CAMPAIGNS OF ITALY AND EGYPT.—THE EMPEROR’S OPINION OF THE GREAT FRENCH POETS.—TRAGEDIES BY LATE WRITERS.—HECTOR.—THE ETATS DE BLOIS.—TALMA.
25th—28th. Our days were for the most part very much alike; if they seemed long in detail, they were rapidly shortened in a retrospective view. They were without character or interest, and left only imperfect recollections behind. In English he went on gradually improving. The Emperor confessed that he had felt a moment of disgust; his furia Francese had, he said, at one time, given way; but he added that I had reanimated him by means of a plan which he considered more certain and infallible than any other—that of reading and analyzing a single page over and over again until it was thoroughly learnt. The grammatical rules were explained by the way. In this manner, there is not a moment lost to study and memory. The progress at first appears slow, the learner seems to advance but little in his studies; but by the time he has come to the fiftieth page, he is astonished to find that he knows the language. We had added a page of Telemachus to the rest of our lesson, and we found the benefit of it. By this time, however, the Emperor, though he had only had twenty or twenty-five complete lessons, could understand any book; and would have been able to make himself understood in writing. He did not comprehend all that was said, it is true; but, as he observed, nothing could be concealed from him for the future, and this was a great thing—this was a decided victory.
The Campaign of Egypt was completed with the assistance of Bertrand, as far as the want of materials would permit. The Emperor now commenced, with another of the gentlemen, a new and very important period; namely—from his departure from Fontainebleau, up to his return to Paris and his second abdication. He possessed no document relating to these rapid events; but it was that very rapidity which induced me to entreat him to employ his memory in recording circumstances which the hurry of events or party spirit might enfeeble or distort.
The Emperor also employed himself very frequently with me, in revising the different chapters of the Campaign of Italy; this was generally done immediately before dinner. He had directed me to arrange each chapter in a regular and uniform manner; to mark out the proper divisions of the paragraphs, and to note down and collect the illustrative articles. This he called the digestive business of an editor. “And your interest is concerned in it,” said he to me one day, with an air of kindness which affected me; “henceforward it is your property: the Campaign of Italy shall bear your name, and the Campaign of Egypt that of Bertrand. I intend that it shall add at once to your fortune and to your fame. There will be at least a hundred thousand francs in your pocket, and your name will last as long as the remembrance of my battles.”
With regard to our evenings, the reversis had been relinquished a second time; we could not continue it long. After the second or third round, the cards were abandoned for conversation. We resumed our readings: our stock of novels was exhausted, and plays occupied our attention for the future, tragedies in particular. The Emperor is uncommonly fond of analyzing them, which he does in a singular mode of reasoning, and with great taste. He remembers an immense quantity of poetry, which he learned when he was eighteen years old, at which time, he says, he knew much more than he does at present. The Emperor is delighted with Racine, in whom he finds a profusion of beauties. He greatly admires Corneille, but thinks very little of Voltaire, who, he says, is full of bombast and tinsel: always incorrect; unacquainted either with men or things, with truth or the sublimity of the passions of mankind.
At one of the couchers at St. Cloud the Emperor analyzed a piece which had just been brought out; it was Hector by Luce de Lancival: this piece pleased him very much; it possessed warmth and energy of character. He called it a head-quarter piece; and said that a soldier would be better prepared to meet the enemy after[after] seeing or reading it. He added that it would be well if there were a greater number of plays written in the same spirit.—Then, adverting to those dramatic productions called drames in French, and which he termed waiting-maids’ tragedies, he said they would not bear more than one representation, after which they suffered a gradual diminution of interest. A good tragedy, on the contrary, gains upon us every day. The higher walk of tragedy, continued he, is the school of great men; it is the duty of sovereigns to encourage and disseminate a taste for it. Nor is it necessary, he said, to be a poet, to be enabled to judge of the merits of a tragedy; it is sufficient to be acquainted with men and things, to possess an elevated mind, and to be a statesman. Then, becoming gradually more animated, he added, with enthusiasm,—”Tragedy fires the soul, elevates the heart, and is calculated to generate heroes. Considered under this point of view, perhaps, France owes to Corneille a part of her great actions; and, gentlemen, had he lived in my time, I would have made him a prince.”
On a similar occasion, he analyzed and condemned the Etats de Blois, which had just been presented for the first time at the theatre of the Court; and perceiving among the company present the Arch-Treasurer Lebrun, who was distinguished for his literary acquirements, he asked his opinion of it. Lebrun, who was undoubtedly in the author’s interest, contented himself with remarking that the subject was a bad one. “That,” replied the Emperor, “was M. Renouard’s first fault; he chose it himself, it was not forced upon him. Besides, there is no subject, however bad, which great talent cannot turn to some account, and Corneille would still have been himself even in one like this. As for M. Renouard, he has totally failed. He has shewn no other talent but that of versification; every thing else is bad, very bad; his conception, his details, his result, are altogether defective. He violates the truth of history; his characters are false, and their political tendency is dangerous, and perhaps prejudicial. This is an additional proof of what, however, is very well known, that there is a wide difference between the reading and the representation of a play. I thought at first that this piece might have been allowed to pass; it was not until this evening that I perceived its improprieties. Of these, the praises lavished on the Bourbons are the least; the declamations against the Revolutionists are much worse. M. Renouard has made the Chief of the Sixteen the Capuchine Chabot of the Convention. There is matter in his piece to inflame every party and every passion: were I to allow it to be represented in Paris, I should probably hear of half a hundred people murdering one another in the pit. Besides, the author has made Henri IV. a true Philinte, and the Duke de Guise a Figaro, which is by far too great an outrage on history. The duke of Guise was one of the most distinguished men of his time; and if he had but ventured, he might, at that time, have established the fourth dynasty. Besides, he was related to the Empress; he was a Prince of the house of Austria, with whom we are in friendship, and whose Ambassador was present this evening at the representation. The author has, in more than one instance, shewn a strange disregard of propriety.” The Emperor afterwards said that he felt more than ever fixed in the determination he had formed not to permit any new tragedy to be played on the public stage before it had undergone a trial at the theatre of the Court. He therefore prohibited the representation of the Etats de Blois. It is worthy of remark, that, since the restoration of the King, this piece was revived with the greatest pomp, and supported by all the favour which the prohibition of the Emperor would naturally procure for it. But, notwithstanding all this, it failed; so correct was the judgment which Napoleon had passed upon it.
Talma, the celebrated tragedian, had frequent interviews with the Emperor, who greatly admired his talent, and rewarded him magnificently. When the First Consul became Emperor, it was reported all over Paris, that he had Talma to give him lessons in attitude and costume. The Emperor, who always knew every thing that was said against him, rallied Talma one day on the subject, and, finding him look quite disconcerted and confounded,—“You are wrong,“ said he, “I certainly could not have employed myself better, if I had had leisure for it.” On the contrary, it was the Emperor who gave Talma lessons in his art. “Racine,” said he to him, “has loaded his character of Orestes with imbecilities, and you only add to their extravagance. In the Mort de Pompée, you do not play Cæsar like a hero; in Britannicus, you do not play Nero like a tyrant.” Every one knows the corrections which Talma afterwards made in his performances of these celebrated characters.
CONTRACTORS, &C. DURING THE REVOLUTION.—THE EMPEROR’S CREDIT ON HIS RETURN FROM ELBA.—HIS REPUTATION IN THE PUBLIC OFFICES AS A RIGID INVESTIGATOR.—MINISTERS OF FINANCE AND THE TREASURY.—CADASTRE.
29th.—At six o’clock, the Emperor, having finished his daily occupations, walked in the garden. We then took a drive in the calash: it was quite dark, and rained very fast when we returned.
After dinner, while coffee was served round, which we took without rising from our seats at the dining-table, the conversation turned on what were termed Agents daring the Revolution, and the great fortunes which they acquired. The Emperor knew the name, the family, the profession, and the character, of every one of these men.
Scarcely had Napoleon attained the Consulship when he became engaged in a dispute with the celebrated Madame Recamier, whose father held a situation in the Post-office department. Napoleon, on first taking the reins of Government, was obliged to sign in confidence a great number of lists; but he soon established the most rigid inspection in every department. He discovered that a correspondence with the Chouans was going on under the connivance of M. Bernard, the father of Madame Recamier. He was immediately dismissed, and narrowly escaped being brought to a trial, by which he would doubtless have been condemned to death. His daughter flew to the First Consul, and, at her solicitation, Napoleon exempted M. Bernard from taking his trial, but was resolute with respect to his dismissal. Madame Recamier, who had been accustomed to ask for every thing, and to obtain every thing, would be satisfied with nothing less than the re-instatement of her father. Such were the manners of those times. The severity of the First Consul excited loud animadversions; it was a thing quite unusual. Madame Recamier and her party, which was very numerous, never forgave him.
The contractors and agents were the class which, above all, excited the uneasiness of the new Supreme Magistrate, who called them the scourge and the plague of the nation. The Emperor observed that all France would not have satisfied the ambition of those of Paris alone; that, when he came to the head of affairs, they constituted an absolute power; and that they were most dangerous to the state, whose springs were obstructed by their intrigues, joined to those of their numerous dependents.—In truth, said he, they could never be regarded as any thing but sources of corruption and ruin, like Jews and usurers. They had disgraced the Directory, and they wished in like manner to control the Consulate. It may be said that at that period they enjoyed the highest rank and influence in society.
“One of the principal retrograde steps,” said the Emperor, “which I took, with the view of restoring the past state and manners of society, was to throw all this false lustre back into the crowd. I never would raise any of this class to distinction: of all aristocracies this appeared to me the worst.” The Emperor rendered to Lebrun the justice of having especially confirmed him in this principle. “The party always disliked me for this,” said the Emperor; “but they were still less inclined to pardon the rigid enquiry which I instituted into their accounts with the Government.”
The Emperor said that in business of this sort he turned the service of his Council of State to the best account. He used to appoint a committee of four or five members of the Council, men of integrity and intelligence. They made their report to him, and, if the case required farther investigation, they wrote at the bottom of the report: Referred to the Grand Judge to enforce the laws. The individuals implicated generally endeavoured to compromise the affair, when it arrived at this point. They would disgorge, one, two, three, or four millions, rather than suffer the business to be legally investigated. The Emperor was well aware, that all these facts were misrepresented in the different circles of the capital, that they produced him many enemies, and drew down upon him the reproach of arbitrariness and tyranny. But he thus acquitted a great duty to the mass of society, who must have been grateful to him for the measures he adopted towards these bloodsuckers of the public.
“Men are always the same,” said the Emperor: “from the time of Pharamond downwards, contractors have always acted thus, and people have always acted in the same way towards them. But at no period of the monarchy were they ever attacked in so legal a form, or assailed so energetically and openly as by me. Even among the contractors themselves, the few individuals who possessed honesty and integrity found in this extreme severity a new guarantee for their own conduct. A remarkable instance of this occurred after my return from Elba. Some houses in London and Amsterdam secretly negotiated with me a loan of from 80 to 100,000,000, at a profit of seven or eight per cent. The net sum which was deposited in the Treasury of Paris, was paid to them by rentes on the great book at fifty, which were then distributed among the public at fifty-six or fifty-seven.”
This resource, so useful in the crisis in which the Emperor was placed, and which must at the same time have been so satisfactory and flattering to himself personally, proves the real opinion that was entertained of Napoleon in Europe, and the confidence which he inspired. This negotiation, which was unknown at the time, explains whence the Emperor derived the financial resources of which he suddenly found himself possessed on his return from Elba; which was a great subject of conjecture at the time.
The Emperor himself said that he enjoyed singular reputation among the heads of offices and accountants. The examination of accounts was a thing which he very well understood. “The circumstance that first gained me reputation, in this way, was that, while balancing a yearly account during the Consulate, I discovered an error of 2,000,000 to the disadvantage of the Republic. M. Dufresne, who was then chief of the treasury, and who was a perfectly honest man, at first would not believe that the error existed. However, it was an affair of figures; the fact could not be denied. At the treasury several months were occupied in endeavouring to discover the error. It was at length found in an account of the contractor Seguin, who immediately acknowledged it, on being shewn the accounts, and restored the money, saying it was a mistake.”
On another occasion as the Emperor was examining the accounts of the pay of the garrison of Paris, he observed an article of sixty and some odd thousand francs set down to a detachment which had never been in the capital. The minister made a note of the error, merely from complaisance, but was convinced in his own mind that the Emperor was mistaken. Napoleon however proved to be right, and the sum was restored.
The Emperor regarded as a matter of the highest importance the separation of the departments of finance and the treasury, both for the sake of keeping the business of the two departments distinct, and for enabling them to become mutual checks to each other. The minister of the treasury, under a sovereign like Napoleon, was the most important man in the empire; not merely as a minister of the treasury, but as comptroller-general. All the accounts of the empire came under his examination, and he was thus enabled to detect every kind of peculation and abuse, and to make them known to the sovereign; and communications of this nature were daily made. To special appropriations Napoleon also attached the greatest importance, as having been among the happiest springs of his administration.
Speaking of the cadastre, he said that, according to the plan which he had drawn up, it might be considered as the real constitution of the Empire. It was the true guarantee of property, and the security for the independence of each individual; for, the tax being once fixed and established by the legislature, each individual might make his own arrangements, and had nothing to fear from the authority or arbitrary conduct of assessors, which is always the point most sensibly felt, and the surest to enforce submission. During this conversation, the Emperor gave his opinion of the talents of Messrs. Gaudin, Mollien, and Louis, as well as most of his other Ministers and Councillors of State. He concluded by observing that he had succeeded in creating a system of administration doubtless the purest and most energetic in Europe; and that he himself had the details so much at his command that he was sure he now could, merely with the help of the Moniteur, trace the complete history of the financial transactions of the Empire during his reign.
March 1st.—To-day two vessels arrived from the Cape. One, the Wellesley, a seventy-four, had another ship which had been taken to pieces in her hold. Both were India built of teak-wood, three-fourths cheaper than they could have been built in England. This is an excellent kind of wood; and ships made of it are said to last much longer than European-built ships; though hitherto it has been complained that they are not such good sailers. However, it is not improbable that this teak wood may produce a revolution in the materials and construction of English ships.
2nd.—The China fleet is arrived. Several vessels successively entered the road in the course of the day, and many others are within sight. This is a sort of festival and harvest for the people of St. Helena. The money which these transient visitors circulate in the Island constitutes a chief portion of the revenues of the inhabitants.
At five o’clock the Emperor proceeded to the garden, and went on foot as far as an opening between some of the hills, whence we could discern several vessels in full sail, making for the Island. The last ship that arrived from the Cape had brought a phaeton for the Emperor. He wished to try it this evening, and he got into it, accompanied by the Grand Marshal, and rode round the park. He, however, thinks that this kind of equipage is both useless and ridiculous, in present circumstances. After dinner the Emperor felt much fatigued; he has been indisposed for some days, and he retired this evening at an early hour.