The road to glory

by E. Alexander Powell

THIS story properly begins in an emperor’s bathtub. The bathtub was in the Palace of the Tuileries, and, immersed to the chin in its cologne-scented water, was Napoleon. The nineteenth century was but a three-year-old; the month was April, and the trees in the Tuileries Garden were just bursting into bud; and the First Consul—he made himself Emperor a few weeks later—was taking his Sunday-morning bath. There was a scratch at the door—scratching having been substituted for knocking in the palace after the Egyptian campaign—and the Mameluke body-guard ushered into the bathroom Napoleon’s brothers Joseph and Lucien. How the conversation began between this remarkable trio of Corsicans is of small consequence. It is enough to know that Napoleon dumfounded his brothers by the blunt announcement that he had determined to sell the great colony of Louisiana—all that remained to France of her North American empire—to the United States. He made this astounding announcement, as Joseph wrote afterward, “with as little ceremony as our dear father would have shown in selling a vineyard.” Incensed at Napoleon’s cool assumption that the great overseas possession was his to dispose of as he saw fit, Joseph, his hot Corsican blood getting the better of his discretion, leaned over the tub and shook his clinched fist in the face of his august brother.

“What you propose is unconstitutional!” he cried. “If you attempt to carry it out I swear that I will be the first to oppose you!”

White with passion at this unaccustomed opposition, Napoleon raised himself until half his body was out of the opaque and frothy water.

“You will have no chance to oppose me!” he screamed, beside himself with anger. “I conceived this scheme, I negotiated it, and I shall execute it. I will accept the responsibility for what I do. Bah! I scorn your opposition!” And he dropped back into the bath so suddenly that the resultant splash drenched the future King of Spain from head to foot. This extraordinary scene, which, ludicrous though it was, was to vitally affect the future of the United States, was brought to a sudden termination by the valet, who had been waiting with the bath towels, shocked at the spectacle of a future Emperor and a future King quarrelling in a bathroom over the disposition of an empire, falling on the floor in a faint.

Though this narrative concerns itself, from beginning to end, with adventurers—if Bonaparte himself was not the very prince of adventurers, then I do not know the meaning of the word—it is necessary, for its proper understanding, to here interject a paragraph or two of contemporaneous history. In 1800 Napoleon, whose fertile brain was planning the re-establishment in America of that French colonial empire which a generation before had been destroyed by England, persuaded the King of Spain, by the bribe of a petty Italian principality, to cede Louisiana to the French. But in the next three years things turned out so contrary to his expectations that he was reluctantly compelled to abandon his scheme for colonial expansion and prepare for eventualities nearer home. The army he had sent to Haiti, and which he had intended to throw into Louisiana, had wasted away from disease and in battle with the blacks under the skilful leadership of L’Ouverture until but a pitiful skeleton remained. Meanwhile the attitude of England and Austria was steadily growing more hostile, and it did not need a telescope to see the war-clouds which heralded another great European struggle piling up on France’s political horizon. Realizing that in the life-and-death struggle which was approaching he could not be hampered with the defense of a distant colony, Napoleon decided that, if he was unable to hold Louisiana, he would at least put it out of the reach of his arch-enemy, England, by selling it to the United States. It was a master-stroke of diplomacy. Moreover, he needed money—needed it badly, too—for France, impoverished by the years of warfare from which she had just emerged, was ill prepared to embark on another struggle.

There were in Paris at this time two Americans, Robert R. Livingston and James Monroe, who had been commissioned by President Jefferson to negotiate with the French Government for the purchase of the city of New Orleans and a small strip of territory adjacent to it, so that the settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee might have a free port on the gulf. After months spent in diplomatic intercourse, during which Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, could be induced neither to accept nor reject their proposals, the commissioners were about ready to abandon the business in despair. I doubt, therefore, if there were two more astonished men in all Europe than the two Americans when Talleyrand abruptly asked them whether the United States would buy the whole of Louisiana and what price it would be willing to pay. It was as though a man had gone to buy a cow and the owner had suddenly offered him his whole farm. Though astounded and embarrassed, for they had been authorized to spend but two million dollars in the contemplated purchase, the Americans had the courage to shoulder the responsibility of making so tremendous a transaction, for there was no time to communicate with Washington and no one realized better than they did that Louisiana must be purchased at once if it was to be had at all. England and France were, as they knew, on the very brink of war, and they also knew that the first thing England would do when war was declared would be to seize Louisiana, in which case it would be lost to the United States forever. This necessity for prompt action permitted of but little haggling over terms, and on May 22, 1803, Napoleon signed the treaty which transferred the million square miles comprised in the colony of Louisiana to the United States for fifteen million dollars. Nor was the sale effected an instant too soon, for on that very day England declared war.

Now, in purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson, though he got the greatest bargain in history, found that the French had thrown in a boundary dispute to give good measure. The treaty did not specify the limits of the colony.

“What are the boundaries of Louisiana?” Livingston asked Talleyrand when the treaty was being prepared.

“I don’t know,” was the answer. “You must take it as we received it from Spain.”

“But what did you receive?” persisted the American.