11th.—After our breakfast in the tent and a few turns in the garden, the Emperor read, for the last time, the chapter of Arcole.

During our ride in the calash, somebody observed that it was Sunday. “We should have mass,” said the Emperor, “if we were in a Christian country, if we had a priest; and that would have been a pastime for us during the day. I have been always fond of the sound of the bells in the country. We should,” he added in a gay tone, “resolve upon choosing a priest among us;—the curate of St. Helena.”—But how ordain him, it was said, without a bishop?—“And am I not one,” replied the Emperor, “have I not been anointed with the same oil, consecrated in the same manner? Were not Clovis and his successors anointed, at the time, with the formula of Rex Christique sacerdos? Were they not, in fact, real bishops? Was not the subsequent suppression of that formula caused by the jealousy and policy of the bishops and popes?”

I did not eat at dinner, the Emperor wished to know the cause. I had a violent pain in my stomach, a complaint to which I said I was very subject. “I am more fortunate than you,” he observed. “In all my life, I never had either the head-ache or a pain in my stomach”[stomach”] The Emperor often repeated what he had said, and he has pronounced these same words perhaps ten, twenty, or thirty times, in the midst of us at different moments.[[8]]

CAMPAIGN OF 1809, &C.

12th.—The Emperor passed the morning in his bath, reading the Journals des Debats of March and April, received yesterday by way of the Cape. The Emperor was very much occupied with them; they produced a great degree of agitation in his system.

In general, since the Emperor had received books, and particularly the Moniteur, he continued much more at home; he scarcely ever went abroad; he no longer used a horse, nor even the calash; he hardly took the air for a few moments in the garden; he was not the better for it, his features and his health underwent a visible alteration.

I found him to-day reading Les Croisades by Michaud, which he left to run over Les Memoires de Bezenval. He stopped at the duel between the Comte d’Artois and the Duc de Bourbon. He found the details curious, but they seemed to be very remote from us. “It is difficult,” he observed, “to reconcile times so close to us with manners so different.”

In the course of this day’s conversations, the Emperor happened to repeat, what I have mentioned elsewhere, that his finest manœuvre had been at Eckmuhl, without, however, specifying it any further.

ON THE WAR WITH RUSSIA.—FATALITIES, &C.—M. DE TALLEYRAND, &C.—MADAME DE STAEL’S CORINNE.—M. NECKER, &C.

13th. At an early hour in the morning, I accompanied the Emperor very far into the wood; he conversed for upwards of an hour, on the situation of France, and then reverted to the persons who had betrayed him, and the numerous fatalities which had hurried him along; to the perfidious security caused by his marriage with Austria; to the infatuation of the Turks, who made peace precisely when they ought to have made war; to that of Bernadotte, who was actuated by his self-love and his resentment, rather than by his real grandeur and stability; to a season severe beyond measure, and even to the superiority of talent, evinced by M. de Narbonne, who, discovering the designs of Austria, compelled her to take active measures. Finally, he reverted to the successes of Lutzen and Bautzen, which, by bringing back the king of Saxony to Dresden, put him, Napoleon, in possession of the hostile signatures of Austria, and deprived her of all further subterfuge. “What an unhappy concurrence!” he exclaimed in a most expressive tone, “and yet,” he continued, “the day after the battle of Dresden, Francis had already sent a person to treat. It was necessary, that Vandamme’s disaster should happen at a given moment, to second, as it were, the decree of fate.”