“I exact only one condition, which is that you get married. Your passion has lasted long enough. It has become ridiculous; and I have the right to hope that the man whom I have called my companion in arms, who will be placed alongside of me by posterity, will no longer abandon himself to a weakness without example.... You know that no one likes you better than I do, but you know also that the first condition of my friendship is that it must be made subordinate to my esteem.”
Berthier fled to Josephine for help, weeping like a child; but she could do nothing, and he married the woman chosen for him. Three months after the ceremony, the husband of Madame de Visconti died and Berthier, broken-hearted, wrote to the Prince Borghese:
“You know how often the emperor pressed me to obtain a divorce for Madame de Visconti. But a divorce was always repugnant to the feelings in which I was educated, and therefore I waited. To-day Madame de Visconti is free, and I might have been the happiest of men. But the emperor forced me into a marriage which hinders me from uniting myself to the only woman I ever loved. Ah, my dear prince, all that the emperor has done and may yet do for me, will be no compensation for the eternal misfortunes to which he has condemned me.”
Never was Napoleon more powerful than at the end of the period we have been tracing so rapidly, never had he so looked the emperor. An observer who watched him through the Te Deum sung at Notre Dame in his honor, on his return from Tilsit, says: “His features, always calm and serious, recalled the cameos which represent the Roman emperors. He was small; still his whole person, in this imposing ceremony, was in harmony with the part he was playing. A sword glittering with precious stones was at his side, and the glittering diamond called the “Regent” formed its pommel. Its brilliancy did not let us forget that this sword was the sharpest and the most victorious that the world had seen since those of Alexander and Cæsar.”
Certainly he never worked more prodigiously. The campaigns of 1805–1807 were, in spite of their rapid movement,—indeed, because of it,—terribly fatiguing for him; that they were possible at all was due mainly to the fact that they had been made on paper so many times in his study. When he was consul the only room opening from his study was filled with enormous maps of all the countries of the world. This room was presided over by a competent cartographer. Frequently these maps were brought to the study and spread upon the floor. Napoleon would get down upon them on all fours, and creep about, compass and red pencil in hand, comparing and measuring distances, and studying the configuration of the land. If he was in doubt about anything, he referred it to his librarian, who was expected to give him the fullest details.
Attached to his cabinet were skilful translators, whose business was not only to translate diplomatic correspondence, but to gather from foreign sources full information about the armies of his enemies. Méneval declares that the emperor knew the condition of foreign armies as well as he did that of his own.
The amount of information he had about other lands was largely due to his ability to ask questions. When he sent to an agent for a report, he rattled at him a volley of questions, always to the point; and the agent knew that it would never do to let one go unanswered.
While carrying on the Austrian and Prussian campaigns of 1805–1807, Napoleon showed, as never before, his extraordinary capacity for attending to everything. The number of despatches he sent out was incredible. In the first three months of 1807, while he was in Poland, he wrote over seventeen hundred letters and despatches.
It was not simply war, the making of kingdoms, the directions of his new-made kings; minor affairs of the greatest variety occupied him. While at Boulogne, tormented by the failure of the English invasion and the war against Austria, he ordered that horse races should be established “in those parts of the empire the most remarkable for the horses they breed; prizes shall be awarded to the fleetest horses.” The very day after the battle of Friedland, he was sending orders to Paris about the form and site of a statue to the memory of the Bishop of Vannes. He criticised from Poland the quarrels of Parisian actresses, ordered canals, planned there for the Bourse and the Odeon Theatre. The newspapers he watched as he did when in Paris, reprimanded this editor, suspended that, forbade the publication of news of disasters to the French navy, censured every item honorable to his enemies. To read the bulletins issued from Jena to Friedland, one would believe that the writer had no business other than that of regulating the interior affairs of France. This care of details went, as Pasquier says, to the “point of minuteness, or, to speak plainly, to that of charlatanism;” but it certainly did produce a deep impression upon France. That he could establish himself five hundred leagues from Paris, in the heart of winter, in a country encircled by his enemies, and yet be in daily communication with his capital, could direct even its least important affairs as if he were present, could know what every person of influence, from the Secretary of State to the humblest newspaper man, was doing, caused a superstitious feeling to rise in France, and in all Europe, that the emperor of the French people was not only omnipotent, but omnipresent.