by Emil Ludwig
But he had more success with France than with the legitimists. Because he is not really a Frenchman, France never becomes his legitimate spouse; she remains his beloved mistress. He knows this ; he wooes, gives himself, renounces ; and from the perpetual uncertainty of his relationship to France, he derives the keenest joys of his life. " I have only one passion, only one mistress: France. I lie by her side. She has never been untrue to me; she pours out her blood for me, and lavishes her treasures upon me. If I need half a million men, she gives them !" When he chides his mistress, he does it as a jealous lover; he rules her " with an iron hand in a velvet glove " ; he gratifies all her caprices ; and he knows better than any one else how to allure her by the glamour of fame and fantasy. That is
The French Remain Sceptical
why she beams on him when he comes home victorious ; that is why she gives him her children.
Yet lover and mistress remain critical of one another. Mutual jealousy persists. Neither of them ever forgets the wish to master the other. Hear his exclamation in the tone of a despotic lover: "I swear that I do everything for the sake of France alone ! If I do not give her more liberty, it is because she does not need more ! " He is standing in the middle of his drawing-room, scrutinising his guests sharply as he speaks to them with raised voice. Among intimates, he will often use harsher words: " Always the same old Gauls! The same frivolity, the same vanity ! When, if ever, will these be replaced by a proper pride ? "
The French, likewise, remain sceptical. Must they not, in confidential talks, say of this Italian the very thing that he once wrote to his brother Louis ? " Since you ascended the throne, you have forgotten that you are a Frenchman, and have strained every nerve to persuade yourself that you are a Dutchman. The foreign environment tickles your fancy, but it is still foreign." Roederer writes of Napoleon: " He is making a mistake. They are by no means so enthusiastic about him as they were about Lafayette (who did nothing practical for them). At bottom, they merely admire and respect him because he is useful to them."
Such a liaison cannot fail to end tragically. The mistress discards her lover when he is no longer useful to her.
Tragical, too, is the ending of another embodiment of his egotism, its noblest incorporation. " I wish I could be my own posterity, and read what such a poet as Corneille would make me feel, do, and say." From boyhood's days down to the time of his exile, in the island where he was born and in the island where he died, his self-esteem is nourished on historical parallels. History, he said, was the only true philosophy. Had he not had his peculiar feeling for history, Napoleon's career would have been very different; nay, it would have been impossible.
His Feeling for History
His political calculations are fed from two sources, history and imagination; the first of these streams being intellectual, and the second passionate. It is history alone which gives him alighting places on his flight. In his own age he is unique; he travels alone; nowhere but in history can he find prototypes by whose example he can guide his impetuous progress. With Caesar, the lieutenant begins to soar. At Rochefort, the Emperor ends the active phase of his existence by trusting too implicitly in the heroic example of Themistocles.
Between the opening and the close, we find numberless indications of the way in which his imagination remains at work, mirroring the great incidents of classical and modern history. Why is he opposed to Tacitus and Chateaubriand ? Because they warn the people against tyrants. Why does he blame the assassins of Caesar ? Because he wishes to defend his own sentence upon the duke of Enghien. When he is First Consul, he actually thinks of writing a few chapters of Roman history, to prove " that Csesar never wanted to become king, and that he was murdered because he wished to re-establish order by uniting all parties." He goes on to add that Caesar had been killed in the Senate House, and that in the Senate were forty Pompeians, personal enemies of the dictator. Napoleon's unexpressed inference is that he must clean up the Senate, and he does so.
In the Roman style, he sketches the ideas for eight splendid bas-reliefs which, on triumphal arches, are to illustrate the doings of his reign; they are to be representations of fact, devoid of self-commendation, and only in a formal sense illustrations of historical egotism. He summons historiographers and imaginative writers from all civilised lands, and converses with them for hours, in order that, through their intermediation, he may win the approval of posterity. When his portrait seems to him too crudely lifelike, he says that Alexander never sat to Apelles ; David must paint him " in a tranquil attitude, mounted upon a fiery steed." It pleases him to write army orders when he
" I Am a Roman Emperor"
is sitting in Frederick the Great's study; at Sans Souci, to invite the biographer of the former master of the house to dine with him; in Lombardy, to visit the arch of Augustus, in Egypt, the pillar of Pompey, and on these monuments to inscribe the names of those who have recently fallen; in Madrid and Moscow, to study the environment and the habits of Philip and of Catherine. But his pleasure in these things is not purely aesthetic. The hours he devotes to them are heroical; they are Napoleon's true recompense; they are realisations of his earliest dreams.
With his own hand, he is continually writing his own history. The young general records his first victories in orders of the day; with each new campaign, and after every battle, he adds to the long series; and the work is done with the hand of an artist, is wrought with an eye to immortal fame. When he is offered the crown of Italy, he surveys his own deeds of little more than five years ago as if they had come down in legend : " When, a few years later, we learned on the banks of the Nile that our aims had come to naught, we were bitterly distressed at this evil turn of fortune; but, thanks to the courage of our armies, we were able to appear in Milan at a time when Italy believed us to be still on the shores of the Red Sea." Actually, in the interim, he had, before the eyes of all the world, trampled on the constitution of France, and even the meanest herd in the Apennines knew of his return from Egypt.
When he is carrying on a struggle with the pope he pens a long letter, and sends it to Eugene for the latter to copy, since ostensibly it is to be a letter from Eugene to the pope; therein Eugene is made to say that Napoleon can only be compared to Cyrus and Charlemagne.
At the height of his career, he says to his Austrian ambassador : " Don't you make any mistake, I am a Roman emperor, in the best line of the Caesars. Chateaubriand has compared me with Tiberius, who could only travel from Rome to Capri. A pretty idea! Trajan, Aurelian— that would be
The Chessplayer
another story. They were self-made men, who shook the world out of old ruts. Do you not see the resemblances between my regime and that of Diocletian ? The net so widely spread ; the Emperor's eyes everywhere; the civil authority omnipotent throughout an Empire that is fundamentally warlike. ... A man is born to be a Csesar."
This is not a proclamation, not a political letter, not an attempt to seduce any one. The words are spoken lightly, in a drawing-room, without emotion and without ulterior aim, with all the simplicity of a man aware of his own strength.
After victories and successes, this historical feeling for his own personality becomes as objective as the attitude of the chessplayer towards the pieces on his board. We seem to be contemplating a man whose fondness for the game is the only thing which makes him want to win ; and who, as soon as he has won, can converse dispassionately with his defeated opponent about the mistakes they have made and the artifices to which they have had recourse. When he is talking to enemy generals whom he has taken prisoner or with whom he is negotiating, he will say : " You ought to have done this, that, or the other. There, you were in an advantageous position. That would have been an excellent move."
Immediately after his victory at Wagram, he says to Count Bubna: "I am certain that you are damnably strong, for you can deliver shrewd blows. At what figure do you estimate my forces ? . . . You appear to be uncommonly well informed ! Would you care to have a look at my army ? . . . N
o ? Well, at least you had better study my position on this map. It was my own fault when I failed to win a victory at Aspern-Essling. I got the punishment I deserved."
Only with regard to one matter does this detachment fail him—Waterloo. In St. Helena, an English surgeon ventured to say that people in England would be glad to hear his opinion of Wellington. The remark was followed by an embarrassing silence.
Fame
Fame is the supreme goal of his egotism ; substantially, it is the only goal. All his energies are directed towards this end : his consciousness of his uniqueness ; his historic sense ; his sense of honour; his dignity; the boy's dreams, the youth's plans, the man's deeds, the prisoner's unrest. Posterity is the great confused picture which fills his imagination; and the desire of his heart would seem to be rather the Latin "gloria" which thinks of future generations, than the French " gloire " which suns itself in the smile of contemporaries. He is animated by a daimonic being's eager wish for immortality, although he knows that he must share the fate of all mortal men. " Better never to have lived, than to exist, and pass without leaving a trace."
He modifies the coronation oath by swearing, not only to protect the realm and the happiness of France, but also to rule for the glory of his people. On one of the battle-fields of Henry IV in Normandy he has a column erected with the inscription : " Great men love the fame of those who resemble themselves." Frederick's sword is " more precious than all the treasures of the king of Prussia " ; but it is not only when he is campaigning that his thoughts turn towards the future. When he is having houses built for the unemployed, his order to the minister to whom the task is entrusted ends with the phrase: " We must not pass out of the world without leaving traces that will commend us to the thoughts of posterity." At the close of his career as Emperor, he refuses to make peace on terms that will involve the renunciation of territories upon whose conquest part of his fame depends ; and towards the end of his life he utters a melancholy parable, darkly significant, lonely as his own destiny:
" The love for glory is like the bridge which Satan tried to build across chaos in order to make his way into paradise. Glory is a connecting link between past and future, from which an abyss separates him. I leave to my. son nothing but my name."
Calculation IV
Energy is the second element in Napoleon's make-up. How does this quality show itself ?
First of all in calculation. Never a trace of the flash of genius; but, rather, continuous weighing, over-elaborating, discarding :
" I have known myself to argue with myself over the thoughts concerning a battle, and have contradicted myself. . . . When I have drawn up a plan of battle I am the most pusillanimous of men. I magnify the dangers and the incidents, am in a terrible state of excitement even when I seem cheerful; I am then like a girl who is going to have a baby." This is the mood of an artist during the conception of his work. He once described these feelings to Roederer in even franker terms :
" I am always at work; I think a great deal. If I appeared to be ever ready and equal to any occasion, it is because I have thought over matters for long before I undertake to do the slightest thing; I have foreseen all eventualities. There exists no guardian angel who suddenly and mysteriously whispers in my ear what I have to do or to say. Everything is turned over in my mind, again and again, always, whether I am at table or at the theatre. At night, I wake up in order to work."
This constant deliberation builds up something within him which he names " the spirit of things " : the precision, which penetrates all he touches ; the thinking in numbers, to which he ascribes part of his success and for which he has to thank his mathematical training. There is nothing too small for this brain; for the sum total of millions of details in a plan whose scope is world embracing. If one of his officers writes to say that the Emperor's instructions have been carried out, Napoleon waves this general statement aside and demands details. Nothing is so small but he wants to know all about it and judge its importance for himself. He writes to Eugene, who is in Italy:
A Man of Figures
" How is it possible that you are distributing three million seven hundred and forty-seven thousand rations of meat ? . . . I can calculate a similar gross total for dried vegetables, wine, salt, and spirits. But I want calculations according to corps. I am robbed of fifty per cent., even as much as seventy per cent. . . . How can you allow them to calculate for one million three hundred and seventy-one thousand rations of hay ? I should have to provide twelve thousand horses to eat it, not counting the Istrians and Dalmatians ! You know I have only seven thousand. . . . The office charges are insane! Frs. 118,000 for four months ! That equals frs. 400,000 a year ! Such a sum should suffice for the whole of Italy! "
This is but one example among many. Thousands of such letters, hailing from every corner of the military and civil administration, personally dictated, are to be found in the volumes of correspondence, and must sadly disappoint those who expect to find only ideas and temperament in the letters. He is the man who, in the midst of his wars in Italy, writes home that they must concoct a letter, nominally written by a German patriot and dealing with Austrian politics, and have it circulated throughout Germany; again, in the throes of a campaign, he has to write to Murat, King of Naples, detailing how the latter is to behave at balls or when he visits the theatre, whom he is to invite and whom to exclude from his invitations. While the preparations are being made for the Erfurt gathering, he suddenly remembers that some one must be there to introduce the actresses to the gallant grand dukes. He never demonstrates more forcibly the way he formulates destinies in figures than by the following incursion into social life : " Each household should have six children, seeing that, on the average, three are sure to die. Of the three who survive, two should replace the father and mother; the third will serve for an unforeseen emergency."
His precision of thought goes to such grotesque lengths !
A third means for expressing this energetic faculty is his
Tempo
tempo. " Activity ! Speed ! " he writes with his own hand at the foot of an order. The king of Prussia has depicted this peculiarity with especial felicity : " We need but see him ride : he always gives his horse rein, and never troubles about what may be happening in his rear! " But Napoleon negotiated better than he rode, for he never negotiated until after long reflection. " Not a moment must be lost," is the slogan even when nothing presses for decision. The instinctive impetus of an overburdened but short life drives him forward; it seems as if he could not arrive quickly enough at the end of his career. He writes to Bernadotte, in the course of a campaign : " I have lost a whole day through you, and the fate of the world hangs upon one single day."
The drive he imposes upon himself has its reaction upon those who serve him. He drives them, not only in the field, but also in circumstances which ordinary governments would take months to decide. He demands a treaty with Russia from Talleyrand, saying it is to be drawn up and ready in a couple of hours. To explain the reasons for his second marriage, he wants a circular letter sent to all his ambassadors and consuls ; this is to be drafted " in the course of the day." One night he is immersed in thoughts concerning the embellishment of Paris. Next morning he says to his Minister for Home Affairs : " I require that Paris shall have two million inhabitants by the end of ten years. I want to do something useful and great for the city. What do you suggest ? "
" Provide the town with a good water-supply, Sire," and the minister expounds a plan whereby the Ourcq water can be conveyed to Paris.
" Your proposal is good. Summon G.; he must send five hundred men to La Vilette to-morrow, in order to start work on the canal."
Another of his weapons is memory. " I always know my position. I cannot remember a single Alexandrine, but I never forget a figure relating to my military situation." This is the
Memory
productive memory. Although he pronounces them abominably, he retains the names of all the important places—important from his
point of view—in all the countries where he has fought. The Postmaster General reports that the Emperor is able to mention, offhand, distances which he himself has to hunt up in works of reference. On his way back to Paris from the camp at Boulogne, Napoleon encounters a troop of soldiers who have lost their way, asks the number of their regiment, whence they set out, and when. He tells them their line of march ! " Your battalion will be at H. this evening." At this time, two hundred thousand men were on the march close at hand !
His technique is to arrange things in his head "as in a wardrobe." He says : " When I wish to put any matter out of my mind, I close its drawer and open the drawer belonging to another. The contents of the drawers never get mixed, and they never worry me or weary me. Do I want to sleep ? I close all the drawers, and then I am asleep."
Among the numerous heraldic emblems which might have tickled the fancy of an upstart—stars, tutelary deities, saints, beasts of prey—he finds none to please him. He chooses the bee, thus emphasising once more his opinion that a man of talent who aspires and works unceasingly, can achieve everything that can otherwise be achieved through what is vaguely spoken of as genius. He declares that genius is industry; meaning, of course, that genius is industry among other things. He says that work is his element, that for which he has been created. Had he left nothing behind him, had all his works perished, still his industry and his glory would have been an emblematic stimulus to the youth of countless generations after he had passed away.
Many witnesses testify to his amazing powers of continued work. Roederer, who was his close companion during the Consulate, writes as follows : " That which especially characterises him is the power and persistence of his attention. He can work for eighteen hours at a stretch, it may be at one piece of
Unflagging Industry
work, it may be at several in turn. I have never seen his mind flag. I have never seen his mind without a spring in it, not when he was physically tired, not when he was taking violent exercise, not even when he was angry. I have never seen him distracted from one affair by another, neglecting the matter in hand for one which he is about to work. Good or bad news from Egypt never interfered with his attention to the civil code, and the civil code never interfered with the steps it was necessary to take for the safety of Egypt. No one was ever more wholly immersed in what he was doing, nor did any one ever make a better distribution of his time among all the things he had to do. Never was any one more stubborn in rejecting the occupation or the thought which was not appropriate to the hour or the day; nor was any one ever more adroit in seizing an occupation or a thought when the right moment had come."