A gloomy silence followed. When, at last, she acknowledged the shameful facts, she fell into a rage. “Why didn’t he kill himself?” she screamed. “Why didn’t he have himself buried under the walls of Sedan? Could he not feel he was disgracing himself? What a name to leave to his son!” The father of her child had aspired to be a second Caesar, but in the eyes of the world he more nearly resembled the unskillful Valerian, the only Roman Emperor to fall alive into the hands of an enemy.
The storm passed, and the Empress, repenting of her words, fell upon her knees. She invoked her husband’s name, and implored him to forgive her trespasses against him.
The next day, September 4, dawned bright. The Empress rose from a sleepless bed and went to her oratory to pray. Already crowds of Parisians, inflamed by the tidings of Sedan, were pressing against the railings of her palace. “Déchéance! Déchéance!” they cried—“Fall! Fall!” Luncheon was served at half past eleven; but few of those in attendance had any appetite for the cuisine. With every passing minute the fury of the mob grew more intense; and cries of “Vive la République!” were distinctly heard by those servants of the dynasty who remained in the Tuileries.
The imperial régime was melting away. The regular operations of government were suspended as imperial functionaries, fearful for their lives, fled the city and the awful retribution which they foresaw must come all too soon. Evil tidings poured in from the faubourgs, as well as from Belleville and the other “red” arrondissements of the city. The dispatches from the Prefecture of Police were grim. Some counseled the Empress to take strong measures to suppress the rebellious Parisians; but this advice she wisely dismissed. “Anything rather than civil war,” she said. Already it was doubtful whether repressive orders would be obeyed, and violent instructions, although they could not avert the calamity, would forever blacken the name of the Bonapartes.
The Empire fell with a great ruin. An angry crowd stormed the Palais Bourbon and invaded the legislature. A young lawmaker, distinguished by the proud and intellectual cast of his features and by the brilliance and vigor of his rhetoric, mounted the tribune; and Léon Gambetta, whose energy and genius were soon to be felt throughout France, pronounced the dynasty of the Napoleons extinct. The chief antagonists of the Empire, accompanied by a great mob of Parisians, went in motley procession to the Hôtel de Ville and proclaimed a Republic. A provisional authority, styling itself the Government of National Defense, was formed, and the new masters of France, or at least of Paris, harangued the crowd, and promised to vindicate the liberty and honor of the nation. Amid such doubtful omens the Third Republic was born.
The gilded eagles which adorned the gate of the Tuileries were struck off and smashed by the crowd. Inside the palace itself all hope was extinguished. Staff officers with revolvers in their hands—it was no longer prudent to trust the fidelity of the troops—stood guard while the Empress bade farewell to her ladies. “Go, go, I beg you!” she said. The sobbing women departed. Eugénie then went to other end of the salon, turned, and made a bow. The Chamberlain addressed those who still remained. “Her Majesty thanks you,” he said, “and invites you to withdraw.”
A few faithful companions attended the Empress to her private apartments. Among them were Prince and Princess Metternich; theirs was a family practiced in the art of fleeing revolutionary mobs. Also in attendance was Eugénie’s confidante, Madame LeBreton, the sister of General Bourbaki; she held the sinecure of reader to the Empress. Eugénie went through her rooms, collecting jewels and other precious items; these she entrusted to Princess Metternich. The Empress cast a last, melancholy look on those rooms which were the scene of her long prosperity and her final distress. They were charming, though some visitors complained that they were a little too new, and a little too gilded. The Salon Bleu bore the impress of Eugénie’s style and her peculiar femininity: white satin curtains hung at the windows, and cartouches over the doors depicted the beautiful women of the age. (Like that other handsome sovereign, Elisabeth of Austria, Eugénie was fascinated by the gorgeousness of rival beauties; they provided her with a standard against which she could measure her own.) Not less distinctive was her boudoir. Its walls were hung with green satin; the curtains and upholstery were of purple silk. To this room she and her husband would repair after luncheon each day; the Emperor would light a cigarette, she herself might dabble with her watercolors, and together they would discuss the day’s events—an interlude of intimacy stolen from the relentless labor of politics and power.
The decisive moment drew near. Ominous sounds emanated from the courtyard, and the tread of boots sounded on the staircase. Eugénie and her attendants stole down a secret passageway that led to the Louvre. Hurrying through the empty galleries of the palace, they gained the street at the easternmost end, near the tower of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. The fugitive Empress, heavily veiled, climbed into a hackney cab. For several harrowing hours she searched for a place in which to shelter herself for the night. At last she found refuge in the house of her American dentist, Dr. Thomas Evans. The next day Eugénie concealed herself in a closed landau, and Dr. Evans mounted the box.
In terror and suspense they drove towards the northern suburbs. Would they be stopped? Would she be recognized? Would she suffer the fate of her heroine, Marie-Antoinette, who had also tried to fly from a revolution? That unfortunate Queen and her husband, Louis XVI, got as far as Varennes before they were discovered, betrayed, and delivered up to the vengeance of the Parisians. Eugénie now felt the cold fear that once gripped them.
At last, however, the carriage gained the open road. As it vanished from sight so did the vision of Empire which, seven decades before, had possessed the first Napoleon, and which his nephew and his consort had vainly attempted to perpetuate.
Chapter 31
VINUM DAEMONUM
Yasnaya Polyana, June 1869-March 1878
EVERYONE IS, at some time or another, conscious of a mysterious dread. Something is looming over one’s head. But what? It might be an obligation one has promised to fulfill, but has put off. Perhaps it is a debt one must pay, that has fallen past due. Sometimes, however, it happens that a person is conscious of this feeling of dread and yet, on reflection, can find no reason for it. He searches his mind, anxiously seeking the clue to his unease. His debts are paid, his duties are performed, yet still he feels fear.
The fear, Tolstoy said, is the fear of death.
He ought to have been in the best of spirits. He was in every outward sense content. He had completed War and Peace, and in his life he was faithful to its thesis that truth and happiness are to be found, not in the empty caprices of politics, but in the ordinary cycle of domestic joys and tribulations. His reward for these domestic labors was a large and loving family, and a tranquil home. He had, too, engrossing work to do. He had begun to teach the peasants again, and he was full of plans for the reform of the Russian schools. His mind and his pen were also active; he learnt Greek, and he began to write Anna Karenina.
But he could not rid himself of the feeling of dread. “I felt lost,” he said, “and became dejected.” The mood passed, and he went on living as before; but soon the feeling returned. The crisis became acute. “My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep ... I could not help doing these things; but there was no life. . . .” His existence, he said, was “a stupid and spiteful joke someone has played on me.”
He opened his Schopenhauer, and found in those pages what seemed to be an answer. “Life,” Schopenhauer said, “is that which should not be—an evil; and the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life.” Evidently the problem was life itself. Existence was a mistake—a blunder of the universe, an error to be evaded. Tolstoy eyed the crossbar in his study, and thought of hanging himself from it.
But Schopenhauer’s rejection of life—his dream of a romantic escape into nothingness and Nirvana—did not wholly persuade him. Tolstoy later said that, had he swallowed Schopenhauer whole, he should have committed
suicide straight off. But he chose rather to live. “I feared life,” he said, “desired to escape from it; yet still hoped something of it.”
It chanced that Tolstoy engaged, as a mathematics instructor for his children, a young man called Vasily Alexiev. Alexiev had once belonged, with Prince Kropotkin, to the Circle of Chaikovsky; he was now living the life of a mendicant revolutionist. “I was literally starving,” Alexiev remembered. “Through some acquaintances, a place as tutor at Count Tolstoy’s was offered me. I was so frightened by the Count’s title, that I at first declined.” But eventually he went to Yasnaya Polyana, and he and Tolstoy became friends. Alexiev confessed to his employer his dream of going to the people, and of escaping the evils of life by building a new form of communal existence. Tolstoy sympathized with Alexiev’s aspirations, though he opposed the violent methods espoused by some of his comrades in revolution. The rebels hated the Tsar and despised his revolution, but Tolstoy insisted that Alexander was “a kind man who has done much good,” and he regretted that the red brigades, with their “godless and inhuman methods, incendiary fires, robberies, and murders,” had “poisoned” the monarch’s life and warped his character. Alexiev told Tolstoy of Chaikovsky’s own doubts on this score; he related how the socialist leader, disenchanted with Russia, had led a group of disciples to the “steppes of Kansas” (so the Russian phrased it) to found a new faith.
A new faith. Here, Tolstoy thought, was a path that might lead him out of perplexity and despair. Alexiev “made me believe in the possibility of what had always dimly stirred in my soul.” Even before he knew the young socialist, Tolstoy had begun to re-examine the question of faith. He had, at an earlier period in his life, turned away from the Orthodox Church, but he had never ceased to find in its liturgy an echo of the eternal. When he was married in the Kremlin, he felt the power of the Church’s mysticism. When his brother lost a young child, he found a consolation in the Church’s rituals. “The priests were there,” Tolstoy wrote, “and a small pink coffin, and everything as it should be.” How else, he asked, was his brother “to remove the putrefying body of the child from the house? . . . There is no better way (at least, I could devise none) than to do it with a requiem and incense. . . . For me at least those Slavonic words evoke quite the same metaphysical ecstasy one experiences when one thinks of Nirvana.”
Tolstoy began to attend Mass every Sunday, and he talked late into the night with the priest who came to teach his children theology. He fasted, he prayed, he visited the monastery of Optina Pustyn and the Saint Sergius Monastery of the Trinity. “Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before,” he said, “but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life; and that it consequently makes life possible.” Turning his gaze on himself, he realized that he only lived at those times when he believed in God. “I need only be aware of God to live. I need only to forget him, or disbelieve in him, and I die. ... To know God and to live is one and the same thing. God is life. Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God. And more than ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again abandon me.” He was ready now to live, and ready also to die.
He did not, however, become, or at any rate he did not remain, an Orthodox Christian. A church, he said, was but “power in the hands of certain men.” What was precious in Christianity, he maintained, was to be found, not in the hierarchy of the Church, but in the teachings of Jesus, and in the faith of the people. The Gospels he perused with diligence, and he devoted much labor to elucidating the meaning of Jesus’ words. The peasants he studied as closely. The more he looked at them, the more he became convinced that “they have a real faith, which is a necessity to them and alone gives their life a meaning and makes it possible for them to live. . . . While we think it terrible that we have to suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and approach death with tranquility, and in most cases gladly.” In order to learn the secret of the inward peace of the muzhik, he began to copy his outward dress. He wore a homespun blouse and shoes of bast or hemp, and so far did he carry this rustic affectation that he was sometimes mistaken by his friends for a peasant.
At peace with himself, Tolstoy was tormented by the suffering of others. The misery of the peasants was acute. Their condition was in some respects worse than it had been before the enactment of the emancipation law. The former serfs languished under a heavy burden of debt. There was a need, one historian has written, for a “more liberal, more flexible” agrarian law, but Alexander’s government, in its reactionary phase, frowned upon innovations in the state. The provincial councils which the Tsar had established attempted to play a remedial rôle; but in the repressive atmosphere that now prevailed, the zemstvos were not permitted to take the initiative in solving their constituents’ problems.
“What then must we do?” Tolstoy asked. He might, like Alexander himself in the earliest days of his reign, have sought a remedy in the institutions of freedom—institutions which, in America at any rate, seemed to offer the masses a chance to escape from poverty and oppression. But Tolstoy rejected the free-state ideal; it led, he believed, to the decay of the soul. Russia might be poor and miserable—but how much holier, how much more spiritually graceful, were her people than those of the supposedly more advanced nations of the West, with their anemic constitutions and bills of rights.
Lincoln had attempted to endow the free state with a new grace; Tolstoy rejected the constitution of liberty altogether. He rejected it even though he believed that Lincoln was the greatest man of the age. Lincoln, Tolstoy said, “was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations.” We are, he maintained, “still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us. . . . The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar, or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln.” Tolstoy’s tribute to the dead President possessed every virtue except comprehension of the subject. He enumerated the noble qualities of Lincoln’s character, his simplicity, his charity, the love he bore his enemies. But the essential drama of Lincoln’s life, his struggle to refine the institutions of freedom, Tolstoy overlooked.
Only when the shadow of authority darkened his path did he speak of the desirability of free-state reform. Once, when one of his bulls gored its keeper to death, he was obliged by the investigating magistrate to promise that he would not leave Yasnaya Polyana while the inquiry proceeded. Tolstoy was outraged, and spoke again of settling in a country where free institutions prevailed. “It is absurd, and shows how utterly arbitrary these gentlemen are,” he said. “I shall sell all I have in Russia and go to England, where every man’s person is respected. Here every police-officer, if one does not grovel at his feet, can play one the dirtiest tricks.”
But the mood passed.
Versailles, October 1870
THE SUN WAS SETTING when Bismarck reached Versailles. He had reached the end of his revolutionary road. “I am God’s soldier,” he said, “and wherever He sends me I must go. . . .” In the sanctuary of the kings of France, the soldier would conclude the last battles of the German revolution. Bismarck hoped, when he arrived, to complete these battles within a few weeks’ time; but he soon confronted difficulties familiar to the student of such cataclysms. There was too little revolutionary spirit in some directions, too much in others; and five long months elapsed before he attained his ends and broke up the house he had commandeered in the Rue de Provence.
To unite Germany by bringing the German states of the south into the fold of his Confederation was the great point of his ambition. Bismarck could influence popular opinion in southern Germany through the vitriol of the newspapers, but he found the hereditary princes less tractable. Bavaria, the largest of the southern principalit
ies, was the greatest prize. Ludwig, however, was jealous of his sovereignty; he found abhorrent the idea that he should subordinate his Wittelsbach blood to that of a mere Hohenzollern.
The task of negotiating a peace with the French was no less arduous. Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister of the French Government of National Defense, which had been formed in the aftermath of the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, came to dine with Bismarck and announced the French position: not “a clod of our earth or a stone of our fortresses.” Such a position could not easily be reconciled either with the demands of German opinion or the requirements of the General Staff. A large number of Germans regarded the cession by France of Alsace and Lorraine, the vestibule that connected two empires, as the sine qua non of a peace settlement; and—what in Prussia was of greater moment—so did the sixty glittering officers of the Staff.
Such were the obstacles the revolutionist confronted. The French might, indeed, be browbeaten, and Paris, which was now surrounded by German troops, could be starved into submission. The Bavarians could be bribed. But General von Moltke was another matter. Relations between the Chancellor and the Chief of the General Staff had long been cool. They now broke down altogether.
Moltke was determined to preserve unblemished his prerogatives as the principal military counselor of King Wilhelm, the Supreme Warlord. He regarded himself not merely as the director of an army, but as the high priest of a military orthodoxy, the guardian of an ancient warrior tradition. He insisted that in time of war he possessed the “exclusive right to advise the King.” He excluded Bismarck from the army’s councils, and left the Chancellor to deduce from the newspapers the designs of the General Staff.
Forge of Empires Page 45