CHAPTER VI
(1804.)
HE First Consul spared no pains to allay the excitement which was caused by this event. He perceived that his conduct had raised the question of his real character, and he set himself to prove, both by his speeches in the Council of State, and also to all of us, that political considerations only, and not passion of any kind, had led to the death of the Duc d’Enghien. As I said before, he made no attempt to check the genuine indignation evinced by M. de Caulaincourt, and toward me he displayed indulgence which once more unsettled my opinions. How strong a power of persuasion do sovereigns, whatever their character, exercise over us! Our feelings, and, to be frank, our vanity also, run to meet their slightest advances half-way. I grieved, but I felt myself being slowly won over by the adroitness of Bonaparte; and I cried
“Plut à Dieu ce fut dernier de ses crimes!”
Meanwhile we returned to Paris, and then my feelings were again painfully excited by the state of opinion there. I could make no reply to what was said. I could only try to persuade those who believed that this fatal act was but the beginning of a blood-stained reign, that they were mistaken; and although it would be difficult, in point of fact, to exaggerate the impression that such a crime must produce, still party spirit ran so high that, although my own feelings revolted against it, I sometimes found myself endeavoring to offer some sort of excuse for it—uselessly enough, since I was addressing myself to people whose convictions were unalterable.
I had a warm discussion with Mme. de ——, a cousin of Mme. Bonaparte’s. She was one of those persons who did not attend the evening receptions at the Tuileries, but who, having divided the palace into two separate regions, considered that they might appear in Mme. Bonaparte’s apartment on the ground floor in the morning, without departing from their principles or sullying their reminiscences by recognition of the actual government on the first floor.
She was a clever, animated woman, with rather highflown notions. Mme. Bonaparte was frightened by her vehement indignation; and, finding me with her one day, she attacked me with equal vigor, and compassionated both of us for being, as she said, bound in chains to a tyrant. She went so far that I tried to make her understand the distress she was inflicting on her cousin. Then she turned violently upon me, and accused me of not sufficiently appreciating the horror of the event that had just taken place. “As for me,” she said, “every sense and every feeling is so outraged that, if your Consul were to come into this room, you would see me fly on the instant, as one flies from a venomous beast.” “Ah, madame,” I answered (little thinking that my words would prove prophetic), “refrain from expressions which at some future day may prove embarrassing to you. Weep with us, but reflect that the recollection of words uttered in a moment of excitement often complicates one’s subsequent actions. To-day you are angry with me for my apparent moderation; yet, perhaps, my feelings will last longer than yours.” And, in fact, a few months later, Mme. de —— became lady-in-waiting to her cousin, the newly made Empress.
Hume says somewhere that Cromwell, having established a sort of phantom of royalty, very soon found himself surrounded by that particular class of nobles who conceive themselves called on to live in palaces so soon as their doors are reopened. The First Consul, on assuming the insignia of the power he already wielded, offered a salve to the conscience of the old nobility which vanity always readily applies; for who can resist the temptation of recovering the rank he feels himself made to adorn? I am about to draw a very homely comparison, but I believe a true one. In the nature of the grand seigneur there is something of the character of the cat, which remains faithful to the same house, no matter who may become the proprietor of it.
Bonaparte, stained with the blood of the Duc d’Enghien, but having become an Emperor, succeeded in obtaining from the French nobles that for which he would have vainly sought so long as he was only First Consul; and when, in later days, he maintained to one of his ministers that this murder was indeed a crime, but not a blunder—“for,” he added, “the consequences that I foresaw have all exactly happened”—he was, in that sense, right.