The wife of the first consul

Contents

PAGE

Introduction 1

Part I. The Temporaey Consulate

CHAPTBIB

I. The Luxemboukg 21

II. The Eormal Entrance into the Tuileries 33

III. The Tuileries at the Beginning of the Consulate 41

IV. Parisian Society, in the Year VIII : 52

V. The Two National Festivals 63

VI. Malmaison in 1800 75

VII. The Infernal Machine 85

VIII. Parisian Society in 1800 98

IX. Malmaison in its Glory 114

X. HORTENSB DE BeAUHARNAIS 129

XI. Madame Louis Bonaparte 140

XII. Madame Jdnot 152

XIII. The Te Deum for the Concordat » 166

XIV. Josephine and the Royalists 178

XV. The End of the Temporary Consulate 187

V

Yl CONTENTS.

PART 11.

THE CONSULATE FOR LIFE.

CHAPTEB PAGK

I. The Palace of Saint Cloud 199

II. The Consulate for Llpe , 216

m. Josephine in 1803 234

rV. Madame de Remusat 244

V. The Teip to Belgium 261

VI. The Princess Borghese 276

VII. Madame Moreau 287

VIII. The Conspiracy , 300

IX. The Arrest of the Duke of Enghien 312

X. The Death of the Duke of Enghien 321

XL The Last Days of the Consulate 337

THE WIFE OF THE FIRST CONSUL.

INTRODUQTION.

IN the modest cliurcli of Rueil, on each side of the altar, there stand, face to face, two funeral monuments which call forth a host of memories. The one to the right represents a woman kneeling at a prayerdesk, in full dress, but with no royal insignia, and the simple inscription runs thus : " To Josephine. Eugene and Hortense, 1825." The statue, which is of Carrara marble, is the work of the sculptor Cartellier. In the foundation of the pedestal rests the body of the woman who was Empress of the French and Queen of Italy. Opposite, a group in white marble, the work of the sculptor Barre, represents a woman and an angel. The woman, who is kneeling, wears a regal diadem, and she is wrapped in the folds of a long veil. Her attitude is that of prayer, with her hands lowered towards the earth, and her eyes raised towards heaven. Before her one may see a crown, a few laurels, and a lyre, but her melancholy face expresses a feeling of contempt for these toys which are so trivial on earth, and so much, more trivial in face of eternity. It is indeed the sad woman, rid of all illusions, who in 1807 said to Napoleon: "My reputation is tainted, my health broken, I expect no further happiness in this life; expel me from your heart, if you wish it, bury me in a convent, I desire neither throne nor wealth. Give my mother peace, grant to Eugene the glory which he deserves, but let me live quiet and alone." Above the statue floats an angel who, with a gesture at once protecting and consoling, shows to the unhappy queen the eternal spheres. On the pedestal is cut this inscription.: " To Queen Hortense, her son Napoleon III."

The remains of the Queen do not lie in the foundation of this monument ; they rest beneath it in a crypt shut off by a gate of wrought iron, to which leads a staircase in the corner of the church. The arches of the vault are upheld by clusters of short and massive columns. A funeral lamp and two bronze candelabra cast a dim glow over this vault, into which the light of day never falls. At the back of the crypt, beneath an arcade, may be descried the huge tomb, which seems to be covered with a royal mantle, carved in stone, and surmounted by a golden palm, with the arms of the French Empire and those of Holland. On the tomb is this inscri23tion : " Hortense Eugenie de Beauharnais, Duchess of Saint-Leu, Queen of Holland, born in Paris, April 10, 1783; daughter by her first marriage of Marie Rose Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, Empress of the French,

Introduction

and of Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais ; daughter-in-law and sister-in-law of Napoleon I., Emperor of the French; married in Paris, January 3, 1802, to Louis Napoleon, King of Holland ; died at her castle of Arenenberg, October 5, 1837." The two women, the mother and the daughter, are united in death, as they were in life. It is impossible to look without emotion at this last resting-place of such vanished splendor, of such fallen greatness, and Bossuet's thoughts on the nothingness of human things occur to one in this village church with its two eloquent graves.

These two graves are appropriately placed under the vaults of the modest church, the bells of which, according to Bourrienne, made a deep impression upon Bonaparte. Near by is the estate of Malmaison, which was for Josephine what the Little Trianon was for Marie Antoinette, a poetic and fateful spot, which, after having been the abode of enchantments, success, and boundless hopes, became that of despair, humiliation, of cruel struggles, of agony, of death, and which finally deserved its name of evil omen, Malmaison, mala mansio.

I am approaching the region of legend, and recall Isabey's celebrated drawing ; I seem to see the First Consul walking alone, in uniform, before the building. I summon memories of the beautiful days and starlit nights, of Malmaison in the year VIII. , of the dinners in the open air, the games upon the grass, of the balls in which all the women are dressed in white. I see

Hor tense cle Beauliarnais, a bright and merry girl, running, swift as Atalanta, in the garden ; or in the theatre at the end of the gallery, playing Rosina in the " Barber of Seville " like a consummate actress. I am back in the consular court, which is still republican, full of charm, of vivacity, rich in youth, glory, and hope, with but little dread of the catastrophes hid in the dark future.

Nine years pass, and what a change ! Poor Josephine, broken with grief, enters once more the house where not long before she had arrived in joy. Her dark presentiments have been realized. The woman to whom the conqueror of Italy used to write burning love-letters is now disgraced, disowned, and driven forever from the Tuileries. She has just drunk to the dregs the chalice of the bitterness of divorce which she had prayed to be spared. It is a cold, wet December night ; the withered leaves lie about like dead illusions; the wind wails, and nature moans. The abode of happiness is become a Calvary. What a night the wretched woman passes in the room which she used to occupy with Napoleon ! And when she wakes in the morning, what a sad eye she turns towards the trees which once shaded so much happiness! In the course of the day Napoleon comes to pay an icy visit to his divorced wife ; he walks for a few moments with her in the park and leaves her without a kiss.

I picture to myself the melancholy scenes of May 29, 1814, Whitsunday. Josephine is lying at the

INTRODUCTION.

point of death in that chamber of Mahnaison, surrounded by her children, visitors, and friends, "as gentle in the face of death as she always had been to every one." When the Emperor left for the island of Elba, she said, "Napoleon is in distress, and I can't be with him." The impossibility of devoting herself to him was a terrible blow to her. " I have been a witness," said Mademoiselle Avrillon, " of the sleeplessness of the Empress Josephine, and her terrible dreams. I have known her to pass whole days buried in gloomy thoughts. I know what I have seen and heard, and I am sure that it was grief that killed her." In her last moments she awoke from her stupor only at intervals, and in a sort of quiet delirium these few words escaped her, betraying all the anguish of her heart : " Bonaparte, Elba, Marie- Louise ! "

A year later, during the Hundred Days, Napoleon went to Malmaison before the ceremony of the Champ de Mai. He was received by Queen Hortense, and at his entrance into the vestibule he betrayed profound emotion. This he controlled, however, with his wonted energy, and he desired to visit everything, the house and the park. He wandered about, deep in thought ; one would have said that from one path to another he was pursuing a shadow. Then he took his place at the table, where he saw the place that Josephine had left empty. The breakfast was short and silent. On rising from the table, the Emperor passed into the gallery, and looked at every one of the pictures, wMch were fixed in his memory. Then he went upstairs, and came to the door of the room where his wife, whom he had loved so warmly, had died. Hortense wished to follow him. "No, my daughter," he said; "I wish to go in alone." Abandoned by the ungrateful Marie-Louise, Napoleon fell into meditation before the death-bed of the grateful Josephine. Doubtless he craved forgiveness for the divorce ; and he said to himself, at the bottom of his heart, " It's because I deserted this woman that fortune has deserted me." The whole drama of his life unrolled itself before his eyes. A world of memories rose before him like a tide. Oh, if one could but seize some part of the past ! If hope could take the place of memory! If faded flowers would but bloom again ! But, alas ! everything had slipped through his fingers. Napoleon left Josephine's room with tears in his eyes.

Possibly he had thought that at Malmaison he U^ould, as it were, dip into a healthful spring, and that there, in this home of his glorious youth, he should find again his self-confidence, his faith in his star; but it was a vain hope. The wife who had brought him good fortune was no more. Once again he was to return to Malmaison, but after Waterloo ; and it was there that he stayed after his second abdication for five days, from the 25th to the 29th of June, 1815. It was again Queen Hortense who received him, a respectful and faithful friend in his misfortune. The sky was clear, the sun brilliant, but the heart of the

INTBODUCTION.

man who was about to become a prisoner was as dark as the tomb. Long before he had said : " One sees everything through a gilded veil which makes it bright and clear. Gradually, as one goes on, this veil thickens, until at last it becomes almost black." This moment had come ; a long crape veil stretched over the shadows over the horizon. The beaten soldier of Waterloo walked until he was worn out in the park of Malmaison, where he passed his last hours as a free man, talking continually to Hortense about Josephine, whose portrait he wished to have. But what did he hear ? The roar of the cannon in the plain of Saint Denis. What did he see? Officers and old soldiers arriving in ragged uniforms, stained with dust, who told him of the progress of the enemy. Bliicher had unwisely separated himself from Wellington ; the Allies were advancing in two columns of about sixty thousand men each, leaving so much space between them that either could be crushed before the other could come to its rescue. The man of battle felt all his genius aroused. In the night between the 28th and the 29th of June he made his plans ; if he could be given the command, he promised to beat in detail the Prussians and the English with the ruins of his Waterloo army. In the morning of the 29th he commissioned General Beker to carry the following message to Fouchd and the other members of the Provisional Government, sitting at the Tuileries. "I offer," he said, "to place myself at the head of the army, which at the sight of me will recover all its spirit, to fall upon the enemj with desperate energy, and to punish him for his rashness. I give my word as a general, a soldier, and a citizen, not to retain the command for one hour after the certain and crushing victory which I promise to gain, not for myself, but for France."

Napoleon, in full uniform, waited with his aides for the answer of the Provisional Government ; if it were favorable, he meant to mount his horse at once. General Beker returned, bringing a refusal, and the man of Austerlitz submitted. If Napoleon sinned by pride, how severely he was punished ! He, who a short time ago made the world tremble, was compelled to consult a regicide, a former accomplice of the cruelties of the comedian CoUot d'Herbois. He, the hero of battles, consecrated by the Pope, the man of destiny, the modern Csesar, the new Charlemagne, obliged to submit to the refusal and the contempt of Fouch^ !

It is easy to imagine the wrath of the young aides-de-camp, impatient to follow him, certain of victory, when they were obliged to sheathe their swords again, to unsaddle their impatient steeds, and to see the last dream of patriotism and glory disappear. Who can describe the torture of such an hour for a character like Napoleon's ? The plaudits of the multitude, the enthusiastic shouts of the soldiers, the intoxicating joys of the triumph, the solemn entry within the walls of conquered capitals, the bulletins of famous victories, ovations, hosannas, — they were all cruelly avenged!

INTBODUCTION. 9

All was over. He had to bow before an implacable fate ; he had to leave before the end of the day. The preparations for departure were completed. The Prussians were advancing on the left bank of the Seine, between Argenteuil and Chaton ; if he had remained a few hours longer, he would have been their prisoner. He had just taken off his uniform and put on citizen's dress. His mother, his brothers, and a few soldiers, a few courtiers of misfortune, had assembled to bid him an eternal farewell. Since he had not thought of providing himself with money. Queen Hortense begged him to accept a diamond necklace. At first he refused ; but when she insisted with tears, he let her hide the necklace in his coat. After having urged unity and courage upon them all, he embraced his faithful friends for the last time. The last one of whom he took leave was his mother. Their separation recalls the grand scenes of antiquity, which were sublime in their simplicity. "Farewell, my son," said Madame Letitia. The Emperor answered, "Mother, farewell." He got into his carriage, and left Malmaison forever.

To the right of the castle is to be seen a stone pedestal, on which there stood, until 1870, a bronze eagle with this touching inscription : " The last step of Napoleon, when leaving for Rochefort, June 29, 1815, at four o'clock in the afternoon." Why was the eagle torn from the pedestal with the inscription? It could not excite anger. It was no longer the royal bird, floating in the clouds, gazing at the sun ;

it was the wounded eagle, fluttering along the ground, like the swallow before a storm. Oh, the melancholy of greatness ! Vicissitudes of fate ! how eloquent is your language in these times of revolution, when fortune seems to make sport of kings and emperors ! How insignificant is man, and how hard it is to find any trace of his footsteps !

In the month of August, 1831, a woman was weeping before the iron gate of Malmaison ; with her was a young man of twenty-three, who shared her grief. This young man was her son. She insisted on being admitted, but entrance was obstinately refused. This woman was Queen Hortense; the young man was the future emperor Napoleon III. The mother and the son had just been kneeling before the tomb of Jofc^ephine in the church of Rueil, and it is thus that the former queen describes the emotion that she felt then : " What a drear feeling came over me when I knelt before that cherished image and sadly thought that of all whom she had loved I alone remained with my son, isolated, and compelled to flee the spot where she reposed. The great number of flowers covering this monument, which my brother and I had such difficulty in getting permission to build, proved to me that at any rate she was lying among friends who held her memory dear. Her daughter only was forgotten."

It was after this pious visit to the church of Rueil, where she herself was one day to be buried, that Queen Hortense and her son wished to revisit Mai-

INTB OB UCTION. 11 maison. She said : " I stopped at tlie gate of tlie castle, and insisted upon entering. It is from there that the Emperor started to leave France forever. . . . It was impossible to secure any remission of the orders of the new proprietor, who had forbidden entrance to the castle without a card. My nephew had sold Malmaison to a banker, who kept a part of the gardens and the castle, and had sold the rest. It was difficult to recognize the place, and I could not believe myself at the same spot which I had left so beautiful, where I had always been so gladly received, when admission to it was so cruelly denied me."

How painful it must have been to see strangers thus occupying a dwelling which she had inhabited with those she loved! It is a bit of the irony of fate, which seems to take a pleasure in persecuting wretched humanity with refined cruelty. The Malmaison of Napoleon and of Josephine, the home of his glory as consul, the last refuge of the defeated soldier of Waterloo before his departure for the rock of Saint Helena, all this belonging to strangers, while the woman who had so shone there had not the right to enter the house to go and pray in the room where she had seen her mother draw her last breath ! No one recognized her. She had hoped to find there what her heart had left, to catch in the song of the birds some trace of departed joys, or of her old griefs in the murmur of the wind. But nature is insensible to our sorrows, and nothing remains of our dreams and illusions.

In 1842 another unhappy sovereign, Queen Christina of Spain, in one of her excursions in the neighborhood of Paris, visited the estate of Malmaison, attracted by the painful memories which clung about the place. She bought the castle and lived in it until 1861. On one side she built a chapel, now empty; but the arms of the Spanish Bourbons yet remain above the place where the Queen used to pray. In 1861 she consented to sell Malmaison to the Emperor, who paid eleven hundred thousand francs and presented it to the state as a sort of national jewel. The castle was restored and decorated, and assumed its former aspect under the days of the Consulate and the Empire. One day Napoleon III. shut himself for several hours in the gallery, and with his own hands hung up the principal pictures in the places where he remembered having seen them when he was a child.

In 1867, at the time of the Exposition, the Empress Eugenie conceived the excellent idea of collecting at Malmaison and the Little Trianon the various objects, pictures and furniture, which could be proved to have belonged to the illustrious occupants of these two historic mansions. The French, and even more noticeably foreigners, crowded thither and gazed with a sort of awe at the two valuable museums ; for foreigners take perhaps a deeper interest in the glories of France than do the French themselves. At Malmaison they saw the council-table of the ministers, Josephine's tapestry-frame and harp, the Em-

INTRODUCTION. 13 peror's field-desk, the clock that stood in his room at Saint Helena, the little iron bed with green silk curtains in which he died. Malmaison had never been so crowded with visitors ; but this climax of its fame was not far removed from a probably final decay.

The janitress, who was in the service of Queen Christina, and has been in the castle ever since, describes the last incidents that have come under notice, with a sort of vigorous and popular eloquence. She says that in 1867 she noticed in the park some Germans in civil dress, who were examining everything about them with the greatest care, and that in the war she saw the same Germans again, this time in uniform, take possession of the castle ; and that a few days before the war broke out, the young Prince Imperial came to visit Malmaison, and that she was struck by his melancholy expression. She adds, that just as he was leaving, a thunder-storm broke forth, and a tree which had been planted by Napoleon and Josephine was half shattered by the lightning. " An evil omen," she said. Then she goes on to tell how they managed to bind up the old tree-trunk ; but that when they began to divide the place into house-lots, in 1879, the tree was cut down and uprooted. At the same time Josephine's descendant, the heir of the Napoleons, was dying in Zululand.

After the fall of the Second Empire, the state sold Malmaison to a private person. The park was cut up into lots and sold to different buyers, who are building houses. The fa§ade of the castle is intact.

but the interior is in a melancholy state of dilapidation, shorn of ornaments, furniture, and hangings.

Malmaison, which at the beginning of the century was, as it were, a symbol of France under the Consulate ; Malmaison, still full of the gigantic plans and the proud dreams of the ambitious hero of Marengo; Malmaison, sacked in 1815 by Bliicher's soldiers, — became in the last war a Prussian barrack. The troops of the victor at Sedan installed themselves in triumph where the First Consul, in his military court, had worn his most martial air. Silent and deserted, Malmaison seems like a tomb. Its bare walls are gloomier than ruins. Yet there is a certain majesty in their bareness. The stones of the castle speak that mysterious language which may be heard in the silence. No man with feeling for poetry or history can enter this house without being filled with respect. One lowers one's voice and steps softly, as if dreading to disturb the sleep of illustrious hosts. The deserted halls seem to be tenanted by phantoms of the past. In the twilight one would say that it is a haunted spot, and haunted by what ghosts !

How many cataclysms there have been in France during the last century ! The scythe wielded by war and revolution commits more grievous ravages than those of time. Of all the buildings which were the scene of the last agonies of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, what is now left? The Tuileries are burned. There is not one stone left of the Manage where Louis XVI. was tried, of the Temple tower

INTRODUCTION. 15 whicli served as prison for the unhappy monarch and his family. The little dungeon of the Queen in the Conciergerie alone remains, and the crowds who daily pass through the place of her execution do not know even where the martyr's scaffold stood. And what is left of what one may call the scenery of the consular epoch? The house in the rue de la Victoire, whence issued the 18th Brumaire, is destroyed, its very site is not to be determined ; Saint Cloud and the Tuileries ^ are mere stone skeletons. Shells and petroleum have destroyed everything. Great stretches of the sky appear through the empty arches, and one would say that these fresh ruins are as old as Pompeii or Herculaneum. The superb appearance of the two palaces which they were in their splendor is so deeply printed on the memory, that at certain moments one, gazing at the ruins, would think himself the victim of a nightmare, and would expect on waking to find the two monuments as they were before the fire. If Josephine could come back to life, how surprised she would be at this destruction ! What would be her reflections before the ruins of the Tuileries and of Saint Cloud! What an, impression would be produced by Malmaison dilapidated and deserted !

Well, if revolutions destroy, let history yet try to build up what they have pitilessly overthrown I History is a reconstruction, which will permit us to see

1 The ruins of the Tuileries have been removed since the above was written. — = Tr.

again with the eyes of our soul what we can no longer see with our real eyes, to build up ruins, to people empty halls, to hear amid the silence the echo of conversation, of the trumpets, of the orchestras of former days. There may reach our ear the distant sound of Josephine's gentle voice which the First Consul used to prefer to the applause of his people and his army. Let us summon forth the image of this woman under the ancient trees which have survived so many disasters. While we think of her, we shall gaze at the views which so often charmed her, at the prospect which was for her a consoling friend, at the river which flowed beneath her feet. Let us consult her friends : here are her husband's secretaries, Bourrienne and M^neval ; here is the lady in waiting, Madame de R^musat ; there is the Duchess of Abrant^s, Miot de M^lito, Roederer, Greneral de Sdgur, Thibaudeau, Marmont, Lav alette. After long study of their memoirs, one seems to know the authors, to be near them, in the same room, exchanging ideas with them, listening to their reminiscences, hearing their anecdotes and their talk about the persons and events of bygone days. Let us ask them, in this sketch, to make us understand the character of the wife of the First Consul, and the part she played, to describe to us this period of four years and a half which was so brilliant and busy, to show us society forming itself anew, with drawing-rooms opening again, the foreign aristocracy resuming its journeys to Paris, the reopening of the opera balls,, as luxury,

INTRODUCTION. 17 elegance, and fashion reassert themselves, while at the same time the populace easily exchanges liberty for glory, and sets a man above every institution.

Fox said in 1802 that in the person of the First Consul there were three Bonapartes equally worthy of study; the one of Malmaison, of Saint Cloud, and of the Tuileries. As for Josephine, she was always and everywhere the same : affable, gracious, obliging, always seeking peace, sharing none of the severities, the anger, or the petulance of her husband, dissuading him from thoughts of vengeance, anxious to see him kind, generous, and inclined to pity. This modest, disinterested woman, who was essentially tender and good, is one of the most amiable and sympathetic figures of history. If her statue has been removed from the avenue leading from the Arch of Triumph which bore her name, her memory at any rate cannot perish. The charm which she exercised upon her contemporaries has survived, and even when one thinks, whether rightly or wrongly, that he has discovered flaws in her private life, one feels an attraction towards her. Whether alive or dead, good women deserve our love. That greatest quality, a woman's real ornament, kindness, would make us pardon many faults. Josephine wished to call forth no tears but those of joy and gratitude. Her ambition was to be Bonaparte's good angel. She often gave him wise advice, and the time of his most earnest devotion to her was that of his greatest success.

In our opinion the Consulate is Napoleon's liighwater mark ; his fall began with the murder of the Duke of Enghien, the inauguration of the imperial period. From that moment a cloud hangs over his star •• this cloud is at first but a black point, but it grew from year to year, and at last produced the dense gloom of the final catastrophe. It was in vain that Napoleon accumulated crown upon crown for himself and his family ; the glory of the Emperor could not outshine the glory of the citizen. Josephine had a presentiment of this, and the throne filled her with a secret dread. She knew that as her greatness increased, her happiness would diminish, and yearned to descend as much as her husband aspired to rise.

PART I.

THE TEMPORARY CONSULATE.

I. The Luxemboueg

ON the 21st Brumaire, year VIIL, there appeared in the Moniteur the following short paragraph : *' Paris, 20th Brumaire. The three Consuls have taken their seats in the Luxembourg. In the evening the public buildings and many private houses were illuminated." From the moment of his installation at the Luxembourg the future Csesar regarded himself as the absolute head of the state. " He is a pike who will swallow the two other fish," said Madame de Permont to his mother, Madame Bonaparte. " O Panoria ! " replied Madame Letitia, with reproachful accent, for at this moment she still believed in the genuine republicanism of her son. " The surprising thing," said Edgar Quinet, '4s the way in which all combined to blind themselves. In fact, every one was new to servitude. Even those who ran towards it most eagerly imagined that they were acquiring a new form of liberty. . . . Not a day passed without an approach to absolute power, but no one seemed to perceive it." Bonaparte, a sovereign