Book Two

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!

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!”

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.”

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.

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.”