Chapter XIV: Book THREE: The River (5)

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!”

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“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.

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