents, as it were, a survey of
his whole life.
XVIII
He begins his testament by declaring that he dies in the apostolical and
Roman religion, in the bosom of which he was born,—the faith which he
re-established in France, which he always protected, although, in his
innermost soul, he never accepted its teachings. Then his thoughts turn
to the glory of a hero’s grave, and, with a turn of phrase which shows
that he regards himself as a Frenchman by choice rather than by birth, he
writes: “It is my wish that my ashes shall be laid to rest on the bank of
the Seine, in the midst of the French people, which I have loved so well.”
Next come thoughts of his son, upon whom are lavished all the hopes a
man can entertain concerning what will happen after his own death, and
for whom he wishes to concentrate such rights as he may possess, such
treasures as he may own, and such teachings as he may utter. He tells
his “beloved wife” that he retains for her the most tender sentiments,
and beseeches her to watch over their son, since the lad is being brought
up as an Austrian prince. She is never to forget that the young Napoleon
was born a Frenchman. She must never allow the boy to become a tool in
the hands of the triumvirs who oppress the peoples of Europe—among whom
the greatest oppressor is the child’s own grandfather.
Then comes a last thrust at the enemy: “I am dying before my time,
murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.” But, in the
challenging tone of a tribune, he adds: “The English people will not
be slow to avenge me.” He closes this part of his will by declaring
that he had been defeated “through the treachery of Marmont, Augereau,
Talleyrand, and Lafayette.” Though he adds, “I forgive them,” behind this
mask of Christian charity the warrior’s steel glitters in the words: “May
the France that is yet unborn forgive them as I do.”
Now, quite in the patrician style, he thanks his beloved mother and his
brothers and sisters for the interest they have continued to feel in him.
“I pardon Louis for the libel he published in 1820: it is full of false
assertions and falsified documents.” Then come the actual bequests.
The main substance of what he has to leave consists of his savings out of
the civil list during fourteen years, together with all the furniture,
plate, etc., he had himself bought for his palaces; and also his Italian
property. He estimates it as amounting to more than frs. 200,000,000,
and points out that, as far as he is aware, no law has deprived him of
it. Half of it is bequeathed to the surviving officers and men who had
fought in the glorious campaigns from 1792 to 1815, in sums proportional
to their rates of pay on active service; the other half is to go to the
provincial towns and communes that had suffered in the two invasions. His
aim, in these provisions, is to put the Bourbon government in the wrong
for laying an embargo, at the time of his abdication, upon all his money
and securities. These clauses in his will are to promote a Napoleonic
sentiment among soldiers and civilians alike; his secret hope being that
his testament will exercise an influence in favour of his dynasty, like
Cæsar’s will when disclosed to the Roman populace by Mark Antony.
Now comes legacies to ninety-seven specified individuals. The list was
drawn up in the course of ten days. “His mind is continually at work
discovering new objects for his liberality; day after day he recalls the
names of additional old servants whom he wants to remember in his will.”
The bequests are to come from a special property of frs. 20,000,000, of
whose ownership he feels more secure than of the great imperial treasure.
Frs. 6,000,000 had been deposited in hard cash on leaving Paris in 1815.
Who are the legatees?
Montholon is to have frs. 2,000,000; Bertrand and the valet Marchand,
about half a million each. The valet is the only one whom Napoleon
honours with the name of friend, and he adds: “It is my wish that he
should marry the widow, sister, or daughter of an officer of my old
guard.” Marchand, Bertrand, and Montholon are to be the executors, and
all three of them have to affix their seals to each page of the will.
Thus the last document penned by Napoleon’s hand bears four seals: the
Emperor’s eagle volant, the arms of the two counts of the old noblesse,
and the plain monogram of the man of the people in whom the Emperor
showed supreme confidence by appointing him one of his executors. “The
services he has rendered me are those of a friend.”
Every one of the servants on St. Helena receives a competence; so do the
three surgeons Larrey, Percy, and Emmery. Of Larrey, Napoleon adds: “He
is the most virtuous man I have ever known.” Similar large sums, frs.
100,000 in most instances, are left to various generals who had been
closely associated with him, to his secretaries, to two authors, the Elba
guards, and the children of generals killed in battle. The stablemen,
the valets, the orderly officers, the huntsmen, a house-porter, a
librarian, the children or grandchildren of old family friends in
Corsica; the children or grandchildren of his nurse (if in need, despite
previous benefactions); the children or grandchildren of his sometime
tutor in Auxonne; those of the general in command at Toulon under whom
he had had his first experience of active service; those of the deputy
who had helped him to get his plans put in force against Toulon; those
of Muiron, “our aide-de-camp, killed at our side at Arcola, covering us
with his body”—all are remembered. The next item to the Muiron bequest
is a legacy “to the subaltern officer Cantillon,” who had been acquitted
of the charge of attempting to assassinate Wellington. “Cantillon had
as much right to assassinate that oligarch, as the latter had to send
me to perish upon the rock of St. Helena. Wellington, who proposed this
outrage, attempted to justify himself by pleading the interest of Great
Britain. Cantillon, if he had really assassinated that lord, would have
excused himself, and have been justified, by the same motives, the
interest of France.”
This revolutionary outcry about Cantillon concludes the list of legatees.
In the instructions to the executors, the following items are enumerated:
the malachite furniture from Russia; the golden table service (which
was presented to him by the town of Paris); a small farm on the island
of Elba which had been purchased with Pauline’s money; a store of
quicksilver at Venice, reckoned to be worth frs. 5,000,000; gold and
jewels in a hiding-place at Malmaison; and so on, the fantastic inventory
of a monarch and an adventurer.
To his mother, he leaves his silver night-lamp which has lighted many a
sleepless night during his sojourn on St. Helena; each brother and sister
receives a special bequest; Joseph and Lucien, as if no cloud had ever
shadowed his relations with them, are mentioned calmly one after the
other, each receiving “an embroidered mantle, vest, and small-clothes,”
though the living Napoleon had given a crown to one and offered a crown
to the other.
But the principal legatee of Napoleon is his son. First of all, the
boy is to have all his “arms, field-beds, saddles, spurs, snuff-boxes,
orders, books, body linen, which I have been accustomed to wear and
use.... It is my wish that this slight bequest may be dear to him,
as recalling to him the memory of a father of whom the universe will
discourse to him.” Amid the inventories, which mention such items as
two pairs of night-drawers and two pillow-cases, there flash out such
entries as the following: “My sword, the one I wore at Austerlitz; ...
my gold travelling box, the one I made use of on the morning of Ulm, of
Austerlitz, of Jena, of Eylau, of Friedland, of the island of Lobau, of
Borodino, and of Montmirail; ... four boxes found on the table of Louis
XVIII. in the Tuileries on March 20, 1815; ... my alarm-clock, it is the
alarm-clock of Frederick II. which I took at Potsdam (in box No. III);
... a blue cloak (that which I had at Marengo); ... a consular sword; ...
a grand collar of the Legion of Honour.” Each list of items finishes with
a charge to one or other of his confidants to take care of the articles
named, “and to convey them to my son when he shall attain the age of
sixteen years.”
Here is another entry: “Marchand shall preserve my hair, and cause a
bracelet to be made of it, with a gold clasp, to be sent to the empress
Marie Louise, to my mother, and to each of my brothers, sisters, nephews,
nieces, the cardinal, and one of larger size to my son.”
Various persons and places are named in which his son is likely to be
interested. “I wish my executors to make a collection of engravings,
pictures, books, and medals which may give my son sound ideas, and
destroy the erroneous ideas which the policy of a foreign land may have
tried to impress on him. I want him to be able to see things as they
really were.... My memory will be the glory of his life.... I do not
expect my son to benefit by my mother’s will, for he is likely to be
wealthier than her other children, but I hope that she will leave him
some such precious legacy as her own portrait and my father’s, or some
trinkets which he will know have come down to him from his grandparents.”
It may seem as if his life were ending with very simple thoughts, since
he makes this touching reference to his parents; but in the next clause
the abyss yawns. Those who are about his son, Bertrand’s children
perhaps, or Montholon’s, are “to see to it that he resumes the name
of Napoleon as soon as he comes of age, and is able to do so without
inconvenience.”
After this sedulous care for the legitimate heir, there follows, at
the very last, a clause of a few lines, §37, in which Napoleon writes:
“I should not complain if little Léon were to enter the civil service,
should he be so disposed. I should like Alexandre Walewski to serve
France in the army.” The writer could not foresee that, some decades
after the death of his legitimate son, Léon was to end his ne’er-do-well
life in America as the husband of a cook; but that Count Walewski was
to attain high distinction, as a diplomat under Louis Philippe, and as
minister of State and senator during the second empire. By his talent and
good looks, Marie’s son was to show that he had, in very truth, been a
love child.
But there is a second testament for the legitimate heir. Two weeks
before his death, towards three in the morning, the Emperor sends for
Montholon, who has been tending him faithfully for the last few weeks:
“When I entered the room, I found him sitting up, and the fire glancing
in his eyes made me fear a fresh attack of fever. He perceived my
uneasiness, and said kindly: ‘I am not worse, but my mind has been roused
by discussing with Bertrand what my executors ought to say to my son when
they see him ... it is better, therefore, that I should, in a few words,
give you a summary of the counsels which I bequeath to my son. Write:’”
There follow twelve printed pages, containing the Emperor’s political
testament. Not a word about war, but a great many words about peace;
and, as regards Europe, we find almost all the leading thoughts of the
century which opened with his rise to power. We are given a glimpse
of a fancied second reign. He tells us how he would govern, loftily
criticising his own previous work. He looks forward to new political
forms, and, with a seer’s vision, contemplates the twentieth century.
From the rock, he issues an appeal for the union of Europe, a manifesto
on behalf of an understanding among the peoples to promote liberty,
equality, civilisation, talent, and commerce. All these thoughts form
themselves in the mind of the dying Napoleon during one of the last
restless nights of his illness:
“My son should not think of avenging my death; he should profit by it....
The aim of all his efforts should be, to reign by peace: if he should
recommence my wars out of pure love of imitation and without any absolute
necessity, he would be a mere ape. To do my work over again would be to
suppose that I had done nothing; ... the same thing is not done twice
in a century. _I was obliged to daunt Europe by arms; in the present
day, the way is to convince her reason._... I have implanted new ideas
in France and in Europe; they cannot retrograde: let my son bring into
blossom all that I have sown....
“It is possible that the English, in order to efface the remembrance of
their persecutions, will favour my son’s return to France; but in order
to live in a good understanding with England it is necessary, at any
cost, to favour her commercial interests: this necessity leads to one of
these two consequences—war with England, or a sharing of the commerce of
the world with her. This second condition is the only one possible in
the present day; questions of foreign policy will, in France, for a long
time, take precedence of questions of home policy. I bequeath to my son
sufficient strength and sympathy to enable him to continue my work with
the sole aid of a lofty and conciliatory diplomacy....
“Let not my son ever mount the throne by the aid of foreign influence;
his aim should not be to fulfil a desire to reign, but to deserve the
approbation of posterity. Let him cherish an intimacy with my family,
whenever it shall be in his power. My mother resembles the great women
of classical antiquity.... The French nation, when it is not taken the
wrong way, is more easily governed than any other; its prompt and easy
comprehension is unequalled; it immediately discerns who labours for, and
who against it; but then it is necessary always to speak to its senses,
otherwise its uneasy spite gnaws, it ferments and explodes....
“Let him despise all parties; let him only see the mass. Excepting those
who have betrayed their country, he should forget the previous conduct
of all men, and reward talent, merit, and services, wherever he finds
them....
“France is the country where the chiefs of parties have the least
influence: to rest for support on them, is to build on sand. Great things
can only be done in France by having the support of the masses....
“I relied on the whole mass of the people without exception; I set the
example of a government which favoured the interests of all.... To
divide the interests of a nation is ... to engender civil war. A thing
indivisible by nature cannot be divided; it can only be mutilated. I
attach no importance to the constitution; but its fundamental principle
should be universal suffrage.
“The nobility I created will not be a buttress to my son....
“My dictatorship was indispensable, and the proof of this is that I was
always offered more power than I wanted.... It will not be the same with
my son: his power will be disputed; he must anticipate every desire for
liberty.... The aim of a sovereign is not only to reign, but to diffuse
instruction, morality, and wellbeing. Anything false is an untrustworthy
prop....
“The French people is animated by two equally powerful passions, which
seem opposed, but which, nevertheless, are derived from one and the same
feeling, namely, love of liberty and love of distinction. A government
can only satisfy these two wants by the most exact justice.... In order
to govern, it is not necessary to pursue a more or less perfect theory,
but to build with the materials which are under one’s hand; to submit to
necessities, and profit by them....
“The liberty of the press ought to become, in the hands of the
government, a powerful auxiliary in diffusing, through all the most
distant corners of the Empire, sound doctrines and good principles. To
leave it to itself would be to fall asleep beside a danger.... Under pain
of death, nowadays, one must either direct or hinder everything.
“My son ought to be a man of new ideas, and of the cause which I have
made triumphant everywhere: ... to reunite Europe in the bonds of an
indissoluble federation....
“Europe is moving towards an inevitable transformation: to endeavour to
retard this progress, would be to waste strength in a useless struggle;
to favour it, is to strengthen the hopes and wishes of all....
“My son’s position will not be free from immense difficulties. _Let him
do by general consent what circumstances forced me to work for by force
of arms._ If I had remained victorious over Russia in 1812, the problem
of peace would have been solved for a hundred years to come. I cut the
Gordian knot of nations; at the present day it must be untied.... It is
no longer in the north that great questions will be decided, but in the
Mediterranean; on the shores of the Mediterranean, there is enough to
content all the ambitions of the different powers, and the happiness of
civilised nations may be purchased with fragments of barbarous lands.
_Let the kings listen to reason; Europe will no longer provide matter for
maintaining international hatreds._ Prejudices are dispersing; interests
are widening and becoming fused; trading routes are being multiplied. No
longer can any one nation monopolise commerce....
“All that you say to my son, or all that he learns, will be of little use
to him, unless he has in the depths of his heart that sacred fire and
love of good which alone can achieve great things.
“I hope, however, that he will be worthy of his destiny.
“If they refuse you permission to go to Vienna....”
The document suddenly breaks off; Napoleon’s powers have flagged; like
the utterance of an oracle, the soothsaying ends in the middle of a
sentence. But what this man on his deathbed designed for the instruction
of his poor little son, can serve to instruct Europe a century after
it was written. The political problems of our own day, however we may
attempt to solve them, are in truth solved here by the sovereignty of
genius.
XIX
After this brilliant outpouring, the productive spring dries up.
Agreeable visions float before his mind. It seems as if fate intends him
to enjoy the euthanasia. The day after writing his political testament,
he lies free from pain and care, surrounded by the mist-wreaths of hope:
“When I am dead, each of you will have the sweet consolation of returning
to Europe. You will see again, the one his relatives, the other his
friends; but for my part, I shall meet my brave warriors in the Elysian
Fields. Yes,” he continued, raising his voice, “Kléber, Desaix,
Bessières, Duroc, Ney, Murat, Masséna, Berthier; all will come to meet
me: they will talk to me of the deeds we did together. I shall recount to
them the later events of my life. When they see me, they will be inspired
with their old enthusiasm, their old passion for glory. We shall talk of
our battles to the Scipios, to Hannibal, Cæsar, and Frederick. What a
delight that will be. If only people here on earth are not terrified at
seeing so many soldiers put their heads together!”
Such is the dying man’s flight of fancy. In all the thousands of his
recorded utterances, there is none that shows the naïveté of his mind
more plainly than this reverie. He looks into a world peopled by the
shades of the heroes, sees his generals there in familiar converse with
those of ancient Rome, enters an idyllic paradise in which they talk
of big guns. While Napoleon is speaking, the English doctor (whose
ministrations the Emperor has at length consented to accept) enters the
room.
At this moment, the music of flutes, to which he has, in fancy, been
listening, breaks off; once more he hears the rattle of the drums. The
statesman recurs to the present. Without transition, he passes into a new
register, after his manner, and makes a formal oration which embodies
what he wishes to be the official view of his death:
“Come nearer, Bertrand, and translate what I say word for word to this
gentleman. My death is the results of injuries worthy of the hands that
have inflicted them. I surrendered to the British people, that I might
settle down at a British fireside. In defiance of international law, I
was loaded with chains.... England overpersuaded the princes, and the
world saw an unprecedented sight. Four great powers hurled themselves
upon one solitary man. How shamefully you have treated me on this rock!
There is no possible mortification to which you have not subjected
me!... With cold calculation, you have slowly done me to death! The vile
governor has been the executioner appointed by your ministers! I end like
the proud republic of Venice! I bequeath the shame of my death to the
royal family of England!”
After this outburst, he sinks back upon his pillows. The doctor stands
there dumbfounded, and Napoleon’s companions are in little better case.
What was it? An epilogue; a protest; a commination? Pure politics! In the
evening, he has an account of Hannibal’s campaigns read aloud to him.
Next day, April 21st, a fortnight before the end, he sends for the
Corsican abbate. Since this man’s coming, Napoleon has had Mass read
every Sunday, but otherwise has had nothing to do with the priest. Now he
says:
“Do you know what a ‘chapelle ardente’ is? Have you ever officiated at
one before? Never? Well, now you will officiate at mine.” Details follow.
“After my death, you will set up your altar at my bedside, and will say
Mass with the usual ceremonies until I am under ground.”
In the evening, the priest spends nearly an hour with him. Since, we
are told, Vignali was not dressed for the occasion, he can only have
conversed with Napoleon, and cannot have confessed him. Napoleon has not
communicated for forty years, and does not do so now.
The sick man is much wasted; for several weeks he has not been shaved;
his face is sunken and dusky. Now he has his bed carried into the
drawing-room, for he finds the bedroom too confined. He is racked by
terrible attacks of gastric spasm. In the intervals of calm, he continues
to speak of persons to whom he wishes to leave legacies. Sometimes he
dozes and dreams. In these dreams, women appear to him; Marie Louise is
not one of them: “I saw my good Josephine, but she would not put her arms
round me.... She was unchanged, loving as always. She said we should soon
meet to part no more. She assured me—— Did you see her too?” Just like
the dream about his generals; from the paradise of children, from the
land of faëry.
When he feels better, he has the latest newspapers read aloud. An attack
on him in one of them excites him, and he has his will brought to him.
Breaking the seals he has laboriously affixed, without saying a word he
writes with tremulous hand:
“I had the duke of Enghien arrested and brought to trial because this
trial was necessary for the safety, the interest, and the honour of the
French people, at a time when the count of Artois, according to his own
admission, was maintaining sixty assassins in Paris.”
Like two ghosts, they face one another; the dead Bourbon and the dying
Bonaparte.
On the 27th., he asks for the will once more, and laboriously reseals
it. He has inventories made of the contents of his boxes and cupboards;
valuable documents are put into envelopes, on which he writes the
inscriptions. All this is done in the intervals between attacks of
vomiting. His companions have to affix their seals, and every one of them
must verify a written record of the packets. So great is his mistrust of
England.
Is there anything still to do? Various articles which have not yet been
dealt with are lying on the counterpane. “I am very weak; there is not
much time left; we must finish things off.” What is that? Hortense’s
diamond necklace, which used to gleam from her neck on festal occasions
in the Tuileries, and was sewn into his waistband the day he left
Malmaison. This he gives to Marchand. There is a plain golden snuff-box.
Toilsomely, with the point of a penknife, he scratches his initial N on
the lid, and gives the box to the doctor, saying:
“I expressly demand that a post-mortem shall be made, and, in especial,
that the stomach shall be examined. I believe that I am dying of the same
illness as my father. Ask Louis to send you the report about that, and
compare it with what you find at the autopsy. Then you may at least be
able to spare my son this horrible illness. Tell him how he can guard
against it, and how he can be saved from the dread of it which has so
afflicted me.”
For six years he has been blaming the climate of the rock for his liver
trouble; only a few days ago he had charged England with killing him in
the unwholesome prison-house. By ordering a post-mortem examination, he
is risking the collapse of this theory; indeed, that is what he expects.
All is done for his son’s safety. He hopes that the lad can be saved from
the family disorder.
Is everything ready? Can we start? Wait a moment! There is still lacking
an official address to the authorities. He dictates the following letter:
“Monsieur le Gouverneur! Emperor Napoleon died on the ——, after a long
and painful illness. I have the honour to inform you of the fact....
Please let me know what arrangements your government has made for the
conveyance of his body to Europe, and also in respect of the members of
his suite.”
“Count Montholon, you will sign that.”
Napoleon had dictated sixty thousand political letters. Perhaps this
one, the formal report of his own death with the date left open, is
the most remarkable of them all; for who would have expected that
destiny would leave so much time and so much tranquillity of mind in
face of approaching death to a man who had faced sudden death on sixty
battle-fields? The lines above quoted seem rather a grotesque close to
his domineering career, and we feel a hope that this gruesome epistle
will not be his last.
It is not the last. On the 29th., after a feverish night, he dictates
the drafts of two communications. One deals with the utilisation of
Versailles; the other with a reorganisation of the National Guard. But
these are not addressed, as they would have been before his abdication,
to the Minister for Public Works and to the Minister for War. He dictates
the superscriptions: “First Dream”; and “Second Dream.” Then he says: “I
feel so wonderfully well now; I could go for a thirty-mile ride.” Next
day, he becomes icy cold and sinks into a delirium, which lasts five days
till the end.
But Napoleon Bonaparte’s vital energies do not subside so easily. During
these five days, there is a lucid interval, and he seizes the opportunity
for issuing orders and making declarations:
“When I lose consciousness, you must on no account admit an English
doctor.... You will remain true to my memory, and will not do anything
that might harm it. All my laws and all my actions were based upon the
strictest principles. Unfortunately, the circumstances were so grave
that I could not be lenient, and had to postpone many good things. Then
came the disasters. I could not string the bow more tightly; ... that
was why France never secured the liberal institutions I had intended to
introduce. But the country credits me with my good intentions; it loves
my name and my victories. You will do the same! Be true to our principles
and to our fame!”
His thoughts are still circling round his work. With the mournful glance
of a dying sculptor, he sees before him nothing but a fragment; and with
his last breath he tells those around him what he had designed to fashion.
Next day, his mind is wandering once more amid memories of youth and
of Corsica. But still, from time to time, there revives the wish to be
useful to his son. His fantasy creates possessions on the island, and the
faithful Marchand takes down from dictation these mind-wanderings that
are so precise in their details:
“I leave to my son my house in Ajaccio with its outbuildings; two houses
adjacent to the saltpits with their gardens; and all my estates in the
Ajaccio district. These will bring him an income of frs. 50,000. I
bequeath....”
This is Napoleon’s last command. He has won and lost half the world; but
in his dying visions he sees the Corsican home of his ancestors, together
with the son to whom he had intended to leave half the world as heirloom.
The strains mingle; to keep his son from want, he bequeaths the lad a
house which he does not own. Then his mind turns back from his kin. He is
once more the soldier, on his first campaign, in Italy. Around him flit
the wraiths of his earliest comrades. He shouts:
“Desaix! Masséna! Victory is ours! Quick! Forward! We have them....”
Next day the abbate goes to him unsummoned. Beneath a layman’s dress, the
priest carries something he seeks to hide. He demands to be left alone
with the dying man. After a while he comes out, saying: “I have given
him extreme unction. Owing to the condition of the stomach, no other
sacrament was possible.”
A terrible last night. Towards morning, when he is murmuring in delirium,
Montholon hears the words:
“France!... Armée!... Tête d’armée.... Josephine!”
This is Napoleon’s last utterance.
Next moment, with amazing energy, he springs out of bed, overpowering
Montholon, who is alone with him. The two fall to the floor, and he
grips Montholon so fiercely that the count cannot even cry for help.
Archambaud, who is in the next room, hears the noise, comes in, and
releases Montholon. No one knows what enemy the Emperor was trying to
strangle in this last fight.
The rest of the day he lies breathing quietly. By signs he seems to ask
for water, but since he can no longer swallow they must be content with
holding a sponge moistened with vinegar to his lips. Mist and rain drive
fiercely round the house. A count of the old noblesse and a man of the
people watch by the camp-bed of Austerlitz.
At five o’clock, the rage of the south-east trade wind is redoubled, and
two trees of the latest planting are uprooted.
At this moment, the man on the bed is in the throes of a prolonged rigor.
There is no sign of pain; his eyes are widely opened, staring into
vacancy; the death-rattle is in his throat. As the tropical sun sinks
into the sea the Emperor’s heart stops beating.
XX
On the study table, in the garish light of noon, lies the naked corpse
of Napoleon. Five English surgeons, three English army officers, and
the three Frenchmen, surround the extemporized post-mortem table,
where Antommarchi is performing the autopsy. The Corsican doctor has
removed the liver and incised it. He holds up the organ for the others’
inspection, and demonstrates, as if to a class of students. “You see,
gentlemen, how this ulcerated part of the stomach has become adherent
to the liver. What are we to infer? That the climate of St. Helena
has intensified the gastric disorder, and has thus brought about the
Emperor’s premature death.”
A vote is taken: England against France. The majority declare the viscera
to be healthy, while the Corsican is ostentatiously thrusting his finger
through the perforated wall of the stomach. Medical report.
The Emperor’s body was embalmed, and at the lying-in-state was covered
with the gold-embroidered cloak of Marengo. The whole garrison, by its
own wish, marched past. All who saw the body testify to the calm and
serenity of the features. In mysterious fashion, his face, which, since
the days of the coronation, had tended to assume the robust maturity of
the Roman emperors, had now returned to the delicacy of youth.
The British authorities refused to allow the shipment to Europe. The
grave was dug in a secluded valley, beside a spring shaded by two weeping
willows. He was accorded the honours of a British general; salvos of
artillery and musketry were fired over the grave, what time there
fluttered in the breeze the colours on which were emblazoned the names of
the English victories in Spain. The governor was present, and declared
that he had forgiven the Emperor.
Six stone slabs from gun emplacements cover the tomb. A seventh was
needed for the artillery officer’s grave; but, since it was not available
at the moment, three glazed tiles were taken from the cooking-stove of a
new house. The governor would not allow the inscription “Napoleon” to be
placed on the tomb, but insisted upon “Napoleon Bonaparte.” There was,
therefore, no inscription. The furniture of Longwood was sold by auction;
the house was bought by a farmer, who turned the place into a mill; the
two rooms in which the Emperor had lived for six years were restored to
their former uses, becoming a byre and a pig-sty.
One thing only did England do in honour of the dead: a sentry was posted
at the grave. For nineteen years, the guard was relieved at the proper
intervals; then the dead Emperor was brought home to Paris.
Without waiting for this, all the others return to Europe. The governor
was publicly horsewhipped in London by Las Cases’ son; he died in
obscurity. Bathurst, who, as Minister for War and Plantations, had been
responsible for the treatment of Napoleon, ultimately killed himself in
an access of melancholia. All England was writing and talking about the
barbarous treatment of the great exile.
The Corsican doctor goes to Italy. Lucien refuses to see him. In Parma,
Marie Louise also shuts her door against him, but he sees her in her box
at the theatre. In Rome, Antommarchi visits Letizia Bonaparte, and for
three days she makes him tell her all his news. He leaves the silver
lamp with her, and sails back to Corsica. Letizia sits by the fireside,
weeping over the fate of her second son, Napolione.
She has still fifteen years to live. She outlives Elise; outlives
Pauline, who dies with a mirror in her hands; outlives several of her
grandchildren, and three popes. She is half paralysed, and has become
blind. But she sits there facing her son’s bust, her spirit unbroken,
mourning her dead.
Like a princess, she welcomes to her palace all those who have remained
faithful to the Emperor. Her servants are the last persons in Europe to
wear his colours; her carriage is the last to bear his escutcheon. She
has news at times from Vienna and her grandson, but the young man is not
allowed to visit her. When he is one-and-twenty, he dies. Now, Marie
Louise writes to her. She does not answer the letter. At last she is told
that she may return home, but she refuses to go, since the same right is
not accorded to her children.
[Illustration: Letter to Countess Walewska]
Nine years after the Emperor’s death, the Bourbon dynasty is overthrown,
and the Orleans monarchy is established. The new king knows how strong
the Bonapartists are, and he orders that the statue of Napoleon, which
fifteen years before had been removed, shall be replaced on the Vendôme
column. When Jerome brings his bed-ridden mother these tidings, she has
a renewal of health and is able to leave her bed. For the first time
after a long interval she makes her way into the drawing-room, and her
blind eyes turn towards the bust. She says in a toneless voice:
“Once again the Emperor is in Paris.”
ENVOY
To write the history of a man, or the history of an epoch, these are two
distinct undertakings, differing both in name and technique. Vain has
been the attempt to combine them. Plutarch renounced the one, and Carlyle
renounced the other; that is why both these masters were able to achieve
their respective tasks. It would be fair to say that Plutarch’s example
has found no imitators; no one, after Plutarch, has made it his specific
task to write the history of great minds upon a strictly historical
foundation.
Such a work does not come within the domain of the historian, seeing that
the search for truth demands other talents than those requisite for the
art of portrayal. Artists have sometimes dramatised historical figures
with a free hand; sometimes they have produced one of those horrible
mishmashes which pass by the name of “historical novel”—of which Goethe,
like Napoleon, said that they confuse everything.
The attempt is especially difficult when, not works, but deeds, are the
milestones along the road of life. Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon, only
became great powers through their victories in the battle-field; and yet
their battles tend, more and more, to become unmeaning for posterity.
Nowadays, it is only in military academies that Pharsalia, Rossbach, and
Austerlitz, have a historical significance. Not one of the three great
generals I have named would mean any more to us than Crassus, Seydlitz,
or Masséna, had they, too, been nothing more than military commanders;
it is the political genius of Cæsar, Frederick, and Napoleon, that makes
these men supreme. In his highest embodiment, the statesman shapes all
our destinies. Where genius and character intersect, is the focus for the
searcher of the soul.
In this book, I have tried to write the inner history of Napoleon. Since
his personality finds expression in every step of his political career,
his ideas as founder of States and as legislator, his attitudes towards
revolution and legitimacy, towards the social order and the problem of
Europe—are valuable means of portrayal. Irrelevant was the course of the
battles; irrelevant the contemporary position of the European States,
in so far as this was manifested only in coalitions or antagonisms as
mutable as the weather.
Every difference of opinion with his brothers or his wife, every hour
of gloom or elation, his outbursts of wrath and his accesses of pallor,
tricks or acts of kindness towards friend or foe, every word to his
generals or to women (as reported in letters or authentic conversations),
seemed more important than the order of battle at Marengo, the items of
the peace of Lunéville, or the details of the Continental System. What
we have all learned about him at school and the university has here been
restricted to a minimum; but there has been a broad demonstration of the
things that are lacking amid such everyday knowledge. Yet we have not
been concerned only with that Napoleon intime who is so favourite a topic
with French writers; but, rather, with the Napoleonic figure as a whole,
in public career and in private life, as representative of all mankind.
Affairs of State and love affairs that happened on the same day, have
been referred to on the same page: they derive from the same source; they
determine one another; and a study of the imbroglio of the human heart
will often give us more information concerning great plans than all the
calculations of the tactician.
Napoleon’s personality, which has no more to do with the nation for which
or against which he was fighting than it has to do with morality, has
not been treated here as miraculous, nor yet as split up into abstract
concepts. In the episodes of his life I have tried to grasp the innermost
moods (of which his rise was a natural and logical outcome), and to trace
his movement towards the climax of St. Helena. To examine this man’s
inner life; to explain his resolves and his refrainings, his deeds and
his sufferings, his fancies and his calculations, as issuing from the
moods of his heart—the disclosure of this _great chain of affects_, was
at once the means and the end of the portrayal.
That is why there was no place in my record for portraits of the
generals. Nothing could be admitted to this one volume which did not
throw light upon the history of the one interior.
If we wish to give a picture of a life so full as this man’s, we must
perforce follow his tempo; the writer, therefore, is bound to the words
of the person being described, and can never let that person speak too
much. For, in truth, a man always explains himself better than any one
else can do it for him; even when he is mistaken, or when he is lying,
he reveals himself to those who come afterwards, to those who know the
truth. But the author must forget that he, too, knows the end. Only if,
from moment to moment, he describes the feelings as they must have been
experienced by one without foresight into the completed destiny, will he
be able to generate that tension which, in actual life, made the sequence
of events vibrant with passion.
Thus with his own sympathy, he forces the heart of the man to reveal its
sympathy. In the present work, the spirit of dispassionate analysis is
shown once only, towards the end. We cannot study the motor engine till
it stops running.
Such a portrayal, which brings us into close proximity with its object,
may give the impression of being a work of pure fancy. If, by its method
of treatment, it is to be sharply differentiated from an imaginative
creation, it must throughout cling to the framework of historical truth.
One who believes that there is a logical succession of happenings in
which there is no room for chance, will guard against retouching any
detail; he will never bend a date or an incident to fit a preconceived
purpose, even though, for stylistic purposes, he may think fit at times
to leave one or the other unmentioned.
In this book, all the data are recorded facts, except the soliloquies.
To it there might well be applied Goethe’s judgment upon Bourrienne’s
_Memoirs_: “All the nimbus, all the illusion, with which journalists
and historians and poets have surrounded Napoleon, vanishes before
the awe-inspiring realism of this book: but the hero is by no means
diminished thereby; he grows. We learn from this what a splendid thing
truth is, when any one has the courage to speak it.” Napoleon’s life is a
great epic, written by the hand of fate; its full meaning will not reveal
itself to one who gives rein to imagination, but only to him who gives
himself up to the amor fati.
Thus, likewise, for the reader of these pages should be reconstructed
the tragedy which once only in a millennium a mortal man has created out
of his life. What a man can attain through self-confidence and courage,
through passion and imagination, through industry and will, he attained.
To-day, in the age of the revolutions which once again are opening every
path to the man of supreme ability, the ardent youth of Europe can find
as an example and a warning no greater man than the one who, of all men
of the West, made and suffered the most violent commotions.
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Monsieur Edouard Driault, editor of the “Revue
des Etudes Napoléoniennes,” Versailles, and Herr F. M. Kircheisen, for
kindly help in supplying material for the illustrations; and to make due
acknowledgments to Professor Pariset of Strasburg and Herr Kurt Wildhagen
of Heidelberg, for advice during the preparation of the book.
INDEX
Abdication. _See_ Demand, He drafts and He signs
Aboukir, 131, 135, 232, 240
Bay, 126, 135
Academy, 6
on Board, 119
Achilles, 598
ACHMED, 131
Acknowledgement of Democracy, 513
Acre, 132, 133, 134, 135, 242, 265, 397, 574
Adaptation to Circumstances, 574
Adda, 66, 113
Additional Act, 514, 517, 518, 519
Adige, 70, 77
Admiral. _See_ Emperor and Admiral
Admiralty, 372
ADOLPHUS. _See_ GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS
Adrianople, 133
Adriatic, 90
Advancement of Relatives, 224
Adventurer once more, 419
ÆNEID, 655
ÆSCHYLUS, 607, 622
ÆSOP, 629
A-flicker with Excitement, 384
Africa, 11, 117, 232, 528
Again attacked, 237
Against the Grain, 157
Again Unity of Command, 82
_Agamemnon_, 622
Aix, 140, 479, 497
Aix-la-Chapelle, 238, 631
Aim. _See_ True
Ajaccio, 18, 24, 27, 139, 251, 481, 485, 673
Alarm. _See_ Emperor’s
Aleppo, 133, 574
Alessandria, 72
ALEXANDER THE GREAT (of Macedon), 11, 115, 117, 119, 121, 127, 229,
232, 238, 242, 259, 324, 359, 361, 370, 565, 653
ALEXANDER I, Tsar of Russia, 232, 240, 252, 253, 270, 271, 292, 308,
311, 312, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 334, 373, 374, 375, 376,
378, 385, 386, 391, 397, 406, 409, 411, 433, 437, 443, 467, 604.
_See also_ TSAR ALEXANDER, _also_ What is ALEXANDER Thinking?
as Prototype, 11
ALEXANDRINE, 571
Allah is Allah, 122
Alliance, La Belle, 523
All young France is ready, 472
Alps, 40, 55, 63, 179, 289, 455, 497, 650
Alsace, 207
ALVINTZY, 60
America, 109, 171, 473, 530, 533, 537, 632, 634, 635, 643, 645, 655.
_See_ He should, _also_ United States
Ambitions. _See_ BERNADOTTE’S Great
America, Spanish, 632
American Marriage. _See_ JEROME’S
Amours, 202
Amphictyonic League, 595
Amsterdam, 650
Anachronism. _See_ War
Ancients. _See_ Council of Ancients
Ancona, 89, 90, 284
Andalusia, 329
_Andromache_, 460, 637
and Astyanax, 460
An everlasting Disgrace, 542
Anger. _See_ Genuine
Angleterre, Hôtel de l’, in Warsaw, 418
ANGOULÈME, Duchess of, 489
An Idyll renewed, 486
ANNA, Grand Duchess, 349
Annexations, 89
Another Family Council, 348
Ansbach, 252
Antibes, 57, 498
Antiquity. _See_ Heroes of
ANTOINETTE, MARIE, 219
ANTOMMARCHI, 656, 658, 674, 676
ANTONY. _See_ MARK ANTONY
Antwerp, 650
Anxieties. _See_ JOSEPHINE’S
Any Crown You like, 300
APELLES, 565
Apennines, 55, 64, 566
Apollo, Salle, 155
Apostolical Emperor, 370
ARCHAMBAUD, 674
ARCHDUKE CHARLES. _See_ CHARLES
Arcis-sur-Aube, 463, 522
Arcola, 64, 65, 76, 77, 78, 112, 137, 158, 536, 624
ARISTOTLE, 229
Arm the Peasants, 464
Army. _See_ Tatterdemalion
Grand. _See_ Grand Army
in the East, 116
of Italy, 40, 50, 56
of Liberators, 61
of the Interior, 45
of the Rhine, 40, 41, 86, 87, 114, 120
ARNAULT, 93
ARRIAN, 119
Artillery Fire, 532
ARTOIS, Count of (afterwards Charles X), 490, 501, 670
“As General Bonaparte,” 433
Asia, 11, 41, 128, 188, 229, 232, 237, 244, 282
Asia Minor, 11
Asiatic Conquests. _See_ Dreams of
Aside. _See_ Naïve
Aspern-Essling, 337, 341, 419, 522, 567
A Son!, 260
Assassination. _See_ Attempted
Astorga, 331, 363, 377
Asturia, 299
Astyanax, 460, 488
At Headquarters, 92
Athens, 63, 69
Atlantic Fleet, 372
Attacked. _See_ Again
Attempted Assassination, 159
Attempted Rising, 24
Attempt on His Life, 193.
_See also_ I intended
At the masked Ball, 347
ATTILA, 86, 90, 511
Audience of Kings, 309
Auerstädt, 255
AUGEREAU, 60, 75, 81, 92, 101, 114, 133, 448, 462, 463, 468, 510,
647, 660
AUGUSTUS, 194, 228, 272, 566
AURELIAN, 566
Austerlitz, 243, 244, 245, 251, 252, 253, 255, 270, 274, 318, 334,
381, 386, 387, 395, 439, 461, 500, 509, 520, 561, 562, 577, 609,
649, 663, 674, 679.
_See also_ Eve of Austerlitz
Austria, 40, 87, 118, 179, 183, 238, 244, 251, 258, 259, 274, 308,
314, 315, 318, 333, 369, 370, 375, 380, 382, 383, 410, 419, 430,
435, 439, 440, 451, 455, 459, 462, 639
Felix, 369
Auxonne, 14, 56, 662
Avignon, 497
Awaiting the Signature, 473
Azores, 494, 618
Aztecs and Incas, 307
Back Room at Saint-Cloud, 155
Back to Europe, 308
Back to Paris, 525
Baden, 206, 246, 279, 493
Bad News from Spain, 399
Bag of Gold, 153
BAGRATION, 389, 394
Ball. _See_ At the Ball
Ballad. _See_ What a Ballad
Baltic, 273, 420
Banishment, 29
Bank of England, 380
Bank of France, 454
Barbier de Séville, 622
BARCLAY DE TOLLY, 389, 390, 394, 395, 399
BARON VOM STEIN, 406
BARRAS, 38, 43, 44, 47, 50, 80, 109, 115, 142, 146, 147, 152, 153
Bar-sur-Aube, 462
Basle, 38, 511
Bassora, 132
Bastia, 480
Bastille, 16, 217
BATHURST, 676
Battalion, Holy, 242
Battle, Death in. _See_ He seeks
of Jena, 255
of the Nations, 446
BAUDIN, 141
BAUER, 556
BAUSSET, 344
Bautzen, 434, 439, 445
“Messenger,” 445
Bavaria, 127, 183, 241, 246, 279, 334, 430, 446, 493
Bayonne, 308, 312, 650
BEAUHARNAIS. _See_ EUGENE, _also_ HORTENSE, _also_ JOSEPHINE
Vicomte de, 47
BEAULIEU, 60
BEAUMARCHAIS, 622
BEETHOVEN, 231
Belated Blessing, 226
Belgium, 30, 89, 453, 458
Belle Alliance, 523
“Bellerophon,” 537, 538, 539, 540, 541
Benevento, 494
BENJAMIN CONSTANT, 512.
_See also_ CONSTANT
Beresina, 415, 416
Berlin, 256, 257, 258, 274, 290, 308, 334, 400, 405, 445, 446, 651
BERNADOTTE (afterwards CROWN PRINCE, then King, of Sweden), 118, 144,
145, 148, 149, 153, 161, 198, 246, 281, 365, 366, 386, 406, 429,
436, 438, 443, 445, 446, 448, 452, 462, 467, 571, 633
Désirée. _See_ DÉSIRÉE
triumphans, 365
Bernadotte’s Ambitions, 386
Bernard. _See_ Great St. Bernard
BERTHIER (afterwards Prince of Neuchâtel), 60, 72, 81, 92, 100, 120,
148, 149, 219, 246, 256, 335, 336, 351, 368, 388, 398, 411, 461,
462, 464, 468, 471, 473, 474, 495, 510, 555, 557, 575, 587, 647,
668
BERTHOLLET, 120, 129, 138
BERTRAND, 481, 484, 535, 609, 610, 613, 615, 621, 636, 638, 654, 658,
659, 661, 664, 669
Madame, 10, 613, 627
Napoléon, 638
Besançon, 501, 509, 555
BESSIÈRES, 668
Betray. _See_ Old Friends
Bible, 120, 122, 601, 622
Big Guns, 13
BINGHAM, 627
Birchen Staff. _See_ Leaning
Blenheim, 127
Blessing. _See_ Belated
Blindness. _See_ Brotherly Blindness
Blindness to its Dangers, 212
Bloodhound, A, 187
BLÜCHER, 443, 444, 445, 455, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 467, 522, 534,
619, 626
Blunder. _See_ Consequences of a
Body of Steel, 548
Bohemia, 447
Bois (de Boulogne), 38
Bologna, 75, 99, 476
BONAPARTE. _See_ As General Monsieur
and Europe, 184
and the Sphinx, 121
Caroline. _See_ CAROLINE
CARLO, 298, 305
Elise. _See_ ELISE
Jerome. _See_ JEROME
Joseph. _See_ JOSEPH
La Pagerie. _See_ JOSEPHINE
Letizia. _See_ LETIZIA
Louis. _See_ LOUIS
Lucien. _See_ LUCIEN
Napoleon Francis. _See_ NAPOLEON FRANCIS
Pauline. _See_ PAULINE
Bon, Cape, 137
“Boney,” 540
Bordeaux, 464, 541, 650
BORGHESE, 199, 200, 485.
_See also_ PAULINE
Born to rule. _See_ Man born to rule
Borodino, 399, 653, 663
Bosnia, 90
Bosphorus, 41, 259, 273, 282
Boulogne, 234, 235, 238, 572, 580
Boulogne, Bois de. _See_ Bois
BOURBON, Duke of, 490
Palais, 529
Bourbons—never!, 469
Bourbons’ Return, 489
BOURRIENNE, 25, 37, 58, 91, 107, 118, 119, 124, 127, 148, 156, 161,
179, 204, 438, 556, 681
Breach between the Brothers, 197
Brescia, 74
Breslau, 268, 425
Brienne, 6, 9, 48, 457, 556, 558, 611
Brieg, 269
Broil with Prussia, 252
Broils. _See_ Family
Brooding Lad, 8
Brother Lucien. _See_ Sire
Brotherly Blindness, 456
Brotherly Hate, 304
Brothers. _See_ Dangerous
Brothers and Sisters, 198
Brothers, The. _See_ Breach between
BRUIX, 234, 235
Brumaire, 528.
_See also_ Eighteenth, _also_ Nineteenth
BRUNSWICK, 253, 255, 408, 576
Brussels, 523
BRUTUS, 64, 85, 149, 343, 560, 629
BRUYÈRE. _See_ La Bruyère
BUBNA, 341, 430, 567
Bucharest, 269
Buenos Ayres, 534
BUFFON, 10
Bulletin from Russia. _See_ Last
BÜLOW, 524
Bukovina, 384
Bureau of Public Opinion, 380, 381
Burgos, 548
Burgundy, 125
BUONAPARTE. _See_ BONAPARTE
Burning Street, 403
But Talleyrand is indispensable, 313
BYRON, 231, 615
Cadets School, 9, 133
Cadiz, 388, 420
CADOUDAL, 438
CÆSAR, 24, 85, 121, 182, 186, 195, 212, 277, 285, 322, 326, 371, 378,
421, 463, 519, 521, 560, 565, 566, 567, 578, 592, 624, 645, 646,
653, 655, 656, 661, 668, 679.
_See also_ Christ
_Cromwell, and Bonaparte_, 195
Cæsar’s Chariot, 519
_Death_, 326
Cæsars, 566
CAGLIOSTRO, 593
Cairo, 121, 122, 131, 132, 135, 136, 185, 264, 267, 286, 396, 476, 605
Cajoleries, 272
Calabria, 633
Calculation, 569
and Imagination, 117
Calculations. _See_ I am the Man and Yearnings
Caldiero, 76
California, 534
CAMBACÉRÈS, 598
CAMILLA, 139
Campaign. _See_ Excitement of
_Campaigns of Napoleon the Great_, 380
CAMPBELL, 479, 504
Campo Formio, 104, 109
Candour to Opponents, 341
Canino, 485
Cannes, 433, 497, 498, 503, 623
CANOVA, 248, 582
CANTILLON, 662
Cape Bon, 137
Cape (of Good Hope), 89, 103, 258, 372, 654
Capets, 414
Capitol, 64, 85, 105
Capri, 566, 613
Capua, 383
Caracas, 534
Care for the Children, 173
CARLO BONAPARTE, 298, 305
CARLYLE, 679
CARNOT, 57, 71, 82, 114, 214, 407, 511, 518, 521, 528, 598, 642
CARNOT’S Advice, 521
CAROLINE BONAPARTE (afterwards wife of MURAT), 198, 224, 247, 260,
266, 352, 364, 428, 429, 451, 475, 485, 632
Carpet, The, 305
Carrée, Fort, 34
Carthage, 10
CASES. _See_ LAS CASES
Cassel, 394, 452
Castiglione, 75, 463
Castille, 331
Catalonia, 312
CATHERINE THE GREAT, 566
Cattaro, 273, 307
COULAINCOURT, 375, 376, 377, 401, 411, 417, 418, 432, 434, 446, 457,
458, 464, 465, 467, 468, 471, 472, 507, 529, 531, 606
Cause. _See_ Espouse my
Cave. _See_ Imagination
Chains. _See_ In Chains, _also_ Strike
Chamber of Deputies, 526, 528.
_See also_ Lower House
Chambers, 153, 186, 195, 455, 496, 511, 517, 519, 525, 526, 527, 528,
529, 530, 634.
_See also_ General
Chambers of Commerce, 176, 379
Chambers take the Initiative, 526
Champaubert, 460
CHAMPAGNY, 311, 343
Champ de Mai, 506, 518, 520
Champion of the Family, 172
Chance. _See_ Circumstances
Chance missed, 235
Channel, 115, 516
Chapelle ardente, 669
Characterisation. _See_ German
Chariot. _See_ Cæsar’s
CHARLEMAGNE, 226, 227, 238, 242, 245, 258, 259, 283, 284, 285, 359,
566
_Charlemagne_, 248
Charleroi, 521, 522
Charles XII, 393
CHARLES AUGUSTUS, 255
CHARLES, Austrian Archduke, 60, 88, 338, 351
CHARLES, Hippolyte, 73, 123.
_See also_ HIPPOLYTE
Charlottenburg, 258
CHATEAUBRIAND, 277, 508, 554, 565, 566
Châtillon, 458, 461, 492
CHÉNIER, 114, 195, 598
Cherbourg, 650
Chess. _See_ Game
Chessplayer, 567
Childlessness. _See_ Tragedy of
Children. _See_ Care, _also_ Name your
China, 11, 652
Chinese Island where there are no Weapons, 581, 582
Christ, 86, 184, 321, 322, 338, 636.
_See also_ Jesus
and Cæsar, 322
Christianity, 319, 322
CIMAROSA, 554
_Cinna_, 591, 622
CIPRIANI, 613, 621, 640
Circumstances and Chance, 604
Cisalpine Republic, 82, 105, 182
CITERNI, 277
City. _See_ Rome, _also_ The Eternal
Civil Code, 170
CLARKE, 80
CLARY. _See_ DÉSIRÉE, _also_ JULIE
Cleaning up the Mess, 176
Clear the Hall, 160
CLEOPATRA, 128
Cleves, 247
Climax of the Scene, 302
CLOVIS, 561
Coblenz, 577
Coburg, 273
Cockade. _See_ Red
Code, Civil, 170
Code Napoléon, 170, 171, 172, 173, 280, 286, 371
Coffee and Sugar, 398
COLLI, 60
Colours. _See_ Kissing
Command. _See_ Again, _also_ Last, _also_ Unity
Commander. _See_ Statesman
Commander of the Forces, 45
Comédie Française, 410
Commercial Warfare, 361
Committee of Public Safety, 40, 42, 47, 561
Companions, 610.
_See also_ Fate
Company at Morfontaine, 452
Comparison with Napoleon, 407
Compiègne, 351, 352
Concerning the Germans, 591
Concordat, 284, 372, 429, 430
CONDÉ, 206, 207, 490, 500
Confederation of the Rhine, 246, 279, 287, 341, 373, 382, 388, 420,
424, 425, 433, 443, 445, 447
Confessions, 214
Confidants conspire, 331
Congress. _See_ Tidings
Conquests. _See_ Dreams and Plans
CONSALVI, 185
Consequences. _See_ Political
Consequences of a Blunder, 208
Consequences of Marmont’s Desertion, 471
Conservatoire, 98
Considerations, 639
Conspiracy, 148
CONSTANT, Benjamin, 195, 511, 512, 514, 517, 527
Constant (Napoleon’s Valet), 267
CONSTANTINE (Roman Emperor), 284
(Russian Grand Duke), 405
Constantinople, 133, 242, 273, 282, 284
Consul, First, 166, 174, 175, 183, 185, 186, 187, 190, 201, 203, 204,
205, 206, 207, 210, 225, 232, 280, 373, 379, 381, 498, 550, 554,
555, 556, 565, 575, 582, 586, 597, 605, 629, 646, 651, 652
for Life, 186, 187, 213
Consuls, 154, 155, 160, 161, 165
Contempt for his Fellows, 583
Content. _See_ Form without
Continent, 109, 114, 116, 183, 214, 244, 246, 248, 258, 282, 361,
367, 524
Continental System, 258, 680
Contradictions of Monarchy, 423
Convention, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35, 42, 43, 44, 45, 658
Conversation. _See_ Memorable
Conversation with Rapp, 508
Conversation with Wieland, 320
Corfu, 89, 90, 103, 473
CORIOLANUS, 23
CORNEILLE, 218, 276, 551, 564, 591, 621, 622
Corniche, 650
Corsica, 1-49, 85, 95, 96, 113, 117, 138, 199, 251, 338, 476, 480,
483, 484, 496, 505, 533, 535, 537, 631, 657, 662, 673, 676
again, 138
Corsica comes to St. Helena, 656
Corsica’s Struggle, 4
Corsican Election, 23
Corsicans, 294
Corso, 73
Corte, 16, 251
Cortes, 453
CORVISART, 475, 598
Cossaria, 86
Council. _See_ Another Family
Council of Ancients, 149, 150, 155, 156, 16
of Five Hundred, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157, 158, 159
of State, 166, 169, 170, 192, 194, 195, 207, 224, 230, 279, 332,
360, 414, 423, 554, 582, 590, 592, 649, 650
Councils, 146, 147, 153, 154, 156, 159, 188
Counterplot. _See_ Plot
Counterstroke. _See_ Stroke
Countess. _See_ Polish, _also_ Walewska
Cracow, 430
CRASSUS, 679
_Creation_, 193
Crete, 11
CRŒSUS, 458
CROMWELL, 195, 463, 647
Coup d’État. _See_ Plans
Courage, 577.
_See also_ Returning
Court. _See_ Little Court, _also_ Plebeians at Court
Court Dress. _See_ Mummy in
Courtship, 351
Crises, 75
Criticism of the French, 215
Crowd. _See_ Tuckets
Crown. _See_ Any
Curse of Legitimacy, 422
CYRUS, 566
Dagger in the Dictator’s Heart, 517
Daily Life, 621
Daimonic Loneliness, 605
Dalmatia, 436
Damascus, 132, 133, 146
Danaids, 414
Danger and Discouragement, 77
Dangerous Brothers, 438
Dangers. _See_ Blindness to
Dangers of Distance, 340
Danube, 259, 308, 337, 341, 419, 612
Danzig, 376, 388, 432, 509
DARU, 238, 323, 325, 410, 415, 418, 444, 597
Dauphiné, 20, 497
DAVID, 565
DAVOUST, 219, 255, 390, 394, 403, 507, 526
Days, Hundred, 599, 609, 623
Deadly Climate, 608
Deadwood, 608
Death, 674.
_See also_ Waiting
Deathbed. _See_ Justifies
Death in Battle. _See_ He seeks
DECRÈS, 229, 533
Defeat, 448.
_See also_ First at Waterloo, 524
Defence. _See_ Napoleon’s
Defenceless, 540
Delta, 130
Demand for Abdication, 527
Democracy. _See_ Acknowledgment Fiction of, 188
Denmark, 493
Deputies in secret Session, 528
DESAIX, 120, 132, 179, 587, 668, 673.
_See also_ Quai
Deserter, 25
DÉSIRÉE CLARY (afterwards Wife of Bernadotte), 30, 44, 46, 145, 452,
633
Destiny, 603.
_See also_ Follow, _also_ Sense, _also_ To Destiny
Man of, 604
Destruction of the Fleet, 126
Devotion to Josephine, 99
Dialogue of the Dead, 646
Diarists, 648
Dictator. _See_ Dagger
Dictatorship, 195
Dictionary of Weathercocks, 638
Die Standing. _See_ I will
“Diet, Imperial” at Erfurt, 561
Dignity, 552.
_See also_ Imperial
Dijon, 178
DIOGENES, 324
Dilemma. _See_ Tragical
DIOCLETIAN, 567
Dioscuri, 511
Diplomat, 88
Diplomats. _See_ Hectoring
Directors, 48, 49, 50, 57, 65, 66, 67, 72, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85,
87, 88, 89, 97, 101, 104, 106, 108, 109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 127,
139, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 165, 284, 529, 532, 556
Directory, 51, 106, 114, 127, 140, 153, 175, 276, 379, 511, 528, 530
Disastrous Inertia, 435
_Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les
hommes_, 11
Discoveries. _See_ Explorations
Disgruntled Kings, 363
Disillusionment. _See_ Victory
Disquiet. _See_ Growing
Distance. _See_ Dangers of
Divine Right. _See_ Rulers
Divorce, 345.
_See also_ Marriage and
Dniester, 259
Domingo, 590, 630
Don Quixote. _See_ Quixote
Don’t you know me?, 499
Dover, 137
Dramas, Family. _See_ Opening
Dream, first, 672
Dream, second, 672
Dream, trivial. _See_ Life
Dreams and Mathematics, 131
of Asiatic Conquests, 41
Dresden, 335, 386, 388, 434, 438, 444, 492, 508, 548, 553, 589, 590,
653
DRIAULT, 683
Driven out, 533
DROUOT, 481, 495, 531
Drums of the Revolution, 15
Drum-Taps, 166
Düben Castle, 445, 462, 470
Düben Heath, 445
Duchatel, 203
DUCOS, 146, 147, 150, 151, 153, 155, 159
Dunkirk, 115, 650
DUROC, 260, 261, 262, 415, 434, 435, 587, 597, 618, 668
Dvina, 390
Dynastic Snare, 301
Dynasty. _See_ Spanish
Eagle Volant, 230
East, the, 90, 91.
_See also_ Army in the East, _also_ Lure of the East, _also_
Messengers from the East
East India Company, 607
Eckmühl, 500
Egypt, 10, 11, 103, 115, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128,
130, 131, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 204, 210, 239, 242, 272, 372,
411, 413, 495, 498, 514, 543, 566, 573, 620, 621
Egyptian Plan, 116
Eighteen-hour Day, 174
Eighteenth Brumaire, 150, 179, 196, 197, 338, 365, 494, 502, 560.
_See also_ Nineteenth Brumaire, _also_ Brumaire
Eighty-five Francs, 21
Elba, 184, 473, 475, 476, 477, 479, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 489,
491, 492, 493, 494, 496, 504, 511, 513, 531, 535, 623, 634, 661,
662
Elbe, 258, 273, 286, 308, 374, 447
Electoral Colleges of the Empire, 505
ELISE, Bonaparte (afterwards Grand Duchess of Tuscany), 92, 96, 198,
247, 248, 364, 451, 452, 475, 676
EL KEBIR, 128
Elysée, 466, 471, 525, 530
Elysian Fields, 668
EMMERY, 661
Emperor. _See also_ Apostolical, I am, Return, Self-crowned
and Admiral, 234
and his Mother, 495
and the Slave, 630
drives a Plough, 641
of the East, 242
of Rome, 283
of the West, 283, 285, 290
Emperors. _See_ Two Emperors
Emperor’s Alarm, 414
Emperor scores over the Poet, 321
Emperor’s Onslaught, 324
Empire. _See also_ Holy Roman Empire, Turkish Empire
End of Everything, 125
Energy in narrow Bounds, 481
ENGHIEN, 206, 207, 208, 210, 214, 281, 332, 565, 591, 646, 670.
_See also_ Kidnapping
England, 33, 91, 103, 105, 109, 114, 116, 127, 183, 207, 212, 233,
235, 237, 239, 240, 244, 247, 248, 258, 259, 282, 285, 306, 307,
312, 328, 333, 359, 361, 362, 363, 365, 373, 374, 377, 379, 380,
382, 390, 396, 420, 430, 436, 451, 459, 475, 490, 492, 503, 538,
541, 542, 584, 588, 593, 607, 614, 624, 626, 631, 632, 634, 635,
650, 669, 671, 675, 676
England’s Enmity, 232
Enmities. _See_ Intrigues
Enmity. _See_ England’s
Epilogue, 675
Equality at the Front, 581
Equality, not Liberty, 168
Erfurt, 255, 308, 309, 313, 315, 317, 318, 322, 326, 342, 350, 374,
392, 450, 555, 561, 591
“Imperial Diet,” 561
_Eroica_, 231
“Espouse my Cause,” 294
Essling. _See_ Aspern-Essling
Essonne, 465
Eternal City. _See also_ Rome, The Eternal
Ettenheim, 206
Etiquette and Parody, 638
EUGENE DE BEAUHARNAIS (afterwards Viceroy of Italy), 47, 93, 118,
128, 143, 204, 222, 224, 246, 248, 249, 284, 285, 298, 299, 300,
331, 336, 348, 349, 382, 389, 402, 412, 417, 531, 561, 566, 569
Euphrates, 574
Europe, 11, 51, 64, 69, 85, 87, 88, 100, 104, 105, 109, 123, 137,
183, 205, 211, 217, 218, 239, 240, 244, 245, 246, 251, 258, 282,
287, 314, 318, 329, 334, 359, 362, 364, 365, 366, 368, 374, 375,
376, 377, 378, 383, 384, 396, 399, 430, 440, 447, 455, 473, 480,
483, 484, 492, 496, 498, 521, 524, 528, 538, 543, 554, 580, 582,
589, 595, 596, 612, 624, 625, 626, 631, 643, 644, 645, 650, 658,
665, 667, 668, 676, 680, 682.
_See also_ Back to, Bonaparte and, Farewell, Partition, United,
and United States of
Europe is a Mole-hill, 91, 121, 378
Europe too small, 296
European System, 650
Eve of Austerlitz, 241
Everyman, 581
Everything is crashing round me, 453
Evil. _See_ Prophet of
Examination of a Prisoner, 393
Excommunication and Victory, 338
Execrated by the Mob, 479
Execration. _See_ Public
Excitement of the Campaign, 461
Explorations and Discoveries, 130
Extinct Volcano, 607
Eylau, 265, 311, 500, 580, 651, 663
Faithful grow weary, 658
Faithful Servants, 613
False to his own Principles, 279
Falsifications, 625
Fame, 568
still lures him, 652
Family. _See_ Champion
Bequests, 662
Broils, 428
Council. _See_ Another
Dramas. _See_ Opening
Man. _See_ Genius and
Troubles. _See_ More
Fantastic Schemes, 283
Fantasy and Number again, 359
Farewell Europe, 543
Farewell to the Guard, 477
Fatal War, 373
Fate of old Companions, 633
Father. _See_ Our
Fatherland. _See_ Without
Faubourg. _See_ Faubourg Saint-Germain
Saint-Antoine, 527
Saint-Germain, 218, 466, 562, 609, 628
Faust, 654
Felix Austria, 369
FERDINAND, 453
Ferrajo, 481
Ferrara, 99
Fertility. _See_ Habsburg Fertility
FESCH, 20, 23, 27, 30, 95, 199, 226, 284, 352, 353, 371
Fiction of Democracy, 188
_Figaro_, 622
Fighting. _See_ Street
Finckenstein, 266, 267, 268, 270, 339
Finisterre, 384
Fire!, 402
First Consul. _See_ Consul, First
Defeat, 337
Dream, 672
“I,” 16
Overtures for Peace, 87
Place is occupied, 20
Sword, 9
triumphal Entry, 68
Victory, 33
Five Hundred. _See_ Council
Fleet. _See also_ Destruction Through
Fleet sets sail, 118
Flight homewards, 136
Florence, 427
Flushing, 650
Foe. _See_ Overestimating
“Follow your Destiny,” 496
FONTAINE, LA, 628
Fontainebleau, 281, 465, 466, 467, 468, 471, 473, 474, 486, 504, 605
Foolish Speech, 156
Fop and the Husband, 73
Forces. _See_ Commander
Forebodings. _See_ Gloomy
Foreign Office, 103.
_See also_ Ministry for Foreign Affairs
Forgotten!, 376
Former Fellow-student, 555
Form without Content, 216
Fort Carrée, 34
Fortress. _See_ Invincible
Fortuné, 73, 74
“Fortune is a Strumpet,” 400
Fortune of War, 457
Fortune’s Wheel. _See_ Turn of
FOUCHÉ, 177, 182, 186, 187, 197, 230, 231, 269, 277, 331, 332, 333,
340, 345, 365, 377, 378, 379, 436, 437, 443, 451, 473, 474, 475,
511, 530, 532, 533, 614
FOUCHÉ’S Rise, 530
FOUCHÉ, TALLEYRAND and, 182
Four Teeth, 394
Fourth-act Moods, 432
Fourth Name, 217
Fowler, 81
FOX, 232
FOY, 277
France, passim. _See also_ All young, History, In southern, and King
of
greets him, 141
is his Mistress, 563
FRANCIS, Emperor of Holy Roman Empire and of Austria, etc., 73, 87,
104, 109, 180, 181, 239, 240, 243, 252, 312, 350, 369, 370, 386,
398, 422, 430, 434, 436, 437, 439, 443, 445, 446, 505, 506, 515,
642
King of Rome, 488.
_See also_ NAPOLEON FRANCIS
Frankfort, 382, 455, 456
FREDERICK THE GREAT, 8, 10, 24, 111, 112, 175, 208, 251, 253, 255,
257, 259, 274, 277, 329, 463, 566, 568, 621, 655, 663, 668, 679
Frederick’s Sword, 257
FREDERICK WILLIAM III, 251, 252, 383, 425, 437, 443
Fréjus, 140, 480.
_See also_ Landing
French. _See_ Criticism of
are easy to rule, 666
remain sceptical, 564
Frenzied Energy, 72
Friedland, 270, 331, 500, 522, 663
Friends betray him. _See_ Old
Friendship. _See_ Last
Fridericus Rex, 251
Friuli, 75
Fronde, 562
Fruitless Wooing, 316
Fulfilment. _See_ Tragedy of
FULTON, 235, 642
Further Peace Proposals, 180
Galicia, 259, 375
Gambler. _See_ Great
Game of Chess, 443
Ganges, 242, 308, 359, 373
Gaoler, 617.
_See also_ Lowe
Garda, 73
Garden. _See_ Kingdom
Gardener, 654
Gassion, 597
General against People, 43
and King, 580
and the Chambers, 151
Bonaparte. _See_ As General Bonaparte
grows dangerous, 65
Generals. _See_ Sons of the People
GENGHIS KHAN, 511, 644
Genius and Family Man, 213
German. _See_ Homage
Genoa, 12, 33, 34, 82, 96, 117, 139, 184, 239, 504
Genoese Senate, 72
Genuine Anger, 575
GEORGE III, 236
George, Mademoiselle (Giorgina), 202, 203, 558
German. _See also_ Homage, Two Germans, and Unconquerable
Characterisation, 111
Genius. _See_ Homage
Opinions. _See_ Other
Germans. _See_ Concerning
German Spirit, 425
German Women. _See_ Two German Women
Germany, 87, 90, 109, 171, 184, 206, 244, 285, 286, 308, 309, 319,
333, 335, 359, 382, 407, 410, 420, 425, 427, 429, 430, 436, 440,
443, 570
Gibraltar, 307
Giorgina, 202, 203, 258
Giuliano, San, 180
GLENDOWER, 273
Gloom, 37.
_See also_ Hours
Gloomy Forebodings, 459
GNEISENAU, 522
Goblet, golden, 181
God protect France, 503
protect the King, 502
“God’s Image on Earth,” 277
GOETHE, 1, 53, 163, 256, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 357, 421, 449,
545, 551, 583, 602, 679, 681.
_See also_ How is
Goethean Motifs, 602
Goethe is imperturbable, 327
Goethe’s Epilogue, 449
GOHIER, 142, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153
Golden Goblet, 181
Good-night, Bourrienne, 161
Gospel and Republic, 86
Gospels, 86
GOURGAUD, 535, 602, 610, 611, 612, 613, 616, 620, 621, 625, 626, 628,
633, 635, 636, 637, 638, 639, 655
Gourgaud’s Petulance, 611
Government. _See_ Tottering
grows uneasy, 80
Grand Army, 424
Grape-shot. _See_ Why not use
Gratitude, 558
GRASSINI, 100, 192
Graz, 364, 427
Great Ambitions, 66
Great Britain, 662.
_See also_ England
Great Gambler, 442
Great Nation, 103, 109, 147
Great Pyramid, 11
Great St. Bernard, 178, 179
Greece, 319
GREGORY VII, 371
Grenoble, 498, 499, 500, 504
Grosbois, 389
Grouchy, 522, 523, 524
Growing Disquiet, 297
Grumble. _See_ Peasants
Guadarrama, 330
Guard, National. _See_ National Guard
Guard. _See_ Farewell
Gumbinnen, 387
Guns. _See_ Big
GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, 365
Habsburg Fertility (missing index entry added by transcriber), 350
Hamburg, 233, 381
Hamelin, 507
Hammerfest, 359
Hampered Energies, 523
HANNIBAL, 55, 178, 189, 534, 668, 669
modern, 178
Hanover, 374
Hansa Towns, 374, 439
Harassing Restrictions, 616
HARDENBERG, 383
Hat, 441
Hate. _See_ Brotherly
HATZFELD, 256
Havre, 650
HAYDN, 193
Headquarters, 92
Head Shepherd, 285
Heart. _See_ Sluggishness
He cheers up, 476
Hector, 598, 637
Hectoring the Diplomats, 104
He drafts an Abdication, 470
He dreams of India, 127
HEGEL, 450
Heir. _See_ Hunt for, _also_ Search for at last, 353
Helena. _See_ St. Helena
HENRY IV, 568, 592
Herald’s College, 6
Herat, 236
Hereditary Titles, 280
Heroes. _See_ Rebels of Antiquity, 229
_Hero’s Return_, 141
Herr Goethe. _See_ How
He seeks Death in Battle, 463
should have gone to America, 643
signs the Abdication, 474
threatens Paris, 100
threatens Rome, 284
Hesitations, 444
Hindustan, 268.
_See also_ India
HIPPOLYTE, 73, 93, 123, 142, 204, 597
His Dealings with the Masses, 592
Feeling for History, 565
first Sword, 9
Generals love and hate him, 587
little Son, 368
social Philosophy, 593
Son’s Heritage, 663
Son’s Portrait, 488
Successors steal his Property, 475
unfailing Memory, 175
History and France, 64
_History of Bonaparte_, 380
HOCHE, 114
Hofburg, 351, 369, 370
Hohenlinden, 206
HOHENLOHE, 253
Hohenstaufen, 336
Hohenzollern, 258, 408, 642
Holland, 116, 139, 183, 246, 247, 280, 287, 307, 371, 427, 428, 447,
453, 552, 559
HOLLAND, 615
Holy Battalion, 242
Father, 340, 370
Legion, 412
Moscow, 402
Roman Empire, 89
Russia, 404
Homage to German Genius, 318
Homely Monarch, 483
HOMER, 119, 622
Honour, 556.
_See also_ Legion of, _also_ Policy and
Hope. _See_ Stirrings
Hopeless, 14
HORTENSE DE BEAUHARNAIS (afterwards Wife of Louis Bonaparte), 47, 71,
143, 198, 202, 204, 222, 224, 247, 249, 298, 301, 428, 474, 486,
503, 520, 531, 533, 575, 633, 671
Hostilities, 619
Hôtel de l’Angleterre in Warsaw, 418
HOTHAM, 538
HOTSPUR, 273
Hours of Gloom, 637
House of Peers, 526.
_See also_ Upper House
“How is Herr Goethe?”, 421
How many of you are there?, 440
Human Heart. _See_ Sluggishness
Humaneness, 578
Hundred Days, 599, 609, 623
Hungary, 87, 341
Hunt for an Heir, 129
Husband. _See_ Fop
Hutt’s Gate, 615
“I.” _See_ First
Iago, 315
“I alone have Money,” 380
I am a Roman Emperor, 566
“I am the Man of Calculations,” 392
“I am the State,” 455
Ideals and Looting, 62
Idyll. _See_ An Idyll Secret
I have lost all Hope, 71
“I intended to kill you,” 342
_Iliad_, 622, 624
Illuminates, 343
Illyria, 438, 439, 610
Imagination, 594.
_See also_ Calculation
Imagination in its Cave, 12
“Imperial Diet” at Erfurt, 561
Imperial Dignity, 211
Imperialists. _See_ Rival
Imperturbable. _See_ Goethe is
Improvisation, 210
I must not stay here, 114
Inca State, 11
Incas. _See_ Aztecs
Indies, 89
In Chains, 615
Incorruptible. _See_ Letizia is
Increasing Tension, 146
India, 10, 11, 91, 127, 131, 137, 236, 258, 259, 268, 283, 359, 373,
617
Indus, 132
In Favour of the Working Classes, 191
Inertia. _See_ Disastrous Inertia
Influence. _See_ Stein’s
In Motley, 480
Inner Man, 303
Inquisition, 328, 331
In Pawn to the Old World, 506
In southern France, 30
Institute, 98, 114, 120, 129, 135, 147, 192, 520, 582
Interior. _See_ Army
In the Elysian Fields, 668
In the travelling Carriage, 335
Intrigues. _See_ Island of
and Enmities, 612
Invalides, 484
Invincible Fortress, 133
Invitation to Paris, 326
Inward Reserves, 482
Ionian Islands, 90, 91, 273
_Iphigenia in Aulis_, 637
Ireland, 372
Iron Age, 510
ISABEY, 227, 620
Islam, 637
Island, The. _See_ Corsica
This. _See_ This Island
of Intrigues, 27
Isola Bella, 100
Israel, 56
Issus, 242
Isthmus of Suez, 116, 131
Istria, 436
Italia unità, 62
Italian Temperament. _See_ Understands
Italy, 3, 40, 55, 56, 58, 59, 62, 63, 70, 75, 81, 82, 83, 89, 90, 93,
94, 96, 105, 106, 107, 136, 138, 139, 150, 178, 183, 210, 239,
240, 244, 246, 283, 284, 285, 287, 291, 298, 300, 336, 379, 412,
419, 436, 447, 453, 458, 472, 473, 481, 489, 535, 569, 591, 621,
632, 652, 676.
_See also_ Army, _also_ Eugene
Viceroy of. _See_ Eugene
I will die standing, 447
Jacobin Club, 23, 27, 145, 153, 303, 555
Jacobins, 25, 26
Jaffa, 132, 614, 646
Prisoners, 132
Jamestown, 615
Janina, 90
Jealousy, 76
Jena, 255, 256, 319, 323, 381, 500, 523, 555, 663.
_See also_ Battle of
JEROME BONAPARTE (afterwards King of Westphalia), 37, 125, 198, 248,
268, 287, 288, 294, 364, 382, 389, 394, 428, 430, 438, 452, 467,
474, 476, 520, 556, 580, 599, 632, 677
Jerome makes himself ridiculous, 288
Jerome’s American Marriage, 248
Jesus Christ, 371, 372, 600.
_See also_ Christ
JOHANNES VON MÜLLER, 319, 321, 323, 603
John (author of Revelation). _See_ St. John
JOHN THE GOOD, 534
JOMINI, 578
JOSEPH I, King of Spain, 308, 330.
_See also_ Joseph Bonaparte
JOSEPH (son of Jacob), 629
JOSEPH BONAPARTE (afterwards King of Naples, then King of Spain), 8,
13, 23, 27, 30, 38, 39, 45, 46, 72, 73, 92, 124, 144, 149, 198,
206, 207, 216, 222, 223, 224, 228, 246, 247, 268, 295, 300, 301,
302, 303, 308, 316, 330, 362, 364, 365, 428, 437, 438, 444, 452,
453, 456, 458, 459, 460, 461, 464, 465, 466, 531, 535, 579, 580,
590, 596, 597, 632, 634, 662
Joseph makes Difficulties, 330
JOSEPHINE DE BEAUHARNAIS (afterwards Empress), 47, 48, 49, 50, 51,
58, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99, 100, 109,
113, 114, 115, 118, 123, 124, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 149, 153,
161, 172, 193, 197, 199, 202, 203, 208, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218,
222, 226, 227, 234, 239, 246, 247, 257, 260, 264, 267, 275, 289,
290, 291, 296, 298, 301, 303, 316, 344, 345, 347, 353, 354, 367,
368, 452, 474, 485, 521, 531, 556, 557, 558, 578, 597, 603, 621,
670.
_See also_ Devotion
Josephine cometh not, 70
Josephine’s Anxieties, 203
Infidelity, 124
Plan of Campaign, 142
Swoon, 344
JOSEPHINE (Giorgina), 203, 558
JOURDAN, 149
Joyful Days for Letizia, 484
JUDAS, 629
JULIE CLARY (afterwards Wife of Joseph Bonaparte), 44, 301
JUNOT, 33, 35, 36, 73, 123, 124, 438, 588
Jupiter, 229, 370
Justifies himself on his Deathbed, 670
Kandahar, 268
KANT, 591, 593
Katzbach, 444
KAUNITZ, 243, 561
Kaunitz Castle, 561
KEBIR, EL, 128
KELLERMANN, 66, 67, 72
Key of St. Peter, 96
Kidnapping of Enghien, 206
Kill you. _See_ I Intended
King of Rome, 382
Kingdom in a Garden, 6
of Westphalia, 287
Kingdoms. _See_ New
King Lear upon the Heath, 397
King Log and King Stork, 247
King of France, 431
Kings. _See_ Audience of, _also_ Disgruntled
KIRCHEISEN, 683
Kissing the Colours, 478
Kléber, 120, 134, 137, 141, 587, 668
Königsberg, 387, 423, 425
KOLLER, 480
Koran, 119, 122, 123, 128
Kovno, 387
Knights of Malta, 103
Kremlin, 400, 401, 402, 403, 409, 410, 653
KUTUSOFF, 399, 400
La Belle Alliance, 523
LA BRUYÈRE, 74
Lacépède, 598
La Corniche, 650
Lady hesitates, 48
Lagoons, 89
LAFAYETTE, 526, 528, 564, 633, 660
LA FONTAINE, 628
LAMARCK, 602
La Mure, 498
Landing at Fréjus, 140
LANNES, 72, 112, 149, 219, 333, 337, 338, 587
Laon, 462, 468, 522, 525
LA PAGERIE, 115.
_See also_ JOSEPHINE.
LAPIE, 416, 417
LAPLACE, 114, 120, 169, 602
La Rothière, 457
LARREY, 661
La Scala, 100, 182
LAS CASES, 536, 538, 609, 610, 611, 624, 626, 628, 630, 636, 637,
641, 646, 647, 652, 655, 676
Last Bulletin from Russia, 417
Command, 673
Gifts, 671
Letter, 405
Offers of Friendship, 254
Touches, 149
Will and Testament, 659
LAVALETTE, 454, 511, 515, 530, 531, 533
LAVATER, 584
La Vendée. _See_ Vendée
La Vilette, 571
Lavishness. _See_ Oriental
Leads a retired Life, 113
Leaning on a birchen Staff, 412
Lear. _See_ King Lear
LEBRUN, 296
LECLERC, 93, 148
LEFÈVRE, 470
Legality. _See_ Semblances
Legatees. _See_ Ninety-seven
Leghorn, 96, 486, 493, 494
Legion of Honour, 192, 211, 212, 279, 348, 491, 501, 547, 556, 559,
560, 621, 663
Legions. _See_ Many
Legitimacy. _See_ Curse
Legitimist Weaknesses, 561
Leipzig, 370, 446, 448, 449, 450, 454, 522
Lemberg, 387
LEO, 86
Leoben, 88, 90, 93, 104
LÉON, 290, 299, 457, 486, 531, 664
LESSEPS, 131
LETIZIA BONAPARTE (“Madame Mère”), 4, 5, 16, 29, 30, 92, 94, 95, 199,
202, 225, 250, 331, 345, 427, 428, 451, 474, 483, 485, 486, 496,
631, 632, 634, 656, 676.
_See also_ Joyful Days
at the Fireside, 451
implores, 631
is full of Trouble, 427
is incorruptible, 250
Letter to Louis of Bourbon, 189
with an open Date, 672
_Letters on Corsica_, 15, 19
Levant, 420
Liberation. _See_ Price of, _also_ War of
Liberators. _See_ Army
Liberty. _See_ Equality
Lieutenant Reads, 10
Life at Montebello, 96
“Life is a trivial Dream,” 39
Life, retired. _See_ Leads
Ligny, 522
Lilliput, 483
Limping Mephistopheles, 379.
_See also_ TALLEYRAND
Lion, Advice of. _See_ That is
Lion of St. Mark, 96, 239
Lisbon, 248
Lithuania, 387, 410
Little Court, 93
Little Mother Russia, 398
Lobau, 578, 663
Lodi, 65, 66, 158, 331, 337
Log. _See_ King Log
Loire, 473
Lombardy, 40, 55, 62, 65, 68, 69, 75, 83, 89, 178, 284, 289, 391,
566, 588
London, 205, 334, 361, 362, 492, 538, 615, 617
Loneliness, 38.
_See also_ Daimonic
Lonely Man, 263
Longwood, 608, 610, 614, 615, 616, 617, 619, 675
Looting. _See_ Ideals
Loudoun, 617
LOUIS XIV, 302, 312, 327, 574.
_See also_ Roi Soleil
LOUIS XVI, 22, 44, 221, 644
LOUIS XVIII. _See_ Louis of Bourbon
Louis of Bourbon, Count of Provence (afterwards Louis XVIII), 96,
189, 209, 466, 490, 491, 501, 502, 516, 561, 627, 628, 634, 660,
663.
_See also_ Letter to, and Louis XVIII
LOUIS BONAPARTE (afterwards King of Holland), 21, 33, 38, 77, 198,
202, 222, 223, 224, 246, 247, 267, 268, 303, 307, 308, 363, 364,
427, 428, 451, 452, 520, 552, 561, 564, 603, 671
LOUIS FERDINAND, 253
LOUIS PHILIPPE, 664
LOUISE, MARIE. _See_ MARIE LOUISE
Louise, Queen of Prussia, 254, 257, 258, 267, 274, 275, 590
Louvre, 83, 650
Love Letter from the Battle-field, 74
Love of Frankness, 554
LOWE, SIR HUDSON, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 638, 640, 658
Lady, 611
Lowe’s Animus, 618
Lower House, 517, 520, 623.
_See also_ Chamber of Deputies
Lucca, 184
LUCIEN BONAPARTE (Archdeacon), 23
LUCIEN BONAPARTE (Napoleon’s Brother, afterwards Prince of Canino),
27, 38, 39, 96, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 158, 159,
160, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 222, 225, 249, 251, 266, 291-306,
427, 452, 475, 485, 520, 525, 526, 529, 531, 533, 632, 662, 676
Lucien as Rival, 196
Lucien’s Portrait of Napoleon, 291
Luck. _See_ Stroke of
Lunéville, 182, 680
Lure of the East, 90
Lutheranism, 285
Lutheran Terminology, 285
Lützen, 433, 439, 500
Lyons, 21, 22, 81, 141, 481, 500, 504, 625, 629, 650, 651
Academy, 21, 22
MACDONALD, 396, 448, 462, 470, 471, 472, 473
Macedonia, 90
Machiavelli, 10
Madame Mère, 225, 345, 459.
_See also_ Letizia
Madeleine, 269
Madras, 620
Madrid, 197, 286, 308, 327, 330, 333, 400, 405, 408, 438, 566
MÆCENAS, 529
Maggiore, 100
Magon, 235
MAHOMET, 310.
_See also_ MOHAMMED.
_Mahomet_, 309, 655
Mai. _See_ Champ
Main, 382
MAITLAND, 538, 539
Mainz, 112, 376, 433, 442, 450, 451, 650
Malay. _See_ Tobias
Malet, 413
Malmaison, 124, 204, 237, 346, 347, 353, 474, 485, 520, 530, 531,
533, 552, 558, 633, 643, 662, 671.
_See also_ Reveries
Malta, 103, 118, 362
Maltese, 122
Mamelukes, 121, 132, 135
Mameluke, The, 335, 416.
_See also_ RUSTAM
Man. _See_ Inner, _also_ Lonely, _also_ Only the strong
born to rule, 98
of Destiny, 604
of Figures, 570
Manœuvres. _See_ Poet’s
Mantua, 40, 73, 75, 78, 139, 206, 292, 305
Many Legions, 387
MARCHAND, 613, 620, 658, 661, 663, 671, 673
Marchfeld, 338
Marching to Victory, 239
March of the Thousand, 498
Marengo, 173, 179, 180, 182, 232, 240, 245, 337, 359, 419, 461, 524,
577, 625, 629, 663, 675, 680
Maret, 413, 455, 457, 458, 459, 474, 493, 507
Marianne (the French Republic), 216
MARIA THERESA, 464
MARIE, 263, 476, 664.
_See also_ WALEWSKA
MARIE ANTOINETTE, 219, 349, 351
MARIE LOUISE, 351, 352, 354, 369, 370, 386, 387, 432, 464, 475, 476,
477, 487, 505, 506, 515, 621, 663, 670, 676
Marie Louise’s Treason, 505
_Marie, ou les peines d’amour_, 364
Marie’s Posy Ring, 270
MARK. _See_ ST. MARK
MARK ANTONY, 661
MARMONT, 33, 36, 66, 70, 77, 125, 136, 148, 149, 150, 220, 363, 399,
433, 445, 446, 449, 462, 463, 464, 465, 467, 468, 470, 471, 472,
499, 507, 510, 553, 558, 587, 633, 634, 660
Marmont’s Desertion, Consequences of, 471
Treason, 468
Marne, 464
Marriage. _See_ Jerome’s, _also_ Reasons for, _also_ Undermined
and Divorce, 171
Marseilles, 27, 29, 30, 500
Martinique, 46, 47, 372
Martyrdom. _See_ Price
Masked Ball. _See_ At the
Masséna, 60, 61, 72, 81, 91, 139, 147, 281, 362, 363, 375, 500, 587,
668, 673, 679
Mathematician and Seer, 56
Mathematics. _See_ Dreams and
MAUBREUIL, 466
Maundy Thursday, 500
Mecklenburg, 273
Mediterranean, 91, 103, 115, 117, 121, 137, 138, 339, 476, 480, 483,
486, 535
Fleet, 372
Medicis, 427
MÉHUL, 554
Melas, 179
Member of the Institute, 582
Memel, 270, 273, 373, 388, 389, 391, 419, 642
Memoirs, 623
_Memoirs_ (Bourrienne’s), 681
Memorable Conversation, 439
_Memorial of St. Helena_, 609
Memory, 572
unfailing, 175
Méneval, 204, 205, 221, 302, 346, 350, 396, 515
Mephistopheles, 314, 575
the limping, 379.
_See also_ TALLEYRAND
“Mercure de France,” 277
MERVELDT, 446, 447
MESSALINA, 306
Mess, Cleaning up the, 176
Messenger. _See_ Third
Messengers from the East, 268
Messiah, 600
Metternich, 271, 307, 312, 318, 347, 353, 369, 375, 383, 385, 423,
430, 436, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 455, 493, 504, 511, 548,
559, 578, 587, 589, 642.
_See also_ News for
Metz, 650
Mexico, 307, 534, 536, 632
Midilli, 20
Milan, 64, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 93, 94, 97, 105, 118,
139, 181, 210, 218, 230, 347, 378, 400, 405, 566
Millesimo, 521
MILTON, 622
Ministry for Foreign Affairs, 101.
_See also_ Foreign Office
for War, 372.
_See also_ War Office
Minsk, 387
Mio dolce Amor, 49
MIRABEAU, 10, 18, 20
Miscalculation, 79
Mob. _See_ Execrated
Modena, 75, 76
Modern Hannibal, 178
Mohammed, 122.
_See also_ Mahomet
Mohammedanism, 122
Moldavia, 259, 375
Mole-hill. _See_ Europe.
MOLIÈRE, 622
Monarch. _See_ Homely
Monarchy. _See_ Contradictions
Money, 586.
_See also_ I alone
MONGE, 120, 138
“Moniteur,” 33, 79, 205, 428, 500, 620
Mont Cenis, 650
Monsieur Bonaparte, 640
Montebello, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 105, 113.
_See also_ Life at
Montereau, 460
MONTESQUIEU, 10, 120, 279, 457
Monteverde, 100
Mont Genèvre, 650
MONTHOLON, 599, 612, 613, 621, 623, 628, 635, 636, 646, 654, 658,
659, 661, 664, 672, 674
Madame, 638, 646
Montmirail, 500, 663
MONTMORENCY, 279
Moodiness, 281
Moods. _See_ Fourth-act
MOORE, 615
Moravia, 242
MOREAU, 114, 133, 148, 167, 178, 205, 438, 443, 444, 530, 587
More Family Troubles, 364
More Peace Proposals, 236
Morfontaine, 330, 452, 457
_Mort de César_, 645
MORTIER, 464, 471, 472
Moscow, 286, 373, 393, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 404,
405, 409, 410, 413, 419, 440, 455, 476, 489, 500, 509, 554, 566,
637, 653
Moskva, 399, 403, 500
Moselle, 26
MOSES, 56, 130, 600, 601, 622
Wells of, 130, 601
Mother. _See_ Emperor and his
Mother Letizia, 94
Mother Russia, 398
Mother’s Life comes first, 354
Motley, 480
MOULIN, 139, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153
MUIRON, 77, 535, 536, 618, 662
“Muiron,” 137
MÜLLER, JOHANNES, 319, 321, 323, 603
(Chancellor, Weimar), 555
Mummy in Court Dress, 231
Munich, 205
MURAT (afterwards King of Naples), 43, 44, 48, 72, 92, 135, 148, 149,
160, 198, 219, 222, 224, 247, 248, 281, 308, 330, 331, 336, 349,
364, 366, 388, 390, 395, 402, 411, 412, 417, 421, 428, 429, 450,
451, 475, 494, 570, 587, 614, 633, 644, 668
and Bernadotte, 429
Murder. _See_ Slow
Mure, 498
Muscovy, 392, 401.
_See also_ Russia
Mutable Many, 355
My Cause. _See_ Espouse
“My Game is going awry,” 445
“My Sceptre is from God,” 371
“My Star is setting,” 434
Mystifications, 204
My Strength is builded on a Rock, 223
Naïve Aside, 228
Name your Children after me, 243
Naples, 82, 183, 246, 300, 308, 336, 412, 421, 494, 570
King of. _See_ Joseph, _also_ Murat
NAPOLEON I, passim. _See also_, Comparison, Lucien’s Portrait, Resume
the Name, St. Napoleon
II, 529, 530, 613, 634.
_See also_ NAPOLEON FRANCIS
III, 613
and Maitland, 538
and the Royalists, 190
FRANCIS, King of Rome (“Napoleon II”), 382, 488, 660.
_See also_ Napoleon II, Rome, King of
Napoleonic Idea, 596
Napoleon Museum, 651
Napoleon’s Defence, 209
Napoleon the Conqueror, 257
Napoleon’s Treasure, 651
Napoleon II, 529
NAPOLIONE, 5, 19, 216, 676
NARBONNES, 279
Nation, Great. _See_ Great Nation
National Assembly, 18
Guard, 17, 23, 24, 42, 44, 57, 177, 414, 420, 424, 454, 457, 458,
465, 481, 525
Natural Philosophy, 601
NECKER, 110
NEIPPERG, 488, 515
NELSON, 118, 119, 126, 240
NERO, 277
NESSELRODE, 379, 465
NEY, 219, 423, 445, 470, 471, 472, 500, 501, 509, 510, 522, 587, 633,
668
Ney’s Remorse, 509
New Testament, 600
New Kingdoms, 246
Programme, 502
News for Metternich, 504
Nice, 30, 33, 34, 51, 57, 139, 433, 650
Niemer. _See_ Memel
Nile, 121, 126, 130, 131, 135, 141, 360, 566
Nineteenth Brumaire, 295, 304, 479.
_See also_ Eighteenth Brumaire, _also_ Brumaire
Ninety-seven Legatees, 661
Niobe, 346, 474
NOAILLES, 279
Nobles’ School, 6
Normandy, 568
“Northumberland,” 543, 608
No Sea Legs, 233
“Not one Polish Village,” 377
Notre Dame, 185, 227, 230, 242, 338, 452, 456, 500
Not so lucky as Genghis Khan, 644
No Tragedies!, 298
Norway, 386
Novels, 396
Number again. _See_ Fantasy
Nuremberg, 252, 450
Oder, 258, 382, 431
_Odyssey_, 622
Œdipus, 310
_Œdipus_, 622
Offers of Friendship. _See_ Last
Old Companions. _See_ Fate of
Friends betray him, 462
Home, 139
Regime, 218
Tempo and the New, 522
Testament, 600
Oldenburg, 374, 375, 377
O’MEARA, 617, 620, 646, 656
Omens. _See_ Russian
On Foot into Warsaw, 418
“Only the strong Man is good,” 22
Onslaught. _See_ Emperor’s
On the Alert, 494
the Banks of the Seine, 465
the “Bellerophon,” 539
Opening of the Family Dramas, 199
Operations Department, 40
Opinion, Bureau of Public, 380, 381
Opinions. _See_ Other, _also_ Two
Opponents. _See_ Candour to
Orangerie, 155
Orbits of the Satellites, 632
Orestes, 309
“Orient,” 118, 121
Oriental Devices, 128
Oriental Lavishness, 112
ORLEANS, 634, 658, 676
_Ossian_, 37, 119, 622, 639
Ostend, 175
Osterode, 266
Othello, 71
Other German Opinions, 450
OUDINOT, 462, 470, 507, 508
Our Father of Blessed Memory, 222
Ourcq, 191, 571
Outbreak of War, 253
Outlaw him, 158
Overestimating the Foe, 389
Over my dead Body, 620
Overtures. _See_ First
OWEN GLENDOWER, 273
PAGERIE. _See_ JOSEPHINE
PAISIELLO, 554
Palais Bourbon, 529
Palazzo Serbelloni, 69, 70, 80
PAOLI, 4, 5, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 36, 95, 538, 657
Papal States, 84, 285, 371
_Paradise Lost_, 622
Parcæ, 432
Paris, passim. _See also_ Back to, He threatens, Invitation to,
Putsch in, Rising in, Road to, Tsar in, What is
PARISET, 683
Parma, 300, 475, 650, 676
Parody. _See_ Etiquette
Partition of Europe, 273
Patriotic Society, 20
_Paul et Virginie_, 37
Tsar of Russia, 230, 232
PAULINE BONAPARTE (afterwards Princess Borghese), 92, 95, 198, 247,
248, 298, 303, 364, 485, 488, 495, 531, 633, 659, 662, 676
Pause in the Advance, 390
Pavia, 178
Peace. _See_ First Overtures
Policy, 183
Proposals. _See_ Further, _also_ More
with Rome, 185
Peasants. _See_ Arm
begin to grumble, 382
Peninsular War, 362, 654
People. _See_ General
needs a Chief, 106
People’s Commissary for War, 36
PERCY, 661
PERETTI, 20
Persia, 268
PETER. _See_ ST. PETER
Petersburg. _See_ St. Petersburg
Petroffsky Palace, 403
Pharsalia, 679
PHÉLIPPEAUX, 133
Philip II, 327, 328, 331, 566
PHILIPPE. _See_ LOUIS PHILIPPE
_Philoctète_, 622
_Philosophie Zoologique_, 602
Pianosa, 481
PICHEGRU, 205, 206, 207
Picture of Philip II, 328
Piedmont, 58, 184, 650
Pied Piper, 507
Pin. _See_ Scarab
Pisa, 484
PIUS VI, 85
VII, 226, 227, 370, 371, 429
Place occupied. _See_ First Place
Plan. _See_ Egyptian
Plans for a Coup d’État, 147
for a Rescue, 635
for World Conquest, 372
Plantation House, 617
PLATO, 10
Plebeians at Court, 219
Plot and Counterplot, 205
Plough. _See_ Emperor drives
PLUTARCH, 6, 7, 19, 21, 34, 64, 69, 97, 119, 188, 212, 213, 679
Plymouth, 540, 542, 610
Po, 58, 65, 75, 127
Poet. _See_ Emperor scores
Poet’s Manœuvres, 325
Poland, 258, 259, 273, 285, 329, 375, 383, 385, 387, 401, 420, 433,
435, 447, 486, 492, 548, 590
Polish War, Second, 387
Poisoning the Plague-stricken, 134
Policy and Honour, 293
towards the Peoples, 590
Polish Countess, 261
Village. _See_ Not one
Political Consequences, 194
Programme, 102
Testament, 665
Politics on the Stage, 310
Pomerania, 365, 429, 438
POMPEY, 566
Pontine Marshes, 650
Pope. _See_ Gregory VII, _also_ Leo, Pius VI, Pius VII, Short Way with
Porte, 103
Porto Ferrajo, 481
Portrait. _See_ His Son’s
of Napoleon. _See_ Lucien’s
Portugal, 183, 362
Posen, 260, 387
Posy Ring. _See_ Marie’s
Potsdam, 256, 319, 321, 663
“Pourvou que cela doure,” 199, 225, 451
Poverty, 7
Prague, 435, 437, 440, 442, 443
Preamble, 660
Pressburg, 244, 603
Preussisch-Eylau. _See_ Eylau
Priam, 598
Price of Liberation, 83
of Martyrdom, 636
Princes. _See_ Servile
Princess. _See_ Which
Principles. _See_ False to
Prison, 34.
_See also_ Socrates
Prisoner. _See_ Examination
Programme. _See_ New, _also_ Political
Prometheus, 649
bound, 649
Promised Land, 56, 59, 63, 178
Property. _See_ His Successors
Prophet, 122
of Evil, 311
Protestantism, 285
Provence, 382, 478
Count of, 189.
_See also_ Louis of Bourbon
Province. _See_ This Island
Prussia, 8, 171, 183, 212, 251, 252, 253, 256, 257, 273, 274, 276,
286, 308, 333, 334, 383, 408, 424, 425, 429, 430, 433, 435, 439,
493, 568, 571, 576, 651.
_See also_ Broil with, _also_ Louise, Queen of Prussia
vacillates, 383
Psychologist, 584
Public Execration, 28
Opinion, Bureau of, 380, 381
Pultava, 393
Pultusk, 265
Putsch in Paris, 413
Pygmies, 436
Pyramid, 11
Pyrenees, 362, 455, 650
Quai Desaix, 191
Quatre Bras, 522
Queen of Prussia. _See_ Louise
QUERELLE, 206
QUIXOTE, 328
Racine, 597, 622, 637
RADZIWILL, 279
RAPP, 204, 256, 342, 388, 389, 398, 411, 508, 509.
_See also_ Conversation
Rastatt, 112, 118
RAYNAL, 10, 11
RAYNEVAL, 418
Reading, 622
Reasons for the Marriage, 50
Rebels or Heroes, 645
Rebuffs. _See_ Two Rebuffs
RÉCAMIER, 38
Red Cockade, 17
Sea, 116, 566
Regent Diamond, 651
Reggio, 359
Regime. _See_ Old
Reichenbach, 435
Relatives. _See_ Advancement of, _also_ Untrustworthy
RÉMUSAT, 214, 215, 278, 591
_Republic_, 10
Rescue. _See_ Plans
Reserves. _See_ Inward
Restoration, 313
Resume the Name of Napoleon, 664
Resurrexit, 677
Retired Life. _See_ Leads
Retrospect, 646
Return of the Emperor, 497
Returning Courage, 454
Revanche!, 264
Revelation of St. John the Divine, 1
Revenges. _See_ Time’s
Reveries at Malmaison, 531
Reverse, 18
Revolution. _See_ Drums
Revolutionary Traits, 559
Revolution is at an End, 177
“Revue des Etudes Napoléoniennes,” 683
Rex. _See_ Fridericus
Rheims, 113
Rhine, 89, 118, 150, 178, 206, 207, 238, 253, 308, 373, 382, 388,
420, 424, 425, 433, 443, 445, 447, 450, 452, 453, 455, 458, 591.
_See also_ Army of, Confederation
-Rhone Canal, 650
Rhodes, 24
Rhone, 30
Rhythm of the Epoch, 426
RICHARD, 630
RICHELIEU, 101, 633
Ridiculous. _See_ Jerome makes
Ring, Posy. _See_ Marie’s
Rio de Janeiro, 635
Rising. _See_ Attempted
in Paris, 42
Rival. _See_ Lucien as
Imperialists, 374
Riviera, 72, 496
Rivoli, 337, 378, 389, 462, 621
Road to Paris, 503
_Robbers_, 381
ROBESPIERRE, Joseph, 32, 35
Maximilien, 25, 30, 34, 35, 47, 498, 511
Rochefort, 535, 540, 541, 565, 643
Rock, The. _See_ St. Helena
ROEDERER, 149, 169, 174, 181, 201, 213, 219, 453, 550, 558, 562, 564,
569, 572, 585
Roi Soleil, 227, 288, 327, 455.
_See also_ Louis XIV
Romagna, 99
Roman, 19.
_See also_ Holy
ROMANZOFF, 316, 333
Rome, 63, 82, 85, 86, 99, 185, 212, 225, 226, 245, 283, 285, 292,
336, 337, 338, 340, 371, 372, 382, 393, 459, 465, 467, 469, 475,
478, 485, 486, 488, 566, 593, 631, 676.
_See also_ He threatens, Peace with, The Eternal, Understanding
Rome, King of, 382, 459, 465, 467, 469, 488, 617.
_See also_ Napoleon II, _also_ Napoleon Francis
Rossbach, 679
Rosetta, 130, 147
Rothière. _See_ La Rothière
ROUSSEAU, 8, 11, 21, 111, 166, 229, 605
Royalists. _See_ Napoleon and
Rubicon, 85, 389
RUDOLF (of Habsburg), 370
Rulers by divine Right, 437
Ruling from afar, 269
Russia, 183, 211, 239, 251, 258, 259, 311, 314, 318, 359, 360, 373,
375, 379, 380, 382, 383, 386, 387, 396, 397, 398, 404, 412, 418,
419, 420, 423, 430, 432, 433, 439, 441, 443, 459, 522, 528, 553,
554, 571, 662, 667.
_See also_ Muscovy, _also_ Last Bulletin
Russian Omens, 265
RUSTAM, 135, 266, 292, 339, 396.
_See also_ Mameluke
Saale, 446
Saalfeld, 253
Saint-Antoine, 218, 527
St. Bernard, Great, 178, 179
Saint-Cloud, 147, 153, 154, 160, 189, 220, 221, 295, 432, 526, 620.
_See also_ Back Room
Saint-Denis, 532
STE. GENEVIÈVE, 456
Saint-Germain, 218, 466
St. Helena, 13, 473, 541, 543, 545-677.
_See also_ Corsica comes
St. John, Church of, in Moscow, 410
ST. JOHN THE DIVINE, 1
ST. LOUIS, 501
ST. MARK, 96
ST. NAPOLEON, 339, 484
ST. PETER, 96, 648
St. Petersburg, 333, 349, 375, 376, 395, 396, 401, 404, 405, 409,
410, 553
St. Sophia, 270, 385
Salamanca, 399, 414
SALICETI, 26, 27, 31, 35, 37, 65, 66, 80, 95
Salle Apollo, 155
Salzburg, 240
San Domingo, 590, 630
San Giuliano, 180
Sanhedrin, 590
Sans Souci, 257, 566.
_See also_ Visions in
SANTINI, 613
Saragossa, 333
Sardinia, 40, 59, 60, 65
King of, 59, 60
Satan, 568
Satellites. _See_ Orbits
Savants. _See_ To the
SAVARY, 461, 529
Savona, 370, 650
Saxony, 325, 433, 443, 447, 493
Scala, La, 100, 182
Scarab Pin, 367
Scene with Lucien. _See_ Climax
Scepticism, 600
Sceptre. _See_ My Sceptre
SCHARNHORST, 253, 383, 437
SCHELLING, 450
Schemes. _See_ Fantastic Schemes, _also_ Worldwide Schemes
SCHERER, 136
SCHILLER, 416
SCHLEIERMACHER, 437
Schönbrunn, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342, 345, 353, 430, 486, 548,
573, 578, 588, 589
SCHWARZENBERG, 348, 559
Schweidnitz, 269
SCHWARZENBERG, 367, 396, 443, 444, 461, 462, 468, 604
SCIPIO, 64, 189, 668
Scion of the lesser Nobility, 562
Scrivia, 180
Scutari, 90
Sea Legs. _See_ No
Search for an Heir, 201
Second Dream, 672
Polish War, 387
Wife, 369
Secret Idyll, 267
Session. _See_ Deputies
Seeks Death. _See_ He seeks Death
Seer. _See_ Mathematician
SÉGUR, 175, 227, 402
Seine, 465, 650, 659
Self-confidence, 551
Criticism, 642
Crowned Emperor, 227
SELIM, 474
Semblances of Legality, 154
Semmering, 548
Senate, 90, 186, 198, 201, 210, 214, 296, 297, 353, 423, 445, 467,
468, 469, 484, 518, 562, 565.
_See also_ Genoese
House (Roman), 565
Sense of Destiny, 360
Sensitive Nerves, 549
Serbelloni, Palace, 69, 70, 80
Serbia, 375
Servants. _See_ Faithful
Servile Princes, 317
Sèvres, 621
Seydlitz, 679
She lays Siege, 143
Shepherd, Head, 285
Shiraz, 132
Short Way with the Pope, 336
Shot at Dawn, 207
SHUVALOFF, 480
Sicily, 118, 119, 372, 429
Siege of Toulon, 31
Sierra de Guadarrama, 330
SIEYÈS, 139, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 159, 168,
528
Signature. _See_ Awaiting
Silesia, 259, 382, 383, 435, 443, 444
Simple Tastes, 221
Simplicity, 553
Simplon, 650
“Simply Dead,” 602
Simulated Wrath, 576
“Sire, your Brother Lucien,” 292
Sisters. _See_ Brothers and
Slow Murder, 669
Sluggishness of the human Heart, 487
Smelting Works, 485
Smolensk, 387, 390, 395, 396, 397, 411, 412, 500
Snare. _See_ Dynastic
SOCRATES, 647
Soissons, 525
Sombre Thoughts, 366
Son! _See_ A Son!, _also_ His little
Sons of the People as Generals, 60
Son’s Portrait. _See_ His
SOPHOCLES, 622
_Sorrows of Werther_, 120.
_See also_ _Werther_
SOUCHET, 472
SOULT, 325, 330, 472, 580
Southern France. _See_ In southern
Spain, 116, 171, 183, 259, 300, 306, 307, 308, 312, 328, 329, 330,
333, 336, 359, 362, 363, 368, 375, 379, 382, 383, 390, 399, 420,
421, 427, 433, 437, 444, 447, 468, 560, 590, 595, 642, 675.
_See also_ Bad News
Spanish America, 632
Spanish Dynasty, 306
Sparta, 21, 63, 69
Spezia, 650
Sphinx, 121.
_See also_ Bonaparte
Spirit and Sword, 167
STAËL, 110, 198, 207, 216, 231, 277, 320, 429, 510, 511, 554
Stage. _See_ Politics on the
Management, 589
STANISLAS, 419
STAPS, 342, 343, 344
State. _See_ I am
State, Prisoner, 415, 416
Statesman and Commander, 181
Stein, 258, 333, 393, 406, 407, 408, 409, 437, 451, 493, 505
Stein’s decisive Influence, 604
Stickler for Morality, 557
Stirrings of Hope, 634
Stock Exchange, 176, 269
Stockholm, 282
Stork. _See_ King Log
Storming Pace, 220
Storming the Habsburg Fortress, 352
Story of Waterloo, 624
Strasburg, 372, 509
Street. _See_ Burning
Fighting, 44
“Strike off my Chains!”, 35
Stroke and Counterstroke, 375
Stroke of Luck, 424
Strong Man. _See_ Only the
Struggle against Venality, 84
Struggles in Vienna, 492
Strumpet. _See_ Fortune
“Stupidest Thing in my Life!,” 329
Stürmer, 611
Styria, 86
Subordinates. _See_ Treatment
Successors steal his Property, 475
Such is my Will, 69
Suez, 116, 131, 147
Sugar. _See_ Coffee
Surinam, 372
SUSSEX, 615
SUVAROFF, 405
Sweden, 365, 386, 430
Swiftly westward, 420
Switzerland, 10, 139, 171, 183, 246
Sword. _See_ First Frederick’s Spirit
Sympathetic, 598
Syria, 119, 131, 132
System. _See_ Continental European
TACITUS, 277, 319, 320, 321, 560, 565
Tagus, 308, 528
TAMERLANE, 652
Talk. _See_ Tea
Talking and Questioning, 585
TALLEYRAND (afterwards Prince of Benevento), 100, 101, 102, 103, 108,
109, 110, 113, 116, 133, 147, 148, 152, 153, 177, 182, 185, 205,
206, 208, 219, 230, 231, 240, 244, 246, 253, 291, 295, 303, 311,
312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 323, 331, 332, 333, 338, 349,
374, 378, 379, 406, 431, 453, 459, 465, 466, 467, 468, 473, 474,
475, 494, 510, 557, 560, 561, 571, 575, 576, 586, 589, 600, 642,
660
and Fouché, 182
as Internationalist, 315
indispensable, 313
is a Traitor, 312
rules, 467
smiles, 333
TALLIEN, 38, 47, 71, 75, 557
TALMA, 218, 309, 502, 535, 592
Taranto, 233
TASSO, 457
Tastes. _See_ Simple
Tatterdemalion Army, 57
Taxis. _See_ Thurn
Tea and Talk, 314
Teeth. _See_ Four
Tempo, 571.
_See also_ Old
Terminology. _See_ Lutheran
Terror, 46, 167
Testament, Napoleon’s, New, 600
Old, 600
“That is the Advice of a Lion,” 410
Théâtre Français, 191, 390
The Eternal City, 286.
_See also_ Rome
“The Mother’s Life comes first!”, 354
The People need a Chief, 106
Themistocles, 537, 542, 565
Thinking. _See_ What is Alexander
Thinking Things over, 491
Third Messenger, 404
Thirteenth Vendémiaire, 44, 50
Thirty Years’ War, 624
This Island, this Province, 95
“This War will last three Years,” 395
Thoughts. _See_ Sombre
Thousand. _See_ March
Three Years. _See_ This War
Thrift, 278
Through the Enemy’s Fleet, 137
Thurn and Taxis, 314
TIBERIUS, 566
Tidings from the Congress, 493
Tiflis, 269
Tilsit, 270, 274, 282, 308, 315, 375, 380, 383, 384, 385, 390, 404,
406, 548, 553, 589, 642, 651
Threatens Rome. _See_ He threatens
Three Cheers, 627
Fundamental Powers, 550
“Time is Everything,” 32, 60
Time’s Revenges, 408
Tippoo Sahib, 127
Tiring Job, 606
Tirol. _See_ Tyrol
Titles. _See_ Hereditary
Tobias, the Malay, 629, 630
“To Destiny!”, 51
TOLLY. _See_ Barclay de Tolly
TOLSTOY, 312, 404
“Too far, Sire,” 388
Too small. _See_ Europe
To Rochefort, 535
Tortona, 72
To the Savants, 97
Tottering Government, 145
Toulon, 6, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 57, 72, 115, 118, 128, 137, 139, 140,
460, 476, 662.
_See also_ Siege of
Tours, 650
Trafalgar, 240, 252
Tragedies. _See_ No Tragedies
Tragedy of Childlessness, 200
of Fulfilment, 282
Tragical Dilemma, 516
TRAJAN, 566
Transitional Characteristics, 560
Travelling Carriage, 335
Treason. _See_ Marie Louise’s Treason, _also_ Marmont’s Treason
Treatment of Subordinates, 588
Treviso, 370
Trianon, 249, 346
Tribunate, 214
Triest, 89
Trinity, 122
Triumphal Entry. _See_ First
Triumvirs, 154
TRONCHET, 169, 174, 194
Troubles thicken, 515
Troy, 637
TRUCHSESS, 480
True Aim, 299
Tsar Alexander, 271.
_See also_ Alexander
breaks away, 334
in Paris, 466
Tuckets for the Crowd, 105
Tugendbund, 383
Turks. _See_ Victory
TURENNE, 279, 574, 655
Turn of Fortune’s Wheel, 40
Turkey, 41, 90, 333, 375
Turkish Empire, 90, 91, 103
Tuscany, 66, 82, 427, 475, 487, 559
Two Emperors, 244
German Women, 256
Hundred and Fifty Men, 458
Opinions, 275
Rebuffs, 46
Tyrol, 40, 75, 333
Udine, 102
Ulm, 239, 500, 663
Unconquerable German, 343
Undermined Marriage, 115
Understanding with Rome, 85
Understands the Italian Temperament, 63
Under the Stars, 120
Unfailing Memory, 175
Unfeeling, 597
Unflagging Industry, 573
United Europe, 82, 378, 667
United States of America, 100, 390, 530, 533, 595, 643
of Europe, 245, 359, 378, 496, 514, 595, 596
Unity of Command, 67
Untrustworthy Relatives, 144
Upper House, 517, 520
Vacillations, 536
Valençay, 312
Valence, 9, 14, 21, 24, 141, 553, 608
Valladolid, 331, 340, 548
Varennes, 22
Vatican, 84, 85, 95, 185, 337
State Papers, 371
Venality. _See_ Struggle
Vendée, 31, 36, 41, 189, 205, 590
Vendémiaire, Thirteenth, 44, 50
Vendôme Column, 676
Venice, 72, 82, 89, 90, 100, 117, 239, 240, 241, 593, 650, 662, 669
Venetian Sbirro, 614
Verona, 73, 240
Versailles, 6, 672
Viceroy of Italy. _See_ Eugene
Victory. _See_ Excommunication and, First Victory, Marching to
and Disillusionment, 78
over the Turks, 135
Vienna, 40, 86, 88, 96, 103, 118, 133, 286, 317, 334, 336, 348, 349,
351, 369, 386, 387, 400, 405, 430, 431, 439, 443, 459, 460, 488,
489, 492, 493, 494, 504, 511, 514, 515, 516, 538, 548, 559, 589,
668, 676
Vilette, 571
Vilna, 387, 390, 391, 392, 393, 397, 413, 419
VIGNALI, 670
Vincennes, 206
VINCENT, 316, 329
VIRGIL, 655
VISCONTI, 92
Visions in Sans Souci, 259
Visitors, 262
Vistula, 265, 382, 393, 431, 528
Vitebsk, 395
Vittoria, 437, 627
Vive l’Empereur, 399, 414, 448, 468, 477, 478, 499, 500, 524, 527
le Roi, 478
“Voilà un homme!”, 323
Volant. _See_ Eagle
Volga, 390
VOLTAIRE, 8, 10, 120, 166, 229, 259, 309, 320, 321, 591, 645, 655
Volcano. _See_ Extinct
Wagram, 338, 340, 381, 461, 500, 520, 567, 587, 629
Waiting for Death, 655
Walewska, 260, 264, 267, 289, 338, 339, 342, 349, 353, 418, 457, 476,
486, 633
again, 339
WALEWSKI, 664
Wallachia, 375
_Wallenstein_, 417
_Wallenstein’s Death_, 509
War. _See_ Fatal, Fortune of, Outbreak, Peninsular, This
as an Art, 579
Office, 40, 41.
_See also_ Ministry for War
of Liberation, 287
Warfare. _See_ Commercial
War is an Anachronism, 582
Warnings, 520
Warsaw, 259, 260, 375, 376, 418, 419, 421, 439, 548, 576.
_See also_ On Foot
WASHINGTON, 645
Waterloo, 523, 524, 527, 567, 605, 617, 624, 626, 637, 642, 650, 651,
653
_See also_ Defeat, Story
Wavre, 522
We have to forget, 514
We must be content, 501
“We need him in the Army,” 36
Weathercocks, Dictionary of, 638
Weimar, 255, 256, 318, 320, 325, 330, 421, 449, 493, 603
Wellington, 362, 368, 399, 437, 491, 522, 524, 533, 534, 567, 626, 662
Wells of Moses, 130, 601
_Werther_, 119, 323, 324.
_See also_ Sorrows
Weser, 374
West Indies, 51, 313
Westminster, 13
Westphalia, 252, 287.
_See also_ Kingdom of
Westward. _See_ Swiftly
What a Ballad my Life has been, 653
is Alexander thinking?, 385
is Paris saying?, 276
Where is Ney?, 500
is the Enemy?, 391
Which Princess?, 349
Whither to go, 534
Why not use Grape-shot?, 26
WIELAND, 320, 321, 322, 323
Wife. _See_ Josephine, His second, Marie Louise
WILDHAGEN, 683
Will. _See_ Last
Without a Fatherland, 657
Women. _See_ Two German
are Slaves, 599
Wooing. _See also_ Courtship, Fruitless
Words overheard, 415
Working Classes. _See_ In Favour of
World Conquest. _See_ Plans
Worldwide Schemes, 103
Wrath. _See_ Simulated
WURMSER, 60, 73, 75, 78
Württemberg, 246, 326
Xerxes, 541
Xerxes’ Answer, 541
Yearnings and Calculations, 346
YORCK, 245, 424
“You are frightfully young!”, 289
“You must!”, 411
Young France is ready, 472
Your Brother Lucien. _See_ Sire
“Your holiness being infallible,” 430
Zante, 90
Zeus thunders, 332
_Zur Morphologie_, 602
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