Memoirs of the life, exile, and conversations of the Emperor Napoleon. (Vol. II)

by comte de Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Las Cases

ANECDOTES ON THE 18TH BRUMAIRE.—SIEYES.—GRAND

ELECTOR.—CAMBACERES.—LEBRUN, &C.

After walking some time in the garden, the Emperor got into his calash. The weather was delightful: we made two turns at full gallop. I was alone with him. He spoke much of my son, and his future prospects, with a degree of interest and kindness which went to my heart. He said that, considering his age, the circumstance of being sent to St. Helena was of inestimable value to his future life; that it must be like a hot-house for bringing forward his character.

After dinner, the Emperor resumed the subject of the 18th Brumaire, and related it to us with an infinite number of minor details. As he has long since dictated it to General Gourgaud, I shall refer to his publication for the mass of the particulars of that event. I shall only give here some little anecdotes or accessories which possibly may not be found there.

Napoleon’s situation on his return from Egypt was unprecedented. He had found himself immediately applied to by all parties, and had been entrusted with all their secrets. There were three which were particularly distinct; the Manege, of which General J. was one of the leaders; the Moderates, directed by Sieyes; and the Rotten party, with Barras at their head.

The determination which Napoleon formed to ally himself with the Moderates, exposed him, he said, to great danger. With the Jacobins he would have risked nothing; they offered to name him Dictator. “But, after conquering with them,” observed the Emperor, “it would have been necessary, almost immediately, to conquer against them. A club cannot endure a permanent chief; it wants one for every successive passion. Now to make use of a party one day, in order to attack it the next, under whatever pretext it is done, is still a piece of treachery; it was inconsistent with my principles.”

“My dear Sir,” said the Emperor to me, at another moment, after having again run over the events of the 18th of Brumaire, "that is a far different thing, you will allow, from the conspiracy of St. Real, in which there is much more plotting, and much less result; ours was struck at a single blow. It is certain that there never was a great revolution which caused less inconvenience; it was so generally desired; it was accordingly crowned with universal applause.

"For my own part, all my share in the plot, for effecting this change, was confined to the assembling the whole crowd of my visitors at the same hour in the morning, and marching at their head to seize on power. It was from the threshold of my door, from the top of my own steps, and without my friends having any previous knowledge of my intentions, that I led them to this conquest; it was amidst the brilliant escort they formed, their lively joy, and unanimous ardour, that I presented myself at the bar of the ancients, to thank them for the Dictatorship with which they invested me.

“Metaphysicians have disputed, and will long dispute, whether we did not violate the laws, and whether we were not criminal; but these are mere abstractions, at best fit for books and tribunes, and which ought to disappear before imperative necessity: one might as well blame a sailor for waste and destruction, when he cuts away his masts to avoid being upset. The fact is that, had it not been for us the country must have been lost: and we saved it. The authors and chief agents of that memorable state transaction may and ought, instead of attempting denials or justifications, to answer their accusers proudly, like the Roman, We protest that we have saved our country; come with us and return thanks to the gods.”

On the completion of the Revolution of the 18th Brumaire, three provisional consuls were appointed; Napoleon, Sieyes, and Ducos. A president was to be chosen, the moment was critical, and rendered the General highly necessary; he accordingly seized the arm-chair, and his two acolytes did not venture to dispute it with him. Besides, Ducos declared himself that moment, once for all. The General alone could save them, he said: and thenceforth he was of his opinion in every thing. Sieyes was greatly mortified, but he was obliged to do the same.

Sieyes was a man of a very selfish disposition. On the first meeting of the three Consuls in Council, and as soon as they were alone, Sieyes went in a mysterious manner to the doors of the apartment, to see whether any person was within hearing; then, returning to Napoleon, he said to him with complacency, and in an under-tone, shewing him, at the same time, a sort of cabinet. “Do you see that pretty piece of furniture? You do not, perhaps, suspect how valuable it is?” Napoleon thought he was directing his attention to some appendage of the crown, which had, perhaps, been used by Louis XVI. “That[“That] is not the matter;" said Sieyes, seeing his mistake, “I am going to let you into the secret; it contains 800,000 francs!” and his eyes opened wide. “In our Directorial magistracy, we reflected that a Director going out of office might very possibly go back to his family without a denier; a very unbecoming thing: we therefore invented this little chest from which we drew a sum for every Director going out of office. There are now no more Directors; we are therefore the possessors of the remainder. What shall we do with it?” Napoleon, who had paid great attention, and began, at length, to understand, said: “If it comes to my knowledge, the sum shall go to the public treasury; but if I should not hear of it (and I know nothing of it yet), you and Ducos, being two old Directors, can divide it between you: only make haste, for to-morrow it may perhaps, be too late. The colleagues did not wait to be told twice,” observed the Emperor. "Sieyes hastily undertook the operation, and divided the spoil like the lion in the fable. He made several lots; he took one as the eldest Director; another, because he was to have continued in office longer than his colleague; a third, because he had suggested the idea of this happy change, &c. In short he adjudged 600,000 francs to himself, and only sent 200,000 to poor Ducos, who, when his first emotions had subsided, insisted on revising this calculation, and seemed bent on quarrelling with Sieyes. Both of them reverted to the subject every moment, wishing their third colleague to arbitrate between them; but the latter always replied—Settle it between yourselves. Above all, be quiet, for if the matter should come to my ears, you would have to give up the whole.

“When we were about to fix on a constitution,” said the Emperor, “Sieyes treated us with another very entertaining scene. Circumstances and public opinion had made him a sort of oracle in these matters; he accordingly unfolded his various propositions in the committees of the two councils, with great mystery, importance and method; they were all adopted, good, bad, and indifferent. Finally, he crowned the work by displaying the upshot which had been expected with lively and anxious impatience: he proposed a Grand Elector, who was to reside at Versailles, to enjoy six millions per annum, to represent the national dignity, and to have no other duty than the nomination of two Consuls, one for peace and the other for war; entirely independent in their functions. Moreover, if this Elector should make a bad choice, the Senate was to absorb him himself. This was the technical expression, meaning, to remove him, by replacing him, as a punishment, in the crowd of private citizens.”

Napoleon, for want of experience in assemblies, and also through a degree of circumspection which the circumstances of the moment required, had taken little or no share in what had preceded; but now, at this decisive point, he began, he said, to laugh in Sieyes’s face, and to cut up all his metaphysical nonsense without mercy. Sieyes did not like to defend himself, said the Emperor, nor did he know how to do it. He made the attempt, however, saying that, after all, a king was nothing more. Napoleon replied, “But you take the abuse for the principle, the shadow for the body. And how can you imagine, M. Sieyes, that a man of any talent or the least honour, will make up his mind to act the part of a pig fattening on a few millions?” After this sally, which, said the Emperor, made those who were present laugh immoderately, Sieyes remained overwhelmed; it was no longer in his power to resume the subject of his Grand Elector; and a First Consul was determined on, who was to have the supreme decision and the nomination of all offices: with two accessory Consuls, who were to have deliberate voices only. It was in fact, from that moment, a unity of power. The First Consul was precisely the President of America, veiled under the forms which the irritable spirit of the times still rendered necessary. The Emperor accordingly said that his reign began in reality from that day.

The Emperor in some measure regretted that Sieyes had not been nominated one of the consuls. Sieyes, who at first refused the appointment, afterwards regretted it himself, but not until it was too late. “He had fallen into a mistake respecting the nature of these Consuls,” said Napoleon; “he was fearful of mortification, and of having the First Consul to contend with at every step; which would have been the case, if all the Consuls had been equal; we should then have all been enemies: but, the constitution having made them subordinate, there was no room for the struggles of obstinacy, no cause of enmity, but a thousand reasons for a genuine unanimity. Sieyes discovered this, but too late.” The Emperor said he might have been very useful in council—better, perhaps, than the others, because he had occasionally novel and most luminous ideas; but that, in other respects, he was wholly unfit to govern. “After all,” said the Emperor, “in order to govern it is necessary to be a military man; one can only rule in boots and spurs. Sieyes, without being fearful, was always in fear; his police spies disturbed his rest.”

At the Luxembourg, during the provisional consulate, he often awakened his colleague Napoleon, and harassed him about the new plots which he heard of every moment from his private police. “But have they corrupted our guard?” Napoleon used to say. “No.” “Then go to bed.—In war, as in love, my dear Sir, we must come to close quarters to conclude matters. It will be time enough to be alarmed when our 600 men are attacked.”

The Emperor said that, for the permanent government, he had chosen, in Cambacérès[Cambacérès] and Lebrun, two distinguished characters; both prudent, moderate, and able, but of completely opposite principles—the one the advocate of abuses, prejudices, old institutions, the revival of honours and distinctions, &c.—the other cold, austere, insensible, contending against all these ideas, yielding to them without illusion, and naturally falling into ideology.

In resuming, he observed that Sieyes might perhaps have contributed to give a different colour, another characteristic, to the imperial administration; but it was observed to him that this variation could not have been otherwise than injurious, for Napoleon’s choice had been much approved of at the time. The men he had selected, it was said, were not liable to be objected to by Europe. They had greatly contributed to conciliate public opinion in France, which ran wholly against Sieyes. His name and the recollections attending it would, in the eyes of many people, have disgraced the acts in which he might have taken part; and there was an anecdote eagerly repeated at the time, which shews all the ill-will that was borne towards him. It was said that, whilst he was talking with the Emperor, at the Tuileries, about Louis XIV. he had suffered the word tyrant to escape him. "M. l’Abbé," the Emperor was said to have replied, “if Louis XVI. had been a tyrant, you would now be saying mass, and I should not be here.” The Emperor smiled at this anecdote, without confirming or denying it. It will hereafter appear that it was false.

FRESH AGGRAVATIONS FROM THE GOVERNOR.—HIS
ABSURDITIES.

Saturday 6th to Monday 8th.—I have not mentioned the Governor for some time. We endeavour to keep him as much as possible out of our thoughts; we now scarcely ever adverted to him. His ill-manners, and the vexations we endure from him oblige me to notice him to-day: they seem to have increased. He has just withheld from us some letters from Europe, although they came open, and in the most ostensible manner—merely because they had not passed through the hands of the Secretary of State; without considering that a want of formality can easily be rectified in England, but that it is irremediable at a distance of two thousand leagues. If, however, in thus rigorously and literally fulfilling his instructions, he had only had the humanity to let us know that he has received these letters, and from whom they come, he might set our minds at ease with regard to those respecting whose health, or whose attention to ourselves, we suffer so much anxiety: but he has the barbarity to make a mystery of the affair. It is not many days since, the Countess Bertrand having written to town, he had the note seized, and sent it back to her as having been written without his permission. He accompanied this insult with an official letter, by which he prohibited us, for the future, from all written or even verbal communication with the inhabitants, without submitting it to his approbation; and what is particularly absurd and incredible is, that he imposed this restriction on our intercourse with people whom he nevertheless permits us to visit at our own pleasure. He accompanied the publication of the act relating to us with commentaries which spread terror amongst the inhabitants; he complains of the excessive expense of the Emperor’s table, and insists on great reductions.—It had not been understood that General Bonaparte would have so many people about him. Ministers, he told us ingenuously, had never doubted that the permission they had sent us to go away would have induced us to quit the Emperor. All this shuffling produced an exchange of pretty sharp notes. To one of the Governor’s communications, in which he said, that if the restrictions imposed on us seemed too hard, we might relieve ourselves from them by going away, the Emperor himself dictated the following addition to the answer we had already written:—"That, having been honoured by him during his prosperity, we considered it our chief pleasure to serve him, now that he could do nothing for us; and if there were persons to whom this conduct was incomprehensible, so much the worse for them."