1 Haydon, I, 243-7, 250; Campbell, II, 246; Wansey, 1, 5, 9. 21-4, 41-2, 108, 111, 114, 116; Bury, I, 242, 245-8, 263-4; Gronow, I, 90^1; II, 299; Broughton, I, 116-17; Harriet Granville, L 60-1; Brownlow, 69; Dudley, 253; Jerningham, II, 54; Stanley, 100-4, 180; Larpent, II, no; JDe Selincourt, II, 878; Lord Coleridge, 223-4; Mercer, II, 17-18, 22-3, 40, 204. 291-2, 302, 309, 328, 330, 334, 336; Simpson, 96-8, 138-9; Lady Shelley, I, 94, 118.
any sense of style except the little cocottes who, with neat ankles, twirling ruffles and darting black eyes, minced among the filth and traffic as if they trod on needles.1
And from the foetid alleys and courtyards of the darker faubourgs —the terrible Quartier de St.-Antoine, the Place Royale and the long blackguard suburbs of La Chapelle and St.-Denis—fearful faces peered, recalling crimes which made respectable folk shudder. Here, recruited at a shilling a head, the guide would explain, the revolutionary mobs had poured forth from their abodes of darkness to fill the gutters with blood. It was clear from the glances cast at visitors that they were only awaiting a chance to repeat their exploits. The presence of foreign troops alone restrained them.2
Yet this "bloody and ferocious capital' as Haydon called it, in which refinement and filth, murder and revolution, blasphemy and heroism had alternately reigned triumphant, was also one of idleness and pleasure. There seemed scarcely a counting-house in the place. Its chief industry, now that war and plunder had ceased, was amusement: a hectic, shameless gaiety, Britons thought it. The broad, tree-lined boulevards which encircled the old city were thronged with indolent people, sauntering about or sitting at open-air cafes watching fiddlers, mountebanks and puppet-shows; the theatres, their boastful Napoleonic inscriptions painted over with fleurs de lys, played to packed houses; the piazzas of the Palais-Royal rang with the odious propositions of brazen boys and meretricious ladies. It was not the Parisian home—a place where husbands and wives huddled together in nooks and corners to fly their separate ways at the first opportunity—wrote a horrified Scot, which was the heart of Parisian society,3 but the restaurant. With his piquante sauces and petit-plats, his gilded mirrors, brilliant lights and marble tables—so different from the smoky, wainscotted chop-houses of London—the restaurateur was the residuary legatee of the Revolution. There were gastronomic paradises like Verys, Hardis and the Quadron Bleu; the Cafe de Milles Colonnes, where a magnificent, diamonded Madame in
1 Haydon, I, 248, 251, 256-7, 270, 277; Wansey, 22, 24, 62, 93; Berry, III, 18; Stanley, 106,
a Brownlow, 170* Gronow, II, 147-8; Mercer, II, 237; Campbell, II, 257. 3 "A French family has no notion of what we call a fireside," Simpson, 112. See idem, 106-7, in, 114,135-6,143-4,156, 182; Stanley, no, 141-2; Mercer, II, 136,154, 216, 218-21, 222, 239, 256; Wansey, 21, 41-2, 46; Lamb, VI, 444; De Selincourt, Middle Years* 906; Farington, VIII,
197", Gronow, II, 283-4, 287-8; Marlay Letters, 265.
crimson velvet—reputed to have been a favourite of Bonaparte's— sat at a raised table among golden inkstands, flower-vases and bells for summoning waiters; Tortoni's with its famous ices, where the great and fashionable supped and made love after the opera and where intending duellists could be seen breakfasting off cold pates, game, fish, broiled kidneys, iced champagne and liqueurs; Frascatis and the Jardin Turque; the little traiteurs of the Palais-Royal where at small spotlessly clothed tables one could dine for a few shillings on three or four dishes and a bottle of good Chablis or Chambertin; and that famous hostelry in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs where the young Thackeray treated his love to bouillabaisse.
At the west end of Paris, close to the Seine, lay the great public buildings which Napoleon, extending the work of the Bourbon Kings, had made the administrative centre of empire. These far surpassed anything to be seen in London. From this side the French capital presented an utterly different face: the noble bridge at Neuilly, the avenue to the Barriere de L'Etoile, the prospect from the summit across the Elysian fields with the road descending through masses of foliage to the Tuileries in the hazy, dreamy distance. Emerging from the dark, cramped, turbulent streets of the city into this spacious over-world of vistas and buildings unstained by smoke, even the most stubborn John Bull could not help being impressed. Here was the venerable royal palace with its formal trees and gravel walks, the unstained banner of ancient France waving above it in the evening breeze, the Place de la Concorde and the Place de Carousel, the pillar of victory in the Place Vendome, the bronze Venetian horses riding above Napoleon's arch, "the gilt chariot," as Haydon with his poet's eye saw it, "the Russian guard and the setting sun casting its glory over all."
Here, everywhere, was the impress of Napoleon s personality: the huge marble bas-reliefs depicting his triumphs, the interminable bees, eagles and laurelled cyphers, the orange trees drawn up in rows as on parade: the marks of all he had done to create an island of order and splendour in the midst of that dark, airless medieval jungle, and of all that he had meant to do when at last he wearied of war and had the time and labour to devote to the arts of peace. "Ah, sir," an old soldier exclaimed to an English tourist, "the Emperor has done more fine things in ten years for the advantage of Paris than all our Sovereigns of a century past; had he reigned ten years longer he would, have made Paris the finest city in the world." The man whom a generation of Britons had come to regard as anti-Christ might have been a scourge and a tyrant, but at least he had been a tyrant of taste. It was a fine thing for a lover of elegance—and what English traveller in the year 1814 was not—to stand in St.-Cloud, the Trianon, Fontainebleau or the Elysee, those temples dedicated to genius and conquest, and see the imperial furniture of green and gold, the ostrich-feathered bed in which the great man had slept, the desk at which he wrote, all daubed with ink, the arm-chair in which he sat, though lacking the gashes which he was said to inflict on it in his fits of neurotic rage, the baths of white marble with cocks for hot and cold water and all their luxurious apparatus of washing.
But of all the evidences of Napoleon's glory, that which most impressed visitors was the palace of the Louvre where he had assembled paintings and sculptures such as had not been collected in one city since the days of Rome. It was something new, this gallery of stolen masterpieces that belonged to a nation. Here, free as sunlight, the property of the public, were humanity's finest achievements. The idea made an irresistible appeal to the English, even though its lawless origin embarrassed them. Instead of being hurried along, after soliciting for cards and bribing the butler, as in the private collections of England, one was allowed to dwell on any painting as long and as often as one pleased. It was there in the statuary hall that Mrs. Siddons, on the arm of the poet Campbell, saw the Apollo Belvedere, his glowing marble unstained by time and the indignation in his countenance giving place to the assurance of victory. As she stood there gazing at it the whole gallery turned and stared at her: this noble Englishwoman in her sixtieth year, as perfect of feature, as poised and as little touched by the years as the Grecian sculpture before her.1
But if the English admired the evidences of Napoleon's taste for art, they disliked intensely those of his love for war. The whole nation seemed to be vitiated by it; even the children wore cocked-hats and strutted, drilled and scowled. The Emperor's ambition to make the terms of man and soldier synonymous seemed to have succeeded. There was scarcely a driver of a fiacre or a waiter who had not
1 Campbell, II, 261, 270-1; Haydon, I, 239, 243-4, 255, 262-6: Marlay Letters, 265; Wansey, 30, 33, 34» 50, 62; Stanley, no, 113-14. 140, 148-9; Lord Coleridge, 221-2; Simpson, 118-24, 141, 146-52, 177-82; Mercer, II, 147
served a campaign. There was scarcely a Frenchman, even among those who most reviled Napoleon, who did not regret his vanished military glory.
For the French were quite impenitent at the suffering they had caused. The only thing they regretted was that they had been defeated. Though they complained bitterly of the Allies' crimes, they dismissed their own with a shrug of the shoulders.1 "Apres tout," they would remark of some b
lood-curdling horror, "c’est le sort de la guerre" Their indifference to death was such that at Montmartre, where the Russians stormed their way into Paris over the bodies of the boys of the Military College, corpses were carefully preserved for sightseers, and houses, pitted with bullets, bore notices, " on voit la bataille pour deux sous!
Though they found much to admire, the English were disgusted at the cynicism of the French capital. All the Parisians seemed to care about was glory and pleasure. Now they had been deprived of the one, they thought of nothing but the other. On the night after the Allies' entry the theatres and public gardens were packed as though nothing had happened. The people regarded the denouement of the bloody drama as a mere spectacle; instead of being chastened by it, they flocked into the streets to gape at their conquerors' uniforms. "They appear," wrote an onlooker, "the same light, trifling, dancing people as ever; pleasure is still their idol, vive la bagatelle their motto." Gambling was a universal relaxation; fagged out, slovenly in air and dress, both sexes crowded night after night into airless rooms where no sound was heard but the crack of the croupier's stick and the rattling of money. It shocked English visitors even more than the pornographic prints on the hotel walls.2
In some ways the country was wonderfully improved. The peasants, thrifty and industrious, were cultivating the holdings acquired from the sale of national lands; roads and bridges had been built; the law codified, and the foundations of an efficient, if over-centralised, administration laid. There was reason to hope, now that France had been freed from the drain of war-taxes and conscription,
1 "No Tory ever believed more firmly in divine right," wrote John William Ward, "than the French believe in their right to plunder and insult all mankind without the smallest chance of retaliation." Dudley, 289. See Brownlow. 80; Haydon, I, 258-9, 260, 296; Mercer, II, 175; Stanley, 106, 116-17, 140-1, 143, 157-8, 243; Simpson, 86, I34 5; Wansey, 93; Campbell, II, 252-3; Granville, II. 512.
8 Harriet Granville, I, 67; Wansey, 101. See idem, 46,100; Haydon, I, 251, 272; Simpson, 108, 125, 162-3; Mercer, II, 128, 144, 154, 216, 222.
that material conditions would rapidly improve. But public morality had ceased, it seemed, to exist. It had been thrown into the basket with the heads of the priests and nobles. The Parisians were ready to betray or follow anyone or anything that suited their private interest. They would in one breath curse Napoleon for having led them to disaster, and in the next praise the crimes he had practised against their neighbours. Their only good seemed to be success.
For after two decades of centralised despotism and the suppression of independent opinion the people of the French capital, politically speaking, were without integrity. The faces of the men struck visitors as coarse and ferocious; those of their womenfolk in the restless boulevards as brazen. There seemed to be no gentlemen and, by English standards, no ladies; as Napoleon himself ungratefully observed, they were all rascals. "Everyone appears intent," wrote a visitor, "on living what is called a life of pleasure... splendour without taste and pride without dignity." Self had become a religion; no one was prepared to play an uphill game or put himself in opposition to power except when it was falling. "What have we to make us patriots?" a Frenchman asked; "in England you have a Constitution to maintain under which you live securely and respectably, while we have nothing on which we can depend." For a generation property in France had existed only by permission of the State, and conscience and conviction had been dangerous luxuries. The confiscation of noble and ecclesiastical lands, the abolition of primogeniture, the inflation under the Directory, the crushing taxation, had left only a tiny minority with any independence.1
So at least it seemed to Englishmen. The sense of despotism, Haydon wrote, preyed on the mind: in everything there was "a look of gilded and bloody splendour, a tripping grace in the women and a ragged blackguardism in the men." Life was regimented in a way undreamt of in England: the very cultivators' carts bore State-allocated numbers, while armed excisemen searched every wagon entering or leaving the capital. Napoleon's system of preventative tyranny had achieved its object: the restless, inquiring people who had made the Revolution were cowed. They did not even realise their own servility.
1 Farington, VIII, 38. Sec Simpson, 85-7, 108, 115-16; Haydon, I, 256, 259-60; De Selincourt, II, 002; Stanley, 117, 243; Wansey, 93; Bury, II, 22; Harriet Granville, I, 64-5; Colchester, II, 554; Lady Shelley, I, 132; Neumann, 43.
"Oh, no," they would reply to those who commiserated with them on the ignorance in which the tyrant's Press had kept them, "we had our Gazettes!"1
All this made British observers doubt the ability of the French to live quietly under a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary system. It was only a few months since a British Foreign Office official had reported that the Napoleonic government was so ruthlessly imposed and so efficiently centralised that it could never be destroyed. Now that it had suddenly collapsed, it was hard to see how the people could govern themselves without it. Their Corps Legislatif was a joke; everyone wore uniform and members wishing to speak rushed to the rostrum like a charge of cavalry, shouting and pushing one another about while a gesticulating president vainly rang his bell for order. The nation had no more respect for it than it had for itself. "Bah! Napoleon knew how to talk to such fellows," a young officer told an inquirer. " 'Corps Legislatif, je vous abolirai: senateurs,gardez a vous That's the way!"2
For, having no independent local and national leaders, the French at the end of the Revolution and its wars were politically children. They obeyed only the rod. When Napoleon and his centralised despotism fell they were lost. They did not even attempt to defend their country against invasion. Those in authority transferred their allegiance en bloc to the new Government, though it was based on principles diametrically opposite to those to which they had so long adhered and sycophantically acclaimed. They were as sycophantic about the new. The higher placed they were, and the nearer the seat of power, the more so.
None were quicker to change than those who owed most to Napoleon. His Marshals' titles and pensions had been guaranteed with the Restoration settlement. Now incongruously mingling with emigri dukes and marquises, they grouped themselves in their broad, red imperial ribbons around their new master, enjoying, as a lady from England wrote, their emoluments. They made him look, she thought, like Daniel in the lions' den. Except for the handsome Ney, with his fair curling hair, and Victor, who was admitted to have a
1 Stanley, 105. "The slavery of the Press had been so hideous a dream that they stared at our conversation as if awakening out of a dream." Haydon, I, 259. See idem, 256-7, 276; Campbell, II, 246; Bury, I, 264; Mercer, II, 31. 263.
2 Wansey, 30; Brownlow, 87; Stanley, 129-30; Simpson, 133-4
gentlemanly appearance, they struck the English as an unprepossessing lot. The Duke of Dantzig squinted, Soult and Augureau were stout and vulgar, Davout had so cruel, cunning and malevolent a face that he made an honest Hampshire squire feel sick. Though Massena was conceded a kind of evil dignity and was said to be very gallant to the ladies, the plebeian faces of the rest were hard to distinguish from one another.1
It was symptomatic of the Bourbon genius for creating humiliating situations that of all Napoleon's lieutenants the King chose as Minister of War, Dupont, the capitulator of Baylen. It was as though James II, recalled to the throne after England's defeat in a naval war, had sent Kirby and Wade to the Admiralty.
To the officers and men of the Grande Armee, trudging home in their thousands from captivity or relegated to half-pay to make way for white-feathered popinjays, the Bourbons and their hangers-on appeared a pack of traitors. Their looks showed what shift they would give them if their Emperor ever returned to lead them. "Quinze, seize'* the sullen veterans called out as their officers numbered the ranks, "dix-sept, gros cochon, dix-neufl" Sent home to starve in their native villages, parade their wounds and weave sagas of faded glories, they spread everywhere their contempt for the crowned embusque. A British artillery officer, passing with
his guns through a provincial town, tested the sincerity of the obsequious cries o£"Vive le Roil” by murmuring "Vive L’Empereur." Immediately men began to look at one another with sly, delighted expressions. "Mais oui, monsieur “ they cried, slapping their thighs, "vive VEmpereur, vive Napoleon!”
Therefore, though royalist audiences called nightly in the Paris theatres for "Vive Henri Quatre" "La Belle Gabrielle' and other Bourbon songs, few Englishmen who visited Paris in 1814 expected to see the Restoration last. King Louis might look an excellent man, as one of them wrote, very benevolent and soft, but he would never be able to control a people half monkey and half tiger. After a year or two of enforced quiet, they would be at their old tricks again.
Yet an unexpected influence was at work to tranquillise France.
1 "In the character of almost all these French military leaders there are such blots and stains that one sickens at the thought of being of the same species." Stanley, 196. See idem, 136-9; Wansey, 100; Brownlow, 97, 182; Lord Coleridge, 228; Granville, I, 516.
Few people liked Talleyrand, least of all those whom his treacherous feat of legerdemain had restored to the throne. Napoleon, whose Foreign Minister he had been, had once described him as filth in silk stockings. He was the most consistent crook of his age; a politician perfectly adapted to the prevailing moral climate of his country and a disordered Europe. He had been trained at St.-Sulpice —a priest of the ancien regime; in youth his epicurean self-indulgence while holding high church preferment had shocked even the amoral aristocracy in which he grew up. For a quarter of a century, through storm and terror, he had lived, survived and triumphed by his wits. There were few crimes, including incest, of which he was not believed guilty. No one who saw his dirty, crafty, powdered face, with its half-closed eyes, villainous mouth, and slobbering, darting tongue, was left in any doubt as to the manner of man he was.
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