The first impulse of his indignation was to determine that they should be printed, and to withdraw his protection: a second thought restrained him. “We are so volatile, so inconstant, so easily led away,” said he, “that, after all, I could not be certain that those very people had not really and spontaneously come back to my service: in that case, I should have been punishing them at the very time when they were returning to their duty. I thought it better to seem to know nothing of the matter, and I ordered all their letters to be burnt.”
THE EMPEROR COMMENCES THE CAMPAIGN OF EGYPT WITH THE GRAND MARSHAL.—ANECDOTES OF BRUMAIRE, &C.—LETTEF THE COUNT DE LILLE.—THE BEAUTIFUL DUCHESS DE GUICHE.
28th—31st. My son and I prosecuted our labours without intermission. His health, however, began to be affected; he felt a pain in his chest. My eyes also grew weak: these were really the effects of our excessive occupation. Indeed, we had gone through an amazing quantity of work: we had already nearly arrived at the end of the Campaign of Italy. The Emperor, however, did not yet find that he had sufficient occupation. Employment was his only resource, and the interest which his first dictations had assumed furnished an additional motive for proceeding with them. The Campaign of Egypt was now about to be commenced. The Emperor had frequently talked of employing the Grand Marshal on this subject.
Those of our party who were lodged in the town were badly accommodated, and were dissatisfied at being separated from the Emperor. They were harassed by the constraint and mortifications to which they were subjected. I suggested to the Emperor that he should set us all to work at the same time, and proceed at once with the Campaigns of Italy and Egypt, the history of the Consulate, the return from the Island of Elba, &c. The time, I observed, would then pass more quickly; this great work, the glory of France, would advance more rapidly, and the gentlemen who resided in the town would be less unhappy. The idea pleased the Emperor, and from that moment one or two of his suite came regularly every day to write from his dictation, the transcript of which they brought to him next morning. They then stayed to dinner, and thus afforded the Emperor a little more amusement.
We made such arrangements that the Emperor insensibly found himself more comfortably situated in many respects. A tent, which had been given to me by the Colonel of the 53rd regiment, was spread out so as to form a prolongation of the room occupied by the Emperor. His cook took up his abode at Briars. The table-linen was taken from the trunks, the plate was set forth, and our first dinner after these preparations was a sort of fête. The evenings, however, always hung heavily on our hands. The Emperor would sometimes visit the adjoining house; at other times he would endeavour to leave his chamber to walk; but more frequently he remained within-doors, and tried to pass the time in conversation until ten or eleven o’clock. He dreaded retiring to bed too early; for when he did so, he awoke in the night; and, in order to divert his mind from sorrowful reflections, he was obliged to rise and read.
One day at dinner the Emperor cast his eyes on one of the dishes of his own campaign-service, on which the Royal arms had been engraved. “How they have spoiled this!” he exclaimed in very energetic terms; and he could not refrain from observing that the King had been in a great hurry to take possession of the Imperial plate, which he certainly could not claim as having been taken from him, since it unquestionably belonged to him, Napoleon; for, he added, that when he ascended the throne he found not a vestige of royal property. At his abdication he left to the crown five millions in plate, and between forty and fifty millions in furniture, which was all purchased with his own money out of his civil list.
In a conversation one evening, the Emperor related the circumstances attending the event of Brumaire. I suppress the particulars, because they were afterwards dictated to General Gourgaud; and a detailed account of this remarkable affair will be found in the Memoirs.
Sieyes, who was one of the Provisional Consuls along with Napoleon, astonished to hear his colleague, on the very first conference, discussing questions relative to finance, administration, the army, law, and politics, left him, quite disconcerted, and ran to his friends, saying, “Gentlemen, you have got a master! This man knows every thing, wills every thing, and can do every thing.”
I was in London at that time, and I told the Emperor that the emigrants there had formed great hopes and placed much confidence on the events of the 18th of Brumaire and on his Consulate. Several of us, who had formerly been acquainted with Madame de Beauharnois, immediately set out for Paris, hoping, through her means, to exercise some influence, or give some direction to affairs, which then appeared under a new aspect.
Our general opinion at the time was that the First Consul had waited for propositions from the French Princes. We grounded this opinion on the circumstance of his having been so long without manifesting his intentions respecting them; which, however, he did some time afterwards in a way the most overwhelming, by means of a proclamation. We attributed this result to the stupid conduct of the Bishop of Arras, the counsellor and director of our affairs; who, according to his own confession, went to work with his eyes shut, and boasted of not having read a single newspaper for a series of years, ever since they had been filled, as he said, with the successes and the falsehoods of those wretches. On the first establishment of the Consulate, some one having attempted to persuade the Bishop to enter into negotiations with the Consul, through the mediation of Madame Buonaparte, he rejected the proposition with indignation, and in language of so coarse and disgusting a nature as induced the person to tell him that his expressions were far from being episcopal, and that he certainly had never learned them from his breviary.