While the Emperor was reviewing the whole of his army, Mme. Murat went to Boulogne to pay him a visit, and he desired that Mme. Louis Bonaparte, who had accompanied her husband to the baths of Saint Amand, should also attend him there, and bring her son. On several occasions he went through the ranks of his soldiers, carrying this child in his arms. The army was then remarkably fine, strictly disciplined, full of the best spirit, well provided, and impatient for war. This desire was destined to be satisfied before long.
Notwithstanding the reports in our newspapers, we were almost always stopped in everything that we attempted to do for the protection of our colonies. The proposed invasion appeared day by day more perilous. It became necessary to astonish Europe by a less doubtful novelty. “We are no longer,” said the notes of the “Moniteur,” addressed to the English Government, “those Frenchmen who were sold and betrayed by perfidious ministers, covetous mistresses, and indolent kings. You march toward an inevitable destiny.”
The two nations, English and French, each claimed the victory in the naval combat off Cape Finisterre, where no doubt our national bravery opposed a strong resistance to the science of the enemy, but which had no other result than to oblige our fleet to reënter the port. Shortly afterward our journals were full of complaints of the insults which the flag of Venice had sustained since it had become a dependency of Austria. We soon learned that the Austrian troops were moving; that an alliance between the Emperors of Austria and Russia was formed against us; and the English journals triumphantly announced a continental war. This year the birthday of Napoleon was celebrated with great pomp from one end of France to the other. He returned from Boulogne on the 3d of September, and at that time the Senate issued a decree by which the Gregorian calendar was to be resumed on the 1st of January, 1806. Thus disappeared, little by little, the last traces of the Republic, which had lasted, or appeared to last, for thirteen years.
CHAPTER XIV
(1805.)
T the period of which I am writing, M. de Talleyrand was still on bad terms with M. Fouché, and, strange to say, I remember that the latter charged him with being deficient in conscientiousness and sincerity. He always remembered that on the occasion of the attempt of the 3d Nivôse (the infernal machine) Talleyrand had accused him to Bonaparte of neglect, and had contributed not a little to his dismissal. On his return to the Ministry he secretly nursed his resentment, and let slip no opportunity of gratifying it, by that bitter and cynical mockery which was the habitual tone of his conversation.
Talleyrand and Fouché were two very remarkable men, and both were exceedingly useful to Bonaparte. But it would be difficult to find less resemblance and fewer points of contact between any two persons placed in such close and continuous relations. The former had studiously preserved the carelessly resolute manner, if I may use that expression, of the nobles of the old régime. Acute, taciturn, measured in his speech, cold in his bearing, pleasing in conversation, deriving all his power from himself alone—for he held no party in his hand—his very faults, and even the stigma of his abandonment of his former sacred state of life, were sufficient guarantee to the Revolutionists, who knew him to be so adroit and so supple that they believed him to be always keeping the means of escaping them in reserve. Besides, he opened his mind to no one. He was quite impenetrable upon the affairs with which he was charged, and upon his own opinion of the master whom he served; and, as a final touch to this picture, he neglected nothing for his own comfort, was careful in his dress, used perfumes, and was a lover of good cheer and all the pleasures of the senses. He was never subservient to Bonaparte, but he knew how to make himself necessary to him, and never flattered him in public.
Fouché, on the contrary, was a genuine product of the Revolution. Careless of his appearance, he wore the gold lace and the ribbons which were the insignia of his dignities as if he disdained to arrange them. He could laugh at himself on occasion: he was active, animated, always restless; talkative, affecting a sort of frankness which was merely the last degree of deceit; boastful; disposed to seek the opinion of others upon his conduct by talking about it; and sought no justification except in his contempt of a certain class of morality, or his carelessness of a certain order of approbation. But he carefully maintained, to Bonaparte’s occasional disquiet, relations with a party whom the Emperor felt himself obliged to conciliate in his person. With all this, Fouché was not deficient in a sort of good fellowship; he had even some estimable qualities. He was a good husband to an ugly and stupid wife, and a very good, even a too-indulgent, father. He looked at revolution as a whole; he hated small schemes and constantly recurring suspicions, and it was because this was his way of thinking that his police did not suffice for the Emperor. Where Fouché recognized merit, he did it justice. It is not recorded of him that he was guilty of any personal revenge, nor did he show himself capable of persistent jealousy. It is even likely that, although he remained for several years an enemy of Talleyrand’s, it was less because he had reason to complain of him than because the Emperor took pains to keep up a division between two men whose friendship he thought dangerous to himself; and, indeed, it was when they were reconciled that he began to distrust them both, and to exclude them from affairs.