Soult was born in the same year as Napoleon, 1769, and out-lived all his brother marshals, dying in 1852, when the second empire was already an impending fact. He had been a private soldier under Louis XVI., he passed through every grade in the service, he became prime minister, and when he voluntarily resigned office in 1847, owing to the infirmities of age, Louis Philippe created him marshal-general—a title which had only been borne by three marshals before him, Turenne, Villars, and Maurice de Saxe. But these honors never quite consoled Soult for having failed to become king of Portugal. He could not stomach the luck of his comrade Bernadotte, the son of a weaver, who was wearing the crown of Sweden.
Bernadotte, whom Soult envied, has some affinities with M. Grévy. This president of the republic first won renown by a parliamentary motion to the effect that a republic did not want a president; so Bernadotte came to be a king, after a long and steadfast profession of republican principles. Born in 1764, he enlisted at eighteen, and was sergeant-major in 1789. He was very nearly court-martialed at that time for haranguing a crowd in revolutionary terms. Five years later he was a general, and in 1798 ambassador at Vienna. He was an able, thoughtful, hardy, handsome man, who, having received no education as a boy, made up for it by diligent study in after years; and no man ever so well corrected, in small or great things, the imperfections of early training. Tallyrand said of him, “He is a man who learns and unlearns every day.” One thing he learned was to read the character of Napoleon and not to be afraid of him, for the act which led to his becoming king of Sweden was one of rare audacity. Commanding an army sent against the Swedes in 1808, he suspended operations on learning the overthrow by revolution of Gustavus IV., against whom war had been declared. The Swedes were profoundly grateful for this, and Napoleon dared not say much, because he was supposed to have no quarrel with the Swedes as a people; but Bernadotte was marked down in his bad books from that day, and he was in complete disgrace when in 1810 Charles XIII. adopted him as crown prince with the approval of the Swedish people. Bernadotte made an excellent king, but remembering his austere advocacy of republicanism, it is impossible not to smile and ask whether there is not some truth in Madame de Girardin’s definition of equality as le privilége pour tous.
Napoleon always valued Kellerman as having been a general in the old royal army. Born in 1735, he was a maréchal de camp (brigadier) when the war broke out. The emperor would have been glad to have had more of such men at his court; but it was creditable to the king’s general officers that very few of them forgot their duties as soldiers during the troublous period when so many temptations to commit treason beset men holding high command. Grouchy, who in 1789 was a lieutenant in the king’s body-guard, hardly cuts a fine figure as a revolutionist accepting a generalship in 1793 from the convention which had beheaded his king. He was an uncanny person altogether; the convention having voted that all noblemen should be debarred from commissions, he enlisted as a private soldier, and this was imputed to him as an act of patriotism; but he had friends in high quarters who promised that he should quickly regain his rank if he formally renounced his titles; and this he did, getting his generalship restored in consequence. In after years he resumed his marquisate, and denied that he had ever abjured it. Napoleon created him marshal during the Hundred Days for having taken the Duc d’Angoulême prisoner; but the Bourbons declined to recognize his title to the bâton, and he had to wait till Louis Philippe’s reign before it was confirmed to him. Grouchy was never a popular marshal, though he fought well in 1814 in the campaign of France. His inaction on the day of Waterloo has been satisfactorily explained, but somehow all his acts have required explanation; he was one of those men whose records are never intelligible without footnotes.
But how many of the marshals remained faithful to their master when his sun had set? At St. Helena Napoleon alluded most often to Lannes and Bessières, who both died whilst he was in the heyday of his power, the first at Essling, the second at Lützen. As to these two Napoleon could cherish illusions, and he loved to think that Lannes especially—his brave, hot-headed, hot-hearted “Jean-Jean”—would have clung to him like a brother in misfortune. Perhaps it was as well that Lannes was spared an ordeal to which Murat, hot-headed and hot-hearted too, succumbed. It is at all events a bitter subject for reflection that the great emperor found among his marshals and dukes no such friend as he had among the hundreds of humbler officers, captains, and lieutenants, who threw up their commissions sooner than serve the Bourbons.—Temple Bar.
[C. L. S. C. WORK.]
By Rev. J. H. VINCENT, D.D., Superintendent of Instruction C. L. S. C.
The Class of ’84 rules the year.