CONCLUSION
HE Memoirs of my grandmother came to an end here, and general regret will, no doubt, be felt that she was prevented by death from continuing them, at any rate so far as the divorce from the Emperor, which, from the very beginning, hangs threateningly over the head of the fascinating, lovable, and yet somewhat uninteresting Josephine. No one can supply what is wanting here; even the correspondence of the author affords little political information respecting the succeeding period, and during the latter part of her life she seldom spoke of what she had witnessed or endured. My father entertained at times the idea of continuing her narrative, by putting together what he had heard from his parents, anecdotes of expressions of their opinions in the last days of the Empire, and what he himself knew concerning their lives. He did not carry out his plan in its entirety, nor did he leave anything on the subject complete. His notes, however, seem to me to be valuable, and give the ending of the great drama which has been described in the foregoing pages. It will be interesting to read them as a continuation of the Memoirs, which they complete, although he has recorded his opinions concerning the latter days of the Empire, and the period when he himself entered political life, in a more extensive work. His political views and clear definition of the conduct of officials and of citizens in times of difficulty deserves to be made known. I have added this chapter to the Memoirs, and published the notes of which I speak in their original unstudied form, confining myself to the slight modifications necessary to make the narrative succinct and clear.
The Spanish sovereigns arrived at Bayonne in May, 1808. The Emperor dispatched them to Fontainebleau, and sent Ferdinand VII. to Valençay, an estate belonging to M. de Talleyrand. Then he himself returned, after having traveled through the southern and western departments, and made a political journey into La Vendée, where his presence produced a great effect. He reached Paris about the middle of August. Count de Rémusat writes:
“My father, who was then First Chamberlain, was appointed to receive the Spanish Bourbons at Fontainebleau. He accomplished his task with the attention and courtesy habitual to him. Although on his return he gave us an account which conveyed no exalted idea of the King, the Queen, or the Prince of the Peace, who accompanied them, he had treated these dethroned Princes with the respect due to rank and misfortune. It would seem that some of the other Court officials had behaved in a different fashion, rather from ignorance than from ill feeling. Charles IV. noticed this, and said, ‘Rémusat, at any rate, knows that I am a Bourbon.’
“M. de Talleyrand happened to be actually staying at Valençay when the Emperor sent him orders to proceed thither, with an evident intention of committing him to the Spanish affair, to receive the three Infantes. He was not altogether pleased with the task, nor on his return did he refrain from sarcastic remarks concerning these strange descendants of Louis XIV. He used to tell us that they bought children’s toys at all the booths at the neighboring fairs, and when a poor person begged an alms of them they would give him a doll. He afterward accused them of dilapidations at Valençay, and cleverly mentioned the fact to Louis XVIII., who, being desirous to dismiss him from Court, while he had not the courage to order him to go, took occasion to praise the beauty and splendor of his seat at Valençay. ‘Yes, it is pretty fair,’ he said, ‘but the Spanish Princes entirely spoiled it with the fireworks on St. Napoleon’s Day.’
“Although M. de Talleyrand was aware that his position with the Emperor was altered, yet he found Bonaparte when he joined him well disposed and inclined to trust him. There was no perceptible cloud between them. The Emperor had need of him for the conference at Erfurt, to which they went together at the end of September. My father was in attendance on the Emperor. The letters which he doubtless wrote thence to my mother have not been found; but their correspondence was so strictly watched, and must therefore have been so reserved, that its loss is, I fancy, of little importance. My father’s general letters referred to the good understanding between the two Emperors, their mutual finessing, and the fine manners of the Emperor Alexander.
“M. de Talleyrand composed a narrative of this Erfurt conference, which he was in the habit of reading aloud. He used to boast, on his return, that as the two Emperors entered their respective carriages, each about to journey in a different direction, he had said to Alexander, while attending him, ‘If you could only get into the wrong carriage!’ He had discerned some fine qualities in the Czar, and had endeavored to win favor, by which he profited in 1814; but, at the time of which I am writing, he looked on a Russian alliance as a merely accidental necessity during a war with England, and he persistently held that friendship with Austria, which would eventually become a basis for an alliance with England, was the true system for France in Europe. His conduct of political affairs, whether at the time of Napoleon’s marriage, or in 1814, in 1815, or, again, in the reign of Louis Philippe, was always consistent with this theory. He often spoke of it to my mother.
“My mother, in order to complete the history of the year 1808, would have had to narrate, first, the Erfurt conference, according to the narratives of M. de Talleyrand and of my father; and, secondly, the reaction of the Spanish affair on the Court of the Tuileries and on Parisian society. The Royalist section of the Court and society was deeply moved by the presence of the ancient Bourbons at Fontainebleau. Here, I think, she would have placed the disgrace and exile of Mme. de Chevreuse.
“The Emperor came back from Erfurt in October, but he merely passed through Paris, and started immediately for Spain, whence he returned at the beginning of 1809, after an indecisive campaign.
“Public opinion was far from favorable to his policy. For the first time the possibility of his loss had occurred to the minds of men, especially of his sudden death in the course of a war in which a motive of patriotism might nerve an assassin’s hand. Various reports, partly loyal and partly malicious, had made the progress of disapprobation and discontent known to him. Talleyrand and Fouché had not hesitated to confirm those reports. The former, especially, was always bold, and even imprudent, as are all men who are proud of their powers of conversation and believe in them as in a force. Fouché, who was more reserved, or less often quoted in society, probably went further in fact. After his positive fashion, he had been practically considering the hypothesis of the opening up of the Imperial succession, and this consideration had brought him nearer to M. de Talleyrand’s opinions.
“The Emperor returned in an angry mood, and vented his irritation on the Court, and especially at the Ministerial Council, in the celebrated scene in which he dismissed M. de Talleyrand from his post of Grand Chamberlain, and put M. de Montesquiou in his place.
“That important functionaries of the Empire, such as Talleyrand and Fouché, as well as other less prominent persons, should have behaved as they did on this occasion, has been severely commented on. I am ready to admit that vanity and talkativeness may have led Talleyrand and Fouché to say more than was prudent; but I maintain that, under an absolute government, it is necessary that men holding important offices should, in the case of public danger, or on perceiving that affairs are being badly directed, not be afraid to encourage, by a prudent opposition, the moral resistance which alone can slacken or even divert the mistaken course of authority. Still more, if they foresee the possibility of disaster, against which no preparations have been made, they should take thought concerning what may yet be done. That the pride of absolute power should be mortified, that endeavors should be made to overcome and to suppress that resistance when it is too isolated to avail, I understand. But it would be none the less a boon to the state and for the ruler, if this opposition were sufficiently powerful to oblige him to modify his plans and to reform his life.
“With regard to the case in point, let us suppose that, instead of imputing the disapprobation of Talleyrand or of Fouché to intrigue or treason, Napoleon had received reports from Dubois, or others who had presented it as a proof of the universal discontent; that his Prefect of Police, himself sharing them, had pointed out to him that these sentiments were felt and expressed by Cambacérès, by Maret, by Caulaincourt, by Murat, lastly by the Due de Gaëta, whom Thiers quotes on this occasion—in short, by every important personage in the Court and the Government—would the service rendered to the Emperor have been an evil one? And would not this unanimous opposition have been the only means likely to enlighten him, to arrest his steps, to turn him from the way of perdition at a period when it was not yet too late?
“As to the reproach addressed to Talleyrand or others, that they censured the Government after having approved and served it, that is a natural one in the mouth of Napoleon, who, moreover, did not hesitate to exaggerate it by falsehood. But in itself it is foolish; otherwise all honest men must hold themselves forbidden, because they have once belonged to a certain government, because they have formerly supported, cloaked, or even justified its faults, either in error or from weakness, to grow wiser as dangers thicken and circumstances become developed. Unless we are resolved on unceasing opposition or on unlimited submission, a time must come when we no longer approve what we approved yesterday, when we feel bound to speak although hitherto we have been silent, and when, drawbacks striking us more forcibly than advantages, we recognize defects which we had hitherto endeavored or pretended to ignore, and faults which for a long time we have palliated! After all, this is what happened in France with regard to Napoleon, and the change took place in the mind of officials and citizens alike, except when the former were blinded by servility or corrupted by a base ambition.
“In our own modest sphere we never had to decide under the Empire, except upon the direction of our wishes and feelings, for we never took any part in politics; yet we had to solve for ourselves that question which continually recurs to me when I re-peruse the Memoirs or the letters in which my mother has preserved her impressions and her thoughts.
“My mother would have had to allude, at any rate indirectly, to this grave subject in narrating the disgrace of M. de Talleyrand. She saw him, at that time, at least as often as formerly; she heard his own statements. Nothing was better known just then to the public than the cold silence (equally far removed from weakness and from insolence) with which, leaning against a console on account of his lameness, he listened to the Emperor’s philippic. As is the custom under absolute monarchy, he swallowed the affront, and continued to present himself at Court with a coolness which was not to be mistaken for humility; and I have no recollection that his attitude under the Empire was ever accused of weakness from that day forth. It must, of course, be understood that the rules of the point of honor are not in this case as they are understood in a free country, nor the philosophic laws of moral dignity as they are understood outside the world of courts and politics.
“My mother would, after this, have had to relate our own little episode in the drama. I am not sure whether the Emperor, on his arrival, felt or showed any displeasure toward my father. I do not know whether it was not subsequent reports which caused our disgrace. In any case, my father did not become immediately aware of the truth, either because it was so far from his thoughts that he suspected nothing, or because the Emperor did not think of him at first. He was a friend of M. de Talleyrand’s, and in his confidence up to a certain point: this in itself was a motive for suspicion and a cause of disfavor. We had written no letter and taken no step that could tell against us, and I remember that even our speech was very guarded, and that, could the police spies have witnessed the interviews with M. de Talleyrand in my mother’s little drawing-room, where my parents habitually received him alone, they could have discovered nothing whereon to found a police report. Such reports were made, however; my father felt no doubt about that, although the Emperor never displayed his resentment by any outbreak, nor did he even enter into any serious explanation. But he acted toward him with a cold malevolence and harshness which made his service intolerable. Thenceforth my parents felt themselves in a painful position with the sovereign, which might, perhaps, lead to their quitting the Court.
“There was no amelioration in this state of things when Napoleon, who had gone to Germany in April, 1809, came back to Fontainebleau on the 6th of October, the conqueror of Wagram, and proud of the peace just signed at Vienna. Victories, however dearly bought, did not make him more generous or kindly. He was still performing work important enough to be vain of his power, and, if it had been put to severe tests, that was a stronger reason why he desired it to be respected. However, he found, in reverting to the recent souvenir of the descent of the English upon Walcheren, a state of things in Spain quite unsatisfactory, a quarrel with the Holy See pushed to its last extremities, and public opinion more restless about his inclination for war than reassured by his victories—defiant, sad, even critical, and besetting with its suspicions the man whom it had so long environed with its fallacies.
“This time Fouché was the object of his thoughts. Fouché had acted in his own way at the moment of the descent of the English. He had assumed authority, he had made an appeal to public sentiment, he had reorganized the national guard, and employed Bernadotte on our side. Everything in these proceedings, both the conception and the details, had greatly displeased the Emperor. All his ill-temper was concentrated upon Fouché; and, besides, as he had come back resolved upon the divorce, it was difficult to hold M. de Talleyrand aloof from a deliberation in which the knowledge of the condition of Europe should have a decisive weight. In this must be still seen one of those proofs, at that time less frequent each day, of the almost impartial justice of his mind. He was sometimes heard to say: ‘It is Talleyrand alone who understands me; it is only Talleyrand with whom I can talk.’ He consulted him, and at other moments spoke of placing him at Vincennes. Thus he did not fail to call him when he deliberated upon his marriage. M. de Talleyrand strongly insisted that he should unite himself to an Archduchess. He even thought that the Emperor had sought an interview with him because his intervention in this matter would contribute to decide Austria. What is certain is the fact that he has always alluded to his conduct in this instance as one of the guarantees he had given of his fundamental opinion in regard to the alliances of France and the conditions of the independence of Europe.
“It is seen how, in all these matters—the state of opinion during the campaign of the Danube, the deliberations relative to the divorce, those which preceded the marriage with Marie Louise—the Memoirs of my mother would have been instructive and interesting. It is unhappily impossible to supply this last link. I am only able to recall that she said that the Empress was wrong in doubting her fidelity on one occasion, probably relative to the divorce. She has announced that this matter was explained. I can not explain it in its place, and I have no recollection that she ever spoke to me of it. At the moment of the divorce her devotion was appreciated, and Queen Hortense went so far as to consult with her in regard to it twice before enlisting her irrevocably in favor of her mother. I have no wish to over-estimate the value of what she did in that matter; the most refined delicacy dictated her conduct; and, besides, with her deplorable health, her forced inactivity, her former relations to Josephine, and our new situation near the Emperor, she would have had in a renovated Court, near a new Empress, a most awkward and painful position. It may be conceived, indeed, that nothing in all that I am going to recall restored our credit at the Court, and my family remained there irreparably lessened in its influence. The Emperor, however, approved of my mother’s remaining with the Empress Josephine. He even praised her for it; this suited her. He regarded her as a person on the retreat, with whom he no longer needed to concern himself. Having less to expect from him, less to demand from him, he reproached us less in his thought for omitting to do anything on our part to please him. He left my father in the circle of his official duties, to which his character and a certain mingling of discontent and fear kept him closely enough confined. It was almost established in the mind of Napoleon that he had nothing more to do for us, and he no longer thought of us.
“This new situation makes it evident that the Memoirs of my mother would have lost their interest. She no longer visited the Court, going once only to be presented to the Empress Marie Louise; then she had later an audience of the Emperor, who wrote to her asking it. She would, therefore, have had nothing to relate of which she had been a witness in the imperial palace. She was no longer placed under obligations by any relations with the great personages of the state—at least she considered herself relieved of them; and yielding, perhaps too readily, to her tastes, and her sufferings, she gradually isolated herself from everything that would remind her of the Court and of the Government.
“However, as my father did not cease to frequent the palace to the end, as the confidence in M. de Talleyrand seemed not to diminish, and, finally, as the rapid and declining steps in the affairs of the Emperor more and more affected public opinion, and soon stirred up the restless attention of the nation, my mother had still much with which to become acquainted, and much to observe, and she would have been able to give to the painting of the last five years of the Empire a positive historic value.
“Some reflections on many events of those five years will be taken, if it is desired, as a remembrance of what I have heard, during this same time, from the lips of my parents.
“Among the events of that year, 1809, one of the most important, and which made the least noise, was the action of the Emperor in regard to the Pope. The facts were not well understood when they took place, and, it is necessary to say, that among the nation that Louis XIII. put under the protection of the Holy Virgin no one thought of them. The Emperor had begun by causing the Roman States to be occupied, then went on by dismembering them, then by demanding from the Pope that he should make war upon England, then by driving him from the city of Rome, then by depriving him of all temporal power, then, finally, by causing him to be arrested and guarded as a prisoner. How strange all this, assuredly! And yet it seemed that no government of Catholic Europe seriously offered assistance to the common father of the faithful. The Pope certainly, deliberating in 1804 whether he should crown Napoleon, had not objected on the ground that it was he who, in that year, had caused the Duc d’Enghien to be shot. The Emperor of Austria, deliberating in 1809 whether he should give his daughter to Napoleon, did not object on the ground that it was he who, in that same year, had placed the Pope in prison. It is true that at that time all the sovereigns of Europe had, in that which relates to pontifical authority, entirely different ideas from those ascribed to them, and from those attributed to them to-day. The house of Austria, in particular, had for a traditional rule that political testament in which the Duke of Lorraine, Charles V., recommends that the Pope should be reduced to the single domain of the court of Rome, and makes sport ‘of the delusion of excommunications, when the real point is that Jesus Christ never established the temporal power of the Church, and that the latter can possess nothing without contradicting his example and without compromising his Gospel.’
“In a letter of my mother she advised my father, in the autumn of 1809, not to allow ‘Athalie’ to be represented at Court, at a moment when it might be said that there were some allusions to papal affairs in that struggle of a queen and a priest, and in presence of a prince so pious as the King of Saxony, who was preparing to visit the Emperor. In this incident was the maximum of evidence of the direction of her thoughts excited by a tyrannic act of which so much would now be heard, and in regard to which public opinion would certainly be no more divided. I have not heard it said that a single officer in this immense empire would have separated himself from a government of which the head was excommunicated, if not by name, at least impliedly, by the bull launched against all the authors or abettors of the attempts against pontifical authority. I can not refrain from alluding to the Duc de Cadore. He was a man not without intelligence nor without honesty; but, accepting as indisputable laws the intentions of the Emperor, after having employed his ministry in the spoliation of the Spanish dynasty, he concurred with the same docility in that of the sovereign Pontiff, and, himself excommunicated as a mandatory, abettor, and counselor, he maintained with great composure that Napoleon could resume that which Charlemagne had given, and that now France was in the presence of Rome by the rights of the Gallic Church.
“The situation of the Empire at the end of 1809 is summarized in these words by the great historian of the Empire: ‘The Emperor had made himself, at Vincennes, the rival of the regicides; at Bayonne, the peer of those who would declare war on Europe to establish a universal republic; at the Quirinal, the peer certainly of those who had dethroned Pius VI. to create the Roman Republic.’
“I am not one of those who assist by declamation in intensifying the odium of these acts. I do not regard them as unheard-of monstrosities reserved to our century; I know that history is full of examples with which it is not difficult to compare them, and that analogous outrages can be found in the life of sovereigns for whom posterity has preserved some respect. It would not be difficult to find in the history of the severities of the reign of Louis XIV. executions which are not incomparable with the death of the Duc d’Enghien. The affair of the Man in the Iron Mask, especially if, as it is difficult not to believe, this man was a brother of the King, is nothing that the murder of Vincennes need be envious of; and power and deception are not less worthily arrayed in the act by which Louis XIV. seized Lorraine in 1661 than in the fraudulent dismemberment of Spain in 1808. I see in the abduction of the Pope hardly more than its equivalent if we revert to the middle ages. I will add that, even after these acts, for ever to be condemned, it was still possible, by the use of a little wisdom, to have assured the repose, the prosperity, and the grandeur of France to the extent that no name in history would have been more honored than that of Napoleon. But if any one imagines that this is what he has not done; that all the wars thereafter undertaken were no more than the mad preparatory steps to the ruin of the country; and that thenceforward the character of the man already loaded with such misdeeds was afflicted with a superciliousness and a harshness which were discouraging to his best servants, it is essential to clearly understand that, even at Court, all those whom the servile complaisance of false judgment had not led astray, sadly disabused, could rightly serve without confidence, admire without affection, fear more than hope, desire lessons of opposition to a terrible power, in his successes to dread his intoxication, and in his misfortunes to weep for France rather than him.
“Such, in fact, is the spirit in which these Memoirs would have been continued, and it will even be found that, by a kind of retroactive effect, this spirit is shown in the recitals anterior to 1809. At the epoch in which history was enacting, this spirit was slow in manifesting itself, as I have now described it. Years glided away in sadness timid and defiant, but without hate, and each time that a happy circumstance or a wise measure gave their light to them, the star of hope resumed the ascendant, and one tried to believe that the progress in the direction of evil would have an end.
“The years 1810 and 1811 are the two tranquil years of the Empire. The marriage in the one and the birth of the King of Rome in the other seemed pledges of peace and stability. The hope would have been without shadows, the security entire, if the torn veil through which the Emperor could be seen had not revealed passions and errors, seeds always productive of gratuitous mistakes and senseless attempts. It was seen that the love of excess had taken possession of him, and was carrying all before it. Besides the interminable duration of a war with England, with no possibility of gloriously conquering her, or of doing her any injury that was not damaging to us, and the continuation of a struggle in Spain difficult and unfortunate, were two trials that the pride of the Emperor could not long endure in peace. It was necessary that he should preserve his reputation at all cost, and that by some astounding successes he should cause to be forgotten those obstinate checks to his fortune. Sound judgment pointed out that the Spanish question was the one to end, I do not say by a return to justice and by a generous concession—the Bonapartes are not among those to whom such measures suggest themselves—but by force. It can readily be believed that, had the Emperor concentrated all the resources of his genius and of his Empire upon the resistance of the Peninsula, he would have conquered it. Unjust causes are not always destined to fail in this world, and the Emperor ought to have seen that, in humiliating Spain, he was preparing the occasion, so vainly sought, for striking England, since that nation rendered itself vulnerable by landing her armies on the Continent. Such an occasion made it worth while that something should be risked. Napoleon should have gone there in person, and himself entered the lists with Arthur Wellesley. What glory, on the other hand, and what fortune did he not reserve to himself and to his nation, in persistently adjourning the struggle, and in confronting them both finally on the mournful plains of Waterloo!
“But the Emperor had no relish for the Spanish question; he was tired of it. It had never yielded a pleasant or glorious moment. He half understood that he had begun it unjustly and conducted it feebly; that he had singularly misconceived its difficulty and importance. He tried to have a contempt for it, in order not to be humiliated by it; he neglected it, in order to avoid its anxieties. He had a childish repugnance, if it was nothing worse, to risking himself in a war which did not appeal to his imagination. Shall we dare say that he was not absolutely sure of doing the work well, and that the dangers of reverses turned him from an enterprise which, even well carried to its conclusions, would have gone too slowly and with too many difficulties to have increased his grandeur? A ready extemporizer, his plan seemed to be to allow everything to die of old age that displeased him, and to build up his fortune and fame in some new enterprise. These causes, joined to the logical developments of an absurd system, and to the developments natural to an uncontrollable temper, annulled all the guarantees of prudence and safety that the events of the years 1810 and 1811 seemed to have given, turned him from Spain to Russia, and brought about that campaign of 1812 which logically drew him on to his destruction.
“Two years in which hope had the ascendency of fear, and three years in which fear left very little place for hope—here we have the division of the five last years of the reign of Napoleon.
“In speaking of 1810 and 1811, my mother would have had to show how the two events, which ought to have inspired in the Emperor the spirit of conservation and of wisdom, his marriage and the birth of his son, served in the sequel only to exalt his pride. In the interval all the obstacles between him and the execution of his will are seen to be removed. For instance, since, long ago, he does not pardon Fouché for having a will of his own. Fouché showed that he desired peace. A violent scene occurs to recall that of which Talleyrand had been the object, and the Duc de Rovigo becomes Minister of Police, a choice which beguiles, without doubt, the hopes of the Emperor and the fears of the public, but which seems, however, to expand still more the area in which arbitrary power has sway. The existence of Holland and the indocible character of its King are still an obstacle, at least a limit. The King is compelled to abdicate, and Holland is declared French. Rome itself becomes the capital of a department, and the domain of St. Peter is united, as formerly Dauphiné was, to furnish a title for the heir to the Empire. The clerical order, driven with a high hand, is violated in its customs and in its traditions. An appearance of a council is attempted and broken up, and prison and exile impose silence on the Church. A councilor, submissive but modest, executes the wishes of his master, but does not glorify him; he lacks enthusiasm in his servitude: Champagny is set aside for Maret and the lion is let loose in Europe, and no voice is heard which rouses it to madness. And as, during this time, the fortune of the conqueror and the liberty of the people have found the one its limit, the other its bulwark in those immortally celebrated lines of Torres-Vedras, it becomes essential that this restless and maddened force should dash itself in pieces upon Moscow.
“This last period, so rich for the political historian in its terrible pictures, has but little value to the simple observer of the interior scenes of the government. The cloud became dense around power, and France knew as little what was done as if she had been lost by a throw of dice. Nevertheless, there was still the work of drawing the instructive picture of hearts and of minds ignorant and restless, indignant and submissive, desolated, reassured, imposed upon, unconcerned, depressed—all that at intervals, and sometimes concentrated into an hour; for despotism, which always feigns to be happy, ill prepares the masses of the people for misfortune, and believes in courage only when it has deceived it.
“It is, I think, to this description of public sentiments that my mother would have been able to consecrate the end of her Memoirs, for she knew something of what everybody saw. M. Pasquier, whom she saw every day, observed, by taste as well as by a sense of duty, the discretion prescribed to his functions. Accustomed to conversations with the class of persons whom he ruled without restraint, he was during a great length of time careful to take political notes, when all the world was free to talk politics. The Duc de Rovigo, less discreet, divulged his opinions rather than the facts; and the conversations of M. de Talleyrand, more frank and more confident, were hardly more than the disclosure of his judgments and of his predictions.”