Immediately before this conversation, the Emperor was playing at chess, and his king having fallen, he cried out—"Ah! my poor king, you are down!" Some one having picked it up, and restored it to him in a mutilated state—"Horrid!" he exclaimed; “I certainly do not accept the omen, and I am far from wishing any such thing: my enmity does not extend so far.”
I would not, on any account, have omitted this circumstance, trifling as it may appear, because it is in many respects characteristic. We ourselves, when the Emperor had retired, reverted to the incident. What cheerfulness, what freedom of mind in such dreadful circumstances! we said. What serenity in the heart! what absence of malice, irritation, or hatred! Who could discover in him the man whom enmity and falsehood have depicted as such a monster! Even amongst his own followers, who is there that has well understood him, or taken sufficient pains to make him known?
On another evening, the Emperor was speaking of his early years, when he was in the artillery, and of his companions at the mess: he always delighted in reverting to those days. One of his messmates was mentioned, who, having been Prefect of the same department under Napoleon and under the King, had not been able to retain his place on the return of Napoleon. The Emperor, when he recollected him, said that this person had, at a certain period, missed the opportunity of making his fortune through him. When Napoleon obtained the command of the army of the Interior, he loaded this person with favours, made him his aide-de-camp, and intended to place great confidence in him; but this favoured aide-de-camp had behaved very ill to him at the time of his departure for the Army of Italy: he then abandoned his General for the Directory. “Nevertheless,” said the Emperor, "when once I was seated on the throne, he might have done much with me, if he had known how to set about it. He had the claim of early friendship, which never loses its influence; I should certainly never have withstood an unexpected overture in a hunting-party, for instance, or half an hour’s conversation on old times at any other opportunity. I should have forgotten his conduct: it was no longer important whether he had been on my side or not: I had united all parties. Those who had an insight into my character were well aware of this: they knew that, with me, however I might have felt disposed towards them, it was like the game of prison-bars; when once the point was touched, the game was won. In fact, if I wished to withstand them, I had no resource but that of refusing to see them."
He mentioned another old comrade, who, with intelligence and the requisite qualifications, might have done any thing with him. He also said that a third would never have been removed from him, had he been less rapacious.
We disputed amongst ourselves whether these people ever suspected the secret, or their own chances; and whether the elevated station and the Imperial splendour of Napoleon, had fairly allowed them to avail themselves of his favourable disposition towards them.
With respect to the splendour of the Imperial power, the Grand Marshal said that, however great and magnificent the Emperor had appeared to him on the throne, he had never made on him a superior, perhaps an equal, impression, to that which his situation at the head of the Army of Italy had stamped on his memory. He explained and justified this idea very successfully, and the Emperor heard him with some complacency.—But, we observed, what great events took place afterwards! what elevation! what grandeur! what renown throughout the world! The Emperor had listened. “For all that,” said he, “Paris is so extensive, and contains so many people of all sorts, and some so eccentric, that I can conceive there may be some who never saw me, and others who never even heard my name mentioned. Do not you think so?” And it was curious to see with what whimsical ingenuity he himself maintained this assertion, which he knew to be untenable. We all insisted loudly that, as to his name, there was not a town or village in Europe, perhaps even in the world, where it had not been pronounced. One person in company added—"Sire, before I returned to France at the treaty of Amiens, your Majesty being then only First Consul, I determined to make a tour in Wales, as one of the most extraordinary parts of Great Britain. I climbed the wildest mountains, some of which are of prodigious height; I visited cabins that seemed to me to belong to another world. As I entered one of these secluded dwellings, I observed, to my fellow-traveller, that, in this spot, one would expect to find repose, and escape the din of revolution. The cottager, suspecting us to be French, on account of our accent, immediately enquired the news from France, and what Bonaparte, the First Consul, was about."
“Sire,” said another, "we had the curiosity to ask the Chinese officers whether our European affairs had been heard of in their Empire. ‘Certainly,’ they replied; ‘in a confused manner, to be sure, because we are totally uninterested in those matters; but the name of your Emperor is famous there, and connected with grand ideas of conquest and revolution:’ exactly as the names of those who have changed the face of that part of the world have arrived in ours, such as Gengis Khan, Tamerlane," &c.
MARSHAL BERTRAND.
Published for Henry Colburn, March, 1836.