“In his Christian charity, for he really is a worthy, mild, and excellent man, he never once despaired of seeing me a penitent, at his tribunal; he has often let his hopes and thoughts on that subject escape him. We sometimes conversed about it in a pleasant and friendly manner. ‘It will happen to you, sooner or later,’ said he, with an innocent tenderness of expression; ‘you will be converted by me or by others, and you will then feel how great the content, the satisfaction of your own heart,’ &c. In the mean time, my influence over him was such, that I drew from him, by the mere power of my conversation, that famous Concordat of Fontainebleau, in which he renounced the temporal sovereignty, an act on account of which he has since shown that he dreaded the judgment of posterity, or rather the reprobation of his successors. No sooner had he signed than he felt the stings of repentance. He was to have dined the following day with me in public; but at night, he was, or pretended to be ill. The truth is that, immediately after I left him, he again fell into the hands of his habitual advisers, who drew a terrible picture of the error which he had committed. Had we been left by ourselves, I might have done what I pleased with him; I should have governed the religious with the same facility that I did the political world. He was, in truth, a lamb, a good man in every respect, a man of real worth, whom I esteem and love greatly, and who, on his part, is, I am convinced, not altogether destitute of interest with regard to me. You will not see him make any severe complaints against me, nor prefer, in particular, any direct and personal accusation against me, any more than the other sovereigns. There may, perhaps, be some vague and vulgar declamations against ambition and bad faith, but nothing positive and direct; because statesmen are well aware, that when the hour of libels is past, no one would be allowed to prefer a public accusation without corroborative proofs, and they have none of these to produce: such will be the province of history. On the other hand, there will be at most but some wretched chroniclers, shallow enough to take the ravings of clubs, or intrigues, for authentic facts, or some writers of memoirs, who, deceived by the errors of the moment, will be dead before they are enabled to correct their mistakes.
“When the real particulars of my disputes with the Pope shall be made public, the world will be surprised at the extent of my patience, for it is known that I could not put up with a great deal. When he left me, after my coronation, he felt a secret spite at not having obtained the compensations which he thought he had deserved. But, however grateful I might have been in other respects, I could not, after all, make a traffic of the interests of the empire by way of paying my own obligations, and, I was, besides, too proud to seem to have purchased his kindnesses. He had hardly set his foot on the soil of Italy, when the intriguers and mischief-makers, the enemies of France, took advantage of the disposition he was in, to govern his conduct, and from that instant every thing was hostile on his part. He no longer was the gentle, the peaceable Chiaramonti, that worthy bishop of Imola, who had at so early a period shown himself worthy of the enlightened state of the age. His signature was thenceforth affixed to acts only which characterised the Gregories and Bonifaces more than him. Rome became the focus of all the plots hatched against us. I strove in vain to bring him back by the force of reason, but I found it impossible to ascertain his sentiments. The wrongs became so serious, and the insults offered to us so flagrant, that I was imperatively called upon to act, in my turn. I, therefore, seized his fortresses; I took possession of some provinces; and I finished by occupying Rome itself, at the same time declaring and strictly observing that I held him sacred in his spiritual capacity, which was far from being satisfactory to him. A crisis, however, presented itself; it was believed, that fortune had abandoned me at Essling, and measures were in immediate readiness for exciting the population of that great capital to insurrection. The officer, who commanded there, thought that he could escape the danger only by getting rid of the Pope, whom he sent off to France. That measure was carried into effect without my orders, and was even in direct opposition to my views. I despatched instant orders for stopping the Pope, wherever he might be met with, and he was kept at Savona, where he was treated with every possible care and attention; for I wished to make myself feared, but not to ill-treat him; to bend him to my views, not to degrade him;—I entertained very different projects! This removal served only to inflame the spirit of resentment and intrigue. Until then, the quarrel had been but temporal; the Pope’s advisers, in the hope of re-establishing their affairs, involved it in all the jumble of spirituality. I then found it necessary to carry on the contest with him on that head; I had my council of conscience, my ecclesiastical councils, and I invested my imperial courts with the power of deciding in cases of appeal from abuses; for my soldiers could be of no further use in all this: I felt it necessary to fight the Pope with his own weapons. To his men of erudition, to his sophists, his civilians, and his scribes, it was incumbent upon me to oppose mine.
“An English plot was laid to carry him off from Savona; it was of service to me, I caused him to be removed to Fontainebleau; but that was to be the period of his sufferings, and the regeneration of his splendour. All my grand views were accomplished in disguise and mystery. I had brought things to such a point, as to render the development infallible, without any exertion, and in a way altogether natural. It was accordingly consecrated by the Pope in the famous Concordat of Fontainebleau, in spite even of my disasters at Moscow. What then would have been the result, had I returned victorious and triumphant? I had consequently obtained the separation, which was so desirable, of the spiritual from the temporal, which is so injurious to his Holiness, and the commixture of which produces disorder in society, in the name and by the hands of him who ought himself to be the centre of harmony: and from that time I intended to exalt the Pope beyond measure, to surround him with grandeur and honours. I should have succeeded in suppressing all his anxiety for the loss of his temporal power; I should have made an idol of him; he would have remained near my person. Paris would have become the capital of the Christian world, and I should have governed the religious as well as the political world. It was an additional means of binding tighter all the federative parts of the empire, and of preserving the tranquillity of every thing placed without it. I should have had my religious as well as my legislative sessions; my councils would have constituted the representation of Christendom, and the Popes would have been only the presidents. I should have called together and dissolved those assemblies, approved and published their discussions, as Constantine and Charlemagne had done; and if that supremacy had escaped the Emperors, it was because they had committed the blunder of letting the spiritual heads reside at a distance from them; and the latter took advantage of the weakness of the princes, or of critical events, to shake off their dependence and to enslave them in their turn.
“But,” resumed the Emperor, “to accomplish that object, I had found it requisite to manœuvre with a great deal of dexterity; above all, to conceal my real way of thinking, to give a direction, altogether different to general opinion, and to feed the public with vulgar trifles for the purpose of more effectually concealing the importance and depth of my secret design. I accordingly experienced a kind of satisfaction on finding myself accused of barbarity towards the Pope, and of tyranny in religious matters. Foreigners, in particular, promoted my wishes in this respect, by filling their wretched libels with invectives against my pitiful ambition, which, according to them, had driven me to devour the miserable patrimony of Saint Peter. But I was perfectly aware, that public opinion would again declare itself in my favour at home, and that no means could exist abroad for disconcerting my plan. What measures would not have been employed for its prevention, had it been anticipated at a seasonable period; for how vast its future ascendency over all the Catholic countries, and how great its influence even upon those that are not so, by the co-operation of the members of that religion who are spread throughout these countries!”
The Emperor said, that this deliverance from the Court of Rome, this legal union, the control of religion in the hands of the sovereign, had been, for a long time, the constant object of his meditations and his wishes. England, Russia, the northern crowns, and part of Germany, are, he said, in possession of it. Venice and Naples had enjoyed it. No government can be carried on without it; a nation is otherwise, every instant, affected in its tranquillity, its dignity, its independence. But the task,” he added, “was very difficult; at every step I was alive to the danger. I was induced to think, that, once engaged in it, I should be abandoned by the nation. I more than once sounded and strove to elicit public opinion, but in vain, and I have been enabled to convince myself that I never should have had the national co-operation. And this explains a sally, which I had witnessed.”
The Emperor perceiving, at one of those grand Sunday audiences, which were very numerously attended, the Archbishop of Tours (de Barral) addressed him in a very elevated tone; “Well! Monsieur l’Archevêque, how do our affairs with the Pope go on?—‘Sire, the deputation of your bishops is about to set out for Savona.’ Very well! endeavour to make the Pope listen to reason; prevail upon him to conduct himself with prudence; otherwise, the consequences will be unpleasant. Tell him plainly, that he is no longer in the times of the Gregories, and that I am not a Débonnaire. He has the example of Henry the VIIIth., and, without his wickedness, I possess more strength and power than he had. Let him know, that whatever part I may take, I have 600,000 Frenchmen in arms, who, in every contingency will march with me, for me, and as myself. The peasantry and mechanics look to me alone, and repose unlimited confidence in me. The prudent and enlightened part of the intermediate class, those who take care of their interest, and wish for tranquillity, will follow me; the only class favourable to him will be the meddling and talkative, who, will forget him at the end of ten days, to chat upon some fresh subject.”
And as the archbishop, who betrayed his embarrassment by his countenance, was about to stammer out some words, the Emperor added in a greatly softened tone: “You are out of all this; I participate in your doctrines; I honour your piety; I respect your character!”
The Emperor, I now understand him perfectly, had, no doubt, merely thrown out those observations, in order that we might give effect to them in other places; but he deceived himself with respect to our dispositions, or at least to those of the palace. Some, the least reflecting part, were decided and loud in censuring his conduct on these occasions; others, with the best intentions, were extremely cautious not to let a word transpire, lest it should prove injurious to him in the public opinion; for, such was, in general, our misconception, our singular manner of understanding and explaining the Emperor’s meaning, that, although without any bad design, and solely through levity, incoherency, or for fashion’s sake, instead of making him popular, we were perhaps the very persons who did him most injury. I very well remember that, on the morning when that famous concordat of Fontainebleau unexpectedly appeared in the Moniteur, some persons confidentially assured each other in the saloons of St. Cloud, that nothing was less authentic than that document, and that it was a base fabrication. Others whispered, that it was, no doubt, genuine in the main points, but that it had been extracted from the Pope by the Emperor’s anger and violence. To that I should not be surprised, if the piquant dramatic episode of Napoleon, at Fontainebleau, dragging the father of the faithful by his white hair, was not precisely the invention of the political proser who wrote it, but caught up from the mouths of the courtiers and even of the Emperor’s servants themselves; and this is the way in which history is written!
WARM CONVERSATION WITH THE GOVERNOR, IN THE
ADMIRAL’S PRESENCE.
18th. The weather was most dreadful during the whole of the night and day. About three o’clock, the Emperor took advantage of its clearing up a little and went out. He came to my apartment, and we called on General Gourgaud, who was indisposed. We then visited Madame de Montholon, who accompanied us to the garden. The Emperor was in excellent spirits, which enlivened the conversation. He undertook to persuade Madame de Montholon to make a general confession, particularly insisting upon her setting out with her first sin. “Come,” said he, “speak out without apprehension, do not let our neighbour constrain you; consider him merely as your confessor; we shall forget it all in a quarter of an hour.”