In the footsteps of Napoleon, his life and its famous scenes

Front matter

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF NAPOLEON: HIS LIFE \\1) [TS I \ Mol'S S< I A ES

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I Birth and Birthplace 3

II Schooldays in France 13

Chapter I Birth And Birthplace Born August 15, 1769

THE strange, eventful history of Napoleon, the strangest and most eventful in human story, must forever start at Ajaceio, the quaint, out-of -the- world capital of Corsica.

Sailing out of the Mediterranean into the Bay of Ajaceio, between Capo di Muro and the blood red lies Sanguinaires, the eye of a traveller is enchanted by a scene of beauty probably unsurpassed in all those waters except by the larger and grander Bay of Naples. Behind its hoary grey citadel, the town glistens like a white city where the green slopes of snowcapped Monte d'Oro come down from the blue sky to meet the blue sea.

The fast little steamer, which makes the 210 mile voyage from Marseilles in about 12 hours and the 150 mile journey from Nice in nine, ties up side-on to a stone dock, where the passengers step ashore as from a train at a railway station and are at once in "la cite Napoleonienne, ' ' with mementoes of the immortal Ajaccian on every side.

Tall palms at the end of the quay surround a wide, shady square which opens the way up town. At the top of this short Place des Palmiers a street leads into the older town back of the citadel. It is the Rue Napoleon. Three streets on the right from this is the narrow, almost sunless Rue St.

Charles, and there at the end of the first block stands a four story, square stone house at the corner of a still narrower street. Above the door there is a marble tablet with this inscription in French:

Napoleon

was born in this house

On that August 15th, the Feast of the Assumption, ever the greatest day in the religious calendar for the Corsicans, was being celebrated in Ajaccio. The little town had given itself over to the holiday and the country people had been swarming in afoot and on mule back since early morning. The bells were ringing, the houses were green with boughs and the cathedral altar was abloom with wild flowers from the mountain side.

In the middle of the forenoon the beautiful young Signora Bonaparte — a girl of nineteen — leading by the hand her six-year-old half-brother, Joseph Fesch, and followed by her husband's uncle, Luciano, and her husband's sister-in-law, Geltruda Paravacini, came out of that front door over which the tablet now rests and made her way down the street two blocks to the cathedral. While she was among the kneeling worshippers at the mass, she received the painful warnings of maternity. Calling for the aid of her companion, she was assisted to her feet and led out of the crowded church to her home. There she sank upon a sofa and, at eleven o'clock in the morning, Napoleon entered the world.

No physician had been summoned. No midwife was in attendance, and that office was fulfilled by Signora Paravacini, aided by the maid of all work, Mammucia Caterina, for history has treasured all this time every name connected with the opening scene in the great drama.

There was, moreover, a stirring prologue to this drama some fifty miles away in the wild heart of the then half-barbarous island, and the savage Corsican mountains are the first background in the life of Napoleon. His prenatal environment appropriately was a scene of war, crowded with moving accidents by flood and field. For forty years a primitive and

BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 5

liberty loving people, only 160,000 in all, Italian in speech and by tradition but Corsicans at heart, had been struggling for their independence, first against the rich republic of Genoa and at last against the great kingdom of France, to which the Genoese had pawned the sovereignty of Corsica, with its less than 4000 square miles of wild mountains and fruitful valleys.

Ajaccio being a seaport, the French invader had readily captured it, and the patriotic Bonapartes, men and women together, fled the town to join the patriot army, where Signora Bonaparte's husband was the secretary of Paoli, the Corsican general-in-chief. A year and a half before the date on the tablet the signora had taken refuge in an old house in the little mountain town of Corte, then the capital, where she gave birth to a son. The house stands to this day, and inscribed amid the many battle scars on its walls is the announcement that it is the birthplace of King Joseph Bonaparte of Spain.

The next year, when the despairing band of Corsicans was making its last stand before the guns of Louis XV, the brave young mother was the companion of her husband in the field. Holding her baby boy, Joseph, in one arm, she drove her saddle mule with her free hand, while, as she said, "under my heart I carried my Napoleon, with the same calm pleasure that I felt afterward when I held him in my arms and fed him at my breast. ... I heard the balls whistling round my ears, without a shadow of fear, as I trusted to the protection of the Holy Virgin."

Often the expectant mother slept in the open in the midst of the soldiers. On the long, swift marches up and down and around the rugged mountains she rode beside or behind her husband and sometimes was obliged to trudge afoot with the hunted army, pursued everywhere by overwhelming forces. In next the last battle she was present on the field, and after the final crushing defeat was among those who fled from the conquering French and hid in the fugitives' grotto, which is still shown in a wilderness of granite far up the side of Monte Rotondo.

Some three hundred Corsicans, who were determined never to wear the yoke of the French, gathered around their General-in-chief and sailed away on an exile to England. Signora Bonaparte 's husband was eager to go with them. But "for the objections of the wife, who was to be a mother again in three months, London and not Ajaccio would have been the birthplace of Napoleon and he would have become perhaps a British soldier. Yielding to her counsels, the husband decided to remain in the island and he took the lead in making peace with the French commander.

The subjugation of Corsica was complete — and France had annexed Napoleon Bonaparte !

A bride before she was fourteen, Letizia was nineteen at the birth of Napoleon, who was her fourth child. The first two having failed to lay hold on life, and remembering that sad experience and her recent struggles and privations with the army in the field, there was a natural anxiety about the newcomer. She nursed him while she could and then her place was taken by a sailor's wife, Camilla Ilari, another name immortalised by association with this infant, her ' ' Nabulionello, " as the good woman fondly called her charge.

In a land of lovely women, Letizia had worn from girlhood the challenging title of the "most beautiful woman in Corsica." According to the standards of a race of low stature, she was of medium height and of graceful carriage, with the small hands and feet and ears, the regular teeth, the chestnut hair, the noble forehead, the brilliant eyes, the long, wellformed nose, the fine mouth and strong chin which Napoleon was to inherit as he developed into manhood. It is certain, however, that he was not hailed as a pretty baby or one worthy of a beautiful mother and a handsome father, and for a long time the family was troubled because his big head was so out of proportion to his really frail body.

Napoleon, as well as his mother, testified that he was a wild, unruly boy, whose inseparable companion was no other than his foster brother, his ' ' brother of the milk, ' ' Ignazio Ilari, the son of a sailor and a nurse. Long years afterward, when he sat down on another island to gaze across the gulf of a lifetime, and this island of Corsica swam into view, he said of his childhood :

BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 7

"I was self-willed and obstinate; nothing awed me; nothing disconcerted me. I was quarrelsome, exasperating; I feared no one. I gave a blow here and a scratch there. Every one was afraid of me. My brother, Joseph, was the one with whom I had the most to do; he was beaten, bitten, scolded. I had put the blame on him almost before he knew what he was about, was telling tales about him almost before he could collect his wits. I had to be quick. My mamma, Letizia, would have restrained my warlike temper; she would not have put up with my defiant petulance. Her tenderness was severe, meting out punishment and reward with equal justice ; merit and demerit, she took both into account."

The rod was not spared by the stern and exacting mother. A cuff or two on the ear were sometimes required to get the boy started to church even on Sunday. When he persisted one day in following his mother against her orders, she turned and calmly gave him such a vigorous slap that he rolled down a hill, where she left him to pick himself up while she went on her way without looking back. Even when the time came for him to flatter himself that he was "too big to be whipped," he learned his mistake. Because his old grandmother walked with a cane he called her a witch in spite of all her pampering of him. The mother simply waited until he was changing his clothes for dinner, in expectation of guests, and catching him out of his armour, gave him one more and his last parental chastisement.

To an American seeking dramatic effects in the plebeian origin of the Emperor, his birthplace is a disappointment. It is too large and too nearly palatial for the purpose of contrast. While Napoleon was a parvenu among kings, he was an aristocrat among Corsicans and belonged to one of the first families of Ajaccio. His father was "the noble Signor Carlo di Buonaparte" in the record of his marriage, and by the same evidence his mother the daughter of "the noble Signor Jean Jerome Ramolino. ' '

The old family mansion at Ajaccio has hardly been occupied since the Bonapartes were banished from Corsica — to fame and fortune. Napoleon's mother willed it to the King of Rome, but she outlived the King, and at her death it came into the possession of King Joseph Bonaparte. Now it is the property of the ex-Empress Eugenie. Across the street, is the tiny Place Letizia, where once stood the girlhood home of the mother, the site of which Eugenie has bought and sown with flower seed.

On the second floor of the Bonaparte home, joining the salon de visite where the inevitable register now awaits the tourist's autograph, is a large chamber with one window overlooking the side street. This is the veritable shrine of the temple — the room in which Napoleon was born. The low, narrow sofa on which the young mother lay in the clothes she had worn at church still stands against the wall.

There is little in the birthroom now except memories, but they crowd it. A Bible scene is there, carved in wood, a gift that Napoleon brought his mother when he came home for the last time after his Egyptian campaign. A bust of Eugenie's Prince Imperial is on the mantel where she placed it with her own hands when she was Empress of the French.

On the wall above the sofa is a simple engraving in a cheap frame. It is a picture of the child grown to young manhood but still looking very boyish, the "Little Corporal" waving the tricolour flag of France on the bridge of Arcole. It is like a picture of him at play and in keeping with the scenes of his j^outh, where on the red tiled floor he stamped about, a wooden sword on his thigh.

The house as a whole is now scantily furnished, but the birth chamber and its sofa, the veritable nest in which the eagle was hatched, is enough for the most eager pilgrim, and this, with the house itself, should appease the greediest curiosity. Then there is Napoleon's back bedroom, where the boy's wild dreams did not equal the realities of the life ahead of him. Moreover, this room has a trap door, and the trap door has a legend of young Napoleon dropping through it to escape from pursuing enemies in the Revolution.

If the largeness of the exterior takes the visitor by surprise, he will be astonished by the imposing interiors of the house, the drawing room, the dining room, the smoking room, and the

BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 9

cabinet or study of the father, all with their mantels of Carrara marble. The grand drawing room, the salon des fetes, its floor of shining parquetry ready for a ball and its walls hung with mirrors and candelabra, suggests the labours of a restorer, for when Napoleon early in. his fortunes ordered the old home repaired, Joseph, to whom the duty was intrusted, is said to have touched up and embellished the ancestral background of the newly arisen family.

However that may be, a sympathetic observer, with a mind for practical things, cannot but be sorry as he wanders from room to room, each opening from the other, to think of poor Letizia taking care of this big house and her eight children with only one servant to help her !

Among the rare keepsakes of the birthplace is the book of ritual which the priest, who was a Corsican, employed when he prepared Napoleon for death at St. Helena. Perhaps the richest treasure of all, which is kept in the house of the custodian, is a laurel wreath or crown of gold, costing $7000, which some enthusiasts ordered for the centenary of the Consulate when it was celebrated in 1902.

Everywhere Ajaccio echoes the memories of her greatest son. The very dock at which the steamer lands is the Quay Napoleon, and bending down to the shore from a terraced height runs the Boulevard du Roi Jerome, recalling the youngest brother of Napoleon. Farther up the leafy Place of Palms, where the flowing water ripples in a fountain, rises a white marble statue of the First Consul, sheeted like a Roman and with a rudder in his right hand. Although he followed his star by land and not by water, the Ajaccian naturally thinks of his immortal fellow islander as at the helm.

Behind the back of that marble effigy, the shady square comes to an end. Or rather it merely narrows into the still spacious Avenue du Premier Consul, lined by more palms, and continues straight on for two blocks where it is intersected by the Rue Bonaparte and by the most important street in town, the Cours Napoleon, along which the throngs saunter beneath the wide-spreading orange trees.

From the Rue Bonaparte, the Rue du Roi de Rome winds its way to the old cathedral, built before 1600, and where Napoleon's parents were married with all possible pomp. At the right of the door stands the baptismal font, surmounted now by an elaborately carved bronze canopy with a crown at the top. Under the crown, ' ' The glory of God and the glory of the world" is engraved with the names of the Bonaparte princes and princesses who were baptised by the priests of the cathedral. But the most conspicuous object is a red marble tablet on a pillar whereon in letters of gold are these words attributed to Napoleon's will :

If my corpse should be proscribed in Paris as I have been, I wish to be buried among my ancestors in the cathedral of Ajaccio in Corsica.

This modest plain old village church well may boast, therefore, that it stood only second to the magnificent Hotel des Invalides in the choice of the imperial exile. How nearly it came to being both the burial place and the birthplace of Napoleon !

If Ajaccio, however, is not the sepulchre of the Maker of Kings, it guards the dust of the Mother of Kings. In the courtyard of the College Fesch in the Rue Fesch — named for the young uncle who taught Napoleon his a, b, c's and who was rewarded with the red hat of a cardinal — is the Chapel Imperial, which, although erected only in 1860, looks as venerable as the ancient mausoleum of the Bourbons at St. Denis. Coming out of the glare of the street into the dusk of the chapel, the visitor sees at first no other epitaph than that of "Mater Regum," but drawing nearer the engraved roll of Letizia's princely offspring becomes legible. Her silent companions in the chapel are her half brother, Cardinal Fesch, and two princes and a princess among the lesser known of the Bonapartes.

When Letizia's remains were enthroned there, having first been brought from Rome and placed in a chapel of the cathedral, the star of the Bonapartes was risen again and was shining gloriously on the Second Empire. But to-day Ajaccio,

BIRTH AND BIRTHPLACE 11

alone in a faithless world, remains faithful to the memory of the vanished empire and its dynasty.

Some lightning- impressionist has described the town as ' ' the shade of Napoleon, with houses built around it. " It is a community of idol worshippers ; it is all a big Napoleonic museum, where every trinket of the Bonapartes is sacredly cherished.

There is only one Napoleonic object in town which the Ajaccians do not take seriously. This is the group of statuary in the Place du Diamant, at the edge of the sea, where Napoleon in Roman toggery sits in bronze on a horse poised atop a block of granite, with his four brothers afoot at the corners. Even the idolatrous smile at the stiff group, which is derisively called "the inkstand."

More interesting is the big, wide square itself, for it was the playground of Napoleon and his first battlefield; Whether it was all Austerlitz and no Waterloo for him in those youthful engagements we are left to wonder. Ajaccio then was a little walled town, with a gate and bastion. Between the wall and the citadel at the point of the peninsula the 3500 inhabitants were packed in eighteen or twenty streets. The nobles and merchants, and their retainers, lived in the old houses within the wall, while the sailors, mechanics and laborers dwelt in the hardscrabble village outside.

Between the boys of those two communities there was a vendetta bequeathed from generation to generation of boyhood, and Napoleon first got into action as the champion of his side in this inherited quarrel, marshalling his troops, armed with sticks and stones, to drive the invaders out of the town gate and to meet hostile reinforcements under the wall. The boy sprang from a fighting race and was bred to war in an age of strife. His earliest lesson in history was of the Forty Years' War, which ended at his birth. "I was born," he once said, "when my native land died." As the stirring story of the long and unequal struggle of his people dawned upon his understanding, he adopted Paoli as his model and his little breast was filled with patriotic zeal.

Friends of the family, seeing him eating soldiers' bread in the streets, were shocked by his presenting a spectacle so unbecoming his parentage and reported it to his mother, who found it was a habit of the boy to swap his home-made bread for the coarser kind issued to the garrison. "lama soldier, ' ' he insisted, ' ' and I intend to eat what the soldiers eat. ' '

Chapter II Schooldays In France

A FORLORN, sallow-faced boy, not yet ten years old and small for his age, alien-looking and speaking broken French, climbed down from a two wheeled cart and followed a priest through the gate of the school kept by the Minim friars at Brienne le Chateau in France one day in May in the year 1779. There he was registered as Napoleone de Buonaparte, although he called himself after his native Corsican fashion, Nabulione Buonaparte — ' ' Nah-bool-ee-ony Bonaparty."

Among the few more than 100 pupils in the school, all of noble birth, there were sixty poor boys of the nobility who were educated on the bounty of the King, now Louis XVI. Thanks to the efforts of Napoleon's father as a seeker of government favours and his mother's hospitality to the French conqueror of Corsica, he was admitted to this group. Carlo Bonaparte had submitted proof of eleven generations of noble Bonapartes behind his son and filed a "certificate of indigence," in which four Corsicans declared that he was too poor to educate Napoleon in accordance with his birth.

Carlo's memorandum when he went home, after placing Napoleon in school, was characteristic: ... "I started for the court of France, deputy noble of the estates of Corsica, taking with me 100 louis. I received while in Paris 4000 francs in gratifications from the King, and 1000 ecus in fees ; and I returned without a sou." He had, however, brought back from Paris twelve beautiful suits of silk and velvet for himself.

As fast as the younger children grew up they were regularly and promptly transferred by Carlo to the care and keep of a generous government, while he himself was on the payroll as assessor of the royal court of justice in Ajaccio and drew his emoluments as the deputy of the Corsican nobility in Paris.

A lawyer by profession, he seems to have had hardly any other client than himself. While a talented man and industrious enough, he laboured hard and constantly all his days to support himself and family by some more respectable means than earning his living.

With his father away much of the time and his mother ignorant of books, Napoleon received no education at home. From his uncle, Joseph Fesch, he learned the alphabet and he was taught the catechism by his great-uncle, Luciano Bonaparte, the archdeacon. At six he was sent to a girls' school to receive lessons from nuns and next he passed to a brothers' school, Abbe Recco's, where he gave the first sign of his aptitude for mathematics.

The boy was only nine when he bade good-bye to his home to enter upon a six years' school course among strangers in a strange land, never again to know throughout the tender years of youth the loving care of a mother or the affections and comforts of a family circle. Sailing away from Ajaccio on a winter's day, with his father and Joseph and his uncle Fesch, he first set foot on the soil of France at Marseilles.

For three months he stayed with Joseph at Autun, in order that he might be instructed a little in the French language, as he still spoke only the Italian dialect of Corsica. When the time came for him to leave for Brienne the elder brother wept loudly at the parting, but only one tear escaped Napoleon's self-repression, and that evidence of weakness was quickly brushed away. Joseph might cry ; he was going to be a priest, but a soldier must have a stout heart.

The boy would need at Brienne all the stoicism in his nature. The discipline there was prescribed by the war department as suited to the breeding of soldiers. In some respects it would have been equally suitable for a prison and it would be looked upon to-day as a cruelly severe regime to impose upon a boy as young as Napoleon.

SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 15

He Wore a bine uniform with red facings and white metal buttons on his coat, and he had to do his own mending. His hair was cut short until he had reached the age of twelve, after which he was privileged to sport a pigtail, but it must not be powdered except on Sundays and saints' days. He slept by himself in a six-foot cell, but ate with the other boys in the mess hall and knelt with them in the chapel at morning mass and evening prayer.

He had no vacations nor hardly an opportunity to see the inside of a home. He saw his mother only once, when, yearning to look upon her boys, she persuaded herself to leave her family cares and join her husband on a journey to France, where she was shocked to find Napoleon so thin and worn.

The little Corsican had found himself a mark for the boys of Autun at the outset of his life in France and never was permitted to forget that he was an alien. He was greeted with the same mischievous hostility in Brienne and had to contend with bitter disadvantages.

His appearance and his foreign accent moved his young comrades to laughter. His Corsican nobility was not taken any more seriously by these children of the old nobles of France than if he claimed descent from some tribal chief among the American Indians. Corsica to their understanding was a savage country and they knew of it only as a scene of rebellions and vendettas, regarding it perhaps as our world to-day regards Albania in the scale of civilisation.

The paying pupils made him feel his poverty. With the thoughtless and unsparing cruelty of boyhood, they chose the friendless, unsocial stranger as a target for all manner of taunts which drove the moody boy in upon his moods and sometimes threw him into fits of ungovernable rage. For a time he led a gloomy, solitary existence on the prairie of northeastern France, far from his kindred and in what seemed to him by comparison with his sunny island a bleak and wintry land.

He did not get along much better with the friars than with the boys when he first went to Brienne. He was not unruly, but his air of sullen defiance and his aloofness troubled the priests. "While corporal punishment had been forbidden by the government, he seems to have received at least one flogging. Again, for some infraction of a rule, he was ordered to do penance before all the boys by eating a meal on his knees at the door of the refectory. He protested vehemently that his mother had told him to kneel only to God, and that he would kneel to no man. His indignation finally running into a wild tantrum he had to be carried off to bed.

Plainly the King of France was nurturing a very rebellious subject. One of the friars reminded him of the debt of gratitude he owed the King, but the boy was steadily forming the purpose to employ the education the nation was giving him as a means of promoting the liberty of Corsica rather than the glory of France. "I will do these French all the mischief I can, ' ' he muttered, according to the report of one of his classmates. A priest reproving him at confession for his denunciation of France, he ran out of the confessional, shouting : "I do not come to this place to talk about Corsica, and a priest has no mission to lecture me on that subject."

Probably with the idea of bringing him into line, the friars gave him a post of honour in the corps, but the boys court-martialed him as "unworthy of our esteem since he disdains our affections." His independence, however, was piquing them at last, and this, with his uncomplaining acceptance of their verdict, served to bring him more into their favour. At any rate, he found himself after a while on better terms with his surroundings, and with one of the boys, Louise Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, he formed a close friendship.

In Napoleon's last winter at Brienne, there was a heavy snow, which brought him an opportunity, the only recorded one, to be a leader among his school fellows. The snow was so deep in the big courtyard that the boys were snowbound. Napoleon proposed that they get shovels, build snow forts, and dividing up, engage in sieges and attacks. "I," said the strategist, ' ' I will direct the movements. ' ' The boys took hold with enthusiasm, the forts were erected and were furiously stormed until the contending forces had delved so deep that

SCHOOLDAYS IN FRANCE 17

gravel was mixed with the snowballs and the casualties grew serious.

The school as a school seems to have been rather poor. It failed utterly to discover Napoleon, and there is no record that this world-beater won a single prize at Brienne. He received dancing lessons, but did not learn to dance. He took German, but seems not to have remembered any of it in manhood. He read Latin authors with a real hunger for knowledge, but never got beyond the fourth class in his Latin studies. He received writing lessons, but his penmanship is perhaps the worst in history.

The library was his favourite haunt. In the recreation periods he was more likely to be there with a volume of Plutarch in his hand than on the playground. He had found for himself the combination of the lock on the storehouse of knowledge — a desire to read books, the habit of reading them and a capacity to understand them.

He had been at Brienne more than five years and was a few months past his fifteenth birthday when he was promoted to the Ecole Militaire at Paris. Probably the only person in town who marked his departure, the only soul who cared whether he stayed or went was Bourrienne, who rode with his friend as far as the stage line for Paris.