21st.—The Emperor took a walk in the garden attended by his suite. The conversation turned on the possibility of our returning to Europe and seeing France once more. “My dear friends,” said he, in a tone of sincere feeling, and with an expression which it is impossible to describe, “you will return!”—"Not without you," we all exclaimed with one voice. This led us once more to analyze the probable chances of our quitting St. Helena, and all yielded to the necessity of admitting that our removal could only take place through the intervention of the English. But the Emperor could not imagine how this intervention was likely to be brought about. “The impression is made,” said he; “it has taken too deep a root; they will everlastingly fear me. Pitt told them, There can be no safety for you, with a man who has a whole invasion in his single head.” “But,” observed some one present, “suppose new interests should arise in England; suppose a truly constitutional and liberal ministry should be established, would the English government find no advantage in fixing through you, Sire, liberal principles in France, and thereby propagating them throughout Europe?” “Certainly,” replied the Emperor, “I admit all this.” “Well then,” continued the individual who had first spoken, “would not this constitutional administration find a guarantee in these liberal principles and in your own interests?” “I admit this also,” replied the Emperor. "I can suppose Lord Holland, as Prime Minister of England, writing to me at Paris: If you do so and so I shall be ruined; or the Princess Charlotte of Wales, whom we will suppose to have removed me hence, saying to me: If you act thus, I shall be hated and shall be looked upon as the scourge of my country. At these words I should stop short:—they would arrest me in my career more effectually than armies.
“And after all, what is there to fear? That I should wage war? I am now too old for that. Is it feared that I should resume my pursuit of glory? I have enjoyed glory even to satiety. I have wallowed in it; and it may be said to be a thing which I have henceforth rendered at once common and difficult. Is it supposed that I would recommence my conquests? I did not persevere in them through mania; they were the result of a great plan, and I may even say that I was urged to them by necessity. They were reasonable at the moment when I pursued them; but they would now be impossible. They were practicable once; but now it would be madness to attempt them. And besides, the convulsions and misfortunes to which France has been subjected will henceforth produce so many difficulties, that to remove them will be a sufficient source of glory without seeking for any other.”
Two of the gentlemen of the Emperor’s suite had been to the town to see the persons who had newly arrived at the Island, and to hear the news of the day. The account which they delivered on their return occupied the Emperor’s attention for some minutes in the garden. About six o’clock he proceeded to his closet, desiring me to follow him; and by chance a conversation was introduced, which to me was in the highest degree interesting and valuable. Though the subject of this conversation relates to myself personally, yet I cannot pass it over in silence; it develops so many characteristic traits of the Emperor, that these would furnish a sufficient apology for my laying it before the reader, were any apology necessary.
The persons who had arrived by the Newcastle had spoken much of my Historical Atlas, which led the Emperor again to remark on the extraordinary celebrity of the work, and to express his surprise that he should not sooner have become thoroughly acquainted with it.
“How happened it,” said he, “that none of your friends should have given me a correct idea of it? I never saw it until I was on board the Northumberland, and now I find it is known to every body. How came you never to call my attention to it yourself? I should have appreciated your merits, and should have made your fortune. I had formed a confused and indifferent idea of your work, which perhaps influenced my mind unfavourably with respect to yourself. Such is the misfortune of Sovereigns; for doubtless no one entertained better intentions than myself. Those who filled posts about my person might easily have brought me to render full justice to the merit of your work; for it was a thing that I could myself judge of, and I asked nothing more. Since I have become acquainted with your tables, and am enabled to form a correct notion of their valuable classification, and the indelible impression which they are calculated to make on the memory, with regard to dates, places, and collateral relations, I regret not having established a kind of Normal School, in which the students should have been uniformly instructed by the help of the Historical Atlas. Our Lyceums would have been inundated with your work, or parts of it, and I would have ensured to it the utmost degree of celebrity. Why, I say again, did you not call my attention to it? It is painful to confess the secret; but it is nevertheless true, that a little intrigue is indispensable to those who wish to gain the favour of Sovereigns; modest merit is almost always neglected. But, perhaps, after all, Clarke, Decrès, Montalivet, M. de Montesquiou, or even Barbier, my librarian, might have withheld the hints which you intended they should throw out to me; for it is another mortifying truth, that favours are sometimes more attainable through the medium of the valet-de-chambre than by a higher channel! And how happened it, that your friend Madame de S.... did not speak to me of your work? We frequently rode in the same carriage together; and she might have secured to you all the advantages she could have wished, by describing your real merits to me.”—"Yes, Sire," I replied, “but at that time I....” “I understand you. You did not then perhaps seek favours?” “Sire, my hour had not yet arrived.” Then ensued a very long explanation respecting my first introduction to the Emperor, the missions to which he had appointed me, the opinion which he had formed of me, and which, according to custom, had remained permanently fixed in his mind.
All this time I was standing near the writing-table in the second chamber, while the Emperor walked backward and forward through the whole length of both rooms. The subject of the conversation was to me most interesting. But, to form a just conception of my feelings at this moment, it would be necessary to look back to the time of Napoleon’s power, to that period when no one dared hope to know his thoughts, or ever to suppose the possibility of conversing familiarly and confidentially with him. Such a happy circumstance would then have appeared to me a dream: and now I almost regard it as a conversation in the Elysian Fields.
“I had no correct idea of you,” said the Emperor, "I had no precise knowledge of anything that concerned you. You had no friend near me to commend you to my notice, and you neglected to put yourself forward. Some of those persons on whom perhaps you thought you could rely even acted in a way prejudicial to your interest. I knew nothing of your work; if I had, it would have been a powerful circumstance in your favour. I was not aware that you had, like myself, attended the military school at Paris; that would have been another claim to my notice.
“You had been an emigrant, you would therefore never have enjoyed my full confidence. I knew that you had been much attached to the Bourbons; you would therefore never have been initiated in the great secrets of my government.”—"But Sire," I replied, “your Majesty permitted me to approach your person, you made me a Councillor of State, and entrusted me with various missions.”—"That was because I conceived you to be an honest man; and besides, I am not of a distrustful disposition. Without knowing why, I considered you to be a man of pure integrity in all that regarded pecuniary matters. If you had only mentioned a single word to me about your affair of the commercial licenses with P....[——?], I would have instantly rendered you justice. But, I say again, I should never have employed you in any political affair."—"Then, Sire," said I, “what risk did I not run, when in Paris and Holland! The English were then situated with respect to us, as we now are with respect to them, and, influenced by my old connections, I ventured in spite of your regulations to forward their letters, when they appeared to me to contain nothing objectionable. To what danger should I not have been exposed had my conduct led to any accusation on the part of the Minister of Police! And yet I conceived that I was only making a very natural and discretionary use of the powers with which Your Majesty had entrusted me, and the confidence which you had reposed in me. I felt so satisfied in my own conscience, and was so convinced of the propriety of my intentions, that I thought myself exempt from the observance of regulations which seemed not to have been made for me.”—"Well," observed the Emperor, “I could have conceived all this, I should readily have given you credit for such an explanation of your conduct; for no one is more ready to listen to reason than I. This was precisely the manner in which I wished duty to be performed; and yet it is certain that you would have been condemned had your conduct been the subject of enquiry, because all would have raised their voices against you. Such was the fatality of circumstances and the misfortune of my situation. Besides, when once I conceived a prejudice, I retained it: this again was the misfortune of my situation and my circumstances. But how could it be otherwise? I had no time for details. I could only take into consideration summaries and abstracts. I was very sure that I might sometimes be deceived; but where was my alternative? Few sovereigns have done better than I.”
“Sire,” said I, “I experienced deep mortification, at finding that your Majesty never addressed a word to me at your Court circles and levees. And yet you never failed to speak of me to my wife when I happened to be absent: I sometimes thought that I was not well known to you, or feared, particularly during later times, that your Majesty had some cause to be displeased with me.”—"By no means," resumed the Emperor; “if I spoke of you when absent, it was because I made it a rule always to speak to ladies about their husbands when the latter were sent on missions. If I neglected you when present, it was because I attached too little value to you. It was the same with many other individuals; you were confounded with the mass, you held only an ordinary rank in my regard. You were permitted to approach me, and yet you did not turn this privilege to good account; you were sent on missions, and yet you neglected to reap the benefit of these appointments on your return home. It is a great fault to keep in the back-ground at court. To my eyes you were in fact a mere blank. Nevertheless, I recollect that I sometimes entertained thoughts of employing you. The person connected with the ministry, on whom you in some measure depended, who declared himself to be your friend, and who had it in his power to serve you, diverted my attention from you, and contributed to keep up my indifference towards you. He knew you well, and perhaps feared you; and it is well known that in all cases I went rapidly to work.”—"Sire," I replied, “my situation was the more painful, since my friends were constantly congratulating me on the favours which I received at Court, and predicting the brilliant fortune that awaited me. Reports were continually raised of my having been appointed to all sorts of posts:—sometimes it was asserted that I had been created Maritime Prefect of Brest, Toulon, or Antwerp; that I had been made Minister of the Interior or of the Marine; or that I had received an important trust connected with the education of the King of Rome, &c.”—"Well," said the Emperor, “now that you call the matter to my recollection, some of these reports were not entirely destitute of foundation. I certainly did entertain the idea of employing you to assist in the education of the King of Rome; and I also intended, on your return to Holland, to appoint you to be Maritime Prefect of Toulon, which at that time I regarded as a sort of ministry. There were five-and-twenty ships of the line in the roads, and I wished to augment their number. In this instance, your friend, the Minister, turned my attention from you. You belonged to the old navy, he observed; your prejudices and those of the new officers must inevitably clash together. This appeared to me a decided objection to your appointment, and I thought no more about you; but now, since I have come to know you, I find that you were precisely the man I wanted. I think, too, that I entertained some other ideas respecting your advancement; but I must again repeat that you neglected your own interests. You retreated when you ought to have advanced. Need I tell you that, with the best intentions on my part, the chance against procuring an appointment to an important post was as great as that of winning a prize in the lottery. An idea occurred to me, and I formed my decision; but if that decision were not immediately carried into effect, it escaped my recollection; for I had so much business on my hands. A luckier candidate was then proposed, and he was installed in office.—But I interrupt you....”
“Sire,” continued I, "being ignorant of your Majesty’s kind intentions respecting me, I was placed in a situation truly ridiculous, amidst the numerous congratulations that I received. I endeavoured to extricate myself from all this embarrassment with the best possible grace; but the more efforts I made for this purpose, the more I was blamed for my modesty. I never asked your Majesty for more than one thing, and that was the situation of Master of Requests, which was immediately granted to me. Clarke reproached me with having lowered my dignity by making such a solicitation. He said that I should have asked to be made a Councillor of State; and that your Majesty would have granted my request."—"No," replied the Emperor, “I did not know you well enough for that. I should have looked upon such a request as the result of silly ambition.”—" Sire," I observed, “I had sufficient tact to guess what your opinion would be.”—"Well,“ continued the Emperor, that was odd enough. But perhaps Clarke was right after all. The solicitation of the inferior post of Master of Requests might have injured you in my opinion; that is to say, it might have tended to fix you in the rank in which I had classed you. I was very well pleased to see my chamberlains have something to do; but Master of Requests was too trivial a post. It is curious,” continued he, “how my memory revives, now that I am speaking on this subject. You had performed detached services, which had rapidly escaped my recollection, because my attention had never been directed to them. If they had been presented to my notice all in a mass, they must have given me a very different opinion of you. You served as a volunteer at Flushing. I knew this; and what I should have regarded as a mere matter of course in any other individual, forcibly struck me in an emigrant, who had for this purpose quitted his family, and who was not without fortune.”—"Sire, I received the most gratifying reward on my return. Your Majesty spoke to me on the subject."—"But," said he, “you suffered this to be lost in the flood of oblivion. You addressed several written communications to me. All these things occur to my recollection by degrees. You transmitted to me some plans respecting the Adriatic Sea, with which I was much pleased. The suggestion was to get possession of the Adriatic, and to establish a fleet there. Ships could have been built at no vast expense, with the wood produced in the immense forests of Croatia. I submitted the whole to the Minister, who never more mentioned the subject to me. But you presented some other things to my notice.”—"Sire, you probably allude to the ideas respecting the system of maritime warfare to be adopted against England, accompanied by an explanatory map."—"Yes, I recollect. The map lay for several days on the desk in my closet. I expressed a wish to see you; but you were absent on a mission."