Corbineau.—Mlle. d'Avrillon (vol. ii. 101) tells how, in haste to join his regiment at Paris, Corbineau had asked for a seat in her carriage from St. Cloud. She was delighted, as he was a charming man, "with no side on like Lauriston and Lemarois." He had just been made general, and said, "Either I will get killed or deserve the favour which the Emperor has granted me. M'selle, you shall hear me spoken of; if I am not killed I will perform some startling deed."
Dahlmann.—General Nicholas Dahlmann, commanding the chasseurs of the guard, was killed in the charge on the Russian infantry which saved the battle. On April 22nd Napoleon wrote Vice-Admiral Decrés to have three frigates put on the stocks to be called Dahlmann, Corbineau, and Hautpoul, and in each captain's cabin a marble inscription recounting their brave deeds.
No. 41.
Young Tascher.—The third of Josephine's cousins-germain of that name. He was afterwards aide-de-camp of Prince Eugène, and later major-domo of the Empress Eugénie.
No. 42.
After this letter St. Amand declares that Napoleon's letters to his wife become "cold, short, banal, absolutely insignificant." "They consisted of a few remarks about the rain or the fine weather, and always the same refrain—the invitation to be cheerful.... Napoleon, occupied elsewhere, wrote no longer to his legitimate wife, but as a duty, as paying a debt of conscience." He was occupied, indeed, but barely as the author supposes. It is Bingham (vol. ii. 281) who reminds us that in the first three months of 1807 we have 1715 letters and despatches preserved of his work during that period, while he often rode forty leagues a day, and had instructed his librarian to send him by each morning's courier two or three new books from Paris. Aubenas is more just than St. Amand. "If his style is no longer that of the First Consul, still less of the General of Italy, he was solicitous, punctilious, attentive, affectionate even although laconic, in that correspondence (with Josephine) which, in the midst of his much greater preoccupations, seems for him as much a pleasure as a duty."
No. 43.
I am still at Eylau.—It took Napoleon and his army eight days to bury the dead and remove the wounded. Lejeune says, "His whole time was given up now to seeing that the wounded received proper care, and he insisted on the Russians being as well treated as the French" (vol. i. 48). The Emperor wrote Daru that if more surgeons had been on the spot he could have saved at least 200 lives; although, to look at the surgical instruments used on these fields, and now preserved in the museum of Les Invalides, it is wonderful that the men survived operations with such ghastly implements of torture. A few days later Napoleon tells Daru on no account to begrudge money for medicines, and especially for quinine.
This country is covered with dead and wounded.—"Napoleon," says Dumas (vol. i. 18, 41), "having given order that the succour to the wounded on both sides might be multiplied, rode over the field of battle, which all eye-witnesses agree to have been the most horrible field of carnage which war has ever offered. In a space of less than a square league, the ground covered with snow, and the frozen lakes, were heaped up with 10,000 dead, and 3000 to 4000 dead horses, débris of artillery, arms of all kinds, cannon-balls, and shells. Six thousand Russians, expiring of their wounds, and of hunger and thirst, were left abandoned to the generosity of the conqueror."
No. 50.