He then began to review, with his accustomed rapidity and talent, the different subjects I had noticed, and stopped to reflect on the absurdity, the inconsistency, the great mistake of our emigration, and the real injuries that it had done to France, to the King, and to ourselves. “You have established, and consecrated in political France,” he observed, “a separation similar to that which the Catholics and Protestants introduced into religious Europe; and to what calamities has it not given rise! I had succeeded in destroying its results, but are they not on the point of being revived?” He next developed the means which he had employed to annihilate that plague, the precautions he had been forced to adopt, and the effects which he had in view. How every thing that fell from his tongue was changed in appearance!—how every thing seemed magnified in my eyes in proportion as he discussed the subject! “And,” he remarked, “a peculiar singularity in my situation was that in the whole of those transactions I held the helm myself constantly in the midst of rocks. Every one, judging according to his own standard, attributed to passion, to simple prejudice, or to littleness, what in me, however, was but the consequence of profound views, of grand conceptions, and the most elevated state maxims. It might have been said that I reigned only over pigmies with respect to intellectual talent. I was comprehended by none. The national party felt only jealousy and resentment at what they saw me do in favour of the emigrants, and the latter, on their part, were persuaded that I sought only to gain lustre by their assistance. Poor creatures!...
“I obtained, however, my object, in spite of reciprocal infatuation and prejudice, and I had the satisfaction of leaving every thing quiet in port, when I launched out to sea in prosecution of my grand enterprises.”
Having mentioned, since my return to Europe, these expressions of Napoleon’s to a great Officer of the Crown, who had often the honour of conversing with him in private (Le Comte de S——), he related to me, in his turn, a conversation precisely on the same subject. Its coincidence with what has been just read is so very striking as to induce me to insert it here. The Emperor said to him one day: “What, think you, is my reason for endeavouring to have about me the great names of the ancient monarchy?”—“Perhaps, Sire, for the splendour of your throne, and for the purpose of keeping up certain appearances in the eyes of Europe.”—“Ah! That is just like you, with your pride and your prejudices of rank! Well then, learn, that my victories and my power are much better recommendations for me in Europe than all your great names, and that my apparent predilection for them does me a great deal of injury, and renders me very unpopular at home. You attribute to narrow views what arise from most extensive ones. I am engaged in renovating a society, a nation, and the elements that I am obliged to employ are hostile to each other. The nobility and the emigrants are but a point in the mass, and that mass is inimical to them, and continues very much exasperated against them; it hardly forgives me for having recalled them. For my own part, I considered it as a duty: but if I suffer them to continue as a body, they may one day be serviceable to foreign powers, prove injurious to us, and subject themselves to great dangers. My object, then, is to dissolve their union, and to render them independent of each other. If I place some of them about my person, in the different branches of administration, and in the army, it is for the purpose of consolidating them with the mass, and of managing so as to reduce all classes into a whole; for I am mortal, and if I should happen to leave you before that fusion is accomplished, you would soon see what disasters would arise from these heterogeneous parts, and the dreadful dangers of which certain persons might become the victims! Thus, then, Sir, my views are all connected with humanity and elevated political considerations, and, in no respect, with vain and silly prejudices.”
When I observed to the person who related this anecdote, how little we were acquainted at the Tuileries with Napoleon’s real character, and the great and excellent qualities of his soul and heart, he answered that, for his own part, he had been personally more fortunate, and that he would give me a proof of it, which he selected out of ten: “The Emperor shewed himself, one day, in his Privy Council, very much incensed against General La F——, whom he attacked with great severity, and whose opinions and principles, he said, were capable of effecting the complete dissolution of a state: becoming animated by degrees, he at length put himself into a real passion. I was present as a member of the Council; I had been recently admitted, and was little accustomed to the Emperor’s manners, and, although stopped by the two members placed next to me, I undertook to speak in defence of the accused, asserting that he had been calumniated to the Sovereign, and that he lived quietly on his estate, with personal opinions which were productive of no ill effect whatever. The Emperor, still in a passion, resumed the charge for the purpose of pressing it with vehemence; but after five or six words, he stopped short, and addressing himself to me, said: ‘But he is your friend, Sir, and you are right. I had forgotten that.—Let us speak of something else.’ ‘And why,’ I asked, ‘did you not make us acquainted with all this at the time?’—By a fatality which would seem to belong to Napoleon’s atmosphere, whether from prejudice or otherwise, the impression on our minds was that it could only be told to his intimate friends; for whoever had said much about it would only have passed for a clumsy romancer of a courtier, who told not what he believed to be true, but what he conceived best suited to obtain favour and rewards.”
Since I have mentioned this great Officer of the Crown, who is no less distinguished by the graces of his mind and the amenity of his manners than by his exalted character, I shall notice one of his answers to Napoleon, remarkable for its ingenious and delicate flattery. The Emperor, at one of his levees, having been obliged to wait some time for his appearance, attacked him on his arrival, openly, in the presence of all. It happened to be precisely at the time when five or six Kings (and among others, those of Bavaria, Saxony, and Wurtemberg), were at Paris. “Sire,” replied the culprit, “I have, no doubt, a million of excuses to make to your Majesty, but at this time, one is not at perfect liberty to go through the streets as one pleases. I just now had the misfortune to get into a crowd of kings, from which I found it impossible to extricate myself sooner. This, Sire, was the cause of my delay.” Every one smiled, and the Emperor contented himself with saying, in a softened tone of voice: “Whatever, Sir, may be the cause, take proper precautions for the future, and above all, never make me wait again.”
NAPOLEON’S SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.—PUBLIC SPIRIT
OF THE TIME.—EVENTS OF THE 10TH OF AUGUST.
3rd.—The weather is somewhat improved; the Emperor attempted to take a walk in the garden. General Bingham and the Colonel of the 53d requested to see the Emperor, who kept them rather long. The appearance of the Governor put us all to flight. General Bingham disappeared, and, for our part, we went to the wood, for the purpose of keeping away from the spot.
The Emperor, during his walk, conversed a great deal about a journey which he took to Burgundy in the beginning of the Revolution. This he calls his Sentimental Journey to Nuitz. He supped there with his comrade Gassendi, at that time captain in the same regiment, and who was advantageously married to the daughter of a physician of the place. The young traveller soon remarked the difference of political opinion between the father and son-in-law; Gassendi, the gentleman, was, of course, an aristocrat, and the physician a flaming patriot. The latter found in the strange guest a powerful auxiliary, and was so delighted with him that the following day at dawn he paid him a visit of acknowledgment and sympathy. The appearance of a young officer of artillery, with good logical reasoning and a ready tongue, was, observed the Emperor, a valuable and rare accession to the place. It was easy for the traveller to perceive that he made a favourable impression. It was Sunday, and hats were taken off to him from one end of the street to the other. His triumph, however, was not without a check. He went to sup at the house of a Madame Maret or Muret, where another of his comrades, V——, seemed to be comfortably established. Here the aristocracy of the canton were accustomed to meet, although the mistress was but the wife of a wine-merchant, but she had great property and the most polished manners; she was, said the Emperor, the duchess of the place. All the gentlefolks of the vicinity were to be found there. The young officer was caught, as he remarked, in a real wasp-nest, and it was necessary for him to fight his way out again. The contest was unequal. In the very heat of the action, the mayor was announced. “I believed him to be an assistant sent to me by Heaven in the critical moment, but he was the worst of all my opponents. I see this villanous fellow now before me in his fine Sunday clothes, fat and bloated, in an ample scarlet coat; he was a miserable animal. I was happily extricated by the generosity of the mistress of the house, perhaps from a secret sympathy of opinion. She unceasingly parried with her wit the blows which were dealt at me; and was a protecting shield on which the enemy’s weapons struck in vain. She guarded me from every kind of wound, and I have always retained a pleasing recollection of the services I received from her in that sort of skirmish.
“The same diversity of opinions,” said the Emperor, “was then to be met with in every part of France. In the saloons, in the streets, on the highways, in the taverns, every one was ready to take part in the contest, and nothing was easier than for a person to form an erroneous estimate of the influence of parties and opinions, according to the local situation in which he was placed. Thus a patriot might easily be deceived, when in the saloons, or among an assembly of officers, where the majority was decidedly against him; but, the instant he was in the street, or among the soldiers, he found himself in the midst of the entire nation. The sentiments of the day succeeded even in making proselytes among the officers themselves, particularly after the celebrated oath to the Nation, the Law, and the King. Until that time,” continued the Emperor, “had I received an order to point my cannon against the people, I have no doubt, that custom, prejudice, education, and the name of the King, would have induced me to obey; but, the national oath once taken, this would have ceased, and I should have acknowledged the nation only. My natural propensities thenceforth harmonized with my duties, and happily accorded with all the metaphysics of the Assembly. The patriotic officers, however, it must be allowed, constituted but the smaller number; but with the soldiers, as a lever, they led the regiment and imposed the law. The comrades of the opposite party, and the officers themselves, had recourse to us in every critical moment. I remember, for instance, having rescued from the fury of the populace a brother officer, whose crime consisted in singing from the windows of our dining-room the celebrated ballad O Richard! O mon Roi! I had little notion then that that air would one day be proscribed in the same manner on my account. Just so, on the 10th of August, when I saw the palace of the Tuileries stormed and the person of the King seized, I was certainly very far from thinking that I should replace him, and that that palace would be my place of residence.”
In dwelling upon the events of the 10th of August, he said: “I was, during that horrible epoch, at Paris, in lodgings in the Rue du Mail, Place des Victoires. On hearing the sound of the tocsin, and the news of the assault upon the Tuileries, I ran to the Carousel, to the house of Fauvelet, the brother of Bourrienne, who kept an upholsterer’s shop. He had been my comrade at the military school of Brienne. It was from that house, which, by the by, I was never afterwards able to find, in consequence of the great alterations made there, that I had a good view of all the circumstances of the attack. Before I reached the Carousel, I had been met by a group of hideous-looking men, carrying a head at the end of a pike. Seeing me decently dressed, with the look of a gentleman, they called upon me to shout Vive la Nation! which, as it may be easily believed, I did without hesitation.