“Nogent, 21st February, 1814.
“... What! six hours after having received the first troops coming from Spain you were not in the field! Six hours’ repose was sufficient. I won the action of Nangis with a brigade of dragoons coming from Spain, which, since it left Bayonne, had not unbridled its horses. The six battalions of the division of Nismes want clothes, equipment, and drilling, say you. What poor reasons you give me there, Augereau! I have destroyed eighty thousand enemies with conscripts having nothing but knapsacks! The National Guards, say you, are pitiable. I have four thousand here, in round hats, without knapsacks, in wooden shoes, but with good muskets, and I get a great deal out of them. There is no money, you continue; and where do you hope to draw money from? You want wagons; take them wherever you can. You have no magazines; this is too ridiculous. I order you, twelve hours after the reception of this letter, to take the field. If you are still Augereau of Castiglione, keep the command; but if your sixty years weigh upon you, hand over the command to your senior general. The country is in danger, and can be saved by boldness and good will alone....
“Napoleon.”
1814.
Etched by Ruet, after Meissonier. Original in Walters’s gallery, Baltimore. Meissonier was fond of short titles, and very often in his historical works made choice of only a simple date. Among such titles are 1806, 1807, 1814, which might very well be replaced by Battle of Jena, Friedland, and Campaign of France. This last subject he treated twice under different aspects. First, in the famous canvas, his great masterpiece, where we see a gloomy, silent Napoleon, with face contracted by anguish, slowly riding at the head of his discouraged staff across the snowy plains of Champagne. This important work forms part of the collection of Monsieur Chauchard of Paris, who bought it for eight hundred thousand francs. The second picture is the one reproduced here, in which Napoleon is represented at the same period, but only at the outset of this terrible campaign—the last act but one of the Napoleonic tragedy. The carefully studied face shows as yet no expression of discouragement, but rather a determined hope of success. Napoleon wears the traditionary gray overcoat over the costume of the Chasseurs de la Garde, and rides his faithful little mare Marie, painted with a living, nervous effect that cannot be too much admired. Meissonier, inaccessible to the poetic seductions of symbolism, has nevertheless indicated here in a superb manner the gloomy future of the hero, by surrounding his luminous form with darkness, and casting on his brow the shadow of a stormy, threatening sky.—A. D.
The terror and apathy of Paris exasperated him beyond measure. To his great disgust, the court and some of the counsellors had taken to public prayers for his safety. “I see that instead of sustaining the empress,” he wrote Cambacérès, “you discourage her. Why do you lose your head like that? What are these misereres and these prayers forty hours long at the chapel? Have people in Paris gone mad?”
The most serious concern of Napoleon in this campaign was that the empress and the King of Rome should not be captured. He realized that the allies might reach Paris at any time, and repeatedly he instructed Joseph, who had been appointed lieutenant-general in his absence, what to do if the city was threatened.
“Never allow the empress or the King of Rome to fall into the hands of the enemy.... As far as I am concerned, I would rather see my son slain than brought up at Vienna as an Austrian prince; and I have a sufficiently good opinion of the empress to feel persuaded that she thinks in the same way, as far as it is possible for a woman and a mother to do so. I never saw Andromaque represented without pitying Astyanax surviving his family, and without regarding it as a piece of good fortune that he did not survive his father.”
Throughout the two months there were negotiations for peace. They varied according to the success or failure of the emperor or the allies. Napoleon had reached a point where he would gladly have accepted the terms offered at the close of 1813. But those were withdrawn. France must come down to her limits in 1789. “What!” cried Napoleon, “leave France smaller than I found her? Never.”