Napoleon

by Emil Ludwig

  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

  The Back Room at Saint-Cloud

  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 Sieyes 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 favourable. 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. . . .

  A Foolish Speech

  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'etat 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

  General Bonaparte in 1798, during the voyage to Egypt. Sketch by Andre Dutertre.

  Against the Grain

  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.

  Outlaw Him!

  "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 Areola, he had been in imminent peril. But here, he was for the first time involved in a rough-and-tumble affray where firearms 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'etat—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

  Attempted Assassination I

  t
ries 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 Sieyes 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

  Clear the Hall!

  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 cafe 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

  Good-Night, Bourrienne I

  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 today ? "

  " 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'e'tat, or to congratulate himself upon its amazing success (for from tomorrow 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. Tomorrow night we shall sleep in the Luxembourg."

  BOOK THREE THE RIVER

  One who thoughtfully ponders the centuries, Surveys the whole in the clear light of the spirit; All that is petty has vanished from sight; Oceans and continents alone are of account.

  —GOETHE.

  ABOUT twenty men are seated round a large oval table. Some are quite young, some middle-aged, some elderly. They are plainly dressed, in accordance with the fashion of 1800, when wigs were no longer worn, and lace was out of date ; those of them that are in uniform are not resplendent with gold braid, and they wear no orders. Some have the bold, self-confident look of the man of action; others, the thoughtful mien of the savant. From town and from countryside, from office and from laboratory, they come, but are unified by a common experience and a common aim. For ten years, they have been living through a revolutionary epoch; they meet to bring that epoch to a close. Around them is the chill splendour of the Tuileries, the palace of the last Bourbon kings. The golds and the reds of the rich carpets and the silken hangings are out of keeping with their bourgeois circumstantiality; the silvery sheen of the candles, reflected in rainbow tints from the myriad facets of the candelabras, recalls an era that scintillated with light and glowed with colour.

  The Directors before them had been wont to entertain their lady friends in royal halls, but that was in the Luxembourg, the former meeting-place of the peers of France. The Tuileries seemed full of Ghosts. Did not a curse lie upon the place ? The dictator had broken the spell. Two months after the coup d'etat, he had come with his fellow Consuls to take possession of the palace, which exerted a magical lure upon his imagination. Yet when, seven years after the arrest of the last scion of the royal line, the first of the bourgeois rulers made his formal entry, the affair had a strong flavour of burlesque. The Parisians could not but laugh to see the numbers of the hackney carriages peeping out from beneath the slips of paper which

  166

  Drum-Taps

  had been carelessly pasted over them. This seemed to symbolise the ludicrous aspect of time's revenges.

  The Consul's own mood was no less haphazard as he looked round with childlike curiosity. " Well, here we are in the Tuileries," he said to one of his friends; " let's see to it that we stay here ! "

  Several of those now seated at the oval table, had waited here of old—wearing powdered wigs, lace jabots, and pumps— tremulous with eagerness to learn whether His Majesty would receive them, and when. Some of them had sat at a similar table in the Luxembourg. There had been no stability about those deliberations. Laws had come and gone, urgency orders and exceptional provisions; transitional decrees had pushed foregoing decrees out of the way; three constitutions had risen and set, had shot up into the air swiftly and brilliantly like rockets, to vanish like these and to fall like rocket-sticks. The whole decade during which the new ideas had been trying to realise themselves in the concrete, had passed swiftly over Paris like a single night, amid a confusion of flashing lights and rumbling drums. The city had been like an armed camp with no fighting fronts and no battles, but perturbed by the to-and-fro march of armed political parties, deafened by the noisy wrangling between the old
order and the new wishes, dazzled by the glare of venturesome ideas, confused by the clamour of disappointed hopes and the clash of warring ambitions—a titanic bacchanal of liberty, equality, and cozenage. Surveying the medley, looking down from the skies, were the shades of the two men whose books had set the whole in motion: Rousseau, with eyes of disgust; Voltaire, with a mocking smile.

  But suddenly the tumult had been stilled. That little man at the head of the table had stilled it, the little general in the well-worn green uniform. Not that he, presiding over the Council of State, is in fact presiding over the State; the parties have withdrawn into their caves, satisfied or rancorous, but at any rate silenced. France, weakened by clubs and corruption, by the

  The Spirit and the Sword

  Terror and the demagogues, is turning back (like an adventuress weary of errant amours) to the arms of a strong man who can master her.

  Enough, now, for Bonaparte that he should aspire to fulfil this masterful lover's role. No longer did he need to fight for the position. The man for whom France was longing, must be a man of order; must be one who had never before held power, who belonged to no party, and who none the less .enjoyed popular favour. He must, therefore, be a soldier and a conqueror. Moreau lacked the self-confidence and adroitness needed to make him a successful rival; the other great generals were dead or overshadowed; there were no civilian competitors. After Bonaparte's outstanding military successes, it was easy for him to win supreme power in the State. He would have won it without a struggle had he not been so stubborn in his desire to observe constitutional formalities.

  The attempt to be strictly constitutional had been a ludi crous failure, and had imposed artificial obstacles in his path. Yet this very fact was a token and a guarantee of his political talents. He was a man with a firm grip on the sword-hilt, but he was also a man who clearly understood the limits of the power of the sword. " Do you know," he said in those days, " what amazes me more than all else ? The impotence of force to organise anything. There are only two powers in the world : the spirit and the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit." Napoleon was the greatest military commander of his day, but neither now nor later was it his habit to strike the table with mailed fist, neither in Paris at this juncture nor elsewhere when negotiating a truce or a peace or an alliance. He was a political genius, who prized the sword, indeed, but prized it only as one of the two powers. His ear was never deafened by the clash of arms. As now, so for fifteen years to come, he is ever on the watch for indications of public opinion ; always listening to the voice of the people, a voice which defies calculation; a voice which Napoleon, a man of