After Friedland he received with the title of count a grant of £40,000, and he began to distribute money at such a rate among his poor relations, that the emperor remonstrated with him. “You keep the lead for yourself, and you give the gold away,” said His Majesty in allusion to two bullets which remained in the marshal’s body.
Macdonald comes next among the marshals for nobility of character. He was of Irish extraction, born at Sancerre in 1765, and served under Louis XVI. in Dillon’s Irish Regiment. Macdonald won his colonelcy at Jemmapes. In 1804, however, all his prospects were suddenly marred through his generous espousal of Moreau’s cause. Moreau had been banished on an ill-proven charge of conspiracy; and Macdonald thought, like most honest men, that he had been very badly treated.
But by saying aloud what most honest men were afraid even to whisper, Macdonald incurred the Corsican’s vindictive hatred, and during five years he was kept in disgrace, being deprived of his command, and debarred from active service. He thus missed the campaigns of Austerlitz and Jéna, and this was a bitter chagrin to him. He retired to a small country-house near Brunoy, and one of his favorite occupations was gardening. He was much interested in the projects for manufacturing sugar out of beetroot, which were to render France independent of West India sugar—a matter of great consequence after the destruction of France’s naval power at Trafalgar: and he had an intelligent gardener who helped him in his not very successful efforts to raise fine beetroots. This man turned out to be a police-spy. Napoleon in his jealousy of Moreau and hatred of all who sympathized with the latter, had thought it good to have Macdonald watched, and he appears to have suspected at one time that the hero of Otricoli contemplated taking service in the English army. There were other marshals besides Macdonald who had reasons to complain of Napoleon; Victor’s hatred of him was very lively, and arose out of a practical joke. Victor was the vainest of men; he had entered Louis XVI.’s service at fifteen as a drummer, but when he became an officer under the Republic he was weak enough to be ashamed of his humble origin and assumed his Christian name of Victor as a surname instead of his patronymic of Perrin. He might have pleaded, to be sure, that Victor was a name of happy augury to a soldier, but he does not appear to have behaved well toward his Perrin connections. He was a little man with a waist like a pumpkin, and a round, rosy, jolly face, which had caused him to be nicknamed Beau Soleil. A temperate fondness for red wine added occasionally to the luster of his complexion. He was not a general of the first order, but brave and faithful in carrying out his master’s plans; he had an honorable share in the victory of Friedland, and after this battle was promoted to the marshalate and to a dukedom. Now Victor would have liked to be made Duke of Marengo; but Napoleon’s sister Pauline suggested that his services in the two Italian wars could be commemorated as well by the title of Belluno—pronounced in French, Bellune. It was not until after Napoleon had innocently acceded to this suggestion that he learned his facetious sister had in choosing the title of Bellune (Belle Lune) played upon the sobriquet of Beau Soleil. He was at first highly displeased at this, but Victor himself took the joke so very badly that the emperor ended by joining in the laughter, and said that if the marshal did not like the title that had been given him, he should have no other. Wounds in vanity seldom heal, and Victor, as soon as he could safely exhibit his resentment, showed himself one of Napoleon’s bitterest enemies. During the Hundred Days he accompanied Louis XVIII. to Ghent, and he figured in full uniform at the Te Deum celebrated in the Cathedral of Saint Bavon in honor of Waterloo.
Augereau, Duc de Castiglione, was of all the marshals the one in whom there is least to admire; yet he was for a time the most popular among them, having been born in Paris and possessing the devil-may-care impudence of Parisians. He was the son of a mason and of a street fruit-vendor, and he began life as apprentice to his father’s trade. Soon after he enlisted, and proved a capital soldier; but his character was only good in the military sense. He was thirty-two when the Revolution broke out, and was then wearing a sergeant’s stripes; in the following year he got a commission; in 1793 he was a colonel; in 1795 a general. His rapid promotion was not won by valor only, but by sending to the war office bombastic despatches in which he magnified every achievement of his twenty-fold, and related it with a rigmarole of patriotic sentiments and compliments to the convention.
There was one great point of resemblance between Augereau and Masséna: they were both inveterate looters. In 1798, when Masséna was sent to Rome to establish a republic, his own soldiers were disgusted by the shameless way in which he plundered palaces and churches, and he actually had to resign his command owing to their murmurs. Augereau was a more wily spoiler, for he gave his men a good share of what he took, and kept another share for Parisian museums, but he always reserved enough for himself to make his soldiering a very profitable business.
It was politic of Napoleon to make of Augereau a marshal-duke, for apart from the man’s intrepidity, which was unquestionable (though he was a poor general), the honors conferred upon him were a compliment to the whole class of Parisian ouvriers. Augereau’s mother, the costerwoman, lived to see him in all his glory, and he was good to her, for once, at a state pageant, when he was wearing the plumed hat of a senator, and the purple velvet mantle with its semis of golden bees, he gave her his arm in public. This incident delighted all the market-women of Paris, and helped to make Napoleon’s court popular; but in general respects Augereau proved an unprofitable, ungrateful servant. He was one of the first marshals to grumble against his master’s repeated campaigns, and he deserted him in 1814 under circumstances which looked suspicious. Napoleon accused him of letting himself be purposely beaten by the Allies. After the escape from Elba, Augereau first pronounced himself vehemently against the “usurper;” then proffered him his services, which were contemptuously spurned. The Duc de Castiglione’s career ended then, for he retired to his estate at Houssaye, and died a year afterward, little regretted by anybody.
Masséna, who had been born the year after Augereau, died the year after him, in 1817. He too had enlisted very young, but finding he could get no promotion, had asked his friends to buy his discharge, and during the five years that preceded the Revolution, he served as potman in his father’s tavern at Leven. Re-enlisting in 1789, he became a general in less than four years. After Rivoli, Bonaparte dubbed him “The darling of victory;” but it was a curious feature in Masséna that his talents only came out on the battle-field. Usually he was a dull dog, with no faculty for expressing his ideas, and he wore a morose look. Napoleon said that “the noise of cannon cleared his mind,” endowing him with penetration and gaiety at the same time. The din of war had just the contrary effect upon Brune, who, but for his tragic death, would have remained the most obscure of the marshals, though he is conspicuous from being almost the only one of the twenty-six who had no title of nobility. Brune was a notable example of what strong will-power can do to conquer innate nervousness. He was the son of a barrister, and having imbibed the hottest revolutionary principles, vapored them off by turning journalist. He went to Paris, and was introduced to Danton, for whom he conceived an enthusiastic admiration. He became the demagogue’s disciple, letter-writer, and boon companion, and it is pretty certain that he would eventually have kept him company on the guillotine, had it not been for a lucky sneer from a woman’s lips which drove him into the army. Brune had written a pamphlet on military operations, and it was being talked of at Danton’s table, when Mdlle. Gerfault, an actress of the Palais Royal, better known as “Eglé,” said mockingly, “You will be a general when we fight with pens.” Stung to the quick, Brune applied for a commission, was sent into the army with the rank of major, and in about a year, through Danton’s patronage, became a brigade-general; meanwhile poor Eglé, having wagged her pert tongue at Robespierre, lost her head in consequence.
The marshal on whom ducal honors seemed to sit most queerly was François Lefèbvre, Duc de Dantzig. He was born in 1755, the son of a miller, and was a sergeant in the French guards at the time of the Revolution. He had then just married a vivandière. The anecdotes of Madame Lefèbvre’s incongruous sayings at the consular and imperial courts are so many as to remind one of the proverb, “We yield only to riches.” Everything that could be imagined in the way of a lapsus linguæ or a bull was attributed to this good-natured Mrs. Malaprop, whose oddities amused Josephine, but not always Napoleon.
Once Lefèbvre fell ill of ague, and his servant, an old soldier, caught the malady at the same time. The servant was quickly cured; but the fever clung to the marshal until it occurred to his energetic duchess that the doctor had blundered by giving to a marshal the same doses as to a private soldier. She rapidly counted on her fingers the different rungs of the military ladder. “Here, drink, this suits your rank,” she said, putting a full tumbler to her husband’s lips, and the duke having swallowed a dozen doses at one gulp, was soon on his legs again. “You have much to learn, my friend,” was the lady’s subsequent remark to the astonished doctor.
Napoleon was a great stickler for appearances, and for this reason loathed the dirtiness and slovenliness of Davoust. Madame Junot, in her amusing “Memoirs,” relates that the Duc d’Auerstadt, having some facial resemblance to Napoleon, was fond of copying him in dress and manners; but she adds that Napoleon himself was very neat. A marshal had no excuse for being untidy. Davoust had been at Brienne with Bonaparte, and had thus a longer experience of his master’s character than any of the other marshals. Had he been wise he would have turned it to account, not only by cultivating the graces, but by giving the emperor that ungrudging, demonstrative loyalty which Napoleon valued above all things, and rewarded by constant favor. But Davoust was a caballer, a grievance-monger, and a grognard; and it must have been rather diverting to see him aping the manners of a master at whom he was always carping in holes and corners. On the other hand, it must be said that Davoust proved faithful in the hour of misfortune, and did not rally to the Bourbons till 1818; that is, when all chances of an imperial restoration were gone; moreover, every time he held an important command he did his duty with courage, talent, and fidelity. His affected brusqueness of speech was an unfortunate mannerism, for it made him many enemies, and sometimes exposed him to odd reprisals. The roughness of tongue which was affected in Davoust was natural in Soult. This marshal had an excellent heart, but he could not, for the life of him, refrain from snarling at anybody whom he heard praised. The proverb about bite and bark might have been invented for him, as the men at whom he grumbled most were often those whom he most favored.